Flight & floe-fall lament

St James Piccadilly follow up Sara Mark's ice melt sculpture (see video) with Flight by Arabella Dorman. 

Lucy Winkett, the vicar of St James Piccadilly, says, 'Whatever the Victorian carols might say about oxen and midwinter snow, the approaching story of Christmas is of Mary and Joseph becoming refugees after giving birth in dangerous circumstances to a baby who grew up to change the course of world history. And the coming festival declares that the birth of Christ expresses something unutterably beautiful and redemptive about the renewing presence of God in the world. The real Christmas celebrates the divine in a humanity that is both messy and miraculous, a festival by no means sanitised from the blood and tears of the world. And this real Christmas story is this year is being played out in front of us in family after family climbing into boats to flee from tyranny.'

Two videos of the work can be viewed on the website showing the vessel used by refugees to reach the Greek island of Lesbos. One is by St James's member and film maker Carolyn Davies; and, the other, a time lapse film showing the 6 hour installation above the nave of St James's as part of Flight. The boat carried 62 refugees from Turkey.

Sara Mark writes: “ ‘Her floe-fall lament (COP21)’ was made by freezing 66 litres of water into an oil drum. I placed it in the central aisle of the church to cause maximum disruption to the usual events on Sunday and the constant amplified sound of the melt-water pouring into the oil barrel beneath was an insistent reminder of something happening in real-time elsewhere in the World.”

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Flight - Installation Time Lapse.

C4M webpage update

This week's commission4mission webpage posts were both about forthcoming exhibitions.

There was a reminder about commission4mission's very first exhibition which will be in the Pentecost Festival on Saturday 30th May at Westminster Central Hall from 12 noon - 6.00pm. David Hawkins, Harvey Bradley, Rosalind Hore, Henry Shelton and myself will be exhibiting.

Also, there were photographs of St Andrew's Leytonstone where our summer exhibition will be held. St Andrews contains windows by noted stained glass artist Margaret Chilton, banners and a window by Hilary Davies and Stations of the Cross by Lewis Davies. Our exhibition will therefore complement a space in which art already plays a significant role.

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Mahalia Jackson - Come Sunday.

The Black Rain (5)

The Cialdini effect takes its name from Robert Cialdini, a American psychology professor who wrote a groundbreaking book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. A Dutch study has recently shown that the Cialdini effect is only the start of our troubles, claims an article in The Times:

"People can actually be steered into criminal behaviour, such as stealing, simply by tinkering with their environment. In fact, the scientists claim, if you know what psychological buttons to press, you can make antisocial behaviour spread like a contagious disease."

Cialdini's argument that "people do what they see others doing, even when they know they shouldn't" would seem to support Tom Davies' assertion that people seeing anti-social activities through the media can then become involved in copy-cat activities. The Times article includes an example of just this phenomenon:

"The looting of the MSC Napoli off the coast of Devon two years ago is a perfect example. Media coverage showing people walking off with items washed ashore emboldened others to try their luck, culminating in “looting mayhem”, in the words of an inquiry into the incident published this week."

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Jeff Buckley - Everybody Here Wants You.

The Black Rain (3)

“... the vision was as if someone was tearing a hole in the ... sky ... and luminous cylinders began forming in the ripped patch. These cylinders seemed to be interconnected, revolving slowly at first but then accelerating. Black marks appeared on the cylinders which disappeared and a trickle of fat black drops began falling out of the blue sky, a few at first but then in a quickening torrent. The black rain

... That vision of the black rain says very clearly, to me at least, that we live in a world where most of our artists, writers and communicators are obsessed with perversion, crime and violence and this obsession is, in itself, leading the world into a growing disorder.”

(Tom Davies, Testament)


It was in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight that I was caught up to the seventh heaven and burdened with a vision of our calamitous present. This vision was seared on my memory and has guided my actions ever since. I recount it, now that the battle has been fought and the danger has ebbed, as a warning to future generations.

I was flicking through the digital channels one evening when my plasma screen suddenly multiplied to fill every wall, ceiling and floor in the room with myriad images from the programmes showing simultaneously on a hundred plus separate channels.

The angel that was to become my spiritual guide, Gogol Tomasiah, whispered a question in my ear as I sat stunned by the suddenness of this image multiplication and overwhelmed with the mass of information presented. “What is there in common across all of the programmes and images you can now view?” he asked and immediately I possessed the ability to process multiple images and a memory that became photographic.

