Judge Not

For today's service in the Parish I have been using an All-age talk on the Parable of the Wheat and Weeds to speak about the dangers of judgementalism. For my All-age talk I added an introductory quiz about our default habits when it comes to how we form opinions about others.

Psychology Today has the following to say about judgementalism: "The more we live in a culture of divisiveness, the more judgmental people become. Being quick to pass judgment on others can harm not only the target but the teller, the very person doing the judging. In addition to creating a cloud of negativity, judgmentalism can lead to conflict and stunt personal growth. With a little conscious effort, it is possible to shift out of a critical mindset."

For our Healing Eucharist this evening, I included, as reflective moments, Al Green's cover of R.E.M.'s 'Everybody Hurts' and Jahlani Pierce's 'Stop Judging Others (You Never Know Their Battles)'.

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Jahlani Pierce's - Stop Judging Others (You Never Know Their Battles).

  

CHRIS GOLLON : STATIONS OF THE CROSS On View at The Church of St. John on Bethnal Green

After a two-year hiatus, The Church of St John on Bethnal Green, designed by Sir John Soane, opens its doors for the Good Friday service. Once again, visitors may view Chris Gollon’s acclaimed Fourteen Stations of the Cross, a fine example of contemporary sacred art.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green is a Grade I-listed church designed by Sir John Soane from 1826-28, and one of the East End’s most admired buildings. In 2000, Father Alan Green commissioned leading British, and London-born, artist Chris Gollon (1953-2017) to create 14 Stations of the Cross paintings for the church.

The sequence of paintings took eight years to complete. Father Alan Green, as Rector of the church, collaborated with Gollon on the project. Gollon used his son as the model for Jesus, and his daughter as Mary; he cast Father Alan as Nicodemus.

Upon the site-specific artworks’ unveiling – in 2008 on Good Friday – Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross were blessed by Richard Chartres, Bishop of London, and permanently installed in the church in 2009. They were also chosen as Critic’s Choice in both The Times and the Financial Times, featured on BBC TV News and Chris Gollon was interviewed by Ed Stourton about his Stations for Radio 4’s Today Programme.

Jackie Wullschlager, in the Financial Times, said: “It was a bold, inspired decision of Father Alan Green to commission Chris Gollon.” She noted: “Like [Stanley] Spencer, he dramatizes the everyday in contemporary images, depicting our clumsy, ridiculous ordinariness, bringing alive for a modern audience the ghastly dissonance of this story of good and evil, sacrifice and humanity, answering on its own terms a 21st-century culture that regards the heroic as absurd.”

One painting from Gollon’s Fourteen Stations of the Cross was also shown in Presence: Images of Christ for the Third Millennium in St Pauls Cathedral, alongside works by Bill Viola, Tracey Emin, Maggi Hambling and Craigie Aitchison.

The Church of St John on Bethnal Green will open for the 10am Good Friday service on April 15 2022. Fourteen Stations of the Cross may once more serve both as an aid to worship and as a visitor attraction.

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John Stainer - God So Loved The World.

The Gospel according to ...

The 10 albums that I've enjoyed most in 2012

Here are the 10 albums (in no particular order) that I've got hold of and enjoyed the most in 2012:

Taken from the Latin and literally meaning 'within the walls', Intra Muros is the album of "spooky" Christian music Bryan MacLean was completing at the time of his death. Due to 'the great strength of songs like the amazing Love Grows In Me and My Eyes Are Open', Intra Muros 'stands as fine testament to the ability of a great songwriter.'

The darkness, loss and wandering that suffuse Babel is fused with the transcendent sound and anthemic choruses that Mumford and Sons conjure up with banjo, double bass, guitar, keyboards and vocals.

The Bob Dylan of Tempest, 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' and so many other songs, is the faithful watchmen who sees the storm of the apocalypse on the horizon and who warns his people before it is too late. Tempest is, therefore, a profoundly religious album.

