On the night of the Great Vigil, I read a short story that I wrote about Israel’s deliverance through the Red Sea.
In honor of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, this story is free to read and adapt under a Creative Commons license.
- Wade
Karl Oles presented a creative interpretation of the Creation story on the night of the Great Vigil.
The idea of “faith as performance” comes to the fore in a very blatant way during Holy Week.
On Passion Sunday we reenacted the Passion of our Lord, taking the parts of Pilate, the Pharisees, the crowds, and Christ himself during the liturgy.
Then during the Great Vigil on the following Saturday, several of us presented the night’s readings through creative interpretations: music, fiction, spoken word, and dance. (I’ll post a couple of the pieces here over the next few days.)
Stanley Hauerwas addressed faith as performance in this interview on Homiletics online:
HOMILETICS: Your recent book on Bonhoeffer, Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence — I thought “performing” was an interesting word. Faith as performance.
HAUERWAS: That was very intentional. One of the things that liberal democratic society has encouraged Christians to believe about what they believe is that what it means to be a Christian is primarily belief![laughter]. So you hold to these 26 absurd propositions before breakfast, you know.
This is a deep misunderstanding about how Christianity works. Of course we believe that God is God and we are not and that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit but that this is not a set of propositions — but is rather embedded in a community of practices that make those beliefs themselves work and give us a community by which we are shaped. Religious belief is not just some kind of primitive metaphysics, but in fact it is a performance just like you’d perform Lear. What people think Christianity is, is that it’s like the text of Lear, rather than the actual production of Lear. It has to be performed for you to understand what Lear is — a drama. You can read it, but unfortunately Christians so often want to make Christianity a text rather than a performance.
- Wade
Story written for the April 15, 2006 Easter Vigil liturgy at Episcopal Church of the Redeemer in Kenmore, WA.
“Ararat”
by Wade Rockett
I, the mountain Ararat, one of the highest upon the Earth; to the small crawling things: grace and peace be upon you, and glory and honor to our Shaper above, whose triple peaks shine like the sun, and whose slopes endure forever. Amen.
You have asked me to tell what I remember of the Great Flood. I was there, of course, although I was new then. We, the highest, were all new: formed in ancient darkness beneath the deep waters, we rose at the Shaper’s call to break the surface with a crash and a roar, sending wet spray skyward from our slopes. We became land, hills, mountains, valleys, canyons, rocks, boulders, the Shaper’s love made manifest in hard stone, glowing gems, veins of hidden gold.
We are stone and stone is strong; but water – the first-made of Creation – is stronger still. Water erodes, dissolves, cracks, breaks mountains into gravel and sweeps the pieces into the sea. It was the Shaper’s mercy that brought forth dry land from the waters of creation. It was the Shaper’s wrath that would now plunge the land, and all that lived upon it, back into the deeps.
"We are trying to live out, as best we can, the religion of the heart. You do that with things that aren't very rational, like music, art, prayer, and liturgy - by giving people an opportunity to learn what really matters, which is living in a relationship with God."
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