Show & Tell-How I Try to Look Smart and Why You Believe Me

My roommate was getting coffee with our former professor, Leonard Oakland, this past weekend. Leonard has been teaching Literature for 43 years. That’s quite the history of experience. They were talking about being 24 years old and he told Kelly, “24-Scary! But a great time!” Oh Leonard, Ain’t it the truth.

I’ve been living on my own now for about five months and I think yeah, scary is a good word to use. I work for minimum wage, in a city I barely know, and I spend all of my time on developing skills that may never pay off in the end. If I’m not reading a book, I’m writing a screenplay which may never get produced. And if I’m not doing that, I’m selling tickets in a box office. At the end of each day, what do I have to show for it?

The home library is where I do most of my intellectual cheating. My roommate and I combine our books into one massive library, intimidating all who enter our hallowed grounds of literature, philosophy, and film. But I know that I haven’t read half the books on those shelves and I probably never will. But you don’t know that, and when you see all of my Charles Dickens books you can’t help but think, “kid knows his stuff.”  

I tell many people I meet that I’m a filmmaker, which is true. Yes, technically I’ve made three short films (and a few shorts for classes). But I’ve only made a whopping 75 bucks off of my movies, and that doesn’t really pay the bills. But I know how impressive the term FILMMAKER sounds (especially to single women) and I can’t resist the look of an intimidated peasant averting their eyes from the celebrity that is me. I could say ASPIRING filmmaker, but come on. Where’s the fun in that?

The act of working on a screenplay is incredibly frustrating, because a finished screenplay, as in greenlit and ready to produce, is still just a screenplay. Until it’s filmed, produced, edited, and released, that screenplay is just a bundle of paper with words. I envy the short story writer. If they want to write a story they can do it in a day and be done, and the whole world can consume it immediately. Once I finish the short script I’m working on, I still have to film the damn thing. I don’t know how professional screenwriters sleep at night, waiting for their next written work to be skewered by some hotshot director. I’m getting away from the point a bit so let me be perfectly clear when I say—working on a screenplay leaves little to show off with.

It’s scary to be in your early twenties because you work damn hard at your craft and you just don’t have much to show for it. But that’s because you’re in your early twenties. What do you expect? A 60,000 dollar salary plus benefits? Living on my own and working minimum wage is forcing me to get creative and get good at what I want to do. It’s annoying that I can’t prove that I’m stretching my intellect and talent every day, but at least I can say that I read James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Sole Searching: How a pair of shoes changed my life

"I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man's shoes?" 

-Red  

The Shawshank Redemption

Remember the joy of Lego’s? Thousands upon thousands of pieces for your disposal. You, the eternal god of Lego creation, were the architect of mystical lands. It’s by far my favorite childhood toy. But there’s a curious thing about Lego’s. I don’t remember actually playing with them.  I built them, and designed some amazing ships and buildings, but I never wielded them as my action figures. What I did was set up grand tableaus. That’s where story came in. I had one dungeon island set that kept my attention for days upon days. I’d set up the opposing pirates, the treasure chests, the boats. And I would set them in a scene. And that was it; there they would lay frozen in time. For me, it wasn’t the action that I was interested in but the image. I had a certain look I was going for, a certain feeling that my tableau of Lego’s meant to evoke. I liked the control. I was meticulous in how the Lego’s were set but I never played games, I never assumed characters, I never acted out my world. I merely created the world and looked in from the outside. For it was the look of the world that felt real to me, not playing the scene out. 

Two days ago I bought a pair of shoes from the Goodwill in downtown Portland. This is a picture of a brand new shoe.

I bought them barely used for 40 dollars. Brand new they would have cost 325 dollars. I don’t mean to brag , but wait, no I’ll just brag for a little bit. 40 dollars! I am the newly crowned king of shoe thrifting! OK moving on. I love the shoes. It’s not that they are super comfortable or anything, they’re just…professional. I would walk to work with my eyes looking at my shoes the whole time. I loved hearing the click-clack-click-clack of the shoes hit the pavement. I looked like an adult. 

I’m not one of those Portland twentysomethings who is desperately clinging on to their youth. I know I’m young, but there is a yearning to be an adult and take on great responsibility. Not in the “start a family” way but “become a film director” way. And in the past five months since I’ve graduated there has been nothing that felt like I was validated as the epic man in search of profundity in his new life, abandoning his youthful ways for the life of the artist. So I got an urban apartment, big woop. I got a job at a premium cinema, who cares! Not even the internship with the NY based production company made me feel like a responsible, mature adult in the pursuit of his passion. It was the shoes.

