Jesus leaving the church?

Oberammergau, whose passion play has just started up again, is not far from Ettal, one of the sites of clergy abuse. An article in the Catholic Church's greatest fan, The New York Times, reports that the director Christian Stückl no longer attends mass. Frederik Mayet, one of the actors playing Jesus (above), has looked into leaving the church, though his reasons have more to do with the Pope's rehabilitation of renegade bishops, one of whom had denied the Holocaust:

“I didn’t want to be a member of a church that welcomed Holocaust deniers with open arms,” said Mr. Mayet, who with his sad eyes, beard and lank blond hair resembled Renaissance depictions of Jesus even in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, adding that hearing church leaders condemn condoms and abortion while at the same time they were covering up child abuse was “personally disappointing.” “The leaders should think less about hierarchies and institutions and more about Jesus and how to reach the people again."

How tempting it is to imagine these villagers are more than just members of community theater, have some sort of mystical participation in the passion story, some deeper insight... (I thought I'd shared my mages from John Stoddard's account of the 1890 play; here's one.) Mary Magdalene marries Caiaphas the Elder! Joseph goes to war! Great for a headline, or maybe a play! Below: this year's expulsion from paradise.

Shoestring

Our latest "Reading New York City" exhibit is up. (Last year's is here.) Curated (such a fancy word) by, mainly, moi. Work from four sets of first year classes - African American Cultures in NYC, Photographic New York, Psychology in a City of Immigrants and Natural History of New York - exhibited with little more than tacks and string, paper clips, two 50¢ dowels and six pairs of disposable chopsticks. (I'm especially pleased at the way the space is filled: you can't really tell in a 2-d photo, but the two sheets of photos above are about 10cm apart, so the images move behind each other, like the view out the window of a city bus.)

Lulu

Went to the Met last night to see Alban Berg's "Lulu," an amazing, amazing work. James Levine, who's conducted all but three of the Met's "Lulus," was unable to conduct this one (back problems) so at the baton was Fabio Luisi, who's just been appointed the Met's first principal guest conductor - a good choice. Marlis Petersen, another lithe German soprano, sang the title part with a kind of detached passion. And the music. Don't know how it does what it does, but do it it does.
It's not a nice story, of course. Lots of people do nasty things to other people, a cavalcade of the betrayals and deaths one expects from opera, but sped up like a farce. (The whole story is framed by a circusmaster introducing a show of wild domestic animals.) As it happens, we just read Kierkegaard's (Constantine Constantius') Repetition in the Job class, and a big chunk of that strange text is an analysis of farce, which has something perhaps of the end run around irony which also defines the religious. I wouldn't say "Lulu" is religious, nor that Mignon/Lulu/Nellie/Eva is a knight of faith (though it might be a fun topic for a late night discussion). But something happens to make the farce of her life achieve (at least in her death) a kind of not quite tragic significance, a teleological suspension of the unethical.

Ich habe nie in der Welt etwas anderes scheinen wollen, als wofür man mich genommen hat. Und man hat mich nie in der Welt für etwas anderes genommen, als was ich bin. [Act 2, Scene 1]

Theatrical incarnation

Profound:

Live theatre, then, of all the arts, may best approximate the incarnational character of our God because of its combination of narrative and performance. A play is a story incarnated in real space and time by real people. … The actors tell the story by becoming the story. [Unlike genres which escape time like painting but also film and recorded music] It is subject to all the vagaries and complexities of life. An actor might forget a part; the timing of curtains, lighting, scene changes could go awry. The story is told in the messiness of an imperfect world, and at its best the live performance of a theatrical piece can bring everyone involved in the play—audience, performers, and stage crew—to a transcendent moment. Such a moment might be reduplicated but can never be recaptured. It, like life itself, is ultimately transient. Every play contains the possibility that it might disintegrate because of external or internal forces. This quality is lacking in film. Even seeing a film of a live performance of a play is not the same as being at the live performance. The risks involved in a fallen world are part of the inherent quality of a live performance.

Todd E. Johnson and Dale Savidge,
Performing the Sacred: Theology and Theatre in Dialogue
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 58-59

Schweizer promqueen

Betcha didn't think you'd ever see a prom photo on this blog! But I can't resist. A quite distant Swiss relative - granddaughter of the sister-in-law of one of my maternal great aunts - has just completed a year studying in a high school in rural Pennsylvania. Her mother proudly posted this picture with the caption ich war zu ihrer prom da und sie wurde promqueen. (Don't know who the lucky farmboy was.)

