Transformative is a tired word, maybe, for the kind of thing art does, and not really the right word. When we say that we’re changed by a story, or a poem, or a play, what we mean is that we’re made in some way more aware, awake, alive. Good art doesn’t pretend to change the world: not from something into something else. We simply know more clearly what’s real and who we are in that reality. Like children in a fairy tale, we return from our imagination’s adventure changed, but only into something more truly like ourselves.
Jane Clark Scharl’s remarkable play, Sonnez Les Matines, engages this paradox of imaginative renewal as a Christian vision for art by invoking the particular paradox of liturgical time as a frame for dramatic action. Secular time moves inexorably forward, a linear sequence of discrete days. But for the Christian, the year is a story, unified, completed, accomplished in the fact of the Resurrection, though it repeats itself endlessly until the end of time. Because we inhabit this world of time and change, we have to wait for the seasons to swing around again in their sequential course. Caught in time, changed by it, older every year, we enter each mystery as it comes and, if we allow its grace to work on us, are restored anew to ourselves. Only by measuring and experiencing time in this way, trusting in its cyclical form, can we begin to imagine eternity and ourselves in it.
