Our 150th Issue: A Whole Life in Twelve Movies
This is the 150th issue of Soul Telegram, and our book A WHOLE LIFE IN TWELVE MOVIES: A CINEMATIC PATH TO A DEEPER SPIRITUALITY is published today. It’s been a labor of love to write about movies that trace the life cycle of a human, from before birth to after death, and we’re delighted to share it with you in hopes that it will help point us toward more meaningful, integrated lives. You can find it wherever books are sold, or click here to order. And for this issue, some thoughts on our friendship and collaboration, and the meaning of the movies.
Kathleen Norris on A SERENDIPITOUS ENCOUNTER
2017 was part of a difficult period in my life as a writer: after publishing several successful books the manuscripts I’d been working on were rejected by publishers. I’d begun to wonder if I’d grown too old to continue, and my writing gift had diminished along with the cartilage in my knees. My encountering Gareth Higgins at Image magazine’s Glen Workshop couldn’t have come at a better time. I had grown used to failing miserably at trying to share my love of movies with friends. I’d get polite interest and blank stares. But with Gareth I was suddenly engaged in discussing everything from the rarified work of Andrei Tarkovsky to the inspired silliness of the Muppets. We both felt that our conversation could go on forever, and it has. We became lifelong friends.
I have to say that until I met Gareth I was having a terrible time at that conference. It was held in Santa Fe and flying from sea level in Honolulu to an elevation of over 7,000 feet is not easy. I had given myself an extra day before the conference began to cope with the inevitable headache and fatigue. But I soon realized that I was coming down with a terrible cold, the kind that begins in my throat and takes its time evolving into serious congestion and coughing. I had some lozenges to help me cope, and fortunately my job as the conference chaplain didn’t involve much public speaking.
My misery faded once I met Gareth, and that conference became one of the best experiences of my life. I believe it was the Holy Spirit, working overtime, that inspired me to look over the schedule of films that Gareth and screenwriter/director Scott Teems were presenting. I asked Gareth if I could sit in, and our conversations began.
Gareth is an inspiring instigator, and soon he had invited me to work at one of his Northern Ireland retreats, and also agree to collaborate on a weekly e-newsletter called SoulTelegram. All of this has changed my life — not only as a writer, but as someone who feels called to share her love of movies with others. It was a calling I hadn’t recognized until I met Gareth.
We’re hoping for a good balance for our readers with Soul Telegram, and are trying to keep our essays to a little more than 1,000 words. Gareth has more access to current movies than I do, and I delight in roaming through the variety of films available on streaming platforms. I’m glad to have introduced readers to contemporary Iranian cinema (which I consider one of the wonders of our world) and also to neglected early 20th century film pioneers like Lois Weber, and even to the first Godzilla movie, made in 1954 and banned in the United States for fifty years. (If you want to know why, see my essay in an early issue, 10/11/22).
My favorite response to the newsletter came from a Benedictine monk, a friend who thanked me for the free subscription I’d provided. He was printing out every issue and putting it on the community’s magazine rack. “Everyone’s reading it,” he said, “and it causes a lot of conversation. We’ll never see most of the films you write about,” he added, “but we love knowing about them.” That’s good enough for me.
Gareth Higgins on A FRIENDSHIP WITH THE MOVIES
I’ve been watching movies for over forty years now, and when I say watching I mean something far deeper than letting them float past my eyes. I mean that somehow I learned to pay attention to the projected dreams of others, and discover myself reflected there too.
One of my earliest memories is of my mum taking me to see Gandhi at eight years old; another of The Goonies at my eleventh birthday party; and then One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at thirteen, on late night BBC, at the behest of both my parents insisting that I stay up with them to see something that they remembered as a profound film from their youth.
All three of those movies did something to me:
Gandhi expanded my horizons beyond Belfast to India, and was the first time I remember thinking about fairness, courage, and social movements. I was captivated by the idea that one person could embody (flaws and all) the hopes of an entire people; and that heroism is both about creating safety for others, and often about what you’re willing to give up rather than what you might do to “the bad guys”. Indeed, Gandhi introduced me to the concept of active nonviolence both as a more effective strategy for positive social change, and a morally visionary way of thinking about enemies. The dream that Gandhi put into my mind four decades ago is still animating me today.
The Goonies spoke to my yearning to be part of a community doing meaningful things together, and initiated the idea that the kind of treasure you might find on a pirate ship is not as important than the treasure of relationship with others. I wept after seeing The Goonies, because I felt lonely in my bones; I believed I would never have an adventure like this group of misfits. Today, I smile the kind of smile that leads to tears of amazement as I think about how genuine community has become one of the most obvious gifts of my life. I’m writing this a couple of hundred yards away from the home I lived in when I saw The Goonies and wept for my loneliness; it turns out that lament revealed a need that became an answer.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest took me to two places I’d never been: the Pacific Northwest, and what was then called a mental institution. I’ve become close to both since - a deep concern for the mental, psychological, sociological and ultimately metaphysical wellbeing of people, and an abiding affection for the rainy forests of Oregon and Washington.
As an eight or eleven or thirteen year old I didn’t know words like psychological, nonviolence, or social movements. I’m not sure I had heard the word empathy, but that’s what the movies were inducing in me - not just a sense of seeing the pain and joy of other people, but of having my own mirrored.
Movies validated my dreams, and gave me bigger ones.
Back then I didn’t know words like cinematography or screenplay; I didn’t know what a director did or how a movie was made; I conflated performers with their roles to the extent that I might have thought meeting Ben Kingsley (the actor who played Gandhi) could help with the peacebuilding urges that were awakening in me. When my mother played an April Fool’s joke on me and my siblings, telling us that E.T. was coming to breakfast, the reveal broke my heart. I recovered, of course, and eventually my sadness that my dream of the movies would not come true gave way to a recognition of something far greater than just the enjoyment of a story well-told with dancing light and resonant sound: I realised that the part of me that resonated with the movie I was watching was inside me, always, and would never leave. Movies were someone else’s dream (often taking hundreds of people to make projectable), but they were awakening a visionary consciousness within me. Awakening my soul.
