Transcript
Speaker: Hey friends, real quick before the podcast started, I wanted to let you guys know that auditions for Godspell are coming up in just over a month, March 23rd and March 25th.
Speaker: That's a Saturday morning and a Monday evening.
Speaker: Me and my production crew are so excited to get started on this project.
Speaker: It's so exciting.
Speaker: God has been so faithful to provide everything that we need.
Speaker: He's not ever failing to come through.
Speaker: It's been remarkable.
Speaker: But if you're interested in being involved or know anybody who would be interested, our auditions are again March 23rd through 25th.
Speaker: We're looking for a diverse cast, all ethnicities, all genders, all ages.
Speaker: So whoever you are, if you've
Speaker: wanted to try theater, if you want to do another musical, you're missing it, or if you just think this project sounds exciting, we would love to have you come out and audition.
Speaker: You can find all the information on our website, artistsoftheway.com.
Speaker: Just go to the Godspell page and click on the auditions tab.
Speaker: You can find everything there and sign up for auditions there.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: Hope to see you guys at auditions.
Speaker: Hey friends, welcome back to Artists of the Way.
Speaker: I'm John, the host.
Speaker: Today we're going to have a slightly shorter episode than normal, just because it's been a crazy couple of weeks.
Speaker: I actually was not sure if I was going to get an episode out, and then I was kind of praying about it, and I feel like there was just... I felt like God opened a door for things I could share.
Speaker: So I was like, oh, cool.
Speaker: That sounds cool.
Speaker: I will...
Speaker: So this week, we're going to talk about Lent for Artists.
Speaker: That makes it sound like I have a really high concept for the episode.
Speaker: I don't necessarily.
Speaker: I just, I was thinking about what's God doing in my life.
Speaker: And today's Ash Wednesday.
Speaker: Um, so I went to an Ash Wednesday service for the first time.
Speaker: I've never done that before.
Speaker: It was really cool.
Speaker: Um, I was really convicted about some things.
Speaker: So, but it really set up the season of Lent in a great way for me.
Speaker: Uh, the last couple years, Lent's been a really important season for me.
Speaker: It hadn't been as much growing up.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Part of that, I think, was just the church culture of Lent wasn't always as important a thing.
Speaker: But the last couple years, especially, Lent has really become important.
Speaker: So just in general, tonight on Ash Wednesday, I've been reflecting on what is the season of Lent?
Speaker: What's this Lent going to look like?
Speaker: What's God expecting?
Speaker: What's
Speaker: out of Lent?
Speaker: What do I have to do for Lent?
Speaker: And I thought that those were some interesting questions that we could talk about as artists.
Speaker: So first I wanted to kind of just set out
Speaker: You know, what do we mean by Lent?
Speaker: I think a lot of times you hear Lent and you're like, oh yeah, that's the time where, you know, you fast something.
Speaker: It's your time to do a social media cleanse, you know, or maybe a juice cleanse.
Speaker: You know, eat veggies, don't eat meat, or don't eat candy.
Speaker: But I mean, I'm sure, you know, a lot of people listening to this know its real goal is a time of
Speaker: reflection and time spent understanding our own fallenness and our own sinfulness and also understanding and grasping and wrestling with the saving work of Christ and that he saves us.
Speaker: And that's just incredible.
Speaker: Yeah, so I was going to read something from a book, but I don't think that that's necessary.
Speaker: I don't need to get that heady with it.
Speaker: So, you know, with that in mind, the fact that I'm reflecting on my sin, and, you know, I really was like,
Speaker: Lord, I want you to show me some sin that I need to work on, uh, because I just feel like I've kind of been oblivious to a lot of stuff the last couple months.
Speaker: And he did that graciously.
Speaker: Um, you know, there's definitely some things where I'm like, okay, I have some areas that need some work, uh,
Speaker: even that phrasing of it is a very American way to get it, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
Speaker: Um, so I'm like, yeah, I've got, I've got after today and some reflection and wonderful conviction from God.
Speaker: I'm like, cool.
Speaker: I've got a laundry list of things that I need to achieve in my spiritual life, uh, where I need to improve.
Speaker: And so I'm going to do that.
Speaker: And it's just gonna be great.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And it just kind of threw me immediately into like this depressive headspace of like, holy crap.
Speaker: I don't know how to improve myself.
Speaker: I don't know if anybody knows how to improve themselves.
Speaker: I was just like, dang, I don't know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know how to reorient my way of living in life.
