Church Times - Art review: Reflections on Christian Themes: Jonathan Hutchins (Harrow Arts Centre, Pinner)

My latest exhibition review for Church Times , is on 'Reflections on Christian Themes' by Jonathan Hutchins at Harrow Arts Centre:

'The exhibition ranges from his earliest religious works — paintings based on medieval images — through to large views of St Mary’s, Harrow on the Hill, painted en plein air. In between, are the three series of Stations of the Cross, plus associated drawings and monotypes, paintings inspired by images from David Jones, including some anti-war paintings, and large-scale paintings on The Women of Jerusalem, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the revelations of St John, and The Dream of the Rood. It is an impressive and eclectic collection of works rendered in the Expressionist style that Hutchins favours.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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U2 - Street of Dreams.

Thomism, Creativity and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain

I recently attended Thomism, Creativity and the Arts: Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, a symposium on artistry, religion and culture in the modern world. The symposium drew together philosophers, theologians, musicians, poets, liturgists and other artists, to converse around the theme of human creativity. The conference included plenary talks, panel discussions, poetry reading, music and film, and gathered a rich and diverse range of presenters from across the UK and USA, with the final keynote talk given by Sir James MacMillan, renowned Scottish composer and conductor. I particularly appreciated input on Raïssa Maritain's journal and poetry, as well as the opportunity to also discover the poetry of James Matthew Wilson.

The Maritains remain at the heart of a dialogue around the theme of human creativity, being uniquely well-situated to confront the problems, principles and complexities of artistry in the modern era – illuminated by the wisdom of St Thomas Aquinas. Jacques Maritain’s belief in the artist’s mission to ‘shelter the prayer, instruct the intelligence, and rejoice the eyes and the soul,’ provides an inspiring mandate to investigate art-making in the present age, in all its depth and variety. 

What was frustrating about this symposium was a denigrating and dismissive attitude on the part of some in the audience towards modern and contemporary art on the basis that such art was not beautiful and had no interest in beauty. Such attitudes which, in this context seek to draw on some of Maritain's writings about transcendentals, generally look primarily to a past "golden age" in their definition of beauty and therefore struggle to deal adequately with the paradox that the Suffering Servant, who had "no beauty that we should desire him" accomplished the most beautiful act through the most horrific torture. Modern and contemporary art often addresses this paradox with great depth and insight in ways that accord with Maritain's writings, particularly in Art and Scholasticism. For a different take on beauty and transcendentals see here.

What is also frustrating about this denigratory attitude towards modern and contemporary art is that it was not held by the Maritain's themselves. They not only wrote about contemporary art but also deliberately met and dialogued with a very wide range of contemporary artists, drawing some into Thomistic study circles and influencing, while also being influenced by, their work. 

Jean-Luc Barré writes in Jacques and Raïssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven of how poets, painters and musicians began gravitating around the Maritains, “most of whom they met in the company of Léon Bloy.” This journey of significant influence began for the Maritain’s with Bloy. The reading of his novel Le Femme pauvre led on to their meeting with the man himself. A period of examination by the Maritains of “the life, the doctrines, and the sources of Catholicism” ensued before, on 5th April 1906, “the couple, at the end of “long conversations” confided to Bloy their desire to become Catholics.” The artist Georges Rouault, who they also came to know, made a similar journey to that of the Maritains, first reading Le Femme pauvre before meeting Bloy. Barré writes that Rouault “seems to have come to the home of this prophet of malediction seeking for other reasons, and always more painful ones, to question himself and to set out towards the unknown.”

William Dryness writes in Rouault: A Vision of Suffering and Salvation that, “Jacques and Raïssa Maritain met Rouault for the first time in November of 1905, and Raïssa recalls evenings when she and her husband would sit and listen to Rouault and Bloy discuss “every important question about art.”” Rouault was, for the Maritains, “the first revelation of a truly great painter” and it was in him that they perceived “the nature of art, its imperious necessities, its antinomies and the conflict of very real demands, sometimes tragic, which made up perhaps the theatre of the artist’s mind.”

Following their discovery of Georges Rouault was, “then of Pierre van der Meer de Valcheren, a Dutch novelist who was presented to them in 1911, two days after his own conversion … Then, during the war, they met the young seventeen-year-old composer, Georges Auric, soon a frequent visitor at Versailles …”

Barré goes on to describe how these friendships led to the formation of Thomistic study circles at the Maritain’s home in Meuden “where close friends of the couple came together – Abbé Lallement, Roland Dalbiez, Doctor Pichet, Noële Denis, the eldest daughter of the painter Maurice Denis, Vitia Rosenblum, the brother-in-law of Stanislas Fumet.” Barré continues, “The year 1921 would see the first circle grow larger: a Romanian prince converted to Catholicism, Vladimir Ghika, a young orientalist eager to bring together the Muslim and Christian worlds, Louis Massignon, the philosopher Henri Gouhier, the writer Henri Ghéon, the future Abbé Altermann, among others, joined the study group.

In the 1930s, Marc Chagall became part of the circle around the Maritain's. The Chagalls were regular attendants at the Maritain's "weekly Sunday gathering in Meuden, where the agenda was how to return secular France to spiritual awareness." The Maritains "made their home ... a centre of spiritual enlightenment for Paris's disillusioned writers and artists such as Rouault and Max Jacob." "Thanks to them, many converted or rediscovered their Catholic origins, most noisily Jean Cocteau."

In The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer note that: “the French poet, writer, and surrealist filmmaker Jean Cocteau converted under the influence of Maritain. For the painters Gino Severini, a pioneer of Futurism, and Otto Van Rees, one of the first Dadaists-both converts - Maritain played the role of spiritual counselor. And when the promoter of abstract art Michel Seuphor embraced Catholic faith in the 1930s, he, too, had extensive contact with Maritain. For all of them, the dictum of the Irish poet Brian Coffey, once a doctoral student under Maritain, applied: modern art needs a Thomist conceptual framework.”

