Defying Gravity as Contemplative Prayer
An excuse to talk about Wicked: Part One (2024) and some words about prepositions
What I would really like to do is write a review of Wicked: Part I. I’d like to write about the devotedness to the stage musical, the gorgeous costume design, the humbly added story beats, and the truly impressive work by the cast—especially the surprise show-stealing performance by Ariana Grande-Butera, who can only be described as being absolutely locked-in to this role—but this isn’t that kind of blog.
So instead, I’m going to analyze Wicked’s Act I/Part I finale as an analogy for contemplative prayer as explored in the 14th century treatise The Cloud of Unknowing.
Oh, and ⚠️ WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD ⛔️
Before I get talking about Wicked, I need to try and try really hard to introduce that little monastic text called The Cloud of Unknowing.
Written anonymously sometime in the 14th century, Cloud of Unknowing is a guide to contemplative prayer, the first half of that ora et labora Benedictine lifestyle.
Central to the document is the virtue of humility: humility to seek God, humility to trust in God, and humility to accept the limits of mortality alongside the humility to try. While contemplative prayer, in which “the mind is at a resting place—resting in the presence of God—and this resting allows us to soak in God’s love,”1 might appear a passive experience, it’s very much meant to be an active enterprise.
Thus the summit of the Mystic Way is not reached through a passive state of being which leads to a gradual dissolution of the self into the infinite, but through an active, self-giving participation in the life of the Trinity.2
My favorite part of the Cloud is when the author gets into how “presumptuous disciples misunderstand” the word “up.”3 We often hear in contemporary discourse about the scourge of pronouns; meanwhile, prepositions are running absolutely amok and no one is paying attention. Not I, who has had at least forty prepositions memorized since the sixth grade (thank you, Mrs. Fessler!) and not Anonymous, who dedicates multiple chapters in the Cloud to dispelling misunderstandings about the prepositions “up” and “in.” Excellent work, if you ask me.
In chapter 75, Anonymous expresses concern that disciples of contemplative prayer might hear or read phrases “that men should lift up their hearts unto God”4 and, to a certain extent, take that literally. They worry that contemplatives might literally cast their eyes to the sky to seek God, which is a gross misunderstanding of the work of contemplative prayer.
But I say that the work of our spirit shall not be direct neither upwards nor downwards, nor on one side nor on other, nor forward nor backward, as it is of a bodily thing. For why, our work should be ghostly not bodily, nor on a bodily manner wrought.5
As the contemplative pursues the fruits of contemplative prayer, as they venture toward the cloud of unknowing, this “ghostly” work ought to be pursued accordingly, letting the “bodily” simply be as is.
Thus the experience of plain and undifferentiated being releases the contemplative from the burden of his own deeds and their effects. There are good deeds and bad, causes of joy and bitter remorse, but underlying these is the silent flow of being, which streams from God and is the life-giving force in everything that is done.6
It’s when the contemplative, through humility and charity, allows their physical nature to just be that they can (strictly metaphorically) incline their soul to the cloud of unknowing in pursuit of communion with the divine.
Now, while I could go on and on about the tenderness, hilarity, nuance, and precision with which Ariana Grande portrays the delightful Glinda the Good Witch, I need to talk about that character’s Act I/Part I co-conspirator and friend, Elphaba Thropp (not yet but on her way to becoming the Wicked Witch of the West). While I would argue that the relationship between these women is the heart of the show, G(a)linda is more the audience conduit. We know her already, so she helps ease us into the world of Oz that many of us haven’t visited since the last time we watched The Wizard of Oz, however long ago that was. Elphaba is truly the protagonist the audience follows, loves, and root for.
That’s the whole conceit that made Wicked so enchanting in 2003 and what has given it the staying power it has. It is, as Gregory Maguire subtitled his book the musical is based on, “The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.” What an awesome premise. Let’s rock and roll.
Elphaba’s conflict is both internal and external, whereas Glinda’s is almost entirely internal (which is what makes acting her part so challenging, possibly so disappointing, but more often than not so rewarding; last time I’ll talk about her, I promise). When we meet Elphaba, she has not fully accepted who she is (a green person with magical abilities), and she both imagines that the Wizard will be able to “degreenify” her and studies with her sorcery professor Madame Morrible to try and contain her magic.
In the movie, this desire to be like everyone else isn’t especially emphasized, but neither is it in the musical; what she wants is to be treated and to act like everyone else. What we get in the movie to round out this internal conflict is a trip to the Wizard. The moment where the Wizard shows her a little figurine of her that he’s made—and he’s painted her green. This takes her aback, but she accepts this as a sort of paternal approval she never got from the father who raised her, and she ultimately does not ask the Wizard to degreenify her. What she asks for instead is help saving the animals of Oz.
