Day 23: National Choreography Month

Finished the Queen song and now I'm getting back to my choreographic roots with a large-group White Heart number -- specifically Heaven Of My Heart (1993).

I think this one comes out of some of the emotional background of Who Wants To Live Forever -- that weight of nostalgia, that longing for another world. I'm still so tired of being here. I'm not suicidal, most of the time, just weary... this breathtaking, soul-scarring, heartbreaking, physically heavy weariness, this bone-crushing, mind-melting nostalgia for something I can hardly remember or perhaps never experienced. I feel like I don't belong here, and I want to go somewhere where I do... home -- wherever that even is anymore.

Locked in a sky so blue

Is a land made for me and you

And we're going there, but until the dream comes true

There's a secret place

So full of love and grace

When the world spins and breaks apart

I'm going to the other heaven of my heart...

I've been realising lately that the theme of a lot of my work (not just choreography) is the theme of escape. Not extreme, altered-reality escape -- not detaching oneself from one's emotions; more like escaping into a better reality. I spent so much time in my head because that was where my better worlds were -- the worlds in my head that I unlocked and sculpted with my fingers on the keyboard and my feet on a creaking wood floor. Maybe this song best describes what I've been doing with my artistic output all along. The themes were about escaping because that's what I have always wanted, more than anything -- to be able to reach the goodness that exists only just beyond the curtain of the physical, time-bound world. I can feel it, I sometimes see glimpses of it, but it can't come here, and, until my time comes, I can't go there either. I guess this is why songs like Terry Scott Taylor's Beyond The Wall Of Sleep (among others) resonate with me SO strongly -- at least there is one other person on the planet who sees it too. It's not just me.

And escape is not just the theme of my work, it's often the reason I create. I can go forward to heaven, or back to times I had with people who I will never see again until I can move forward to heaven -- and in the past few years, creating art has often done both at the same time. Choreographing this song specifically takes me back to the time when I still had viable dreams of choreographing and performing, and the friendship of people like M and Brittney. If I could lock myself in any year forever, it would be 2012. There was so much potential and hope in my life then. Now I'm just old and washed up. Doing this piece has really made me realise just how critical M's very existence was to my creative process. There's a duet section in this piece, and I still see her beside me in my mind's eye, doing the beats and turns as I write them down -- her endless energy and bright dramatic eyes. She wanted to escape too, and she was lucky enough to get it. I would be lying if I said I wasn't jealous. I've already choreographed a piece in her memory, but I think this one is in her memory too. No doubt everything I choreograph from now on will be.

I'm about a third of the way through the song now. It's a light, airy allegro piece, very ethereal, lots of arms and heads and a few floating turns... a lot like the music itself, energetic yet dream-like. I am LOVING choreographing the duet part (I still have a little bit of it to go), especially making them intertwine with each other and with White Heart's glorious harmonies. I can't put into words how much I wish M could dance this with me for real. I wish the curtain of time didn't seperate us.

There I go, trying to escape again.

Stream Of Consciousness -- The London 2012 Opening Ceremonies

(If I was on Twitter, my updates during the ceremony this afternoon might have gone something like this...)

~ Okay, the Rona commercials are officially the best of the Olympics. (I still miss Frank and Gordon though -- remember them from Torino 2006 on CBC?)

~ The music at the end of the opening bit, when they'd just forged the ring -- that was beautiful. I don't remember it anymore, but I remember thinking it was beautiful.

~ Can you fathom how many people were just dancing? And then how many people were technicians, working the lights and giving direction? How crazy organised was this? More crazy -- how much time did the choreographer spend on this? I'm sure he had assistants, but still -- I have trouble keeping track of a sixteen-person formation in my head. I can't even wrap my head around several thousand.

~ I seriously almost got my camera so I could take a picture of the rings against the darkening sky, even though it was on the TV screen. Stunning. The colour was fantastic.

~ OHMYGOODNESS IT'S MR BEAN!!!

~ Wow, Mr Bean got old... still just as funny though.

~ Holy man that's a lot of spandex... I mean, I wasn't around in the seventies so I don't know, but that still seems excessive...

~ That dance to Abide With Me was so cool! Though I wouldn't have put it to such a solemn song.

~ I would so love to be a part of something like this. It doesn't matter where or how or in what position -- I just want to be on that stage.

~ Ha, look at all those iPhones in the parade of nations.

~ Are you freaking kidding me? Am I seriously going to have to listen to that crappy I Believe song every hour for seventeen days -- again? No. No. Just -- no. (And to make this worse, I think this is a network decision, meaning we Canadians are the only ones who have to suffer... come on CTV, really? Really? There haven't been any half-decent songs recorded since Vancouver 2010 that you could play ad nauseum?)

~ I hope nobody in London planned on getting a 'decent' nights' sleep tonight. That light show would wake anybody.

~ I wonder just how many human beings there are in that place. You have all the athletes from all the countries, you have the spectators, you have everyone who shows up on the stage at some point in the show, you have all the technicians and the cameramen from who knows how many networks...

~ GO CANADA GO!!!

~ I so want to pull off something even a fraction of this magnitude.

~ Did you see the ceremony? Did you see how many people where there, giving their all for this? How much effort and detail and practice went into this? And Heaven will be something like this, only more so -- all the people praising God with this intensity and passion and exuberance. And it won't be over in four hours -- it'll go on for eternity.
Awesome.

Restless...

This is me rambling a bit, just so you're aware.

The last few weeks have been torment for me.

It's as if I had forgotten Jesus is going to return and suddenly I remembered... and it terrifies me.

