The World Beloved – An essay by Gavin Barbour

The World Beloved
An essay by “our very own” Gavin Barbour (March 2019)

In addition simply to being a beautiful work of music, The World Beloved is an expression of the dynamic relationship between modernity and the Christian tradition. The fact that it combines two such seemingly disparate elements as Bluegrass music and a Latin Mass, announces from the outset that this is something new, a conscious effort to stitch together a unique quilt from a variety of well worn, well loved fabrics.

It is tempting to let that novel combination define the piece for us, but The World Beloved is more than a clever juxtaposition. The compelling marriage between high church and mountain hollow belies a more subtle, and more radical, reimagination of the Christian tradition than is immediately apparent.

Consider: the libretto, completed in 2007 by novelist/playwright Marisha Chamberlain, contains no mention of a virgin birth, mounted sermons, blood, mortal sacrifice, a cross, a resurrection, or a holy trinity. There are no Gospels, no Apostles, no Saints, no Baptist, no Mary. “Christ” appears only in the Latin Kyrie and does not identify Jesus of Nazareth in the role. God is referred to as both “He” and “She.”

What are we to make of a “Christian” work with a bigendered God and no Jesus? To some, the conflicts with scripture are insupportable. In his doctoral thesis on the piece, composer/conductor Matthew Bumbach, who was involved in some of the first renderings of the work, recounts his experience with singers and musicians whose religious beliefs forbid them from participating.

Of course, the piece feels Christian. The Latin, the references to characters and places from the Old Testament, the presence of God, the evocation of an Appalachia we associate with hymns and sabbaths all play on our preconceptions. But the “World” in The World Beloved is better understood when seen through the lens of fiction than the lens of scripture. As in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass or Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union¨it is a World in which the familiar is newly contextualized to create an alternative version of what we know as “reality.”

If one assumes that the piece is a full and faithful rendition of Chamberlain’s World, what kind of place is it? This World, like it’s traditional JudeoChristian counterpart, originates with an omnipotent Creator. But unlike the more familiar one, this God has never expressed anything other than affection for humanity. The sometimes wrathful and jealous God of our Old Testament needs no New Testament revision into a “God of Love” for He/She was never anything but. God’s love, in Chamberlain’s World, is as infinite, permanent and unwavering as any Newtonian Law.

While all powerful, The God of this world is familiar on a human scale. Creation is not achieved through incantation and shifting mist. It is the hard, hands-on work of piling and scattering and rolling and launching the various elements into being. God works like a human, and like humans, God is driven by emotion, compelled by love to take human form in order laugh and weep with “my people.” Like us, He is driven by a longing for fellowship. His people politely refer to His decision to “set aside His crown” before taking human shape. Later, He corrects them: the crown was not “set,” it was “cast.”

At the same time, God’s presence is decidedly nonhuman. In addition to Her place “on high” where Christians in our world have become accustomed to locating omnipotent beings, God also exists “below” in the scales and fins of Her fauna, the vitality of Her flora and in the very tissue of our bodies. Incarnation affords God the opportunity to dwell “among” us, but God also dwells “in” us. Chamberlain, herself a student of Buddhism, infuses God into all of Creation, blurring the distinction between the material and the divine. It is no wonder that the people of this World understand God through His creation. They are able to access the divine via natural landforms: Heaven is just beyond the highest mountain peak, eternal rest is to be found on the Jordan’s far shore. And just as God worked to create the world, so they work to live in it. They toil†and climb†and labor†and row†on†, their efforts a form of devotion.

In a World where work is worship, it is not surprising to find that life is hard. So hard, in fact, that the seasons themselves can wear one down to “dust and emptiness.” But they endure. Born of two equally stoic traditions, hardscrabble farming and strict adherence to elaborate ceremony, these Appa-latin people are not idle, unnaturally posed, fig leafed characters commemorated in oil paint. They are your neighbors, Eve and Adam, who know the pains of childbirth and hunger.

Like us, they are witness to calamity on a “biblical” scale, with a sky that explodes and fells towers and sets armies to marching. And like us, they are overwhelmed and lost and must grapple with the sense that love has abandoned the World. God reminds them that while She cannot explain these phenomena, She is present and continues to hold out the promise of a future Peace.

So it goes in Chamberlain’s World. Which begs the question: how goes it in our own? Chamberlain chose “Beloved” as the defining adjective for her invented world. How many of us see ourselves as the obedient subjects of an infinitely loving Creator in this one? As our connection to Christianity as the dominant spiritual perspective in America evolves, as some of us reject it out of hand and others blend their cultural inheritance with others, what remains? Do we all even inhabit the same world, and if not “Beloved,” with what word do we describe it?