The Game

This blog post by Dr. Michael Brown, senior minister at Marble Collegiate Church, appears on the church's web site.

Imagine that you had won the following prize in a contest: Each morning your bank would deposit $86,400.00 in your private account for your use. However, this prize has specific rules, just as any game has certain rules.

Rules:

1) Everything that you didn't spend during each day would be taken away from you.

2) You may not simply transfer money into some other account.
3) You may only spend it.

4) Each morning upon awakening, the balance in your account would be exactly $86,400.00 for that day only.

5) The bank can end the game without warning; at any time it can say, the game is over! It can close the account and you will not receive a new one.

What would you personally do? You would buy anything and everything you wanted, right? Not only for yourself, but for all the people you love, right? Even for people you don't know, because you couldn't possibly spend it all on yourself, right? You would try to spend every cent, use it all, right?

Actually, THIS GAME IS REALITY!

Each of us is in possession of such a magical bank. We just can't seem to see it. The magical bank is TIME!

Each morning we awaken to receive 86,400 seconds as a gift of life, and when we go to sleep at night, any remaining time is not credited to us. What we haven't lived up that day is forever lost. Yesterday is forever gone.

Each morning the account is refilled, but the bank can dissolve your account at any time.

So, what will you do with your 86,400 seconds? Those seconds are worth so much more than the same amount in dollars. Therefore, enjoy every second of your life, because time races by so much more quickly than you think.

So take care of yourself, be happy, love deeply, and enjoy life!

Here's wishing you a beautiful day.

Start spending.

Wrestling with the story

This essay is by the Rev. Buddy Stallings, priest-in-charge at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Manhattan.


Lauren Winner's non-memoir memoir, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, is a delicious treat during these waning days of Lent. At one point she writes, "Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith. I doubt; I am uncertain; I am restless, prone to wander. And yet glimmers of holy keep interrupting my gaze." Reading the entire book Sunday on my cross-country flight, I found it to be charming, a description I hope Ms. Winner won't find objectionable, for it is much more than that. Its poignant gentleness is just what I needed as we near the end of an intense Lent of teaching and preaching.

My class Operating Instructions: A Series about Life  has been particularly exciting and draining. We 'cut to the chase' in this class with very little preliminary work, daring to engage a mutual adventure -- going closer to the margins of our faith than most of us may have suspected at the outset. The experience is a great testimony to the power of honesty, to speaking as clearly as possible, relying on as little insider church talk as we can -- an exercise in trust, deep trust that our most honest thoughts and wildest ponderings when measured, tweaked and argued in community, will not lead us astray. While we can be (and no doubt have been) honestly wrong, the speaking of what is as honest for us as we know how to be at any given moment is never wrong; it simply is; and is it quite different from that which we fabricate as truth even for good reasons.

Near the end of Winner's book, she tells a story about her friend Julian. When it came time for Julian to be confirmed, she told her father, who happened to be the parish priest, that she was not sure she believed enough to be confirmed and was certainly not prepared to proclaim before the whole church -- his church -- that she was ready to believe it always. The wise priest and father said to his young daughter, "What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever."

Of all the Operating Instructions we have considered in this course, this simple statement may say it best for me: we will wrestle with the story forever! In my heart of hearts, I KNOW that wrestling with God is always holy; and though we may on occasion limp away from the match, we leave with the mark of God, a transforming and life-giving experience that changes us forever.

Hyacinths

If I had but two loaves of bread,
I would sell one and buy hyacinths,
for they would feed my soul.

I don’t know the author of this charming verse, but I’ve always loved it. Hyacinths definitely feed my soul. I buy them every spring and always stop to smell them as I pass florists or the Korean grocery stores that sell them all around the city. They’re such a welcome sign of spring, which I am always more than ready for. I was born on the first day of spring, so I feel a special connection to this time of year.

Happy Spring!

Forsythia

You said, take a few dry
sticks, cut the ends slantwise
to let in water, stick them
in the old silver cup on the
dresser in the spare room and
wait for the touch of Easter.
But a cold wave protected the
snow, and the sap’s pulse beat
so low underground I felt no
answer in myself except silence.
You said, winter breaks out in
flowers for the faithful and
today when I opened the door
the dry sticks spoke in little
yellow stars and I thought
of you.

--James Hearst

Monopoly

Tina Howe Still Shimmers

I wrote this feature for today's Theatermania.com.


Two hallmarks that have made Tina Howe such a beloved playwright, especially to women, are her humor and her shimmering endings. Both are onstage again in the first New York revival of Painting Churches, Howe’s 1983 breakthrough play about a family facing past resentments and a darkening future. This story of love and forgiveness, produced by the Keen Company, opens March 6 at the Clurman Theatre on Theatre Row under the direction of Carl Forsman.

