For naught. October 23, 2007

I have a drive to create; to sing, to play, to write, to act, to direct.  To create beauty.  To make art.

It is indeed unfortunate when that drive is undermined by those with whom I must work.

This afternoon, I had a truly terrible rehearsal, the kind that makes me wonder if I want to continue doing this at all.   I realize that an occupational hazard of working with teenagers is that they will, more often than not, behave like teenagers, but it is still so shocking to see the level of self-absorption that they can achieve, particularly in groups.  No job is ever well enough done, no amount of sacrifice is enough to satisfy their insatiable need to criticize, consume, and destroy.

Creation circumvented by destruction.  Oldest story in the book, but it never stops hurting.

No shock here. October 18, 2007

My friend Heather posted this quiz on her blog, and I thought it might be fun…

No one who has ever met me will be surprised.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Fad Reader
Non-Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Moving into worship, revisited October 17, 2007

It is my natural impulse to compartmentalize. Work life, social life, home life, church life, each in it’s own clean square box, each to be removed and replaced in its rightful time. I am comfortable with my neat little system, and I become disconcerted when these worlds fail to stay in the lines.

Things are starting to mix up.

Last week I went to rehearsal, where normally I, well, rehearse.  Rehearsal is time to work out all the kinks of technicality so that on Sunday art and worship can happen.   Practice may not, in fact, make perfect, but it does make possibilities.  In my mind, rehearsal is strictly technical — what notes to sing or play, the particular arrangements of a Sunday’s set, tempo and harmonies.

The past few weeks have been different.  All of the technical aspects are still there, and we still as a band have the tendency to fall apart somewhere in the middle of a song, often with cacophony as we all simultaneously figure out that no one knows what the heck is going on.   But somewhere mixed in with all that I found myself moving from the mundane to the sublime.  I caught myself raising my hands in the middle of a song and not really realizing it until we stopped.  Even the technical work of creating was becoming art, and worship, all tangled together.  It is both wonderful and frightening, as my carefully segregated worlds start to bleed into one another.

Artful whining October 10, 2007

I’m frustrated.  I’m working on a play right now, which is a lot of work all by itself, but in addition to that I am teaching a full class load and I have a new prep this year.  Basically, every day I get to work at 7:15 and work as hard an as fast as I possibly can until I go home after 5, and I am still just barely keeping my head above water.

In previous years, my work with drama never really felt like work.  That’s not to say it was easy, it has never been that, but it was an escape.  I enjoyed the whole process, mostly because I felt like I was creating something worthwhile and there were other people there with me invested in the artistic process.  This play is different though.  I dread going to rehearsals, I am tired all the time, and it is not going nearly as well as I had hoped.  I think I have figured out the problem though —  in many ways, I am doing this one alone.

I have actors, of course, but all of them seem to be there just because it’s a fun after-school activity, not for the theater part.  None of them seem to be very invested in the art itself.  It makes me sad, since to me, art is the only reason I spend so much time and energy working in the theater.  Sigh.

Maybe now that I have found the source of my discontent, I can do something about it.  Hopefully.

Waiting October 9, 2007

A week ago today, my beloved baby laptop breathed its last.

I suppose that is technically incorrect, since computers don’t breathe, but I still feel like I lost a friend.  I have had this particular laptop for almost six years.  I got it just before my best friend left for Kazakhstan for 6 weeks, so I could email her.  It didn’t take long for me to learn to love it, and we have been through a lot together.  My first play was born on that laptop, along with innumerable essays, poems, and the embryonic forms of a dozen other works.  I edited pictures of parties and weddings and babies; my sister’s and my aforementioned best friend’s not the least among them. It was on that computer I learned to use my first ipod and finally reached the top level of Zuma.  I made friends all over the world with that computer, from Scotland to as close as 3 miles away.

A new computer is on the way — the updated version, with much more hard drive and RAM and all the other bells and whistles required to live in the modern computer age.  I am sure I will love the new one just as much, if not more, and I am fascinated by tracking its progress across the world as FedEx brings it to me from China.  I am excited at the  prospect of learning new programs and finally being able to get wireless internet.  But in the meantime, I am thankful for my very first Apple, and a little sad to see it go.

In its many and varied forms October 8, 2007

Right this minute, there is a banner stretched across three tables pushed together in my classroom.  It is covered from edge to edge in ever color imaginable, mixed and swirled in a million different designs.  It is overwhelming, almost blindingly so in its mesh of color and pattern, but when you look a little harder, it becomes more and more beautiful.  The names of its creators co-mingle with their handprints, peace symbols, stars and flowers and swirls bookended by the masks of comedy and tragedy.

Light meets dark.  Color meets blank space.  Symbol becomes abstract and the shapeless takes form.  It’s the magic of theatre captured on paper.

I wonder if man without art could ever understand God.

A Change of Lens October 5, 2007

Across the street from the house where I grew up there is a horse farm, and directly across the street from the driveway is a grove of trees.  Every day for years and years I stood in the driveway waiting for the bus and looked over at those trees, and the horses that meandered in and out between them.  I spent many, many hours looking at those trees.   I remember distinctly the day I saw individual leaves.

 

Previous to that point I did not know what I was missing.  I was used to seeing a mass of green with no distinction, and the appearance of individual sharp edges was a revelation to my 4^th grade mind.  Even today I sometimes marvel at leaves, at such a mass of color made up of thousands of individual little parts.

