South Bend, Indiana
2022
To teach Christian communities how to see grace and mercy in loss and suffering by enabling young people to contemplate difficult questions as they rehearse and perform the newly composed Passion for the Innocents.
Project Summary
"The Passion" is a newly composed musical representation of the Passion, based on scripture, tradition, and the lived experience of a collaborative process between students in the Folk Choir and professional artists. The Passion teaches Christian communities how to see grace and mercy in loss and suffering. The original inspiration for this work was to see the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis within the Catholic Church through the lens of the Passion. This project seeks to enable young people, within a ministerial environment, to contemplate the difficult questions that they’re longing to ask and talk about. This communally constructed work will be workshopped in January 2022 and premiered during a tour of the East Coast in March 2022.
What questions about worship and your discipline will be guiding your project?
One of the main questions that we're asking is how to build on the concept of "full, conscious, and active participation" in liturgical formation and worship with young adults. All too often, conversations about this concept revolve around over-simplistic dichotomies - did the congregation sing or not?, do they know the responses?, etc. What is most exciting about this project is the opportunity to consider how artistic and creative work with the scriptures can yield an integrated concept of full, conscious, and active participation both directly within worship, and as preparation for communal worship.
How do you envision this project will strengthen the worship life of congregations?
The most direct way that this project will strengthen the worship life of congregations is in a missionary sense. Our project is centered around college students and emporwering them to think and do creatively in and through their Christian faith. These students will graduate from university and join parishes with not only a fundamental understanding of the Passion, but with a set of tools that will enable them to share their creative insights confidently as a cornerstone of their faith practice.
What do you expect might be your greatest challenges (or challenging opportunities)?
What is and continues to be the greatest challenge in working with college students is the ease of relying on "tradition". Tradition of course is completely invaluable and a fundamental pillar of Catholic faith, but there's a constant pull towards simply relying on tradition as an excuse to be stagnant in our own zeal for the Gospel. This manifests in big and small ways, but now that the artwork has been "created", I have noticed that to facilitate similar encounters to the Passion and to scripture in general requires a constantly renewing posture, one that is committed to discovery of how the Gospel can change our hearts.
What do you hope to learn from the Grants Event and other grant recipients?
I hope to learn strategies specifically geared toward the challenges described above. I know that these challenges are not unique, and I'm excited to enter into creative conversations around these challenges in a community of scholars who are creatively exploring new ways of renewing my commitment to the Gospel.