The shoes I had before this pair were the ugliest puppies in the history of footwear. I had to have this specific pair for my job at the last theater I worked. Two weeks later I got a job at the Living Room Theaters. Every day I walked to work in those God forsaken shoes (that after 2 weeks were already falling apart).  I felt like a fraud. At the bottom of my outfit lay the true value of my life’s pursuit. I was worthless, how could such a slob be capable of any profound work of art? How could an artist fill those shoes? He has no aesthetic outlook for his own self, how could he have an aesthetic outlook in the world of celluloid? Under the surface of my wardrobe was the intellect and hard work of a young artist. The requisite reading and writing (I hope) is being done so that I may be a competent and skillful artist. But none of you know that, because my shoes didn’t reflect that.

Director Ingmar Bergman
looking so...Cinematic

Everything changed when I got the shoes, of course. My walk to work the first day was glorious. Here down the avenue was Ryan Graves, aspiring film director, intern for a production company in NYC. He may have the humble task of selling tickets in a box office, but it is the box office for the Living Room Theaters, the premiere art house cinema in all of Portland. Here was the man, the myth nay, the legend.

Obviously the shoes got me carried away, but you get the point. The shoes validated everything I was doing. All along I had the content of the artistic life, but now I had the image, and the image was everything for me. Like the Lego’s of my childhood, I had latched onto the image, and the shoes were the beginning of the successful image, and thankfully, I caught myself before going headlong into superficiality.

Because come on, they’re just a pair of shoes. In my childhood I was obsessed with the image. I didn’t play with my toys-I set them up so it looked like I did. For me, it was more entertaining to look the game rather than live the game. It was easier, I had more control because I was on the outside looking in. But I’m not a child anymore, I don’t have the luxury of looking from the outside in, that’s left to God alone. It’s time I stop obsessing with the image of success, and begin living the successful life that I desire.

Did You Read?: Why God Probably Cares About What You Read Next

James Joyce

Since graduating college I’ve been slowly building in my mind the ultimate reading list. Everyone’s on it. DeLillo, Rushdie, Woolf, Dickens, and on and on. I know it will take forever to read these authors, but I know I’ll eventually get to them.  I’m a lazy completist. When it comes to films and literature, I claim being a fan of many artists, but only a handful of them have I actually studied their entire collection of work. So this reading list I’ve been storing in my head is an attempt to cut out my pretentious critical review of many authors and actually do the required reading. But while I was in the midst of rereading my favorite novel, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, my reading habits changed completely. 

            Beginning Portrait was actually the beginning of the end for my agnosticism. My Mom urged me to buy Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. Actually, I think she gave me birthday money for it. Anyway, I bought the book and started it when I started Portrait. But most of my reading was done in the box office when it got slow. And you can’t read the prose of James Joyce in a Box Office when the phone keeps ringing and silly customers come and bother you for a ticket for a movie that’s in three hours. No sir, the attention required for Mr. Joyce is just too much at work. But not the prose of Donald Miller. I don’t mean to insult Mr. Miller, he chooses to write simply so that his message can be received for the better. 

Donald Miller

I traded out Joyce for Miller, and I finished the book within the week. The book is about Miller’s efforts to adapt his book Blue like Jazz into a film. The book makes the argument that the cinematic life we see in the movies is desirable because they are a culmination of our wishes and we ought to live the adventurous life that we crave on the screen. I was tracking the whole time with Miller, but still on the outside as an agnostic. I think in the postmodern world a problem we all have is understanding how our lives should be now that we are inundated with too much art. And it was the starting point for the understanding of my life’s purpose as a filmmaker and follower of God. So unenthusiastically but quietly intrigued I bought Blue Like Jazz on my lunch break, a gamble in its own right, my bank account was already embarrassingly small. 

I had read Miller’s book, Blue like Jazz in high school, but it meant little to me then.  This time around the book acted as the catalyst to my rediscovery of God. The book illuminated in me the religious life I had and showed me the spiritual life I could have. That man was supposed to write that book, and once I realized that, I understood that I was a man who has his own work to be done, and I knew that that task was from God, and deep in my heart I knew that God has great plans for me. There were many other factors that were a part of my rediscovery, but when it came to the intellectual understanding of God, Blue like Jazz got me thinking about God in a brand new way. 

