Brilliant Things: Directing the Heart Toward Hope

The pastor of the church I called home in Los Angeles talked about the Lord’s Prayer like a kedge anchor. We may first think of an anchor as holding something in place, and certainly we can consider the Lord’s Prayer in this way: a tether for our hearts and minds to the model offered by Jesus. Yet, the purpose of a kedge anchor is to move a water vessel along when it has run aground or needs hauling due to engine failure or lack of helpful wind or current. This type of anchor is carried by a small boat in the direction the ship needs to go and is dropped there; then, the chain is reeled in to draw the ship toward the anchor. Little by little, the ship can make its progress in this way. When words fail us, when we feel abandoned, afraid, stuck, or nothing at all, when the resistance is overwhelming, we can rely on these words to draw us toward God. This prayer can move our hearts when our hearts are not moved to prayer.

This metaphor has been on my mind since attending a performance of Every Brilliant Thing in New York City, a “mostly-one-person show” starring Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame, though he’s had a robust Broadway career since). That same week, I was reading Dr. Justin Ariel Bailey’s latest book, Discipling the Diseased Imagination, which is very much about prayer and its formational effect on our imaginations. I’m thinking about the importance of remembering and naming the “brilliant things” in life; these can be a sort of kedge anchor, too, as they direct our attention toward hope. And, it matters that we hope in community; at times we will need others to set the anchor for us.

My experience at the theatre that day has set itself among my life’s own collection of brilliant things. The play serves up just what it claims our hearts need: to notice and name the good; to let others name those good things for us; to speak them out when others cannot. To put ourselves in contact with foretastes of heaven, however simple or small they may be. As a total experience, this production conjures an ultimately joyous spell that has the audience at times quite literally singing and dancing, high-fiving and hugging, playing together, declaring out loud a host of small beauties that glimmer within this life… quite an accomplishment for a story about depression.

The list of “brilliant things” began for the play’s narrator (in this case named Daniel) when he was a young boy. He hoped that, if he could give his mother enough reasons to stay alive, she might get better. So he began writing down “every brilliant thing about the world, everything worth living for.” Daniel calls out, “One!” and someone from among the audience responds: “Ice cream!” “Two!” and from elsewhere in the theatre: “Water fights!” On cue, additional delights of a 7-year-old ring out: staying up past your bedtime to watch TV, the color yellow, things with stripes, rollercoasters. The ever-growing list becomes a thread through the narrator’s life story as he tells us about loss, love, depression, rupture, and repair.

Though the designated and swiftly prepped participants are a small percentage, the total audience seems aware from the beginning that we have a role in this event. We are not distanced observers of an entertainer; we have entered a shared space of play with someone who views each one of us as a friend. We lean in, agreeing, “yes, let’s play; this will be fun.” Together, in this theatre, we are rehearsing a way of moving through the world and of being in community: noticing, remembering, mourning, sharing, reaching for each other, delighting, sighing, hoping.

If you think you might have the pleasure of experiencing this play, you may want to skip the next four paragraphs. But I wish to help you, reader, understand the particularly life-affirming nature of this kind of theatre, which I shall attempt to do by describing in detail the first scene involving significant audience participation.

The first scene played for us portrays a heart-breaking childhood experience: the death of a beloved pet. In this case, the family dog, represented by an audience member’s coat, is draped in Daniel’s arms. Daniel beckons a nearby audience member to represent the veterinarian. Her task is this: give the dog an injection in the thigh that will allow the suffering animal to painlessly drift off. A pen is borrowed to serve as the syringe. Our veterinarian approaches slowly, almost reverently, gaze fixed on the dog. She then pauses, looks Daniel in the eyes, and, at the height of the scene’s intensity, asks, “where is his head?”

She does not say this to be funny. She earnestly wishes to succeed with what she’s been asked to do. At any other performance, the participant might simply make a choice about which part of the coat is the dog’s leg and commit to the action. In this case, however, our vet is suddenly recast as impossibly incompetent, much to our delight. We connect deeply with her insecurity; we were all wondering the same. It is an exquisite blend of the carefully structured and the totally improvised, and the scene is unique yet successful in each performance as a result. Daniel himself is a little surprised and must negotiate participants’ choices moment to moment and case by case. The inherent risk increases the sense of play, the aliveness, the preciousness that this is ours and only ours, both for him and for us.

