First, what a pleasure to see your work here and to read your ruminations on your current “behind the veil” investigations. This new work has a visceral and luminous transcendence that is very exciting to me as a filmmaker. One of my current projects, “Praying the Hours,” is—as you well know—a narrative drama based on the idea that there is a river of kairos time flowing beneath the surface of ordinary life. Everyone is familiar with this time and yet very few intentionally live there. Yet nearly everyone is, at one point or another in this physical life, plunged into it because of any one of a handful of common but fracturing experiences—love, death, birth, suffering, to name a few. We are, thereafter, never the same.

Recently, on Halloween night, while surfing television political commentators from CNN to SNL, I was caught by the statement of a spiritual medium who said cavalierly that the veil between the spiritual life and this physical life is “always thinner during this season.” He was talking, I believe, about pagan theories that there are spirits that “cross over” during such times. (Presumably for the candy.)

I was piqued by the thought of what that thought might have sounded like coming from a Christian. After all, this is our holy season: Halloween is simply the evening before All Saints Day—and soon, the season of waiting for the Christ (Advent), the incarnation (Christmastide), and then the discovery of how that act has very physical implications for me (epiphany). These three seasons describe one of the great arcs of our faith. In some ways, I have to agree that during this portion of the Eternal Year the veil between the two worlds seems thinner. That has to be true at least in part because of the great cloud of witnesses that has gone before us and marked the time with prayer and anticipation, as well as the millions of our faith-family around the world who do so in union now.

This interesting thought is illustrated in your vision of Steven dying which is depicted in this Theology Forum blog exhibit. It beautifully illustrates the mystery of movement between this life and the next (or the alongside?) with the implicit assumption that both worlds exist, and that the bridge on which we cross over is Jesus himself.

You and I both have stood nearby as our loved ones have taken the great journey from this physical life to the mystery that awaits. Just as I know this experience has shifted the light onto my own work in a new way, I see that it has revealed to you things beyond what the mind sums up like a math problem, to reveal something that intuitively we know to be true. “Glory beyond the edges of our comprehension”—what a beautiful line, and how abundant in its promise. And, as your belligerently (!) physical work so richly confirms, we feel it in our spirits and we feel it in our bones. Why we should want to relinquish that in fear is increasingly beyond me to imagine.