Thanks to UUCOV for having me back for another month. Knowing that, as I write this, it’s a poignant time for this Congregation, the thing most on my mind is to focus on the longterm flourishing of UUCOV itself.

You have a strong Congregation. As the ancient Chinese sage, Lao Tzu, has been quoted, “Leading is like cooking a fish: you can ruin it with too much poking.” In my month with you, I will be here to help where my talents are needed and useful—but not to hinder your journey with “too much poking.” In other words, your lay leaders are dedicated and wise. My aim, in my limited time with you, is to support and even inspire. But not, in any way, to sidetrack you from the work this Congregation and your leaders have done in the past five months.

That said, as I mentioned on my way out the door at the end of February, I’m taking this opportunity to work on a book project that’s been in the back of my mind for years. My working title is The Celluloid Periscope: Movies as Windows into America’s Soul.

Ministers in more traditional churches often preach on passages from the Bible, using various approaches to analyze the text. The technical term for this is exegesis. As a Unitarian Universalist minister, I was taught long ago that it’s possible to do a religious exegesis of any text. Including motion pictures.

The best Biblical scholars will tell you that the Bible is not so much a history of what happened, as the history its various writers wanted to happen. Good Biblical scholars look at archaeological context, non-Biblical writings from the same time period, the language itself—and then evaluate the writers’ messages. In the same way, the scriptwriter and director of a movie may want to tell you something. But when you look at them within their own culture, and evaluate their unspoken assumptions, that movie will almost always tell you more about the people and culture who made it than they realize. That’s where it gets interesting.

I’m looking forward to my four weeks with you. Working long and hard on my book, I’ve prepared four of my very best examples of motion picture exegesis.

Rev. Dennis