No, not your body image, or mine, but as in the FAQs, Jesus ‘transformed into a new body – the one becomes many, the many become one’, and we see these transformations /this transformation happening. But what does this transformed Jesus look like? Perhaps a little like this image from the American dance company Pilobolos – the dancers balanced around a central person, or the classic circus act of the clown on the bike which others then jump on board, as in this photo. That’s Jesus?! Well, Jesus transformed – the one becomes many, the many become one – and here’s how you might begin to make it, doing say these Frantic Assembly exercises, learning to depend on one another.

Such a workshop might be useful in helping us to create a body as an agent of learning to think mythically. Not in the sense of Joseph Campbell and the Hollywood script writers who continue to draw on his monomyth creation – focusing on the lone hero – nor in the sense of Jung’s archetypes and Jordan Peterson’s lectures and the ‘Wisdom Schools’ that proliferate, but it may be that this sort of workshop is a way of beginning to overcome what Karen Armstrong describes as the inability, or unwillingness, of an increasing number of people in Western societies to think mythically. (One consequence of this, according to Armstrong, is that ‘the biblical myths are experienced as alien.’) More simply it may be that there’s no mythic membrane left so that the spirit world is hard for us.

Wherever we turn these days there’s a need to discover different ways of being together – new collectivities – to counter our pervasive individualism. Take this example of a 2013 conversation between Andreas Roepstorff and the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Roepstorff suggests: ‘The we-mode is characterized by instances of sharing. It might be instances of sharing acts, of sharing language or food, because these transform the “I” and the “you” into some kind of we-ness.’ And Eliasson responds: ‘I like that—the we-mode. That is a good word to remember, we-mode. Also the other word, we-ness. It is nice to be in the cultural sector and claim to occupy the word we-ness before some commercial company exploits it. Let’s just sit for a second in the we-ness together. I am so excited about this idea that interdependence is something that you co-create … we also have to co-create our realities, our we-mode.’ And so on. It’s a little bit different to 4 Mysteries talk of the creation of a ‘he/we’ – here there’s no he – but you understand the point they’re making about how you and I might become a we.

This seeking to find new ways of belonging to one another is there in the gospels. John’s gospel has Mary at the foot of the cross. Why is she there asks Colm Toibin and he proceeds to answer his question by writing his play and subsequently his novella, ‘Testament of Mary’, about a mother traumatized by the loss of her son. What’s more difficult for him to imagine – naturalism tends to focus on the she/he – is that this trauma might be the beginning a new way of belonging to one another, a new family, gathered there at the foot of the cross and it’s the cross which gives birth to it. John’s gospel has been about the emergence of that new way of being family right the way through, but this ‘mythic dimension’, this creation of a new body – what 4 Mysteries calls a ‘he/we’ – is not something that Toibin’s moving, but more one dimensional imagining allows.

It’s what you get in this image of the Mexican voladores. The one goes to the top and the others slowly emanate from him. The bodies in motion, opening slowly from the centre, are still connected as they descend, so that, in 4 Mysteries terms, it combines both a sense of death and resurrection. And this emerging body is happening even before the death, before the family standing at the foot of the cross, at the earlier passover meal for instance. In Luke’s gospel, in the post resurrection Emmaus story where the fleeing followers recognize the stranger in the breaking of the bread, you get the mirror image of the passover meal. By eating and being eaten we are learning to create that body. As one writer said of the previous Piloblos image : ‘It is a communion of persons … it expresses each self in Christ, each having a part in this sacrament of mutual support.’

In Text we mention that on a cemetery fence someone once hung a sign saying, ‘Easter’s off this year, they found the body’. Of course, Easter is off if they haven’t found the body, because Easter is all about bodies and our finding them, only they’re living bodies. As we say elsewhere, ‘If there’s no body then we might say, quite literally, we’re gutless, but, still and all, a gutless wonder!’ Similarly, when Erik Ehn says, ‘theatre is all about our being together and seeing how we can give of ourselves’,  it’s a reminder that ‘theatre, like myth and sacrament, is communal to the core.’

