St Martin-in-the-Fields, HeartEdge & St Mary the Virgin Cathedral, Johannesburg (4)

Here's the sermon that I preached at The Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin, Johannesburg, for their 90th Anniversary Celebration Service:

I bring greetings and congratulations from St Martin-in-the-Fields on your 90th Anniversary. It is a joy to us that we have shared in partnership during the latter period of those 90 years and a pleasure that the partnership has been revived and renewed since Dean Xolani began his ministry here. I am thrilled personally to have this opportunity to visit and learn from you and those you have given me the opportunity to meet in Johannesburg, here at the Cathedral and in Alexandra, Sophiatown and Soweto.

For my curacy, I was at a church in East London (UK, not South Africa!) which, because of its history, was full of images of white people although it had a large black majority congregation. The historical development of the church had created a disconnect between its past heritage, which was mono-cultural, and its current congregation, which was diverse. We realised that this disconnect couldn’t continue and had to be addressed. So, we commissioned an artist to create a painting as an altarpiece in one of the side chapels and took Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance cooking breakfast for his disciples beside Lake Galilee as the image for this painting. We stipulated that Jesus should be black and his disciples’ multi-ethnic. When the image was unveiled Eileen, our black churchwarden, shed tears of joy that the diversity of our congregation was now reflected to some degree in the imagery and story of the church and that she and others from the Black and Minority Ethnic communities in that place could see themselves in the story of faith depicted within that church.

I learned that this image became a sign of the kingdom in the church and changed our culture for the better. Signs show what is in front of us, so reflect where we are and direct us somewhere else, so point us to the future. The creation of this image revealed our lack of diversity in the past and created a greater appreciation for the diversity we had found in the present. The image provided a way of affirming that such diversity is our future in God’s kingdom. Similarly, the visual art which is here in St Mary’s or which has been here over the years provides one way to tell the story of your 90 years as the Cathedral for Johannesburg, as well as indicating possible areas of development as you begin your next 90 years.

In 1936 Ernest Mancoba’s African Madonna, which is now held by the Johannesburg Art Gallery, was displayed here to raise funds for those in need in the drought-stricken Limpopo. This sculpture seems to be the earliest South African interpretation of the Holy Virgin that is not European in appearance. Unlike most church sculptures in South Africa for which imported oak or teak was favoured, Mancoba carved his figure of indigenous yellowwood. Mancoba’s ‘sculptures Africanized the prevailing Western norms of iconography and aesthetics.’ (Elza Miles)

So, here at an early stage in the life of the Cathedral was a black artist using indigenous materials to create a genuinely African image of a central figure in the Christian faith. Mancoba trained as a sculptor at the Grace Dieu Mission near Polokwane, where artists such as Gerard Sekoto and Job Kekana also trained. Grace Dieu Mission was Africa’s first modern art workshop and developed a trademark style of wood carving that won considerable critical acclaim in the 1930s and allowed the school, through commercial activity, to support and promote the first professional black artists in South Africa.

Job Kekana carved relief panels of the lives of the saints for your pulpit in the 1940s. He was a skilled sculptor who undertook all manner of carvings for churches, from pews to pulpits. He spoke of wanting his religious carvings to be ‘true’ historically, and therefore usually only depicted Biblical figures as Africans in African settings if specifically requested to do so. His relief panels here were designed by Martinus Moolman, a teacher at Grace Dieu, and depict European figures in traditional drapery. Those depicting St Ambrose, Thomas Aquinas and St Chrysostom show these saints in architectural settings which required Kekana to use elaborate perspective. So, under the influence of Grace Dieu’s teachers, Kekana’s work primarily followed the conventions of European church art.

Above the chancel steps and dominating the whole church is your famous hanging rood, an almost life-size wood-carving of the Crucifixion that was hung in 1957 as a memorial to William Palmer, Dean from 1924 to 1951. Palmer had been part of the Campaign for Right and Justice which called for full and direct representation of all sections of the community, irrespective of race. By the 1950s, the Cathedral had become one of the few racially integrated churches in downtown Johannesburg, yet it was decided that your rood should be made in England. The artist was George Baden-Beadle, who was Secretary, then Managing Director of Faith Craft; a business, set up through The Society of the Faith, that successfully and creatively produced church furnishings, vestments and other ecclesiastical artefacts from 1921 – 1972.

