Holy Saturday

Station 14 - Jesus is laid in the tomb*

still
be still
be still and know
God
born
still God
still man
still born
still born among us
God
in flesh appearing
defenceless
helpless
needing us
all-knowing
un-knowing
all present
confined in space
a child
God child
incarnate
incarnate still
be still
be still and know

still
be still
be still and know
God
dead
still God
still man
still buried
still buried in the ground
God
in flesh appearing
defenceless
helpless
killed by us
falling
buried
germinating
growing
a seed
God man
incarnate
incarnate still
be still
be still and know

* The first verse of this meditation is by Alan Stewart.


In between

Between the action and its consequence
Between knowledge and its understanding
Between the invitation and the party
Between the longest day and the last day

The stone not rolled away
The tomb still guarded
The friends still scattered
The promise known
but not understood
The body still still

The still time
The still waiting time
The time between times
The last times
In between

Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste
and the dream of liberation and rebirth,
ours is the long days journey of the Saturday

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Mahalia Jackson - Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

Windows on the world / Metaxu (273)

Tower of London, 2013

William Kentridge, in Figuring Faith, applies Plato's term metaxu to art in a way that has considerable synergy with the Windows on the world series:

"Plato's term metaxu describes that which separates and connects, an ironic or oxymoronic, contradictory position. It makes me think of the wall between two prisoners that separates them, but that also makes communication possible through knocking. Or a window that separates you from the view outside, but also frames the view and makes you aware of what you are looking at. Metaxu also refers to an "in-between state", between being separated and connected, between a quotidian, every day reality and the world of mystery and transcendence beyond ... the very activity of making the work involves the artist in a journey of going from what is known to what is glimpsed at, half understood and tentatively approached with the work."

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Leonard Cohen and U2 - Tower Of Song.

'Visual Dialogue' invitation

You are invited to the opening night reception for Visual Dialogue; a joint exhibition by Rodney Lloyd Bailey and Jonathan Evens.

The reception will be from 7.30pm on Friday 5th October 2007 at St John the Evangelist, St John's Road, Seven Kings, Ilford IG2 7BB. Also featuring in the reception will be:

• a piece of conceptual sculpture created by Jonathan Evens in the week prior to the exhibition as a public art event;
• photographs by Rodney Lloyd Bailey of Jonathan's public art event; and
• meditations and images from Jonathan's collaboration with artist and writer Alan Stewart.

Rodney Bailey trained in Visual Arts and Design and Public Art at Chelsea College. His work is concerned with identity, communication and the difficulties we face in communicating our identity and nature to each other in a respectful and sincere way. In his work he hopes to give the audience an aspect of himself that is normally hidden from view. Rodney works in a variety of media and styles. His work can be viewed on his website and he recently exhibited at the Bankside Gallery as part of the Eye Play exhibition.

I am Vicar of St John's Seven Kings and a creative artist and writer. I paint in a symbolic expressionist style and writes poetry, meditations, stories and sketches. As curate at St Margaret's Barking I helped create opportunities for local people to contribute to a public art event, a series of arts workshops, the creation of a graffiti mural and a film/photographic project and exhibition. I have written on the arts for Art & Christianity, the Church Times, New Start, AM, Strait and The Month.

Rodney is a District Leader with the Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International (which means 'Value Creating Society'). He practices the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and seeks through SGI to build bridges through dialogue and cultural exchange. An interesting aspect of the collaboration between Jonathan and Rodney will be the dialogue between their two sets of beliefs. Rodney's link with St John's is that he is the son of one of the Churchwardens and came to services as a child.

Visual Dialogue will be open on: Friday 5th October, 6.30 – 10.00pm (including reception and performances); Saturday 6th October, 9.30am – 5.00pm; and Sunday 7th October, 12 noon – 5.00pm.

As a precursor to the Patronal Festival, from 1st to 5th October, I will publicly customise and decorate a four drawer cabinet in the Parish Centre. This unusual public art project will involve photomontages, constructions, and paintings to create a piece of conceptual sculpture that will be exhibited at St John's throughout our Patronal Festival weekend.