 

How might we do it? How might we perform the resurrection of Jesus, given the disorientating accounts we have in the gospels and given that, ’nothing like this had ever happened.’ (Resurrection isn’t an exotic word for revival as in the movie ‘The Matrix’ where Neo revives at a kiss, let alone a synonym for paranormal activity, as in the TV series ‘Resurrection’, where a dead child returns.) So how might you tell a story without precedent? You could follow a Roman soldier in pursuit of the truth as in the 2016 movie ‘Risen’; or you might have a tree appear through the floor and disappear as in Toibin’s ‘Testament of Mary’; or present it as publicity stunt as Phillip Pullman did in his 2010 novel, ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’; or have Jesus/a body emerge from the overflowing water of a cistern flanked by two women who then catch and cover the emergent body, as did Bill Viola in his 2002 video ‘Emergence’; or have Jesus appear as a ghost as in Adamo’s 2009 opera, ‘The Gospel of Mary Magdalene’; or wonder whether organ donation gets at it, as in the 2001 movie ‘Jesus of Montreal; while in the follow up to the movie ‘The Passion of the Christ’ it’s said that, ‘the resurrection will take place in another realm and there are things that will shock an audience.’

It seems that other realm is hell, based on an iconic image called the ‘Harrowing of Hell’, which was mentioned in a discussion after London’s National Theatre 2004 production of ‘In His Dark Materials’, the epic production of Philip Pullman’s trilogy of the same name. Rowan Williams and the author were in conversation and there was mention of the difference between the Western tradition of painting the resurrection, where you often end up with, ‘a sort of luminous figure bouncing out of the tomb on clouds and lots of people sitting around looking rather surprised’ – and the Orthodox tradition where there’s a recognition that you can’t actually show Jesus rising from the tomb, so what you see is the risen Jesus in Hell astride a great pit, dynamically rescuing Adam and Eve from out of their tombs in the presence of many others, showing us the effect of the resurrection as it were, the way it effects our lives. It’s based in a recognition that you can’t simply show it like it was – it’s impossible, even for Mel Gibson! To adapt what Williams said elsewhere in the discussion about Adam’s skull shown, in icons, at the foot of the cross, ‘it’s a deeply mythological moment.’

Interestingly enough, Pullman went on to suggest that a rational depiction of Jesus’ death and resurrection would be a sort of cinema like Mel Gibson’s movie, ‘The Passion of the Christ’, and then he asked two questions: ‘But that would miss the other part wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it miss the mythical element of it, which is something that has to be lived and lived and lived again?’ Furthermore he said that it’s, ‘something whose truth is not historical truth only, but it has a truth that sort of lives on.’ It’s easy enough to miss ‘the other part’, the ‘mythical element’ of it, the living out of it in the present.

Not that the performance of ‘In His Dark Materials’ was managing this mix of history and story (or myth) that is characteristic of the gospels, but it certainly seeks to think mythically about, or re-imagine, the Christian story (as Pullman did head-on in his 2010 novel). In doing so, as Pullman reminds us, he’s able to alert us as to what it is myth exists to do and which seemingly it did at odd moments in the production, resulting in a transcendent moment like this: ‘the dead are released from captivity on condition they tell true stories about everything they loved in life. Pullman’s extraordinary vision of a universe in which the untethered dead merge with wind and the trees is perfectly realised.’ (It’s a combination, said one writer, of Greek myth and a medieval harrowing of hell.)

The 4 Mysteries way of getting at this, ‘something which is to be lived again and again and again’, is through the creation of a ‘he/we’, a body which reveals how we might belong to one another and which is the central myth, we say, that all four gospel accounts, each in their own way, feed into. It’s a re-creation story: Jesus as a Body is a new creation. As the FAQs have it: ‘he/we’ is a particular take on how to view the four gospels together. It’s a mystery. This is a key to the project.’ The body is happening through the death – even before a new family emerges at the foot of the cross eg. at the Passover meal. Creating such a meaningful body – a body of work – is a means to our learning how to think in such a way that we might live it again and again, which is to say it enables us to think mythically. (As we suggest in a blog entry entitled ‘A Body of Words and Stage Images’, this is what Shakespeare’s plays enable us to do continually – it’s the myth of Shakespeare at work!)

