Switching Gears
Fishing, “the Zone,” Bodies, and Theatre
Note: I want to give you a heads up in case you didn’t catch the drift in my regular Advent blogging that some of the focus of Controlled Burn is shifting as I engage a continuing process of discernment towards ordained ministry. I expect I’ll have lots to say that isn’t about things theological, and I know I’ll always be sewing anything I learn back into my lived experience, which is how my book and this blog was born. But I wanted to let y’all know in case my engagement with things ecclesiastical is not for you. This entry is that kind.
As I’ve thought about my spiritual story in recent weeks, I’ve returned again and again to the belief that my spiritual autobiography is also the story of my body. There are many good reasons why that belief, in my particular case, should not be a foregone conclusion and would not have been until just a few small years ago. At the same time, as I’ve taken the time to reflect deeply and prayerfully, I’ve seen that telling my story now requires weaving narrative threads of Spirit and Body. They’ve always been together, partners, in ways I didn’t always see.
Some of my earliest memories are of standing in trout streams, farm ponds, and small lakes in Missouri. When I was very young, I fished — a lot. My dad fished. My grandfather on my mother’s side fished and still does. They and I fished in the Biblical tradition of Peter and Andrew: obsessively, intently, and continuously. At an age I was too young to remember, my folks signed me up for a subscription to Missouri Conservationist, a publication that arrived every month or two and told the stories of the creatures and environs of my home state, and this fueled my imagination briefly until we could hop in the car or on a bike trail and find those very spots. While I was growing up, my father was an Associate Pastor, Youth Pastor, later a Senior Pastor, and for a while, a traveling Christian educator. This last job had us in the car every weekend, crisscrossing the state for sermons and Sunday school guest spots with stops at the nearest state parks and ice cream and barbecue joints along the way. I now think of these experiences as kinds of communion along with the endless, wonderful stream of church potlucks. The body partaking in itself in some way – the cold, rippling water of the Roaring River in the Ozarks, the taste of freshwater fish, the flavor of casseroles and barbecue, the fellowship of the earth and its people – these were and remain spiritual experiences that required my body and my self to experience.
In some ways, the church I grew up in would not acknowledge these experiences as the primary expressions of the Spirit. Despite its interest in the power of water and fire, my Baptist upbringing mostly encouraged me to think of the body as a thing to control, a place where sin begins, the troublesome source of fleshly things. Because of this teaching, I slowly learned to separate myself into Spirit and body. To be fair to that tradition, they were Platonists, seeing the real world of material and body and breath up against – almost literally – the “real” world of the Spirit. The goodness of fishing and potlucks and being in nature and fellowship was good, but not good enough – not until the Spirit more or less subjugated the body. Not until walking down the aisle, as it were. And so, at eight years old, that’s what I did. I prayed what they called “The Sinner’s Prayer” and accepted Jesus into my heart and was baptized some weeks later by my dad in the sight of my entire extended family and the church congregation.
But I’ll be honest and say I don’t think that experience stuck in the spiritual sense. There are times when I’ve considered the unnecessary separation of body and Spirit as trauma. I have much more to say about this elsewhere. But, when I can think most mindfully and generously about this, I conclude that perhaps I was too young or my world at eight years old too insular. Still, I’ve grown to think of my spiritual life in this way: I was born and raised into Christianity, but only later did I choose to become a Christian in any meaningful way. And this choice has been made over and over again in a series of things both of the Spirit and of the body – when one or the other of these things experiences Christ. Like standing in waist-high grass on the banks of the Carmichael’s pond, like potluck Communion, I felt Christ in the running of junior high track, in the playing of flag football behind the stands of the local high school football team my dad coached, in learning how to paint and craft alongside my mother, in writing, in singing and acting, in teaching and coaching, and in prayer.
Athletes and performers have a phrase that signals hyper-focus, clarity of intent, and a sense that the world sort of disappears. At the same time, they are truly present and in the moment – they call it being “in the Zone.” This state is similar, I’ve discovered, to one pursued by skilled meditators, worshippers, writers, and even managers. I’ve experienced being in the Zone in these contexts – and others, especially standing in a river or in nature or doing things artistically – and I consider this state a kind of awareness and presence, free of the anxieties of thought and the shifts of emotion, to be a kind of prayer state, where the prayer is what my body, spirit, mind, self, and environment are doing what they should be doing – together, in concert, integrated, whole, and where Christ happens. In these moments, I’ve known and felt Christ alive in me. As I’ve pursued a career in the arts and education, one of the most significant discoveries I’ve made is that “the Zone” is not a state to work up to – it is not a mountaintop experience achieved through the kinds of ecstatic experiences common to my Evangelical upbringing – but rather a thing that’s always there. Like breath. Like Christ. Like water between the toes. Like an endless supply of fish. Like an unending part to play in a lasting, cosmic performance.
