Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" Aug-Sep-Oct 2022

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in Forward Day by Day, and I've culled highlights every quarter going back to 2013.

August For August, Patricia Marks, deacon and retired professor in Valdosta GA, made the choice to write exclusively about the gospel readings. The strongest statement of her main theme came in her final message, a response to John 8.47, where Jesus tells the Pharisees why they "do not hear" the word of God. The Pharisees hang up on words and miss "the joy of those who have been healed, fed, and awestruck" by Jesus. She's reminded of her aunt, deaf from birth, who took in everything about a person at sight: she could design and sew a dress without measuring or patterns. Marks tells us that the aunt heard "more deeply than words."

In earlier meditations, Marks tells how words are more than letters (Jn. 6.63 My words are spirit and life), and how a teacher has to see beyond / beneath the surfaces that students present. I especially appreciated her story of a wise-guy in her class who slouched in her office doorway asking for permission to drop the course. She told him he was talented and told him to reconsider. He came back minutes later, crying, as no teacher had ever believed in him.

Marks also tells about walking the Labyrinth, an activity that animates some Episcopalians, not me. But Marks tells us it takes "patience," a word that comes from a word for "suffer." As she wanders slowly through the twists and turns of the labyrinth, she keeps her mind focused on the center, in plain view. Nice metaphor for religious life. Just don't make me walk it!

SeptemberThe writer for September was Lynn Jordal Martin. She works in a "major news organization." We share the pleasure of mentoring Education for Ministry. In her meditations for September, I found help with some unpleasant feelings.

Anxiety: A line from Joan Didion strikes hard: "Life changes in the instant. An ordinary instant." Martin imagines a birth or death, "a surprise in the mail or a knock at the door." All of those things have disrupted my life before. Martin reminds us how Jesus prays so often, "at meals, after healings, and at times of big decisions." Prayer didn't insulate him from pain, and won't insulate us, but prayer gave him the courage to go forward. Martin's text for this meditation, by the way, is Psalm 37, the subject of a recent sermon by our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon, who drew from its few verses all the advice we need in life.

Discouragement: Feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of "this tricky time," Martin suddenly connected to the day's reading in Esther, chapter 2, when the young Jewish woman determines to help her people, at the risk of losing the Persian King's favor and possibly her life. The prayer came to Martin: "You put me here in the present -- You must know I am meant to be here." We may still feel afraid, she tells us, but we can go on "confident and secure," even "eager to see what God has in mind" for us.

Foolish: Martin takes comfort from Psalm 69.6, O God, you know my foolishness, and my faults are not hidden from you. For her own folly, Martin gives the example of how she sometimes frets for weeks over some looming event that turns out to be pure joy. She also knows the folly of impulsive buying or eating. The comfort in the Psalm is that God knows all this and loves us anyway.

Martin offers some new angles on angels and donkeys.

• Jesus chose to ride a donkey into Jerusalem as a sign that he was fulfilling Zechariah 9.9. But Martin found other reasons for that choice at a ranch for rescue donkeys. A cross of dark fur runs down a donkey's spine and across its shoulders. Also, "donkeys are not flashy animals, but they are more sure-footed than horses. They are famous for forming strong friendships with other creatures. They can be very affectionate and can even [herd and protect] sheep and goats." Riding a donkey, Jesus offered a sign of peace.
• Images of angels are easy to find in our popular culture, and Martin writes that she never paid much attention until someone pointed out that the word "angel" means "messenger of God." She took to praying for the "good sense" to recognize God's messages from other people in her life, and to be God's messenger to others.

October Mallard W. Benton shares some details of his life that overlap with mine: retired, he now "writes and volunteers in the Atlanta area." He was involved with EfM, and he has been a teacher (of Boy Scouts, in his case). Unlike me, he has been a husband, father, and grandfather. I appreciate what he brings to Scripture from his family experience.

One of my favorite Benton meditations comes from a bit of Scripture that's translated differently in my Bible. For Hosea 11.4, my Oxford Study RSV has the Lord leading his people as pack animals with "cords of compassion," easing the yokes on their jaws, bending down and feeding them. That's nice, but does not delight the way Benton's translation does:

I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them.

That's awww-inspiring. Benton picks up on the picking up part, recalling how his little grandson would react when Mom or Dad picked him up and "nuzzled" him: "He'd broadcast his most loving sounds along with some of his biggest smiles...and his small feet would arch and reach." Benton asks if we react to God's love this same way -- a viscerally joyful response so different from the internal intellectual response expected of our age and dignity. I'd like that.

