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Happy Birthday to Us!
Yes, Soul Windows - Reflection is turning 2! This is our 48th issue of twice-monthly (mostly!) publication.
We thank you, our growing body of readers, for your support and words of encouragement. Your comments help us know that we are touching people's lives.
In our inaugural issue in June 2009, we wrote, "every ordinary thing around us lights up, now and then, reflecting God's glory. May we have eyes to see."
We pray that this newsletter will continue helping us all see God's grace and God's glory.
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Scripture as Musical Score | |
The scriptures, writes Aaron Milavec, "are like scores of Mozart's violin concertos; a living master is required to bring the score alive and to thrill us with the depth of aesthetic feeling that it contains. In parallel fashion, it requires a Christian master to break open the text of Scripture and to correctly nourish the messianic holiness proper to our times."*
How true: Christian scripture is not a masterpiece to be admired on a shelf, but an inspiration and guide for holy life. Like a musical score or the script for a play, the Bible comes into its own only when it is brought alive in action and sound, flesh and voice.
Also, like a musical score, there is no single interpretation of scripture that is definitive. Different performers will interpret a piece of music differently, highlighting different elements of the score's riches. This is true even of the same performer, at different times: Canadian pianist Glenn Gould recorded Bach's "Goldberg Variations" twice, in 1955 and again in 1981. The performances are strikingly different.
Still, I cannot fully endorse Milavec's view. Yes, I have sat at the feet of Christian "masters" and been inspired by their teaching and preaching. I have been in the presence of saintly people who surely embodied the gospel of God. But the performance of Scripture is not reserved for the select few, for masters and prodigies. Nor is it a solo performance. Christian faith is choral music, where each voice has its part; it is a jazz ensemble were each instrument may have its time to solo, then moves to the background while another player takes a turn.
The music of scripture is about harmonies and counterpoint, not about individual virtuosity. The chorus will not be complete until your voice is heard. The scriptures will not be performed in their fullness until you and I take up our instruments, great or small, and begin to play.
Bill
*quoted by Ronald Rolheiser, in address delivered June 22, 2011 at Oblate School of Theology, San Antonio, Texas. | |
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Awful Honesty
--by Jan
The man with the withered hand. I know him. I met him in my imagination as I watched Jose Ruben De Leon dramatize the scene where Jesus said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." Slowly the gnarled and deformed hand untwisted and relaxed, powerful and alive. Then in a quick moment the unclean spirits fell down before Jesus and shouted, "You are the son of God." I saw them all - the withered hand, the unclean spirits, the multitude at the seaside, the girl restored to life - all as Jose Ruben brought them to life on stage by his dramatic words, gestures, and movements, all telling the Gospel story with awful honesty.
Jose Ruben De Leon amplifies the definition of Gospel Narrative. What we conceive to be a story, Jose Ruben gives breath and muscles and tissue to Jesus and all the Bible characters. Reciting the entire Gospel of Mark from memory, his one-man sacred drama is theatrical storytelling at its best.
Besides the Gospel of Mark: A Drama of Hope, actor-playwright-musician Jose Ruben also performed portions from two other sacred dramas, St. Francis of Assisi: A Musical; and El Encuentro: Juan Diego and the Virgin de Guadalupe. He was one of the presenters along with Kathleen Norris, Mary Jo Leddy, and Ron Rolheiser and 6 others at the recent Oblate School of Theology "Theology and the Arts" Summer Institute.
De Leon's proclamation of the Gospel through performance is  evidence of Frederick Buechner's notion that, "There would be a strong argument for saying that much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of the poets, playwrights, novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world and about the storm of his absence, both without and within, which, because it is unendurable, unlivable, drives us to look to the eye of the storm."*
How do we perform the Gospel in our everyday lives?
*Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, p. 44.
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Copyright (c) 2011 Soul Windows Ministries
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