 

What changed?  I got glasses.

 

It’s funny how two pieces of concave plastic on frames can change a perspective.  Suddenly objects lacking distinction come into focus, and items previously unnoticed become significant.  It can be almost disturbing to realize how previously skewed our perception of the world was when everything comes clear.

 

I have realized of late how often I view life though the wrong lens.  This time it is not my myopic eyes that are causing the problem, it is my myopic heart.  When I value the wrong thing, or let myself become entangled in selfishness and pride, my perception becomes more and more twisted and I begin to see reality as if in a funhouse mirror.   

 

I think that is scariest danger in sin.  Not just the damage it does to others, or the damage it does to ourselves, but the way it skews and twists our view of reality until it becomes virtually unrecognizable, and we are trapped in a false universe of our own making, or the making of those around us whose view is equally distorted.  It is much harder to learn to see things clearly than to slide into myopia, and there is only one lens through which we can truly see the real world as it is.  It is unfortunate that the church, the intended purveyor of true vision, is often too caught up in its own agenda to help people learn to see – instead, they teach people to trade one pair of cloudy glasses for another.

 

I pray that just like that day when I saw the leaves for the first time, God would teach me to see with His lens, and that as I see clearly, my wonder would never cease to increase.

Filling in the spaces October 2, 2007

Saturday night I went to see Derek Webb in concert.  To be perfectly honest, before last week I had not even heard of Derek Webb, but my friend Brian was opening for him and I went to hear Brian.   I would have gone even if he was terrible, because I think it is important for artists to support one another.  Fortunately, he is awesome, and I love his music and his lyrics, so it was no great hardship to go.

 

The whole concert experience was pretty thought-provoking, but not altogether in ways I would have anticipated.  I went with a girl I really enjoy but whom I don’t know very well – I am trying to be more deliberate about spending time with the people I care about, and this was a perfect opportunity.  I had dinner with she and her roommates, and then we went along to the show.  All three of the girls are significantly younger than me, which usually is not an issue, but that night somehow I felt…old.  Out of place.  Even though the concert was held at my alma mater, it felt like lifetimes had passed since I had been there, or as if my time there was a part of another life.  It was time out of time, and my discomfort was pronounced.  Standing in line surrounded by 20-somethings (and younger) I saw clearly the difference between my life now and my life then.

 

I remember when I was one of those 20-somethings, when life was both easier and more difficult than I had ever imagined when my friends were all important and a weekend was wasted without some sort of excitement.  I remember Sunday nights watching the X-files with a basement full of people, hoping desperately that a certain one of them would look my way and dreading that he never would.  I remember long, earnest conversations about God and life and boys and God again, and how we all took ourselves very, very seriously. 

 

Saturday night I ran into the owner of that basement where I watched the X-files so long ago, eight years since the last time we spoke.  We both had changed – my hair has evolved (several times) and I dress better now, he’s a little heavier and has grown facial hair, but seeing him made me remember those late nights and those days, heavy with anticipation.  Until that moment I had forgotten about him, and his roommate, the subject of all those desperate longings, and in that moment I when I remembered, something inside me was healed.  I remember easily the pain of my past, but I tend to forget the spaces of mundane time that dominate real life.  I am thankful for the mundane time.

Moving into worship October 1, 2007

I sang on Sunday – I don’t sing very often anymore, my schedule precludes the ability to practice as much as I should, but I love doing it, and I was excited at the opportunity.   I really love to worship when I let myself.  It should not be so difficult to let myself, but unfortunately it is easy for me to get enveloped in self-consciousness, particularly on a stage in front of a few hundred people.   Before the service I prayed for freedom (there it is again!) from the fear of what other people are thinking, and God answered in such a beautiful way – I was not self-conscious at all, at least during the service itself.   I did get a little squicky afterwards, not that I was embarrassed by anything I did in the service, but God is definitely pushing me into previously unexplored places, and that is bound to be uncomfortable.  I grew up in churches where even the occasional “Amen” was frowned on, raising hands was something the wackos did, and dancing was unheard of.  To do both on a platform in front of a congregation is to me both beautiful and highly counter-intuitive, like Indy walking onto the invisible bridge in The Last Crusade. 

 

I am also very aware of how my actions influence others.  It’s kind of a hard line to walk – when you are leading worship, your primary goal is to genuinely worship and hope others will follow, but at the same time you don’t want to be distracting to those you are attempting to lead.  It is always tempting to try and judge your own success in leading others to worship based on the externals; how many people sang, or clapped, or participated in any of the half-dozen signs we have come to associate with “successful” worship, but to make such a judgment is idolatry.  Worship happens only in the heart, and thus its true signs are visible only to He who sees the heart. 

 

Ideally, art as worship should be our goal, and we do a great disservice when we create an artificial divide between the two.  Long ago I had a conversation with someone who was criticizing church music, saying that she “did not come to church to be entertained”.  It makes me sad that she does not understand the distinctions between art and entertainment, or the delicate connections between creating art, participating in it and appreciating it, and adoring God.  This is not to say that all art will be worship, or all worship will be art, but when the two connect it creates a synergy that is, to my mind, the fullest expression of what it means to be a human in communion with God.