DRAMATIZING THE DIVINE
The day after I watched a coup attempt unfold in real time, I re-watched The Prince of Egypt. It’s long been a favorite film of mine, and I turned to it because I needed an emotional reset and it can be reliably counted upon to make me cry. I got the catharsis I was looking for, sniffling through the opening scene and giving in to shoulder-shaking sobs at the parting of the Red Sea, but when I switched off my computer I also realized that I’d been chatting with God about the film for its entire hour and a half run time. It was the longest conversation we’ve had in quite a while.
Praying has been difficult for me during the pandemic. Early on my prayers just consisted of sustained internal screaming, which I didn’t feel particularly bad about, but once the internal screaming subsided I kept trying and failing to maintain a regular prayer practice on my own. I don’t connect well to Sunday services through a computer screen, though I do still watch, and I am hopeless at saying the Daily Office without people to say it with and a church to say it in. Choral music used to be a massive part of my prayer life, and we can’t have choirs right now. Even trying to maintain a routine of saying short daily prayers in front of the cross and icons hanging on my bedroom wall has proven frustratingly difficult.
So it was a huge relief to realize, as I stared at the ceiling processing my emotional response to a film I’ve seen numerous times since I was a child, that I’m still capable of having a conversation with God that isn’t just me running through the Creed and the canticles because I feel like I should. It also made me consider what a large role dramatic representations of stories from Scripture have played in my spiritual upbringing and expression.
It is important to know that I’m not breaking any new ground here. Christians have been extremely into dramatic and theatrical retellings of Scripture for hundreds of years. Mystery plays were popular in medieval Europe, and we still enjoy some of their legacy today; the song we know as “The Coventry Carol” is so named because it appeared in the Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant in Coventry, a play that dramatized the nativity narrative from the Annunciation to the Massacre of the Innocents.
As both a cradle Episcopalian and a certified theatre kid, the cast recordings of Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat were on frequent rotation during my middle and high school years. In sixth grade I was in a production of Godspell, and in tenth grade I was in a production of Joseph. Both of these productions were put on by Roman Catholic schools, so most of us who were acting in them had a personal spiritual connection to the material that made up the story, and acting it out certainly deepened that connection for me.
Godspell is notable to Episcopalians because many of its lyrics are drawn from the Hymnal 1940, and because its creator John-Michael Tabelak was raised in the Episcopal Church. (I do feel compelled to be a bit of a buzzkill and point out that Tabelak was inspired to write Godspell after attending a deeply uninspiring Easter service at an Episcopal church in 1970.)
I think my castmates and I got a more thorough religious education from putting on Godspell than we did from attending religion class every day. This is partly because the show sticks very close to the narrative of the synoptic gospels, so we got a healthy dose of scripture; to this day, if you asked me to tell one of the more famous parables from the Gospels of Matthew or Luke, my phrasing would likely reflect the script for Godspell more than it would the NRSV. It also felt good to take the story off the page and play around in it, making each other laugh and putting ourselves in the headspace we imagined Jesus’ disciples must have been in as they heard his teachings and watched his death. It made the gospel feel immediate.
When I search my memories of Joseph I mostly find disco music and rehearsing the nine minute dance number that served as our curtain call, but clearer than anything else is the day of our Sunday matinee, when one of my castmates brought her Bible to the girls’ dressing room and we took turns reading the Joseph story aloud from Genesis while we prepared for the final performance of a show we’d poured four months and our hearts into. It made a dressing room feel like church.
I first heard the music of Jesus Christ Superstar when my mother put it on the stereo one Holy Saturday while we dyed Easter eggs. That was in elementary school, and I listened to Superstar during Holy Week without fail from that point on. By college my annual listen had migrated from Holy Saturday to Maundy Thursday, because that was more appropriate to the timeline, and when I got to grad school and the strictures of work and school and distance prevented me from coming home for Easter, I still had the wailing guitar riffs of the Superstar overture to look forward to. I clung to that tradition even harder the following year, when work and school and distance were no longer a barrier to Holy Week attendance at my home parish, but the raging pandemic was.
My love of hymnody and sacred choral music runs as deeply as it does because I appreciate not having to come up with my own words for the emotions I’m feeling or the spiritual situation I’m in. Oftentimes the emotions and the situation are exhausting enough, and I’m either going to use someone else’s words to talk to God or I’m not going to talk to God at all. These show tunes also fill that role, and songs I learned every word to as a child help me express emotions I didn’t experience until adulthood. I’ve grown into them, as one might grow into a well-loved but slightly too-large sweater.
One afternoon in college I stood alone in my mother’s kitchen, listening to “Close Every Door” from Joseph. I was finally beginning to emerge from a mental health episode that left me feeling like a stranger to myself, and I had tears rolling down my face at the lines, “Close every door to me / Keep those I love from me / Children of Israel are never alone / For we know we shall find our own peace of mind.” Don’t think of this song as a depression metaphor, I texted my mother, unless you feel like crying. As it turned out, she’d had the same thought herself the first time she’d heard it, years before I was born.
“I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar perfectly captures the awe and confusion I feel when faced with the unconditional love of the divine. Recently I’ve been listening to “Superstar” on repeat, because hearing Brandon Victor Dixon riff on the line “I only wanna know” after singing a song composed almost entirely of questions helps me show God the part of myself that is very tired of “these uncertain times” actually, and would like some answers now.
Something I had forgotten about The Prince of Egypt until my recent re-watch is that the final scene of the film is not the Israelites safe on the far side of the Red Sea, but the descent of Moses from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. There is no dialogue, just the huge swell of Hans Zimmer’s score, the orchestra playing a melodic line that was paired in the opening scene with the cry of the Israelites, “Deliver us! There’s a land you promised us.” That final moment is nothing short of arresting, as God’s people are finally on their way to the promised land (although it’s going to take them quite some time to get there), and the film ends on the image of Moses holding God’s great gift of the Law in his hands.
The Exodus story that The Prince of Egypt is based on—and all of Scripture, really—is a story of how God keeps God’s promises. That’s a comforting fact to remember, but I am also comforted by the fact that Scripture is full of people reminding God of God’s promises. I think I invited God in for movie night the moment I heard that first “Deliver us! There’s a land you promised us,” at the beginning of the film. Yes, I thought, sitting in my living room the day after a coup attempt, ten months into a pandemic. You promised you would look after us. You promised. I won’t deny my tone was a little accusatory. The Lord came to hang out with me anyway.
(This is the same Lord who gave us the parable of the persistent widow, after all. I could tell you that parable right now, if you want. It’s in Godspell.)
My spiritual practice thrives when I have something to anchor myself as I grasp at what I cannot touch. That’s why I like my churches full of art and incense and choral music; that’s why I like icons and prayer beads. That’s why I’m so full of love for these modern-day mystery plays, which have given me words and music and memories of performance to wrap around myself, much as I wrap a scarf around my head for church or rosary beads around my hand as I pray, reaching out for God.
