The Annunciation's Drama

A sort of advent ensues prior to a dramatic play. We make our way to the theater, purchase tickets, take our seats and wait for the curtain to rise. Yet something else transpires pre-show. We willingly put ourselves at risk for we know art has the ability to alter our belief systems— including the ways we view the world and ourselves. And thus it is so with Christianity, the world being altered by a true story. George Steiner goes as far to define the narrative of the annunciation as the scene of “gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being.” Indeed, beware of the angel’s announcement that the Holy Spirit is birthing something new in you, for as Simeon uttered to Mary, “A sword will pierce your own soul too.”

The Christian narrative asks us to give up our wants, or rather, re-align them with God’s. This push and pull is the formula for good drama. And what drama, as Lionel Trilling observes, “does not consist of the opposition of ideas?” Art unsettles. This is how it aids the arrival of Jesus. Art interrogates our ways of being, and hopefully, acknowledges our need for Him.

In literary terms, Edward Said would describe the “opposition of ideas” as “antithetical positions.” Here logic and reason dally with pure contingency. According to Said, this volatile combination generates meaning. And so in the logic of art making we become faithful through the contingencies. Faithful art provides meaning, produces new life, and breaks up the walls of our cautionary being.

Let advent and the annunciation enlarge you.

--Maria

Creativity and Incarnation; The message of Advent

In The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller the playwright describes a singular moment of artistic creation – the very first time in rehearsal that actor Lee J. Cobb actually became the character of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman.

…Lee rose from his chair and looked at Milly Dunnock and there was a silence. And then he said, “I was driving along, you understand, and then all of a sudden I’m going off the road…”

And the theater vanished. The stage vanished. The chill of an age-old recognition shuddered my spine; a voice was sounding in the dimly lit air up front, a created spirit, an incarnation, a Godlike creation was taking place; a new human being was being formed before all our eyes, born for the first time on this earth, made real by an act of will, by an artist’s summoning up of all his memories and his intelligence; a birth was taking place above the meaningless traffic below… I knew then that something astounding was being made here. It would have been almost enough for me without even opening the play.

Miller’s fascination and wonder at witnessing a live artistic birth reveals a wonderful truth – that creativity and incarnation are intertwined. Many artists have experienced similar moments when time stands still and something new suddenly springs to life. It is what makes art so thrilling. The only fitting descriptive language that seems to suffice is the supernatural.

The beauty of Christ’s incarnation, which we celebrate at Advent, is that God chose to become like us, to identify with us, in order to save us. He did not come as a raging storm, smiting everything in His path. He came as Emmanuel, God with us. He felt what we feel and experienced what we experience. This is not the action of a remote and uncaring deity but of a lover doing whatever is necessary to rescue the beloved. Take away the incarnation and you drain the power of Augustine’s conclusion: “God is more intimate to me than I am to myself.”

--Steve Shaffer

Steve is a fellowship group director at Redeemer. This entry is excerpted from his presentation from the Living Room study series.