Advent -- Newman and Wojtyla

Advent is upon us.  Last year I reviewed a number of Newman's sermons during the Advent season (see first review  here). Today, I returned to the sermons again. In mind's eye I see Newman climbing up into the pulpit and speaking his wisdom of the heart. As his contemporary William Lockhart said: "Newman's sermons came down like a new revelation. He had the wondrous, the supernatural power of raising the mind to God, and of rooting deeply in us a personal conviction of God, and a sense of presence."


As I read the sermon, "Worship a preparation for Christ's coming," (PPS V.1) I  thought of our recent production of the Jeweler's Shop; through Newman's imagery we can find an advent dimension to Wojtyla's play.


Newman reminds us right at the beginning we should relish the opportunity to worship now, even in the damp and cold of a dark Advent morning  -- because we believe we come before God. "They who realize that awful Day when they shall see Him face to face, whose eyes are as a flame of fire, will as little bargain to pray pleasantly now, as they will think of doing so then." Because his gaze is too hard to bear, Newman says, we must learn through our worship how to come into God's presence.


In the Jeweler's Shop, the figure of the jeweler represents judgment, and serves as a sign of the  future judgment of God. The imagery used in the play emphasizes the eyes of the jeweler. He is watching (42, 52), his eyes are flashing (43), he acts on others with the "force of his eyes" (81). Andrew and Theresa could bear his gaze and learn from him, troubled though they were by the responsibility of the sweep of temporal existence. Anna was ashamed by his gaze and sought to avoid it.  Christopher and Monica trivialized his gaze. Would they learn to bear it and learn from him? It is the standing question of the play. "what are you building, children?" Theresa asks them. She wants to follow them, but commends them to us, "they will come back, they will certainly come back."


Newman also uses the imagery of the Bridegroom: "Let us then take this view of religious service; it is 'going out to meet the Bridegroom,' who, if not seen 'in His beauty,' will appear in consuming fire. Besides its other momentous reasons, it is a preparation for an awful event, which shall one day be." We are not ready for meeting the bridegroom, but we can learn to watch for him through prayer and liturgy. "And what is true of the ordinary services of religion, public and private, holds in a still higher or rather in a special way, as regards the sacramental ordinances of the Church. In these is manifested in greater or less degree, according to the measure of each, that Incarnate Saviour, who is one day to be our Judge, and who is enabling us to bear His presence then, by imparting it to us in measure now." 


Sacramental life points us beyond, towards "He, who is Judge to us, [and] prepares us to be judged,—He, who is to glorify us, prepares us to be glorified, that He may not take us unawares; but that when the voice of the Archangel sounds, and we are called to meet the Bridegroom, we may be ready."


Adam uses the same imagery of the Bridegroom to direct Anna's gaze beyond the present and away from the temptation of the present desire for a substitute for love. He explains to her that most men live in a lethargy and verge on sleep. Anna must discover that "dormant space" in her soul and look beyond (63). She must wake up to the demands of love even if it means forgiveness and suffering: "to love means to give life through death." Anna by play's end has entered the path of love.


At the end of the play, Adam exclaims: "Human existence seems to short for love." (or love is too short or trivial for existence). The task for human existence is to "reflect in some way the absolute existence and love."  As he calls forth each character by name, Adam says that such absolute love "is the ultimate sense of our lives." 


We learn the same advent truth from Blake as well as Newman. Blake wrote: "And we are put on earth a little space//That we may learn to bear the beams of love." That little space is opened up by the Advent season to become a time to wake, to watch and to prepare.

Advent, Newman advises, is "a season for chastened hearts and religious eyes; for severe thoughts, and austere resolves, and charitable deeds; a season for remembering what we are and what we shall be." I take this to be the very thrust of The Jeweler's Shop -- Adam helps us remember who we are and the Jeweler chastens our hearts. Wojtyla opens our eyes.

