PARK CITY, Utah-I’m sitting at the Sundance Film Festival with young filmmakers and theologians watching the memorable and historic inauguration of Barack Obama.

Here, film and politics-two influential and powerful shaping forces in American life-are juxtaposed with my own personal third reality. I live on a small island well within the reach of politics and media, but out of their grasp.

Island life is relentlessly local and personal. Many of us came to the island to leave behind the impersonal forces of American life.

My island friend Mark stopped by to talk last week. He is grieving the loss of Jeff, his partner of 15 years who had come to the island last May because he wanted to die in a beautiful place.

Mark is wrestling with survivor’s guilt. He looks back on his life and sees nothing but bad choices. He ran away from home at the age of 13 and became a male prostitute. He is now 49, and for his entire life, has been supported by one lover or another. He is HIV-positive and suffers from hepatitis C.

Jeff, meanwhile, was a renaissance man, a voracious reader, a successful engineer, gourmet cook and a stabilizing presence in Mark’s life. He was everything Mark is not. Mark has what he calls an unfillable vacuum in his life. Last Friday night, he intentionally overdosed and then called 911 when he had second thoughts.

What can Hollywood or Washington do for Mark?

Prolific filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is here at Sundance. In a recent Esquire interview, he described filmmaking as unimportant.

“Don’t you think art makes the world a better place?” he was asked.

“What tragedy has it kept from happening? Tell that to the 13-year-old girl from Somalia who got stoned to death last week after being raped by three men and then convicted of adultery, buried up to her head, and stoned to death in front of a crowd of 1,000 people. If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t keep that from happening, then what is it worth? Honestly?”

Soderbergh has outgrown that sense of artistic self-importance that’s here on such display at Sundance. Like many of us in the media, he has realized the overriding limitations that surpass media’s ability to inform, provoke and entertain.

David McFadzean, one of the creator’s of the popular television series “Home Improvement,” put it to me this way a few years ago: “Dick, the media can do a lot of things, but it can’t deeply transform. Transformation happens local, grass roots, in community.”

In his case, he added, “it happens in the local church.”

One of Obama’s great strengths was his willingness to operate a national campaign from the grass roots. His experience as a community organizer, much derided by Sarah Palin and others, actually turned out to be a defining element in the success of his campaign.

I believe Obama recognizes the limitations of impersonal and disembodied politics, just as McFadzean recognized it in the media.

Obama is driven by ideas and recognizes the power of words in conveying them. As a young man, he realized that words had the power to transform. With the right words, everything could change. Yet behind the words were his ideas, and his ideas were shaped by books.

Media can transmit ideas in a multitude of ways, and government can codify ideas into legislation to be executed and enforced, but Obama understands ideas must be embodied if they are to transform.

The formulation (Washington) and dissemination (Hollywood) of ideas is important, but without their embrace in the everyday lives of us mere mortals, and their application in local settings, those same ideas blow away in the wind like seeds that never take root in the ground.

Rather then place our hope in Hollywood or Washington, it is time for us to place hope in ourselves as we let ideas take root in our lives by putting them into practice in our local settings.

Obama and Soderbergh cannot come to my little island to meet personally with Mark, to listen, laugh, cry and encourage him. But I can.

Local matters.

Small is beautiful.

You and I are the hope, and the change, that Obama is proclaiming.

(Dick Staub is the author of “The Culturally Savvy Christian” and the host of The Kindlings Muse (http://www.thekindlings.com). His blog can be read at http://www.dickstaub.com)

KRE/AMB END STAUB