Seen and Unseen - Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?

My latest article for Seen & Unseen is entitled 'Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?'. It makes suggestions of what to do when confronted with contentious culture:

'Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.'

For more on a charitable hermeneutic see here and here. For more on responses to controversial art see here and here.

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

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

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

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

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

My sixth article was 'The visionary artists finding heaven down here' in which I explored a tradition of visionary artists whose works shed light on the material and spiritual worlds.

My seventh article was 'How the incomer’s eye sees identity' in which I explain how curating an exhibition for Ben Uri Online gave me the chance to highlight synergies between ancient texts and current issues.

My eighth article was 'Infernal rebellion and the questions it asks' in which I interview the author Nicholas Papadopulos about his book The Infernal Word: Notes from a Rebel Angel.

My ninth article was 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' in which I review Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death and explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My 10th article was 'Theresa Lola's poetical hope' about the death-haunted yet lyrical, joyful and moving poet for a new generation.

My 11th article was 'How to look at our world: Aaron Rosen interview', exploring themes from Rosen's book 'What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World'.

My 12th article was 'Blake, imagination and the insight of God', exploring a new exhibition - 'William Blake's Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum - which focuses on seekers of spiritual regeneration and national revival.

My 13th article 'Matthew Krishanu: painting childhood' was an interview with Matthew Krishanu on his exhibition 'The Bough Breaks' at Camden Art Centre.

My 14th article was entitled 'Art makes life worth living' and explored why society, and churches, need the Arts.

My 15th article was entitled 'The collective effervescence of sport's congregation' and explored some of the ways in which sport and religion have been intimately entwined throughout history

My 16th article for Seen & Unseen was entitled 'Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d' and reviewed the ways in which artist Richard Kenton Webb is conversing with the blind poet in his former home (Milton's Cottage, Chalfont St Giles).

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Feargal Sharkey - A Good Heart.

'Silence' - Endo, Scorsese, Fujimura, Yancey & Kraus

“My personal encounter in the late 1980s with fumi-e displayed at the Tokyo National Museum led me to read Endō’s masterpiece, Silence,” writes Makoto Fujimura in his new book Silence and Beauty. “As I write this, the novel is being made into a major motion picture by the master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. A good friend of mine introduced me to Scorsese, and my conversation with him compelled me to write this book."

"Only Mako Fujimura could have written this book," Philip Yancey writes in the foreword to the book:

"Bicultural in upbringing and sensibility, he understands the nuances of Japan, and his knowledge of the language sheds light on Endō’s original source material. At the same time, Mako’s years of living in New York have given him a contemporary, global perspective ... Informed by both East and West, Mako guides the reader on excursions into Japanese art, samurai rituals, the tea ceremony and Asian theology, even while relying on Western mentors such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, J. S. Bach, Vincent van Gogh and J. R. R. Tolkien."

Yancey continues:

"Shūsaku Endō described Japan as a swampland for Christianity, and missionaries who have served there tend to agree. Other Asian countries have seen explosive growth—the megachurches of the Philippines and South Korea, the massive unregistered church in China—while in Japan, the average church numbers less than thirty. A nation that copies nearly everything Western, from management practices to McDonald’s, baseball and pop music, curiously avoids religion. Most puzzling, as Mako mentions, is that so many values in the culture already reflect the way of the New Testament. Why, then, do so few Japanese convert?

That question troubled Shūsaku Endō too, who ultimately concluded that the failure stemmed from the Western emphasis on God’s fatherhood. Mother love tends to be unconditional, accepting the child no matter what, regardless of behavior. Father love tends to be more provisional, bestowing approval as the child measures up to certain standards of behavior. According to Endō, Japan, a nation of authoritarian fathers, has understood the father love of God but not the mother love ...

For Christianity to have any appeal to the Japanese, Endō suggests, it must stress instead the mother love of God, the love that forgives wrongs and binds wounds and draws, rather than forces, others to itself. (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing!”) “In ‘maternal religion’ Christ comes to prostitutes, worthless people, misshapen people and forgives them,” says Endō. As he sees it, Jesus brought the message of mother love to balance the father love of the Old Testament.

