Let The Slave

I meant to post this extract from William Blake's America on 28th November, the 250th Anniversary of his birth, but forgot to do it. Paul Trathen reminded me on retreat of just how great these words are:

'The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrappèd up;
The bones of death, the cov'ring clay, the sinews shrunk and dry'd
Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing, awakening,
Spring like redeemèd captives, when their bonds and bars are burst
Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field,
Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;
Let the enchainèd soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
Rise and look out; his chains are loose, his dungeon doors are open;
And let his wife and children return from the oppressor's scourge.
They look behind at every step, and believe it is a dream,
Singing: "The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning,
And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;
For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease." '

Van Morrison sings a version of the above combined with The Price of Experience (taken from The Four Zoas) on A Sense of Wonder:

What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun
And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.
It is an easy thing to talk of prudence to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs.

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements,
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughterhouse moan;
To see a god on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of love in the thunder-storm that destroys our enemies' house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,
And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead.
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity:
Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.

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Joni Mitchell - Hejira.

Public Art and Churches: ideas for involvement

Love & Light

RE:Generation

Graffiti mural

The Cabinet of Sin and Salvation

In the four years that I have been ordained I have had the opportunity to be involved in four church-based public arts projects that in different ways have involved the local and church community in the art. This article, which has just been published in the Veritasse Artisan's newsletter, briefly describes these projects in the hope that they will stimulate ideas for other ways of doing public art through and in churches.

Love & Light

Visual Jockeys, SDNA, filmed people from the congregation and community and then digitally enhanced these images before projecting the images onto the windows, roof and tower of the church. This project, which SDNA called Abbey Happy, turned St Margaret’s Barking into a temporary artwork that was a blaze of light and colour with moving images showing the diversity of the church’s congregation. The project was part of an evenings’ art trail, called Love & Light in the Town Centre which highlighted, through projections, significant heritage buildings in Barking. The project was organised by the local council through their Arts Services department and funded by the Arts Council.

RE:Generation

Michael Cousin was commissioned by the local council to produce a film and photographic exhibition in collaboration with the community. When he thought about where to go to find groups of local people, he realised that local churches were one of the best places to go. Michael interviewed several people from St Margaret’s about their experience of living in Barking. From these, and other interviews, he created a film called RE:Generation which is a recording of personal anecdotes, memories and views on change, past and present with a view to reflecting on all our futures in a borough currently undergoing large scale redevelopment and change. This film was shown in St Margaret’s as part of an exhibition by Michael Cousin called Memento which featured places and personal events, from days past, as recorded by our community in their personal photo albums, alongside images of how those places and people are now.

Graffiti mural

Under the banner of SOULINTHECITY St Margaret’s Barking has been involving young people in the Arts through workshops in Fashion Design and Graffiti Art. These workshops culminated in the creation of a graffiti mural on the blank wall of a local park. This project involved many local youngsters, teaching them can-control and design skills while also learning about the history of hip hop culture. The names of all those taking part in the workshop and enhancing their own local environment were recorded in the mural. Graffiti Artist AKS who led the workshop that produced the mural stressed that the work carried a Christian message as the words included in it - "one, heart, soul, unity, community and together" - reflected the essence of SOULINTHECITY and showed that there is "no conflict between hip hop values and Christian values."

The Cabinet of Sin and Salvation

The most recent project came after I had moved to St John’s Seven Kings. There I customised and decorated a four drawer cabinet as a public arts project carried out over the course of one week in the lounge of the Parish Centre. The resulting conceptual sculpture, The Cabinet of Sin and Salvation, included constructions, paintings and photomontages and was exhibited as part of the Visual Dialogue art exhibition that was held in the church over our Patronal Festival weekend. As I worked on the project I invited users of the centre to comment on the work as it developed. I also documented the project photographically and posted daily blogs about the project here. The project generated considerable interest and comment locally and was featured in the Church Times and the local press.

