Those who humble themselves will be exalted

Here's the sermon that I have shared at St Mary's Runwell and St Peter's Nevendon today: 

One of the things I did during my holiday was to watch a film about the life of the guitarist and rock star Eric Clapton. In part, this was because he experienced a conversion to Christ, about which he has written in some of his songs.

Clapton knew significant trauma in his life being brought up by his grandparents as his mother was unable to look after him as a child and did not bond with him later in life. Additionally, later in life, his four-year-old son, Conor, died in a tragic accident when he fell from a window in a high-rise apartment. The film was particularly interesting because of a radical difference in the way he responded to the painful issues he experienced in his life in his early and later years.

Clapton found fame, wealth and adulation as a young man because of his musical talents but finding those things, when combined with his early traumas did not bring joy and contentment. Instead, they led him into drug and alcohol addition which was focused on his own desires, needs and wants, including desiring a relationship with Patti Boyd, the wife of his best friend, the Beatle George Harrison. Once out of control, through excessive drinking, he also found himself making racist statements on stage that he later regretted because his career was actually based on discovering the blues, the music of Black America.

So, his selfish and self-centred behaviours, which derived in part from early experiences of pain and hurt as a child, had the effect of destroying his and other’s relationships while leading him to say and do many things that, when sober, he regretted. At a key moment in his attempts to kick his addictions, he cried out to God for help and felt that he was answered. Getting sober and finding faith meant that when the rebuilding of a new life was rocked by the tragic death of his young son, he didn’t revert to his former absorption in drink and drugs instead he committed to living in a way that honoured his son. The film ended with Clapton as a happy family man who has set up a charity providing support to those who could not otherwise afford the help needed to get free of their own addictions and using his talents and those of his friends to raise funds to support that vital work.

Our Gospel reading today (Luke 14: 1, 7-14) sets up similar contrasts to those we find in the life of Eric Clapton. The context is a party, something that would have been very familiar to Clapton in his hedonistic days, and the question Jesus poses is how should we enter. In his early years, Clapton would have become familiar with being the star, the one who turned heads when he walked in the room, and would have become used, as a result, to being given all he wanted and desired, even if it did him harm.

Jesus commends the reverse of entering as the star. He encourages us to be the one who takes the last and lowest place at the table. One of the problems, as Clapton discovered, with being at the head of the table is that the only way from there, at some stage, is down. But, as Jesus notes, if you are in the last and lowest place, the only way is up. Jesus is famous for prophesying that, in the final reckoning, the first shall be last and the last first. This is a part of what Clapton discovered in later life as he changes from a life centred on his own needs and wants to one centred on others – his family and those seeking to be free from addictions.

His understanding of this change shows up in his songs, particularly a song called ‘Broken Hearted’, where, in the context of looking forward to heaven, he writes:

‘there's a place where we can go
Where we will not be parted
And who alone will enter there?
Only the broken-hearted’

We live in a world where leaders are increasingly focused on self-promotion – constantly creating narratives about how wonderful they are and how awful their predecessors were – and are advocating policies based on selfishness, particularly by blaming the problems faced by nations on those who have or are migrating from issues and situations most of us can’t imagine and couldn’t cope with. Placing the blame for the issues we face on those travelling to different countries ignores all the other problems our countries face and seeks to portray those who are actually victims of violence or oppressions as invaders. The inherent selfishness that is at the heart of such policies is that of saying we must keep all our resources for those that we see as being the same as ourselves instead of being willing to share – ‘sharing is caring’, as my grandchildren are rightly taught at their school.

How should we respond to our changing and self-centred world, as those who are told by Jesus to take the last and lowest place at the table? The answer is to be found in today’s Epistle (Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16):

‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. Let marriage be held in honour by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.’

Christian love – taking the last or lowest place - involves showing hospitality to strangers, remembering those who are in most difficulty or distress as though we are experiencing the same ourselves, being faithful to those closest to us, and living contentedly with what we have, not chasing after material wealth, in order that we trust God for his presence which means more than all we might otherwise gain.