This insight helps answer a common question about Silence: Why did Endō express his own  deeply felt faith through a story of betrayal? ...

Endō explains that he centers his work on the experiences of failure and shame because these leave the most lasting impact on a person’s life ... The entire Bible can be seen, in fact, as a story of betrayal, beginning with Adam and proceeding through the history of the Israelites, culminating in the cross ... Our only hope is the forgiving gaze of the betrayed Savior, the still point of Endō’s novel."

In sessions that I led in the past at North Thames Ministerial Training Course we explored many of these same issues involved in cross-cultural communication of the meaning of the Atonement by looking at examples of missionary work in Japan through the writings of Endō and the approach of C. Norman Kraus as summarised in Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Green & Baker, 2000).

Endō's writings depict both the anguish of faith and the mercy of God. A central theme of his writings has been the clash between Japanese culture and a very Western mode of religion. Novels like Silence and The Samurai suggest that Christianity must adapt itself radically if it is to take root in the “swamp” of Japan.

In assessing Christ’s atoning work, Kraus suggests that a Japanese “shame” culture is a less distorting lens through which to read the New Testament than a Western “guilt” culture. The “atonement theory” which emerges from Kraus’s reading centers more on “solidarity” than on “substitution.”

Among the questions we explored in these sessions were:

• What are the cultural factors that Ferreira in Silence thinks have prevented the Christian message from taking root in Japan?
• What other factors in the success or failure of this mission to Japan can be identified in Silence?
• Ferreira says that “the God whom those Japanese believed in was not the God of Christian teaching”. Assuming for the moment that he was right, do you think this matters and why?
• What are the cultural factors in Japan that Kraus takes into account in developing a theology of the atonement for Japan?
• How do these factors influence the theology of the atonement that he develops?
• In your view, is Kraus’ theology of the atonement consistent with the Biblical concepts and images of the atonement? 
• In what ways does your discussion of The Samurai link to Kraus’ atonement theology for Japan? Are there cultural issues that are common to both? Are there understandings of the atonement that are common to both?
• Does Kraus’ theology answer the issues raised by Ferreira in Silence?
• From your understandings of Japanese culture, which of the Biblical concepts or images of atonement would you emphasise in mission to Japan, and why? 
• What factors do you think need to be taken into account when communicating the god news of the atonement in a culture that is not your own (whether this is the culture of another country or a sub-culture within your own culture)?

In one such session we identified the following:

Issues for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement 

• Unholy alliances of politics, economics and religion and no consultation with the indigenous peoples
• Our religion is embedded in our culture - difficulties of disentangling the two (can we do this?)
• Perceived conflict between different religions i.e. Western Catholicism and Japanese Buddhism
• May be exporting our denominational, and other, divisions
• Need for understanding of social structures i.e. hierarchies
• Need for understanding of cultural norms i.e. shame
• Suspicious personal motives and suspicion of motives
• Suspicion of ‘outsiders’
• Shaming or threatening people through lack of cultural understanding
• Causing threat through the undermining of cultural hierarchies
• Concerns over Empires following on the heels of missionaries
• Disruption of a ‘closed’ cultural system through ‘outside’ ideas
• Violence accompanying ‘mission’
• Lack of respect for the indigenous culture and religion
• Discounting of indigenous cultures
• Clash with indigenous religious understandings e.g. Velasco’s passion and the Buddhist sense of ‘not desiring’

Ideas for cross-cultural communication of the Atonement 

• Importance of outsider’s showing care
• The giving of honour to all whatever their place within cultural hierarchies
• The giving of help rather than the bringing of oppression
• Exposure to Christian selflessness across cultural hierarchies
• Recognising the examples of service seen in indigenous peoples e.g. Yozö’s example of dedicated service being an image of Christ
• The experience of cultural rejection leading to identification with Christ
• The stripping away of culture leaving people exposed to revelation
• Identification with Christ through experience of sorrow
• Tapping into a universal sense of longing
• Seeing the universal in the particular
• Drawing metaphors from within the culture
• Salvation as being saved from the consequences of cultural norms and practices e.g. Christ above the “karma of man”, identification with Christ once shamed

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Bruce Cockburn - Tokyo.

