Write for God

Robert McKee on story design

“It is no accident, if you go back and survey history, that in those periods of enlightenment when people were more civilized than in other periods, the quality of the storytelling was very high. Is there a relationship between empty, banal, false, happy-ending storytelling and crass, uncivil behavior? Absolutely.”

Hollywood story guru Robert McKee, in the Sydney (AU) Morning Herald

Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal in a scene from her documentary about battling cancer.

With apologies to the Grateful Dead, what a long, strange trip it’s been this week.

Michael Jackson’s death was a shock, even though it was evident from news reports that he was in poor health. Still, you don’t expect the passing of someone you grew up with. My birthday is between Michael’s and his brother Marlon’s, so we were all almost the same age. The Jackson 5 were so much a part of my middle-school years that one of their albums was the first I ever bought for myself. Their Christmas album was the first in my collection of holiday music, too.

I would like to think of Michael Jackson as the super-talented little dynamo in this clip and as the monster hitmaker of Thriller instead of as the pathetic soul he became after his trials for child molestation and his endless plastic surgeries. May God rest his soul.

It was also a week when Farrah Fawcett and TV pitchman Billy Mays died. Farrah, the original Charlie’s Angels pin-up, used to stare at us from my brother’s bedroom during the 1970s, when her poster in a red swimsuit was all the rage. Her feathered hair became a cliche and her mile-wide smile was familiar in countless magazine covers. Her acting improved as she stretched her limits and she was actually very good in The Apostle as Robert Duvall’s wife.

I watched a bit of the documentary she made to document her fatal bout with cancer and I was amazed at how brave she seemed to be as she got weaker and weaker.  Anyone who has lost a friend or family member to cancer will identify with the pain and sadness in this program about the ravages of a disease that doesn’t discriminate among the famous or the forgotten. May God grant her peace and eternal rest.

Billy Mays was the commercial king with the booming voice and the Brawny paper towel man physique. We used to laugh at his silly pitches for picture hooks and cleaning products in ads where his voice was louder than a sonic boom. The man seemed made for the mute buttons on our remote controls. He lived in our same small town until recently, when he moved to a more posh part of the Tampa Bay area. He seemed to live and breathe commercial endorsements, but at least he was entertaining — if also loud.

When it was mentioned in our local media that Mays had been hit on the head with luggage from a bad crash landing at Tampa International Airport the day before his death, I was praying that a head injury hadn’t been the cause of death. Our family has suffered two major brain injuries this past year and the world lost Natasha Richardson a similar mishap, so it would have been difficult to see a brain injury take another person. According to today’s autopsy, Mays died of heart disease. May his family be comforted and may he rest in peace.

It’s also been a week when a local arts critic published one of the saddest stories I’ve read recently. The column appeared in The St. Petersburg Times, our hometown daily. It detailed the decline of a former reporter who had lost her job and whose life had disintegrated into homelessness and substance abuse.

My husband pointed out the column because it mentioned that the subject had been a reporter for the Tampa Tribune, where I had covered dance for eight years.  Within a couple of paragraphs, I knew who the anonymous reporter was. I’ve been praying for her recovery since I read the column late last night and I’ve asked other media pros in our area to do the same. I will remember how beautiful she was and how good a reporter she was.  Let’s pray that she can pick up the pieces of her life and find a way to help others through her gifts and her life experiences.

This week, I’ve also heard that a former co-worker lost her husband and was arrested for a crime that I couldn’t help but think was related to her grief. Life can be so beautiful and it can be so harsh — sometimes within the same hour or day.

Sunday’s reading from the Book of Wisdom seemed apropos to explain the reasons I’ve been praying for those I know and those I didn’t know this week:

Because God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, And there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the nether world on earth,
For justice is undying.
For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him.
But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it.

“The afflicted spirit is a sacrifice to God.”

St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul

St. John of the Cross

“When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.”

Henri Nouwen

The church of Nuestra Senora de la Guardia in Havana

Sunday, June 21, is Father’s Day, just as it was 45 years ago when I made my First Communion in a Havana church.  Nuestra Senora de la Guardia was a Franciscan church in the next neighborhood. It wasn’t our parish church and I’ve forgotten why we ended up there that Sunday, but I remember my first Eucharist well.

