Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Oberammergau Dialogue

2023; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/pajj_a_00665

1537-9477

Matt Cornish, Don Hinchey,

Religion, Theology, and Education

In the summer of 2022, just after I attended the forty-second Oberammergau Passionsspiele, I heard from my parents that my childhood pastor, Reverend Donald Hinchey, would also be traveling there, with a group of congregants and friends. When I was asked if I might write about the Passion Play for this section of PAJ on spiritual matters, I proposed interviewing Pastor Hinchey. At Our Father Lutheran Church, in the southern suburbs of Denver in Colorado, Pastor Hinchey guided me through Confirmation (in the late nineties), ministered to me and my family when I was sick and hospitalized, and presided over the funerals of my grandparents. Hinchey retired as founding pastor of Our Father in 2010.What follows are excerpts from a conversation with Pastor Hinchey on November 13, 2022, interspersed with my own reflections (in italics) on the experience of the Passion Play.■CORNISH: Why did you go to Oberammergau?HINCHEY: Why did we go? It’s a spiritual experience. It connects with faith. And it’s a cultural experience: Oberammergau is also a woodworking town, an artisan’s town. You’re getting to see a town that really lives for this. I went because of its living theatre history dating to 1633, and because I was already in Germany, and because it only happens every ten years. I’m already almost forty. How many more chances would I have? That it was a spiritual experience was tangential. I feel culturally Lutheran, but I am not practicing. The leap of faith is too much.What was I expecting? Oberammergau, like the rest of Germany, has secularized; you don’t need to be Catholic, or even belong to a religious faith, to perform in the Passion—you have a right to participate if you are a child, if you were born there, or if you have been a resident for twenty years. Yet the entire built landscape of the town and its surrounds calls you to faith.Running in the woods the morning of the performance, I came across a grotto, from 1900, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Up the road a few minutes in Unterammergau, on my way to dinner, I passed a trail of contemporary sculptures on the theme of the Passion of the Christ, including packing boxes stacked to form crucifixes (Bruno Wank and Torsten Mühlbach, Bitte stehen lassen, Amen, 2018–2022).1The churches in the area, evangelical and Catholic, created a walk through town on Christian themes. In and around Oberammergau, you find lots of tradition, some tourist kitsch, beautiful wood carvings on New Testament themes, and much earnest and often playful grappling with what it means to believe in Christ in 2022.HINCHEY: This was our second trip. I suppose it’s something you can do and then say, “I’ve done it,” and take your t-shirt and run. But for us it was a memorable first experience in 2010. Back then, we were assigned guest homes. My wife Margaret and I stayed with a delightful family. They were very involved in the town. It was a bed and breakfast, and you felt a kind of personal connection with the people.This year we were taken with how the production and the town had become much more … what’s the word? Professional. In a sense, professional, but not in a terribly good sense. It seems to have lost some of its personal quality. So, in that sense it was a bit of a disappointment but they move the numbers, as you know. There are just crowds and crowds of people going in and out.2 I don’t know if we would go again. Still, we were not disappointed with the production, especially with the quality of the music. It was just outstanding. It’s more like an oratorio than anything. The Passion Play Theatre, just off the town’s center, is an imposing building, seating 4,500. It looks something like an aircraft hangar, open to the air, though the audience and stage are covered. The peaked roof over the lobby, a few stories high, frames a simple cross, around which abstract figures gather; they seem to be praying together, in community.About 1,800 people (out of the village’s total population of some 5,000) participated directly in creating the Passion Play.3Walking through town, past the fresco of Hansel and Gretel on the side of a house—one of many famous examples of Lüfltmalerei—and window shopping for carved wooden crucifixes, you watch teenagers on bikes teasing each other as they ride towards the theatre in time to change for the opening scene. Then you might buy a loaf of bread from a man with a beard and long hair, obeying the mandate to “let their hair grow” from Ash Wednesday through the final performance in October (only those playing Romans are exempt).4Reviewed by critics from major newspapers and magazines, including Süddeutsche Zeitung and Theater heute, the Passion Play can be taken seriously as a work of art. This hasn’t been the case for long. Christian Stückl, who has directed the play since 1990, and who is also Intendant [artistic leader] of