Endo & Scorsese: Approaching Silence

'Shusaku Endo is celebrated as one of Japan's great modern novelists, often described as "Japan's Graham Greene," and Silence is considered by many Japanese and Western literary critics to be his masterpiece.

Approaching Silence is both a celebration of this award-winning novel as well as a significant contribution to the growing body of work on literature and religion. It features eminent scholars writing from Christian, Buddhist, literary, and historical perspectives, taking up, for example, the uneasy alliance between faith and doubt; the complexities of discipleship and martyrdom; the face of Christ; and, the bodhisattva ideal as well as the nature of suffering. It also frames Silence through a wider lens, comparing it to Endo's other works as well as to the fiction of other authors.'

In his essay for Approaching Silence Martin Scorsese writes: 'Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence.'

'Adapting Silence ... has been a passion project percolating in Martin Scorsese’s mind for decades. For a while, it looked like the film would never get done. But with the release of a full cast, a first still, and a brand new essay and storyboard courtesy of The Film Stage, [Matthew Becklo says,] Scorsese’s Silence is well on its way to its scheduled 2016 release.

In an early forward for the novel, Scorsese wrote:

“How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos… [Endo] understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture… That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.”

Similarly, as David Ehrenstein writes, Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, released in 1988 and adapted from Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the life of Christ, takes as its subject this same struggle between the spirit and the flesh - 'the “temptation” is simply that to be only human—to forgo divinity and martyrdom in exchange for a normal life':

'Kazantzakis’s novel had long fascinated Scorsese, who saw in it an opportunity to create a religious epic like no other, a “Passion project” if ever there was one. Written in 1951, The Last Temptation of Christ, according to its author, shows that the “part of Christ’s nature which was profoundly human helps us to understand and love him and to pursue his passion as though it were our own. If he had not within him this warm human element, he would never be able to touch our hearts with such assurance and tenderness; he would not be able to become a model for our lives.” And so instead of dealing with Christ as a remote icon, Scorsese’s film would explore what it meant for him to be fully human as well as divine—as the Gospels say it was Jesus’ unique condition to be.'

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Peter Gabriel - The Feeling Begins.

Perhaps the most underrated band ever

"Rock'n'roll is a vehicle to express the emotions you are not allowed to use in everyday life. We shouldn't waste rock and roll. Rock should be looking at some of the big questions. At its best, it's an art form that inspires, sometimes teaches, sometimes threatens. Its only crime is when it bores." Michael Been

Michael Been, The Call's singer/songwriter, was born in Oklahoma City but migrated to California before forming The Call with Scott Musik. Sin and salvation were staples of the diet that The Call served up. Been thought "that every fault in the world is within him" and said that he had had "hundreds of born-again experiences" needing them because he is dead a lot of the time. "I believe in truth. Whatever is necessary for a person to experience to find the rock bottom, to know the darkness of his life, that's right. A lot of our music is confrontational, it deals with the dark side of life because that teaches us something."

Been’s focus on the dark side of life led to the band being labelled as negative and may have restricted their overall impact – their greatest success was with the deliberately life-affirming single 'Let the Day Begin' which reached number three in the American charts. Another limiting factor, in the UK at least, was that they were perceived as playing the ‘Big Music’ when the likes of U2, Simple Minds and The Waterboys had fallen out of critical fashion. The fact that Bono and Jim Kerr contributed to their albums didn’t help dispel this perception. In reality, though, the band that the Call most resembled (never more so than on Red Moon) was The Band, and both Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson contributed to their albums. Support was also lost among American Christians (something Been had been at pains to build up – he sent copies of the single 'I Still Believe (Great Design)' to Christian radio stations together with a signed copy of the Apostles Creed) when Been appeared as the apostle John in the Martin Scorcese film The Last Temptation of Christ. He was asked to take part as a friend of Scorcese – The Call were reputedly Scorcese’s favourite band – and got involved because he “wanted to show something of the struggle Christ had”. However a lot of people wrote to him saying, “Your records helped me when I was down. But now you’re involved in this film I can’t listen to them anymore.”