Public Art projects – benefits

The projects I have been involved in have encouraged our congregations because they have been able to contribute to the project and see their contribution in the finished artwork. They have raised the profile of the two churches locally because the projects have each made very visual stories that the local press wanted to feature. Finally, the projects have either brought people into church to see the project/exhibition or they have taken the church out into the community, as with the Graffiti mural, and left something of benefit to the community created through the church and community working together.

Public Art projects - tips

Here are a few suggestions of things to do that might result in a public arts project:

• Find out if your local council has an Arts Services department or a local Arts Council. Get to know them and support the projects they commission.


• Talk to local artists to see if they have ideas for ways of involving local people in arts projects.


• Offer your church building as a venue for projects, workshops or exhibitions.


• Apply for funding to commission artists or run arts workshops.


• Get together with other local churches to organise art activities that benefit the local community.

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U2 & Daniel Lanois - Falling At Your Feet.

Advent & Christmas @ St John's

At Christmas we, like the Wise Men, can go on a journey in search of the Christ-child. Instead of being guided by a star we are guided by the Bible as we hear from the prophets who prepared people for Jesus’ birth and from the Gospel writers who recorded his birth.

The Wise Men did not find Jesus where they expected to. They went to a palace but he was not to be found there. Instead he was found in obscurity, in the home of working people. The Wise Men were surprised by Jesus’ birth but worshipped him nonetheless and I hope that will be our experience this Christmas as we listen to the familiar story and sing the familiar carols.

In the familiarity, may we not miss the surprise that the child we come to find is in fact God himself. In Jesus, God has moved into our neighbourhood, entered our world and come to be with us by becoming one of us. The God, who created by saying "Let there be ...", became a baby who had to be taught to speak. The one on whom the universe depends became dependent on a human mother for milk. God could be dropped or hurt or harmed or left unchanged or left unfed or just left. In Jesus, God became weak, wordless, vulnerable and dependent.

For God to become a human being and ultimately die for our sins, was inherently risky. What it made possible, though, was for our humanness to become part of who God is. God comes alongside us as someone who understands all that we know and experience. What Jesus did was total identification with us and the result is that we can be totally identified with God. God came into our human nature in order that we might return to God and to his nature.

This Christmas may we reflect on both the risk and the reward. May we seek after God's nature and ask ourselves what we will risk in future as thanks that Jesus became God with us. I wish you a joyful and peaceful Christmas, and all God's best for 2008.

Advent & Christmas @ St John's Seven Kings, 2007

* Saturday 1st 6.00pm Tamil Carol Service
* Sunday 2nd 6.30pm Advent Carol Service at St Teresa’s Newbury Park - Seven Kings Fellowship of Churches
* Friday 7th 6.30-7.30pm Carol Singing outside Newbury Park Sainsbury’s
* Sunday 16th 10.00am All-age Christingle Service - a colourful service of music & light
6.30pm Service of Nine Lessons and Carols by Candlelight - traditional carols and readings
* Tuesday 18th 7.00pm Carol Singing around the Parish - wrap up warm
* Friday 21st 2.00pm Carol Tea – Mothers’ Union (All are welcome)
* Sunday 23rd 10.00am Reflections of Christmas Holy Communion - poems, readings and songs
* Monday 24th 5.00pm All-age Nativity Service - dressing up, carols, fun for all
11.30pm First Holy Communion of Christmas
* Tuesday 25th 8.00am Holy Communion - Book of Common Prayer
10.00am Christmas All-age Holy Communion - children, bring a gift you have received to show others
* Monday 31st 11.30pm Watchnight Communion Service - welcoming the New Year in prayer and reflection

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Larry Norman - Sweet Sweet Song of Salvation.

Christmas exhibitions

The Christmas season traditionally brings with it several exhibitions focused on Christian imagery and stories and this year sees two particularly interesting examples.

