Exhibitions at Glasgow International 2018 and by Art Angel engage with religious approaches to grief and loss:
'For his solo exhibition at Tramway, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has taken as his starting point an 18th Century wooden figurine of Job held at the Wellcome Collection in London. Leckey has enlarged the object to human scale. This single forsaken biblical figure occupies alone the vast space of Tramway.
The title ‘Nobodaddy’ is taken from the poem by William Blake, a name that for Blake is a play on the idea of God the father of no one, but also the man with no body. In Leckey’s sculpture this body is expanded and infiltrated by technology. Man’s limbs are hollowed out, the organs removed, and filled with speakers that give voice to his state. Opposite the sculpture a large video projection mirrors the figure as it is toggles through different scenarios.'
Laura Cumming writes: 'Based on a German carving, Mark Leckey’s statue is larger than life and fully as profound with its sorrowful face and putrefying sores. A poor soul lost in suffering, almost, he sits alone in his melancholy contemplation, head in hand like Rodin’s Thinker.
But what he’s thinking is voiced in the air. The statue speaks, words emitting from its wounds and also from a screen in which the motionless Job is given some kind of life through a flux of shifting light and scenario. Time passes, place changes, the days speed and slow; and still the prophet endures. He talks of his plagues, ancient and modern (the camera enters the figure, an endoscopy of hollowed tracts), bewildered by their harshness; and yet there is still hope: he dreams of swimming, and even of flying.
The lament is powerfully moving, not least because the Turner prize-winning artist sets up a tension between the virtual and the real. The screen, with all its brilliant CGI effects, is restlessly compelling, and yet one is drawn loyally back to the poor simple statue. It is a gripping standoff between old and new technologies, in which the biblical agonies of Job, thousands of years ago, are made devastatingly present and timeless.'
Taryn Simon's first major performance work An Occupation of Loss takes place in a subterranean location in Central London. 'Each night, professional mourners simultaneously broadcast their lamentations, enacting rituals of grief from around the world.'
'Their sonic mourning is performed in recitations that include northern Albanian laments, which seek to excavate “uncried words”; Venezuelan laments, which safeguard the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek Epirotic laments, which bind the story of a life with its afterlife; and Yezidi laments, which map a topography of displacement and exile.'
Adrian Searle writes: 'Alone, in couples and in trios and quartets, these singers and musicians – Armenian Yazidis, Cambodian performers of Kantaomming, Ghanaian women wailing and crying, performers of Greek polyphonic panegyri – are singing for those who are not here ... Their indifference to us despite our proximity is disturbing, as one is led by sound from one group to another, from culture to culture, language to language, ritual to ritual. Sometimes I feel like I am intruding on a stranger’s grief. At other moments transfixed and bewildered, like a lost anthropologist, a rubber-necker, a ghoul. Do I think about my own losses, the dead I didn’t mourn, my insufficiency of tears, my failed gravitas?
For all the polyphonies and cultural differences, there is an overall measure to the forms and sounds of lamentation, a register of sorrow that appears to cross times and places, religions and beliefs. What they mostly have in common, apart from a display of outward mourning and loss, is a sense of paying witness, and of being alive among the dead.'
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John Prine & Nanci Griffith - The Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness.
Showing posts with label observer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label observer. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
Monday, 16 April 2018
'Novelist Guy' & 'Wade in the Water'
The following were worth noting amongst the reviews in yesterday's Observer:
Novelist: 'Novelist Guy' - 'This is, for lack of a better word, a conscious album: there aren’t any shanks or mentions of weed, nor is there any disrespect to women. God gets a lot of shoutouts. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when God entered Novelist’s narrative, but a great deal of the rectitude on here has its backup in the musician’s faith.
You can’t help but wonder how Novelist’s audience will take to it, and to his reappearance after such a long absence; Novelist was incandescently hot three years ago. Grime moves fast and Novelist isn’t quite who he used to be.
However, Stormzy demonstrated that faith doesn’t exactly play badly on a grime album – the video for Blinded By Your Grace Pt 2 (ft MNEK) has 5.5m YouTube views. And neither does conscience: witness again Stormzy’s refusal to let the Grenfell Tower disaster be forgotten. Grime is now a maturing genre, with room for a multiplicity of voices and subject matters. And in Novelist, grime now has an upstanding and versatile outlier.'
Tracey K. Smith - 'Wade in the Water' - 'Her offbeat, spiritual poems are her boldest – where it seems almost as though she is putting together a DIY Bible.
In Hill Country, God drives round in a jeep with the windows down and wonders whether there is “something larger than himself rearranging/ The air.” In Beatific, an arresting (in every sense) poem, a man obliviously crosses the road and there is a hint this down-andout pedestrian could be a messiah. In The Angels, we meet a pair of Hells Angels: “Grizzled,/ In leather biker gear” who prove “Emissaries/ For something I needed to see”. They reek of “rum and gasoline” but, like many angels before them, tell us “not to fear”. This startling poem ends with other celestial sightings – laid on thick, poetic impasto. Yet the ending is beautiful and bare. It gives us “night” where “light” was expected: “My mother sat whispering with it/ At the end of her life/ While all the rooms of our house/ Filled up with night.”'
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Novelist: 'Novelist Guy' - 'This is, for lack of a better word, a conscious album: there aren’t any shanks or mentions of weed, nor is there any disrespect to women. God gets a lot of shoutouts. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when God entered Novelist’s narrative, but a great deal of the rectitude on here has its backup in the musician’s faith.
You can’t help but wonder how Novelist’s audience will take to it, and to his reappearance after such a long absence; Novelist was incandescently hot three years ago. Grime moves fast and Novelist isn’t quite who he used to be.
However, Stormzy demonstrated that faith doesn’t exactly play badly on a grime album – the video for Blinded By Your Grace Pt 2 (ft MNEK) has 5.5m YouTube views. And neither does conscience: witness again Stormzy’s refusal to let the Grenfell Tower disaster be forgotten. Grime is now a maturing genre, with room for a multiplicity of voices and subject matters. And in Novelist, grime now has an upstanding and versatile outlier.'
Tracey K. Smith - 'Wade in the Water' - 'Her offbeat, spiritual poems are her boldest – where it seems almost as though she is putting together a DIY Bible.
In Hill Country, God drives round in a jeep with the windows down and wonders whether there is “something larger than himself rearranging/ The air.” In Beatific, an arresting (in every sense) poem, a man obliviously crosses the road and there is a hint this down-andout pedestrian could be a messiah. In The Angels, we meet a pair of Hells Angels: “Grizzled,/ In leather biker gear” who prove “Emissaries/ For something I needed to see”. They reek of “rum and gasoline” but, like many angels before them, tell us “not to fear”. This startling poem ends with other celestial sightings – laid on thick, poetic impasto. Yet the ending is beautiful and bare. It gives us “night” where “light” was expected: “My mother sat whispering with it/ At the end of her life/ While all the rooms of our house/ Filled up with night.”'
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Tracey K. Smith - Wade In The Water.
Monday, 27 February 2017
Georg Mayer-Marton: work in churches has considerable religious significance
George Mayer-Marton (1897-1960) was born in Gyor, Hungary and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. From 1919 to 1924 he studied art in Vienna and Munich. He immigrated to England in 1938 to escape the threat of Nazi Germany.
His abiding interest in music was reflected in his painting and mosaics, not only in subject matter but also in the chromatic use of colour, and the feeling for structure and form which characterize his landscapes. In 1957 all the different strands came together with the Pentecost Mosaic, amongst his finest work, now displayed at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.
The mosaic at the Church of the Holy Rosary is currently under threat following the decision of the Diocese of Salford to close the church. Catherine Pepinster, writing in The Observer, says, 'The arts heritage body, the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, has warned the bishop, the Right Rev John Arnold, that the mosaic’s destruction would be “a very regrettable loss, if not an act of iconoclasm”.
According to the association’s chairman, John Lewis, the émigré artists of postwar Britain, of whom Mayer-Marton was a leading figure, are only now being appreciated by art historians. In a letter to Arnold, Lewis cited the Oldham mosaic as “an unusual commission … which must be preserved. Mayer-Marton’s work in churches during this period has considerable historic and religious significance.”
The eight-metre-high mosaic was installed in the church in the 1950s and is made of natural stone and glass tesserae, giving it a striking sheen, typical of Byzantine work. The original piece had frescoes depicting St John to Jesus’s left and his mother Mary to his right, but these were covered over with white emulsion in 1980.'
