Timothy Stoner

My Dinner With Andras: A dialogue about art and evangelism

Posted on 25. Oct, 2009 by Tim Stoner in Blog, art

When you sit down to dinner with Hungary’s leading playwright you don’t expect to talk about evangelism, but that is what we did at Mangiamo’s Thursday evening. My son, Jonathan, my eldest, is a master connector and set it up. He is studying under Andras Viski, a visiting professor of at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. Jonathan introduced my wife and me to him at the showing of his play Juliet: A Dialogue About Love.

The play is a dramatization of his mother’s struggle to make sense out of her and her children’s (seven) banishment into the Romanian Gulag when Andras was a few years old. It is about ambiguity, paradox and silence. It is the story of a woman’s brutally honest monologue with a God who is the third member in a love triangle which includes her husband, a pastor in the Hungarian Reformed church. He is absent throughout since he has been convicted and sentenced to 22 years as a political subversive. God is also keeping His distance. Juliet speaks to Him but He barely utters a word. His presence is only made present by Juliette’s persistent, desperate monologue with an unresponsive lover.   

The play which was mesmerizing and acted brilliantly by Melissa Hawkins, one of the best female actors we have had the pleasure of watching. Afterwards, we chatted.

I asked Andras about this theme of God’s absence and whether this has been an ongoing issue in his own life. It has. To illustrate the point he told us that he does not argue the point with his Eastern European, atheist artiste friends: “He is absent”, he concurs. If you have lived through the Holocaust and its aftermath in Stalin’s Gulags, you don’t argue, you concede. This is unlike any apologetic I’d ever heard of. He went on to describe our current reality like that of DaVinci’s The Lord’s Supper with the central figure erased. Then he said something startling: “The goal of [my] art is to call God back.  It is an attempt to try and force him to return”.

This has so many paradoxical layers and so many theological red flags that I was momentarily stunned. Yet it somehow also managed to resonate and echo evocatively in some strange cavernous space. There are things that you don’t understand intellectually yet make perfect sense. This was one of those. Hyperbole is an effective tool to awaken the intellectually and spiritually lethargic, or, so Jesus shows us. It startles us like walking into our comfortable living room and seeing our favorite reading chair upside down in the middle of the room. Andras knows what he is about, which is why he has Juliet quote a numbingly familiar biblical passage with her limbs jerking like a mindless marionette.

Shock, scandal—listen!

It was at that point that I decided I needed to spend more time with this soft-spoken Hungarian, born only a few months earlier than I, with his bushy, walrus 19^th century, gray moustache. Thanks to Jonathan he made it happen.

On our walk up to the restaurant Andras shared a recent conversation in which he had been asked to help start a Christian theater company by some accomplished talents with significant support. He turned them down without giving it thought (and prayer, I would gather) his decision having been made long before. He explained that he wanted no part in a group of artists who would dedicate their skills and craft to a Christianized ghetto that would use comfortable religious code language for the initiated. He believes he and the vocation of any artist who is a follower of Jesus is to be separated from the world in order to enter fully into the world not hike up its skirts and flee from it.

Andras tells us that he does not believe the church has been made holy kadosh (from “to cut”) in order to stay at a far remove, but to draw close and move into proximity with those who are in darkness and need the light. That is what underlies his frequent exhortation to Christian artists: “Don’t bother with Christian publishing houses. If you’re called to write, then you are called to write for the world. The standards and expectations are higher and, in any event, you are to be lights on a hill not hidden inside a safe, insular community of set apart ones.”

After we are seated at the linen-covered table, Jonathan orders the steak as does our guest–medium-rare, which is as it should be. Every meal in America, he tells us, is an adventurous choice. I, feeling the compulsion of a similar spirit, opt for baked artichoke, something I’ve never ordered off a menu. I wanted something light. Having had a late lunch with my wife and our other children, Benjamin and Christiana (number two and four, respectively) I was not hungry. It had been an artsy day. We had spent it downtown looking at various works being shown at our city’s international Art Prize competition. One of Benjamin’s paintings was on display and some of Jonathan’s dramatic photographs. And, to crown the day, at its end, I was breaking bread with a writer of international reputation.   

As we ate and drank together he shares his life and illustrates what “holiness” looks like for him in Hungary. His context is post-Communist, Eastern Europe. Because of the national recognition his plays and essays have garnered him his audience, and those he rubs shoulders with, are many of the upper-tier artists (writers, actors and painters); all household names in that part of the world. He has a company of about 30 full-time actors who put on several plays at a time, most written by him. Many in the troupe are not Christians. This is purposeful. He can’t imagine excluding unbelievers from intimate contact with words that point to transcendence and thus, toward God. Since the longing for God is universal, he knows he is speaking a language everyone understands, at least subliminally, at some level.

He invited _________________, one of the most respected dramatic directors in Hungary to direct Juliet a study of his mother’s wrenching monologue with an absent God.

A few years ago, Andras wrote a play about suffering and despair. It was a retelling of Job’s story. He wanted Hungary’s best male actor to have the lead. Like most artists at that level, he brought with him not only a mastery of his craft but a “reputation” to match. It was a scandalous choice. When _________________ accepted, the Christian tongues began to wag. But Andras had decided long ago that he was to use his gift not to entertain the religious but to try to bring the irreligious to God. Or, in his words, in some way to “call God down” to those in desperate need of a word from Him; to somehow mitigate His otherwise unacceptable absence.

