Tag Archives: Family

May 8, 2012 · 11:06 am

Marriage and Aesthetic Unity

When I typed the title of this post, I had to reconsider.  Really?  Marriage and aesthetic unity?   What I mean by aesthetic unity as in what emerges from a strong work of art or a successful theatre production, an attribute of a production’s ruling idea, metaphor, or concept, so that all the choices being made in the various aspects of design, directing, and acting are informed by that ruling idea, metaphor, or concept.  (Okay, some people will argue aesthetic unity is passe, certainly not a post-modern value, but I still think it holds…anyway…that’s another post.)

What does aesthetic unity have to do with marriage?

I’ve been married 31 years today.   It’s been a wonderful ride, with ups and downs, triumphs and failures, all the variety of feeling and action that you’d expect from a long journey together.   Achievements and set-backs, depressions and ecstasies, kids coming and going, families growing and changing and hearts breaking all over the place for reasons best kept private.    Moving forward day by day, first Year One, then it stretches into Years Three to Five, facing choices about what it will mean to be us, our togetherness, our love-making, our fighting, and yes, our economics, our possessions–houses and cars and the stuff that hangs on the walls.   There’s cooking and travel and parents, and it moves to Years Seven and Nine, the kids arriving just after Dad’s death, and it’s great, mournful, amazing, fun, expensive, and wistful.  Then come Years Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, and everyone’s hanging on for dear life because sometimes dear life has to be hung on to in the face of aching, doubt, temptation, more expense, melt-down, and rebuilding.   Then more openings and closing of days and weeks, and the Years get to Twenty, then Twenty-Five, and more death stops by, and costs spiral (economic and emotional) and new work shows up, work you hadn’t planned on, and you get to it, all the while watching marriages around you dropping like flies.  And then there’s the culture, the moral shifts, the battles in culture that send all your sensibilities reeling as you try and figure out along with the rest of the world what’s true, what’s good, and what’s real, especially about you and the person you’ve been waking up next to for all these years.    One thing you know, as all these scenes play out, the ruling metaphors are simple: God, faithfulness, oneness, loyalty, kindness.   The shared hand, the look across the pillow, the embrace at the window as the child flies away, the continuing interest in that ever-changing, never-changing face across the corner table in the bar.   Commitment, muscles bound together, the ongoing wedding of hope, cynicism, inquiry, faith, questioning, tears, and the simple shared ease of a long, red sunset.

And after 31 years, you think, is it possible that this production is still open, still running, still thriving, still finding the newness of moments, still finding the kind of meaning that holds the world together?

In the middle of all this, you have to know that our aesthetic sensibilities have places of intersection for sure, but by and large, Anjie and I are pretty different.   Different enough to make the “opposites attract” idea pretty applicable.   Different “tastes”, you might say; I like foreign films and slower, more atmospheric works, and she’s an action girl who likes music with a strong beat.   I enjoy jazz and classic rock; she likes country western (though not as much as she used to.)    Our relationship to foods and other sensual realities differs as well, but I think what we’ve learned over the years that an emphasis on the common ground can help guide creative choices much the way ruling metaphors or concepts can guide individual choices in a production.   Early production meetings (cups of coffee at JoJo’s in Austin, Texas, later Starbucks and the kitchen table) focused on common commitments to God, to kindness, to being for each other, to learning, to admitting to fault when we screwed up, and to actually verbalizing those classic words, “I’m sorry”, “I forgive you”, and “I love you” as often as needed, which is pretty much every day.  Humility, warmth, trying as best we can to move in “grace and peace” which has emerged more and more in mind as the thing I wanted all along from life, from family, from that great production called my marriage.

Finally, the idea is that if you look at any one moment of the marriage (or the production), it may not feel like a unified piece of the whole.    Sometimes ruling ideas fray, and you lose sight of them, and you veer off into territory that just doesn’t make any sense but you can’t go back, you have to invent on the fly, and hopefully find your back into the center of things.   Happens all the time in creative work.   Sometimes you think the piece you’re working on isn’t worth pursuing anymore.  But then you hang on, and hang on, and finally, days come when you can back up and understand something of how the ruling metaphor or concept was present even when you thought the whole thing was tanking.