The Call’s original career may have ended with Red Moon but it ended on a high, that album together with 1986’s Reconciled representing the peak of their work. Combining literate lyrics with powerful anthems and genuinely encompassing despair, ecstasy and the stages in between, The Call are "perhaps the most underrated band ever".

"A preacher and a teacher, Michael was always much more than your usual 'ten-a-penny' careerist '80s rock star. As driven as he was with his beliefs, he was far from sanctimonious and always a hoot to be around. He had a similar soul that one perceives in true American greats such as Robbie Robertson, but he also had the wickedly spirited comedy of John Belushi draped all around him." Jim Kerr

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The Call - Let The Day Begin.

Lent film evenings

Tomorrow evening we will begin the first of five Lent film evenings at the St John's Vicarage at which we will show four controversial Jesus films before having a discussion about all four films on the final evening:

The Gospel According To St Matthew

“[Pier Paulo] Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew was made in 1964 by a Marxist who was frequently accused of blasphemy by the Catholic church and whose attitude to religion was ambivalent.

Its portrait of the Messiah - played by Enrique Irazoqui, a young Spanish economics student with a scraggy beard - is far harsher than the usual soft saint that passes for Jesus. He is, as screenwriter and director Paul Mayersberg has suggested, "a procurer for God". The actor wears no make-up and nor does the rest of the cast. Judas is played by a truck-driver from Rome (Otello Sestili), and Pasolini's own mother is the Virgin Mary. They are all amateurs, and the close-ups of their faces make the story seem more real than usual. The bleak hillside scenery of Calabria, where the film was made, gives the film a primitive feel that is augmented by grainy cinematography. The soundtrack - Prokofiev, Bach, Mozart and even Billie Holiday - surprises us … What Pasolini clearly wanted was a believable gospel, armed with real people … He did say … that he was not interested in deconsecrating: "That is a fashion I hate. I want to 'reconsecrate' as much as possible."

It is a stark film (someone has described it as one-dimensional), but with clear-headed interpretative qualities that avoid the usual cliches. This Christ was a political animal, angry at social injustice. The silent cry from the cross is believable and the miracles avoid any kind of underlining comment - they just happen, with not a special effect in sight.” (The Guardian, November 2000)

The Last Temptation of Christ

“This is a life-of-Christ story unlike any other … In adapting this epic tale, [Martin] Scorsese has stripped away the familiar epic trappings to concentrate on the human dimension, and except for the central character and the basic outline of the story, the film has nothing in common with the more conventional accounts.

The most radical departure is Jesus Himself. There is no plaster saintliness here. When we first see Him, Christ is a cross-maker, collaborating with the Romans in their persecution of the rebellious Israelites. His reason for this, He says, is to make God hate Him: "God loves Me and I can't stand the pain." And He goes as far in His efforts to alienate His Father as to hold the feet of the rebels as the nails are driven in and their blood spurts into His face.

Scorsese takes a huge risk in these early moments. He succeeds in conveying Christ's pain, but at the same time he alienates us from his hero. Scorsese's specialty is souls in torment. In ‘Mean Streets,’ his protagonist stuck his finger in an open flame and speculated on the pain of Hell. In ‘Taxi Driver,’ Travis Bickle's Hell was the streets of New York, and for Jake La Motta in ‘Raging Bull,’ it was a boxing ring.

The Saviour here is on a direct line with these characters. But these men were outside God's circle. Being chosen by God and having His divinity within Him are the cause of Christ's suffering. This Christ is wracked with doubt over his destiny. He can't be certain if the voices He hears are those of God or the Devil. Hating His own weakness and cowardice and susceptibility to temptation, Jesus excoriates His flesh, wearing a nail-studded belt around His waist.

