When your work is fun: An interview with Greg Matzker

Meet the hardest working man in show business.

No, not him.

I’m talking about Greg Matzker, founder of Marble Stage Theatre in St. Louis and–full disclosure–a personal friend. Through our years of knowing each other, it’s been apparent that he works about a thousand times harder than I ever have on anything, and about five hundred times harder than his closest competitor. At any given time he is choreographing, scriptwriting, directing, fundraising, and performing, usually for three shows at the same time–in his own theatre company or for someone else’s.  As “work” is our subject this month, he seemed the guy to consult about devotion to vocation.

Starting his own theatre company “was something I always wanted to do,” he told me. “I’ve tried starting one several times before; this was the first one that took off.” From the beginning, it was a group effort. He’d been involved in a young people’s theatre, and as one group of young people started losing the attribute that qualified them to be part of a “young people’s” company, they approached Greg and said, “We want to keep doing shows with you.”

“Basically I told them, ‘Putting on a show is a lot of money. We need to first raise the money. If we can raise the money, I will get the company started.’” The group gave it a shot but didn’t come up with the amount needed. But Greg had another idea. He approached the community center which did the young people’s shows and asked them to back the project. They said yes, and Marble Stage had its start.

Starting is one challenge; continuing is another. Greg knew he wouldn’t have the community center’s backing forever, but “I refused to be this one-off theatre company…It all came down to, once again, it was time to fund-raise. We came up with every conceivable hair-brained idea you could think of. We started going door to door selling eggs, we had a garage sale, we literally begged for money, we put on a music revue. It all helped us put enough money in the account to do a show. With each passing show we barely keep the funds, but we always make it. Sometimes we rob Peter to pay Paul, but the funds are there.”

Greg’s description of selling the vision of Marble Stage in that critical moment when they first went solo is a parable of the power of faith. “One of the people who was involved owned a coffee shop and it happened to have a meeting room upstairs. I remember when we found out [the community center] was not going to back us, we had our first meeting there. So many of the people were saying, ‘This is it, it’s closed, we had one good show, we’re done.’ I had to keep assuring them, ‘We’re not done. It’s gonna be work, it’s gotta be the work of more than one person, it’s gotta be all you people. It was kinda funny, I went into motivational speaker mode: ‘Come on! We can do it! We’re number one!’  I really did. I got everyone’s spirits nice and high. Everyone was leaving the coffeeshop chanting, ‘We can do it! We can do it!’”

So why do it?  For Greg, it came out of a love of theatre–he’s been in shows since he was eleven–and a passion for having theatre done well. “By the time I got into my twenties, I had been in and around most of the theatre companies in St. Louis. I saw what I thought were very good elements and some very bad elements.” By having his own company, Greg could try out his theories on what would make for the best possible theatre experience.

Other companies fail, Greg believes, “Because of how they treat people, honestly. Not realizing when someone might be starting to get burned out. If I have someone who’s around a lot, as much as I appreciate it, I can see if they’re starting to get burned out, and I will tell them, ‘Why don’t you go and recharge your batteries? I’d rather not have you for this and keep you for the long run.’

“And another reason they fail is that the person who is in charge doesn’t want to listen to the rest of the company. I think they—I don’t want to say ‘power trip,’ but they become unapproachable: ‘It’s my way or no way.’

“I can understand that; I really can. People come to me with ideas, telling me I should change this or that. I’ll take it offensively, but I can also admit they’re right. It may not be at that point in time! I’ll think about what they said to me and think, ‘You’re right.’ If the change happens, I’ll make sure they’re aware.”

The reward Greg gets from his work is the creation of community and the fostering of talent. At the end of a run, he said,  ”I always tell [the cast and crew], ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for doing the show. You’ve not joined a theatre company, you’ve joined a family.’ As long as they’re around we keep them around. And it’s exciting for me to find people who will come into the theatre with no skills, and work their way up or try something they’ve never tried before. I had one person who came into the theatre, who had really not done anything. I gave him a chance, he kept growing with us, then went off and directed a very successful show at another company. I’m so proud of what I’m seeing people accomplish. That’s what keeps me going.

“And when it comes down to it, it’s fun. How long are you going to stay at a job if it’s not fun?”

Prayer: Eloquent and maybe not so eloquent.

This week a co-worker sent me a video. I don’t think he was intending to prompt theological reflection in me. But it’s Prayer Month, so what else was I gonna do?