A problem named Maria

Just watched the miraculously restored "Metropolis" of Fritz Lang (1927) - miraculous because the 25 minutes cut from the original by American distributors had been thought lost for eighty years, and only recently rediscovered (in Buenos Aires!). The reconstructed film, complete with original soundtrack and titles, is almost unbearably gripping - the graininess of the recovered images (like Maria and the children drowning in the flooded worker's city, above) makes it feel like historical footage! Didn't all this actually happen?
The only other time I've seen the film was in the 1980s when someone put together a techno soundtrack for it. (I remember going to see it with my mother in a movie theater with surround-sound - in Fashion Valley, I think I recall.) Then it was prophetic proto-cyberpunk sci-fi ancestor of "Blade Runner," but the restored print seems very much a critique of its own time, Christianity (I'd forgotten) alive as a human hope if no longer a faith. But it's impossible not also to think about the decades to follow in Germany; socialist revolution indeed averted, but.

Dialogin'

This semester isn't quite finished - three more classes - but the mind starts to wander toward next semester. I'll be teaching a first year seminar called "Religion in Dialogue." Here's the course description:

This course explores three related questions. What roles has dialogue played in the sacred texts of various religious traditions? Is dialogue between religions — or between religion and secularism, or religion and science — possible? And, finally, is there something religiously significant in the experience of dialogue itself? Students read works as varied as The Book of Job, the Bhagavad Gita, stories of medieval Zen masters, Martin Buber’s I and Thou and Rita Gross and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Religious Feminism and the Future of the Planet.

But then this afternoon I was talking to a graduate student in media studies who is convinced that social media is transforming the world as we speak. How could I not at least raise some questions about the dialogical world of the internet (if it is dialogical)? There must be ways of integrating it into the class... Any suggestions?

Chelsea Golgotha

Sitting outside the chic pizzeria Company on the east side of Ninth Ave, between 24th and 25th, happened to look across to find Golgotha!

Before and after

What do these two buildings have in common? Not much, except that they're both the soon to be built "signature building" of The New School! The one on the top is a few years old. The one below, unveiled yesterday, has been cut down to size by limited resources, zoning laws and neighborhood pushback. (But does it have to be brown? The surface is to be "pre-patinated brass" and evocative of the façade of the school's first building on 12th Street, but the model at least reminds one of wood shingled houses in mid-century suburbs.) The main point of continuity is the visibility of movement between floors, but compressed and squashed into the brown as it is here, Nicolai Ourousoff's observation is hard to resist: it looks like an "ant farm."

We hoped you'd never have to see this

Had a sobering chat this afternoon with one of my junior colleagues, L, a social psychologist and human rights educator. We were speculating about why this year's first year class seems less engaged than last year's. Is it the distractions of dorm life (before this year, first year students didn't have a dorm of their own)? The wobbliness of a semester whose start was slowed by holidays and a snow day in the the week when classes usually come together as a learning community? Starting college at a time of economic anxiety, or in a school in transition?

Then we came to talk of the political situation. It started with wondering what it's like for students who came of age politically with the Obama dream - the "Obama generation" - and the disappointment or disillusionment which followed. I mentioned that some people I know, who worked in the Obama campaign, are quite blue - and beating themselves up for not keeping on.

Not to mention, I said, the ongoing freak show of ugliness from the party of No. It is ugly, L said with feeling, and started telling me about how heartbroken she is at what's happening in the country she loves, and how frightening it is. What's just happened in Arizona seems to her like trying to reintroduce Jim Crow: whites American by right, everyone else suspect and subject to interrogation. Do the politicians courting this racist xenophobia even know what they're dealing with? L's parents, who fought segregation, have said to her with great sadness that they hoped their children would never have to see this.

Barl(eyris)otto

I've been wondering what to call a risotto made with barley (something I discovered recently). It's obvious, I suppose, if a linguistic mongrel, and now that it's appeared in the New York Times, official: barlotto. My self-designed barlotto cooks in the pressure cooker - 15 minutes and natural release - and involves toasting a cup of barley in sautéd onions, then adding chopped dried porcini, chopped sundried tomatoes, some lentilles du Puy (for color contrast) and 2.5 cups of mushroom stock. Serve with parmesan or, as here, with sautéd shiitake (fresh) and leeks.

