Seen and Unseen - Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?

My latest article for Seen & Unseen is entitled 'Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?'. It makes suggestions of what to do when confronted with contentious culture:

'Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.'

For more on a charitable hermeneutic see here and here. For more on responses to controversial art see here and here.

My first article for Seen and Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interviewed Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations.

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

My 12th article was 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

My 13th article 'Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood' was an interview with Matthew Krishanu on his exhibition 'The Bough Breaks' at Camden Art Centre.

My 14th article was entitled 'Art makes life worth living' and explored why society, and churches, need the Arts.

My 15th article was entitled 'The collective effervescence of sport's congregation' and explored some of the ways in which sport and religion have been intimately entwined throughout history

My 16th article for Seen & Unseen was entitled 'Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d' and reviewed the ways in which artist Richard Kenton Webb is conversing with the blind poet in his former home (Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St Giles).

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Feargal Sharkey - A Good Heart.

The life of Jesus reproduced in our lives

Here's the sermon I preached at St Catherine’s Wickford this morning:

Stephen Verney begins his commentary on this passage with a great evocation of the way in which vines are grown:

“On a stony hillside above his house, where the thyme grows and the prickly pear, and a wild fig tree fights for its existence in a pocket of shallow soil, a farmer decides to plant a vine. In the autumn he clears a terrace, and brings top soil. He sets a post for the vine to climb, and fixes horizontal supports for its branches. Then in the spring he plants it and fences it against the goats; as it grows he trains it, and in the following autumn he prunes it back.

The vine depends for its life on the farmer, but equally the farmer depends on the vine. For the vine can do what the farmer cannot; it can take the rain that falls on the hillside and convert it into grapes, which the farmer can harvest and tread out in his wine-press, and pour the juice into his vat to ferment and bubble. The farmer and the vine are dependent on each other, and the purpose for which they work together is that water should be turned into wine.”

Jesus is the vine, his Father is the farmer (John 15. 1-8). They are dependent one on the other although their roles are different. Their shared purpose is that water is turned into wine; that the vine is fruitful and that its fruit becomes wine shared with others as the sign and symbol of Jesus’ blood. The process for achieving this can itself be painful; involving pruning and crushing.

We are part of this picture because there is one vine but many branches. Each one of us as we become Christians is grafted into the vine to become part of the vine itself. Verney writes:

“I AM the vine, and you are the branches. Dwell in me, and I in you. Here is teaching both simple and profound, to move the human heart. If the branch dwells in the vine, then the life of the vine dwells in the branch. If the branch grows out of the stem, and out of the roots which are drawing up the goodness of the soil and the rain, then the sap of the vine flows into the branch, and the pattern of the vine’s life unfolds itself through each branch to produce bunches of grapes. So it will be, says Jesus, between you and me. If you do not dwell in me you cannot bear fruit …”

How do we dwell in Jesus? To keep our life dwelling in Christ’s, we must continually renew our decision that “what has been done once for all on the cross by Jesus shall the basis, the starting point, the context of all my thinking and deciding and doing,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. We feed this decision by protecting time for prayer, bible study and worship in our busy lives and schedules.

As we do so, the sap of the vine, the life of Christ, flows into us and we produce fruit. The fruit of the vine is, as Newbigin again writes, “the life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world, the pure love and obedience by which people will recognise the disciples of Jesus, the branches of the real vine.”

This fruit, the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives, is the real test of whether or not we are actually dwelling in the vine, in Jesus. In recent years, we have come to know much more about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa, someone whose face shone with the all-encompassing joy of one for whom “to live is Christ.” Everyone who knew her assumed that she was supported in her ministry through a deep and abiding sense of Christ’s presence with her.

Yet the opposite was true. Mother Teresa lived feeling as if she did not believe: “I have no faith” – “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God … in my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not being God – of God not really existing.”

Her sense of feeling that there was no God has been revealed in letters that she wrote to her spiritual confidantes. Yet, as Sister Wendy Beckett has written, “this woman who felt that there was no God and lived in emotional anguish was also profoundly aware, intellectually, that God was her total life and that she lived only to love him.” This was what was apparent in her life and ministry and this fruit showed that whatever she felt about the absence of God in her life, she was still a live branch in the vine.

Ultimately, the fruit of our lives - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives – is the sign of whether we are healthy branches dwelling in the vine. Prayer, bible study and worship are channels for the life of Christ to flow into our lives rather than the sign than his life is flowing into our own.

As we are grafted into the vine, into Jesus, we receive his life flowing through us and take on his characteristics – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. These characteristics result in acts of love because love must act, as we saw in the life of Mother Teresa. While hate could be indifference or inaction, love is always active and must respond practically to the needs we see around us.

