Sibling Assignment #77: Raymond, The Christian Skeptic

About three weeks ago, I assigned this prompt to my sisters and me:

In honor of the upcoming production by the Sixth Street Theater of the musical "Godspell" write a post explaining what your spiritual experience has been with "Godspell" and, if possible, how that experience is similar and/or different from your spiritual experience with "Jesus Christ Superstar".

Silver Valley Girl's post is here and here is InlandEmpireGirl's.

As I posted in my last piece, I live my life skeptically, never really knowing if what I see or hear or feel is true. I experience the world as an unsettled, unpredictable, puzzling, inconstant, fluid, riddling place where we live our lives acting on partial knowledge, fallible judgment, and fractured perceptions. It's humbling. As much as I'd like to think I'm knowledgeable, exercise keen judgment, and am impeccably perceptive, I'm not. I do the best I can, but I'm living in a fog. I think we all are.

Therefore, I am a Christian. I have to live by faith in a mysterious reality of resurrection and forgiveness. Otherwise, I'd go mad. By all scientific and social scientific measures, to live a life of faith in what I cannot see or touch or taste or hear or smell and by a reality that cannot be measured, is to be a fool.

I'm a fool. I'm a Christian fool.

Over the last couple of years or so, I've not been going to church, primarily because my struggles with depression combined with my introvertedness combined with the demands of my work make church attendance draining. It's weird. Church fatigues me.

But, two weeks ago, I recommitted myself to church worship again. After services both Sundays, I came home and slept for an hour or so.

Church still fatigues me.

But, entering again into the liturgy of the Anglican tradition and once again drinking the wine of the blood of Christ and eating the bread of Christ's body at the Communion rail invigorated my spirit, fatiguing as that might be.

Returning to church is awakening what I think is my most Christ-like quality: my skepticism.

And this brings me to "Godspell".

I saw "Godspell" the first time at Cowles Auditorium on the campus of Whitworth College (now University) during the summer of 1974. The performance was put on by a group of Christian actors giving benefit performances in various cities in support of Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers.

I'd heard that "Godspell" offended some Christians because Jesus is portrayed as a clown.

I thought it was perfect. Clowns are skeptics. Clowns subvert the world as we know it, taking what we assume to be true about the world and showing us, no, that's not true. There's more. We think a small car can only hold a couple of people. Then we discover a small car can hold a thousand clowns.

Jesus was skeptical of common understandings of the Law, of the human tendencies toward strife and grudges, of the what the world says is the place of the poor and the infirm and the prisoner.

He was skeptical of the finality of death. Where others saw finiteness, this clown Jesus saw eternity, everlasting life.

"Godspell" helped me understand the subversive nature of the parables. We expect the holy men to help the man beaten on the road to Jericho, but it's the slimy Samariatan who aids him; we expect the prodigal son to be yelled at and punished by his father, but he his return is celebrated, laviciously; the world would say that if a shepherd had ninety-nine out of a hundred sheep in tow, be satisfied. Ninety-nine out of a hundred ain't bad. Jesus subverts that idea. In the subversive Kingdom of God, the shepherd searches and seeks and doesn't rest until he's found his one lost sheep and returned it to the fold.

I don't remember all that Jesus the clown does in "Godspell". It's been too long since I've seen it. But as one who is skeptical of worldly values and of worldly pursuits as ends in themselves, Jesus as clown helped me see worldly values turned upside down.

I can't change the nature of the world I'm so skeptical of, but I can live in faith, seeing through the eyes of Jesus, seeing things in reverse, living by a reality that transcends the one I'm so skeptical of.

But, there's more.

Complementing the experience I had with "Godspell" was the very different experience of "Jesus Christ Superstar". I first saw Jesus Christ Superstar as a movie, first with Silver Valley Girl when she was about a fifth grader and then again my junior year at Whitworth when it was the Saturday night campus movie and Cowles Auditorium was packed.

