Last week I attended a performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. In two hours of vocal, choral and instrumental music in multiple styles Bernstein tells the story of our modern crisis of faith. In it, the central character, called the Celebrant, begins searching for meaning in his life by trying to search for God. He first tries religion and prayer, shutting out the singing, dancing crowds that represent modern secular life. As the Mass proceeds, however, the Celebrant finds that prayers and rituals alone leave him empty. He realizes that he cannot find God or the sacred by shutting out life in the world, but when he tries to incorporate the outer world into his view of the sacred, the contradictions between his absolutes and the infinite shades and conditions of human life drive him into a breakdown.
Meanwhile, the lack of meaning in the modern world has led to chaos and destruction. In the final scene, as the Celebrant wanders gibbering through a wasteland of spiritually dead bodies he is approached by a young boy, singing a simple song of praise. As the boy embraces him, both the Celebrant and the world are healed, as all realize that God and the sacred are to be found not in another world, but in this one, not by seeking a distant God, but in seeking the God in each other.
As I watched Mass, I realized that this piece is a story about story. The Celebrant is Everyone—each one of us, as well as Us collectively. His dilemma is our dilemma, his solution our solution. We’re all searching for meaning in our lives, for meaning in life itself. Another way to say that is to say that we’re all searching for the story or stories that work for us.
And what makes a story work for us? That’s an answer that keeps shifting as our needs, questions, and understanding shift. But we know it when we encounter it. Our ears perk up, our heartbeat quickens as we sense that we are entering a part of the sacred world we need to explore. Such stories lodge in our hearts, changing us subtly, so that we are ever ready for new stories.
And each new story that we hear moves us along the path of our own story. We feel chills as our own ideas arise, coming to us from we don’t know where. So progresses our spiritual search, weaving our story together with those of others into the Grand Story.
So we discover, as the Celebrant discovered, that the end of our search comes in joining the human community: precisely what we find in sharing stories. Stories, like that young boy, come to embrace us and resurrect our humanity. And through sharing stories, we glimpse the God in each other.
(Image at the top: "Leonard Bernstein hugs members of the cast of his "Mass" during certain call last night on the Opera House stage at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, Sept. 9, 1971.)
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