I felt guilty that I was ditching James Joyce for a Portland Christian writer (No offense Mr. Miller). And I really wanted to get back to Portrait. But there was a tug inside me to read Surprised by Joy by C.S. Lewis. The only thing I remembered about that book was that it was about the writer’s life as an atheist and how he came to faith. I’m not sure how Lewis’s book came up, but somehow I knew I had to read it next. So I forwent Joyce again and read Surprised by Joy. And again my bank account took a hit; Powell’s is making a fortune off of my coming to faith. Lewis’s claim that he’s no theologian is infuriating because of course everyone is. He may not be an Aquinas or an Augustine, but his thoughts in this book profoundly shaped my newfound faith in God. 

C.S. Lewis

Lewis’s one fault as a writer is overwriting. There are many stories in this book (and others) that can be completely cut out. They do not contribute to the whole message of the book. But I can’t complain too much, they’re interesting anecdotes. The most important passages in this book were about his coming to atheism and his coming to Christian faith. He lays out many philosophical and personal facets to these stages of life, of which I have no time to comment on. But I will say that his arguments prompted me to ask more questions about my time as a Christian in high school and my time as an agnostic. I realized that there were even more factors that affected and shaped these two identities, and I found that I had to undergo a similar introspection like Lewis.

No, I’m not going to write an autobiography. But I am going to work at exploring my life further, so I can understand myself emotionally, psychologically, mentally, and spiritually. If there’s any good thing a person ought to do, it’s examining the self. If you don’t know yourself, how can you know the other? Through the past few books, my coming of faith was greatly impacted by what I read. So I can’t shake the feeling that God has had a hand in what I read. That seems obvious since they are super popular Christian books, but all the while in my reading I still wanted to go back to Joyce. But, my choice in reading these books felt innately important, as if the Holy Spirit was choosing the books for me. 

They say write what you know, and after encouragements from family members, I will explore my agnostic period through screenwriting. A character transforming from a blind follower of the herd to a dynamically spiritually liberated person makes for good drama. An autobiographical film you ask? Maybe not, but certainly there are elements from my life that would transfer well to the cinema. A writer must do his research, and I can advance myself both personally and professionally writing this screenplay. By doing the research and work that comes with writing the screenplay, I will attain a thorough understanding of myself that I would never previously understand. In the process I will write my first film that would explore how different environments imprison a character, and how that character can break free and be his own person—tried and true screenwriting elements that have worked. I know that I have to do some intellectually challenging research if I am to understand myself and write authoritatively on the problems that come with existing. So now my adventures in literature have brought me to the inevitable: The Russians. 

Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’ve never read Dostoevsky, but I hear he’s pretty good. He is the forerunner on existentialist literature and is preoccupied with ethics and religion, among many other things. I know his literature will not mirror my history in any profound way (or it may), but he will get me thinking about problems that have permeated my mind that have yet to be articulated. Or so I hope. He may just be a hack who is worthless to my own writing and reading. But there’s only one way to find out. Read, read, read. 

Looking back, I find a spiritual through line to my recent reading. Out of practicality I start reading Donald Miller, which leads to rediscovering God, which then leads to more books that contribute to both my spiritual and professional wellbeing. I’ve abandoned my reading list of canon completion, and I’ve left it up to God to decide what’s next. Don’t worry; I’m finishing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. But then it’s on to Notes from the Underground and the Brothers Karamazov. Audacious I know, but I think God has some big plans with these books that will affect me in ways I’ll never quite fathom.

Home, Sweet Home: Why Movies Can Feel More Comforting Than Mom’s Home Cooking (No Offense, Mom)

The other night I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, critically agreed to be the best in the Jones series. I’ve been watching this movie since childhood, originating in my Grandparents bunkhouse where I watched a taped version of it on a TV that was probably 20 years old. I’ve watched it so many times in so many places over the years that the film has developed a familiarity with me. I’ve never studied the film in a theoretically intense way, so I don’t know the film intimately in an intellectual way, but I do know it in a more personal way, I notice its characteristics, its faults, its nuances, its goodness. It hasn’t been long since I last watched the film, but this last time the film gave me a nurturing presence, a warm feeling that only an old friend or family member could give me. The experience helped me find that the movies in my life have a power that transcends its original utility as a piece of entertainment and can become a work of art that can do work in your life that you may never full fathom.