What happens next? Daniel first looks at her like a shocked and offended little boy. He does not speak, but we see this brief reaction register fully yet subtly: the grown-up does not know. He deftly slips from “little boy Daniel” to narrator-coach, indicates where she ought to make the injection, and snaps right back into character. Our veterinarian now approaches the coat-dog in one bold step and stabs with the swift force of a dramatically heroic TV-show Epi-Pen injection. Again, we are in stitches of laughter. Again, Daniel is both fully surprised by the choice she has made, and masterfully managing those choices, to our great delight.

Mere seconds later, tears are welling in our eyes as Daniel describes these final seconds of his best friend’s life and how it feels to hold his body as he dies. A brief pause, we wipe tears, and suddenly the coat is nothing but a coat, promptly returned to its owner.

The entire show is a swift-moving current of emotions, pressing the edges of our capacity to feel it all in turn: joy, grief, delight, the bitterest and sweetest of our own memories echoing within the narrator’s deeply personal and vulnerable story. All pretend, all come and gone in seconds, all truly felt but never over-indulged. And off we go to the next chapter of the story. This itself is a lesson: feel it, but don’t linger there. Let yourself be carried onward.

Later, Daniel remarks: “The younger me had dealt with this so much better. He wasn’t self-righteous. The younger me was hopeful. Naive, of course. But hopeful.” This naive hope becomes a handhold for the narrator within his own depression. Prompted by a seed quietly planted by someone in his life, and late-discovered, he has the momentary courage to do something childish: he calls for help. And a helper, by the grace of God, is there to respond in simple compassion, reminding him who he really is.

“I’m not sure I can ever allow myself to be joyful. I’m just not very good at it. It’s helpful to know there are other people who feel the same.” And, in this play, it proves helpful to be buoyed by others reminding us: this isn’t the whole story. The brilliant things are arrows pointing to the “more” – and when we can’t see them ourselves, may the Spirit move someone nearby to show them to us, to help us imagine more than we can see right now, help us remember to hope, and hope on our behalf.

It warrants mentioning that this play is not attempting to offer a simplistic prescription of self-help positivity. On the contrary, a big part of this story is that despite his persistent efforts, a long list of brilliant things did not change the outcome for his mother. In treating the topics of depression and suicide, the script takes great care to not perpetuate harmful narratives and directly addresses the Werther Effect: research demonstrates that “suicide is contagious,” especially through how it’s talked about in media. The play accepts, and grieves, the sorrowful mystery that some end their lives for reasons unknowable in our time.

“Because there’s only so much anyone can know.”

“Why?”

“Because if you were able to know everything then life would be unlivable.”

“Why?”

“Because then there would be no mystery, no curiosity, no creativity, no conversation, no discovery. Nothing would be new and we’d have no need to use our imaginations and our imaginations are what make life bearable.”

“Why?”

“Because in order to live in the present we have to be able to imagine a future that will be better than the past.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what hope is and without hope we couldn’t go on.”

In trying to help his mother by childish, naive means, in a roundabout and unpredictable way, the narrator himself is helped in his adulthood. The ongoing task he required of himself for someone else’s sake – looking to notice, paying attention – slowly changed his way of seeing the world. And, the vulnerability of sharing the list – something he never intended to do – allowed it to become something bigger than he could create, added to and shaped by others. And then, it returned to him in his need. God, in your grace, keep us childish. The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

“If you live a long life and get to the end of it without ever once having felt crushingly depressed, then you probably haven’t been paying attention,” says the narrator in the final minutes. He has feared that his fate may one day be the same as his mother’s. Paying attention will hurt. Paying attention can heal.

We can sensitize ourselves to wonder, and living within community helps us sense it when we cannot on our own. We are carried within a bigger, wider story. In our daily living, we will lose sight, forget, perhaps even not want to hear it, and we need all the more to be told again and again.

I’m reminded of Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”, in which she writes:

“Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.”

Together, we can cultivate an attitude of wonder, of beholding what is there, signaling the More. Renew our vision, Lord. Help us to be astonished and delighted, like children, by the foretastes of your Great Promise. Help us to reach for one another and, in so doing, find You.

In birdsong.

In grass suddenly greening.

Ants dutifully carrying a cookie crumb.

That song we sang over and over again on a roadtrip.

A baby fussing in the pew behind us.

The swirl of milk poured into a cup of coffee.

The breaking of bread.

In life.

In death.

You.