Lots of ideas, info, events and an extract from Martyn Percy's latest book.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prince - The Cross.
Showing posts with label percy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label percy. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 April 2021
HeartEdge Mailer - April 2021
Check out April's great HeartEdge Mailer here - https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?u=3c49876c902f5b7ddcf73b9e3&id=5bffdc4a03.
Saturday, 16 June 2012
Walker Percy: A Documentary Film
In a rare television interview in 1980, Walker Percy said his concerns as writer were with “a theory of man, man as more than organism, more than consumer – man the wayfarer, man the pilgrim, man in transit, on a journey.” Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, looks at Percy’s own journey, and is framed as a narrative about his life and ideas.
As a doctor turned writer and philosopher, Percy was concerned with the big issues: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" But he knew his audience was inured to a direct approach. Binx Bolling, in The Moviegoer, is almost allergic to such discussions –“... if they spoke to me of God, I would jump into the bayou” – yet he is preoccupied with what he calls ‘the search.’ It is a preoccupation that haunts all of Percy’s work.
Part of what makes Percy’s characters like Binx, Will Barrett, and Thomas More so indelible is their wry humor despite being ‘Lost in the Cosmos.’ In Percy’s fifth novel, The Second Coming, the protagonist, Will Barrett, descends into a cave, determined to confront God. He is thwarted by a toothache. For Walker, “humour was an instrument of introspection,” writer Robert Coles says in the film. “That’s what he beautifully combined: that lighthearted sensibility merged with a grave, seriously introspective side. This takes a genius.”
Walker Percy: A Documentary Film tells the story with archival film, excerpts from Percy’s work, and interviews with family, friends and scholars.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woven Hand - Dirty Blue.
As a doctor turned writer and philosopher, Percy was concerned with the big issues: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" But he knew his audience was inured to a direct approach. Binx Bolling, in The Moviegoer, is almost allergic to such discussions –“... if they spoke to me of God, I would jump into the bayou” – yet he is preoccupied with what he calls ‘the search.’ It is a preoccupation that haunts all of Percy’s work.
Part of what makes Percy’s characters like Binx, Will Barrett, and Thomas More so indelible is their wry humor despite being ‘Lost in the Cosmos.’ In Percy’s fifth novel, The Second Coming, the protagonist, Will Barrett, descends into a cave, determined to confront God. He is thwarted by a toothache. For Walker, “humour was an instrument of introspection,” writer Robert Coles says in the film. “That’s what he beautifully combined: that lighthearted sensibility merged with a grave, seriously introspective side. This takes a genius.”
Walker Percy: A Documentary Film tells the story with archival film, excerpts from Percy’s work, and interviews with family, friends and scholars.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woven Hand - Dirty Blue.
Thursday, 5 January 2012
The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (3)
Gene Kellogg notes, in The Vital Tradition, that:
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."
Kellogg also suggests that:
"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."
O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.
Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.
The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.
"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
M Ward - Epistemology.
"... in the United States, the tendency of American Catholics to adopt the secular community's values of social meliorism without spiritual reservations gave rise rise to Flannery O'Connor's brilliant satires, in which social meliorists were depicted as blind victims of illusion, who did not understand that without spiritual dedication social meliorism was powerless to reach even those it sought to help. J. F. Powers had already exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the "golfing priests" and the "regular fellows," who had abandoned spiritual values to go over to secularism on secularism's most superficial terms."
Kellogg also suggests that:
"Flannery O'Connor and J. F. Powers ... represented the two tendencies we had seen in the work of the European Catholic novelists, criticism of the secular environment and criticism of "religious" people, but in criticism of the environment the approach was milder than the European. When Powers or Flannery O'Connor criticized non-Catholics, or nonreligious people, the criticism had nothing to non-Catholicism or anti-Catholicism. Powers tended to attack some general characteristic inhumanity as in "The Old Bird" or racial prejudice as in "The Trouble." Flannery O'Connor tended to attack broadly prevalent patterns of human behaviour, such as meliorism (Rayber in The Violent Bear It Away) or the need to dominate (Mr Head in "The Artificial Nigger")."
O'Connor and Walker Percy introduced ideas on ways of communicating Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor saw it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ. What O’Connor and Percy both seemed to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Children of God deliver a central Catholic priest who is wonderfully himself despite the extremities of situation and suffering into which he is placed. They are a brilliant demonstration of the difficulties of communicating the Gospel in another culture and, as such, are on a par with Endo's Silence and The Samurai. Emilio Sanchez, its Jesuit central character, is an engaging central character who is honest about the deficiencies and the inspirations of his faith. The split narrative works well before meshing at the conclusion to bring together the events of the central crisis and the response to it. This central crisis is genuinely shocking although its resolution is probably a little too easy and dealt with too briefly but the novel, as a whole, provides an engaging and challenging exploration of God's presence and guidance in human exploration and suffering.
