Somewhere in the middle of performing "The Muse" at church yesterday, I realized that it wasn't that good a piece.
It has all the essential elements of drama. The main character, Neil, is having a struggle both internalized as an inability to create and externalized as a job he hates because diligence and quality are liabilities rather than assets. The conflict reaches its climax as he appeals to Calliope for inspiration, and it reaches resolution when she points out that he already is communing with her quite effortlessly, and hands him his paintbrush, a visible indicator of his reinstatement as an artist.
The essential failing of the drama, as I see it, is that it fails to say anything truly meaningful in his context. So Neil hates his job and feels wasted as an artist. Those are certainly common enough attitudes, I'm sure, but the sermon that the drama was written to prepare the way for was "Tuning into God."
The drama didn't say anything about prayer, and it didn't really depict anything that would stir the soul and make people think about how they could pray. It does provide insight into my character and some of my struggles -- the ad agency described was based more or less on my experience with WCN Newspapers -- but I'm not convinced it provides any great insights into God, or prayer. I had hoped to do something where Calliope dived to a deeper level than Neil, and her insight and weightier messages slowly changed the way he was viewing his problems and began the process of resolving them.
And, ironically, my complete failure to accomplish that was probably the greatest strength of the drama.
The preacher referred to the piece several times during his sermon, saying how great it would be for us to develop an image of prayer as a matter of sitting down at a table in a cafe and chatting with God over a cup of coffee. After the service, several people came up, effusing praise over the drama.
Later Sunday it hit me why people may have reacted so strongly to it. I've taken it for granted for years that prayer is simply a conversation with God, and I've often depicted it in conversation and writing as something akin to having a milkshake with Godor sitting down and talking with him over a burger.
This is an old, familiar way of thinking for me, but that doesn't mean it's universal or even common. A friend of mine thinks it's great when I ask questions like what kind of dog Jesus had as a boy, because he's not used to thinking of Jesus in such human terms. By the same token, an accustomed way of thinking about prayer still can be insightful and revolutionary for someone who's never looked at it that way before.
So what made the piece effective had nothing to do with the stronger points of my writing, nor even what I hoped to do. The writing has some weaknesses anyway that I really should change to make it stronger, anyway. In a way, I'm reminded of Charles Sheldon's book "In His Steps." The book is badly written. The writing style is meretricious, there is no character development or plot to speak of, the book is melodramatic, and when characters appear, they're usually gone within the next five or six chapters. But I read the book, and even as I groaned over the writing, I was moved by its poignancy. The message itself was beautiful, and heart-rending, and even if it did spawn that fucking WWJD marketing craze about ten years ago, it remains a deeply powerful one: Before you make a decision, stop and ask yourself what Jesus would do, and then do that.
The book endures and remains worth reading not because of the writing, but because of the message. I'd rather have lousy writing and a good message that fantastic writing that says nothing. (Best of all is the writing that is both excellent and meaningful, but that is the rarest of combinations.)
This in turn inspires some thinking about my own writing, namely the principle of letting go. Nothing is ever finished; there is always room for improvement. But at some point you have to accept that it is done, toss the story upon the water, and begin work on the next one.
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label drama. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2006
Friday, February 25, 2005
a pleasant surprise
My conversation with the pastor at Zarephath Community Chapel surpassed my expectations by light years. It was positive, productive and deeply encouraging. Rob Cruver, the pastor, leapt several points upward in my estimation from this meeting.
One of the biggest things I carried away from this was Rob's genuine humility. I started off the meeting by saying essentially (but politely) that I was genuinely unsure of whether Zarephath is even the right place for me to attend. He didn't try to convince me that it was, not even once. That's virtually unprecedented in my experience.
He also didn't get defensive when I critiqued his sermons as shallow. He was a little taken aback, but he also admitted that I'm not the first person to tell him that he's not providing much for people to think about, and that he's going to have to put more effort into giving his sermons more oomph in the analysis and application departments.
I also mentioned that I got a little soured on the church by some of the political attitudes I encountered before the election. I've mentioned the one, where Eowyn's Sunday School teacher told me I shouldn't bother going to church if I was planning to vote for Kerry, but there were others. The political action bulletin board also has a ton of GOP campaign literature for the taking, and the Sunday before the election there was a reminder (not from the pulpit) that it was our Christian duty to elect professing Christians to office, because God's blessing is on such people, and they actively seek God's guidance, blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, Rob was disappointed that someone actually would be crass enough to link faith and the GOP to that extent, and apologized for it. He also explained that they had asked both political parties to provide their literature but the Democrats never came through, and what's more, he agreed with me that Christians often get one-sided in their allegiances when they try to infuse their faith into the political process. And it wasn't just a polite thing either; apparently the head of the Pillar of Fire Bible college on the church campus, when he came to the area a few years ago, was of the opinion that you couldn't be a Christian and vote Republican.