Speaker: I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do.
Speaker: God's highlighted this thing, and I don't know now what I do with this highlighted thing.
Speaker: because that, you know, it's a big thing, and I don't know how to adjust, you know, attitudes and just different things like that, you know, thought patterns and stuff.
Speaker: Anyways, I'm rambling.
Speaker: So I read this devotional then this evening, and
Speaker: It's written by the Right Reverend Greg Brewer.
Speaker: So he's a bishop or retired bishop in the Anglican, I think it's Anglican Church, maybe it's Episcopal Church.
Speaker: I'm not 100% sure, but it's in the Anglican tradition.
Speaker: And there was a devotional that came out through the seminary that I'm looking at doing.
Speaker: That was all about Ash Wednesday.
Speaker: So I read it.
Speaker: And there was a sentence that really struck me as I was thinking about this.
Speaker: Oh, how am I going to be better this Lent and really trim the fat of my spiritual life?
Speaker: And I just read this beautiful sentence where he said, this is quoting from him now, the words of the Ash Wednesday liturgy are meant to help us get to the bottom of things.
Speaker: It says, rend your hearts and not your garments.
Speaker: But it is God who begins the tear.
Speaker: Our part is to face the fact that God's hand is at work and say yes to the tearing.
Speaker: Do you fear the tearing?
Speaker: It is only for your cleansing and healing.
Speaker: God is a master surgeon whose chief aim is shaping us for his glory.
Speaker: God sees the bright splendor of his son that God has planted within us, and God is determined to answer the deepest cries of our heart and set us free.
Speaker: I just read that and I was like, holy crap, because...
Speaker: I think that there's a radical nature to God's doing that we don't always grasp, especially in America, where we have to be the ones who make ourselves into something.
Speaker: We have to improve ourselves.
Speaker: And in that narrative, God radically is like, no, let me do it.
Speaker: And this will get to art eventually, I promise.
Speaker: But God is like, I'm going to come in there and I'm going to be the one that fixes this.
Speaker: So he shines this light on these areas that I need to work on today.
Speaker: And I'm like, what do I do?
Speaker: And he tells me nothing except to open up and let me do the slow work that I will do over the next 40 days of Lent or over the next several months of my life or over the rest of my life, probably.
Speaker: Which what a crazy invitation to look at something wrong, be like, crap, what do I do?
Speaker: And God's like,
Speaker: open it up to me.
Speaker: That's all.
Speaker: And that's hard to do.
Speaker: I find that hard to do at least because I'm like, okay, I just, I can't see you physically doing the thing.
Speaker: So I, it's so nebulous.
Speaker: It's so hard.
Speaker: And you would think I would get it with my abstract thoughts, but I don't, nobody does.
Speaker: Um, it's, it's tricky.
Speaker: And so I, then I was thinking about that, uh,
Speaker: in terms of creation and in terms of artists.
Speaker: And right now I'm working on a paper in school about creation theology.
Speaker: So a part of the thing that I think is interesting about this as artists is one of the things that I've really latched onto as I've been working on that paper and reading scripture is, um,
Speaker: that we human beings, you and me, we're creation.
Speaker: We are art ourselves.
Speaker: We are God's art.
Speaker: And I don't just mean that in the sense of we exist, hooray, we're God's art.
Speaker: I mean that in the sense that every single thing that God does in our life, that is art, which is mind-blowing in and of itself.
Speaker: But Paul, because we've been looking at new creation, right?
Speaker: Because that's a big part of creation.
Speaker: And so when Paul talks about new creation, a lot of times, not a lot of times,
Speaker: One of his key references is in 2 Corinthians, when you have the classic, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.
Speaker: The old is gone, the new is come, yada, yada, yada.
Speaker: You've probably heard it before in church or Sunday school.
Speaker: If you haven't, Google new creation, 2 Corinthians and Bible Gateway.
Speaker: It's a wonderful passage.
Speaker: Sorry, I'm sounding academic and brainy and blah.
Speaker: Anyways, so just taking that you are a new creation idea and thinking about the nitty-gritty of that and thinking about, okay, that new creation aspect means that when I'm being prideful or I'm being envious or, you know, I'm angry driving,
Speaker: And God is trying to adjust that and shift that out of me.
Speaker: That is not just God refining me.
Speaker: That's God creating.
Speaker: in some strange sense of the word, right?
Speaker: It's like when a director works with an actor or a writer works with a character or a painter works to shape the line that they messed up on.