Before I link to said video, two introductory notes:

1. It has lots and lots of explicit language. Be forewarned if you are offended by that sort of thing.
2. Chances are good you’ve seen it already. It had 9,257,613 views on YouTube at last count. (It was quite the phenom in 2010. By blogging about it now, I am demonstrating that I am not hip.)

Okay, here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs

Now, before I get to why I’ve gone all Juggalo, one more disclaimer:

Be it known I am not about to claim “Miracles” is a misunderstood masterpiece. No. It’s bad. The song, the video, everything about it. Half-articulated reflections on the unfathomable mystery of the cosmos are followed by an anecdote about a pelican’s attempted cell phone larceny. Small children are wearing killer clown makeup. For that matter, grown men are wearing killer clown makeup. Let’s keep some perspective.

All that said–to me “Miracles” may be the truest, rawest exemplar of a principle of our interactions with God that may not get enough attention:

All of our prayers are ridiculous. All of them.

Can it be anything but insanely incomprehensible that love has opened up lines of communication between us and the One who is responsible for every atom in the universe, the One who says, “You can call me Dad”? Won’t all human language break down when it dares to approach?

Abraham knew this when he sidled up to God to do some negotiating about the whole Sodom business–Look at me even having this conversation, he said. I’m dust and ashes!

O Lord of the Starfields, if ever, ever I make the mistake of thinking I’m being eloquent when I praise You or petition You or thank You or argue with You, let me say instead:

Stop and look around, it’s all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
$%&#ing magnets, how do they work?

Prayer: What Does It Mean To You? Part II

Prayer: What Does It Mean To You? Part I

Guest post by Mr. Charlie Levine. Part II will be posted tomorrow.

What we got here is a failure to communicate...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJStzRuSFLY

Who hasn’t felt like this?

Prayer is something I still wrestle with and though I’ve cleared a couple of hurdles, I don’t pretend that I’ve arrived. But I also can’t pretend that I haven’t learned anything either.

Prayer has been a contentious thing for me for most of my time as a Christ follower. Early on, it seemed like I couldn’t miss. I’d ask for something, and it happened. This seemed to confirm my faith, and it was easy to believe in God’s providence, involvement, and overall good will.

Then, radio silence.

I got angry. I felt like my rights were being trampled. He wasn’t making good on the promises he made in the Bible. I accused God of being asleep at the wheel.

The backdrop of all this was a pretty long and chaotic set of seasons in my life. I was a very unhappy person with a lot of unresolved character issues (Character is mentioned a lot, but at the heart of it, for me at least, is a question of who you truly are at your core. Are your actions, beliefs, etc reflective of the person you truly want to be?). There were a lot of unresolved hurts, and a lot that I needed to turn away from. In essence, most of my requests were for things that would paper over these problems.

Plus, I had all kinds of false dichotomies making the idea of following God too scary to fully commit to anyway. Basically it could get boiled down to “if you want it, it’s bad, it’s the world, it’s false, it won’t build character,” etc. To borrow from C.S. Lewis it seemed like without ever reading them, I’d overdosed on Emmanuel Kant and the Stoics.

By the way, read The Weight of Glory by Lewis at least once a year. It kicks ass.

I was influenced by the Christian culture around me and unfortunately it was a culture of timidity and false humility.

Here’s a great illustration shared by one of my colleagues:

Consulted with a beautiful mother of two with an incredible modeling career. She… had been suffering what many encounter on the road to massive success: fear of arrogance. She reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite artists, Frank Lloyd Wright, “Early in my career, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I deliberately chose honest arrogance, and have never found reason to be otherwise.” The bigger you ALLOW yourself to be, the better everyone you touch with your message will become. Your passion is too important to be squandered on timidity.

Most of what I saw as “being a Christ follower” would fall under the category of timidity and playing it small. We (the Christian community) couldn’t hang with the cool kids in real life, so we retreated to our own subculture and relabeled our story using Biblical language. This wasn’t the transformation that I’d seen in my friends when I had become convinced of the Gospel, so I was pretty much always angry and hopeless, because if you can’t go to God with your deepest heart issues and expect to actually move him to action, then you’re pretty much on your own.

This was not what I wanted, so needless to say I wasn’t too thrilled about engaging with this God.

A lot has changed since then and I’m further along in putting those lies behind me. Because those are lies. Satan accuses us to ourselves, accuses God to us, and unless you counter that with some serious truth, it’s easy to get off track and stay there.

