The Great Re-Jiggering

Okay, so “great” may be overstating it just a tad.  I’ve taken the last couple days to give this blog a slight re-jiggering in hopes of making it operational again.  In the past, it was focused on the transformative power of arts and entertainment, and if you scroll down you can see many posts to that effect.  But now I’ve expanded it to include many other regenerative arenas in which I operate, most particularly that of coaching, counseling, and of course my faith which undergirds it all.

I hope you enjoy it.

Dream the impossible dream

C.S. Lewis: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, exploit.”  Shortly after reading that quote on my wife’s blog, I popped the movie musical Man of La Mancha into the DVD player and discovered a cinematic illustration of that quote.  Okay, maybe not exactly, but I was struck by the fact that Don Quixote saw each person as much greater than they actually were.  He had supposedly slipped the bonds of sanity, but perhaps he actually saw the world more clearly than those around him?  I highly recommend the movie.

I was reminded of it again last night as I listened to Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” — which serves as yet another reminder that the men and women around us — beings created in the image of God — have more to them than meets the eye.

Teaching theology through art

For my Systematic Theology class, we’re reading Christian Theology: An Introduction by Alister McGrath.  In a passage on some Trinitarian ideas that are difficult to understand and even more difficult to explain, he wrote the following:

“But how could these difficult ideas be expressed?  And, more importantly, how could they be communicated to ordinary Christians?

“One of the most influential answers was given by the great Methodist writer Charles Wesley (1707-88): through hymns.  For Wesley, hymns were not merely a means of praising God; they were an instrument of theological education.  In 1746, Wesley published a collection of 24 short hymns concerning the Trinity.  Individually and collectively, they manage to communicate and explain the two trinitarian notions we have just been considering without technical language or theological fuss.  Here, for example, is the concept of appropriation, applied to redemption:

“Father of Mankind be ever adorn’d;
They Mercy we find, In sending our Lord,
To ransom and bless us; Thy Goodness we praise,
For sending in Jesus, Salvation by Grace.

“O Son of His Love, Who deignest to die,
Our Curse to remove, Our Pardon to buy;
Accept our Thanksgiving, Almighty to save,
Who openest Heaven, To all that believe.

“O Spirit of Love, of Health, and of Power,
Thy working we prove; Thy Grace we adore,
Whose inward Revealing applies our Lord’s Blood,
Attesting and sealing us Children of God.”

Okay, so what Wesley did?  I want to do that with musical theatre.

Yes, I realize it’s not a direct comparison — after all hymns were already being used to praise God, while that’s not the intention of most musical theatre productions.  But I think musical theatre has incredible potential to communicate theological truth.

Twice now I’ve produced a musical revue pulling together songs from various musicals and highlighting their spiritual themes or pointing out spiritual applications of the songs.  However, I’ve been frustrated by the limitations of working with others’ material — there are spiritual truths I’d like to communicate for which there are no songs out there.

I’ve been impacted lately by listening to the cast recording of !Hero: The Rock Opera, a Christian-produced retelling of the Gospel story.  Despite its flaws (one of which is that they didn’t make it conducive to reproduction by others), it has helped me to envision some aspects of the Gospel in a new way (can you imagine being the one that Jesus saved from embarrassment by changing water into wine?).  Obviously there are several other Bible-based shows out there with varying degrees of orthodoxy — Godspell, Superstar, Joseph, Children of Eden, etc.  But there aren’t enough.

I think I want to do something about that.  What exactly, I’m not sure.  I’m not a composer or lyricist, so I may need to focus on some sort of producer role.  Hmmm…..

(This is what happens when I’m studying theology while one of the songs I’ve used in God on Broadway — “I’m Changing” from Dreamgirls — is playing in the background).

How to own a book

I’m reading the classic How to Read a Book for my Theological Research Methods class and was struck by this passage:

“When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them.  But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book.  Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it…

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.  Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book.  But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher.  He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying.  Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author.  It is the highest respect you can pay him.”

And this is where I refrain from mentioning that I almost never mark in books (I’m still startled every time I run across the one verse in my Bible I’ve underlined).  I guess it’s time to develop a new habit…

The quest for beauty

My theological studies have taken me away from doing much blogging, but every now and then they offer up a quote I need to pass on.  Such is this, coming by way of Alister McGrath’s Christian Theology: An Introduction, it is actually a quote from a C. S. Lewis sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory”:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.  These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.”

