Who built the temple in Jerusalem?

Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Dude Abides

Home
Progressive Christian

Last updated on: September 14, 2007 at 5:17 pm by Cathleen Falsani

2007-09-14T17:17:00-07:00 Cathleen Falsani

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

GODSTUFF:

Priest finds stage life scripted in faith

Before I was a journalist, I was an actor.

Briefly, a semester or so ahead of my debut in the pages of the Wheaton College student newspaper, I became a member of its theater company, a group known simply as “Workout.”

The company performed in the Arena Theater, a simple black box that was transformed miraculously into (variously during my tenure) an enormous rope cage for “Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie?” a multilevel fairy tale land for “Into the Woods” and a post-apocalyptic wasteland for a production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” Long since I walked its stage, that theater remains a sacred space for me. I was transformed inside its walls; touched by grace and the hand of God in a way I’ve rarely felt elsewhere.

What happened in Workout was wonderfully creative and deeply spiritual, no matter what material we were working with. I learned as much about faith and doubt, forgiveness and trust, holiness and wounded wholeness from a raucous production of “The Man Who Came to Dinner” as I did from a magical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wrinkle in Time.

I’ve been reminiscing about my short-lived acting career this week and remembering fondly my encounters with L’Engle, the Newbery Award-winning author who died last week in Connecticut at the age of 88.

L’Engle was a dear friend of our theater director, and I was blessed to have met her during one of her visits to Wheaton. I recall her elaborate amulets and silver talismans, her purple and red caftan, and the way she talked about art as an essential expression of faith.

L’Engle often revisited her own experiences in the theater in her books. One of my favorites and one of her most popular works for adults — The Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage — chronicles her 40-year marriage to actor Hugh Franklin, whom she met when she landed an understudy role in a production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” And next spring, L’Engle’s longtime publisher, Farrar Straus & Giroux, is set to release a never-before-published semi-autobiographical novel the author wrote in the 1940s about a 22-year-old woman who falls in love in the theater.

While I cannot quote from memory what Ms. L’Engle said during her visit to Wheaton, it can be summed up in her words on another occasion when she said, “Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.”

Eventually I had to make one of the more difficult decisions of my life — the theater or the newspaper. I chose the paper and a vocation that called me to pursue the truth in a different way. But I mourned the loss of life inside the theater.

Both are wonderfully collaborative processes (when done correctly). Producing a newspaper every day has a lot in common — emotionally and creatively — with putting on a play. Everyone has a different part to play, and none can be performed fully without the other.

Ideally at least, both acting and journalism are all about chasing, uncovering and presenting what’s true. Both vocations do that in community — be it a metro news staff or a dinner theater troupe.

Some of the similarities are vividly explored in a marvelous new book by one of my favorite priests, the Rev. James Martin, about his experience as a “theological dramaturge” for the Public Theater production of the play “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” in New York two years ago.

Martin’s book, A Jesuit Off-Broadway, recounts the months he spent consulting on spiritual and biblical matters for the play written by Stephen Adly Guirgis, directed by Oscar winner Philip Seymour Hoffman, and featuring actor Sam Rockwell as Judas.

Martin, author of last year’s best-seller, My Life With the Saints, is also a journalist. A onetime Chicagoan, he is an editor at America magazine in New York. In A Jesuit Off-Broadway, he tenderly records the play’s creation process from 10 pages of dialogue to a heralded five-week sold-out run.

Far from being an outsider, the priest is quickly adopted into the sometimes hard-partying, profane and deeply spiritual ensemble of actors that included Eric Bogosian in the role of Satan.

Along the way, Martin discovered a loving camaraderie among the cast of “Judas” that most churches would envy and learned lessons about his faith and his Lord that he hadn’t anticipated. One of the most poignant comes in a conversation with Hoffman about his gentle method of directing.

“Sometimes you have to tell someone exactly what you want,” Hoffman says, “but you can’t dictate. You have to keep suggesting. Otherwise the person becomes a sort of empty shell, they end up performing in a way that’s not, well, spiritual.”

This reminds the priest of someone else.

“His approach mirrored the way Jesus preached,” Martin writes. “Much of Jesus’ preaching involves inviting his listeners to consider something new. … Or, to use [Hoffman’s] words, Jesus was always suggesting, in order that the decision to follow or not to follow was that person’s own decision.”

————————————————————————-

HERE’S FATHER JIM ON LAST NIGHT’S COLBERT REPORT:

Uncategorized

Previous Post

September 13, 2007

Next Post

September 16, 2007

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A little happy ARCHIVED COLUMNS BECOMING FAMILY BelieberNess BREAKING NEWS! Disquiet Time DJ JEFF'S SPINTASMS falsani FILM from OCRegister From Sojo.net God Nods GODSTUFF I Take Requests incubatespirit LURKING IN THE NARTHEX On My Nightstand ONEMOMS Polling the Room PONTIFEXCELLENT Thru My Eyes TWO CENTS Uncategorized Upcoming Events VASCO VASCO'S HEART

Select a Month January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 July 2014 May 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 April 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 December 2003 October 2003 March 2003 December 2002 October 2002 January 2001

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who built the temple in Jerusalem?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Abraham Moses Solomon David