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A Sagely Word
No matter how long you might stay at the stream, you would always be beginning to see the water. For the water never stops flowing, and it is always beginning to bubble up again. It is the same with one who fixes his gaze on the infinite Beauty of God. It is constantly being discovered anew, and it is always seen as something new and strange in comparison with what the mind has always understood. And as God continues to reveal himself, man continues to wonder….
St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th Century, Greek Father of the Church)
Commentary
In the 2004 movie “Finding Neverland,” the producer of a play by Sir James Matthew Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, anxiously paces. The theater is not full because persons to take the twenty-five seats Barrie requested have not arrived. The producer is about to order the box office to sell the seats. Then, Barrie intervenes, announcing the arrival of the last twenty-five audience members.
Down the street come twenty-five, modestly dressed children from the neighborhood orphanage. Quickly they are led into the theater and dispersed to seats among the well-to-do, well-dressed theater patrons. Many of the wealthy patrons appear irritated by the orphans next to them. A couple remarks openly, "We got one of the best-dressed ones."
Lights go down, curtains go up. Nana is the first character to appear. Nana is a dog that believes she is a Nanny. Clearly the dog is a man in a dog costume. The adults in the audience are uncomfortable. The children are delighted, and many of them giggle out loud. As the play continues, the children sit on the edge of their seats, amazed by the fantasy. Gradually, urged on by the delight expressed by the children, the starchy adults loosen up and laugh, too. At the end of the play, the audience explodes into applause. The show is a hit.
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The producer, who was sure the play was doomed to fail, looks with wonder at the audience response. Seeing the sunny faces of children and adults, alike, he exclaims, "Genius!"
The producer did not believe in what Barrie could see. Barrie, from imagination and experience, created a play that brought the audience to its feet. Then, only then, did the producer exclaim, “Genius!”
There are important lessons in this scene from “Finding Neverland.” We find in the scene, as through the movie, a tension between the giftedness of Barrie and the skepticism of the producer. The producer thinks of one thing: money. Barrie thinks through imagination. Art and artfulness cannot be contained in pragmatics of money. Likewise, good art often does not appeal to the majority of the public.
Barrie repeatedly envisions, inwardly, even while he is going through the daily routine, another world, a subjective world. For Barrie, that subjective world is as real as the objective world.
When religion and religious Practice become reduced to dominance of objectivism and pragmatism, religion loses its soul. This same deadness occurs when we approach Scripture as an objective document imparting factual data that can be easily understood, even systematized in an orderly fashion. Spirit is too wildly free, like Wind, says Jesus, for such rationalization! Love will not be held in the arms of the pedantic mind, for Love is, being Spirit, too lively and truthfully vague for that.
With interpreting Scripture I find persons want to fit Meaning in a one-right meaning. Scripture loses its multivalent capacity, its inherent power to evoke varied meanings of Meaning. Scripture is reduced to the one meaning I was taught, my tradition taught me, my teachers taught me, my church taught me, my parents taught me, or what fits what I already think to be true, ... What is central to all those statements? I and me and my. Engagement with Scripture often lacks the artfulness of Spirit and arises out of teachers that lack the playfulness of the God dancing in the Creation, from microcosm to macrocosm, from galaxies to subatomic particles; the Eternal Dance.
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