Alexander de Cadenet, Awakened Artists, & Ekhart Tolle

Awakened Artists is an international community of artists whose artwork offers access to a deeper dimension of existence and contributes towards the evolution of consciousness.

This new web-site has been launched as a platform for specially invited artists whose work has a spiritual direction. The site was launched featuring both the artworks of Alexander de Cadenet and desert artist David C Greene's wonderful paintings of the desert under the light of the moon and stars. It is intended to build a community of artists who share a love of art that explores and gives access to a deeper, spiritual dimension of life. If you would like to be considered for inclusion on the site email Alexander de Cadenet at cadenet@aol.com.

In September 2016, de Cadenet was invited to meet with Eckhart Tolle, in his home town of Vancouver to explore his perspective on the relationship between art and the spiritual dimension. Together they explored how this relates to Eckhart’s own practice as the one of the world's foremost spiritual teachers and an amateur photographer. It was a joyful, life enhancing encounter, filled with profound insights into the deeper, spiritual dimension of art and the mysteries of creativity. Part 1 has been published in Watkins Mind Body Spirit Magazine in the May issue and Part 2, with an exclusive featuring of Eckhart's photos, will be published in a later issue. Copies of the magazine can be purchased here - http://www.watkinsmagazine.com/product/50-summer-2017-watkins-mind-body-spirit.

Here is a short extract from Part 1 of the interview:

"Beauty arises when something more essential or deeper, something that underlies the world of sense perception shines through. It is what I call the ‘underlying Intelligence’ that is the organizing principle behind the world of form, a hidden harmony, as it were. To use more traditional language, it belongs to the realm of the transcendent, the realm of the divine, if you want to call it that". Eckhart Tolle

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Jeff Buckley & Elizabeth Fraser - All Flowers In Time Bend Towards The Sun.

News round-up: Papal plots, David Shrigley & Nick Cave

Today's Guardian asks why are there so many papal plots in fiction? From Dan Brown to Graham Greene, the papacy has long proved fascinating to writers so Mark Lawson examines the mysteries around this powerful figure and the church he leads. He identifies the work of Morris West as particularly prescient:

'West’s novels have an astonishing record of prophecy. The Shoes of the Fisherman was published on the day that John XIII died, and imagined an eastern European anti-Soviet cardinal ending the long line of Italian popes, which duly happened in 1978, when Cardinal Wotyla of Kraków became John Paul II. The unlikely plot of The Clowns of God (1981), in which a pope resigns because he can no longer face the burdens of office, was validated in February 2013 by the retirement of Benedict XVI. In West’s final conclave novel, Eminence (1998), the leading candidate to become pope, a Latin American radical called Cardinal Luca Rossini, now reads as a spooky preview of the Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio becoming Pope Francis.'
Lawson writes on the coincidence of the publication of Conclave this month with The Young Pope starting on Sky Atlantic in October and Doctor Faustus being at the Barbican.

'In two weeks, David Shrigley’s new sculpture will be unveiled on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. At first sight it looks like a work that needs no artspeak to explain its meaning. It’s a giant thumbs-up, cast in bronze. And who doesn’t understand that? Just in case there’s any doubt, Shrigley has titled the piece Really Good. He’s even made the thumb extra long, to emphasise the “really”.' He was interviewed by Marcus Field for the Evening Standard:

'Faith is an occasional theme, although Shrigley treads gently here. His parents are Christians, his mother an Anglican, his father an Evangelical. Shrigley himself went to church until he was 16 “and then I did sociology A-level and I stopped”.

He still has a lot of time for the principles, though. “I’m a sympathiser,” he tells me. “I think if you remove the aspects to do with gender and homosexuality, if you take that out of all the main religions, then I would say that if people lived by their central tenets — love thy neighbour, altruism, compassion, kindness — then the world would probably be a better place. And I think it’s wrong to separate Christianity from politics. What would Jesus do? Well, he certainly wouldn’t vote Conservative. He certainly wouldn’t dismantle the NHS.”'

Alexis Petridis has written an excellent review of Nick Cave's new album Skeleton Tree which scotches the idea that the album is about the death of Cave's son. Petridis concludes, this is 'an album that is no less brilliant, but perhaps less straightforward, than initial reactions suggested: not so much an exploration of grief as an example of how grief overwhelms or seeps into everything – a subtle difference, but a difference nonetheless.'

