Full Circle

It’s exactly a year since I started this series of reflections exploring faith through the arts. The time has come to draw a few conclusions. It’s been a wonderfully creative twelve months for me and those I work with on The Space Project in St. John’s. There’s been the series of Arts Weekends during Lent, the new play about Christina Rossetti, our second annual Arts Festival and the start of rehearsals for “Our Town.” Throughout the year I have found inspiration from exhibitions, live theatre, films, television drama and documentaries, novels, music and poetry-the whole range of arts which so enrich our lives. I have been nurtured too, by that hidden life of personal devotion and the rhythm of corporate worship in my church across the road pulsing steadily through the changing seasons in Sussex. All this is of course a gracious gift which repays us a thousand fold whatever we invest in it. It’s also nearly the end of the first decade of the new millennium. Ten years ago I was approaching forty and languishing in mid-life despair. I remember listening to the celebrations along the Thames on the radio and wondering somewhat dramatically if I would survive much longer into the new era. A couple of years later The Space Project was born out of that time of darkness and now, after half a dozen years of being at the forefront of St. John’s outreach to the wider community, it has been established as a registered charity. Looking back I recognize that crisis was a calling to release the powerful surge of creativity in myself and others especially within the context of the local church. In his eloquent and moving memoir, “Opening Doors and Windows,” the theatre director and Anglican minister James Roose-Evans writes, ‘Creativity, like a stream or river, will always find its outlets.’ Yet somehow the stream gets silted up both in individuals and institutions and the process of releasing the flow can be painful. In the same chapter of the book the author observes, ‘True creativity is closely linked with the inner spiritual life of each person. Yet strangely this is an area in which the Church in general shows little interest.’ I think this is true of our society generally. So many of my sixth-formers complain that education seems to have become about ticking boxes, rather than using their own imagination. So many of my colleagues and friends feel stifled, rather than inspired, by their work-place. This presents the Church of the new millennium with a real opportunity and an exciting challenge. As Roose-Evans goes on to say, ‘the majority of people posses, no matter how unused, real creative and imaginative faculties, so that the question is less one of educating people to appreciate the fine arts than of providing facilities and environments in which they can be and are actively encouraged to use their own creative faculties.’ At key points in its history, the Church has very much fulfilled this brief; the Mystery Plays in the medieval period are an excellent example of how ordinary craftsmen were encouraged and inspired in this way. Today, as the unseemly spectacle of talent contests with their preening panellists and melodramatic process of eliminating competitors threatens to turns us into a nation of couched potatoes, the Local Church can be the provider of these facilities and environments where true creativity and spirituality can flourish. This has certainly been my experience working on the Space Project in recent years. Let me leave you with just three examples. Today I was called by my friend Carl as he was doing his pub-rounds for Carlsberg in the lorry through the ice and snow. ‘They all need their bleedin’ Christmas booze,’ he moaned down the phone at me. He was calling to check his rehearsal time for a sketch for our Carol Service on Sunday. He then proceeded to recite his duologue down the phone with his work-mate gingerly standing in for our other actor. I think being part of the Space Drama Company keeps Carl sane although he continues to struggle with the Sunday services at the church. More significantly his creativity and larger than life personality are finding an outlet through St. John’s and we are all the richer for it. One of the cast members of “Our Town” Cordy does not go to our church or any other one as far as I know. Her marriage ended recently so I suppose this must be a very challenging phase of life for her. I met her at a dinner party some months ago and she told me that when she was young she really wanted to go to Drama School, but couldn’t pluck up the courage to give it a try. She now works on the other side of the camera in Television. I invited her to play a central role in the play which she remembered loving many years ago. She is coming on fine in rehearsals and proving to be one of the warmest, most encouraging members of our company. She may or may not start coming to the church but in reality she is already a big part of it. A man called Jon, a relatively new member of the congregation has started coming to ‘Open Space’ this year, a monthly workshop exploring faith through the arts. Jon is a builder by trade, but I have been particularly struck by his talent as a writer, as I mentioned in an earlier chapter. At our last meeting I set people the task of writing a short scene for the family service on Christmas Day featuring Mary and Joseph in the stable on the morning after the birth. Our vicar asked if I could provide a brief sketch which illustrated how the provision of food, a bath and fresh clothes for Mary can be seen as a metaphor for the hope of the Christian faith. Within less than twenty minutes Jon had scrawled the following scene which is a fitting climax to this book and will grace our service on Christmas Day. It’s not just a good short-sketch considering how little time it took, it’s also great theology!


Everything You Need - by Jon Ogan

Joseph takes hold of Jesus from Mary trying to take control of the situation

Joseph- Right my little man, let’s get you wrapped up and tucked away so I can sort out your poor Mum. I’ve got some water warming up over the fire, so we can get her cleaned up….

Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine!

Joseph- I’ll get some bread from the pack and some figs. You must eat.

Mary- (Smiling) I’m fine, Joseph.

Joseph- I’ll get my rug. You can sleep on that-at least it’s clean.

Mary- Joseph, I’m fine.

Joseph- How can you be fine? You must be exhausted and ache all over!

Mary- Honestly, Joseph, I’m fine.

Joseph- You must be hungry.

Mary- I’m fine.

Joseph- Surely you want to wash yourself, get cleaned up?

Mary- (Picking up the child) I’m fine Joseph. Stop fussing!

Joseph- Come on, Mary, wash, eat and sleep!

Mary- (Looking at Jesus) I’m fine. He’s everything I need.

