Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return

Here's the reflection I prepared for today's Ash Wednesday Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.

Remember you are dust. In the Genesis creation stories we read of God forming human beings from the dust of the ground and breathing life into us, so we become living creatures. In the imagery of these stories, we come from the dust of the earth and then are tasked with tilling the earth and keeping until we return to the ground, for we are dust and to dust we shall return.

My father’s career went from being a sociology lecturer and community work pioneer at Oxford to becoming a landscape gardener in Somerset. His story was an early example of escape to the country and getting back to the soil. One thing he particularly appreciated about the change was a deeper sense of being immersed in the cycle of the seasons, the circle of life.

We will shortly be marked with the sign of the cross in ash on our foreheads as those words, Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ, are said. The dust forming the cross on our foreheads, is not only a sign of mortality and penitence but is also a reminder of our origins and our purpose. We come from the earth and are on earth to tend and keep it. When we live in the artificial environment and frenetic busyness of cities, it can be easy for us to forget that reality and lose a sense of being one with nature. We won’t all be able to make a similar mid-life change to that of my father, but could each seek new ways to connect more closely with the earth and the natural cycle of life.

Jesus taught that his life would be like a grain of wheat that falls into the earth and dies. He would be like a single grain until he died and was buried in the ground to germinate and bear much fruit – the first-fruit of all who will be resurrected by God. Through his life, death and resurrection he entered into the natural cycle of death and new life calling us to follow him into resurrection life where we are with God, with ourselves, with others and with creation.

By forming the sign of the cross on our foreheads and by being made from burnt palm crosses, the ash or dust is also a reminder to us of Christ’s identification with us in our mortality and our identification with him in his resurrection.

The season of Lent mirrors the 40 days Jesus spent in the wilderness – a place of dust – in which he spent time with God and with himself deepening his sense of who he was in God to the extent that when tested he could speak with authority about God’s purposes and intentions before then beginning his active ministry. In that active ministry, Jesus regularly used times of returning to the soil for contemplation, such as the moments in this story when he writes in the dust, to find the words and actions that would open new possibilities of encounter with God for those who were constrained by their circumstances.

Lent is a time for us to do something similar by being with God, ourselves, each other and creation more deeply and intentionally in order that we learn to live God’s future now more fully and deeply. Our future is one of being with and enjoying God, ourselves, each other and creation ever more deeply for ever. We prepare for that future by anticipating it in the here and now. Doing so, is what Lent is for.

I, therefore, want to wish you a holy Lent in which you find ways to deepen your being with God, yourself, other and creation as Jesus did during his time in the wilderness. Often on Ash Wednesday you are encouraged to take up or lay down certain activities. I simply want to remind you today of the core purpose for Lent and encourage you to find your own ways to reach the goal of being with God, yourself, each other and creation. You may wish to take those four aspects of Being With and use them to explore how you this Lent you can deepen your ways of Being With in each aspect of your life. My prayer is that the sign of the cross marked on your forehead in the dust of ash will be both a sign of your commitment to reaching that goal and an inspiration for us as we begin.

Remember you are dust formed from the dust of creation for Being With and that to the dust of creation you will return in preparation for eternal Being With, turn away from the sin of being out of relationship and in isolation and be faithful to Christ by being with Christ in the body of Christ.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Forty Days And Forty Nights.

Knots, Dust & Epiphany

Exhibitions of multiple drawings are relatively rare, but, like the stereotypical buses, two have come along together at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery.

Francis Alÿs has created an installation of hundreds of drawings, which are suspended in enclosed space at the centre of the exhibition. The drawings are the stills required to produce three minutes and fourteen seconds of an animation showing a woman repeatedly tying a simple knot in her long hair that then undoes itself. The massive number of drawings required to form this short animation demonstrate the huge disproportion, on which Alÿs regularly reflects, in much human activity between effort and result, work and labour.

Much of that involved and repetitive activity centres on knotty problems – Catch 22 situations or paradoxes – that cannot simply be unravelled and straightened out. In this work, Alÿs activates a game of opposites - joining and unravelling, arranging and disrupting, doing and undoing, drawing and erasing – while also emphasising the human nature of what it is that we are doing, as knots require the work of our hands and untangling knots is one thing a machine is unable to do.

