The Way of the Cross: A Passion Pilgrimage Through Song, Part 3: Storytelling Through Song

Episode Topic: Storytelling Through SongLed by Grammy® Award winner and Director of the Notre Dame Folk Choir Dr. J.J. Wright, this series will introduce The Passion, a new artistic production combining Scripture with original poetry and set to original music. Through Christ’s Passion, we learn to encounter suffering and incarnate love, to behold one another in our “not-enoughness.” As we enter the upcoming Lenten and Easter seasons, we invite you to journey with the Folk Choir and some of our closest collaborators through the development, rehearsal, and performance process of The Passion. Along the way, we will explore the Passion and Resurrection in light of the most pressing issues on the minds of our students, including the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the role of women in the Church, and climate change. The Passion offers a framework for encountering ugliness, teaching us how to respond with compassion, empathy, kindness, forgiveness, and humility. However, encountering ugliness takes work. Music allows us to unite our pursuit of the Passion, not as a distraction from the ugliness, but as an unexpectedly deeper way in. As artists and musicians, we practice over and over and form our bodies and voices to be able to perform freely. In The Passion, the joy and sorrow of performance is completely commingled with God’s story of salvation. The Passion enables us to contemplate the difficult questions that we’re longing to ask and talk about. It enables us to “sing through them or into them” and share the load in community. Through our continued conversations in this course and through The Passion, we hope that you’ll continue sharing the load with us as we explore storytelling through song. In May, the choir will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where they’ll walk in Jesus’s steps through the Passion and record this new work at the Jerusalem Music Center.

Featured Speakers:

• J.J. Wright, Director, Notre Dame Folk Choir, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: go.nd.edu/479e19.

This podcast is a part of the Choirs of Notre Dame ThinkND Series titled “The Way of the Cross: A Passion Pilgrimage Through Song”.

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