We can choose active love over inactive indifference and create a powerful force for change which derives from the life of Christ flowing into us as we dwell in him and where our active love is the fruit of the vine - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Strawbs - Benedictus.

Church Times - Book review: Majesty by Richard Harries

My latest review for Church Times is on 'Majesty: Reflections on the life of Christ with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II' by Richard Harries:

'In his writing on art, Harries has picked up the mantle left by Sister Wendy Beckett of writing popular reflections that combine art history and Christian contemplation. This is a vital task, as much that is written on the visual arts in a church context is primarily geared to an academic audience, and images such as those chosen by Harries deserve to be more widely appreciated than that context makes possible.'

For more on 'Majesty' and Richard Harries, read my Artlyst piece on 'Paula Rego and Lord Harries Respond to Art and Religion'.

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Bill Fay - The Healing Day.

Amethyst Review: Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages

My two newest poems are being published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' appears today in Amethyst Review, while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

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Carolyn Ahrends - I Can Hear You.

Poetry for Amethyst Review and Stride Magazine

My two newest poems are to be published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' will appear in Amethyst Review on 8 April while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook (an event that Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst, attended). As one or two of my early poems featured in Stride, I am particularly pleased to be published there once again.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Rupert Loydell - Boombox.

Art, theology and preaching

I was asked recently about resources for bringing together art, theology and preaching. 

The request came from someone already using 'Inspired to Follow: Art and the Bible Story' a free resource to help people explore the Christian faith, using paintings and Biblical story as the starting points. It’s been created by St Martin-in-the-Fields in partnership with the National Gallery. The course uses fine art paintings in the National Gallery’s collection, along with a theological reflection and a Biblical text, as a spring board for exploring these two questions:

• How can I deepen my faith in God?
• What does it mean to follow Jesus today?

Find out more at https://www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/life-st-martins/discipleship/inspired-to-follow/. 

Additionally I suggested the following:

The Visual Commentary on Scripture as a great resource for bringing together art, theology and preaching - https://thevcs.org/. The Visual Commentary on Scripture (VCS) is a freely accessible online publication that provides theological commentary on the Bible in dialogue with works of art.

The Visual Meditations at the Artway site (some of which I have written) are always good value - https://www.artway.eu/artway.php?lang=en.

Former Vicar at St Martin's +Nicholas Holtam wrote a book of reflections on paintings in the National Gallery's collection - https://www.nationalgallery.co.uk/products/the-art-of-worship-paintings-prayers-and-readings-for-meditation-hb/p_1032035.


The Art of Worship: Paintings, Prayers, and Readings for Meditation represents a unique collaboration between two famous Trafalgar Square institutions: the National Gallery and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. In this beautifully illustrated book, the Reverend Nicholas Holtam – then vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields – presents his favourite paintings from the National Gallery.

I find Sister Wendy Beckett's books of meditations on art helpful. As you'll be aware there are many of them. The Art of Lent is the one for this season - https://spckpublishing.co.uk/the-art-of-lent - but 'Art and the Sacred' and 'The Gaze of Love' are also great.



Join Sister Wendy on a journey through Lent, and discover the timeless wisdom to be found in some of the world’s greatest paintings. Illustrated in full colour with over forty famous and lesser-known masterpieces of Western art, this beautiful book will lead you into a deeply prayerful response to all that these paintings convey to the discerning eye.

Stephen Cottrell's Christ in the Wilderness is a book in a similar vein - https://spckpublishing.co.uk/christ-in-the-wilderness



The Calvin Institute of Worship has a useful page on Art that Preaches - https://worship.calvin.edu/resources/resource-library/art-that-preaches
Art That Preaches. Call it "the preacher's friend." Certain types of visual art are especially good for helping people worship because they direct attention beyond the artist or artwork to God.

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Nickel Creek - He Will Listen To You.

The life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world

Here's the reflection I shared today in the lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Stephen Verney begins his commentary on this passage (John 15. 1- 8) with a great evocation of the way in which vines are grown: “On a stony hillside above his house, where the thyme grows and the prickly pear, and a wild fig tree fights for its existence in a pocket of shallow soil, a farmer decides to plant a vine. In the autumn he clears a terrace, and brings top soil. He sets a post for the vine to climb, and fixes horizontal supports for its branches. Then in the spring he plants it and fences it against the goats; as it grows he trains it, and in the following autumn he prunes it back.

The vine depends for its life on the farmer, but equally the farmer depends on the vine. For the vine can do what the farmer cannot; it can take the rain that falls on the hillside and convert it into grapes, which the farmer can harvest and tread out in his wine-press, and pour the juice into his vat to ferment and bubble. The farmer and the vine are dependent on each other, and the purpose for which they work together is that water should be turned into wine.” Jesus is the vine, his Father is the farmer. They are dependent one on the other although their roles are different. Their shared purpose is that water is turned into wine; that the vine is fruitful and that its fruit becomes wine shared with others as the sign and symbol of Jesus’ blood. The process for achieving this can itself be painful; involving pruning and crushing.