I scanned the screens viewing soaps, news, comedies, sports, plays, documentaries, reality shows, games, music videos, cartoons and films searching for commonality among the diversity of genres. In a matter of seconds I laughed, shed tears, mourned, experienced thrills, fear, elation and boredom seeing family arguments, drunken fights, martial arts, torture techniques, abusive language, sexual predators, demonic possession, terrorist atrocities, murder investigations, football hooliganism, child soldiers, rioting protestors, police aggression, self-harming, drug abuse, automobile accidents, plane crashes, knife crime, insults and mockery. I spoke the answer before I knew it.

“Violence.”

Immediately I was raised by Tomasiah to look down from a height on the multiple screens forming my room. The cables from each screen sub-divided like tree roots and connected screen to screen in a vast web of wiring which generated a everlasting relaying of images from screen to screen to screen. The beating of a pensioner in a soap instantly triggered an image of youths attacking an elderly woman on the news which was closely followed by a documentary with fly-on-the-wall images of the actions of those attacking the elderly. Their rooms were seen to be littered with posters of action heroes and when not on the streets they were to be found shooting up and beating up when game playing online. Images chased one another from screen to screen constantly triggering new images in an ever-changing spiral of violence which never yet issued in orgiastic release.

Tomasiah raised me still higher until I could see that the entire web of wiring emanated from a common source. Each cable was ultimately hard-wired into a gigantic, monstrous head throbbing with ideas and images telepathically transmitted through the web of wiring to be blazoned on screen; each idea and image triggering a thousand and one reactions and responses across the interconnecting screens.

Tomasiah was whispering in my ear once again. “This is the head of the romantic Nietzschian superself, humanity come of age in violent self obsession, self absorption and self interest.”

As I watched black marks began to form on the surface of each screen oozing and coalescing into fat black drops which fell from the screens as black rain. These drops rapidly pooled, with the pool growing in size until it became a stream, then a river and then a torrent flooding from the room into the wider world.

I saw this flood sweep over the prayers of the righteous, the preaching of protestants, the writings of theologians and I heard a voice from heaven saying, “Whom shall I send and who will go for me?”

I answered, “Every word I have spoken is tainted and unclean and those among whom I live use words that corrupt and desecrate.”

Tomasiah held a book in his hand and said, “Let me teach you how to speak.” As he opened the book I saw the story of Israel unfold from its earliest beginnings in the call of Abram to the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings and the Promised Land. I saw the story of a people called out to be a light to the nations, Israel’s story, and from that people I saw one man come to retell that selfsame story through his life and death and life again.

Under Tomasiah’s guidance I descended to the room of screens and directly into the black torrent. Barely able to keep my head above the poisonous ink in which my body was submerged, Tomasiah implored me to speak.

In my panic I spoke what I saw on the screens and my words became black flies which swirled and swarmed about my head pushing me under. The black rain was in my eyes and in my mouth. My eyes stung from its poisons and my tongue tasted its acrid, oily horror. My head filled with scenes of violence – shootings, stabbings, bombings, suicides - I sunk under its swell my nostrils filling with its glutinous slime and then, not a moment too late, I finally understood what I had to say.

In a moment of insight and revelation, I saw a victim of this tide of violence and spoke of the victim that I saw, naming the elderly woman and the effect on herself and her family of the attack and robbery inflicted on her. As I did so, my head was raised above the acrid swell, I breathed the air, and a fleck of gold appeared in the coal black waters.

Rapidly, I spoke of the neighbour who heard the sound of the attack, who called the police and who tended her wounds. I spoke of the paramedics who brought her to hospital and the medics whose skills healed her. I spoke of the family who brought her flowers, grapes, magazines, love and the hope that sustained her. As I told their story and retold this story of violence as one of compassion, the flecks of gold in the black waters conjoined and became a shaft of light piercing the darkness.

I continued by retelling the story of her attackers in terms of the deprivations that had mounted around them from birth and the teacher who refused to give up on them and was finally able to reach them in the guilt that followed their arrest. I retold violent video games by means of compassionate passers-by caring for their victims and sacrificing themselves to embrace the violent. I retold soap family conflicts as confrontations with truth resulting in forgiveness. I retold murder trials as acts of restorative justice.

I spoke for the victims - spoke “for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed / For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse” - and read into their stories people of compassion and care and, as I retold stories in this way, the shafts of golden light began to push back the darkness of the black rain’s falling.

Then Tomasiah showed me that the water had become crystal bright. It now flowed from the Throne of God right down the middle of the room. Trees appeared in each screen planted on each side of the one River, producing twelve kinds of fruit, a ripe fruit each month. The leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations.

Tomasiah said to me, "The words you have spoken are dependable and accurate, every one. The God and Master of the spirits of the prophets sent me to show what is taking place and to tell all, 'Yes, I am on my way!'”