His great-nephew, Nick Braithwaite, who is campaigning to save the Oldham mosaic, said: “The mosaic is inspiring and beautiful and it dominates the church. It would be disastrous if it were lost, and would signal a dreadful failure to understand its unique value. We are urging the diocese to think again.
“My great-uncle, who was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, worked on this mosaic just 10 years after the war and losing his parents and brother in the Holocaust. It must have been very poignant for him to work on an image of the suffering Jesus.”'
Mayer-Marton studied the art of Byzantine (face) mosaic at Ravenna between the wars. Following his appointment at Liverpool College of Art in 1952, he received commissions from the Roman Catholic Church to carry out mosaic works at a number of churches in the area, as well as a commission for a font at the Anglican Church of St Michael and All Angels in Tettenhall, West Midlands.
His abiding interest in music was reflected in his painting and mosaics, not only in subject matter but also in the chromatic use of colour, and the feeling for structure and form which characterize his landscapes. In 1957 all the different strands came together with the Pentecost Mosaic, amongst his finest work, now displayed at the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.
The Pentecost mosaic was originally installed at the Church of the Holy Ghost in Ford, Liverpool and when the church was faced with demolition, a campaign was undertaken by the artist’s niece, Johanna Braithwaite, Robin Riley, Gordon Millar, Brian Drury and Sister Anthony Wilson of the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral to save it. The process, supervised by Robin Riley, was technically challenging. The mosaic was transferred to the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral in 1989.
The mosaic at the Church of the Holy Rosary is currently under threat following the decision of the Diocese of Salford to close the church. Catherine Pepinster, writing in The Observer, says, 'The arts heritage body, the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, has warned the bishop, the Right Rev John Arnold, that the mosaic’s destruction would be “a very regrettable loss, if not an act of iconoclasm”.
According to the association’s chairman, John Lewis, the émigré artists of postwar Britain, of whom Mayer-Marton was a leading figure, are only now being appreciated by art historians. In a letter to Arnold, Lewis cited the Oldham mosaic as “an unusual commission … which must be preserved. Mayer-Marton’s work in churches during this period has considerable historic and religious significance.”
The eight-metre-high mosaic was installed in the church in the 1950s and is made of natural stone and glass tesserae, giving it a striking sheen, typical of Byzantine work. The original piece had frescoes depicting St John to Jesus’s left and his mother Mary to his right, but these were covered over with white emulsion in 1980.'
His great-nephew, Nick Braithwaite, who is campaigning to save the Oldham mosaic, said: “The mosaic is inspiring and beautiful and it dominates the church. It would be disastrous if it were lost, and would signal a dreadful failure to understand its unique value. We are urging the diocese to think again.
“My great-uncle, who was of Hungarian-Jewish descent, worked on this mosaic just 10 years after the war and losing his parents and brother in the Holocaust. It must have been very poignant for him to work on an image of the suffering Jesus.”'
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Woven Hand - The Speaking Hands.
Sunday, 8 May 2016
The Dance of Love: Living the prayer of Jesus (2)
Angus Ritchie, Director of The Centre for Theology & Community preached at St Paul’s Cathedral this morning on a theme that had synergies with my sermon on 'The Dance of Love'; the calling of the Church to help us “learn together how to be more fully human, and how to make a more human world.”
Also of relevance from today's Observer:
"... happiness can never result from the exercise of choice alone: we are social beings, and the building blocks of happiness lie in looking out for each other, acting together, being in teams and pursuing common goals for the common good. Families, schools, colleges, unions, newspapers, sports clubs and even firms should all understand that such commonality should be part of their core DNA." (Will Hutton)
and
"The big issue for me concerns isolationism and the rise of rightwing extremism in Europe and beyond. The extremists are diametrically opposed to the EU’s founding values. We forget that this is something that binds us and protects us and that, as one of the posters puts it, is “the largest peace project in human history”." (Wolfgang Tillmans)
Angus said:
"The Ascension is above all about hope. It marks the completion, of Jesus’ earthly work. In him, God has entered the human condition to heal and restore it. Jesus shows us what a truly human life should be. We could say, without exaggeration, that Jesus us the first fully human being since the Fall. Our lives are not fully human. We are only partly the creatures God made us to be, as his image in us is marred by sin and death.
This is reflected in our day-to-day speech. When we have had a refreshing holiday, or are enjoying glorious sunshine like today’s, we say: “I feel more human.” It’s a recognition that we spend most of our lives feeling less than fully human. We have a sense that there is something – a fullness of life, a generosity of heart, a deeper connection with others – something we’re made for, which is largely missing from our lives. We are not who we should be, who we were made to be.
What, then, were we made to be? That question is answered in today’s Gospel. Human beings are made in the image of God, a God who is love, fellowship, communion. When we love one another, we participate in the fellowship which is at the very heart of God. That is why Jesus prays:
As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, … so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.
That is the purpose of humanity, that is what we were made to be: made to share the very life of God, by living in his love."
"The Ascension is above all about hope. It marks the completion, of Jesus’ earthly work. In him, God has entered the human condition to heal and restore it. Jesus shows us what a truly human life should be. We could say, without exaggeration, that Jesus us the first fully human being since the Fall. Our lives are not fully human. We are only partly the creatures God made us to be, as his image in us is marred by sin and death.
This is reflected in our day-to-day speech. When we have had a refreshing holiday, or are enjoying glorious sunshine like today’s, we say: “I feel more human.” It’s a recognition that we spend most of our lives feeling less than fully human. We have a sense that there is something – a fullness of life, a generosity of heart, a deeper connection with others – something we’re made for, which is largely missing from our lives. We are not who we should be, who we were made to be.
What, then, were we made to be? That question is answered in today’s Gospel. Human beings are made in the image of God, a God who is love, fellowship, communion. When we love one another, we participate in the fellowship which is at the very heart of God. That is why Jesus prays:
As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, … so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.
That is the purpose of humanity, that is what we were made to be: made to share the very life of God, by living in his love."
"... happiness can never result from the exercise of choice alone: we are social beings, and the building blocks of happiness lie in looking out for each other, acting together, being in teams and pursuing common goals for the common good. Families, schools, colleges, unions, newspapers, sports clubs and even firms should all understand that such commonality should be part of their core DNA." (Will Hutton)
and
"The big issue for me concerns isolationism and the rise of rightwing extremism in Europe and beyond. The extremists are diametrically opposed to the EU’s founding values. We forget that this is something that binds us and protects us and that, as one of the posters puts it, is “the largest peace project in human history”." (Wolfgang Tillmans)
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Pierce Pettis - That Kind Of Love.
The Dance of Love: Living the prayer of Jesus
Here is the sermon that I preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields today:
If you knew you had roughly eighteen hours to live and could use that time to talk and pray with your nearest and dearest, I wonder what you would say and do? It is likely that whatever you did and said in that time it would all be to do with what was of central importance to your life and thought.
That was the situation in which Jesus found himself in the hours before his crucifixion and we know that he used that time to share acted parables and key messages with his disciples, as well as to pray. His prayer at that time, a part of which forms today’s Gospel reading (John 17. 20 - 26), was for the unity of his current and future disciples – that they might be one. So, why was unity of such central importance to Jesus’ thinking and praying at that most significant moment in his life - the time of his death? If we can answer that question, we can reach into the very heart of Jesus’ being and thinking.
When Jesus prayed that his followers might all be one, he prayed this on the basis that his followers might be in God as he is in the Father and the Father is in him. He was praying that we, who follow in his footsteps, would experience the same oneness with God and each other that he enjoys with God, his Father. In essence, his prayer is that we will experience unity, because unity is what is at the very heart of God.
The Greek Fathers called the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit perichoresis, which “means ‘to dance around one another in relationship’, … peri meaning around, and choreio to dance” (Touching the Sacred, Chris Thorpe and Jake Lever, Canterbury Press). Stephen Verney, a former Bishop of Repton, explored this idea in several of his books (e.g. The Dance of Love, Fount) writing about “the dance of love of the Trinity in which they give place to each other.” “This is the glory revealed in Jesus, as the Father and the Son give authority to each other in mutual interdependence, and as the creator and the creation interpenetrate each other.” Similarly, David Runcorn has described “the Holy Trinity as a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped. They live and know each other in the simple ecstasy of giving” (Choice, Desire and the Will of God, SPCK). At the heart of the Godhead is a relationship of love where love is constantly being shared and exchanged between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and this exchange or dance of love holds them together in unity.