In Big Series (1983-85), Vladimír Kokolia is showing a large number of fragile figurative ink drawings produced during the final years of the Iron Curtain – when the Communist Party reinforced its censorship of the politically subversive arts as part of a programme of ‘Normalisation’. This programme of censorship included a ban on ‘politically subversive’ exhibitions, films, publications and concerts. Kokolia’s drawings are on display for the first time after more than thirty years in storage; synergies, perhaps, with the ‘Unpainted Paintings’ of Emil Nolde.

Kokolia has described the atmosphere of suppression in which these drawing were produced as being ‘a horrible time’ because ‘your enemy was everywhere and nowhere’ meaning that you ‘could never meet him.’ As a result, these early works acquired a sense of political commentary in the depiction of grotesque stories of cruelty and weakness. They show the wretchedness of human endeavour in which human figures struggle for a glimpse of meaning in absurd circumstances. As such, they hold their own against similar series such Goya’s Disasters of War or Rouault’s Miserere.

This first room of Kokolia’s exhibition, with its deliberately subdued lighting, has significant synergy with the notion of turbulence found in Alÿs’ exhibition. In addition to the surreal horrors of the Big Series, we also find Storm Centre (2001) which draws us, helter-skelter, into a deep blue spiralling vortex. Similarly, we enter the Alÿs exhibition through Tornado (2000-2010), a video projection which records Alÿs’ chasing of “dust devils” in attempts to enter their eye with a camera in hand. He then films their windless core, a monochrome of dust that literally abstracts him from the outside world.

The lianas, mazes, or winding footpaths of Kokolia’s paintings – generally depicting the trucks, branches or leaf canopies of trees around Veverské Nnínice, the small Moravian village where he lives – also resemble the knots which form a central image in Alÿs’ exhibition. In Kokolia’s work, his tangled coils of shifting patterns and colours are skeins through which we glimpse the light beyond. In Alÿs’ work they enmesh us in the repetitive and demanding round of human activity from which we cannot emerge.

While there are many synergies between these two exhibitions, the heart of the difference between the two is found in Kokolia’s sense of wonderment with the natural world and Alÿs’ sense of constraint in the human world.

Both touch fleetingly on spiritual language in their work, demonstrating by this not any sense of personal proselytization, more the enduring strength of religious language and concepts even when secularized. Kokolia expresses his sense of wonderment in his exhibition title ‘Epiphany’; ‘a profound {and unexpected) revelation borne out of everyday experience.’ Alÿs entitles his new animation Exodus 3:14, in which God speaking from the burning bush names himself before Moses as, ‘I am who I am’. For Alÿs this is another knotty paradox that we cannot resolve. Even when we run into the eye of the storm, nothing is revealed. For Kokolia, however, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Francis Alÿs: Knots’n Dust and Vladimír Kokolia: Epiphany are at Ikon Gallery until 9 September 2018

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gungor - Vapour.

Subversion in the Cathedral?

My latest exhibition review for Church Times explores some of the reasons for the engagement with religious themes found in the work of Roger Hiorns, as well as paying particular attention to Untitled (a retrospective view of the pathway), 2016, his site-specific work with Birmingham Cathedral in June 2016, when the choir lay on the cathedral floor to sing evensong:

'Hiorns recognises that faith continues to have power and authority in many lives, and he seeks to explore and deconstruct aspects of this in his work. He does something similar in relation to the power of propulsion, symbolised by the jet engine. He has undertaken through his work a sustained assault on jet engines, adding to them brain matter and anti-depressants, having them prayed for by prayer groups, atomising them, mixing the engine with altar dust, and burying the aircraft that carried the engines. His aircraft pieces often become mementi mori for humanity: reminders of the ultimate end of us and our achievements, as in his final project for the Ikon Gallery, the burial of a Boeing 737 in Ladywood, Birmingham. Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.'

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ikon Gallery - Roger Hiorns Interview.

