Last night was a highlight of my summer in USA. I was able to do a workshop on Diamond Ensemble and Enacted prayer with people from the drama ministry of an Orange County church. Here are some of my reflections on the evening.
HE:
It’s kind of cool to be able to use your whole body in worship. To be given the ‘permission’ to move and not feel weird about it.SHE:
I believe we have 3 new guys for our dance ministry. HE:
This isn’t really ‘dance’ though, is it?SHE: (with 2 Master’s Degrees in Dance)
Oh yes. It is.HE:
Please don’t tell my father-in-law.And then later in the evening…HE:
I often have asked myself, why did God make me to love artistic expression if there is no acceptable outlet for me to use it?
This last comment had the deepest effect on me. Even into the next day I am thinking about it. I drove down the street this morning thinking about the loss of creativity and beauty in the world because so many people feel exactly the same way. And I wept.
It wasn’t just a stranger saying it. The person who said it was someone I’d grown up with; in the same Baptist church youth group. Somone I haven’t seen for more than 20 years, sometime back when I was a kid and feeling like the oddball artist in a family of atheletes. My family was a lot like his: Sports was the appropriate activity for spare time outside of church and work and school. Certainly not dance! Good little Christian girls don't take dance classes! In a leotard? Showing your body? But I was a GIRL. It’s acceptable to be silly; to prance around, to be in plays, and like music and drama. How much harder would it be for a BOY with the same inclinations?
This guy was a Dude in a big family of Rugged Men. I remember him as an athelete. Baseball, I think. And to look at him now he’s a grown up “Man’s Man.” I suppose he had a few acceptable outlets for creativity over the years through music, or a funny skit to advertise Church Camp. But obviously nothing serious. After the session tonight; seeing him enact the prayer of an artist who longs to be accepted and validated by the church, and seeing him move in worship, fluidly and beautifully to music, I’m confident that this was a special night for this closet artist old friend of mine.
For at least one night he found acceptance, satisfaction, and masculine wholeness, in physical worship of God. The Creator God who is the one who placed the love for artistic expression in him to begin with.
What a shame that God has given creative gifts to so many and then they don’t really get opened. How many men live their lives with the same unmet holy yearning to have an outlet for artistic expression? Thinking about it today, I weep more for those other men who do open their creative gifts and get ridiculed out of it, or ridculed into an alternative lifestyle where those gifts are celebrated. Why isn’t the church a place where everyone is empowered to exercise their gifts? Why are some gifts more valuable?
I start asking these questions and I just get get homesick for heaven. I can do what I can to fullfil this calling of mine to “add spice to life.” I can empower and encourage some to develop and excercie their artistic, poetic and sometimes prophetic gifts. I can make a small difference in some people’s lives who are burdened with that tyranny of beige. But this side of heaven there are a lot of problems that just ain’t gonna get solved. War in the Middle East, terrorism, and AIDS give perspective on the tragedy of my little artist’s issues.