Bill Fay’s songs on Life is People are simply astonishing - simple and melodic yet with unusual imagery and insights delivered with gravity and grace. 'Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)' is a highlight from a collection of stand-out tracks; a celebration of the miracle of ordinary life, the infinite variation in each human face, which stirs his soul.

The Laughing Stalk - Woven Hand’s David Eugene Edwards says, 'The myths of our country are in the songs. The untold stories and gaps in history books are in the songs – our recollection is preserved in this music. Those songs as well as the stories that my parents told me, the bible and the books I read, all this is the foundation of my imagination of America.'

The fluid, flowing lines of Aradhna’s Namaste Saté possess the something more that comes from an ability to inhabit and then transcend the spirit of your sources.

Wrecking Ball is a masterful summation of Bruce Springsteen's strengths and an inspirational call to real hope in the face of genuine despair. The album is propelled forward by the anger of its storytelling songs before seguing through 'Wrecking Ball' into songs of hopeful fortitude for which Springsteen appropriates the language of faith and the imagery of the Bible.

Home Again - Michael Kiwanuka, who has been compared to Bill Withers and Al Green, has an "honest, unpretentious and raw style" that "is straight to the matter, unspoilt soul music at it’s best." Alexis Petridis wrote that "Kiwanuka addresses The Lord with such frequency that you picture Him hiding behind the sofa and pretending to be out. At first, it just sounds like a lyrical tic, but by the time you reach I'm Getting Ready – "to believe" – it's pretty clear that it runs substantially deeper than that."

One of the things I love most about the work of Leonard Cohen is his self-deprecating humour. There is real self awareness and humility on Old Ideas combined with the distance and irony of setting many of the lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Leonard the man speaks to Leonard the persona. All performers seem to need to create a stage persona that is in some way separate from the reality of who the person actually is. On this basis, ‘Going Home’ is to do with the experience of leaving the stage in order to experience reality - "Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore."

Gungor’s Ghosts upon the Earth is a set of songs for the jaded in which the phrase "fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made" sums up much of what is experienced on this album. "All praises to the one who made it all and finds it beautiful". Michael Gungor writes, "As the various vocal parts circle the listener’s head when the band’s last chord fades out, one can imagine hearing the voices of all of these elements of creation (moon, sun, earth, wind, etc.) singing the praises of their creator."

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Woven Hand - As Wool.

Babel - the sound of transcendent music

Second albums are tricky affairs and, despite three years of preparation, Mumford and Sons' Babel is no exception.

One issue is that what surprised on the first album is now familiar territory when it comes to the second. Hence, in part, the plethora of comments in reviews that Babel is Sigh No More part II. That is only partly the case. Negatively, there is no equivalent surprise on Babel to the shock of Sigh No More's opening lines, 'Serve God, love me and mend ...' which set up the then unfashionable combination of driven folk strumming with spiritual insight which characterised that album. Babel retains the use of religious language but has less to offer in the way of those insightful aphorisms, couplets and verses which leapt out of so many of the songs on Sigh No More. This, combined with its relentlessly first person narratives, means that Babel, although consistently using the imagery of darkness and light, has less contrast, less light and shade, than Sigh No More.

Babel is generally a darker album with its repeated themes of leaving, loss and wandering set primarily in first person strained romances. That is not the full picture however as several of the songs seem both more powerful and more logical as addresses to God rather than a human lover. I'm thinking here particularly of 'Hopeless Wanderer' - a prayer for constancy having found the right road - and 'Below My Feet' - a prayer for ongoing learning and service having received the message from Jesus that all is well.

