Once upon a time, a brilliant storyteller came into the world to touch countless hearts with tales of wisdom and wonder, losing and finding, tears and laughter. She scattered her life-giving stories far and wide, and encouraged others to do the same. She knew the power of stories to bind us together, ground us in communal wisdom, and help us imagine better futures. Hers was a serious vocation in a world so forgetful of the stories we need, the stories that nourish, the stories that save. But she always lived out her calling with levity and lightness. Everyone who has known her remembers her laughter, her joy, her delight in daily blessings, her generous and irrepressible spirit. As she liked to put it, she was “subject to bursts of enthusiasm.”
A week before Christmas, master storyteller Angela Lloyd was up at dawn, photographing the beauty of the California desert sky. She posted two photos with a greeting to her friends: “Good morning. The view from here: looking west, looking east.” She loved sharing the beauty of her desert home. But sometime after that glorious morning she was taken ill, and not long after, on the twelfth day of Christmas, Angela departed this life. When I got the news today, the world felt suddenly washed with grey, bereft of her bright presence.
I came to know Angela nearly 40 years ago, when we worked together on creative retellings of Old Testament stories for the Easter Vigils at Christ Church, an Episcopal parish in Ontario, California. We both believed that God is not known through ink so much as through breath. Without the breath of a spirited teller, our sacred stories may lie dormant and listless.
After a few years we made a film of the stories, The Electronic Campfire: New Storytelling from Scripture. Angela took some of the parts (including that of God), while I took the rest. We shot the scenes in various southern California locations.
When I heard that Angela had died, I wanted to celebrate her giftedness by sharing her work in this film. While throughout her life she told many different kinds of stories from a variety of sources and traditions, our biblical collaborations do convey, I believe, a lively sense of the engaging spirit she brought to everything she did. I offer these clips in her memory.
The first is the Creation story from the first chapter of Genesis. Instead of speaking the divine words for each of the seven days (“Let there be light,” etc.), God performs an action, since in the Bible God’s word is not just description of an action, but the action itself. For God, to say is the same as to do.
Angela’s other stories in the film were the Red Sea and the Valley of the Dry Bones. In the first story, I play the Israelites, so you’ll see a bit of that as a lead-in to Angela’s performance of both Yahweh (God) and Miriam (Moses’ sister). The Dry Bones story is all Angela, including some of her riffs on the washboard. She improvised a line the Exodus tale which, in retrospect, sums up her life: “Let’s do it for the story.”
At the Easter Vigil, there is a bidding to prayer after each story. Here are the words which follow the story of the Divine Breath that ceaselessly enlivens our “dry bones”—in this world and the next:
Dear People of God:
There are those who tell our story
as a history of defeats and diminishments,
a narrative of dashed hopes and inconsolable griefs.
But tonight we tell a different story,
a story that inhales God’s own breath
and sings alleluia even at the grave …
We did a number of Easter Vigils together, and Angela would always surprise me with a new variation. One time, playing an Israelite in the Exodus, she pulled out a postcard. “I was planning to mail this when we got to the Promised Land,” she said, “but something tells me I should mail it now. It may be a while before we get there. Besides, I’m starting to think that maybe anywhere can be the Promised Land, that even in this wilderness I am standing on holy ground.”
Thank you, dear Angela, for your marvelous stories, your enthusiasm, your joy, and so much more. There’s an old song by Jane Voss that salutes absent friends, and what the song says, that is what I say:
Wherever you may be tonight,
I hope this finds your burdens light,
Your purpose high, your spirit strong,
I hope that you have got along—
My song was lost and gone, if not for you.
The religious imagineer 