Speaker: Not to imply that God messed up on us, but that line into the broader picture, right?
Speaker: God is creating in us in that minute sense, in that minute moment-to-moment thing going on in life.
Speaker: So that brings us to Lent, where we, as God's people, are called to reflect on our sinfulness, and
Speaker: reflect on everything that's awful about us and the things that we need to work on.
Speaker: Uh, and then also in that, in this 40 day fast, uh, that's meant to mirror Christ's fast, according to the like church history.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: then in that we remember that Christ is the one that bears the burden of that.
Speaker: Christ is the one that took the punishment of that on himself.
Speaker: And we can give it to God, not just for our justification to not be judged, but also to be sanctified.
Speaker: And God in these 40 days is going to orchestrate something in our lives.
Speaker: to mold us and shape us and create in us the people that he wants to make, the works of art, the little walking living works of art that he wants in the world.
Speaker: That can include our art, right?
Speaker: So because one of the things we talk about a lot is we're shaped.
Speaker: by what we make, right?
Speaker: We talk a lot about the spiritual formation of that.
Speaker: God uses art when we make something or when we take something in.
Speaker: So in that sense of
Speaker: art as spiritual formation, I want us... want us?
Speaker: Now I sound like a priest.
Speaker: I want to encourage you guys.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: That's what I want to say.
Speaker: I want to encourage you guys, and I'm encouraging myself to embrace things that are uncomfortable because that's kind of what Lent is about.
Speaker: It's what's uncomfortable in us that we don't want to look at, that sometimes we have fleeting thoughts of like, eh,
Speaker: Maybe this is a problem, but you know, you're trucking along.
Speaker: Life is going.
Speaker: You don't have time for that.
Speaker: By and large, things are okay.
Speaker: And Lent encourages us to slow down too fast to cut away some of the things that have us trucking along so that we have to look at those uncomfortable things.
Speaker: And there's a lot of uncomfortable things in making art, right?
Speaker: You might have a character that you're playing that you don't like or a color in a painting that isn't mixing well, or a sentence that you just can't crack or a harmony that doesn't seem to click for some reason, or there might be uncomfortable things as you co-work with other artists, right?
Speaker: You might not be agreeing on the direction something's gonna go and it might be causing some tension in there.
Speaker: I want to encourage you guys and myself
Speaker: to embrace the uncomfortable moments and not just fall back onto our survival mode of how we've learned how to navigate those, but rather embrace the uncomfortable ugliness and then say, okay, God, what do you want to do in this uncomfortable ugliness where I'm not handling something well, or I don't know how to make this piece of art better, or I'm anxious or self-conscious about my performance in this piece of art.
Speaker: Or I don't agree with the morals or ethics of something going on in this piece, but I still think it's important.
Speaker: How can you take that and bring it into your relationship with Christ and then see what he has in store for you there?
Speaker: The example I want to point to with this is when I did Hamlet last year.
Speaker: I'm going to talk about Hamlet again.
Speaker: Here we go.
Speaker: And I don't think I've talked about this aspect on the podcast, or if I have, not a whole lot.
Speaker: Because I initially wanted to write a blog post about it, and then I just didn't end up having the time to edit it and make it actually good.
Speaker: But last year, Hamlet happened over Lent.
Speaker: We started in February slash March, and we performed in April.
Speaker: So it was our Lent Easter season thing.
Speaker: And it became this sort of accidental Lenten discipline for me.
Speaker: For a couple reasons.
Speaker: Firstly...
Speaker: Everybody had a really strong viewpoint of who Hamlet was as a character because he's a very nebulous guy.
Speaker: And so you can make him a lot of different things.
Speaker: And a lot of people in that show had clear ideas of who Hamlet was and interpreted his actions a certain way, which kind of clashed with the ways that I was interpreting them, but in important ways where it was like, oh, that's kind of a valid point.
Speaker: I don't think I can just ignore that.
Speaker: Specifically, there's a couple people that, you know, well, there's a lot of things that Hamlet does in that show where it's like, is this actually morally justifiable?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: And yet I really had a lot of love for Hamlet, the character, like if he like as a person, like I loved and cared for this person a lot.
Speaker: So I found myself in this weird place.
Speaker: Well, I was kind of clashing with my fellow artists a little bit and even experiencing some tension with me and the directors.
Speaker: Good tension, not bad tension, but like good creative tension of like, oh, we're not quite seeing quite the right way.
