Jesus Christ, Superstar: All That Talk About God

by editor Michele Catalano

It’s almost Lent, or as I like to call it, Jesus Christ, Superstar season. It’s a time of year when I reflect, take stock of my life, and listen to the original cast recording (1970 version, on vinyl). I do a lot of thinking about Jesus and God. I also think about 11-year-old Margaret in Judy Blume’s Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret prefacing her meditation to God with “Are you there?” When I first read the book, I wondered if she was questioning if God really exists, or questioning if he’s listening. I wonder that too, Margaret.

I was the same age as Margaret when I first listened to Jesus Christ, Superstar. My mother was obsessed with the record and played it daily. I don’t think she realized I was listening intently, because when I asked for the lyric booklet so I could read along in the same breath, I asked if Judas was really a bad guy. She was taken aback. To her credit, she still gave me the lyrics and answered all of my existential questions. A lot of what I was hearing didn’t seem to line up with what they were teaching me in religious ed. My mother reminded me that Superstar is fiction based on reality, but even then I questioned the reality part of it.

***

I used to give up things for Lent, mostly because I was forced into it as a kid. “Jesus sacrificed for you, now you sacrifice for him.” I wasn’t sure how that worked, and I tried to argue that Jesus wouldn’t want us to suffer as he did. My mother would remind me that going without candy for 40 days is not “suffering.” So I would choose the thing I’d miss the least, mom would complain about me not getting the point, and she’d suggest something such as giving up reading comic books, which, no. I inevitably landed on candy every year. As I got older, I started to understand the concept of giving something up for Lent, and I tried to be more meaningful in my choices. Then I fell out with the Church, dropped out of Catholicism (and religion in general), and enjoyed the freedom of not having to forgo a vice every February.

That’s how I find myself listening to “Overture” at four in the morning, thinking about God and Jesus and Margaret. I’ve been contemplating giving up something for Lent, even though I haven’t practiced any kind of religion in almost 30 years. I think it would be a good exercise, if not in faith, then in self discipline. I run down a list of things it would take some fortitude to give up: social media, weed, sugar-free popsicles. The more I think about it, the less I have reason to do it. What would giving up popsicles for 40 days prove, except how much I love popsicles? What ultimate purpose would it serve? Would it in any way help me or anyone else? Would it make me grow or diminish my sadness, or change the world? I don’t have the answers at 4 a.m.

****

As a kid, my favorite songs from the album changed daily. Sometimes I would play “This Jesus Must Die” over and over, carefully lifting the arm up and putting the needle down, the way my cousins taught me. I wanted so badly to listen in the privacy of my own room, so I could really become one with it. But I had neither a turntable nor my own room. So I’d sit in front of the living room stereo cabinet—the kind that weighed a ton and took up an entire wall—and listen until my mother decided it was time to listen to Pink Floyd or the Beatles.

Then I was 14, with my own room and stereo. I hadn’t really given much thought to Jesus Christ Superstar, except during Easter season, when my mother would put on the album. I’d sing along, mostly by rote, and contemplate Jesus’ existence. Once Easter was over and the soundtrack went away, I’d tuck away those thoughts for another year. But something happened at 14 that made me want to listen intently again. I took my mother’s album, headed into my room, put my headphones on, and took a deep dive.

I spent that night in what amounted to a metaphysical crisis. There were things I heard that escaped me when I was an 11-year-old. Things I understood now, that I didn’t then. The whole of “Last Supper” devastated me. For some reason, everything that unfolds in that song made me see Jesus, or my idea of Jesus, in a different light. It also made me see Judas in a different, forgiving light.

I realized that I was listening to the words of lyricist Tim Rice, and that they could be considered a fictionalized version of this pivotal time in Jesus’s life. I thought about that—about Jesus and God and the Bible—and decided that I believed Jesus really did exist, but that he was just a man who had a following and got carried away with it, as messiahs are wont to do. I didn’t know if I believed in God, though, even though Jesus Christ, Superstar was doing its best to convince me. I had a lot of questions that would probably never be answered. Not by my Catholic school teachers, not by mother, not by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. For all its evident flaws, Superstar radicalized me religiously, but in a way that turned me away from the Church.

Later, much later, I would recognize that I wasn’t the rebel atheist I labeled myself as a teenager. I had no commitment either way. God may exist. God may not exist. Jesus was real. Jesus was fiction. Praying works. Praying is useless. I chose which things to believe on a case-by-case basis. Uncle has cancer? Pray. Two planes hit the World Trade Center? God doesn’t exist.

***

It’s 5 a,m., and I’ve started the record over. Somewhere around “Pilate’s Dream,” I have an epiphany. What if, instead of giving something up for Lent, I do something positive for 40 days? What if I pick up a habit instead of breaking one, but a good habit? I could actually improve my life by addition, not subtraction. I’ve been really bad about reading, and I have a large stack of books waiting to be read; so I’m thinking about reading every day for 40 days. This could get me back into being a reader again. Or what if instead of saying I’d give up ordering in for Lent, I commited to cooking dinner every night for forty nights. I know this is blatantly ignoring the premise of giving something up, but I’m trying to meet God halfway.

I think again about Margaret, about how she fights with herself over religion and struggles with her religious identity. She separates herself from God, but in the end reconciles with him. There are a lot of complicated issues in that book, and I don’t think I really got the gist of all of them until I reread Are You There God as a young adult. I know I have separated myself from God. But that’s because I don’t trust that he could be real. I don’t want to put my whole being into something that may or may not be. Margaret figures out her relationship with God at 11; I’m 62 and still as confused as I was when I was Margaret’s age.

When I lay my head down at night, I want to pray. I want to ask to have my health looked after. I want to right my wrongs. I want to be forgiven, to forgive, to put a faith-based shield over my loved ones. I stop short of saying actual prayers, because it feels wrong of me to put all that out there when I’m not sure God exists.

I have to make some kind of peace with this because it eats at me. Do I take the leap of faith and reconcile with a God I once loved, or do I back off and let my agnosticism just be?

Superstar made me contemplate Judas’s role in Jesus’ death, as much as I had to consider Jesus’ own role in his crucifixion. It made me question how much Pontius Pilate was at fault. Again, these are fictionalized words I am listening to, but are they really?

As I sit here once again at 5 a.m.—listening to “Gethsemane” and contemplating the existence of God and Jesus—I decide that during Lent I will really explore my feelings about God and religion and my place in a universe where God as I know him exists. I will better myself, maybe even grow a little. I am fully aware that an answer may not await me. Like Margaret, I will deal with God on my own terms. I just have to figure out those terms.

I don’t think any album I own has affected my life the way that Jesus Christ, Superstar has. I thank Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber for bringing this strange, deep, look at the end of Jesus’s life to me, and for forcing me to be more truthful with myself about my place in the religion in which I was brought up.

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