Slings and Arrows

Have you ever gone on a God Hunt? A God Hunt begins when you teach yourself to look for God’s hand at work in the everyday occurrences of your life. Here’s one of my personal God Hunt Sightings:



David and I have gone up to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario for some 39 years. Rather than have a cabin on a lake, or a vacation getaway, we have returned to this little stone town with its four theatres and amazing cultural life, inviting friends and family and acquaintances to come with us. Theatre in this environment, with the finest repertory company on the North American continent, has enriched our souls. Will Shakespeare is part of our family history.

On several occasions people have recommended the Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, a fictional account of a theatre company much like the Stratford Festival. “No one says its about the Festival,” said the friend who most recently recommended this series, no longer on television, “But it’s about the Festival. We laughed our heads off.”

Since Slings and Arrows had been recommended so frequently and so highly by people whose judgments we trust (most of whom have traveled to the Festival with us), I ordered the four-year series through Amazon.com. Last night after a wearying day, I sat down to view the first segment of the first DVD. I ended up watching one whole season and laughed all the way through it. It was outlandish; it was fascinating; it was filled with actor’s ego and performer’s angst. And at the same time, the story lines were unaccountably sweet. This first season is about the mounting of the play “Hamlet” and finally, when the young Hollywood star who has been brought in to boost the box-office receipts, reaches the deepest meaning of the lines he has memorized, I leaned into the television set, moved mightily by the power of the language and brushed away the tears that began to swell.

Remarkably, despite its wild display of human foibles, this quirky television series has captured some of the transcendency we often feel when we sit in the theatre and watch the dramatic presentations of the Bard.

Slings and Arrows is by no means a Christian production—far from it. So I am often left to puzzle how it is that non-church people capture those moments that open up before us all and in which the holy, in which the sacred reside. We’ve actually had conversations with Shakespeare Festival actors about this very thing. Something numinous, something transcendent occurs; they know it, they recognize it when it happens, but they struggle for the words to explain it. “Those are the moments in the life of the theatre that we wait for,” one lead actress explained. Her colleagues nodded their heads in agreement.

Perhaps, for the rest of us, less talented certainly in the dramatic arts, we also wait for moments when God comes near, when the veil of this life parts a little, and we know His presence in a way we don’t always know it, and we bow like Moses before the burning bush. We have taken off our shoes.

Thanks be given for a life filled with friends who recommend great things to read or see or places to go. Rich thinking and beautiful moments of being come from heeding their recommendations. Somehow, often despite us all, God is present.

I spy God!