Derek Hunt and The Prince’s Master Crafters: The Next Generation

Derek Hunt, who designed the West Window at St John's Seven Kings, is involved in the current Sky Arts series 'The Prince’s Master Crafters: The Next Generation.'

The series sees a selection of top amateur craftspeople take on a variety of crafting challenges to supercharge their skills before each of them creates a final showcase piece to present to His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales in person. Drawn from across the country, the six amateur craftspeople explore the history and importance of six key disciplines. They’re joined by some of the country’s leading experts who each week set them a new task within their crafts. 

The challenges and experts are as follows:

• Episode 1: Wood Carving – Sarah Goss asks the craftspeople to create a carving inspired by William Morris and the arts and crafts movement
• Episode 2: Stained Glass – Derek Hunt challenges the craftspeople to create a stained-glass panel to include a symbol
• Episode 3: Weaving - Rezia Wahid sets an intricate task asking the craftspeople to use different types of weaving in as they weave material of their choice
• Episode 4: Blacksmithing – Phil Carter challenges the craftspeople to create a fire poker with a leaf detailing
• Episode 5: Stone Carving – Zoe Wilson sets a task to create a stone carved leaf
• Episode 6: Pargeting – Johanna Welsh’s task for the crafters is to create a pargeted panel of leaves and acorns
• Episode 7: Grand Final

The West window at St John's Seven Kings was installed in 2005. The theme is “Light of the World” and its design brings together references from St John’s Gospel with elements particular to St John’s. Hunt’s commissioned designs can be found in churches, theatres, schools, public libraries, shopping centres and private buildings in Britain and abroad.

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Pierce Pettis - We Will Meet Again.

Art and faith: Decades of engagement - 1960s

This is Part 8 in a series of posts which aim to demonstrate the breadth of engagement there has been between the Arts and religion within the modern period and into our contemporary experience. The idea is to provide a brief introduction to the artists and initiatives that were prominent in each decade to enable further research. Inevitably, these lists will be partial as there is much that I don’t know and the lists reflect my interests and biases. As such, the primary, but not exclusive, focus is on artists that have engaged with the Christian tradition.

The introduction and the remainder of the series can be found at: Introduction, 1880s, 1890s, 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s.