Pullman’s image of the unreleased dead is a reminder too that the mythic moments are often the exhilarating moments, and you can see how this works in a 2017 State Theatre Company of South Australia /Frantic Assembly co-production of ‘Things I Know to be True’ written by Andrew Bovell. Scott Graham from Frantic Assembly, a UK physical theatre group, was involved in the development of the performance, working with another director, the writer, the actors, designers et al to open it out through and beyond naturalism. As he later wrote: ‘The deep love at the heart of the play must be able to soar and explode. We must be able to achieve what we call theatrical ‘lift-off’. The problem with naturalism is that it’s often rooted and ‘normal’. My aim was to make these heightened ‘lift-off’ moments just as normal.’ Then the follow up: ‘I began to explore how the stories might escape gravity.’ So, with the actors working together, ‘bodies were passed between hands and over heads; they’re gently embraced and let go’; they were silently able to embody what was spoken of in a number of moments through the show. In doing this the cast learnt to work as, ‘an affecting and strong unit’, even as the play was framed by the silent observing figure of the youngest member of the family. It added another dimension to the performance, we might even say a ‘mythic’ dimension. In 4 Mysteries terms, as the play unfolded, it resulted in the making of a body, so that, in the end, the family members preparing to head off to the mother’s funeral, simply held hands again: ‘it became a physical representation of how the family found their strength.’ It was a kind of muted lift-off, but its’ moving action draws attention to the unexpectedness of the gospel’s ending which, with its disorientating lift-off, ‘makes possible what had been impossible. And it does so without tearing the fabric of history and matter’.

Of course when Scott Graham speaks of lift-off he certainly doesn’t have in mind those Renaissance paintings of the resurrection of Jesus which delight in lift off, but nor do the gospels when they invite us into their moments of lift-off, into those ‘mythic spaces’ as we call them, like the tomb of Jesus. Yes, he did die, but he didn’t stay dead. How do we speak of this? The tomb is a womb we say, out of which we’re born, not simply a burial place carved out of rock, owned by whoever; and in Mark’s gospel, say, it’s a very strange place indeed. When the three women turn up to attend to the body, there’s no stone across the entrance, there’s no body, and there’s a young man dressed in white standing within, who speaks to them. The world, it seems, has gone crazy: they’re struck dumb. How do we speak of this? How might we perform it? The harrowing of hell is one powerful way of doing this – which is what you see in most of the medieval mystery plays and Orthodox churches at Easter – but we might also learn from its way of imagining resurrection. In the Mark performance, 4 Mysteries uses a Butoh-like movement, the break- up of language, lighting etc. breaking free of the constraints of naturalism in an attempt to do this. Similarly in the John performance we start with the risen, transformed body and end with the ‘once and always’ union which performers are now part of as the risen, transformed body. The John performance has transformation at its’ heart so there are five stories of transformation framed by a resurrection parade to begin with – featuring an empty tomb, an inhabited garden, and a spirit dance – and an expansive, dancing vision of the ‘once and always union’ to conclude. Again, in the Luke performance we see the cross and resurrection in the one striking central image – and watch as bodies slowly emanate from a centre with which they’re still connected. One goes to the top and the others emanate from that one. We see bodies in motion creating a body in motion: it gives us a sense of a new creation, as does the on-the-road scene that follows.

Clearly there’s a sense in these accounts of moving beyond and transforming naturalism, but also that, as this happens, ‘natural life and resurrection life are held as one’, which is something akin to what Scott Graham said: ‘I am always looking beyond naturalism, but I always want images, scenes or moments to be rooted in naturalistic truth.’ (It’s a version of the myth/history mix characteristic of the gospels.) Perhaps that’s why he encouraged Andrew Bovell to write without thinking about the Frantic Assembly contribution and why he spoke about the need not to impose stuff on the text. But what if you were to integrate the Frantic Assembly way of doing things into the writing of the play, indeed, insist even moreso, that this is what the play is about, their inseparability? This is what is distinctive about the gospel’s way of telling a new story.  In 4 Mysteries terms you’re looking at not simply lift-off, but transformation, a new creation, which is what resurrection is about. In resurrection, naturalism is transformed and shown to be but one way to re-create the ‘real’. Now resurrection is part of the real; it’s a part of the naturalistic world that is transformed … by resurrection! Indeed, we might go further and say resurrection is the way the world is.

At which point, we might say, resurrection demands that we think mythically. It’s a way of thinking that expands the imagination in the way the icon of the resurrection mentioned at the beginning does. The icon doesn’t show Jesus somehow emerging from the tomb, or the meetings with Jesus, raised from the dead, that characterise each of the gospels, instead it shows Jesus bringing an aged Adam and Eve out of the pit of death into a new creation. So we begin again where it first began, showing the effect of resurrection.