Jesus is clear that those who live self-centred lives are on the wrong path, as all who exalt themselves will be humbled. As we have seen from the story of Eric Clapton’s life that is also what he discovered as he came to see it was a path of destruction, both for himself and for those around him. He wrote in his autobiography: ‘From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for life, and most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do.’

Each of us, however, has to come to that realisation for ourselves, if we are as individuals or as nations are to change tack and, as Clapton also did, learn the lesson of Jesus’ parable and the value in God’s eyes of taking the last or lowest place. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Eric Clapton - Broken Hearted.

Rediscoveries and new discoveries

In a week of rest I've been taking time to enjoy the following:

Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus say they: 

'have always been concerned with the sacred or — perhaps more accurately — the loss of the sacred. We are searching for its echoes and traces which are scattered and hidden in surprising and forgotten places.

We have spoken in the past about the theology of Icons in the Eastern Church. They are fragments of a restored creation; elements of nature that have been transfigured to create images of heavenly glory. We are not claiming that our music in any way realizes this ideal, but it is an idea that has influenced us almost from the inception of RAIJ. It has been an even more explicit inspiration for this album and its title, Beauty Will Save the World, which is a quote from Dostoevsky, a writer steeped in the Orthodox tradition.

In the Western tradition, art is illustrative and beauty is an aesthetic concept whereas to the Eastern Church art is sacramental and beauty is the pursuit of divine truth, so questions about the sacred and the beautiful necessarily converge.' (NPR)

'Victoria Williams - Happy Come Home' is a film by D A Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus of the storytelling, improvising, tree-hugging, spellbinding talent that is Victoria Williams.

Pennebaker explains that: 'David Geffen asked us to make a short video portrait of Victoria Williams, whose first record he was about to release. He wanted radio stations to see what she looked like. So we took her back home to Louisiana and made a half-hour film with her that we loved.'

The remainder of the film can be found here, here and here.

Grant Alden writes in 'No Depression' that: 'Victoria’s records and concerts are like one imagines church should be. They are open and honest and celebratory, full of delight and respect, able to sweep black clouds to the side with a soft breath.' 

Long Hot Summers - The Story Of The Style Council: Documentary about the band that Paul Weller formed after The Jam split up in 1982, with insight from key members, collaborators and fans. 'When Paul Weller announced The Style Council's arrival in March 1983, he'd come a very long way. In fact, at the age of just 24, he was already a musical veteran with six albums and nine Top 10 singles under his belt with The Jam. As their leader he had become a deity-like figure and for his fans, The Jam's split was unimaginable. But creatively restless and of inquisitive mind, Paul jettisoned them at their height to form a collective with an eventual core line-up of Paul with Mick Talbot, Dee C Lee and Steve White. Over four albums and 17 singles, The Style Council made a stand and became the standard bearers of progressive soulful pop and social comment. This is their story.'

Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right - In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today.

In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

Our Lady Peace: When Mark Van Doren, the American poet and teacher, wrote his famous work, "Our Lady Peace" in 1943, he couldn't have imagined the concept of rock'n'roll, let alone that a Canadian rock group would adopt his title for their name. 'Our Lady Peace were one of the quintessential bands of the 1990s alternative boom. The group shared qualities with many of its guitar-driven contemporaries, such as angsty power chords and propulsive beats. But front person Raine Maida's iconic jolts from chest voice to falsetto singing and enigmatic, labyrinthine lyrics helped set the group apart from the pack.'

Some of the above are rediscoveries and others new discoveries.

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The Revolutionary Army of The Infant Jesus - Bright Field.

Artlyst: 'Hard Beauty' and Helaine Blumenfeld

My latest piece for Artlyst is a review of ‘Hard Beauty’, the first film about the life and work of sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld which premiered on Sky Arts in April 2018:

'If Blumenfeld’s focus on beauty is one factor distancing her from a greater level of recognition in the world of contemporary art, then spirituality may be another. The film emphasises the extent to which Blumenfeld’s natural forms are also visionary. From an early age Blumenfeld has received the forms she now shapes into sculpture through her dreams. Clay is used as her malleable medium in which to capture what remains of these dreams before they fade.'