• In 1960, Sainte Marie de La Tourette at Eveux-sur-l'Arbresle by Le Corbusier is completed.
• In 1960, William Kurelek has his first exhibition at the Isaacs Gallery in Toronto. It is an immediate success. In 1963, Kurelek paints Dinner Time on the Prairies.
• Around 1960, art dealer Larry Borenstein meets Sister Gertrude Morgan while she is preaching in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He invites her to perform and exhibit work in his art gallery.
• Revelations is the signature work of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which premiers an extended version of the work in 1960, when Alvin Ailey is 29. Set to spirituals, gospel, and blues music and influenced by the choreographer's own Christian upbringing, it presents a vision of the historical African American experience from a church-inspired perspective.
• Igor Stravinsky composes A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer (1961), which is based on biblical texts, and The Flood (1962), which mixes brief biblical texts from the Book of Genesis with passages from the York and Chester Mystery Plays.
• Francis Poulenc’s Gloria is premiered on January 21, 1961 in Boston, Massachusetts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chorus Pro Musica under conductor Charles Münch with Adele Addison as soloist. In 1962, he completes Sept répons des ténèbres (Seven responsories for Tenebrae, 1961–62) and writes, "I have finished Les Ténèbres. I think it is beautiful. With the Gloria and the Stabat Mater, I think I have three good religious works. May they spare me a few days in Purgatory, if I narrowly avoid going to hell."
• The Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture is founded in October 1961 by Alfred Barr, art critic and founder of the Museum of Modern Art, theologian Paul Tillich, and Marvin Halverson, an American Protestant theologian and author of a 1951 booklet, Great Religious Paintings. Among the more than 300 Fellows of the Society have been Mircea Eliade, Denise Levertov, Sallie McFague, Cleanth Brooks, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, and John Updike.
• In the early 1960s, Greenwich Village poet Robert Nichols asks Al Carmines if Judson Church can host productions of experimental theatre pieces, including his own short plays. Judson Church becomes a venue from which "Off Off Broadway" develops. The productions are done on a shoestring and admission is by contribution, with most plays presented in the church's balcony space. The first play is Joel Oppenheimer's 'The Great American Desert' in November 1961.
• In 1961, Graham Sutherland paints an altarpiece Noli Me Tangere for the Chapel of St Mary Magdalen in Chichester Cathedral. Kenneth Clark speaks at the unveiling. Leonard Bernstein composes the 'Chichester Psalms' in 1965. John Piper designs a Tapestry for the screen behind the High Altar which is installed in 1966.
• In 1961, after many years of deliberation, George Mackay Brown is received into the Roman Catholic Church.
• In 1961, Elizabeth Jennings’ Every Changing Shape considers, from a Christian poet's perspective, how religious or mystical experience informs the imagination. Christianity and Poetry (1965) considers the influence of religion on literature.
• Nicholas Mosley writes ‘The Life of Raymond Raynes’ (1961) and ‘Experience and Religion: A Lay Essay in Theology’ (1965).
• St Vincent ArchAbbey Library’s ceramic tile mural, measuring 22 feet by 11 feet, is designed, glazed and fired by Roman Verostko, while a monk at St Vincent. The mural is installed in 1961 and dedicated in 1962. In 1966 he begins experimenting with electronics and creates ‘The Psalms in Sound and Image’ consisting of four 15 minute units with collage photos, drawings and brief texts flashed in sequences on two screens and timed with original soundtracks. These audio visual psalms are created as 20th Century songs of praise and wonder of the experience of life. Verostko becomes a pioneer of algorithmic art.
• In 1962, the new Coventry Cathedral by architect Basil Spence is consecrated, with artworks by Ralph Beyer, Elizabeth Frink, Hans Coper, John Hutton, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, among others.
• In 1962, The Crucifixion by Geoffrey Clarke is unveiled during the dedication ceremony for the chapel of the Bishop Otter College. It is later followed by Jean Lurçat's Aubusson Creation tapestry.
• In 1962, F.N. Souza paints The Crucifixion (now in the Methodist Modern Art Collection).
• Eric Smith wins the 1962 Helena Rubinstein Scholarship with paintings which are a return to the structural concentration of his 1955 religious paintings.
• In 1962, Sadao Watanabe holds a one-man show at the Portland Art Museum.
• In 1962, Sister Corita Kent, as a teacher in the art department at Immaculate Heart College, introduces her students to the Los Angeles debut of Andy Warhol’s pop art Campbell’s soup cans. Asked to create a mural for the Vatican Pavilion at the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair, Kent produces a 40-foot-long banner updating the Beatitudes, the blessings pronounced by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, with quotes from Pope John XXIII and John F. Kennedy. Kent’s screenprint "Powerup" (1965) melds a sermon on spiritual fulfillment by an activist priest, Daniel Berrigan, with the advertising catch-phrase of the Richfield Oil Corporation. Also in 1965, IBM ask Kent to design the Christmas window display for its Madison Avenue showroom. Kent and students from her lettering and design course at IHC create a display of 725 cardboard grocery boxes adorned with quotations, silkscreens, and photographs focused around the theme of “Peace on Earth.” Kent appears on the cover of Newsweek in 1967.
• Jean Cocteau dies in 1963. At the time of his death, he is preparing to decorate the chapel at Fréjus. He left so many designs and drawings for this work, that his adopted son Edouard Dermit was able to carry out the work in 1964.
• In 1963, David Alfaro Siqueiros paints Cristo del Pueblo and Mutilated Christ.
• In 1963, Doctor Cicely Saunders buys Marian Bohusz-Szyszko’s Christ Calming the Waters for the St Christopher’s Hospice Sydenham.
• Peter Schumann co-founds the Bread and Puppet Theater in 1963 in New York City. The theater is named for its combination of puppetry shows with free freshly baked bread. Among the notable Bread and Puppet Theater shows directed by Schumann are "Nativity 1992" and "The Divine Reality Comedy".
• In August 1964 Colin McCahon resigns from the Auckland City Art Gallery to take up a position as a lecturer in painting at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts. He teaches there for six years, influencing a generation of artists.
• In 1964, Béla Kondor paints Iron-sheet Corpus. In 1968 his panel painting depicting the legend of Saint Margaret is placed in Margaret Island, Budapest.
• In 1964, Thomas Merton's Message to Poets is read at a meeting of the “new” Latin-American poets – and a few young North Americans – in Mexico City.
• Jazz Vespers starts in 1964 at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York. Revd John Garcia Gensel realises that most musicians can’t make a Sunday morning service given that they only get home around 4/5am. The Jazz Vespers service is introduced at 5.00 pm each Sunday.
• Elimo Njau champions the arts of East Africa by founding the Paa-Ya-Paa (‘The Antelope Rises’) Gallery in Nairobi in 1965. As the first African-owned art centre in East Africa, Paa-Ya-Paa becomes a key forum for local artists and intellectuals, hosting exhibitions, workshops and debates.
• Founded by the Church of Sweden Mission, Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre starts producing weaving in 1965. Rorke’s Drift becomes a centre for arts and crafts, including fine art, printmaking, pottery and weaving, located in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It has been described as "the most famous indigenous art centre in South Africa". The Centre produces some of southern Africa's most renowned artists and printmakers, including Azaria Mbatha, John Muafangejo, Dan Rakgoathe, and Bongiwe Dhlomo.
• In 1965, the Staple Singers premiere ‘Freedom Highway’, for a live recording at the New Nazareth Church on Chicago’s South Side, a few weeks after the beginning of the Selma to Montgomery marches in the US.
• In the second half of 1965 Colin McCahon begins work on what was to be his largest public commission – the design and painting of clerestory windows in a new convent chapel being built for the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions, in Upland Rd, Auckland. It is a project that will prove critical in determining the course of his future career, stimulating a renewed interest in religious subjects and their symbolism. In the windows McCahon uses traditional Christian (Catholic) symbols, both pictorial (the Cross, the dove, a crown of thorns, wheat and the chalice) and textual (IHS, XP), as well as newer symbols of his own devising.
• In 1965, Patrick Pye completes commissions for Glenstal Abbey, Co. Limerick; Church of the Resurrection, Belfast; Convent of Mercy, and Cookstown, Co. Tyrone.
• Duke Ellington’s first two Sacred Concerts (1965 and 1968), John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965) and Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity (1965), Spirit’s Rejoice (1965) and Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe (1969).
• Olivier Messiaen's La Transfiguration de Notre Seigneur Jésus-Christ occupies him from 1965 to 1969 and the musicians employed include a 100-voice ten-part choir, seven solo instruments and large orchestra. Its fourteen movements are a meditation on the story of Christ's Transfiguration.
• George Seferis’s final collection, Three Secret Poems (1966), is his most mystical work, imbued with his experience of reading and living with the Revelation of St John the Divine.
• Recording since 1966, first as a lead singer for the group People! and then as a solo artist, Larry Norman becomes a pioneer of Christian rock music. In 1969, Capitol Records release Norman's first solo album, Upon This Rock.
• Barnett Newman’s The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachtani (1958-1966) is exhibited for the first time in 1966 at the Guggenheim Museum.
• In 1967, “An Evening with God” takes place at the Boston Tea Party, a rock music club, and features performances, music, conversation, and an informal communion meal of store-bought bread and wine. The event is planned by Corita Kent, the priest Daniel Berrigan, the musician Judy Collins, and the Harvard professor Harvey Cox.
• John Coltrane’s funeral is held on 21 July 1967 at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church on Lexington Avenue and 54th street in Manhattan. The service features readings, including Coltrane’s friend, the trumpeter Calvin Massey, reciting the former’s poem “A Love Supreme”, and musical performances by Coltrane’s saxophonist-peers Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman.
• Arvo Pärt’s first overtly sacred piece, Credo (1968), is a turning point in his career and life; on a personal level he reaches a creative crisis that leads him to renounce the techniques and means of expression used so far; on a social level the religious nature of this piece results in his being unofficially censured and his music disappearing from concert halls.
• Dylan’s Gospel by The Brothers and Sisters, a choir of Los Angeles session singers including Merry Clayton and Gloria Jones, is released in 1969 on Ode Records. This rare and sought-after album finds the California collective covering a clutch of Dylan classics in the era’s revolutionary gospel style.
• In 1969 Henk Krijger moves to Chicago to become Master Artist for the Institute for Christian Art (ICA) — later Patmos Workshop and Gallery (Toronto, Ontario, Canada).
• Christopher Fry’s Curtmantle is performed (1962). Dennis Potter’s Son of Man is broadcast (1969).
• Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear It Away (1960), Julien Green’s Chaque homme dans sa nuit (1960), David Lodge’s The Picturegoers (1960) and The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Anthony Burgess’ The Wanting Seed (1962), J.F. Powers’ Morte D’Urban (1962), Morris West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963), Heinrich Böll’s The Clown (1963), Caroline Gordon’s Old Red and Other Stories (1963), Jean Sulivan’s The Sea Remains (1964), Anticipate Every Goodbye (1966), Eternity, My Beloved (1966) and Death’s Consolations (1968), Shusaku Endo’s Silence (1966), Elizabeth Jennings’ The Mind Has Mountains (1966), Michel de Saint Pierre’s The New Priests (1966), Geoffrey Hill’s King Log (1968), Brainard Cheney’s Devil's Elbow (1969), and Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede (1969) are published.

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Arvo Pärt - Credo

Hidden Gems - Bill Fay & Malcolm Morley

2020 has been labelled a Biblical year for TV with 'The New Pope' following 'The First Temptation of Christ' while 'The Two Popes' is still on cinema screens. Fascinating as these are for those who explore the interface between faith and culture, the most interesting work is often that which is or has been more hidden.

'Bill Fay Was a Hidden Gem. One Musician Made Finding Him a Mission.' is New York Times headline for an article exploring the background to Fay's latest album 'Countless Branches.'

Bill Fay made two albums at the beginning of the 1970s before losing his contract and disappearing from the scene. The strength of these albums, particularly the second 'Time of the Last Persecution,' led several musicians and producers to find Fay and assist in releasing more of his music.

Fay’s first two albums since his rediscovery, “Life Is People” in 2012 and “Who Is the Sender?” in 2015, were both profitable and effective follow-ups to the records he’d made 40 years earlier resulting in the recording of the most recent 'Countless Branches.'

Grayson Haver Currin notes that Fay's: 'self-titled 1970 debut featured idealistic odes to friendship, nature and peace swaddled in swooping strings and cascading horns. But only a year later, he’d turned to thorny rock for “Time of the Last Persecution.” Fueled by the horrors of the Vietnam War and the violence of the Jim Crow South, Fay railed against social corruption for 14 fractured songs, framing life as a revolving door of chances to get right with God.'

With the more recent albums Fay is: 'still writing about his distrust of governments and his belief in the goodness of people. Henry smartly dressed those songs in chamber-pop elegance. Tweedy lent his voice to a jangling tune called “This World,” while Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce added subtle harmonies to “Bring It On Lord,” a paean to valuing the days you have left. Fay’s voice wavered and rasped with age, the seams worn like proud wrinkles of wisdom.'

A Bill Fay song is often a 'deceptively simple thing, which carries more emotional weight than its concision and brevity might imply.' They are musical haikus on 'his recurring themes: nature, the family of man, the cycle of life and the ineffable vastness of it all.' The most recent releases being 'as pointed and as poignant as anything he’s ever recorded, as if songs waiting for their time have finally found their rightful place within our current zeitgeist.'

