Theater Finding God through longing and darkness
By RETTA BLANEY
In An Almost Holy
Picture, the character of Samuel Gentle, a former Episcopal priest, now
groundskeeper, shares his four life-changing experiences of God in American
playwright Heather McDonalds one-man play on Broadway. Making his first
stage appearance in a decade, Kevin Bacon takes on the role of Gentle in this
shimmering play, at the American Airlines Theatre through March 31.
His opening words set the tone: There are three experiences
that have shaped my personal idea of God. By the time the play is over, a
fourth will have emerged as well.
In his first experience, he was 9 and walking with his father on
Cape Cod when the air all around me suddenly went still. He looked
up and heard a voice whispering, Follow me. The voice spoke again
more strongly, Follow me.
Gentle did follow, as a priest working in a small adobe church 20
miles outside of Albuquerque at the foot of the Cebolleta Mountains, a location
he had chosen. I was drawn there by light, space, the deep pleasure of
unexpected life and stillness. The geography allows for God.
Moses,
Jeremiah, Jesus all spent time in the desert listening to the silence. And they
brought back visions.
I was full of longing.
Longing is an essential stage in our spiritual life.
Its an arrow, an arrow that points toward God. Here the second
event that shaped his personal idea of God occurred. I believed then that
each of us has a good work to do in this life, and our purpose is
to discover what that good work is. And so I came to the desert with my longing
for vision and light: I had not expected to stumble blind into so much
darkness.
The darkness was a bus accident that killed nine children in the
parish youth camp. He left the priesthood and the desert and returned to the
East, to The Church of the Holy Comforter to tend the bishops garden. He
married an anthropology professor and they faced the pain of losing three
babies a trinity of miscarriages. I looked for answers and
comfort in the religion of my youth. But most religious answers arent
intended to ease our pain but to defend and justify God.
If it is true
that God is somehow testing us, then he must know that many of us are failing
the test. If God is only giving us the burdens we can bear, I have seen him
miscalculate many times.
But as painful as these miscarriages were, none provoked him like
the third experience. That occurs with the birth of his daughter, Ariel, who
was covered face and body in a white-gold swirl of hair, the result of a
hereditary disease called congenital hypertrichosis lanuginosa, which is passed
on by the opposite-sex parent. He is overwhelmed with love for his daughter and
offers himself up in prayer at matins each morning, still trying to
strike a bargain with God, hoping to find him in a benevolent mood and open to
deal-making. My left leg if Ariels hairiness would leave her. My sight in
exchange for a smooth-skinned daughter.
He stands in the back, not partaking of Communion. I have
trouble with the Apostles Creed. I can never get beyond the first two
words: I believe ...
The struggle for faith has been well represented on New York
stages this month. Another one-person play dealing with men and their
relationship to God opened on the same night within blocks of An Almost
Holy Picture, on 42nd Street. In Damien(NCR, Feb. 8),
the Belgium-born priest recounts his life among the lepers of Molokai, Hawaii.
Both plays are blessings.
Rhetta Blaney is a theater and religion writer in New
York.
National Catholic Reporter, March 1,
2002
|