I AM? YOU ARE.

"Let there be peace, I am a stand for peace
Let there be love, I am a stand for love
Let there be joy, I am a stand for joy
We are making a new world now." 

--Karen Drucker, closing song at Seattle Unity

Friday night I went to see the movie, "I AM," with a bunch of friends. I was poised to love it, to be inspired, and to have my life changed, but I left the theater feeling somewhat disappointed. 

My disappointment turned to dismay when I realized that almost everyone in the group I was with LOVED IT. I mean, REALLY LOVED IT. 

I was flummoxed. 

Did I not "get" the movie? Did I miss something? (It was the late show on a Friday night.....)

The thing I just kept thinking is: There is nothing new here. Everything he presented in the movie I have already seen or read or experienced somewhere else. We are all one. The Universe is connected in ways we cannot fathom. Yeah? And? 

I am not even sure what I wanted from the movie, but I wanted something MORE. Something BIGGER. Something MIND-BLOWING. 

I guess it was that movie for some people, it just wasn't that movie for me. 

The thing that really gets under my skin is something Tom Shadyac (the director and star) says in the trailer, "I decided to....spark a conversation around challenging and rarely-asked questions....What's wrong with our world and what can we do about it?"

I reject the premise that these are rarely-asked questions. I ask myself these questions. Every. Single. Day. And so do the friends I went the the movie with (a group which included a massage therapist, a psychic, a cranial sacral practitioner, and two highly intuitive energy healers). Which is why I just cannot understand why they were so enamored with it.

The irony of the whole thing is that just prior to the start of the movie I got into a discussion with one of the women in our group (a friend of a friend and someone I had never met before) about Catholicism and the clergy-molestation scandal. I did not handle it well. 

[As a quick aside, my history with the Catholic Church: I grew up pretty fundamentalist Protestant, became a Catholic when I met my husband, and ended my affiliation with the Catholic Church five or six years later for personal, political and spiritual reasons. While I no longer support the church financially or take communion, I do attend services from time to time with my husband.]

I had just read an article about the Texas priest who is under investigation for the attempted murder of a boy who has accused him of molestation and my hackles were up about the Catholic Church so when we started discussing Catholicism it brought up a lot of energy for me. A LOT. 

I was sitting there in my head saying, "Calm down. You don't know this woman very well. Your husband is Catholic and you can understand that. There is no need to make a stand here, etc., etc." But I just wasn't listening to myself. 

I wanted some kind of admission, from this woman that I don't know at all, that what her church had done by covering up all of these cases of molestation and refusing to apologize publicly for it was wrong. Wrong with a Capital W. 

But she couldn't, or wouldn't, at that moment give that to me. And I couldn't, at that moment, accept that. 

And then the lights came down and the movie started and that was it. We didn't get a chance to finish our discussion or come to any kind of meeting of the minds (and I think we would have gotten there had there been time) and I felt badly about that. 

So maybe I didn't get it because I wasn't in a space to get it. I was sitting there thinking, I know this already, this is nothing new, all the while still obsessing about what was separating me from this woman I had just met (our opinion about how best to react to the clergy molestation scandal in the Catholic Church).  

So what now? 

Yesterday I took the kids to Unity and got a hit of the I AM that I could appreciate, accept, and understand. 

At the end of the service we all stood hand-in-hand singing, "Let there be peace, I AM a stand for peace; Let there be love, I AM a stand for love; Let there be joy, I AM a stand for joy...." Tears came to my eyes, as they always do at the end of the service, and I realized, once again, that it doesn't matter HOW you get to Peace, Love, Joy, and Oneness, only THAT you get there. 

So if you see the "I AM" movie, I hope you love it. I hope it inspires you. I hope it gives you hope. 

I also hope that you recognize that just being there means you already are. YOU ARE.