No More a Stranger Nor a Guest

A few weeks ago, Chez Dilys sent a little delegation down to San Antonio to study screenwriting-storytelling with representatives from Barbara Nicolosi's Act One enterprise. The deal-sealing feature of the mini-course was Barbara's idea of "haunting moments" in films -- eloquent unlabored images of beauty, shock, and wonder that still the mind, touch the heart, and feed the soul with a mysterious nostalgia. How to identify, and, if the muse is willing, how to tell stories as settings for those moments.

Examples offered by Act One instructors include the assembling Shawshank Redemption prisoners in a desolate exercise yard beneath soaring-soprano Mozart; an end to disorder when in Fargo the pregnant police chief rests next to her husband as the ominous theme music becomes a baby's music box; and the last scene of Places in the Heart, where communion in a country church lifts earth to heaven, chronos blooming into kairos, long-lost faces smiling at last beside us again.

At home among spring birds' nests and his several little boys with their make-believe transparent paint, Tony Woodlief in a recent post marries the daily world of mopping up -- eeuw! -- the baby to the brightness and joy of a glimpsed eternity. As we all do, he has a stake in both realms. The difference is, he knows it. A top-notch writer with sophisticated narrative moves, president of a real-deal university research institute for interdisciplinary research and application in the humane sciences, he willingly and urgently acknowledges that from some perspectives we are all only children. Blessed and beloved children.

Isaac Watts (1674-1748) paraphrased the 23d Psalm and others set it to music:

The sure provision of my God
Attend me all my days.
O may thy house be mine abode
and all my work be praise.
There would I find a settled rest
while others go and come;
no more a stranger or a guest,
but like a child at home.