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Nick Cave - I Need You.

Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

Creativity and care

Here is a slightly expanded version of the sermon I preached today at Salvation Church, who share space with us at St Stephen Walbrook. This sermon can also be heard by clicking here.

At the weekends the City of London is very quiet, apart perhaps from those, like yourselves, travelling in for services at those churches which have Sunday services. But Monday to Friday first thing in the morning and early evening, Walbrook is a river of people travelling to and from their workplaces. These people pass by the church but, in the main, don’t come in and that is probably also, in the main, symptomatic of people who see little connection between the work they do and the Christian faith. As Mark Greene has written, “Society encourages us to believe that our faith is private and has no place in the working world. Indeed the working world operates on an atheistic basis. God, it believes, does not show up on the balance sheet. What we do in our own time is up to us, but there is no place for biblical ethics and claims about truth on the factory floor or in the board meeting” (Thank God it’s Monday, Scripture Union, 2002)

According to the most recent Business Register and Employment Survey, 392,400 people are employed in the City of London. This represents 8.3% of Greater London’s employment, and 1.4% of the UK’s total employment, meaning over 1 in 100 of the UK’s workforce are employed in the City. The great opportunity that the City’s churches seem to have, if it can be grasped, is to engage with working people and demonstrate the connections that do exist between the Christian faith and the world of work.

Those connections can be made. One example comes from Romans 12 where St Paul talks about offering the whole of your life to God as an act of worship, which includes your work whatever or wherever that may be, paid or voluntary. Or as Eugene Peterson puts it in his paraphrase of that passage: “Here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering.”

This was an important passage for me when I worked in the Civil Service for 18 years prior to ordination. What did it mean to offer the work that I was doing then – which involved seeking various ways to assist disabled people to find and keep jobs – to God as an act of worship? For me, it meant doing my work as well as I could – bringing all my experience, skills and understanding to the role – and doing my best for those I was seeking to assist – by offering as holistic a service as I could within the constraints of the role instead of going through the motions by doing the basics of the role but no more. I also explored opportunities to make connections between the work I was involved in and the social action that churches and other faith groups were engaged in. This led to a project which demonstrated the value to Jobcentre staff of engaging with their local faith communities and provided them with resources to enable that engagement to happen effectively.

When I was ordained this continued to be a focus of my ministry. So I have provided working people with weekly work-based reflections and prayers, written resources on being a Christian at work, led a network on Faiths in London’s Economy and have set up ESOL courses and social enterprise projects in parishes. As a result, when the shared partnership development role with St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Stephen Walbrook was advertised providing the opportunity to minister to working people in Central London and set up partnerships between churches and the organisations around them, it seemed too good an opportunity and too close a fit with my interests to overlook.

So, I’d like to explore with you this morning some more of the connections that exist between faith and work before concluding by telling you a little about our first initiative here at St Stephen Walbrook to make these connections for those who pass by this church each weekday.

As we do so, I’d like to take us back in time to the beginning of time and to the stories of Genesis of the creation of our world. In Genesis 2. 8 – 23 we read:

8 Then the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and placed in the garden the man he had formed. 9 The Lord God planted all sorts of beautiful trees there in the garden, trees producing the choicest of fruit. At the centre of the garden he placed the Tree of Life, and also the Tree of Conscience, giving knowledge of Good and Bad. 10 A river from the land of Eden flowed through the garden to water it; afterwards the river divided into four branches. 11-12 One of these was named the Pishon; it winds across the entire length of the land of Havilah, where nuggets of pure gold are found, also beautiful bdellium and even lapis lazuli. 13 The second branch is called the Gihon, crossing the entire length of the land of Cush. 14 The third branch is the Tigris, which flows to the east of the city of Asher. And the fourth is the Euphrates.

15 The Lord God placed the man in the Garden of Eden as its gardener, to tend and care for it. 16-17 But the Lord God gave the man this warning: “You may eat any fruit in the garden except fruit from the Tree of Conscience—for its fruit will open your eyes to make you aware of right and wrong, good and bad. If you eat its fruit, you will be doomed to die.”

18 And the Lord God said, “It isn’t good for man to be alone; I will make a companion for him, a helper suited to his needs.” 19-20 So the Lord God formed from the soil every kind of animal and bird, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever he called them, that was their name. But still there was no proper helper for the man. 21 Then the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the place from which he had removed it, 22 and made the rib into a woman, and brought her to the man.