The darkness, loss and wandering that suffuse Babel is then fused with the transcendent sound and anthemic choruses that Mumford and Sons conjure up with banjo, double bass, guitar, keyboards and vocals. In this way the songs, despite their content, provide Mumford Moments - what the Urban Dictionary describes as moments when you become really engrossed with and entranced by the transcendent music of Mumford and Sons bringing on a feeling of euphoria or spirituality. The essence of Mumford and Sons' sound and success is this sense of transcendence which they create  The restlessness of which they write is the precursor to the search for participation in something greater than they know. That is transcendence and their euphoric music achieves this even when the words they sing focus more on restlessness than rising. The religious language they use and the spiritual insights they bring serve to ground this transcendent sound in the search for something more so that their songs are not simply motivational or exhortatory but instead sound and sense are one and the same.

Written Pre-Mumfords, these words from Bill Friskics-Warren in his book I'll Take You There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence are nevertheless relevant:

'Records that articulate an urge for transcendence, and a great number of them do, are not pegged as easily as the bins of retailers might suggest. Less the domains of genres like rock, soul, and rap, they might more appropriately be termed "transcendental music" - music that, regardless of stylistic signature or marketing niche, points beyond itself, urging listeners to look past the mundane and to see themselves and their striving in a new light. Those who make transcendental music understand how this works only too well. They typically have had their worlds opened up in much the same way. Johnny Cash, who struggled, as he sang, to "subdue the beast within," was drawn to the existential conflict in the songs of Bob Dylan and Kris Kristofferson, just as Dylan and Kristofferson were enthralled by the work of the Beat Poets and the French symbolists before them. Al Green, a soul singer who eventually became a preacher, identified with the spiritual desolation of Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry." Polly Harvey, a post-punk, art-school dropout from rural England, sought cathartic renewal in the blues, much as her Irish counterpart Van Morrison first did some thirty years before her.

Records of a transcendental bent, those made by people trying to get higher - and often, to take us there as well - are not peripheral to the history of popular music; they lie at the heart of it. The restlessness that they express often speaks to people as profoundly as what they hear in church or at their mosque or synagogue - more profoundly at times, especially lately, as many wrestle with questions of providence in our seemingly more volatile world. Countless people in the United States, for example, looked to Bruce Springsteen and his album The Rising for comfort and insight after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. In today's post-Christian milieu - a world defined increasingly by multiculturalism and globalization - pop music frequently serves as a substitute for conventional religious observance, or at least provides spiritual clarity and guidance where it might be lacking. Pop music has for decades possessed the power, much as liturgies and sacred music have for centuries, to transport the human spirit and serve as a vehicle for the transcendence we seek.'

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Mumford and Sons - Below My Feet.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (4)

Monday 27^th August

 

The sense of peace from last night holds for me and my final day is less working issues through and more simply enjoyable, particularly as I catch up with friends from church.

John Schad gave a reading from his novel ‘The Late Walter Benjamin’ that being well dramatised heightened his wonderfully interesting and creative take on Benjamin’s life and writings. ‘We penetrate mystery,’ Benjamin said, ‘only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.’ ‘Every second was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter’

This was followed Deborah Fielding on reading and writing short stories. Fielding gave us a personal and eclectic presentation with readings of, quotes about, and hints and tips on the writing of short stories. Read other writer’s short stories then just do it were the main messages that emerged. Her chapbooks combine art, design and narrative in one compendium, always a fascinating combination.

Sessions from Anthony Green and Simone Lia enabled me to finally get the exhibition in the Gallery. The initially unrecognised issue for me with this exhibition has been that the organisers have chosen to show work which break two standard lines in regard to contemporary art. The first is that narrative art is merely illustrative and, therefore, second rate. The second is that it is professional suicide for visual art to be explicit about Christian faith. Each of the artists included here, in different ways, are explicitly narrative (often confessional) Christian artists and within the mainstream art world. This is something to be celebrated but shouldn’t solely apply to those who can make it work in the mainstream art world. Instead, artists such as these should be inspiration for others who also aim to be explicitly confessional or narrative Christian artists but do not have similar standing within the mainstream art world. This exhibition may be a helpful development in affording equal understanding and support to these artists as for those whose vision is to address issues of faith through allusion and elusively.

