A young couple fall in love and panic about the consequences of commitment. A woman hides away in the bathroom at her own fortieth birthday party because she can’t face being reminded of so many years lost in an unhappy marriage. A young man confronts his widowed mother because she doesn’t seem to trust the woman he wants to marry.
There were constant glimpses of the beauty and the fragility of human love, and the way it inevitably uncovers a longing for something even deeper, something more mysterious. An indescribable longing, as one of the characters says.
You might expect a Polish bishop to preach about some of these themes, but not to dramatise them and bring them to the underground theatre of his day.
It was a marvellous play. I wish I could urge you all to go and see it, but there were only two performances. Martin O’Brien is the artistic director of Ten Ten Theatre. He’s adapted a play called The Jeweller’s Shop by Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II.
It’s hard to present profound spiritual themes in the context of our contemporary culture without trivialising them, or sounding preachy. The most fruitful way is often through the medium of human experience. We live in the age of Big Brother and YouTube. Lives are exposed. We are constantly confronted with an unmediated human experience. So when grace is working through that ordinary human experience, it gives an opportunity to touch the fringe of God’s cloak and be lifted up for a moment into the transcendent, without stepping into church or lighting a candle.
Formal religion and popular devotions have lost none of their significance, but the fact is they are outside the bounds of most people’s reality. That’s why a bishop in the late 1950s, and a cutting-edge playwright in our own time, have tried to put the focus on everyday human relationships. Through those relationships, with the ambiguous longings of the human heart exposed so clearly, we catch a glimpse of the divine; just a whisper – quiet enough to be missed, clear enough to unsettle and enchant.
The Jeweller’s Shop by Karol Wojtyla is published by Ignatius Press. The Jeweller, by Martin O’Brien, was performed at Leicester Square Theatre on 22 June, directed by Paul Jepson, as part of the Spirit in the City festival. If you can help Ten Ten Theatre put on a longer run of this wonderful play, see their fundraising page here.
Bridges and Tangents 
For me that image of indescribable longing is captured beyond the real image of a mother holding close to her body her newborn, and the newborn most securely secure within the mothers embrace. That feeling and knowing, the one that unites us by an umbilical cord, although severed in life, is spiritually forever there.
We long for that same eternal pure Love created by God.
And just sometimes in the bluest of moons, beyond maternalness, beyond physical need and yearning, sometimes most rarely, unbelievably, through another, we just feel that same pure Love, for no reason other than Love alone. Grace. Love. God. The greatest mystery and blessing.
I have a great interest and affection for the very humanity of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, Who It seems saw the world in a perspective that being of an artistic spiritual nature I can grasp. I wish I could have seen this play.