Seeing More Clearly with the Eyes of Love

Yesterday saw the presentation at St Martin-in-the-Fields of ‘Seeing More Clearly with the Eyes of Love’, a new liturgy for voices based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, composed to mark the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains two significant references to the New Testament: Bottom’s misquoting of St Paul (‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…’) and Bottom’s declaration taken from the Letter to the Ephesians (‘I assure you: the wall is down that parted their fathers’). In this ‘Liturgy for Voices’ these references are woven together with other excerpts from the play, words from the biblical poem ‘Song of Songs’, and elements from the traditional Christian liturgy to enable those present to explore Shakespeare’s own theme of clarifying the vision which belongs to love. The liturgy also includes five newly commissioned pieces from contemporary poets based on characters in the play: Laurence Sail (Titania), Michael Symmons Roberts (Demetrius), Sinead Morrissey (Puck), Micheal O’ Siadhail (Helena) and Jenny Lewis (Bottom); and the whole is intended to present an aspect of ‘Civic Shakespeare’, reflecting on the potentially transforming effect of love in civil society.

Andy Goodliff has posted a reflection on the experience of being present for this liturgy. He says:

"I like the ambition of the liturgy, the way we journeyed through the play and also the pattern of worship. I loved the music, composed by Myra Blyth (who for her many talents, did not know this was one). The music was suitably Shakespearian in sound, but also had echoes of Karl Jenkins and his The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace. The final piece, which worked as a means of Blessing and Dismissal was wonderful. The intercessions were powerful and brought the themes of love and God into the concerns of our day."

‘Seeing More Clearly with the Eyes of Love’ was a fascinating interweaving of new and old texts, voices, music, responses, symbolic action and performance.

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Karl Jenkins - The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace.

Seeing more clearly with the eyes of love

As part of the 400th year celebration of William Shakespeare the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture will be leading an act of worship at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Wednesday 3 August at 7.00pm entitled: “Seeing more clearly with the eyes of love.” 

The liturgy will weave together excerpts from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with traditional liturgy and contemporary poetry. It promises to be a very creative and illuminating reflection on the nature of love. This service is open to all and no ticket is required. There will be a retiring collection. All are welcome.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains two significant references to the New Testament: Bottom’s misquoting of St Paul (‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…’) and Bottom’s declaration taken from the Letter to the Ephesians (‘I assure you: the wall is down that parted their fathers’). In this ‘Liturgy for Voices’ these references are woven together with other excerpts from the play, words from the biblical poem ‘Song of Songs’, and elements from the traditional Christian liturgy to enable those present to explore Shakespeare’s own theme of clarifying the vision which belongs to love. The liturgy also includes five newly commissioned pieces from contemporary poets based on characters in the play – Laurence Sail (Titania), Michael Symmons Roberts (Demetrius), Sinead Morrissey (Puck), Micheal O’ Siadhail (Helena) and Jenny Lewis (Bottom) – and the whole is intended to present an aspect of ‘Civic Shakespeare’, reflecting on the potentially transforming effect of love in civil society.

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Michael Symmons Roberts - Pelt.

Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus: From occupation to liberation

Ahead of a recital, Michael Symmons Roberts explained in The Guardian at the weekend how the composition of Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus by Olivier Messiaen at the end of the second world war, and its filmic qualities, inspired his response in poetry to the work

Messiaen wrote his piano piece Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (20 Contemplations of the Infant Jesus) in 1944. It was originally a Radio Paris commission, based on some poetic tableaux by the French writer Maurice Toesca.

Symmonds Roberts writes: 'What I hadn’t realised was that Messiaen began to write the piece in Paris under German occupation in March of that year, and finished it in September after liberation. Although his commission was to write music to accompany the 12 sections of Toesca’s text, Messiaen soon abandoned that, pursuing his own poetic vision into wilder and stranger territories.

My work on the poems began to reflect aspects of this story. I was fascinated by the idea of Vingt Regards being written in a city as it crossed from occupation to liberation. Not only does the nativity story take place under Roman occupation, but “occupation” is not a bad metaphor for “annunciation”, even if it starts with a willing “yes’”. And in Christian theology, the arrival of God the creator into his own world as a helpless baby is both a huge risk and – ultimately – an act of liberation.'

