Here is my sermon from today's Eucharist at St Stephen Walbrook:
"Amen, you wonderful priest." The climatic scene in the BBC drama Broken had Fr Michael, the central character, sharing the Eucharist at a Mass for his dead mother, with each of his parishioners saying to him as they received, "Amen, you wonderful priest".
Events had conspired to create a crisis of faith for him at this point in the drama and he had planned to step down as a priest as a result. We presume though that the affirmation he receives from his parishioners at this low moment in his ministry enables him to continue.
Broken is an excellent example of a drama based on a good priest. There have been others in recent years; the comedy Rev and the film Calvary, for example. What they all have in common is the understanding that a good priest is not perfect.
In Broken, Fr Michael clearly struggles with his own demons at the same time that he comes alongside his parishioners to support them in their struggles. Indeed, he is enabled to support them with empathy and understanding because he is honest about his own struggles. It is this honesty and vulnerability which makes him 'good', not any sense of supposed moral perfection.
In our Gospel passage (Luke 6. 37 - 42) Jesus illustrates how easy we find it to criticise others - to see the speck in another’s eye, whilst ignoring the log in our own. Jesus is calling us to become, like Fr Michael, aware primarily of our own faults and failings (this is, after all, the point of including confession in church services) and then to use this awareness not to prevent us from acting (because we are overwhelmed by guilt) but instead to use it as a spur to acting to support and enable others out of the empathy and understanding that results from our awareness of our own shortcomings.
‘Maybe you know the saying, "When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you." Jesus had a version of this wisdom when he said, "Don't focus on the speck in your brother's eye while ignoring the log in your own eye." When cruel accusations fly, we all need to hear the voice of reason that says, "Look in the mirror … You might just be talking about yourself" …
We all know what it's like to get caught up in the heat of the moment. When we cannot bear to see something painful in ourselves, we want to get rid of it. We want to relocate the ugliness we feel about ourselves and put it into someone else. We say those bad feelings do not apply to us; they apply to someone else. The fancy psychoanalytic term for this unconscious process is projective identification. We get rid of the unwanted feelings (projection) and identify them as belonging to someone else (identification).' (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/headshrinkers-guide-the-galaxy/201109/three-fingers-pointing-back-you)
Jesus is calling for us to look within ourselves for our faults before we ever start pointing them out in others. Another proverb covers similar ground: There is so much good in the worst of us, / There is so much bad in the best of us / That it ill behoves any of us /To find fault with the rest of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted this proverb when he said, ‘There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.’ In reflecting on this quote, Katha Waters, Bookstore and Resource Center Manager at The King Center, suggests that we often don’t see things as they are, but instead see things as we are. People often seem to judge others not based on the real person, but on their own prejudices. Since perception is reality to most people, we often misjudge others based on misconceived generalizations. As we have been reflecting, no one is perfect, no one is all good or bad. To understand this should be to have better tolerance for people and not let hate overcome us. So, next time we are tempted to criticise another person, maybe we should stop to think whether we are really judging them or are really looking at a reflection of ourselves (http://www.thekingcenter.org/blog/mlk-quote-week-good-and-evil-all-us).
The point of this isn’t that we become overwhelmed by guilt or a sense of failure. Instead, Jesus is calling us to become, like Fr Michael, aware primarily of our own faults and failings in order to use this awareness as a spur to acting to support and enable others out of the empathy and understanding that results from our awareness of our own shortcomings.
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Nina Simone - I Think It's Going To Rain Today.
Showing posts with label waters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waters. Show all posts
Thursday, 13 July 2017
Monday, 25 May 2015
Temple: a crisis of faith
Temple is a new play by Steve Waters at the Donmar Warehouse which is a fictional account inspired by the Occupy London movement in 2011.
On 15 October 2011 Occupy London makes camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. On 21 October 2011 a building that had kept open through floods, the Blitz and terrorist threats closes its doors. On 28 October City of London initiates legal action against Occupy to begin removing them from outside the Cathedral ...
Set in the heart of a very British crisis, the play explores a crisis of conscience, a crisis of authority and a crisis of faith.
Giles Fraser, who was at the centre of these events, writes about them in today's Guardian as exploring "a theological question that takes us back to the very foundations of the Christian faith"; the tension, inherent within the Christian faith, "between swapping the rags of the oppressed for the ermine of high office."
Fraser suggests that it is if the play captures something of this theological dynamic, with justification on both sides, that it will have succeeded.