The part of me that was with Marty McFly holding the Jeep while taking a skateboard shortcut in Back to the Future; the part of me that felt like I was in the room with Yves Montand in Manon des Sources when he realises his monumental mistake; the part of me that knew I was not a cowardly lion but “just a victim of disorganized thinking”; the part of me that wanted to cheer and celebrate Karl Malden’s priest (and oh how I love a good movie priest) in On the Waterfront for naming the daily crucifixions that occur anytime a human denies the full humanity of any other person; the part that wondered at the end of Cabaret or Caché or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon if I would be part of the targeted remnant, or join the complicit crowd; the part that saw myself in Andrei Rublev and The Muppet Movie and The Verdict and After Life and Fearless and The Abyss and To Sleep With Anger and The Fisher King and The New World and Todo Sobre Mi Madre and Yi-Yi and Atanarjuat The Fast Runner and Beau Travail and Stranger than Fiction and In the Mood for Love and Amsterdam and Perfect Days, and the part of me that keeps asking what it means to Do the Right Thing - that part is already more real than anything in the movies.
It’s a mistake to think that the movies are bigger than real life - for just like everything else, our experience of the movies exist inside the mind of anyone watching them. Some people believe that the universe itself exists inside our mind, or the story we tell about it. That may be a poetic notion rather than an assertion of objective fact, but whether or not it’s literally true is not the point.
Real life is bigger than the movies, but the movies can help us take real life seriously enough to experience it while it’s happening to us.
I don’t know if I would have learned to pay attention to my own life if I hadn’t learned to pay attention to the movies. I’m profoundly grateful for that, and for my collaboration with Kathleen, that has now seen 150 issues of Soul Telegram, and the publication today of our book A WHOLE LIFE IN TWELVE MOVIES: A CINEMATIC PATH TO A DEEPER SPIRITUALITY.
It’s Kathleen’s first book in fourteen years, and my first book on cinema in a decade. It aims to help us reflect on our lives through movies that trace the lifespan of a human from before birth to after death. It’s been a joy to write, and we offer it in that same spirit to you today. You can get it wherever books are sold - and here’s a link to find it.
Finally, some words from Father James Martin, who kindly wrote a foreword to the book.
Fr. James Martin on A WHOLE LIFE IN TWELVE MOVIES
Reading this beautiful book is like having an endlessly fascinating conversation with two friends about film, when those two friends are always wise, thoughtful, and funny and have inspiring things to say about the movies they love. They invite the reader to consider films that have something to tell us about how best to live: how we can protect the innocence of children, how we can find a job that pays the bills and also nourish a vocation in the arts, how we can counter greed and violence with self-sacrificing love, and how we might choose to remember our lives once they’ve ended. Movies for every stage of life…
Of course, the best way to approach this book would be to watch these films with a friend, discuss them afterward, then turn to Gareth and Kathleen. Or, if you’re more of a loner, you might watch them privately and then have a kind of virtual conversation with these two authors. For me, the first thing I want to do after watching a powerful film is see what others have to say about it. At heart, it’s a desire for conversation, for learning, and for being challenged. This book is an answer to those common desires.
Enjoy the conversation you are about to have!
ENDORSEMENTS
“There are few pleasures as distinct as viewing a great film, then chasing it with a spirited chat with a friend. This book is loaded with that lovely feeling. A rich format and rich set of films; Norris and Higgins make excellent tour guides who can lead us into the vast landscape of world cinema.”
—Josh Jeter, producer of Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
“Norris and Higgins seem to engage movies for the same reason I do: in the faith that better is possible and that good stories show us the way. Their experience of said stories and which stories have the most meaning for them are, of course, different from my own. But isn’t that the gift? In the movies they have invited us to, I get to experience the world through their eyes, and my own experience is broadened. What will we choose to do with the broadening of our experiences? This is the charge these two movie lovers so deftly set before us.”
—Melvin Bray, equity designer and author of Better: Waking Up to Who We Could Be
“As a fan of Kathleen Norris’s Cloister Walk and Dakota, I loved reading her honest engagement with various films in this book. Higgins and Norris add to a conversation that the filmmaker has begun and draw from their experience of life to give these humble films more depth. I wish there was more writing about films like it. I feel my perspective about the world widening through it.”
—Lee Isaac Chung, director of Minari and Twisters
“In A Whole Life in Twelve Movies, Norris and Higgins do what they do so well: weave together stories and commen- tary that remind us what it means to be human, to long for love and connection, and to search the world around us for moments of kinship as we carry grief, joy, healing, and long- ing inside our own hearts. Art is powerful, and in the pages of this book you’ll find an incredible guide into one of the most effective forms of art—film—to explore our connection to ourselves, spirituality, and one another. Whether you’re an avid movie watcher or hoping to dive into these films for the first time, please read this book and let it lead you into curiosity and wonder. You’ll be so glad you did.”
—Kaitlin B. Curtice, award-winning author of Native, Living Resistance, and Winter’s Gifts
“This book is a loving embrace of a new way of seeing— which used to be an old way of seeing. With eyes and souls wide open, Norris and Higgins dare to engage cinema on its deepest and most meaningful levels; they dare to believe in it as art. Most scandalously of all, they dare to believe movies can teach us how to live better, if only we’d allow them to. This book is a treasure.”
—Scott Teems, writer-director, Rectify, Narcos: Mexico, and The Quarry