23 “This is it!” Adam exclaimed. “She is part of my own bone and flesh! Her name is ‘woman’ because she was taken out of a man.”

Now there are all sorts of reasons why we might think this a surprising passage to look at in relation to faith and work but, as I hope to show, this is a passage about the very first tasks allocated to human beings and, because it comes before the Fall and before the entry of sin into the world, shows us something of God’s original intentions for work, to which it is imperative that we return.

Within the Biblical Creation stories human creativity is seen in: God’s blessing of humanity which included the tasks of increasing in number, filling and subduing the earth and, ruling over living creatures (Genesis 1: 28); Adam’s working and taking care of the garden (Genesis 2: 15); and, Adam’s naming of the living creatures (Genesis 2: 20). Albert Wolters notes that: “Adam and Eve, as the first married couple, represent the beginnings of societal life; their task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life." (Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview)

This story from Genesis 2 suggests that work is intended to be about creativity and care - naming the essence and possibilities of a good creation and I would like to explore three points with you in relation to this understanding.

The first point is about creativity and care. Our task is to cultivate creation (to make it fruitful) and to care for it (to maintain and sustain it), just as God told Adam to work the ground and keep it in order. Now, cultivating creation is a creative activity based on understanding the essence of each thing that we cultivate. This understanding comes from the task God gave to Adam of naming the creatures brought to him. Names in ancient culture are descriptive of the essence or meaning of objects or people. So, in this story Adam’s task is to identify the essence of each creature that God brings to him.

Because the creation is good, Adam is being asked to name all that is good, integrated and coinherent within it. James Thwaites has suggested that this is what Paul, in Romans 8, suggests creation is crying out for from us as human beings (Romans 8: 19-22): “It must be crying out for its goodness to be fully realised and fully released. The creation cannot be good apart from the sons and daughters because we alone were given the right to name it; we are the image bearers who were made to speak moral value and divine intent into it. We were created to draw forth the attributes, nature and power of God in all things.” (The Church Beyond The Congregation)

As we do this, as we look for the essence - the attributes, nature and power of God in all things - we also see possibilities inherent in creation. Everything in creation is both what it is in its own right and what it could become. God has given us the task of naming both what things are - their actuality - and what they could become - their possibilities.

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has noted that: “In the case of human willing, the possible precedes the actual, for the forming of a project precedes its realization: “The presence of man in the world means that the possible precedes the actual and clears the way for it; a part of the actual is a voluntary realisation of possibilities anticipated by a project.” (Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur)

“… according to Ricouer, human being is possibility: “it does not yet appear what we shall be” (1 John 3: 2). Human existence is “forward-orientated,” constantly projecting itself in front of itself towards a possible way of being. Possibility is therefore intimately connected to the imagination which projects it, and to time, specifically the future. Human being, then, is not limited to the here and now, that is, to actuality … there is a “surplus of being” to human existence, and this surplus of being is nothing other than possibility. We are not as we shall be. Thanks to this surplus of being – possibility – humanity can hope.” (Kevin Vanhoozer, “The Image of God and the Epic of Man” )

So, in our work, we can explore the actual by looking both for the good in the work itself and in those with whom we work and we are to name the good when see it. We are also called to look for new possibilities in our work - both in the work itself and in those with whom we work - and to name these possibilities as we see them. Because we live after the Fall, our task is one of attempting "to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.”

The second point is that we are not made to do this alone but in collaboration. Our work of naming the good and the possible is to be done together with God, with each other and with creation. We are to be in conversation with God, each other and our world. Paul Ballard has said that “human beings can enter into a creative partnership with [God] in terms of [our] own powers over creation” and that the “power to work is a God-given power that finds its place in relation to the service of God and man’s place in creation”. As an example of this, Christian Schumacher has written in his book God in Work about team working and the way in which, in teams, “each person should be willing to give up the ‘raw material’ of his or her own ideas in order that it can be subsumed or absorbed into the pool of other ideas being contributed by other team members, so that a new and better ‘product’ of the team’s combined endeavours can be created”. He suggests that this experience “of unity in a warm, effective and strongly bound cohesive team operating within divinely compatible structures” has moved people “to deepen their own inner lives” and has drawn them closer to God. But much of the work we have done as human beings has been with our back turned to God - we have been ‘out of conversation’ with him - and, therefore, instead of caring for creation we have exploited it for our own selfish ends.