The Maritain's initial approach, Barré writes,“to [Rouault] this “true and great artist” in his imperious confrontation with the first demands of the creative act … then took form and developed into a reflection which ended with the publication in 1920 of Art et Scolastique.” Art and Scholasticism:

“set itself to demonstrate the autonomy of the creative act, the particular responsibility that falls to artists. Directed to beauty as to its very own absolute … art has “an end and a set of rules and values, which are not those of men, but of the work of art to be produced.” … Nor does the nature of art consist in imitating the real, but rather in “composing or constructing” by delving into the “immense treasure of created things, from sensible nature as from the world of souls.” In this way the creator becomes “an associate of God in the making of beautiful works.” … In praise of pure art, Art et Scolastique can be read as the manifesto of a new classicism, founded on “the simplicity and purity of means,” aspiring to nothing more than the veracity of the work itself. In modern art Maritain disclosed the first steps of search in this direction and noticed in cubism “the infancy, still toddling and screaming, of an art that is once again pure.” … it contained a kind of call, inviting philosophers and artists to enter into a “conversation” that would lead to an escape from “the immense intellectual disarray inherited from the nineteenth century.””

As Barré notes the book “was closer to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie than to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas” and, as a result, in the 1920s and 1930s, Maritain’s cultural criticism (Antimodern, 1922, Religion et Culture, 1930) and his reflections on aesthetics in Art and Scholasticism enjoyed wide interest in artistic and intellectual circles.

One example of this response can be found in Gino Severini’s The Life of a Painter. Severini writes of his encounter with Maritain as marking an important point in his life, in part because Maritain loaned him money to set up his own art school. During his initial meeting with Maritain it was clear to him that he was being submitted to a thorough examination on the part of those present (which included Ghéon, as well as the Maritains) and that his every word was significant to them. As he left, Maritain put a book into his hands, “saying: “Take a look at it when you have the time.”” On the electric train back to Paris, Severini discovered that he had been given a first edition of Art and Scholasticism and “was amazed at the extent to which it agreed with the most modern goals, and at the profound sense of freedom, from what supreme heights of intelligence, the author could observe, put in order, and clarify, everything related to art.”

Severini continues: “… what a great sense of joy I felt upon discovering, in Maritain, the confirmation of certain thought patterns, certain ways of clarifying these to myself and to others, and, what I considered most important, of discovering a friendship and human comprehension of the most profound sort. Later the formidable significance of Art et Scolastique became clear to everyone, as did the caliber of the author, the transparency and clarity of whose soul recalls the purest of rock crystals.”

Severini reconverted to Catholicism in the 1920s. He claims that his thinking on this decision began prior to the conversions of the poets Jean Cocteau and Pierre Reverdy and before meetings with Maurice Denis and Jacques Maritain. He highlights the writings of the Benedictine Desideratus Lenz as an influence of the direction of his work but not his conversion. The most significant influence on his decision seems to have been the Abbé Sarraute who Severini met at Denis' home and who conducted the Severini's marriage ceremony.

These artists and other French-speaking ecclesiastics were in touch with and inspired by the writings of Jacques Maritain and the practice of Maurice Denis. "Maritain played a part in the next stage of Severini's career by suggesting that the Swiss painter Alexandre Cingria visit Severini and encourage him to enter a competition for the decoration of a Church in the Fribourg Canton of Switzerland. Severini did so, won the competition and went on to work on several Swiss churches over the latter period of his career. So much so, that Denis spoke of him as "the most famous decorator of Swiss churches."

Denis first worked with some of these artists when he was commissioned to work on the renovation of Notre-Dame Geneva and also became artistic director for the construction of Saint-Paul Grange-Canal, also in Geneva. Together they dreamed of "creating a movement of rebirth of religious art in France and in all Catholic countries." This ambition resulted in 1919 in the formation by Cingria of The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice in Switzerland and also of the Ateliers d'Art Sacré by Denis and Georges Desvallieres in Paris.The Groupe de Saint-Luc et Saint-Maurice which he founded, built, restored and decorated more than 70 churches in Switzerland during the interwar years.

Severini writes that Jean Cocteau was chief among the “somewhat atheist poets” that Maritain transformed into Christian artists but notes too that this period “was all too brief.” Similarly, Rowan Williams considers in Grace and Necessity that “Maritain’s relations with Cocteau … constituted an important if inconclusive episode in the lives of both.”

Although Cocteau’s subsequent life seemed, from the perspective of Maritain, to be “going deeper “into the caves of death” and to be dealing with the “powers of darkness”, the influence that Maritain and Catholicism had had on Cocteau was not altogether lost. Something of this can be sensed in the church decorations that Cocteau undertook.

In 1960 he painted murals in one of the chapels of Notre Dame de France, London. According to eye witnesses, he always began by lighting a candle before the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes and spoke to his characters while he worked on the mural. For instance, he is reported as telling the virgin of the Annunciation, “O you, most beautiful of women, loveliest of God’s creatures, you were the best loved. So I want you to be my best piece of work too… I am drawing you with light strokes… You are the yet unfinished work of Grace.” Cocteau is buried at the chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, where he had also painted decorations. Before his death, he had also been making sketches to paint a chapel in Frejus which was actually decorated, after his death, by the gardener that Cocteau had trained as an artist shortly before he died.

Jacques and Raïssa Maritain moved to Meudon in 1924, where Jacques started his famous Thomistic Study Circles. Peter A. Redpath writes, in a review of The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain, that: 
‘Their fifteen years there were tumultuous. Maritain attempted to rival the negative literary influence of André Gide in French culture and came into public conflict with Jean Cocteau. Among the things that [Ralph] McInerny tells us caused conflict among Gide, Cocteau, and Maritain was Gide’s celebration of homosexuality in the book Corydon, and Cocteau’s flamboyant lifestyle as a homosexual drug addict and his overall character as “an enfant terrible of artistic innovation”.’

One result of this period was Art and Faith, the book which Maritain published in 1926 as a treasury of insights on the broad and interrelated topics of art and faith revealed in the correspondence of letters between he and Cocteau. Maritain wrote, ‘We merely claim that these two can love each other and remain free.’ Cocteau went on much later in his life to decorate several churches and chapels, including the chapel of Saint-Blaise des Simples near his home in Milly-la-Fôret where he was buried amidst the murals he had prepared for this purpose himself. His self chosen epitaph was 'Je reste avec vous' or 'I remain with you'.