I will work publicly on the piece during the mornings of 1st - 5th (9.30am – 12 noon) and on the evenings of 1st and 4th (6.30 – 8.30pm). There is an open invitation to view the development of the piece and leave comments about the work and the project. Please come along and tell me what you think or follow the project on this blog. The project will be documented photographically by Rodney Lloyd Bailey.

Other Patronal Festival events at St John's include:

• Saturday 6th October - Coffee morning with stalls and refreshments in the Parish Centre from 10.00am – 12 noon;
• Saturday 6th October - Quiz Night from 7.00pm (for a 7.30pm start). Tickets for the Quiz Night are £7.00 for adults and £5.00 for those under 16 and are available from the Parish Office. They include a fish/chicken and chips supper. Teams will be eight per table;
• Sunday 7th October - Revd. Rosemary Enever (Redbridge Area Dean) will preach and preside at 10.00am for the Patronal Festival Holy Communion Service;
• Sunday 7th October - Choral Evensong at 6.30pm featuring the combined choirs of St John’s and St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch with the preacher being Revd. Clare Nicholson, Vicar of St Peter’s.

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Check out Switchfoot's Meant To Live.

How (Not) To Speak Of God

I'm part way through Peter Rollins' book How (Not) To Speak Of God (thanks again to Huw). The book is an exciting and fresh discussion of how Christianity can speak into and about our postmodern condition. Brian McLaren seems right to rave about the book in his Foreword as "one of the first and most hopeful expressions to date of Christian theology being done in a postmodern context."

Several of Rollins' arguments are synergous with ideas expressed by Nicholas Mosley and Walter Brueggemann and the theological conversation that Rollins is engaging in can only be enhanced by the ideas that Mosley and Brueggemann bring to the discussion.

Rollins writes of the way in which our approach to speaking of God:

"must be a powerless one which employs words as a way of saying that we have been left utterly breathless by a beauty that surpasses all words. This does not mean that we remain silent - far from it. The desire to get beyond language forces us to stretch language to its very limits. As Samuel Beckett once commented, we use words in order to tear through them and glimpse at what lies beneath. The desire to say nothing, to create sacred space, opens up the most beautiful type of language available - the language of parables, prose and poetry."

Similarly, Mosley writes about the need to "hear for ourselves what might be going on just behind our words, off-stage" and to:

"evolve a language which will try to deal not just with facts, with units of data, together with the patterns, connections, that such data, together with the minds that observe them, make - in particular a language that can deal at the same time both with the data and with the language that is traditionally used to describe them. By this, apparent contradictions might be held. This language would be elusive, allusive; not didactic. Some such language has been that of poetry, of art; also of love ..."

Rollins goes on to argue that the emerging conversation:

"is demonstrating an ability to stand up and engage in a powerless, space-creating dis-course that opens up thinking and offers hints rather than orders. In short, the emerging community must endeavour to be a question rather than an answer and an aroma rather than food. It must seek to offer an approach that enables the people of God to become the parable, aroma and salt of God in the world, helping to form a space where God can give of God."

Similarly, Brueggemann has argued that "the task of the Christian minister is not to construct a full alternative world but to fund - provide the pieces, materials and resources - out of which a new world can be imagined." Our responsibility, he says, "is not a grand scheme or a coherent system, but the voicing of lots of little pieces out of which people can put life together in frsh configurations":

"Over time, these pieces are stitched together into a sensible collage, stitched together, all of us in concert, but each of us idiosyncratically, stitched together in a new whole - all things new."

One of the Ikon services described in Rollins' book speaks about our experience as Christians being the experience of Holy Saturday; "that 24 hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Saturday, between crucifixion and resurrection." A reflection from this service by Ikon says that Holy Saturday "speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after." It asks: "Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling, from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday?"

Brueggemann also writes of this perception of Holy Thursday citing George Steiner as writing:

“There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor scripture make report. It is a Saturday. And it has become the longest of days. We know of that Good Friday which Christianity holds to have been that of the Cross. But the non-Christian, the atheist, knows of it as well. That is to say he knows of the injustice, of the interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending … We know also about Sunday. To the Christian, that day signifies an intimation, both assured and precarious, both evident and beyond comprehension, of resurrection, of a justice and a love that have conquered death. If we are non-Christians or non-believers, we know of that Sunday in precisely analogous terms … The lineaments of the Sunday carry the name of hope (there is no word less deconstructible). But ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation of rebirth on the other.”