Joan Baez

For someone with a passion for the arts and a wife who is a professional violinist I have a rather paltry CD collection. I sometimes wonder how I would fare on a show like Desert Island Discs as I have never been conscious of listening to particular music at key moments of my life. After a burst of enthusiasm in my teens, which had as much to do with keeping up with my friends than a serious engagement with the artist’s work, I lost interest in the Rock and Pop scene and haven’t as yet developed a really discerning appreciation of classical music despite Rachel’s influence. Every so often I feel a vague sense of ‘must try harder’ about all this and go and buy a CD which someone’s recommended but I seem to lack the patience to sit and really listen for any length of time. More recently since taking up singing lessons I have begun to enjoy a range of mainly classical composers like Vaughn-Williams and Roger Quilter and I suppose this is as good a way as any to really engage with music such as this. However, following a fascinating television documentary the other day about the American folk singer and activist Joan Baez, I braved the Christmas crowds to buy her latest CD “The Day After Tomorrow.”

As a musical Philistine I knew very little about Joan Baez before seeing the documentary but I am now in awe of this extraordinary woman. She burst onto the burgeoning folk scene in the late fifties admired by the young Bob Dylan among others with whom she later developed an intense relationship. He was especially impressed by her guitar playing at the time which he tried and failed to emulate, but it is her voice which, as she nears seventy, still cuts through. Watching her on Utube singing some of those great peace anthems of the sixties ( ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Where have All the Flowers Gone,’ ‘We Shall Overcome’) I am struck by the total lack of self-consciousness with which she delivers those heady lyrics. She sings without vocal adornment; her face is equally clear of the strange contortions and mannerisms which performers sometimes adopt to persuade us how much they really mean it. Fifty years on little has changed in her simple yet powerful performance, though she has apparently lost the kind of stage-fright of her youth which left her feeling like she was walking to her execution every time she approached the microphone; how well she did to hide it! I suppose what she possesses as a folk singer is a moral authority without a trace of bigotry or self-adulation. This gives her a directness which transmits the essence of a song straight from her soul to the audience. Her ethical stance as an artist has been with her from the start of her career. It was shaped by her Quaker upbringing (her father was a pacifist) and it was further ignited by listening to Martin Luther King in the early sixties. Since then she has protested and campaigned and sung on behalf of minorities and victims of injustice around the world for half a century and still shows little sign of letting up. She was imprisoned for trying to persuade soldiers to defy the draft for Vietnam in the seventies, but this did little to deter her: ‘I came out a stronger pacifist.’ Recently she approached the vast memorial in Washington to that war and felt a scream of distress welling up from deep within her as she saw the endless list of names inscribed there. It is surely this profound sense of right and wrong which inspires her music. Interestingly she has always sold the most records (she has six Gold Albums) when singing about the issues closest to her heart. One of the most moving moments of the documentary was a piece of footage of her out in Sarajevo in the early nineties during the civil war there. (Baez was invited to do a concert there by Lionel Rosenblat from Refugees International) As she was walking through the war-torn city she witnessed a large man in a tuxedo playing Albinoni’s Adagio on his cello in a public square as a sort of lament over the city. When he finished she embraced him as a kindred spirit and as he got up from his chair she sat down in his place and quite spontaneously began to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ in her own inimitable style. The Catholic theologian Tina Beattie underlines the force of such gestures by artists in a recent book:

“Art has the power to change the world, for great art exerts a different kind of power – not the power of violence and revolution, but the potent vulnerability of imagination and memory, of mourning and hope. Art is powerless in itself, and yet it stands in the path of every destructive and oppressive force. That is why every tyrant and ideologue has sought to silence or control the artistic imagination."

In the Bible, St. Matthew records how Jesus summed up the challenges of following him in his parable of the Sheep and the Goats; to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, refresh the thirsty and take care of the sick. This may be undertaken today more directly by front-line missionaries and activists, but as Baez has shown throughout a life-time as a singer, the artist may do so in less tangible but equally vital ways. For in a world of deprivation and hardship, especially, people hunger and thirst for a beauty which the arts at their best are able to conjure. They long to rediscover through songs and stories and images the freedom, dignity and wholeness which is the essence of their humanity.

Half-way through Advent, in this season of waiting patiently and hopefully for the coming of Christ, I am reminded of the words of the great Gospel song and Civil Rights anthem which Baez sung at Woodstock in 1969.

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day
Oh, I do believe deep in my heart
We shall overcome some day.

Earlier this year she recorded a new version of this anthem with additional Farsi lyrics and posted it on Utube to encourage the people of Iran in their peaceful protest against oppression. Forty years on from Woodstock Joan Baez’s faith in the coming Kingdom is apparently undiminished.

In Praise of Shakespeare

The latest challenge for my monthly book group is to talk about someone who has had a profound influence on our lives. It could be someone living or dead, someone we have actually known personally or encountered through another medium such as literature. My book group is currently made up of half a dozen men in their forties or fifties. It includes a couple of doctors, one of whom is Colin, the former vicar of our church mentioned in the previous chapter, an English teacher, an inventor, and my playwright friend Simon who earns his money as an accountant. After considering a whole host of options I decided it had to be Shakespeare for me.