‘Tree of Life’, a major solo exhibition by Helaine Blumenfeld OBE is at Ely Cathedral until 28 October 2018.

My other Artlyst articles and interviews are:

• 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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Gungor - Beautiful Things.

Something Worth Sharing

Something Worth Sharing
Saturday 13 October - Sunday 14 October 2018
St Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square, London

A weekend of events to mark our 7th annual conference on Disability and Church, a partnership between St Martin-in-the-Fields and Inclusive Church.

Saturday 13 October
10.30am - 4.30pm, St Martin’s Hall
Something Worth Sharing

Disabled people can be isolated by experience or geography, and face barriers to belonging in churches and communities. What can we do to unlock gates and open our gifts? From access statements to advisory groups, using language and structure, connecting and gathering, we explore ideas and share practical resources for getting in and joining in.

Speakers include: June Boyce-Tillman, Tim Goode, Fiona MacMillan, Ann Memmott, Emily Richardson and Sam Wells

Through plenary talks and in small groups, with a silent space and a marketplace, this is a day to resource each other and the church. Organised by and for disabled people, supporters and people with an interest in disability issues.

Cost: £20/£10 concessions

Registration: www.inclusive-church.org/disability-conference-2018. Spaces are limited.

Sunday 14 October
10.00am - 11.30am
Eucharist and Healing Service for St Luke’s Day

This special service reflects the weekend’s themes using liturgy written by members of St Martin’s Disability Advisory Group and Healing Team. The service includes the laying on of hands and anointing with oil, accompanied by prayers for healing - for yourself, someone else or the wider world. All are welcome.

Sunday 14 October
2.00pm - 4.30pm, St Martin’s Hall
Something Worth Sharing: Defiant Lives

A special screening of this feature-length documentary followed by discussion of the issues and ideas. Defiant Lives tells the story of the disability rights movement in the UK, US and Australia, Mixing archive footage and recent interviews with disabled people who fought for a society where everyone can participate. All are welcome.

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/defiant-lives-tickets-47404939450/

Tickets are free with a retiring collection to cover costs - suggested donation £5.

https://defiantlives.com

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Victoria Williams & Vic Chesnutt - God Is Good.

Bill Viola: Three Women & The Journey to St Paul's

HeartEdge member St Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh (Kirk of the Castle Rock and Princes St Gardens) is currently home to an outstanding video art installation by the internationally respected American artist Bill Viola. The piece is ‘Three Women (2008)', which has most recently been on display in the Grand Palais, Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and is now installed in Edinburgh until 1st September.

'Three Women (2008)' is part of the Transfigurations series by Viola, and his wife and close collaborator, Kira Perov. Transfiguration is generally defined as “an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change.” In this work, the mother and her daughters enact a transfiguration when they choose to pass through the threshold of water and briefly enter an illuminated realm. By exploring such universal human experiences as spirituality, birth, and death, Viola’s videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to engage with the work in their own personal ways.

St Cuthbert's also held the Scottish premiere of the new feature length documentary Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul's at an event last Sunday where Simon Groom, the Director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, chaired a discussion with the director and producer, Gerald Fox.

Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul's is a powerful, moving portrait of the world's most influential video artist and his wife and close collaborator, Kira Perov. It is an up-close documentation of their 12-year odyssey to create two permanent video installations for St. Paul's Cathedral. Martyrs (2014) and its companion piece, Mary (2016), symbolise some of the profound mysteries of human existence. One is concerned with comfort and creation, the other with suffering and sacrifice. This film follows Viola's remarkable story of producing, filming and realising the first art commission of its kind to ever be installed in one Britain's most famous religious spaces.

The BAFTA and Grierson Award winning British director and producer Gerald Fox takes the audience on a fascinating journey through the spiritual oeuvre of this innovative, ground breaking artist. The film ranges across the deserted landscapes and deserts of California as Viola builds his epic works for St Paul's, to the streets of Paris and London as Fox looks back at the art and career of this seminal artist, who, since the early 1970s, has taken video art to a new level of acceptance in contemporary art. 

