I love going to see plays, movies and musicals as well, but there is something so exciting about a play. You sit down with your program, and soak in the moments before the curtain rises, when you only hear murmured conversations and pages flipping. Then the lights go down, and you wait expectantly for the magic to begin. This enchantment involves the actors on stage placing themselves in a completely vulnerable position. They create a world of conflict and emotion, a world that usually remains private behind drawn blinds and a polite “fine, thank you and yourself?” They create this world and then they invite you to join in. Accepting this invitation can be a daring decision. Stories that we choose to surrender to can bring dangerous, life-altering experiences. 

Last Friday night was one of those times when stepping into another person’s world was both challenging and uncomfortable. It was also filled with laughter (mostly the snorting, guffawing kind), some really tantalizing descriptions of Italian cuisine and the promise of love. Intrigued? I saw Pacific Theatre’s new production of Espresso by Lucia Frangione and I left the theatre with my mind and my heart buzzing.

The play is about three Canadian-Italian women who reunite around the hospital bed of a dying man they all love in different ways. There is the man’s daughter, who tells the story, his second wife and his mother. Each woman struggles with many damaged relationships: with the man who lies broken on the hospital bed, with the other men in their lives, with each other, and with the God who seems to have abandoned them. Into this minefield of hurt and mistrust, comes the character of Amante, who quotes the Song of Solomon, dances, kisses and refuses to allow any of the women to be less than truthful about the brokenness of their relationships or about what they truly desire. Amante (which is Lover in Italian) is God himself, who has come to woo them back into relationship with himself.

Stories that we choose to surrender to can bring dangerous, life-altering experiences.

This is the story that has been replaying in my head since Friday evening, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the pursuit of God. On a normal day, I would take that phrase to mean our pursuit of him, how we seek him, search for him. It sometimes has the connotation of a lot of difficult, soul-searching work. But this week, I have been challenged to think differently. I have been thinking of God’s pursuit of me. 

When I have considered this in the past, it is always along the lines of The Hound of Heaven, a poem which, as the title implies, portrays God as the hunter and ourselves as the fox, running from the hound. It begins with a sense that we are running frantically from the inevitable:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

The interesting thing is, I can relate to this hound-like God, chasing me down, rousting me from my hiding places. I am even reasonably comfortable with the picture, because it often feels true. God’s pursuit can seem too focused, chasing me into uncomfortable situations and away from the things I want or think I need. I sometimes feel like the fox.

What I struggle with, what made me so uncomfortable as I watched Espresso, is the idea of God pursuing me more like a lover pursuing his beloved, full of tenderness and desire. We are used to thinking about God as the Bridegroom, and we are comfortable with singing, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (Song of Sol. 6:3). Most of us, however, are a bit more uncertain about what the rest of the Song of Solomon has to say. We are completely comfortable viewing God as a parent, a sibling, even a friend, but we can be uneasy with notion of being seduced.

I can imagine though, that if I could move past my discomfort with this metaphor, I might find a very helpful picture of God, because it is a metaphor that is real and can be felt in our own experience. And our experience is really all we have when it comes to our own understanding. Dorothy L. Sayers comments that, “To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.”

Romance. Pursuit. Desire. These are yardsticks that we know. We’ve seen them. We’ve imagined them. We’ve experienced them. And because of our experiences, we can ask ourselves, what kind of God pursues us like this?

It is an incarnate God who loves all of us – not just our minds or our spirits – but our physical bodies. It is this God who cares if that body is pleased with life, if it enjoys the breeze, if it’s sunburnt or if it is caressed with love and tenderness.

It is the God who speaks to us in the Song of Solomon, whispering softly, “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold, the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come” (Song of Sol. 2:10-12). It is a gentle, playful God who pursues us with joyful determination, so that he may delight us, beguile us, love us and take us dancing.

Espresso is playing at Pacific Theatre until June 14