Last Sunday, Pastor Emily, her husband Steven, and Iattended a couple dance performances.The first performance entitled, Pretonically Oriented v.3, was intended toillustrate a choreographic system for generating and organizing movement. Wereceived an e-mail prior to the performance day that offered some explanationabout what we would eventually see. But of course, all of us were too busy to readthe e-mail links so we entered the theater without any context. As a result, wewere totally baffled by the dance which consisted of three dancers appearing todo unrelated, obscure movements in repetition. I had seen a preview of theperformance, so I offered my own, still uninformed interpretation. At thattime, the preview was set up for the audience to share feedback with thedirector and he was keen on listening to how the audience reacted to thevarious parts of the dance. So I carried that idea into my own interpretationthat the whole purpose of the performance was not for the audience to figureout a “plot” to the dance but rather to reflect back on how they experiencedthese obscure movements. How did I, as the viewer, tense my own body when I sawthe tense body movements on stage or get anxious about things that I expectedto be repeated but might not?
Although misguided, my reflection led to some good food forthought on the way home about the role of the creator and the receiver in apiece of work - whether dance, poetry, or literature. In high school, I hadalways been taught that you had to figure out what the author had intended.There was only one right answer, and that perplexed me - how could the authorhave considered all the different interpretations that our teacher assigned tothe literature? It was not until just a couple years ago that a friend educatedme on something that I think I had always known instinctively: that writing thetext is only half the story. The other half is how the reader receives andresponds to the text. In this way, text becomes alive because we are just asimportant as the story itself.We often hear people complain that the Bible is dull or toocomplicated to understand or that Christianity and God are outdated andirrelevant. But I think it is the same way as the performance or reading apiece of literature. God is telling us only one part of the story - a story oflove and grace. The other part though is what are we going to do about it? Howare we going to respond? Some of us will receive the message and put it on ourcoffee table to collect dust. Some of us will think it is just a bunch ofgibberish. But that story is just the beginning. When we listen to ourselves,how we feel about it and how we are called by it, then that story becomes alivein us. Our faith and who we are become part of that story. The nature of God,the world and ourselves are revealed. And that is when things start to getexciting …