Speaker: So we've got to find that middle ground.
Speaker: So, you know, engaging, valuable, creative tension.
Speaker: So there was that tension with the other artists, but there was also the tension of like, man, I really love this character.
Speaker: I'm loving playing this character.
Speaker: And I love him as like a person, but I think he's doing some morably reprehensible things.
Speaker: That was really hard to navigate, especially because, and I think this is true from what I've heard of anybody that plays Hamlet, there was a lot of me, John, the person in Hamlet.
Speaker: I think just because it's such a nebulous character, you have to put so much into it.
Speaker: And so this resulted in me playing a character over the course of Lent who was
Speaker: had a lot of similarities to myself and made a lot of really bad decisions that hurt a lot of people and resulted in him sinning quite a bit.
Speaker: And that was really, really hard.
Speaker: And there were some points where I was talking to Shane.
Speaker: I was like, this is, I don't know if this is the version of Hamlet that I wanted to do.
Speaker: And I don't know if this is the character I wanted to play.
Speaker: Like, he was just coming out so nasty and irredeemable, it almost seemed, that I was like, I don't know what to do with this.
Speaker: Like, I was having this creative existential crisis of, like, this has been a dream project for five years, and it's not turning into what I want it to be, and I'm, you know?
Speaker: But I mean, I was committed.
Speaker: So I had to keep reengaging with that uncomfortable, tense, kind of tense situation and ugly character.
Speaker: And in doing that, I got to this point with him where because I'm going to try not to get too nerdy with Shakespeare, but I
Speaker: There's a lot of religious themes, specifically Christian themes in Hamlet.
Speaker: And Hamlet is a big crux of his character arc is his theology, honestly, and what he thinks will or won't happen to the person who killed his father if he kills him and what will happen to himself if he does that.
Speaker: So Hamlet is really having this theological quandary throughout the whole show.
Speaker: So I was like, man, if Hamlet keeps...
Speaker: coming back to this sticking point, like his faith must be the most important thing to him.
Speaker: Which, to me at least, with what I knew of Hamlet the person and his actions and then, you know, his love for his faith, like that wasn't jiving.
Speaker: I was like, how can you be this person and have so much love for God and then also do all these horrible things?
Speaker: And what happens to that person?
Speaker: So, you know, we ended up having this really beautiful through line with this rosary that Hamlet had at the start and then eventually gave to Ophelia around the middle of the show before Hamlet left.
Speaker: And then Ophelia went crazy and...
Speaker: dies because everybody dies in Hamlet.
Speaker: And when Hamlet comes back, he sees the rosary again and takes the rosary back.
Speaker: And so that rosary kind of ended up tracking, where's Hamlet at with God?
Speaker: Because while he had the rosary, he was doing okay.
Speaker: As soon as he lets go of that rosary is where things really start to take a tumble.
Speaker: And then when he pulls that back,
Speaker: It's where he really gets to the point of being willing to surrender to God's sovereignty.
Speaker: In my interpretation, which I think is on the ball of what Shakespeare was writing, but I also don't know because I'm not a scholar.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so this all ended with, you know, there's a big duel and Hamlet has the opportunity to get revenge and blah-de-blah.
Speaker: But he very much is like, I'm just going to let what God wants to have happen, happen.
Speaker: And he is 100% convinced that he's irredeemable and that he will not go to heaven.
Speaker: But he does repent.
Speaker: Not in the script, but in my Hamlet does repent.
Speaker: It's a brief moment.
Speaker: I highly doubt many people caught it, but he does repent.
Speaker: And so then I had this beautiful moment when Hamlet dies, because again, everybody dies in Hamlet, including Hamlet.
Speaker: Um...
Speaker: You have a character that you've watched for four hours, lie, manipulate, manipulate the woman that he loved most, kill innocent people, three innocent people, delay the justice he's supposed to give out, and, you know, debatably go crazy.
Speaker: I don't think he went crazy, but it certainly looked like he did.
Speaker: And so you're watching all these horrendous things that this person is doing, but then you're also seeing his heart behind it and the good that's in this man and this man's attempts to get back to God.
Speaker: And you're seeing that parallel with the villain's attempts to really turn his back completely on God.
Speaker: And you get to Hamlet's dying moments, and I think it's one of the most beautiful scenes I've gotten to play.
Speaker: First of all, he and another character have a beautiful moment of forgiveness, but then...
Speaker: There's this oft-debated line where he says, the rest is silence.
