Jesus Christ Superstar
I went to see the 50 anniversary tour of Jesus Christ Superstar (https://tickets-center.com/search/Ed-Mirvish-Theatre/Jesus-Christ-Superstar-tickets) on the weekend with my sister. We expected to sing along. My family has been known to sit on the sand before Lake Huron and sing the entire rock opera from start to finish. All the parts. Between JCS and Queen’s, Bohemian Rhapsody, a family dinner table or holiday rarely escapes some part of these masterpieces. When we told our brother we were going to JCS, he wanted to be on speed dial or live stream in case an understudy was needed for ANY of the parts. If you were to say that Jesus Christ Superstar has been the soundtrack of my family, you would not be wrong.
We expected a fun and engaging performance. What I did not expect was a spellbinding and profound experience. There was no singing along. At least not out loud. I was rapt withal. So much of the performance was nothing short of sacred. I secretly made the sign of the cross a few times to both ground myself and in some way acknowledge that the secular space had transformed into sacred space. This was not just entertainment. I was deeply moved to tears many times. This is surely the greatest story ever told, and 50 years later, these songs have underscored this for me. This is not a religious pronouncement, this is the revelation of the very structure of reality. Let me unpack what I mean by that.
Willing self sacrifice is surely the highest value we have managed to achieve as a species. Motherhood itself exemplifies this. So does heroism. The JCS soundtrack bellows that sacred sacrifice of a Palestinian Jew as much today as it did 50 years ago, 400 hundred years ago, two thousand years ago. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Always. The Roman Church teaches that Jesus the Christ was fully human and fully divine. It teachers that his mother Mary, was the necessary and willing human container, the human womb for this divine coniunctio. Isn’t this mystery at the heart of reality itself. There is nothing new made manifest without surrender. Life lives on death, surrender, sacrifice.
John 12:24-26 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.
When that surrender is to something greater than what you know, greater than what the ego prizes, greater even than your own life, spirit falls into matter and reality itself is altered, created, made manifest. Eros and Logos kiss. The word is made flesh. And when what is manifested remembers its origin, the eternal return is exponential. Fractal.
Jung called this the magnum opus. The alchemical marriage. The divine coniunctio. There were a number of these profound moments in the performance on Saturday afternoon. Moments of insight. Moments of illumination. One such moment was watching a woman of colour sing her love to a white Jesus. Almost immediately, Judas, a man of colour, decried her as a “woman of her kind”. We all know what is implied by this slur. We have heard it. We have uttered it. It splits us. It others us. Undaunted in her love for Jesus, later she sang, “and I’ve had so many men before in very many ways, he’s just one more, I love him so…”. Something profound landed for me in that unexpected moment. Multiplicity into unity. I have often mused that there is a split in the Roman Church between the Marys. The virgin and the whore. I get the virgin in the full sense of the definition, meaning belonging to no man. In this way, Mary, the Mother of God belongs to both God the Father and God the Son. She is both unity and a singularity into multiplicity. Her single moment of surrender, willing self sacrifice, some two thousand years later, has multiplied into her advocacy for all of humanity. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.” The other Mary, Mary Magdalene, sacrificed many men for one. Multiplicity into singularity. This dark Mary gathers while the other light Mary sows. One Mary is closer to the divine, the other closer to sin. Isn’t this the diastolic and systolic rhythm of our heart, our breath, reality itself?
As I understand it, Orthodox Christians, who celebrated Easter on Sunday, believe that Mary is the Theotokos. The house of God. The container, the womb, the creative matrix of reality itself. I got an inkling of that on Saturday. Maybe this is a stretch, but I felt that there were some 2000 lesser Marys in that theatre. Some of us will gather. Some of us will sow. Something timeless and necessary is perpetually being reenacted. For those with eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts to open, the pattern of reality itself is being revealed. In song and dance and rock opera, the greatest story ever told is retold. Multiplicity into unity, and singularity into multiplicity. An exchange between audience and stage, stage and audience, secular and sacred, becomes a God bearer. A grail. And, once we have glimpsed Avalon and encountered the wounded King, or been humbled by the image of a man hanging on a tree, we are tasked with Percival’s two questions: What ails you? What does the Grail serve?