He meditates a few times on the value of routines. Benton tells how he used to be "busy as a bee" in the early morning to get through his to-do list before anyone else showed up to work. He's riffing off Sirach 11.3, The bee is small among flying creatures, but what it produces is the best of sweet things. For Benton, "seemingly insignificant patterns of behavior can yield the sweetest of rewards." Responding to Psalm 56.10, In God the Lord, whose word I praise,...I trust and will not be afraid, he tells how his morning discipline of praying the Daily Office from the Episcopal Prayer book "surrounds" him "in words of praise." (I can identify: see my poem At 63).

Looking back over generations of his family, he finds "patterns of faith and life" in a history that includes instances of success among times of "slavery, poverty, and medical distress." He's responding to Psalm 131.2 I do not occupy myself with great matters when he writes of his family's history:

There doesn't seem to have been the space, most times, to occupy themselves with "great matters" though things that were hard seemed to have been the regular pattern of many lives. What becomes clearer and clearer to me as I research these lives is that the Lord walks with us through very difficult times with seemingly no end to the troubles we're facing.

In this idea, Benton anticipates a reading in Sirach 38.32 assigned for the last day of October. Sirach describes various craftsmen at their work with livestock, wood, iron, and clay, concluding that they haven't the time to reflect on great things as Sirach's scholarly students do, but their prayer is in the practice of their trade.

A few times, Benton recommends that we look at a bit of Scripture from a different perspective. The "injustice" of Luke 8.18 (to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away) disappears when you look at the clause that leads into it: Pay attention to how you listen. He writes:

Perhaps a key instruction here is about our growth and our potential for growth in Christ if we are invested in expanding our understanding. Maybe, just maybe, with better listening, we're equipping ourselves to carry forth what we're hearing and learning, better positioning ourselves to live the evangelism that we're being called to do.

In this way, those who listen better may "walk alongside Christ as he shares with those who may not have listened as well at first." Benton helps me to appreciate Psalm 119, very long, very disjointed, focused with tedious regularity on "the Law." The Oxford Bible tells us that in Hebrew, it's an alphabetical acrostic, one stanza for each letter, and probably a class assignment for psalmists-in-training. Benton suggests that we read these lines with Jesus in mind, as he embodies the law. That brings these verses to new life.

Responding to Psalm 139, Benton deals with a problem I share. The psalm begins, Lord, you have searched me out and known me, and the other verses tell how there is no escaping God, high or low, dark or light. Verse 18 launches into a series of statements of hatred for enemies of the Lord. It's in that context that Benton cites the line, Search me out, O God, and know my heart; try me and known my restless thoughts. Benton writes that he tries to conceal dark thoughts "even in the age of social media, with everyone knowing everything." But God knows his thoughts. "What do we do with that?" Benton asks, "Clean them up? Change them before we act on them? Pray about why we're having such thoughts? Or just let them ride?" He continues, "I have so far not had the discipline to shut down wicked thoughts, even while I am generally able to prevent them from being actualized through my mouth."

I second that. Those thoughts are poison to my mood, even to my physical well-being -- elevating my heart-rate and interfering with my concentration on where I'm going. Like him, I'll ask God's help to "flush" those thoughts.

Educating Desire through Worship: A Theologian's Approach to Ethics

Thou shalt or Thou shalt not: with ten commandments carved in stone, does the world need theologians to analyze ethics? In A Very Short Introduction to Theology, author David Ford writes that there's more to ethics than rules.  The surprise is, he connects ethics to prayer in his title to chapter four, "Living Before God: Worship and Ethics."

[PHOTO: I'd thought the connection between Ethics and Worship was a pretty strange one to make, but a quick Google search proved me wrong. The photo comes from an article on "The Relationship Between Prayer and Morals" at Salt & Light]

He blows through the popular approaches to ethics in a paragraph:

follow your conscience; do your duty; cultivate certain virtues and habits; relate your actions to certain values, standards, or some idea of what is good; stick to certain principles; accept the norms of a particular tradition; imitate good examples; pursue your deepest desires; make a rational choice taking into account the consequences of your actions. (53)

Philosophers have probed these approaches for 3000 years. Ford lists Platonists, stoics, utilitarians, and existentialists, among others. They're all familiar to me from discussions between Kirk and Spock on Star Trek.

When we bring God into the discussion, Ford asks, "Which God?" and advises Christians to do some theological reflection to be sure we're not calling our own tangle of desires and culturally-based values by His name. In an essay "Last Words," former Archbishop Rowan Williams echoes this concern, warning against worshipping the "God of our agenda."

When Ford defined God in the previous chapter as "that which is worshipped," that covered non-religious "gods" too -- what Paul Tillich called "ultimate concerns" of our lives. We can have many such gods. "In every major area of life," Ford writes, "there is a dimension that you do not experience as basically your own choice...and which shapes your behavior." For example, if "money" takes "practical priority over everything else in your life, then it is ... a form of worship, [your] religion." Other examples include identity, justice, self-fulfilliment.