We are part of this picture because there is one vine but many branches. Each one of us as we become Christians is grafted into the vine to become part of the vine itself. Verney writes: “I AM the vine, and you are the branches. Dwell in me, and I in you. Here is teaching both simple and profound, to move the human heart. If the branch dwells in the vine, then the life of the vine dwells in the branch. If the branch grows out of the stem, and out of the roots which are drawing up the goodness of the soil and the rain, then the sap of the vine flows into the branch, and the pattern of the vine’s life unfolds itself through each branch to produce bunches of grapes. So it will be, says Jesus, between you and me. If you do not dwell in me you cannot bear fruit …”

How do we dwell in Jesus? To keep our life dwelling in Christ’s, we must continually renew our decision that “what has been done once for all on the cross by Jesus shall the basis, the starting point, the context of all my thinking and deciding and doing,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. We feed this decision by protecting time for prayer, bible study and worship in our busy lives and schedules. As we do so, the sap of the vine, the life of Christ, flows into us and we produce fruit. The fruit of the vine is, as Newbigin again writes, “the life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world, the pure love and obedience by which people will recognise the disciples of Jesus, the branches of the real vine.”

This fruit, the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives, is the real test of whether or not we are actually dwelling in the vine, in Jesus. In recent years, we have come to know much more about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa, someone whose face shone with the all-encompassing joy of one for whom “to live is Christ.” Everyone who knew her assumed that she was supported in her ministry through a deep and abiding sense of Christ’s presence with her.

Yet the opposite was true. Mother Teresa lived feeling as if she did not believe: “I have no faith” – “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God … in my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not being God – of God not really existing.” Her sense of feeling that there was no God has been revealed in letters that she wrote to her spiritual confidantes. Yet, as Sister Wendy Beckett has written, “this woman who felt that there was no God and lived in emotional anguish was also profoundly aware, intellectually, that God was her total life and that she lived only to love him.” This was what was apparent in her life and ministry and this fruit showed that whatever she felt about the absence of God in her life, she was still a live branch in the vine.

Ultimately, the fruit of our lives - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives – is the sign of whether we are healthy branches dwelling in the vine. Prayer, bible study and worship are channels for the life of Christ to flow into our lives rather than the sign than his life is flowing into our own. As we are grafted into the vine, into Jesus, we receive his life flowing through us and take on his characteristics – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. These characteristics result in acts of love because love must act, as we saw in the life of Mother Teresa. While hate could be indifference or inaction, love is always active and must respond practically to the needs we see around us.

This Christian Aid week we can use our spheres of influence to give, act and pray, and in this way support the loving, sacrificial selflessness of Christian Aid partners who support and empower those they serve. We can choose active love over inactive indifference and, together with Christian Aid and others like them, create a powerful force for change which derives from the life of Christ flowing into us as we dwell in him and where our active love is the fruit of the vine - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives.

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Belle and Sebastian - If You Find Yourself Caught In Love.

Sister Wendy Beckett RIP

My latest piece for Artlyst is an appreciation of the life and writing of Sister Wendy Beckett who has died aged 88:

'I first encountered Sister Wendy Beckett in the pages of ‘Modern Painters’, the art magazine founded by the art critic Peter Fuller which ‘celebrated the critical imagination; stood up for aesthetic values and had a particular focus on British art.’

An early piece would have been a review of an exhibition by Norman Adams in which she suggested that a mystical sense of oneness was making itself visible in his work. In ‘The Way of the Cross and the Paradise Garden’ she noted a radiance of joy conveyed by ‘angels somersaulting through a dazzle of colour bars, crosses of light, that proclaims the marvellous oneness of the Death of Christ and His Rising.’

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Polish Art In Britain Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields;
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar;
• Refugee Artists Learning from The Lives Of Others;
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg;
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement;
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition;
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation;
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields; and
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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The Civil Wars - I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.

The life of Jesus reproduced in our lives

Here is my sermon for today's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Stephen Verney begins his commentary on this passage (John 15. 1 - 8) with a great evocation of the way in which vines are grown: “On a stony hillside above his house, where the thyme grows and the prickly pear, and a wild fig tree fights for its existence in a pocket of shallow soil, a farmer decides to plant a vine. In the autumn he clears a terrace, and brings top soil. He sets a post for the vine to climb, and fixes horizontal supports for its branches. Then in the spring he plants it and fences it against the goats; as it grows he trains it, and in the following autumn he prunes it back.