            I think the strangest feeling is homesickness. I get it time to time. It’s always the little things we miss. The smell of your house. Your neighborhood. The smell of your old bathroom. Of course you miss all the people that inhabit your past home. But when you get a whiff of something that reminds you of home, a rush of nostalgia hits you, and suddenly this new place that you chose to go seems less welcoming. And the true sting to feeling homesick is that the instant you need to be back home you hopelessly cannot return, home is there, you are here. Everyone has a way of easing the pain of missing home. Mom’s cookies. That tea you always drink at home. And for me, it’s the movies. 

            During College, coming home for break was probably more significant than I ever understood. For four years, I always went home for all my breaks, save for a few in my senior year. Break is what you look forward to at the end of your semester; it’s what you’re working to. It’s not just the break from school for three weeks. It’s home. There’s a strange rejuvenation when you’re home. You see your family, you see your friends. But it’s being in that familiar place. Your hometown, your old house. Being in that place gives you a new energy, it heals all the stress that built up over the semester, and it empowers you to go and accomplish another term in school. 

            This past week has been tiring. My work week went seven days in a row. You would think an extra couple days of work wouldn’t be too much given that I just sell movie tickets. But once that seventh day just won’t end you eventually want to strangle every customer who wants to see Fright Night (I’m kidding, I would never strangle a customer, even if they were seeing Fright Night). So I was pretty exhausted by work, and in the midst of my work week, my friend Jaime broke her ankle falling down some stairs. I’m the classic worrier, think a young George Banks from Father of the Bride. So when I heard she broke her ankle I rushed to her apartment, and with other friends took her to the hospital. I was so worried that I never left her side, making the entire hospital staff think that I was her concerned husband. 

            So the past few days I’ve been doing what I can to help her. Buy her groceries, get her coffee. And I’m not saying in any way that I resent her for doing all this work. But subconsciously, I think I’m worried that I haven’t done enough to help her out. I love doing what I can for a friend who could use some help, it gives me peace knowing that I’ve helped her out, it makes me happy. And I don’t want to toot my own horn, and I know if I keep defending myself, the pretension will just grow-so suffice it to say, with great pleasure but with a wearied sense of duty I have been doing my best to help out a friend. 

             Since coming back to be a Christian, I feel that God is going to use me in a variety of ways in the city. I meet people, in random ways that don’t feel coincidental. Just a couple of nights ago I met a guy who just needed someone to talk to. He was dealing with alcoholism, and so I told him a condensed testimony of my Agnostic life and how my love of film helped me find God, and I encouraged him to pursue what he loved (and prayed it wasn’t alcohol). He said that I made an impact on his night, and he was glad he met me, I just feel so nervous that I could’ve done more. Lately, I feel like I’ve been doing a crappy job of whatever I ought to do, because I know that I want to help everyone in my life, but I know I will -and have- let them down. (I know the pretension is creeping back, just bear with me) God hasn’t given me more than I can handle, I just feel, tired.

            So last night, my roommate Kelly, Sky, a new friend from work, and Jaime, all watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was really great because we got Jaime over to our apartment, the farthest she had been from her apartment for many days. The film was exactly what I needed. It’s a fun film, filled with adventure, humor, and heart. The action scenes gave me a solid amount of catharsis. I think I’ve been so mad at the universe for all the bad luck it’s been shelling out to some people in my life that I just wanted to punch something. Indiana Jones punched for me. The film has such a thought out world. It’s not a hyper realistic portrayal of WWII-era Europe, but it’s a world that is consistent across a slew of films, and it makes for a world that I can escape into. Most films aren’t as thought out, but with Indiana Jones, there is a certain consistency that you easily can latch onto for hours. 

            I had a blast watching the film, and so did my friends. The film was just like home. Not to say that it emulated the power of home, but it was home. It was that familiar thing that I grew up with. If I could, I would have taken the first train home, and spend a week drinking café Ladro and hanging out with my friends and family in order to de-stress from the past week. But I couldn’t. Luckily, I had Indiana Jones. I was delivered home through the movie. The stress that had been weighing me down had left me. Like a good winter break that heals the wounds of your last semester, the film relieved the stress of the past week.