Ann Rice was brought up a cradle Catholic but exchanged her belief in God for the belief that there is no God while at University in response to her imperative need to read authors that were banned by the Roman Catholic Church. She married a convinced atheist and became famous as the author of popular Vampire novels. Her novels, however, reflected her search for meaning within a personal life touched by tragedy. The combination of her personal search and the research for her novels returned her to the history of Rome and beyond this to the mystery of the survival of the Jews. In 1998 she returned to the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to her own search for the historical Jesus as she read extensively on the subject with the result being the first two novels in her Christ the Lord trilogy.
The first of these, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, is written in simple, sparse prose with the story told in the first person. The storyline incorporates some of the miracles found in the apocryphal infancy gospels but these are mainly restricted to the period in Egypt. The remainder is an imaginative fleshing out of the minimal Gospel stories of Jesus' childhood. Very little happens in terms of action but Rice's dramatisation of Jesus' growing understanding of who he is and what he has to do is effective and moving. In Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, Rice creates a pre-history for Christ which seems consistent both with the Gospel narratives and with the character and personality of Christ which emerges from those narratives. The fictional pre-history of The Road to Cana is also dramatic and engaging; which is itself a considerable achievement. Rice is clearly a novelist who is well read in Biblical Criticism with a real understanding of the Gospel narratives.
"The American Catholic Ron Hansen ... has effectively transposed the story of the Prodigal Son to our own day in Atticus," writes Crowe. His novel, Mariette in Ecstasy, is the senstively told story of a young postulant given the stigmata and the varied reactions to her from her convent. Elmore Leonard's Bandits and Pagan Babies both have a focus on issues of Catholicism and organized religion with more invested in their questions of doctrine and faith. Touch provides a wry take on fame and the miraculous when Juvenal, a former brother of a Catholic order in Brazil who now helps alcoholics in a Detroit rehabilitation centre, performs a miracle cure on a woman who has been beaten by her husband. The story contrasts the love Juvenal finds with the business and church zealots who seek to exploit his gift.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
M Ward - Epistemology.
Monday, 24 October 2011
Apocalypse Now (3)
On Saturday I led a workshop entitled 'Apocalypse Now' at the excellent Exploring
Spirituality day in St Albans
Diocese,, which began with a wonderful address by Jeffrey John, Dean of St Albans.
In my workshop sessions, we began by exploring popular understandings of the word 'apocalypse'. The first items to come up on a google search for ‘Apocalypse’ map out these popular understandings of Apocalyptic well:
In my workshop sessions, we began by exploring popular understandings of the word 'apocalypse'. The first items to come up on a google search for ‘Apocalypse’ map out these popular understandings of Apocalyptic well:
An Apocalypse (Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apokálypsis; "lifting of the veil" or "revelation ") is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era ...
►
Apocalypse is a fictional character who is an ancient mutant that appears in comic books published by Marvel Comics.
25 Mar 2008 – The real science behind the events predicted in 2012.
Rating: 8.6/10 - 808 reviews
During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Starring Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall.
The name given to the last book in the Bible, also called the Book of Revelation.
www.guardian.co.uk/.../apocalypse-not-now-rapture-fails-materialis... - Cached
21 May 2011 – Christian doomsday prophet Harold Camping had predicted the world would end at 6pm on Saturday.
It’s a similar picture when you google images of Apocalypse; you get images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, apocalyptic cityscapes, and apocalyptic games and films.
“Popular culture is awash with images and narratives of the apocalypse in various forms. These range from war and acts of terrorism involving “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” to religious, science-fiction, horror and fantasy representations of the “End Times,” depicted in a wide range of media including novels, comics, film, television and video games. They include also “biblically based” presentations, notably the Left Behind series of 12 best-selling novels based on a fundamentalist application of millennialist teachings to the contemporary world.”
David Dark writes in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:
“Our ability to recognize apocalyptic is, in our day, often most hindered by the popular, best-selling misunderstandings of biblical witness. Confusing the death-dealing forces that enslave, exploit, and crucify (what our biblical translations sometimes render ‘the world’) for the created world itself, such so-called ‘apocalyptic’ is a negation of this-worldly experience. It tends to view the physical as only fit for burning.”
“In a kind of Gnostic-style-propaganda, creation is deemed a sort of waiting room, irredeemable and best discarded. Confusing redemption for escape, real injustice – political and personal – goes mostly unengaged, and the actual, everyday world gets left behind. In this view, apocalyptic is simply equated with disaster and destruction …”
So, where can we look to find a better understanding of apocalyptic? Leon Morris’ Apocalyptic is a standard work on apocalyptic writings. In this brief introduction to apocalyptic, Morris brings together the results of a great deal of work that has been done on the subject by himself and others. In a clear and lucid style, he addresses himself to the characteristics of apocalyptic writings, the world from which they arose, and their relations to the gospel.
