I don’t know if I’ve
mentioned it, but I’ve been working a movie script. It’s true! It’s in
development with Pound Foolish Productions, a mail-order studio out of Slidell,
Louisiana. It’s called “Priests a-Poppin’”, about an overworked Episcopal
minister and a repressed hotel clerk who find true love during Holy Week. I
chose the romantic comedy form because rom-com plots are as formulaic as Kabuki
Theater, so how hard can it be?
Anyway, like most movies,
It proceeds in three movements or “acts,” as we say in the biz. In Act 1 we
meet a beautiful priest named Ariel and her kooky best friend, Deacon Gloria,
who urges her to slow down,
maybe take some time off,
already, but it’s Advent
and she’s got a ton
of work. Cut to the hotel manager, a handsome guy named Gabe and his best friend, kooky
bell-hop Mark. They’re sitting in Gabe’s office, going over the books, looks
off dismay on their faces. Sales are down, and Gabe’s under pressure from the
owner to cut expenses.
Act 1 ends when Ariel and
Gabe meet cute: Ariel books into the hotel with Gloria for a ladies-only
weekend. And as she and Gloria troop toward the elevators, weighed down by
their luggage—Ariel may be a priest but she’s still a woman, yuck yuck—Gabe comes
out of his office, head buried in paperwork. They collide, and her luggage
spills all over the floor. She gets mad, spitting out “I want the manager!” And
when Gabe says I am
the manager, they look deeply into one another’s eyes.
In Act 2, their romance
blossoms: there’s lots of shots of them holding hands and kissing, a montage of
them visiting a park, then more holding hands and kissing. Finally it’s Lent,
Ariel’s work has tripled,
and she begins to give their romance short shrift, she has to break some dates,
and finally, the night before Palm Sunday—the beginning of Holy Week—she’s
promised to go to a basketball playoff game with Gabe, the most important game
of the year, but there’s been a hitch in worship preparation, and she has to
cancel, and he tells her they might as well cancel their romance and hangs up.
Lot’s of moping around:
Gabe’s team is out of the playoffs lost and management has offered him a
transfer to Omaha. She officiates blankly at Holy Week services, just going
through the motions, and cries at night, surrounded by sad music about the
crucifixion. Finally, Ariel realizes that she can’t live without Gabe, that she
just has to have him. So she calls him and Mark tells her he’s accepted the
transfer and is even now at the train station. Act 2 ends with a shot of her
shocked face.
Act 3 is the shortest; it
involves Ariel racing to the train station while Gabe prepares to board the
train. She gets into a taxi; he pays for his ticket. The taxi gets stuck in
traffic and she jumps out to walk; he strides out of the terminal and sits on the
platform. She hurries up to the station, robes billowing and collar askew,
while train pulls into the station. She sprints out to the platform, sees him
boarding the train and calls out—prettily—Gabriel! Gabriel! And At last he hears her, turns, and
they end up in each others’ arms.
I’m really excited about
my script; Pound Foolish Productions has promised to get started on it as soon
as they receive the final payment. It’s a classic three-act structure—the first
establishes the characters and sets the plot moving, the second develops the
plot and throws up an obstacle, and in the third things are resolved, sometimes
happily and sometimes not so much.
Our reading proceeds in
three acts as well. In Act I, Jesus encounters John the Baptist, who has been
baptizing in the River Jordan, at that point not particularly deep and wide. I
like to imagine it like Jesus just walking along, minding his own business,
maybe whistling a little tune, maybe he’d come out to see what all the hubbub
over John was about, but he’s just ambling along when John says “Behold, the
Lamb of God!” and before he knows it, he’s baptized, and as he comes up out of
the water a voice comes from heaven telling him who he is: “You are my Son, the
Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And notice that God is identifying him
not to the bystanders,
but to Jesus himself,
and that’s the end of Act I.
In Act II, the conflict,
the difficulties in his path start out from the get-go. The Sprit—that’s the
Spirit of God, you
understand—drives
him out into the wilderness, where for forty days and forty nights he’s tempted
by Satan. And although Mark doesn’t give any details—that’s Mark for you—we can
imagine Jesus, already discombobulated by the heavens cracking open and a big
old voice booming out at him, already off-balance from all that, and now he
faces ol’ scratch himself. And as I always point out in this passage, testing
is another translation of the Greek here, and the words are kind of
interchangeable, aren’t they? A temptation is certainly a kind of test, isn’t
it? If you fall you fail, if you resist you pass.
Anyway the angels wait on
him, and then he hears that John has been arrested, and that’s the end of the
second act. And in the third Act, his ministry begins. His proclamation, which
he calls “good news,” is that the Kingdom, or reign, of God has come
near—another translation says it’s at hand—and
as a response, his listeners are to repent, to go to a higher way of being, and
believe.