Pianist Cordelia Williams is presenting ‘Between Heaven and the Clouds’, a year-long series of events setting Vingt Regards alongside words and images, including specially commissioned poetry and paintings, in order to explore these universal themes and Messiaen’s rich variety of inspiration.

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Olivier Messiaen, Vingt regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus.

Sabbatical art pilgrimage: Poetry

Here are two brief poems which I have written during my sabbatical:

***

Reading 'Drysalter' before Mass at Aylesford Priory.

Lip-smacking words savoured on tongue,

epiphanic explosion come.

Using the escalator at Tottenham Court Road,

praying a David Adam prayer,

raise us from the depths of despair.

Watching film of a plastic bag dancing on the breeze

for fifteen minutes straight,

beautifully evident benevolence.

***

Our bodies age, our cells replace continually

without regard to our volition.

We are not who we were.

All is mutability, constant change.

We cannot bear so much reality -

being changed utterly - so build routines,

schedules, repeating patterns of sameness,

to mask our awareness of transition.

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Love - You Set The Scene.

Anglican, nature and metaphysical poets

Mia Anderson, priest and winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize, is interviewed in the current edition of the Church Times.

In the interview, she highlights the long tradition of poet-priests including John Donne, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Euros Bowen, R.S. Thomas, Rowan Williams and David Scott, among others. She locates herself with the nature poets of any country including Henry Vaughan, Don McKay, Tim Liburn, Jan Zwicky and Mark Tredinnick.

Poetry also features in an insightful interview by Michael Symmons Roberts with John Drury in which they discuss the relative merits of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.

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John Donne - At The Round Earth's Imagined Corners.

Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now

Interesting to note that Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter which has just won the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection is being praised by the Forward judges for its powerful spirituality.

“We need to be able to talk of matters of faith and the soul, and how the soul intersects with the heart. What Symmons Roberts does is difficult but necessary now – it addresses a fissure in the human psyche: how we deal with faith and with secularism, how we find a life .. It is an outstanding winner,” said Jeanette Winterson, chairman of the 2013 Forward judges. She praised Symmons Roberts, an atheist who converted to Catholicism at university, for challenging the “fundamentalism” of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins.

The press release from the Forward Arts Foundation specifically notes that Symmons Roberts was a thorough-going atheist as a teenager, who chose to study Theology and Philosophy at Oxford University in order to “talk believers out of their faith”. The ploy backfired. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.”

Symmons Roberts has publicly asked the question of whether it is possible to write religious poetry that communicates widely in an increasingly secular language, noting that "T. S. Eliot warned against a religious poetry that “leaves out what men and women consider their major passions, and thereby confesses to an ignorance of them”, but argued instead for “the whole subject of poetry” to be treated in “a religious spirit”. Symmons Roberts pointed then to the work of John Berryman as being one affirmative answer to that question. The response of the Forward judges to Drysalter indicates that his own work also genuinely answers that same question in the affirmative.

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Michael Symmons Roberts - The Vows.

Greenbelt diary (3)

Alistair McGrath

Pete Rollins

I queued to hear Rob Bell first thing and didn't get in but did see Sam Norton who was also in the queue. From there I went to hear Chris Dingle speak on music and faith. He argued that all music is inherently sacred and provides a glimpse of eternity as we lose our sense of time while listening to exist for a time in the eternal now. Clearly this depends on the extent to which we lose ourselves in the music but I've certainly had that experience and once read an interesting interview with Van Morrison who, at that time, viewed his music and concerts as inducing that experience and taking the listener into the heart of silence.