Ford's intention isn't to downplay the importance of earning a living or pursuing justice, but to propose that theological reflection -- on sources such as religious traditions, the values in our culture, and our own life experiences -- can "wean us away from inadequate ultimates" (Nicholas Lash). He writes:

A theology that is not prepared to start thinking in relation to some particular conception of the divine condemns itself to lining up and describing various options without ever moving into issues of truth and practice. (49)

Ford relates morality to desire, as human behavior is so involved with "shaping and directing" our desires.

Ford notes, while all the major religions teach us how to "educate desires," any discussion of desire in Christianity should start with God's desire for us -- "God so loved the world." (The Hebrew prophets also express God's yearning for recalcitrant children.) But if God wills for us to obey the law, or to give up our lives to follow Jesus, does God infringe on our freedom and fulfillment? Ford ticks off some answers to that question: that God doesn't interfere, or that God may encourage and persuade but won't direct, and the intriguing analogy to love between people, influence by a relationship. But that conceives God as a being like us "only better," not transcendent.

A part of Ford's answer came earlier in the chapter, where he went into some detail about kinds of prayer: praise, thanks, intercession for others, petition for oneself or one's community, and confession. In the habit of prayer and worship, a relationship with the transcendent God can form over time -- so long as the forms of worship do not themselves become an idol.

That approach echoes what I've read in Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's plan for a kind of underground monastery of believers dispersed under the Nazi regime. Ford may have been thinking of that, too, because his chapter ends with a photo of Bonhoeffer and a discussion of an ethical imperative of responsibility.

[David F. Ford, "Living Before God: Worship and Ethics," fourth chapter in Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). In other posts I've reflected on chapters 3 and 6. See What We Talk About When We Talk About God (10/2022) and Angles on the Crucifixion (10/2018).]

"Sondheim & Me" and Me

Having kept every issue of The Sondheim Review from its debut in 1994 to its demise 22 years later, I had already internalized every article that Paul Salsini references in his new book Sondheim & Me: Revealing a Musical Genius (Lacrescenta, CA: Bancroft Press, 2022). Still, I read the book straight through and enjoyed the 60+ pages of pictures.

What's new are a number of personal letters that Sondheim wrote to Salsini, fan, journalist, and founding editor of the Review.

In those letters, Sondheim comes across, first, as generous. In 1984, Salsini wrote Sondheim a fan letter with questions about Saturday Night, a musical project from 1955 that hadn't reached fruition because its producer died. In a short, courteous note, typed on the stationery he used throughout his adult life -- my own collection spans 1976 to 2010 -- Sondheim thanks Salsini for a help to his ego "at a time when ego-building is of the essence" (7). He enclosed a rare tape of the original cast of Saturday Night singing for potential backers. Writing by hand, he listed the actors.

What was going on in Sondheim's life that he needed "ego-building" when he wrote that note on April 26, 1984? To find out, Salsini checked with Sondheim's collaborator James Lapine. Writer/director Lapine and the composer were in the throes of previews for Sunday in the Park with George, a show that was in trouble [I cover Lapine's book about it, Putting it Together]. The second act collapsed where Sondheim had so far failed to provide crucial songs for the stars Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin, and audiences walked out during the show. Sondheim delivered the first song "Children and Art" on April 24 and the second song "Lesson #8" on April 26. While Lapine and the cast rehearsed with the new material, Sondheim took time to read and reply to Salsini, and to find the tape.

What also comes across in these numerous letters is Sondheim's dedication to truth. Salsini quotes at length a reader who found Sondheim's letters to the editor to be cranky and nit-picking. Sondheim himself responded that he want[ed] the record to be correct. He was especially concerned to give proper credit to others, even if it just meant spelling their names right.

By the way, Sondheim edited himself in interviews rather than settle for a blithe generalization or imprecise image. He even corrected Terry Gross on Fresh Air when she described his music as "discordant" -- which would mean the notes were mistakes -- instead of "dissonant." Another time, she misquoted him and he set the record straight:

GROSS: Now in your sidebar about Ira Gershwin in your book, you describe him as rhyming poison (laughter). So...

SONDHEIM: No, I don't describe him as rhyming poison. I describe - that is an aspect of his writing.

Sondheim's also funny, not just in his lyrics. Asked what he thinks about being called the savior of the American musical, he quipped, "I failed." When Salsini asked what Sondheim thought when he saw the first staged production of his early work Saturday Night, he wrote that the book was "charming" and the score "promising."

All these traits showed when Sondheim responded to a letter from me in 1976, then a junior in high school: he was generous with his time, precise, and funny. My letter told him that I wanted to be like him, a writer of scripts, lyrics, and music, just as he in school had aimed to be like Noel Coward. So said his mother, according to People magazine. "Dear Mr. Smoot," he wrote:

Don't believe everything you read in the magazines -- I never said i wanted to be Noel Coward, that's merely my mother's version (I suspect she wanted to be Noel Coward).

