Who, boy

I have to write a three-part curriculum on wisdom, contemplation and resolution as one of the final projects for my “Teacher As Prophet” class. We were kind of tricked into determining the three subjects following a group exercise exploring the themes of the book “Gilead.” “Gilead” is a slow, and fascinating, read about an aging preacher who has married a young wife, has a seven-year-old son and who is dying. The book, which is a letter or essay to his son, explores a multitude of themes, three of which are the aforementioned.

And after playing a class version of “Name that Theme,” we all chose three themes that were particularly important to us. Unbeknownst to us, in that moment, is that they would be the basis of a three-part curriculum that we would have to develop.

And so as every seminary student might do some five weeks before the assignment is due, I entered “wisdom, contemplation and resolution” into a “Google” search. What came up, after an extensive weeding through a variety of useless web pages, was that those three words were themes of the Hindu heart sutra. Eureka! Maybe I would be able to find some connection that I could use for my assignment.

Alas, I needed to download RealPlayer, a multimedia software, in order to hear the heart sutra chant, which I thought could form some sort of basis for my curricula. A whole web reality presented itself on the RealPlayer site, a part of which was the trailer for “Stranger than Fiction,” a movie that is being released tomorrow.

Many readers of The River Reporter might remember that my son, Zachary, traveled to Chicago last summer to be a Production Assistant on set for this Will Brennan, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson film. In his column “Reel Life, he explored the meaning of the Pablo Picasso sculpture in downtown Chicago and told of his experience in East Chicago, a suburb in Illinois. I watched the trailer through my newly installed software, which played without hesitation, which is more than I can say for some of the clips that I attempt to watch with my dialup connection.

Realizing that it would be a movie that I could watch the credits and see my son’s name roll by, I was overcome with an emotion that I cannot explain. I was not sure whether I was in tears because of the abundance of the universe and the amazing potential that each of us holds, as exemplied by Zachary, or whether there is a bittersweet experience of being human where we almost reach an understanding and fall mute in its presence.

Perhaps I am homesick.

Perhaps I am transforming, as some of new friends here have suggested.

Perhaps, I really can’t tell. Yet.