Nigel Cross explains that Malcolm Morley’s 'first musical steps into the public eye came as the leader and chief songwriter of Help Yourself, and it was with them that Morley made his mark, recording four albums for UA (and a posthumously released fifth one) between 1971 and 1973': 'Ignored by record buyers at the time, there are now many who believe these albums rank as some of the most musically enduring and unique releases of their era. Post-Help Yourself, Morley played with a diverse array of musicians including Bees Make Honey, Wreckless Eric, Kirsty MacColl, and Man, long-lived Welsh rockers whom he has recently re-joined.'

'The songs on his new CD started to flow after a bout of illness over the winter of 2017/18.' 'Sound-wise with the sizzling organ and his newly-acquired Telecaster on some of the songs they suggest vintage Band or even the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited and Tempest.'

Richard Gould writes that:

'Malcolm’s voice now bears a rich smoky timbre and the imagery in his lyrics carries a certain world weariness of the experiences of life.

As for the tracks themselves, proceedings open up with ‘To Evangeline’ – a mid paced effort with the aforementioned organ nicely to the fore. The couplet regarding the woman and the babe on the bridge is nothing short of brilliant by my book. It almost has the feel of being from the lineage of ‘Paper Leaves’ – one of the early Morley classics that still sounds so good today. Next up is ‘Forgotten Land’, and this has a feel about it not a million miles from Tony Joe White – we tend not to have too many swamps in the UK, maybe we could settle for some fertile moist woodlands with a moody groove.

‘A Walk On The Water’ carries some great biblical imagery in its lyrics. ‘What Hurts’ has a JJ Cale swing and growl to it. The only cover here is ‘Two Brothers’ and is an American Civil War tale – anybody else remember the early 60s TV series ‘The Americans’ – the Clanfield family where Jeff joined the Confederates and his brother Ben the Unionists ? You’ll be impressed by Malcolm’s acoustic picking. ‘Broken’, as with ‘All Washed Up’, the mood belies what the title may lead you to suppose. Not for the first time, you will find the lyrics intriguing in their imagery. Some lovely organ breaks courtesy of Daisy Rollins.

‘Must Be The Devil In Me’ – sounds as though it could be an old Blues Standard. The title track, ‘Infinity Lake’ comes across as perhaps the most perfect piece among those on offer here – the understated music allows the lyrics to bite and hit. ‘All Washed Up’, although hardly a joyous sentiment, the track kicks along with another set of quality lyrics. Matters conclude with ‘Rambling Boy’ and its tone is perhaps the closest to that which Malcolm put to such good effect on the previously cited ‘Summerlands’. There is a magical air to its rural purity and imagery.'

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Bill Fay - Countless Branches.

Broken, Dibley, Rev and Calvary

Broken has rightly been called a flawless depiction of a good priest. Jo Siedlecka writes that:

'Jimmy McGovern’s pitch perfect writing and Sean Bean’s hypnotic, understated performance as Fr Michael Kerrigan did not disappoint. This drama portrays one of those many good priests, who has really taken to heart the advice of Pope Francis to bring the healing power of God’s grace to everyone in need, to stay close to the marginalised and to be “shepherds living with the smell of the sheep.”

We are used to seeing clergy depicted performing their sacramental roles. But the huge amount of pastoral work the average Catholic priest does often goes unrecognised - the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis. All those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals. All those problems. All that listening! This series has gone behind the scenes for what feels like a very authentic portrayal of life in a run down north country parish.'

It's worth pointing out, however, that seeing the dramatic and comedic potential of 'good priests' began in recent years firstly with The Vicar of Dibley followed by Rev. Set in a fictional small Oxfordshire village 'which is assigned a female vicar following the 1992 changes in the Church of England that permitted the ordination of women', The Vicar of Dibley has all the elements which characterise the phenomenon of the 'good priest' in comedy or drama i.e. a committed but flawed priest struggling with personal failings and the demands of contemporary ministry. Rev is a grittier reworking of the comedic value of the 'good priest' in being 'a contemporary sitcom about the daily frustrations and moral conflicts of Reverend Adam Smallbone - a Church of England Vicar who was 'promoted' from a sleepy rural parish to the busy, inner-city world of St Saviour's, in East London':

'It is an impossibly difficult job being a good, modern, city vicar. And, equally, it's a very hard job being married to one. Alex - Adam's long-suffering wife - does her best to support him, but she's got her own career as a solicitor to worry about. And she is no-one's idea of a conventional vicar's wife ... Every day throws up a moral conflict for the vicar. Adam's door must always be open to urban sophisticates with ulterior motives, the chronically lonely, the lost, the homeless, the poor and the insane. All are welcome at St Saviour's and Adam can't turn any of them away - even if they're clearly lying, mad or just very annoying.'

'Heavily researched and supported by anecdotes from a number of working city vicars and Church insiders, Rev lifts the lid on how the modern Church actually functions and what life is really like in a dog collar.'

Dramas featuring good priests continued with 'Calvary, a 2014 Irish drama film written and directed by John Michael McDonagh.' 'McDonagh explained the intentions he had for the film: "There are probably films in development about priests which involve abuse. My remit is to do the opposite of what other people do, and I wanted to make a film about a good priest."' He has also said, “The idea was a good man, a good priest, and what that would entail in a modern life where everything is ironic and insincere. Let’s follow a sincere man through to the end.”

'Calvary is a blackly comedic drama about a priest tormented by his community. Father James is a good man intent on making the world a better place. When his life is threatened one day during confession, he finds he has to battle the dark forces closing in around him.'

'McDonagh has called the film “basically Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest with a few gags thrown in,” and the film name-checks Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, whose novel Bresson’s film is based on.

Like Diary of a Country Priest, Calvary is about a good priest in a small village where attitudes toward him range from benign indifference to contempt and abuse.

Yet where Bresson’s saintly protagonist was a wan young consumptive who could be wounded by something as minor as a saucy schoolgirl impudently flirting with him, Father James — played by the physically imposing Brendan Gleeson in a grizzled beard and cassock that makes him an even more formidable presence — is a battered Celtic warrior who seems impossible to rattle ...

it is Father James, alone among the cast, who offers a persuasive, integral, authentic example of what a human being should look like: too honest for cant, too jaded for naiveté, too self-aware for illusions, too solicitous for self-absorption, too fallen for self-righteousness, too down to earth for self-importance.'

The development of 'good priest' stories has gone hand-in-hand with reality TV series such as A Country Parish and An Island Parish which, again, demonstrate significant levels of interest in the demands of the priestly role within contemporary culture. This is a phenomenon that would reward more research and review as it would seem true the case that, rightly depicted or dramatised (i.e. with a honest focus on the commitment, struggle and integrity of the priest) authentic portrayals of parish life can generate significant interest and empathy. This is, in part, as Jo Siedlecka notes, because of the huge amount of pastoral work the average priest does; the visits to the housebound, those in prison or in hospital, accompanying people in times of crisis, all those deaths, weddings, baptisms and funerals, all those problems, all that listening!

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Ray Davies - Broken.

Malcolm Muggeridge: Accurate prophecy in many areas

Sally Muggeridge, our curate at St Stephen Walbrook, has written an excellent comment piece for the Church Times this week about her uncle, Malcolm Muggeridge.

Sally reviews her uncle's life and thought suggesting that: 'The legacy of the writer, journalist, and Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge can be viewed in retrospect as one of accurate prophecy in many areas. Although he did not always get it right, he expressed legitimate concern on many of the issues of our time: sexual permissiveness, immigration, ethical questions over advances in medical science, the spread of Islam, lowering of standards in the media, the fantasy world introduced by technology, and others.'

'Writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge died 14th November 1990 at the age of 87. To mark the 25th Anniversary of the passing of her uncle, Sally Muggeridge will be leading the 10.30am service on Sunday 15th November at the Parish Church of St Mary Magdalene, Whatlington, Sussex.

As President of the Malcolm Muggeridge Society, Sally will review the life of her uncle and his spiritual journey as a twentieth century pilgrim towards faith. All are welcome. A display of the extensive literary legacy of Muggeridge will be made available to view.'

John Stott once characterised the Prophet Muggeridge as courageous, perceptive, awkward and exaggerated. Intended as a compliment after Muggeridge's London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity entitled Christ and the Media, Stott's summing up captures some of the complications that made Muggeridge fascinating as a journalist, broadcaster and writer. Stott characterised him as a prophet while the then Director-General's of the BBC and the IBA who also chaired these lectures, in order to neutralise what they thought to be his attack on them and their work, preferred to characterise him as a jester. 

He was first and foremost a journalist who, in the course of his life, reported from the key continents and ideologies of his time - Imperialist India, Communist Russia and Capitalist America. He documented his dissatisfaction in his memoirs, Chronicles of a Wasted Life, and in his novel, In a Valley of this Restless Mind.

His life took a new, and to his mind, more purposeful direction when his dissatisfaction with the transient waste of what he until then done and seen, led to conversion and a commitment to Catholicism. His new commitment was expressed both through and against the new media of television. 

As a broadcaster he was involved in programmes that allowed key figures such as Mother Theresa and Alexander Solzhentitsyn airtime to communicate. Yet he also viewed television as a shallow, superficial medium. This, in itself, would not be incredibly harmful if television was not presented or viewed as the ultimate reality - the window on the world. It was this that Muggeridge argued was so damaging and which ultimately meant that television, rather than mirroring reality, was actually creating fantasy. For these reasons he argued, in the lectures collected as Christ and the Media, that, if offered by the devil, a fourth temptation of a primetime television slot Jesus would have rejected the temptation because his reality could not be conveyed using the fantasy medium of television. 

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Malcolm Muggeridge - Face your Image.

A refreshing vision of religion

Jay Lakhani from the Hindu Academy (who spoke at the launch of the Seven Kings & Newbury Park Sophia Hub pilot) is involved in producing a fresh series of talks on Hinduism offering a more refreshing vision of religion suited to the needs of youth. This series is being shown every Sunday morning on sky 793 (MATV)  normally at 11.00am (but at 12noon on the first Sunday of each month). Jay says that this series does not preach or impose Hinduism - it allows the youngsters to come to terms with their religion in a structured and rational format.

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Aradhna - Mukteshwar.

How music makes us feel

Last night's imagine on BBC1 explored 'How Music Makes Us Feel.' The BBC's publicity for this documentary said:

"Many people turn to music when words are not enough, at funerals and weddings, at times of heartbreak and euphoria. It seems to hold more emotion and go deeper than words.

Musicians as varied as Emeli Sande, who enthralled the world when she sang at the Olympics, opera diva Jessye Norman, dubstep artist Mala and modern classical composer George Benjamin explain how music makes them feel. Alan Yentob also talks to a vicar, a psychologist, a Hollywood composer, an adman and even the people who choose the music played in shopping malls. He sees babies dance to a rhythm, and old people brought forth out of silence by the power of music."

The vicar interviewed for the programme is the Revd. Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James Piccadilly, who has published an interesting book called Our sound is our wound in which she explores how we listen for the voice of God within the soundscapes of our lives and how we find our own voice? Our lives are lived, she suggests,  against the backdrop of an internal and external soundscape. The sounds, noises and music with which we are surrounded in modern life have spiritual implications. There is also a soundtrack within us that plays constantly through memory, dreams, anxiety or thought.

The sense of music providing a soundscape throughout our lives also featured in the programme framed as it was by film of babies responding to music at its beginning and dementia sufferers helped through music therapy at its close.

Many of the issues raised by the programme are also explored by Peter Banks and I in The Secret Chord. For example, in Chapter 3 'Play vs Plan' we think about music in relation to play theory in child development, while in Chapter 6 'Head vs Heart' we discuss the expressive impact of music including assessing a quote from Stravinsky, also used in the programme, that "music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all."

Clips from the documentary can be viewed here and the whole programme can be seen on i-player by clicking here.

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Emili Sande - Abide With Me.

Realism is fiction

In Sculpting In Time, Tarkovsky quotes Dostoevsky as saying, "They always say that art has to reflect life and all that. But it's nonsense: the writer (poet) himself creates life, such as it has never quite been before him ..."
If Dostoevsky said it, then it must be true! But this statement also resonates with my own sense, through my own minor creative work, that realism is fiction. Any attempt to describe, recreate or re-present an actual experience always results in subtle changes to the experience. This is partly to do with time and partly to do with editing.

All experience is gained in the moment, in time, while all description, recreation or re-presentation is reflection on what has passed. The act of reflection is qualitatively different from the act of experience involving, as it does, perspective on the event which it is not possible to have at the time. This difference in time subtly effects the description, recreation or re-presentation of the past event changing it, albeit slightly, in the process.

All description, recreation or re-presentation of past events also involves editorial decisions about what to include/exclude and what perspective to give. Actual experience is a constant flow in time but no description, recreation or re-presentation can mimic the constant flow of events in time and therefore decisions have to be made about where to start and end thereby disrupting the actual flow of events as they were experienced. Much of what is viewed on television purports to be actual experience (i.e. news footage or reality TV) yet editors have always made decisions regarding where and what to film as well as, often, what to show. What is seen is always a glimpse of the actual influenced by an editor's perspective rather than the whole of what occurred.

In this sense, realism - even, or perhaps especially, hyper-realism - is a fiction.

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Paul Weller - That Dangerous Age.

Resurrection: chain reactions

Jesus’ resurrection is like a chain reaction causing a resurrection or transformation to occur in the disciples too (John 20. 19-31 and Acts 4. 32-35). They change from being people who desert and deny Jesus, who hide away because they are afraid of the authorities. They change into people who meet publicly as Jesus’ followers, through whom miracles and wonders are done, and who share their belongings or sell what they have in order to give to others. It is an incredible transformation and it happens because Jesus comes into their midst and they receive his Spirit.

Each of us, like the disciples, faces on a daily basis uncertainties and fears about our lives and faith. The disciples were afraid of what they authorities might do to them and this is a reality for many of us today. For instance, we have been reading recently in our local press from Christians today who are convinced that our government wants to prevent Christians from speaking openly about our faith. I don’t subscribe to that view myself but for some people that is how they perceive reality. For others of our congregation, their fear of the authorities has been to do with the way in which their asylum case will be dealt with. These are just some of the reasons why we might feel fear.

Thomas was not afraid instead he was uncertain. He knew that Jesus had died so, despite all that the other disciples told him about Jesus’ resurrection, how could Jesus now be alive? Again, we will have many reasons for uncertainty ourselves. Unlike the disciples, we cannot see Jesus physically and therefore we wonder is he real and am I just making all this up? We can also feel the same uncertainty about decisions we have made about our future – are we in the right job, living in the right area, are our children going to the right school, and so on and so on?

What the disciples felt in these stories is what we all feel ourselves much of the time – different situations, different reasons but the same feeling, concerns and worries!

Now the change that occurs - the transformation that happens to them, this personal resurrection that comes for each one - is not a change in their circumstances but a change in themselves. What happens is that they become aware of Jesus with them and receive his Spirit. They are still in danger from the authorities and they will spend the remainder of their lives not seeing Jesus physically but because they know Jesus with them and receive his Spirit they are able to come out of hiding, face the dangers and begin to do and say the things that Jesus did and said in their own lives.

The point about the disciples being behind locked doors and Jesus appearing to them may not be so much to do with the sense that Jesus was no longer restricted by space and time (although that is significant) and more to do with the disciples becoming aware that he was now always with them wherever they were, if they acknowledge and receive him. Isn’t that what Jesus is saying to Thomas, “happy are those who believe without seeing me.”