 Watching Jaime watch a movie is almost as good as watching the movie itself. She interacts with the movie, she talks to it, but somehow, it’s not annoying. And I saw that she was happy, and out of her apartment, which had been her prison lately because of the damn broken ankle. I got to rest up from the past seven days of work. Maybe any other movie could have done a similar effect, but truly, watching a movie that has been so embedded in me gave me a comfort only home could give. And when it comes to my responsibility to my fellow man, well, I realized that there is only so much we can do, even Indiana Jones can stumble, and I need to let go of thinking I can solve all the problems of life, forget that I may be able to grab the cup of Christ in order to save everyone. At the end of the day, I just need to let it go. 

(P.S.-Other films that I grew up with and now feel like home include the Star Wars films, the Back to the Future trilogy, and the Wayne’s World films)

Meetcute, meet Cute: How the Snob Took a Detour Through Cinema's Weakest Link

RomComs, Chick Flicks, whatever you want to call them, this is not manly territory, and certainly not a territory for any self-respecting cinephile. Not by a long shot. Yet, I confess the romantic comedy is my ultimate guilty pleasure. I confess it so much though that the guilty part is rapidly fading away. I can’t help but love every bit of a damn good RomCom: the contrived meet-cute, the leading actor and actress, the quirky screwball comedy, the romance. Oh and the requisite gallon’s worth of Velveeta cheese that tops it all off. I used to pride myself in a refined taste when it came to cinema. Hitchcock, Godard, Kaufman-These were the filmmakers that were meant talking about, so why the grand detour down Sandra Bullock lane?

I think the simplest explanation for my newfound cinematic preoccupation is intellectual exhaustion. I started falling for RomComs last January, after about a year and a half of intensive cinema and literature studies. In a passage of six months I took survey courses in the history of British and American literature, Literary theory, and the British novel (including the studies of Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Shelly, and others). I had studied the films of Hitchock, Truffaut, Godard, Coppola, Powell & Pressburger, Scorsese, Kubrick, and literally dozens of others. I was steeped in intellectual artistry. My brain was exhausted. My love of film needs constant care and attention, and I think the diversion with RomComs satisfied a few things: 1. Light reading-These films do not require a lot of mental attention, and my brain really wanted to take it easy. 2. New material-These were films that I knew very little about, I learned all about the tropes and traditions of a RomCom, and there are a lot of elements a filmmaker employs to make a RomCom good (really, I could write a book about-Ooh, I should write a book about it.) 3. I’m a hopeless romantic. There is something about these films that satisfies the romantic who is dying to go on a date this Friday (I’m free btw, give me a call). 

So after watching one more French film from 1961, I decided to give Hugh Grant and the like, a chance. May this blog teach you a bit about the great RomComs that are out there. Because know well dear reader, I continued to be a snob in my explorations of RomCom territory. So I started with arguably the greatest one. Annie Hall. Woody Allen’s masterpiece is the magnum opus for the genre. Alvy Singer (played by Allen) is the quintessential romantic comedy archetype-witty, quirky, self-deprecating and incredibly neurotic, the film follows his hyperactive musings on the silly preoccupations people hold in the world of dating, and Annie Hall is able to get so much right-the comedy, the romance, the drama that comes with love-I love the film, and it’s no wonder that the film remains one of Allen’s most cherished films. 

I stayed in the upper middle brow by continuing to Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally. Here’s another film that’s intelligently written without being snobbish or pretentious. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan work well together, and the film acts as a magnifying glass to the modern relationship. If it was any other actor playing Harry, I think I would have been nonplussed by the film. Could you imagine any other actor dry enough to explain the sexual preoccupations of men? If you don’t believe me, just watch-

After these two iconic films, the floodgates were opened, and the 90’s easily became the ruler of RomComs-Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, Four Weddings & a Funeral, French Kiss, While You Were Sleeping, As Good as it Gets, Notting Hill. These are some of my favorites, while the aughts have a few exceptional RomComs-Two Weeks Notice, Hitch, Miss Congeniality, the genre, in my opinion has homogenized to blandness (my critics will say blandness has always permeated RomComs, to which I say “….So?”)
I also unfortunately endured some true stinkers (UGH Practical Magic! My Best Friend’s Wedding! Petty, petty, petty-pretty people with problems). It became clear what it took to make a RomCom work. First, the film needs to be somewhat honest. It needs to stay away from pure escapism and actually work through an issue that arises in romantic encounters, whether it be love in the workplace, or falling in love with a close friend, the plot needs to be grounded in reality, even if everything else is contrived. Second, the lead actor and actress have to be ON. The reason why RomComs don’t work these days is partly because our actors are lame. We need another Tom Hanks, we need another Sandra Bullock. The best we can come up with is Gerard Butler and Ginnifer Goodwin. These people are pretty, not funny, sexy, not hilarious. And you know something is wrong when Steve Carrel is the best bet when it comes to seeing a new RomCom. (Or not, Carrel really is highly talented). 