The vine depends for its life on the farmer, but equally the farmer depends on the vine. For the vine can do what the farmer cannot; it can take the rain that falls on the hillside and convert it into grapes, which the farmer can harvest and tread out in his wine-press, and pour the juice into his vat to ferment and bubble. The farmer and the vine are dependent on each other, and the purpose for which they work together is that water should be turned into wine.” Jesus is the vine, his Father is the farmer. They are dependent one on the other although their roles are different. Their shared purpose is that water is turned into wine; that the vine is fruitful and that its fruit becomes wine shared with others as the sign and symbol of Jesus’ blood. The process for achieving this can itself be painful; involving pruning and crushing.

We are part of this picture because there is one vine but many branches. Each one of us as we become Christians is grafted into the vine to become part of the vine itself. Verney writes: “I AM the vine, and you are the branches. Dwell in me, and I in you. Here is teaching both simple and profound, to move the human heart. If the branch dwells in the vine, then the life of the vine dwells in the branch. If the branch grows out of the stem, and out of the roots which are drawing up the goodness of the soil and the rain, then the sap of the vine flows into the branch, and the pattern of the vine’s life unfolds itself through each branch to produce bunches of grapes. So it will be, says Jesus, between you and me. If you do not dwell in me you cannot bear fruit …”

How do we dwell in Jesus? To keep our life dwelling in Christ’s, we must continually renew our decision that “what has been done once for all on the cross by Jesus shall the basis, the starting point, the context of all my thinking and deciding and doing,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. We feed this decision by protecting time for prayer, bible study and worship in our busy lives and schedules. As we do so, the sap of the vine, the life of Christ, flows into us and we produce fruit. The fruit of the vine is, as Newbigin again writes, “the life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world, the pure love and obedience by which people will recognise the disciples of Jesus, the branches of the real vine.”

This fruit, the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives, is the real test of whether or not we are actually dwelling in the vine, in Jesus. In recent years, we have come to know much more about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa, someone whose face shone with the all-encompassing joy of one for whom “to live is Christ.” Everyone who knew her assumed that she was supported in her ministry through a deep and abiding sense of Christ’s presence with her.

Yet the opposite was true. Mother Teresa lived feeling as if she did not believe: “I have no faith” – “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God … in my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not being God – of God not really existing.” Her sense of feeling that there was no God has been revealed in letters that she wrote to her spiritual confidantes. Yet, as Sister Wendy Beckett has written, “this woman who felt that there was no God and lived in emotional anguish was also profoundly aware, intellectually, that God was her total life and that she lived only to love him.” This was what was apparent in her life and ministry and this fruit showed that whatever she felt about the absence of God in her life, she was still a live branch in the vine.

Ultimately, the fruit of our lives - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives – is the sign of whether we are healthy branches dwelling in the vine. Prayer, bible study and worship are channels for the life of Christ to flow into our lives rather than the sign than his life is flowing into our own. As we are grafted into the vine, into Jesus, we receive his life flowing through us and take on his characteristics – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. These characteristics result in acts of love because love must act, as we saw in the life of Mother Teresa. While hate could be indifference or inaction, love is always active and must respond practically to the needs we see around us.

This Christian Aid week we can use our spheres of influence to give, act and pray, and in this way support the loving, sacrificial selflessness of Christian Aid partners who support and empower those they serve. We can choose active love over inactive indifference and, together with Christian Aid and others like them, create a powerful force for change which derives from the life of Christ flowing into us as we dwell in him and where our active love is the fruit of the vine - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives.

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Gregory Porter & Beverley Knight - Mary Did You Know.

Dora Holzhandler RIP

The Guardian's obituary of Dora Holzhandler starts in the following way:

'“The beginning of a picture is very important,” said the painter Dora Holzhandler, who has died aged 87. “You have to be in quite a meditative state. It’s magical. When I paint something I’ve seen 50 years ago, it’s the same moment recreated. The moment is the truth.”

Such mystical intimacy characterises her oils of naked lovers embracing in psychedelically patterned rooms; darkly flourishing gouaches of icon-like mothers and children, or rabbis meditating; and free and luminous watercolours of, say, a skateboarding teenager or a woman sweeping a floor. The art critic Sister Wendy Beckett, a close friend in later years, called Dora “an artist with a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.'

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Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Make Me Smile (Come Up & See Me).

Evelyn Williams: Tender, intimate and emotional paintings

The "tender, intimate and emotional paintings" of Evelyn Williams "are concerned with the subtleties and complexities of relationships and the human predicament." Her work explored human relationships by establishing formal rhythmic relationship between figures and by charging them with intense emotion. "Her very personal paintings followed her progress through life as child, lover, mother and grandmother."

From tomorrow the Martin Tinney Gallery has an exhibition of approximately 25 works which features the last paintings she worked on. "These are powerful, haunting paintings which, fully aware that her health was declining rapidly, show the artist facing her own mortality with her customary directness and tenderness."