Reading Newman we can return from the world of the stage and face the very coldness of the [December] day; he exhorts once again to "go out to meet Him with contrite and expectant hearts; and though He delays His coming, let us watch for Him in the cold and dreariness which must one day have an end."

The Descendants: Death and the tales told by idiots

The Descendants is a well crafted movie about the drama of a small family as they learn to live with the impending death of the wife and mother who suffered a head trauma in a boating accident and is taken off life support. The husband, Matt King, played by George Clooney,  must learn to deal with the disclosure of his wife's infidelity and his two daughters (ages 10 and 16) must now bond with a father who has been detached and only concerned with his work.


Here is Morgenstern from the WSJ: "Mr. Clooney is a star at the peak of his powers (though he never flaunts them), playing the sort of person we're seldom privileged to meet—a whole man, which is to say a flawed and foolish man who is basically good, and who gets a precious shot at being better."CBS News reports that many now think this movie will win the Oscar (see link here) The New York times also speaks highly of the movie (see link here).  CBS reports that Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote, "If there's something fundamentally wrong with 'The Descendants,' I can't find it. What I see ranks high on the list of the year's best films." I agree that it is well paced, well directed, and emotionally satisfying. But perhaps the thing wrong with it may be found in another accolade, this one from the LA Times, that it straddles comedy and tragedy. Well perhaps it is neither, because there is no deep affirmation of the human condition (unless eating ice cream while watching TV counts) and there is no tragedy because there is no real evil in this world. 


The most important conversations in this drama are silly, jumbled, or silenced. When the father confronts the man who had an affair with his wife, he takes consolation from the fact that he did not really love her (it was an affair of appetite). When the ten year old is informed about her mother's condition, the director shows a scene of the girl sitting with a counselor, and her father standing behind, and we hear nothing, not a word,  of what they say. I suppose this is very symbolic of the post modern, post Christian world -- it does not matter what you say about death because there is nothing to be said about it. An after life is unthinkable; this life provides various means of coping, choose one or two. Marcus Aurelius provides a fitting epigraph for the movie: your doctrines should be few and fundamental, "sufficient to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin." This is a fine description of the catharsis offered by the movie -- to be free of pain and resentment, all around. 


Marcus is remarkably relevant to the affect of this film: "And what is it you will resent? Human wickedness? Recall the conclusion that rational creatures are born for each other's sake, that toleration is a part of justice, that wrong doing is not deliberate. Consider the number of people who spent their lives in enmity, suspicion, hatred, war and were then laid out for burial or reduced to ashes. Stop, then." (Meditations 3.4.2)


The father is reduced to getting advice from a sweet but simple minded pot head, Sid, his daughter's boyfriend. The boy is wise because he knows how really laughable is all adult discourse in this world without meaning --  self-centered, appetite driven, rationalization. He justifies himself to the adult -- he can cook, play guitar, and roll a joint -- food, music, pot -- he has it all. What do adults have to offer him, anyway? 


So Matt King and his older daughter do yell and express their anger at the comatose woman, wife and mother, because she has disappointed them. (At one point King calls his comatose wife a "corpse." Marcus Aurelius often referred to living bodies as corpses.) But the daughter is reconciled to the fact that she is her mother after all; the husband accepts that he failed to take an interest in in his wife and now she is no longer present for him. But this is mere "emoting," and known to be such -- their speech is not a narrative, a seed for potential dialogue,  or the beginning of an attempt to understand a life, of spouse, mother, human being.  At the end of the film, the wife of the man who carried on the affair visits the hospital room and rambles on about forgiveness, but George Clooney must interrupt her interminable babbling. Emote for a few minutes, whatever words may flow, and get over it. There is no rationale for forgiveness in this world. Stuff happens and we move on. There is no narrative of a life singly, or together.


In the penultimate scene the father and two daughters sprinkle and then dump her ashes into the ocean water along the beautiful coast of Hawaii.