To turn away from this blindness about ourselves brings us to the third point. We need to see that work is also about our own self-understanding or comprehension. Again, Paul Ricoeur is helpful here as he suggests that “in determining to do something, I likewise determine myself: “In the same way that a project opens up possibilities in the world, it opens up new possibilities in myself and reveals me to myself as a possibility of acting. My power-to-be manifests itself in my power-to-do …” The “possible” is therefore an essential component in self-understanding. I achieve self-understanding when I grasp what possibilities are open to me." (Biblical Narrative in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur)

Work is intended to develop our understanding of ourselves because, as we name what is good and what is possible, we also develop our understanding of ourselves. As Adam named the good and imagined possibilities for each creature that God brought to him, he was also coming to an understanding of his needs as a human being and rejecting each creature in turn as a suitable helper for him. Therefore, when God created Eve, Adam had the necessary self-understanding to recognise Eve immediately as the helper for which he had been seeking. Work is intended to be a place in which we grow in our understanding and comprehension of ourselves.

So, work is intended to be about creativity and care - naming the essence and possibilities of a good creation. It is about collaboration - a conversation with God, each other and our world - in order to better comprehend or understand ourselves and our world and so see the creative possibilities for developing our world and culture in line with the essence of its goodness.

As I hope we can see from these brief reflections on one passage, the Bible contains significant wisdom on approaches to work. I would like St Stephen Walbrook to be seen as a place which is able to draw on its significant history in the City of London and the wisdom resources of Christianity to offer services which will make a difference to the way businesses in the City work and to those who employed here. To do this I would like to build a network of people able to offer support and consultancy services which could enable businesses to address issues of diversity, ethics, faith literacy, relationships, social enterprise, social responsibility and spirituality as they affect customers, employees and suppliers in workplaces and the markets.

It is vital that businesses understand their clients and their diverse cultures. Religion is a key influence globally and has very varied cultural expression making faith literacy important for working effectively on a global basis. Gaining some background knowledge about faith communities in a safe environment can give staff the confidence needed to engage with people from faith communities more directly and appropriately.

Research among managers by Roffey Park has indicated the extent to which managers are looking for more meaning in their work (70%) and to which tensions are experienced between personal spiritual values and daily work (39%). Values play a defining role in motivation at work. So, an organization that has identified and examined the values by which their staff want to live, is a workplace with motivation potential. The closer the fit between personal (often faith-based) values and company values, the higher the level of motivation.

Workers in the UK took an average 5.3 days off work in 2012, according to the 2013 CBI/Pfizer Fit for Purpose survey, with stress, anxiety and depression given as the main causes of absence. There is a growing body of research which suggests that prayer and religion rank high among the best stress busters. Use of a church or prayer/quiet room for meditation, reflection or prayer on a regular basis can assist greatly in the management of stress. “It is now widely accepted that those organisations which have a ‘spiritually-friendly’ culture, show universally lower than average rates of absenteeism, workplace stress and staff turnover”. (Spiritual Care Matters NHS Scotland, 2009)

We have begun to provide, in a small way, the beginnings of this type of provision through Start:Stop, our new regular Tuesday morning opportunity at St Stephen Walbrook for City workers to start their day by stopping to reflect for 10 minutes. Every 15 minutes between 7.30am and 9.15am, a 10 minute session of reflection begins which includes bible passages, meditations, music, prayers, readings and silence. City workers are encouraged to drop in on their way into work to start their day by stopping to reflect. Between 40 and 50, but sometimes as many as 70, people are availing themselves of this opportunity.

We would be glad of your prayers for this new area of ministry and for our engagement with the working life of the City. Some of you will work here in the City yourselves and might be able to participate in or contribute to Start:Stop and other work-related ministry that we intend to develop. Others can support us through yours prayers for this new ministry and its development. I would be very happy to talk further with you about this area of ministry if you would like once the service is over and have brought some examples of resources with me which you would be welcome to look through.

We often think of worship as being about the services which are held in church but, when St Paul says in Romans 12 offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, which is your true and proper worship, he is saying that what we do outside church in our sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life is our real act of worship. Time spent gathered together as we are today should resource and re-energise us to live as Christian people in our homes, communities and workplaces, wherever those may be.

