The Trashman Cometh...

A while back, I blogged about my performance arts class doing a sacramental creation of the prop-bags they were using in a chapel service. The combination film/skit involved trash bags as allegorical to the junk we carry around in our souls and what Christ can do to free us from that trash.

Today we had that chapel service. Later, I learned that in the break-out discussion groups that followed the service, two girls were weeping, girls who have been sitting on the fence about their faith in the power of Jesus Christ. How amazing it is to watch teenagers do such a thing in each others' lives! For it was the kids themselves that made this happen. They selected the text. They created the break-out groups' discussion guide. They adapted the text for film. They made the film. My own teenage son did the video edit. All I did was facilitate their vision of what they wanted to offer with this piece of performance art.

I had wondered for a while whether this odd class had really accomplished any valid purpose. It was such a synthesis of random elements. But if C.S. Lewis is right about art when he says, "We sit down before a picture [movie/play/concert] in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive." If this is what art is to accomplish, then I have shown them the tools within them to create art that does things to people.

I like what Graham Greene says in The Power and the Glory: "There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets in the future." May these amazing young people have seen through such a door today, God, as their artistic witness stirred the souls of their peers.