Somehow my mother found a long white dress and veil for me to wear. It must have come from the black market where Cubans score everything that the government’s ration books don’t provide. Most likely it was a borrowed gown. I remember wanting to keep it so that I could play-act First Communion and bride games at home, but we returned the dress to whomever owned it. It was a treat to wear something fancy for a special day in a nation that was officially atheist and did its best to discourage displays of religious fervor. The fact that my First Communion fell on Father’s Day made June 21, 1964 special indeed. After all, isn’t Communion really a celebration of our Heavenly Father just as the temporal Father’s Day honors our earthy fathers?

I recall a long fast before receiving Communion in the old style at an altar rail where an acolyte held a paten as the priest placed the precious Host on my tongue. After Mass, I had a First Communion portrait taken, but I don’t look too happy in it. I was as hungry as a six-year-old could be after such a momentous morning spent fasting. The large crucifix the photographer had me hold was almost as big as I was. The feeling that I was actually a member of the church was and still is special. It’s always been a privilege to receive Our Lord’s Body and Blood at Mass, just as it was 45 years ago.

If we all really thought about the miracle of the Eucharist and how Christ shares His flesh with us through the mystery of the Transubstantiation, nobody would ever take Communion casually ever again. We would all fall to our knees crying with joy at the prospect of receiving Christ within us at every Mass instead of thinking how quickly we could leave the pew to avoid congestion in the parking lot. We would marvel at how Jesus lives within us and how scores of martyrs through the centuries have died to protect the Consecrated Hosts that atheists have tried to desecrate.

When I was an Extraordinary Minister a few years ago, we were trained in the proper way of disposing of blessed pieces of the Body or drops of the Blood that fall on the ground. We were told to always handle the Body and Blood with the utmost reverence, which meant dressing modestly, blessing children and those who cannot receive as they come before us and connecting with the other person receiving to see whether he or she prefers the Host in the hand or tongue. For the moment that the Extraordinary Minister and the communicant connect with the Body of Christ between them, Jesus is there to bless both.

When I receive Communion at Mass tomorrow in my parish, I’ll remember the same sacrament 45 years to the date. Once again it will be Father’s Day and I’ll visit my Dad, whom we’re blessed to still have with us. These days, Father’s Day also means two more generations of fathers:  my husband, Kevin, is the greatest father in the world to our four children and our three grandchildren have their own young Dad to fete.

Once again, as it is at each Mass, it will be special to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. Every instance we receive the Eucharist can be our First Communion.

This poster-sized image of the Sacred Heart has a prominent place in our home.

My patron saint, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, was the Apostle of the Sacred Heart and images of Jesus expressing his immeasurable love have always been displayed in every home where I’ve lived. Our home is devoted to the Sacred Heart, in fact, and the adversities our family has faced in the past 18 months have led me to collect images of the Sacred Heart. I’ve directed many prayers to the heart of Jesus that is broken for the world.

These are the Sacred Heart promises that were made to us through my patron saint:

1. I will give them all the graces necessary for their state of life.
2. I will give peace in their families.
3. I will console them in all their troubles.
4. I will be their refuge in life and especially in death.
5. I will abundantly bless all their undertakings.
6. Sinners shall find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.
7. Tepid souls shall become fervent.
8. Fervent souls shall rise speedily to great perfection.
9. I will bless those places wherein the image of My Sacred Heart shall be exposed and venerated.
10. I will give to priests the power to touch the most hardened hearts.
11. Persons who propagate this devotion shall have their names eternally written in my Heart.
12. In the excess of the mercy of my Heart, I promise you that my all powerful love will grant to all those who will receive Communion on the First Fridays, for nine consecutive months, the grace of final repentance: they will not die in my displeasure, nor without receiving the sacraments; and my Heart will be their secure refuge in that last hour.

British literary critic and theorist Terry Eagleton

An Oxford chap named Richard Dawkins who needs a lot of our prayers is making a lot of money ridiculing those of us who have faith. His book, The God Delusion, does its best to place Christians, Jews and Muslims in the same boat as adults who believe in Santa Claus.