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Van Morrison - Contemplation Rose.

Francis Bacon: Almost a religious painter

Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence was a 'unique, compelling film,' where those who knew him spoke freely, some for the first time, to reveal the many mysteries of Francis Bacon.

'Artist and friend Maggie Hambling suggested that “his work can be seen as a search for God,” while art critic John Richardson reckoned that Bacon is now seen “almost as a religious painter”.'

Gillean Craig explored this theme further in his Church Times review:

'“ALMOST a religious painter” might seem the most unlikely trib­ute to pay to the subject of Francis Bacon: A brush with violence (BBC2, Saturday), given his deliberate im­­mer­sion in a world of excess, his drinking, his promiscuity, his eagerness to inflict pain and (even more keenly) have it inflicted upon him­, and his production of picture after picture that, instead of hiding such proclivities, displayed them to the public as open wounds; and yet, shockingly, I think that it is true.

The images are flayed and vis­ceral, but their agony is that of a shriek de profundis. Not only is this a legitimate religious position: he was also drawn again and again to explicitly religious subjects: the scream­ing popes and the creatures at the foot of the cross, which can be, and were, dismissed as wilful expressions of hatred for Christianity.

But it makes more sense to see this continual return to Christian imagery as a profound engagement with, and deconstruction of, the impulse to faith which comes not from inside ourselves but is rather a response to the God who will not let us go.

Bacon brings us face to face with the hard stuff of Christianity: incarnation, flesh and blood naked on the canvas, sacrifice, mystery. This fine documentary told Bacon’s story through personal remin­iscences, a life scarcely believ­able in its combination of sordid, criminal depths and extraordinary creativity.'

Crucifixions: Francis Bacon will be at St Stephen Walbrook from 6-31 March 2017, 10.00am – 4.00pm Mon – Fri (Weds, 11.00am – 3.00pm), 

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James MacMillan - Seven Last Words From The Cross.

Mavis! Her message of love and equality is needed now more than ever

Mavis! is the first feature documentary on gospel/soul music legend and civil rights icon Mavis Staples and her family group, The Staple Singers. From the freedom songs of the ’60s and hits like I’ll Take You There in the ’70s, to funked-up collaborations with Prince and her recent albums with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Mavis has stayed true to her roots, kept her family close, and inspired millions along the way.

Featuring powerful live performances, rare archival footage, and conversations with friends and contemporaries including Bob Dylan, Prince, Bonnie Raitt, Levon Helm, Jeff Tweedy, Chuck D, and more, MAVIS! reveals the struggles, successes, and intimate stories of her journey. At 75, she's making the most vital music of her career, winning Grammy awards, and reaching a new generation of fans. Her message of love and equality is needed now more than ever.

As she sings on her new album Livin' On A High Note:

"The simplest things can be the hardest to do
Can't find what you're looking for even when it's looking for you
The judge and criminal, the sinner and the priest
Got something in common, bring em all to their knees

Do what you can, do what you must
Everybody's trying to find the love and trust
I walk the line, I walk it for us
See me out here tryin' to find some love and trust"

"Chicago wasn't always easy
But love made the windy city breezy
I've got friends and I've got family
I've got help from all the people who love me
I got friends and I got
I got family
I got help from all the people who love me"

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Mavis Staples - MLK Song.

Electric Eden and the New Folk Revival

Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music is an acclaimed history of the evolution of British folk music. Author Rob Young has a fascination with the roots of English folk music and its ties to the British countryside. For the most part the book "is a surefooted guide to the various tangled paths the English folk song has since been taken down by classicists, collectors, revivalists, iconoclasts, pagans, psychedelic visionaries, punks and purists."

