Thanks, Anne, for that response.

Thanks, Anne, for that response. I grew up with a double whammy of patriarchal subservience: the Southern Baptist church and a father who was an Air Force Colonel. As children, teens, and adults, we work through that which we were given, some of it DNA, much of it our childhoods.

We all have parent issues.

What if the God of judgment and wrath were a God of acceptance and love?

We still have to deal with the shadow of the powerful imprint laid upon us as children.

This is one reason why I believe movies, no matter the vagaries of the business, will never leave us. We watch a movie -- two hours -- where a Protagonist starts off in a state of Disunity and by the end of the film, they have moved toward Unity ...

We want to believe we can change. Stories tell use we can change.

J. Campbell talks about the Hero's Journey being a passage from living under the yoke of the "should" to finding our own path. Not the parent path. But our own.

Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you." Not a God of judgment ... but the essence of who we are within.

C. Jung says: "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who we are."

That "are" state exists within.

Those of us who grew up in a religious environment predicated on the principle that we have to do this or that to justify God's love ...

God as judge ...

No.

Our journey is not to appease a God up there ...

But to find the god within.

Our authentic nature. The path toward who we are supposed to be.

This is not about human potential.

This is simply about aligning ourselves with our True Self.

And that's what stories are fundamentally about.

Good luck, Anne, on your life journey.

Godspeed.