Speaker: And everybody's like, we don't, you know, they're not 100% sure what that's supposed to mean.
Speaker: Every actor kind of plays it differently.
Speaker: It probably means that Hamlet is, you know, I'm dying.
Speaker: So there's nothing more to say.
Speaker: The rest is silence, meaning I'm not saying anything more.
Speaker: But I specifically played it as he was seeing heaven.
Speaker: He was seeing the rest.
Speaker: And it was silent.
Speaker: It was peaceful.
Speaker: It was everything Hamlet had been dreaming of for the whole show.
Speaker: And Hamlet, through no work of his own, was redeemed forever.
Speaker: Not because he earned it.
Speaker: And I think that's one of the beauties of what happened with this character is he absolutely, 100%, without any debate or question, does not earn a redemption.
Speaker: But, at least in our version, he got it anyways as a gift because of what he put his faith in.
Speaker: Even though he didn't think he was worthy enough to get it.
Speaker: And I'll tell you, the first Sunday that we went to church after closing Hamlet is one of the greatest Sundays I've had.
Speaker: Because...
Speaker: It's weird to close a show when a character dies because it's like you're saying bye to them forever.
Speaker: So, you know, Hamlet had everything happen to him for the last time and then I went to church the next day and I was just like, holy cow, the mercy and grace and love and saving power of God is just so incredible.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: How can you lean into those uncomfortable moments in your art like I did with Hamlet?
Speaker: I'm sure a lot of you have done many a time.
Speaker: But I want to encourage you as you create or, you know, really as you just go about anything in life.
Speaker: What are those uncomfortable moments?
Speaker: What are the moments where you want to look away from?
Speaker: Moments that you, you know, want to ignore.
Speaker: That's the same thing.
Speaker: I said the same thing twice.
Speaker: But embrace those and bring those to God because he probably wants to do something over these next 40 days for you in that.
Speaker: And it's not up to you to do Lent right or to do your art right, to create the perfect thing for yourself or for the world.
Speaker: That's not up to you.
Speaker: It's not up to you to redeem yourself or to redeem art or to redeem your community or to save others.
Speaker: None of that's up to you.
Speaker: None of that's up to me, which is a lesson I really need to learn.
Speaker: But it isn't.
Speaker: The beauty of the gospel is
Speaker: the beauty of what I think God is teaching me in Lent this year, one of the many things he's teaching me in Lent this year, is that we don't do the work ourselves.
Speaker: God does the work in us.
Speaker: He points out the area that he wants to revise, that he wants to adjust.
Speaker: He
Speaker: And we open our hands and we let him tear like Eustace with Aslan when he's a dragon.
Speaker: One of the most beautiful passages in that book.
Speaker: We just accept and we let him dig in and rip the scales off and shred.
Speaker: Because we cannot do it on our own.
Speaker: We can't create on our own.
Speaker: We can't be redeemed on our own.
Speaker: We can't adjust our behavior on our own.
Speaker: We can do nothing on our own.
Speaker: It's all through God.
Speaker: And that's not a depressing, I can't do it.
Speaker: That's a... God does it lovingly and willingly and freely if we just let him.
Speaker: And it's so counter everything that we've learned.
Speaker: But it's the truth.
Speaker: So... Yeah, that's just my little... I don't know, Lenten meditations late at night after Ash Wednesday.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I hope that was helpful in some way.
Speaker: I'm going to link to that devotion that I read today because I think it was really, truly beautiful and a great way to kick off Lent for me, at least, and a helpful way to reframe my mind.
Speaker: So that'll be in the description below on the episode.
Speaker: I would like to know, what are...
Speaker: What are there any times where you guys have embraced uncomfortable situations in your art and it's led to something better?
Speaker: What's sometimes you've had some great creative tension or bad creative tension that's turned great?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thank you guys for tuning in.
Speaker: I'm hoping next episode we'll have a guest and we'll get back to a more regular kind of rhythm of what we're doing.
Speaker: It's just been a crazy couple of weeks, but love to hear from you guys about your uncomfortable creative experiences.
Speaker: And I really just pray that God blesses you all through Lent.
Speaker: It's a beautiful season.
Speaker: I'm excited for myself.
Speaker: So by extension, I'm excited for you guys.
Speaker: I can't wait to see what God does with you and your art and your spiritual lives.
Speaker: And my prayers are absolutely with all of you.
Speaker: Thanks, guys, for listening.
