We have a story to prepare, and we have our script, and we have the materials, and we have in our volumes the scriptural references that underpin our telling. Besides these, Jerome has pointed us towards secondary texts like Samuel Terrien's The Elusive Presence or Bernard Brandon Scott's Hear Then the Parable that can open a wider window for us onto the prospect of a whole genre.
I'm sure we all have our own ways of preparing to tell a story. The triad work that has evolved through our trainings has taught me an important principle: learning together is easier, less stressful, and more productive of insight than learning alone (unless, like a few of my adolescent students, one is painfully introverted). At a recent Montessori Math conference, my teaching colleague took part in the following exercise: first, participants were given a story problem to solve on their own; next, they were allowed to tackle a similarly thorny problem in small groups. Afterwards, the whole group was asked to compare the two experiences in terms of stress level. Story phobia may not have quite the resonance of math phobia for most of us, but performance anxiety can run strong among our training participants, and ourselves, and, in the circles I've been part of, the collaborative approach has been received as a grace and a mercy.
Still, often, late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, we feel on our own. It is hard to remember in these penultimate moments that the stories are ours in the largest sense; that is, they have survived thousands of years of meddling and permutation, and they will survive us as well. We try to get out of the way, and often fall short, but we are never really alone in the work of telling and interpreting and retelling. Of course, we as trainers have our memories to draw from, of Jerome, of each other, and of many of the participants through countless trainings—all fellow storytellers who have much to teach us. But there are other friends as well that I have found to collaborate with in my preparing of the spirit as well as the syntax and the diction of a story: the translators of scripture, the commenters on scripture, and the poets. There are other friends who help with the teaching approach to storytelling, but I will turn to those in a different post.
First, the translators, or paraphrasers.
Some say that, even at best, translation can't carry us but part way toward the original truth. Oh well. We come as close as we can to a Mystery, and like Moses, we are blessed if we catch a glimpse of backside. But I have found real help in coming closer to the ideas in scripture by taking multiple word-paths in. An uneven and at times jarringly clunky (to my ear) paraphrase like Eugene Peterson's The Message can still repaint an image in new and unexpected colors. An example, for me, would be verse 10 of his version of Psalm 51:
God, make a fresh start in me,
shape a Genesis week from the chaos of my life.[1]
Encountering this verse in a time of personal vocational chaos just after the second national Godly Play conference at Sewanee a little more than a decade ago, I shotgun-wedded it to the Creation lesson, and together they became form and content of my daily prayer practice. Soon, seven avenues of self-examination and oblation of which I had been made aware in spiritual direction a decade earlier squirmed their way back into my consciousness and attached themselves to the 7 images on the story cards: Day 1, Will; Day 2, Emotions; Day 3, Work; Day 4, Intellect; Day 5, Imagination; Day 6, Relationships; Day 7, Rest. As this practice deepened, the days became weeks and the weeks became seasons. And my understanding of these seven categories deepened as well, as if beneath each lay a truer intention. A movement emerged from within each static image: from will towards a decision for willingness; from the seesawing extremes of emotion towards the balancing fulcrum of gratitude; from work towards calling; from intellect towards wisdom; from imagination towards co-creativity; from relationships towards community; from rest towards Sabbath. It was my personal learning spiral, my way of making a lesson my own, and it was sparked by a new friend's choice of words.
I have several different translations of the Bible at home to consult, but one other translation I'd like to mention here for its helpfulness in illuminating the storytelling and especially the poetry of scripture is The Schocken Bible, translated by Everett Fox. He has tried to give to the English a sense of the rhythms and word collages of the Hebrew original, or as he puts it, to present "the text in English dress but with a Hebraic voice."[2] His notes accompanying the text are invaluable. To continue the Creation motif, here's a taste of his Genesis 1. The focus on verbs in participial form and the use of exclamation points convey to me both a sense of unfolding and of surprise, as though we were present at a birthing: Look, it's the head appearing! Now the face! The arms! It's all happening as we speak! (It makes me wonder whether anyone has ever translated the Creation story into the Eternal Present tense?)
At the beginning of God's creating
of the heavens and the earth,
when the earth was wild and waste,
darkness over the face of Ocean,
rushing-spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters—
God said: Let there be light! And there was light.
God saw the light: that it was good.
God separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light: Day! and the darkness he called: Night!
There was setting, there was dawning: one day.[3]
Second, the commenters on scripture.
As a lay person without the benefit of seminary education, I have nonetheless been graced with a few friends in this domain who have enriched my understanding. First among these is probably Canadian literary critic and ordained UCC minister Northrop Frye, from whom I was able to take an undergraduate lecture course on the morphology and typology of the Bible. These lectures later became his book, The Great Code.[4] Without his insights into the narrative patterns and core metaphors of scripture, I might not have been prepared to "get" the genius of Godly Play when I first encountered it.