Hoe-down!

One of my favorite commentators just happens to also be a classical music critic and recently penned a piece recommending where a newcomer to the classical world should begin.  Being such a one myself, I was a bit overwhelmed by the enormous number of his suggestions, but he caught the attention of my nationalistic side with his reference to Americans:

If you’re an American, you’d better know all of Gershwin — and maybe even if you’re not: the piano preludes; Rhapsody in Blue; the Concerto in F; An American in Paris; Porgy and Bess (certainly excerpts). Did your mother ever sing to you “Summertime”? Keeping to the home front, Copland, a Brooklyn Jew, gave us the sound of the American West in Rodeo. He gave us the sound of pastoral America in Appalachian Spring. Try a couple of songs, too — maybe “Heart, we will forget him,” from the Dickinson Songs.

Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” has been a favorite of mine ever since I heard it in the background of the video that plays in a continual loop in the museum beneath the Lincoln Memorial (that video is one of the best things on the Mall, in my ever-so-humble opinion, and those who gripe that it portrays too many leftwing causes can go jump in a lake – or reflecting pool – but anyway…).  Long story short, listening to clips on YouTube couldn’t quite cut it, so I got meself a CD of Copland music.  Good stuff.  Maybe I’ll try Gershwin next – already know a lot of his stuff from musicals.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Okay, so I got a bit derailed by the end of the semester (two 10-page papers due on 4th of July weekend – how lousy is that?) and have delayed getting back up to speed, but now we are once again on a blog roll.  I mean, the blog is on a roll, not in one of those sidebar thingies.  You get the idea.

The weekend from H-E-double-hockey-sticks left me in front of the TV (working on a paper) watching the Capitol Concert which was taking place a mere 15 blocks away.  Oh well.  I enjoyed seeing the Jersey Boys perform – I’m dying to see that show but have been holding out for TKTS tickets – as well as the rest of the show.  Well done, as always.

As I noted on twitter at the time (you’re following me, right?  You know you want to…), I was a bit ambivalent about the fact that Gershwin’s Rhapsody reminded me of an airline commercial.  I’ve also realized lately that a lot of classical music sounds familiar because I heard it in Bugs Bunny cartoons growing up.  Still not entirely sure what I think about that – I suppose it’s a good thing, exposing kids to it early on and all that.  Right?

Give me the songs of a nation…

“And there was distant music, simple and somehow sublime, Giving the nation a new syncopation — The people called it Ragtime!”

A couple weeks back I went with a group of folks to see the musical Ragtime at the Kennedy Center – a fantastic production of a fantastic show.  I’d seen it twice before – a community theatre production that left something to be desired and a dinner theatre production that was quite good – but this production was amazing.

As I was pondering what to say about the show, I was struck anew by how the show is framed around the very issue this blog is focused on – the arts ability to shape culture.  As that first quote (from the opening number) presents it, ragtime music is credited with “giving the nation a new syncopation” – inspiring (and reflecting) the cultural change going on at the time.

The musical, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. L. Doctorow, focuses on an often overlooked era – the pre-WWI 1900s.  The three main families – WASP, black, and immigrant – function as types for that era and are surrounded by historical characters such as Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, chorus girl Evelyn Nesbit, anarchist Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini, and Booker T. Washington.  If you ever get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it.

A few more lyrics from the opening song:

“And there was music playing,
Catching a nation in its prime…
Beggar and millionaire
Everyone, everywhere
Moving to the Ragtime!

And there was distant music
Skipping a beat, singing a dream.
A strange insistent music
Putting out heat,
Picking up steam.

The sound of distant thunder
Suddenly starting to climb…

It was the music of something beginning,
An era exploding, a century spinning
In riches and rags and in rhythm and rhyme.
The people called it Ragtime!”

Story’s importance to worldview

My apologies for infrequent posting (both recently and for the next four weeks).  My semester has started up which will likely interfere with my blogging.  I also expected my schoolwork to inconveniently not provide fodder for my blog (how much arts stuff can there be in Addictive Behaviors and Christian Ethics after all?) but that has fortunately proven to not be the case right out the gate.

