Old Acquaintance

Seventh Day of Christmas/New Year's Eve

 “'You like to tell true stories, don't you?' he asked, and I answered, 'Yes, I like to tell stories that are true.'
Then he asked, 'After you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? Only then will you understand what happened and why. It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'” [Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It]

The novella I just completed and want to start sending around soon has part of its genesis in the above lines from Norman MacLean. Another part was from an NPR story about memory and its inaccuracies. Between misremembering things and the hope of understanding by telling it with made up people sent me down the road to write this novella I'm calling, simply, Cora. 

That it is based heavily on where I grew up and my own mother, anyone who knows me or our family will recognize. But as I wrote, it was interesting how Cora became not my mother and her life not my mother's life. Parallels, yes, absolutely and obviously, but by the time I got to the end of it, Cora was someone else. 

Because memory did not have all the answers to the life I wanted to explore. Memory, as important to us all as it is, could not give me a full life and more a full inner life. 

Memory was still important, though. Memory is always important. the Bible is full of commands to remember this and that. The prophets addressed God with "remember your promises to us" and God responded with "remember what I've done for you." 

To be held in the memory of God is to live forever. 

And so I remembered what I could and made up a lot to create something else. A fiction to be sure, but one that, I think, offered me some understanding and maybe offers the readers some understanding (if I did anything right at all). 

We don't create out of nothing. We may claim God does that, but we can't claim that for ourselves. Sometimes the creation is closer to actual events, sometimes there is more invention, but even when we try for the truly alien, as a sci-fi writer might, it starts somewhere in our experience. 

I don't know if I agree completely with the MacLean quote, but I know it sent me on a particular creation, one that is very close to me, so close that I worry that it will not interest anyone else. And insofar as it exercised my memory and pulled me into directions I didn't predict, I can't say that it's completely false.

Imagining Resurrection

 While we are in the season of Incarnation, the part of the Jesus story that further confirms the goodness of our body is resurrection. It's not just good for the time we live this life, but there's the promise/hope of something carrying into eternity. 

What we know from the gospel stories about the resurrected Jesus is that he was not confined by laws of physics. Jesus would appear in locked rooms, dissolve at being recognized, solid enough to be touched and eat fish. 

For years now, I've thought of the resurrected body as having properties akin to sound. Sound is not solid and passes through walls, but you can also feel it. Loud sounds or sounds at particular frequencies can shake or break more solid objects. 

I've more recently started wondering about the phenomenon of stage presence. Last post, I spoke about projecting voice (breath) to the back of a theater, but we've probably all had the experience of someone who enters a stage and fills the room with presence, before any word is spoke. We call it stage presence, but I've wondered if it isn't also a spiritual things, a way that foreshadows our resurrection, when we'll be able to enter rooms or be present across distances.

Earlier in the pandemic, I took a few Gaga classes online. Gaga is a movement practice that was developed by dancer/choreographer Ohad Naharin. He developed it, in part, to reclaim the joy and pleasure of movement, which can be lost when it becomes your job. Anyway, as I took the class, I was pleased and encouraged to hear the leader say something like, "now project your movement and body beyond the walls." In words that I hadn't used, he was stating some of the things I've been saying about practicing stage presence. Indeed, my version of that practice is called "practicing resurrection." It's not just my absurd idea. It's also something other people think about (without the Jesus language). 

Because there's a lot of absurd religious ideas here and there, I feel compelled to say I don't think of this as literal or even scientific. It's an image I've worked with as a performer. It's imagination. And I think imagination makes a difference. An actor who can imagine the emotional state of the character embodies the character in a way that is not accomplished by an actor of less imagination. Imagining the way our presence fills an auditorium surely affects our state presence. 

Like the vocal projection I wrote about yesterday, I've also shifted in my thinking about stage presence as a gift upon the performer, but more a gift of the performer on the audience. It's a sharing of the person, physical and spiritual. It might be used to say "look at me!" but it's also a way to love the audience. 

A Word Given Breath

 The Fifth Day of Christmas (the first day of the season without another feast on top of it!)

In the beginning . . . 

In Genesis, we hear the story of creation, which was accomplished by no other means than "God said." It's the vibration and shaping of breath, remembering that in the main biblical languages, both Hebrew and Greek, use words for breath that can just as well mean spirit.

In the Gospel According to John, we hear how the Word was in the beginning, being with God and being God. It's poetic language and I find it evocative. Jesus is the Word spoken and through him, all things were created.

I think of what actors and singers and other vocal artists do as shaping their spirit, sharing their spirit with us by shaping it and projecting it into the world. Performers train their voice, shape their breath into their expression, their art. As a sometimes performer, I've always been loud, able to project to the back row in most theater settings. In my younger days, I considered it something to get me noticed. "Look at me! Look at me!" As I've aged and thought differently about any gift that I have, I've tried to look at my vocal projection as a gift to the audience. Less of a gift bestowed upon me, more a gift for whatever I'm up to in the moment, whether entertainment or enlightenment. 

In this season of Incarnation, I give thanks for my own flesh, a part of the creation spoken into being "in the beginning."

Innocent Bystanders

 Today, the 4th Day of Christmas and the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we remember that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, King Herod murdered all the boys of a certain age in hopes of killing this newborn king of the Jews. 

Aside--It is a little gruesome to have a feast day remembering murdered children, no? 

This historicity of the event is in question. Herod did a lot of cruel things and many are recorded by historians, but nothing is known of this massacre. The defense to this fact is that of all the many terrible things Herod did, this didn't warrant recording. One estimation has the number of boys of the same age in Bethlehem, given the overall population of the town at the time, would have been around a dozen. Imagine being so terrible that killing 12 children falls off the radar.

Anyway, with that out of the way, my reflection on this story goes to the ways that something like a dozen toddlers were murdered while Jesus got away to Egypt. The theodicy of the story would ask why a dozen families couldn't have also had a convincing dream to get out of town. Some might say that these dozen boys were the cost of Jesus staying alive to become savior. 

And following that thought, I'm left with how the good fortune of some comes at terrible cost of others. In modern terms, we often have the benefit of cheap goods because of abusively cheap labor (sometimes by children, to keep to the theme) in far away places. 

Pushing a little bit further, I'm more and more aware of how most of the comforts I enjoy may come at the cost of racist policies, international military interventions, and other political maneuvers that crush people I will never know. 

The holy innocents definitely have modern day parallels. It is an old and current story of power preserving power by violent and oppressive means. 

In fact, it's such a pervasive real-life story, that I wonder if we need to do it in fiction anymore. To some extent, it's so pervasive that even  when a story is not about that overtly, it can still permeate the subtext. I've started investigating, interrogating my own fiction and what lies behind or under some of the characters' lives, things they didn't earn, things that they don't even see. 

I've been saying for years that we need to find new stories to tell. I think that's part of my job as a writer---and I fail at it miserably, but it's there in the back of my head. How can I as a writer reveal another possible world? 

I haven't found a way to tell those stories and I even begin to suspect that I will not find a way to do it in my lifetime. In a recent post, I've said artists can reflect the world as it is and as it could be. I am still in the first category. I don't think it's a wrong or useless category. 

But it's in my mind that I'd like to find my way into the second.

Beauty and Danger

 Today was the Feast Day of John the Evangelist--whoever they were. 

It's a day to celebrate and honor the writer of the Gospel According to John. We know very little about the person, but we have the text. It has a mixed history. 

It is the most poetic and mystical of the four canonical gospels. The opening is famous for it's imagery and it's cosmic proposal that the Word always existed and became incarnate in Jesus, in whom dwells light and life. It is beautiful. 

This gospel presents Jesus as a self-award, in-control Son of God, in stark contrast to the occasionally afraid Jesus of Mark's gospel. In Mark, Jesus prays for the "this cup" (his suffering and death) to be taken from him. In John's gospel, Jesus says confidently, "Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?" It is the most triumphant Jesus. Which is probably why it gets published individually and used as an evangelism tract. Mark is much shorter, but when you're selling the religion, you probably want to put forward the more marketable version of your guy. 

But the history of the gospel is also heavy. While opening with an echo of Hebrew scripture ("In the beginning"), it also talks about "the Jews" as if the main hero of the tale wasn't also a Jew. There might be some reasons for this, among them being that this gospel was recorded after the Christian sect was breaking away from it's Jewish roots. The Temple was destroyed by this time and Christianity was no longer being seen as a subset of emerging, post-Temple Judaism. This might be all well and good except for some really terrible things. 

It was the Gospel of John that was quoted by people who persecuted and killed Jews on the basis of being "Christ-killers." This is clearly the fault of the people throughout history who read scripture and instead of finding hope and salvation looked for reasons to abuse and kill other humans. I do not believe the writer of John's gospel intended to lead to the Holocaust. 

And yet, here is the consequence of separating Jesus from his people. Putting in Jesus' mouth critical words about "the Jews" led to later readers murdering millions of people. 

We should not read those passages in John lightly. We should not dismiss the consequences of what was written. 

To create a literary work like the Gospel of John in a particular place and time may not be immediately dangerous, but for it to be read outside that place and time creates danger. The beauty of the imagery gets twisted and bloody. 

And this is a weight on me. It is a weight on me as a Christian, for sure. I would not want to lose the beauty that is in John, but neither can I comfortably read some passages anymore. 

Even more, as someone who puts some effort in writing literary works, I feel the weight of my words potentially taking off in directions I would never intend. I realize my lack of control over this. I recognize that any evil done, however small, is the responsibility of the person who commits the evil.

Still, I feel the weight. The responsibility of creating anything is that others bring their own lenses to the work. I want to be open to interpretation. I want no evil to come from it. 

This awareness is part of my paralysis in this pandemic year, because it is not only a pandemic year but a year of heightened racial tensions. As a white person in a society that favors white people, I feel the uncertainty that I can see anything outside of my own privileged way of seeing. Being gay gives me a lens through which I get glimpses, but despite similarities I know it's a different set of biases that I face. 

However beautiful something I create may be, I know I will have blind spots for the potential danger. 

I don't have a solution for this problem, but it's where I end up as I reflect upon the Feast of John the Evangelist.

Creativity and Martyrdom

 The Feast of Stephen follows the Day of the Nativity like some sort of reminder that you, o human, are dust and to dust you shall return. 

I think there's always a wee bit of lent in every season. 

If you read the account of Stephen's martyrdom in the Acts of the Apostles, there's a part of me that can't help but say he was asking for it. He was abrasive, accusatory (which in the biblical languages can be read as satanic), and just not very smart in how he shared the Gospel. 

But I wasn't there. I don't know how it really went down. I kind of hate how it leads some of us moderns into a martyr complex, how some of us want to get some adverse affect (though maybe not a full on martyrdom) for our witness to Jesus so that we can claim favor. It seems like a poor use of scripture, honestly. But maybe it wasn't as abrasive and boastful as I read it. I hope there was some humility in Stephen's proclamation. 

The desert fathers and mothers always emphasized humility. 

One abba or another said we should always keep death before us, lest we become complacent. If that isn't a hard way to live, I don't know what is. 

I have to say, though, I get complacent. I say I have this calling on me as a writer and performer and I am in a place of no urgency about it. Except for when I am. It comes in spurts. But as I wrote in the last post, this has not been a year of great creativity. 

There is a myth of the artist as martyr. Here, I think of myth not as an untrue story but as a story that reveals some deeper truth. Myth as revealing archetype and pattern. And the true thing is that art making costs. If we do anything true, those who'd rather not see it recoil from us. Which isn't what we generally get in the art game for, to be honest. There's a part of "look at me, look at what I made" too often so close to the surface. That's not humility.

The humble artist answers the call to create, to reveal the world. The revelation may be as the world is, or it may be as the world could be. I think both are valid. Both have a prophetic aspect to it. Both have an aspect of bearing witness to the world, about the world. 

This martyr's feast day, the second day of Christmas, has me thinking about the ways following Jesus has cost me (and hasn't), how following the creative call has cost me (and hasn't). The ways I've died and thew ways I've found life. I'm thinking about the humility to create. 

The abbas and ammas would tell us humility is the way to love. I wonder on this martyr's day if I have the love to show the world what it is and what it could be.

Creator/Created/Create

 I write stories and make performances and sometimes interpret others' stories into performances. I find it one way the Imago Dei is alive in me. 

I'm typing this at 1:00am on Christmas Day (the First Day of Christmas) 2020. It's been a mess of a year and I, like many creatives around me, have felt paralyzed by this year. Not everyone. Some have found it a rich time of creation and I haven't been completely idle. But I have felt . . . paralyzed. 

As I reflect, once again, on the Christmas story, I'm reminded of how we teach and sometimes believe that God took on flesh like ours, a sack of blood and bones that experiences pain and ecstasy, experiences death and decay after some period of growth of life. 

In this bit of life I've been given, I've tried (and succeeded and failed) to take ideas and give them some manner of flesh, whether the flesh of words on paper or the flesh of my own flesh on stage/display. It's been hit and miss. I've loved it all Well, most.

I wonder if God the Creator loves all or just most. We teach and sometimes believe God loves all. I can't help but think that there are moments when God has been a little disappointed in me and my output, as I am sometimes disappointed by my creations. Maybe I'm projecting. Maybe God loves better than I do. I hope God loves better than I do. 

Tonight, we tell the story that the Creator became Created. Maybe we as Imago Dei have some capacity to create---love, abundance (not the kind associated with money), a beloved community.