No idea

As the semester winds down, it's time for course evaluations! Our dean's office has moved from narrative responses to IDEA, a "scantron" multiple-choice form used in hundreds of other colleges and universities. It promises to let you compare your courses to courses elsewhere... but distinctive yet unconventional courses (like all the non- and interdisciplinary courses in the first year program I direct, and integrative courses like Religion & Theater) tend to get lost in the comparisons. Dumb idea.

When hell's no fable

I'm not sure if I ever told you the story of how "Religion & Theater" happened. In April 2005 my friend C, a passionate advocate of community theater as well as documentary theater, directed a performance of "The Exonerated" (a play about men DNA tests had saved from unjust death sentences). It was the same semester I was planning my course "Cultures of the Religious Right," amazed, disturbed and in no small measure impressed by the evangelical sub- or countercultures I'd discovered. C and I got to talking about how powerful it is, as a form of community building and consciousness raising, to perform a play together, especially one which takes you to places you don't know, and I started to imagine how powerful it would be if our students performed some religious right play - perhaps a one-act, together with a secular one-act with the same cast? C thought the idea exciting, but first we had to find a good conservative Christian play. Neither of us could think of one, so we started asking around. I looked at the websites of Christian colleges to see what plays they were putting on - nothing of note. C asked her colleagues at NYU (where she had long taught), who concluded: "they have religion, we have theater." This seemed a bit too simple - hence our course. But we're still looking for our religious play.
A few candidates have come to New York recently. Paul Claudel's "The Satin Slipper" was on in January. The brief run of The Actors Company's production of T. S. Eliot's "The Cocktail Party" has been extended several times; I saw it a few weeks ago. And I just got back from Jeffrey Fiske and Max McLean's adaptation of C. S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters," recently returned after successful runs in Chicago and DC. I'm not sure I've found my play yet, but these have been interesting. (As have a few secular plays which tried to take on religion, Geoffrey Naufft's "Next Fall" and of course Sarah Ruhl's "Passion Play.")

Taking the most recent first, "Screwtape Letters" is a romp... but it has little dramatic tension (we're sure the devils won't win, and the soul for which they are vying isn't very interesting), and the pleasures it affords are ultimately not very interesting either: a mix of Schadenfreude and, I hate to say it, one of the sins it discusses, "spiritual pride":

an unobtrusive little vice which ... consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous. ... He must be made to feel (he'd better not put it into words) "how different we Christians are"; and by "we Christians" he must really, but unknowingly, mean "my set"; and by "my set" he must mean not "The people who, in their charity and humility, have accepted me", but "The people with whom I associate by right". (This is text from the book, not all included in the play.)

Not every play has to be a tragedy, filling the viewer with terror and pity, but this play was too easy. No suspense, no moral complexity - even as Screwtape seems urbane and winsome, we know he isn't really. But then, he's not human anyway. One could imagine a play where the object of the tempters' efforts appears - even just in the distance, a pantomime - and seems to us by turns not worth saving and worth saving, saved and lost, but as long as the only figures on stage are a devil and his helper... (Screwtape Letters, to be fair, wasn't written as a play.) I kept seeing Rick Warren's beatific smirk: "We know how the story ends: We win." Can one make good drama, indeed any drama out of this?

Eliot's drawing room farce is about people (at least they seem to be people), and has its share of twists and surprises. Some characters seem by turns worth saving and not worth saving, saved and lost. Grand questions about human destiny are raised. But by the end, all the merely human characters are saved through the machinations of the rest, a shadowy bunch of guardians who might be angels. I found the story oppressive and infantilizing: I don't want to be led around by paternalistic guardians, and don't think wanting that (recognizing you need that) a desirable trait. (Spiritual pride of another kind, I suppose!) In any case, it saps the energy from the drama once you know what's going on. You don't know how people will end up saved, and there's some interest in the very surprising ways in which they are saved, but by the end you know they will be. Perhaps Eliot hoped we'd be interesting in the particularities that make one person's salvation martyrdom and another's bourgeois marriage... at least in this production, though, the surprising saving of the bourgeois was merely surprising, and Celia's transcendence of the ordinary merely odd. A different production might have made Celia's story more compelling and disturbing, I suppose...

