My Faith

In 2019 I’ve decided to “come out” as a Christian. The bigoted intolerant, hypocritical Religious Right has totally co-opted the term, Christian. I believe that those of us who follow Christ’s teaching to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit and comfort (and treat) the sick, cherish the children, and help those in need MUST speak up and take back the definition of “Christian.” And so, I am writing a book.

My faith is the culmination of a very long spiritual journey.  Or, perhaps, it is just the start.  Spiritual journeys are like that. Any journey toward God is a continuing inner spiral. It is a struggle.  But our story is in the struggle, so is our faith.

BUT if God makes you uncomfortable substitute The Universe or A Power Greater Than Yourself.  It is all about finding your truest highest most authentic self. It’s about drawing closer or further away from altruism, tolerance, and generosity. That is what represents God to me.

My Story

I am an international film and television consultant. I taught at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) film school in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in screenwriting for ten years. I was privileged to work with some of the finest screenwriting students in the world (the program is an international one). It was there that I developed The Character Map. Beyond UCLA, I have worked with directors, producers, and writers who are Oscar winners, Emmy winners, BAFTA winners, and absolute beginners, through a variety of international film institutes and universities, broadcasters, and production companies using the map. The method has been successfully applied to thousands of stories.

I live and work in a secular world.  The professionals and academics that hire me usually have no connection to a church, the Bible, and very little interest in God or religion of any kind. The production companies, writers, directors, or producers who are my clients only call me as a last resort for a failing project; a television show that is sliding downward in the ratings or a film that doesn’t work despite an extensive (and expensive) development process.

What is missing in these failing projects is the lack of a clear emotional journey for the protagonist (the main character). Or that’s how I explain the problem. But over the years, I’ve been camouflaging the real problem.  The real problem in any failing story is the lack of a spiritual journey. And a failed or faltering journey is also at the heart of a failed or faltering life.

My professional colleagues can all understand emotion.  A spiritual journey seems much less comprehensible.  So in my professional work, I put things in the way that is most user-friendly. Now, I want to share what I know about the spiritual journey at the heart of any great personal story.  And I will illustrate a wide array of spiritual journeys in the Bible undertaken by a whole host of characters.

The Spiritual Journey

A spiritual journey is an intentional movement (filled with stumbles and wrong turns) toward connection with the divine through embracing one’s true self. God isn’t found somewhere outside of you.  God is inside of you and inside others.  Because God made you in His image, God is most fully present in your being when you act authentically. But you have to go deep inside and strip away all pretence, falsehood, or posturing.

The years have taught me that the key to solving any problem in art or life is finding your truest most authentic self.  Most of us live in our “surface self.”  We have a face we present to the world.  This face represents what we want others to believe about us or what we want to believe about ourselves.

This book asks you to go deep inside to find out who you really are. I hope it helps you embrace your uniqueness. This process is a journey, and it helps to have a map. Finding the authentic self and thereby finding God (my secular friends would call this peace/contentment) is at the heart of any character in a memorable work of fiction or any well-lived spiritual journey. No one is successful by being other than they are. We will only be successful in life and in art by being more of who we are.

The Spectrum or Continuum

I don’t believe people change.  I believe they evolve. A lifetime of experiences, decisions, and actions make someone a brighter truer version of who they already are OR a darker more false and twisted version of who they already are.  We live life on a continuum, on one side is our best self and on the other is our worst self. Most of us struggle through life somewhere in the middle.  I’ve never met someone who had a personality transplant. We all exist on a spectrum of how God made us.  It is our choice to spiral closer to God or further away.

One would think it would be easy to recognize that spiral.  Most often it is a mystery.  We usually don’t know or don’t understand where God (or the Universe) is leading us.  If we follow God’s call, He is leading us toward our true self, which is always a revelation.

Sometimes that revelation is a surprise, and sometimes you discover you are what you want to reject, and sometimes your true self is hiding in plain sight.

The Spiritual Character Map: The Story is in the Struggle

My little book, The Spiritual Character Map: The Story is in the Struggle, is a six-step process that provides a practical tool to guide you on your journey.  It helps to look at your life as a story.  It is a method I’ve used thousands of times in helping people create compelling fictional stories all over the world. The most vivid stories are about characters searching for the truth of who they are and struggling to live (or failing to live) a genuine life.  In stories and in life, conflict, difficulty, and obstacles don’t build character; they reveal it. The Spiritual Character Map is a tool to help reveal your true self through story.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist Monk, and renowned theologian had a simple concept of who the true self is: it is the person we are before God, the person we are meant to be. I would add, it is who we are when we are living without fear.  It is who we are when we are living securely in the conviction we are enough in God’s eyes.  It is who we are when we really believe we are forgiven, free, and whole. It is who we are when we are living in a state of grace; grace that is not earned, nor worked for, nor achieved through pious self-sacrifice, nor by any other means.

We are offered the gift of grace because we are human. It is our decision whether to accept this blessing— or not.  We are loved because we are human. We are forgiven, free, and made whole if we fully accept Christ’s love for us. We all know this from Sunday School. Why is that so hard to live this way?

What to do about Fear

The answer is fear. We live in fear that we aren’t enough, that we should somehow be different than we are, or be better than our neighbor, or somehow be more than we are.  It is the fear we are not lovable because we are too flawed, too broken, or too damaged.  It is the fear we can never “really” be saved because we continue to mess up and make mistakes.

Amongst our fellows, we believe that if anyone knew who we were at our weakest and most vulnerable, how could they possibly love us? We construct an elaborate false self, out fear of being “less than.”  We spend years developing a persona we think will be seen as better, different, or more than we are at heart. Or we surround ourselves in a carefully constructed illusion of not caring or being in rebellion against community and convention or the superstitious and absurd myth of “God.”

To deflect our fear we clamp on an iron suit of armor, chocking and obscuring our natural growth, shutting off our blooming toward the light of grace. We build a persona we believe is strong enough to protect our vulnerability inside brought on by disappointment, disapproval, or rejection. Can we map a journey toward God or away? That is the purpose of The Spiritual Character Map: The Story is in The Struggle.