The day before previews were to begin, Howe sat in the sunny living room of her Upper West Side apartment and talked about this most autobiographical, and vulnerable, of her works in which Mags, a young artist -- the Tina character (played by Kate Turnbull) -- returns to her parents gracious Boston townhouse determined to paint their portrait and finally win their approval. But Fanny and Gardner Church (Kathleen Chalfant and John Cunningham) have their own needs -- dealing with the decline in their lives as age and finances force them from their Brahmin world to a small cottage on Cape Cod. Set in the living room amid boxes in various stages of packing, old grievances give way to fresh understandings, with Howe’s zany sense of comedy lighting the way.

“The characters are very close to the household I grew up in, with echoes of the drama, the eccentricities, I heard constantly growing up,” she says.

Howe’s father was journalist Quincy Howe, who broadcast the evening news for years on CBS radio and moderated the final Kennedy/Nixon debate. One of her grandfathers and an uncle were Pulitzer Prize-winning writers, as is Gardner in the play.

“I grew up hearing the news in my father’s voice,” she said. “I knew what it felt like to grow up with a famous father.”

In Mags, she comes to terms with the feelings of inadequacy and need for attention that marked her early life. Reviewing the original production, New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote: “What Painting Churches has really revealed is the time and pain it costs us all to make that complete and honest parental portrait at last come into view.”

“It’s all true but none of it happened,” Howe says.

The play’s ending, though, is far removed from her parent’s leave-taking.

“The actual portrait, and the play, is a wish, a fantasy,” she says. “We all know life does not end that way. My parents’ ending was much more harrowing. I was painting a portrait of how we wish to see our parents at the end of life. That’s why audiences have loved it. It gives them a beautiful alternative, which I think is the function of theatre.

“I see Fanny and Gardner as tremendously brave and valiant. Fanny is aware Gardner is losing it but she soldiers on, creates an illusion that everything is all right. Their valor gets me. That’s very New England. They’re not into self-pity.”

She thinks of her endings as epiphanies.

“I believe in transformation. All my plays end in characters who are transformed and rise to a new level.”

Her plays also offer a decidedly female point of view, from The Nest, which deals with husband hunting, to Birth and After Birth’s portrayal of frazzled young motherhood, then menopause in Approaching Zanzibar and finally old age in Chasing Manet.

She is pleased that Painting Churches is one of three major revivals of the work of women playwrights this season, along with Margaret Edson’s Wit and Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive. For her, it’s still too few.

“Women’s work is still not at the top of artistic directors’ lists, yet we’re the ones buying the tickets.”

Painting Churches was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, losing to Glengarry Glen Ross. Pride’s Crossing, her play about the first woman to swim from English to France, also was a finalist in a year the Pulitzer committee chose not to offer an award for drama.

Next up, Howe is shopping around her latest work, which she will identify only as “apocalyptic play set on ocean liner,” and is working on a musical and a TV pilot, the details of which she declines to disclose. And she is passionate about developing new writers in her role as playwright in residence at Hunter College’s MFA program.

“I’m a hopeless optimist. It’s so easy to go to the dark side, weeping and tearing of flesh. It’s much harder to find grace. That’s always my goal.”

Surviving a career in the arts

This Lenten reflection on Mark 8:31-38 was written by Brian Hampton, Marble Collegiate Church’s director of arts ministry and children, youth, and families ministry.


"He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me'" (Mark 8:34).

Many creative people in the arts come to church for a very specific reason—to strengthen their faith. It keeps them going. Careers in the arts are some of the most difficult professions out there, and faith in God and in God's will for them is essential to artists' work.

To be in the arts means that you have to have a "thick skin"; at least, according to the old adage. "I hope you have a thick skin," was what people told me when I decided to move to New York City from Virginia to become an actor and a playwright.

They were right. But it's not really about the box of rejection letters, the countless auditions, or the unanswered calls. It's about putting your point of view and faith out there to be judged and seen by others. It's tough. Just like telling others about your faith in God, it's exposing, personal, and there will always be critics.

Peter is the critic in this story. He rebukes Jesus, but Jesus says to him, "You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things" (verse 33).

That's what you have to listen to and hold on to when you are in the arts. When you put words to page, acting to dialogue, paint to canvas, movement to music, or notes to a melody, you have to keep in mind the divine message, the ministry it gives to you, and what you, in turn, give to your audience. You can't think of those who will reject you—you think of those whose spirits you'll be healing and what you'll be inspiring in people as a result.

As Jesus says to the crowd, deny yourself and take up your cross and follow him. It won't be an easy road, but if you hold on to God, God will pull you through to see your creative work come alive and touch people's lives.

So go and create, and discover, and minister in your own creative way! As Jesus says in this passage, "Get behind me, Satan!" That's what you need to say when that voice inside critiques you and holds you back. Push it behind you, because you and your talent belong out there in the front.

God, as we walk through the season of Lent, remind us that even though the road is not always an easy one, with you walking beside us, our faith reminds us that you are the greatest guide, on the greatest path, to the greatest glory. Amen.