We’re not talking a sort of magic realism here. As Rowan Williams says: ‘It’s not that the risen Christ appears saying, ‘By magic I will take away your history and I will smooth out your faces’; which is why, in the icon, Adam and Eve are not shown in their Edenic youthfulness, but in their old age. They’re not restored to their former selves, but are brought forth as they are: ‘The resurrection is not about the wiping out of our history, pain or failure, it is about how pain and failure themselves – humanity marked by history – may yet be transfigured and made beautiful.’ It’s in this ‘naturalistic truth’ – to quote Scott Graham again – that resurrection is rooted. In this way the icon, ‘opens us onto the inner story, to the bedrock of what’s going on.’

That’s the challenge if you’re to perform the resurrection of Jesus – including the subsequent resurrection encounters – and not end up doing something that, in attempting to show us what ‘really happened’, often ends up being weirdly flat, or too po-faced; once again revealing that it’s impossible to perform a transformed naturalism naturalistically and, more broadly, alerting us to the limits of naturalism when performing the gospel mix of myth and history. The icon reveals this, while the STCSA /Frantic Assembly performance alerts us to how we might move beyond and transform naturalism. Both the icon and the performance prepare you for the challenge of imagining a world where naturalism and ‘lift-off’ might be seen, not only as normal, but inseparable in a world where there’s no longer a division between spiritual and bodily realities. In doing so our insistent, one dimensional imagining might open onto a larger, less straightforward world, where we might hope to be returned to ourselves. As we’re reminded by the Harrowing of Hell icon and Scott Graham’s lift-off in ‘Things I Know To Be True’, myth as a way of imagining the world is a crucial element – ‘the other part’ – in enabling us to tell what otherwise couldn’t be told; and enabling us to live it again and again.

 

 

 

There are many different answers provided by theatre companies over the last 20 years and more – by professional and semi-professional companies from London to Cape Town, Sydney and York. One of the more intriguing reasons was provided by the RSC Mysteries company in the late 1990s when the director Katie Mitchell and company decided to explore the biblical account of who we are by performing their version of English medieval Mystery Plays, only to discover, at a certain point, they’d ‘entered the biblical world through the wrong door’.

Their version of the plays was medieval only insofar as they maintained the shape and an echo of the original language, otherwise it was ‘more like a religious meditation than a conventional drama’, using a hybrid text based on the scriptures and incorporating insights from the apocryphal gospels, the Koran and bits of writing from the original plays. In keeping with contemporary practice about how we might respond to the scriptural account, the intent in these Mysteries was, ‘to humanize and de-politicise’ the medieval plays, trying to historically locate the source material thought to be underwriting them and rooting out what was taken to be any hint of propaganda, so that ‘it was all about personal faith, God within you.’ This approach gave us Jesus as a homeless beggar, Peter as a foul mouthed mugger and Matthew as a commodities broker living in Kensington. Overseeing it all was God, the creator of the universe, as a genial elderly actor with a gentle voice – by way, it seems, of conveying that God is both male and female. In the name of personal responsibility – and because there’s no mention in the Genesis stories – out went the Devil. Once again, for all the different emphases, it’s a not an unfamiliar contemporary response. It seems we can’t handle God and other elements of the mythic landscape while, in this performance, Jesus was explored through ‘a quasi-Stanislavskian character analysis across all available gospels’ to determine the central elements of his character’ (it seems we can handle this.) In 4 Mysteries terms the emphasis was more on the ‘he’ – Jesus as loner – than the ‘he/we’ transformation we take to be a key to opening up the gospels.

Yet, interestingly enough, it was said that in performing their ‘modern mystery play’ the RSC company was more at ease in what was understood to be the mythic realm of the Book of Genesis than it was with the New Testament account, and in particular the gospels, which are a multi-dimensional mix of myth and history; so that, ‘as the story moved towards the New Testament it became less and less engaging.’  In my experience other performances of Mystery Plays have the same problem with Jesus and his story, until we arrive at the Crucifixion where there’s a characteristic mix of some on-the-job humour and intense pathos that is often quite moving.