The movie brings to our attention the grief of loss, the wounded character of most relationships, and the human yearning for love and community.  George Clooney in this role is the man for our time; he is the consummate adult. Very composed, very human, willing to share his feelings. But he knows the truth expressed by Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach. The world (especially the Hawaii of the privileged) "seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams" and yet it "Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." There is nothing to be said. He settles in with his two daughters with a bowl of ice cream and they watch the March of the Penguins on the TV. Here at last a narrative may be found: the march of penguins to ancestral breeding grounds to hatch and protect the chicks.


Cui bono? What to teach the young ones? What is the legacy? 


Perhaps it is Matt King's stoic apatheia. He is after all king of himself; he triumphs over appetite, anger, grief. The sub plot about a land trust simply plays up this triumph. As the sole executor of the trust he chooses not to sell the vast holding on Kauai -- he defies the appetites and greed of his family and fellows. He is a descendant of King Kamehameha. He is Matt King;  he is a modern day emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Stoic supreme.


He is also, we are told, a descendant of a missionary. But the missionary line is presumably swallowed up by greed (his business ancestor). That is the one sole reference to religion in the movie. There is no more reference to God, religion, ministers; no shots of churches or graveyards with crosses; no personal religious items; no one prays. No conversations. There are Hawaiian songs and long loving pans of sea and landscape. It celebrates pantheism and human (moral) puniness. 


So Peter Travers's judgment is sound - there is nothing wrong with this movie; given our post-modern, post-Christian culture the Descendants gives aesthetic expression to the prospects for a moderate and humane existence in a world without God. The Clooney character plays out perfectly his part in a Graceless world. 


Saith Marcus Aurelius at the end of the Meditations: "Mortal man . . . what matter if that life is five or fifty years. . . . It is like the comic actor dismissed from the stage. 'But I have not played my five acts but only three.' 'True, but in life three acts can be the whole play.' Go then in peace."


It is random. And it helps to be rich.

So the philosophy of Richard Rorty also suggests itself as the basis for this movie: “Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future.” 


Is it not remarkable that a movie about death can fail to even mention an after-life or God?

More pictures from recent production of the Jeweler's Shop

Act 1: Andrew (John Strickland) and Theresa (Autumn Clack)

Act 2: Anna (Katy Burns)

Act 2: Chorus "You have not changed"

Act 3: Christopher (Alex Ozburn) & Monica (Leah Englund)

Chorus leaders: Left, Katherine Rinaldi; right, Sara Kumar; Leah Englund in center

Back: John Strickland (Andrew), John Hittinger (Producer), Jake Schaafs (Lights), Guy Schaafs (Director), Katherine Rinaldi (Chorus)
Front: Alex Ozburn (Christopher), Katy Burns (Anna), Autumn Clack (Theresa), Leah Englund (Monica), Sara Kumar (Chorus)
Upfront: Jonathon (Jeweler & Adam)

Introduction to Performance of Jeweler's Shop

Anna (Katy Burns) and Adam (Jonathon Colunga)  in the Jeweler's Shop

When Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope in 1978 the whole world became his stage. But he never strayed far from his roots in the Polish theater community. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, a group of actors, Wojtyla among them, met in basements and kitchens to rehearse long passages from great Polish literature. Thus was born the Rhapsodic Theater.

 In his memoir, founder Kotlarczyk wrote "We held rehearsals in the dark kitchen of our catacomb, sometimes by candlelight when the power was turned off. Romantic rehearsals deepened our Polish consciousness, our resolution to survive and reach the shores of freedom, faithful to our ideal of theater." The Rhapsodic Theater presented 22 performances, and met for over 100 rehearsals or evening workshops in clandestine conditions

The Jeweler's shop was written in 1960 when he was Bishop of Krackow;  it is subtitled: “A meditation on the sacrament of matrimony, passing on occasion into a drama.”  It is a meditation born of his own human experience, conversations with friendship, and his priesthood. The drama, from his creative art. It reflects the ideals of the Rhapsodic Theater such as respect for the concrete human person, freedom, and community.  These ideals permeate all of the writings of John Paul II.

