In Search Of...

Let me tell you about how something as simple as a film helped to remind me of the not so distant past. “Searching For the Wrong-Eyed Jesus”, a fairly weird and unassuming name for a film I had never even heard of until a few months ago when my Aunt sent me list of her top favorite films and on that list happened to be this movie. I don’t tend to rent movies, I borrow them from the extensive library system here in Seattle.

So I put this movie on my list and it finally arrived at my local branch the other day. I sat down and watched it last night and was completely taken aback by what I saw. This crazy film about the South and some of the things that make it what it is reminded me that I come from one of the most culturally rich places in America. A place full of the hope of heaven and the hell of life. A people who tend to see everything as either black or white with no room for anything in between. One man in the movie, an inmate at a small town penitentiary, described it like this, “There was no middle ground, you was either in church, or you was in the bars, you know, partyin’.”

One line in particular really summed up who I am (or who I want to become). An old man walking down a dirt road speaks of people in the South and says this of them, “truth of the matter was, stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world, it was their understanding of themselves.”

Amen.