The odd thing is that Dawkins waxes so poetic about Darwin, atheism and anti-creationism that — well, he’s religious in his fervor for these topics, but woefully ignorant about religion. (You might even say he’s delusional about what faith is.)

Here’s what author and literary critic Terry Eagleton had to say about The God Delusion and Dawkins in the London Review of Books:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.

Read Terry Eagleton’s excellent essay on this book here.  Funny how atheism brings out the religious fanatic in some folks!

Henri. J.M. Nouwen

“Can we hold the cup of life in our hands? Can we lift it up for others to see, and can we drink it to the full?” (Henri J.M. Nouwen, Can You Drink The Cup?)

Ten years ago, I was attending a meeting of the International Thomas Merton Society. During a break in one of the sessions, I asked a theologian for the name of a contemporary writer worthy of Merton’s mantle. Without hesitating, the theologian mentioned Nouwen.

When the student is ready, the teacher arrives, as the Buddhists say, so I’ve just started reading Can You Drink the Cup?, the late Father Nouwen’s little book on spiritual challenges.

“Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour…Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world.”

Writers of all genres will get something from reading Story, script guru Robert McKee’s masterful book on narrative structure. It’s not a short book and it helps to have seen the films he discusses — particularly Casablanca and Chinatown — but the time reading it will yield inspiration and lots of “a-ha” moments. (McKee believes that our age of “moral and ethical cynicism” has resulted in the “erosion of story” in films. I couldn’t agree more.)

Whether you write short fiction, screenplays or novels, Story is inspiring and well worth the read.

Victor Jara, 1932-1973

In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet deposed and murdered Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected president. The Cold War was still hot then and Allende was the type of leftist leader who was supposed to threaten our hemisphere if he wasn’t stopped — even though his own voters had elected him.

Thousands of Allende supporters were arrested and brought to detention at Chile’s stadium after the coup on September 11, including theater director / singer-songwriter Victor Jara. Last week, 36 years after Jara’s death at the stadium, a former low-ranking enlisted man in Pinochet’s forces was charged with Jara’s murder.

The singer’s body was exhumed today to determine how many bullets killed him. Three dozen years later, someone may finally be brought to justice for Jara’s death. The singer’s corpse was dumped in a shantytown, where it was later found bullet-ridden and with the bones in the hands he had used to play his guitar smashed. Witnesses said that soldiers crushed his hands and then taunted him to play one of his populist songs.

I first heard of Victor Jara in “Washington Bullets,” one of the best songs on Sandinista!, the Clash’s 1980 three-record set. The song is critical of American intervention as well as that of other nations (”If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed / Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist.”)

The death of Victor Jara has inspired other musicians and human-rights activists to press on. U2’s “One Tree Hill” also references Jara’s murder: 

“And in our world a heart of darkness / A fire zone where poets speak their hearts, then bleed for it / Jara sang his song, a weapon in the hands of love / You know his blood still cries from the ground.”

Jara’s life was short compared to Pinochet’s, who died at 91 and just missed standing trial for hundreds of charges related to the estimated 3,200 people his regime killed.

General Augusto Pinochet was indicted in 1998 by the Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón, arrested in London and finally released by the UK government in 2000. Authorized to freely return to Chile, he was there first indicted by the judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, and charged of a number of crimes, before dying on 10 December 2006, without having been convicted in any case.

Two different lives, two different outcomes, each on different ends of the spectrum. Despite his crimes in Chile, Pinochet was indicted in Spain, where the nation’s principle of universal justice can be used to prosecute serious crimes, even if they were committed abroad.

If the name “Baltasar Garzon” sounds familiar it’s because the magistrate is now a judge who has recently set his sights on other human rights abusers:  In April, Judge Garzon opened an investigation into the Bush Administration’s torture program in Guantanamo.

Three decades later, there will be justice in Jara’s murder. Spanish wheels moved the indictment of Pinochet and we may yet see an indictment of torture sanctioned by the Bush Administration.