I’ve been riding in parades, going to weddings, taking meetings at home on our productions, folks helping me while I’m on crutches; all of it sharing honest beauty and joy and Charity. Yet the pain from the surgery is one thing. We are suffering a great, ugly wound right now as a nation. The ignorance and blistering shame. Exposed raw. The killing, the dying, the body count. For what? For us to learn how to love and live in peace as God intended. Why must we pay for this lesson with lives? Why does this moment in our country’s history have to break us and shoot us and kill us? The cost is too much. I despair. We are all connected, brothers and sisters; how can there be so many among us ignorant of that?
I have my neighbors and friends, colleagues and co-workers, all of us holding each other close, a community, and we feel safe, we feel loved, and this is the Hope we take with us going forward. The backwardness will end someday, I pray, I believe. We will heal. With empathy. With knowing that what is done to one of us is done to all of us. My Faith comes from seeing and experiencing the great good within each of us. And this is why I post here and share with you. Since we began in 2011, we have been drawing the best within everyone. The best in all of us is what has given us growth, the passion for excellence and doing the right thing. Tim Rater’s own words speak to creating a culture here that is open, for and available to everyone. It is the goodness in everyone that has brought us here and moves us into the future. I only know this by my work in the theatre. And so I know someday we will be healed. Heal ourselves.
Love and thanks,
Jim