I'd been told in my high school youth group at the United Church of Kellogg that I should be careful about seeing "Jesus Christ Superstar" or listening to its music.

The musical presented Jesus as human. The show did not portray the resurrection. It looked at Jesus as a product of his followers' public relations and marketing. Was Jesus Lord? Or was Jesus Christ a Superstar, a Beatle, Joe Namath, Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe, or Marlon Brando?

Put another way, I began to think the musical was raising questions regarding what happens when Jesus, in the 2oth/21st century is not so much Jesus Christ the Lord, but Jesus Christ Superstar.

I saw "Jesus Christ Superstar" live in London in the summer of 1975.

Afterward, I walked the streets of the West End, questions erupting inside me about Jesus Christ.

Who are you?

Are you what they say you are?

Is it all hype?

I heard the voice of Mary Magdalene: "I don't know how to love Him."

My faith grew as I questioned, as I gave in to rather than suppressing my skepticism. I experienced spiritual expansion. I experienced God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost urging me to doubt more, to ask more questions.

"Jesus Christ Superstar" opened the way for my interrogative living of faith. Even these thirty-three years later, questioning is my chief way of knowing God through Jesus Christ.

I don't want to worship a Superstar.

I continue to do, as I did that night walking the streets of London: in the words of Paul, I work out my salvation with fear and trembling.

"I Only Want to Know": Sibling Assignment #31

Inspired by seeing "Kiss Me Kate" this past Sunday, I assigned my siblings to write about a musical in whatever way they see fit. InlandEmpireGirl's post on "Annie" is here. Silver Valley Girl wrote about "Les Miserables", here.

When I started classes at North Idaho College in 1972, I enrolled in choir. Our director was Rick Frost, a Christian, an openly professing Christian.

Several members of the choir, most from Coeur d'Alene, were also openly professing Christians and had a history with each other in the Lutheran church through their involvement in youth group and in regional and national Christian youth conferences.

They were good people: Marian, Sandy, Jim, Kurt, Darrell, and others. One day I ran into Kurt in a hallway of the Aministration building. I liked Kurt, greeted him, and we began to talk.

Suddenly, Kurt asked me if I was a Christian. No one had ever asked me this before.

I didn't know what Kurt meant. I'd gone to church all my life. I was baptized at age 15. I had a lot of friends who also went to church and we never asked each other or asked others in the church or outside it if they were Christians.

What Kurt meant, I know now, was whether I had opened my heart to Jesus Christ and accepted Him as my personal savior.

At that point, I began to realize that this group of Coeur d'Alene kids had Jesus on their minds all the time. They talked about the Lord. They prayed together. They saw their lives through a prism whose light was the Lord.

They also understood being a Christian to be a matter of a special, overtly stated commitment that they talked about a lot and showed to the world by carrying Bibles, wearing buttons, like "I am Third", and putting bumper stickers on their cars.

I didn't like this. I liked these kids, but I did not like their overt confession of their Christian faith. It seemed clubby. It seemed that they were too interested in figuring out the Christian status of others and I thought these kids were looking for too many external signs and certain ways of talking that confirm, in their way of seeing the world, whether a person was truly a Christian. Or not.

For me, a person being a Christian was pretty much assumed if a person went to church and I understood our American culture to be primarily a Christian culture. I didn't see any need to talk about having received Christ (to this day, I've never claimed a particular moment when this happened; it's always been happening) or of behaving in ways that set me apart from my Kellogg friends, as long as I was good.

These new friends got me thinking.

Actually, they got me to asking questions. I began a process which is still at the core of my being. I did then, and I still do, experience Christian faith as interrogative, not declarative. I experience my faith with more of a sense of mystery than of certainty. I am less concerned with personal salvation and more concerned with the collective body of Christ and the impact of the life of Christ on social matters, less on individual ones. I see Christ as our Savior, not mine.