For Ethics, we’re reading portions of Elements of a Christian Worldview (compiled and edited by Michael D. Palmer who’s my professor for this class), which describes six elements of a worldview — ideology, narrative, norms (moral and aesthetic), ritual, experience, and the social element.  Concerning narrative, I was struck by the following:

“[W]orldview narratives provide patterns, or models, for the adherents of the worldview.  The language of ideology by its very nature tends to be abstract, technical, and somewhat sparse.  In well-developed worldviews, ideology’s role is crucial, but the average person finds little delight or encouragement in navigating its intricacies and nuanced distinctions.  Narratives, by contrast, engage and capture the imagination.  They inspire not only the mind but also arouse the emotions. They invite the hearers to envision and vicariously feel what it would be like to live out the ideological content of the worldview… Narratives may make us laugh or cry; they may amuse or shock our sensibilities.  In any case, they provide models — for character development, for how and how not to behave, for what are and are not acceptable social arrangements.”

Incidentally, the five forms of narrative it lists are sacred writings, myths (stories involving deity but not necessarily considered factually true), historical narratives, literature and drama, and visual art.  I have to write a short paper describing the elements of worldview, so it’s safe to bet that “Give me the songs of a nation, and it matters not who writes its laws” is going to make it in there somehow.

And while we’re on the subject of Story, you’ll want to check out Ben Arment and his upcoming STORY conference.  Cool stuff!  I probably won’t be able to make it out there (day job and all that), but the regenerate Mrs. is hoping to go.  She, incidentally, teaches a not-so-small group called The Story each May where she takes people through the entire Bible chronologically in three 2-hour meetings.  Crazy but cool.  I’ll have to blog more on that in the future.

Retelling the old, old story. With song and dance.

As I mentioned on twitter, the other day I watched a DVD of !Hero: The Rock Opera.  Where to begin?

!Hero was created by Christians and (arguably) for Christians.  It’s a retelling of the Gospel story in the modern day, supposing Jesus hadn’t come 2000 years ago, but instead arrived today and was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  To create a Roman government parallel, they’ve created “the world’s iron-fisted government,” ICON, which reminded me of Left Behind‘s post-Rapture government.  This is a rock/rap stage performance, featuring folks like Michael Tait (of dcTalk and Tait), Mark Stuart (of Audio Adrenaline), and Rebecca St. James — the ones I’ve heard of — as well as T-Bone, Nirva, Matt Hammitt of Sanctus Real, Grits, Paul Wright, and John Cooper of Skillet.

I got my hands on a copy of the CD several years back, but never really listened to it much since the opening reference to ICON rubbed me the wrong way and rap isn’t really my thing to begin with.  However, several months ago I gave it another try and, once I started framing it as a Christian-created version of Jesus Christ Superstar, I started warming up to it.  Then, of course, my whole I-like-any-form-of-music-once-I-know-the-words thing kicked in and I ended up really, really liking it.

That prompted me to obtain the DVD (via Ebay) and I watched it last Saturday.  Sigh…

The cast was obviously chosen for their singing abilities, since they can’t really act.  The little dialogue (it’s mostly songs) was atrocious.  The dancing was well-done but the set (which included continual video clips in the background) didn’t always seem to make sense.  One of the biggest offenses, however, was the explanatory screens (e.g., “Hometown Crowds are the Hardest”) before scenes, to ensure the audience understood what it was about.  We wouldn’t want to make the audience think, would we?

My biggest disappointment, however, is that their intention seemed to be more to showcase the artists involved than to create a show that’s reproducible (like Jesus Christ Superstar).  Maybe it just seems that way to me, though, since I don’t have a wealth of rappers at my fingertips.  Musical theatre has its share of Bible stories — Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Children of Eden, etc. — with varying degrees of Biblical orthodoxy.  It would be nice to see a few more added to the repertoire.

I’m intrigued by the thought of doing a Gospel retelling that focuses on individual disciples rather than Jesus — could be an interesting perspective.  I also think it would be interesting to retell it in a way where you aren’t sure until the moment of betrayal which character is Judas.  That could be an interesting way to mess with Christians’ minds and force them to think.