Tomasiah continued, "Don't seal up the words of this prophecy; don't put it away on the shelf. Time is just about up. Let the black rain go all out in pollution, but let the wright storytellers reread the stories of their times and turn back the polluting tide.

Let them tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it and reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it. Stand on the ocean until you start sinking, know your song well before you start singing, cause it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.”

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Bryan Ferry - A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.

The Black Rain (2)

The meaning and mystery of Tom Davies' vision of the Black Rain is, he writes, that:

"The modern media has become the mother and father of all terrorism everywhere. It was also clear to me that a media in love with violence was responsible for most major crimes in our modern world from the assassinations of our leading figures, particularly in America, to the alarming spread of violence on our housing estates and soccer hooliganism in our stadiums."

Additionally, "The vision of the black rain says very clearly, to me at least, that we live in a world where most of our artists, writers and communicators are obsessed with perversion, crime and violence and this obsession is, in itself, leading the world into a growing disorder."

A media obsessed with perversion, crime and violence grows copycat violence in those who participate in its obsessions which in turn creates new images on which the media can feed.

The strength of this vision can be seen in the quantity and frequency of violent images that can be found in all forms of media. We are immersed in violent imagery whenever we watch TV, read a newspaper or play a computer game. It is commonly accepted in advertising that images can become surrogate objects of desire or other emotions but in other media this same association becomes contested. Davies is arguing for a direct link between the flood of violent imagery in the media and copycat actions in those who become obsessed with such imagery.

The weakness of the vision is in its lack of discrimination between those portrayals of violence that critique or explore the sources of violence and those portrayals that glorify violence or use it gratuitously. For example, in a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist Dennis Potter as characterising this Romantic Mind that he identifies as a tide of evil. Potter was stereotyped in the tabloid press as Dirty Den, a sex-obsessed Mr Filth of television, but, as I wrote in an early post, he was also the TV dramatist with the most pronounced religious vision.

Davies' vision, therefore, seems to take no account of either authorial/editorial intent or the narrative of the pieces he criticises. His focus seems solely on the portrayal of violent, criminal or perverse imagery when he writes about his visions and not on the way in which these are used within the work itself. Interestingly, when it comes to his own novels we do not find an absence of violence, crime or perversion. Instead, these things are set within the moral framework of his visions and are then presumably justified by this intent and narrative. The central dilemma of Davies' writings and visions, it seems to me, is that his visions are actually expressed in the same romantic and violent imagery that they seek to critique.

At the same time as reading Davies' Testament I was also reading and reviewing Daniel A. Siedell's God in the Gallery. Siedell has a much more positive vision of contemporary culture claiming that “remarkably beautiful, compelling, and powerful” ‘altars to the unknown god’ are “strewn about the historical landscape of modern and contemporary art.” Such altars are artworks whose insights point to, but do not name, Christ. Siedell argues that such cultural artifacts and the insights they reveal and illuminate should be examined and celebrated by Christians and ultimately bent toward the gospel, making them work “as a means of apologetic grace.”

The two approaches are clearly opposed, at least when neither are nuanced. So, which is right or is there some way to hold both together? Siedell's argument if taken to its logical conclusion, which Siedell does not do, would mean that all art could be bent toward the gospel. I accept enough of Davies' argument to think that, although "beautiful, compelling and powerful altars to the unknown god" can be found in many surprising places, some artworks embody values, narratives or images whic are simply opposed to the values, narratives and images of Christianity. Juliette and Grand Theft Auto would seem to be two disparate examples.

The Christian critic then should not simply celebrate, à la Siedell, or condemn, à la Davies, but do what all good critics do by celebrating the positive and critiquing the inadequate and having some underlying methodological basis for making such judgements. However, there is a further and more post-modern means of combining aspects of the two and that is for the Christian artist or critic to re-tell or re-present narratives or images of violence in terms of their victims. This is an approach that I will explore through fiction in the final post in this series.

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Bruce Springsteen - Chimes Of Freedom.

The Black Rain (1)

Over Christmas I have read two books by Tom Davies; his biography Testament and his most recent novel The Tyranny of Ghosts. Not having read any of his work for some years it was fascinating to revisit the uncomfortable issues about faith and popular culture that his writings raise. The following is a synopsis of his career that I wrote several years ago:

Tom Davies is a seer. As a travel writer and semi-professional pilgrim, his descriptions both evoke and enliven the ordinary sights and people that he passes by, pausing just long enough to perceive significance. As a prophetic visionary, he uncovers the apocalyptic battle-drop against which ordinary life is played out. His best works involve journeys in which observation mingles with vision and where he runs the gamut of emotions from despair through boredom to wonder.

