Nativity Catholic Church
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Under the Lights
A "FIRESTARTER" Spiritual Essay by Rev.
Dr. Benjamin
Berinti, C.Pp.S. I am proud to say that I made my debut with the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Theater company during the pre-Christmas holiday season! While I have been on stage before, acting in plays in what now seems a lifetime ago, this was a new experience—since I had no chance to practice my lines, or for that matter, even know what “business” I was supposed to concoct while on stage. You see, I was grabbed out of the first row of the audience for a bit piece in a zany send up of Every Christmas Story Ever Told. This was the second year the Shakespeare Theater staged this frenetic production, and although I had attended a performance last year, clearly I had forgotten that they “invited” audience participation at a couple of junctures in the play. In a stroke of good luck, although unrehearsed, I instinctively knew what to do with my role since I have watched, read and recited the lines of this story numerous times over the years. As the playwright of Every Christmas Story Ever Told would call it, this skit was drawn from a “BTHC”—a “Big Time Holiday Classic”! Oh right, I forgot to say…I played Cindy Loo Who from Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Muscled up onto stage, I was crowned with a weird little headband with bouncy sparklers and pink feathers sticking out of the top of it, shoved next to the “Grinch,” who was grasping a sickly little Christmas tree he was stealing from the Who’s household, and then instructed to “speak” with the Grinch. Without missing a beat, I innocently cooed, in my best Cindy Loo Who voice: “Santee Claus, why are you taking our Christmas tree? Why?” Much to the amazement of the professional actors on stage, who were poised to hold up a cue card for me, I finished with panache, holding the actors’ hands while we belted out the beloved Seuss refrain: “Fah who for-aze! Dah who dor-aze!”—and the audience roared their approval. As I stood on the stage, caught up in the excitement and adrenalin of the moment, I was reminded about one of the great equalizers about acting—when you’re on stage, you can barely see a blasted thing beyond the edge of the platform! The lights are so bright and overpowering that the audience members appear merely as black dots or blobs in the distance, thereby reducing the actor’s concern about looking into their eyes and becoming distracted. These lights were intense, overwhelming, incredibly hot, and most of all, nearly blinding! In this season of light…as we ponder the coming of the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, we tend to think of and experience light as something gentle on our senses, filling us with joy, and wiping away all that is darkness. But as the stage lights at the Shakespeare Theater reminded me, quite often light can be blinding and overwhelming, concealing as much as revealing. And so it is with the Light of Christ. If we were to experience the fullness of God, in all God’s Divine splendor, surely it would be too much for us and too overpowering. Like the shepherds in the field, we would cower and tremble at the glory of God. The fullness of the Almighty come to visit us would sear us as a white-hot laser; in a sense, we’d be incapable of embracing this awesome revelation, this earth-shaking Divine descent. But God spares us from an overwhelming light by allowing the Light of God’s Son to come among us as one like us in all things but sin! Surely, God’s glory blazingly shines in Emmanuel, but in his human nature, this God who comes to us as a baby in a feeding trough, is an embraceable God, a God who wants to be held and loved, just as the Father holds and loves each of us and all creation. The poet Mary Karr affirms this truth in a more eloquent way in her poem, Descending Theology: Christ Human: Such a short voyage for a god, and you arrived in animal form so as not to scorch us with your glory. Indeed, we rejoice that humanity and all creation has been “touched” rather than “scorched” by the glory of God—and that we have no need for fear while basking in this Light of the World!
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