Post 190--A Biblical Reader's Theatre

Below follows a Reader's Theatre from the Old Testament. It is written by

a pastor who was raped during his late teens at college. The story is a

story of how families tend to react in shame.  (S)he who has ears.....  

A Bible Resource in the Wake of #MeToo

RE

Ruth Everhart <rutheverhart@me.com>

Sat 2017-10-28, 2:59 PM

A Bible Resource in the Wake of #MeToo A number of people have asked if they can borrow the Readers Theater of the Tamar Story (2 Samuel 13). I put this resource together for my "Shame: Hope & Healing" workshop last week, and am delighted to share it for free. Just click the link above to access a PDF. Let me know what happens when you use this story with a group. It's powerful stuff. READERS THEATER (2 Samuel 13)

Narrator, Amnon, Jonadab, Absalom, Tamar

Narrator: Absalom, David’s son, had a sister who was very attractive. Her name was Tamar. Amnon, also David’s son, was in love with Tamar. In fact, Amnon was obsessed with his sister Tamar — to the point of making himself sick over her. She was a virgin, so he couldn’t see how he could get his hands on her.

But Amnon had a cousin named Jonadab, who was also a good friend. Jonadab was exceptionally streetwise.
Jonadab: “Hey Amnon, why are you moping around like this, day after day—you, the son of the king! Tell me what’s eating at you.”

Amnon: “In a word, Tamar. My brother Absalom’s sister. I’m in love with her.”

Jonadab: “Here’s what you do. Go to bed and pretend you’re sick. When your father comes to visit you, say, ‘Have my sister Tamar come and prepare some supper for me here where I can watch her and she can feed me.’”

Narrator: So Amnon took to his bed and acted sick. When the king came to visit, Amnon said, “Would you do me a favor? Have my sister Tamar come and make some nourishing dumplings here where I can watch her and be fed by her.” David sent word to Tamar who was home at the time: “Go to the house of your brother Amnon and prepare a meal for him.”

So Tamar went to her brother Amnon’s house. She took dough, kneaded it, formed it into dumplings, and cooked them while he watched from his bed. But when she took the cooking pot and served him, he wouldn’t eat. Amnon: “Everyone, clear out of the house. Now, Tamar: Bring the food into my bedroom, where we can eat in privacy.”

Narrator: So Tamar took the nourishing dumplings she had prepared and brought them to her brother Amnon in his bedroom. But when she got ready to feed him, he grabbed her. Amnon: “Come to bed with me, sister!”

Tamar: “No, brother! Don’t hurt me! This kind of thing isn’t done in Israel! Don’t do this terrible thing! Where could I carry my shame? And you—you’ll be out on the street in disgrace. Oh, please! Speak to the king—he’ll let you marry me.”

Narrator: But Amnon wouldn’t listen. Being much stronger than she, he raped her. And no sooner had he raped her than he hated her—an immense hatred. The hatred that he felt for her was greater than the love he’d had for her.

 Amnon: “Get up, and get out!”
Tamar: “Oh no, brother. Please! This is an even worse evil than what you just did to me!”

Narrator: But he wouldn’t listen to her. He called for his valet.

Amnon: “Get rid of this woman. Get her out of my sight! And lock the door after her.”

Narrator: The valet threw her out and locked the door behind her. Tamar was wearing a longsleeved gown because that’s how virgin princesses used to dress from early adolescence on. Tamar poured ashes on her head, then she ripped the long-sleeved gown, held her head in her hands, and walked away, sobbing as she went.

Absalom: “Tamar, has your brother Amnon had his way with you? Now, my dear sister, let’s keep it quiet—a family matter. He is, after all, your brother. Don’t take this so hard.”

Narrator: Tamar lived in her brother Absalom’s home, bitter and desolate.

King David heard the whole story and was enraged, but he didn’t discipline Amnon. David doted on Amnon because he was his firstborn. Absalom quit speaking to Amnon—not a word. He hated him for violating his sister Tamar.

Two years went by. One day Absalom got the idea to throw a big sheep-shearing party and invite all the king’s sons. He was finagling it so his brother Amnon would have to make an appearance and the king would have to allow it.

Absalom: Hey there servants, Look sharp, now. When Amnon is well into the sauce and feeling no pain, and I give the order ‘Strike Amnon,’ you kill him! And don’t be afraid—I’m the one giving the command. Courage! You can do it!”

Narrator: Absalom’s servants did to Amnon exactly what their master ordered. The other sons of the king managed to escape, although at first King David thought all his sons were dead.

Jonadab: Don’t be so upset my master, King David. Not all your sons are dead — just Amnon. And I can tell you why. It’s because Absalom has been outraged at Amnon for years, ever since the day Amnon raped his sister Tamar.

Narrator: And David mourned the death of his son Amnon for three years.

(Created by Rev. Ruth Everhart using the Message paraphrase. Please use freely.)

Post 189--Taize Prayer--What and Where in Vancouver

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have heard of Taize Prayer. You may be curious about it as I have been. For some reason I never actually bothered to check them out, but today I came across this local (for Vancouverites) article giving a fairly clear picture of it. For me, the surprising thing is that it is right under my nose here in Vancouver BC--only a 30-minute walk from my place. The peculiarity of its location is that it is housed in what is known as Canada's poorest postal code. That is, in the ESDT or East Side Down Town.  But, perhaps this isn't so peculiar; that may be its natural home.

Another peculiarity of Taize Prayer is its popularity with young people.  I am a supporter of the Institute for Christian Studies (ICS) in Toronto, a private, small Christian post-graduate Institute of the highest order and of rigorous research and studies. Our problem is that though our students are young people from all over the world, its supporters are just about exclusively seniors.  That is disturbing to us, for who will take our place when we have left the scene?  We are looking at young people and wonder how we can attract them  into the circle of supporters.  In other words, how will it continue without young people?

But here we are with this global movement that may seem stale to outsiders or overly spiritual but attractive to young people. What gives? What is the difference?  What is the Taize secret? 

I'm now thinking I should go visit the place and check it out. You might do well to investigate whether there might be a chapter in your city and check it out for yourself.  In the meantime, I invite you to read the forwarded article by Alicia Ambrosio. I like both her name and her article. Go for it!

Leap of Faith: The distraction-free peace of Taizé prayer

Alicia Ambrosio / Westender

OCTOBER 10, 2017 12:04 PM   Westender

I’m standing on the corner of East Cordova and Gore streets looking at the facade of a church that looks very much shuttered for the evening. “It looks closed,” my astute sidekick observes as we climb the steps of St. James Anglican Church, trying not to disturb the local resident who has tucked in for the night at one end of the stairs. Indeed, the front door is closed.

We try the sides of the church and, on Cordova Street, find a sign with an arrow pointing towards an open gateway. Cell phone flashlights in hand we follow the walkway until we reach a courtyard and see a warm, glowing light flooding from an open door. This is the entrance to the Blessed Sacrament chapel at St. James – a space reserved for weekday masses and, tonight, for a Taizé prayer gathering.

The Taizé prayer style gets its name from Taizé, France, where a religious community made up of men from different Christian denominations live and work. The Taizé community hosts week-long retreats for young people and has developed a unique style of candle-lit prayer based on scripture, short, simple songs in multiple languages, and long periods of silence.   

Inside the chapel at St. James church, seats and low stools have been arranged in a semi-circle around a cluster of candles on the floor. A young woman with a short crop of dark hair pads around barefoot lighting the candles on the floor and the altar, while three young boys entertain themselves on the floor with unlit candles. She introduces herself as Elisha and invites us to take a seat while she finishes setting up. 

Just when it looks like tonight’s session will be an intimate affair, Elisha turns off the overhead lights, sits on a cushion by the candles, and a group of about half a dozen people silently flood into the chapel. My friend whispers, wide-eyed, “They’re all young people!!”

There are a few moments of silence, before Elisha pulls a large Bible towards her and reads Psalm 94. The reading is followed by more silence, and then the most glorious a cappella music begins. The song is two lines in Latin: “Ubi Caritas et Amor, Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est” (meaning “where charity and love are, God is there”) and the melody is just two or three notes repeated over and over. Soon everyone in the chapel is singing, the sound gently bouncing off the high ceiling and filling the cool, candlelit air.

 

I’m not a touchy-feely person of faith, but at a certain point I was surprised to realize my cheeks were wet and my eyes were blurry. At the end of the evening I noted I was not the only person in the chapel who experienced such an effect.

The pattern – a Bible passage, silence, then two or three similarly simple songs – is repeated three times over the course of an hour. After the last song is sung, the lights stay off and the candles stay lit and people get up and leave when they feel ready. “I usually let people stay for quite a while after,” Elisha tells me as we stand in the courtyard chatting.

Taizé prayer evenings have been taking place at St. James on the first Wednesday of every month for almost two years.

The Taizé Community was founded by Roger Schutz in 1949. Today the community is made up of more than a hundred men who make promises to live simple, celibate lives. Most members of the community live in Taizé, while some have been asked to live in disadvantaged parts of the world.

Today the community in France hosts thousands of visitors every year, the vast majority of them young people. Living is simple: dorms or tents. Guests are asked to do regular chores and take part in a variety of workshops, on topics like, “Why poverty is not inevitable and how can we prevent it?” or, “Christians and Muslims living together today” and, “The world changes, ethics remain, what’s my place in that?”

Three times a day church bells sound and everyone gathers together for prayer in the typical Taizé style.

Elisha had a chance to visit the Taizé community a few years back. “I was expecting this contemplative retreat experience, and then bus loads of French high school students arrived and I thought, ‘Oh no.’” To her surprise, the teens kept each other in line and took part wholeheartedly in the community chores, workshops and prayers. The experience drove home for Elisha the belief that all people, especially young people, yearn for peace, stillness and the chance to connect with something bigger than themselves.

Back in Vancouver she felt moved to make Taizé prayer available locally. She knew the chapel at St. James well, having attended the church for many years, and was able to get permission to use the chapel once a month. With the help of a pastor from Artisan Church, a community church based in Railtown, she began hosting the monthly Taizé nights.

Elisha’s only hope was that “in the business of life filled with constant distraction and stress” she could provide a way for people to stop and be still. “We’re constantly distracted, and it’s only when you’re not distracted that you realize you’re unhappy. And when you realize that, you start to ask, ‘What else is there?’ and the only answer is that there has to be something bigger than us.”

In the space and time provided by an evening of Taizé prayer, she hopes people will start asking those questions, and find answers.

• Taizé prayer evenings are held at St. James Anglican Churchthe first Wednesday of every month at 7:30 p.m., in the chapel. St. Andrews United Church is hosting a Taizé contemplative evening on Oct. 15 and Nov. 19.

• After graduating from Simon Fraser University with a degree in communication, Alicia moved to Rome, where she got an unexpected start covering religion. Stints in Toronto, Madrid and Toronto followed, culminating with her return home to the West Coast. Alicia has worked as a television producer and host, and is currently a freelance writer for Aleteia and Catholic News Service, as well as Leap of Faith, the Westender's blog on faith and spirituality in Vancouver.

Post 188--Global Hand Washing Day

In the public washroom in my church there are several posters about hand washing on the wall. One that drew my special attention was the one giving step-by-step instructions about how to wash your hands effectively. 

              1. You turn on the tap.
              2. You hold your hands under the tap to wet them.
              3. You apply soap to your hands.
              4.  Etc., etc. 

I don't believe I need to present you with the full list of instructions. If you read this blog, I think you know how to wash your hands without written instructions on your wall. 

My initial reaction was, "My goodness, what's this world coming to?  So much education and we don't know how to wash our hands?" I couldn't believe what I read!  Do we really need that?  Apparently we do.

Different cultures have different ways of caring for their hands, their hygiene and their health. In the part of Nigeria where I spent many years, people are very particular what they do with which hand. The right hand is the social hand and the food hand, because of the unspoken things they do with their left. Before you eat, you wash your hands in a bowl of water that is passed around along with a towel, but without soap. They want to make sure their hands are clean, especially because in some ethnic cultures they eat with their hands  and often in a group from one bowl. But why no soap? Because the soap smell will affect the taste of the food. However, after the meal, a bowl of clean water is passed around along with the towel AND the soap. So, very hygienic.

In the Canadian culture that surrounds me these days, people eat some foods with their hands and some with fork or spoon.  However, many times they do not wash their hands before eating, not even before eating so-called finger foods. Those who do, do so privately, not publicly.  Probably because I lived in Nigeria so long, I tend to wash my hands before eating, but privately from a tap, not at the table. 

This issue is, of course, hygiene and health.  And that holds not only for food, but for many activities. Whenever I come home from outside, I wash my hands even if I do not intend to eat. The reason is that one picks up all kinds of dirt, both seen and unseen, that can make you ill. 

So, perhaps, those washroom posters are necessary after all, even for careless educated people. At any rate the UN and others think the world needs to have its attention drawn to the need to wash hands regularly. So they established Global Hand Washing Day. I quote the following from some websites:

The first Global Hand Washing Day was held in 2008, when over 120 million children around the world washed their hands with soap in more than 70 countries. Since 2008, community and national leaders have used Global Hand Washing Day to spread the word about hand washing, build sinks and tippy taps, and demonstrate the simplicity and value of clean hands.  Each year, over 200 million people are involved in celebrations in over 100 countries around the world. Global Hand Washing Day is endorsed by a wide array of governments, international institutions, civil society organizations, NGOs, private companies, and individuals. 

Global Handwashing Day is an annual global advocacy day dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding about the importance of handwashing with soap as an easy, effective, and affordable way to prevent diseases and save lives.

Celebrated annually on October 15, Global Handwashing Day was founded by the Global Handwashing Partnership, and is an opportunity to design, test, and replicate creative ways to encourage people to wash their hands with soap at critical times.

Global Handwashing Day is designed to:

• Foster and support a global and local culture of handwashing with soap
• Shine a spotlight on the state of handwashing around the world
• Raise awareness about the benefits of handwashing with soap

Well, I think you get the point. I urge you to join the event this coming Saturday and that you draw many people's attention to it.  As unlikely as I first thought it, I've become a believer and supporter. I hope the same for you--a lot cheaper than your doctor or your pharmacist. And, in case you forgot, God expects us to do all we can to protect ourselves by living responsibly. Washing our hands regularly is part of that responsible living. 

https://globalhandwashing.org/global-handwashing-day/about-ghd/

Post 187--Media SOS

Yes, I'm back.  This time I was off to Grand Rapids, Michigan, for two weeks,  where the core of my in-law family lives. Not only did I meet Fran, my wife, there at Calvin College, but so did our three kids meet their spouses there.  Educational incest, you say?  Perhaps, but it put us all on a good course, at least, economically and, to a certain degree,  worldviewishly as well. Well, whatever....  It's the place where I would like to see my cremains strewn over its pond, since that place is the navel of our small clan.  Not sure it will happen.  Okay, back to the blog business.  A short one today. A cry for help from Religion News Service under the caption "Sunday Morning Editor's Note."  Again, it's American but affects us Canadians as much as it does them.  Here's the editor's plea to all of us:

This week I’d like to ask for your help, and I promise it doesn’t involve money. I was at the Online News Association annual conference last week and one thing that was patently clear was the monopolistic power Facebook and Google now wield in the news business. They get to distribute news for free, while they have decimated ad revenues for the creators of news content. As digital media strategist Heidi N. Moore recently lamented in the Columbia Journalism Review, "Facebook and Google collect 99 percent of all digital-advertising revenue growth in the U.S., leaving only crumbs for media companies."  So here’s my ask. Don’t let Facebook and Google decide what news you get — which they do based on data you’ve most likely given them unwittingly, through your browsing history and other information they can track. Instead, be an active news reader. Put a little extra effort into getting your daily fix. Go directly to your favorite publications’ home pages. Bookmark a few of them, and when you want to know what’s happening in the world, make it a habit of checking them first. And I hope, of course, that RNS will be one of them. I promised it wouldn't cost anything, and it might just help ensure the viability of the news industry that is so essential to democracy.  I suggest you read Moore's lament mentioned above.  Tomorrow is Canadian Thanksgiving Day. I wish you all a time brimming with gratitude for all the things God has given us here in Canada--or, at least, most of us, though perhaps a declining number?  The thing I appreciate the most is our orderly way of living. Compared to an absolute ideal, we probably have a long way to go, but in contrast to where our new neighbours, the refugees, come from, we live in heaven. Just ask them!  Have a thankful one!