His chapel murals, including those at Notre Dame de France in London, are, perhaps, a late flowering of the French Catholic Revival within which Maritain had played such a key role. These murals, newly restored and protected behind a glass screen, are unique examples of the art of the French Catholic Revival within the UK.

 
Robert Fallon has also written about this same connection in an essay entitled Composing Subjectivity which explores Maritain 's poetic knowledge in Igor Stravinsky and Messiaen:

'Maritain and Stravinsky first met after a concert on 10 June 1926, at the time that Stravinsky was writing his first work with a religious text, a Pater Noster for four-part chorus. That year, Cocteau published his Lettre a Jacques Maritain and Maritain his Reponse a Jean Cocteau; both volumes are dedicated to Stravinsky. By the end of April 1927, Stravinsky had returned to the Orthodox faith that he had abandoned in his youth. He later wrote that "Jacques Maritain may have exercised an influence on me at this time [ 1926]. "Though Stravinsky denied that Maritain played a role in his conversion, his assistant Robert Craft says that Maritain did exert some influence on his return to the Church. In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera oratorio Oedipus Rex, a collaboration with Cocteau, premiered in Paris. 

Following Oedipus Rex, however, Stravinsky's attitude toward Maritain became ambivalent. In 1928, he wrote to one of his patrons, Victoria Ocampo, that Maritain's entourage nauseated him. In another letter he describes Maritain as: 

"one of those people of superior intelligence who are lacking in humanity, and if Maritain himself does not deserve this judgment, certainly it applies to a great deal of his work.

Maritain is still attached to the nihilism of his youth, and this can be sensed in all of his books, despite the great value of his work in Christian and Thomist thought."

Stravinsky's famous Norton Lectures of 1941, delivered at Harvard University and later published as Poetique musicale, refer several times to Maritain and borrow his neo-Thomistic definition of a composer as a medieval artisan who orders and disciplines his craft. The book's considerable debt to Maritain includes quotations from the very same passages from Baudelaire, Poussin, Bellay, and Montaigne that Maritain had used in Art et Scholastique two decades earlier ...

Unlike Stravinsky, Messiaen never met Maritain, though by his own account he did read one book (probably Art et Scholastique) by him in 1927. He said it was "a book of high philosophy that seemed very difficult to me," but admitted having benefited from it. Maritain's influence is suggested in Messiaen's views on artistic imitation, his skeptical attitude toward science, his apparent interest in Emmanuel Mounier's personalist movement, and his rhetorical use of terms such as "poetic intuition."

Among Messiaen's early works, La Nativite du Seigneur (1935) most strongly suggests Maritain's influence in its Thomistic theme of truth. Like Oedipus Rex, La Nativite opens a window onto Messiaen's epistemology. Comprised of nine movements for solo organ lasting twice as long as any composition he had yet written, La Nativite quickly entered the organist's repertoire and remained one of his favorite works. Though it bears no dedication, Messiaen later said it was written in homage to his teacher Paul Dukas.'

Fallon also notes that 'Olivier Messiaen's father, Pierre Messiaen, did know Maritain, whose books quote English Romantic poetry in the father's translations.'

Stephen Schloesser's 'Jazz Age Catholicism offers an original, insightful, and penetrating analysis of an important moment in the cultural history of modern France. It argues that pervasive collective bereavement in the aftermath of World War I prompted a profound cultural shift in elite French society that made Catholicism—dismissed only a few years earlier as retrograde, essentially out of step with the modern world, and archaic—a vibrant and consoling cultural option for many of France's most innovative and creative minds ... prominent French Catholic thinkers and artists embraced modernity not by wholesale rejection of the past but by effecting a synthesis of medieval and modern philosophical principles and artistic forms. At the forefront of this experiment in Catholic renewal and redefinition were Jacques Maritain, Georges Bernanos, Georges Rouault, and Charles Tournemire. Refusing to abandon the philosophic and aesthetic traditions of the Catholic past—whether Scholasticism in philosophy (in the case of Maritain) or Gregorian chant in music (as was Tournemire's striking accomplishment)—each of Schloesser's subjects "formulat[ed] traditional Catholic ideas in modernist guise" ...

Schloesser's ... willingness to think about how sexual modernity (epitomized in the 1920's by homosexuality) often coincided with a deep respect for cultural order—most evident in Jean Cocteau's abiding friendship with, and respect for, Jacques and Raissa Maritain—offers us a new way to understand the modernist initiatives of inter-war Catholicism: "la main tendue,"once understood only as the outstretched hand that hoped to bring Catholics and Communists together, emerges here as another form of cultural rapprochement, equally unexpected by the standards of the pre-war era, by which Catholics and homosexuals could find common ground.

Schloesser also notes that, 'Maritain's extended argument in Art and Schlasticism made two principal points: first, religion and the avant-garde are eminently compatible as they meet in the artistic and aesthetic arenas; second, there is no particularly "religious" form of art.' As a result, 'Maritain gave a Catholic artist licence to jettison received external forms and set out on an avant-garde path. One thing alone mattered: the eternal formal principle that radiated clarity ... from within and gave unity and meaning to the organic whole.'

The failure of Maritain's relationship with Cocteau came at a time in which more than one of those whose conversions he had won wandered away from their regained faith and in which he became suspect in the eyes of Catholics in general. He questioned whether he had been wrong and mistaken to bother himself with all these literary people. Reflecting these new problems confronting him, Barré writes that new and different friendships formed around him with his network becoming “more open to philosophers, professors, French and foreign religious.”

Maritain’s greatest influence on an artist was perhaps not on one of those that was a part of his immediate circle. Art and Scholasticism was important, as Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel write in The Maker Unmade, to the thinking in Eric Gill’s establishments at Ditchling, Capel-y-ffin and Pigotts as well as to David Jones’s thinking about art. 

