God Made Flesh

Since I wrote my first blog before Christmas I have been, with my friend and artistic collaborator Simon, to the Francis Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. I do not go to art exhibitions much, as I am put off by my own ignorance and so I rarely know where to begin in a vast gallery of images. It helps to focus on just one particular artist, however, and also to use the excellent audio guides which deconstruct specific paintings. The exhibition was also very helpfully arranged to provide both a chronological and thematic journey of Bacon's work including a room set apart to offer insight into the artist's working method's and source materials.

Bacon in common with many of his contemporary artists was profoundly influenced by the brutality of the 20th century and in particular the horrors of the concentration camps. At some point in his life he had a kind of epiphany when passing dog excrement on the pavement. He felt then that human life amounted to little more than this. Yet rather than inhibiting his artistic energy, this nihilistic vision of life apparently galvanized him and he tackled grand subjects in stikingly original ways throughout his career. His Three Studies for a Crucifixion painted in 1962 is a vast triptych with each panel showing the victim as little more than butchered meat. The images are as messy, undignified and apparently inconseqential, as the turd on the pavement; as brutal as the photographs which emerged from the death camps after the war. Bacon distills the great moment of salvation history down to its sheer physical essence. Yet he sees beauty in the butchery as he did in all human wounds. Most importantly he aims to stop you in your tracks and make you contemplate something of the revolting reality of the crucifixion before you have time to formulate an intellectual response. This is the great gift of art, especially with regard to a subject that is for many of us all too familiar. Somehow life equips us with filters which distance us from discomforting subjects, especially human suffering. Religion, for example, can become one such filter preventing us from really contemplating and engaging with reality. We sometimes take refuge in its grand themes and dogmas as a way of distracting ourselves from that which we find hard to understand or accept.

Art makes the familiar appear strange, unsettling us, and so awakening us from the deadly slumber of escapism or indifference. Bacon regarded himself as an atheist and regarded the crucifixion as no more than another example of man's inhumanity to man. Yet for me, God speaks powerfully through Bacon's art regardless of this, making me feel first of all, and then question, his vision of the cross. Was he right? When the carols fade and our homes are stripped of decorations is there any more to look forward to than our own mortality? Certainly the coming year will witness many such acts of violence around the globe. Why? Was that which was done to Jesus of Nazareth so different? How? We cannot, ofcourse, prove this either way, but Bacon's painting illuminates for me the great truth of Christmas, if not of Easter. God was made flesh. Again I can all too easily see this as an abstact idea, rather than a physical reality. Bacon's crucifixion rams the reality home. Here is blood spattered on a pillow. There is the body with its ribs exposed, flesh like raw meat spilling from the carcass. Unwittingly Bacon has uncovered the God lost amidst the horror of the century in the graphic carnality of his triptytch.

So, stange as it seems, Bacon's gruesome Easter painting takes me deeper into the mystery of Christmas and the incarnation. God is beheld in the infants slaughtered by King Herod, or indeed Hitler, as well as the one lying on a bed of straw.

An Artist's God-Reflections on Spirituaity and The Arts

In her book 'The New Atheists,' Tina Beattie discusses the objections Dawkins et al have towards the Christian concept of Intelligent Design. It is a comforting idea to imagine a God who has put together the universe with the precision of a watchmaker so as to ensure it fuctions efficiently, but it just doesn't fit the observable facts of our evolutionary world the scientists argue. There are too many flaws and random elements in nature which suggest if there was a God behind creation he was more of 'A Blind Watchmaker' to quote the title of one of Dawkins books. So in her final chapter Tina Beattie proposes a model for God drawn from the world of the arts. She suggests God may interact with His creation rather like the way an author or indeed any creative artist shapes their material. The artistic process for any actor, choreographer, composer, writer etc is a far more mysterious, organic one than that of 'intelligent design.' There may be an end in view but the more sensitive artist soon discovers that their material has a life of its own. The characters in the unfolding plot for example take their author, playwright or actor in unexpected directions which are often more interesting than the artist's original intentions. The really creative soul especially the genius is not discouraged by this but instead opens themselves up to the mystery of creativity trusting the often messy process to give birth to beauty. So we might encounter God more authentically with this model in mind and consider how our own artistic creativity could become central to the growth of our faith and humanity since we are made in His image.



I have taught A level Drama and Theatre Studies in one of the largest departments in the country and have established The Space Drama Project in my local Anglican Church in Broadbridge Heath, West Sussex. My aim is both simple and yet extremely complex; to stimulate creativity among the actors I work with whether in drama workshops or rehearsing for a production. By helping to release their creativity they increasingly discover their true selves as artist made in the image of God and give birth to all sorts of wonderously original material capable of moving total strangers to laughter or tears. A huge part of the challenge is nuturing my own creativity, otherwise it's the blind leading the blind or perhaps more accurately the boring leading the bored!! Infact in one of his books on the theatre, the director Peter Brook likens the process of directing actors in a play to a guide leading followers through a long dark tunnel with just a flaming torch to find the way. This analogy evokes the notion of religious faith and in particular words of St. Paul 'Now we see but a poor reflection as in a (dark) mirror' (my italics)



In my own journey as theatre director and as a Christian, I sense that God is teaching me to live and work more spontaneously,to work more blindly or intuitively. There is much resistance to this not least from within my own mind! I want to understand where I'm going, where it's all leading. Similarly those I lead want to pin things down , especially the A' Level students I work with. In the local church there is also an understandable concern to see the project fuilfil certain 'Mission' criteria as a means of outreach to the local community. Yet I have to be careful not to allow these subtle pressures for greater control from within or without to quench the Spirit who blows where she will. So as I rest from a wonderful year of creativity through drama both in my school and local church I think of the God from the book of Genesis who rests after creating the world. Perhaps if he didn't he would be tempted to govern his project in a more systematic way and thus end up with an efficient machine instead of this living installation which we are all such a unique and dynamic part of. In the next chapters of the Genesis narrative His creation does indeed take on a life of its own and God all but tears up the script in the story of the flood. But ultimately He doesn't and discovers that he has to work with his material as it is even to the point of entering His own narrative as Christ and experiencing it from the inside. That is part of the mystery of Christmas. It is a second creation, a second birth, a masterstroke by a genius who is infinately more interesting than an intelligent designer.