The next item on my schedule was the Simone Weil celebration with Grahame Davies and Michael Symmons Roberts. This rapidly became less of a celebration and more of a critique as, while the contributors were challenged by Weil's attempts to eliminate the gap between how she lived and what she believed, they were also disturbed her martyr complex, jewish self-hate, and egotistical impersonality. She had a brilliant mind and it is fascinating to see someone so intellectually rigorous come to faith in Christ. She also wrote beautifully and this is perhaps the clue to the loss of celebration from the debate as, while we heard about Weil from the two contributors and from their writings about her, we never actually heard from Weil herself. Her writings were not read or quoted at any length, so we never heard her beautiful writing or the reasoning of her brilliant mind and, therefore, it was possible for us to focus on the issues that we have with her death at the expense of celebrating her work.

I hadn't intended to hear Alistair McGrath but, on arriving at the wrong venue, decided to stick around and appreciated his debunking of Richard Dawkins (although much of it I had already read in The Dawkins Delusion). A very structured speaker, he neatly summed up his argument in this talk as being that the New Atheism represents a sense of anger that religion is very much still here when, by the reckoning of secularists, it should have died out years ago. The arguments of Dawkins et al have actually made it easier to talk about God now than was the case ten years ago and we should have confidence to engage in the debate because of our understanding that Christianity was gifted to us by God and of the interest that there is i our culture to talk about God.

Mark Vernon would have been unlikely to agree with McGrath's sense of confidence. He is both a former priest and former atheist who as an agnostic is a tutor at 'The School of Life', a new organisation offering short courses on life, love, work, play, and politics. Vernon argued that agnosticism has always been a part of Christianity and offered seven tips for being a religious agnostic; the practices of questioning, love, knowledge, writing, negation, suspension, and wonder. However, if we accept that these practices (which acknowledge the existence of doubt in faith and of limits to our human knowing) have consistently been a part of Christianity, where is the need to practice them outside of Christianity itself. It seemed to me that in this session Vernon was essentially describing his return to a nuanced faith as opposed to any sort of journey away from it.

Vernon's session was followed by a fairly uproarious panel session on the theme of art, propaganda and evangelism. Uproarious, primarily because Billy Childish was playing the lovable anarchist to the hilt ably assisted by Angie Fadel. One felt for Adrienne Chaplin and Rita Brock gamely trying to make their serious academicly rigorous contributions in the face of Childish's faux 'I no nothing' stance coupled with occasional shafts of wit and profundity. There are times when the dryness of logic, reason and catagorisation are revealed and this seemed like it might be one of those occasions. A concensus of sorts was cobbled together around the notion that communicating a pre-conceived message or idea through art doesn't do justice to art and that, currently, conceptual artists are those most inclined to deliberately and cheerfully throw themselves into this faultline.

There was more iconclasm to be had as Pete Rollins took to the stage to argue that identification with Christ is dereliction, as we identify with one who, at the cross, is stripped of identity and meaning. 'Religionless Christianity' sees Christ resurrected in the community which bears his name as our identification with him enables us to escape the system that defines us and take responsibility for the dreaming of new possibilities. Rollins uses Slavoj Žižek and 'Death of God' theology to flesh out what Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have meant by 'religionless Christianity'. In doing so, he argued for a closing of the gap between how we live and what we believe that was at least as radical as that of Simone Weil.

Rollins argues that we often treat Church as a sop to the lack of radicality in our lives i.e. that hearing about the need for loving sacrifice becomes a subsitute for actually living sacrifical and loving lives. It is, of course, entirely possible that, for those of us present, listening to Rollins is a part of the same game giving us the frisson of radicality without the need to follow through but the challenge was to the real transformation of rebirth.

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Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The UK.

Poetry treated in a religious spirit

There is an excellent article by Michael Symmons Roberts in today's Times on the poetry of John Berryman.

The article concludes:

"T. S. Eliot warned against a religious poetry that “leaves out what men and women consider their major passions, and thereby confesses to an ignorance of them”, but argued instead for “the whole subject of poetry” to be treated in “a religious spirit”.

For Berryman, the “whole subject” included radioactivity, chicken paprika, mistresses, Lana Turner, Kleenex and the pearly gates. Is it possible to write religious poetry that communicates widely in an increasingly secular language? Berryman’s Dream Songs say yes."

I concur wholeheartedly!

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James Macmillan - Veni Veni Emmanuel: II. Heartbeats.