Tags
batman, christian bale, communion, heath ledger, joker, lucifer, Michael, Raphael
I took communion today for the first time in a long time. Like years.
I’m not proud of that.
It’s not that I didn’t care or didn’t think it was important. It was just life, my day-to-day, earthly, customer-driven life of questions:
Why didn’t you do your homework?
When do you need it?
Baby, can you grab me a vanilla cappuccino?
What is in her mouth?
Did you put on deodorant?
Why—just why?
You know what I’m talking about…it all got in the way. I took for granted my one on one relationship with God. I languished in my own achievement—hey, I wrote a God-centered book, doesn’t that buy me some Heaven points? Don’t I get a bunch of Bedside Baptist services credited?
I don’t think so. Guess it doesn’t work that way.
What I didn’t realize was how far I’d drifted from the person I was when I first wrote The Road to Hell. I also didn’t realize what an impact a steady diet of Bible study and sermons would have on my writing. If you’ve followed either of my blogs, you know that bringing Come Hell or High Water has been a tough row to hoe. It’s been one of the more difficult endeavors I’ve ever undertaken, fraught with half-hearted beginnings and shoddy execution. I tried to rationalize it out, saying this lost feeling in my life really mirrors the lost emotions of the angels I’m writing about—and it does—but it shouldn’t. I should have been lost. I chose to lose myself.
As much fun as Lucifer is to write (and he is, enough that I’ve wondered (a lot) if that is who I really am), and as much as Come Hell or High Water is really about Raphael and his capacity to love, Michael is my favorite character. I find the brutality of his morality to be the most curious and interesting idea to explore in a series of novels about the gray areas in our moral code. To best sum up Michael in the beginning of Come Hell or High Water, think about the scene in The Dark Knight (because we both know you saw it), where Batman and the Joker are having a wonderful little discussion about the whereabouts of Batman’s friends (and his secret girlfriend) inside a jail cell. The Joker is being “uncooperative” so Batman tries to beat the answers out of him, only to receive laughter and this little nugget from the Joker:
“You have nothing to do with all your strength.” That’s Michael and, curiously, that’s me.
Writers are curious creatures. We engage and interpret life through the lens of the written word (you like that visual imagery pertaining to reading as a way of ingesting input, huh? Sociology major, baby). We act as translators, turning the universal truths of the human existence into specific stories as a way of understanding the universal. Storytelling is the most basic form of human communication—it is how we understand the world and our place in it. As a writer, then, I use that same translation to understand my own life and am often surprised by what I find. I put the wilderness I was experiencing in my life into the characters I was writing so I could understand my own listlessness. Does that make sense? I had to write my feelings into characters so I could understand myself.
The reason the Come Hell or High Water rewrites have been so exhausting and so difficult is I was too stuck in the specificity of my own situation to see the universality of the story from end to end. I became a character in my own narrative without the perspective to see how the story should end. Deep, huh? And if I’m a character, so to speak, then the only one who can tell me how the story ends is the author Himself.
So I went to the source.
Going back to church is the latest in a series of steps I’ve been taking to get back in touch with what matters. I’m becoming more introspective with myself, sending letters to my wife on a daily basis, trying to be a better father and husband all around. Trying to be what I’m supposed to be. I have to say, I’ve certainly heard the Author speaking in ways I haven’t heard in months. In ways I haven’t heard in years. I didn’t realize how much I’ve missed His voice. How much I missed Him. And, thankfully, the story’s starting to make more sense to me now.