Since I claim to be a Christian, I'm supposed to be ready. And I don't feel that I am. And that in itself terrifies me even more, because then obviously I don't find Jesus as precious as He should be to me. Or maybe I don't know Him at all; maybe it's all head knowledge from a lifetime of attending church.

Perhaps there's a huge glaring sin that's separating us. Once you're God's child, sin doesn't completely cut you off from God, although it does strain the communication.

But I don't know if I'm God's child to begin with.

I 'prayed a prayer' when I was five, and then sort of renewed my commitment a couple years ago as I was beginning to understand more of what it actually meant to be a Christian. But does that count? As much as I think about pleasing God and trying to do as much as I can in obedience to His word, I feel I don't do anything... that I'm just going through the motions of life.

But what more does He want me to do today? I'm pretty sure I know what He'd like me to do in the semi-near future, but what about now? What about today? This moment? What can I do this very hour, minute, second, that will bring glory to His name, no matter if no one else notices or cares? In my daily life, how can I live it to the fullest for God?

I think the church in general has, over the years, built up this misconception that the only way you can serve God is to go live in the remote jungles of Africa and preach to an entire tribal group that formerly participated in witchcraft and cannibalism and human sacrifice. And it makes everyone who God hasn't called to that sort of thing feel either 'less Christian' or free to sit on the couch and watch televangelists all day while other people do the 'dirty work.'

Nobody makes note of the fact that the mission field is all around us. That God can call you to be an accountant or something and still serve Him by doing that while at the same time being open about your faith and reflecting Christ to your spiritually-lost family, friends, and neighbours. Because the church seems to have decided that this sort of thing isn't important, I and everybody else have no idea where to start glorifying God in our normal daily routines. And that's a tragedy really.

What was that Jesus said? 'Go into all the world and make disciples of all men.' All men. Not just the remote tribesmen of Africa or India or Central America somewhere. All men, in all the world -- including first-world countries like Canada and the US.

But we feel unequipped for that. We had led ourselves to believe that you must be special and have been visited by an angel in order to do any mission work. (This just occurred to me... why do we want an angel to tell us to do this when Jesus Himself gave the command? Who has greater authority than Jesus to give such a command? Answer: no one. The big guy Himself, if you will, told us to do this. So hop to it. (This applies to me and everyone else, by the way.))

And this ties in to the other part of my fear.

I have many unsaved relatives and a few unsaved friends. The difficulty is, most of them would, if asked, call themselves Christians because most of them, at some point in time, did attend church. How can you show them they may not be Christians after all? I can't even know that for sure... maybe they are. Maybe if they died, they would end up in Heaven. But maybe they aren't, and maybe they would end up in Hell, forsaken by God for eternity (Think about that a minute. Eternity -- literally forever, no end, no 'undo' button).

The less spiritual fruit you see in their lives, the more you worry about their eternal destiny... and the more likely they are to be offended if you broach the subject. You want to avoid being hypocritical, especially when you yourself are struggling with a number of things, but you also genuinely worry about the condition of their soul. If Jesus came right now, where would they end up? And would He look at me and say, 'I gave you a chance to show Myself to them. Why didn't you?'

How can you answer that?

You can't just walk up to them and start preaching at them. They'd never speak to you again. But you also can't just stay silent because you have no idea how long they have and you really do want them to end up in Heaven.

There's this old Larry Norman song that talks about Christ's return. One line says 'I wish we'd all been ready...' and that's been my thought for the past couple of weeks. I want everyone in the world to be ready. I don't really have a lot of enemies, but even if I did, I wouldn't want them in Hell either.  Jesus told a parable about a rich man and a beggar named Lazarus (not the one He rose from the dead -- that guy was real). Lazarus sat outside the rich man's gate and begged for bread, but the rich man never helped him. When they both died, Lazarus, because he trusted in God, went to Heaven. The rich man, because he didn't know Jesus, went to Hell.

And as the rich man was tormented in Hell, he saw Lazarus enjoying Heaven with other people who had followed God and he pleaded with Lazarus and Abraham to help him. They said they couldn't -- the rich man had had his whole life to make his choice and now he was stuck with it. Then the rich man begged them to send someone to Earth to tell his brothers to avoid Hell at all costs. And Abraham said, 'There are people on Earth who know Jesus. Your brothers must listen to them. Because if they won't listen to the Christians, they won't believe someone who's risen from the dead either.' (This is all paraphrased... find the official version of the parable in Luke chapter 16 verses 19-31.)

You know, that's us. We are the Christians that the rich man's brothers need to listen to. They can't listen if we leave the job to somebody else because eventually we're going to run out of 'somebody elses.' Notice how the rich man didn't say 'Woo-hoo, I'm the first one here for the big party in Hell!' He pleaded that his brothers would be warned so they could avoid this terrible place. Misery does not love company in the case of Hell.

So we owe it to all the lost who have already died to let as many people as possible know what they're heading for and that there is an alternative. We can't force them to make the decision of course, but we can give them as much information as we can and love them as God does.
And pray.
Maybe sometimes that's all we can do. But maybe sometimes God asks us to do more, and we have to do it.

Don't think I'm preaching at anyone reading this. I'm not. I'm just trying to sort of my own thoughts. (That's why it probably seems to go off on half-thought-out tangents. Also, it's very likely that I didn't explain something as well as I could have, or that I've got something completely the wrong way. Check this against the Bible if you've any doubts or questions.)

If I could have one wish

I know just what I'd like to find

If I could have one dream

Come true before my eyes

More than a pot of gold

More than a pathway to the stars

More than anything I know

I want Jesus in your heart

      ~ Connie Scott, Jesus In Your Heart

(from Spirit Mover; Image 7 Records, 1985. The song is on iTunes here.)