One of the problems for the RSC Mysteries company was that that the Mystery Plays aren’t based in, or authorized by an historical text, but rather, a long tradition of people imagining the stories they’d inherited, which were part of their lives and the communities they belonged to. In other words, as I’ve had occasion to say on this website, they weren’t so much interested in what really happened back then as in what was happening to them – how the biblical story was coming alive in them. Through an intense collaborative process it seems the RSC company experienced something of this among themselves, meditating together, as it were, on what they had decided were biblical themes -‘God was within you’, faith was personal – though it seems they were intrigued both by what was happening to them in the rehearsal room and what might have happened back then. ( In a sense this was what was happening to them in the room.)  It had implications for an audience, their minimalist style of acting establishing ‘a formal relationship between the actors and spectators’ – or even being seen as a means of ‘analyzing the space between the actors and the audience’- so that ‘the division of actor and audience became very apparent.’ The audience may well have leaned forward expectantly according to Katie Mitchell, but someone else suggested that it, ‘rarely glimpsed any wider life beyond the one directly represented on stage.’ In the end, it seems, there was a suggestion that ‘the most we can hope for is an authentic individualism.’

Clearly, this approach was a little different to what Sarah Beckwith once said about the Mystery Plays when she described them as a complex sort of para-liturgy – which means an audience is crucially involved in making the plays, in making meaning – and different again to a renowned modern version of this para-liturgical experience presented at London’s National Theatre from the late 1970s into the 1980s and beyond. One theatre critic had this to say about it: ‘I wish there were another word for performance for it diminishes the thing that has been created , which transcends any idea of a theatre as place we visit to see a play and of a play as that which we visit a theatre to see.’ Here was another answer to the question why perform the Mystery Plays. They were a means to affirming the nature of theatre as an event, of  ‘re-discovering a communal theatre’ and so reclaiming ‘an essential part of our dramatic heritage.’ Of course, the realization dawned in the midst of this fellowship and celebration that though they affirmed a need for it there was no reason to be found within the plays themselves for doing so. Equally, by rooting the plays in a gritty 1980s working class environment, by giving back the poetry to ordinary people in Tony Harrison’s vigorous, alliterative verse, they both reclaimed the plays and evinced a 1980s nostalgia for a working class culture.

The Tony Harrison version returned most recently to London, to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in 2011.  Times had changed, as had its’ length, now trimmed from a daylong performance to three hours. It was said to create ‘nothing like the sense of community – of belonging together – that characterized the National Theatre production of the 1980s.’ Though it was not for want of trying, given that the audience was acknowledged at every turn and come the Doomsday scene it was divided into the damned and the saved. This led one critic to describe it as ‘a jokey farce of a last judgment’, which is one way of dealing with it of course. It seems there was a fair bit of ‘roguish romping’ to boot, though the performance wasn’t without it’s grotesque humour and neat touches and the scenes that played well were Abraham and Isaac and the Crucifixion. It may still have been ‘a superlative feat of storytelling’, but, for all that, as one writer noted, there was ‘a lack of imagination, no theatrical revelation’- none of that para-theatrical delight that had been present thirty years previously.

Similarly, someone left the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2009 performance of The Mysteries:Genesis wondering about what constituted community theatre and the role of the audience. She suggested a community event had been ‘made elite’. Yes, the theatre space had been reconstituted as a ‘starkly black’ promenade space, but the audience, commented one critic, were like ghosts in it. That’s not to say it didn’t invite the audience into the show in some way – it did: ‘making sure everyone gets a bit of the action’ – and in ways that didn’t demand a form of ‘audience participation’, but still, ‘we were part of this world as invisible spectators, like ghosts, men and women already passed.’ The three contemporary versions of stories from the book of Genesis – Eden, After the Fall and The Ark – were said to be ‘hilariously tongue-in-cheek and ironic re-tellings of the foundation folk tales of Christianity’, though, it was suggested by the same critic, they still ‘resonate and command despite their patent absurdity.’ There was reference to ‘hypnotic picture making and stunning design’ and a text that ‘lacked identity’, less so perhaps when Noah was seen ‘through the prism of febrile 20^thcentury cults.’ Once again, God was imagined as best we could: ‘… an average bloke with an average bloke’s distaste for being disobeyed’, while the devilish bits – as is our wont – were the fun bits (‘There’s a sense of everyone having more fun with the sleaze … ‘) On the one hand the performance was said to feel, ‘odd and contemporaneously right’, while on the other it was reckoned to have not gone far enough in invoking ‘the spirit of the medieval pageant plays’, or breaking with the ‘familiar conventions of contemporary theatre’, or ‘seriously questioning its source material’. Still and all, ‘an interesting and multi-faceted night in the theatre’.