Like everyone, I encountered Shakespeare at school and then later, when I went to Drama College, I acted in one of his comedies and also a tragedy as part of my training. However, it wasn’t until I was in my late twenties that I first came under his spell. The autumn of 1988 was the low point of my life. My older brother, Adam, had died the summer before, the victim of a brutal mugging by Ladbroke Grove Canal in London. I was an out of work actor then with not much to shout about in my first few years in the business and I was back living with my mother in her small basement flat off the Portobello Road. We had begun to go to the Anglican Church around the corner on Sundays. Adam had been a regular attendee there and it felt the right thing to do though I had long since stopped going to Church after too much compulsory Chapel at Boarding school and the sort of wayward lifestyle in my late teens and twenties which had left me ‘far from home.’ The vicar of St. Peter’s, Bruce, immediately befriended us and one day when he came to visit, suggested I might like to use the beautiful neo-classical Church to put on a play. I assumed he meant with members of the congregation and vaguely imagined something about Noah’s Ark or a Passion play, but he was happy for me to involve whoever I wanted and to do pretty much whatever I liked. I had many actor-friends scattered around London who were ‘resting’ and desperate to be doing something creative regardless of whether I could pay them. I had got to know Twelfth Night at college and realized there were excellent parts for all my friends in this play. I decided I would direct the play as a memorial for Adam and this idea caused such a stir that even the BBC pitched up a few days before opening night to cover the story on their local news programme. The interviewer wondered whether a comedy was quite the right thing to remember the victim of such a brutal death by and I think I said something about Adam having a great sense of humour and of the ridiculous, just like the play. I know he would have found Malvolio’s absurd wooing of Olivia in his yellow stockings a joy! Looking back I think it was an inspired choice. Among its many themes it explores loss and grief and our capacity to overcome them which couldn’t have been more appropriate in the circumstances. However, it’s one thing to have an idea, another to carry it out. I had never directed a play before but frankly the best way to learn is to do it and there is no better material to cut your teeth on than Shakespeare. I remember pouring over my Arden edition of the play sprawled on the shaggy carpet of my mother’s open-plan lounge. I was utterly riveted by the challenge of bringing these words off the page with my cast and I think I said something to her about how I believed I had found my vocation. I wasn’t far wrong. People came from far and near, our past and present to enjoy the play and remember Adam. My father was working at the RSC at the time and brought such stage and screen-luminaries as Brian Glover, Phil Daniels and Colin Welland to see the production. Thanks to an excellent cast culled mainly from my peers at Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, along with the glorious setting of the Church and the enthusiastic support of its members it was a great success. It felt like a rite of passage into the profession with my father, mother, and their friends from the business being so affirming and in a different sense a rite of passage into the life of the Church; the Prodigal had returned! Moreover, I had encountered the writer and the man who was to have such an influence on me in the coming years.

I was watching a programme presented by the philosopher and writer Roger Scroton the other day called, “Why Beauty Matters.” He was discussing the importance of the arts in fulfilling the universal thirst for beauty and emphasizing their redemptive nature, therefore, in a world of pain and suffering. I suppose this is what I encountered through Shakespeare some twenty years ago and continue to discover as I work on his plays as a director, teacher and still occasionally as an actor. His plays are indeed sublime and though they show a world of folly, coarseness and extreme cruelty they also reveal its beauty. The moment at the end of Twelfth Night when Viola sees her twin-brother whom she had supposed drowned is as moving as the finest master-piece by Rembrandt or most lyrical score by Mozart. Their moment of reconciliation is an image of the beautiful mystery of providence and resonates with our longing to find again the lost half of our lives devoured by the ‘blind waves and surges’ of the past. Though I had not lost a twin, I had most certainly lost a brother and so much else of my life by this stage seemed swallowed up by what Hamlet describes as ‘the whips and scorns of time.’

But as well as opening my eyes to beauty, Shakespeare has been my mentor and guide in my life as both artist and pilgrim soul as I’ve made my way in the world since the death of my older brother. For Shakespeare these two roles were surely as indivisible as those twins in Twelfth Night. I like to think his plays and his hugely successful life in the theatre were the creative outworking of a faith which he must surely have inherited from his Catholic father and what a legacy he left behind. Shakespeare experienced Elizabethan life in all its complexity, its contradictions, its joy and sorrow, comedy and tragedy. As a father he lost a child, saw his own father fall from grace, endured the scorn and envy of some of his contemporaries as a young playwright, and suffered the hypocrisy and sometimes vicious cruelty of the reformed Protestant Church. However, rather than be left bewildered or defeated by it all he gave shape and meaning to his experience and held up a mirror to nature for us all to contemplate both virtue and vice. His life in the theatre, at least, was surely a profoundly sensitive response to a Divine vocation which he followed to the end. His plays right up to The Tempest, his last full length play, continually reflect a man with great spiritual authority and integrity. He never became a mouth-piece for a movement or an ideology but rather saw the limitations of any single view-point whether political, religious or philosophical. He used his skills as a dramatist and master of rhetoric to explore the problems of life from the perspective of a whole cast of characters and left the audience space to come to their own conclusions at the end of the play. Many a preacher could learn a trick from this and Shakespeare would certainly have little truck with the sort of fundamentalist, dogmatic religion which has become so wearisome to so many today. In my own journey of faith his complex response to morality, to notions of good and evil explored in his drama have left me very wary of the kind of crude black and white thinking which sometimes passes for Christian truth.

I think what I love most about Shakespeare and what I need to learn most of all from his work, however, is his sheer emotional honesty. I have no idea whether this was a feature of his everyday life and I’m not sure it really matters. I find it a bit tedious when people self-righteously point out that writers such as, say, Dickens was actually horrible to his wife or that Shakespeare supposedly had an affair with the ‘dark lady’ of the sonnets or with the Earl of Southampton as if these allleged moral failings diminished their voice or even discredited their entire body of work. It may be that to have had a tankard of ale in a Southwark Tavern with the bard might have proved a surprisingly dull affair, but he was an artist and we encounter him most fully therefore through his art; here, nothing is held back. In his plays we encounter Shakespeare’s youthful passion through the characters of Romeo and Juliet, his fury at falsehood and corruption in Hamlet, his vulnerability and anguish through Lear and his broken and contrite heart in Prospero in the final speech of The Tempest. Here the actor stands naked before the audience, still in role as the Duke of Milan who has divested himself of his dark magical powers and yet also as the author himself confessing his weakness and need for absolution at the end of his final play.