Returning to Presbyterian pastor Eugene Peterson, who is also a published poet by the way, I should acknowledge the great help some of his pastoral guides have been: in opening my eyes, for example, to the five scrolls of the Megilloth, especially Ruth and Esther, and to the ways in which scripture comments upon scripture.[5] I also spent most of a year of Sunday mornings with five fourth graders building a story box of David using another book of Peterson's as a guide.[6]
More than a decade ago, in a fit of unnatural piety, I got embroiled in one of those consumer boondoggles to which bibliophiles are susceptible — a subscription series. The final volume of the Apocrypha just arrived last month in what has seemed the inexorable filling of my bookshelves at a glacial pace with hefty black-spined tomes bearing the inscription, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. To say that I have spent vast quantities of time in the past 12 years poring over these arcane beauties would be a bald-faced lie. Their pages are still immaculate and crisp, and they face my living room as a collective reproach to my many sins of omission. But I have made some use of them, particularly of the commentaries on the gospel stories, and on the parables. Here are two citations below, by way of example, the first from Ambrose's commentary on Luke 15:3-24, the second from Hilary of Poitiers' commentary on Matthew 14:17:
St. Luke did not idly present three parables in a row. By the parables of the sheep that strayed and was found, the coin which was lost and found, and the son who was dead and came to life, we may cure our wounds, being encouraged by a three-fold remedy. [...] Who are the father, the shepherd, and the woman? They are God the Father, Christ, and the church. Christ carries you on his body, he who took your sins on himself. The church seeks, and the Father receives. The shepherd carries. The mother searches. The father clothes. First mercy comes, then intercession, and third reconciliation. Each complements the other. The Savior rescues, the church intercedes, and the Creator reconciles.[7]
I can't help but substitute Spirit for church in the Ambrose excerpt, but this first passage has often made me wonder what a side-by-side of these three parables might engender in a story circle, or how these three parables taken together might make a gloss on the Trinity Synthesis lesson. I value the second passage as an example of the depths and layers we are seeking as we collect and name and make concrete in our materials the core metaphors on which we base our spiral of experience and understanding. Not that we have made this particular connection visible in our own materials, having loaves and fishes by color or shape point to the Torah and the prophets, the way the golden triangle of leaven can reference the parables, and now, the Greatest Parable. But insights like this from the commentaries can awaken us to the possibilities of connection that still may lie hidden in our rooms.
I shouldn't leave this partial examination of some of my own scholarly guides in the work of preparation without mentioning Martin Smith's The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture. If Frye's book opened me to the patterns and imagery that religious language could offer for making meaning and inspiring creative activity, Smith's influence on my prayer life was to open me to the activity, the playful presence, of the Trinity in my encounters with scripture, and therefore to make me more ready to see the wisdom in the Godly Play approach to storytelling with its open-ended wondering and undirected work time. Here's a short but telling excerpt:
Our prayer is not making conversation with God. It is joining the conversation that is already going on in God. It is being invited to participate in the relationships of intimacy between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is an eternal dance already in full swing, and we are caught up in to it. Prayer is allowing ourselves to join the dance and experience the movements, the constant interplay of the Persons of the Trinity.[9]
Third, the poets.
But why do we need them here, when we already have the scriptures, the scripts, and the scholars? Won't they just confuse things or lead us off on tangents, perhaps getting us stuck in some theological backwater? Again, I have to trust that their process is akin to ours, and that they can help us to keep our lines spare, our silences necessary, our words pregnant with meaning. It's not as though our scripts haven't already been informed by an attention to the poetry of scripture and the wisdom of the theologians—"The Word of God was born a wordless babe" being but one example that comes to my mind.
There are many poems to add clarity to our engagement with the Godly Play lessons. As I continue to organize my little collection, I would like to begin identifying poems as resources for each lesson. I enlist your help in this. This should include scripture that references or illuminates other scripture. One of my favorite examples is the passage from Isaiah 51 with which Caryl Menkhus often opens a Core Training, as each of us in the circle meditates on the smooth stone we have chosen from the basketful she has brought with her:
Look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug. 2Look to Abraham your father and to Sarah who bore you; for he was but one when I called him, but I blessed him and made him many. (v. 1-2)
Here are a few verses now, all from women poets. And only one poem available in its entirety online, so my neck is on the block here. Mum's the word.
From Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), British poet and Blake and Yeats scholar, a short poem, "Ark," which makes me want to practice how I move my arms when giving that lesson, and to never leave out the raven part of the story:
I send soul like a dove
Out from this fragile ark
Afloat in space.
Body puts out a hand
And soul's secure again
In time and place.
