Jason & The Golden Fleece

Speaking of careers, the whole issue of “what ifs” came nosing out of it dirty little hole the other night. I had just finished watching “Lost”, a T.V. series Susan and I are addicted to. Really, it’s a fascinating series, in which a group of people are stranded on a tropical island, and all sorts of inexplicable things begin to happen to them. The second season is gathering around a conflict between Jack, the doctor and de-facto leader of the group, and a character named Locke, who, after being wheel chair bound, mysteriously regained the use of his legs after their plane crashed on the island. The conflict between Jack and Locke is about faith. Jack doesn’t want to deal with it if it can’t be logically explained. Locke talks a great deal about “destiny”, and enters into the situations the island leads him to with a sense of wonder and unquestioning faith, faith that this is what was meant to be. How could I not be gripped?

The actor playing Locke is named Terry O’Quinn, and he and I share a resemblance. Knowing that this series was cast with an ensemble of newcomers and relative unknowns (except for Dominic Monegan, the actor who played Pippin in the Lord of The Rings movies), I was suddenly seized with envy of Terry, thinking: that could have been me. If I had been a bit more adventurous and had given L.A. a try, if I hadn’t been paralyzed with alcoholism, if, if if . . . How I fantasize about acting in a hit T.V. series shot in Hawaii, and how easily I forget that if it were true, Griffen and Ella wouldn’t be alive, and the struggles I endure now would be replaced by others, like the ones Terry had to endure on the way to playing Locke. The darkness says, you’re a loser Ben, and what’s worse, you could have been a winner, like Terry.

What pulls me back into the light is my family and my work. Pulling on the costumes I wear for Jason and exploring these wild and wonderful characters, hearing the extraordinary sound of intergenerational laughter from the audience, feeling my kinship to the artists I work with and to the audience I serve. It’s a kinship I share with Terry O’Quinn, and with actors everywhere, and I am comforted by the truth that it doesn’t matter where you act, it matters that you act at all, and act well.

This morning, we played for a school group of about 12 kids and a handful of teachers (the theater holds 175). Peter, who plays a bunch of roles in the play, was grumpy about having to put on all his make-up for such a small group. I was surprised to find that I wasn’t. Something has changed in me. Others have witnessed it. This summer, my friend Kathryn who was my partner on stage in two of the three short plays I acted in for 30Fest, said to me during a tech rehearsal, “So what’s up with you? You’re different – good different”. Abbey, during a conference about the upcoming season at the theater, commented, “People have been glad to have you around Ben. Please take this in the best possible way, they tell me, ‘It’s like the good Ben is here!’” Here’s what I told Kathryn, but couldn’t say to Abbey: I have God in my life now.

I think, very quietly, and with no fanfare, I have been born again. It took about 13 years, beginning with my surrender to my addiction and having its apotheosis through The Religious Society of Friends. It has been a slow motion conversion. And I feel in my struggle and pain around being denied tenure, I have passed through a rite of purification, and what had been closed up inside has finally unfolded on the outside. It is private – I don’t talk about it unless asked, and then only to those who I feel can hear it without alarm or confusion. And it’s not scripture based. It’s not even Christocentric by any conventional standard, although I was deeply moved by Anne Lamott's account of her conversion. In it, she imagined Christ following her around as a stray dog, and then sitting in the corner of her room, a hunched and shadowy figure, until finally she stood up in her misery and said, “Okay! You can come in!”. Nothing that dramatic for me, but I relate to the sense of being pursued by Something with enormous spiritual goodness. For me, S/He hovers, or sits near me like the angels in Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire. I feel renewed by my Suitor, and I have held the image of Jesus in my mind during meeting for worship, seeing Him sit amongst us, occasionally sliding off his bench to wash someone’s feet.

I have just finished reading the 19th century journal of American Quaker John Woolman. I figured, if I have set out to write a 21st century Quaker journal, I might as well read the most famous one I can find from the past. Woolman’s journal is even more widely read that Fox’s, in part because he articulates spirit-based positions on economic justice that were far ahead of his time, in part because his ministry to abolish slavery is so forceful and so personal, in part because the quality of his faith is overpowering. I confess, friends, I felt ashamed at my puny faith when I hold it against John’s, who could not meet a moment in his life without being completely aware of the spiritual implications of it. He took the principal of living one’s faith to the logical extreme, and famously refused to wear dyed clothes because he felt the use of dyes to be both ostentatious, and leading to the oppression of those forced to make them. I fear that if poor John were alive today, her would throw himself from the Ben Franklin bridge in despair, so deeply into the darkness – by his definition - we have drifted as country.

But I also saw that I can’t be an 18th century Quaker in the 21st century. I feel I am called to Quaker ministry in the terms of my own time, and live in the world I have been given. Too often, I fear, Quakers use examples like Woolman as ways to prop up defeatist positions. The only way John is useful to us today is if he propels us forward into action. We cannot wallow in regret at the sad state of the world, and the inability of our Society to bring Divine Light more fully to earth. We must trust in continuing revelation – that we are just as much agents of God’s will as was John Woolman, each to our own measure.