Now my charms are all o’er thrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own
Which is most feint: now ‘tis true
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not
Since I have my Dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from your hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Such vulnerability, such raw emotional honesty expressed so eloquently is the hallmark of a great soul. I will forever be in debt, like countless others, to the one who blazed a trail for the artist in every soul from every age.

Choral Evensong on Armistice Day

There’s a performance which has been running non-stop for more than three hundred years in some of the most theatrical buildings throughout the world. Its essential script and structure has remained virtually unaltered in that time. It invariably includes ancient poetry dating back as far as the late bronze-age set to some of the most beautiful choral music from the renaissance period up to the present day. Its form encourages active participation from an audience congregated in the most beautiful of settings- and it doesn’t cost a penny. Despite its ancient origins, (the roots of the service come from the early monastic tradition) Choral Evensong seems as relevant to the great concerns of the day as ever. This one will no doubt run and run and indeed such is its continuing popularity that it has been broadcast at least once a week on BBC Radio 3 since 1927.

On Armistice Day this year, the broadcast came from my Diocesan Cathedral, Chichester, although I didn’t catch up with it till the following Sunday when it was repeated at 4 pm. Now I must be honest and confess that this was virtually my first, albeit vicarious, experience of Choral Evensong but I listened to the service partly because it came from Chichester and also since I am becoming increasingly aware of the rich heritage of traditional Anglican forms of worship as I approach fifty. As an artist, and specifically a man of the theatre, I can recognize the irresistible dramatic force of rituals such as these. Acts of worship at their best are like great theatre in so far as they confront us with the reality of the human condition and yet enable us to transcend it, or at least see ourselves in the context of a bigger picture. Recently the news has been full of tragic stories of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Last week the Prime Minister was lambasted by a distraught mother because he wrote what appeared to be a hastily scrawled letter of condolence in which he misspelled her dead son’s name. The government is being hounded by the media for its alleged failure to properly equip and thus protect its troops. Bitter arguments rage back and forth about the rights and wrongs of this war to the point where we are almost at each other’s throats and have forgotten how and why the war in Afghanistan began. It seems our society badly needs to regain a more sober perspective on events and perhaps a humbler one.

Well it certainly worked for me last Sunday as I sat on my bed and tuned into Radio Three as the afternoon light began to fade outside. The sound of the choir singing Purcell’s ‘Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts’ for the introit immediately lifted me out of the vague lethargy and distraction of a typical Sunday afternoon spent at home. As the liturgy began, I remembered I had a copy of The Book of Common Prayer and so I could follow the familiar general confession which reminds us that ‘we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep’ and ‘followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.’ (Food for thought indeed!) I was especially struck by the chanting of the psalms which I also managed to follow in my edition of the prayer book. Singing through The Book of Psalms is at the heart of Choral Evensong and goes back to the earliest forms of Christian worship. As I suggested earlier, many of these religious poems were written as early as the end of the Bronze Age and were probably in many cases re-workings of even more ancient Canaanite or Egyptian texts. The psalms remind us that war has been with us since the dawn of civilization and that humanity has from the earliest times sought deliverance and hope by reciting prayers and hymns to God or gods with words which remain as poignant as ever: ‘O be thou our help in trouble, for vain is the help of man.’(Psalm 60) The Old Testament reading in the service was from the Book of Micah in which the prophet looks to ‘the last days’ and famously declares: ‘And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.’ (Chapter 4) One of the great things about Evensong is the absence of a sermon and so the full force of ancient prophetic words like this are left to speak for themselves. We are made to wonder at the mysterious authority of such profound utterance. After the reading of the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew which includes Christ’s timely encouragement, ‘blessed are the peacemakers,’ the choir sung an anthem by Maurice Greene based around some verses from Psalm 39: ‘Lord, Let me Know Mine End.’ This beautiful setting by the English composer gently reminds us of our mortality and teaches us to reflect deeply on this reality. How many of the man-made catastrophes throughout the ages such as war erupt when we lose touch with the ground of our being and imagine ourselves as immortal gods? The service concluded with the Hymn, ‘All My Hope on God is Founded.’ Seeing in my copy of the Radio Times that this was coming up, I quickly dug out a hymn book from another room so I could join in with the congregation. Both the music and the words are wonderfully transcendent and full of hope whilst remaining utterly realistic about the perennial failings of every human society. For me and no doubt many others that Sunday, and indeed the previous Armistice Day, this glorious hymn together with the rest of the service put the world to rights, at least for the time being:

Pride of man and earthly glory,
sword and crown betray his trust;
what with care and toil he buildeth,
tower and temple, fall to dust .
but God’s pow’r,
hour by hour,
is my temple and my tower.

End Game at Advent

It’s early November now and the Christian year is coming to a close with Advent just a few weeks away. The mist this morning shrouded all but the essential details of my route as I ferried my wife and kids to their respective schools. It’s strange how such a grey haze devoid of colour and the intricate forms of the landscape focuses the mind on what really matters. The cherry trees outside my window are stripped to just a few tattered leaves hanging limply from their spindly branches. The trees’ dark structure is etched against the pale sky now the fog has cleared and I think back to springtime when they were so fleetingly in bloom. On Friday we took the students at my school to see “End Game” in the West End. The play starring Mark Rylance and Simon Mc Burney was written by arguably the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett. Some people find Beckett’s plays either incomprehensible or so utterly bleak that they have little stomach or patience for them. I suspect many Christians would bridle at their apparent nihilism. In his most famous play, “Waiting for Godot” one of the characters makes the following observation about humanity: ‘They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.’ However, as this magnificent production of one of his other great works demonstrated, Beckett’s perception of the human condition is so brilliantly illuminated because it is invariably pared to the bare bones by this master craftsman of dramatic technique.

