MaryAnn McKibben Dana, God, Improv, and the Art of Living

MaryAnn McKibben Dana has written a beautiful and engaging book—part self-help book, part inspirational literature, part theological exploration. She weaves the whole together with a quick sense of humor and a disarming awareness of her own shortcomings, failures, and uncertainties. She isn’t an expert in improv trying to tell us how it’s done. She is a student of improv reflecting with us on the ways life and faith are themselves acts of improvisation.

Dana is a talented storyteller. She writes in short vignettes that move seamlessly between improv, Game of Thrones, the Bible, and Parks and Rec, to name but a few. Yet, like a well-crafted sermon, the book journeys from light observations about “living Yes-ly” to deep explorations of the darkest night of the soul. While she is not naively optimistic, she is relentlessly hopeful. No matter what life throws at us, she believes, we can find our way to something authentic and beautiful and real.

The Art of Living Yes-ly

I wasn’t sure what to expect picking up a book about God and improv. Never having studied improv myself, I thought of it basically as cracking jokes, each actor trying to make the audience laugh. How profound could an improv book really be?

But improvisation, Dana says, isn’t about being zany. Rather, it’s about being authentic—each person responding to their partners, honoring the gifts they offer and responding in kind. In this sense, improv is fundamentally about presence and attention. Dana says,

We simply can’t improvise without paying attention—without seeing the person in front of us and hearing what’s actually being communicated. It’s one of the greatest ways of honoring another human being.

Here, she begins to open a metaphor for living a life as paying attention to those around us, receiving what they offer us, and making an offer back.

Dana describes this principle of improv as “Yes, And.” In improv, one can’t simply refuse an offer made by a partner. Refusals shut down the action, leaving no way forward. Rather, improv proceeds by the principle of “Yes, And”—acknowledging the moment and finding a way to move it forward. So, too, in life we can’t simply wish that things were other than what they are, she says. Rather, we accept the situation we are presented with and find a way to move it forward.

Fashioning a Life

At first I was resistant to the notion of “Yes, And” because, of course, life gives us all kinds of things that we dare not simply accept. Life gives us failure, and tragedy, and loss. Yet, from the principle of “Yes, And,” Dana weaves a beautiful vision of what it means to find the Yes in any given moment.

In one of the most poignant passages of the book, Dana reminds us that even in the face of tragedy, we can put the pieces back together in ways that move us forward. She says,

The truth is, we’re not in control of our lives, and the unforeseen happens. Plans fall through. People get sick. Marriages end. The plant closes down. Loved ones die. Our job as improvisers is to use our resources to put together a life in the wake of things—maybe not the life we had planned, but a good life, a life with dignity, fashioned out of what’s on hand.

When I mentioned this passage to some of my friends at Mercy Community Church, most of whom have been homeless at some point in their lives, they recognized its truth immediately. Having lost everything, they learned to live again. So it is with all of us, in varying degrees. None of us live perfect lives. We do the best we can with whatever we have on hand.

Improvising with God

While I think it’s possible to read Dana’s book as a sort of self-help book about how to live a meaningful life in the face of difficulty, it is in fact also a deeply theological work. Dana’s theological reflections aren’t heavy-handed, but there is a theological richness infusing the book.

What Dana proposes is that God, too, is improvisational. God responds to the moment of our lives as a kind of spiritual scene partner. Like us, God is always finding the “Yes, And” in every situation.

Dana rereads the biblical story with an eye for the improvisational nature of God. She reminds us how God responded to Abraham’s challenge to spare Sodom if only 10 righteous could be found (Genesis 18). She recalls that God brought forth manna—just enough for each day—when the people became hungry (Exodus 16). She finds improvisation in Jesus’s first sign (John 2), giving a miraculous “Yes, And” to Mary’s improvised notion that he should turn water into wine. Jesus even seems to expand his notion of his own ministry in response to the improvisation of a Canaanite woman’s witty wordplay (Matthew 15:21-28).

In the Bible, Dana finds a God who is constantly improvising. She says, “God’s nature is to collaborate—to improvise—with God’s people. And when that improvisation occurs, it moves in the direction of inclusion and mercy and grace.”

Finding the Best Yes

Most profoundly, though, Dana finds an improvisational God in the tragedies of her own lived experience. She tells the story of a family she pastored at a previous church who had lost their son to adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) at the age of 9. When the couple’s second son also became sick and died, she says, it “completely vaporized any notion of God’s unchanging and all-encompassing plan.” She could not accept the common theological response that God sends us tragedy to test us or make us stronger. “If I were ever to find out that this is how God works,” she says, “God and I would be finished.”

Instead, Dana finds hope in the idea of an improvising God. For her, God remains present in times of tragedy, not merely weeping with us or comforting us, but helping us to find the Yes, And in the situation. “God,” she says, “is creative and dynamic, working with us to bring about the best wholeness—the best Yes—at any given moment.”

This is what MaryAnn McKibben Dana can do with improv. She can reach into the depths of tragedy and give us hope. She can lead us into the dark night of the soul and help us find God.