I cannot speak for you, but maybe you like me are feeling things more than ever these days. Feelings for me are where spirit meets emotion.
In one of my acting workshops I recently shared ” actors can’t do anything. I went on to say ballerinas can go on pointe, engineers can build bridges, doctors can help make people well, but what do actors do?
In all fairness I was for sure being autobiographical, but as I persisted I asked “what do actors have to offer?” Then I said, it “passion, we can offer passion”.
You know the song “what the world needs now is love sweet love, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of”? Love and passion are like time and trial. You can’t have one without the other.
Think of whom you love. Can you possibly be neutral about that person? Does your heart skip a beat? How about disappointment in love? That’s where a different kind of passion may come. I am not minimizing here the pain of loss in relationships, I am addressing it. I speak here of when time meets travel and its days which we call life.
I recently drove through Banning CA on my way to do the Apostle Paul at a church. My mother died here 7 years ago here. Before that, we had had years of reunion in Banning as my ministry brought me to Banning. Mom was victorious and anyone who knew her knew she was maybe the nicest person they had ever met. A quiet rock.
My mother’s name was Hyacinth or Giacinto in Italian. When I was young she showed me a different love and a different story. Even back then there was always a quiet niceness. But she was cut off from feeling anything but pain in those early days of my life. The divorce from my father was too much for her. She had known tragedy as a child, but when it came to romantic love she was only prepared for pure happiness. When the rug was taken from under her feet what remained was a sustained state of shock. A numb passion where feeling meets disappointment and the only expression is deep sadness.
These days where society is crumbling we can be extra helpful to one another by knowing up front that he or she is in a pregnancy of feelings. Alive, but not expressed with satisfaction. In our workshops we do acting exercises that cause us to re-experience the softness we once knew but we may no longer express in life. Jesus talks about a kind of party going on in the last days celebrating the freedom from living under Gods way. What I am saying that for the spirit of “eating and drinking and marrying and giving in marriage” there is a need for sadness that can be its salvation. I.e. “better to go into the house of mourning than the house of feasting”
“There is a time to mourn.” Listen….to Him…look into your partners eyes…..feel what they feel…and so goes the acting exercise. Then continuing, the same words create different scene situations, and it builds; the partner allowing himself to get inside the others words. Then, coming to the other side of the drill, “there is a time to dance”. It’s amazing, no miraculous what can happen when we make time to empathize with one another.
I learn from unlearning. What I learn I teach. Go to ground zero; begin there and end there too. That’s where the empty get filled. In fact only the empty get filled. Like Giacinto, who finally did and became stronger, happier, more at peace and more fulfilled, planet earth would do well to face up to the sorrow. The pureness of a flowers scent staying through a cold spring.
Ground zero is all around you. Look at our times; it’s like Act 2 of Gone with the Wind out there. I promise you that God lives at ground zero.
You too come as you are. There are so many reasons to say goodbye, to go through the door and then to be a door knob for someone else where wonderful empathy and passion begin its bloom.
“There is a time to dance”
