In the film All of Us Strangers, main character Adam uses creative and personalized ways to initiate his own healing journey. Adam’s parents passed unexpectedly when he was eleven years old. Since then, he has struggled with intense feelings of being alone. Adam imagines and writes about what could happen if he could visit his parents in his childhood home as they were the year of their death, 1987. What would it be like if parents and son could reunite 36 years later, now that Adam is a professional writer in his late 40’s?
The audience witnesses a series of Adam’s imagined encounters with his parents. We see his parents’ joy in seeing their child all grown up and with a career they are proud of. Adam comes out to his parents as gay, something they didn’t live long enough to learn. His parents come to grips with this important part of him. Adam has the opportunity to connect with his parents over his experiences with being bullied, anxiety, and loneliness. In one encounter, Adam comes home for Christmas. His parents grow to fully love and embrace adult Adam. They encourage him in a potential relationship with a neighbor he is interested in. They express they want him to be happy, loved, connected, and fulfilled. We watch Adam and his parents embrace one another and weep together in joy, reconciliation, grief over years together they lost, and unrestrained love.
Adam never got to tell his parents he was gay, and they weren’t there to support him through the struggles of teen years and young adulthood, or the anxiety he felt during the AIDS epidemic. He has never fallen in love, and while he is comfortable with his own sexuality and identity, he has struggled to let people into his life and has not reached his potential for fulfilling connections. This has left gaps in Adam’s life that he seeks to fill through his creative spiritual work. His visualizations help him come to terms with parental loss and get in touch with his desires and hopes to live a more relationship and love-focused life. Highly recommend this beautiful film, there is a lot more to it, including Adam’s caring relationship with his neighbor Harry. The themes about queer love and relationships, queer mental health, family connections, and what it means to live a fulfilling queer life make this film a perfect choice for Pride Month.
What Adam experiences could be understood as a series of transformative spiritual visions. They are not visions in conventional religious terms. They remind me of the kind of visions Gnostic scholar Meggan Watterson describes from her experience. She explains:
“The Shaman taught me how to have a vision. Or, she taught me how to become aware of the fact that the majority of us have them all throughout the day, whether we’re aware of it or not. She taught me how to begin to see with a different form of perception by going deeply inward…It seems like a strange concept. But it’s actually not strange at all. It’s the most natural thing we humans do. We vision. We use our imaginations. What we don’t realize, or what we don’t really get sometimes, is that what we imagine can actually affect and change us. What we envision with our imagination isn’t just our “imagination” (Mary Magdalene Revealed pg. 64).
I used to think of spiritual experiences as something that could happen to you if you were involved in conventional religious practices. I assumed people were like empty vessels waiting to be filled by their higher power sending experiences, insights, or answers. And this may be how some people frame their religious experience, which is fine. I also thought a spiritual vision meant something grand, obvious, and religious. But now I recognize that individuals have immense capacities to create the sacred experiences and meanings they need, and that so much potential for sacred meaning-making can be uncovered within each of us. And this is the case whether we are working in a faith context or not. Adam’s imaginative visions, for example, do not have any religious pretext that we know of, but are nonetheless full of poignant meanings about the love within him and his capacity and longing for connection. These meanings can be understood as sacred for many reasons, including that they make him feel deeply connected to and seen by himself and his deceased parents.
It’s not that our minds’ imaginative activities are always spiritually-oriented or helpful. They can lead us down rabbit holes of catastrophizing, for example. But it can be valuable and empowering to recognize that our imaginations also have the potential to help us get in touch with our subconscious wisdom, spiritual desires, feelings of love, peace, and belonging, and the purpose we want to cultivate in our lives.
We can notice and cultivate imaginative visions by bringing intention to them. Watterson explains that assertive seeking and the intentions we bring can enhance such everyday visions. She says, “once I stopped questioning everything that happened [in my imaginative visions], once I trusted that what I heard and felt and experienced was real in the sense it was really the wisdom I needed, then it all came effortlessly to me. My greatest obstacle was believing it could all be this simple; ask for what I need, and receive it from within. Which is also to say, my greatest obstacle was believing that I could ever be that powerful'' (pg. 65). Spiritual imagination is a great way to cultivate trust in our spiritual selves.
Both the character Adam’s creative activities and Megan Watterson’s perspective invite me to see experiences with my own imagination in new ways. Once I was walking on Mt. Royal when an unexpected visualization came to my mind. I had been thinking about a challenging writing project that brought me great fear and a sense of being overwhelmed but which I also hoped could help others and shed much needed light. In my mind, I visualized my grandfather, a teacher and writer who was very invested in my life, and other people from my family tree there with me on the mountain. I sensed their awareness of me, and their empathy for the struggles I was grappling with. I imagined my grandfather telling me he could see that the project I dreamed of completing was a good thing, and something he would support me in. He said I wouldn’t be alone. Others who came before could see what I see, and they would rejoice in my efforts. As I walked down the mountain, I wept tears of joy that I could feel so closely in touch with my grandfather’s love and support for me 19 years after he passed. I realized that I have had these kinds of imaginative experiences for many years, but had never framed them as a kind of spiritual vision before.
What our imaginative visions may interact with and reveal to us is open. Meggan Waterson emphasizes the subconscious and hidden inner wisdom of the self, but there are other possibilities, including faith-based ones. In the experience above, was I connecting with my grandfather, who continues on beyond death? Was I in touch with God? I’m open to these things, and I choose to trust and hope that sometimes this has been the case. Was I connecting with the loving imprint my grandfather left on me, and the values and gifts he passed down? Of this I am confident. The love, sense of connection, joy, and hope this helps me cultivate are valuable enough in and of themselves for me to value this kind of imaginative activity going on within me.