Michael Frost has written:

“We have locked God into the so-called sacred realms of church and healings and miracles and marvels … We seem to be trying so hard to “bring down fire from heaven” in our worship services while all along God’s favour is to be found in sunshine on our faces, the sea lapping at our toes, picking our children up at school, or a note from a caring friend.”

As we go about our daily lives are we aware that Jesus is with us in the ordinary things we see and do or do we only expect to meet with Jesus when we are in church or at some other super-charged spiritual occasion. The point about the resurrection experiences of the disciples is that Jesus is with them where they are if they recognise him. Often, the stories tell us, that they don’t recognise him initially. Mary mistakes him for the gardener and the disciples on the Emmaus Road don’t recognise him until he breaks the bread. Jesus is with us where we are, wherever we are, but often we do not recognise him.

How can we recognise him? We recognise him through his Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit, Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility and self-control. Where we see these things in ourselves, in others and in the world, we can be certain that Jesus is there.

If you watch the TV News and read the newspapers regularly you can easily be convinced that love, joy, peace etc. do not exist within our world. There is a story of bad news that is frequently being told but underneath, hidden and obscured by that bad news story is a different story of good news that doesn’t make the headlines but is the reality of our lives, our church and our faith. This is what we read about in Acts 4: 32-35 – people who are one in heart and mind, who share with one another everything they have, who witness to the resurrection of Jesus and who distribute money according to need. As a church we seek to demonstrate the Spirit of Jesus to our community through our community involvements and through all that goes on in the St John’s Centre.

As we meet with Jesus today in this building, in this service, in each other and in our lives as we go away from this place, may we take his Spirit with us and share the fruits of his Spirit in our homes, communities and workplaces throughout the week.

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World Wide Message Tribe (WWMT) - Revolution.

Going downhill very quickly!

Loved this selection of one liners from the very wonderful Milton Jones when I was watching a repeat of Mock the Week recently.
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Milton Jones - Work.

World War 1 War Memorial updated

In 2006 one of our young people at St. John’s Seven Kings, Sara James, together with two friends, won first prize out of 1000 students who had entered a TV competition in Channel 4’s Lost Generation season. Entries were open to students aged 11-16, working in groups of three or five to create a short project about World War One.

Sara, with her friends Rebecca Smith and Zeenat Pelaria, decided to adopt the war memorial dedicated to those who lost their lives in the First World War from St. John’s. The three 14 year olds represented the Chadwell Heath Foundation School and were up against GCSE students from the best private and grammar schools from all over England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Initially they obtained information from historical research of St. John’s. They then compared the names on our War Memorial with a photograph of the church football team from a few years before the war (above) and found that several of the names matched. They were able to obtain more information on the internet using sites such as the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1837 Online and the Western Front Association in order to find out more about some of those who had died.
Their competition entry, along with all the others, was judged by a panel of historians, writers, teachers and others involved in Channel 4’s history programmes. They won a ClipBank History Library worth £700 for their school’s history department, which will enable everyone to obtain further wide-ranging historical materials about the two World Wars. There was also a VIP trip for Sara’s class of around 30 students, along with some humanities teachers, to the Imperial War Museum in London.

As a result of their research featuring on our website we were contacted by the family of Charles Brooks Smith, in the football photo, and his brother Frederick Allam Smith. Both had been killed during WW1, Charles Brooks Smith at the Somme no less, but their names had not be included on the War Memorial. Their family, therefore, asked whether their names could be added to the Memorial and today that happened with the letter cutting being undertaken by Mark Tremaine of Woodenyou. 

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The Call - War Weary World.

The Nativity

BBC1's The Nativity was, in my immediate view, one of the very best biblical dramatisations that I have seen because it didn't simply reproduce, in the manner of most Nativity plays, the familiar elements of the story in the forms with which we have become familiar (although it did reproduce these). Instead, because screenwriter Tony Jordan understood both what the story meant in human terms for those caught up in it and what it has come to mean for many of us in terms of salvation history, Jordan was able to movingly dramatise the human cost and challenge of the incarnation.

The changes which Jordan made to the chronology of the stories told in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and the additions to those stories in terms of fleshing out the back stories and personalities of the central characters worked, not because they were literally true to the way the stories are told in those Gospels, but because they were emotionally and symbolically true to the meaning of the stories. The final stable scene with Mary, Joseph, Jesus, Shepherds and Magi is not accurate biblically and is the stereotypical end to most Nativity plays and yet was deeply moving, in a way that most Nativity plays are not, because we had travelled emotionally with these characters and so shared the impulses which led them to worship this child.

The quality of the writing, characterisation, and acting was exceptionally high in the production, with Tatiana Maslany's portrayal of Mary being the standout performance, but it was Jordan's understanding of the emotional and symbolic heart of the story which made the familiar story with its familiar elements profound and moving all over again.

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John Coltrane - Psalm.

Not persecuted and not ashamed

Nick Baines, the Bishop of Croydon, has taken some flack in the last day for his 4thought.tv interview on whether Christians are being persecuted in Britain today, prompted by the launch by Christian Concern of their Not Ashamed campaign.

In his post on the topic Nick makes it clear that "being marginalised, misrepresented or misquoted is not the same as being persecuted." This isn’t just a matter of semantics:

"Christians are being persecuted in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, parts of Africa and the Middle East. Being ridiculed a bit or misrepresented by the religiously illiterate in Britain is a pain and poses challenges – but it is not persecution. My point in the broadcast was to encourage Christians to stop seeing themselves as pathetic victims, recognise the amazing freedom we have in (and massive contribution we make to) British society both locally and nationally… and get out there more confidently with the unique gift of Christian faith, service and apologetics."

Others commenting on the Not Ashamed campaign, rightly in my view, link the issues about which Christian Concern campaign to a refusal to accept the end of Christendom and a hankering after the privileges for Christianity which Christendom provided. The end of Christendom, as these quotes from Symon Hill and Simon Barrow indicate, actually opens up the opportunity for a radical review of the way in which we think and act as the Church, not seeking privilege and instead seeking to serve:

"Anyone wanting a level playing-field should recognise that the UK is a country in which over 99 per cent of faith schools are Christian and in which bishops get to vote on legislation in Parliament (a situation almost unique in the world). These are the vestiges of Christendom, the situation that prevailed for centuries in which Christianity was closely allied to political and cultural power. The gradual passing of Christendom gives us a great opportunity to look again at the real nature of Jesus' message."

"That Christians do not rule others in the way they once did, in the fading Christendom era, does not amount to "persecution". Rather, it is an invitation, in the midst of some pain and adjustment no doubt, to rediscover patterns of church life in a plural society which show the heart of the Christian message to be about embracing others, not isolating ourselves; multiplying hope, not spreading fear; developing peaceableness, not resorting to aggression; and advancing compassion, rather than retreating into defensiveness."

It's also worth noting that the implication of the way the Not Ashamed campaign is set up seems to mean that those who don't support it can be accused of being ashamed of their faith (presumably Nick Baines has endured some of this) while those that do support can be claimed as supporters of Christian Concern's wider agenda.

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Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.

The Age of the Do-Gooders

Most reviewers of Ian Hislop’s Age of the Do-Gooders (Mondays, BBC2, 9.00pm) accepted the line that Hislop pursues in the series; that it’s curious how ‘do-gooder’ has become such a pejorative term (a euphemism for interfering busybody) when doing good is what we should all aspire to.

The series celebrates Victorian social reformers who tend to be regarded as pious laughing stocks in this enlightened age; Hislop’s aim being to rescue them from ridicule and illustrate their importance in the evolution of British society. As the Metro notes: “He argues that the moral revolution of the 19th century invented the wide-ranging concept of a caring, just society, and that, far from being interfering busybodies, reformers were pioneering mavericks whose dynamism is to be admired.”