In End Game a tyrannical old rogue Hamm sits in a bare room, shrouded by grey light. He is unable to stand and his useless legs dangle impotently just above the floor. There are two high windows in this cell which, so we are informed, look out on one side to the earth and on the other to the ocean. His aged parents live in two metal ashbins placed side by side at the front of the stage. We only ever see their drawn faces peeping out and spindly fingers feebly gripping the rim of the bins like animals in a cage. Hamm lords it over them and his sad clown of a servant Clov. This pathetic figure is apparently unable to sit down thus heightening the anguish of the daily trial of serving his master. Hamm summons his servant from an off-stage kitchen by blasting his shrill whistle and he perceives their life together as a game which must be played to its bitter end; hence the title. On one level Beckett exploits these surreal elements to create some familiar comic routines based around clowning and vaudeville acts involving age-old conflicts between masters and servants; but he also uses them as a metaphor for how life can so often feel for many people today. The old may identify with, and even laugh at, the image of life reduced to living in a dustbin, waiting to be fed and hoping to die; old peoples homes can sometimes seem little more than this. Those of us who seem to have spent our lives going through the same predictable routines at work and at home simply to keep a roof over our heads will surely understand Clov’s maddening frustration as he endlessly carries out his master’s bidding. How many of us sit in dreary meetings wondering what on earth we’re doing as we work through apparently unchanging agendas that never seem to change anything. Hamm’s furious, impotent ranting and absurd posturing are hysterically funny in Mark Rylance’s virtuoso performance but they are also perhaps a fair, if somewhat heightened, reflection of our own vainglorious existence emphasizing our futile quest to assert control over our fellow man and the world around us. The writer of Ecclesiastes in the Bible would have recognized Beckett’s world all too clearly. Indeed the first lines of this treatise on the human condition could have been written by Beckett himself: ‘“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”’ The book continues in words akin to those quoted from “Waiting for Godot” earlier: ‘Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb, and as he comes so he departs. He takes nothing from his labour that he can carry in his hand.”
Both Beckett and the Biblical scribe seem to take a perverse pleasure in using their poetic vision to shatter our fanciful illusions of the neat and ordered ‘picket-fence’ existence we are inclined to take refuge behind. However, we can choose to respond to Beckett’s bleak comedy either positively or negatively. We may, rather like the characters in his plays, remain stubbornly entrenched in our false existence, 'waiting for Godot' or playing the same old games over and over again. More positively we may allow his shocking, brutal humour to wake us up from our torpor and begin in us the work of redemption. Advent is also a wake up call. It reminds us what is essential; the birth of Christ and his imminent return. It challenges us to wait in the darkness of winter for the light of Christ to dawn. At Worth Abbey, the Benedictine monastery just down the road from me in West Sussex, the monks keep their walls free of decorations till Christmas Eve. This keeps them focused on the essence of their vocation which is to make room in their lives for what really matters. We would do well, this Advent, to do the same.

The Road

An excellent English Literature teacher at my school sometimes gives me a tip for a good read, especially near the start of a holiday. Her latest recommendation was The Road by Cormac Mc Carthy and I was not disappointed with her suggestion, polishing it off in virtually one sitting during the half-term break. This winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 tells a story of Biblical proportions about a father and son who have survived some unspecified cataclysmic event that has reduced America and possibly most of the world to little more than dust and ashes. We soon discover that within this shrivelled landscape, human society has been stripped of any veneer of civilization and thus sinister gangs of cannibals roam the scorched woods and wasted cities. The freezing winter is beginning to bite, and father and son must move south to the sea to have any chance of survival. Their life on the road becomes a primal quest for food, shelter, and personal safety, though beyond this they both hunger for hope and search for meaning to sustain them. The boy constantly seeks for reassurance that they will ultimately be met by goodness, and tries to internalize the mantra his father has taught him that they must ‘carry the fire.’ On this level, the story is universal, but it has touched a particular nerve today as the notion of a ruined earth, either through nuclear annihilation or global warming, increasingly haunts us. Indeed British environmental campaigner, George Monbiot was so struck by the book that he declared that Cormac Mc Carthy was one of fifty people who could yet, save the planet. He went onto praise the book with words which affirm the power of the arts to transform our society:

“It contains no graphs, no tables, no facts, figures, warnings, predictions or even arguments. Nor does it carry a single dreary sentence, which, sadly, distinguishes it from most environmental literature. It is a novel, first published a year ago, and it will change the way you see the world."

It has now been released as a feature film, which will hopefully ensure that Mc Carthy’s dystopian vision challenges a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic, although inevitably much of the savage beauty of the writer’s prose will inevitably be lost in the screen version. Disturbing images have become such common currency for most of us today in our media culture that perhaps we need more than ever the power of language to open our eyes to see the world afresh and shake us out of our complacency. I wonder if any cinematic shot will evoke the horror of post-acopaclyptic cities and their inhabitants quite like this description:

“The long concrete sweeps of the interstate exchanges like the ruins of a vast funhouse against the distant murk….The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bog-folk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth. They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for all their shoes were long since stolen.”