St Paul seems to be saying in Romans 12 that our natural inclination as human beings is to be focused on our own self interest. Our thinking needs to be transformed by our faith in order to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, who was focused on the needs of others. It is when we are transformed by the renewal of our minds – so that we think and act, to some extent, in Christ-like ways – that we can then live lives, which through service of others, are an act of worship to God.

At last Tuesday’s Start:Stop we reflected on Genesis 2 and concluded with the following prayer:

Creator God, you have given us the task of naming what things actually are, by looking for the essence of things and seeing the attributes, nature and power of you in all things. Enable us to do this in our work and for those with whom we work by naming the good when see it and by speaking moral value and divine intent into our workplaces and relationships. Through our speech, may we draw forth the attributes, nature and power of you in others. Guide us to see the good in our colleagues and workplaces. May we name and develop new possibilities in our work and colleagues.

Creator God, you have given us the task of naming what things could become - their possibilities. Enable us to look for new possibilities in our work - both in the work itself and in those with whom we work - and to name these possibilities as we see them. Guide us to see the good in our colleagues and workplaces. May we name and develop new possibilities in our work and colleagues.

Creator God, you have said that our work is intended to be about creativity and care - naming the essence and possibilities of a good creation. May we cultivate creation by making it fruitful and care for it by maintaining and sustaining it. Enable us to cultivate creation as a creative activity based on understanding the essence of each thing that we cultivate. Guide us to see the good in our colleagues and workplaces. May we name and develop new possibilities in our work and colleagues. Amen.

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Sufjan Stevens - All the Trees of the Field will clap their Hands.

Religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite

Today's Guardian has a perceptive article by John Mullan about Hilary Mantel's fiction which includes the following:

'... theology is often alive and well in Mantel’s fiction. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, formed by her early experience of Catholic doctrine and her later battles of cunning with the nuns of her convent school. In her next novel, Fludd, set in the 1950s, she creates a bizarre village on the edge of some northern moorland where the Roman Catholic church holds a redoubt. Transformed from her memories of Glossop in Derbyshire, where she grew up, it is another of Mantel’s prisons of the spirit. Fetherhoughton is presided over by a Catholic priest, Father Angwin, who seems to have lost his faith in God while keeping to his horrified belief in the devil, and the appalling Mother Perpetua, mother superior of the local convent. Into this benighted world comes the curate Fludd, a spiritual alchemist who can free anyone who will listen – but particularly the rebellious Sister Philomena – with the influence of his beneficent magic. It is the only Mantel novel with a happy ending.

Religion always impinges on Mantel’s fiction, but not because, like those Catholic converts Muriel Spark and Graham Greene whom she has diligently read, she uses it to detect any providential shape to events. Emma, one of the main characters in A Change of Climate, published in 1994, thinks of the Catholic church as a “bauble shop”, even as, in bereavement, she visits a shrine to tap its sympathetic magic. Religion reflects back the needs and fears of its would-be believers and its no-longer-believers. A Change of Climate, which moves back and forth between present and past, Norfolk and Africa, centres on a married couple, Ralph and Anna, who, driven initially by Christian idealism, have dedicated themselves to philanthropic work. Ralph is a “professional Christian”, but the novel tests any Christian faith in human goodness well past breaking point. Not in disdain of religiosity though: it may be that religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite. Mantel’s characters tend to have, as we say, their demons, and the temporal shifts of this novel are devised, in true Mantelian manner, to show us how these good people are haunted by their hardly repressed memories of evil.'

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16 Horsepower - Bad Moon Rising.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (5)

Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that the development of the Catholic Novel involved "the appearance of an entirely new kind of fiction in French, English and American literature":
"... metaphysics, ontology, and particularly the power of the historic Roman Catholic apocalyptic "matrix" of heaven, hell, and purgatory as deeper realities framing, enclosing, and terminating ostensible "reality" were never the touchstone of novels until the time of Bernanos and Greene. And all the long complex development from the time of Barbey d'Aurevilly was required before the work of Greene and Bernanos became possible. The work in aesthetics of Maritain, Claudel, and Mauriac was necessary to establish the critical premises of such a radically new form. Maritain made his distinction between an "individual," a human being as a social or political unit, and a "person," a man or woman with a soul to save or lose. Claudel asserted the possibility of dramas concerned with ontological problems and developmas for the stage. Meanwhile Mauriac claimed that the "romanticism" of stories about "individuals" was exhausted and declared that writers should examine the "eternal Tartuffe" or the "eternal Harpagon" to create a gallery of spiritual "types," as in his own fiction he proceeded to do."
Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the critical literature on the Modern Catholic Novel suggests:

