When we read the Gospel, it is tempting to think of ourselves as gathering information. We want to know what happened, what Jesus said, what it means.
That is good and necessary, but it is not the whole of what the Word asks of us. To contemplate the Gospel is to be drawn in with more than the intellect. It asks for our attention and our will, and for something we are often shy to bring to Scripture: our imagination. We are meant to stand in the crowd, to smell the bread, to feel the weight of the water jars at Cana.
I have been thinking about this because of a piece of music. My colleague at the McGrath Institute for Church Life, Carolyn Pirtle, has written a musical called “Behold God’s Love,” composed in service to the National Eucharistic Revival. What interests me is what it reveals about how we come to the Word, and through the word to the one who is the Word.
The musical moves in three acts, and the movement is itself a Eucharistic image. Root takes us into the Exodus and the gift of manna, the Old Testament prefigurings of the Eucharist. Vine sets us at the Last Supper and lets the apostles step out of the scene to remember other meals with Jesus, at Cana, at Martha and Mary’s table, at the multiplication of the loaves. Branches brings us to a house church in Corinth, where the first Christians grapple with what it means to eat his body and drink his blood.
What strikes me most is the mode of remembering the work relies upon. The liturgy has a name for it, anamnesis: a remembering in which a past event, recalled, becomes present. At Mass we do not merely think back to the Passion and Resurrection; through the grace of the Spirit, that event is made present here and now. In the musical a memory is not narrated at a distance but summoned onto the stage, where it happens again before us. This is what contemplation of the Gospel is meant to do in the theater of the praying heart.
A performed art teaches this in a way a page cannot, for you cannot receive music all at once. It exists only as it unfolds. To let a scene play at its own speed, rather than the speed of our hurry, is to be schooled again in what we have nearly forgotten: to wait, to attend, to let the Word work on us rather than rush to extract its point.
There is a discipline of reading Scripture well that this kind of work quietly enforces. Coming to the Old Testament, we are anxious to leap ahead to the Gospel and move on. But you cannot see the fullness of a prefigurement unless you first let the image stand on its own terms. The manna has to be manna before it can be the Bread of Life. In the musical, the actor who plays Moses returns as Jesus, so the typology is felt before it is explained, the older image keeping its weight even as it opens toward its fulfillment.
I want to be careful about the claim. A musical, however beautiful, does not replace the Gospel text, and is not meant to. Scripture finds its fullest home when proclaimed in the liturgy, and no work of art stands in for that. What a work like this offers is a way in, a means of entering the story more deeply so that we return to the text and the altar with our imaginations awakened and our attention retrained. It is a door, not a destination.
That entering happens in two ways. First, simply by listening, we are invited to imagine, to stand inside the scenes and let them become present to us. Second, for a community, there is the deeper labor of studying a work by preparing it for performance. Carolyn’s cast were volunteers, 27 of them, from children to people in their 60s, and the hope is eventually to license the musical so that parishes, schools and universities can mount it themselves. To learn a role is to live for a while inside a scene of the Gospel, reckoning with a person’s words until they become nearly your own, a form of study the intellect alone could never accomplish.
In the end, what any of this serves is encounter. The point is not the music, nor even the story, but the One the story is about.
Carolyn hopes that someone, the next time they go to Mass, might remember a scene from the third act, Paul consecrating the elements while Jesus stands unseen behind him, and think: I cannot see him, but I know that Christ is here. That is the whole of it. We bring our intellect and attention, our will and imagination, to the Word not to master a text but to be met by the One present in it, who waits, still, for us to behold him.
Leonard J. DeLorenzo is a professor of the practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life and concurrent professor in the department of theology at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is “The Rule of the Sacred Heart: Finding Rest in a Restless World.” You can find his writing at leonardjdelorenzo.com.