a major theatre in Munich, has, along with the community of Oberammergau, transformed their Passion. From a somewhat embarrassing and anti-Semitic amateur tourist curiosity in which married women were not allowed onstage (for most of the twentieth century), the Passion has become (in the twenty-first) the best kind of community theatre.5HINCHEY: It doesn’t help that it’s all in German, of course. We know just enough German to be able to bounce between the Passion Play libretto and what was happening onstage. It was not as difficult for us as it was for many in our group. They really struggled with the experience, but I didn’t hear anyone complaining. You know, nobody was saying, “this was too confusing to follow” or anything like that. The fact that you know the plot really does help: spoiler alert, he rises from the dead. But to bounce back and forth is somewhat distracting. So, you’re working—I guess that’s a good word. It was a labor. You dare not let your mind wander for too long. But it is such a marvelous spectacle. I mean, at one point they had how many people onstage?CORNISH: Over six hundred.HINCHEY: And then those scenes at the beginning and the end where you had the children and the animals and the citizens and the soldiers, you know, your mind is just being blown away. During the entry into Jerusalem, the first major scene of the Passion Play, children ran between sand-colored robes, playing little games. The smallest child was an infant, held in the arms of an old man. The old man pointed at Jesus riding in on a donkey (a giant Catalan) and I could see him watching the scene through the eyes of the child. There was so much joy onstage: the high brass of the trumpets, the brilliance of the strings, and the generations singing together, as they have for generations: “Hosanna to our Son of the King!”As theatre, the Oberammergau Passion Play may have a long history but it is almost unique today, with episodic storytelling that interspaces the story of Jesus with living tableaux set to symphonic choral music in the style of Bach cantatas. The symmetrical unit set, with a central space topped by a peaked roof, and three smaller spaces on either side, Corinthian columns visible behind the frames, all of it in textured desert tones, looks like the entrance to a marketplace or a temple.Here is the Son of God, played by Rochus Rückel.6Here he lives for us, here he tries to save us. He gathers with his followers under a tent for a final meal. Here Judas, played by Cengiz Görür, points out Jesus, betrays him.7Later, alone on the stage, Judas hangs himself, so lonely, engulfed with sorrow, disbelieving forgiveness. Here Jesus is crucified, dies, and is buried. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”8And here is an angel. He sits far down stage right, alone with a small bowl of fire and surrounded by immense darkness. Played by Michael Hollatz, a young man with a calm and caring face, the angel asks: “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen.”9CORNISH: How did all of this connect you to Jesus?HINCHEY: It helped me to move into the scene in a more real way. I think, you know, we’re raised in the church with a kind of Sunday-school mentality. You’re seeing Bible stories as though they’re on a page or, you know, an artist’s rendition or something. Occasionally, you get a fairly good historical portrayal. Have you seen The Chosen?CORNISH: No. I haven’t heard of it.10HINCHEY: It’s a well-done story on the ministry and life of Jesus. It kind of moves you into thinking about Jesus as a real live human being. And that happened to me too during the Passion Play. For example, I saw the political machinations. They did a beautiful job of setting the Passion within a political context. You saw the struggles going on between Annas and Caiaphas. You saw Pilate as the kind of the goofy dupe he really was. As somebody who’s trying to make a career. And the disciples were bumbling. They didn’t know what the heck was going on. I gained a whole new appreciation of Jesus as an angry young man. I was uncomfortable with that. I still am, although you start reading through the Gospels and you can’t avoid it. So often we present, and I’m guilty of this in my preaching, we present Jesus as a kind of a cardboard character, and he’s not, he’s really flesh and blood. Here he’s really flesh and blood, and within a context. I felt close to God at Our Father, especially on Easter, when we lit candles and repeated together: He is risen. He is risen indeed. On April 20, 1999, I went to Our Father after I was released from lockdown at Arapahoe High School, in Littleton, not far from Columbine. I remember holding onto the wooden pew in front of me. We sang: “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, / And grace my fears relieved.” I wept, we wept. For children dead, for children left alive. For ourselves, for them.CORNISH: Some critics saw this as a Passion more focused on politics than on the humanity and the religious aspects of Jesus’s life, death, and Resurrection.11 As a Passion for 2020, it