On Hope

I love the 'goodle doodle' today (Martha Graham dancers)! A few years ago, a student in one of my theology classes did a paper and presentation on gesture in dance as a theological space for envisioning and living into the distance between promise and hope in eschatology. 
      She used the gesture of Martha Graham in particular--as you can see in this picture. As Christians, we practice this distance between promise and hope on a regular basis. With the Psalmist, we cry out “How long, O Lord? How long?” Why do we have to wait for the fulfillment of both God’s lament in Jesus Christ as well as the divine protest found in Christ’s resurrection? We live in the in-between. Hope is the space where we practice this fulfillment in our lives. Faith propels us into this unknown yet anticipated future in God and are moved into a practice of love.
    I love thinking about how dance can help us to re-invigorate the ‘gesture’ of hope, of how we practice from here to there, from there to here. It is the fullness of the gesture (as demonstrated in Martha Graham's choreography) that forms our imagination. 
I was recently at the Forum on Music and Christian Scholarship conference where a number of papers reminded me of the potential of music to call to us and induce a response similar to Martha Graham's 'gesture of hope'. Dr. Ferdia Stone-Davis argued that musical beauty could move us from a place of disenchantment (a lack of hope) to a place of re-enchantment (hope). Time is reinvested with meaning and we are moved outward. Dr. Bruce Ellis Benson contended that a model of improvisation could help us understand how beauty can move us into a pattern of call and response. Again, that we are moved outward, moved into the action of faith and hope. Finally, Dr. Randolph Johnson did a paper on how Brahms in his German Requiem was able to sound out the fullness of the gesture of hope. In the Requiem, Brahms is able to hold together the paradoxical time/space of suffering, mourning and future glory. 
This is what Jeremy Begbie calls “redeemed time” in music. Music can take time and hand it back to us. Time is restructured (moves from disorder to order in the music) and we are able to sort through our thoughts and emotions. Especially when someone dies, we need this to help us grieve in healthy ways. I believe that music does not only sooth our pain, but can also help us feel deeply the loss of a loved one. Through the music we are able to gesture into the hope of our promised life in eternity with the triune God. We are not always able to believe in the promises of God fully, but we can practice into them. And I believe that music and dance can show us how expectant waiting can be formed in us. Come Holy Spirit!