He gave great advice for an aspiring composer: skip courses in music appreciation and get straight into music theory. He recommended colleges that I now recognize to have been the alma maters of his famous friends. He finished with best wishes.

The second photo shows letters from Sondheim to me, 1976-2010, framed over my piano. The two in the middle arranged his meeting with me and friends following a performance of Side by Side by Sondheim at the Music Box Theatre. We had performed his songs that year. See a photo of that meeting, along with links to many, many articles about him and his work at my Stephen Sondheim page. The text of the final letter is included in a short blogpost, How Stephen Sondheim Responded When I Told Him His Impact on Me]

Poems from this Month

I write new poems each month for my poetry blog First Verse. I include an image by my friend Susan Rouse with each poem.

During these last four weeks, the impetus for each of the poems came from an outside text.

Midnight Psalm runs real life experiences through the whimsical blender of alphabetical order, as many of the Psalms do in Hebrew, and as my drama students used to do in our favorite warm-up. I also quote one of my favorite prayers from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. The end was a pleasant surprise to me.

Midnight Psalm

Awake in bed while others sleep, I
Bless you others who remain awake:
Clerk, behind glass 'til dawn for my convenience;
DVMs who nursed my dog through his worst night;
EMTs who kept me talking in the dark while
Firefighters sliced my car apart;
Ghanaian on night shift alone among towers of tires, and
Hero who towed my wreck through a chilly drizzle --
I'd had coffee and dessert at the end of my day
Just as, saving me, you both had started yours;
Kid who slept on the tile of an empty diner, who
Leapt up, straightening his apron to make my omelet;
Mom's attendants hoisting her back into bed while the
Nurse with her honeyed accent phoned, "She's all right";
Operator, who sighed before sunrise and dispatched a
Plumber to stanch the gusher in my lawn;
Quellers of cranks like me in the ER at midnight;
Railroad engines' whistles faint through the window,
Sirens' wails,
Trucks' rattles and growls -- sounds of you
Urgent drivers hurtling miles away while I lie idly
Venerating alphabetically you
Who work or watch or weep this night:
Exemplars of service: by my memories
You all bless me with another gift -- of
Z Z Z

Alternate Route combined a prayer attributed to St. Francis with a real-life experience (one familiar to anyone in the Atlanta area) and the story of Nick that I'd just heard from someone who knew him.

Seventy mph with windows open
as friendly NPR reported hope
in Nick -- on death row over thirty years,
a mediator, nurse to disabled prisoners --
while from my left the deep blue dome of night
was closing over orange sunset to my right,
I topped a ridge and in the instant slammed
my brakes. Six lanes of blinking red were jammed

as far as I could see. No backing out; too late
to ask my phone to find an alternate.
Between "1999" from a neighboring Mustang
and a Silverado's country twang,
I heard from Nick: This is it. My life. This place.
I choose to be an instrument of peace.
The Mustang wanted to cut. I gave him room.
He smiled, thumb up, eased in, and raised the volume.

Ode to Paul is a flat-out parody of Hymn 376 in the Episcopal Hymnal of 1982, music by Beethoven, words by Henry Van Dyke. Paul Kelley served our church as interim organist/choir director during these lean years of the pandemic. At the end of that interim period this week, the choir and congregation sang these words to him:

Grateful, grateful, we salute thee
Maestro Kelley known as "Paul."

Though the hours did not suit thee,
still you gave this job your all.

During COVID, you were devoted,
playing for priests online alone.

Now, at last, you've been demoted
to a humble baritone.

A preacher recited other words by Henry Van Dyke at a memorial service this week, about how the sailboat disappearing on our horizon is appearing to those on the other side -- just the right sentiment for that time and place.

More than Skin Deep: Fr. Daron Vroon, the first 10 years

With the retirement of our Rector at the end of this year, our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon will soon be moving on to another church, so I take this occasion to appreciate his work at St. James, Marietta these past ten years.

Fr. Daron's Sermons: More than Skin Deep Two of Sunday's readings concerned leprosy, giving me a good opportunity to show how Fr. Daron so often relates the texts to each other, to the capital "C" Church, and to our individual lives.

First, Fr. Daron explained how the name "leprosy," what doctors now call Hansen's Disease, was in Biblical times a catch-all term for any skin disease. Hansen's Disease is a bacterial infection, easily treated today. Untreated, the disease causes nerve damage and can result in the loss of extremities. Though it is not spread by casual contact, it was thought to be contagious.

Then Fr. Daron explained how leprosy was, for Biblical writers, an image of sin. A person with Hansen's Disease appears to be decomposing, a walking corpse. As infected persons were isolated by custom and law, the disease also broke up family and community. "We often think of 'sin' as 'breaking a rule,'" Fr. Daron said, but sin is more like this disease: it causes the decay of an individual's soul and the disintegration of relationships.