N.T. Wright has written helpfully about apocalyptic in ‘The New Testament and the People of God’:
“In a culture where events concerning Israel were believed to concern the creator god as well, language had to be found which could both refer to events within Israel
“the word … denotes a particular form, that of reported vision and (sometimes) its interpretation. Claims are made for these visions; they are divine revelations, disclosing (hence ‘apocalyptic’, from the Greek for ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’) states of affairs not ordinarily made known to humans. Sometimes these visions concern the progress of history, more specifically, the history of Israel
“As a literary genre, ‘apocalyptic’ is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it.”
Slavoj Žižek is a contemporary philosopher who, although an atheist and Marxist, has worked with this understanding of apocalyptic in a recent book ‘Living in the End Times’:
“the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”
“… the truth hurts, and we desperately try to avoid it … The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (if we change these here and there, life could go on as before”); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning …”
Bob Dylan is a contemporary artist for whom the apocalypse is key to understanding his work and who, like Slavoj Žižek uses the apocalypse as a frame for viewing contemporary events. “Dylan's vision is essentially apocalyptic; again and again he tells of an evil world which is soon to be both punished and replaced tomorrow, perhaps, when the ship comes in” writes Frank Davey in "Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan: Poetry and the Popular Song".
Dylan's manifesto for his work is 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall'; a song about walking through a world which is surreal and unjust and singing what he sees:
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
This is a song which has been interpreted as dealing with events that were contemporary to the time such as the Cuban missile crisis and, more generally, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. That may well be so, but I think a more straightforward interpretation and one that is closer to what the lyrics actually say is to see it as a statement by Dylan of what he is trying to do in and through his work. In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
"I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it,
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin' ..."
This is a song which has been interpreted as dealing with events that were contemporary to the time such as the Cuban missile crisis and, more generally, the threat of a nuclear holocaust. That may well be so, but I think a more straightforward interpretation and one that is closer to what the lyrics actually say is to see it as a statement by Dylan of what he is trying to do in and through his work. In the song he walks through a surreal and unjust world, ahead of him he sees a gathering apocalyptic storm and he resolves to walk in the shadow of the storm and sing out what he sees:
"... 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest dark forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where the souls are forgotten,
Where black is the colour, where none is the number.
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect from the mountain so that all souls can see it ...".
What we have in the best of Dylan is a contemporary Pilgrim, Dante or Rimbaud on a compassionate journey, undertaken in the eye of the Apocalypse, to stand with the damned at the heart of the darkness that is twentieth century culture.
Over the course of his career Dylan has travelled the paths of political protest, urban surrealism, country contentment, gospel conversion and world weary blues. On his journey he: sees "seven breezes a-blowin'" all around the cabin door where victims despair ('Ballad of Hollis Brown'); sees lightning flashing "For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse" ('Chimes of Freedom'); surveys 'Desolation Road'; talks truth with a thief as the wind begins to howl ('All Along the Watchtower'); comes in “from the wilderness” to receive shelter from the storm from a woman with “silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair" ('Shelter from the Storm'); feels the Idiot Wind blowing through the buttons on his coat, recognises himself as an idiot and feels so sorry ('Idiot Wind'); finds a pathway to the stars, can't believe he's survived and is still alive ('Where Are You Tonight? Journey Through Deep Heat'); rides the slow train up around the bend ('Slow Train'); is driven out of town into the driving rain because of belief ('I Believe in You'); hears the ancient footsteps join him on his path ('Every Grain of Sand'); feels the Caribbean Winds, fanning desire, bringing him nearer to the fire ('Caribbean Wind'); betrays his commitment, feels the breath of the storm and goes searching for his first love ('Tight Connection to My Heart'); then at the final moment, it's not quite dark yet but:
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven')."
"The air is getting hotter, there's a rumbling in the skies
I've been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes.
Everyday your memory grows dimmer.
It don't haunt me, like it did before.
I been walking through the middle of nowhere
Tryin' to get to heaven before they close the door." ('Tryin' To Get To Heaven')."
Apocalyptic change in Dylan's work can be understood as generational confict, Cold War conflicts, nuclear holocaust, Civil Rights struggles, the imminent return of Christ, and more. The generic message throughout is that apocalyptic change is coming and we need to think where we stand in relation to it. That message is as relevant today in terms of economic meltdown, climate change or peak oil, as to the Second Coming, whether imminent or not.
David Dark, drawing on the writings of N. T. Wright, argues in ‘Everyday Apocalypse’ that:
"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."
“Joyce … said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city “... Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of fifteen epiphanies “… which were written to let Irish people take “one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass.”
Similarly, Walker Percy wrote about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace.
Thinking along similar lines Flannery O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.
In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin.
This song leads us to a place of realization about the abhorrence and reality of sin and its consequences. Possibly, even to a place of acknowledging that the story could be about us. We all have that potential in us; for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.
Flannery O’Conner wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Violent Femmes - Country Death Song.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Violent Femmes - Country Death Song.
Friday, 22 April 2011
Transfigured Vision and Everyday Apocalypse
I've just finished reading Faith, Hope and Poetry by Malcolm Guite which is about transfigured vision and am just beginning to read David Dark's book about Everyday Apocalypse. Each are different sides of the same coin; the coin in question being epiphany understood as a moment of revelation.
Guite writes that:
"sometimes ... the mirror of poetry does more than reflect what we have already seen. Sometimes that mirror becomes a window, a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature, a 'casement opening on perilous seas'. From that window sometimes shines a more than earthly that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon. Through that window, when it is opened for us by the poet's art, we catch a glimpse of that 'Beauty always ancient always new', who made and kindled our imagination in the beginning and whose love draws us beyond the world."
It is those moments of transfiguration, he writes, "those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine," which are the subject of his book.
Dark, by contrast, writes that:
"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."
Two contrasting revelations but both meeting the requirements for an epiphany. James Joyce set out the requirements or conditions for an epiphany in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) where he writes:
"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual transformation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments ...
... First, we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing, which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."
This description of epiphany seems more aligned with Guite's sense of transfigured vision than it does of Dark's everyday apocalypse, although it is Dark who claims Joycean understanding. On the one hand this is because Joyce draws heavily on theology for his understanding of epiphany. He wrote, for instance, of the work that would become Dubliners as being "a series of epicleti." This term Terence Brown notes, "derives from the Greek Orthodox liturgy and refers to the moment in the sacrifice of the Mass when the bread and the wine are transformed by the Holy Ghost into the body and blood of Christ." It is at this moment of consecration that "the everyday realities of bread and wine are charged with spiritual significance." Similarly, the literal meaning of epiphany is manifestation but, in the Church calendar the Feast of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ's divinity to the Magi. Bernard Richards notes that with this definition Joyce "comes close to the aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his philosophy of haeccitas ('thisness')." Richards also notes that, "For centuries writers and mystics have experienced sudden insights that seem detached from the flow of everyday perception. He cites William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sudden Light as examples, before stating that often these epiphanies "have been on a borderline between the secular and the religious: what has been revealed in the mystical moment has been a sense of God, of the whole shape of the universe, of the unity of all created things."
On the other hand, Dark is right in stating that Joyce's use of epiphanies in his work was more to do with everyday apocalypse than with transfigured vision. Francesca Valente writes that:
"Joyce himself confirmed this in a letter of July 1904 to Curran, where he said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Joyce, Letters 55). Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of "fifteen epiphanies"-as he stated in a letter dated February 8, 1903 to Stanislaus (Ellmann, James Joyce 125)-which were written to let Irish people take "one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass" (Joyce, Letters 63-64). What emerges from these words is that both the fictional characters of the tales and the readers are meant to undergo an epiphanic confrontation."
The two sides of the coin are, to some extent, combined in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy (Dark says that O'Connor "is perhaps the best example of how the Yes and the No can coincide"). Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. Thinking along similar lines O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ (an epiphany of transfigured vision).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over The Rhine - Jesus In New Orleans.
Guite writes that:
"sometimes ... the mirror of poetry does more than reflect what we have already seen. Sometimes that mirror becomes a window, a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature, a 'casement opening on perilous seas'. From that window sometimes shines a more than earthly that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon. Through that window, when it is opened for us by the poet's art, we catch a glimpse of that 'Beauty always ancient always new', who made and kindled our imagination in the beginning and whose love draws us beyond the world."
It is those moments of transfiguration, he writes, "those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine," which are the subject of his book.
Dark, by contrast, writes that:
"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."
Two contrasting revelations but both meeting the requirements for an epiphany. James Joyce set out the requirements or conditions for an epiphany in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) where he writes:
"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual transformation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments ...
... First, we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing, which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."
This description of epiphany seems more aligned with Guite's sense of transfigured vision than it does of Dark's everyday apocalypse, although it is Dark who claims Joycean understanding. On the one hand this is because Joyce draws heavily on theology for his understanding of epiphany. He wrote, for instance, of the work that would become Dubliners as being "a series of epicleti." This term Terence Brown notes, "derives from the Greek Orthodox liturgy and refers to the moment in the sacrifice of the Mass when the bread and the wine are transformed by the Holy Ghost into the body and blood of Christ." It is at this moment of consecration that "the everyday realities of bread and wine are charged with spiritual significance." Similarly, the literal meaning of epiphany is manifestation but, in the Church calendar the Feast of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ's divinity to the Magi. Bernard Richards notes that with this definition Joyce "comes close to the aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his philosophy of haeccitas ('thisness')." Richards also notes that, "For centuries writers and mystics have experienced sudden insights that seem detached from the flow of everyday perception. He cites William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sudden Light as examples, before stating that often these epiphanies "have been on a borderline between the secular and the religious: what has been revealed in the mystical moment has been a sense of God, of the whole shape of the universe, of the unity of all created things."