In this same period the artist Cecil Skotnes was employed as the cultural Recreation Officer at the Polly Street Recreational Centre here in Johannesburg. Under his guidance Polly Street came to be identified as an Art Centre and a significant training ground for a new generation of artists who were able to experiment and make work, developing and honing their skills to the point where they too were recognized as professional career artists. Skotnes was able to put the Centre and the students in touch with an array of contacts including many foreign visitors and dealers, as well as acquiring commissions from churches and the City Council. This continued until the apartheid authorities effectively shut down Polly Street. Skotnes also undertook commissions himself and, in 1983, created Stations of the Cross for this Cathedral in memory of Fr. Neville Jarvis Palmer. With his woodcuts, in particular, Skotnes is reckoned to have developed a genre and a style that was uniquely South African.

More recently the sculpture 'Sinethemba' by Chaim Stephenson was installed in 2015. This was almost twenty-one years after the arrival of democracy in South Africa and the dedication by Archbishop Desmond Tutu at St Martin-in-the-Fields of the sculpture of which 'Sinethemba' is a twin, our ‘Living South Africa Memorial’ to victims of injustice and violence. The sculptures were inspired, as you know better than I, by the iconic image of the shooting of Hector Pieterson in Soweto in 1976. Sam Wells, the vicar of St Martin’s, said, in a sermon here, that, ‘In 1976, [this] was a picture of the brutality and injustice of the apartheid regime, and the solidarity and resilience of the struggle to bring democracy and the rule of law to South Africa’. By 1994, the sculpture portrayed the burden the anti-apartheid movement had carried for so long. Then, in 2013, ‘when we at St Martin’s gathered with so many South African friends to mark the passing of Nelson Mandela, the image asked a question: Mandela had carried South Africa in his arms for so long; who would carry South Africa now?’ Now, he suggests, ‘it may be that this statue is a declaration of faith that the God who in Christ has brought forgiveness, is in the business of bringing resurrection too’. All this Christian reflection initiated by a Jewish artist was was inspired by stories from the bible, despite not practicing religion himself.

The story told by your artworks demonstrates the power that the visual arts possess in reflecting and shaping culture. Culture is a key aspect of the model of mission – culture, compassion, commerce and congregation - with which St Martin’s has worked over the past 30 years and which we have made the basis of HeartEdge, the international ecumenical movement of churches of which St Martin’s and St Mary’s are both part. That is because, as human beings made in the image of God, we are culture-making people who create communities, fashion environments and shape societies.

Our Bible readings today (Genesis 2. 4b-8, 15, 18-23; Philippians 4. 4-9; Matthew 13. 31 & 32) begin with God’s creativity in fashioning our world and our own creativity experienced because we are made in God’s image. The world that was fashioned through creativity God called good, and God gave to us, as human beings, the task of caring for and cultivating this world using our own creativity. Adam and Eve’s task of tending the garden, the primary task of agriculture, represents the beginnings of cultural life on earth.
One of the formative aspects of this creative culture-making is to name the good that we see in the created world - the creatures, people, artefacts and cultures around us - and, by naming these things, to increase our understanding of the world and cultures that we inhabit. Of course, our creative culture-making can be used both for good and ill, as you know only too well in this country. Indeed, this passage from Genesis has been used to justify the oppression of patriarchy. God’s intent, however, is that we use our creative abilities to see and name the essence of all that is around us and use that knowledge to support our mutual flourishing. St Paul, in his letter to the Philippians, revived this understanding with his injunction to look for what is true, honourable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent and praiseworthy in that which is around us. Jesus called us to use our creativity in creating signs of the kingdom of God which start small and then grow in ways that provide shelter and support to others.

So, we have been formed by God to be creative culture makers seeing and naming the good in order that we create signs of the kingdom of God. That is what you have done here over your first 90 years in creating an inclusive community that has supported social justice and engaged with culture, commerce, compassion and congregation in order to be a sign of the kingdom of God here in Johannesburg. That was what was happening when, for example, several of your deans were deported for challenging aspects of apartheid, when the first black Dean was appointed, when land and property were developed to provide financial support for the Cathedral, and when visual art was created for or brought into this space.

