...hallowed be Your name,

Hallow : to make holy, to consecrate

Hallowed: greatly revered or respected.

Whenever I’ve been asked what I do for a living and I reply that I’m an actor,  there’s usually a response like ‘ooooh’. It’s not your average job I suppose and I guess there’s a perception that it’s glamorous, which in all honesty it rarely is, or exciting, which it can be sometimes. Our culture, with its obsession with celebrity,  loves to set actors, musicians, writers and other artists apart, put them on a pedestal and revere them. We go weak at the knees for movie stars, we faint at the feet of rock stars. The very fact that we call accomplished artists ‘stars’ says something about the heights to which we hang our hopes on these people, imagining that they are endowed with something extra special.

We set them apart; let’s be honest, we idolise artists. And there is a temptation when you have a longing to be an artist, to also long for the recognition or perceived glamour that comes with it, albeit rarely.

Jesus taught us to pray not for our own glory but for God’s, that we would set God’s name apart as holy, that we would revere the Divine name and endow it with the respect and honour it’s due. Get a bunch of actors in a room together, and before long the talk turns to the ‘business’, how one’s agent isn’t getting him enough work, how such and such a director doesn’t recognise talent when she sees it etc. etc. It’s  all  about us! We’re obsessed with getting the respect we think we deserve from the industry. It’s the same with writers. How often do we read an article or a book and think to ourselves, ‘I could do that!’ or ‘how come they’re published and I’m not?’

A number of years ago, I came across stories of Eleonora Duse, a 19^th century Italian actress who was said to have inspired Stanislavsky when he was devising his method of acting training. She was a contemporary of the famous Sarah Bernhardt and there was great rivalry between  the two.  While great success came to her through her art in the theatre, she never sought the fame it brought, seeing herself instead as a ‘messenger’, her art as a service to the Divine. She sought throughout her life to get beyond her ego and allow herself be a channel of Divine grace in the world.  On stage, it is said that she was magnetic, and people travelled from far and wide just to see her perform. Eva La Gallienne, in her biography of the actress/mystic, describes seeing Duse play when she was quite elderly;

     ‘I saw the stage take on an added dimension; I felt the vast audience grow still and sit as though mesmerized in the presence of a frail, worn woman who, with  no apparent effort, through the sheer beauty of truth within her, through the sheer power of her spirit, reached out to each one of us and held us all enthralled.’

 I reckon there are many artists who would give their right arm to have this effect on an audience or a reader but the point is that Duse never used that longing as her starting point. Her starting point was devoting herself to the service of God through her art.

When we pray ‘hallowed be Your name’, we acknowledge that the act of creation has its origin, its source in God. When we intentionally pray for God’s name to be hallowed,  we are giving the focus to God and off ourselves and this can only be good for our art.

 

Melanie Clark Pullen is an actress and writer living in Ireland.

Comments

[Nicole]

Yes! Amen. Well done.