Well, it’s pretty clear at this moment in our production that it’s not tanking.  Will it rise to the heights of great art, soaring as thrilled audiences are moved to weep and laugh, inspired to go out and take life on one more time?   Frankly, that’s not what we’re after.  We’re after more of a quiet poem of a life, a corner spot where a few folks can contemplate what love might look like if they decide to give it a shot.

Anyway, I’m not sure my metaphor works, but all I was trying to say is this:  you can enjoy a work of art in all it’s parts and/or as a long, beautiful whole.    Marriage is much like that.   Don’t miss the moments, sculpt them as best you can, holding the ruling idea in mind, body, and heart.   And don’t forget to look over the long arc of it all, and enjoy it’s fullness as a whole work.   It’s especially helpful to do that when the moments aren’t working as well as you’d like.   Sometimes you just forget your lines and stand there until you remember them.

Okay, enough.   You get the picture.   I’m still in the middle of the production, and my cues take me away from here just now.

The show must go on…loving it.   Planning on running for at least another 30 years….

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January 1, 2012 · 7:12 am

Gratitude as Spiritual Practice

Gratitude as spiritual practice can be tricky.  It’s a bit like trying to help actors understand the difference in thinking about doing something or pretending to do something, and actually doing something.

What are we truly grateful for?

For me, gratitude is extremely powerful when you come to the place of awareness where your eyes open to the incredible mystery and blessing of actually being alive on the planet.   “But it all seems so normal,” we say, “and there’s a lot of crap anyway, right?   Yeah, I’m thankful, but life’s beating the hell out of me right now…what’s to be thankful for?  I don’t feel thankful, and yeah, it’s easy from where you sit, in that fat old world of blessing you’re sitting in.”   And we mouth the usual, “Thank you God for this or that, the meal, the family, and the church, blah, blah, blah,” and whatever else is part of usual prayer pattern and language.   All the while gratitude as I think of it is slipping out the back door of our souls.

Maybe it takes a certain kind of stopping.   A dead stop in the day.  A shift in awareness, an intentional stoppage to the grinding.  To zero in on one fact of existence that’s right in front of us…a raindrop, a streak of light, the weight of morning quiet, a series of black marks that make an intelligible word.    The patter of a loved one’s feet as they make their way toward you.   The spreading coolness of water in your chest after a long, thirsty drink.   The lift of spirit as a tenor soars across a high “G”.   Sudden news of the joyful achievement of a goal by someone you’d give your life for.   The escape valve of sobbing, that miraculous way God gave us to move the pain of living through our bodies so we can breath again.

I don’t know the answer to pain.  All the answers seem inadequate.   Gratitude as spiritual practice is no answer to the searing pain that lives on both individual and national planes.   But if the answer to pain lies somewhere in a matrix of thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, medicines, and relationships, then I would argue that at the very least, gratitude opens the doors between all those slippery factors so that light and comfort can miraculously squeeze its way in.

This very moment, what am I grateful for?  For the girl that just got up and now sits across the room from me, my companion of 30+ years.  For the first morning time of 2012, and the fact that God has not gone anywhere, and for my battered faith, still standing after a year of heart-wrenching questions.  For the Christmas tree reminding me of my kids and their recent visit.  For the love I feel in my heart, because there was once a time when I felt so very little.  For the faces of my friends flickering across the screen of my mind, for the fact that I miss them, and for the hope I have of greater things for all of them.   For the music that I’ll play this morning as I lead worship for the first time in a year, and for the angels of my imagination that will be there as they always are.  For the leftover scones from yesterday that wait for me at breakfast.   For growing courage to face what I don’t want to face.   For God’s incredible patience.   For learning how to be grateful.

I have no idea what God has in store in 2012.   But gratitude for whatever is coming is not a resolution.   It’s a commitment.