Your artworks are also signs of the kingdom of God as it has been expressed here in St Mary’s. Signs, as we noted earlier, show what is before us and aspects of these artworks reflect the time in which they were made and the issues current at that time. Your art is by a diverse group of artists and shows a diversity of approaches which sometimes engage with contemporary issues and sometimes seek to show that the Christian story is for all times and all cultures. In this way a diverse set of answers have emerged to the questions of who creates, what is created, and of how cultures change depending on the answers given to those questions. Similar dilemmas were also experienced in my curacy where the image of the black Christ in our Youth Chapel was created by a white artist.

So I wonder how will these same questions be answered here in the future? Who are the artists that could create images for this Cathedral in the future? What images would create signs of welcome, community and inclusion in these times of when around our world particular groups in society are being scapegoated, targeted and attacked? Many of the artworks here come from initiatives that combined culture and commerce to provide routes out of poverty and oppression. What equivalent initiatives are needed today to provide similar opportunities in different ways? Could initiatives like that be part of your plans for the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Precinct? How can we, as inclusive Christian communities, create signs of God's kingdom today in the midst of the scapegoating and violence that surrounds us?

Signs also point forward towards a place we have yet to reach. Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God as something small in the here and now which then grows to become large in the future. What are the small seeds that you can plant in the here and now that may have similar impact in the future to that which was achieved by Grace Dieu Mission, Faith Works and the Polly Street Art Centre? Each of these began as something small but grew to have significant impact.

Speaking of the need for HeartEdge as a movement for renewal in the Church, Sam Wells has said: ‘The church … has to let its financial needs and the material poverty of many it encounters become entry-points to new adventures, new relationships, new discoveries in God’s kingdom. What are needed now are communities of ordinary virtues, but ones infused with grace: thus trust, honesty, politeness, forbearance, and respect are the bedrock of such communities, while tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resilience are among its abiding graces.’ As an inclusive community with a commitment to the Arts, a commercial basis to your financial sustainability, and a compassionate commitment to engaging with the pressing issues of your time, over the past 90 years this Cathedral has been an example of the HeartEdge mission model lived out in practice. That is one of many reasons why we, at St Martin’s, are so proud to be in partnership with you and so pleased that you are using the HeartEdge framework of compassion, culture, commerce and congregation to review your current mission and ministry.

Christ calls us to create signs of the kingdom of God in each generation. Those signs cannot simply repeat what has gone before. They need to be creative re-imaginings of the kingdom for the present time? So I wonder, where are the artists, the dreamers, the ideas people and creatives in this congregation and community? Where are energy, inspiration and initiative to be found in the wider community, beyond the congregation, with which you can partner for the future?

As we look back to celebrate what this Cathedral has been and has enabled over the past 90 years, including its art and culture, we also need to look forward and take inspiration to go on new adventures, develop new relationships and make new discoveries which will enable us to be and become signs of the kingdom of God for this time and this day here in South Africa, here in Johannesburg. What are needed now are congregations that combine creativity with commercial acumen and compassion. Communities of ordinary virtues infused with grace; with trust, honesty, politeness, forbearance, and respect as their bedrock and tolerance, forgiveness, reconciliation, and resilience among their abiding graces.

Let us pray: We pray for the dreamers of this life, O God, for those persons who imagine new possibilities, who long for what others cannot perceive, who spin dreams of wonder and majesty in their minds. Defend them from ridicule and harsh criticism, from self-doubt and lack of faith in their dreams, and from abandonment of this call to make things new. Grant that from their dreams may come forth blessings for humankind to enrich the quality of life and the wonderment of us all. Amen (Ashley Marinaccio)

Click here to view the sermon.

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Amadodana ka Eliya.

South Africa: the art of a nation

In his review of Martin Scorsese’s Silence, John Patterson comments that ‘Christianity is one of the Big B’s of violent colonial intrusion – Bullet, Bottle, Bacillus, Bible.’ (‘A test of faith’, J. Patterson, guide 31 Dec – 6 Jan 2017) This succinctly outlines the issues with which the curators of South Africa: the art of a nation have to grapple when it comes to exploring the influences later religions have had on South African art. They do so with rather more nuance, subtlety and grace than Patterson manages in his review.