Rowan Williams writes in Grace and Necessity that: “Jones’ exposure to Maritain came through his participation in Gill’s project. After demobilization in 1919, Jones studied first at the Westminster School of Art, where it appears that a catholic friend introduced him to Fr. John O’Connor. He became a Roman Catholic in 1921 and, prompted by O’Connor, joined Gill at Ditchling later that year … Thus, he was alongside Gill and Gill’s colleagues … during the crucial period during which they were all reading Maritain; and it is very clear that for Jones … this made sense of what he had assimilated at the Westminster School of Art.”

As Rene Hague later wrote, ‘the Post-Impressionist attitude to the arts fitted in very well with Maritain’ and ‘Thomism’. Miles and Shiel write that: “The philosophy of Maritain explored two related questions that are of importance for David Jones: signification and epiphany. By rigorous habit, the artist would not only be able to reveal this or that object under the form of paint but also make an epiphany, make the universal shine out from the particular. Thus, what is re-presented also becomes a sign of something else and if that something else is significant of something divine, then the art can claim to have a sacred character or function, a sacramental vitality.”

Similarly, Williams argues that what preoccupies Jones from the beginning is “precisely what so concerns Maritain, the showing of the excess that pervades appearances.” As his work develops, Jones comes to see that you paint ‘excess’ by: “the delicate superimposing of nets of visual material in a way that teases constantly by simultaneously refusing a third dimension and insisting that there is no way of reading the one surface at once. As in the Byzantine icon, visual depth gives way to the time taken to ‘read’ a surface: you cannot construct a single consistent illusion of depth as you look, and so you are obliged to trace and re-trace the intersecting linear patterns.”

Williams notes that in several respects Jones takes Maritain a stage further. Firstly, in that “the half-apprehended consonances of impressions out of which an artwork grows has to be realized in the process of actually creating significant forms which, in the process of their embodiment, in stone, words, or pigment, uncover other resonances, so that what finally emerges is more than just a setting down of what was first grasped.”

Secondly, in “the way in which a life may become a significant form – as, decisively and uniquely; in the life of Christ.” He: “illustrates a point Maritain does not quite get to. Jones implies that the life of ‘prudence’, a life lived in a consciously moral context, however exactly understood, is itself an act of gratuitous sign-making; moral behavior is the construction of a life that can be ‘read’, that reveals something in the world and uncovers mystery.”

Both are exemplified by Jones’ life and practice as he turns away “from one mode of representation in which he excelled in order to include more and more of the interwoven simultaneous lines of signification and allusion” in “an attempt to embody a more radical love in what he produces, a love that attends to all the boundary-crossing echoes that characterize the real, which is also the good.”

In doing so, he embodies in his art Maritain’s view that “the joy or delight of a work of art is in proportion to its powers of signification”: “the more there is of knowledge, or of things presented to the understanding, the vaster will be the possibility of joy; this is why Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves and as things, but it takes them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to say as signs. And the thing signified may itself be a sign in turn, and the more the work of art is laden with significance … the vaster and the richer and the higher will be the possibility of joy and beauty”.

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."

In Art and Scholasticism Jacques Maritain writes that Christian art is not impossible but is: "difficult, doubly difficult - fourfold difficult, because it is difficult to be an artist and very difficult to be a Christian, and because the total difficulty is not simply the sum but the product of these two difficulties multiplied by one another: for it is the difficulty of harmonizing two absolutes." He says that the "difficulty becomes tremendous when the entire age lives far from Christ, for the artist is greatly dependent upon the spirit of his time" and then asks "whether courage has ever been lacking on earth." 
'Two difficulties multiplied' would, I think, make a great title for a survey of modern and contemporary Christian Art. Maritain, and his wife Raïssa, helped generate that courage in many artists, musicians, poets and writers. 

Jean-Luc Barré writes that: "They invented "a style of full freedom in the faith," based on friendship, on "person-to-person influence," on chance encounters, "what each one brings, in the depths of his heart, from his coming and going in a house where he was loved, from the peace of God that he felt there, but of which he had no idea ..." What took place there [in Thomistic Study circles at the Maritain's home in Meuden] was derived from no institution and hearkened back to no known model, and became the target of multiple conversions and a prey of just as many qui pro quo's and misunderstandings."

Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism includes an appendix describing the banning, by the Roman Catholic Church, of Stations of the Cross created by the Belgian artist Albert Servaes. Servaes played a significant role in a renewed interest in ecclesiastical art in Belgium. This renewal also had links to the revival of religious art in France in which Maurice Denis played a significant role. Maritain's comments can be read, together with background information on Servaes, at this blog - idle speculations: The Banning of the Stations of the Cross.

Servaes' banned Stations are reproduced in Ecce Homo: Contemplating the Way of Love together with meditations by Titus Brandsma. The publisher's state that: "Albert Servaes (1883-1966) is the leading representative of Expressionism in Belgian painting. Here we have a great piece of Flemish art matched with the spiritual thoughts of Brandsma. Titus meditating on the passion of the Lord, and calling attention to the place of the cross in prayer. These meditations on the passion stand wholly in this tradition of the vivid use of the imagination in order to evoke the reality of Jesus' sufferings. The details of his thoughts are determined by the artist's black on sepia drawings and are completely understood only by reference to them. No doubt the grim expressionist statement of the theme brought home with extra force to Titus' mind the frightful nature of the crucifixion."

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Olivier Messiaen - La Nativité du Seigneur

Seen & Unseen: The visionary artists finding heaven down here

My latest article for Seen&Unseen is 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explore a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds:

'Everywhere is Heaven is an art exhibition of work by Stanley Spencer and Roger Wagner at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham. It’s the English village where Spencer lived most of his life and which he described as a “village in heaven”. ‘Everywhere is heaven’ is also a description of sacramental theology and a theme for British Visionary artists from William Blake to the present day.

Everywhere is Heaven is the gallery’s first collaboration with a living artist. Wagner has been deeply inspired by Spencer’s paintings, viewing Spencer as being “an artist who seemed to be doing exactly what I wanted to do”...