By way of contrast the Isango Ensemble from Cape Town – formerly the Isango Portobello company – have performed their version of The Mysteries:Yiimimangaliso through the 2000s in London and elsewhere. (Most recently they performed an intimate version indoors at Shakespeare’s Globe, in 2016.) The company members come in the main from the shanty towns round Cape Town and there were thirty three of them involved in the 2009 version. It was described as ‘a folksy, funny, yet deeply serious telling of the Christian story’ from the Creation to the Last Judgment; and, ‘a thrilling celebration of God, humanity and the spirit of survival.’ Over twenty years their various re-imaginings of The Mysteries have continued to invite audiences into the telling of a story that enables an experience of ‘communal joy’. As ever, we’re surprised and delighted that we’re able to experience something like this in the theatre, through the telling of these stories. It’s one of the reasons why companies continue to perform the Mystery Plays – they enable us to imagine different ways of making theatre. I like to think that just as the Isango Ensemble has found a moving, joyous way into telling this story from Creation to the Last Judgment – in eight different languages – so too 4 Mysteries might find an interesting way of entering into and imagining the four gospels, inviting an audience to join them in this. Of course, the medieval Mystery Plays aren’t interested in there being four gospels – they tend to shrink down the bits of one story – which is one of the many points of difference between 4 Mysteries and them, but, in one way or another, like all of the versions mentioned here, what we’re looking for is a way of entering into and imagining these fascinating, re-creation stories, one that offers ‘a richer perspective, new theatrical possibilities.’

 

According to a form of prayer called ‘composition of place’ – aka Ignatian, or imaginative contemplation – you put yourself in the gospel scenes and see what happens. My sense is that many people who feel excluded from the gospel stories may need a little help to find their way in and not only from the experts. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, certainly I’ve found this working with actors and students and local church communities. A composition of place is designed to assist us with this and movingly it has helped and continues to help many people enter into the gospels. No doubt there’s a good deal to be learnt from it, but in doing so, as I’ve been keen to emphasise on this site,  it might assist us to discover other ways that could enable more people to find their way into a story that, as a performer once said, ‘everybody is in.’

In the matter of imaginative contemplation and putting yourself in the gospel scenes James Martin SJ suggests in the preface to his enlivening 2014 book Jesus: A Pilgrimage that, ‘it doesn’t matter if I have a completely accurate recreation of Palestine in the time of Jesus loaded into my cerebellum, or that I can describe the face of Jesus as it truly was.’ Of course it’s not possible to do this, in part because the gospels aren’t interested in either, so Martin continues: ‘I can, however, trust that God will help me use my imagination in ways that will break open the Scriptures for me and draw me closer to Jesus.’ Clearly imagination is a key to this form of contemplation, as it is to belief and the gospels, let alone a life in the theatre.

So when you put yourself in a gospel scene, what are you doing?  Martin proposes that he approaches his prayer place with reverence and a consciousness that he is in the loving presence of God. Then he does an initial ‘composition of place’ situating himself in the room and within his moods, needs and desires.  After which, having chosen a passage from scripture, he tries to place himself imaginatively in the scene, asking questions like these: ‘Who am I in this gospel story? What do I see? What do I hear? What do I smell?’  He suggests that your response to these questions will help put you in the scene.

Perhaps when James Martin was working as an adviser on the 2005 Off-Broadway play the Last Days of Judas Iscariot he might have recognized what the playwright and director Jonathan Moore had to say in 2010 when he was directing a play he wrote called Inigo, based on the life of the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola (whose Spiritual Exercises are the basis for Martin’s approach). Moore suggested that this form of imaginative contemplation was not unlike what a lot of actors do in a rehearsal room: ‘They’re very different let’s get that absolutely clear, but the similarities are striking, too, inasmuch as Stanislavski has this thing called sense memory, where you go back and revisit a feeling that you had when a child or something from your past and then you connect with that feeling again. You can use that feeling to place a scene or a character in the present.  To use the imagination like that, and imaginative processes, is a very important thing in Ignatian spirituality.’

