December 16, 2005Good NoiseI'm about to become Charlie Brown. I'm playing the part in a sketch for our church's Christmas pageant. I've got the dance down, which does me no good, because the part doesn't call for dancing. Instead, I've got to figure out how to match Charlie Brown's odd speech patterns and, more than anything, how to move naturally between having no mouth and having a huge, gaping hole of nothingness as I speak. The scene we're doing is from the Charlie Brown Christmas special--Charlie Brown is talking to Linus. It's an interesting movement from Charlie's desperation to Linus's serene retelling of the Christmas story. I was cast because I'm good at being loud; my counterpart is pretty soft-spoken and a really good dramatic reader. We ran lines last night, and whereas my big problem was how wide to open my mouth, Linus stumbled over one phrase: "good news of great joy." This was the herald angel announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds keeping watch at night, et cetera et cetera. On our first pass the phrase was conflated into two words: "good noise." There's a paradox built into the Christmas story: heavenly peace, on one hand, and really loud angels on the other. We're often inclined to equate silence with godliness, stoic impassibility with holiness. But one of most significant moments in world history--the birth of God--was a spectacle of sound and light. There is such a thing as "good noise," I think, and particularly as it relates to "good news." The prophet Isaiah speaks to it: How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, "Your God reigns!" This seems as good a time as any to let you know about my new blog, which will run independently of this one. I've long been a fan of "loud time" as a way to balance an inordinate fascination with the evangelical practice of "quiet time," so I've inaugurated Loud Time as a place to explore and live out the concept of spiritual life together. Check it out and let me know what you think. In any event, may you have good noise this Christmas, and may you sleep in heavenly peace. Posted by Dave Zimmerman
at December 16, 2005 9:21 AM
ooohhhh...fancy. Very, very nice. Comment by: Damon at December 21, 2005 6:48 AMWow--you're not kidding. I didn't even know they had done this. Dave Comment by: dave at December 21, 2005 7:53 AMComments are closed for this entry. |
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