It is this conflict - the struggle between the spirit and the flesh - that Scorsese and his screen writer, Paul Schrader (who wrote ‘Taxi Driver’ and co-wrote ‘Raging Bull’), take as their subject. In this they attempt to strike a universal chord -- to place Christ not above us, and above our weaknesses, but on a level with us, and prone to the same doubts and temptations.” (Washington Post, 1988)

Jesus of Montreal

“The action of this movie is set in motion by a theatre-loving priest who decides to commission a contemporary Passion Play. He engages Daniel, a young actor played by the androgynously ethereal Lothaire Bluteau, who conscripts a group of unemployed Montréal actors to carry out this commission. Their performance, which makes use of Mount Royal as an outdoor theatre, dazzles the audience even while it offends the priest …

Jesus of Montreal has the audacity to take institutional religion and spiritual questing seriously and still call itself a comedy. The device of history as a play within a film permits Denys Arcand to move seamlessly from one line of narrative continuity to another, so that eventually the film moves towards a unifying and credible answer to the implicit question: what would Jesus look like if he walked among us today? Daniel becomes so identified with the character of Jesus that the line between ancient narrative and the contemporary life in which he is deeply immersed becomes deliberately blurred. Daniel rails against crass corporate culture like Christ among the money-changers, cultivates a sublime asceticism and ultimately transforms the material world through his struggle and suffering. So it is that we see how life among troubled and searching actors in modern-day Montréal might be marked by halo-traces of a time-honoured story of death and rebirth. Arcand has created a brilliantly witty allegory for a commercial age in which doubt is not merely conceived as an antithesis to faith; it is the permanent fact of our postmodern condition.” (The Canadian Encyclopedia)

The Passion of the Christ

“Well before the commercial release of his film, Mel Gibson had organized private showings for important journalists and religious leaders. If he was counting on assuring the goodwill of those he invited, he badly miscalculated; or perhaps he instead manifested a superior Machiavellianism.

The commentaries quickly followed, and far from praising the film or reassuring the public, there were only terrified vituperations and anguished cries of alarm concerning the anti-Semitic violence that might erupt at the cinema exits ... Nothing justifies these accusations. For Mel Gibson, the death of Christ is a burden born by all humanity, starting with Mel Gibson himself. When his film strays a bit from the Gospel text, which happens only rarely, it is not to demonize the Jews but to emphasize the pity that Jesus inspires in some of them: in Simon of Cyrene for example, whose role is amplified, or in Veronica, the woman who, according to an ancient tradition, offered a cloth to Jesus during the ascent to Golgotha on which the features of his face became imprinted.

The more things calm down, the more it becomes clear in retrospect that the film precipitated a veritable tantrum in the world’s most influential media that more or less contaminated the entire atmosphere in its wake. The public had nothing to do with the controversy, since it had not seen the film. It wondered with evident curiosity what was it in this Passion that could create such a panic among those who are normally so difficult to shock. What ensued was easy to predict: instead of the 2600 screens originally planned, The Passion of the Christ opened on more than 4000 screens on Ash Wednesday - a day evidently chosen for its penitential symbolism.

The charge of anti-Semitism has receded somewhat since the film’s release. But the film’s detractors have rallied around a second complaint, the excessive violence that they see in the film. There is indeed great violence, but it does not exceed, it seems to me, that of many other films that Gibson’s critics would not dream of condemning. This Passion has shaken up (no doubt only provisionally) the chessboard of media reactions concerning violence in the movies. All those who are normally accustomed to spectacular violence, or even see in its constant evolution so many victories of freedom over tyranny, find themselves condemning it in Gibson’s film with extraordinary vehemence. On the other side, all those who see it as their duty to denounce cinematic violence (without their criticisms ever having the slightest impact) not only tolerate this film, but frequently admire it.” (René Girard, Anthropoetics 10, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2004)

We will be using the following questions on the final evening of the series when we will be discussing the four films:

1. What surprised you about the depictions of Jesus seen in these films?
2. Did you find any aspects of the films particularly moving? What and why?
3. Was your understanding of who Jesus is and what he did challenged in any way by seeing these films? What and why?
4. Several of these films were controversial when released, why do you think that was the case? Do you think people were right to protest against the making or distribution of these films?

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Peter Gabriel - Passion.