The work of these two artists has been brought together, in part, because both work in the tradition initiated by the visionary poet and artist, William Blake.'

For more on Stanley Spencer click here, here, and here. For more on Visionary artists click here.

My first article for Seen&Unseen was 'Life is more important than art' which reviews the themes of recent art exhibitions that tackle life’s big questions and the roles creators take.

My second article 'Corinne Bailey Rae’s energised and anguished creative journey' explores inspirations in Detroit, Leeds and Ethiopia for Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest album, Black Rainbows, which is an atlas of capacious faith.

My third article was an interview with musician and priest Rev Simpkins in which we discussed how music is an expression of humanity and his faith.

My fourth article was a guide to the Christmas season’s art, past and present. Traditionally at this time of year “great art comes tumbling through your letterbox” so, in this article, I explore the historic and contemporary art of Christmas.

My fifth article was 'Finding the human amid the wreckage of migration'. In this article I interview Shezad Dawood about his multimedia Leviathan exhibition at Salisbury Cathedral where personal objects recovered from ocean depths tell a story of modern and ancient migrations

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Clifford T Ward - The Travellers.

Artlyst: The Art Diary July 2023

My July Art Diary for Artlyst includes exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Salisbury Cathedral, Gloucester Cathedral, Firstsite, y Gaer Museum, Fry Gallery, Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, Newport Street Gallery, The Arx. Read about work by Brian Clarke, Deborah Harrison, Neo-Romantics, EVEWRIGHT, David Jones, Sean Scully, and Ella Baudinet, among others.:

'‘Life Is More Important Than Art’ claims the title of the latest exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery. Taking inspiration from African-American writer and novelist James Baldwin, who proposed that life is more important than art which is why art is important, the exhibition explores the intersection of art and everyday life and the role of contemporary art institutions in a time of uncertainty and change. As Whitechapel Gallery Director Gilane Tawadros has explained, Baldwin “meant that we have the bare necessities of life —a roof over our head, food to eat and so on—but life should be more than the bare necessities” and that’s “where art comes in”. So, when the cost-of-living crisis is causing severe financial hardship and the after-effects of the pandemic are still being felt, the exhibition asks what importance we can attach to art alongside more pressing concerns.'

My Artlyst interview with Sean Scully can be found here, another Artlyst piece is here, and my review of Scully's 'Endangered Sky' is here. My writings about David Jones can be found here, here and here. 

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

• Sean Scully A Humility Towards Nature
• Winslow Homer: American Passage An Interview With Biographer Bill Cross
• Grayson Perry Tapestries On Show At Salisbury Cathedral
• Sidney Nolan’s Africa: Interview With Andrew Turley
• Ilona Bossanyi: Tate’s Ervin Bossanyi Stained Glass Window Mothballed After 2011 Redevelopment
• Louis Carreon: Sampling Art History
• Modus Operandi - What Makes Successful Public Art: Vivien Lovell InterviewedGenesis Tramaine: A Queer Devotional Painter
• Lakwena Maciver: Review-Interview Hastings Contemporary
• Nicola Ravenscroft - Sculpture With A Peaceful Stillness
• Artist Hannah Rose Thomas – Tears of Gold – Interview
• Marcus Lyon: Human Atlas Explorations
• Elizabeth Kwant Interview
• Helaine Blumenfeld: Undulating Structures
• National Gallery Explores ‘Sin’ In New Exhibition – Interview Dr Joost Joustra Curator
• Betty Spackman: Posthumanism Debates
• Christopher Clack: Connecting The Material And Immaterial
• Peter Howson Artlyst Interview
• Marleen Hengelaar-Rookmaaker On The Legacy Of ArtWay
• Alastair Gordon A Testament To His Faith
• Katrina Moss Chaiya Art Awards Interview: Where is God in our 21st century world?
• Apocalypse Now: Michael Takeo Magruder Interviewed
• Jonathan Anderson: Religious Inspirations Behind Modernism
• Caravan – An Interview With Rev Paul Gordon Chandler On Arts Peacebuilding
• Art Awakening Humanity Alexander de Cadenet Interviewed
• Michael Pendry New Installation Lights Up St Martin In The Fields
• Mark Dean Projects Stations of the Cross Videos On Henry Moore Altar

Monthly diary articles -

• The Art Diary June 2023
• The Art Diary May 2023
• The Art Diary April 2023
• The Art Diary March 2023
• The Art Diary February 2023
• Surveying New Exhibitions With A Spiritual Twist January 2023 Art Diary
• Christmas: The Art Of Faith December 2022 Diary
• Soulages And Strange Clay November 2022 Art Diary
• Alexander de Cadenet And Michael Forbes October 2022 Diary
• Spiritual Joseph Beuys Plus More: September Diary
• Holiday Snaps – End Of Summer Art Diary
• Art Search: August 2022 Diary
• Re-imagining Essex July 2022 Diary
• Art Illuminating spirituality June 2022 Diary
• Venice To London May 2022 Diary
• Jacob Epstein, Louis Carreon, Titus Kaphar, Betty Spackman – April 2022 Diary
• Audrey Flack Carlo Crivelli And Robert Indiana – March Diary
• My Art Diary And Other Thoughts February 2022
• And On An Art Note: End Of Year Diary 2021
• International Autumn Art Exhibition Reviews
• And On An Art Note: End Of Year Diary 2021