The worlds of Law and Love

Woman taken in adultery by Dinah Roe Kendall is a wonderful visualisation of tonight’s Gospel reading (John 8. 1 - 11). There are two things which are immediately apparent and which make this a picture of contrasts. First, the women’s accusers are all painted in black and white while Jesus and the woman are the only characters painted in colour. Second, the hands of the accusers all point upwards towards her while the of Jesus points downwards and away from her.

Kendall is, I think, suggesting that the women’s accusers live in the black and white world of the Law. In the black and white world of the Law, everything is clear and everything is simple. "This woman," they say, "was caught in the very act of committing adultery. In our Law Moses commanded that such a woman must be stoned to death." If you do wrong then you are punished. No consideration of circumstances or motivations, no compassion for a fellow human being, no opportunity for restoration or rehabilitation, and no equality because it is the woman, not the man, who has been brought from the very act of adultery to be tried.

In the painting, that contrast is also very clear in that it is a crowd of men who point accusingly at the woman. Dinah Roe Kendall wrote that Jesus highlighted the lack of respect in the Pharisees for woman and their judgemental attitude towards this woman. "He demonstrated how completely opposite his attitude was both to her and to them." There is a special pleasure for her, she writes, "to see how much Jesus respected and cared about women regardless of status or age."

So, returning to the black and white world of the Law, there we find no consideration, no compassion, no restoration, no equality. The black and white world of the Law has no colour because it has no nuances, no distinctions, no difference, no variation. People often like to live in the black and white world of the Law because everything is easy to understand and easy to put into practice - no wrestling with difficulty and no struggling with conscience - but it is also a harsh world without understanding, without compassion, without forgiveness.

Ultimately, the black and white world of the Law is undermined by the different hands which we noted in this picture. The hands of the accusers point away from themselves towards the woman. This is our common response as human beings to our own fallibility and failure. Instead of acknowledging our own shortcoming we attempt to distract attention away from our selves by identifying a scapegoat and angrily pointing out that person’s many failings. We are often very successful in covering up our own shortcomings when we adopt this tactic but the reality is that we are being hypocritical.

Jesus reveals this hypocrisy through his hands. He bends down and writes in the sand with his finger. He creates a pause that is pregnant with the possibility of other points of view, other perspectives, other understanding. When the simplistic rush to condemnation is halted, other questions immediately arise to muddy the waters which had initially seemed crystal clear; what would be the compassionate response, the restorative response, the forgiving response?  

In the painting however although Jesus’ is depicted as writing in the sand, his finger is actually pointing out of the painting towards us. So the words which follow this act of writing in the sand, "Whichever one of you has committed no sin may throw the first stone at her," are applied to us as to the woman’s accusers.

They are words which undermine the black and white world of the Law by revealing the hypocrisy at its heart. The reality is that each one of us has broken the Law and each one of us are sinners. If that is so, on what basis can one sinner presume to judge or condemn another? To do so is a gross act of hypocrisy which multiplies one sin upon another.  

Jesus and the woman by contrast live in a world of colour because they live in the world of love. They live in a world without condemnation – "Is there no one left to condemn you?" Jesus asks the woman. "No one, sir," she answers. "Well, then," Jesus says, "I do not condemn you either." They live in a world where second chances and fresh starts are available – "Go," says Jesus, "but do not sin again." 

This world of Love is a world of colour because nuances exist, difference is recognized, and variation is understood. Therefore choices and chances exist which simply did not occur in the black and white world of the Law. By contrast in the world of Love a multitude of sins are covered over (1 Peter 4. 8). 

What does all this have to do with Ash Wednesday? As the sign of the cross is marked in ash on your forehead, these words are said: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel." In this service, therefore, we acknowledge both our sinfulness and our mortality recognising the link between the two – the wages of sin are death.

The ash mark on our forehead is a public acknowledgement of our sinfulness but, because it is formed as a cross, it is also a sign of the forgiveness we have received. We are saying that we no longer live in the black and white world of the Law where sin automatically leads to death, instead, like the woman caught in adultery, we have been accepted and welcomed into the world of Love by Jesus himself.

He says to us what he said to that woman, "I do not condemn you … Go, but do not sin again." Those words are spoken to us all whether we were the accused or whether we were those who accused others. Whichever we may be, we are called to turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Kings X - Shot Of Love.