A lot of that change came down to pursuing real life and inviting God (often very grudgingly) into that process. As a result, I’ve learned and grown much more in a much shorter amount of time. It also was born out of being around other Christians who are successful in real life and who also live the Gospel and who experience God’s working in their lives. Major paradigm shifts don’t happen in a vacuum.

The Pressures of Grace, Part II

In my last post I asked, “What makes service worth it?”

In thinking about this question, I’ve gone back a few steps.

The question came in meditating on the difficulty of service. If you’ve got any fear-based motivation in you at all, reading Scripture is a hazardous activity, as Jesus is no word-mincer. For instance, there’s that bit about “Whatsoever you do (or don’t do) to the least of brothers, you do (or don’t do) to me.” So–does guilt set in any time you pass a panhandler without making a contribution, or if you refuse to do someone a favor?

Logic says that you’re not going to “do for others” every single minute of every single day, which can easily lead, in Fear-Guilt Land, to the thought that you’re letting Jesus down. But other bits of Scripture say “Be not afraid” and “Perfect love casts out fear.” Maybe grace isn’t applying pressure. Maybe fear is.

It’s not that service isn’t difficult, or that looking at all that needs to be done to get this world looking like the Kingdom of God (as some of us believe we’ve been called to do) won’t inspire the occasional panic attack. But I look at people who are good at doing for others, and they do not have backs bent double under the weight. They look happy. (And remember–I specified this applies to the people who are good at it. I also know people who do get bent double under the weight. They don’t look happy.)

What can get us thinking less about the pressure and more about the privilege of serving? Maybe something as simple as changing our vocabulary.

Maybe service is “not a burden, but an adventure,” as Bono put it.

The Pressures of Grace

In exercise class a song from Elbow played, “Forget Myself”. Has a great hook, you can dance do it, but I bring it up because of a provocative line in its lyric: “He’s so mercifully free of the pressures of grace.”

Ever wish for this? Ever wish you had never heard “You shall love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself”? Ever think that life would be so much easier if we had no commitment to follow Christ, because then we would have no obligations to God or neighbor?

It’s worth pondering in Service Month. We serve a serving God. When I hear the phrase “the pressures of grace” I think of Jesus saying, “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” It’s a lot to live up to, make no mistake about it. What makes it worth it?

Practical Acts of Love

The month devoted to Service has this vow: “In a world that idolizes power, individualism, and ego we’ll demonstrate Christ’s way of serving through practical acts of love.”

What I like about this vow is that it avoids abstract language. How do we demonstrate Christ’s way of serving? Through practical acts of love. The word “practical” makes these acts doable. I bet, right now, if you stopped and gave it ten minutes’ thought, you could make a list of actions you could do today for people in your immediate circle, actions that would be kind.

• You could extend a “let’s hang out” invitation–with a specific day and time, not just a nebulous “sometime”–to a friend who has been having a rough week.
• You could write an email to someone coping with an illness–their own, or someone else’s–to let them know you are thinking of them.
• You could check in on someone who has had a death in the family. This is especially good if this will be their first holiday season without the person who died. Consider checking in, also, on those mourning the loss of a relationship–a divorce or separation–and on those who are longing for family.
• You could offer to babysit for a single parent, or for a couple who could use a date night.
• You could call your mom. She always likes that.

When we think of service, we often think of those “in need” as though that were a special category of persons, forgetting that everyone is in need, one way or another. And while I will not dissuade you from paying particular attention to the most vulnerable–to those experiencing homelessness, to those in prison, to the mentally ill–remember service can be done close to home, or at home, too.

And keep your service practical. If you put something on your list that you can’t in fact do, take it off your list. If you don’t perform every item on your list, then maybe your list was too long. Do what you can.

For Joyce Cue

I’m editing the prayerbook for December. The topic is “service,” and is the last of our purgative, or cleaning-house, vows that stand counter to the great temptations of money, sex and power. In October we focused on simplicity to seek cleansing from the temptation of endless acquisition. Here in November our focus is purity, which stands against (among other things) the temptation to treat people as objects, vessels of our own gratification. A vow of service–”In a world that idolizes power, individualism and ego we’ll demonstrate Christ’s way of serving through practical acts of love”–forces us to look the temptation of being bigger and better than anyone else squarely in the eye.

It’s fitting to concentrate on service this December for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that this is the month we celebrate the birth of our God who came to serve us. It is also a month where winter officially sets in (at least in the Northern hemisphere). The most vulnerable among us are more vulnerable in December than August. Those who have no home may find warmth and safety harder to come by. Those who suffer depression may find interior gloom darkened by diminishing sunshine.

As I worked on assembling the quotes for the December prayerbook, I found another reason to be glad we are talking about service this coming month.

A few weeks ago, Cincinnati lost a living icon of service. Joyce Cue was a social worker in one of our region’s most economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, Over-the-Rhine. She worked with the poor and marginalized for well over twenty years, most recently at Our Daily Bread, a food and hospitality ministry here. At her memorial, testimony after testimony was made of her giving spirit, her ever-present smile, and her deep faith in God which empowered her in her work.

I discovered as I went over the quotes we gathered on the topic of service that we had included a quote from Joyce. So now, fittingly, Joyce is present in Formed’s December prayerbook. We quote her in Short Reading for December 30th: “I always felt that I needed to be in a place to help people, and somehow that’s what I’ve been doing. I guess my prayers have been answered.”

Thank you, Ms. Joyce, for your service and your inspiration. May our God guide us to be as joyful in our service as you were in yours.

Unicorns

When I think of purity, I think of unicorns, knowing full well I’ll get mercilessly mocked for it. But in truth the symbolism of the unicorn is complex even when–maybe especially when–this creature is mocked. Take a look at this recent essay and wonder, as I do, why the author has expended this much energy on his derision of the unicorn concept. If a unicorn is nothing more, as most of us would assume, than something that appears on puffy rainbow stickers collected by grade school girls, nothing more than a mythical creature with an obscure connection to the idea of virginity, why would anyone write about it with such scorn and contempt? It’s almost as if there’s something threatening or dangerous about whatever it is a unicorn represents.

Let me go at this from another direction. When I was teaching pre-kindergarten, there was a girl in my class who was very, very into unicorns. She’d wear sweatshirts with embroidered unicorns on them. She’d want to play Unicorn Family when we went out for recess. Most of her classmates took this in stride–they all had their own interests, like Star Wars or fairies or whatever–but one boy in particular repeatedly demanded an explanation. “Why do you like unicorns so much?” he’d ask her.

“Because they’re beautiful,” she’d answer in a tone indicating nothing was more self-evident.

What was clear to me, in observing this scene, was that unicorns represented something lovely, something worth her attention. Her classmate didn’t understand her interest–but it was the sort of not-understanding that isn’t satisfied at leaving it at that. It was almost as though he was more invested in unicorns than she was.

Why do I think about unicorns when I think about purity? It’s more than the aforementioned link with virginity, because purity, as a concept, encompasses more than sex. Purity is unmixed purpose, singularity of desire. And there is incredible power in it. Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God. Pursuit of the pure leads us to God, because He alone is completely set apart, completely unmixed–He is One and True and God.

A unicorn–a creature with a single horn–traditionally symbolizes purity and strength. The two symbols are linked for a reason. There is power and strength in having one purpose in mind. So much power, in fact, that others will feel threatened and may mock you for it, not realizing their mockery is coming from their own fear–or that the fear they are feeling masks their own desire to be pure.

Motive

Had a great conversation the other day with a friend of mine, Charlie Levine. He challenged me to think about the “why” of spiritual disciplines, not just the “how”. What’s the motive for undertaking a curriculum like Formed of vowing together, praying together, practicing service or Sabbath or simplicity together?

Charlie, now, he knows something about discipline. He knows how effective it can be to develop good habits. He teaches exercise classes–I take one from him. He will let me know when it’s time to add more weight; he will give me trouble if I skip a class out of laziness.

But he knows the “why” behind a discipline is just as important, if not more so, than how the discipline is performed.

Here’s his example of a bad starting point. Don’t attempt the spiritual disciplines, he says, if you’re starting from thoughts like “I really suck, I’m afraid, I’ve got a God that has a smite button.” Just don’t even do them. If you do, you are doing them because you think God won’t hurt you anymore because you are “being good.”

Here’s my example: the disciplines will be useless to you if you’re using them to control God. You could be thinking, “Once I get good at praying, God will give me what I want.” I know I’m often guilty of thinking this way. I’ll tell you from personal experience–it’s not going to happen.

No one’s going to start from perfect motives, but it doesn’t hurt to ask yourself why you want to commit to this.