I admire John Chu and the screenwriters Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox because the Someone-Is-Oppressing-The-Talking-Animals-Of-Oz subplot is a weaker element of the musical and has been criticized as such for the better part of the last two decades. They very well could have inserted some other political issue to serve the same purpose, but instead, they doubled down and leaned into it. Good. Oz was always fantastical and never not a little weird. Don’t sterilize it now.
So Elphaba goes to the Wizard and asks him to help stop whatever is happening to the talking animals, which makes sense. Up until now, we’ve seen only two characters treat her with kindness from square one: Dulcibear, her childhood bear-nurse who is not in the musical but has been added to the movie, and Dr. Dillamond, her university goat-professor. But Elphaba learns she has been manipulated and deceived, not just by Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard but by her university sorcery professor, Madame Morrible, played a little awkwardly but ultimately very and successfully deviously7 by Michelle Yeoh.
These two have lied to Elphaba from the get-go, playing on her insecurities and relative naïveté with designs of using her magical abilities to increase and maintain their draconian chokehold on the people of Oz. They're attempting to accomplish this by casting the talking animals of Oz in a negative light, suppressing and ultimately revoking their rights, all in an effort to give the non-animal citizens of Oz a “really good enemy” to unite against. Sure, but why? That’s a question that’s never actually answered in both musical and movie. Oh well! Maybe we’ll learn in Wicked: Part Two next year.
Whatever the case, it matters for Elphaba’s character because it’s this train of plot that becomes tightly wound with her self-acceptance arc, both of which cultivate in the Act I/Part I final musical number “Defying Gravity.”
Oz is a Godless land, for all intents and purposes, so to make this work, we must substitute that which is morally good—charity, hope, love, justice, peace—for God in the case of Miss Elphaba.
It is in “Defying Gravity” that she gives in to these ideals the same way the contemplative gives in to God. Just as the one tries her best, reaches for the sky, puts her whole self in the hands of that which is truly good, so does the other try his best, reach for the cloud of unknowing, and put their whole self in the palm of the hands of God.
So, the Anonymous writer of the Cloud says that “the work of our spirit shall not be direct neither upwards nor downwards, nor on one side nor on other, nor forward nor backward, as it is of a bodily thing,”8 that the ghostly work of the spirit must not be directed “up.” But as only fantasy can do quite so well, Wicked provides us the analogy of the flying broomstick, the flight “up” out of the world, away from the world, above the world (what did I say about prepositions?).
Elphaba’s flight into true love and material indifference is correlative to the contemplative monk’s ghostly flight into the very same. “Defying Gravity” has been for many an anthem of self-acceptance, of social justice, and of self-love—all good things. I argue it is these and so much more: It is an abject rejection of a world that promotes shallow utopianism (a redundancy, perhaps); vicious ambition at the expense of humanity; and a base, ugly kind of goodness that only extends as far as comfort allows.
A common, but quiet, critique I sometimes hear about musicals with political underbellies (Wicked, Rent, Les Misérables, Chess, Cabaret, Evita, Hamilton, et cetera) is that they are pacifiers. They coddle the audience with a sense of shared humanity that makes one feel really good while seated and really good when remembering the show and its emotional throes, but they do not always challenge the audience to change, to grow, to rally around the problems at the heart of the show. Now whether or not this is an accurate or, even, a fair critique, it is always my hope that we are moved, challenged, compelled, and changed for good by stories embedded one way or another with beauty, truth, and love. Wicked is one such story, and the release of Wicked: Part I is socially and politically timely. Let us, through either contemplative prayer or some dark arts, strive for the cloud of unknowing, for defying gravity, and above all, for love.
Works Cited
Anonymous. The Cloud of Unknowing. London: Watkins, 1922.
Rissanen, Paavo. “The Prayer of Being in The Cloud of Unknowing.” Mystics Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1987): 140–45. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20716809.
Roberts, Amanda. “What Is Contemplative Prayer?” Grotto Network, February 16, 2019. https://www.grottonetwork.com/stories/what-is-contemplative-prayer.
Amanda Roberts, “What Is Contemplative Prayer?” Grotto Network, February 16, 2019. https://www.grottonetwork.com/stories/what-is-contemplative-prayer.
Paavo Rissanen, “The Prayer of Being in the Cloud of Unknowing,” Mystics Quarterly 13, no. 9 (2010): 144, accessed November 22, 2024, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20716809.
Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing (London: Watkins, 1922), 89.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Rissanen, 145.
I don’t want to hear a word against adverbs. Sorry, Mr. King.
Anonymous, Cloud, 89.