On the other hand, Dark is right in stating that Joyce's use of epiphanies in his work was more to do with everyday apocalypse than with transfigured vision. Francesca Valente writes that:
"Joyce himself confirmed this in a letter of July 1904 to Curran, where he said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Joyce, Letters 55). Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of "fifteen epiphanies"-as he stated in a letter dated February 8, 1903 to Stanislaus (Ellmann, James Joyce 125)-which were written to let Irish people take "one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass" (Joyce, Letters 63-64). What emerges from these words is that both the fictional characters of the tales and the readers are meant to undergo an epiphanic confrontation."
The two sides of the coin are, to some extent, combined in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy (Dark says that O'Connor "is perhaps the best example of how the Yes and the No can coincide"). Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. Thinking along similar lines O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ (an epiphany of transfigured vision).
In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin. They told a story in which the central character acts in a way that all of us recognise as sinful and then spoke about the reality of hell as a consequence of what he that did. This song is, therefore, an example of what Flannery O’Conner was talking about when she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.
In her novels Flannery O’Connor also wrote about the way in which the holy interpenetrates this world and affects it. St Paul, in Philippians, tells to go through life with an attitude of looking out for things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable. He expects us to find these things in our ordinary lives, if we look for them. Over The Rhine say in the song Jesus in New Orleans that you never know just what on earth you'll find in the face of a stranger or in the dark and weary corners of a mind because, here and there, when you least expect it, you can see the Saviour's face. In their story of meeting a stranger in a bar inNew Orleans
In her novels Flannery O’Connor also wrote about the way in which the holy interpenetrates this world and affects it. St Paul, in Philippians, tells to go through life with an attitude of looking out for things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable. He expects us to find these things in our ordinary lives, if we look for them. Over The Rhine say in the song Jesus in New Orleans that you never know just what on earth you'll find in the face of a stranger or in the dark and weary corners of a mind because, here and there, when you least expect it, you can see the Saviour's face. In their story of meeting a stranger in a bar in
American Literature and American Music frequently oscillate between epiphanies of grace and epiphanies of terror. Compare and contrast Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor, for example, Victoria Williams and Jim White, The Innocence Mission and Sixteen Horsepower. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music (see my post here). Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. Epiphanies are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.
Dark recalls an interview given by Malcolm Muggeridge in which he says:
"Let's think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting as it were, its own inadequacy - attempting something utterly impossible - to climb to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth, and those two things both built into this building to the glory of God ... [The gargoyle is] laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap - disparity - between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so until the end of time you see ... Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human being who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals."
Dark recalls an interview given by Malcolm Muggeridge in which he says:
"Let's think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting as it were, its own inadequacy - attempting something utterly impossible - to climb to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth, and those two things both built into this building to the glory of God ... [The gargoyle is] laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap - disparity - between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so until the end of time you see ... Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human being who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over The Rhine - Jesus In New Orleans.
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Steve Scott dialogues 5: Art & Evangelism
These extracts come from a dialogue on art and evangelism as part of the scoping of an arts project:
SS: I'm guessing `evangelism' in its most comprehensive (and appropriate) sense. An arts event that models/demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists can talk about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. Churches proclaim, demonstrate and live out the gospel in the local context. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that `evangelizes' the artists/participants i.e. deepens their own thinking and faith in regard to their callings and practice. We learn more about the love of God `Together with all the saints.'
JE: I don't think the Arts are essentially evangelistic. I think the Arts can be used to communicate explicit messages, as occurs in advertising for example, but that doing this narrows their impact to the specific message being communicated and thereby screens out of the artwork the nuances and depth of meaning which characterise truly great art. In other words, evangelism uses the Arts for its own purposes instead of allowing the Arts to communicate on their own terms. I would, therefore, prefer that, in working together, we create something that allows the art created to speak on its own terms rather than packaging it in a box marked evangelism.
SS: I heartily agree, especially in the light of Jonathan's insights and concerns about`art' as an evangelical tool being on a par with advertising. Here's why. In my experience this approach actually reduces the person and work of Jesus, and then tries to sell this on.
I think the role(s) art can play in the evangelistic efforts of the local church are more `roadclearing' (John the Baptist) and seed planting. I also think it is legitimate and appropriate for an artist to have strong convictions about why they make art, and to make wise use of any afforded opportunity to speak out about those convictions ..... especially in a multifaith and multicultural context.
Because it's my conviction that an artist in the spirit will have one eye on the opportunity to speak (and listen) one eye on the humanity of the listeners and one eye on the long term implications of the relationships being built that moment. So one aspect of our inquiry becomes: how can artists of faith engage in practices conducive to honouring Christ and supporting the best efforts of those organisations (churches?) mandated/anointed to both proclaim and live out the gospel faithfully in a multifaith and multicultural society? The apostle Paul reminded the Corinthians (some of `Paul', some of `Peter' or `Appollos' .... each exercising different teaching styles and foci) that God appointed (and anointed) those that planted seeds, those that watered, and those that brought in the harvest all equally. I would never deny an artist (so led) any role in any phase of that process, but by the same token I would be wary of suggesting that art is only valid as a platform or a pulpit. The New Testament has many suggestive images and metaphors for the different phases of God's church building process, and it is among those I see both hospitality and opportunity for the arts.
Another inquiry: (so) what role can we play in helping artists of faith towards best practice? Discussions like this one are sorely needed as a way of encouraging `one another to (genuinely) good works, even more as we see the day approaching' as the author of Hebrews puts it. My favorite piece of `evangelical art' is the Gospel of John. My current, second favorite (constantly changing) is the song `Ambulance' by a music group called Eisley (its a video on youtube) breathtakingly clear, simple, and yet it's a beautiful, haunting song.
JE: One person has said that art simply by being has the ability to speak to people about God and wants to provoke thought about spiritual issues by presenting Biblical truths in a visual format and Christianity as a living and relevant faith using culturally relevant delivery methods. Steve has written of an arts event that models/ demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists talking about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that deepens the thinking and faith of artists and participants alike in regard to their callings and practice.
I think these are actually very similar visions and one's which I can endorse. However, they are evangelistic in the very broadest sense and not in the sense of an evangelistic event where every aspect of the event is designed to bring people to a point of decision and commitment during that event. Steve calls what we are talking about seed planting, Francis Schaeffer would have spoken of it as pre-evangelism. Drawing on the writings of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy I would prefer to talk in terms of creating epiphanies for people of the reality of life and their lives. Whatever we call it, I think we need to acknowledge that whatever Arts event we organise, while it would clearly point to Jesus, it will not be explicitly and specifically designed to bring those that come to the event to faith there and then but instead will stimulate thought and reflection opening up faith as a possibility for exploration. I don't think arts events can and should do more than that in terms of evangelism.
SS: What I sense going on here in our work at listening to the vision that is emerging, is something that I believe would constitute a teaching and empowering moment for all the artists and others that became involved in such an enterprise. As we clarify the role(s) of art, both in planting seeds in local cultures, but also in the concerns of communicating faith and value across cultures, I sense the emergence of a conversation thatcould have long term implications for what artists/artisans do in the future. There WAS a `position paper' that came out of Lausanne 04 on the arts ... and it was all worthy, well argued and comprehensive etc ... but I'm wondering if part of our brief might be to nudge the conversation a little further along ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Athlete - Chances.
SS: I'm guessing `evangelism' in its most comprehensive (and appropriate) sense. An arts event that models/demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists can talk about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. Churches proclaim, demonstrate and live out the gospel in the local context. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that `evangelizes' the artists/participants i.e. deepens their own thinking and faith in regard to their callings and practice. We learn more about the love of God `Together with all the saints.'
JE: I don't think the Arts are essentially evangelistic. I think the Arts can be used to communicate explicit messages, as occurs in advertising for example, but that doing this narrows their impact to the specific message being communicated and thereby screens out of the artwork the nuances and depth of meaning which characterise truly great art. In other words, evangelism uses the Arts for its own purposes instead of allowing the Arts to communicate on their own terms. I would, therefore, prefer that, in working together, we create something that allows the art created to speak on its own terms rather than packaging it in a box marked evangelism.
SS: I heartily agree, especially in the light of Jonathan's insights and concerns about`art' as an evangelical tool being on a par with advertising. Here's why. In my experience this approach actually reduces the person and work of Jesus, and then tries to sell this on.
I think the role(s) art can play in the evangelistic efforts of the local church are more `roadclearing' (John the Baptist) and seed planting. I also think it is legitimate and appropriate for an artist to have strong convictions about why they make art, and to make wise use of any afforded opportunity to speak out about those convictions ..... especially in a multifaith and multicultural context.
Because it's my conviction that an artist in the spirit will have one eye on the opportunity to speak (and listen) one eye on the humanity of the listeners and one eye on the long term implications of the relationships being built that moment. So one aspect of our inquiry becomes: how can artists of faith engage in practices conducive to honouring Christ and supporting the best efforts of those organisations (churches?) mandated/anointed to both proclaim and live out the gospel faithfully in a multifaith and multicultural society? The apostle Paul reminded the Corinthians (some of `Paul', some of `Peter' or `Appollos' .... each exercising different teaching styles and foci) that God appointed (and anointed) those that planted seeds, those that watered, and those that brought in the harvest all equally. I would never deny an artist (so led) any role in any phase of that process, but by the same token I would be wary of suggesting that art is only valid as a platform or a pulpit. The New Testament has many suggestive images and metaphors for the different phases of God's church building process, and it is among those I see both hospitality and opportunity for the arts.
Another inquiry: (so) what role can we play in helping artists of faith towards best practice? Discussions like this one are sorely needed as a way of encouraging `one another to (genuinely) good works, even more as we see the day approaching' as the author of Hebrews puts it. My favorite piece of `evangelical art' is the Gospel of John. My current, second favorite (constantly changing) is the song `Ambulance' by a music group called Eisley (its a video on youtube) breathtakingly clear, simple, and yet it's a beautiful, haunting song.
JE: One person has said that art simply by being has the ability to speak to people about God and wants to provoke thought about spiritual issues by presenting Biblical truths in a visual format and Christianity as a living and relevant faith using culturally relevant delivery methods. Steve has written of an arts event that models/ demonstrates core values (both on the canvas and in the community), international/multicultural alongside local expressions ... all rooted in the singularity and supremacy of Christ and his work. Artists talking about what they do and why they do it. An event that attracts people to and (therefore is supportive of) the local church(es) .... those tasked and commissioned and empowered to be ongoing salt and light in the community long after `we' are gone. An event (and conversations up to/and around) that deepens the thinking and faith of artists and participants alike in regard to their callings and practice.
I think these are actually very similar visions and one's which I can endorse. However, they are evangelistic in the very broadest sense and not in the sense of an evangelistic event where every aspect of the event is designed to bring people to a point of decision and commitment during that event. Steve calls what we are talking about seed planting, Francis Schaeffer would have spoken of it as pre-evangelism. Drawing on the writings of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy I would prefer to talk in terms of creating epiphanies for people of the reality of life and their lives. Whatever we call it, I think we need to acknowledge that whatever Arts event we organise, while it would clearly point to Jesus, it will not be explicitly and specifically designed to bring those that come to the event to faith there and then but instead will stimulate thought and reflection opening up faith as a possibility for exploration. I don't think arts events can and should do more than that in terms of evangelism.
SS: What I sense going on here in our work at listening to the vision that is emerging, is something that I believe would constitute a teaching and empowering moment for all the artists and others that became involved in such an enterprise. As we clarify the role(s) of art, both in planting seeds in local cultures, but also in the concerns of communicating faith and value across cultures, I sense the emergence of a conversation thatcould have long term implications for what artists/artisans do in the future. There WAS a `position paper' that came out of Lausanne 04 on the arts ... and it was all worthy, well argued and comprehensive etc ... but I'm wondering if part of our brief might be to nudge the conversation a little further along ...
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Athlete - Chances.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
Spiritual Life column
The following has been published as the 'Spiritual Life' column in today's Ilford Recorder:
Why do people feel so sad in the twenty-first century? Why do people feel so bad in the very age when, more than any other age, we have succeeded in satisfying our needs and making over the world for our own use? Why is it that a person riding on the tube from Redbridge to Central London, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving partner and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities, often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that the only news we will buy or watch is bad news? Why is the good life which people have achieved in the West in the twenty-first century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert us from the sadness of an ordinary morning? Why is it that the satisfying of our needs results in waste, pollution, and inequities which contain the seeds of our own destruction?
Why do we continue across the world with an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self destruction unparalleled in history? Why are we so much better at destroying buildings and then rebuilding them than in keeping them from being destroyed in the first place? Why are we a species that wages war against our own species? Why do we constantly need someone else on which to pin the blame?
Why does so much great art and so many great lifestyles come from circumstances of oppression? Why is it that altruism and self-sacrifice exist in a world that, we are told, evolved through the survival of the fittest? Why does scientific research indicate that those committed to a religious faith enjoy greater levels of well being, show greater levels of trust, and are more likely to volunteer than those without? Why is it that science can answer questions of how things occur but not questions of why things occur? Why has secularism not destroyed religion?
(Adapted from questions posed originally by Walker Percy and Philip Yancey)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On? / What's Happening, Brother?
Why do people feel so sad in the twenty-first century? Why do people feel so bad in the very age when, more than any other age, we have succeeded in satisfying our needs and making over the world for our own use? Why is it that a person riding on the tube from Redbridge to Central London, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving partner and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities, often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that the only news we will buy or watch is bad news? Why is the good life which people have achieved in the West in the twenty-first century so bad that only news of world catastrophes, assassinations, plane crashes, mass murders can divert us from the sadness of an ordinary morning? Why is it that the satisfying of our needs results in waste, pollution, and inequities which contain the seeds of our own destruction?
Why do we continue across the world with an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self destruction unparalleled in history? Why are we so much better at destroying buildings and then rebuilding them than in keeping them from being destroyed in the first place? Why are we a species that wages war against our own species? Why do we constantly need someone else on which to pin the blame?
Why does so much great art and so many great lifestyles come from circumstances of oppression? Why is it that altruism and self-sacrifice exist in a world that, we are told, evolved through the survival of the fittest? Why does scientific research indicate that those committed to a religious faith enjoy greater levels of well being, show greater levels of trust, and are more likely to volunteer than those without? Why is it that science can answer questions of how things occur but not questions of why things occur? Why has secularism not destroyed religion?
(Adapted from questions posed originally by Walker Percy and Philip Yancey)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Marvin Gaye - What's Going On? / What's Happening, Brother?
Monday, 14 April 2008
Modern Catholic novels
I'm currently reading Marian Crowe's Aiming at Heaven, Getting the Earth which is an excellent analysis of four contemporary Catholic novelists - Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Piers Paul Read - demonstrating that the demise of the Catholic novel has not yet occurred in the UK, at least.
Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:
"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."
Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.
All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.
In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.
What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woven Hand - Tin Finger.
Crowe also provides a useful summary of the beginnings of the Modern Catholic Novel in the French Catholic Renaissance. She writes:
"An impressive number of intellectuals and cultural figures followed the same pattern as Barbey d'Aurevilly. Having abandoned their childhood faith and become atheists in their youth, they reconverted to Catholicism in their adulthood. Among them were Paul Claudel, who wrote poetry and plays stressing sacrifice, chivalry and nobility; Léon Bloy, whose novels expressing the doctrine of the communion of the saints called attention to the poor as an integral part of that communion and depicted poverty as both a social evil and source of santification; and Charles Péguy, an early socialist, who, like Bloy, stressed the importance of the poor and seemed to embody the best ideals of both the republican and religious traditions of France. Bloy's novels made a strong critique of the hypocrisy and materialism of many nominal Catholics, a theme that would be repeated in future Catholic novels. Jacques Maritain, who was raised as a liberal Protestant, converted to Catholicism under the influence of Bloy and interpreted the philosophy and theology of St Thomas Aquinas for the modern world. These converts were leading figures in the revitalized Catholicism of the early twentieth century ..."
Crowe then describes the work of François Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, the greatest novelists of the French Catholic Renaissance, before surveying the work of Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark to give the background in the UK for the contemporary Catholic novels of the four novelists analysed in this book.
All of which is useful preparation for the Big Picture 2, a Diocese of Chelmsford Eastertide course which starts this Tuesday evening in Waltham Forest and in which I share the leadership with Philip Ritchie and Paul Trathen. How can Christians respond to controversial art: protest or engagement? How have Christian artists expressed their faith through popular culture? How has Christianity influenced popular culture? How does popular culture portray or critique Christianity? These are some of the questions the course will explore using multi media resources with plenty of opportunity for discussion and practical response.
In one of my sessions I use the thoughts of US Catholic novelists, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy, to introduce ideas on how to communicate Christianity in popular culture. O’Connor wrote that:
“When you can assume your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of taking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock – to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
The problem as O’Connor sees it is that non-Christians do not recognise as sin those things that Christians view as sin. The whole concept of sin itself may be anathema to those who are not Christians and they may accept as completely normal things that Christians view as sinful. So she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In order to make things which seem normal to many appear as sinful to your audience you need to use the shock tactics of distortion and exaggeration, crisis and catastrophe.
Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; a moment in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. This is what O’Connor was talking about when she said that the job of the Christian novelist is to help the audience see activity that they regard as normal as a distortion. Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ.
What O’Connor and Percy both seem to suggest is that their characters and their audience cannot see the grace of God without the first stage of becoming aware of the inadequacy of the current lives.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woven Hand - Tin Finger.
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
Needing things incarnated
Interesting article in the National Catholic Reporter about Image. In the article Image's founding director, Greg Wolfe, speaks about the influence of the Arts in his conversion:
"He converted to Catholicism when he was 23 and a graduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford University. He said that the two main highways leading him toward the church were art, including literary art, and ethics.
“I’ve never been a very good abstract thinker. I tend to need things incarnated, made concrete. So for me, art and ethics take the big ideas and make them concrete in a very palpable, powerful way,” he said. “I began to be interested in issues to do with human life, and life and death, and sexuality and marriage and what seemed to me to be an increasingly coherent and unified cluster of moral understandings on the part of the Catholic church. ...
“And then of course there was the great art and literature of the Catholic tradition,” he said, naming 20th-century French writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac; Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; British writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo as people who “had a huge impact on my journey toward the church.”
Mr. Wolfe said that he sees the Incarnation “as a model of balance, that it brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live,” he said. “It’s hard to be balanced in that way. Sometimes we even tend to valorize being on one side or the other as if that makes us somehow more pure, more committed.”"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rachmaninov - Vespers (Nyne Otpushchaeshi)
"He converted to Catholicism when he was 23 and a graduate student at Mansfield College, Oxford University. He said that the two main highways leading him toward the church were art, including literary art, and ethics.
“I’ve never been a very good abstract thinker. I tend to need things incarnated, made concrete. So for me, art and ethics take the big ideas and make them concrete in a very palpable, powerful way,” he said. “I began to be interested in issues to do with human life, and life and death, and sexuality and marriage and what seemed to me to be an increasingly coherent and unified cluster of moral understandings on the part of the Catholic church. ...
“And then of course there was the great art and literature of the Catholic tradition,” he said, naming 20th-century French writers Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac; Americans Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy; British writers Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo as people who “had a huge impact on my journey toward the church.”
Mr. Wolfe said that he sees the Incarnation “as a model of balance, that it brings together those two poles of human and divine, justice and mercy, all these different tensions in which we live,” he said. “It’s hard to be balanced in that way. Sometimes we even tend to valorize being on one side or the other as if that makes us somehow more pure, more committed.”"
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rachmaninov - Vespers (Nyne Otpushchaeshi)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)