Then, in the specifics of the stories from II Kings 5 and Luke 17, Fr. Daron observed parallels. In the curing of the leprosy, there are no hocus-pocus and magic gestures (as Fr. Daron demonstrated at the lectern). When Elisha cures the Syrian general Na'aman, Elisha doesn't even come out to see him, much to the powerful man's indignation. Jesus doesn't touch the ten lepers, or even say "you're cured now," but only sends them to the priests to show themselves.

Neither do the cures require heroics from the infected people, though risk is involved. Na'aman's angry response shows injured pride and the humiliation he fears if, after he strips and bathes in this modest stream before all his subordinates, nothing happens. Fr. Daron pointed out that the ten would be stoned to death for entering the temple with leprosy. Na'aman and the ten had to act on faith.

Here's where Fr. Daron did his magic: He found the sacraments of our communal worship in these stories. Na'aman's bath in the same river where Jesus was baptized foreshadows our baptism; lepers' presenting themselves to the priests is like us when we make our public confession in church. Then, observing how one leper came running back to Jesus to give thanks, Fr. Daron pulled the rabbit out of his hat: the Greek word for "thanks" is the root of our "Eucharist."

Fr Daron: The Long View He's a wonky guy by nature, a techie before entering the priesthood. That shows in his analysis of scripture, and also his dispassionate approach to problems. In many committee meetings with him, I've been grateful for his calm and his knack for raising fair questions about contentious issues without seeming contentious.

We'll miss his family, too. For decades prior to Fr. Daron and his wife Julie joining St. James, we had not seen a priest with small children. We've watched little Isaac grow up, way up past six feet. While his dad is at work in the chancel, Isaac helps his mom take care of his much younger brothers James and Charlie in the balcony, in the aisles, in the narthex, and, at least one time, out the open door and into the street. Isaac has learned patience, as I noticed last week, as Isaac silently coached another child, our littlest acolyte, who carried the book for the Gospel reading. After, Isaac gave the little guy a fist bump for a job well done.

Julie Vroon plays an important role as a priest's wife. I admire how she keeps conversations going with questions that come from paying close attention to people she may not know well. When I've encountered her searching for wayward sons in remote hallways before the service, she has kept her sense of humor. She also kept the boys in line during services livestreamed from the Vroon home at the depth of the pandemic.

Fr. Daron suggested at the end of one sermon that we Episcopalians miss out on something important if we're not opening our prayer books every day to services offered us for worship at home. He promised that the liturgy and prayers there, if read as a daily habit, would have a correcting and sustaining effect on us. After some difficult years, including two of pandemic teaching, and another couple of years in retirement, I can attest that he was right. (I wrote a poem about it. See At 63 on my poetry blog First Verse.)

Fr. Daron's first sermons for us were scholarly, erudite, and, well, dry. But, boy, did he improve! From my vantage point in the choir behind him, I've enjoyed how he hops like a boxer on the balls of his feet when his sermon is coming up on a surprising conclusion or etymology. I wrote a good overview of Fr. Daron's singular talent for Flipping our Perspective (06/2018).

Fr. Daron did it again after I posted this appreciation on my blog. He flipped our common understanding of Jesus and the Pharisees, that they were too strict and Jesus did away with the old Jewish laws (02/12/2023).

[Photo collage: 2008 with Julie and little Isaac; pandemic Easter from the Vroon living room; Isaac and middle brother James, little Charlie watching Dad]

Here are links to other reflections on his sermons that I've posted to this blog:

Fr. Daron Vroon

• Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount (02/2023) Fr. Daron refreshes familiar sayings of Jesus by giving them their Jewish context
• The Secret of Ash Wednesday (03/2022) Fr. Daron finds an unfamiliar angle on the familiar passage about wearing ashes "in secret."
• Death, Trinity, and Church Architecture (06/2021) is an olio of highlights and insights.
• Fulfilling the Scripture (01/2021) is not the same as proving a prediction, Fr. Daron Vroon told us at Christmas
  
• The Word Tabernacled Among Us (01/2020) reflects on what Fr. Vroon pointed out in John's first chapter.
• Freedom is no Piece of Cake (07.2019) was Fr. Daron's July 4th sermon. Who decides what you want?
• Medieval Challenge to Modern Mindset (06/2019) re: individuality and Mary 
• Little Jesus at Large (12/2018) remembers two sermons 12 years apart by Fr. Lee and Fr. Vroon
• Worship and Ordinary Life: Flipping our Perspective (06/2018)
• Jesus Ascended: Then What?  (06/2014) ...and a companion piece, Ascension Day: Up to Us (05/2017)
• The Only Thing in the Gospel to Fear  (02/2014)
• "What's Necessary to Salvation?" Wrong Question! (08/2013)
• Putting St. Nicholas Back into Christmas. (12/2013)
• Miracles, Magic, and More (01/2013) "Our young associate rector hit a grand slam this morning."
• Belief in Things Unseen:  Views of Trinity and Soul (05/2013) Fr. Vroon starts with a child's view of adults in the kitchen, laughing -- for me, the single most memorable portion of all his sermons.

Atlanta Opera's Moving Take on "Bluebeard's Castle"

Susan Bullock and Michael Mayes as "Judith" and "Bluebeard"

Bela Bartok's 1911 opera Bluebeard's Castle was a moving experience in a production presented by Atlanta Opera last week, and nothing like what I expected.

The story of Bluebeard is well-known. The title character brings his wife Judith to his castle, gives her keys to all but one room. Naturally, she becomes obsessed with what's in there. Bluebeard at last opens the door, where Judith sees the corpses of his earlier wives.

This is not that story. As translator/director Daisy Evans recasts it, the story shows a wife with dementia, a loving husband who brings her back to a home she no longer recognizes, where a trunk full of mementoes stands in for "doors" to different "rooms" of their marriage. A scarf, a robe, a boy's baseball cap all conjure versions of herself, dressed for the 1960s, 80s, and 90s, and also two children. We understand the arc of their life together.

Helpful notes in the program by Mark Thomas Ketterson explain that Bartok and Balasz embraced abstract expressionism, a movement among the artists of their time who foregrounded emotion, leaving background sketchy. Ketterson gives the example of Munch's The Scream.

At different times in this production, Judith (Susan Bullock) is childish, flirtatious, agonized, aggressive, lost, and paranoid. At one awful moment, she beats Bluebeard (Michael Mayes) and he fights back. I can say from experience, they get dementia right.

Stephen Higgins conducted the small ensemble onstage. They were heroes in this production, maintaining a relentless flow of music highlighted by some brilliant effects -- a fanfare, a rising spray of notes.

I'm so grateful to Atlanta Opera and its supporters for continuing its "Discovery Series."

"Assassins" and "The Frogs" in New York, 2004

In 2004, before I knew what a blog was, I wrote as a de facto foreign correspondent for London's Stephen Sondheim Society. "Just returning from a Sondheim-focused trip to NYC," I wrote on their discussion board, "I can second others' accolades for Assassins at Studio 54, and praise The Frogs at Lincoln Center."

By now, things that were new in that Assassins have become standard, and Sondheim in his memoir has downplayed The Frogs as a misbegotten effort to expand a piece from 30 years earlier that Sondheim would rather have left alone.

Still, since I ran across a hard copy of my dual review, I'm posting portions that highlight under-appreciated parts of those shows. This will just about complete my list of reflections on shows at my Sondheim Page. I reviewed productions of Assassins in Atlanta (06/2012).

Assassins (2004)
book by John Weidman
directed by Joe Mantello I commented on the creepy carnival stage set, with a dark roller-coaster that disappeared in darkness above the proscenium arch. Guiteau climbs up its slope to his hanging; but the rest of the play happened in a small area, where the cast of assassins was ever-present, watching if not participating in the action. I wrote:

Unlike others in this forum, I feel that the song "Something Just Broke" works for the show on different levels. It is a needed relief after a series of furious scenes, an emotional release that, in any production I've seen, never fails to evoke those moments of singular national trauma that we've all lived through.

The song is an example of Sondheim's generosity to actors. These singers have been second-string all night, and now each one gets enough in a lyric to build an individual character, and also gets enough musical emphasis to make a strong impression.

Finally, there's the effect of balance. By this point in the show, we've learned to see things the assassins' way, and we've come to enjoy their quirks. Then the non-assassins, dressed to suggest different eras of history, gather in a small pool of light against the background of menacing shadowy scaffolding and lurking assassins, and they sing over the ostinato lament that makes a haunting background. They sing of work they were doing when they heard the news, we imagine their loves and cares (one woman sings that she remembers "folding the sheets... Lizzie's sheet" and folds the cloth in her hand), and they seem sympathetic, honest, kind, and vulnerable. The contrast to the assassins is as stark as can be, emphasized in this production by clothing the citizens all in fabrics of creamy white. The song restores our full perspective, and with a shock we realize how seductive the assassins' twisted sense of justice has been.

The Frogs
a comedy written in 405 BC by Aristophanes
freely adapted by Burt Shevelove
even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane
directed by Susan Stroman Sondheim in his memoir expresses contempt (which was mutual) for Robert Brustein, professor at Yale Repertory Theatre who knew the "page but not the stage." Brustein invited Sondheim's friend Burt Shevelove to adapt the play by Aristophanes, and Shevelove invited Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on Forum (blog 06/2010), to write songs.

