Me, Myself, They by Joshua M. Ferguson

Author:Joshua M. Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2019-03-14T18:20:21+00:00

I was baptized in an Anglican church when I was a baby. I don’t feel connected to the Christian faith specifically, but I do sense an undeniable energy when I walk into churches, particularly those that have existed for centuries. I feel magic in older churches. They are filled with an emotional energy: sadness, hope, joy — an endless array of feelings left behind. The concentrated energetic faith also pulls me empathically to these spaces. Like the prayers that are spoken in churches, each energetic force gets trapped, like little stories mapped in the varied architecture of emotion and energy.

My secular spiritual faith, combining parts of Christianity and Buddhism and involving a practice of compassion, respect for sentient life, and the power of prayer, is related to my empathy. The power of my spirituality, a force of empathy really, comes from a source beyond that which can be fully contained in language. Practising spirituality, and my connection to energy, involves a deep desire to know that there is something more than our daily lives, something that we can believe in and channel our faith into by releasing ourselves from the incessant and repeated suffering of life. The need to always categorize our spiritual existence prevents us from finding a similarity in our faith. At my core, I have learned from experiencing my suffering and the suffering of others closest to me — like my dad, mom, and grandmothers — that faith and hope can be life-saving, and they can inspire us towards tolerance and love for one another.

Florian grew up in a small village in Switzerland called Engelberg, which translates as “angel mountain.” It’s the perfect name to describe the special, almost magical feeling one enjoys when visiting there and spending time with the village’s beautiful people, who live with faith in their hands and hearts. The origin of Engelberg dates to the year 1122, and it’s the site of Florian’s ancestral heritage. The village sits at over three thousand feet above sea level almost in the middle of the Swiss Alps. Another three thousand feet above this village, near Lake Trübsee, is where Florian grew up. We named our production company Turbid Lake Pictures after the English translation of Trübsee. Florian had to travel on a cable car every day back and forth to his school in Engelberg. You can stand anywhere in the village and look up at a panorama that perfectly resembles a majestic painting. It’s truly that beautiful.

Visiting Engelberg is a spiritual experience. Aside from its natural beauty, the village has a spiritual force that resonates from its Catholic monastery. I cry every time I visit the massive church with its marble altars. I can feel on the edge of my skin the waves of energy that have been left by the spirits who once resided there.

The first card I gave Florian, a month after we started speaking on the phone, had a picture of a lighthouse illuminating a hopeful horizon. Florian became that light in my life.

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