Into the unknown
Soul ventures her love
To bring back some green leaf.
Into the shoreless dark
Whence none returns
The raven flies. [10]
From Denise Levertov (1923-1997), A British-American poet who finished her teaching career at the University of Washington in Seattle and whose grave lies not far from those of my father- and mother-in-law, three poems from the same collection, A Door in the Hive. I will return to her in future posts, as she is one of the great Christian poets of our time. First, "On the Parables of the Mustard Seed," followed by two meditations on sacred images in art, an excerpt from "Annunciation," and "Nativity: An Altarpiece." The last two poems one could use as preparatory meditations while sitting with Giotto's frescoes and The Glorious Impossible.
I.
Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
Not a bird of the air in sight.
No, He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,
was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.
Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique—
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,
as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom
a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.
The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.[11]
II.
[...]
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.
__________________
She did not cry, 'I cannot, I am not worthy,'
nor, 'I have not the strength.'
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.[12]
III.
The wise men are still on the road, searching,
crowns and gifts packed in their saddlebags.
The shepherds are still asleep on the hill, their woolen
caps pulled over their ears, their campfire low.
It's the wondering animals, ox and ass, unused
to human company after dark, who witness,
alone with Mary and Joseph, the birth; who hear
the cry, the first cry
of earthly breath drawn through the newborn lungs
of God.
And the cord is cut, and the shepherds
that selfsame moment have sprung to their feet
in a golden shower of angels, terrified, then
rejoicing. They lope downhill to the barn
to see their Redeemer. A cloud of
celestial music surrounds them.
The wise men
are still far off, alone on the road with a star.
But the ox and the ass
are kneeling aready, the Family's oldest friends,
in the glow of light that illumines the byre, the straw,
their eyes and the human eyes—a glow
shed from no source but the living Child Himself.[13]
And to round out this week's conversation with the poets, a bit of playful humor and a return to the Beginning. Here is Canadian poet Lorna Crozier's "On the Seventh Day." I was introduced to this poet when visiting the UCC retreat center, Naramata, in British Columbia, where she is sometime poet-in-residence, and where Canadian trainer Allison Rennie is Program Director.
On the first day God said
Let there be light.
And there was light.
On the second day
God said, Let there be light,
and there was more light.
What are you doing? asked God’s wife,
knowing he was the dreamy sort.
You created light yesterday.
I forgot, God said. What can I do
about it now?
Nothing, said his wife.
But pay attention!
And in a huff she left
to do the many chores
a wife must do in the vast
though dustless rooms of heaven.
On the third day God said
Let there be light. And
On the fourth and fifth
(his wife off visiting his mother).
When she returned there was only
the sixth day left. The light
was so blinding, so dazzling
God had to stretch and stretch the sky to hold it
and the sky took up all the room –
it was bigger than anything
even God could imagine.
Quick, his wife said,
Make something to stand on!
God cried, Let there be earth!
and a thin line of soil
nudged against the sky like a run-over snake
bearing all the blue in the world on its back.
On the seventh day God rested
as he always did. Well, rest
wasn’t exactly the right word,
his wife had to admit.
On the seventh day God
went into his study
and wrote in his journal
in huge curlicues and loops
and large crosses on the t’s
changing all the facts, of course,
even creating Woman
from a Man’s rib, imagine that!
But why be upset? she thought.
Who’s going to believe it?
Anyway, she had her work to do.
Everything he’d forgotten
she had to create
with only a day left to do it.
Leaf by leaf,
paw by paw, two by two,
and now nothing
could be immortal
as in the original plan.
Go out and multiply, yes,
she’d have to say it,
but there was too little room
for life without end,
forever and ever,
on that thin spit of earth
under that huge prairie sky. [14]
As you have time or inspiration, I invite your comments and your suggestions for other resources in the work of preparation, of getting ready. Go have a Genesis week of your own!
[7] Just, Arthur A., Jr.; Oden, Thomas C., eds. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. III, LUKE. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2003. p.244.
[8] Oden, Thomas C.; Simonetti, M., eds. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, Vol. Ib, MATTHEW 14-28. Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2002. p.8.
[9] Smith, Martin L. The Word is Very Near You: A Guide to Praying with Scripture. Lanham, MD: Cowley, 1989. p. 28.
[10] Raine, Kathleen. The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2001. p. 321.
[11] Levertov, Denise. A Door in the Hive. New York: New Directions, 1989. pp.83-4.
[12] Ibid., p.88.
[13] Ibid., p.91.
[14] Crozier, Lorna. The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2007. pp. 62-64. This poem can also be found online in a talk given by Crozier at an educational conference in 2007, at http://www.complexityandeducation.ualberta.ca/conferences/2007/Documents/CSER07_Crozier.pdf
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