That is why this play is being produced by the Pope John Paul II Forum; our mission is “to promote the understanding of the thought of Pope John Paul II.”  The Forum will also sponsor a special event on Thursday evening next week, on the campus of the University of St. Thomas, an interpretation of the play by Professor Peter Casarella of De paul University. His talk is entitled “The Proper Weight of Love.”

The play runs for about 72 minutes; there will be no intermission.  The restrooms are to my left, but be aware that actors and props are back there.  Director Guy Schaafs has done a magnificent job in staging this play; and the cast has given their time, their dedication and their enthusiasm for the play. I see in the faces of the young cast a reflection of Karol Wojtyla, an actor who 60 years ago founded the Rhapsodic Theater.  Actors are totally committed, "all in," dedicated to the craft, and love the beauty of the words and production.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you -- The Jeweler's Shop

A portrait of the artist, Wojtyla, as young man

As we finished our second showing of the Jeweler's Shop tonight, I started to get mesmerized by the magic of the theater and fancied that I could look into the mirror of the Jeweler's Shop window and see time bent to suit our vision -- and I saw young Karol in the faces of the actors performing at the Obsidian Art Space in Houston. Krackow 1941, Houston 2011. 70 years in a flash - there he is, performing for the Rhapsodic Theater. Devoted to the task of the play -- memorizing long lines of dialogue  -- enthralled with the beauty of the verse and the color of the scene. Pope John Paul II continued to live the actor's life, not because he loved the limelight or he was good at hamming it up; but rather because he retained his youthful love of the beautiful, he stood in awe before the depth and passion of the human person, felt grief over human weakness and foible, and mastered the craft of an art. Actors are "all in" and give of themselves for a common good.

SO I look away from the mirror where I saw Karol's face and heard his voice, and turned to the Letter to Artists (found here on line) and I read:

Society needs artists, just as it needs scientists, technicians, workers, professional people, witnesses of the faith, teachers, fathers and mothers, who ensure the growth of the person and the development of the community by means of that supreme art form which is “the art of education”. Within the vast cultural panorama of each nation, artists have their unique place. Obedient to their inspiration in creating works both worthwhile and beautiful, they not only enrich the cultural heritage of each nation and of all humanity, but they also render an exceptional social service in favor of the common good.

We need artists; we need more young people devoted to art; we need more young people memorizing their lines and working with a team to present the tragedies and comedies of our human life; we need more young people with palette and pencil tracing out the shadows and forms of things; we need more young people playing music and singing. They enrich us as no one else can. True wealth. The wealth of humanity. Beauty -- the wealth of God!

And young Karol - turned John Paul II -- would also remind us --

The particular vocation of individual artists decides the arena in which they serve and points as well to the tasks they must assume, the hard work they must endure and the responsibility they must accept. Artists who are conscious of all this know too that they must labor without allowing themselves to be driven by the search for empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity, and still less by the calculation of some possible profit for themselves. There is therefore an ethic, even a “spirituality” of artistic service, which contributes in its way to the life and renewal of a people. It is precisely this to which Cyprian Norwid seems to allude in declaring that “beauty is to enthuse us for work, and work is to raise us up”.

 A spirituality of artistic service. Yes, art is based on a deep generosity and nobility of spirit. An ethic as well -- there is a justice to the text (or the canvas and color, the strings, or material), a cooperation with others, a courage to face the unknown and attempt the grand gesture, a restraint of ego for showing the face of the other.

So with good reason does John Paul II write this letter to artists and say "I feel closely linked [to you artists] by experiences reaching far back in time and which have indelibly marked my life." The portrait of Wojtyla as a young man; it is seen in the mirror of his own art.