Global Warming and the environment is the burning (sorry!) issue of the day and thankfully, the Church has begun to speak urgently about the problem along with many others. Archbishop Rowan Williams has surely one of the more resonant voices for this and many other contemporary debates and he spoke powerfully at a lecture in Southwark Cathedral recently. Like Mc McCarthy, Williams sees the connection between the gradual destruction of our planet and the increasing degradation of our humanity, but rather than pressing the panic button he urges us to consider what we have lost in our reckless plundering of the earth’s resources and how we can work to restore it:

“Many of the things which have moved us to towards ecological disaster have been distortions in our sense of who and what we are, and their overall effect has been to isolate us more and more from the reality we are part of. Our response to the crisis needs to be a reality check, a rediscovery of our responsibility for the material world. And this is why the apparently small scale action that changes personal habits and local possibilities is so crucial”

I’m sure Williams is right but as Monbiot has implied it may take the artist in the first instance, rather than the campaigners or clergy, to galvanize us to make that change.

Whisper of God

It’s half-term for children and teachers up and down the country. After seven weeks of assemblies, classes, and extra-curricula activities it’s time for a break. In the drama department of my school, fifty or so sixth-formers will feel they’ve most certainly earned one. At the start of term these A’ Level Theatre Studies students were put into groups of between three to six and set the task of devising an original piece of drama from whatever stimulus their particular teacher chose to give them. Although the pieces were to be short, (the exam board stipulates around five minutes per candidate) this in some ways makes it harder since live theatre generally requires sufficient stage-time for a plot to be teased out or characters to be fully developed if it is to have an impact on an audience. Moreover, the project requires the students to work collaboratively with minimal intervention from the teacher. For both teachers and students this part of the drama syllabus feels designed to drive us all bananas or at least turn us against each other for evermore. The teacher is supposed to merely facilitate, acting as ‘a critical friend.’ In effect this role is akin to parenting stroppy teenagers; the students resent your intrusion when they think they’re working well, and then expect you to bail them out at the last minute when it all goes pear-shaped. Nonetheless it is fascinating to observe the group dynamics of each creative family as the problems of any and every community inevitably surface in each tiny microcosmic unit. There are the pushy leaders who try to seize control from the start, the passive ‘passengers’ who seem indifferent to any kind of creative vision and the earnest negotiators seeking to keep all on board. Having seen both the process and product of this kind of project for the best part of twenty years, I have noticed many common traps the students are ensnared by. Perhaps the most typical is the drive to be wildly experimental above all else. Any kind of conventional scene such as two characters interacting with one another in a recognizable setting is thrown out in favour of the weird and wacky. While one wants to applaud this attempt at originality, such innovation often leave an audience bewildered and thus ultimately disengaged. Moreover, the students obsession with style can mean a lack of substance and the teacher inevitably ends up asking them: ‘yes, but what’s it all supposed to be about?’ As their teacher, you long for them to find and trust their own creative voice rather than pretend to be cleverer than they are.

However, once in a while a group manages to really gel and create a piece of theatre which resonates profoundly with an audience of their peers, parents and the staff. This year two attractive girls and a strapping lad all wearing orange jump suits faced their audience and welcomed them to their unit three devised piece. They then went on to explain their mission:

“It’s not really a play; we haven’t got a set or scenes…it’s just things we think and feel, and things you think and feel.’

Now of course this approach could have been disastrous leaving the audience squirming in their seats at such embarrassing self-indulgence. However, in the ensuing twenty minutes one could sense that strange many-headed monster which fills up an auditorium becoming increaingly inspired and moved by the group's raw honesty expressed through profound and witty visual metaphors together with some fresh and unpretentious dialogue. One of the girls, Jess, pedalled furiously on an exercise bike on the right of the stage observed intently by Max who stood near by. As she pedals she explains:

“ I want to be one of the fishes in the pond…not necessarily a big fish, maybe just a different colour…a lighter colour..no..a brighter colour one with a stripe or a little…a little…a little…spot. Just something different. Because if I had that, then every body would believe in me and see that I can do this. They would look at me and say. ‘look at that fish with the bright stripe…wow!’ And I could just be this fish, you know? Just be me.”

Max then asks her how much further she has to go to get to where she’s aiming for and Jess gets off the bike and measures from the wheel to the edge of the stage and discovers to her despair that she has moved nowhere. “Oh” says Max, with evident concern for her. "Come and take a rest."
The other girl, Betsy hadn’t even scripted her part, but she brillintly improvised a series of monologues addressed to the audience in which she babbled incoherently about things she clearly hoped we would be impressed by: getting boys, bunking off school, ‘crashing’ parties and clubs. At the height of each excitble rant she would suddenly freeze, look at what she was wearing and rapidly exit in horror at her inadequate choice of clothing. The audience found this hysterical, due to Betsy’s delivery and timing and perhaps because we recognized a grotesque image of ourselves through the way we can fall at lightning speed from sky-high confidence to cringing vulnerability . However, by her final entrance at the end of the play, Betsy was only able to make unintelligible noises at the audience like a character from a Samuel Beckett play or The Goons. This again was both farcical and finally moving as she stared out to the auditorium and gingerly confessed, ‘I’ve got nothing to say,’ before quietly asking, ‘ Can I not just be?’ This was intensified further when the other two performers drew alongside Betsy and echoed this final question as the lights slowly faded to a blackout.

