Playing God

This Easter season I have been thinking about the biggest writing project I have ever done -- 15,000 script pages, in English and Spanish, and still counting. It is the dramatized performance of the entire Old and New Testaments: the first attempt won Audio Book of the Year in 2007, and featured hundreds of Hollywood stars and religious leaders.


Along with converting the text into audio scripts (the chapters and chapters about boundary issues and dimensions of the Temple are particularly stunning, I am sure you would agree), I had to create character packs for the actors. The actor, or voice talent, in an audio production generally gets a character pack that includes just the lines he or she has to record, not the whole script. It also includes a bit of a description of the character to help the actor and the director along.


God's character pack for The Bible Experience is about 500 pages long, which is pretty divine in itself. This is what I wrote as hints to the voice talent who would play God:

God is so powerful, so all-knowing, so essential to our being, that it is important to underplay him a fair bit. It is what God does himself, of course: he underplays about 99% of himself whenever he walks the earth and talks with humans.


CS Lewis has a great image of angels taking human form. It is so hard to contain themselves into merely three dimensions that they sort of shimmer, and their hair stands out in all directions. God does a better job: we do not sense any tension, stress, or pressure in God.


God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. God knows all and sees all, and supports us in our doings. In the book of Job, God even supports the devil in his attempt to tempt a good man.


However, for the sake of relating with us and making us part of his ongoing creation of the universe, God takes on certain conversational forms. He expresses wrath. He allows himself to be outbargained, to be wrangled with, to be yelled at. He asks rhetorical questions of Jonah, and shows his backside to Moses because Moses cannot tolerate seeing God’s face.


God is not petty, mean, forgetful, capricious, lazy, annoyed, frustrated, or at a loss. Those emotions are not available to you in your performance. God delights in his creation, and delights in his people; he agonizes in their agonies, and resolves to destroy them for their naughtiness in order to let himself be argued out of it.


The trickiest part, perhaps, is that God, although immeasurably far beyond us in all ways, does not treat us as we, say, treat ants. He engages with us to draw us to him, while giving us the will to choose to come closer or turn our backs.