As is the case with Shusaku Endo’s novel on which Scorsese’s film is based, artists in South Africa exploring aspects of religion have done so within their own culture and, as a result, what we view and discuss cannot simply be dismissed, as Patterson seeks to do, as alien poisons. The curators of South Africa: the art of a nation tackle these complexities from several angles. They showcase artworks indicative of indigenous beliefs as well as positive examples from later religions of engagement with the Arts, whilst also balancing confessional artwork with art which questions religion from within the belief system of the religions questioned.

This is the first major UK exhibition to use objects to tell the story of South Africa’s art heritage and history over 3 million years, including rock art images which often depict shaman (or spiritual leaders) entering trance-like states while dancing, giving them the power to heal the sick, overpower evil spirits and summon rain. This modest but astonishing exhibition includes some of the earliest known human artworks and iconic pre-colonial art from southern Africa. It also explores the impact of nonAfrican artistic influences and traditions from the 17th century onwards, showcases 20th century apartheid ‘resistance art’, and celebrates the contemporary art of post-apartheid transformation.

When the history of modern art in South Africa is examined, as here, the influence of Christian missionaries cannot be overlooked. Rasheed Araeen described Ernest Mancoba as ‘Africa’s most original modern artist’ and noted that ‘he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority and demolishes it from within.’ Mancoba’s missionary training, however, was typical for ‘that magnificent generation’ (to use Mancoba’s own words) of ‘pioneer modern artists in South Africa that included Gerard Sekoto (a close friend and colleague of Mancoba) and George Milwa Pemba.’ ‘These artists were all, to a greater or lesser extent, educated and Christianised members of a small but influential African middle class that espoused the Victorian liberal values inculcated by their missionary training.’

Rather than highlighting the work of Mancoba, this exhibition shows the influence of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift, which together with Polly Street Art Centre and the Thupelo workshops, was ‘vitally important to the development of new artists.’ The legacy of these centres ‘lives on in South Africa’s contemporary art scene.’ (South Africa the art of a nation, J. Giblin & C. Spring, Thames & Hudson / The British Museum, 2016) Rorke’s Drift ‘became one of the most important institutions for black South African artists during apartheid,’ with Emma Dammann, Lionel Davis, BongiDhlomo, Avhashoni Mainganye, Philda Majozi, Kasigo Patrick Mautloa, AzariaMbatha, Elizabeth Mbatha, Gordon Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Sam Nhlengethwa, Anthony Nkotsi, Mpolokeng Ramphomane, Joel Sibisi, Paul Sibisi, Velile Soha and Vuminkosi Zulu all having taught or studied there. Works by Davis, Muafangejo and Nhlengethwa are all included within the exhibition, as are works from Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi and the Siyazama Project which utilize Christian imagery in the context of struggles with apartheid and HIV/Aids.

Rorke’s Drift was far from being a one-off however. Sister Pientia Selhorst of the Congregation of the Precious Blood as well as other Christian missions, including the Ndaleni Teachers’ Training College and Mariannhill Art School, all made their contribution towards the provision of access to opportunities for art education.

As a means of exploring the positive and negative legacies of Christianity in South Africa, the curators examine the work of Jackson Hlungwani and Willem Boshoff. Hlungwani was ordained in the African Zionist Church and founded New Jerusalem, a church at the site of an ancient hilltop settlement where he carved monumental wood sculptures of animals, warriors and Biblical figures. His Christ with football indicates the essential humanity of Christ, as a man for all peoples. Boshoff’s Bad Faith Chronicles skewer thirty-six very small baby dolls through the heart, like insects, labelled and displayed on a collector's chart. The labels bear the names of Old Testament nations who had lost their land and lives in ancient Israel. Below each collection is a Bible in an official South African language, opened at Psalm 111:6, which in an English translation reads: "He has given His people the power of His works, giving them the lands of other nations.” Boshoff’s work is ‘an angry response to the way in which Christian churches colluded with the apartheid regime, and to how the Bible was used to justify apartheid.’