The original production, performed in Yale's swimming pool, included swimming actors Meryl Streep, Christopher Durang, and Sigourney Weaver.

After the success of a studio recording of the 1974 songs, Nathan Lane convinced Sondheim to expand the show. At a time when the USA was fighting two wars, Lane found resonance in the story of Dionysus, god of drama, bringing back from the dead a playwright who could speak truth to power and change minds. They added dialogue and seven songs. I saw a preview and wrote:

At the conclusion of Act One, the audience was loud, cheering, laughing, worn out. We were fond of characters Dionysus (Nathan Lane) and Xanthias (Chris Katton [later replaced]), and we were delighted by one surprise after another in the Frogs' chorus/dance number that ends the act.

Act Two could hardly not be a let down after Dionysus and Xanthias arrive at Hades. Their journey over, all obstacles overcome, there's not much left to do in the play except to meet new characters: the Graces, Pluto, Shaw, and Shakespeare all make impressive entrances, sing appropriate numbers, and get laughs. Those last three named have moments of pathos, too. It's just that the forward momentum is gone -- and I have no way in mind to fix that. During the contest of speeches by Shaw and Shakespeare -- for which the entire play is prologue -- the audience grew restless. I love those speeches myself, but I too was wondering when we could get back to something more like that frogs' chorus number.

The finale reprises the opening "Instructions to the Audience" quietly, almost as a benediction from the "gods of the theatre." The Frogs as I saw it was much less the esoteric experience I'd anticipated, mostly funny, spectacular, and, most surprising, warm -- thanks especially to the presence of Lane, Katton, Shakespeare, and the Sondheim music.

Smoot Leads Tour de Paris

←← | ← || →

Louvre-worthy? "Scott Smoot en Triomphe," pastel courtesy Android

Since September 26, I've biked 223 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from London to Paris, where I learned two lessons.

In the summer of 1983, I chaperoned a dozen students in France, two from St. Andrew's Episcopal School where I taught in Mississippi, and 10 from schools in California and New Jersey. To those 10, I was just some young guy without authority.

On the day we had scheduled the Louvre, my wards showed no interest in our tour guide's guidance; they just wanted to see the Mona Lisa. I dismissed the docent with apologies, joined the herd around Leonardo's painting -- "so disappointing, so small" -- and issued an ultimatum: "Tour with me or just go wherever you want, and meet me at 4:30 in the café across the street."

Only John Teal stayed with me; the others couldn't leave fast enough. John, a rising freshman at St. Andrew's, had been a top student in an 8th grade class blessed with many top students. He was a gentle soul, inquisitive, and very funny. We found art we liked in the Louvre, had lunch, then wandered out into Paris. The Arc de Triomphe was our goal, because so many other streets fanned out from it.

My first lesson was at the top of the arch. When we arrived, before we even glanced at the scenery, John and I bent our heads over a map to see where we were. That struck me as funny, because any person in the world would recognize that place. But I realized that we were living a parable for what education is: knowing where you are means seeing where you've been and imagining where you want to go. That was the essence of what I wanted to teach students through history, fiction, and writing personal essays -- then, and four decades after.

My second lesson was impressed upon me when John and I returned to the meeting place. We'd heard a street musician near the Arc sing for an hour, just one line from one song, Paul Simon's "The Boxer" (Li-li-li-...); we'd browsed stores on the Champs Elysées, criss-crossed the town, located a site from A Tale of Two Cities, found the only Episcopal Church in Paris, and sprinted back to the café to arrive exactly on time. All the others were there, demanding to know where we'd been. They'd gone straight from the Louvre to the café and had not budged in all the hours since. "We're so bored!" they groaned.

Boredom is a choice, I would tell my students ever after. You can exert yourself like John, searching Paris for things he could connect with -- as he'd done in school with language, history, Shakespeare and Dickens -- or you can "just hang out" and be bored, even in the middle of one of the world's greatest cities.

John (R) with a friend from CA

[For an essay about what France has meant to US culture, including an experience with asparagus that changed my life, see my review of David McCullough's book The Greater Journey (10/2011). It's a favorite among my essays.]

←← | ← || → Use arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

Too Young to See "Bros?"

Luke MacFarlane (L) and Billy Eichner in "Bros"

In the new rom-com Bros, a teacher tells her grown son's boyfriend that she keeps "gay" out of her classroom. "Second grade is too early," she says.

She has a point. At 63, I may be too young to have seen some of Bros -- sex scenes that verge on slapstick comedy. Gay guys really do that? and that?!

While the mother (Amanda Bearse) talks with "Bobby" (co-writer Billy Eichner), Bobby tries to "tone down" himself, not to embarrass his boyfriend Aaron (Luke MacFarlane). But Bobby does push back, politely, more emphatically with each sip of wine. The awkward dinner is an example of how the movie is what Eichner wanted, as he told The New Yorker Hour, "laugh-out-loud funny but authentic."