staged, I think, Jesus as a refugee and the Jews around him as refugees.HINCHEY: I struggled with the political aspect of it. I did. But eventually, over the course of those five hours, I came to see that you really can’t separate the two, and I tried to think of what the Evangelists do. Mark being the first gospel. Matthew being heavily Jewish. Luke, kind of pitching to the gentiles. I mean, they each have their perspectives, too.CORNISH: We heard Christian Stückl, in a pre-show talk, say that this year’s Passion was most influenced by Matthew, the life and acts of Jesus, rather than the traditional John, which focuses on the suffering and death.HINCHEY. I hadn’t thought about that until you just said it, but that’s right. It was within that Pharisee political context. And you do have to wonder how what’s going on within our world at our moment influences the presentation. Still, I struggle with a less compassionate Jesus. Afterwards, talking about it in the group, that was the word, compassion, that kept coming up over and over again. Where was his compassion? You didn’t see it. You know, this was not the Jesus who said, Let the children come to me. This was a very angry Jesus. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they ever got around to Luke. Because, you know, in Luke, Jesus is the shepherd, the gentle Jesus. Designed by Stefan Hageneier, the tableaux, presented within the stage’s central framed space, excite awe and then wonder, deep messages from a dark past. In the third living picture, curtains open to reveal a golden calf towering over terrified Israelites, Moses wearing white robes and burning in anger, the scene painted in rich shades of blue; in the fourth picture, we behold Moses again, his arms cast wide, protecting his fleeing refugees, while a maroon sea, which looks like silky fiberglass, washes over Egyptian soldiers. “Great things the Lord has done,” the chorus sings while our eyes work to take it in, “He leads Israel on a safe path!”12Wind gently blows the actors’ cloth costumes; all else holds eerily still.HINCHEY: You refer to Jesus as a refugee. I never saw him as a refugee. How did you see that?CORNISH: As he first comes in, during that great opening scene on the donkey, it felt to me like a flood of people arriving somewhere they both belong and don’t belong, and Jesus is asserting belonging, while being rejected by political leaders. And then seeing the faces of children in the crowd, especially black and brown faces, some of whom were refugees or whose families were seeking refuge in Germany, made that feeling more concrete for me. This searching for a place to belong and Oberammergau being that community, perhaps trying to find that community in Oberammergau, just as Jesus is trying to establish a community or find a community.HINCHEY: Yes. Well, he clearly was the insider and outsider. He was one of the tribe of David. He was one who comes out of the people, and yet he distances himself. And he invites the people to come and distance themselves too. Because that’s the nature of the kingdom of God. And that’s within all of the Gospels.CORNISH: Are there particular moments from the Passion that you’re still thinking about that you might talk about in one of your study groups?HINCHEY. Yes. The centrality of the cross, I mean, you couldn’t miss the cross. It was oversized. Yes, Jesus on the cross. I don’t recall much of the Resurrection. I think the Resurrection was kind of downplayed here. There was some real criticism of the Resurrection twenty years ago.13 It was staged as if it had happened in the minds of the disciples. Ten years ago, or actually twelve years ago, it was a little more real. Jesus comes out with a light and passes the light. And there were lights here too, but it wasn’t quite as vivid. Then there’s that political wrangling that was so pronounced. Nicodemus came off in a central way. He played a big role in this performance and if you read the Gospels, he makes, what, three appearances or something like that. Who else was big. Oh, Joseph of Arimathea. That was the other prime character for me. He’s a gutsy guy, and much more so than I ever saw him in the Gospels. He’s willing to put his life and reputation on the line for Jesus. Miracles not so much. I wasn’t very moved by the miracles, and this wasn’t Jesus as a miracle worker. My mother often said, when I was small, that I might grow up to be a minister, like her father, who was ordained in the Episcopalian church. I think that the professoriate today is not so dissimilar from the Church in the first half of the twentieth century, when my grandfather, Joseph Erickson, studied ecclesiology. Academe attracts similar kinds of people, studious and quiet but also turned socially outwards. Trollope’s cathedral-town novels could be easily adapted to satirize the life I live. Only I concern myself not for the souls of the flocks I lead.How many of the characters I’ve mentioned here would my students understand if I were to teach a class on Oberammergau? Judas and Paul, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, Annas