Make thanks a part of your daily bread.   Say it whenever you can, whenever it’s truly true.  And let flourishing increase…

Wishing you more peace than you can stand in 2012…

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May 25, 2011 · 7:16 am

On the Occasion of a Son Turning 21

He’s always been a surprise.

Not that the expectation for something special wasn’t there, but who this young boy I played catch with would become just wasn’t on my radar.  The music piece, in a generic sense, didn’t surprise me; we’ve got singers in the family–some good ones (My uncle, closer in age to a brother, was All-State in high school and continues to sing with some hefty classical folks.).  The athleticism (that none of his current friends really know about) didn’t surprise me either.  I’ve mentioned in previous writing how, back in the days of Pea Patch soccer,  the ease and smoothness of his six-years-old running stride caught me off guard, making breath hard to catch for a moment or two.  But I was an athlete back in the day (a facebook friend just asked me just a couple of days ago if I still played football), so that made sense.   And he wiggled and squirmed like he was supposed to, noticed girls pretty much on schedule, and over the years has had lots of questions that you might expect a young man to have.

So what’s the surprise?

The shape of his heart, and the way it’s wrapped itself around mine.

I’ve written on these pages about my daughter Amy, and how she’s a hero of mine, and it’s even more true these days than it’s been before.  My love for her is unmatched and untopped, and she holds my heart in a way that belongs to her alone.  To you, Amy…(zoom in to clinking of wine goblets).

This piece of writing is trying to describe the shape of that sort of thing as it relates to my other child, the boy who turns twenty-one at midnight, at which point I will raise my glass to him, though he be twenty-five-hundred miles away.

My son.

He got to my deep places when I wasn’t looking.  He’s a spelunker of a kind, quietly ruminating on God’s ways in the world, finding lots of different shadings, shapes, and qualities in those mines.  It’s a little horrifying to think there’s a kid in the world watching you, and the chief prayer is that God will bend his sight to see the good stuff, the stuff he needs, and that God will make him mostly blind to the lesser things, the stuff he doesn’t need.  Daniel helped me build the book shelves back in Kent; that’s when David Wilcox’s music began its gracious work in our lives.   (“Show the Way” is a shared anthem.)  We tussled and played tackle in the rain, played catch with a baseball for hours, and as he got a bit older, he’d come into my office and ask eyebrow raising questions about this whole God thing.   His heart nearly pounded out of his chest the day he was baptized–I’ll never forget the sensation of my hand on his back as we stood before the church together.   I somehow think God noticed that pounding and decided that here He’d found a heart that could stand some big hammering, some big gifts, and a big, living-water kind of life.  And who knows, maybe it was then that God thought, let’s give that heart a voice.

And what a voice it is.

But make no mistake, the singing voice (which I’ll mention in a minute) is not all of what I mean.  A voice is a speaking into the world, a giving of energy into the people around you, a pouring of spirit into the world you walk in, and all kinds of moments require the delivery of the best voice you’ve got.  We all have these voices, and to follow the metaphor, all too often, we are like the folks who don’t like their voice much (too nasal, we think, not rich enough, too screechy or pitchy), so they artificially raise it or lower it or try to make sound like someone else’s.  Or they get too tired to bother or they scream too much cause they’re just so mad, or they just go quiet, thinking what’s the use.

Among vocalists, it’s called “not speaking on your voice.”

One of Daniel’s great desires, I think, is to speak (and sing) on his voice, squarely in the middle of it, wide open, matching it’s timbre, tone, volume, and musicality to the need of the particular moment in front of him.  And as we who’ve lived awhile know, most of those moments are going to be about love–its lack, its presence, its healing, its growth, its discovery, its first offering, its repair.  And lately (let the reader understand) he’s discovered some new things about love, and the joy that particular theme can bring.  But he knows the pain of it, too; he’s an old soul that way, which we love about him.  He can be 14 one minute, and 45 the next.   There have been many days when he’d just as soon not be like that, when he’s been tempted to maybe trade in that old soul for some flatter, simpler version.

But then, that old soul is what comes roaring out in those moments so many of us have experienced, that most the world doesn’t know about yet.  Whether it was “If I Didn’t Believe in You” that first time we all got a taste of what was to come at 15, or “Bring Him Home” at Taproot’s summer camp version of Les Miserables, or “Something’s Comin’” at Roosevelt (one of the hardest songs to deliver in the Musical Theatre canon, in my humble opinion, and he was standing there not just singing it, but actually bringing the art of it), what’s been surprising is not that he can sing, but that whatever-it-is-that-happens-when-he-sings, happens.   They know it at Michigan, they know it ACT, and something tells me the “circle of knowing” about whatever that is, is about to grow some more.  I could make this post really long talking about it, or trying to, but let’s just let God do what He’s going to do with whatever that is, and return finally to the simple fact of Daniel’s person, and his sonship.

To say I’m proud of my children is to state the obvious.  But what Daniel (and Amy, all of this is for you, too) must understand moving forward is that performance and accomplishment and accolade and even his own sense of fulfillment do not have any bearing on my love (and Anjie’s love) for him. I yearn for and long for his spirits and his heart to be free, to be free of the burden of having to measure up to anything that might live in my fatherly head about his life.  My hope for him is that he will rise into the full expression of his voice, his gift, and his life.  That he will be unencumbered by imagined shames.   That he will listen to the voices of promise and hope and possibility rather than the voices of doubt, fear, and cultural comparison.   That he will keep that easy way of moving in the world, the quick laugh that shouts faith to those around him, and the deep sigh that means it’s time to go deep once again.  That he will be unafraid to weep over that which requires it.  That his writing and creation will bless what worlds God gives him, be they large or small.   And that all those who travel with him will be companions well aware of the tenuous nature of love and gift.

That’s enough.

Raise your cup to the days to come, my son.  All those who love you raise them as well.

To Daniel.

Time to fly.

I believe great things are comin’…

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January 4, 2011 · 6:42 am

The Ten Great Blessings

On New Year’s Eve, I glanced over an email from Bill Hybels, the Senior Pastor at Willow Creek Community Church, in which he encouraged everyone to take time to count their blessings.  He told the story of his own family, of their New Year’s Eve tradition (if I’m getting this right) of sharing ten great blessings from the year.   I didn’t really think about it much at the time, but then when it came time for our family tradition, which is a rather loose process of sharing some goals for the year, the “great blessing” exercise seemed like a good thing to do.  While I won’t go into the details of all ours, there were some important themes that emerged, worth remembering.

  1. Family – Where would I be without these other fantastic people in my life?
  2. Friends – Each of us had at least one non-family friend that was making a huge difference, rocking our world.
  3. Opportunities Past – 2010 had travel, auditions, passages, and new beginnings.  Things didn’t work out exactly as we saw them, but there’s a trail of good.
  4. Opportunities Future -  There are no guarantees, but for the moment, doors are wide open all around.
  5. Health – There were challenges, some of which is unavoidable–we’re getting older–but by and large, miraculously, we all motor around in decent shape.
  6. Community – The ensembles (church, co-workers, classmates) that surrounded us in 2010 shored us up, challenged us, kept us sane and on fairly straight if not always narrow paths.
  7. Generosity – God’s grace to us has been echoed in many daily interactions in both giving and receiving, and it’s plain that we are mere vessels of his bounty and gifts, supernatural ones included.
  8. Inspiration – Somehow God is teaching to see possibility and hope in each other, in our journeys, and in the journeys of so many people around us.
  9. Beauty – Whether poetry, music, autumn, or performance, beauty made a big difference this year.   Thank God for eyes to see and ears to hear.
  10. Life – As we say in my house, it’s all grace.  All of it.  Every inch, every breath, and we cherish it, refuse to take it for granted, and by the grace of God hope to seed, nurture, and cultivate more.

Oh, yeah, one more.

  1. Scones

That last one’s just mine, but I’m thankful for the small things.

Lest you think I’m a gauzy-eyed positive thinker out of touch with reality, I could  make a powerful list of the Top One Hundred Crappy Things That Happened.   But who wants to dwell on that?   Studies show that those kinds of lists bake no bread, seed nothing but foul crops, and generally wreck the hell out of days.   I’d just as soon not have 2011 be full of wrecked days.   Anybody want to write a song lauding the  benefits of counting your crap, naming them one by one?

Not me.

So maybe there’s some spin to the list.  But…no.  Those are the things that make our hearts swell in love when we stop and look at each other in the eye.   And that rising swell of emotion is evidence that the mental and spiritual effort required to tell the story of God’s goodness in the face of hard days, tragedies, and the ever-pressing entropy that would tear our lives apart is worth every bit of the struggle.

Telling the story of God’s grace and goodness is a mountain to climb.

Rope up for the New Year.   Find one toe-hold and begin.

Name your blessings in the presence of those with whom you share them.

And don’t forget….

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April 14, 2010 · 6:14 am

“Places”

Each night I stand backstage pacing back and forth, running a small ritual that has become important to me as a preparation for a coming night of emotional journeying.  The role of Eric Weiss in Brooklyn Boy is a challenging one, one that I relate to all too well.   And then, inevitably, my friend Carla comes to me and says the word, “Places.”

“Places” is the call to be ready.  It means that an important moment has arrived.  Time to make an entrance in full view of an audience, an audience with expectation, hope, demands, and a low tolerance for boredom and poor work.  Whatever I do, at the end of the night, they’ll applaud, but whether my work impacts or moves their collective heart is another question.  And that depends largely on my own preparation, skill, willingness, and presence.  Admittedly, some nights are better than others, and there are moments in a “Places” call where I wish I was anywhere but where I am.   Maybe its been a bad day, or someone’s critique has gotten into my head, or the general angst that’s been in my DNA since day one is just reminding me that though faith in God is mostly a fine idea, sometimes it seems more ludicrous than sane.

The bad days don’t come nearly as often as they used to, and the other night, after Carla gave her smiling “Places” call, I thought how wonderful it would be if someone would show up just before all the big moments in our lives, the life-changing ones, and say, “Places.”  In effect, they’d be saying, “This is one of the moments when you really need to show up.  All your days up to now have been rehearsals, and in the next five minutes, you are going into the bright lights.  Get your cues, keep the energy, stay alive, be present, and leave it all out there.  Oh, and have fun.”

My daughter Amy just got a places call that was both metaphor and fact, and she nailed it.

After four years of study at the University of Cincinnati College of Conservatory of Music Depart of Drama (that’s a mouthful), she graduates in June with a BFA in Acting.   Monday and Tuesday, her “Places” call was for a two and half minute scene in New York City, a small portion of an actor’s showcase featuring some 44 actors in 90 minutes.   Industry types come to these things–agents, managers, producers, etc.   They’re looking for new talent, and it goes by in a whiz.   And while no one moment is make or break (we talked about that a lot–there are multiple ways into getting work in the long haul), this felt like a big one.  You have to perform under pressure, and I was a bit nervous as I watched her first come on.

No need for nervousness, this girl knows what she’s doing.   In fact, hats off to the training at CCM-Drama.   Their entire class did strong work down the line…real, vital, intimate, and risky.   Kudos to them all. And though I don’t have many details yet, sounds like the industry response was strong, and they all have meetings lined up with various agencies interested in their work.

As a father, I could not be more proud of her work.   But I am far more proud of her response to the “Places” call that is coming into her life.   She is ready, and bold, and brave.  You can imagine my emotion as I type the words.   It’s a father’s love, a father who was there for her first “Places” call, when she first showed up in that spectacular entrance called birth.    The lights are never brighter than when we make entrances into relationship, into the heartbreak of the lives around us, into the spaces where God waits to watch and participate, which I suppose is always and everywhere.   When are we not at “Places”?

My time watching my kids at “Places” makes me think of our Father, and the way He must watch us, nervous, pulling for us, coming alongside however we will let Him, wanting nothing for us but the kind of performance that makes for full, generous, and vital worlds.

Sun’s up.

“Places, please.”

Way to go, girl…

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