The dynamic 19th-century figures that Hislop highlights took it upon themselves to fix the Victorian equivalent of “broken Britain”. They overturned the ruling class’s callousness and unconcern for the poor and restored its social conscience. The big question was: What can I do? Hislop calls it “the moral revolution”: “They took a lot of flak at the time. That’s what interests me about it. I’m split between seeing why people took the p--- and thinking that, actually, they were rather good news.”

Reviewers generally thought the first episode was an eloquently argued slice of social history that aimed to reveal what a sorry state we’d all be in were it not for a bunch of remarkable 19th-century revolutionaries. What they seem to have missed was Hislop’s argument, highlighted particularly when interviewing members of the public, that our contemporary individualism militates against the 21st century (at least in its beginning) becoming an age of do-gooding. As Hislop stated in The Telegraph:

“We tend to see do-gooders as interfering busybodies … Few people believe they can personally make a difference. But the achievements of enlightened characters like Robert Owen [founder a model mill town in New Lanark], Thomas Wakley [scourge of cronyism among surgeons], Octavia Hill [pioneer of social housing] and George Dawson [the Birmingham social reformer] may just have something to teach us in the 21st century.

Amongst those reviews that I read only John Crace, in The Guardian, had a critique of this first episode. Crace argued that Hislop is turning into a rather good TV social historian but would benefit from providing rather more context to his story:

“Because while philanthropy emerged out of a sense that the better-off had a duty of care towards the less well-off, it also had its limitations. It is a start towards social justice but it is not an end or sufficient in itself. That's why the welfare state was introduced. To have followed this argument would not just have made these Victorians part of a historical narrative rather than liberal curiosities; it would have highlighted the obvious flaws in the coalition's belief that Do-Gooding can replace the state.”

Hislop’s series looks likely to be valuable in rehabilitating the idea of doing good to others for our strongly individualistic age but needs to be balanced by the perception that philanthropy alone is not enough. What may be most significant about those whom Hislop highlights, is that theirs was not simply individual philanthropy but instead a search for social and political solutions to the poverty of their age.

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 Willie Nelson & Emmylou Harris - The Maker.

Rev.ived

Bit late in the day for a post on Rev but, as I've been commenting on other people's posts, here's one bringing my thoughts together.

Firstly, I don’t think, as some have suggested, that Adam Smallbone was portrayed as either a fanatic or a wimp. That has often been the stock portrayal of clergy on TV but this Rev certainly wasn't held up for ridicule. Instead much of the comedy in the series came from moments when Smallbone's experience and expectations of ministry were at odds and, in my experience at least, that seemed an authentic reflection on an aspect of being in ministry.

While some of the storylines weren't as sharply observed as could have been the case (Episode 2 in particular), Smallbone throughout has been a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure, and for me that aspect of his portrayal has been the secret to the success of the series.

For example, his “I'm tired of having to tell people what they want to hear all the time” in the final episode was something that I would guess most of us who are ordained think at some stage in our ministry. In the context of the story told in that final episode, this comment was then deliberately undercut by the writers in the denouement to the episode where Smallbone said exactly what his dying parishioner wanted and needed to hear and this was restorative both for the parishioner and himself.

When the Last Rites are given to someone who has requested them, the person receiving is being given what they want, expect and need. This doesn't mean, though, that there is a simple continuity between this action and Smallbone's earlier statement. What Smallbone surely learnt to acknowledge, as his vocation was reaffirmed by administering the Last Rites, was that there are situations where it absolutely the right thing to tell people what they want to hear (this being one of them) and that to do so is to be a channel for God's grace. Prior to this point he only thought negatively of telling people what they want to hear and condemned himself for doing so.

What he learnt to acknowledge (and this was, I think, often the resolution of many of the episodes) was that his expectations of what ministry is and can be have to continually be nuanced because grace can be received and shared in wholly unexpected ways. The weakness of the man became a means of grace, which I think is absolutely right both theologically and in terms of comedic resolution in this series.

Finally, in the context of the series, his statement was not a fully accurate description of what we actually saw Smallbone doing and saying. Much of the comedy in the series came from a number of significant moments in the series where he does not tell people what they want to hear.

The fact that he was portrayed as doing both - showing a lack of backbone and acting with integrity - and the reality that we saw both cut both ways at different times (i.e. sometimes grace came through weakness and sometimes through strength of character) is part of what leads me to say that he is a nuanced character oscillating humanly between faith and doubt, integrity and failure.

The prayers in each episode acted as key turning points in each narrative. They are one of the plot devices which mean that Smallbone could not be a social worker or government bureaucrat and the comedy remain wholly in place. Prayer was portrayed as reorienting him to his vocation and triggering the moments in the narratives when he either grew in faith or became a channel for grace.

It is in the nature of a sitcom that the central character be fallible. Were this not so, from where would the comedy derive? The success of this series was that we identified with Smallbone’s weaknesses and that these same weaknesses were revealed as vehicles for grace or growth.

More interesting discussion of the series can be found here, here, here, here, here, ad infinitum.


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Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day.

Remembering Alan Plater

Am currently watching The Last of the Blonde Bombshells which precedes an Alan Plater tribute on BBC Four. In it the Judi Dench character asks, "What is the best way of honouring the dead?" to which her grand-daughter replies, "That's easy, to go on living."

The Guardian's obituary summed up Plater's significance and character succinctly:

"Alan Plater, who has died of cancer aged 75, was one of a handful of writers, including Jack Rosenthal, Dennis Potter and Simon Gray, who truly made a difference on British television in the golden age of comedy, drama series and the single play. Like the other two Alans – Bennett and Bleasdale – his name guaranteed a quality of humour, heart and humanity, usually matched by high standards of acting and production values. And like them, he was definitely "northern"."

BBC Four say:

"Spanning four decades, writer Alan Plater's work has been described as a meeting of Coronation Street and Chekhov. With his spare dialogue and irreverent attitude, Plater helped introduce an entirely new voice to the world of television drama.

He is perhaps best known for the Beiderbecke Trilogy but has written in all forms and is especially known for his radio, stage and television work and also for his passion for jazz. The principles of jazz are at the very heart of the man and his writing."

Home Cinema has an excellent review of Plater's "gentle, whimsical and very British" classic comedy series The Beiderbecke Trilogy, which is where I first encountered Plater. The dialogue - "Are you eating, boy? You should know by now that eating is forbidden. That's why we supply school dinners"  - is particularly sharp in a comedy thriller where there are a couple of brisk walks and a car chase, at slightly less than the speed limit, around a roundabout several times.


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Bix Beiderbecke - I'm Wondering Who.

Re-inhabiting the past

The Singing Detective is a TV drama serial by Dennis Potter that was first shown in the 1980s. The story is about Philip Marlow, a writer of detective novelettes in the style of Raymond Chandler including one called ‘The Singing Detective’. At the beginning of the series Marlow is confined to a hospital bed because of the psoriasis which has affected every part of his body.

Marlow’s situation is that his childhood beliefs and commitments to God and to his parents have been betrayed through key incidents such as his seeing his mother’s adultery and his allowing another schoolboy, Mark Binney, to be punished for something that Marlow himself had done. His inability to face these betrayals has led him into a lifestyle where he abused and betrayed those he loved and it is only as he is stripped by his illness that he can begin to face these memories, come to accept who he is and move beyond these abusive relationships and The Singing Detective shows us how this happens.

The story is about the way in which Marlow faces up to the key events in his past. He has to re-inhabit his past, almost re-live it, in order that he comes to feel sorrow for the way in which he betrayed Mark Binney. It is only at the point that he re-lives that experience and feels sorrow for what he did that he is able to get up from his bed and walk again.