Verney goes on to say that the eternal dance of the Trinity in heaven is reflected in creation and we are invited to join in because it was out of that relationship of love at the heart of the Godhead that Jesus came into our world to open up a way for us to participate in the eternal dance of love constantly shared between Father, Son and Spirit. We are familiar with the idea that God’s love for us is shown in Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for us by becoming human and then dying for us on the cross. We are, perhaps, less familiar with the idea that we can be part of the constant exchange of love in God of which we have been speaking and which Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice of himself enables us to experience. If we live in God, we live in love and love lives in us. We become included in the constant exchange of love which exists in the Godhead and are, therefore, constantly loved no matter what else is going on in our lives.
In the words of Paul Simon, we could respond to this by saying ‘So beautiful or so what’. It’s all very well picturing a beautiful dance at the heart of the Trinity but what difference does that make to us or anyone else?
Firstly, it says to us that we are 100% loved by God, surrounded by and filled by love, and that the more we experience of God, the more we can come to know love for ourselves. I wonder, do we allow the reality that we are accepted and loved by God to seep into the depths of our being where it can and will address our insecurities and anxieties? Do we know this for ourselves? Do we accept it for ourselves? Because ultimately our deepest need is to know with absolute confidence that we are loved and that is what is assured for us through the sacrifice of Jesus and the dance of love which is the Trinity.
Second, we see that love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority. The dance of love is not a solo with the spotlight firmly fixed on an individual who garners all the glory for his or herself. It’s not even a picture of the kind of intuitive interaction which we see in ballroom dancing and which has been popularised on TV by ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. We are talking here of reciprocal love or giving which cannot be manipulated by ego, because the gift always moves beyond the reach of the one who first gives it. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that God is Trinity, three persons who are also one.
Lewis Hyde notes in his book called ‘The Gift’ that when giving is reciprocal: "The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points.” It is only “When the gift moves in a circle [that] its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” That is what we see in the Trinity and what we are called to replicate in our own relationships. “The Dance of Love,” Verney writes, “is the glory in God’s heart, but it is also the pattern which is reflected in everything he has created.” The more we live according to God’s pattern for life, the more we know in our lives the love and unity of the Trinity itself.
In his prayer Jesus makes a contrast between giving which can be controlled by personal ego or one pair of gift partners and giving which is genuinely reciprocal. He states that the world does not know his Righteous Father and, earlier in the prayer, that the world hates his disciples because they do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.
When Jesus uses this language of separation in John’s Gospel between his disciples and the world, Verney suggests that he is speaking about two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. In the first, “the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.” In the second, “the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.” Runcorn puts it like this, “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” To be God-like, “is not to be grasping” and so “Jesus pours himself out ‘precisely because’ he is God from God.”
These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and we are caught up in the struggle that results. Choosing our side in this struggle is a key question for us as human beings, the question being “so urgent that our survival depends on finding the answer.” Verney writes that: “we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. Human beings have set up prison camps where they torture each other for pleasure. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.”
I was reminded of these words when reading a recent interview that Neil McGregor gave to The Observer. In this interview he made some typically insightful contributions to the current debate about the EU referendum based on research for his book ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’. He said, for example, that: “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”
Similarly, President Obama suggested, during his recent visit to Europe, that “the people of Europe … are more secure and more prosperous because we stood together for the ideals we share.” As a Guardian article commenting on this speech noted this message runs counter to Europe’s growing populism; “the self-glorification of national egos, the distrust towards outsiders, and the reflex of putting up walls or closing down borders.”
In the UK we are at the very heart of this discussion as the last few years have seen us engaging in considerable political debate about the benefits of collaboration versus independence. From 2010 – 2015 we had our most recent experience of coalition government and, for all the complications inherent in coalitions, many would see that period as preferable to the licence that a majority Conservative Government has had to pursue austerity cuts on those with the least influence and political power in our society. In 2014 Scots voted narrowly to remain part of the United Kingdom rather than choosing independence and this year we are asked vote on essentially the same issue but in relation to the European Union.
Jesus’ focus on unity at the time of his death and the dance of love within the Trinity which is the basis for that focus, would suggest that, as his followers, we should favour collaboration, coalition, alliances and unions over independence, in the way that Neil suggests the German people have come to do. Yet we know, too, that a focus on unity at all costs also can silence voices of dissent and conscience and that power can accrue in unhelpful or unaccountable ways the larger or all-embracing an organisation or union may be.
Here at St Martin’s we know how difficult and complex it can be to create and sustain a community that is both unified and inclusive. We also know how valuable it is to make the attempt and to grapple with the complexities. I know that I have been both impressed and impacted by the way in which St Martin’s grapples with these issues and realise that I need to make changes in my thinking and practice as a result. These issues and complexities are, of course, magnified when it comes to working them through in the context of a union of nations, as we can by being part of the EU.
Nevertheless, the dance of love at the heart of the Trinity and our participation in that dance, as God’s children, compels us, I think, to make that attempt within the communities, organisations and networks of which we are part; whether that is family, church, local community, nation or union of nations. In doing so, we come to know ourselves firstly as surrounded by and filled by the love which overflows from the Trinity, then understand that such love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority as we seek to live in and through the dance of love in the complexities of human relationships, alliances, coalitions, collaborations and unions. Like the Holy Trinity, we strive to be a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped; living and knowing each other in the simple ecstasy of giving, which is the unity for which Jesus prayed.
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If you knew you had roughly eighteen hours to live and could use that time to talk and pray with your nearest and dearest, I wonder what you would say and do? It is likely that whatever you did and said in that time it would all be to do with what was of central importance to your life and thought.
That was the situation in which Jesus found himself in the hours before his crucifixion and we know that he used that time to share acted parables and key messages with his disciples, as well as to pray. His prayer at that time, a part of which forms today’s Gospel reading (John 17. 20 - 26), was for the unity of his current and future disciples – that they might be one. So, why was unity of such central importance to Jesus’ thinking and praying at that most significant moment in his life - the time of his death? If we can answer that question, we can reach into the very heart of Jesus’ being and thinking.
When Jesus prayed that his followers might all be one, he prayed this on the basis that his followers might be in God as he is in the Father and the Father is in him. He was praying that we, who follow in his footsteps, would experience the same oneness with God and each other that he enjoys with God, his Father. In essence, his prayer is that we will experience unity, because unity is what is at the very heart of God.
The Greek Fathers called the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit perichoresis, which “means ‘to dance around one another in relationship’, … peri meaning around, and choreio to dance” (Touching the Sacred, Chris Thorpe and Jake Lever, Canterbury Press). Stephen Verney, a former Bishop of Repton, explored this idea in several of his books (e.g. The Dance of Love, Fount) writing about “the dance of love of the Trinity in which they give place to each other.” “This is the glory revealed in Jesus, as the Father and the Son give authority to each other in mutual interdependence, and as the creator and the creation interpenetrate each other.” Similarly, David Runcorn has described “the Holy Trinity as a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped. They live and know each other in the simple ecstasy of giving” (Choice, Desire and the Will of God, SPCK). At the heart of the Godhead is a relationship of love where love is constantly being shared and exchanged between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and this exchange or dance of love holds them together in unity.
Verney goes on to say that the eternal dance of the Trinity in heaven is reflected in creation and we are invited to join in because it was out of that relationship of love at the heart of the Godhead that Jesus came into our world to open up a way for us to participate in the eternal dance of love constantly shared between Father, Son and Spirit. We are familiar with the idea that God’s love for us is shown in Jesus’ sacrifice of himself for us by becoming human and then dying for us on the cross. We are, perhaps, less familiar with the idea that we can be part of the constant exchange of love in God of which we have been speaking and which Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice of himself enables us to experience. If we live in God, we live in love and love lives in us. We become included in the constant exchange of love which exists in the Godhead and are, therefore, constantly loved no matter what else is going on in our lives.
In the words of Paul Simon, we could respond to this by saying ‘So beautiful or so what’. It’s all very well picturing a beautiful dance at the heart of the Trinity but what difference does that make to us or anyone else?
Firstly, it says to us that we are 100% loved by God, surrounded by and filled by love, and that the more we experience of God, the more we can come to know love for ourselves. I wonder, do we allow the reality that we are accepted and loved by God to seep into the depths of our being where it can and will address our insecurities and anxieties? Do we know this for ourselves? Do we accept it for ourselves? Because ultimately our deepest need is to know with absolute confidence that we are loved and that is what is assured for us through the sacrifice of Jesus and the dance of love which is the Trinity.
