And a little child shall lead them

Here's my sermon for Midnight Mass at St Martin-in-the-Fields: 

This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.

What does Christmas look like today? Artist Nicola Ravenscroft has given us a vivid portrayal in her installation ‘With the Heart of a Child.’ It's on display below us in our crypt. The crypt is currently closed, so I'm going to describe the sculpture to you. It shows us seven life-size bronze children - one from every continent on Earth. Each one is simply dressed in soft silk. Each is leaning forward hopefully as if poised to dive into the future. Their eyes are closed as if they are dreaming into their future, anticipating things unseen.

Nicola writes that, as mother, and artist, she has agonised at the sight of our fractured society, our impending climate catastrophe, and our collective fear. She sees a desperate need for creativity and togetherness to arrest this. Her belief is that children can quietly lead us into recognising the truth of our ‘universal ONENESS, our oneness with each other and our oneness with the Earth’. So, her response to the challenges we currently face, especially this Christmas, has been to create this international group of little leaders pointing us towards understanding and TOGETHERNESS. They are an encouragement ‘to do whatever it takes to find solutions, to heal our broken planet, and so, to save our future.’

The prophet Isaiah promised a child born for us who would establish endless peace upheld with justice and righteousness: ‘For a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.’ Isaiah also told of a little child who shall lead. He described a time when the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.

Isaiah's vision of the peaceable kingdom was centred on a child born to be the Prince of Peace. When that promised child came among us, he said: ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs’, ‘Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’, ‘Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven’ and ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

So, the child born for us in Bethlehem leads us to become like children. Why is this so? I want to suggest two reasons. The first is about a vulnerability revealing the interdependence of which Nicola speaks and the second, a way of looking revealing our connection with creation.

First, vulnerability. The Christmas story is that the God we think of as an all-powerful protector chose to become wholly dependent on human beings for his own protection. As a human baby God was wholly dependent on other human beings, primarily Mary and Joseph, for his protection and, as we hear regularly on the news, human beings don’t actually have a very good track record when it comes to treating children well. God was willing to take the risk of coming into our world; a world in which genocides occur and in which innocent children are abused and die - as happened with the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem and beyond, a world in which he, though innocent, was tortured as a criminal and strung up on a cross to die:

“And the word became … / Wordless / Flesh / A baby with no words / And the voice of the maker became a hungry voice / A cry for food / A cry for milk / The voice that made gravity cried out for fear of falling / The voice that made women cries for a woman’s breast and screams with disappointment when it is denied …

Then now God is this small thing / Is a baby / Is a baby that can be dropped or hurt or left unfed, left unchanged, left wet and smelly / Or be child-abused.” (‘Image of the Invisible,’ Late, Late Service)

That was the reality of the incarnation and of the Christmas story. That is what it meant for Jesus to be born. It is the ultimate identification. God became flesh and blood and moved into our neighbourhood with all that that involves, not just at the beginning of his life but throughout. Why does this matter? It is when we are vulnerable that we are most aware of our need of others; that intrinsic interdependence that Nicola suggests is revealed to us by our experience of birth and childhood.

The sense of vulnerability engendered by the pandemic originally brought us a sense of community like never before as neighbours left notes offering help to those in their streets, as food banks supplied those in need, as we stood on our streets to applaud NHS and care workers, and as those same workers give sacrificially to care for those in need. If we follow the little child who leads we will see more community connection because, if we develop the heart of a child, our sense of vulnerability will reveal our interdependence and need one of another.

The second path to connection through childlikeness is about looking. As a baby Jesus was wholly dependent on others, as a child he began to explore the world around him using his sight, because sight precedes speech. We know from his parables and teaching that his learning was firmly rooted in the natural cycles of sowing, growing and reaping combined with deep appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, including the lilies of the field, and the value of each creature, including sparrows that cannot fall without God knowing. This understanding and appreciation derived from the attention he paid as a child to the natural world around him.

Artist and nun Sister Corita Kent once described a child’s journey from the front of the house to the back to illustrate the way children see the world, the attention they pay to it, and the wonder that they find. That short journey would ‘be full of pauses, circling, touching and picking up in order to smell, shake, taste, rub, and scrape’, ‘every object along the path will be a new discovery’ because ‘the child treats the situation with the open curiosity and attention that it deserves.’