The book is in some ways a search for the national psyche which Young notes has been shaped by a "wrestling for possession between competing religious doctrines, heathen, pagan and Christian." Young finds more of interest in folk-rock which is heathen or pagan but, interestingly, he does value the work of Bill Fay, the Biblical references which abound in C.O.B's Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart, and also includes a brief survey of '70's Jesus Music noting that "there were a few groups - After the Fire, Caedmon, Canaan, Cloud, Bryn Haworth, Meet Jesus Music, Narnia, Nutshell, Parchment, Presence, Reynard, Trinity Folk, Water into Wine Band and 11.59 - which managed to make a music that has lasting value, a kind of Eucharistic-progressive sound that sits comfortably with the better acid folk of the period." He highlights, as being of particular interest, Caedmon's self-titled 1978 album, the Water into Wine band's Hill Climbing for Beginners, Bob and Carole Pegg's And Now It Is So Early with Sydney Carter, Carter's A Folk Passion, and the Reflection Records compilation Sounds of Salvation. 

Young acknowledges that set against "the Dada venom of punk, the angular edges of post-punk and new wave and the plastic seductions of New Romanticism," the "irrelevant, parlous state of folk music in the late 1970s" was revealed. From this point on the book loses focus as Young indulges his liking for Kate Bush, David Sylvian, Talk Talk and Julian Cope without (except in the case of Cope) demonstrating their links to what has gone before. In doing so, Young overlooks the links between punk's political attack and folk's role as the voice of the common people; a connection that Billy Bragg clearly recognised and utilised.   

More recently, Young was one of those interviewed along with Bragg, for Get Folked: The Great Folk Revival which takes up the story Young told and explores the current resurgence in folk's popularity:

"Something incredible has been happening in the music scene over the last few years. Folk - a musical tradition with roots in the pre-electric world - is now becoming the new 21st-century pop phenomenon. Is it the antidote to manufactured music, the new punk, or simply evidence of the enduring appeal of this age-old musical form? This programme features first-hand testimony and intimate, specially shot musical performances from a cross-generational cast of legends, new and old. Richard Thompson, The Lumineers, Jake Bugg, Frank Turner, Akala, Donovan, Martin Carthy, The Unthanks, Alt-J, Newton Faulkner, Seth Lakeman, Bob Geldof and Ade Edmondson are among the contributors."

In introducing the new Folk Revival, the programme references visually the influence of Communion artists including Mumford and Sons and Laura Marling. Although not included in the documentary per se, some of these artists, such as Mumford and Sons and Michael Kiwanuka, continue to tap the Christian influence which, as Young notes in Electric Eden, can be found as a strand within English folk music.

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C.O.B. - Martha And Mary.

Route Masters

The husband of one of our church members at St John's Seven Kings, Tom Mckerr, has been driving the number 25 for the past two years and features in the BBC2 documentary Route Masters. He said that at first he did not want to be included on the documentary and it was only when he gave the film crew a lift home he ended up being included. He said often when people cannot pay, or do not want to, they become abusive. “I have been threatened and spat at many times, with threats to beat me up and stab me. I’ve been sworn at in a number of languages but it’s just a minority. “It’s nice when the public are leaving the bus and say ‘thank you driver’,” he added. “It makes you feel good when they acknowledge you.”

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Athlete - Flying Over Bus Stops.

How music makes us feel

Last night's imagine on BBC1 explored 'How Music Makes Us Feel.' The BBC's publicity for this documentary said:

"Many people turn to music when words are not enough, at funerals and weddings, at times of heartbreak and euphoria. It seems to hold more emotion and go deeper than words.

Musicians as varied as Emeli Sande, who enthralled the world when she sang at the Olympics, opera diva Jessye Norman, dubstep artist Mala and modern classical composer George Benjamin explain how music makes them feel. Alan Yentob also talks to a vicar, a psychologist, a Hollywood composer, an adman and even the people who choose the music played in shopping malls. He sees babies dance to a rhythm, and old people brought forth out of silence by the power of music."

The vicar interviewed for the programme is the Revd. Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James Piccadilly, who has published an interesting book called Our sound is our wound in which she explores how we listen for the voice of God within the soundscapes of our lives and how we find our own voice? Our lives are lived, she suggests,  against the backdrop of an internal and external soundscape. The sounds, noises and music with which we are surrounded in modern life have spiritual implications. There is also a soundtrack within us that plays constantly through memory, dreams, anxiety or thought.