"... the highest achievements in the genre of the Catholic novel were possible only because a window of opportunity appeared as Catholicism was venturing out from its defensive posture and entering into conversation with the secular world yet still maintained a clear and robust sense of its own identity. If this thesis is correct, we are unlikely to see again Catholic novels of the quality of the best of Mauriac, Bernanos, Greene, and Waugh or other European Catholic novelists in the years preceding Vatican II.

The Catholic writers who produced the flowering of the Catholic novel faced the perennial challenges of all Christian novelists: how to show the workings of grace and allow for the miraculous and supernatural without violating psychological credibility or the canons of realism, how to make salvation or damnation seem important to a secular reader, and how to convey a worldview based on a deeply held personal faith without appearing to engage in underhanded apologetics and evangelization ... not all critics agree that they met all these challenges successfully, yet some novelists found ways to navigate these difficulties and produce fiction of exceptionally high quality and wide appeal for secular as well as Christian readers. To what extent these extraordinary achievements in Catholic fiction were the result of the uncommon situation of the Church - an unprecedented openness to secularity while still retaining a clear and strong sense of its own identity - and to what extent they were the result of the appearance of several extraordinarily gifted Catholic writers must remain a matter for speculation."

Many of those discussed as Catholic novelists in this series of posts have, in the words of Theodore P. Fraser from The Modern Catholic Novel In Europe, "adamantly shunned for themselves the nomenclature of "Catholic novelist" and have insisted that as artists they possess their own angle of vision and unique literary universe":

"Ultimately they view themselves not as writers consciously writing novels with specific "Catholic" content but as Catholics who happen to be novelists. François Mauriac has perhaps best explained the intention and intellectual disposition of Catholic novelists who are creative creative artists in their own right: "Being a Christian," he says, "my Christian beliefs dominate my novels, not because I want to make propaganda for Christianity, but because it is the deepest part of my nature ... I am a christian first and last, which means a man responsible to God and to his conscience for the epoch he lives in ... he has been put here to play a certain role among his fellow men. He is engaged; it isn't a question of deliberately engaging himself.""

David Lodge, in The Novelist at the Crossroads, insists that:

"in their appraisal of Catholic novelists critics would do well to follow the wise dictum of Henry James: that artists must be granted the right to use their ideas, their artistic vision, their donnée as their inspiration directs them, and that the proper role of critics is to comment on the use that authors have made of their donnée through an evaluation of the craft of their work (Lodge 1971, 88) ...

Using James's sensible critical principal as his point of departure, Lodge grants that Greene indeed makes frequent use of Catholic symbolism to create his "metapoesis." Yet in doing so his intention, Lodge insists, is not to proselytize or to present "a body of belief requiring exposition and demanding categorical assent or dissent" but to see his fiction as "a system of concepts, source of situation, and reservoir of symbols ... to dramatize intuition about the nature of human experience" (Lodge 1971, 89). Hence, Lodge contends, Catholicism as a system of dogma and laws is not in or by itself an adequate key to understanding and interpreting the meaning of Greene's works, and these are, Lodge argues, as accessible to most readers as any other works of art that possess a unique vision and aesthetic patterns. These Catholic novels can therefore be appreciated as authentic pieces of literature above and beyond the doctrinal or confessional elements of faith contained therein."

Fraser believes that what Lodge says of Greene can be applied to other novelists considered as "Catholic".

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Bruce Cockburn - Understanding Nothing.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (2)

Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that:
"[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."
Chesterton 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.

Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the influence of Chesterton and Belloc came primarily through their non-fiction - "especially their vigorous defense of Catholicism" - but that they did write some fiction which had bearing on the development of the English Catholic novel:

"Chesterton used allegory and fantasy to express religious themes, a technique that would be utilized by later novelists. Although weak in terms of character development, his novels like Napoleon of Nottinghill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) effectively convey Chesterton's sense of Christianity as a robust, life-affirming religion, and a vision of humanity as flawed and unable to improve without supernatural help ...