After playing the role of Job, this celebrity was interviewed on national television. His performance had won acclaim mixed with a surprise and curiosity at his unexpected and unusual choice of character. In the middle of the interview, before an audience of millions he told the interviewer that something shocking had occurred to him as he had performed the part of this modern-day Job. With a look of surprise, and with what could pass for awe, this notorious bon vivant told his audience, “as I acted in this play, for the first time in my life–God spoke to me!”

Andras’s non-evangelistic evangelism has borne fruit, not just once but many times. He and the community he belongs to have sponsored a camp for close to 20 years. They are a group of Christians who love the arts. Invitations are issued to the leading lights in the artistic firmament (most without a religious commitment) to come and share their works at this 10-day retreat. Over the years, artists of all stripes come to have their work honestly critiqued by a group of intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate Christians. While there they are invited to be part of the corporate times of prayer and Scripture reading: “Sorry, this is what we are accustomed to do together. You are welcome to join with us.” And, invariably, they do.  

The atheists and agnostics keep flocking to the camp which is all the defense that is required (if such is required). After all, it was Jesus who said that if we make Him conspicuous He would draw all men to Him. The pattern seems self-evident: we lift Him up, He does the drawing. Perhaps, given that we are mostly pragmatists on this side of the pond, it is also necessary to note the response of these unbelievers. Scores have been so impacted by what they experience in the midst of this community of Christians that they have invited themselves (some almost pleading) to spend more time with Andras. Inevitably, he asks them to come live in his home for a few days where they share his family and work-life close up and personal.

This diffused, non-confrontive evangelism can be blamed on Andras’s father (“my master”, he calls him). Very interesting term. It is so humble and so unlike anything an American, no matter where he was positioned on the fame continuum, would ever say. It opens up this large window into the soul of this playwright. It is also thick with meaning.

It reminds me of the double-entendre in his play Juliet in which the protagonist uses the Hungarian term “ur” for husband which can mean both husband and Lord. There are layers and more layers. Andras is from Eastern Europe, after all, and this is to be expected. He is no Oliver Stone or Michael Moore, for there are nuances, and juicy rivulets of meaning which are fruitfully unpacked only after some good, hard listening and thinking. Europe is not America.

Rev. Visky told his son not to bother evangelizing, “Live your life” he encouraged his children and his congregation. “God is very expert at converting people. That is His job not yours. So just live your life.” Of course, Rev. Visky was an unusually holy man of God. Andras describes him almost in formidable, iconic terms. In Juliet he is described by his wife paradoxically as God’s donkey who, like Balaam’s beast of burden, could see the angel when no one else could. Rev. Viski refers to the soldiers coming to arrest him and throw him into prison as “angels”. While they are sweeping the house with malicious intensity, he invites them to join the family sitting around the table for evening devotions. The captain complies and the passage the pastor reads is the one about entertaining angels unawares. No wonder Juliet gets her husband confused with God, her Lord and her lover.

We ended the evening discussing that play. I had marked up the script rather unscrupulously. I was fascinated by the multiple paradoxes and the persistent, pervasive ambiguity. This is not an easy, breezy romp. This is no eye or ear candy. It is sirloin steak, medium rare, with some strong red wine. It is bloody, which is an interesting metaphor, since several times during that evening he commented that holiness is not antiseptic and uncontaminated—“it is bloody, and dirty and broken.” Apparently, it was an essential point needing to be underlined. “This is what God uses.” He stressed that He does not believe that God uses the morally immaculate. He calls sinners into relationship with Him so that they might call other sinners. If you’re not a sinner, if you’re not dirty God can’t do anything with you, he suggested. But, if you are, and you come to Him and you submit–fully, as Juliet eventually does—to the divine, insistent, yet heart-shattering Lover, He can send you back into the world to live out your love affair. And, as his play implies and his life illustrates, there is nothing more captivating that a lover in love.  

This affair, Juliet whispers to me, is not private, nor is it selfish. It is an affair that is intended to draw in the whole world. For the Lover who shrouds Himself in silence and crushes us with His absence, is also the One who allures us into the very Gulag-wilderness in order to break our adulterous attachments and capture our hearts fully. God is ruthless and uses means that to us are utterly “unacceptable”. He allures (or drags us, as the case may be) into the Gulag as an invitation to intimacy. This concurs with what another very wise lover discovered almost two millenia ago: ”Yet man, this part of your creation, wishes to praise you. You arouse him to take joy in praising you, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, we are told. Silence makes us open our own mouths, not only to speak words of longing and earnest, honest desire–hunger, but to receive, against all hope, the kiss of the beloved. At the end of the play, Juliet has a heart attack, the victim of angina (“to squeeze or crush”) pectoris. Her heart has not only been crushed physically, for its angry hardness has also been softened and restored. So, she can declare, with sheepish surprise at her recovery (both physical and spiritual), and with sturdy resolve, “I walk on, I walk on” with her Lover, Her husband, Her Lord.   

Andras enjoyed his steak. I enjoyed the conversation. For me, the artichoke was a one-shot experience. Next time I will follow the playwright’s lead (generally a good choice, and in this case wisdom indeed) and get the red meat. My sangria (pear!), however, was a treat. I recommend it.             

Tags: Add new tag, art, evangelism, God's absence, God's silence, theater