I first watched Jonathan Larson’s 1994 musical Rent on a Christmas Eve after my family had gone to bed. It felt sacrilegious to watch a musical that celebrated godless living on such a holy night, but (according to theatre Tumblrs) that was the natural time to watch a musical that opens with the line, “December 24th, 9 PM, Eastern Standard Time—from here on in I shoot without a script.”

That Christmas Eve was the beginning of a continuing love affair. I didn’t just watch Rent once; I watched it over and over again. I bought the soundtrack. I bought the live Broadway recording. I listened to the songs on repeat, channeling all my teenage rage into the titular number. I made my friends watch Rent. I even made my conservative Christian parents watch it. My mom’s first comment? “I really like how the characters feel like a family.”

This family features the avant-garde of New York’s Alphabet City in 1989: the cross-dressing musicians, AIDS-positive anarchists, and lesbian lawyers that were going to change the world through art and love. It was exactly the kind of musical that a good Christian teenager wasn’t supposed to watch, and yet I, like my mom, couldn’t help but find something beautiful in this group of friends. United in their diversity, they join together in a life-long quest to pursue the good, defy the evil, and support each other in that journey. They question the staunchest beliefs of their day, from capitalism to sexuality to the meaning of life.

The characters find life’s meaning in the lyric “No day but today,” which is woven through the piece. It is a carpe diem solution to the difficult question of death. The characters live in a godless reality; the here and now is all that they have. Most have the death sentence of AIDS looming over their heads, and the others face the loneliness that will come with their friends’ passings. So they sing “No day but today,” affirm a fleeting existence, and find purpose in the ramshackle family they’ve formed. However, while the love that joins them together is beautiful, it is not eternal.

The Hymn of the Religionless

The characters of Rent preach their “No day but today” mantra with the fervor of true believers. A scene in Act I features a support group meeting for those living with AIDS. This meeting is called Life Support, a morbidly tongue-in-cheek name for a group of people who live in increasing pain, tempered by medication until they die.

Life Support is a church service for the areligious. They meet on Christmas Eve for a service led by a man named Paul. They begin the meeting by holding hands in a circle and singing a hymn:

There’s only us. There’s only this.
Forget regret, or life is yours to miss.
No other road, no other way.
No day but today.

The four short lines contain the sum of the hope and the despair of the modern world. There is no God, there is only us—therefore we can live our lives as we want them to be, not as others tell us. There is no other way—therefore we must accept the hardships that come and simply live together until we die. In this instance of the song, the tune is slow and sung in unison, a melancholy rendition of small comforts: this life is all that is real, and there are other people living in it with us.

The admonition to “forget regret” is almost a Christian one; since God fully forgives our sins (Psalm 103:12) and guides our lives (Romans 8:28), we can live without regret of what we’ve done and with hope for the future. But the church of Life Support does not have that spiritual basis for forgetting regret. One member of the group, Gordon, interrupts the song, telling Paul, “My T-cells are low. I regret that news.” Paul’s response is to ask how he feels today. Gordon says he feels fine, even great, and Paul asks why he would choose fear. Gordon deflects with a joke: “I’m a New Yorker—fear’s my life!”

For this congregation, regret and fear are to be denied because they are negative emotions, not because of any actual reality. The truth is dependent on the feelings of today. Gordon feels better today, so the song holds true. Reassured, Gordon gives the group his testimony:

Look, I find some of what you teach suspect
because I’m used to relying on intellect,
but I’m trying to open up to what I don’t know.
Because reason says I should have died three years ago.

When reason failed him, Gordon opens up to the mystery. What exactly that mystery remains unsolved; it seems to be an inner peace with the universe. For the members of the church of Life Support, that is all that can be attained: a denial of fear and an inner peace in day-by-day living.

The original hymn of “No day but today” is sung in reprises throughout the show, but it appears in full force in the show’s finale. Mimi, a 19-year-old stripper, has seemingly died after a long battle with AIDS. However, a heavenly vision of the deceased Angel, her close friend, resurrects her back into the arms of Roger, her lover. Here, the hymn is sung in an upbeat tempo contraposed against the lyrics of “Without You,” a love song from Mimi to Roger. At the end of the show, the characters have learned their lesson: meaning in life can be found in community and in love. But the audience is left wondering: what will happen as that community slowly dies?

A Love That Dies and a Love That Doesn't

The church of Life Support offers only that: life support. It does not offer life renewal or resurrection or even insurance until death. Every member of Life Support is condemned and waiting for their dying day.

Christians understand that without Christ, life is nothing more than life support. As Ephesians 2:1-3 tells us, “you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world . . . in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” Before we accepted the saving work of Christ, we affirmed the hymn of the church of Life Support. We too were condemned and waiting, believing that we belonged only to ourselves and could find meaning within our own narratives. Like the characters in Rent, our only hope was a continuation of our living death and a postponement of our physical death.

That is why, thematically, Mimi cannot die at the end of the musical. Her resurrection justifies the pain of Angel’s death and affirms the need of living in love. If she is not brought back to life by Angel’s vision and Roger’s love song, then there is no worth to their community. The love that they have put their trust in will have failed. Her death cannot bring hope. So Mimi resurrects. But the audience knows that the hope that is gained by her “resurrection” is only temporary. She still has AIDS. She will die again.

As a piece of art, Rent drips with the desire for eternality. The characters, plot, and theme beg for the existence of a higher plane, where love is capable of great things beyond the here and now. But because their love is rooted in themselves and in this world, it is capable only of a temporary hope, a warding off of condemnation.

Christians, however, have a permanent hope in the steadfast love of God. We are assured that our efforts to love God and love our neighbor are not only real in this life, but are reconciling us into the life to come (Hebrews 6:10-11). As a result of his steadfast love, we are promised a true resurrection into his life. The life of a Christian is not warding off of death, but a defiance of it, knowing that in Christ we have already conquered spiritual death and we will conquer bodily death in our resurrection. While the members of the church of Life Support can only offer condolences in the face of living grief, the members of the church of Christ are empowered to fight boldly against the enemy together. The loving support may look similar to the community fostered in Rent, but it is infused with the knowledge that the victory is already won. And that is a far better reason to carpe diem.