Rocky Horror: Spiritual Advisor?

This is just a little summin' summin' I wrote last fall. Enjoy.

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"You're doing The Rocky Horror Show?!? But you're a spiritualist! An ordained minister, even! You help people find their spiritual way. How can you even think of participating in something as base and lewd as The Rocky Horror Show, let alone perform in it?" Just the thought of it confounds people. Really confuses them. But it all makes perfect sense to me. It's a perfect fit in my mind and heart. How so?

It can be – and has been – argued that The Rocky Horror Show is a morality play, that our heroes, Brad and Janet, are representative of us, Everyman, and that Dr. Frank N. Furter and the other lascivious characters embody the licentious temptations of the forbidden fruits that will spiritually and emotionally destroy us. In the end, however, we … er, they are saved by the realization and acceptance, in the forms of the mutinous Riff-Raff and Magenta, that things have gone too far out of control. Dr. Frank N. Furter and the other bacchanalians are destroyed and Brad and Janet are returned to their "real" lives with carnal knowledge now in the place of their former innocence.

But that's not where I find my spiritual connection with the show. It's so much simpler for me than that. For me, it's in the lyrics. It's the gems of truth and wisdom and the almost Eastern philosophical guidance found in the words of the songs that have guided so many aspects of my life for the last twenty-odd years.

"There's a light in the darkness of everybody's life." Even the saddest, grumpiest, most unreasonable troll of a person has a secret soft spot of happiness and love deep down inside. Some people are just like a burnt marshmallow, all crispy and charred on the outside, but soft and sweet and oozy-gooey sugary on the inside. If you're willing to offer a little understanding and patience, that outer layer can and will easily be removed allowing that inner sweetness to be discovered and shared.

When I was a little girl living on a very small island in Italy, there was a terribly grumpy old man who lived in a little house down at the end of our road. We never saw him smile. He never had any visitors. And he always watched us play with a scowl on his face. One evening, he invited my little sister and I to stay and have hot milk and fried potatoes with him. Of course, we turned tail and ran home just as fast as we could without saying a word. When we told our mother what had happened, she walked with us back down to the little house at the end of the road and introduced herself – and us – to the old man. He was a widower and lived alone. His children had moved to the mainland and he never saw his grandchildren. He was lonely. After that night, and learning that he wasn't a scary old man at all, but a lonely grandpa who missed his bambini, we would look forward to having hot milk with molasses and fried potatoes with him every Friday night while he told us stories and taught us Italian words and customs. He became one of my most favorite people ever, and his memory lives as a light in my heart to this day.

"After the night there's a brand new day." No matter how rough our lives are, no matter how horrible our day is, no matter how seemingly insurmountable the task at hand appears, there is always the promise of success and accomplishment and joy. Stick with challenges, keep holding to the faith that all is as is should be, embrace and learn from the experience, and look forward to tomorrow. As Scarlet O'Hara stated so boldly in Gone with the Wind, "Tomorrow is another day."

I was a high school junior and had just barely turned seventeen when my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a radical mastectomy, removing her entire left breast and lymph nodes. Not even a week after being released from the hospital, she was readmitted with a staph infection that had her on life support for several days. She almost didn't survive. But one afternoon as I went to visit her after school, I heard her voice singing down the hallway a song from another favorite show of mine, Monty Python's The Life of Brian. It was at that moment as I heard her voice singing, "Life's a piece of shit when you look at it," that I knew my mother would survive.

Of course, she wasn't the same woman she was before. Her brain had suffered quite a bit of damage and she had difficulty remembering how to read and write. It was such a difficult time for her. She had always been a prolific reader. But she never gave up. She would spend hours doing crossword puzzles and word searches. She watched Wheel of Fortune regularly, and although she'd get frustrated when we'd call out the answer to the puzzle long before she had it figured out, she never gave up. She kept saying, "I'll get it tomorrow. I'll do better tomorrow." And she did. She is now a published author.

Her example taught me that nothing is insurmountable if you keep working and trying to do better and hold on to the promise of tomorrow.

"Stay sane inside insanity." Even when – no, especially when the whole world seems to turn against you and everything you know begins to crumble all around you, stay strong in your heart and remember "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger." If you keep hold of this belief and remember that just because everyone around you seems to have lost their heads, it doesn't mean you have to lose yours.

Last November, my father-in-law was scheduled for some routine testing. The morning he was to go in, he had a heart attack. The result of this was surgery to insert two stents into his arteries. That same day, while he was in surgery, I received news that my uncle was being admitted for brain surgery to remove a malignant tumor and that his chances of survival were minimal at best. The insanity continued. The next day we learned that my father-in-law's artery had been nicked during surgery and his heart sac was full of blood and his lungs were filling with fluid. His prognosis wasn't so great now, either. My husband spent every available moment with his father and mother, while I spent as much time as I could on the phone with my cousin trying to stay updated on my uncle's condition. It was a crazy time, to say the least, and quite possibly one of the biggest challenges to "staying sane inside insanity" I've ever experienced. But, thanks to the loving support of family and friends and to daily meditation, we managed.

"Don't dream it, BE it." It's not just enough to want something or to wish for something. In order to achieve it, you must do what is necessary to attain your goal. You must educate yourself, you must practice and gain the experience, you must actually see yourself in that position whether it is professional, emotional, personal, spiritual, etc. You must truly believe in yourself and all the possibilities you hold within you. You must honestly accept that not only can you become what it is you wish to become, you are IT already.

This is true not only of what you want to be – an astronaut, a CEO, a ballerina, a rock star, a neurosurgeon – but of what kind of life you want to have and what kind of person you want to be. It is your choice to be happy, to be successful, to be kind, to be respectable, just as it is your choice to be miserable, to be a failure, to be cruel, to be untrustworthy. No matter what life throws at you, how you choose to react to it and to act in spite of it shapes and determines the person you become.

There have been so many opportunities for different choices in my life. But I am determined to be a happy person no matter what, so instead of dwelling in the negative aspects of my life – my mother's cancer, my abusive first marriage, single parenthood, health scares – I choose instead to embrace the opportunities for learning and for growth. I choose to be an example (a good one, I hope) to others who find themselves in similar situations. I choose love and joy and understanding. And with these choices I sing, "I've seen blue skies through the tears in my eyes, and suddenly I realize I'm going home."




copyright 2007 Leisl Bonell