Second, we see that love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority. The dance of love is not a solo with the spotlight firmly fixed on an individual who garners all the glory for his or herself. It’s not even a picture of the kind of intuitive interaction which we see in ballroom dancing and which has been popularised on TV by ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. We are talking here of reciprocal love or giving which cannot be manipulated by ego, because the gift always moves beyond the reach of the one who first gives it. That is one of the reasons why it is so important that God is Trinity, three persons who are also one.
Lewis Hyde notes in his book called ‘The Gift’ that when giving is reciprocal: "The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points.” It is only “When the gift moves in a circle [that] its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.” That is what we see in the Trinity and what we are called to replicate in our own relationships. “The Dance of Love,” Verney writes, “is the glory in God’s heart, but it is also the pattern which is reflected in everything he has created.” The more we live according to God’s pattern for life, the more we know in our lives the love and unity of the Trinity itself.
In his prayer Jesus makes a contrast between giving which can be controlled by personal ego or one pair of gift partners and giving which is genuinely reciprocal. He states that the world does not know his Righteous Father and, earlier in the prayer, that the world hates his disciples because they do not belong to the world, just as he does not belong to the world.
When Jesus uses this language of separation in John’s Gospel between his disciples and the world, Verney suggests that he is speaking about two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. In the first, “the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.” In the second, “the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.” Runcorn puts it like this, “the life of God is non-possessive, non-competitive, humbly attentive to the interests of the other, united in love and vision.” To be God-like, “is not to be grasping” and so “Jesus pours himself out ‘precisely because’ he is God from God.”
These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and we are caught up in the struggle that results. Choosing our side in this struggle is a key question for us as human beings, the question being “so urgent that our survival depends on finding the answer.” Verney writes that: “we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. Human beings have set up prison camps where they torture each other for pleasure. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.”
I was reminded of these words when reading a recent interview that Neil McGregor gave to The Observer. In this interview he made some typically insightful contributions to the current debate about the EU referendum based on research for his book ‘Germany: Memories of a Nation’. He said, for example, that: “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”
Similarly, President Obama suggested, during his recent visit to Europe, that “the people of Europe … are more secure and more prosperous because we stood together for the ideals we share.” As a Guardian article commenting on this speech noted this message runs counter to Europe’s growing populism; “the self-glorification of national egos, the distrust towards outsiders, and the reflex of putting up walls or closing down borders.”
In the UK we are at the very heart of this discussion as the last few years have seen us engaging in considerable political debate about the benefits of collaboration versus independence. From 2010 – 2015 we had our most recent experience of coalition government and, for all the complications inherent in coalitions, many would see that period as preferable to the licence that a majority Conservative Government has had to pursue austerity cuts on those with the least influence and political power in our society. In 2014 Scots voted narrowly to remain part of the United Kingdom rather than choosing independence and this year we are asked vote on essentially the same issue but in relation to the European Union.
Jesus’ focus on unity at the time of his death and the dance of love within the Trinity which is the basis for that focus, would suggest that, as his followers, we should favour collaboration, coalition, alliances and unions over independence, in the way that Neil suggests the German people have come to do. Yet we know, too, that a focus on unity at all costs also can silence voices of dissent and conscience and that power can accrue in unhelpful or unaccountable ways the larger or all-embracing an organisation or union may be.
Here at St Martin’s we know how difficult and complex it can be to create and sustain a community that is both unified and inclusive. We also know how valuable it is to make the attempt and to grapple with the complexities. I know that I have been both impressed and impacted by the way in which St Martin’s grapples with these issues and realise that I need to make changes in my thinking and practice as a result. These issues and complexities are, of course, magnified when it comes to working them through in the context of a union of nations, as we can by being part of the EU.
Nevertheless, the dance of love at the heart of the Trinity and our participation in that dance, as God’s children, compels us, I think, to make that attempt within the communities, organisations and networks of which we are part; whether that is family, church, local community, nation or union of nations. In doing so, we come to know ourselves firstly as surrounded by and filled by the love which overflows from the Trinity, then understand that such love involves the continual giving and receiving of affirmation and authority as we seek to live in and through the dance of love in the complexities of human relationships, alliances, coalitions, collaborations and unions. Like the Holy Trinity, we strive to be a dancing community of divine poverty. Each eternally, joyfully, dispossessing themselves; emptying, pouring themselves out to the favour and glory of the other. Nothing claimed, demanded or grasped; living and knowing each other in the simple ecstasy of giving, which is the unity for which Jesus prayed.
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K.D. Lang - Jericho.
Friday, 22 April 2016
The whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances
Last Sunday The Observer published an interview with Neil MacGregor in which he made what seem to me to be some of the most pertinent observations that I have heard to date on the issues surrounding the EU referendum and the possibility of Brexit. In the interview he talks about acts of memory as a defining difference within Europe:
'In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”
Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?
“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”
And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”
Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”
The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes
That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.
“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”
The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”
The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”'
'In Germany, he says, “the thing I continue to find striking is that in the centre of Berlin you keep coming across monuments to national shame. I think that is unique in the world.”
Did they really have an option but to confront what had happened though?
“Well,” he says. “Austria hasn’t done it. Post-Soviet Russia hasn’t done it. Japan hasn’t done it.”
And, he would suggest, Britain and France have never really done it. “If you compare the way we remember, the perfect example was the opening ceremony of the Olympics, that selective national memory: all true but not looking at any of the difficult bits.”
Two things, he says, in the past couple of months have highlighted that complacency. The Cecil Rhodes statue debate “shows that we still cannot look at the past dispassionately, even a hundred years on”. Likewise, the centenary of the Easter Rising. “There is still no appetite to look hard at British behaviour in Ireland. What I find so painfully admirable about the German experience is that they are determined to find the historical truth and acknowledge it however painful it is. You can’t be an informed adult – or an artist – in Germany without doing that.”
The great thing a museum can do is allow us to look at the world as if through other eyes
That reflexive act of memory also colours the great political schisms of our times. Much has changed in Europe in the 18 months since the British Museum’s Germany show and the first publication of his book. It contains many chapters of forensic storytelling, but the one that stands out reading it now is MacGregor’s analysis of a simple refugee cart. That cart was representative of one of the most forgotten events of the last century: the forced “repatriation” of German speakers from eastern Europe after the war. About 30 million people were “ethnically cleansed” and 12-14 million returned to a devastated homeland they didn’t know, and became absorbed into a society that was rebuilt and reordered within a decade.
“If you try to explain why Germany has taken its unique stance on Syrian refugees in Europe you can’t ignore this,” MacGregor says. “Some argue the policy is another way of atoning for the Nazi era. But another absolutely central motivation, rarely mentioned, is that almost everybody now in Germany in their 20s or 30s has a grandparent or great-grandparent who has been a refugee. Pretty well every German has direct family experience of knowing what it means to be welcomed.”
The other debate that has become more charged since the book first appeared is the notion of sovereignty. MacGregor believes that the British and Germans mean completely different things when they use that word. Partly because of its own traumatic experience of nationalism and partly because of the history of shifting borders and alliances during the Holy Roman Empire, in Germany, he says, sovereignty always means an appetite for coalition and compromise. “Any German knows that as well as the Bundestag there are 16 other parliaments making laws within its borders. In Britain we don’t have the language for that.”
The European debate in Britain looks so strange if you are a German for precisely this reason, he suggests. “German people see the whole purpose of a political leader is to make successful alliances. The proper use of sovereignty is all about pooling it to achieve your aims. The British idea that you should entirely do these things on your own and try to assume total control over your environment is unthinkable.”'
This, it seems to me, explains, in part, the shortcomings of the argument currently being made by anti-EU campaigners that Barack Obama is guilty of double standards when he encourages the UK to remain part of the EU. What those campaigners fail to acknowledge is that the USA is, as it says on the tin, a Union of States. Obama recognises the importance of cooperation rather than isolation and interdependence rather than independence because that is built in to the existence of America, part of its raison d'être. By contrast, the anti-EU campaigners believe, as McGregor notes, that we should entirely do these things on our own and try to assume total control over our environment. In my view it is this refusal to recognise the value of cooperation and interdependence that causes the shallowness in the arguments made in favour of Brexit.
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Woody Guthrie - This Land Is Your Land.
Sunday, 27 September 2015
Society has largely lost the ability to talk about religion and belief in public discourse
There is an excellent article in today's Observer from Stephen Pritchard on levels of faith literacy in the media:
'“The media’s coverage of religion is a bit like covering football from the point of view of hooliganism and never really watching the game,” said Michael Wakelin, former head of religion and ethics at the BBC, at a fascinating, though occasionally depressing day of discussion held in London recently on Islam and its treatment in British broadcasting and newspapers. After years of conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East, Muslims in Britain feel that they are too often associated with the crimes of extremists while too little attention is paid to the positive contribution they make to civic life or to the peaceful aims of their faith.
Understanding that faith – and indeed all faiths – is an urgent priority, said Wakelin, quoting Professor Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths University of London: “Billions of people around the world remain religious, despite the assumptions of secularity. Millions are in Britain, Europe and the west. After decades in which we have barely talked about religion and belief in public discourse, society has largely lost the ability to do so. Diversity, global trade and extremism make it pressing to do so now.”
Wakelin maintained that a generation of neglect, with education failing the religious curriculum, the major religions failing to engage with the wider public – and the media not understanding religion and therefore keeping it at arms’ length – had resulted in a society that lacked the confidence to deal with religious subjects and religious people.
Inspired by the success of the Science Media Centre in transforming the way science is reported, he is now involved in setting up a religion media centre. “We do not want to promote religion or even say that it is a good thing, but we are wanting to have a recognition that it matters and therefore it needs to be reported, discussed and examined with knowledge, fairness and respect.'
Earlier in the week Jonathan Freedland addressed this same issue in relation to society in general:
'Whatever else the seers of the past, the Aldous Huxleys, Jules Vernes and HG Wellses, imagined for the 21st century, it wasn’t ... that in 2015 we would still be in thrall to the stories we’d told one another for two millennia. And yet here we are ... a recurring theme of our era is the persistence of the ancient faiths.
It was not just the sci-fi writers who assumed we’d be over this by now. Most believers in science and progress took it as read that we would put aside such fairytales as we reached a higher stage of evolution. There would be no room in the space age for the sand and dust of the biblical past. What’s more, true progressives would want to hasten the banishment of religion from the public sphere, taking its superstitions, its fear-fuelled strictures about sex and its out-dated patriarchal attitudes with it.
But this has proved a double mistake. It’s failed as both description and prescription. On the former, its prediction of the future proved wrong: faith is still here, apparently stronger than ever. For that reason alone, for the role it plays in shaping our world, religion has to be taken seriously – more seriously than Dawkins-ite atheists, who dismiss it with talk of “fairies at the bottom of the garden” or “sky-pixies” will allow.'
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Arvo Pärt - Credo.
'“The media’s coverage of religion is a bit like covering football from the point of view of hooliganism and never really watching the game,” said Michael Wakelin, former head of religion and ethics at the BBC, at a fascinating, though occasionally depressing day of discussion held in London recently on Islam and its treatment in British broadcasting and newspapers. After years of conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East, Muslims in Britain feel that they are too often associated with the crimes of extremists while too little attention is paid to the positive contribution they make to civic life or to the peaceful aims of their faith.
Understanding that faith – and indeed all faiths – is an urgent priority, said Wakelin, quoting Professor Adam Dinham of Goldsmiths University of London: “Billions of people around the world remain religious, despite the assumptions of secularity. Millions are in Britain, Europe and the west. After decades in which we have barely talked about religion and belief in public discourse, society has largely lost the ability to do so. Diversity, global trade and extremism make it pressing to do so now.”
Wakelin maintained that a generation of neglect, with education failing the religious curriculum, the major religions failing to engage with the wider public – and the media not understanding religion and therefore keeping it at arms’ length – had resulted in a society that lacked the confidence to deal with religious subjects and religious people.
Inspired by the success of the Science Media Centre in transforming the way science is reported, he is now involved in setting up a religion media centre. “We do not want to promote religion or even say that it is a good thing, but we are wanting to have a recognition that it matters and therefore it needs to be reported, discussed and examined with knowledge, fairness and respect.'
Earlier in the week Jonathan Freedland addressed this same issue in relation to society in general:
'Whatever else the seers of the past, the Aldous Huxleys, Jules Vernes and HG Wellses, imagined for the 21st century, it wasn’t ... that in 2015 we would still be in thrall to the stories we’d told one another for two millennia. And yet here we are ... a recurring theme of our era is the persistence of the ancient faiths.
It was not just the sci-fi writers who assumed we’d be over this by now. Most believers in science and progress took it as read that we would put aside such fairytales as we reached a higher stage of evolution. There would be no room in the space age for the sand and dust of the biblical past. What’s more, true progressives would want to hasten the banishment of religion from the public sphere, taking its superstitions, its fear-fuelled strictures about sex and its out-dated patriarchal attitudes with it.
But this has proved a double mistake. It’s failed as both description and prescription. On the former, its prediction of the future proved wrong: faith is still here, apparently stronger than ever. For that reason alone, for the role it plays in shaping our world, religion has to be taken seriously – more seriously than Dawkins-ite atheists, who dismiss it with talk of “fairies at the bottom of the garden” or “sky-pixies” will allow.'
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Arvo Pärt - Credo.
Sunday, 30 August 2015
Migration: This is a story about humanity
'Migration is what we have done since the earliest of times, triggering growth and enlarging our circles of possibility. Whether we’re discussing the Roman or British empires, 15th-century Venice or 20th-century New York or London today, great civilisations and dynamic cities have been defined by being open to immigrants and refugees.
They are, as migration specialist Ian Goldin characterises them, “exceptional people”. Over centuries, as he painstakingly details, it has been immigrants and refugees who have been part of the alchemy of any country’s success: they are driven, hungry and talented and add to the pool of entrepreneurs, innovators and risk-takers. The hundreds of thousands today who have trekked across continents and dangerous seas are by any standards unusually driven. They are also, as Angela Merkel says, fellow human beings. To receive them well is not only in our interests, it is fundamental to an idea of what it means to be human.' (Will Hutton)
'Other than a tiny proportion of sociopaths, our species is naturally empathetic. It is only when we strip the humanity from people – when we stop imagining them as being quite human like us – that our empathetic nature is eroded. That allows us either to accept the misery of others, or even to inflict it on them. Rightwing newspapers hunt down extreme and unsympathetic stories of refugees, and we fight back with statistics. Instead, we need to show the reality of refugees: their names, their faces, their ambitions and their fears, their loves, what they fled.' (Owen Jones)
'What do the following people have in common: Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England; the former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen; Nigel Farage’s wife, Kirsten; Chelsea’s new striker, Pedro; and Sir Bradley Wiggins?
Yes, they are all migrants – or, if you prefer, immigrants. Having moved to the UK to further their careers, some of them might perhaps be described as “economic migrants”. Except that this term is reserved exclusively by politicians and the media to describe people who – unlike bankers or sports stars – they don’t like: people who, in the words of our foreign secretary, are “marauding” across Europe.
People from the UK moving abroad to pursue their career or financial interests, meanwhile, are “expats”, never emigrants or migrants.
The language we hear in what passes for a national conversation on migration has become as debased as most of the arguments, until the very word “migrants” is toxic, used to frighten us by conjuring up images of a “swarm” (as David Cameron put it) massing at our borders, threatening our way of life.
As Prof Alexander Betts, director of the refugee studies centre at Oxford University, says: “Words that convey an exaggerated sense of threat can fuel anti-immigration sentiment and a climate of intolerance and xenophobia.”'
'Another journalist says: “They are people – men, women and children, fathers and mothers, teachers and engineers, just like us – except they come from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Why not just call them ‘people’, then list any other information we know that is relevant?”'
'Politically charged expressions such as “economic migrants”, “genuine refugees” or “illegal asylum seekers” should have no part in our coverage. This is a story about humanity. Reporting it should be humane as well as accurate. Sadly, most of what we hear and read about “migrants” is neither.' (Dave Marsh)
They are, as migration specialist Ian Goldin characterises them, “exceptional people”. Over centuries, as he painstakingly details, it has been immigrants and refugees who have been part of the alchemy of any country’s success: they are driven, hungry and talented and add to the pool of entrepreneurs, innovators and risk-takers. The hundreds of thousands today who have trekked across continents and dangerous seas are by any standards unusually driven. They are also, as Angela Merkel says, fellow human beings. To receive them well is not only in our interests, it is fundamental to an idea of what it means to be human.' (Will Hutton)
'Other than a tiny proportion of sociopaths, our species is naturally empathetic. It is only when we strip the humanity from people – when we stop imagining them as being quite human like us – that our empathetic nature is eroded. That allows us either to accept the misery of others, or even to inflict it on them. Rightwing newspapers hunt down extreme and unsympathetic stories of refugees, and we fight back with statistics. Instead, we need to show the reality of refugees: their names, their faces, their ambitions and their fears, their loves, what they fled.' (Owen Jones)
'What do the following people have in common: Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England; the former England cricketer Kevin Pietersen; Nigel Farage’s wife, Kirsten; Chelsea’s new striker, Pedro; and Sir Bradley Wiggins?