I mention this, because what Marlow experiences in The Singing Detective is very similar to what Peter experiences in our Gospel reading. Peter betrayed Jesus by denying him three times. Since the crucifixion Peter would have been in agony in his conscience over the way in which he failed Jesus at Jesus’ moment of need. The agonies that Philip Marlow experiences in The Singing Detective help us to flesh out this story in the Bible and to understand a little of what Peter would have felt.

When Peter meets Jesus by Lake Tiberias, Jesus forces Peter to re-live that experience of betrayal. That is why Jesus asks Peter three times, ‘Do you love me?’ These three questions mirror Peter’s three denials and take him back into that experience. Like Marlow, Peter has to re-inhabit his past in order to move on from it. As Jesus questions Peter, his sense of remorse for what he had done would have been immense.

Peter denied Jesus three times and so Jesus asks Peter three times, ‘Do you love me?’ When they have finished re-living the experience of his denial, Peter finds that he has three affirmations that counter-balance his three denials. By taking him back into the experience of denial Jesus turns Peter’s denials into affirmations and he turns Peter’s memory of the denial from a negative memory into a positive one. The denial happened, Peter would never have forgotten that but then he was given the opportunity to turn it into a positive affirmation of his love for Jesus and that would have been the memory that he carried forward with him.

Like Peter and like Philip Marlow we can carry around with us the memory of bad events that have happened to us – things that we did to others or things that others did to us. If we are not careful the memory of these events from the past will twist and harm our life now, in the present. The way to be released from the harm and hurt of these memories is, with the help of others, to go back into those memories, to re-live them, feeling sorrow what the wrong that we did and finding positive ways in which we can show that sorrow and repair the hurt that we have done or which has been done to us.

If that is your situation then put yourself in Peter’s place now as you read a meditation written by Revd. Alan Stewart based on this passage:

I am the one who ran away when I said I never would
I didn’t believe you when you said
‘the sheep will scatter’

I am the one who sat in the shadows avoiding eyes
I never believed I’d disown you like this
Not once, but three times

I am the one who wasn’t there while you died that death
I couldn’t believe that this was how
The story ends

‘do you love me?’ he later asked

‘I love you’ I replied
‘feed my lambs’

I am the one who hid in an upstairs room
I wanted to run but there was no longer
anywhere to go

I am the one who could find no solace nowhere
I wanted to open my eyes and see him there
Laughing

I am the one who wept my heart raw with regret
I wanted to tell him ‘I’m sorry…
I do love you..’

‘do you love me?’ he asked again

‘I do love you’ I replied
‘take care of my sheep’

I am the one who woke to the sound of women’s voices
I longed to believe they’d seen you, but hope
Was still on its knees

I am the one who ran to where they lay your body down
I longed to destroy the rumours
Before they destroyed me

I am the one who saw you arrive like a ghost
I longed to reach out and touch you, but I couldn’t
even look at you

‘do you love me?’ he asked for a third time
looking into my eyes
and my heart tore within me

‘you know that I love you’ I replied
‘then feed my sheep’

(Revd. Alan Stewart)

Let us pray,

Gracious God, how can I begin to forgive myself? Your promise is to forgive all who truly repent. I regret what has happened and confess my part in it, yet every day, I wake remembering – and my guilt is a heavy weight. Others may forgive me, and assure me that you forgive me too, but the dark cloud of my guilt blocks out the light of your love. How can I begin to forgive myself? When Jesus came face to face with Peter at the lakeside, he asked, ‘Do you love me?’ I long to hear that question and to answer ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,’ but my guilt is a barrier between us. Help me to hear the voice of the risen Lord, to accept your forgiveness and to forgive myself. Amen.

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Gordon Gano and The Ryans - Gone To Pray.

Children of Abraham

Bit late but this was my All-Age Mothering Sunday sermon at St John's Seven Kings:

How many of us have watched the TV programme ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ How many of us have done some research into our family history? For those who have researched their family histories, how far back have you been able to go? What has been the most interesting thing that you have discovered? How many of us have known our grandparents? Our great-grandparents? Our great, great grandparents? What is that we find interesting about ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Why is that we need to know so much about our past?

There can be many reasons why it is interesting to research our family histories; we may track down relatives about whom we knew nothing and broaden our extended family, for instance, or we might come to understand ourselves better by knowing about family traits and characteristics which have been passed down across the generations.

I doubt that any of us have traced our family histories back to Abraham and Sarah but our Bible readings today suggest that we can. Abram and Sarai, as they were originally known, were very old and very sad because they had no children. But one night, out in the desert, God made Abram a special promise. God said:

“Look up and count the stars – if you can. That’s how many people there will be in your family one day. Think of the sand on the seashore. How many grains can you count? I’ll bless you and give you such a large family that one day they’ll be as many as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore.”

As a sign of that promise, God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and Sarai’s name to Sarah. God’s promise comes true when Sarah finally does have a baby, called Isaac, when she’s very old. The great-great-great-(lots of greats)-grandchildren of this family are the members of God’s family here today, so we’re all actually members of the same family; Abraham and Sarah’s family, which is also God’s family.

Now, because we are all part of the same family we’ve got to care for each other like we are family. Some of us heard John Bell talking about that this week in our Lent Course. He said:
“... within the Church, at its best, we are the surrogate mothers and uncles and grandchildren to other people – and that’s a very different unit of belonging. Which means that should your mother or father reject you, the Christian Church will still accept you.”

This is an important part of Mothering Sunday because today is about Mother Church as well as being about the Mothers who gave us birth. As John Bell says, the Church at its best is our extended family; “the water of baptism will be thicker than the blood of genealogy.”

As a result, we’ve got millions of brothers and sisters of all ages and colours in every land all over the world. In fact, just like on ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ when we realise that we are Children of Abraham, we also realise that we have some unexpected relatives because Jewish and Muslim people are also Children of Abraham.

Bono, the singer with rock band U2, suggested in his guest column for the New York Times on 2 January this year the idea of an: “arts festival that celebrates the origin of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Every year it could be held in a different location; Jerusalem would obviously be the best place to start.”

We can already experience something of that idea locally through the East London Three faiths Forum:

“For more than ten years, the Three Faiths Forum has been encouraging friendship, goodwill and understanding amongst Muslims, Christians and Jews. We also facilitate dialogue, leading to action with people from other faiths, and those who do not subscribe to any religion. We create new models for faith encounters.”

So we can see through all this that although God’s promise starts out with small things it can become incredibly massive. Sarah laughed when she heard what God had planned. Just like Sarah we can be sceptical, cynical and mocking about what it is possible for God to achieve through us but, in the story, Sarah’s cynical laughter turns to joyful laughter when her son Isaac is born and the same can be true for us too as we learn to trust that God can use us and achieve great things through us.

We know the difference between cynical laughter and joyful laughter don’t we? Who can give me a cynical laugh? Who can give me a joyful laugh? Sarah’s story shows us how we live life joyfully and hopefully. Patricia De Jong has described what happened to Sarah like this:

“Here is Sarah, at age 90, saying to God: Look, I'm old, I'm tired, I have arthritis and even a little osteoporosis; are you sure we want to get into something new like this now?

But this is when we encounter the marvelous wonder of God, at that very vulnerable moment - when the improbable is mistaken for the impossible, at that moment when we actually believe that our spirits are wasting away, as our bodies are, and God couldn't possibly have any more surprises in store for us, at that moment when we have settled in to things the way they are, instead of things the way they can be through the hope of God …

And yet what better way to live than in the grip of a promise? To wake in the possibility that today might be the day ... To take nothing for granted. Or to take everything as granted, though not yet grasped. To handle every moment of one's life as a seed of the promise and to plant it tenderly, never knowing if this moment, or the next, may be the one that grows.

To live in this way is to discover that God is always blessing us ... This is what Abraham and Sarah found out late in life ... This is what the psalmist had in mind when he wrote, "so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's." (Psalm 103:5) This is the spiritual path we embark upon when we place our hand in the open palm of God ...

