“More than two thousand years of reading and research have not succeeded in exploring its full meaning. Today it is as if it had never been touched, never been seen, as if we had not even begun to read it.”
Abraham Joshuah Heschel“Literature, by virtue of its ironic force, undermines “the fantasy of authority.”
“One does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it.”
–The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (2007)
Bibliodrama is a way of reading sacred writings, awakening interior dialogues with symbolism that directly move and grow the heart. It can be spiritually nourishing and grounding as we seek union and rest, support and reassurance, at the still point of life. With an open and searching heart, we engage spontaneous prayerful dialogue, engaging the creative and active imagination that contains, steadies, and directs our thoughts, desires, potentials, ties, knots, sorrow, gratitude, praise or petition.
Once upon a time, scripture was turned to as a mirror for who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we are going. Its’ living myths and archetypes engaged us in spirited dialogues with our ancestors, our Creator, our present, our past, our loved ones, nature, ourselves, and more. These symbols are the magic, the very essence living in our modern stories, modern lives, modern dreams seeking conscious spaces in our hearts and minds. With every dialogue, consciousness is birthed, fortified, revived.
Bibliodrama is non-fundamentalist, neither proselytizing or preaching any religion or belief. Instead, if there is a goal at all, that goal would be to allow participants to directly and deeply experience the text from a restful, playful, contemplative state that opens the imagination to language, desire, and prayer. This is the space from which our originality emerges, our original song. Our conditioning, our narratives, our existential fears can not only be befriended, but transformed through friendship.
When reading a book do you experience yourself entering a conversation that grabs you somehow, as if you are being led by a thread through the labyrinth of your soul? Perhaps it leads you to experience or visit places in your heart and imagination that inspire you, engage you, unburden you, disturb you, frustrate you, and perhaps even articulate questions and concerns you didn’t even know were so relevant to your inner life and situation!
Kairos Center for Change is devoted to creating reflective spaces for conscious femininity to awaken. Bibliodrama is a reflective, playful, creative way of listening to and awakening mythological text carrying the symbols of our human condition that liberate the imagination and nourish the soul.
If anyone does not feel comfortable with the exercise, watching and listening is also a very important form of participation.
