When I was younger, I was supposed to be a preacher, but I decided it would be too much responsibility. I didn’t want to worry about other peoples’ souls. I switched to pre-med, but I didn’t want to worry about other peoples’ bodies. And so, I switched to playwriting.
The expectation that I become a preacher did not come out of nowhere. I grew up in churches. My mother went to seminary when I was in middle school. During the summer months I’d sit next to her during her classes. I learned some Greek, some Hebrew. I read books on hermeneutics and epistemology. Some of it I understood. Some of it I pretended to understand.
In seminary you learn a lot about translation. You learn about how there can be more than one way to translate a word. You come to realize just how many words the Bible has that could be translated this way or that way. The act of interpreting the Bible carries with it a lot of responsibility. A friend from high school who ended up becoming a pastor recently said to me that pastors have to be very careful not to remake the gospel into their own image.
But my question was, “Isn’t that unavoidable?”
For a few years, I taught expository writing at NYU. I’d have students read challenging texts by folks like Barthes, Berger, or Sontag. I’d ask them simply to read and understand what these writers are saying.
Often the students would project themselves into the meaning of the essays we were studying. The students were eager to find ways to make the texts “relatable,” and in doing so, they would bend the words of the author to say something the author isn’t actually saying.
That word “relatable” troubles me. It implies that because I think something is like “me” it is therefore generally understandable and also especially good. But what about the things that are nothing like “me”? Our imaginations seem to be so limited by our personal experiences, you have to wonder if it’s even possible to understand something that sits outside of those experiences.
That expository writing class became, in large part, about the task of encouraging students to be okay with not immediately understanding the texts. In the rush to understand, we get in the way of our ability to see something as it is.
I can feel that rush to understand when people ask me, with respect to The Christians, what I personally believe. I refuse to answer the question. I’m not necessarily cagey about my beliefs (although I do tend to think that the attempt to put those beliefs into words will always result in a misrepresentation of said beliefs; I am very mistrustful of words), but I suspect that answering the question will somehow diminish the effect of the play.
I can also feel it when I’m asked if the play is based on this preacher or that preacher. (Invariably, the answer is no. It’s inspired by many different preachers and many people who are not preachers, all thrown into a blender.)
In these kinds of questions, I detect the desire to explain away something. I detect the desire to locate a single, visible “point.” And while the plot of The Christians is far from ambiguous, the play is a series of contradictory arguments. No single argument “wins.” There’s no resolution.
That lack of obvious resolution can be uncomfortable, agitating. But we can also take pleasure in the agitation.
And maybe something more complex and true becomes visible within the agitation, amidst the collision of disparate perspectives.
I think back to my very brief pre-med days. I think back to a physics class I took and to a diagram from the course textbook. I think of this diagram often: it depicted a method of seeing a very tiny particle. The particle is too tiny to see with a microscope, but a scientist could detect its presence by colliding it with lots of other particles and studying how those particles scatter.
Here’s what I’m getting at—something I believe very much:
A church is a place where people go to see something that is very difficult to see. A place where the invisible is—at least for a moment—made visible.
The theatre can be that too.