Bobby says that second grade is the best time to introduce children to the knowledge that gays exist, before the bullying from some and self-loathing for others. When you grow up seeing no one like you, and learning that grown-ups are hush-hush about anyone like you, and that your friends, who don't suspect the truth, have derogatory words and jokes about people like you -- well, you learn to "tone down" yourself and to despise your secret self, and yourself for being secret.

So the most telling moment in this rom-com comes down to trust: can a gay man trust that anyone finds him worthy of being loved?

With that authentic experience at its heart, Bros does what all the other good rom-coms do, pulling us into the story of two appealing people who can't seem to get together -- Bobby tells Aaron, "You may be even more emotionally unavailable than I am!" -- and lifting us up when they finally do.

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

 

Moses & Burning Bush, Byzantine mosaic

"Is God real?" In Theology: a short introduction David Ford writes that the answer depends on what you mean by "God" and what you mean by "real."

Sounds like an evasion. One type of reader will say that theologians just complicate something obvious, while another type of reader will scoff that a theologian can't give a straight "yes or no" answer because there's really nothing there to talk about, only our own projections on the unknown.

But this reader is having some fun.

I'm amused when Ford sidesteps the different concepts of God by defining "God" as "that which is worshipped."

Then it's refreshing to be reminded that there are different kinds of reality. A table is real; a conversation that happened at that table centuries ago may have been real; love may be real. Even writing in 1999, before the era of deep fakes, Ford avers that all ways of determining reality rely to some extent on trust -- of your senses, of your sources, of your reasoning, of your experience.

Experience, what Ford calls "self involvement" in a faith is what builds the trust that assures the believer of reality. Seeing that believers in all kinds of faiths have "experience," what are Christians to think? Ford writes that we can all be "bilingual" in faith, respecting elements of worship that we share while remaining "agnostic" about relationships of one faith tradition to another.

I suspect that "the Trinity" would not be the first answer that anyone in my church would give to the question "Who is God?" But Ford points out that the God worshipped by Jesus and his Jewish followers was already experienced three ways. In a voice from a bush that burned yet was not consumed -- a sign of ongoing and everlasting power -- God tells Moses "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I have heard the cries of my people." Asked for a name, God says "I am what I am" or "I will be what I will be." Ford points out that these are elements of the Trinity: Creator God known through history, Compassionate God with us in our suffering, and unbounded Spirit God who "can go on springing surprises in history."

"Now leap over hundreds of years to Jesus," Ford writes, and find that the first Christians experienced God in trinitarian terms. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of Jesus. In Jesus, God was compassionately involved in our lives. "The resurrection was the great surprise... comparable to a new creation," Ford writes.

To me, the surprise in Ford's essay is that he moves on to look at the messy way this idea of the Trinity was worked out over the first 300 years of Christianity, first among followers of a persecuted sect, and then among leaders in an imperial church. Ford makes that a model for how we all know what is real, through practice:

...teaching the faith to new members (culminating in their baptism 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'), continually worshipping this God, deciding on the contents of the New Testament, interpreting scripture and tradition, wrestling with the most sophisticated contemporary philosophy and culture, responding to challenges from pagans and Jews, settling internal Christian disputes, and engaging in ordinary living in faith. (35)

My big takeaway from this is how Christian theology was never just "deductions from authoritative statements" but was -- and still is! -- "worked out by worshippers responsibly engaged with God, each other, scripture, the surrounding culture, everyday life [and] the ups and downs of history."

Ford confirms my sense that the ancient doctrine of the Trinity is getting more attention now than when I first believed; the renewed emphasis on the Trinity has been "exploding" for less than a century.

So, what do Christians mean by "God?" Naturally, Ford gives three parts to his answer: don't accept any description of God that's less than trinitarian; do see God's very being as a relationship that includes us in the love between Father, Son, and Spirit; and be ready for "more surprises" from this God.

At this point in his chapter, Ford focuses on that idea of "trust" mentioned above. He warns that the Christian scriptures are "vulnerable" to being "misunderstood, manipulated, tortured, and killed" -- like Jesus himself (43).

Ford's final message in the chapter concerns peoples of different faiths. Christians know the Trinity through experience. They can learn the languages of other faiths "through study, collaboration, hospitality, and friendship across the boundaries separating the religions and worldviews."

That's part of what we're talking about when we talk about God.

[This is my reflection on David F. Ford  "Thinking of God," third chapter in Theology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press).]

[In chapter 6, Ford explores many ways that Christians have explained the meaning of the crucifixion -- including metaphors of the sacrificial lamb, conquering hero, ransom paid to the Devil -- before finding a succinct and very satisfying answer.  See my response, Angles on the Crucifixion (10/2018).]