Seen and Unseen: Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope

My latest book review for Seen and Unseen is on Nobody's Empire by Stuart Murdoch:

'Nobody's Empire: A Novel is the fictionalised account of how Stuart Murdoch, lead singer of indie band Belle and Sebastian, transfigured his experience of Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) through faith and music.'

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 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).

My 17th article was entitled 'Controversial art: how can the critic love their neighbour?'. It makes suggestions of what to do when confronted with contentious culture.

My 18th article was an interview entitled 'Art, AI and apocalypse: Michael Takeo Magruder addresses our fears and questions'. In the interview the digital artist talks about the possibilities and challenges of artificial intelligence.

My 19th article was entitled 'Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us'. In the article I highlight alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

My 20th article was entitled 'Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs'. In the article I highlight folk musicians capturing both the barbaric and the beautiful in the hymn Amazing Grace and Christianity's entanglement with the transatlantic slave trade more generally.

My 21st article was entitled 'James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord'. In the article I noted that the composer’s music contends both the secular and sacred.

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Belle and Sebastian - Ever Had A Little Faith.

Start:Stop - Faces shining with God's glory

Bible reading

Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? …

Since, then, we have such a hope, we act with great boldness, not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the people of Israel from gazing at the end of the glory that was being set aside … when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3. 7 - 18)

Meditation

After Moses has been in the presence of God on Mount Sinai to receive the Law, his face shone with the light of God; so much so, that he put a veil over his face whenever he was not speaking with the Israelites. The experience of being in the presence of God irradiated Moses in a way which meant that he reflected something of God’s light.

At Mount Sinai the Israelites, as a whole, had been given the chance to become a nation of priests enjoying the kind of intimate, direct relationship with God that Moses developed. Moses learnt to mirror God from his conversations and debates with God; so much so, that his face began to shine with the reflection of God’s glory. But the people of Israel never really learnt what God is like because they would not speak with him face to face. They kept him at arms-length by using Moses as their mediator and by trying to keep rules which they knew but didn’t fully understand. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 3.18 that we have the opportunity to be like Moses, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. That transformation comes as we dialogue, debate, argue and converse with God.

Many of the great figures in the Bible seem to have viewed prayer as being more like a constant conversation with God than they did a scheduled time for making requests. Other people in the Bible who had these kinds of conversations with God include: Abraham, Jacob, Samuel, Job, Jeremiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Jesus, and Paul. Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi, sees Abraham as being the starting point in scripture for this kind of dialogue between God and human beings and says that there begins with Abraham “a dialogue between Heaven and Earth which has not ceased in 4,000 years”. He calls it the dialogue in which God and Man find one another.

When we find God in this way that is when we, like Moses, with unveiled faces, will see the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, and will be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another so that our faces begin to shine with the reflection of God’s glory.

Prayer

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. Your light is most clearly seen in Jesus, who is the light of the world. Enable each one of us, with unveiled faces, to see his glory as though reflected in a mirror, and be transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

Like Moses may we enter into the dialogue in which God and human beings find one another. May we learn to dialogue, debate, argue and converse with you. With the poet-priest George Herbert, may we pray, ‘Ah my dear angry Lord, / Since thou dost love, yet strike; / Cast down, yet help afford; / Sure I will do the like. / I will complain, yet praise; / I will bewail, approve: / And all my sour-sweet days / I will lament, and love.’

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

We recognise that much of life in the city is struggle: the struggle to keep the children from crime; the struggle to make the money last the week; the struggle to find energy after a heavy day at work; the struggle to keep the house decent; the struggle to find quiet space in overcrowded rooms. And especially, the struggle to find space to be conscious of your presence: energy to live out your loving forgiveness. Yet somehow your blessing is discovered in the struggle, just as Jacob wrestled and struggled with you. And although he was left with a limp, your deeper blessing never left him. Lord, we pray for our friends and neighbours that they may know your blessing in this struggle of living and their faces shine as a result.

Great God, you said, ‘Let there be light,’ and light came into being. May our lives reflect your life and our faces shine with the light of Christ.

Blessing

Seeing God’s glory, dialoguing, debating, arguing and conversing with God, blessing in struggle, faces shining with God’s light. May those blessings of almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and remain with you always. Amen.

  

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Van Morrison - In The Garden.

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.

Competition & consumerism: The Darwinian narrative of strife

Competition and consumerism are the mantras of Capitalism. Both are critiqued effectively in comment pieces in today's Guardian:

Chibundu Onuzo - '[Namwali] Serpell’s decision points to an arena where it is even more futile to compete: life. Increasingly our existence on this planet is framed as a struggle – for jobs, resources: for oil, water, land.

This Darwinian narrative of strife continues at an individual level. I am not yet halfway through my twenties, and already I am fatigued by the way the world is determined to frame my life. Someone always has more money, a better job, more vibrant social life, more attractive postcode. I am forever to be in competition with this ever elusive someone who is always a stride ahead, their shadow darkening my progress.

At a concert I attended recently, the MC asked who was dissatisfied with their life. More than half of the audience put up their hands. We live in perpetual fear that we have missed out, that just across the road from us, someone is getting more out of life. I watch my friends and family go through the rigmarole of finding school places, assiduously comparing which Ofsted report is more outstanding than the other. No matter how good the school, someone’s child is always in one that is better. Extracurricular clubs and classes thrive, not because of any love for dance or drama, but because one’s children must not fall behind, one’s toddler must begin to make their way through the jungle gym of life. Slowly but steadily, we are banishing contentment from the world.

