Can I get a witness Essay Example For Students

Can I get a witness? Essay More than 6 million of the faithful have lined up for Arkansass Great Passion Play. Art is where you find it. Im looking forward to when Our Savior gets lifted up on that wire, says the man next to me. His name is Earl Potjeau and he is pointing to a cable high above our heads. We are sitting with 4,000 other Christians on Mount Oberammergau in northwestern Arkansas, waiting for the Great Passion Play to begin. Over on its own mountain, seven stories tall, its arms outstretched in invitation, the Christ of the Ozarks statue gleams in the setting sun. In the valley right below us lies the city of Jerusalem, 500 feet wide and 400 feet deep, with Calvary about 100 yards upstage on an opposing hill. The camels have been called to places. In the aisles, circulating among a Baptist youth group wearing T-shirts that read Jesus the Rock that Rules, a shepherd sells programs and paper fans printed with fruitily sentimental depictions of scenes from the New Testament. Earl and his wife have driven to Eureka Springs from Alabama to watch this spectacular reenactment of the last week in Jesuss life. Ea rl, a farmer, looks to be about 50. This is his first play ever, but he already knows the plot. All I know is what Ive studied in the Bible. I hope theyre not going to change it any. Earl says this serenely, securely unaware that the Crusades had been launched for less, but I feel, for the first of many times during my weekend in the Ozarks, Zero at the Bone. The image is Emily Dickinsons, who uses it when she accidentally meets a snake in the grass. Coastal Americans, educated Americans and artists find fundamentalist Christians very easy to feel superior to, very easy to imitate for laughs and perilously easy to dismiss. Yet righteous, filled-with-the-spirit Earl Potjeau would be as upset by any alteration to Holy Gospel to suit dramatic license as civil libertarians of every stripe are with current efforts to diddle the First Amendment. The difference is that Earl, like the Crusaders, will be far easier to mobilize. Paul says to the Ephesians: Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand (6:13). Evangelicals, at least the kind I grew up with, believe in a life of personal witness, which means a retelling of their personal experience of Jesus Christ and his redeeming love. I feel bound to get out some of my own witness before I start criticizing what I saw in Arkansas. My adolescence was spent in one of the centers of the Bible Belt, a Chicago suburb of 40,000 where the churches outnumber the gas stations by a substantial margin. Over the years I watched more and more of my friends and family members cross over to Christ. Pat Robertson, the Bakkers, Jerry Falwell, Ernest Ainsley, Jimmy Swaggart and a host of lesser UHF lights pitched continuous woo from the portable TV over the dishwasher. Demons were cast out of strangers in our living room. My mother kept, may still keep, oil in her glove compartment for healing calls. Since I was 15 Ive been hearing tongues and testimony and seeing prayers get answered in powerful, uncomfortable ways. On the other hand, the people I lived among, and still choose to visit, make lots of money, own vacation homes and freely stalk the malls like everyone else. They use computers. Their faith is ordinary; most have had it from birth, so its a reflex . They are no more or no less petty or sanctified or loving or sly or banal or interesting than any other subset of Americans, but they have a worldview. They know they are saved, and it is that spot reserved in heaven especially for them that makes them complacent and irritating and gets me into trouble. America was founded as a Christian nation, and they want it back. While it is indeed far more expedient to regard the religious right as a horde of tacky, snake-handling nutbags, that has not been my experience; because I have seen Christ work miracles in peoples lives, I cannot write their faith away. So even if my family was thrilled that I was being sent to Eureka Springs, I was afraid. I was going alone. There wed be, 4,100 self-satisfied soldiers of Christ and one susceptible fence-sitter with a pad and pen. My armor would be a lifetime of self-distancing paratexts Emily Dickinson, Flannery OConnor, Hee Haw, Elmer Gantry, Walt Whitman a useless, useless slingshot before a population completely without irony, a population for whom there is only one text, and that Word was God. After 25 years of operation, the Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs received its six millionth paying customer this summer on faith and word-of-mouth alone. Christs final days, from Palm Sunday to the Ascension, are historically bigger than LORT, and they dont need the publicity. How, I wondered, was I ever going to get back? 2.   