The sense of music providing a soundscape throughout our lives also featured in the programme framed as it was by film of babies responding to music at its beginning and dementia sufferers helped through music therapy at its close.

Many of the issues raised by the programme are also explored by Peter Banks and I in The Secret Chord. For example, in Chapter 3 'Play vs Plan' we think about music in relation to play theory in child development, while in Chapter 6 'Head vs Heart' we discuss the expressive impact of music including assessing a quote from Stravinsky, also used in the programme, that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."

Clips from the documentary can be viewed here and the whole programme can be seen on i-player by clicking here.

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Emili Sande - Abide With Me.

Walker Percy: A Documentary Film

In a rare television interview in 1980, Walker Percy said his concerns as writer were with “a theory of man, man as more than organism, more than consumer – man the wayfarer, man the pilgrim, man in transit, on a journey.” Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, looks at Percy’s own journey, and is framed as a narrative about his life and ideas.
As a doctor turned writer and philosopher, Percy was concerned with the big issues: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" But he knew his audience was inured to a direct approach. Binx Bolling, in The Moviegoer, is almost allergic to such discussions –“... if they spoke to me of God, I would jump into the bayou” – yet he is preoccupied with what he calls ‘the search.’ It is a preoccupation that haunts all of Percy’s work.

Part of what makes Percy’s characters like Binx, Will Barrett, and Thomas More so indelible is their wry humor despite being ‘Lost in the Cosmos.’ In Percy’s fifth novel, The Second Coming, the protagonist, Will Barrett, descends into a cave, determined to confront God. He is thwarted by a toothache. For Walker, “humour was an instrument of introspection,” writer Robert Coles says in the film. “That’s what he beautifully combined: that lighthearted sensibility merged with a grave, seriously introspective side. This takes a genius.”

Walker Percy: A Documentary Film tells the story with archival film, excerpts from Percy’s work, and interviews with family, friends and scholars.

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Woven Hand - Dirty Blue.

The Pugin Trail

My piece on Birmingham's Pugin Trail has been published in the current edition of the Church Times.

One strand of the Trail explores prints as an important vehicle by which Christianity was extended to and received by the wider community. Pugin used the work of Dürer, seem by him via prints, as inspiration for his own architectural and interior designs including furniture, tiles, wallpaper, and stained-glass windows.The influence that prints could have was also demonstrated by Pugin's own influence as his own name was made with the publication in 1836 of Contrasts, a book of satirical “before and now” etchings, through which he contrasted the glories of medieval architecture and its civilised society with the tired classical constructions that were the product of the degraded modern industrial city.

Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain provides an excellent introduction to the man and his work. The BBC documentary Pugin: God's Own Architect can currently be seen in i-player.

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Bobby Womack - Deep River.

The Dreams of William Golding

Last night's Arena documentary on William Golding was a fascinating study of a fascinating writer:

'In 1954, William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than 20 publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide.

Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious West Country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it embraces the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.' 

The Presentation Speech for his Nobel Prize gives a helpful summary of some of his core themes and approaches as a writer:

'Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings. He often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow. His stories usually have a fairly schematic drama, almost an anecdote, as skeleton. He then covers this with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colourful characters and surprising events.

It is the pattern of myth that we find in his manner of writing ...

Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself - it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.

There is a mighty religious dimension in William Golding's conception of the world, though hardly Christian in the ordinary sense. He seems to believe in a kind of Fall. Perhaps rather one should say that he works with the myth of a Fall. In some of his stories, chiefly the novel The Inheritors, 1955, we find a dream of an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the motive power of a new species. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence - individual as well as social violence. But these qualities and incentives are also innate in man as a created being. They are therefore inseparably a part of his character and make themselves felt when he gives full expression to himself and forms his societies and his private destiny.'

In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:

'Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore ... Twenty years ago I tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in prison.

"All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long year in year out the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail. The oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour.

"But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both worlds are real. There is no bridge."

What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no reductive pessimism from me.'

Watch the documentary on i-player by clicking here.

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Lou Reed - Waves Of Fear.