Articles/Reviews -

• Chris Ofili Exploring Sin At Victoria Miro
• Ai Weiwei - The Artist of Resistance - The Design Museum
• Saint Francis of Assisi A Timely Exhibition - National Gallery
• Why Critics Have A Problem With The Pre-Raphaelites?
• Religion and Spirituality in Post Impressionism National Gallery
• Black Artists From The American South Royal Academy
• Donatello: The Divine Fused With The Human V&A
• Lucian Freud And His Circle Surveyed In Two London Exhibitions
• A Question Of Clay: Strange Clay – Hayward Gallery
• William Kentridge: Merging Politics With Aesthetics – RA
• Winslow Homer: Beyond The Sea – National Gallery
• Hidden Depths: The Woman in the Window – Dulwich Picture Gallery
• Heavenly Visions: Churches As Spaces For Contemporary Art
• In The Black Fantastic London’s Best Summer Exhibition
• Hew Locke And The Christian Roots Of Carnival – Tate BritainLes Lalanne, Schütte And Gursky London Spring Exhibition Highlights
• Sensuous Sickert and Philpot Two Major UK Solo Exhibitions
• Raphael The Human And Divine – National Gallery
• Damien Hirst The Visceral Reality Of Death
• Ali Cherri: Artist in Residence National Gallery
• Surrealism Outside The Usual Story – Tate Modern
• Marcus Lyon Creates Fields of Vision At St Martin-in-the-Fields London
• Van Gogh Self Portraits The Infinite And The Ordinary
• Marvellous Icons: The London Jesuit Centre
• Albrecht Dürer Travels Of A Renaissance Artist – National Gallery London
• Diasporan Identities: Life Between Islands Caribbean British Art – Tate Britain
• Isamu Noguchi: Socially Engaged Art – Barbican Centre
• Pablo Bronstein: A This-World Vision Of Hell
• Bosco Sodi: In The Beginning Of Wisdom
• George Condo Lockdown Works Hauser & Wirth
• Theaster Gates Clay As A Profound Metaphor
• Mark Rothko: Mesmerising And Intimate Works On Paper
• Roger Cecil: A Once In A Generation Welsh Painter
• Tino Sehgal: Location, Nature And Pandemic – Blenheim Palace
• Michael Armitage And The Power Of Art – Royal Academy
• Marie Raymond And Post-War Avant Garde Painting In Paris
• Rachel Kneebone: A Complex Tableau Of Organic And Geometric Forms
• Rodin: Suffering And Conflict – Tate Modern
• Barbara Hepworth: Symbols Of Art & Life – Hepworth Wakefield
• 20th Century Women Artists Challenging Conventions In Britain
• Chaiya Art Awards 2021 Gallery OXO
• Marc Chagall’s Exquisite Stained Glass Window Commissions
• George Gittoes Equal parts artist and warrior
• Keith Haring: Personal Spiritual Imagery
• Sean Scully: Philosophical Poetic Pastoral The 12 / Dark Windows
• Arthur Jafa: The Art Of Cutting And Pasting
• Blackpentecostal Breath: Spirit-Led Movement Jumps From Music To Visual Art
• Made in USA Ed Ruscha An American Perspective
• Robert Smithson: The Archetypal Nature Of Things
• If Jesus Is A Man Of Colour Why Did We Make Him Aryan?
• Cosmic Patches And Quilts Five Exhibitions
• Everyday Heroes: Southbank Exhibition Celebrates Low-paid Key Workers
• Entwining Spiritualism And Art – Three Shows
• Of Church And The Visual Arts
• Has The Word Master Reached Its Sell-By Date?
• The People Behind Community Is Kindness Billboard Campaign
• André Daughtry: Art, Rebellion And Racial Justice
• Salisbury Cathedral 800 Years Of Art And Spirit
• Home Alone Together Twenty Five Artists
• Botanical Mind Online: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree
• Salvador Dalí The Enigma of Faith
• Art And Faith A Time For Seeing
• Andy Warhol: Catholicism His Work, Faith And Legacy
• Kiki Smith: Embodied Art
• Art and Christianity Awards A Positive New Millennium Legacy
• Arnulf Rainer: 90th Birthday Exhibition Celebrated At Albertina Museum
• A Belonging Project And Exiles Loss and Displacement
• Robert Polidori: Fra Angelico Opus Operantis
• Art, Faith, Church Patronage and Modernity
• Contemplating the Spiritual in Contemporary Art
• Mat Collishaw Challenges Faith Perspectives With Ushaw Installation
• Waterloo Festival Launches At St. John’s Waterloo
• John Bellany Alan Davie Spiritual Joy and Magic
• RIFT Unites 17 Art and Science MA Graduates At Central St Martins
• Visionary Cities: Michael Takeo Magruder – British Library
• Van Gogh’s Religious Journey Around London
• William Congdon Holy Sites And The Kettle’s Yard Connection
• Mark Dean Premieres Pastiche Mass At Banqueting Hall Chelsea College of Arts
• John Kirby: The Torment
• Underlying The Civilised Facade
• Curating Spiritual Sensibilities In Changing Times
• Homeless Highlighted: New Beau Exhibition At St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Ken Currie: Protest Defeat And Victory
• Bosco Sodi: A Moment Of Genesis
• Bill Viola And The Art Of Contemplation
• Art In Churches 2018: Spiritual Combinations Explored
• Sister Wendy Beckett – A Reminiscence
• Guido Guidi: Per Strada Flowers Gallery London
• Peter Howson: The play is over – Flowers Gallery
• Camille Henrot: Scientific History And Creation Story Mash Up
• Nicola Green Explores Recent And Contemporary Religious Leaders – St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Art And The Consequences Of War Explored In Two Exhibitions
• Helaine Blumenfeld Translating Her Vision
• Sam Ivin: Physically Scratched Portraits Of Asylum Seekers Exhibited
• Sacred Noise: Explores Religion, Faith And Divinity
• Bill Viola: Quiet Contemplative Video Installation St Cuthbert’s Church Edinburgh
• The ground-breaking work of Sister Corita Kent
• Picasso To Souza: The Crucifixion Imagery Rarely Exhibited
• Michael Takeo Magruder: De / coding the Apocalypse – Panacea Museum
• Giorgio Griffa: The Golden Ratio And Inexplicable Knowledge
• Arabella Dorman Unveils New Installation At St James Church Piccadilly
• Can Art Transform Society?
• Art Awakening Humanity Conference Report
• Central St Martins in the Fields Design Then And Now
• The Sacramental And Liturgical Nature Of Conceptual Art
• Polish Art In Britain: Centenary Marked At London’s Ben Uri Gallery
• Refugee Artists: Learning from The Lives Of Others
• The Religious Impulses Of Robert Rauschenberg
• The Christian Science Connection Within The British Modern Art Movement
• Artists Rebranding The Christmas Tree Tradition
• Art Impacted - A Radical Response To Radicalisation
• The Art of St Martin-in-the-Fields
• Was Caravaggio A Good Christian?