Abraham and Sarah believed in God's promises and dared to hope. As Paul reminds us, "hope does not disappoint because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which is given to us."

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Pops Staples - Hope In A Hopeless World.

Glimpes of Clarity

"Sometimes we find ourselves on the edge, falling uncontrollably through life, punctured by a cannonball sized hole of despair, overwhelmed by emotion, facing the perhaps impossible task of trying to pick up the pieces and put ourselves back together from a pile of shattered fragments."

Glimpses of Clarity was a recent exhibition by George Triggs at the Art Academy which features in the current edition of art of england. Broken is the piece that provide the cover photo for this edition of the magazine and about which the above quote pertains.

Triggs has written of this work:

“Broken goes about examining the fragility, isolation and silent determination of our existence. It captures the seemingly impossible task of picking up the pieces and putting ourselves back together after a complete emotional implosion. This life-size figure is in fractured pieces slumped on a stool. It is trying to rebuild itself, examining the deterioration of its own existence, examining what it means to be broken, questioning whether it can return to life anew, questioning whether the cracks and experiences stay below the surface and whether some pieces of itself are gone forever. Broken was created in solid clay, then cast as a hollow shell, which I then literally shattered into pieces and reassembled. Looking at all the pieces, it seemed like an impossible task, which made it both more exciting, exhausting and inspiring. The process was a huge emotional and thought-provoking journey for me which I feel transfers to the work.”

Photos of the work can be found here and here.

T.S. Eliot writes, at the end of The Waste Land, of shoring fragments against his ruin and that equates to Triggs' sculpture but both, I think, also capture a sense of the inspiration and revelation which comes as this shoring of fragments against our ruin takes place. Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective presents a similar vision and one that I have linked to Jesus' restoration of Peter following his denial (John 21. 15-19).

Leonard Cohen in Anthem highlights the sense in which we all are cracked and broken within our lives and that, it is actually through our cracked natures that light comes into our lives and the world:

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in."

This echoes 2 Corinthians 4: 6-12 in which Paul writes of our lives as being like cracked clay pots with the light of Christ shining through the cracks or fractures in our lives. I have reflected on this insight in the meditation below:

unregarded

Birthplace,
least among the clans of Judea.
Home town,
a place from which no good was known to come.
In appearance,
without beauty or majesty, undesired.
In life,
despised and rejected, unrecognised and unesteemed.
In death,
made nothing.
His followers,
not wise, not influential, not noble – fools!

The light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the bodies and form of human beings.
Light shining
through the gaps and cracks of clay pots.
Light shining
in the unexpected places, despised faces, hidden spaces.
Light shining
in the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry.
Light shining
in the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers.
Light shining
in the persecuted, the insulted, the falsely accused.
Light shining
in the lowly, the despised, the nonentities.
Light shining
in weakness and fear and trembling.
Light shining
in the foolish followers of the King of Fools.

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Leonard Cohen - Anthem.

Northwood & Northwood Hills stns

Jesus falls for the first time by year 6 pupils from Hillside Juniors.

Your face, set like flint,
set towards Jerusalem,
bears the mark of the cross.
You carry the cross
in the resolution
written on
your features.
Death is the choice,
the decision,
the destiny,
revealed
in the blood,
sweat and tears
secreted from
your face
in prayerful questions,
prophetic grief,
pain-full acceptance,
as you
fall
for the
first time.

Simon helps Jesus carry his cross by ‘Edify’ (a group of local inter-church youth)

Take up your cross:
accept and use
your suffering and pain;
become a servant -
wash the feet of others;
give yourself
for the benefit of others;
don’t walk by on the other side;
give away your shirt and coat;
go the extra mile;
turn the other cheek;
love your enemies;
do good to those that hate you;
love God
with heart, mind,
soul and strength;
love others
as you love yourself.
Take up your cross.

Jesus falls for the second time by students from RNIB Sunshine House School.

Gravity pulls at your head.
Sweating blood,
questioning
whether this cup can be taken from you.
Not your will, God’s will.

Gravity pulls at your shoulders.
Red raw,
wicked wood
splintering in lacerations.
Weight of wood pressing down.

Gravity pulls at your legs
having walked
the length and breath of the country,
having knelt
in prayer in Gethsemene,
having stood
while beaten and whipped.
Gravity pulls you down.

Jesus meets women of Jerusalem by a local family.

Do not weep for me.
I go to prepare a place
for you to wait
in my Father’s courts.
I go to reveal a temple
not made with human hands.
I go to return and bring
the Holy City
from heaven
to earth;
God’s home with
humankind –
no death, no grief
or crying or pain,
tears wiped away,
the healing of the nations.
Do not weep for me
but pray.
Pray for the kingdom come,
on earth
as it is in heaven
for I go to reveal the Temple
as it has always existed –
the creation and human story;
His story.

Weep only for yourselves.
For the foot of human pride
will soon descend
as the armies of the Empire of power
ring this city
to crush this Temple
and destroy.
How terrible for mothers
in the violence
of those days;
it would be better
for children not to be
than to suffer
in the killing fields.
Cry for yourselves
and for your children,
cry for the mountains
to fall and hide you,
cry,
for the terror
inflicted by
the Empires of power
will be great.

Jesus dies on the cross by Miriam Kendrick

Death comes in an agony of mind:
questioning whether the cup could be withdrawn;
forsakenness experienced within your very self;
normality faced as the last temptation.

Death comes in an agony of relations:
deserted by those who had followed;
betrayed by one who was your friend;
forsaken by God, your loving Father.

Death comes in an agony of body:
evaporation of fluids in wilderness heat;
steady drip of lifeblood from lacerations and wounds;
suffocating angle of body pinned to wicked wood.

Death comes in finality.
“It is finished”;
agony ended,
purpose fulfilled.

Today I went to Northwood and Northwood Hills to see their community art stations which explore some of the events in the final hours of Jesus' life. As with last year's Hertford stns project, these artworks are also accompanied by my meditations on the fourteen Stations of the Cross.

The artwork has been produced by local artists and community groups and includes photographic pieces, drapes, paintings, metal sculpture and collage. Each station is also accompanied by an explanation from the artist(s). The concept for Miriam Kendrick's Jesus dies on the cross was of particular interest as it explored through imagery of the crucifixion on TV the idea that we are disconnected and detached from the reality of his death.

As there is less involvement from established artists and artist-led workshops in this project, the artworks have much more of a community feel with youth groups, local families or friends and schools, as well as churches all producing and hosting artworks. Occasionally, this means that the depth of emotion in the Passion narrative is not fully tapped, with the Year 2 children at Hillside Infants, for example, producing a lovely piece that is understandably (because of their age) more about Mothering Sunday than Good Friday. Overall though, the broad community involvement means that this is genuinely a project in which the Passion is being explored and owned by the wider community and not just by the Church community.

Particularly strong works included: Simon helps Jesus carry his cross a fabric work by ‘Edify’ which uses the footprints of group members to form a cross; Jesus falls for the second time in which the crown of thorns has been created using discarded medical equipment used by students from the RNIB Sunshine House School and transfigured into a thing of beauty be being sprayed gold; Jesus meets women of Jerusalem which uses photos of a great grandmother, grandmother, mothers and daughters to question the legacy passed down through the generations; and Jesus is stripped by Martin Wilson where close up shots of a branch form the words 'I was naked and you clothed me.'

Throughout my walk around these stations I crossed paths with a group from Holy Trinity Northwood who were also walking the stations. We finally talked at the 11th station where they said how much they had appreciated the meditations as well as the artworks. Each one, they said, had given a fresh take on Christ's Passion.

The stations remain in location until 10th April and then will be gathered together at Fairfield, the home of Northwood Evangelical Church, for viewing on the 11th and 12th April.

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Iona - When I Survey The Wondrous Cross.