Rob said he would have to introduce the two of us, since he's sure we would hit it off fine.
Also nicely, we talked about our visions -- in Rob's case, for the church; in mine, for the sort of ministry I'd like to be involved with.
I used to head a drama ministry at my old church. There's been talk of starting a drama ministry at Zarephath as well, but nothing else public but talk. Well, apparently they've hired someone to head the drama ministry this August, and the guy they've hired has pretty much the same vision I'd had for our drama ministry back at Community Gospel Church. He wants to have dramas during the church service each week to lay the groundwork for or build upon the sermon, and he wants to do other things in the community. First is some sort of open-air evangelical outreach via drama -- the mere thought is enough to make me cringe, given the caliber of most evangelism through drama -- but he also wants to bring something to the community in terms of theater, by performing honest-to-gosh plays like "The Crucible" or "Death of a Salesman" that deal with eternal issues honestly without being distinctly Christian.
Wow. That's *exactly* what I would have loved to do at my old church, if we had been granted the breakthrough in numbers that we would have needed. (And in an area like this part of New Jersey, a theater presence would be a tremendous asset. We're an hour away from Broadway, and the two Tony-winning theaters outside New York are here in the area as well.)
So since it's evident that the two of us have similar visions for what it means to be serving God, I shared with Rob my vision for a community where the believers share all their possessions in common and use their freed-up wealth to reach out to the needy around them. He was visibly impressed with the vision, and said he'd love to see that happen, although he's uncertain how that would play out in New Jersey, where people drive 30 or 40 minutes to get to church, making community fairly difficult to cultivate. (My response was that even with that distance, there would still be pockets of church members who live fairly close together, and one goal should be to encourage a sense of community within those pockets, and to get people to view the church as a place we gather for worship on Sundays, and not as the place where all ministry and spiritual activity is centered.)
Anyway, it went well. So well in fact that he told me his chief goal right now is to get more people actively involved in discipleship relationships, where one person is committed to discipling three or four other men.
He asked me to consider being one of those leaders. I'm considering.
So. I'm impressed, and I was really pleased at how well this went today. I was bracing myself for a huge disappointment and a need to plunge back into the waters to find a church, but as I told my wife today, "If you want to keep attending this church, I'm a lot more open to it now than I was last week."
One of the biggest things I carried away from this was Rob's genuine humility. I started off the meeting by saying essentially (but politely) that I was genuinely unsure of whether Zarephath is even the right place for me to attend. He didn't try to convince me that it was, not even once. That's virtually unprecedented in my experience.
He also didn't get defensive when I critiqued his sermons as shallow. He was a little taken aback, but he also admitted that I'm not the first person to tell him that he's not providing much for people to think about, and that he's going to have to put more effort into giving his sermons more oomph in the analysis and application departments.
I also mentioned that I got a little soured on the church by some of the political attitudes I encountered before the election. I've mentioned the one, where Eowyn's Sunday School teacher told me I shouldn't bother going to church if I was planning to vote for Kerry, but there were others. The political action bulletin board also has a ton of GOP campaign literature for the taking, and the Sunday before the election there was a reminder (not from the pulpit) that it was our Christian duty to elect professing Christians to office, because God's blessing is on such people, and they actively seek God's guidance, blah blah blah blah blah.
Well, Rob was disappointed that someone actually would be crass enough to link faith and the GOP to that extent, and apologized for it. He also explained that they had asked both political parties to provide their literature but the Democrats never came through, and what's more, he agreed with me that Christians often get one-sided in their allegiances when they try to infuse their faith into the political process. And it wasn't just a polite thing either; apparently the head of the Pillar of Fire Bible college on the church campus, when he came to the area a few years ago, was of the opinion that you couldn't be a Christian and vote Republican.
Rob said he would have to introduce the two of us, since he's sure we would hit it off fine.
Also nicely, we talked about our visions -- in Rob's case, for the church; in mine, for the sort of ministry I'd like to be involved with.
I used to head a drama ministry at my old church. There's been talk of starting a drama ministry at Zarephath as well, but nothing else public but talk. Well, apparently they've hired someone to head the drama ministry this August, and the guy they've hired has pretty much the same vision I'd had for our drama ministry back at Community Gospel Church. He wants to have dramas during the church service each week to lay the groundwork for or build upon the sermon, and he wants to do other things in the community. First is some sort of open-air evangelical outreach via drama -- the mere thought is enough to make me cringe, given the caliber of most evangelism through drama -- but he also wants to bring something to the community in terms of theater, by performing honest-to-gosh plays like "The Crucible" or "Death of a Salesman" that deal with eternal issues honestly without being distinctly Christian.
Wow. That's *exactly* what I would have loved to do at my old church, if we had been granted the breakthrough in numbers that we would have needed. (And in an area like this part of New Jersey, a theater presence would be a tremendous asset. We're an hour away from Broadway, and the two Tony-winning theaters outside New York are here in the area as well.)
So since it's evident that the two of us have similar visions for what it means to be serving God, I shared with Rob my vision for a community where the believers share all their possessions in common and use their freed-up wealth to reach out to the needy around them. He was visibly impressed with the vision, and said he'd love to see that happen, although he's uncertain how that would play out in New Jersey, where people drive 30 or 40 minutes to get to church, making community fairly difficult to cultivate. (My response was that even with that distance, there would still be pockets of church members who live fairly close together, and one goal should be to encourage a sense of community within those pockets, and to get people to view the church as a place we gather for worship on Sundays, and not as the place where all ministry and spiritual activity is centered.)
Anyway, it went well. So well in fact that he told me his chief goal right now is to get more people actively involved in discipleship relationships, where one person is committed to discipling three or four other men.
He asked me to consider being one of those leaders. I'm considering.
So. I'm impressed, and I was really pleased at how well this went today. I was bracing myself for a huge disappointment and a need to plunge back into the waters to find a church, but as I told my wife today, "If you want to keep attending this church, I'm a lot more open to it now than I was last week."
Monday, May 12, 2003
This is a work in process; nonetheless, I'm going to add my disclaimer that any reproduction of this piece by any means is strictly forbidden, as is its performance, without my express permission. The piece is obviously very autobiographical, which makes it rather difficult for me to view it with any measure of objectivity. I'm intending it to go either with a sermon on prayer or on sacrifice. Constructive feedback is welcome and desired.
"The Christian at Prayer"
By David Learn
All is dark on stage except for a single spot illuminated by a spotlight. Framed in that spotlight is Andrew. He is sitting on the ground, wrapped tightly in the fetal position, with his face not visible. He sits like this for a while, saying nothing and barely moving. When he does speak, it is with deep emotion barely suppressed.
ANDREW: Just tell me one thing. Why?
He pauses, but only briefly. The first crack has appeared, and the dam is slowly beginning to burst. Andrew lifts his head, and he begins to speak. He's talking to God, but it's not one of those formal let's-hold-our-hands-and-pray types of prayers. He's speaking as though God in the room with him.
ANDREW: I meant, it's not as though I don't have a right to ask that much. I'm not asking you why I'm suffering. If I suffer, it's because I either sinned or because I chose to follow you, and either way it's because of a choice I made, and I have no right to complain about that.
No, what I want to know is why Isaac has had to suffer. I accept that I have to suffer for me my sin, and I accept that following you is difficult. But why him? Ian isn't even 3 years old, Lord. What sin has he committed? What decision did he make that's left him like this? What was his great crime against you, except to be born to a father who doesn't understand responsibility and a mother who doesn't know how to love anyone but herself?
Andrew rises to his feet. He is beginning to brim with anger, but fighting hard to contain it.
ANDREW: This kid's been abused. (He points a finger accusingly, at God.) You know better than I do what he's had to go through, the way his mother has sacrificed him and his sister to her own happiness, stunting their development so they'll need her longer. (Now he starts to tally off on his hand the various problems Ian had.) This is a kid who barely even knew how to walk when the state put him in our care. He didn't know how to feed himself, and he couldn't say anything more advanced than gootchy-gootchy-goo. You saw what he was like when he came to stay with us -- he was practically dead inside. He was as close to being a poster child for reactive-attachment disorder as you can get.
You're such a big one for talking about what increases your glory. Tell me, how does the suffering of a child like Ian increase your glory? I see that what he's going through is wrong, and if I, sinful as I am, can see that, why the hell can't you? And if you can see it, why won't you stop it? Come on, tell me: What great ineffable purpose of yours did it serve for Ian to spend a single hour like that, let alone the two years he had for them to ignore him and stunt his growth?
Damn it, give me an answer! (He grabs something at his side and pushes it the floor, where it breaks. He stops and stares at it, and slowly regains his composure somewhat.) I've given you everything I have, Lord. You know that. But you still find a way to take more out of me and wring out more tears. What do you want from me? I've given everything -- everything -- for this child.