Eureka Springs, which flourished as a mineral spa earlier in the century, is now also one of the essential destinations for vacationing Christians from around the world. Owned and operated by the Elna M. Smith Foundation, the Great Passion Play was chartered by Gerald L.K. Smith and Elna M. Smith, who, having retired to Eureka Springs after long and prayerful lives, had a vision to uplift Christ and bring his message to all people. The Passion Play, which opened on July 15, 1968, is but one of five Sacred Projects that fulfills this vision. The others are the Christ of the Ozarks statue, which was designed by Emmett Sullivan, who worked on Mt. Rushmore; the Christ Only Art Gallery, featuring more than 1,000 pieces of religious art in 64 different media, including butterfly wings; the Bible Museum, which houses more than 7,000 Bibles printed in 625 languages; and the New Holy Land, an ambitious project begun in 1990 to recreate a full-scale representation of the significant events in the life of Christ. To date, the Dead Sea, the River Jordan, the Temple Gate and the Nativity have been completed on the 50-acre site. But, from the end of April to the end of October, the Passion Play is the real draw. The Wiz - Directed by Gary Hicks EssayAlthough the show is taped, he also explains that players are instructed to memorize the lines, not only because it helps them with their acting, but because the Foundation likes to uphold the simulacrum for patrons with binoculars. The show four reels of tape in sync with a computerized light board is run from a booth under the audience. Nothing can ever go wrong. A computer is a lot more efficient than human hands. The only live sound is a hammer on an anvil used when Christ is nailed to the cross. 5.   I head to historic downtown Eureka Springs, all of it limestone. Hatchet Hall, the last home of Carrie Nation, is closed. I am not in the market for gingham. throws, so I wander listlessly through nests of boutiques until something stops me in a jumble shop. A Nile-green skeleton with a tambour is dancing on a black skeleton with a tambour is dancing on a black background under blood-red block letters: Federal Theatre Presents Marlowes Faustus. An original WPA poster for the 1937 Orson Welles production. After blanching in front of a series of truly demented canvases in the Christ Only Gallery, the lithograph strikes me as a secular treasure of staggering connections: Welles, Marlowe, the Dance of Death, the Federal Theatre Project a government that actually created opportunities for artists during a time of economic disaster. What on earth is it doing there? Is this from God? Is this from the Enemy? Will they take a check? 6. Saturday night, I interview Don Berrigan in Jerusalem as the play progresses around us. Originally in film and theatre on the West Coast, Berrigan had been with the Passion Play for eight seasons. As we talk, he uses a hand-held tape recorder to take performance notes for the cast. Around 10:15,, we climb up to Calvary for the Crucifixion with the rest of the cast. A soft-spoken man, he nevertheless holds firm opinions. The audience doesnt know whether theyre in a church or a theatre. Thats why they dont respond much. The biggest challenge with a show like this is cast morale. Weve got some hill people in the company if you yell at one, the whole family is mad at you. We have to come up with the minimum expectations that a believer is going to have. Jesus cant be chewing gum up there. You have to preserve His dignity even after Hes been whipped. Theres no curtain call, because we lift up scripture, not people. Ive gotten some changes put in, but the Foundation has the final say. Theyre the producers; No one could touch the Christ figure before. He couldnt smile or express joy. Now thats what I call a cautious chicken passion play. (To the tape recorder) Too much talking on the Via Dolorosa I think it was those Romans. I believe in detail. Im a Wagnerite. I wish there was some way to remove the element of chance in this show completely. 7.   I speed away as fast as I can, not caring where I spend the night, as long as it is in Missouri. Next day, when my hop-flight to Memphis takes off, in defiance of all FAA regulations, I hold the WPA poster on my lap like a shield. Art is where you find it. Art is how you hold it I didnt have to travel all that distance to determine that the Great Passion Pray of Eureka Springs wasnt good theatre as I knew it, but I could respect Earl Potjeaus rapture. That the spectacle didnt strike me as particularly spirit-filled was the surprise. When I stood and watched the Crucifixion at 15 feet, surrounded by the costumed population of Eureka Springs, more secular perhaps than their forebears who stood on the play wagons in Aachen and Fleury and Wakefield, I was held by the idea of a grand continuum of faith. But I was more moved by their passion in cobbling together a mystery out of anvils, cheesecloth and wire. I go to the theatre with the hope of being scared by brilliance, blinded by the fanatical visions of others, changed through crisis. At one point on the Holy Land Tour, LaJuana Amicone, our driver and leader, had taken us out of the bus to look at the concrete reacreation of Gotgotha. We were standing in a grove of trees when she suddenly murmured in a voice that had lived pain and redemption: It is so much easier to fear God than to love Him. When you feel you have hit bottom, all you need to say is |Jesus, come and be the Savior of my life. He is as close as His name, any time, in the middle of the night. LaJuanas witness wasnt for show. The juiet intensity of her invitation needed no loudspeaker. She was talking to me. I wish some of LaJuanas spontaneous, unmediated drama could have come forth in the Great Passion Play. This last objection, however, is of no import to Christians, who take content over form as a matter of course, and who, unlike theatre critics, always trust the message.