All I Ever Wanted

“I know you have more pressing matters than who gets captain – I watch the news – but I could use any extra luck you could toss my way, ’cause I’ve worked my whole life to lead Truman High to nationals. It’s all I ever wanted since I was a kid.”

Bring It On (2012)

Bring It On is a stage musical about competitive high-school cheerleading¹ – fun story, brilliant score, phenomenal choreography, highly recommended all round – which, randomly enough, kicks off, after a few seconds of opening overture,² with a prayer.

God – and any other higher powers that might be listening – it’s me, Campbell. You probably already know that. So, today is the last day of school, and then I’m a senior, and tonight, my squad is holding tryouts to replace old seniors who are leaving our plane of existence. The tryouts are going to be led by our new captain, who gets selected at lunch, and that’s why I’m talking to you. I know you have more pressing matters than who gets captain – I watch the news – but I could use any extra luck you could toss my way, ’cause I’ve worked my whole life to lead Truman High to nationals. It’s all I ever wanted since I was a kid.³

 

Cheerleading. Impressive stuff.

Here come the spoilers: Campbell is chosen as captain and seems on the brink of fulfilling all her dreams, until she finds out during the summer that, due to a school redistricting, she’ll be spending her senior year not at Truman High with her beloved squad, but at some other school called Jackson. Thanks to that and a couple of other unfortunate coincidences, the role of captain ends up falling to the newest member of the squad, Eva. Or at least, we initially thought it was thanks to a few unfortunate coincidences; in actual fact, Eva engineered the whole thing, as she triumphantly declares in the second prayer of the show.

Dear God up in heaven, a prayer for Campbell:

Once she was my hero,

Now she’s a disgrace.

I’m here on top and she’s less than zero,

Dragging me down to save face.

She always worked hard, she was trusting and fair,

And, Lord, that’s the crux of her problem right there.

You need that killer instinct to give you the nerve,

To grab everything you want in life but may not deserve.

Like, if some girl’s in your way, there’s only one thing to do:

You blackmail your mother, who sits on the school board, to get Campbell transferred and ripped from the life that she knew,

And your dreams come true.

You’ll probably have gathered that, as the song goes on, it altogether ceases to constitute any sort of address to God, as Eva gets caught up in extolling the benefits of using her ‘killer instinct’ to get what she wants – which makes it all the more striking that the monologue even starts as a prayer in the first place. Maybe that initial, nominal supplication amounts to nothing more than an excuse for Eva to be saying this stuff aloud, since, at this point in the story at least, she’s maintaining a façade of amiable innocence in front of the other characters. Or maybe – and I prefer this possibility – it’s designed to encourage us the audience to draw a parallel between what Eva’s saying here, and what Campbell said at the start of the show.

At first glance, these two prayers look pretty different. Campbell’s prayer, on the one hand, consists of a genuine entreaty of whichever divine entity might hear, that he might intervene to aid the fulfilment of her dearest wishes. Eva, on the other hand, isn’t really asking God to intervene in anything on her behalf: her dreams are already coming true, and that was achieved through her own judicious employment of her killer instinct, with no outside help required. Her praying for Campbell is just part of her gloating; it’s a statement to the effect that, unlike herself, Campbell, poor thing, is frankly a bit rubbish and would require some serious help – like, divine intervention kind of help – in order to ever amount to anything.

That said, however, the crucial similarity between both prayers is that Campbell and Eva both express the same desperate desire: each has her heart set on captaining her cheerleading squad and taking it to national success, and will go to extraordinary lengths to achieve that aim. Campbell is willing to petition any supernatural entity she can persuade to listen if he will help her defeat her rivals; Eva is willing to furtively devise and execute complex, malicious plots to bring about her rivals’ downfall. At the end of the day, prayer is of value to each of these teenagers only insofar as it enables her obtainment and enjoyment of an opportunity she already dearly wanted. And at the end of the day, furthermore, neither of the two actually commits the situation into God’s hands: both take matters into their own.

Campbell, having formed some accurate suspicions about what Eva’s been up to, decides to wreak her revenge by reappropriating Jackson High’s hip-hop dance crew as a cheerleading squad and competing against her former teammates. The only snag with this plan is that she has to convince her new Jackson friends to turn their hand to cheerleading, which she manages by means of several well-chosen lies. She tells Nautica and La Cienega that the winning squad will be featured in a twelve-episode reality series on MTV; she tells Cameron that his hero Michael Jordan used to be a cheerleader; she tells Danielle that each member of the winning squad is awarded a scholarship to a university of his or her choice. Such false promises carry her as far as the regional round of the contest before their inevitable exposure. Her friends have done a bit of Googling and found out that all they’ll actually get if they succeed at nationals is a trophy and a fancy hoodie, whoop-dee-doo – so off they trot to confront Campbell about her deceit.

 

Yeah, not quite the same as a university scholarship.

She attempts to defend herself: “Look, it was this girl, Eva, at the other school: she manipulated the system to get me out so she could become captain, and I just wanted to get revenge.”