There is one thing that worries me about my RomCom attachment. I may be replacing actual romance in my life with these movies. I haven’t really dated at all in my life, and as I grow up, the yearning in my heart to meet a girl grows and grows. My attachment to film can be at times unhealthy. To start obsessively watching these films makes me feel like I am filling that void with fake, artificial works dealing with love. Art has that problem for people like me who obsess over our medium of choice. We involve so much of ourselves in the medium, that sometimes we confuse art for life and life for art. However, the desire to meet a real girl still exists, and the awareness of film’s deception in my life is enough for me to understand how to keep priorities healthy in my life, and I understand that it’s far better for me to go out and chase a girl then watch Hugh Grant do it for me. 

I’m actually running low on critically acclaimed RomComs. On the shortlist I have You’ve Got Mail and Addicted to Love and that’s really it.  I hold the philosophy that every time I’m watching a new movie I’m looking for a new favorite movie. So there may be a lifelong favorite waiting to be found, but it’ll take work to get there. Soon, a new genre preoccupation will take hold. Kelly, my roommate, wants it to be the Western, and I’m open to the idea, but to replace Tom Hanks with John Wayne? I don’t know, do you think I could do it?

Adventures in Agnosticism: How I Gave Up Christianity in Order to Find God

            You may or may not have known that for the past two years I have been an Agnostic. I affirmed a higher power in life, but did not know or understand what that power was. The following is an account of how I came to become an agnostic, and how those two years were essential in order to discover God and affirm Jesus Christ as Lord.

            I grew up in a Christian home. While we may not have all gone to church together every Sunday, by the time I was in junior high, Church had become a habit ingrained in my lifestyle. My whole life was based around the Church. I made all of my closest friends at Church. I met my mentor at a Young Life camp. I made even more friends at Young Life. Everything I did in my social life was based on the calendar of Church and Young Life. I committed my life to Jesus in 8^th grade. When you’re that age, you are forced to create an identity very rapidly, and there just isn’t enough time to fully develop who you are when life happens. In the rush to create my identity, I let the Church create me. The youth pastors and leaders told us to have Jesus at the base of our identity. That’s what I thought I was doing, but instead of pursuing Jesus, I pursued Christianity

            In High School, the way I understood one ought to live their life is as a Christian. I wanted to be a good person, so I did my best to be a good Christian. I volunteered at every avenue I could. I was leading small groups at Church and playing drums in the worship band. All the while unhealthy psychological tendencies were developing deep inside my heart. But I ignored them. I didn’t have time to worry about myself; I had to prepare what my small group was going to read that night. If I was going to do things well, I had to be a good Christian, so I went through all the motions of what a Christian does, except for the essential part-a relationship with Jesus Christ. I did everything else though, I read my bible, I went to every church event I could, and I was damn good at the Popcorn Prayer. I thought I was pursuing God, but really I was trying to live the way a Christian ought to live, and along the way my concept of God had been skewed by immature high school insecurities.

            I was doing my best to be a good Christian. I thought early on that to be a good Christian you had to pursue God-that is correct, but that made me wrongly assume that everything secular was secondhand. I thought a good Christian was only interested in things that were related to Church. All other passions were second rate, secular, and were of no concern to a Christian. This created a huge conflict within me. While I wanted to be a good Christian, I also had a passion for the movies. Whenever I caught myself thinking about going into the world of Cinema, I told myself it was a pipe dream. “God doesn’t want you involved in fantasies like filmmaking,” I thought. “Pursue God: that is your only duty.” So I bit my lip and repressed my passion for film as best I could. 

