Wish I knew, but no, I have no idea what it all means. What does that question mean anyway, it usually is given by a person who is trying to find meaning out of life, and it is usually followed by sappy music, a meadow, and two people running towards each other. I guess what they are getting at is that it love is the meaning of everything, or at least the trajectory of where everything is going. I have an hour before I take off for the tube and make my fifteen hour journey home, to see my wife, and the fetus pushing on the interior of her womb. A question comes after thinking about my wife and how much I miss her, that question being what is love? Am I just attached ... and all the question that go with that. What is love? (By the way that is her pictured below, She is the second from the left on the top row, she looks really young in the picture, I sware she is not twelve. It is nice to be able to find her on the Internet).In my few off hours I watched a couple of movies that I borrowed from Rosie who lives down the road. I watched the Notebook, and The Prince of Tides two very different takes on love.

So, I am bringing this up because I have to give these back on my way out the door, and I remembered that they had a profound effect on me. Not because they were particularly good movies, although I did like the Prince of Tides for subjective reasons, but because they gave two images of love that seem to pulse through our culure at the moment. The Notebook is a powerful story but unfortunately the acting takes away from the brilliant idea for the movie. Not to ruin it, but it is about a man who reads a notebook to his wife who is suffering from dementia, and cannot remember him. The story then brings her out of her dementia for just a moment, and they have dinner and then she forgets because he does not take her back to the life that they used to live. They end up dying together in the end giving an image that we all want to have, to live together completely devoted to one another without any temptation from the outside world.

If the Notebook gives us an image of pure devotion, Prince of Tides gives us an image of accountability, and commitment. Yet it is not the commitment in the sense of the couple desperately in love with one another, but two people struggling with whether they love one another, both having affairs and then both returning to the other deciding to care for one another. The interesting part of the Prince of Tides is that the main character has to re-live a traumatic moment in his life to give sense to his family of origin, and the family that he is about to leave. You see his reason for distancing himself, and desiring to run away is because of the trauma in his life that keeps him from feeling anything anymore. So love in this case is a decision to be with someone in the midst of pain and longing for another person.

The dichotomy between feeling, and decision seems to be two camps within the American Cinema. This battle seems to distance people from the journey metaphor that can be given to life. We long for static feelings, which is an oxymoron of course. Feelings are fluid but we fight against their fluidity, struggling to hold onto a moment that will pass. The struggle is living with time, a time that changes things, that causes us to fight for what we love, because it seems that there is something in the world that wants us to leave everything behind in search of the next great ecstatic moment.

I guess that is what this trip has been for me, a struggle with time. There have been moments of pain, lonliness, joy, sorrow, frustration, massive anxiety, and everything other emotion that I can't think of right now. I have seen the faces of every person from my home in the different faces of all of you Mooters, and St. Matties. There are so many similiarities to home and here, and I think that is why I have fallen in love with all of you. I find that in the ecstasy of the last six weeks (meaning life outside of stasis, or outside of the static life) I have tried to create in someways comfortable patches of home here, and when I have not been able to, I felt anxiety and frustration (like this guy below). I think that is part of how we deal with life, we create the comfortable places as an escape from the struggles of uncomfortable life. And when it does not work out well we might take a machine gun to the world we have created and try and destroy everything around us, (ok, I know I just wanted to use the Scarface image).

Even with all of that excitement I am going to miss you all terribly. I have found a real home here, and I hope to keep these friendships for life. You are all welcome to Seattle at any moment, and I know COTA will welcome a visit from its sister church. This was an enormous growing experience for me, I have never felt more like a priest than when I was here. I think in someways MOOT and St. Matt's did an amazing job of pruning and weeding, so I could grow with leaps and bounds. You are in my being now, because you helped me understand who I am. I will always be grateful for that.

Your Brother in Christ,
Travis K Smith