ruah arts group

What would happen in Darfur, in the Philippines, in the Holy Land if the faithful laid down their lives in holy martyrdom?

The Sixteen Martyrs of Compiegne did just that in 1794, and the terror of the French Revolution ended ten days later. Behold the revolution of contemplation.

 And Act One’s Barbara Nicolosi breaks the good news that Origin Entertainment has optioned for the rights to the martyrs’ tale in To Quell the Terror by William Bush:

I’m excited. I just got a message from my business partners at Origin that the paperwork has gone through, and we officially have to option on this book:

The title there is To Quell the Terror: The Mystery of the Vocation of the Sixteen Carmelites of Compiegne. Set during the darkest days of the French Revolution, this story is about sixteen women ages 27 to 78 who brought about the end of the Great Terror by an offering themselves body and soul to save the people of France.

The nuns’ story was fictionalized in a book called The Song at the Scaffold, by Gertrud von LeFort, and then turned into a beautiful opera called The Dialogues of the Carmelites. But the real story - which is kind of The Mission meets Amadeus - uh, with women - has never been dramatized.

I will be writing the screenplay while Origin puts the project in development (ie. looks for financing). And we can brood and pull our hair out over the financing tomorrow. Today, I am really, really happy and honored that I have the grace to work on this project.

I saw the Dialogues a couple years ago, and the opera–even on DVD–was profoundly striking, and more than any artistic piece I can think of taught me the power of the sign of the cross. You have to see it to know precisely what I’m talking about. Stay tuned here for updates on the Screenwriting of a story of women whose inaction brought death to the French devolution and Life might shine in a land soiled with the blood of martyrs.

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As promised, I will comment more on things seen and heard at the Washington Arts Group Convocation…

There’s an intellectual nausea over a certain kind of sentimentality that creeps into the Christian art world. This was one of the pithy themes of Greg Wolfe’s opening talk. “Art is linked with prophecy,” he proclaimed. He went on to remind us that “Beauty always creates shock–a surprise, a flash of radiance…” He insisted that tragedy is an essential dimension of the Christian life.

We live in the shining shadow of the Holy Cross of Christ, and who are we to think he walked from Tabor straight to the Resurrection? Indeed, Christ is Risen. He is truly risen! However, it is the moral imperative in a fallen world to preach Christ and preach Him crucified. That is a brave prophecy–to portray in one’s own medium the wastelands of our time. I will take the darkest verse of T.S. Eliot over a thousand Thomas Kinkade pieces any day.

When we participate in His suffering willingly, and “dare to disturb the world” by portraying brokenness, we become prophets, not of doom, but of the the redemptive power of pain.

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