Missing The Magic

Remember your first kiss? Your first car? Your first trip to the beach? There's something about a "first" that is hugely significant—later kisses, cars, and vacations may be better, but we inevitably find ourselves comparing them to that first time. It's as if the first time is the standard by which all other times are judged. 

I was six years old when I saw my first play. My parents drove my sister and me downtown one cold night to see “A Christmas Carol” produced by our city's finest repertory company. The vastness of the theatre lobby, the excited murmur of the patrons, the usher who handed us a thick program and directed us to our seats—all of it seemed somehow magical, even before the show started. The seat in the balcony nearly swallowed me, but as the house lights came down and the curtain went up, I was transfixed.

I could probably describe the production elements that made the show seem so amazing (snow effects, hugely choreographed dance numbers, massive rotating sets, and elaborate Victorian-era costumes, just to name a few), but all of those details are being filtered through the frosted pane of a director's memory. A grown-up's memory. A deeper part of me knows that it wasn't a series of technical cues and theatrical designs that captivated my six-year-old mind that December night. It was the magic.

For two hours, I was lost in the shadowy but strangely beautiful world of Ebenezer Scrooge, and it ruined me. No play I've ever seen since (including the ones that I've written and directed) has quite been able to match the magic of that first production, and sometimes I think my own efforts at drama are simply a little boy's futile attempts to catch that feeling once again in his now adult-sized hands. To hold it a while and remember the magic, even if just for one night. To make others feel what I felt that snowy winter evening, program in hand, my family tucked safely into the seats beside me.

Where has the magic gone? C.S. Lewis once said, “I suspect that men have sometimes derived more spiritual sustenance from myths they did not believe than from the religion they professed.” Such is the power of fiction and story. As drama ministers, we're in the magic business. And if the fictional work of Charles Dickens could so capture a little boy's imagination that he devotes the rest of his life to theatre, how much more should the dramatic telling of the Gospel stories be able to motivate sinners to give their hearts and lives to him?

This holiday season, we may find ourselves once again blowing the dust off of the same old Christmas-pageant scripts we used last year. (And the year before that, and the year before that...) But be encouraged. The actors and director of that production of “A Christmas Carol” had no idea what an impact they were making on at least one young member of their audience that night, and the same is true for us. So this year, find new material. Find new energy. Find new inspiration. Above all, find the magic.