Living the Story (3)

Philip Ritchie has posted on the Living the Story session which I led on Friday and which made use of poems by Carol Ann Duffy, George Herbert and John Berryman.

In this Lent series for the Chelmsford Diocese we have been comparing and contrasting artworks which can be said to be living the Christian story with others that seem to view that same story from the perspective of a non-participant. This is not in order to suggest that one is better than the other but simply to see and explore the different types of insights and understandings which come when your perspective is inside or outside the story.  

It was interesting to note that the course participants had most to say about the two poems - Duffy's Prayer and Berryman's Dream Song 201 - which seemed to have been written from the perspectives of characters without a Christian faith. In the first, they identified with its evocations of moments of particular attention or epiphany which come with a sense of gift or realisation or revelation. In the second, with its sense of the meaningless mundanity of a faithless existence.

It is a source of interest that, as we have sought to explore in this series, so many artists (like those we have looked at in this series, Nick Cave, Mike Nelson, Denys Arcand, Carol Ann Duffy, Philip Pullman) remain fascinated by the stories, beliefs and impact of Christianity at a time when the secularist narrative remains that of the decline of faith. Why this should be can in some measure be gleaned from the works we have explored in the series e.g. the intertwined nature of passion and violence to which Cave responds, the strength for survival in the face of marginalisation that Nelson sees as stemming from belief systems, or the existence of moments of gift or illumination in life that Duffy evokes.

These may not be the principal reasons why those who seek to live the story of Christianity do so but they are undoubtedly among the reasons why Christianity retains an inspirational and provocative place within contemporary culture. Those who seek to live the story have much to learn from the responses to that story of those who don't, both in the significance for our faith of those aspects of Christianity to which others respond and in understanding connections and context for mission.  

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Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Brompton Oratory.