Episcopal Commission for the Biblical Apostolate

Biblio = Bible – Drama = Action

There are so many different ways to dramatize the different steps that I will be using with you.

 Biblio-drama is new creative way to become familiar with the Biblical text and to do this in a playful manner. But this does not mean that is mere play or acting in the way the famous passion plays are staged, where scenes from the Bible are acted out in front of the audience in a less free interpretation of the Bible.

 To be par t of a Biblio-drama means to connect the Scripture passage with one’s own life story or life experiences, so that I may find my own situation and my experience in biblical passage. That means I understand and interpret the text or a particular role, which I have chosen, from the viewpoint of my own situation and experiences in anew light. When I take i=on a particular personage I can become aware of certain aspects of my personality or life story which up to then I had not seen so clearly: longing, despair, fear, amazement, hope, inhibitions….

 When involved in Biblio-drama I am bound to the text, but not in a way that the text becomes the “script” as it does in play and thus determines exactly what I have to say. On the Contrary, I have to develop my role intuitively, that is, I respond to the text with my feelings and sense what or whom I can identify with.

 Biblio-drama is an action of faith, when I play my role I encounter my faith, I might even come to the limits of my faith. But the Biblio-drama can also lead to consciously take steps in deepening my faith, making it grow.

 Biblio-drama will only succeed when the actors are honest and open. It is presupposes the readiness to encounter my true self in the depth of my being to share of it with the others. However, each person is free to decide how far she/he will go in revealing his/her inner self. I have been willing to allow a process of change in myself. What is at stake is my own journey of faith.

Where Biblio-drama is handled in this way, it can begin a healing process in the person and lead her/his to a new relationship with God and Christ.

Some information’s about BIBLIODRAMA

BIBLIODRAMA:          Bringing     WORD       and    LIFE

 Together…..Becoming FLESH for the WORD!

•      Drawing waves in Germany and other European countries, Bibliodrama has been found as an effective tool in bringing the WORD OF GOD powerfully to the people
•      It is a personal encounter with the WORD allowing participants to know themselves better and discover life deeply through others
•      Through a facilitator, the group enters into a selected Biblical text where a gradual deepening is achieved by way of reading, conversations, interviews, gestures, acting and group sharing.
•      The process becomes a spiritual experience…..where personal history, group life and faithful tradition draw from the WORD.

Facilitators

Fr. Rudi Pohl, S.V.D. (Italy) and Miss Joy Candelaria (Las Piñas). Bibliodrama is “Lectio Divina on stage”. It was introduced in Europe about 30 years ago as a method of internalizing the Word of God in one’s avtive life. By popular demand, Bibliodrama was given in four rounds in Manila, Baguio and in Cebu. Three basic workshops were given for the beginners and one for the facilitators. Bibliodrama works on four levels: cognitive-affective-spiritual and social. It is not a show for others to watch but it is a “beginning” of Word- Event wherein the participants themselves experience the word physically, emotionally, spiritually and socially.

 Participants (Lay, religious sisters. Priests) of Bibliodrama have these things to say:

•      “It is a wonderful experience of WORD. We have witnesses how the word can put us in touch with our personal lives and how it can bring us closer as a community.”
•      “We experienced the word alive within and among us.”
•      “Journey with the text through the different exercises like dances, and reflections, we have witnessed how the word can really transform and lead us to collaborate as church.”

Bibliodrama leads participants to deeper and more expressed love for the word. It aims to equip them for the basic elements in using bibliodrama for liturgies, retreats, formation programs and other pastoral ministry work. We hope to share the experience nationwide.

Most simply described, Bibliodrama is a form of role-playing in which the roles played are taken from biblical texts. The roles maybe those of characters who appear in the Bible, either explicitly and by name (Adam and Eve); or those who presence may be inferred from an imaginative reading of the stories (Noah’s wife or Abraham’s mother). In bibliodrama, the reservoir of available roles or parts may include certain objects or imaged which can be embodied in voice and action (the serpent in the Garden of Garden of Eden or the staff of mosses). Places can speak (the Jordan River or Mount Sinai). Or spiritual figures may talk (angels, or God, or the adversary). Then there are a host of characters from the legendary tradition (Lilith or five perverted judges of Sodom) who can be brought onto the bibliodramatic stage. Finally, as an extension of the process in a different direction, there are the figures from the history who have commented and brought alive an act of role playing.

As I have developed it then, Bibliodrama is a form of interpretative play. To honor it with a venerable name, Bibliodrama can be called a from a Midrash-used with the definite article and a capital M is both a product and a process classically associated with the exegetical works of the rabbi of late antiquity. For the rabbis, this interpretive engagement with the bible manifested itself in a word plays, analogies, and even puns which intensified the active experience of reading text. Midrash is derived from the Hebrew root that means to investigate or to explore. In the Midrash, the written texts are closely examined for meanings and insights that will enrich our understanding and enhance our relationship to the Bible. In a more generic sense, however, midrash- and  now in lower case- may be extended in time to later ages and to our own and nay, from a more liberal-perspective, include extra literary acts of interpretation such s movement, song, visual art, and drama, which like their classical forebears, serve to illuminate meaning in the Biblical narrative.

In our time, a vital interest in religion and scripture exist within three different and often antagonistic communities. There are the religiously devout for whom the scriptures are an unquestioned and replenishing source of doctrine, law and moral imperative. There are academics and literary scholars many of whom see the Bible as a patchwork of writing embodying complex literary, textual archeological, political, social and historical agendas- who give their professional lives to studying and teaching religious texts. And finally there are creative men and women- writer, artist, poets, actors, musicians-who still find inspiration for works of imaginative creation in the myths of the Judeo-Christian culture.

But outside of these communities, it is clear that the Bible is losing its meaning for regular people and has been doing so for several generations- even though the stories and images of the Bible still run in our veins and haunts our dreams, the spiritual awakening, the spiritual hungry to say nothing of the ordinary literate do not by and large, turn to the Bible for nourishment and direction. They do not see it as a mirror and window for their souls.

The popular culture, despite all its talk about myth and soul, does not encourage us to revisit our inherited tradition and rediscover there the soul-myths we so deeply need. Few of our contemporary guides and spiritual pundits, not professionally associated with the pulpit or the business of religion, look to the bible for those archetypes of human experience and feeling that might connect our struggles for meaning and continuity with the request of our ancestors, we are so busy distancing ourselves from patriarchy, or from institutional religion, indeed from the past itself, that we do not recognize how the old biblical figures are still able to tell us something about who we are, we’ve came from, and we are going.