Salvation seems more a corporate experience than an individual one and, for years, I've thought that, the promise of salvation is a beginning point, and that focusing on it so much can be put aside and the question, "What now?" ought to be restlessly and ceaselessly asked and acted upon. How can Christians be a salve in a wounded world?

I've gotten ahead of myself.

When the rock opera "Jesus Christ Superstar" was released in 1970 as a record album, before it had ever been performed, it became a flash point of controversy. The opera looked at Jesus as a man. Its story ended before the resurrection. It looked at Jesus largely through the perspective of Judas.

I remember church members at the United Methodist Church of Kellogg not quite knowing what to think about it, wondering if we should have some kind of youth meeting to talk it out.

I heard a couple of the album's songs on the radio and didn't think much of the album until I received it as a graduation gift. Because I knew it was controversial, I listened to it with deeper interest and read the lyrics.

It was the best stuff, for my temperament, I'd ever heard regarding Jesus and the Christian faith.

There were the central questions: Who are you? What have you sacrificed? Do you think you're what they say you are? And, in "Heaven on Their Minds", Judas cuts loose with a pained and emphatic, "Jesus!" and exclaims:

You've started to believe
The things they say of you.
You really do believe
This talk of God is true.
And all the good you've done
Will soon get swept away.
You've begun to matter more
Than the things you say.

These lyrics began my career of skepticism and critical thinking. It began my lifelong asking of the question, "What if?" What if the good of Jesus got swept away because the name Jesus or the utterance of "the Lord" began to matter more that what Jesus said? What if this emphasis on accepting Jesus was the acceptance of a feeling more than of a way of seeing and moving and acting in the world?

What if Jesus had become more a Superstar than a Savior, more an icon than an embodiment of the Kingdom of God, where the meek, the poor, the mustard seed, the prodigal son, and the prostitute at the well, not the proud, the wealthy, the fancy gardens, the self-righteous, seething brother, and moralistic legalists come to stand for the values of God's Kingdom.

What if Jesus was more human than anything else? And what if his life was a PR campaign?

I loved these questions and wrestling with them strengthened my faith rather than threatening or diminishing it. What diminished my faith was buttons and bumper stickers and Christians who wouldn't say shit if they had a mouthful.

I've had a handful of transforming spiritual experiences when I could hear God speaking to me. One of those experiences was seeing "Jesus Christ Superstart" on stage in London. I'd seen the movie already, and enjoyed it, but somehow the story was diminished on the movie screen because of the movement of the movie from one place to another and because the characters themselves seemed small in relation to the landscape of the Holy Lands.

In the theater, the action and the songs were confined to a single stage. Having the story before me intensified the questions, made the passion of Mary Magdeline, the tortured soul of Judas, and the hours leading up to the crucifixion and crucifixion itself more immediate, more unnerving and glorious.

I was a junior at Whitworth College (now University) when "Jesus Christ Superstar" showed at Cowles Auditorium as the Saturday night movie. Afterwards, the halls of the South Warren dormitory, most of the discussion was of the movie's theology and whether it was sound.

In effect, I responded that "Jesus Christ Superstar" wasn't the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was asking us to look at the story of Jesus from an imaginative perspective, to see it from a perspective unaccounted for in the gospels. (I say this better now than I did in 1974!)

It was as if the story of "Othello" were told from Iago's point of view. The changed perspective changes the story, and while the point of view of the gospels is the canonical perspective, can't we, I wondered, imagine what Jesus looked like from Judas' point of view? Even if it's not canonical?

Furthermore, might this not be the perspective shared by many who are outside the faith? Shouldn't we entertain that perspective as well as the insider's view?

I'm sure many of the students that night minimized my point of view because I was a literature major and understood truth more in terms of story and multiple points of view than dogma or doctrine.

But, I was really, indirectly, echoing the words of Judas. Jesus' life and what his story has become in the 20th and 21st centuries inspires me to ask questions, look at a variety of perspectives, and to be driven by the same wish that "Superstar's" Judas has:

"I only want to know."

Unlike Judas, though, I'm not a traitor.