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Candi Staton - Revolution Of Change.

Poem: The twin poles of Rouault and Girard

My two newest poems have been published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' was published in Stride today. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' appeared in Amethyst Review earlier in April. These are poems which muse on the nature of art exploring approaches to the making of art and to art criticism.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens. 

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook (an event that Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst, attended). As one or two of my early poems featured in Stride, I am particularly pleased to be published there once again.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Van Morrison - For Mr Thomas.

Amethyst Review: Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages

My two newest poems are being published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' appears today in Amethyst Review, while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

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Carolyn Ahrends - I Can Hear You.

Poetry for Amethyst Review and Stride Magazine

My two newest poems are to be published by Amethyst Review and Stride respectively. 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages' will appear in Amethyst Review on 8 April while 'The twin poles of Rouault and Girard' will be in Stride on 21 April.

In 2020 two of my poems 'Are/Are Not' and 'Attend, attend' appeared in Amethyst Review. I also had three poems appear in Stride magazine that same year. All those poems concerned other poets beginning with the artist-poet David Jones, continuing with Dylan Thomas and ending with Jack Clemo. The third of these poems featured in a Stride series entitled 'Talking to the Dead'. These poems can be read at http://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/search?q=evens.

Amethyst Review is a publication for readers and writers who are interested in creative exploration of spirituality and the sacred. Readers and writers of all religions and none are most welcome. All work published engages in some way with spirituality or the sacred in a spirit of thoughtful and respectful inquiry, rather than proselytizing.

The Editor-in-chief is Sarah Law – poet (mainly), tutor, occasional critic, sometime fiction writer. She has published five poetry collections, the latest of which is Ink’s Wish. She set up Amethyst Review feeling the lack of a UK-based platform for the sharing and readership of new literary writing that engages in some way with spirituality and the sacred.

Stride magazine was founded in 1982. Since then it has had various incarnations, most recently in an online edition since the late 20th century. You can visit its earlier incarnation at http://stridemagazine.co.uk.

I have read the poetry featured in Stride and, in particular, the work of its editor Rupert Loydell over many years and was very pleased that Rupert gave a poetry reading when I was at St Stephen Walbrook (an event that Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst, attended). As one or two of my early poems featured in Stride, I am particularly pleased to be published there once again.

Rupert Loydell is a poet, painter, editor and publisher, and senior lecturer in English with creative writing at Falmouth University. He is interested in the relationship of visual art and language, collaborative writing, sequences and series, as well as post-confessional narrative, experimental music and creative non-fiction.

He has edited Stride magazine for over 30 years, and was managing editor of Stride Books for 28 years. His poetry books include Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone (both published by Shearsman), and The Fantasy Kid (for children).

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Rupert Loydell - Boombox.

Making the world a Eucharist

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Sunday 14 November 2021 by Revd Jonathan Evens. 

Readings of address: Daniel 12.1-3; Hebrews 10.11-14 [15-18]19-25; Mark 13.1-8 

View the service at https://www.facebook.com/stmartininthefields/videos/456468419203039 

In 1917 Private David Jones of the Welsh Fusiliers was out searching for firewood. He was in the Ypres section of the Western Front. ‘As I was always cold, one of my main occupations was to hunt for any wood that was dry and could be used to make a decent fire.’ ‘Just a little way back, between our support trench and the reserve line, I noticed that a byre or outhouse … still stood and its roofing appeared to be intact … I thought that looks to be the most likely place where there might wooden objects or, with a bit of luck, a wood-store perfectly dry and cut ready for use. So I went to investigate, but there was no door on that side. I found a crack against which I put my eye expecting to see empty darkness.’[i]

Instead, he saw something that changed his life. He could make out an altar constructed from of ammunition boxes. On it were two candles. As his eye adjusted to the light, he could see half a dozen infantrymen kneeling on the floor. And in front of them, a robed Catholic priest celebrated Mass. The tinkling of a bell broke the silence, followed by Latin words, gently spoken. He realised he recognised some of the men. He felt the oneness between the priest and those tough soldiers gathered round him in the half-darkness; a unity of spirit beyond anything he had previously experienced. He was amazed, too, that this Mass was happening so close to the frontline.

In this sight a saving and redeeming God emerged from the devastating brutality and squalor of the trenches. David Jones found Christ in the darkest of places. As he witnessed his first Mass in an outhouse amid the wasteland of the western front, he started to seek for hope among the ruins.[ii] This hope was found in the unity of spirit he observed because, as he later wrote, ‘the Mass makes sense of everything.’[iii]

After the war he became both a painter of sacramental images and a poet who wrote two epic poems. The first is about his experience of being wounded during the attack on Mametz Wood in July 1916, when about 4,000 Welsh soldiers died. It has been described as ‘a book about how, even in the most appalling circumstances,’ we ‘can still discern beneath the surface of experience an ultimate significance in life.’[iv] The second is a long meditation on a man attending Mass sometime during the Second World War which encompasses the entire history of humankind because the Mass makes sense of everything.

His work is about remembrance and the ways in which remembrance transforms us in the present. It takes the shattered fragments of wartime experiences putting them together with the key stories of humanity to form poems that were bigger and more beautiful that their fragmented parts. In doing so, he mirrors the action of Christ in the incarnation and crucifixion as he goes down into the depths of destruction in order then to bring together the fragments of our broken lives.

Some years ago, Fiona MacMillan created a wonderful image of that incarnational activity in a photograph of a broken host to publicise the 2018 disability conference Something Worth Sharing. In this image: ‘seven contrasting hands belong to members of St Martin's community aged 7 to 90, of diverse gender, ethnicity, disability and experience. Each have a piece of the host: Each has something worth sharing without which some part would be missing.’ Fiona concludes, ‘The broken host is a reminder of Jesus, his life broken and shared. For me, it echoes the words of Donald Eadie, Methodist theologian whose life changed with a disabling spinal condition: 'My world cracked open and life broke through'. Being broken is sometimes the way new life begins’.’