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On 15 October 2011 Occupy London makes camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral. On 21 October 2011 a building that had kept open through floods, the Blitz and terrorist threats closes its doors. On 28 October City of London initiates legal action against Occupy to begin removing them from outside the Cathedral ...
Set in the heart of a very British crisis, the play explores a crisis of conscience, a crisis of authority and a crisis of faith.
Fraser suggests that it is if the play captures something of this theological dynamic, with justification on both sides, that it will have succeeded.
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Saturday, 18 April 2015
Why the Bible is box office
The Guardian has a useful summary of twentieth century religious drama as a result of several new productions which suggest that the Bible is currently box office:
'Temple by Steve Waters opens next month at the Donmar Warehouse in London ... a fictionalised version of the clash between clergy and anti-capitalist protesters during the occupation of the piazza outside St Paul’s in 2011-12.
And, last week, Temple Church in London became a temporary stage for performances of a new production by director James Dacre of Shakespeare’s King John, in which the English monarch faces inquisition and excommunication by a cardinal sent from Pope Innocent III ...
Two recent openings at the National Theatre – a revival of Shaw’s Man and Superman and Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem – feature debates, Shavian and neo-Shavian respectively, about the likelihood of God. And the West End has just staged a revival of Peter Barnes’s 1969 comedy The Ruling Class, with James McAvoy as an English aristocrat who shocks his Anglican, Tory family by announcing that he is the Risen Christ.'
'Temple by Steve Waters opens next month at the Donmar Warehouse in London ... a fictionalised version of the clash between clergy and anti-capitalist protesters during the occupation of the piazza outside St Paul’s in 2011-12.
And, last week, Temple Church in London became a temporary stage for performances of a new production by director James Dacre of Shakespeare’s King John, in which the English monarch faces inquisition and excommunication by a cardinal sent from Pope Innocent III ...
Two recent openings at the National Theatre – a revival of Shaw’s Man and Superman and Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem – feature debates, Shavian and neo-Shavian respectively, about the likelihood of God. And the West End has just staged a revival of Peter Barnes’s 1969 comedy The Ruling Class, with James McAvoy as an English aristocrat who shocks his Anglican, Tory family by announcing that he is the Risen Christ.'
It is also interesting to compare and contrast this article with a 2012 Guardian article claiming that, 'despite its roots in ritual, religion gets barely a look-in on stage these days.'
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Pops Staples - Somebody Was Watching.
Thursday, 26 February 2009
Tryin' to throw your arms around the world (2)
And I Have No Compass
On both counts – the running and the falling down – movement is essentially improvisatory.
“”There’s a line in, I think, the New Testament,” Bono told Joe Jackson of Hot Press before Zooropa was released, “which says that the spirit moves and no one knows where it comes from or where it's going. It's like a wind. I’ve always felt that way about my faith. That’s why on Zooropa I say I’ve got no religion. Because I believe that religion is the enemy of God. Because it denies the spontaneity of the spirit and the almost anarchistic nature of the spirit.”” This embodies itself in lines such as “And I have no compass/And I have no map” from Zooropa and in U2’s improvisatory approach to creating music and writing lyrics:
“On the road, U2 are constantly working informally on new ideas. As a matter of course, rehearsals and sound-checks are recorded. Frequently the germ of something new will emerge as the band improvise their way through a series of rhythm patterns and chord changes … U2 songs often proceed along parallel tracks. On the one side, a set of musical ideas is taking shape. On the other, Bono and The Edge are developing bits of titles, lyrics, choruses and whatever other scraps of ideas have suggested themselves. The real heartache starts when they begin the process of bringing these different elements together.”
A Sort of Homecoming
Improvisation leads to two further characteristics of their spirituality, allusiveness and reconciliation. U2 have been vociferously criticised at times for didactic preaching and yet this has always been an approach they have tried to avoid. There can, of course, be a big gap between what people say and what people do. U2 did not always stick to their good intentions but, they did have good intentions, did generally acknowledge when they had fallen down and did get up, dust themselves down and try again.
There were also times when they did succeed, both in their songs and in performance. The best U2 songs are either impressionist sketches or aphoristic paradoxes. ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is an example of the former while ‘The Fly’ is an example of the latter. Niall Stokes has described ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ as an “impressionistic reverie … written in a dreamy, cinematic style” but with a “constant sense of movement propelling the song” through the intermingling of sex, spirituality, death and resurrection. There is, he says, “a sense in the lyrics that things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold" but also a sense of reassurance from the control that the writer has over the poetry and ideas.
