Chaim Stephenson: Between Myth and Reality

Wednesday 1 March –Wednesday 10 May
Chaim Stephenson
Between Myth and Reality

A sculpture exhibition in the Foyer of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Chaim Stephenson worked for over sixty years to produce a wide range of sculpture, of which this exhibition shows but a small part – pieces inspired by the stories in the Old Testament, and those that came out of his lifelong concern for people driven from their homes. Among the former, every sculpture tells a story, familiar and built into our culture and traditions. The refugee statues speak of a universal and contemporary reality that not only mattered profoundly to the artist but affects us all.

Chaim Stephenson was born in Liverpool to Russian Jewish immigrant parents. He served in the mines as a ‘Bevin boy’ before joining a group of young Jews who emigrated to Palestine. After fighting through the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948 he joined a kibbutz in western Galilee where he worked as a shepherd, sculpting in his limited free time. After a year in England studying and sculpting, he went back to Israel, and married writer Lynne Reid Banks. They returned to the UK in 1971 with their three sons. He spent the rest of his life as a working artist, dying last year aged 89.

The Living South Africa Memorial by Chaim Stephenson is on permanent display in church and St Martin’s is pleased to display a full exhibition of the work of this remarkable artist.

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Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill.

Fantasy vs Reality: Lewis and Tolkien vs Reed and Wain

'At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.' (C. S. Lewis)

'The heart of a lyric for me has always been anchored in an experienced reality, whether it be Avedon's photo of Warhol's bullet-scarred chest or the sociopathic attitudes recorded in "Kicks" or "Street Hassle." So in answer to the question I am most often asked, "Are these incidents real?" Yes, he said, Yes Yes Yes' (Lou Reed)

I've been reflecting on the differences between so-called 'fantasy' and so-called 'reality' having watched The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug yesterday and while looking forward to the BBC4 tribute to Lou Reed tonight. Lou Reed, at his best, was trying to write the Great American Novel through music and, in line with above quote, might well have agreed with John Wain that the "writer's task ... was to lay bare the human heart." Reed achieved this end supremely with his desolatingly emotional song cycle Berlin.

Richard Purtill has an excellent discussion of this issue in the Introduction to his Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien:

'In his [Tolkien's] view, fantasy has three purposes: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. By Recovery, he means a "regaining of a clear view . . . 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'". Familiarity has dulled our sense of the wonder and mystery of things; fantasy restores it ...

By Escape, Tolkien means nothing especially original. We must define Escape as the turning of our thoughts and affections away from what is around us to something else--the past, the future, a secondary world. Tolkien's originality lies in defending Escape when so many have deprecated it. His reasons are several. First, the modern world is preeminently something desirable to escape from ...

A deeper reason for Escape, however, is the human longing to flee from our limitations. First is the hardness of life even at its best; but beyond this is our isolation from each other and from the living world around us. Finally, the great limit, Death, is something that men have tried to escape from in many fashions.

Here Tolkien's discussion of Escape merges into a discussion of the third use of fantasy. Consolation is secondarily the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires, such as the desire really to communicate with species other than our own. But primarily it centers on the happy ending, the "eucata-strophe", the "sudden joyous 'turn'". This Consolation arises from the denial of "universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief".'  

Does The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug enable us to experience these three purposes of fantasy? Probably not. Its focus is mainly on escape. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, describes the film as 'a cheerfully exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture ... something to set alongside the Indiana Jones films.' That it works in this way is, in part, because Peter Jackson focuses primarily on telling the story of The Hobbit rather than, as was the case with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, also giving equal time to telling the story of The Hobbit as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It is in the whole arc of the story (and in the story's significance as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings), however, that we come closest to Tolkien's understanding of the purposes of fantasy. As an enjoyable and gripping film in its own right, though, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug works because it sticks with the 'huge propulsive energy' of its humorous and exciting source story and whooshes 'the heroes onwards towards their great goal' rather than engaging more widely in the significance of fantasy and the setting of The Hobbit in Tolkien's wider canon.

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Lou Reed - Berlin.

The contemporary magic of denial

There is significant insight into our Western denial of reality in today's Guardian. Giles Fraser is particularly apposite in a comment piece (which has some synergy with my Christmas night sermon) about our continuing belief in magic:

"What do I mean by magic? Forget Merlin. Forget Potter. I mean the belief that there is ever a short cut out of the constituent limitations of our humanity. That there is a way, instantly, with the flick of a wand or a credit card, of changing ourselves from one thing to something else entirely. Abracadabra. Magic is the escape fantasy of those who cannot cope with the fact that we are limited creatures, that we will grow old and die, that we can never have everything, that we will always be dependent on food and oxygen and the love of others, and that, because of this, we will often feel pain and loss. Magic is the belief that there is some other way of dealing with all of this other than simply by dealing with it.

Which is why I think the really dangerous magic – and I believe all magic is dangerous – is out there in the post-Christmas sales. The most insidious magic is disguised as something so ordinary we don't even notice it. In terms of magic, both Christianity and contemporary market capitalism appear under the form of their opposites ...

We buy the new suit or go on a diet to become a new person. We think becoming a pop star will plug the longing within – ignoring the evidence of those many pop stars who tragically take their own life as they realise the Simon Cowell brand of promised magic is a lie. We play the lotto. And every night on our TV screens, advertising offers us the contemporary equivalent of the philosopher's stone (turning lead into gold) and the fabled elixir of life. All of this, at root, is an attempt to escape from something that cannot be escaped from. Escape from the ordinary conditions of life. Escape from the anxiety within ourselves."

Elsewhere, in their 'Worst Ideas of 2012' feature, we read Oliver Burkeman saying (in a section entitled 'Ignoring Reality' and including comment on the Jimmy Savile scandal):


"The horror was hiding in plain sight. But acknowledging it would have meant acknowledging exactly who it was that we'd elevated to the status of national treasure – or perhaps even acknowledging, as Andrew O'Hagan put it in the London Review of Books, "that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements"."

He argues that this "refusal to see what we're looking at is surely at the heart of climate-change denial, too," as well as the implacable faith Republicans had in a Romney landslide:

"The annals of psychological research are full of examples of how accomplished we are at not seeing what's there, for many reasons. People given the opportunity to cheat in small ways on tests, for example, don't consciously acknowledge they're dishonest; they'd rather preserve their sense of not being cheats. Or perhaps you've seen that famous basketball video demonstrating the phenomenon of "change blindness": when people are asked to count the number of times the ball is passed between players, they fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk right across the frame."

Denial, in a broader sense, he notes, "has its benefits: without a dose of it, we'd be unable to overlook our own and others' lapses and faults, and relationships would become impossible. But its pitfalls are enormous, as Romney's aides and media supporters learned. Or did they learn?"


Fraser makes a similar point: "At the end of his seminal work Religion and the Decline of Magic, the historian Keith Thomas states: "If magic is defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it." That is exactly right. But in an age that prides itself on its rationality, we commonly mask this reality from ourselves." 

Fraser concludes: "The Christian tradition insists on one thing over and over again: that you and I are not gods and that we cannot defy the gravity of our basic humanity. This religion is a process of disenchantment from the persistent belief that we are the centre of the universe. What is the secular equivalent to this admonition? I don't see one. Everywhere, we are told that we can (with what Marx called "the magic of money") be transformed into mini gods – rock gods, sex gods, masters of the universe."

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Michael McDermott - Hit Me Back.

Leonard Cohen: Going Home

Sam Norton has a helpful reflection on the problem of suffering based on songs from Leonard Cohen's Old Ideas. My series of posts on the Suffering God here, here and here seem to cover similar ground.
The song from Old Ideas that I've been musing over is 'Going Home':

"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit"

This opening verse sets up the ambiguity inherent in the song, as Leonard is singing about speaking with Leonard.

Just who is the first person character in the song? One suggestion from some reviews has been a manager-type figure. It is also possible that the character speaking in the song is intended to be God, who might command the kind of obedience attributed to Cohen within the song. That would also seem to fit with 'Show Me The Place' where the singer of the song speaks of himself as the slave being told where to go. Where he is to go seems to be to do with incarnation ("Where the Word became a man") and resurrection ("Help me roll away the stone") and therefore it would seem that he is characterising himself as the slave of God.

In 'Show Me The Place' this slavery seems to be accepted but in 'Going Home' it seems more ambiguous and more sinister:

"But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn’t have the freedom
To refuse"

As an alternative, I want to suggest that Leonard the man is speaking to Leonard the persona. All performers seem to need to create a stage persona that is in some way separate from the reality of who the person actually is. On this basis, the song is to do with the experience of leaving the stage in order to experience reality - "Going home / Behind the curtain / Going home / Without the costume / That I wore."

It seems to me that this is a good fit with Cohen's experience of spending five years in a Buddhist retreat only to return to performing when his retirement savings were plundered by his personal manager. Not that 'Going Home' is a confessional song. It's ambiguities mean that it can be read on several different levels but this reading makes sense of both it's central premise - Leonard talking to Leonard - and the stage-related imagery of the song's chorus.

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Leonard Cohen - Going Home.  

Lent: Confronting us with reality

This was my Ash Wednesday sermon, based heavily on materials from Call to Change:

"Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: 'Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.'

"Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, 'God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.'"

Jesus commented, "This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face, but if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself." (Luke 18. 9 - 14)

The prayer of the tax man opened him up to reality – the reality of who he really was – while the prayer of the Pharisee was an exercise in unreality because it was designed to make him look better than he was by comparison with others.

This is one of the reasons why Jesus says in Matthew 6. 1 - 6 don’t perform your religious duties in public and don’t pray where everyone can see you. If our religious duties and our prayers are performed to gain the praise of others then they are not opening us up to the reality of who we are, instead they are poses designed to escape from, hide or mask that reality.

God’s judgment confronts us with reality.  His word pierces through our layers of self-deception.  It pierces through the false gods of profit, popularity and status on which we set our hearts, and through our shell of self-protecting cynicism.