Sister Corita went on to argue that through practice adults can learn once again to see as children do. She suggested that the kind slow looking practised by children, like prayer and art, enables us to view life without being distracted and allows us to put all our attention on a special area for a time. As would have been the case for the child Jesus, when we slow ourselves and focus our attention in this way we begin to receive what the world around has to show us; we notice things that others don’t and come to see that ordinary things are wondrous. The art historian John Ruskin claimed that the power of seeing in this way is ‘the teaching of all things,’ and that ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one.’

This is a form of prayer taking us to a place and space full of delight and wonder; prayer, poetry and prophecy. In this prayerful space and attitude we see the peaceable kingdom into which the child born in Bethlehem wishes to lead us. For many of us that was part of our original lockdown experience, as we walked in green spaces and, in the silence, heard the birds sing like never before.

Children naturally see that peaceable kingdom through the attention that they pay to the world around them, until we, as adults, teach them otherwise. That is why the children are our future and can lead the way into a better future. Like the poet Thomas Traherne, we need to unlearn the dirty devices of this world in order to become, as it were, a little child again that we may enter into the Kingdom of God.

Nicola Ravenscroft intuitively understands these truths and, as a maternal sculptor, creates children that through their connection to nature grant us a vision of the peaceable kingdom toward which they wish to lead us. In words taken from the novelist Joseph Conrad, her urgent prayer is that the children she has sculpted, ‘shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders, that feeling of unavoidable solidarity: of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds all to each other, and all humankind to the visible world.’

These are the children the adult Jesus called us to welcome, the children we are to become, the children to whom the peaceable kingdom belongs. They stand together peacefully in our Crypt as friends, vulnerable and strong, silently singing out their call to change. These little bronze children lead with trusting feet, plump and bare. The Prince of Peace is with them and calls us to let them lead the way saying the kingdom of heaven belongs to children, and anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it. 

Our world with its current catastrophes, fractures in society, and collective fears is crying out for change and hope. The baby born at Bethlehem remains the sign that we, too, need to be born again if our world is to know new life and fresh hope. That is the Christmas we need today and so, together with Nicola, my prayer is that we let the baby wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger lead us to become like children ourselves; open to vulnerability, embracing interdependence, paying prayerful attention to the world and thereby entering Christ’s peaceable kingdom.

I will be continuing to explore the themes of the sermon in a new series of posts called 'Seeing is receiving: The art of contemplation', the first of which will follow this post. Click here to read the first post in this new series.

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Randall Thompson - The Peaceable Kingdom.

Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation (1)

Today I'm beginning a new series exploring the art of contemplation. This post introduces the series and I'll post the remainder of the series on a weekly basis.

Introduction - Seeing

This is a book about prayer. But it is not a book about prayer like any you will have read. Most books about prayer are about the words we should speak or, if they are books of prayers, give us the words we are to speak. This is a book using words to bring us to silence.

Why? Because when we fall silent is when we begin to see. All we do and all we stop doing begins and ends in silence. Silence wraps itself around our lives through birth and death but also all our activity and speech within life.

This is perhaps most evident when music is played. Music fills the spaces in which it is performed for the duration of the performance but there is silence before and after. It may even be that the purpose of the sounds is that when they end we notice the silence more acutely than before. That is the movement – lyrically and musically – of Van Morrison’s ‘Summertime in England’ – one of the most meditative pieces created within the canon of noise that is rock music. It may also be why – in his most famous work – John Cage gave us 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence structured as a musical composition. Morrison takes us on a lyrical journey from the Lake District through Bristol to Glastonbury picking up on the literary and spiritual references as we travel to reveal that what we find in nature, literature and religion is the opportunity to rest, to experience, to be, to see, in silence.

We are led into silence in order to see because seeing is foundational to understanding. Seeing precedes speech. That is the sequence of human development, one that we ignore at our peril. It is also the sequence of the foundational story in the book of Genesis where Adam names the animals. Naming is a key human speech-act. Describing and defining is a tool for navigating existence and is the basis of scientific discovery, but it begins with seeing.

In order to accurately describe or define or map, you have first to see what is there. That is the sequence within this story. God brings animals to Adam. He looks at each one and then describes or defines each by naming it. Names in ancient times described the essence of the creature or object so named. That is what Adam does in this story. He looks for the essence of each creature and then names that essence.