To reiterate, Act I: Jesus
is initiated (that’s what baptism is)
and labeled as Son of God. Act II: he undergoes a trial, he is tested and comes
through. Act III: his ministry begins. And it’s good to notice that each Act is
initiated by a specific action. In my soon-to-be classic rom-com, Acts II is
precipitated by Ariel and Gabe meeting, and in today’s passage by the voice
from heaven telling Jesus who he is. In my film script, Act III is precipitated
by Ariel’s learning that Gabe is leaving. In our passage from Mark, Act 3 is
driven by Jesus learning that John has been locked up.
And that’s kind of how our
lives proceed, isn’t it? Things are going along swimmingly, on an even keel,
when something happens to disrupt things. It doesn’t have to be anything
momentous, like being called Son of God by a supernatural voice or tempted by
the devil—it can be a simple realization that you’re getting too complacent, or you’re
not doing anything of import
with your life. And this precipitates another direction, another act in your
life.
Well. I learned the way to
structure the telling of a story—whether it’s fact or fiction—by reading the
New Testament. And New Testament
authors learned about it from Greek dramatists, who learned it from their exemplars, and if we
go back in time, looking at how writers of the Old Testament Scriptures
structured their
writings, we begin to suspect there might be something basic, something primal even, about the three
act dramatic structure.
Richard Rohr, Franciscan
Priest and director of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque,
speaks in a way that might help us with this. He calls the process
“orientation-disorientation-reorientation,” and thinks that its the major
progression through which our lives are transformed, through which we move from
life-stage to life-stage. Orientation is a “ground state,” a state of
stability, of steady-state, to use a systems term. Things are going along
smoothly, there are no problems of any magnitude, although that’s not to say
there are no difficulties. In “Priests a-Poppin’,” both Ariel and Gabe are
successful at what they do, although both have the normal kind of problems, she
with stress and he with impatient bosses. But their lives are generally moving
along fairly steadily and on an even keel.
Then something happens. It
can be sad or happy, blessed or a tragedy. Whatever its nature, it is
disruptive enough that it moves us into a second stage of disorientation, where
everything is unsettled. Having children is one such event, which the majority
of couples undergo. Our daughter and son-in-law have a 20 month old, our
granddaughter, and I’d venture to say that they’re still in the disorientation
stage . . . their lives are still in a state of flux (cynics might say it’ll
last till the children leave the house).
Another such disorienting
event is when you meet another whom you fall for, or become infatuated with at any rate,
another individual, and he or she turns your life proverbially around. You walk
around in a daze, you can’t think of anything else, you feel the hand-holding,
making-out euphoria that Ariel and Gabriel do . . . and this disorientation can
last a long time, years, even, before things settle back into a new, different
normal.
Rohr makes a special study
of suffering . . . when a life-threatening illness strikes, for example, we’re
always hearing about how near-death experiences gives you a new lease on life,
you don’t sweat the small stuff, you concentrate on what’s important . . . after the
period of suffering, or dis-orientation, you’re re-oriented to a different way
of living. After you lose a loved one, after Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief—you
know, bargaining, anger, etc.,—one
can be a long time in this uneven, unsettled state. And even when things
stabilize, when you are re-oriented, as Rohr would put it, it is not the same,
it is a different
state of being. It’s not just that the loved one is gone, or the kids are gone,
but this re-orientation leaves you changed, different, you have undergone transformation.
But perhaps the ultimate
disorienting event is an encounter with the divine, something dramatic, like a
vision, or maybe just the proverbial still, small voice, the voice you’re not
even sure is there. Like a nudge in the dark, or in prayer . . . St. John of
the Cross writes of his experiences with the divine, and calls the confounding,
confusing period in his life that followed “The Dark Night of the Soul.”
And that’s what I think is
going on here: Jesus meets the divine, in the form of a dove and a voice from
heaven, and it sends him into the wilderness, a metaphor for this time of
disorientation and trial if I ever heard one. Though Mark says it’s forty
days—and it might have been—forty is another symbol for a long time, and
besides: it’s the same number of years the Israelites were in the wilderness.
And really: wouldn’t you
be discombobulated just a little
if that happened to you?
He comes out of that phase
by cold necessity: his cousin John is arrested, and somebody’s gotta carry on
in the family tradition. And so Jesus’ life—and remember, in Mark he’s very
human—his life is upended and reoriented to his mission, to announce the good
news of God’s coming Kingdom.
And now, on this first
Sunday of Lent, we begin to accompany Jesus on the last chapter of his life,
the last, melancholy phase . . . We’ve seen the beginning, heard about the
wrenching, affirming time of wilderness trial, and seen him take up the
ministry mantle, perhaps a changed person, the same and yet not . . . And now
we follow as he enters the last, apocalyptic upheaval— the scene at Gethsemane,
the humiliating trial, the agonizing, final suffering as he’s nailed to a tree.
But we’ll also witness—on
Easter Sunday—the transformation, as he’s raised and elevated, then taken up, to
be with God the Creator as the cosmic Christ. And I guess that’s where his life
intersects with ours . . . One way or another, after intense bouts of
suffering, when all seems gray and lost, like Jesus we will be transformed,
either in this life, or the next. Amen.
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