As today’s reading from Hebrews reminds us, Christ’s was a once-for-all action that is then re-presented and re-membered in and through the Eucharist. The Eucharist being the most significant and meaningful form of Remembrance. We bring the broken fragments of our lives, including the shattering destruction of wartime experiences throughout the centuries, to the one whose own body was broken on the cross but who endured that experience out of love for us to bring us through brokenness into reconciliation and resurrection. In return we receive his body and blood into our lives through a fragment of bread and a sip of wine. Our life is joined to his. The broken fragments of our lives are gathered up and incorporated into the story of God’s saving work with humanity. The fragments of our lives are accepted – overaccepted – and unified as we are brought together to form a new body - the body of Christ – in which all things find their place and where all shall be well and all manner of thing be well.

God takes us and our offerings and places them in a far larger story than we ever could have imagined by giving them a sacred story and making them sacred actions. As we retell and re-enact what Jesus did at the Last Supper, we also remember what God did to Israel in ‘taking one special people, blessing them, then breaking them in the Exile before giving them as a light to the nations to bring the Gentiles to God.’ ‘In the telling of those stories and the performance of those actions we are transformed into God’s holy people.’ That’s what the regular celebration of the Eucharist is about. When the Eucharist is served, each of us offers all that we uniquely are at the altar and we receive from God everything we need to follow him by being a blessing to others in our daily lives. In this way, as David Jones claimed, the Mass makes sense of everything, even the destruction and damage of war. Not by explaining it away or even explaining it at all but by plumbing its depths to find a way through to renewal and restoration.

We remember that story, not simply by recalling it to mind but by re-enacting and re-inhabiting it. We join our story to that of God’s activity in the world by playing a part within that story because we are, as David Jones once wrote, ‘creatures with bodies, whose nature it is to do this, or that, rather than think it.’[v] This is what it means to live sacramentally and to truly remember. So, in the Eucharist we see, we touch, we hear, we taste our God. As Sam Wells has said: ‘The Eucharist is a whole-body experience of truthful living in a new society as God’s companions together forever.’ Only one thing more remains. We must ask, as have all those who, like David Jones, experienced war and survived, what do we need to remake the whole world like this? What do we need to do to make the whole world a Eucharist?

St Augustine said: ‘You are the Body of Christ. In you and through you the work of the incarnation must go forward. You are to be taken. You are to be blessed, broken and distributed, that you may be the means of grace and vehicles of eternal love.’ Sam has explained that: ‘The elements of bread and wine are taken, blessed, broken and shared just as Jesus was taken, blessed, broken and shared. In a similar way the congregation as a whole is taken out of its ordinary pursuits; blessed with the grace and truth of forgiveness and scripture; broken in the disciplines of intercession, peacemaking and food-sharing; and shared with the world in love and service. As the bread and wine are offered, transformed and received, the congregation, and through it the whole creation, is offered, transformed and received.’

Although he suffered throughout his life from what we know called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, David Jones spent the rest of his life creating poems and paintings that re-call before God events in the past so that they become here and now in their effect on us. He wrote of the Mass as being to do with the re-calling, re-presentation and re-membering of an original act and objects in a form that is different from but connected to the original act or object that is being recalled. Remembering the Lord’s Supper is not simply recalling it to mind; instead, it is remembered by the re-enacting and re-presenting of the original act. He created poems and paintings that mirror the action of the Eucharist and create a world that is a Eucharist.

In this way he discovered the mission statement of the church, which is to make the world a Eucharist. Amazingly, he discovered this in wartime in the depths of destruction and despair when nation had risen against nation and kingdom against kingdom. That was a real demonstration of the reality that we, as the people of God, are often closer to God in adversity, than in times of comfort.

We are not all artists or poets but, whatever our roles and talents, like David Jones, we too can go out from the Eucharist to make the world a Eucharist. Again, Sam has explained well what this looks like in practice. ‘Faithful service,’ he says, ‘means practices that look like worship—those that gather people and form them as one body, that reconcile and open lives to repentance and forgiveness, that proclaim truth and reveal God’s story, that embrace need and unleash gifts, that express thanks and are open to the Holy Spirit, that share food and wash feet.’ As we do such things, we will discover what David Jones discovered at the Western Front in 1917, we will create our equivalents of his sacramental poems and paintings, we will reconcile the broken fragments of our lives, we will restore the torn fabric of society, we will make the world into a Eucharist. This is the most significant and meaningful form of remembrance in which we can engage.

In 1917 David Jones went looking for wood for a fire that would temporarily warm him in the trenches. What he found in an outhouse in the Ypres sector of the Western Front was a glow, a fire which he described as ‘goldenness’, that would inspire him throughout his life. In the Mass all the fragments of his life were held together and recreated, he was connected to the bigger story of God’s work in the world throughout human history, and he was inspired to make his world a Eucharist for others to inhabit and experience.

What will you bring to the altar to be gathered up by Jesus today? Will you come forward today to receive Christ in the form of bread into your life and join your story to his, so you can play your part in the story of God’s work with this world? How will you go from here today to make the world a Eucharist tomorrow? David Jones found his answers to those questions in an outhouse on the Western Front. Will you find your answers at St Martin-in-the-Fields this morning? To do so, will be to truly remember on this Remembrance Sunday.

[i] Rene Hague ed., Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1980, pp.248-249.
[ii] Jonathan Miles, Backgrounds to David Jones: a Study in Sources and Drafts, University of Wales Press, 1990, p.64.
[iii] Letter to Saunders Lewis 3rd March, 1971, published in Agenda, vol. 11, no..4 - vol. 12, no. 1, 1973/4, "Saunders Lewis introduces two Letters from David Jones", pp.17-29, particularly p. 20.
[iv] Atholl C. C. Murray, "In Perspective: A Study of David Jones's 'In Parenthesis'," in Critical Quarterly, Autumn, 1974, pp. 254-63.
[v] Rene Hague ed., Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters, Faber & Faber Ltd, 1980, p. 232.

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David Jones - In Parenthesis.