            So when it came time to pick a college, Whitworth, a small Christian university, was the obvious choice. I believed that a good Christian ought to be a pastor, because that career is the only one that pursues God. I didn’t understand how only some of us at Whitworth wanted a theology degree; I thought it was the only one that’s worth it, since it was our duty to follow God and God alone. Meanwhile, my other lingering career aspiration had been clawing for attention. It was getting to be too much. I had to do away with my passion for film. I knew that you were supposed to follow God, but I didn’t know how I could do that in the movies, I couldn’t reconcile my passion for movies and my need to follow God. So I thought the reason I had a passion for film was so I could sacrifice it in order to follow God. Jesus talked about taking up your cross and sacrificing your life in order to follow him. So at the time, I understood that to mean we need to kill things that we were most passionate about in order to follow God. And yet, I could never kill that passion. I hated myself for failing.

            The other great passion I struggled with was Women. In high school and college, I had really bad luck with dating. For some reason I was just having a tougher time than my friends. I wasn’t meeting the right girl, and I thought there was something seriously wrong with me. Since I wasn’t finding anyone, and since I was getting so upset about it, I didn’t have any other option but to somehow put away this passion for women, which I needed to do in terms of God. So like film, I felt God expected me to sacrifice having a girl in my life. I felt that I was supposed to accept being alone in order to follow God. I felt that my passion for women must have been sinful, that my attraction to woman was only because of my depraved nature, and any attraction was just lust. I had to get over women in order to follow God. I hated myself for failing.

            By my junior year at Whitworth, I was burnt out on church with heavily repressed desires that made me hate myself. Eventually, I couldn’t hold out any longer, and so I gave into my desire for film. I switched majors from Theology to English at the end of my sophomore year. And in my new pursuit of film, it felt good, it felt right, more right than God. That feeling scared me. God was supposed to fill me with joy, so why was film doing a much better job?

            That made me think about how I was raised, how I went to church all of my life and how it rapidly shaped my identity, all of it happening behind the scenes of my consciousness. I realized that I had given up control of what I believed, and really, I never had much control to begin with. I realized that from the day I was born, the outside world had a profound impact on who I was. The world shaped my personality and my characteristics. It was the world that taught me the conception of truth and being raised in the church created a bias to name Christ as Lord. My liberty was at the mercy of the world that created me, and it would be years until I realize the potency of the world’s power over my freewill.

            Since I never was fully conscious of my choosing God, that my childhood had created a bias previously unknown, I realized that my belief was inauthentic and mostly fake. My conception of God had been skewed by my history of insecurity, chiefly my insecurities about cinema and women. The real God wanted to be discovered. I knew that my faith was phony, and the only way to find God was to tear down everything I knew about God, question everything and build up an authentic belief from the ground up. A part of me knew at the time that it was God who told me to be an agnostic. Ironic.

            So I tore down my faux-Christian identity, and life got a lot happier. I pursued art and embraced its power to influence and inspire my life. I talked to people I would usually ignore as a Christian. I understood what they were most passionate about. I realized how authentic other atheists and agnostics were. I started preferring their company to other Christians because they seemed real, they didn’t sound like clones. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved my Christian friends, it’s just the agnostics weren’t afraid to express that which was most precious in their heart, they were real, and sometimes painfully so.

            And so I was happy, so I stopped worrying about God. Apathy was the name of the game. I would go weeks without thinking about God. Why would I? I was learning about the passion of humanity in the arts, so why would I go back to the frozen chosen languishing in the pews, ultimately nurturing loneliness and unhappiness?

            The only reminder I got about God was from my friend Sara. We would enjoy philosophical debates in coffee shops. Eventually God came up, and I simply stated that I didn’t care. She insisted that I should. But I couldn’t. She was like that friend who was trying to convince you how amazing the movie you just saw really was. Try as they might, you just weren’t moved by it. It’s not that you thought the movie was bad; it just wasn’t as good as “Blade Runner”.

            Yet she persisted. I don’t know where she got the willpower, but she kept bringing Him up. Apathy was hard to explain to her. I acknowledged his existence, so why didn’t I care about his wanting to be in my life? She had me there—damn women, I hate it when they’re right.