In my In Between collaboration with Alan Stewart, from our time together at NTMTC, we used the three days of Easter as a paradigm for our own experience as Christians arguing that, in our Christian journey we experience: rebirth (an Easter Sunday experience); suffering (a Good Friday experience); and tension, from the now and the not yet of the Kingdom (an Easter Saturday experience). We structured our material non-chronologically because we wanted to leave people in the tension of the now and not yet which is where we thought we spend most of our time as Christians and illustrated this with the quote from Steiner.

Several of the meditations that we wrote for this collection also express ideas that have synergy with those developed by Rollins in How (Not) To Speak Of God:

in between

Between the action and its consequence
Between knowledge and its understanding
Between the invitation and the party
Between the longest day and the last day

The stone not rolled away
The tomb still guarded
The friends still scattered
The promise known
but not understood
The body still still

The still time
The still waiting time
The time between times
The last times
In between

Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste
and the dream of liberation and rebirth, ours is the long days journey of the Saturday.

are/are not

We hear you
and
do not.
We are with you
and
are not.
Through whom,
with whom
and in whom,
we are – what?
We are one
with what
we are
not.

No voice is audible,
yet we hear.
No hand touches ours,
yet we feel.
No eye has seen the glory,
yet we kneel.
What you are,
who you are
is and
is not
clear.

Knowing
and
not knowing.
In
and out
of touch.
Out of mind
yet
mindful.
Out of sight
yet
insight.

We are
in relation
to much
that is excess -
beyond
comprehension
and expectation –
being
night
and light.

These are among the In Between meditations that I will be reading at the opening night reception for Visual Dialogue on Friday 5th October.

Rollins' book comes out of and develops an emerging conversation about ways to speak of, with, and to hear from, God. Mosley, Brueggemann and In Between are part of that conversation of which there is much more still to be said. Some further thoughts on the significance of Mosley, Brueggemann and others can be found by clicking here.

A final thought is that Jim White is the bard of this emerging conversation. To see what I mean, check out the lyrics to Static On The Radio and 10 Miles To Go On A 9 Mile Road or try this video.

'Visual Dialogue' invitation

You are invited to the opening night reception for Visual Dialogue; a joint exhibition by Rodney Lloyd Bailey and myself.

The reception will be from 7.30pm on Friday 5th October 2007 at St John the Evangelist, St John's Road, Seven Kings, Ilford IG2 7BB. Also featuring in the reception will be:

• a piece of conceptual sculpture that I will create in the week prior to the exhibition as a public art event;


• photographs by Rodney Lloyd Bailey of this public art event; and


• meditations and images from my collaboration with artist and writer Alan Stewart.
  

Rodney Bailey trained in Visual Arts and Design and Public Art at Chelsea College. His work is concerned with identity, communication and the difficulties we face in communicating our identity and nature to each other in a respectful and sincere way. In his work he hopes to give the audience an aspect of himself that is normally hidden from view. Rodney works in a variety of media and styles. His work can be viewed on his website and he recently exhibiting at the Bankside Gallery as part of the Eye Play exhibition.

I am Vicar of St John's Seven Kings and a creative artist and writer. I paint in a symbolic expressionist style and writes poetry, meditations, stories and sketches. As curate at St Margaret's Barking I helped create opportunities for local people to contribute to a public art event, a series of arts workshops, the creation of a graffiti mural and a film/photographic project and exhibition. I have written on the arts for Art & Christianity, the Church Times, New Start, AM, Strait and The Month.

Rodney is a District Leader with the Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International (which means 'Value Creating Society'). He practices the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and seeks through SGI to build bridges through dialogue and cultural exchange. An interesting aspect of the collaboration between Rodney and myself will be the dialogue between our two sets of beliefs. Rodney's link with St John's is that he is the son of one of the Churchwardens and came to services as a child.

