Good Answers to My Best Questions

Hey!  It’s the 25th Anniversary of...

By the time I was in my 20’s, I had spent roughly 20 years of my life trying to get decent answers to my best questions.  

In high school I went to a Catholic school with daily religion classes.  They didn’t answer my questions satisfactorily.  

“Is my Methodist father really going to hell because he had a vasectomy after this 39 year-old wife (my mother) gave birth to his seventh child (me), even though the doctor said further pregnancies would be dangerous?”

“I’m afraid so.  Yes.”

“Seriously?” 

“Well…”

“Don’t bother to answer that.  The second question was rhetorical."

And besides, that wasn’t one of my real questions anyway.  I was just using the process of elimination to see if anybody or any institution had any good answers.

God is Back!
And this time…it’s personal!

So far, the only things that had really spoken to me about the things I really wanted to know were movies and books.  These might have been the impetus for asking my best questions in the first place.  My first memory of “awe” was as a very young child, maybe 2 or 4, and being allowed by my hell-bound, birth-controlling  parents to stay up to watch the annual showing of “The Ten Commandments" on ABC.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s a truly awesome experiment in bombast and scenery chewing, featuring a dream pairing for fans of the William Shatner school of acting - Charlton Heston vs. Yul Brynner (as Moses and Ramses).  I still watch it every year.  A long time ago I switched over from thinking it was a truly great film, to thinking of it more as beloved nostalgia.  Kind of like the way Macaroni and Cheese switches somewhere along the line from a child’s delicacy to comfort food.

But the first time I saw “The Ten Commandments?”  With the pillar of fire, the parting sea, the staff that turns into a cobra, the God who lives on the mountain top?   Let’s just say it left a mark.

"Wait... you couldn’t have told me that before?!
WTF?!"

Around the same time, also in perpetual reruns on TV but new to this child, “The Wizard of Oz.”  Terrifying, truly awe inspiring, and there was something about those instructions… “Follow the yellow brick road.”  It wasn’t until many years later that I really understood.  I was trying to get somewhere, to come to an understanding about my best questions, metaphorically crawling on my hands and knees in the dark, spiny shrubs and hedges scratching my face and my arms, going nowhere… when all along there was an easier path, paved in gold bricks, right next to me.  I was astonished to find this out.  As with another scene in that film, when the good witch tells Dorothy, "you could have gone home anytime you liked, but you wouldn’t have believed it.  You had to find out for yourself."

He’s going ot see Star Wars?  Again?  WTF?!

After that it was Star Wars.  I was ten in 1977.  Right in the wheel house for Star Wars.  I saw it twelve times that summer.  No easy feat for a kid who needed a ride from his Mom to get to a movie theater.  At some point she started saying “again?!  I’m not taking you all the way over there to see the same movie again.”  So I lied, started saying I was going to see something else, and then went to Star Wars again. Over and over.  Absorbing every sound and nuance like a starving man invited to a BBQ, who can stop gorging by the twelfth hamburger, and truly taste and appreciate the joy and wonder of food.   It’s funny when I think about that now, that a parent trying to be conscientious about what her child is doing, somehow thought it would have been better to see a different movie, any other movie, like say “Smokey and the Bandit” or Airport ’77, rather than absorb any more of the life-changing event that was Star Wars to every ten-year-old that summer.

In the ensuing formative years, the big moments all came through story.  Reading the “Lord of the Rings” in junior high school.  “The Grapes of Wrath” in high school.  “Hamlet.”  The first 2 Terminator movies.  Various treatments of King Arthur.  Robin Hood.  Batman.  Comic books in general.  

What did all these things have in common?  Hmm.  Little did I know that this was just another way of asking one of my best questions. 

I found a real good answer to that in my 20’s when somebody who knew I wanted to be a writer - and I wish I could remember who it was because I’d like to thank him or her - told me about Joseph Campbell.  

The answer to what they had in common is in this book:  “The Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

If you are a writer or an artist of some kind, certainly any kind of a storyteller, there’s very good chance you have already read this, but if you haven’t... go read this book.  

If you are not looking for something quite so academic, maybe just wondering and looking for some decent answers with meat on the bone, answers that don’t come with the baggage of institutions or dogma, answers that are simple, honest and will give you easy directions on where to find the yellow brick road so you can follow it yourself, absolutely check out the interviews with Bill Moyers, “The Power of Myth.”  The series in available for purchase in many forms including books and DVDs.  And the website of "Moyers & Company” has posted many videos with excerpts a plenty  HERE

Here’s about 40 seconds worth...