If this sounds even the slightest bit enlightened, let me add that many of these discoveries have been accidents of Grace and the consequences of prayers I believe work – my own and those of my family especially. But I think this discovery is the result of a call I’ve felt since those fishing days. A call I tried out when walking down the aisle at eight years old. When I joined the church worship team and took voice lessons in high school. When I took on my first role in Bye-Bye Birdie in high school. When I became a dorm shepherd (something like a junior chaplain for my floor) in college. When I worked on church staff leading worship and outreach to pay my way through graduate school. When I took parts in Shakespeare plays in graduate school. When I directed young people in some of those plays. When I fell off a block in a rehearsal and tore up my leg. When a tornado ripped through our college community weeks before our wedding, leaving the stained glass in the chapel where we were to be married shattered. When I drove at times twice the speed limit to take my daughter, Elliott, to a specialist in Iowa City at the urging of a doctor who dared to whisper the words “cancer” and “I don’t know” to the parents of a three-month-old. When I sought out therapy when facing a bullying environment in my higher education job. When designing environments for plays that match the magic of the Missouri outdoors. When walking through the cathedrals and churches of England and Scotland. When founding and cultivating my own theatre company. When giving up personal boundaries and living for long periods in resentment. When losing friends to my obsessive work habits. To rearranging chairs in my parish’s flexible worship space. To giving a lecture on how the theatres and museums and restaurants of New York City are cathedrals themselves. To career and personal trauma that knocked me flat out. To the miracles of re-constructing my faith, thinking, body, and practice in therapy, meditation study with another former Baptist – a Buddhist monk from Thomasville, North Carolina – to working on and with issues of embodiment and trauma and myth in a graduate degree from UNC-Wilmington, to the Spirit working itself out on the treadmill as I lost 50 pounds, to hosting barbecues for students, to rekindling my childhood tradition of finding good barbecue (and the fantastic new tradition of craft breweries) with my family, to travel, to coaching other artists, to interning on an arts series where I saw some of the world’s great classical and jazz artists, to creating such arts series myself, to joining and helping to lead efforts in my Episcopal parish, to being blown away by my first service attending my parish and the simple, powerful healing service I witnessed there, to seeking healing for myself, to taking up professional acting and directing gigs, to publishing scholarship, to leading the formation of an arts charter school, to challenge upon challenge upon challenge of growing up, not growing up, and doing hard things. These, together, are moments where I have been able to find Christ, sometimes for Christ to become alive in me, to form communities of belonging – spiritual potlucks. These are moments of creation or re-creation after challenge or even destruction. These are moments – long periods, when I felt utter desolation and isolation and hurt. And these are moments of integration and healing and overcoming.
My story is about this healing, creation, and re-integration of the body, spirit, and world. Where trauma separates, the “Zone” of Christ is a kind of germinating and interweaving and, especially, embodying of new, whole, good things – whether those things be stories or communities or art or events or worship or experiences or meals or other communions. Where trauma damages, the “Zone” of Christ heals, adjusts and compensates. Where trauma dis-embodies us from ourselves, Christ’s body and our bodies metabolize that suffering and brokenness. Where trauma keeps us from being present, Christ is where and how we show up for ourselves, our world, relationships, and communities.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a teacher, actor, designer, and director. I know theatre pretty well. At the start of most semesters, I stand in front of a class and explain how theatre and ritual are similar. Churches and sporting events and classrooms and political rallies are all theatre, in a sense, all performers in special costumes (uniforms, robes, etc.), all assigned to particular roles (priest, home team, cheerleader), all on flat playing spaces (stages, courts, fields), all reading from scripts (either plays in the sports sense or scripts in the scripture sense), all with heroes and villains, all with stories, all with audiences and spectators. Worship services are one such kind of theatre. In all types of theatre, what happens is that we create what’s called a “liminal” space – a threshold space, where we are neither where we came from nor where we are going – a transformational space, where possibility and uncertainty live. The hope of the theatre, the ritual, the worship, the game, the “Zone,” the experience is that it transforms us as individuals and as a community. I see the creation of these spaces – the design of them, the acting in them, the playing in them, the dancing in them, the storytelling in them – as spiritual practice, community-building, and prayer.
Artistic creation – and the creation of worship – also emulates the work of the Creator. I believe and live and embody the notion that this work, wherever it takes place, is a kind of sacred intention, a liturgy of lifestyle, a practice of belonging. In the work I’m most interested in, the liminal, transformative spaces are about the body reminding itself that it belongs to itself, the Body of Christ, other bodies, and the world. Rivers and ponds and long car rides are also these liminal spaces, like the sacrament of Baptism, like the quiet of a car wash, like the intent studiousness of graduate study. In my life as part of Holy Trinity, one of my greatest delights has been in what I’ve referred to above and what I’ll call here the “sacrament of shifting chairs.” That’s where we – often a rector and I – will design a space that itself transforms even as we hope the space will transform others. We move from inspiration to intent to hands gripped on wooden seats – like the sides of a boat – on a fishing expedition or in the seats of a theatre. We are contemplating the audience and congregation and what their bodies – and the Body they make up – will do. How they move. How their bodies and spirits will work together in worship. How they will commune. How they will celebrate the Eucharist. And the potluck.