Mysteries of Grace and Judgement

★★★★★

This moving recording was created by the Mennonite Central Committee Canada in 1996. Jonathan Erb received permission from MCC Canada to distribute it on the Dock. However, please note that the recording is still under copyright by MCC Canada.

From the description on the CommonWord website:

This performance, scripted and produced by Jack Dueck, comprises five main elements in interrelated dramatic function. Like a cantata – although it does not consist exclusively of song and music – the form is a setting for story to be told and sung but not acted.

• The reader represents the voice of Scripture and includes words, like those by Menno Simons, inspired by the biblical passages.
• The letters From Russia with Tears express the agony of suffering and of faith’s testing toward a new spiritual formation – finding ‘soul’ even while all seems lost.

  The songs and music provide a poetic and sound screen against which the letters, stories and scripture are played. The songs with their celebration of a comforting faith create painful irony, a horrific sense of total loss and heart cries for answers.

• The stories give a felt experience of a people caught in the Russian Communist Revolution’s juggernaut of community destruction: the wrenching doubts, the cry for answers, the horror of experiencing a seeming silent God, the collapse of their material and immaterial world, are all played within, and even against, the other voices.