Fay Weldon has said: “Evelyn Williams’ work is imbued by an unmistakable mixture of grace and greatness. It is 'awesome' - if we can get back to the true sense of the word. It fills you with awe. In its restraint, its gravity, the sense it imparts of female endurance, female beauty, the power and seriousness of love between woman and child, woman and woman, man and woman, her sheer courage in taking on board the nature of the universe in its most unsmiling mode, it achieves greatness, and will outlast all of us”

Sister Wendy Beckett says: “All Evelyn’s work has a deep contemplative stillness within it. The dignity of her figures – women above all – is a consequence of their listening hearts. Looking at Evelyn’s paintings I think of Keats “Unheard Melodies” … love is her theme”

Williams' work has synergies with that of Eileen Cooper, Marlene Dumas and Ana Maria Pacheco, among others.

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John Keats - Ode On A Grecian Urn.

Impossible judgements: critiquing contemporary art

Transpositions has recently finished hosting an Art in the Church workshop where scholars, practitioners, and artists reflected on and considered issues that emerge when art and the Church intersect. I was interviewed about the work of commission4mission.
Interestingly those organising the workshop wrote that they "chose to feature examples because of the issues and questions that they raise rather than the artistic or aesthetic quality of the work of art" and "that works of art made for the church cannot be judged according to the same criteria as works of art made for the gallery."

These statements taken together seem to assume that criteria exist for determining the artistic or aesthetic quality of church art and gallery art. So much talk occurs about good and bad art that this would seem a reasonable assumption and yet I doubt that anyone would be able to articulate a set of criteria that had majority agreement in relation either to church art or gallery art.

The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones recently wrote an interesting piece on the way in which he stated that the age of the art critic as an unassailable voice of authority is long gone due to the force of digital debate and the era of readers biting back. Entitled 'how I learned to look – and listen' Jones wrote that the way he thinks about art criticism has changed: "Criticism in the age of social media has to be much more playful and giving ... Criticism today is not about delivering truths from on high, but about striking a spark that lights a debate."

In the past, he argues, he and other art critics could speak in an "aggressive, cocksure, dismissive voice, determined to prove that my opinion was worth more than my readers" but "in today's more open forum – where people answer back, and where people often know more than I do – it becomes more and more absurd to claim such august authority for one's opinions." As a result, the way he thinks about his work, and about art, "is infinitely more plural and ambiguous than it was in 2006."

Essentially, Jones is arguing that, while he can still express strong opinions, he is now much more aware that his opinions are essentially personal opinions and need to be acknowledged as such. Again, in essence, he is saying that there are no agreed criteria for assessing, evaluating and critiquing contemporary art.

Not everyone agrees. Rachel Whiteread, in a recent G2 interview, seemed to argue in favour of elitism and against the democratic developments that Jones has noted, saying that "the papers can't get enough of culture and it's just rammed down everyone's throat. And actually I think to the detriment of culture, because it belittles it. Everyone can have a say, but not everyone's an expert, not everyone's an art critic. It's become far too easy to have a pop at modern art."

Grayson Perry has been exploring the issue of taste in the Channel 4 series All In The Best Possible Taste. He thinks that "there will always be this barrier where there are people who are looking for rules. A lot of the lower middle class still need reassurance and clear rules, which they find in brands and in definite trends because they perhaps don't have the confidence to go on their own intuition and try something else out. So there's always going to be a large proportion of the population that have what they think is a very clear idea about what is good taste. But of course the good taste is just an illusion; it's just that they're obeying the rules of their tribe."

In answer to the question as to whether taste is completely subjective or whether there is such a thing as good taste and bad taste, Perry said: "I think it's very similar to the way that the art world works. It's consensus plus time. If it's agreed amongst the tribe for a fairly sustained amount of time, then it becomes good taste. Of course there are always fashions and changes within the group but they're often quite slow-moving. The art world is just another tribe in many ways and has its own system. What's interesting about the art world, of course, is that that's its business. It's almost like taste and visual culture are its business and therefore it's very, very self-aware about that, and other fields are less self-conscious than the art world."

On this basis, Transpositions would be correct in thinking that works of art made for the church cannot be judged according to the same criteria as works of art made for the gallery, because the church world and the art world are essentially different tribes with different tastes and fashions. Consensus is about the contemporary establishment, whether church or art world, while time is about the judgement of history. There are, of course, examples both of hugely popular artists in their own day being more harshly judged by history and of obscure artists in their own day being hugely valued through history.