Having recognised this doesn’t ultimately change my reaction to the work itself. Green, as he eloquently explained in his presentation, paints his life as a petit histoire recognising that to do so sanctifies ordinary life. In doing so, as an ex-Slade student, he would seem to be following in the footsteps of Stanley Spencer. It seems to me that Green’s work, wonderful as it undoubtedly is, has similar weaknesses to that of Spencer when the ordinary aspects of life being celebrated are so personal that a family history is required in order to fully appreciate or understand the imagery. Which brings us back to the standard critique of narrative art – which I think can be applied to Green’s Resurrection – that the work does not stand alone but needs literary explanation. Lia’s worm paintings don’t have this problem but, unlike her graphic novels, seem slight and ephemeral as images. Leunig, by contrast, provides a masterclass in single images which are both simply designed and drawn yet possess real pathos and depth.

Green did, in his talk, eloquently and forcefully emphasise the sanctify of ordinary life and each of us as ordinary people. My resolution of my own issues over this weekend has partly been though accepting the value of ordinary ministry and also the tensions and stretch that come from straddling several different areas of ministry with the risk that none are done as well as they might but also with the potentiality for creativity which comes from the attempt. 

Bellowhead, in their headlining set, played with a spirit of wild abandon that was based on disciplined familiarity with each other and their sources and which therefore provided something more than the acts who preceded them could deliver. Aradhna, who I heard again earlier in the day, also, it seems to me, possess this something more that comes from an ability to inhabit and then transcend the spirit of your sources.

In the tension of the now and not yet,

between order and disintegration,

between anarchy and regimentation,

in between, the broken middle,

the crack where the light gets in,

is the edge of chaos where life evolves,

where change occurs not free of cost –

ragged edges, blind alleys, the snake in Eden –

evolution into consciousness, falling up.

The edge of chaos

is order and disorder,

movement and stasis,

unity and fragmentation,

paradox and mystery

bringing change, development,

creativity, growth and mutation.

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Aradhna - Namaste Saté.

My Greenbelt 2012 journal (1)

Friday 24^th August

I arrive at Greenbelt this year feeling frustrated due to the relentless nature of ministry combined with a sense that my ministry was not delivering all that it could – perhaps wanting more than I or the situations can deliver, perhaps that I am operating across too many fronts. I had left home later than anticipated, as usual trying to cover all bases at the last minute and then feeling frustrated that I’m behind schedule. On the way I toy with the phrase, ‘When will the culmination come?’, as I’m driving and begin to express some of what I’m feeling in some initial unsatisfactory lines of poetry:

There is no end, no culmination, no completion - like an ever

flowing stream or a cat which never tires of stroking, your people

age and fail and demand unless I cry, ‘No more, no more,’ and die.

When will the culmination come? When needs are met?

When work ceases? When demands are done? There is always more

therefore no respite, rest or resolution. Where is joy - where am I –

in sacrifice and self-giving?

I arrive and the fluid, flowing lines of Aradhna’s Soul Space worship wash over me while trying to absorb the complexities of the programme. Beyond hearing Bruce Cockburn tonight, there are few must attends for me this year. I decide to wander and experience the site initially but can’t settle to absorb and take anything in. Even viewing the Gallery – Michael Leunig, Simone Lia, Si Smith and Anthony Green – I can’t initially connect despite the obvious accessibility and humour of much of the work. Instead I go to see friends in G-Source and the Marketplace where I receive encouraging news on Near Neighbours, info about a South London exhibition, news of a friend’s family and changes to 12Baskets’ operation (the publisher of my 'Mark of the Cross' meditations).

Then comes an awesome gig from Bruce Cockburn who makes his solo acoustic chime and ring with rhythm and lead. There is no sense here that a solo artist cannot command and fill the main stage. He plays a good selection of early to mid career openers before moving on to a selection from Small Source of Comfort. The crowd call for early ‘Christian’ songs but Cockburn can pull great material from the hat of any period. He talks about no pictures of God being possible before singing ‘Boundless’. ‘You can call me Rose’ is both a highlight and, he says, a gift. The standout line for me and, perhaps, one with personal spiritual significance is, ‘If I loose my grip, will I take flight?’