I've taught him how to walk, how to talk, how to eat with his fingers, and with a fork and spoon. I've taught him how to speak, and even though I know I shouldn't, I can't help but smile every time he calls me daddy.
And now you want to send him back to his parents. What for? So they can finish what they started? You disgust me.
Why are you so intent on destroying him? You're sending him back there, and he's going to lose everything he's gained here. He's going to lose the only real parents he knows, he's going to lose the sister he gained in our household, and he's going to lose the love, the support and the discipline we've given him. Do you have to take even that away from me?
What do you want from me? (Andrew pauses, and in the silence he hears something whispered. His response is filled with disdain) Follow you. I have followed you, and this is where you've led me. If this is how you treat your friends, Lord, it's no wonder you have so few of them.
He pauses and looks about him. Everything around him is in darkness, and there is no indication what lies ahead if he takes a step in any direction. He appears to get ready to take a step, but before he does, the light goes out and the curtain falls.)
FINIS
Copyright © 2003 by David Learn
"The Christian at Prayer"
By David Learn
All is dark on stage except for a single spot illuminated by a spotlight. Framed in that spotlight is Andrew. He is sitting on the ground, wrapped tightly in the fetal position, with his face not visible. He sits like this for a while, saying nothing and barely moving. When he does speak, it is with deep emotion barely suppressed.
ANDREW: Just tell me one thing. Why?
He pauses, but only briefly. The first crack has appeared, and the dam is slowly beginning to burst. Andrew lifts his head, and he begins to speak. He's talking to God, but it's not one of those formal let's-hold-our-hands-and-pray types of prayers. He's speaking as though God in the room with him.
ANDREW: I meant, it's not as though I don't have a right to ask that much. I'm not asking you why I'm suffering. If I suffer, it's because I either sinned or because I chose to follow you, and either way it's because of a choice I made, and I have no right to complain about that.
No, what I want to know is why Isaac has had to suffer. I accept that I have to suffer for me my sin, and I accept that following you is difficult. But why him? Ian isn't even 3 years old, Lord. What sin has he committed? What decision did he make that's left him like this? What was his great crime against you, except to be born to a father who doesn't understand responsibility and a mother who doesn't know how to love anyone but herself?
Andrew rises to his feet. He is beginning to brim with anger, but fighting hard to contain it.
ANDREW: This kid's been abused. (He points a finger accusingly, at God.) You know better than I do what he's had to go through, the way his mother has sacrificed him and his sister to her own happiness, stunting their development so they'll need her longer. (Now he starts to tally off on his hand the various problems Ian had.) This is a kid who barely even knew how to walk when the state put him in our care. He didn't know how to feed himself, and he couldn't say anything more advanced than gootchy-gootchy-goo. You saw what he was like when he came to stay with us -- he was practically dead inside. He was as close to being a poster child for reactive-attachment disorder as you can get.
You're such a big one for talking about what increases your glory. Tell me, how does the suffering of a child like Ian increase your glory? I see that what he's going through is wrong, and if I, sinful as I am, can see that, why the hell can't you? And if you can see it, why won't you stop it? Come on, tell me: What great ineffable purpose of yours did it serve for Ian to spend a single hour like that, let alone the two years he had for them to ignore him and stunt his growth?
Damn it, give me an answer! (He grabs something at his side and pushes it the floor, where it breaks. He stops and stares at it, and slowly regains his composure somewhat.) I've given you everything I have, Lord. You know that. But you still find a way to take more out of me and wring out more tears. What do you want from me? I've given everything -- everything -- for this child.
I've taught him how to walk, how to talk, how to eat with his fingers, and with a fork and spoon. I've taught him how to speak, and even though I know I shouldn't, I can't help but smile every time he calls me daddy.
And now you want to send him back to his parents. What for? So they can finish what they started? You disgust me.
Why are you so intent on destroying him? You're sending him back there, and he's going to lose everything he's gained here. He's going to lose the only real parents he knows, he's going to lose the sister he gained in our household, and he's going to lose the love, the support and the discipline we've given him. Do you have to take even that away from me?
What do you want from me? (Andrew pauses, and in the silence he hears something whispered. His response is filled with disdain) Follow you. I have followed you, and this is where you've led me. If this is how you treat your friends, Lord, it's no wonder you have so few of them.
He pauses and looks about him. Everything around him is in darkness, and there is no indication what lies ahead if he takes a step in any direction. He appears to get ready to take a step, but before he does, the light goes out and the curtain falls.)
FINIS
Copyright © 2003 by David Learn
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