Academia, the markets and the media all influence and affect the judgements that are made by consensus and history. Again, Perry is perceptive noting that, while the goal is to become "people who are confident enough to say, "I'll be the one to decide," it is "often when we think we're at our most individual we're most vulnerable to influence, and perhaps the hard-wiring of our upbringing comes into play; the material culture that one imbibed with one's mother's milk, that's the default setting on your taste, and often people don't even realise that's happening, when they make microscopic decisions all the time about what clothes to put on and how to decorate their houses."

Perry argues that "Part of being an artist is that you are achingly self-conscious about every aesthetic decision you make." Whiteread agrees that "anyone who makes art over a long period has to know when they are making good art and bad art" but acknowledges that "money and fame are very addictive" and can lead to people losing their "critical distinction" and making "shit work" which is "emperor's new clothes."

Artists are constantly making choices about what works and what doesn't in their own work and, each time they exhibit, also receiving feedback from others on the same issue. This is perhaps why artists develop their own personal sense of 'good' and 'bad' in art but, again, it has to be acknowledged that this primarily personal, although inevitably artists then also compare and contrast their choices with those of their peers and against the history of art.

The variety of styles and media that exist within contemporary art limit the extent to which such contrasts and comparisons can be made however. The action of Marcel Duchamp in exhibiting ready-mades and his arguing that the choice of the artist makes them art essentially opened floodgates which render rules or criteria for the creation and comparison of artworks superfluous.

In my recent review of The Christ Journey for Art & Christianity I noted that Sister Wendy Beckett, who wrote meditations on Greg Tricker's artworks, is an enthusiast who applies the instruction in Philippians 4:8, to fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise, to her writing and presenting. The kind of poring and praying over images that characterises Beckett's best writing can be a distinctively Christian contribution to the plurality of art criticism and can be cultivated through a framework that encourages a sustained contemplation of the artwork and which notes our personal responses to each facet of the work as well as their cumulative impact.

I have outlined this framework previously in relation to Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. All response to art begins with contemplation of the work itself and consideration of our initial responses. Those viewing Piss Christ without knowing anything of the work often comment on the beauty of the images, the traditional nature of the crucifix and the way in which it is lit.

 

Next, is to contemplate the nature of the artwork itself. In this case, a 60x40 inch Cibachrome photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in urine. Responses often include comments on its beauty and the traditional nature of the image in addition to questioning whether the work is intended satirically.

Then, the ideas and influences of the artist in creating this piece include it being one in a series of classical statuettes submerged in fluids and a comment on the commercialisation of religion. Responses often include questions about other statuettes in the series and about the artist's motivation in attacking the commercialisation of religion.

Then, in thinking about the artwork’s relationship with its historical and art historical context, we can see that the crucifix has an art historical lineage but is also a contemporary commercial religious product, so the work contributes to a debate regarding traditional and contemporary expressions of Christianity. Responses often include a sense of agreeing that the work raises issues about the nature of images in religion.

Finally, the response of viewer’s to this artwork has been twofold. There have been death threats to the artist, vandalism of the artwork and attempts to ban it from those who view it as an attack on Christianity. Alternatively, there are Christians who see it as a depiction of incarnation; of Christ coming into the detritus of life. Responses often include the acknowledgement that the work stimulates a depth of debate because it works on several different levels.

The work comes alive to us through the different layers of response we make to each facet of our consideration of the artwork and the debate this engenders. Each facet that we have considered involved an real engagement with aspects of Christianity and such sustained reflection on artworks will often lead to a recognition of the spirituality and religious engagement inherent in much modern and contemporary art and can result in distinctive approaches to art criticism from a Christian percpective among the plurality of views which is contemporary art criticism.

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The Kinks - Dedicated Follower of Fashion.

Born again: material and spiritual

Here’s a poem about our first birth:

These are your first lessons in living.

To begin we drag you head-first from your shelter,

away from your food, from your warmth.

We cut you apart from your only known friend.

We take you and beat you until strange gases

rush your lungs and pain jerks your frame.

These are your first lessons in living.

They will stand you in good stead. (Steve Turner)

In this poem life is portrayed as something hard and painful. It says that we are being born into a world where, if we don’t look out for ourselves, we will dragged from everything we enjoy and beaten up. And it says that our first lessons in living when we emerge from our mother’s womb, the placenta is cut and the nurse strikes us on the back to get us breathing are important lessons for us in survival. The lesson to learn is that in a world like this we need to put ourselves first, we need to look after No. 1, otherwise someone else will take what we have and hurt us in the process. It is what scientists describe when they talk about us having selfish genes which get us ready to live in a world that is about the survival of the fittest.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again (John 3. 1 - 17). He went on to explain that a person is first born physically of human parents. In our physical, material existence we do not have to believe in God. We have a genuine choice, we can grow up choosing to believe only in the material world around us and in our own powers or we can encounter God and grow in relationship with him. The world in which we live can point us to God but it does not provide us with absolute proof of his existence. Therefore, we are free to choose.