Conversely, ‘The Fly’ has a specific sense of place – Hell – and a much sharper and wittier, but ultimately no less enigmatic, turn of phrase:
“I became very interested in these single-line aphorisms,” Bono states. “I’d been writing them. So I got this character [The Fly] to say them all, from ‘A liar won’t believe anybody else’ to ‘A friend is someone who lets you down’. And that’s where ‘The Fly’ was coming from … It was written like a phone call from hell, but the guy liked it there,” Bono told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. “It was this guy running away – ‘Hi honey, it’s hot but I like it here’.”
This same allusiveness can also be seen in performance through a use of symbolic gesture. For part of their ZooTV tour U2 included live broadcasts from war engulfed Sarajevo in the show. This brought accusations of bad taste from some critics but for others it was a means of realisation:
"The fact that it felt so awkward, that the thing sat so badly in the show, is a way of saying to this huge audience, 'There are things that can't be accommodated easily, and that are painful and awkward and you can't homogenise them into the rest of the world'. I thought exactly the awkwardness of it, the ill-fittingness, was what made it memorable. I've never been made in a rock and roll show, to feel the pain of the world before".
This allusive language both lyrically and in performance has resonances with the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s suggestion that society needs to develop a language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. It may be that U2 have moved from proclaiming truth to testing the style, substance and patterning of truth. That they may be, in however limited a fashion, exploring the message of standing back, coincidence and growing tenderness from the acceptance of complexities.
That this is so, may also be seen in their reconciliatory intent and practice. ‘New Years Day’, for example, contains the line, “Though torn in two we can be one”. This is reconciliation in a lyric that - through images of separated lovers returning home and of a united crowd at a Solidarity rally - links public and private in the injunction to be one. War, the album from which ‘New Years Day’ comes, is, paradoxically, about surrender.
War was the outcome of internal conflicts between individual members of the band and the demands of their Christian faith, as they understood it at the time. Their reconciliation of these conflicts came, in part, from the understanding that Christianity did not divide body from spirit or sacred from secular. Instead these were, at best, reconciled and, at least, held together in tension.
Reconciliation is also embodied in their activism and working methods. U2 do not simply sing about the world’s woes they also take practical actions to address them, whether this is contributing to concerts/records to raise charitable funds, symbolic actions such as their Sellafield protest for Greenpeace, or, most significantly, Bono’s campaigning for debt relief through Jubilee 2000.
In their working method, scraps or fragments of music and lyrics are combined to create something that is larger than the sum of the parts. Adam Clayton describes this as being "not just a playing thing - it's a whole supportive role within the commune". John Waters has identified this sense of unity as a key feature in the impact of U2:
"As in no other band that I am aware of it, the music of U2 is a unity of all its parts. There is no sense that the music can be divided into its constituent elements - into voice, guitar, rhythm section, backing, accompaniment. It comes to you whole, maybe because that is the way it is imagined. The Edge plays the guitar, as Bono sings, Larry hits the drums or Adam plays the bass, not as an end in itself, but in order to serve the song. Voice and instruments are united in a single purpose: they tell the story".
U2’s spirituality, their language of reconciliation is not just about words - the lyrics are allusive containing hints and glimpses - but is also about the friendship between the four band members, their approach to composition and performance, the relationships and approach of their organisation. Their spirituality then, is a combination of words and actions and of on-stage and off-stage, characterised by movement, allusion, symbolism and action, aiming to express honesty, integrity and wholeness.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
U2 - Zoo Station.
On both counts – the running and the falling down – movement is essentially improvisatory.
“”There’s a line in, I think, the New Testament,” Bono told Joe Jackson of Hot Press before Zooropa was released, “which says that the spirit moves and no one knows where it comes from or where it's going. It's like a wind. I’ve always felt that way about my faith. That’s why on Zooropa I say I’ve got no religion. Because I believe that religion is the enemy of God. Because it denies the spontaneity of the spirit and the almost anarchistic nature of the spirit.”” This embodies itself in lines such as “And I have no compass/And I have no map” from Zooropa and in U2’s improvisatory approach to creating music and writing lyrics:
“On the road, U2 are constantly working informally on new ideas. As a matter of course, rehearsals and sound-checks are recorded. Frequently the germ of something new will emerge as the band improvise their way through a series of rhythm patterns and chord changes … U2 songs often proceed along parallel tracks. On the one side, a set of musical ideas is taking shape. On the other, Bono and The Edge are developing bits of titles, lyrics, choruses and whatever other scraps of ideas have suggested themselves. The real heartache starts when they begin the process of bringing these different elements together.”
A Sort of Homecoming
Improvisation leads to two further characteristics of their spirituality, allusiveness and reconciliation. U2 have been vociferously criticised at times for didactic preaching and yet this has always been an approach they have tried to avoid. There can, of course, be a big gap between what people say and what people do. U2 did not always stick to their good intentions but, they did have good intentions, did generally acknowledge when they had fallen down and did get up, dust themselves down and try again.
There were also times when they did succeed, both in their songs and in performance. The best U2 songs are either impressionist sketches or aphoristic paradoxes. ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ is an example of the former while ‘The Fly’ is an example of the latter. Niall Stokes has described ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ as an “impressionistic reverie … written in a dreamy, cinematic style” but with a “constant sense of movement propelling the song” through the intermingling of sex, spirituality, death and resurrection. There is, he says, “a sense in the lyrics that things are falling apart and the centre cannot hold" but also a sense of reassurance from the control that the writer has over the poetry and ideas.
Conversely, ‘The Fly’ has a specific sense of place – Hell – and a much sharper and wittier, but ultimately no less enigmatic, turn of phrase:
“I became very interested in these single-line aphorisms,” Bono states. “I’d been writing them. So I got this character [The Fly] to say them all, from ‘A liar won’t believe anybody else’ to ‘A friend is someone who lets you down’. And that’s where ‘The Fly’ was coming from … It was written like a phone call from hell, but the guy liked it there,” Bono told David Fricke of Rolling Stone. “It was this guy running away – ‘Hi honey, it’s hot but I like it here’.”
This same allusiveness can also be seen in performance through a use of symbolic gesture. For part of their ZooTV tour U2 included live broadcasts from war engulfed Sarajevo in the show. This brought accusations of bad taste from some critics but for others it was a means of realisation:
"The fact that it felt so awkward, that the thing sat so badly in the show, is a way of saying to this huge audience, 'There are things that can't be accommodated easily, and that are painful and awkward and you can't homogenise them into the rest of the world'. I thought exactly the awkwardness of it, the ill-fittingness, was what made it memorable. I've never been made in a rock and roll show, to feel the pain of the world before".
This allusive language both lyrically and in performance has resonances with the novelist Nicholas Mosley’s suggestion that society needs to develop a language or style “by which apparent contradictions might be held … [being] elusive, allusive, not didactic”. It may be that U2 have moved from proclaiming truth to testing the style, substance and patterning of truth. That they may be, in however limited a fashion, exploring the message of standing back, coincidence and growing tenderness from the acceptance of complexities.
That this is so, may also be seen in their reconciliatory intent and practice. ‘New Years Day’, for example, contains the line, “Though torn in two we can be one”. This is reconciliation in a lyric that - through images of separated lovers returning home and of a united crowd at a Solidarity rally - links public and private in the injunction to be one. War, the album from which ‘New Years Day’ comes, is, paradoxically, about surrender.
War was the outcome of internal conflicts between individual members of the band and the demands of their Christian faith, as they understood it at the time. Their reconciliation of these conflicts came, in part, from the understanding that Christianity did not divide body from spirit or sacred from secular. Instead these were, at best, reconciled and, at least, held together in tension.
Reconciliation is also embodied in their activism and working methods. U2 do not simply sing about the world’s woes they also take practical actions to address them, whether this is contributing to concerts/records to raise charitable funds, symbolic actions such as their Sellafield protest for Greenpeace, or, most significantly, Bono’s campaigning for debt relief through Jubilee 2000.
In their working method, scraps or fragments of music and lyrics are combined to create something that is larger than the sum of the parts. Adam Clayton describes this as being "not just a playing thing - it's a whole supportive role within the commune". John Waters has identified this sense of unity as a key feature in the impact of U2:
"As in no other band that I am aware of it, the music of U2 is a unity of all its parts. There is no sense that the music can be divided into its constituent elements - into voice, guitar, rhythm section, backing, accompaniment. It comes to you whole, maybe because that is the way it is imagined. The Edge plays the guitar, as Bono sings, Larry hits the drums or Adam plays the bass, not as an end in itself, but in order to serve the song. Voice and instruments are united in a single purpose: they tell the story".
U2’s spirituality, their language of reconciliation is not just about words - the lyrics are allusive containing hints and glimpses - but is also about the friendship between the four band members, their approach to composition and performance, the relationships and approach of their organisation. Their spirituality then, is a combination of words and actions and of on-stage and off-stage, characterised by movement, allusion, symbolism and action, aiming to express honesty, integrity and wholeness.
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U2 - Zoo Station.
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