Yes, they are all migrants – or, if you prefer, immigrants. Having moved to the UK to further their careers, some of them might perhaps be described as “economic migrants”. Except that this term is reserved exclusively by politicians and the media to describe people who – unlike bankers or sports stars – they don’t like: people who, in the words of our foreign secretary, are “marauding” across Europe.
People from the UK moving abroad to pursue their career or financial interests, meanwhile, are “expats”, never emigrants or migrants.
The language we hear in what passes for a national conversation on migration has become as debased as most of the arguments, until the very word “migrants” is toxic, used to frighten us by conjuring up images of a “swarm” (as David Cameron put it) massing at our borders, threatening our way of life.
As Prof Alexander Betts, director of the refugee studies centre at Oxford University, says: “Words that convey an exaggerated sense of threat can fuel anti-immigration sentiment and a climate of intolerance and xenophobia.”'
'Another journalist says: “They are people – men, women and children, fathers and mothers, teachers and engineers, just like us – except they come from Syria, Eritrea, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Why not just call them ‘people’, then list any other information we know that is relevant?”'
'Politically charged expressions such as “economic migrants”, “genuine refugees” or “illegal asylum seekers” should have no part in our coverage. This is a story about humanity. Reporting it should be humane as well as accurate. Sadly, most of what we hear and read about “migrants” is neither.' (Dave Marsh)
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Michael Kiwanuka - I Need Your Company.
Sunday, 26 July 2015
Lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles
The Observer suggests that this summer bigger crowds than usual are set to travel up the long driveway to see the decorated furniture, flamboyant fabrics and wall paintings of Charleston, the Sussex home once shared by artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, where key scenes in the lavish BBC2 drama Life in Squares were filmed. Also on the tourist trail will be Monks House at nearby Rodmell, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf lived, and Berwick church, which the group decorated at the request of Bishop George Bell.
Frédéric Chopin - Concerto pour piano n° 2 (Larghetto).
I visited Berwick Church as part of my sabbatical art pilgrimage and my report of this visit can be read by clicking here. This commission was the first time in the twentieth century in the UK that a modern artist of national standing undertook a complete decorative scheme for an historic rural church. Bell and others involved believed that if the project was successful, 'it would stimulate demand for commissions in churches all over the country to alleviate the plight of many artists.'
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Sunday, 12 July 2015
Grappling with the differences between what we hear and what we see
It is interesting to compare the response to Soundscapes at the National Gallery with reviews of the Richter/Pärt collaboration at the Manchester international festival.
Laura Cumming thinks that, in Soundscapes, 'sound ... is working against art' and Jonathan Jones says that 'great paintings do not need the emotional prompt of music and sounds to make them come alive' but, by contrast, Stephen Pritchard thinks that Richter's paintings 'don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.'
Cumming writes: 'Soundscapes is the worst idea the National Gallery has come up with in almost 200 years. It is feeble, pusillanimous, apologetic and, even in its resolute wrong-headedness, lacks all ambition. Invite a sound artist to compose a work in response to a masterpiece from the collection and you might expect something original, given all the precedents in music alone, from Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to Philip Glass’s piano portrait of Chuck Close. But instead this show feels more like the ambient soundtrack on a pair of National Trust headphones ...
Anyone can (many people do) walk around the National Gallery listening to their own private music. I can imagine how it might focus the mind or block out the buzz of other lives. But paintings create their own soundscapes, which may arrive in the form of wordless thoughts.
Sound here is working against art. Instead of seducing people into staying longer with a painting, concentrating harder, noticing more, it is limiting our free response by filling the gallery with sounds that one has to make an effort to ignore. And this does no favours to the living or the dead.'
By contrast Pritchard writes that Richter's paintings 'are wonderful creations; the deeply subtle Double Grey reflecting the streaked reds, greys, greens and blues of the Birkenau set. And yet they don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.
His piece, entitled Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima, is sung at intervals throughout the day. On preview afternoon last week there was no warning of its start; the singers of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis mingled with the crowd and simply sang where they stood – an electrifying moment. It’s vintage Pärt; at first it could be a gentle, lilting folk-song as old as time but it unfolds into a multi-layered, densely harmonised acclamation of alleluia, which both triumphs over the horrors of Birkenau and bestows a profound nobility on the victims of that terrible place.'
Why is one art/music collaboration perceived to succeed when another does not? Adrian Searle suggests that the difference lies in the grappling, which goes on in the Richter/Pärt collaboration, between the differences between what we hear and what we see, what we are told and what we experience with our senses, what is mediated and what hits us directly':
'Pärt’s singers repeat the same song, seven times in succession. Every time it sounds different. Richter’s four grey diptychs, hanging opposite the Birkenau panels, play a further formal game of similarity and difference (the paint hidden from us on the reverse of glass sheets). The grey, paired panels are alike one another, but no two greys are the same, though each pair of panels has one lighter, one darker sheet. Comparisons between the different pairs are difficult to make, and shift according to where we stand, the ambient lighting and time of day. They are filled with murky reflections. Similarly, listening to Pärt’s music, we sense differences in the rendition, even though exact comparisons are difficult.'
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Laura Cumming thinks that, in Soundscapes, 'sound ... is working against art' and Jonathan Jones says that 'great paintings do not need the emotional prompt of music and sounds to make them come alive' but, by contrast, Stephen Pritchard thinks that Richter's paintings 'don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.'
Cumming writes: 'Soundscapes is the worst idea the National Gallery has come up with in almost 200 years. It is feeble, pusillanimous, apologetic and, even in its resolute wrong-headedness, lacks all ambition. Invite a sound artist to compose a work in response to a masterpiece from the collection and you might expect something original, given all the precedents in music alone, from Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to Philip Glass’s piano portrait of Chuck Close. But instead this show feels more like the ambient soundtrack on a pair of National Trust headphones ...
Anyone can (many people do) walk around the National Gallery listening to their own private music. I can imagine how it might focus the mind or block out the buzz of other lives. But paintings create their own soundscapes, which may arrive in the form of wordless thoughts.
Sound here is working against art. Instead of seducing people into staying longer with a painting, concentrating harder, noticing more, it is limiting our free response by filling the gallery with sounds that one has to make an effort to ignore. And this does no favours to the living or the dead.'
By contrast Pritchard writes that Richter's paintings 'are wonderful creations; the deeply subtle Double Grey reflecting the streaked reds, greys, greens and blues of the Birkenau set. And yet they don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.
His piece, entitled Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima, is sung at intervals throughout the day. On preview afternoon last week there was no warning of its start; the singers of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis mingled with the crowd and simply sang where they stood – an electrifying moment. It’s vintage Pärt; at first it could be a gentle, lilting folk-song as old as time but it unfolds into a multi-layered, densely harmonised acclamation of alleluia, which both triumphs over the horrors of Birkenau and bestows a profound nobility on the victims of that terrible place.'
Why is one art/music collaboration perceived to succeed when another does not? Adrian Searle suggests that the difference lies in the grappling, which goes on in the Richter/Pärt collaboration, between the differences between what we hear and what we see, what we are told and what we experience with our senses, what is mediated and what hits us directly':
'Pärt’s singers repeat the same song, seven times in succession. Every time it sounds different. Richter’s four grey diptychs, hanging opposite the Birkenau panels, play a further formal game of similarity and difference (the paint hidden from us on the reverse of glass sheets). The grey, paired panels are alike one another, but no two greys are the same, though each pair of panels has one lighter, one darker sheet. Comparisons between the different pairs are difficult to make, and shift according to where we stand, the ambient lighting and time of day. They are filled with murky reflections. Similarly, listening to Pärt’s music, we sense differences in the rendition, even though exact comparisons are difficult.'
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Arvo Pärt - Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima.
Sunday, 3 May 2015
The best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action
The Observer has a major feature article on Theaster Gates, the artist that ArtReview likes to call “the poster boy for socially engaged art”. His Freedom of Assembly exhibition is at White Cube Bermondsey until 5 July 2015.
At 13, Gates was director of his church’s gospel youth choir and now plays with his own Zen-gospel band, the Black Monks of Mississippi. His joint masters was in religion, ceramics and city design.
