And all of this should begin to explain why I loved church plays.
I loved plays because they merged with the current of my imagination. They satisfied a deep, unslaked thirst for images and story-lines: for truth-in-life. I loved the portrayal of an ordinary Savior who hung out with his disciples and laughed at their jokes. He seemed like someone I would want to hang out with. I loved the jaunty depictions of a Lord who dressed strangely, moved around a lot, and talked with his hands. He seemed like someone I would want to talk to.
I loved the strange, surprising sound of Jesus' words when they were spoken aloud. And I even loved the homely re-enactment of Jesus' miracles. Somehow, subversion with low-tech and no-budget special effects made Jesus' signs of power appear even more sublime and even more spectacular to my young mind.
Needless to say, nowadays I love sermons as much as I love plays. I have developed an analytic mind, and I am able to thrill in the discovery of new "facts" about scripture. Still, I owe it to church plays (among some other things, including a solid family life) that I now know how to synthesize these facts into a worldview. Life has taught me that a worldview is greater than a sum of truth claims. It is the current of real life that connects all these dislocated truth claims together. If I were to explain to you about a person whom I love deeply, I would have to tell you much more than all the facts about that person; I would have to tell you their story. In the same way, I loved the Jesus that I could place within a story -- even within my own story. That Jesus made sense to me.
So I loved church plays. And my favorite church play was (and still is) the Passion play.
To be continued...
Click here to read the previous post in this series.
By: Chad
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