Epiphany at Wallspace showcases contemporary Iconographers working in Britain. This is a uniquely beautiful exhibition with an ambience and setting that supports worship of the reality to which each icon is a window. I was particularly drawn to the work of Dr Stéphané René who practises Coptic Icongraphy. The Contemporary Coptic style is a refreshing alternative to the more familiar styles which is both more stylised and lively in its composition and colours.

At the Chappel Galleries 'The Life of Christ' is shortly to be depicted in ninety-one etchings by Francis Hoyland. These prints were originally commissioned by Aimee and Monroe Price, a well known American art historian and her lawyer husband. One complete edition is in the Print Room at the British Museum where a selection from it was exhibited. On receiving the prints into the British Museum’s Print Room Anthony Griffiths, Head of Prints and Drawings wrote. “It is a most extraordinary and impressive achievement and we are very glad to have it in the department as one of the major monuments of British print making in recent times."

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Mark Olson - The Salvation Blues.

Transnormal Skiperoo

Jim White writes songs that could have been sung by the characters who people the stories of Flannery O'Connor. Like the characters in Flannery O’Connor’s novels we are, at best, incomplete – even the good, she felt, has a grotesque face, because “in us the good is something under construction.” The holy interpenetrates our world but we also see in life distortions which are repugnant to it and the problem for the novelist with Christian concerns is to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, the film about the American South that Jim White narrated, has this double sense of the holy in the grotesque and the grotesque in the holy. The film shows desperate people with a hell-fire religion and a God who will whup the ass of those prefer the sinful flesh over the Holy Spirit but, at the same time, you also feel the presence of the Spirit; alive and awake and in the blood of those who live in the South.

Transnormal Skiperoo takes us into the same locale. both musically and lyrically. Take Me Away a boy, who appears to be mentally disturbed, steps into the path of an oncoming train crying, "Take me away." As he does so he sees a stranger calling him in the voice of an old friend. White deliberately leaves us pondering the significance of the stranger and of the boy's cry to be taken away.

In A Town Called Amen he laments our lost innocence and in Blindly We Go reflects on our inability to penetrate the mystery of life. At one turn a plywood Superman becomes a symbol for our inability to achieve our dreams but at another pieces of heaven can be seen in "photographs of you and me."

Jim White is, I think, the pre-eminent bard for the postmodern Christian but he achieves this by going back in time to the old-time religion of the American South and the mystery and manners of Flannery O'Connor's stories and characters.

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Vigilantes of Love - Resplendent.

The CF Celebrity Cookbook

Dear all

Nearly 3 years ago, Rachel and the children had a really good idea to raise funds for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust. Partly because diet is really important in CF, they thought we could write letters to famous people and ask them for a recipe, and then we could put the recipes we got into a book, to sell and raise money.

Well, to cut a long story short, we did it! "The CF Celebrity Cookbook" came back from the printers 10 days ago, and we have already sold over 400 copies!! It is in full colour, with recipes from all sorts of people, including Gordon Brown, Rowan Atkinson, Ian McKellen, Ellen McArthur, and Andrew Flintoff!

We were really fortunate in getting a designer friend to do us the layout and design for free, and Dave's firm and others have helped with the printing costs - all of which means that ALL of the £5 cover price goes straight to the CF Trust.

If you would like to buy a copy, either: let us know when you can pop in and get one, and we'll put one (or more than one!) on one side for you, or if you would like one posted to you, then please send a cheque payable to "DS and RJL Alcock" for £5.76, with your name and address, to: CF Celebrity Cookbook, c/o Anthony Collins Solicitors, 134 Edmund Street, Birmingham B3 2ES.

£5 covers the cost of the book and 76p is the actual cost of postage and packing. All funds we receive go into a separate bank account, set up just to process the recipe book. Dave's work have been really helpful and have agreed to process letters and sending out for us.

Please help us raise more money for research into CF. If we sell all our copies, we'll raise over £6000!

Thank you.

David, Rachel, Charlie, John and Louisa

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The Style Council - Walls Come Tumbling Down.

At Last the 1948 Show - The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch