Filming Grace

November/December 2008 Issue | Posted by Melissa Hartog in Features

By Simcha Fisher

Aaron Wiederspahn is a man who follows through.

The 36-year-old writer and director of the independent film The Sensation of Sight has chosen a difficult road for his fledgling production company, either/or films: He wants to bring his characters — and thus the audience — to an inescapable confrontation with mystery, “the mystery of grace.”

“It’s like Jacob wrestling with God,” Wiederspahn says.

He’s a Catholic, but he’s not making overtly religious movies. Instead, he and his production partner (and godfather) Buzz McLaughlin want to tell stories about ordinary, flawed human beings who tangle with the divine through sometimes painful encounters with each other.

In Wiederspahn’s first film, Peter­ borough, N.H., the town that inspired Thornton Wilder’s Our Town is transformed into a haunted mindscape. Finn, an English teacher, played by Oscar nominee David Straithairn, responds to a local tragedy by stepping abruptly out of his life, seeking the answer to his question, “Why?” Other suffering characters drift through and mingle with his story, isolated by their own reluctance to live in a world that doesn’t offer clear answers.

The Sensation of Sight is a visually ex­ quisite film, shot with John Ford-esque impassivity, with scenes that are highly composed and intimate, and yet somehow jarringly detached. The soundtrack is unusual and perfect, never intruding, always enhancing the story. And every last second of the film is entirely sincere: There is no pretense, no fakery, and not an ounce of pandering or lazy writing.

But there’s more than that. Wieder­ spahn, who is a recent convert, believes that movies are the perfect vehicle for “creating windows into the eternal.”

Sporting a plaid cowboy hat, a Dostoevsky T-shirt, and an enthusiastic glow, Wiederspahn looks like a man in love, carried away with ardor for his Church (he is a regular guardian at the adoration chapel in Keene, N.H.), his family (his wife, Keri, is an iconographer), and films from Hitchcock to Ingmar Bergman to Charlie Chaplin.

He displays the same incandescent earnestness, intelligence, and humor, whether discussing ancient philosophy or Japanese film; but most of all, he looks like a man on a journey. His hope and enthusiasm for the future seem to animate his thoughts as well as his gestures as he speaks of his conversion, his plans for future films, and his family.

Wiederspahn’s own parents were only 19 years old when he was born. His mother attended a raucous Pentecostal church, while his father was more interested in American Indian thought. Both were involved with drugs. “I spent my childhood basically watching my parents grow up,” he said.

Once on his own, he “dabbled in everything,” he says — from fundamentalist churches to Calvinists, from Sartre to Jack Kerouac. He was writing and acting all the while; but when he stumbled across the journals of the Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, Wie­ der­ ­ spahn says he began to realize “the utmost importance of the quest. That what I was after above all was the truth.”

His voracious reading, including works by Dostoevsky, W.H. Auden, Thomas à Kempis, and St. Augustine, eventually led him down the path toward Catholicism. He had joined an Episcopal church, but he “was struggling, trying to figure out what to do, feeling the urge, but I just couldn’t let go. So I prayed, ‘Is this necessary?’”

It was. Here is how God answered his prayer.

I was at Border’s bookstore, and I see this man, this average Joe, standing there. And all of a sudden I’m struck with this huge sensation that God is saying, “Speak to him.” It’s overwhelming. And I stop myself, thinking, “What are you talking about?” So I sat there, and I paced in the aisle, because I felt I couldn’t escape it. I felt like a freak, and like, “I really don’t want to do this!”

So finally I just got up the courage and dragged myself over there, kind of shuffling my feet, and I said, “I don’t want to freak you out, and this is going to sound weird, but I feel that God . . . wants me to talk to you?”

And he look­ ­ ed at me, and with this thick Irish accent, he said, “No, no, I don’t think that’s weird at all. I’m Father Joe; nice to meet ye. Let’s go get some coffee.”

We went through all my questions, line by line. After that conversation, I called Buzz and I said, “Okay, that’s it. I want to come into the Church.”

This is just the kind of thing that happens in The Sensation of Sight: People in distress are thrown together, made vulnerable, and faced with a decision. There is a fight in a bar; an awkward, silent dance between strangers; an angry daughter shaving her elderly father’s stubborn face: all excruciating moments of physicality when the shattering power of grace makes its terrible demands.

His characters suffer not because of bad choices, but from being inattentive, from refusing to hope, or refusing even to face their own lack of understanding. The film quietly demands attentiveness.

“That same attentiveness,” says Wiederspahn, “that God pays to us.”

Salvation, the film implies, doesn’t re­quire understanding (at the climax, the main character makes his spiritual break­ through while crying out in pain, “I don’t understand!”), but it is painfully necessary to have the courage simply to ask.

Wiederspahn’s film, as well as his life, testify to this same belief: that grace, however mysterious, must not be refused.

When asked if any particular doctrine or idea kept him from joining the Church for so long, he said without hesitation: “The Eucharist. The actual body and blood of Christ.”

He described his experience of coming to terms with the physical presence of God himself in the Eucharist, after doing some “church-hopping and church-shopping” among various Protestant sects. He explained:

“You walk into any [Catholic] parish, and you listen to the priest, and you think, ‘Wow, where is that guy coming from?’ Or, ‘Wow, the music is atrocious.’ But it doesn’t matter! Because you have Christ — that’s why you’re there. Christ is Christ, always. And Christ works through the weakness of man.”

It is clear that Christ is working through Aaron Wiederspahn. We look forward to either/or’s next film, to see how they follow through.E

The Sensation of Sight will be available on DVD in the fall.

Simcha Fisher lives with her husband and seven children in Marlborough, N. H., where they confront the mystery of life daily.

My Faith andFamily — In this department, we feature prominent people who, even if they haven’t always been role models, acknowledge the debt they owe to their faith and their family.

 Print Article   Email a Friend