It’s always hard to analyse why a piece of art resonates with a particular audience, but in this case it may have had something to do with what I was saying earlier about the striving of so many of this group's peers (present among the audience) to devise a piece of ultra-sophisticated drama throughout the past few weeks. It may also have reflected a recognition of how hollow all our attempts at expression sometimes seem either in art or life: ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ to quote Macbeth at his most despairing. I think, above all the final question 'can I not just be?' reflected a yearning we all felt to let all our strivings cease especially after such a busy few weeks. When the light had gone there was that wonderful silence in which you could feel some deep truth had dawned on us. It was a shame that the recording of a kazoo playing some jaunty circus music cut in so suddenly as I felt the audience wanted to bathe in the darkness and quiet of the theatre for longer before applauding. Nonetheless I left the auditorium exhilarated by the student’s work. All the best art leads us to the silence which brings a deeper realization of the human condition. It is a silence where we can, if we’re open, hear the whisper of God. On reflection, as I begin my half-term break, I think He may have been answering that final petition with a firm but gentle 'Yes!'

Photographic Exhibition

I was beginning to get a little anxious about how we were going to get the best use from our new community hall for the forthcoming annual arts festival at St. John’s. The new academic year was upon us and I had to get the publicity out as the festival happens in mid-October. Last year when the hall had just been completed, it became a very effective exhibition space for local artists. We installed a picture rail in the hall and adjoining meeting rooms allowing us to hang an extensive exhibition including a range of subject-matter, styles and media. This not only complimented the other events, such as the concerts and dramatic production I had directed, but helped create a very impressive foyer for these performances. It was such a success that we put in some architectural spotlights later in the year when we held a second exhibition during Lent. However exhibitions take some organizing and I do not have a long list of contacts of local artists. I decided somewhat impulsively that perhaps we should have a photographic exhibition instead. I know very little about photography, nor what an exhibition on this scale might involve. However, churches are wonderful sources for net-working and after a couple of emails I had my man! Jeremy has been on the fringes of the church for a number of years, but I have always found him to be something of a jack of all trades who has come to the rescue when we have needed help with sound or lighting for a number of shows. He is also a very gifted amateur photographer and one of those characters who makes things happen and ensures they are done with flair. It so happens that Jeremy has a very impressive website of his work including travel photography, flora and fauna and an inspiring series of more abstract work. We sat down over coffee with another mover and shaker from the church and began to plot! We discovered there were a few other excellent photographers among the congregation including a young graduate who was studying in Brighton. She had a ready-made display of fascinating portraiture to contribute from her AS photography course at the local sixth-form college. In addition, Jeremy had the idea of including a digital display projected onto a large screen in one of the meeting rooms. We decided to invite anyone from the congregation and their friends to email their best shots to Jeremy so he could create a slide-show which could loop round and round throughout the weekend. Finally, we borrowed an extensive set of screens from the local council which meant we could mount smaller prints where they could be encountered at closer proximity and which would give the hall space a sort of café atmosphere. A private view was held earlier in the week and Jeremy and the graduate Alex Best were interviewed about their work with additional questions coming from the floor.

The exhibition was enjoyed by many people from the local community including the three hundred or so folk who had come to the performances over the weekend. There were several, like me, who were drawn into the side-room to enjoy the digital display. We had put sofas and soft chairs in front of the screen creating the feel of an intimate cinema. It became, moreover, a sanctuary from the main hall with the giant images slowly and silently dissolving every five seconds or so; it also, for me at least, became a form of prayer. The loop took the best part of an hour and I was surprised that I had stayed the course, as I do not make a habit of looking at still images for any length of time. Yet I found myself to be strangely energised by the end of the show. I had been transported around the world from Sussex, to Nepal, Antarctica, the Falklands, Cape Town and many other foreign lands. I had laughed at the silly posturing of penguins, gasped at the power and majesty of landscapes, identified with the deep-set, soulful expressions of venerable Nepalese natives. As I reflected on the slide-show in the following week I was able to identify some of the elements that had contributed to the spiritual dimensions of the experience. Each image reflected in some way a moment of thoughtful response from human beings to God’s endless revelation of the fascinating complexity and diversity of life through all which surrounds us. Taking the photograph involved a slowing down and waiting, a contemplation of an image, finding an interesting angle on it and a way of framing the picture. It was also a way of remembering, appreciating, and perhaps sharing moments of significance or meaning along our pilgrimage through life. I was talking with one of the photography teachers at our school the other day and he remarked that a photograph often tells you as much about the person taking it as their subject. In that case each image was potentially a moment of self-revelation and I suppose that is partly why photography at its best is an art form capable of moving us very powerfully. Thomas Merton, one of the great mystics of the twentieth century was a very keen and expert photographer and it was central to his profound, contemplative spirituality. Although Jeremy has, as I said, been on the fringes of the Church he had taught us much through this exhibition. Perhaps it is those on the edge of things who often find the most interesting angle. That is certainly true for the photographer and the artist in general.

Young Musicians Showcase

Just half an hour before the Young Musicians Showcase, the final event at our weekend arts festival, my 14 year old daughter Charlotte popped her head around the living room door. Her face was pale and her eyes were glistening: ‘Mr Head has died,’ she said. The head of History at the girl’s comprehensive had been involved in a terrible car crash earlier that week and we knew his prospects were grim. Nonetheless, it was still a horrible shock for Charlotte and her sister Katy to receive the email that confirmed their fears. I was with some new friends when she told me this news and Charlotte and Katy needed to get over to the church to tune up for the concert. I mumbled something about saying a prayer before the event started but wasn’t sure this was quite appropriate. One of the performers in the showcase had thought up a much better idea. When it was her turn to play, seventeen year old Lorna Nye took to the stage with her cello, sat down and said: ‘I’d like to dedicate this to Stephen Head.’ She then proceeded to play “Elegie” by Faure as she had rehearsed. Lorna had been a pupil at Tanbridge House School until a year ago and together with many pupils and staff from the school held him in very high regard. Like all the musicians who played that afternoon Lorna played with great technique and sensitivity, but her dedication before her piece added a whole extra dimension to the showcase.