Fiona Rankin-Smith has noted that ‘the immense and often unfathomable topic of faith is frequently debated in the public sphere in South Africa’, including its political history. The 2006 Figuring Faith exhibition that she curated provided multiple depictions of the symbols, people and places associated with belief. William Kentridge, whose work features in South Africa: the art of a nation, spoke at the opening of Figuring Faith saying that the works showed that ‘we are incurably en route’ between ‘a quotidian, every day reality and the world of mystery and transcendence beyond.’ This journey is ultimately what is depicted in South Africa: the art of a nation. The very activity of making the work’, Kentridge suggests, ‘involves the artist in a journey of going from what is known to what is glimpsed at, half understood and tentatively approached within the work.’ (Figuring Faith, ed. F. Rankin-Smith, Fourthwall Books, Johannesburg, 2006)    

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Soweto Gospel Choir - Thina Simnqobile.

Notes on Blindness, Geoffrey Hill & Ernest Mancoba

Mark Kermode writes of Notes on Blindness:

'Now this superb documentary by Peter Middleton and James Spinney dramatises the life-changing experiences of theology professor John Hull, whose audiotape diaries of his journey into blindness formed the basis of his 1990 book Touching the Rock. Building upon their 2014 Emmy award-winning short film, Middleton and Spinney have created an utterly immersive feature worthy of Hull’s end-quote declaration that “to gain our full humanity, blind people and sighted people need to see each other” ...

Maximising its accessibility, Notes on Blindness is available in audio-described and enhanced soundtrack versions, the latter transforming the film into a singular aural experience. (There’s also a virtual reality project, subtitled Into Darkness, currently touring UK venues.) John Hull died in July last year, but his spirit lives on in this extraordinary inclusive work, which is as educational, entertaining and inspirational as its subject.'

Peter Bradshaw writes that: 'The tone is sober, unflashy, and Hull’s reflections on God are presented without any hectoring or special pleading. Affecting and profoundly intelligent.'

The Guardian's obituary for Sir Geoffrey Hill contained the following:

'For the Unfallen ... remains a powerful book, astonishing as a young man’s debut; ornate, rhetorical, grandiose in its subjects and themes. Genesis, the very first poem, takes the creation myth as its own creative occasion, beginning: “Against the burly air I strode, / crying the miracles of God” and ending:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world,
There is no bloodless myth will hold.
And by Christ’s blood are men made
free
Though in close shrouds their bodies
lie
Under the rough pelt of the sea;
Though Earth has rolled beneath her
weight
The bones that cannot bear the light.

For the Unfallen, eventually published in 1959, and all Hill’s subsequent books, dwell on blood and religion; his treatments of violence range from Funeral Music (from King Log, 1968), a remarkable sequence on the astonishingly violent battles of the Wars of the Roses, to his careful and sensitive elegies for Holocaust victims. From his earliest poetry he was intensely interested in martyrs, whether of the religious controversies of the 16th and 17th centuries, or totalitarian regimes of the 20th; and he aimed at a scrupulous weighing of the appropriate words by which their witness could be mediated. By making historical atrocities more immediate, and refusing to abandon the memory of the dead, Hill was also tacitly calling attention to more contemporary political predicaments.'

Sean O’Toole writes on the life of Ernest Mancoba in the current edition of Tate etc. 'Mancoba, who left Africa to study art in Paris in 1938, infused modern European art with a unique African spirit. One of the founding members of the CoBrA group, his unique style is characterised by subtle colours, dynamic compositions and diffuse, enigmatic forms.' O'Toole acknowledges though the significance of Mancoba's Christian faith and the influence of his early arts training at the Christian school of Pietersburg, 'where in 1929 his Bantu Madonna created a scandal.' 'It showed her barefoot with African features, her hand making the gesture made by Bantu girls on nearing the head of the family. This break with tradition was not limited to iconography but extended by implication to the whole Christian world‐view as upheld in the West. Seven years later the Madonna was placed in the Anglican cathedral of St Mary in Johannesburg.'

Also in the same edition, Marco Pasi explores artists, from William Blake and Georgiana Houghton to Matt Mullican, who have been ‘guided’ by forces beyond their control.

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Geoffrey Hill - The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy.