ImprovSpirituality

 The Christian Church has been improvising since it's beginning. There was no plan. Jesus didn't leave a 12-point manifesto for establishing a church. In fact, he didn't come to establish a church at all. He came to show God's love and to point out how the Israelites got off track. He didn't bring an organization, but a way of life. People who say they don't like organized religion should love Jesus. He improvised as we went along. For example, his parables. He taught basic truths, not from a curriculum, but from engaging with the world around him. A good improviser does the same thing. There is no script, just a basic idea that riff on the material at hand. Jesus is talking to an agricultural community about the Kingdom of God, so he looks around and sees vineyards and wheat fields.  You know, he says, the kingdom of God is like a man who planted seeds. Or it's like a vine surrounded by weeds. He was improvising.  For this Sunday's lesson, the Sixth Sun...

  I've read that the greatest emotional need for human beings is to truly know and be known by an other person. That is the basis for love, isn't it? Full disclosure and acceptance by the other. I love you because of who you are, not in spite of it.  As humans we are in constant search for our person, our knight in shining armor or the princess in the ivory tower. We want to belong, we are in constant look-out for our tribe. It begins in earnest once we enter school. Sometimes we pick our tribe and sometimes others pick it for us. The jocks, the nerds, the losers, the mean girls, the bullies. It's why we join athletic teams, the marching band, the chess club or the drama club. It's why we join fraternities and sororities. And for some it's why they join gangs, for a sense of identity and camaraderie.  I found my first tribe in high school. It was the drama club, Thespian Troupe #1. It wasn't until many years later I discovered another one of my tribes, the Queer...

I hate the phrase, "Maybe it was for the best." It's always seems like a cop-out at best, or bad theology at worst. I've heard this, or very similar messages, given to people experiencing loss or grief due to tragic accidents, the death of children, broken relationships, or whatever painful loss we experience. Loss is real and grief is natural We want understanding when all we can do is accept.  As it happens, this was the message on my tiny buddha calendar three days before we held the final service for the parish in which I had been serving. A faithful congregation of 119 years closed. Sadness, disappointment, loss, yes all of those. But it was clear that it was time. We can't change it, but as this buddha thought teaches, "if I resist the urge to judge a situation, I can find something good within it." Things don't always happen for the best, but if I act on the resurrected Christ, I can find something good. I can't change the situation, but I...

 Greetings! It's been quite some time since I've added new material to my blog. Life, it seems, has been a long season of living in Improv. I planned on spending my retirement working on my improv workshops, writing, consulting, and blogging. Apparently I failed at retirement because about two years ago I went back to parish work. I became the Priest-in-Charge at a small parish in Louisville. That time has now come to an end. After much discernment and prayer, the parish decided to close its doors. So back to retirement for me and back to spending time writing blogs instead of sermons.  Through my writing I hope to share what I've learned through this last career phase. Life is always improv and the only thing you can count on is the unexpected. Everything is an offer, good or bad, and our only response is to "yes, and."  I look forward to reconnecting to my old readers and maybe gaining some new ones. Let's journey together through this thing called life and ...

In a previous Improvising With the Buddha post, I wrote about shoshin, “beginner’s mind.” In this post I’m writing about energy work. If you’ve studied or read about improvisation, you know the rule about making strong choices. One of the strong choices we make in scene work is choosing an emotion. In class I’ve used the Emotion or Feeling Wheel to help students understand the depth and range of emotions. In the center of wheel are six to ten core emotions depending on which wheel you use. The most common has seven core emotions. Those emotions fan out to four to eight secondary emotions that then fan out to four or more tertiary emotions. Through the wheel you can see that a feeling of numbness stems from a feeling of distance with comes from the primary emotion of anger.  In a scene knowing where our emotions come from helps with sub-text and in real life it helps us better understand our motivations and relationships. In scene work just knowing where an emotion comes from may...

  "Ya either got it, or ya ain't" The other day an artist friend held a gallery opening of their work. As I was gazing at the amazing work, I bemoaned a little and said to my friend, “I wish I could paint but I just don’t have any talent.” My friend lovingly chastised me and said, “you’ve got lots of talent!” I replied, “I know I have talent in some areas, just not in the visual arts.” We then went on to have a brief discussion on what it means to have talent. I came to realize that part of our disconnect was the use of the word talent. When most people think of talent, they think it’s something special that only a few people are born with. In fact, the Cambridge Dictionary defines talent as, “a natural skill or ability to be good at something, especially without being taught.” As Mama Rose sings in Gypsy, “Ya either got it, or ya ain't. And, boys, I got it!” It’s no wonder most people don’t think they have any talent. Talent implies something special that comes n...