As this Jubilee of Hope comes to a close, we can recognize an opportunity to go forward keeping a desire to continue working on committing to an outlook of hopefulness.
The New Year is always a great time to look back over the previous year and establish something new in one’s life. The common practice of making New Year’s resolutions was good for me in the past, but I found that the expectation of the resolution often had disappointment built in. The perfection I aimed at was rarely achieved immediately, and the negative feelings about not living up to the resolution would sometimes make me abandon the resolution completely.
A few years ago, I decided to start making New Year’s “refrains” instead of resolutions, a kind of mantra that I would repeat to keep me focused and energized.
A few years ago, I decided to start making New Year’s “refrains” instead of resolutions, a kind of mantra that I would repeat to keep me focused and energized. The fun was coming up with something that had a real aim but was broad enough to be free from harsh assessments of success and failure. I looked at areas of my life where I wanted to challenge myself or adjust my habitual response to a situation to expand past the limits of what had become automatic for me. For example, I can tend to rush through things when I’m overly stressed, so one year I adopted “take your time” as my New Year’s mantra. Another year I wanted to work on letting go of feeling overwhelmed with tasks at hand, so I chose as my mantra “share the weight, ” and another was “people, not projects.”
The specific but open-ended mantras were always connected to real moments, real desires, real needs and as a result brought forth fruitfulness in my adjusting to the moment regardless of the outcome.
To my surprise, my chosen refrain never lost its freshness and its newness because I allowed it to come spontaneously from the work at hand at whatever moment I needed it. I had not predetermined when I would repeat the refrain, I just knew that there would be instances during the day where I would need to remember it. Rather than a predetermined resolution intimidating me, the specific but open-ended mantras were always connected to real moments, real desires, real needs and as a result brought forth fruitfulness in my adjusting to the moment regardless of the outcome. Rather than demanding results, I was shaping conditions that allowed results to happen. That never gets old.
Life Story:
Actors work to take something that they know backwards and forwards: text, blocking, actions and objectives — things they have gone over a million times in rehearsal. The challenge is to make it seem new with each performance. Each presentation of these elements of the work must appear to an audience as if it is being lived for the first time.
Audience members can tell when a performer is fresh, or on automatic pilot. Once I was in the audience of a long-playing touring show and was bored to tears because I could tell the lead actor was just “phoning it in.” The text was engaging because it was an adaptation of a great book, but the performer’s lack of investment was dangerously close to making me leave. There were moments in the performance where I would wake up, because there was something the actor could actually care about. For those brief moments, I invested and I cared, because something seemed new, fresh, connected to something that was happening now.
On the other opposite end of the spectrum, it is absolutely thrilling when a performer is totally present, totally committed, no matter how many times they have done a show. I was in the audience for Carol Channing’s 1,500th performance (yes her personal 1,500th!) of “Hello Dolly,” and it was just as fresh as I imagine her first. Why? She connected with this particular audience as a new lifeline, a new inspiration, a new partner. Each moment is new in life; why not let something of the actual newness of the present moment into even the most studied of daily practices?
Work Story:
One of the first productions we did with my own company, Magis Theatre, was a production of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” It was a co-production with the Shakespeare Project, and my good friend Scott Cargle organized a festival called “Play Outside” with the New York City Park system. The production was a remount from six years earlier with Opera House Arts in Stonington, Maine.
I was playing Leontes and was thrilled to take on this wonderfully complex role once more. The character goes from placid to maniacal in a matter of a few pages, and you can imagine how this would require a very specific score of actions and triggers to set off a believable chain of events that would allow an audience to believe this almost instantaneous shift in the character. Difficult enough in the quiet and dark of an opera house — add the various stimuli of the New York City Park system!
I had mistakenly begun the run expecting to be focused in the same way that I was when I performed it in a self-contained theatre space. I would view outside stimulus of the audience as “interference” with my pre-determined actor’s score. Until one day when I heard a baby screaming … and I mean SCREAMING. It came in short bursts, usually at significant points in the arc of actions I was trying to recreate. I felt distracted until the demands of the blocking of the scene had me facing out … in direct view of the raucous infant.
To my surprise, he not “misbehaving” as I had assumed. He was glued to the performance. His eyes wide, his fists clenched. But not screaming … yet. Directed outward, I saw that there was a good reason why his outbursts were so in sync with Leontes’ outbursts. From his stroller, he too was playing Leontes. Letting this reality in for a moment no longer distracted me from my set of tasks, it fueled me. Had I not been in a position where I could let the present moment in, I would have remained stuck in my own judgment.
Suggestions:
- Come up with your own refrain for the New Year or for a specific project or goal you are working on. See what you might want to fold into your consciousness, and compose a short phrase you can repeat to yourself as a friendly reminder.
- Reread one of the pieces Pope Francis wrote about hope. Notice what has deepened in you or what takes on new meaning.
- Revisit one of the suggestions you may have tried from a previous month of the practice. Try it in your new circumstances and notice both the differences and the continuity.
- Play a game you played as a child, or if you are a parent, uncle, aunt or teacher; teach the game to one of your youngsters.
- Go back to a monologue, poem or song you have memorized and imagine expressing it as yourself to your best friend, your parent, your love, your inner self and see what new colors you can discover.
- Listen to people around you and try to note four different interesting vocal qualities. Try to recreate them in your own voice. Don’t go for an exact match, just pay attention to what your voice is doing in a new way.
- Look at the same view out your window on five different moments of the day or five different days of the week. Jot down the new elements in your journal.
- Go to a performance and pay attention to the rapport between the most successful actor in the cast and the audience.
Looking Back Over the Course of the Year:
Over the course of this past year, we have been looking at themes that come up in the creative life and the spiritual life. Each theme is something we can come back to again and again when that particular theme resonates for me, or when I feel a particular need. The challenge is coming back to it in a way that is still seeking something, instead of thinking that I already know how this is going to turn out. The suggested practices each month are meant to build up a battery of things I can do — various activities— and still truly and confidently call it my practice. I find that my personal, creative and spiritual practices have to be flexible enough to fit into whatever the present moment presents to me. As I mentioned in a previous month, “The greatest secret about a practice is that you do it.”
The greatest secret about a practice is that you do it.
The final meditation in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius is the “Contemplatio ad Amorem,” the contemplation to obtain divine love. Some have suggested that this meditation was often done along the journey back home from the retreat. In it, the person making the retreat is invited to go over the course of the graces received during the retreat, and even over the entirety of life. Ignatius encourages us to see each of these as a very particular gift that God has given. He asks us, in light of all that has been given to me, what will be my response?
One option he gives us is a prayer called the “Suscipe”:
Take Lord and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding and my entire will,
all that I have and possess.
You have given all to me, now I return it.
All is yours, do with it what you will.
Give me only your Love and your Grace,
these suffice for me.
As we journey forward, what are the graces I have received? What will be my response?
Further investigation:
Take a look at Amy Welborn’s article on the Suscipe.