Continued from yesterday.  On her album Fan Dance, Sam Phillips sings: Burning light inside my dreams I wake up in the dark The light is outside my door. Love is everywhere I go. That could be the song of Jack O’Brien, The Tree of Life’s central character. Jack lives with deep wounds—the loss of a…

As the barista took my ATM card, she noticed my notebook and asked, “What are you writing?” “A movie review.” “Oh, really? What movie?” She scribbled my coffee order on a strip of paper and gave it to her coworker. “The Tree of Life.” “I haven’t heard of that. Who’s in it?” “Sean Penn, Brad…

My first wedding took place on November 1st, 2003, All Saints’ Day, exactly two years after my fiancé proposed to me in a Waffle House parking lot, before we’d ever even kissed, and I said yes. I was twenty-one, old enough at least to legally have a glass of champagne at the reception. Where I’m from,…

Last summer we revisited Santa Fe and the Glen Workshop, an annual pilgrimage of sorts, searching for renewal of body and soul. In pondering my faith, I sometimes ask myself, “Am I building on a rock, or on a slippery beach that reconfigures itself every time the tide changes?” Maybe something in between—sandstone, friable and…

I have had three or four truly excellent teachers in my life—teachers who not only made lights come on for me, but who challenged and pushed me so far beyond boundaries that were previously comfortable that I was never able to return. David Miller of Mississippi College was one of those teachers for me. When…

At the end of next week, barring some kind of family emergency, my husband and I will load the children into the car and head up Interstate 95 to attend my twenty-fifth reunion at a boarding school in Massachusetts. For my husband, as is the case with most spouses, I guess, this is one of…

“Why,” asks the title of a recent movie review by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir, “are Christian movies so awful?” He asks this after watching Soul Surfer, a film targeted at American evangelicals, about a one-armed surfer girl. It’s supposed to be a true story, insofar as anything can be true once it has been plucked…

Are your fingers long enough to play Old keys that are but echoes: Is the silence strong enough To carry back the music to its source And back to you again As though to her? —Hart Crane, “My Grandmother’s Love Letters” Last Wednesday, my grandmother, my father’s mother, died. She had been fighting lung cancer…

Last week, I witnessed the Big Bang. More specifically—I enjoyed a sneak preview of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. The film’s publicity company will chop off my hands if I publish a review before opening day. But I’ll tell you this: Malick’s movie did more than catapult me back in time to witness the…

One thing that we know about ourselves as a race is that we do not deal well with uncertainty, open endings, fades to black. We want the orchestra to swell, the curtain to be run down, and the actors to come to the apron and receive their applause. We require a child-like reassurance that everything…