Category: blog

First performances at St. Mark’s

This week I will be giving the first performances of the Gospel of Luke at St. Mark’s Catholic Church. Hopefully there will be some school administrators there to assess whether this is something they’d like in their classrooms.

It’s high stakes, but it’s also necessary stakes. It’s like the ante in a poker game. You have to be willing to take some risk in order to be allowed to play the game.

I am trying to transform my life, to engaging full with the Gospel of Luke. I mean that it needs to become my main source of material support, so that I can commit to memorizing the rest of it, and performing throughout or society, from prisons to schools to churches to assisted living facilities to parks to events, and so on.

Sometimes I realize how far way this goal lies. And the biggest obstacles to its realization are my ingrained habits, both of activity and of perspective.

This is not a project that comes naturally to me, and I’ve never tried something like it before. It requires a great reframing of how to organize my life and how to feel about strangers witnessing the project.

It was begun and developed in private. Not only do I have to take it public, I have to spread it as far and wide as possible. The nature of the thing has to change. It’s like a necessary metamorphosis, or like a plant emerging from within the ground and having to suddenly interact directly with the entire sky.

I will report back how things have gone at St. Mark’s. This is a crucial time in the growth of the project.

When I recite the Gospel of Luke from memory, up to chapter nine verse fifty, it takes more than an hour. Sometimes actors have to memorize a lot of lines, and sometimes monks memorize large portions of scripture. But apart from these two instances, I don’t know who would be compelled to undergo such an exercise.

It’s not that I have a great memory. When I started, it was with the notion that my limits would become apparent, and that would restrict how much I could memorize.

But with consistency, regularly adding lines and reciting what I know daily, the amount grew beyond what had at first seemed possible. When the total reached more than an hour, then the limitation emerged of how much I could rehearse each day to maintain what I had learned.

It would have been nice to continue on to the end of the Gospel of Luke, but in order to keep that in memory, I would have to recite it for more than three hours a day. I’m sure that with good organization, I could set up a routine where a section is recited each day, with the sections cycling through a weekly pattern, so that all of the material is covered. That may become necessary in the future.

I would like to memorize all of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, because they are by the same author and are a single, continuous narrative. This will certainly require proper organization to keep things memorized.

I haven’t experimented with delays, to see how long it takes for something to disappear from my memory. That’s because I don’t want to lose what I’ve already worked to acquire. But that may become an issue as I try to expand the project.

If there is enough interest in the Gospel of Luke Project, and there are plenty of venues in which to perform it, then I will work on the rest of the Gospel. Until then, it seemed prudent to stop at an hour and a half of material, so test the waters, and see if there is enough interest to sustain it.

The debut is set for next week.

The Gospel of Luke will be performed next week at St. Mark’s Catholic Church next Wednesday at 12:30pm. This will be the first full performance, and it will be for clergy, deacons, and school officials, with the hope that they will see enough value in it to consider it for their school curriculum in the Fall.

Yesterday, I met a Volunteer Services Coordinator at a local prison, and we set up a tentative schedule of Tuesdays and Thursdays, after I have completed the required volunteer training in a couple of weeks.

So thing are beginning to get underway. Now I will be focusing on assisted living facilities, to see if there is any interest in performances there. 

All of this might allow me to fulfill all the requirements for my senior project in the Fall at Boise State University, part of which requires me to perform the Gospel of Luke in at least three different venues.

I should mention that this is not the entirety of the Gospel of Luke. I have memorized from the beginning through chapter nine, verse 50. This is a natural break in the narrative, and at over an hour long, this seems enough to start with. 

If there is enough interest, and the project seems to be self-sustaining, I would like to add chapters of Luke’s Gospel until the entire thing is completed, and then start adding chapters from the Acts of the Apostles, but that is a much longer-term goal.

Now all the preparation and effort will be tested. Real people will see it, and deliver their verdict on whether it should be allowed to expand. I always expect difficulties along the way, including here at the first performance. It would be great if they decided to include it in their schools.

This is beginning in a local Catholic church, and I hope to expand to other churches and denominations. It will be interesting to see how it is received elsewhere. I don’t really know what inter-church relations are like, and this will expose me to some of these outside relationships.

Setting up a schedule for performances.

This morning I met the Volunteer Services Coordinator at a prison in Idaho. He is enthusiastic about the project.

I still need to take a volunteer training class in a couple of weeks. After that, I will be coming in on a regular basis to recite the Gospel of Luke for the prison residents. 

I hope that this is a starting point. If things go well, and there is a good reception, it will be possible to expand to other prisons and facilities in the area. 

My personal goal is to perform the Gospel of Luke on a regular basis, to improve my performance, and to expand into more venues, like schools and assisted living facilities.

I hope to have news soon about an upcoming performance at a local church.

On Saturday morning, I performed a part of the Gospel of Luke for a small group of men at my local church. This was the first public performance of The Gospel of Luke Project.

It was a small group, and rather than take an hour and a half of their time, I asked them to pick a chapter from one to nine. Someone called out, “six!” and that seemed like a good choice because that chapter contains the sermon on the plain.

It was very nice to see how people reacted to this project, with a ten minute version. It was positive, and gave me confidence that the entire project can work, and work well. 

Tomorrow morning, I will be visiting with administrators at the Idaho Department of Corrections about The Gospel of Luke Project, to discuss performing the Gospel of Luke at the prisons. The performance on Saturday convinces me that this can be a valuable exercise, and could even be well received!

It has also been valuable because I am encouraged to contact other venues in the area, including assisted living facilities and schools. This can be a success.