There is a possibility that Belloc, who spent a good part of his youth in France (his father was French), may have read Huysmans and some of the other French novelists, for in his novel Emmanuel Burden (1904), a satire on the moral debasement of a mercantile English family, he writes with the kind of interiority and emphasis on the salvation of one's soul typical of the French Catholic writers."

Crowe continues that "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both of whom started publishing fiction in the late 1920s, were the most important English Catholic novelists of what is referred to as the golden age of the Catholic novel":

"Perhaps because of his robust enthusiasm for his new faith and his pugnacious disposition, Waugh made no apology for the less salient aspects of Catholicism ... By making that choice, Waugh produced novels that arouse repugnance in secular readers (as well as in some Catholics), but also provide for many Catholic readers a fiction that explores with great depth and subtlety the religious world in which they live. Although Waugh's approach alienates some, it is possible that his boldness in unabashedly insisting on Catholicism as a supernatural entity gives his fiction a depth and intensity that resonates with many readers, even many secular ones ...

Whereas Waugh looked to the Church as a principle of order in the chaotic decadence of modern life, Greene was more focused on the personal drama of good and evil, sin and grace. Also, although Greene had no illusions about the depravity to be found in the secular world and depicted it in stark detail, he was also attentive to a critique of the Catholic community. Perhaps for this reason, he did not arouse as much ire among critics as did Waugh. Like Mauriac, whom he very much admired, Greene is particularly hard on self-righteously pious Catholics who keep the letter of the law but have little charity."

Joseph Pearce writes on CatholicAuthors.com that:

"Graham Greene is perhaps the most perplexing of all the literary converts whose works animated the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. His visions of angst and guilt, informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility, make his novels, and the characters that adorn them, both fascinating and unforgettable.

His fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created."

Crowe writes that:

"Muriel Spark ... is one of the most important English Catholic novelists after Waugh and Greene ... Spark believed that her conversion enabled her to write: "Nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn't do it because I was never sure what I was. ... I didn't get my style until I became a Catholic because you just haven't got to care, and you need security for that." One critic refers to Spark's Catholicism as her "rock," a position from which the believer can survey the human condition. She herself said that Catholicism helped her become a satirist. "The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart. It's not a fluctuating thing." Spark's narrative voice is sure and confident, able to survey the foolishness in a fallen world without ever quite falling into cynicism. The irony, though sharp, is open to the possibility that God may bring good out of sin and evil."

Crowe wrote in 2007 that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon":

"... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism. Yet ... they have produced highly accomplished fiction in which religious meaning emerges from and is inextricably entwined with human experience. Some of their novels make extensive use of explicitly Catholic material. Others are deeply informed by a Catholic vision without much use of explicitly Catholic material ... Clearly they have not been doing the same kinds of things that Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, and Greene did, yet their fiction exemplifies exciting possibilities for the Catholic novel ... they have more than most contemporary English novelists, allowed their faith to inform their writing and have exemplified very different and interesting ways of integrating Catholicism into their work in ways that are substantial, imaginative, and serious."

Crowe concludes regarding Ellis, Lodge, Maitland and Read:

"These novelists do not hesitate to delineate with trenchant irony, biting satire, or simply devastatingly realistic description the ways in which the Church fails. Their angles of vision diverge and their critiques are distinctly different, focused on sexual teachings (Lodge), patriarchy (Maitland), or post-Vatican II developments (Read and Ellis). Yet they still see their world through the categories, the symbols, the stories, and the rituals of Catholicism - not just because they are literarily useful, but also because they undergird the story with a meaning that transcends the secular."

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James Macmillan - On Love.

Transforming the Workplace

This evening I ran a session on 'Transforming the Workplace', as part of the Continuing Ministerial Development programme in the Diocese of Chelmsford, with a very engaged and responsive group of curates.

Last week I listened to the second in this year's series of Keene Lectures at Chelmsford Cathedral where Revd. Will Morris outlined his understanding of the issues which led to the credit crunch and argued for a positive engagement by the Church with the world of work together with a postive theology of work to underpin that engagement. My 'Transforming the Workplace' session, which I had previously delivered for St Mellitus College students and which adapts materials from the Christians in the Workplace resource pack, seeks to outline such a theology of work.