Samuel Beckett’s great play, Waiting for Godot, features two tramps who spend the whole play doing nothing except waiting for Godot, who of course never arrives. For Beckett, to wait for Godot is the equivalent of believing in God, both are a waste of time. So Beckett in his plays is describing a world without God and what an unremittingly harsh and despairing place it is. In another of his plays, Endgame, two of his characters spend the whole play living in rubbish bins and the last speech in the play sums up Beckett’s sense of what a world without God is like in these words: “all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all.” Life without God is the equivalent of living in a rubbish bin or of spending everyday pointlessly waiting for someone who does not arrive.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that: “Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” Russell, like Beckett, is saying that life without God is despair. If we are here by accident, if we are shortly going to die without there being an afterlife and if whatever we achieve in our short life will also be destroyed soon after our death, then a life without God offers us no hope just unyielding despair.

So, for us to believe in God, to believe that both the material and the spiritual exist and are intertwined, involves us in coming alive to the spiritual. It therefore involves a second birth, an awakening to the reality of the spiritual as well as to the reality of the physical. The physical things around us are easy to believe in because we can see and touch them. The spiritual, though, is like the wind - it can’t be seen, although it can be experienced and felt. It is not immediately apparent in the way that physical realities are and so we have a free choice about whether or not we respond to the signs of the Spirit in our world and when we do we are coming alive, being born again, to the spiritual in our world.

Here are some of the things in my life that have made me come alive to the spiritual:

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,

I come alive.

When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,

I come alive.

When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,

I come alive.

When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,

I come alive.

When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,

I come alive.

When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,

I come alive.

When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,

I come alive.

When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,

I come alive.

I come alive to endurance

when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.

I come alive to pain

when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.

I come alive to patience

when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.

I come alive to injustice

when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.

I come alive to suffering

when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.

I come alive to grief

when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive

when I am touched and see and hear

the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.

The mystery or madness

of the Other in which God

meets and greets me

and calls forth the response

that is love.

I wonder what it is that makes you come alive to the spiritual in life. Jesus came into our world to bring us to life; to wake us up from the despair of living only in the physical and material. He does this, firstly by showing us what life is like when it is lived as God intended and secondly, by the threatened response that we as human beings make to him. To see someone genuinely living by the Spirit is scary, it turns our understanding of life upside down. We often respond to people who live life differently to us by attacking them and that is what we did with Jesus. We focused on the physical, we nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood. We thought that by killing him physically we were doing away with the threat he posed to our material way of life.

But God is greater than our materialism and he loves us too much for that to be the end and so he raised his Son from death that we might be saved from material existence and come alive to the Spirit of God himself.

We have a choice - the unyielding despair of a rubbish bin existence or the freedom of life in the Spirit. Which will it be for you? Have you come alive to the spiritual in life? And, if you have, have you gone on coming alive to the spiritual on a day by day basis by looking out for all that God’s Spirit is doing in our world and getting involved?

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David Grant - Life.

Review in 'Art and Christianity'

The latest edition of Art & Christianity is out and includes the following:

• Feature - Aaron Rosen re-visits an anti-Jewish masterpiece
• Letter from Jonathan Keostlé-Cate
• Exhibition reviews - Neal Brown on Damien Hirst, Nicholas W S Cranfield on David LaChapelle, Stephen Laird on John Piper and the Church, Charles Pickstone on David Hockney
• Book reviews - Gillian Darley on Pews, Benches and Chairs eds Trevor Cooper and Sarah Brown
• Martin Eastwood on Lost in Wonder by Aidan Nichols OP, Jonathan Evens on Greg Tricker by Sister Wendy Beckett, Laura Moffatt on Divinity, Creativity, Complexity ed Michael Benedikt; Constructing the Ineffable ed Karla C Britton; Robert Maguire and Keith Murray by Gerard Adler
• DVD review - John Cooke on Creative Spirit (Methodist Art Collection)
• Commissioning - Sheona Beaumont on Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva and Michael Pinsky, Peter Doll on Norwich Cathedral Censing Angel

My review of The Christ Journey: Sister Wendy Beckett reflects on the Art of Greg Tricker highlights Tricker's creative processes before exploring issues of devotional reflection on artworks.

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The Innocence Mission - The Wonder Of Birds.

The vine and the branches

Stephen Verney begins his commentary on John 15. 1 - 8 with a great evocation of the way in which vines are grown:

“On a stony hillside above his house, where the thyme grows and the prickly pear, and a wild fig tree fights for its existence in a pocket of shallow soil, a farmer decides to plant a vine. In the autumn he clears a terrace, and brings top soil. He sets a post for the vine to climb, and fixes horizontal supports for its branches. Then in the spring he plants it and fences it against the goats; as it grows he trains it, and in the following autumn he prunes it back.

