I've spent this last week revising a paper that is to become a chapter in a multi-author book due out this spring. It's a technical paper based on my research in the library industry that I work. I've learned two things this week during the revision process: 1.) I know why people want to be writers and 2.) Why writers really need to do it full-time. Even though this week was very stressful and draining, I didn't have migraines this week like I did last week when I was working on my other projects. For full disclosure, I was also sick with a cold, so that could also be a reason for no migraines.

At the end of last week I finished a book by John Shelby Spong called Why Christianity Must Change or Die. It was incredibly challenging because Spong pushes the edges of the Christian faith with a mix of science, rational thinking, modernity and post-modernity, and an interpretation of an ancient text in the midst of the understandings we have gained over millennia. There are many who try to push Spong further out past the edges, but I'm just as happy to allow him the freedom to explore the faith. Maybe the greatest thing I've learned since college about our scriptures is that the Bible was not written as a scientific or logical text, but as a narrative story about people living life trying to relate to God and God constantly relating to people in new and grace-filled way.

So in that, one of the challenges that Spong laid out to me in his book that I am trying to process through is what if God isn't an external deity that lives in a remote heavenly location that acts as the eternal parent, but rather a spiritual force from which all of being has its source? It's a question that I've been talking with A* about especially in the context of our relationships with our fathers. The biggest topic that made the connection for me was Spong's idea is on prayer, which I have struggled with my entire life. In a nutshell, Spong wonders if prayer is really how we live our life and love; that prayer is not words which we say to an external deity to or with other people, but rather how we live in community in that love.

I'm going to leave it at that for now. It's still a question muddling through my soul, and hopefully I can flush it out soon here.

The movie Cast Away was on tonight. Though every time I see it advertised I think to myself how difficult that movie is to watch, when I catch it on unexpectedly I can never seem to stop watching it. There are two clear reasons that I realized tonight:

1. It's an excellent story
2. The theme of the musical score

Both touch me in my core, then grabs me and won't release me until I complete the emotional journey of the castaway. The musical theme is simple, yet heart-wrenching. There are waves to it, like the tide keeping him from getting off the island, yet an airiness that, when it climaxes, carries him to freedom, or really more waves, this time in a metaphorical sense. As a musician, this is what I know and love about composing and listening to music. I can identify just as easily, sometimes more so, with a theme and counter theme, than with dialog. And Cast Away is a perfect movie for that with so little dialog.

I can claim at a certain level of being a writer, but I'm not a storyteller. Not yet, I'd like to be, but in a different way that you would think of a storyteller, like how the writer of this movie is a storyteller. But I think this may be the best movie story next to Stranger Than Fiction in the sense of touching me to my core. There are so many abstract levels that I could probably try to analyze and agonize over for hours, but there were a couple levels that hit me square in the chest tonight that I know I needed to write about.

On the last day of the church camp we went to, I agreed to go on the blob with a teenager in the church who has babysat for us. The blob is about 25 yards off the dock, connected to a large trampoline, in the deeper water of the lake. I can't swim, but knowing that I would be required to wear a life-jacket, I agreed to do it. As we were walking to the dock, the teen said to me "You just have to jump in the water so you aren't shocked by the cold." Made sense to me, like ripping off a band-aid quickly to minimize the total pain. But I should have thought about it more carefully, especially in light of a near-drowning incident I had in the ocean last year. Even with the life-jacket, it took a lot longer for me to come out of the water than I expected, and when I did, I was in total panic mode, reliving all too clearly the panic I had in that sand bar in the North Carolina coast.

There is the scene in Cast Away after Chuck Noland has gotten through the waves and past his first storm on the deep seas looking for a way to be rescued that "Wilson", his volleyball companion for the past 1500 days, had fallen off the raft. For a myriad of reasons, for sure, Noland jumps in the water to try to rescue and recover "Wilson". Realizing he needs his raft more, he grabs the rope for which he tied the plastic sail and tries to swim out to "Wilson" with the rope extended so he can get back to the raft. The rope's end eventually slips out of his hand and his is struggling to grab it. At the moment, and for the next couple of minutes until Noland was safely back on the raft, my heart was pounding with panic and I was sweating with fear and I was breathing of desperation. My mind and emotion were back in the lake, panicking yet again, struggling to get back to dry land. As the scene ended, two things came mind:

1. that I have neglected to find and sign up for swim classes to learn how to swim so that I could have the ability to save myself or my family, if necessary
   
2. that there really is no use in trying to learn because I will never be able to get over that fear and be able to relax in water in which I cannot touch solid ground.

It frightens me that I feel number two so strongly. It is more than just a lazy or defeatist attitude. It is deeper than that, and one that I am even more aware of now as we prepare to go down to the beach in a couple of days. It all but rules out that I'll be anywhere in the ocean past knee depth.

The other level that hit me tonight as I watched Cast Away was the irony throughout the second half of the movie. After 1500 days of learning how to live within the reality Noland found himself, with no tools but a pair of ice skates, a dress, a deflated raft, and a dead flashlight, the story displays irony in every corner once Noland is rescued and is coming back "home". He receives a Dr. Pepper and two glasses of ice on the plane. They serve fancy sushi and lobster for his welcome home party, as if he had been living on chicken for the 1500 days as a castaway. (Personally, beyond irony, I think this also shows a certain and realistic level of how insensitive we can be to others who need to be "saved".) He picked up a lighter and wearily laughed at how easy it was to make fire. He laid on the floor of his hotel room unable to sleep, I assume because his body was not used to a bed, and turned on and off the light switch of the lamp. When his fiancee gives him the keys to "their car" that she had saved all this time, even though she had to move on as if he were dead, the key chain included a swiss army pocket toolkit. All of these conveniences and delicacies of life he spent 1500 days away from were now at his disposal. The irony drips every 5 seconds it seems.

Through all of that I wonder just how much of what I have I need and how much of what I know is real? More so the latter examination of my spiritual journey. What do I take for granted? What elements of my faith do I need to cast away in order that I must re-learn for survival and not to maintain comfort? What truly are the the reasons to breathe, live, survive, and hope. How can I share my story of those reasons through how I live that story out? Will it make sense to anyone, or will I be a foreigner who feels out of place because I have lived without the comforts that made me take my life and faith for granted in the first place?

These are HUGE questions, and ones that I had to get down out of my head even so I could sleep tonight. They are questions that I will even forget asking myself if I don't re-read them later, which another reason I want to write them down. And they are questions I will ask myself again whenever I see this movie playing or am reminded of it in conversation. Before I go to bed, I'm going to listen to "Keep Breathing" by Ingrid Michaelson. Ironic how I can return to the same music for similar situations, huh?