With God the sequence is the same but on a cosmic scale, as God is creator. The account of creation in Genesis 1 begins with the Spirit hovering over the waters. We do not know how long this state lasted - it was a time out of time, as time did not yet exist – but it is clearly a preparatory time without speech. God then speaks and the world comes into existence. But then God looks. God looks, and sees that it is good. Then he rests; in silence. The end of speech is silence. The end of creation is rest. That is where our co-creation with God begins, in contemplation.

The Bible is full of words and speech and action but we are told that God continues to look. He sees us in the womb; Psalm 139.15-16 tells us that our frames were not hidden from God when we were being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. God’s eyes beheld our unformed substance there. God saw into the hearts of Jesse’s sons - as also with each one of us - selecting David as the one after his own heart. He saw Jonah as he tried to evade God’s call on his life, he sees every hair upon our head to the extent that they can each be numbered, and he sees and numbers every sparrow that falls. The stories that Jesus told are often stories in which the central characters look for what is lost or hidden. The point of these stories is that we find by seeing what is lost, hidden or over-looked. The point is that we see, as God sees.

As seeing is fundamental to creativity, this book suggests that art and artists can teach us how to see. The inspiration for this book is an insight expressed by the art historian, critic and curator Daniel Siedell. He suggested that attending to details, ‘looking closely is a useful discipline for us as Christians, who are supposed to see Christ everywhere, especially in the faces of all people.’ He then argued that, if ‘we dismiss artwork that is strange, unfamiliar, unconventional, if we are inattentive to visual details, how can we be attentive to those around us?’[i]

Similarly, the philosopher Simone Weil said that attention - the kind of close contemplative looking that is fundamental to our experience of art – when ‘taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer’. That is because it ‘presupposes faith and love’. Therefore, ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’[ii]

To explore this connection between contemplative looking and contemplative prayer I’m going to take us on two journeys. The first is an exploration of 7 S’s which aid our ability to genuinely pay attention in the way Weil suggests. We are aided in contemplative seeing by slowing down, sustained looking, surrendering ourselves to art through our immersion within it, staying with the silence inherent in much art, study of sources, the sharing of experiences, and openness to inspiration, the sparking of the Spirit. Many of these aids to seeing are practices shared by those who pray contemplatively. In particular, there are significant parallels to the rule of life practised by the Nazareth Community at St Martin-in-the-Fields, the members of which each shape a personal rule of life, containing individual and communal activities, using the practices of Silence, Scripture, Sacrament, Service, Sharing, Sabbath, and Staying With.

Be Still was a visual arts trail that was a wonderful example of the 7 S’s being surfaced and used. In 2016, Be Still celebrated Lent through the mindful reflection of art in six of Manchester’s most iconic venues. Contemporary installations, paintings, sculpture and live performances by internationally renowned and local artists uncovered moments where the sacred inhabits the ordinary. Each art work in the trail was accompanied by a reflection to help viewers engage spiritually and practically with stillness, prayer and mindfulness.

In the accompanying booklet Lesley Sutton, the Director of PassionArt, summarised the gift that artists offer to use in regard to attentive looking and contemplative prayer:

‘The gift the artist offers is to share with us is the mindful and prayerful act of seeing, for, in order to make material from their thoughts and ideas, they have to spend time noticing, looking intently and making careful observation of the minutiae of things; the negative spaces between objects, the expression and emotion of faces, the effect of light and shadow, shades of colour, the variety of texture, shape and form. This act of seeing slows us down and invites us to pay attention to the moment, to be still, not to rush and only take a quick glance but instead to come into a relationship with that which you are seeing, to understand it and make sense of its relationship with the world around it. This is a form of prayer where we become detached from our own limited perspective and make way for a wider more compassionate understanding of ourselves, others and the world we inhabit.’[iii]

The second journey is one to view some of the art commissioned by churches in the period since modern art began. For a significant part of its history the Church in the West was the major patron for visual arts. In that period, content ruled for the Church as art illustrated Biblical narratives and the lives of the Saints for teaching the faith, inspiring praxis, and facilitating prayer. But by the time Impressionism initiated modern art, art had already freed itself in many ways from the patronage of the Church and, as form not content became its primary focus, the developments of modern art led to an increasingly strained relationship between the Church and the visual arts.