Under the loving judgment of God, we see ourselves as we really are.  We see the futility of our self-deception, the emptiness of our false gods and the destructiveness of our cynicism.  Why does God force this painful truth upon us?  For this reason: it is only when we face the reality of our lives that change and growth become possible.

The prayers and practices of Lent exist to open us to reality.  Their words of penitence urge us to face the truth about our sins and their impact on others.  For example, the chastening words of the Ash Wednesday liturgy ‘Remember thou art dust, and unto dust shalt thou return’ force us to face the truth of our mortality.

We won’t go on forever.  The choices we make each day mean there are paths down which we have decided not to travel, possibilities we have shut down, perhaps permanently.  We need to ask what kind of values we will affirm, in our deeds as well as our words.  As we face our mortality, we are forced to ask: what do I want this life to say?

This question needs to be considered alongside an honest examination of what my life currently says.  What would you say my values and priorities were if you looked, not at the beliefs I profess, but at the ways I spend my time and money, the things that preoccupy and vex me, the ways I treat the people around me?

Lent helps us to explore the gap between the answers we give to these two questions: what does this life say? and what do I want it to say?

These are questions we can also ask of our common life.  In The Rock T.S. Eliot asks:

What is the meaning of this city?

Do you huddle together because you love each other?

What will you answer? ‘We all dwell together

To make money from each other?’ or ‘This is a community?’

Today, many people are asking these questions with a new intensity.  There is a large and growing gap between rich and poor, one which politicians of all parties say they want to see reversed.  And we all live with the ongoing and unpredictable consequences of the global financial crisis for years to come. In the midst of a recession – and the yawning gap between the richest and poorest in our society – there is a growing sense that something needs to change.

So this Lent, two Christian social action charities – The Contextual Theology Centre and the Church Urban Fund – are issuing a Call to Change.  (This is online at www.calltochange.withtank.com and on Twitter at @calltochange.)  It builds on decades of ministry by churches in some of England’s poorest neighbourhoods.  It seeks to draw more people into their work of prayer, of listening and of action for social justice by use of the season of Lent to achieve real change in our local and national life.

The Call to Change is not a call to scapegoat someone else – be they a ‘benefits scrounger’ or a banker.  Each of us is called to open ourselves to reality.  We do this through prayer: as we encounter the ultimate reality of God in Scripture, worship and personal devotion.  We do it too through listening: and in particular, a serious engagement with the voice of England’s poorest communities.

Words are not enough.  They need to take flesh in action.  The experience of churches engaged in their local community points to concrete things every Christian and congregation can do – to tackle poverty, and build an economic system that works for poor as well as rich.

Lent is traditionally seen as a rather gloomy time, when we turn inward in tortured self-examination.  The truth is very different.  The deeper purpose of this season is to draw us outward – into a deeper communion with God and with neighbour. We actually need Lent now more than ever, so that mind, body and spirit can be released from the self-indulgence of a consumerist, individualistic society. The ‘Good News’ of Lent is how much more we believe there is to life than this. This is God’s reality which Lent enables us to encounter.

Lent is mirrored on the way Jesus’ own ministry began: with forty days of prayerful discernment. Only then can our action be part of God’s transforming work. Without prayer, we will not discern God’s purposes or act his power. Without listening, we will not discover our neighbours’ concerns - or be able to harness the power of common action.

Both prayer and listening help us see that Christian discipleship involves a challenge to the values of our broken world. In Lent, we are called to remove the idols of money and power from the thrones they have in our hearts and in our society. In Lent, we are challenged to face up to the reality of our self-indulgence in a consumerist, individualistic society and remember that money and power are to be placed at the service of Christ, and of his Kingdom of justice and of peace.

It is through changes like these, individual and corporate, that we can grow together into ‘life in all its fullness.’ That is the message of Lent. And, more importantly, it is the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, God’s word of love made flesh.

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Keane - Everybody's Changing.

Gospel Reflection: Matthew 16: 21 – 28

Are you able to imagine an alternative reality or can you only see your future as being more of the same?

Jesus not only imagines an alternative reality but creates one by pursuing a path and purpose which is in opposition to the thoughts and expectations of our human nature (v 23 of Matthew 16: 21 – 28). As the songwriter T. Bone Burnett put it, Jesus’ words and actions open up a trapdoor beneath us when we think we have life sussed: “you've got to give up your life to be alive / you've got to suffer to know compassion … you find only pain if you seek after pleasure / you work like a slave if you seek after leisure.”

The alternative reality that Jesus lives out is where salvation, compassion, pleasure, leisure, and abundant life are all to be found but to touch that reality we have to be able to imagine an alternative. So, what might forgetting self, carrying your cross and losing your life look like in your workplace? What might these things mean for the organisation for which you work? If we cannot imagine how life could possibly be different, aren’t we essentially trapped in whatever reality we currently inhabit with no options for change?

Prayer: Turn my thoughts and ideas about life on their head and help me imagine how life could be different, so that I have choices for my future and my life. Amen.  

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T Bone Burnett - Power Of Love.