As individuals respond to this meta-story of competition, we become discontent in a world where there is enough space for everyone to go at their own pace. Serpell said in her acceptance speech: “We don’t want to compete. We all want to be honoured.” There can be no winners as long as life continues to be depicted as a competition. We will all lose.'

Giles Fraser - 'How quaint, sniggers the Tory business minster, Anna Soubry, on the Today programme. Before we were liberated to spend our Sundays down at the shopping mall, “Sunday was the most miserable day of the week,” she says. And there you have the Tory business philosophy in one. In fact, it’s not a philosophy, it’s a dogmatic theology. For nothing, absolutely nothing, must get in the way of shopping and our ever increasing productivity. Instead of all those tedious family gatherings, we should be out there buying more things we don’t need with money we don’t have. A day of rest? God, no! We must be turning those wheels of finance, building those pyramids, getting into more debt.

A strict monotheist, Soubry wants us to worship the god of finance on a Sunday. All other gods must be smashed, smeared, ridiculed. Only the god of money deserves our true and unquestioning obedience. Well, I do wish she’d stop ramming her religion down our throats. I don’t want to be more productive.'

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The Clash - Lost In The Supermarket.

I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing

'I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing.' So said Bruce Springsteen when interviewed about his tastes in literature. I found this interview via 'The Imaginative Conservative'.

Springsteen spoke about the way that Flannery O’Connor, James M. Cain, John Cheever, Sherwood Anderson and Jim Thompson contributed greatly to the turn his music took around 1978-82:

'They brought out a sense of geography and the dark strain in my writing, broadened my horizons about what might be accomplished with a pop song and are still the cornerstone literally for what I try to accomplish today ... the short stories of Flannery O’Connor landed hard on me. You could feel within them the unknowability of God, the intangible mysteries of life that confounded her characters, and which I find by my side every day. They contained the dark Gothicness of my childhood and yet made me feel fortunate to sit at the center of this swirling black puzzle, stars reeling overhead, the earth barely beneath us.'

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Bruce Springsteen - Reason To Believe.

Nuancing notions of church growth

Adrian Newman, the Bishop of Stepney, has written an excellent article in the Church Times explaining why a 'good Vicar' (whatever that means!) does not necessarily equal church growth (whatever that means!):

"I find that the "standard" growth formula of expanding suburban churches rarely works in deprived parishes, where confident and able lay leadership is scarce, upward mobility robs churches of asset bases, and the dysfunctionality of everyday living means that congregations contain a disproportionate number of needy individuals. There are numerous well-researched inhibitors to growth in the inner city - even in the most vibrant churches, and even with the best clergy."

"... when we talk about a growing Church: it is only partially about the numbers. Growth cannot be an end in itself."

"... in an increasingly fragmented and tribal world, perhaps God is calling his Church to create and become communities of difference. If we are to be icons of hope, perhaps diversity is the key, a kaleidoscopic community struggling with harmony."

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Lifehouse - Nobody Listen.

Difficulty of belief

Here are two different but current acoustic-soul takes on the difficulty of belief.
Mobo recommended Michael Kiwanuka, who has been compared to Bill Withers and Al Green, has an "honest, unpretentious and raw style" that "is straight to the matter, unspoilt soul music at it’s best." Kiwanuka is getting ready to believe:
"Oh my, I didn't know what it means to believe
Oh my, I didn't know what it means to believe
but if I hold on tight is it true
you take care of all that I do
Oh Lord, I'm a-getting ready to believe
Oh my, I didn't know how hard it would be
Oh my, I didn't know how hard it would be
but if I hold on tight is it true
you take care of all that I do
Oh Lord, I'm a-getting ready to believe"

Scottish singer Emeli Sandé has: had two Top 10 hits, thanks to collaborations with Chipmunk and Wiley; written for Cheryl Cole, Susan Boyle, Cher Lloyd and Leona Lewis; and is influenced by Joni Mitchell, Lauryn Hill, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. Sandé, by contrast to Kiwanuka, focuses on the loss of the good intentions that she links with heaven:

"Will you recognize me, when I’m stealing from the poor
You're not gonna like me, I’m nothing like before
Will you recognize me, when I lose another friend?
Will you learn to leave me, or give me one more try again

Oh heaven, oh heaven, I wake with good intentions,
But the day it always lasts too long
Then I’m gone!
Oh heaven, oh heaven, I wake with good intentions,
But the day it always lasts too long
Then I’m gone, then I’m gone, then I’m gone , then I'm gone
Then I’m gone, then I'm gone, then I’m gone , then I'm gone"

As a supplement to the above we could also include 'Believer' by Susanna and the Magical Orchestra to give a trio of songs exploring the nature of belief:

"Didn't think you would trust me.
Thought you would see what I see.
These days have been good for me too,
But I can't stay.
You know why.
Didn't want this to end like this.
Thought I might, could convert.
These nights have been sad for me too,
But I don't pray.
You know why.

You are a believer,
I am not."

We would then have songs about observation of another's belief, preparation to believe, and the difficulty of the practice of belief. It is a fascinating sociological phenomenon to find such songs being written and connecting within popular culture at a time when secularisation was supposed to have eradicated such notions.