The vine depends for its life on the farmer, but equally the farmer depends on the vine. For the vine can do what the farmer cannot; it can take the rain that falls on the hillside and convert it into grapes, which the farmer can harvest and tread out in his wine-press, and pour the juice into his vat to ferment and bubble. The farmer and the vine are dependent on each other, and the purpose for which they work together is that water should be turned into wine.”

Jesus is the vine, his Father is the farmer. They are dependent one on the other although their roles are different. Their shared purpose is that water is turned into wine; that the vine is fruitful and that its fruit becomes wine shared with others as the sign and symbol of Jesus’ blood. The process for achieving this can itself be painful; involving pruning and crushing. 

We are part of this picture because there is one vine but many branches. Each one of us as we become Christians is grafted into the vine to become part of the vine itself. Verney writes:

“I AM the vine, and you are the branches. Dwell in me, and I in you. Here is teaching both simple and profound, to move the human heart. If the branch dwells in the vine, then the life of the vine dwells in the branch. If the branch grows out of the stem, and out of the roots which are drawing up the goodness of the soil and the rain, then the sap of the vine flows into the branch, and the pattern of the vine’s life unfolds itself through each branch to produce bunches of grapes. So it will be, says Jesus, between you and me. If you do not dwell in me you cannot bear fruit …”

How do we dwell in Jesus? To keep our life dwelling in Christ’s, we must continually renew our decision that “what has been done once for all on the cross by Jesus shall the basis, the starting point, the context of all my thinking and deciding and doing,” writes Lesslie Newbigin. We feed this decision by protecting time for prayer, bible study and worship in our busy lives and schedules.

As we do so, the sap of the vine, the life of Christ, flows into us and we produce fruit. The fruit of the vine is, as Newbigin again writes, “the life of Jesus reproduced in the midst of the life of the world, the pure love and obedience by which people will recognise the disciples of Jesus, the branches of the real vine.”

This fruit, the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives, is the real test of whether or not we are actually dwelling in the vine, in Jesus. In recent years, we have come to know much more about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa, someone whose face shone with the all-encompassing joy of one for whom “to live is Christ.” Everyone who knew her assumed that she was supported in her ministry through a deep and abiding sense of Christ’s presence with her.

Yet the opposite was true. Mother Teresa lived feeling as if she did not believe:

“I have no faith” – “They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God … in my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss – of God not being God – of God not really existing.”

Her sense of feeling that there was no God has been revealed in letters that she wrote to her spiritual confidantes. Yet, as Sister Wendy Beckett has written, “this woman who felt that there was no God and lived in emotional anguish was also profoundly aware, intellectually, that God was her total life and that she lived only to love him.” This was what was apparent in her life and ministry and this fruit showed that whatever she felt about the absence of God in her life, she was still a live branch in the vine.

Ultimately, the fruit of our lives - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives – is the sign of whether we are healthy branches dwelling in the vine. Prayer, bible study and worship are channels for the life of Christ to flow into our lives rather than the sign than his life is flowing into our own.

As we are grafted into the vine, into Jesus, we receive his life flowing through us and take on his characteristics – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. These characteristics result in acts of love because love must act, as we saw in the life of Mother Teresa. While hate could be indifference or inaction, love is always active and must respond practically to the needs we see around us.

Several years ago, Nadia Kabula’s father died and her family became desperately poor. She lives in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo where family loss and poverty often lead to children being forced to live on the streets, where violence and prostitution can claim their future as well as their youth. This did not happen to Nadia because of help that she received from Humanitié Nouvelle, a Christian Aid partner in Kinshasa. Nadia took a sewing course with Humanitié Nouvelle which has given her back the chance of a full life. Her unique eye for style is already earning her commissions, and she hopes to open her own business.

Nadia is trusting God as she struggles towards this vision. A talented singer, she encourages others with songs of worship. She say, “Music is an important part of life here … When I sing I feel good – it is like food. My favourite song is ‘Lord I Lift Your Name On High’.” Nadia is also displaying extraordinary determination and selflessness as she sacrifices her time to care for her four younger siblings, and helps teach other young women to sew. Her life of love is an example to us all.

This Christian Aid week we can use our spheres of influence to give, act and pray, particularly by helping with the door-to-door collection, and in this way support the loving, sacrificial selflessness of people like Nadia and the Christian Aid partners who support and empower them. We can choose active love over inactive indifference and, together with Nadia, Humanitié Nouvelle, Christian Aid and others like them, create a powerful force for change which derives from the life of Christ flowing into us as we dwell in him and where our active love is the fruit of the vine - the life of Jesus reproduced in our lives.

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Gungor - Brother Moon.