Somewhat to my surprise, I think Claudel's insane Spanish golden age epic - shortened in the adaptation we saw from a nine-hour original - is the most dramatically compelling of the lot. There are guiding figures aplenty, from the moon to St. James (and a whole stable of other saints left out of the adaptation) but the human characters seize our attention. Their lives are full of drama - lots of passion, suffering and separation, the central lovers never able to consummate their love - and the plot full of outrageous twists. We find ourselves conflicted about the characters - saved or not saved, worth saving or not worth saving or, more broadly, hero or villain? - and so engaged in a different way than in "Cocktail Party" or "Screwtape." The individual characters and their passions are part of a magnificent(ly hokey and imperialist) providence, but they don't lose the groundedness in individual fates which seizes the viewer's attention and care. The situations, passions and questions which drive great drama are here, not relativized by the know-it-all perspective of God or his friends. Providence peeks through from time to time, but it's not offered to the viewer to survey. Indeed the strangeness of the plot corresponds to a God more uncanny than reassuring... and we're with the human characters, working out their fate, achieving extraordinary things, nature completed by grace. (It might be interesting to compare "The Tidings brought to Mary" with "The Cocktail Party.") Perhaps this is why Claudel alone succeeds in doing religion and theater?

So, if we get to do "Religion & Theater" again, include Claudel? Or this whole problematic?

No shame.

Rorshack

In the little lull before the final exertions of the academic year, I had a chance to read an important best-selling book you've probably never heard of, Wm. Paul Young's The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity. I heard about it first at AAR in November - a self-published word-of-mouth hit was the latest evangelical fiction sensation, displacing the Left Behind books. I've put my religious right course on the back burner, so was in no hurry to find out more, but an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in January made me at least order a copy. And now I've read it.

It's nothing like the world of Left Behind, with its paranoid rapture fantasies. The Shack comes from what you might call the evangelical left, and it's full of surprises. I won't spoil the whole plot, but I will let you know that when the protagonist Mack meets God (in the shack where Mack's daughter had been killed), it's a trinity he meets.

First comes a big black woman named Elousia who goes by Papa and has a great sense of humor. (Young knowingly references The Oracle in The Matrix, 126.) Next comes an unremarkable middle eastern-looking man with dark skin and a big nose - he and Papa both have crucifixion scars on their wrists. And finally a shimmering spritelike Asian woman named Sarayu. They've taken these forms to help Mack get over the calcified judgment-centered patriarchal religion he's grown up with (and away from). In the suddenly clean and cosy shack, Papa cooks, Sarayu gardens, and Jesus fixes things. Their joyful and loving relationship - nobody's boss - is like nothing Mack has ever seen.

Was one of these people God? What if they were hallucinations or angels, or God was coming later? That could be embarrassing. Since there were three of them, maybe this was a Trinity sort of thing. But two women and a man and none of them white? Then again, why had he naturally assumed that God would be white? He knew his mind was rambling, so he focused on the one question he most wanted answered.
“Then,” Mack struggled to ask, “which one of you is God?”
“I am,” said all three in unison. (89)

A non-white egalitarian Trinity - pretty cool! (And then there's the Hispanic beauty who turns out to be Sophia.) There's more, for Jesus makes clear that he's not a Christian.

"Those who love me have come from every system that exists. They were Buddhists or Mormons, Baptists or Muslims; some are Democrats, some Republicans and many didn't vote or are not part of any Sunday morning or religious institutions. I have followers who were murderers and many who were self-righteous. Some are bankers and bookies, Americans and Iraqis, Jews and Palestinians. I have no desire to make them Christian, but I do want to join them in their transformation into sons and daugters of my Papa, into my brothers and sisters, into my Beloved."
"Does that mean," said Mack, "that all roads will lead to you?"
"Not at all," Jesus smiled ... "Most roads don't lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you." (184)

And indeed it emerges that God wants to save everyone - even the murderer of Mack's child. It's heady stuff, and has become the subject for countless reading groups and discussions. There are the inevitable semi-illiterate exposés of The Shack's "heresy" online, but even these are few. It's too soon to know what long-term effect it will have, but I think it shows not just a possibility within evangelical religion but an emerging reality.

The Shack invites its readers to a form of joyful spirituality centrally about relationship (not hierarchy, not laws and rules, not roles and responsibilities, not institutions and rituals) which is more like ecofeminism than dispensationalism. Its cosmopolitan Trinity (though God does appear to Mack in old white male form at the end) resonates with evangelical communities - more racially integrated than any other religious group in the US - as well as with the predominantly nonwhite global church. Its sense of Jesus' indwelling resonates with the egalitarian (and often women-led) communities of Pentecostalism. It's certainly not what the white male leadership you hear on Fox says Christianity is about, but it may well speak to what's really happening in their congregations and communities.

It's not a work of literature, but The Shack seems an important book. And a hopeful one. I'd be happy to have Shack-readers as neighbors.

God comes off pretty well, too!

Mayday

(Source of picture above and below)

Beyond remedy?

My erstwhile colleague José Casanova, now at Georgetown, has some interesting thoughts about proselytism. While everyone has the right to exit a religious community, he asserts, The individual’s right to exit his or her religious community does not necessarily entail the right of outsiders to enter that community in order to encourage others to exit. Some religions (like Christianity) are called to missionize, but [e]very universalism is particularistic and irremediably so. Although religious diversity may seem a painful mystery, we should develop a respect for the irremediable plurality of world religions and human cultures. Yes perhaps, though further argument is required; one wonders what work the strong and unhappy word irremediable does in all this, and why we should permit it to.

The most interesting part of Casanova's argument (which partly explains his view that some things are beyond our remedying) is that our very conception of proselytism is inadequate to the realities of religious life. Responding to a definition of proselytism as the effort to win adherents for one’s religious community through persuasion Casanova questions three things it assumes:

a) That individuals can change religious communities at will,
that religious communities are nothing but voluntary associations, confessions or denominations.

b) That individuals need to choose, to belong to one particular religious community rather than another, rather than being able to belong simultaneously to multiple religious communities or to none at all.

c) That conversion happens through “persuasion,” as a kind of cognitive rational choice process through which individuals weigh the pros and cons of the various alternatives and settle for the one which makes most sense to them.

By the time you've absorbed the arguments against these assumptions (arguments I find compelling), you've ended up in a quite different religious world. It's not one where religious change doesn't happen, but one where many more factors than the "rationality" of traditions and the "search for truth" of individuals are at work. It may be that religious change - like religious life more generally - is driven by different needs and capacities than we fully comprehend. And what we can't remedy may not need remedy ... or not by us.

Yabba-dabba-Job

The beautiful picture book called The Wonder of it All: The Creation Account According to the Book of Job isn't terribly deep - it certainly doesn't notice that the sequence of topics makes God's speeches more of an "uncreation" (Newsom, 243) in comparison to the Genesis accounts. But it does offer - rather subtly - a quite novel interpretation of the Behemoth, a great creature that Job was obviously familiar with. Can you see it, the triceratops at lower left? And its fellow dinosaur buddy at upper right? So that's why the introduction insisted: The climax of its [the Book of Job's] message, though unexpected, is intensely practical, with special relevance to the needs of God's people in these days of widespread humanism and evolutionary scientism!

Ginkgo in Spring

Sarah Ruhl's play

You might recall that I went up to New Haven a year and half ago to see an highly praised production of a new play by Sarah Ruhl called Passion Play, thinking it might be of use for the Religion & Theater class. I was not amused. Well, I had a chance to see it again tonight as it gets its New York premiere - indeed, to be part of an after show discussion with my Religion & Theater coteacher C. The play's the same (though it's now being called Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play), and the director, but something about the venue (the Irondale Center, in a half-converted church hall in Brooklyn), a lower budget production and a very winsome cast made me enjoy it a lot more. I'm still a little miffed that every kind of stage magic happens (characters with supernatural powers, prophecy, reincarnation, the uncanny survival across time and place of gestures, interactions and poetic snibbets of text, the haunting of the present by figures of the past - and a parade of fish) except the one you might expect from the play's name: participation in the passion narrative has no discernible effect on anyone - unless it's to make people more likely to act against the role they play (but Ruhl has bigger fish to fry than hypocrisy). However I was prepared for it this time, and so was able to appreciate and enjoy the opulently rich theatrical world Ruhl is able to create, layered and resonant if not always clear. And in a converted church hall, it feels like an outgrowth and outgrowing of religious theater, not a mockery of it. I guess I liked it!

(The pics
are from the program.)