Where the Light Is?
Many nights, driving home across Hollywood, I pass a church- the Hollywood United Methodist church, where I often enjoy their advertisements for upcoming sermons revolving around the popular movies of the day (“What can Avatar teach us about love for others?” “Are you a Liar Liar?”). Late at night, for years now, a homeless woman sleeps on the walkway in front of the church. She sleeps on bits of a cardboard and her rags of clothing, no one around but herself. All alone on the vast church sidewalk: she’s not on the steps of the church nor in the way of people walking past, heading out to the clubs or home from dinner. She’s just there, at the foot of this oddly beautiful building stuck somewhere between the Magic Castle and the megapolis of Hollywood and Highland. I see her for just a moment as I drive by, driving toward my own home… an apartment I don’t love, in an area I feel no connection to, and I wonder if she loves this little stretch of sidewalk she has called home for so long now. What brings her back there every night? It does not look comfortable; the street is busy and loud; there is no community there… and yet she returns. Every night.
I see her laying there, in the light that shines down from the lit up exterior of the church. I wonder what brings her back to this spot. I wonder if this is her home.
***
I always hated the cloying paintings of Thomas Kinkade and the cult of religiosity that surrounds him and his “light of god” artworks. I saw Charlie St. Cloud last week and while it wasn’t a great or terrible movie, while The Efron wasn’t really given a chance to shine, I wondered while watching it why the director decided to paint each and every shot as if Kinkade’s “light of god” were shining down on Charlie… the visuals were an empty nod toward covering a lackluster story, a story of a man haunted by ghosts of loved ones passed, searching for new life, for new hope. For a new home.
I imagine that in several months, the preacher at Hollywood United Methodist could devise a sermon inspired by Charlie St. Cloud. Something to the effect of “Asking Charlie St. Cloud , is there life out there? Is there something beyond our world?”
Every night as I drive by, I wonder if that preacher looks out in front of his own church and finds that, lying beneath this church’s light, their own “light of god,” is a woman in her own home… searching for something.
Or maybe not. Maybe she’s already found what she’s looking for.
