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.