I do not desire to prove anything. I do not wish to convince anyone of anything. This is only what I have come to believe. This is a choice I make.
As a Quaker, I listen. I listen to the sounds, and I listen to the quiet where I discern the rustle of God’s great robe. I am touched. I witness. I sense God everywhere: in the patterns of my life, in other people, in the music I listen to, in my students, in my family. But I must choose to be present, watch and listen, and I choose to give divine import to what I witness.
As an actor, I feel, move and speak. I reach across empty space towards other beating hearts. I move them and am moved by them. I serve the community I live in with my art. Each new role is the most important role I have ever played. Each new role is world premiere.
As a teacher, I walk the walk. I let my life speak, and I fill my students with hope and possibility, helping them find the necessary virtues in themselves to begin walking the beautiful and preposterous road of the American actor.
As a husband and a father, I am ever vigilant, never taking these three lives for granted, choosing again and again to be a loving presence in their lives, moving them always back to the center of everything.
As person in recovery, I am reminded that every day free from addiction is a gift and a miracle. I honor that miracle by taking care of that gift.
What I want is to change the world. When I am creative, I am closer to God, and when I am witnessed being closer to God, I am a minister, and when I am minister I am helping others get closer to God too. I have faith that when I am acting, teaching, worshiping and loving my family I am a minister and I am changing the world. I work on letting that be enough.
I cannot stop the war. But I can make people laugh. I can soften people’s hearts. I can bring people together where they can feel each other’s heat. I can give the young hope. I can raise strong and peaceful children. I can lift up an amazing woman. These are extraordinary powers. They are from God.
Here is a pattern I witness in my life: I am led by continuing revelation to explore new territories of Quaker worship. This leading is part of a larger whole, involving a love of youth, of the Society of Friends and of the divine mixture of actor and Quaker in my heart. I sense a chafing at our customs, and a need for new expressions. I am mindful of our traditions that lead us away from adherence to empty forms and rote rituals. I seek the courage to join others in choreographing Godly dances and composing new Spirit songs.
Another pattern: I sense a hunger in the artists I meet for a way to discover and embrace their own holiness away from conventional churches. And yet, I sense a slow growing closer together of my unconventional church – the Quakers – and our evangelical brethren.
And another: I begin in the middle and move to the outside looking in, yearning to be in the middle again. My life is an on-going movement from the center to the edge. Or maybe I am always at the edge, trying to pull the center towards me. In loving the eccentric, the anarchist, the prophet, the outcast, the maverick, I am loving this aspect of myself. It is an essential aspect, one I came in to the world with, and one that was groomed by the circumstances of my life: an only child of divorced parents, raised in a family that was never really mine. My transformation from defeated drunk to worker in the world was due in part to my decision not to be at war with this part of myself. I am no longer ashamed of who I am or where I’m from. This is huge.
My mother and father still continue to teach me: my mother about art, my father about family. I love and honor them. I witness them both in me in so many ways. I am glad I chose them.
And another: I mend the wounds of my real and imaginary exiles by burrowing into community and family. I am led to jump up and down like a silly cheerleader for both my communities – theatre and Quaker. I like to gently mingle those communities, it makes me happy. This is one of the things The Rooms taught me: let us love you until you can love yourself. I love you loving me, and I love me loving you back. I sense that my work is here where I live, and that in naming and celebrating that work – and the work of others here – I am breaking new ground.
And yet I have a strained relationship with institutions. I’m working on this, trying move from the edge a little bit back to the center, trying to ease my wounded suspicions.
Nowhere do I burrow more deeply than with my little family. In making them so very important to me, in choosing them over other things I might have done, I have missed some opportunities and compromised my professional possibilities. I now see this as an intentional choice, and when one of my children leaves their place at the table just so they can thrown themselves at me and hug me, saying I love you so much Daddy, I am certain of that choice. And when I am able step back from the chatter and the frustrations, and witness what my wife and I are doing in the world together, when we come together in embraces too deep for words, when I feel myself humbled by who she is and that she chose me, and that she keeps choosing me, I am certain of my choice. But I have to remind myself to pay attention. This is the only way to work through the doubts. When I pay attention, even in the darkest place, I can crawl back to gratitude. Then I can stand again.
Speaking of gratitude:
Three shows performed: eight total roles.
Forty or so meetings for worship. Ten to twelve meetings for theatre.
Two workshops created and offered: one on Quaker/actor creativity, one on teaching acting.
One book, one article, one pamphlet and two blogs published.
Four classes taught: one high school, two college, one adult.
Three workshops taken: Long Form Improv, Commedia, Psychodrama.
Two children raised: Griffen and Ella.
One wife loved: Susan.
And the water rises . . .
One car lost: Ellex (the Accord).
One car purchased: Little Blue (the Civic).
Song of the year: Speed of Sound, Coldplay. (Runners up: Clarity, John Mayer; Give up and let it go, Francis Dunnnery, Fix You, Coldplay)
One bridge mended.
And the water flows.
One father aided.
No toilets trained.
Birthdays celebrated.
Anniversaries squeezed in.
Important moments overlooked.
Mistakes made, apologies offered.
Moments of transcendent meaning seized and released.
Bitchy vendettas enacted.
Movements begun and left dangling.
I am the faucet . . .
Awesome circles of community created.
Whispers of quiet affirmation passed along.
Sleepless nights of anxiety passed through.
Doubt and despair wrestled with.
Doubt and despair vanquished quizzically.
Poems written and tears shed.
Gales of laughter.
Farts and awkwardness.
Faith considered and pursued.
God under all, through everything,
and I am the faucet
turn me on turn me on
be with me, be through me,
up from mother earth, Your water,
I am the faucet, you are the Source,
be through me, flowing,
running down streams,
filling ponds to drink from
and the heartbreak of emptiness everywhere,
filling us all to overflow,
so our waters mingle and roll
in great warm rivers,
one water
out -
out into the unfathomable sea.
