The View Up Here

I'm now in Day Three of living my Rule of Life. After working on this and receiving the blessing of my spiritual director, I began to live in an intentional way according to my Rule of Life on the Feast of St. Elijah. You might ask what a rule of life is, and well you may. Essentially, a rule of life is a means by which someone comes closer to God (or really, to any desired outcome, I suppose) by virtue of lifestyle and daily schedule. The trick to all of this is to keep it reasonable in what the individual (in this case, myself) is able to sustain. The point isn't to set oneself up with an impossible standard that will constantly be disappointed. For instance, part of my Rule of Life is to go to Mass every day possible. At first, I tried to appoint certain Mass times for each day of the week, but it immediately became clear to me that in summer, those early Mass times might not always be attainable. I am not concerned with what time or where I go to Mass as much as getting to ...

“Son of God,” produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett and directed by Christopher Spencer, was an enormous disappointment. Despite some strong performances, including Darwin Shaw (Peter) and Sebastian Knapp (John the Evangelist), it wasn’t even close to being the greatest Jesus movie of all time, and in fact, it wasn’t even a good movie. Not only was it shallow, disconnected, and self-important, it neglected to show a crucial aspect of Jesus’ saving ministry: relationship. Jesus had and has relationships with us, and with the Father, and he invites us into his intimate relationship with the Father. Nowhere did this crucial element of his life and teaching appear in this film.   The-who-what-where-in-the-what-now? (Trying to make sense of this movie) The episodes of Jesus’ ministry were never connected with who Jesus was as a person,  and characters were drawn with neither depth nor passion. They came and went with no explanation and with no real ...

On the first day of week, after Jesus had been crucified and laid in a tomb, Mary Magdalene arrives early, before dawn, to the tomb where he lay. She finds the stone of the tomb entrance rolled away, the blessed body of her Rabbi gone. She is distraught. She runs and tells Peter and John. They come back to the tomb with her and verify that it is, indeed, empty. Then they go away. But Mary, she stays. She stays and weeps. I completely understand this. When my mother died, I didn't want to be apart from her, even at the funeral home, where I stood next to the casket the entire time, even at the grave, when I didn't want to leave after the service was over. I wanted to stay and be still, to mourn and cry, and to be near her. There is something visceral about this experience, when the connection to the deceased is so strong that separation feels like an impossibility, and there is a sense of massive disorientation, like this person isn't truly gone, somehow. Mary turns...

I admit I was neglecting this blog for weeks, mainly because I wasn't sure what the point was to keeping it up. Most people I know follow me on Facebook and get a fairly decent picture of my life there. But I suppose the blog is more than just the minutiae of every day life, isn't it? So I will attempt to get back to what I started with this format - analysis, rants, musings, and updates on my writing. The 1999 novel is rolling along into revisions with my editor, so that's very exciting. Debut will be at the con this fall here in L.A. I also have to work on publicity and other such perfunctory duties. Into revisions for "Eden" my latest screenplay - that's going much more smoothly once I hammered out the first act re-write. I prayed for the Muse to help me with this first act re-write, because I felt like I was staring into the gaping maw of "I don't know what the fuck to do with this." Literally 30 minutes later, in the shower, it was like ...