When Martin talks of first putting ourselves in the room, then in the gospel scene and letting the gospel unfold – ‘almost like a movie’ – one of the problems we often run into is that the gospels aren’t really interested in place as such, in the same way that an icon painting isn’t interested in it. (Both are more interested in the action of God and our bodies as sites for this.) Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Martin suggests he is interested in books on the historical Jesus – they help to establish a particular context in ways that the gospels don’t, and assist us in naming the physical particulars that a composition of place brings into focus. It may be, amongst other things, this is a way of dealing with the surface of the gospel texts, their flat organizational structure. The well known story of Zacchaeus in Luke’s gospel is only a couple of lines long, so there’s nothing much to it: it’s as if the gospel stories have no depth, or often we don’t see it. Being uncomfortable with a surface story that doesn’t seem to make much sense, we may turn to historical sources to help us out, seeking to locate the gospels in a quite specific setting. This kind of specificity is built into a composition of place and is part of a ‘modern’ tradition of seeking to establish some specifics about the life of Jesus, with a view to his coming alive for us. In that sense it could be said that these specifics are intended as an aid to our imagining this relationship.

However, it raises a question about whether there are limits to our need to get specific? Elsewhere on the website I’ve spoken at length about this, suggesting we have to move beyond our inevitable question, ‘what really happened?’, while proposing that myth enters in when we ask the question ‘what meaning does it have for us?’  You get a sense of the limits to our yearning for specificity when James Martin suggests there’s not much point in worrying about on which mountain did the transfiguring of Jesus occur – there are a couple of suggestions – nor, we might add, where did the sermon on the mount take place, not only because there is no way of knowing, but also because the gospels aren’t meant to be read as an antique form of Google maps. Rather, the mountain where Jesus is transfigured functions like the cupboard in the Narnia books, or a ‘thin place’ in contemporary versions of Celtic spirituality, or a liminal space in  contemporary writings i.e. as an entry point into another dimension. If you’re intent on a literal, too specific reading, what might happen in the case of the sermon on the mount, is that you end up determining this is the place where Jesus preached, followed by determining the time of day, crowd numbers etc. with a panel of experts called in to confirm it; psychic numbing ensues and as an inevitable antidote to this we have the corresponding scene in the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian.

Inevitably a composition of place works better where there’s a little assistance, an unusual bit of specificity from the gospels e.g. Zacchaeus up the sycamore tree, or a sick man being lowered through the roof of a house, or the woman who comes to a well. But take another instance of Jesus crossing a lake – the Sea of Galilee – by boat, as he does in three of the gospels. When Martin visited the holy land he was struck  by all sorts of things that he hadn’t understood about the region around the Sea of Galilee – that it was a trading crossroads, a quite confined geographic region and, as he noted, the portico of the Franciscan Hotel was the best place to contemplate the ‘spiritual dimension of the lake’. Whatever about the spiritual dimension of the lake and its geography – fascinating as they are – more importantly in the gospels you have to get over any sense that landscape is neutral. It’s not simply something you walk or sail across to get from here to there. It’s alive in the way that Aboriginal landscape is alive: it’s a mythic landscape. For instance, in Mark, the sea isn’t simply something you sail across beset by the occasional storm, instead it’s a place where the demonic holds sway: it’s as if the sea were a creature. In that sense the sea has to be subdued: the demons who clamber aboard the boat as Jesus sleeps – i.e. the waves threatening the boat – have to be dealt with by this unusual ‘hero’.  In the 4 Mysteries sense of it this results in a sea battle – there are many different sorts of battles with different sorts of demons – which is part of a guerrilla movement to free territory in the control of demonic forces and so create a liberated space where we might learn to belong to one another. In other words, despite Martin writing of his lake experience: ‘this time I had to do no imagining at all. Here it was laid out before me’… in fact the 4 Mysteries approach suggests there is more to the lake than meets the eye; even if we’re standing at it’s edge it insists on our imagining this scene as much as, say, the scene that follows it which features a possessed man living in a graveyard.  At which point you might situate yourself in a room – even a rehearsal room – and ask questions like, how do I imagine this battle between the demonic forces and Jesus? What do these demons look like? How do the others in the boat respond to this? How do we respond to it? And what sounds do we hear? As we respond to these questions we might find ourselves in a quite different place, wondering about our role in this scene, and playing our part in creating it: imagine that.