'I could do no other....'

We just recently attended a production of the hit broadway show ‘Come From Away. It is based on the book by Jim DeFede ‘The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander Newfoundland’, [which both my husband and I read before seeing the play]. The plane passengers kept wanting to pay for what they were receiving. People found themselves being accepted for who they really were. They were offered help and friendship that had nothing to do with wealth or position, race, sexual identity, religion or skin colour.

And we, the audience got caught up in their experience, erupting after the performance… and erupting is the only word the will adequately describe what happened. We weren’t cheering the set which was minimal using only a backdrop and a dozen or so wooden chairs. We weren’t cheering for the costuming, which could be found in anyone’s closet. There was nothing spectacular about the makeup. There was no well-known actor in the cast and no special effects. What prompted such an outpouring? I think it was because we had just heard Lady Wisdom speaking, and regardless of our religious [or non-religious] leanings, she had spoken to something deep within everyone in that audience.

At the Diet of Worms, 1521, an assembly of the Holy Roman Empire, Martin Luther is said to have declared: “Here I stand, I can do no other.” And even it Luther didn’t actually say these words [and no one knows whether he did or not], they were certainly the unheard words coming from the stage.

“Lady Wisdom goes out in the streets and shouts

At the town centre she makes her speech

In the middle of the traffic she takes her stand

At the busiest corner she calls out…”

Four days later these words quoted above from Proverbs were part of the Old Testament reading at the Sunday sermon. And as the priest preached on these words my mind kept going back to that performance where I had seen them preached, not from a street corner, but from a stage..and had been part of the crown that had reacted to them..

When was the last time we heard Lady Wisdom speaking? When was the last time WE became her spokesperson?

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