'He paid his way through college cutting his friends’ hair. “I liked it because I always thought inside this little head under my hands is this vast possibility. With clippers and comb, there I went. That felt like the cultivation of a mindset, a skill set – and I wanted my girls and my guys to look good.”
He makes it sound almost a religious ritual.
“Well, yes. But better not to talk about that. There is always a part beyond what man owes man. It’s like: some decisions, most decisions I make, are not the right smart market decisions, but they are important to me.”'
His first show at White Cube was called My Labor Is My Protest. He says, 'In my body I felt for a long time that the best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action.'
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Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi - And The Whole Yard Said Amen.
At 13, Gates was director of his church’s gospel youth choir and now plays with his own Zen-gospel band, the Black Monks of Mississippi. His joint masters was in religion, ceramics and city design.
'He paid his way through college cutting his friends’ hair. “I liked it because I always thought inside this little head under my hands is this vast possibility. With clippers and comb, there I went. That felt like the cultivation of a mindset, a skill set – and I wanted my girls and my guys to look good.”
He makes it sound almost a religious ritual.
“Well, yes. But better not to talk about that. There is always a part beyond what man owes man. It’s like: some decisions, most decisions I make, are not the right smart market decisions, but they are important to me.”'
His first show at White Cube was called My Labor Is My Protest. He says, 'In my body I felt for a long time that the best political act, the best faith act, is always an act, an action.'
My post about My Labor Is My Protest can be read by clicking here.
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Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi - And The Whole Yard Said Amen.
Sunday, 1 February 2015
Expressing what was possible but not yet realized
William Nicholson's latest novel 'The Lovers of Amherst' tells the story of an affair between Emily Dickinson’s brother Austin and the wife of a colleague, seen alongside a contemporary story, also involving a love affair. Nicholson says, 'Austin Dickinson’s passion for Mabel Todd is fascinating because it was so defiant of all convention – so much so that in order to justify what he was doing he concluded that his love must come from God. Tracking his affair, and Emily’s part in it, led me to reflect on Emily’s own attitude to sex and passion; and from there to my own attitudes. The result is a many-layered meditation on passionate love, with all its self-generated delusions as well as its glories.'
The novel is in some ways: 'my love letter to the poet Emily Dickinson, who I first encountered over forty years ago. Her poems shock and thrill me as much today as they did then. She herself is so unfathomable that I’ve been shy of writing about her, though over the years I’ve accumulated a great deal of knowledge about her, as well as a first edition of her poems, published in 1890. Then when Polly Longhurst published her edited edition of the letters and diaries of Emily’s brother Austin, relating his passionate adulterous affair with the wife of a colleague, I became fascinated by the world of the Dickinsons. The result is my new novel.'
'A poet who took definition as her province, Emily Dickinson challenged the existing definitions of poetry and the poet’s work. Like writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, she experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints ... To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.'
Emily Dickinson - I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Speaking about Emily Dickinson in The Observer, Nicholson says: 'I’ve always loved her poems. I’ve always been interested in religious subjects and relationships, and here was a woman struggling with issues of loneliness, meaninglessness, value and beauty, excitement and wonder, all in such a tiny compass. A lot of people in this country don’t know her and I felt quite missionary about it.'
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Sunday, 22 December 2013
Debate about foodbanks and food poverty
A few weeks ago Jack Monroe started a petition to get Parliament to debate hunger in the UK and why there's been a rise in the use of foodbanks. She thought she'd work steadily towards 100,000 signers over a few months and aim for a debate by Spring. She was wrong about that, and explains here how the story developed:
"Within a day more than 60,000 people had signed and the campaign made the frontpage of the Independent. Within two weeks you helped the campaign reach 142,000 signers and on Wednesday we secured our goal of a debate in Parliament.
People going hungry in the UK has been a quiet secret for too long now, often only seen by the volunteers dealing with an increasing number of families turning to foodbanks. This petition changed that: #Foodbanks was trending on Twitter, the campaign reached the newspaper frontpages -- and most importantly MPs sat for three hours and heard story after story of what it is like to struggle in modern Britain.
Over 60 Labour MPs requested to speak at the debate and they took turns to tell the stories of their constituents. We heard about the ex-serviceman who turned to a foodbank while waiting for four weeks for Atos to deal with his appeal. The story of two hungry young boys who came to ask for one packet of cereal and one packet of drinking chocolate as a treat. And we heard of the man whose benefits were sanctioned when he couldn't attend an assessment interview because he was in hospital with his wife who was seriously ill with cancer.
Unfortunately Government ministers held their party line. Esther McVey said: "it is right to say that more people are visiting foodbanks, as we would expect.” And while Iain Duncan Smith turned up for the debate -- a victory in itself -- he chose not to stick around and snuck out half way through.
We should be proud of what we achieved through this petition. MPs were reminded of the people that they are there to represent. And while some of them might try to drown out the stories with jeers and laughter -- these stories are now out in the open for all to see. They are on the official Hansard record and can't be ignored any longer.
This debate is just the start - we'll be back in the New Year fighting food poverty - because hunger isn't going to go away. If your MP is one of the shameful 296 who voted against the motion to investigate foodbank use - why not invite them to go along with you to visit a Trussell Trust foodbank in the new year.
There are lots of other ways you can get involved to help foodbanks in your area -- check out The Mirror who have been backing this campaign for more details."
The Observer reports today that "Iain Duncan Smith, the embattled work and pensions secretary, is refusing to meet leaders of the rapidly expanding Christian charity that has set up more than 400 food banks across the UK, claiming it is "scaremongering" and has a clear political agenda.
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Thea Gilmore - Midwinter Toast.
Sunday, 21 August 2011
Poem: Guilty generation
Guilty generation
There is oil on the streets tonight, oil! It only takes a spark to ignite;
the streets are flammable! Ram raid a van into a wall, wait nervously
for its fuel tank to blow. Spread fire and build barricades on streets
giddily lit by flames as lines of blue lights flash on distant riot shields.
Scaffold poles to smash up shops and passers-by, the sensation of feet
crunching glass, the shells of cars burnt to paintless, tyreless shapes,
the cheering as TVs, gangster chic and dangerware - free shit -
are pillaged. Get free stuff, fuck the system, rip the feds, in a festival
of illegal consumption, a violent Olympiad of lawlessness.
London is burning with more than boredom now. The streets
of London are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere.
You could almost think that you’re seeing double on a hot, bright night
in Peckham Rye witnessing the decline and fall of the Western world!
The sneer of a wealthy diner from the safe side of a restaurant window
is observed by a young rioter who sees in this look all he is personally denied.
One kick from a boot shatters the glass divide and replaces the sneer
with a look of fear. The thin film between rich and poor has been torched tonight
as night-time riots follow daylight robbery by wealthy elites.
Traders and bankers socialise risk and privatise profits
while trousering bonuses which exceed lifetime average salaries.
MPs fiddle expenses, police take backhanders as journalists hack phones for profit.
Public discourse sneers in a celebrity-obsessed media,
cynical and contemptuous of old values. Mutual assistance abandoned
in favour of solipsistic entrepreneurship, as community is cut
from the big broken society. The already rich at the forefront of the charge
to grab what you can while you can, now the good times are over.
From Salford to Pembury, from the City to Westminster
fear and greed roam unchecked without bothering to mask their faces;
generational fear and loathing increases now the old have power,
money, votes and demographics on their side. A generation is lost -
brooding, disoriented, suspicious - bearing the imprint of a consumer culture
determining ideas of status and achievement. A generation which pays
for the financiers’ calamity while their elders, who have taken early retirement
with generous pension packages and the proceeds of property booms,
spend liberally on their own pleasure and leisure. A generation whose basic desires
for stable jobs and secure homes will be hit hard by a triple whammy
of climate change combined with the loss of cheap fuel and credit.
A generation with a shared sense of deprivation, seeing a democracy deficit
and experiencing a collapse in the authority of traditional institutions.
If it is a crime to live without hope or meaning, then, yes, this generation is guilty.
(This poem has been collaged primarily from phrases and images used in articles published in the Observer - 14/08/11 - and the Guardian - 13/08/11, 15/08/11, 18/08/11 and 20/08/11)
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The Jam - Down In The Tube Station At Midnight.
There is oil on the streets tonight, oil! It only takes a spark to ignite;
the streets are flammable! Ram raid a van into a wall, wait nervously
for its fuel tank to blow. Spread fire and build barricades on streets
giddily lit by flames as lines of blue lights flash on distant riot shields.