The story of modern art has often been told with little or no reference to Christianity and yet, as Daniel Siedell has noted, an alternative history and theory of the development of modern art exists ‘revealing that Christianity has always been present with modern art, nourishing as well as haunting it, and that modern art cannot be understood without understanding its religious and spiritual components and aspirations.’[iv]

Seeing art commissioned for churches as part of the twentieth century renewal of religious art in Europe, as I did as a Sacred Art Pilgrimage in 2014, enables reflection on the ways in which artworks in churches facilitate contemplation and prayer. On my pilgrimage I visited churches in Belgium, England, France and Switzerland and I’ll take you back to some of those churches in the pages that follow. The majority were connected in some way with the encouragement to commission contemporary for churches given by George Bell, Marie-Alain Couturier, Maurice Denis, Albert Gleizes, Walter Hussey and Jacques Maritain.

Near the beginning of the pilgrimage I sat in St Giles Cripplegate on a balmy summer’s evening in July. I was there to listen to The Revd. Dr. Samuel Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, speak about ‘Art and the renewal of St Martins’. I didn’t know it then, but within a year I would join the team at St Martin’s and become a colleague of The Revd. Dr.

I was nearing the end of one journey whilst being at the beginning of several others. At that point I was a Vicar in East London with a significant interest in the Arts and their connections to faith; more than that, an interest in faith connecting with the whole of life. Engaging with the Arts, with workplaces, with community life and social action; these had all been key motivations on my journey into ordained ministry and of my ministry in East London since ordination in 2003.

Sam’s talk, part of an International Conference organised by Art & Christianity Enquiry, was scene-setting for a journey that was part pilgrimage, part art trail; while wholly concerned with seeing and contemplating the connections between art and faith. After initial remarks on the theme of art as a plurality of possibility showing what could be by using form, media and idea for creation, appreciation and interpretation, he took John Calvin’s threefold office of Christ as a frame for speaking about art, St Martins and art at St Martins.

In speaking about the Prophet, he said that art holds up a mirror to society and asks, ‘Are you proud of what you see?’ Art can create a dream of society fulfilled and thereby the painful gap between the ideal and reality. Prophets often shock and some prophetic acts are shocking. The priestly dimension of it that it enables us to see beyond the stars; we can “heaven espie” through art and it can, therefore, be a sacrament. Through the arts the ordinary stuff of life speaks or sings of the divine. Artists are the high priests of creation. Finally, using the kingly dimension, art can show what humanity can be when we reach our full potential. Kingly art stretches us and is about glory, as with a road sweeper he had encountered who spoke of his love of opera as being “his glory.” Artists construct acts of worship. God is the great artist and each human life is an interpretation and improvisation on the creativity of God.

These were the exciting aspirations on which I reflected as I set out on my journey of discovery through an art pilgrimage. I hope they also excite you as we set out on our shared journey through the 7 S’s of contemplative looking in order to discover the place of silence where we see with prayerful attention.

Every journey needs to include points at which we rest, recuperate and reflect before moving on further. As such, each chapter on our journey ends with options to Explore, Wonder, Pray, and undertake a Spiritual Exercise or an Art Action. Explore is information enabling further exploration of the theme, usually through related artworks. Wonderings are open-ended while relevant to the theme of the chapter and the reader's experience. They are intended to move in the direction of entering the content of the chapter and your own lived experience more deeply. There are no right or wrong responses to wonderings. The prayers included seek to channel the main themes of the chapter into personal prayers. Alternatively, you may wish to write or pray your own. The spiritual exercises seek to suggest an activity to enable prayerful reflection on the themes in ways that could enhance your own spirituality. Finally, the Art Actions provide links to some of the artworks or art activities mentioned in the chapter.

Our journey together begins and ends with poetry:

Attend, attend, pay attention, contemplate.
Open eyes of faith to days, minutes,
moments of miracle and marvel; there is wildness
and wonder wherever you go, present
in moments that never repeat, running free,
never coming again. Savour, savour the present –
small things, dull moments, dry prayers –
sacraments of presence, sense of wonder,
daily divine depth in the here and now.
There is only here, there is only now,
these are the days, this is the fiery vision,
awe and wildness, miracle and flame. Take off
your shoes, stand in the holy fire; sacrament
of the burning, always consumed, never repeating
present moment, knowing the time is now.

[i] D. Siedell - https://imagejournal.org/artist/daniel-siedell/
[ii] S. Weil, Gravity and Grace, Routledge, 2004, p. 117
[iii] L. Sutton in Be Still: PassionArt Trail 2016, PassionArt, 2016, p. 38
[iv] D. A. Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, BakerAcademic, 2008

See also 'And a little child shall lead them' which explores similar themes.

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Van Morrison - Summertime In England.