I used as a framework N.T. Wright's idea of salvation history as a five act play suggesting that in 'Act 1: Creation' work is seen as a collaborative partnership developing the possibilities inherent in God's creation. 'Act 2: The Fall' is then our choice to undertake the task of developing the created order independently of God and, in aiming to exploit creation for human ends, to work against the best interests and inherent possibilities of creation. As a result, work is experienced as toil and hardship. The end of the play ('Act 5') sees our experience of work being restored to its original form (Isaiah 65.21-23).

At the heart of my suggested theology of work is a quote from Richard Baukham regarding our present experience of “painful contradiction between the promise and present reality.” Bauckham writes: “The contradiction arises from a hope for the world, for the whole of this worldly reality, which it exposes in all its god-forsakenness. The Christian’s suffering is thus a loving solidarity with the whole of the suffering creation … and a hopeful solidarity in expectation of the transformation of all creation … Love and hope for the world involve the Christian in a movement towards world-transformation which has two moments: critical opposition and creative expectation … In the first moment, hope liberates the Christian from all accommodation to the status quo and sets him critically against it … In the second moment, it gives rise to attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.”

As an example of work-related liberation from the status quo I used Mark Greene's summary of Biblical teaching on work. Greene says that work is “intended as a source of satisfaction and pleasure”; “an intrinsic part of our walk with God”; limited by our need for rest and by our ultimate value being found elsewhere; “done for God” as worship and therefore needing to be done well; “any activity that contributes to the provision of human needs – cooking, washing, food shopping, car maintenance – as well as those activities that generate money directly”; and a means of provision (for families and for those who don’t have), mutual service, and personal development. I argued that seeking to live these approaches to work with integrity involves a liberation from the status quo of ways in which work is viewed and approached within our culture.

For Bauckham that is only one part of a fuller response to living between the promise and the present reality. I illustrated the second aspect of being critically set against the status quo by using the example of Distributism, which aims to be "a third-way economic philosophy that sits between socialism and capitalism. According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals.

Distributism was developed by Hilaire Belloc from Roman Catholic social encyclicals and has since been a thread knitting together the journalistic pronouncements of G. K. Chesterton with the alternative arts and crafts communities formed by Eric Gill and Father Vincent McNabb, the ‘small is beautiful’ economics of E. F. Schumacher, and the work structuring methodology devised by Schumacher’s son, Christian. Gill, for example, wrote that the “factory system is unchristian primarily because it deprives workmen of responsibility for their work.”

Finally, there is creative expectation; "attempts to change the world in the direction of its promised transformation, imaginatively grasping and realising the objective possibilities in the present which conform most closely to the coming Kingdom.” This I illustrated with the example of Christian Schumacher who, in his work as a company consultant, restructures work so that each workgroup member can personally plan, do and evaluate at least one transformation in the work process. Schumacher “asks that … each person should be willing to give up the ‘raw material’ of his or her own ideas in order that it can be subsumed or absorbed into the pool of other ideas being contributed by other team members, so that a new and better ‘product’ of the team’s combined endeavours can be created”. This experience “of unity in a warm, effective and strongly bound cohesive team operating within divinely compatible structures” has moved participants “to deepen their own inner lives” and has drawn them closer to God.

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The Jam - Smithers-Jones.

Modern Catholic novels

I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.

Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:

"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."

Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.

All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.

In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:

“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.

Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.

What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.

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Woven Hand - Tin Finger.

Needing things incarnated

Interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about Image. In the article Image's founding director, Greg Wolfe, speaks about the influence of the Arts in his conversion:

"He converted to Catholicism when he was 23 and a graduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford University. He said that the two main highways leading him toward the church were art, including literary art, and ethics.

“I’ve never been a very good abstract thinker. I tend to need things incarnated, made concrete. So for me, art and ethics take the big ideas and make them concrete in a very palpable, powerful way,” he said. “I began to be interested in issues to do with human life, and life and death, and sexuality and marriage and what seemed to me to be an increasingly coherent and unified cluster of moral understandings on the part of the Catholic church. ...

“And then of course there was the great art and literature of the Catholic tradition,” he said, naming 20th-century French writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac; Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; British writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo as people who “had a huge impact on my journey toward the church.”

Mr. Wolfe said that he sees the Incarnation “as a model of balance, that it brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live,” he said. “It’s hard to be balanced in that way. Sometimes we even tend to valorize being on one side or the other as if that makes us somehow more pure, more committed.”"

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Rachmaninov - Vespers (Nyne Otpushchaeshi)