            But I knew that I had to respect the agnostic process. I know that sounds lazy and pretentious, but I had a lot of work to do so that I could fathom God’s being. Picture it like this, in order to rediscover God; I had to come to him afresh, to see him from the farthest out so that I could slowly take all of him in. It’s like a rocket ship that wants to rediscover the magnificence of Earth. In order to do that, it needs to orbit around the dark side of the Moon, and return to the Earth, afresh. Sara was calling me back to Earth; but I knew I had to reach the moon first. And what was on the moon? My insecurities. It was those insecurities that contributed to the false conception of God. In order to come home to God, to prepare a slate ready to understand the real God, I would have to understand the issues that plagued my soul.

At the end of my sophomore year I switched majors from Theology to English. We don’t have a film program at Whitworth so I did English literature. I fell in love with reading, and my knowledge and understanding of not only film but all the arts had been heightened. I watched an embarrassing amount of films in the past two years. I think for an entire month I watched at least one film a day. Roger Ebert recently said that "the movies, as they always do, will cheer and inspire me. They heal, because they take me into the minds of their creators.” I couldn’t say it any better. The movies affirmed my passion for not only beauty, but my need to know the person behind it. There are certain filmmakers who have the incredible ability to light up the screen with awe and wonder, it is my belief that that talent is from God alone. I know now that film is an inspired passion of mine. The world of cinema is where I belong. My two years of agnosticism confirmed that passion.

            Once I became an agnostic, I realized that I was actually damn handsome, and that any woman should be lucky enough to be pursued by me. But it took all two years to come to that understanding. I didn’t really go crazy once I unshackled myself from the rules of Christianity. When I came to Portland, I could have been that guy at the bar who constantly hit on women and had a bunch of one-night stands. But I knew deep in my heart that that is not what I wanted, and I knew it wasn’t the after effects of Christianity; it really was something I believed in. It was my agnosticism that allowed me to understand that. The Church can instill fear in young men. In high school, I hated myself for failing in my romantic pursuits, so I convinced myself that all of my romantic emotions were the product of lust, and therefore sin. It was the only justification I could make for myself and only now I realize how psychologically damaging that is. But I came to understand myself as a passionate and sensitive man when it came to romance-whether it was by how I was raised or something deeply innate about me, I knew that my potential to love a woman was not lust, not sin, but something so right. My conflicted nature was the reason for my failure in romance-fear, insecurity, and no confidence in myself was why I failed-not because of a sadistic God who commanded worship without end.  

            I always told Sara that it had to be God that was the motivation to return to Him. A part of me wanted to be a Christian again so I could find someone to date. But I didn’t want loneliness to motivate me. Know this dear reader, being an agnostic is a lonely time. You are always a stranger in a strange land. There is not one group you’re fully apart of, not even other agnostics, because you’re all in very different boats. So I waited out the loneliness and discovered myself. I discovered the beauty of solitude. In my time with myself I affirmed everything that was in the core of my heart, without worrying about religion or spirituality. And so I discovered my passion and the love of myself. I was always lonely, but never truly alone. I learned to be alone but not lonely. I learned about the power of art and its ability to illuminate the soul. I learned about my potential as a person. And it excites me to think about my potential as an artist.

            And so at the end of two years, I learned about the important things in my life that I freely chose and affirmed. Without worrying about the law of God, or pleasing God with a high moral code, I understood that life amounted to this: That we have been born as people who ought to live in community together, who do their best to love themselves and to love others in every way that is most right, and to pursue the passionate things found deepest in their heart. For me, to live is to express those things deepest within my heart, that being love, truth, and passion. It is my need to love my family, love my friends, and to find a special woman to fall madly in love with.

            So in the midst of my life affirming self realization, I discovered the life I wanted, and I realized, it was the life that God wanted for me, and behind it all, I discovered God. God had shown me the life he wants me to live, and he has shown me that he is meant to be at the center of it all. That doesn’t mean a life of religion but a pursuit of the life God has promised: Life to the full. I know that it was God who told me to pursue agnosticism. In those two years I discovered how to love myself and the things I wanted to do. Now that I know that, I understand that God has made me who I am. He created me with certain tendencies and allowed me to be born at a certain time, in a certain place, to a certain family. He will use me through the things I do.

I don’t live like I did in high school. Back then, everything outside of the church was secular, second rate. Now I know that God is bigger than the institutions we made for him. The parts of life that are filled with truth and passion are because of God. I forgot religiousness and discovered a spiritual life. By pursuing God, I pursue myself, I know the life that I have is a gift from God, and I know God has great plans for me. To accomplish them, I follow God, the God of the universe who created all of us who were made to live a life to the full.