Trained as a journalist with the Western Mail, he later wrote for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Observer before biting the hand that had fed him by castigating the media in the books (travel, theology and novels) that he wrote subsequent to his conversion. His career came full circle with a column in the Western Mail under a pseudonym and published as The Visions of Caradoc.

His work is a tracking of the bloody footprints of Romanticism through literary, social and media history. Davies defines the Romantic Mind as emphasising the imagination and emotion over and above reason and intellect. It cultivates sensation and emotion for their own sake and has a persistent attraction to the morbid, the supernatural, the cruel, the perverted and the violent. He believes that: this Mind is predominant in Western media and culture; has been the gasoline in the bottle igniting a blazing orgy of violence that is speading uncontrolled through the world; is to be identified with the Biblical Man of Lawlessness, a tide of evil which engulfs the world as a necessary precondition to the return of Christ. In a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist, Dennis Potter, as characterising this Romantic Mind.

By contrast, as Caradoc, he argues that the Christian artist should "generally seek to affirm that which is pure, good and lovely. He would always be seeking to mediate the beauty of the ordinary world to us; he would be looking for new insights into reality and, in this way, celebrate the fantastic wonder of creation.

The Christian artist would never bother with a pervert, preferring to study a normal man at work or play; he would never gaze at a scene of horror when he could find as it floats, like a falling leaf, through the real world. The art of the Christian is the most difficult art of them all."

This sermon is delivered to Idris the Pointless, a Van Gogh in safety pins, who promptly informs Caradoc that his latest project is paint "portraits of the homes of all the convicted murderers in the Valleys". Davies' self-deprecating humour and confessions of personal weakness leaven the fire and brimstone of his prophetic vision and allow us both to absorb his warnings and follow his evocations of wonder. He has said of the Biblical prophets that "With their wild veerings and ravaged visions they all had a questionable sanity". He would count it a compliment if we admitted him to that same company.

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Sam Phillips - Baby I Can't Please You.

Heaven in Ordinary

Huw has passed on the following links for John Davies writing on the theme of 'Heaven in Ordinary':

Go to http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/index.php?p=768 for a Greenbelt article about the theme, to http://www.johndavies.org/sermons/bbc_06_08_07.html for Davies' wheely bin prayer and to http://www.johndavies.org/ for his main site.

Through looking at these I've also found site for writer/artist/cartoonist Michael Leunig and also for artist Antonia Rolls. Both of which are worth a look and continue the 'Heaven in Ordinary' theme.

This is a theme that is linked to the 'Praying through the Everyday' Quiet Days that I will be leading over the next six months or so. These will be at:

• St Andrew's Hertford on Saturday 12th July;
• St John's Seven Kings on Saturday 13th September; and
• Chelmsford School of Prayer at St John's Moulsham on Saturday 7th February.

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The Innocence Mission - Song AboutTravelling.

A great Catholic, writer and man

G. K. Chesterton was a Renaissance Man. A well established journalist and reviewer by the age of twenty one, he went on to publish biographies, literary and art criticism, essays, history, nonsense verse, novels, poetry, and to illustrate his verse.

Chesterton was a major influence on the shape of Christian writing in the twentieth century. He provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out.

It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

He was criticised of course for his use of humour in explaining and defending orthodox Christianity. His defence was that fun and seriousness were not opposites and that whether "a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. Chesterton's humour and invention was not, as Lewis noted, gratuitous but integral to his argument - "humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the 'bloom' on dialectic itself". He particularly valued the way in which use of the grotesque tends “to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself”. As an example he gave the impact of seeing St Paul’s Cathedral upside down. The effect would be that we should “look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations”. It is, he thought, the “supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it”.

Chesterton's imagination enabled him to understand and explain aspects of Christianity which for many had seemed impossible or naive or impossibly naive. In his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi he memorably characterised Francis as the Court Fool of the King of Paradise, who sees the world upside down and cannot see the wood for the trees. As he explores these phrases we begin to understand the way in which conversion turns our life and life itself upside down (or, as we now see from God's perspective not man's, the right way up) so that a nobleman becomes a fool (for Christ), the son of a prosperous merchant who is provided for in every way become dependent on God, and sees every part of God's creation as an individual character and brother, even the trees. In understanding Francis and his actions Chesterton inadvertently explains the inversions, metamorphoses, defiance’s of gravity and fabulous zoo of Marc Chagall's art which, like Chesterton, is imaginatively revealing the spiritual reality experienced by the likes of Francis of Assisi.

For all these qualities Chesterton fully deserves the praise awarded him by Lewis - "A great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man."

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Kathleen Battle & Branford Marsalis - Come Sunday.