“Hold on,” interjects Danielle. “Back up … You’re telling me some girl came in on turf that wasn’t hers, and lied and cheated and manipulated until she was running the whole show?”

“Exactly!” exclaims Campbell, in relief at having been understood. Not very long-lived relief.

“I’m not talking about her,” retorts Danielle. “I’m talking about you.”

That moment is a pivot point of the whole story. For all she seemed to be the better person of the two, Campbell ended up betraying her friends in the same way Eva had betrayed her, because of the same single-minded pursuit of the same coveted goal. Campbell’s prayer may have looked different to Eva’s on the surface, but the core of what it meant was the same: I want what I want and I am willing to do whatever it takes to get it.

Whence (come) fights and whence (come) quarrels among you? (Is it) not hence, from your desires waging war in your members? You set your heart on (something), and you don’t have (it): you murder. And you covet and you are not able to obtain: you quarrel and fight. You don’t have, on account of you not asking. You ask and you don’t receive, because you ask evilly, so that you might spend on your desires.

That’s from the start of the fourth chapter of the supremely convicting letter of James,⁴ which I don’t suppose we are meant to imagine Campbell ever having read, although, from what it says, this chunk could have been written directly to her. Why did she end up in conflict with all her friends? Because of her desires: because she set her heart on something and she didn’t have it. Though she asked, she asked evilly, for the sake of obtaining her preexisting desires: asking God was just another strategy to try in pursuit of that.

It’s interesting how she framed her asking, though. “I know you have more pressing matters,” she conceded. There was an acknowledgement there that God was probably more interested in things other than her being made captain, but all the same, that didn’t stop her making her request as if it really were the most important thing she could be asking for.

How often do we pray like that? I know you have other priorities – like your glory, and my sanctification, and the building up of the Church – but God, what I really, really want is this. And contained implicitly in that: I know you say you have other priorities, but God, if you really cared about what’s best for me, you’d give me this.⁵ We’re not committing the situation into God’s hands; we’re just using prayer as one strategy in our pursuit of our preexistent desires. One strategy, indeed – if our desires are what are driving us, we’ll be bound to try other strategies as well to obtain them. We’ll quarrel and fight, like James’ addressees; we’ll lie and cheat and manipulate, like Eva and Campbell. God’s glory and our sancticification and the building up of the Church will fall by the wayside.

The root of all this, as I already hinted, is not trusting that God really cares about what’s best for us. As easy a thing as that is to start believing faced with the General Suckiness of Life, though, it’s a totally doolally suggestion in light of the cross. How will he who did not withhold his own Son, then withhold anything? How will he who has already laid every curse due us on our righteous Lord, reserve anything but blessing for us? How will he who has adopted us as his own, dishonour himself by failing to be an ultimately good Father to us?

Seriously, though, stop and dwell on that for a moment. The more we get the sheer gracious extent of what God has already done for us into our heads and hearts, the more our desires will align with his. We’ll seek his kingdom and his righteousness instead of whatever it is we think we need in this life. “If, therefore, you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children,” said Jesus, “how much more will your Father from heaven give the Holy Spirit to those asking him!”⁶ Not, how much more will he give those who are asking their worldly desires; but how much more will he give them the blessing they really need, the Holy Spirit. “You don’t have, on account of you not asking,” wrote James – and indeed, why would anyone ask, of all things, for the Holy Spirit, unless he had set aside his worldly desires because of his certainty that his ultimate good was to be found in pursuit of God’s will?

Let’s not pray like Campbell: I know you have other priorities, but what I really want is this. Instead, let’s remind ourselves of everything God has done for us, and that if that’s true, there is nothing but blessing in his will for us. Which being so, why should we be driven by any desire except to do his will and know him better?

Footnotes

¹ Not to be confused with the 2000 Kirsten Dunst film of the same name, which, though I’ve not seen it myself, I can gather from online synopses has nothing in common with the musical except that it’s about competitive high-school cheerleading.

² Some kind human has uploaded the original Broadway cast soundtrack to YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnjsz42Q_DA&list=PLF1GqpgdUI_BlykrwaxaHC3sSOQVBuD-b, though I anticipate it’s likely also available on whatever your preferred music-streaming platform happens to be.

³ Thanks to Toms River High School North for putting a full recording of their performance of the show up on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt34NNwofgA, such that I could consult it for accurate citation of relevant bits of dialogue not covered by the soundtrack.

⁴ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James+4&version=ESVUK. As a bit of a side note, I’ve now quite got in the habit of giving my own translation when I quote the Bible on my blog, but do be comparing and contrasting: no translation is ever totally accurate.

⁵ Credit for establishing this point in my mind is due to Elyse M. Fitzpatrick. Because He Loves Me is taking me a long time to read because it’s so emotionally exhausting, but it’s all colours of brilliant. Y’all should check it out: https://www.10ofthose.com/uk/products/13788/because-he-loves-me. (Or ask to borrow my copy when I’m done with it.)

⁶ Luke 11:13.