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In the summer of 2022, I wrote a screenplay of a film called “The Allegory.” I began writing the script in a fit of artistic agitation that comes upon you every so often when you are an artist and not producing.
“The Allegory” is about a misfit band of artists putting on a Christian play, while disguising that the play is Christian. I workshopped and revised the script over the next 12 months. In the summer of 2023, in a theater in a church in New York City, we shot a 12-minute sequence of the opening two scenes of the film: A low-budget theatre company chaotically rehearses a convoluted Christian play to impress the director’s religiously devout crush.
We describe the film as a romantic comedy with religious themes. Our movie is a comedy first and last. A Christian playwright or filmmaker doesn’t have to imbue their work with a lot of religion to get the gospel across. A little Jesus goes a long way.
We would be using this 12-minute trailer to share with potential investors and donors for financing the entire film. Before we did that, though, before we began raising money in earnest, I decided to do something I had never really done at the beginning of an artistic project. I decided to ask God if doing this thing was, well, God’s will.
Was this just me deciding to do a thing and then doing it, without inviting God in from the get-go? Was this simply one artist’s own unaided and spiritually vapid will barreling ahead into what seems to be a good thing, without asking if it actually is a Good Thing?
So I gathered a few of the principals of the film — the producer, the director and two Catholic writers who had read early versions of the script — and we prayed the St. Francis Xavier Novena of Grace.
A novena is a nine-day prayer typically offered to a saint, asking for a specific intention or grace. The Navarre-born Xavier, patron saint of the missions, has a very cool novena named for him. The main prayer, which you pray every day for nine days straight, begins thus:
“O St. Francis Xavier, well beloved and full of charity, in union with thee, I reverently adore the Majesty of God.”
It goes on to ask for “the grace of a holy life and a happy death.”
The kicker is what really sells the whole thing. It lends the prayer a unique “Ignatian” flair: namely, if it is not for the glory of God, then forget the whole thing:
“But if what I ask of thee so earnestly doth not tend to the glory of God and the greater good of my soul, do thou, I pray, obtain for me what is more profitable to both these ends. Amen.”
Long story short, we prayed this; we finished praying this; we decided to do the film. We went out and raised a lot of money, hired the crew, cast the actors, scouted the locations, and shot and edited the whole thing. We are finishing up editing and preparing to send to festivals this spring.
But we didn’t do this because God suddenly spoke from on high in the middle of the novena telling us to do this. The novena did not yield such clarity. What the novena did was remind us, or at least remind me, that there is a God. And this God can do things. And that by inviting God in, (if I can be utterly sacrilegious for a moment) we created God’s will for us. We shaped ourselves around the idea of God being part of this. We built some kind of numinous funnel for the spirit to enter, and we hope that it entered and we believe it entered.
We are just happy that we asked God to be part of it from the get-go. It offers some relief and takes some of the pressure off us and gives it to the one above. It may be that the moment we asked God if this was his will, God declared that it was his will.
The Novena of Grace runs from March 4 – 12. You can pray it by downloading this resource from the Jesuit Institute. Click here.