My God, I’ve forgotten how overwhelming acting is. I am playing two relatively small supporting roles in Jason, and still I haven’t been able to focus on anything else for the past two weeks. I have been scratching notes in my notebook, frantically looking for time to sit down and record what’s been going on. I have a half an hour now, I’ll see how far I can go.

We’ve been in tech, and tonight is first preview. It’s going well. I thought I had injured myself playing Inos, but I made an adjustment in the way I slither around the stage and now my shoulder doesn’t hurt anymore.

Jason observations:

The character Hypsypole sows doubt, but Jason chooses faith. He chooses it. Not because he knows he’ll reach Colchis, but because he chooses to believe he will. Choose to believe: a recovery catchphrase. This is where the evangelicals have it so wrong. No one knows that God exists. Some of us believe it, some of us don’t. My hunch is that actors are good at believing in things, especially in things that matter. The cynic will say, no – actors are good at fooling themselves. Whatever. It’s like my Russian acting teacher Slava said, when I asked him about spirituality and the actor: “Acting is isn't for smart people”. What he meant was, it takes a kind of foolishness to believe in anything, especially in things that you can’t see or prove, like God, or the success of your improbable trip to Colchis. At a moment of crisis at the end of act one, Jason prays a sort of, “help me, help me, help me” prayer. A bird appears and guide him and the Argonauts to safety. He says, “Thank you”.

Jason is a great deal about the hero’s journey, in the great cycle that Joseph Campbell mapped out. I find myself relating to the title character a lot: facing great doubt and forging ahead; relying on my friends to get him through, trying to choose ideals to follow, even when they aren’t expedient.

Jason is a leader. So am I. Does that sound grandiose, friends? I don’t mean it to be. But you live with yourself for a while and you begin to accept who you are. I am always jumping to the head of the line. I enjoy making things and inviting others in. I am comfortable with responsibility. I’m good at making decisions. I think innovatively. I encourage input from others. God gives us each different gifts, and we must be able to name them and celebrate them in ourselves. There are plenty of things I’m not good at, and part of what Jason shows us is that we need to gather people around us to fill in our blanks. A shadow aspect of mine is an unease with institutions, with hierarchies. I am part anarchist: I’m prone to tearing it down and starting over. This can make me hard to work with.

And there is in loneliness in leadership. There is a prophet-like quality in it, in which at the outset people call you a fool a lot. Prophets go against the current and buck the trend. I think Phineus was such a prophet, it. What got him into trouble with God was his tendency to tell people exactly how thing were going to turn out. Phineus began to operate as if he was God, and God said, “Um, no”. I think God much prefers to work in suggestions and symbols. God makes it possible, we make it happen. Leadership has the aspect of moving forward even when you can’t clearly see where you’re going, but if you have a quality of faith about you that is compelling, others will sense your prophetic power and peel off from the main stream to follow you. Rufus Jones, a great Quaker who worshipped at my meeting in the early 20th century, writes about this kind of prophetic leadership in his book Spiritual Energies in Daily Life:

The prophet has a very different task. He cannot give people what they want. He is under an unescapable compulsion to give them what he believes to be true. He cannot take lines of least resistance; he must work straight up against the current. He cannot work for quick effects; he must slowly educate his people and compel them to see what they have not seen before. The amens are very slow to come to his words, and he cannot look for emotional thrills. he must risk all that is dear to himself, except the truth, as he sets himself to his task . . . .

But this is not all there is to say. It is not possible to teach the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; it does not drop like the shooting star from the distant skies. The great prophets of all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had their "ears to the ground” . . . but have understood the human heart.

I reflect on my constant sense of “otherness” I have carried around with me in my life, how I have always chosen rooms away from the rest of the family to sleep in. I know this is born from my strange childhood, but maybe it also something from another Source. Maybe it is who I am – and being who I am makes me best.

I reflect on my first prayer. In a moment of unbearable anguish, after having received a thrashing from both my father and my stepmother (physical from him, verbal form her) I was left alone to cry in my room. I was 10 or 11. Sobbing, I buried my face in my pillow and said, “Please help me. Please help me. I won’t let them beat me. I won’t let them”. I must have been imitating something I had seen in a movie or a T.V. show. I had no religious instruction as a child. And abuse like that was very rare. I remember this episode being shocking because of its suddenness and disproportion to whatever I had done to trigger it. But the grief I felt was real, and so was the prayer. My next prayer was 18 years later, in a similar darkness, only I was the one administering the beating, me and my mistress, drink. The form was similarly borrowed, but again, the grief was very real. Out of these borrowed forms a true faith emerged, forged in despair.