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Good Letters

It was time to incorporate. Given the tax incentives to do so as a screenwriter, it was time to become a company of one. To be sure, the spiritual correlatives were not lost on me either, for which reason I had decided well in advance that when the time came to make it official, I would name my corporation Upper Room Productions.

The double (or triple) entendre was something to chew on, for me at least. But if my accountant’s reaction to the name, or rather, his lack thereof, was any indication of reactions to come, it looked like I would have that bone all to myself. Not that I was about to expound on the corporeal motif in Acts when the apostles are huddled in the upper room after the Crucifixion, corporeal in terms of both the Body and the body—i.e., that fledgling community in formation and its witness to Jesus risen in the flesh, his wounds and appetite intact.

No, sitting in my accountant’s office with the paperwork before us, I was a congregation, as well as corporation, of one.

The name would also serve as something of an apostolic boost to my unforeseen career, which had suffered regular bouts of ambivalence about being a TV writer. Movies, maybe. But television? Fine, I didn’t have a single published poem to my name to prove I was a poet— but I would! Just wait! (Erratum: see “vanity” for “ambivalence.”) As of Upper Room Productions, though, I had a new sense of mission.

Not an evangelical one per se, but simply a cultural one: to create a likeable, relatable Christian character or two in contemporary television and film. Because if God hates Hollywood, it’s not for the rampant violence and degenerate sexuality. The Bible, after all, has its fair share of that. But rather, it’s because Hollywood remains chronically unable or unwilling to give us a fictional Christian character who isn’t a loser or lunatic.

More important, perhaps, was what the name, Upper Room, and the biblical scene it alludes to implied for my creative process. For as the apostles tarried and waited in that room in the midst of their despair, so would I learn to tarry and wait in the midst of my own. And with my writing space in a fourth-story Brooklyn walk-up, an upper room it was indeed. I had my work cut out for me, professionally and spiritually.

That was almost two years ago. I have yet to live up to my expectations, professionally or spiritually— but I will! Just wait! The good news is that such waiting is the very mandate of the name I gave to my company of one. Though hardly my intention at the time, how clever it was to mark any given failure as an opportunity for patience.

Two weeks ago, I found myself in the auditorium where I attended junior high school in Connecticut, this time for an Easter service at a church plant while visiting my mom for the weekend. It was my second service of the morning, having traveled north as I do yearly for the transcendent dawn vigil at a barn church run by a Benedictine. Ready for more, I accompanied my wife and sister with our children in tow to the Trinity service at Central Junior High, where back in the eighties I had addressed my classmates as a school president more concerned with getting into a good college than improving junior high. But now I was the one being addressed. And in a sermon ranging from Dylan Thomas to Jodie Foster in The Panic Room, the gifted pastor used the latter as an analogy for that similar room in our hearts where we retreat in times of distress and despair.

As is often the case with the Scriptures, it was a previously overlooked verse that, in the hands of another, made all the difference to me. John 20:26 reads: “A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’”

Who knows how many times that detail of Jesus passing through the locked doors had passed through one ear and out the other? But all of a sudden, I had to manage the dams welling at my eyelids. And I could sense my wife doing the same as the pastor emphasized the fact that it didn’t matter that the doors were locked. And the upper room took on a new level of meaning better than any I had formerly found in it.

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