Scaffold poles to smash up shops and passers-by, the sensation of feet
crunching glass, the shells of cars burnt to paintless, tyreless shapes,
the cheering as TVs, gangster chic and dangerware - free shit -
are pillaged. Get free stuff, fuck the system, rip the feds, in a festival
of illegal consumption, a violent Olympiad of lawlessness.
London is burning with more than boredom now. The streets
of London are filled with rubble, ancient footprints are everywhere.
You could almost think that you’re seeing double on a hot, bright night
in Peckham Rye witnessing the decline and fall of the Western world!
The sneer of a wealthy diner from the safe side of a restaurant window
is observed by a young rioter who sees in this look all he is personally denied.
One kick from a boot shatters the glass divide and replaces the sneer
with a look of fear. The thin film between rich and poor has been torched tonight
as night-time riots follow daylight robbery by wealthy elites.
Traders and bankers socialise risk and privatise profits
while trousering bonuses which exceed lifetime average salaries.
MPs fiddle expenses, police take backhanders as journalists hack phones for profit.
Public discourse sneers in a celebrity-obsessed media,
cynical and contemptuous of old values. Mutual assistance abandoned
in favour of solipsistic entrepreneurship, as community is cut
from the big broken society. The already rich at the forefront of the charge
to grab what you can while you can, now the good times are over.
From Salford to Pembury, from the City to Westminster
fear and greed roam unchecked without bothering to mask their faces;
generational fear and loathing increases now the old have power,
money, votes and demographics on their side. A generation is lost -
brooding, disoriented, suspicious - bearing the imprint of a consumer culture
determining ideas of status and achievement. A generation which pays
for the financiers’ calamity while their elders, who have taken early retirement
with generous pension packages and the proceeds of property booms,
spend liberally on their own pleasure and leisure. A generation whose basic desires
for stable jobs and secure homes will be hit hard by a triple whammy
of climate change combined with the loss of cheap fuel and credit.
A generation with a shared sense of deprivation, seeing a democracy deficit
and experiencing a collapse in the authority of traditional institutions.
If it is a crime to live without hope or meaning, then, yes, this generation is guilty.
(This poem has been collaged primarily from phrases and images used in articles published in the Observer - 14/08/11 - and the Guardian - 13/08/11, 15/08/11, 18/08/11 and 20/08/11)
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The Jam - Down In The Tube Station At Midnight.
Monday, 5 January 2009
The Black Rain (1)
Over Christmas I have read two books by Tom Davies; his biography Testament and his most recent novel The Tyranny of Ghosts. Not having read any of his work for some years it was fascinating to revisit the uncomfortable issues about faith and popular culture that his writings raise. The following is a synopsis of his career that I wrote several years ago:
Tom Davies is a seer. As a travel writer and semi-professional pilgrim, his descriptions both evoke and enliven the ordinary sights and people that he passes by, pausing just long enough to perceive significance. As a prophetic visionary, he uncovers the apocalyptic battle-drop against which ordinary life is played out. His best works involve journeys in which observation mingles with vision and where he runs the gamut of emotions from despair through boredom to wonder.
Trained as a journalist with the Western Mail, he later wrote for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Observer before biting the hand that had fed him by castigating the media in the books (travel, theology and novels) that he wrote subsequent to his conversion. His career came full circle with a column in the Western Mail under a pseudonym and published as The Visions of Caradoc.
His work is a tracking of the bloody footprints of Romanticism through literary, social and media history. Davies defines the Romantic Mind as emphasising the imagination and emotion over and above reason and intellect. It cultivates sensation and emotion for their own sake and has a persistent attraction to the morbid, the supernatural, the cruel, the perverted and the violent. He believes that: this Mind is predominant in Western media and culture; has been the gasoline in the bottle igniting a blazing orgy of violence that is speading uncontrolled through the world; is to be identified with the Biblical Man of Lawlessness, a tide of evil which engulfs the world as a necessary precondition to the return of Christ. In a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist, Dennis Potter, as characterising this Romantic Mind.
By contrast, as Caradoc, he argues that the Christian artist should "generally seek to affirm that which is pure, good and lovely. He would always be seeking to mediate the beauty of the ordinary world to us; he would be looking for new insights into reality and, in this way, celebrate the fantastic wonder of creation.
The Christian artist would never bother with a pervert, preferring to study a normal man at work or play; he would never gaze at a scene of horror when he could find as it floats, like a falling leaf, through the real world. The art of the Christian is the most difficult art of them all."
This sermon is delivered to Idris the Pointless, a Van Gogh in safety pins, who promptly informs Caradoc that his latest project is paint "portraits of the homes of all the convicted murderers in the Valleys". Davies' self-deprecating humour and confessions of personal weakness leaven the fire and brimstone of his prophetic vision and allow us both to absorb his warnings and follow his evocations of wonder. He has said of the Biblical prophets that "With their wild veerings and ravaged visions they all had a questionable sanity". He would count it a compliment if we admitted him to that same company.
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Sam Phillips - Baby I Can't Please You.
Tom Davies is a seer. As a travel writer and semi-professional pilgrim, his descriptions both evoke and enliven the ordinary sights and people that he passes by, pausing just long enough to perceive significance. As a prophetic visionary, he uncovers the apocalyptic battle-drop against which ordinary life is played out. His best works involve journeys in which observation mingles with vision and where he runs the gamut of emotions from despair through boredom to wonder.
Trained as a journalist with the Western Mail, he later wrote for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph and Observer before biting the hand that had fed him by castigating the media in the books (travel, theology and novels) that he wrote subsequent to his conversion. His career came full circle with a column in the Western Mail under a pseudonym and published as The Visions of Caradoc.
His work is a tracking of the bloody footprints of Romanticism through literary, social and media history. Davies defines the Romantic Mind as emphasising the imagination and emotion over and above reason and intellect. It cultivates sensation and emotion for their own sake and has a persistent attraction to the morbid, the supernatural, the cruel, the perverted and the violent. He believes that: this Mind is predominant in Western media and culture; has been the gasoline in the bottle igniting a blazing orgy of violence that is speading uncontrolled through the world; is to be identified with the Biblical Man of Lawlessness, a tide of evil which engulfs the world as a necessary precondition to the return of Christ. In a Caradoc article he sees the television dramatist, Dennis Potter, as characterising this Romantic Mind.
By contrast, as Caradoc, he argues that the Christian artist should "generally seek to affirm that which is pure, good and lovely. He would always be seeking to mediate the beauty of the ordinary world to us; he would be looking for new insights into reality and, in this way, celebrate the fantastic wonder of creation.
The Christian artist would never bother with a pervert, preferring to study a normal man at work or play; he would never gaze at a scene of horror when he could find as it floats, like a falling leaf, through the real world. The art of the Christian is the most difficult art of them all."
This sermon is delivered to Idris the Pointless, a Van Gogh in safety pins, who promptly informs Caradoc that his latest project is paint "portraits of the homes of all the convicted murderers in the Valleys". Davies' self-deprecating humour and confessions of personal weakness leaven the fire and brimstone of his prophetic vision and allow us both to absorb his warnings and follow his evocations of wonder. He has said of the Biblical prophets that "With their wild veerings and ravaged visions they all had a questionable sanity". He would count it a compliment if we admitted him to that same company.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sam Phillips - Baby I Can't Please You.
Monday, 15 September 2008
Why are our orchestras so white?
Ethnic minority musicians are a rarity in Britain's classical establishment, and those who do make the grade often feel they have to work twice as hard to break through. Why has multiculturalism not reached the orchestra pit? The Observer talked to some musical trailblazers, including my friend Althea Ifeka from St Margaret's Barking.
The result is a fascinating article with Althea suggesting that "the lack of black orchestral musicians is about money, not colour." In other words, "it's a bad career choice ... first-generation immigrants don't want their children going into a profession that is uncertain and poorly rewarded."
Althea's debut CD, From Leipzig to London, explores the innovative role of J.S. Bach in creating the earliest duo sonatas, by presenting three sonatas now known to date from his Leipzig period performed on the oboe, oboe d'amore and cor anglais and harpsichord. The demise of the oboe as a solo instrument and the complete demise of the harpsichord during the nineteenth century were overturned in the twentieth as both instruments made impressive comebacks. The four modern pieces were inspired by the duo partnership of Evelyn Rothwell (Lady Barbirolli), oboe and Valda Aveling, harpsichord, and form a powerful overview of the different compositional styles at work in London in the mid to late twentieth century.
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Marsha Heller & Elaine Comparone - Organ Trio Sonata in E minor.
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