and Caiaphas. The Pharisees. Do they know the structure of the stories, the New Testament dramaturgy that shaped the form of the drama in Europe for so many centuries? Not just Passion plays or Mystery plays—if they have little or no knowledge of Judeo-Christianity, how do I read with them Waiting for Godot?HINCHEY: One of the things that my wife mentioned was that you look around that theatre with thousands of people from all over the world, mostly coming in on tourist buses. And you have to wonder, What is the level of understanding of the life of Jesus, but also what is the level of commitment to Jesus as Lord? And will it change anyone after sitting through the Passion? I don’t know quite what to do about that. I would like to think that at some point somebody walked out of there saying, you know, I’ve never thought of him that way. And that somehow this would lead into a new kind of understanding of who Jesus was. I mean, that’s the pastor in me speaking. Did it effect you?CORNISH: Yes, it did. I have moved away from church, moved out of the church. And I felt that during the Passion as a kind of a loss. Still, I am closer to God when I am, say, out running in the woods on a Sunday morning then when I go to church, which feels rote. One of the great experiences of the Passion, for me, was hearing texts I am deeply familiar with, so familiar that they are almost a part of my body, hearing these texts anew again because they were in German. It reminded me of doing Confirmation with you at Our Father, when you would try to get us to both memorize the Lord’s Prayer and say it as if new every time.HINCHEY: And that’s the struggle of faith too, particularly as you get into the older years, because you’re hearing these texts every Sunday and you want to hear them as though for the first time.CORNISH: You asked about commitment to Jesus. During the performance I thought also about my children and their lack of connection to the church. They will be not able to access this well of faith and tradition that sustained me during times of suffering.HINCHEY: It’s not too late. Leaving the Passion Play Theatre with my wife that June evening, walking back to our holiday apartment, the town was deserted already, quiet enough that I could hear our footfalls on cobblestone. Stopping on the sidewalk, we saw lights spinning in the windows of the Church of St. Peter and Paul, a Catholic church in the South German Baroque style. We walked through a small cemetery and ducked inside. It was a wonder in light. Projected words swam on every surface: Verzweiflung, Verzeihung, Hingabe [doubt, forgiveness, devotion].14It always seemed to me that Pastor Hinchey’s favorite moment of Sunday services was calling out to the congregation: “Let the children come to me!” He would sit on the edge of the stairs with a great smile, and they would run up and gather around his white robes to hear a story.What is it about the church that I miss, and that I fear my children will not even know they miss? The stories, the characters, and the beauty of the Bible’s language. (I remember Psalm 104, which I memorized: “Oh Lord, how manifold are thy works!”) The rituals and the festival days, which give shape to the year and to a life. The community: the people and the places that provide light and grace on days both best and worst. And the mystery.My older son asks me: “Daddy, who is God?” He’s five, this is a universal question. Stumbling through a response, I am the allegorical figure of the secular middle-class man. I know that I could take him to church and teach him one potential answer. And I decline. Unable to find majesty in the quotidian service, not wanting to put on church clothes, mistrusting talk of Jesus, I feel content each Sunday, if a bit delinquent, with a run, the Times, a big cup of coffee. Still, I whisper a prayer of thanks, always, every morning, to God. Who will my children thank? Hingabe. Verzeihung. Verzweiflung.HINCHEY: It’s not too late to give your kids the same blessing of faith that your folks gave you. Okay … no pressure, no pressure.Well, unfortunately, your story is being told over and over again. The average age within our Lutheran church, Missouri synod, I think is somewhere in the mid-sixties now. You look around that congregation and they’ve all got the same color hair as I do. One of our friends from the church died yesterday. There are more and more funerals. But yeah, it’s an unfortunate story. I don’t know what God has in mind. But I do know that the church so far has not died out. There’s always been a flicker, and maybe that’s the message of Oberammergau too. You know, at the end. The angel comes out and passes the light from person to person. And then candles blink all over the stage.CORNISH: Going to Oberammergau is a pilgrimage: You travel to this separate, special place away from your everyday life, and it allows you to reflect on that everyday life and maybe change your path.HINCHEY: Well, I have really enjoyed talking with you, my dear friend.CORNISH: I have so enjoyed it as well. Thank you.