Visual Dialogue will be open on: Friday 5th October, 6.30 – 10.00pm (including reception and performances); Saturday 6th October, 9.30am – 5.00pm; and Sunday 7th October, 12 noon – 5.00pm.

As a precursor to the Patronal Festival, from 1st to 5th October, I will publicly customise and decorate a four drawer cabinet in the Parish Centre. This unusual public art project will involve photomontages, constructions, and paintings to create a piece of conceptual sculpture that will be exhibited at St John's throughout their Patronal Festival weekend.

I will work publicly on the piece during the mornings of 1st - 5th (9.30am – 12 noon) and on the evenings of 1st and 4th (6.30 – 8.30pm). There is an open invitation to view the development of the piece and leave comments about the work and the project. Please come along and tell him what you think or follow the project on this blog. The project will be documented photographically by Rodney.

Other Patronal Festival events at St John's include:

• Saturday 6th October - Coffee morning with stalls and refreshments in the Parish Centre from 10.00am – 12 noon;


• Saturday 6th October - Quiz Night from 7.00pm (for a 7.30pm start). Tickets for the Quiz Night are £7.00 for adults and £5.00 for those under 16 and are available from the Parish Office. They include a fish/chicken and chips supper. Teams will be eight per table;


• Sunday 7th October - Revd. Rosemary Enever (Redbridge Area Dean) will preach and preside at 10.00am for the Patronal Festival Holy Communion Service;


• Sunday 7th October - Choral Evensong at 6.30pm featuring the combined choirs of St John’s and St Peter’s Aldborough Hatch with the preacher being Revd. Clare Nicholson, Vicar of St Peter’s.

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Check out Over The Rhine's I Want You To Be My Love.

Public Art event & Art Exhibition

The four drawer cabinet that I shall be customising and decorating

From 1st to 7th October 2007 St John's Seven Kings will stage a public art event and exhibition as part of our Patronal Festival. The public arts event will lead up to the Patronal Festival, running from 1st to 5th October, with the exhibition taking place over the Patronal Festival weekend (5th - 7th October)

For the public arts event I will be customising and decorating a four drawer cabinet in the St John's Parish Centre. This project will involve photomontages, constructions, and paintings to create a piece of conceptual sculpture that will be exhibited at St John's throughout our Patronal Festival weekend. I will be working publically on the piece during the mornings and evenings of 1st to 5th October and there is an open invitation to view the development of the piece and leave comments about the work and the project. Comments can also be left on this blog and, while working on the project, I will aim to update the blog daily with progress on the project. The project will be documented photographically by the artist, Rodney Bailey.

Rodney and I will jointly exhibit paintings in St John's Church and Centre over the Patronal Festival weekend (5th-7th October). The exhibition will also feature the newly created piece of conceptual sculpture. On the evening of Friday 5th October there will be an opening night reception for the exhibition during which Rodney's photographs and public reaction to the public art project will be displayed. I will also perform meditations and display images from my In Between collaboration with my friend, artist and writer, Revd. Alan Stewart.

Rodney trained in Visual Arts and Design and Public Art at Chelsea College. His work is concerned with identity, communication and the difficulties we face in communicating our identity and nature to each other in a respectful and sincere way. In his work he hopes to give the audience an aspect of himself that is normally hidden from view. Rodney works in a variety of media and styles. His work can be viewed in Central London this autumn as part of the Eye Play exhibition at Bankside Gallery from 29th August to 9th September 2007.

Rodney is a District Leader with the Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International (which means 'Value Creating Society'). He practices the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and seeks through SGI to build bridges through dialogue and cultural exchange. An interesting aspect of the collaboration between Rodney and I will be the dialogue between our two sets of beliefs. Rodney's link with St John's is that he is the son of one of the Churchwardens and came to services as a child.

Other events and activities during the St John's Patronal Festival include a coffee morning and quiz night on Saturday 6th October and the Patronal Festival service (10am, with Area Dean Revd. Rosemary Enever) and Choral Evensong (6.30pm, with the combined choirs of St John's and St Peter's Aldborough Hatch) on Sunday 7th October.