My poem is perhaps beginning to clarify and now looks like this:

There is no culmination, no end

to need or greed, no resolution.

The need for someone to dim the lights

never ceases. Human selfishness

calls out for love without limits;

love as an ever flowing stream,

the tap turned full on.

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Bruce Cockburn - Strange Waters.

First fifteen music meme

I was tagged for this meme by Philip Ritchie:

1) Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.

2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.

3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up–song title and artist – NO editing/cheating, please.

 
‘New Home’ - Eric Bibb (Booker’s Guitar)

‘Building Up’ - Al Green (Gospel Collection)

‘Thank You For The Cross’- Various Artists (Songs of Fellowship Vol. 5)

‘Primitives’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Brown’ – P.O.D. (Brown)

‘Quechua Song’ – Jan Gabarek/Hilliard Ensemble (Mnemosyne)

‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Rock, Salt and Nails’ – Buddy Miller (The Best of the Hightone Years)

‘My Immortal’ – Evanescence (Fallen)

‘This Time’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Stop’ – Spice Girls (Greatest Hits)

‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 5)

‘All My Trust I Place In You’ – McIntosh Ross (The Great Lakes)

‘On The Grind’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Ubi Caritas’ – David Fitzgerald (God is Love)

Make of that what you will! Here is something different again ...
 
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Bill Mallonee - River Of Love.

Commission: contemporary art in British churches

Much has been written about the ground-breaking efforts of twentieth century church art patronage, including the work of Marie-Alain Couturier and Pie-Raymond Régamey in France and George Bell and Walter Hussey in England. However much of this narrative, in the UK at least, peters out after the inauguration of Coventry Cathedral some fifty years ago. Commission, the current exhibition at the Wallspace Gallery, and the Art + Christianity Enquiry monograph Contemporary Art in British Churches seek to bring that story up-to-date.

Artists featured in Commission include Tracey Emin, Henry Moore, Craigie Aitchison, Mark Cazalet, Stephen Cox, Chris Gollon, Shirazeh Houshiary, Iain McKillop, Rona Smith and Alison Watt. The exhibition shows a key work by each artist together with installation photographs, drawings, maquettes and other documentation of the commissioned pieces.

The central argument of Contemporary Art in British Churches is that we are witnessing something of a renaissance of commissioned art for churches and cathedrals in this country. Paul Bayley argues that this upsurge of commissioning from the church sees many significant contemporary artists, such as those featured in Commission, creating art for church spaces. The approach underpinning this upsurge is, therefore, synonymous with that of Couturier and Régamey who argued that "each generation must appeal to the masters of living art, and today those masters come first from secular art."

Alan Green has provided a theological underpinning to this approach in the collaborative book by Chris Gollon and Sara Maitland based on Gollon's Stations of the Cross at St John on Bethnal Green; a commission which features in both the exhibition and monograph. In his Afterword Green points out that "Jesus was not afraid to associate with, and be looked after by, those who were not seen as good Jews ... Those who approached Jesus and seem to have got the best responses from him were not the religious elite, but those with no particular religious standing who nevertheless recognised something special in him and presented themselves honestly." As a result, he says "it seemed important to share this project with an artist who could come at the themes without the perspective of a shared faith." Maitland concurs saying, "I have come to think that there are real advantages, when working on themes about the Incarnation, in having an artist who is not an active Christian or, try as we will, the "God-bits" creep back in."

Maitland contrasts Gollon's powerful images with "the innumerable images of a rather soppy-looking Jesus, tidily and gracefully - if non-anatomically - pinned to his cross with not a wrinkle of pain on his forehead." Bayley too sets up a similar opposition between the significant contemporary artists participating in this upsurge of commissioning from the church and "self-styled 'Christian art' that though sincere and well-intentioned" is "often formulaic or decorative" and (tellingly) has "little or no standing within the art world."

There would seem to be here a danger of exchanging a religious elite for an artistic elite - the "loose amalgam of artists, curators, public and private galleries, art consultants and publishers" who, as Bayley notes, increasingly inhabit their own architecture, develop their own hierarchies and language, and expand the borders of their own ecosystem that to the outsider, and many an insider, can be opaque and excluding.

Although this reality is noted in the monograph, many of the criteria used to praise significant contemporary artists and dismiss self-styled 'Christian art' are drawn directly from this artistic elite. Contemporary art, for example, is viewed as 'challenging' and 'difficult' and is therefore a "critical dissenting activity" which changes the way we view the world as opposed to a lot of art commissioned for churches which reinforces the context, being decorative rather than transformative. However, the crowds which throng Tate Modern and other contemporary art galleries have been seen by some as evidence that contemporary art is 'populist' and 'easily understandable.' Conceptual art, it can be argued, is simply the illustration of ideas and once the concept has been grasped there is little left to contemplate. There are also legitimate questions that can be asked about the engagement of the art establishment in capitalism and of the extent to which spirituality in the arts provides a veneer for consumerism. These perspectives seem to rarely be heard within the arts world, and don't feature within this monograph, but dissenting voices should be heard if only to ensure that the current arts establishment does not become complacent.

Generalised and stereotypical oppositions of "significant contemporary artists" and "self-styled" Christian artists have always been characteristic of those who have argued for contemporary art in preference to earlier styles, whether the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Couturier and Régamey. What changes in these arguments is often simply the object of attack, as the previously avant-garde becomes passé. In contrast to such generalisations, what always truly counts in the visual arts is a sustained and contemplative viewing of works themselves which will realise depth of composition and insight within both the best of what is currently considered contemporary and what is currently considered traditional. This, to my mind, has been one of the strengths of the Wallspace Gallery with its embrace of, for example, conceptual, iconographic and visionary art.

There is a second exclusionary issue with a sole or primary focus on "significant contemporary artists" in church commissions which is that of cost. Much of the upsurge in church commissions of such artists has been publicly funded and Bayley notes that "in the wake of the credit crunch and public spending cuts the new austerity will slow the recent surge of Church commissioning." While the monograph contains some examples of local churches engaging with "the whole twenty-first century apparatus of arts consultants, planning stages and public consultations," such engagement is more suited to and more viable for Cathedrals and City centre churches. Local churches can therefore either feel excluded from or simply not consider the possibility of commissioning contemporary art.

If such churches are to be included in the upsurge of church commissions then they are likely of necessity, for reasons of access and cost, to engage with a different grouping of artists who will predominantly be those with local/regional, as opposed to national/interational, reputations. Generalised oppositions, such as that made by Bayley, are likely to discourage and depress such engagement because of the sense communicated of such commissions being second-rate. However where local churches genuinely take a sustained and contemplative look at the work of such artists creative commissions can result despite the absence of perceived 'significant' contemporary artists.

It is my experience, through commission4mission, that there are significant numbers of contemporary artists who are engaging with both faith and art yet who do not feel included by or engaged by the existing faith and art organisations and therefore lack networks for encouragement, debate, and connection to commissioning churches. It is also my experience, again through commission4mission, that the issues which seem to prevent a widespread involvement of local churches with commissions of contemporary art can be overcome through a different form of engagement to that which underpins the commissions highlighted by the ACE monograph.

I agree with Bayley that there has been a real and exciting upsurge in church commissions which builds on the twentieth century achievements of Couturier and Hussey, among others, and which is well documented by this monograph and Commission. Within this upsurge, I for one, wish to see the active encouragement and development of emerging artists and regional arts networks as another tier of such commissioning and as fertile ground for future creativity. My critique of aspects of the survey found in this monologue comes from this perspective and in this cause.

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Duke Special - Portrait.