Earlier that morning I had spoken at our thanksgiving service for the arts festival. My theme was the importance of festivals for the flourishing of a community. I read the passage from the Book of Revelation which describes all creation gathered around the throne of God singing the words which inspired one of the great choruses from Handel’s Messiah. ‘Worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honour and glory and blessing!’ I asked the congregation to consider this eschatological scene as a magnificent arts festival just like the one we had been enjoying over the weekend. I highlighted the great tradition of festivals and celebrations recorded in the Bible from the inauguration of Passover which annually marked the Israelites deliverance from slavery in Egypt, to the regular celebration of the Eucharist in the early Church. I suppose I was asserting that the language and rituals of celebration were the default position for Christians and people of faith in good times and bad. This is not to escape from grim reality or live indulgently but to remember the eternal perspective which the passage in Revelation offers: the wonder, mystery and above all sacredness of life calls forth unceasing praise and celebration from all living things over and above all else. Furthermore, I suggested that the arts are a God-given language to enable us to celebrate appropriately. From the building of the Tabernacle in the desert, and onward throughout the ages in the Judeo-Christian tradition, artists and craftsmen have used their gifts to lead their religious community in celebration and festivity or lament and mourning. We need poets, composers and performers to help us to access and release the intensity of thought and feeling within us in order to express ourselves eloquently before God especially corporately.

The other point about festivals and celebrations I made that morning was that they provided a forum for initiating younger members into the rites and traditions of the adult community. According to the book of Deuteronomy, Moses instructed the fledgling Israelite community to teach their children all the laws that the Lord God had commanded them to follow. One of the most effective ways of doing this would be through the rituals of annual festivals and celebrations. In the service that morning, the worship was led by an all-age orchestra. Lads of twelve or so stood on the rostra from last night’s performance playing brass instruments of various kinds. Girls of a similar age and younger sat in the string section next to seasoned musicians from the congregation. We are too quick to segregate children off from the adult community. There is a place for Sunday school and any other kind of schools for that matter, but we should look for opportunities for children to participate in and even lead all age community events such as this. Lorna’s gesture later that day at the concert was a perfect example of just how much they can contribute. Through her simple and seemingly spontaneous words and subsequent playing of “Elegie” Lorna dignified and magnified the Young Musicians Showcase and affirmed that even in the bleakest circumstances we may continue to celebrate. Moreover the children raised £165 from the concert which will be donated to projects in the developing world. I’m not sure what impact Lorna’s words had on my daughters or the other children at the concert, but I imagine they gave them a sense that they can ultimately respond with eloquence to whatever life throws at them. There are few lessons more important than that.

The Messiah Experience

A bright-eyed ‘evangelist’ called Gareth Malone has been winning over the most unlikely devotees to the ‘gospel' of community singing over the past few years in front of TV audiences of millions. He’s ventured into a boys comprehensive in Leicestershire, a run-down estate in South Oxhey, Hertfordshire persuading the most reluctant singers to join with their peers and discover the power of choral song. It’s made compulsive viewing as the cameras have recorded Gareth’s determination to help shuffling, self-conscious school-boys find their voice as they’ve rehearsed for the big concert at the Albert Hall. In the last series it was particularly moving to witness members of his choir from South Oxhey reduced to tears of pride and joy as they listened to their recording of a Beatles song at Abbey Road studios. I suppose what these ordinary folk have discovered, is how powerfully expressive they can be when they come together as one and respond to the inspirational guidance of a great leader such as the plucky young Gareth. The people of South Oxhey had apparently felt themselves to be a pretty worthless and insignificant lot up till then, but Gareth’s idea of staging an open-air concert on their vast common, galvanized them to work together to ensure it was a success. Perhaps the series has proved so moving because a huge choir of all ages and backgrounds like this is such a potent metaphor for the potential of a community when it is governed with passion, wisdom, and sensitivity. This is made all the more poignant at a time when so many people feel increasingly alienated from a society led by politicians who fiddle their expenses, or bankers and businesses that drive the nation to the brink of economic collapse through insatiable avarice.

In our own small way we have been following Gareth’s example at St. John’s Church as we have prepared for our second annual arts festival in Broadbridge Heath, West Sussex. (A Space for the Arts). On Saturday 10th October we will present “The Messiah Experience” in the church. This will feature a selection of Handel’s music from his great Oratorio sung by a choir pulled together from the local congregation including one or two professionals who have sung at Glyndebourne alongside several, including myself, for whom the whole choral tradition with its weird vocal warm ups and endless note-bashing is still a relatively novel experience. We will be joined on the platform by a community gospel choir largely drawn from the Catholic church in nearby Horsham. They will be singing funkier contemporary settings of the classic libretto accompanied by a band formed from the local community and led by a dynamic singer from our congregation who has much experience working with community choirs of all ages. In more recent rehearsals we have warmed up together at the start of the evening and reunited at the end to perform a little of what we have been rehearsing throughout the session to one another. Its great to encounter a whole new group of people through the immediacy of song rather than the tedium of social niceties. Anglicans have fused with Catholics, classically trained musicians with Gospel singers.
I am singing bass in the three songs the classical choir are offering including the rousing “Glory to God” and triumphal “The Hallelujah Chorus.” Its been fascinating to experience such familiar pieces being deconstructed by an excellent musician from Horsham, as she’s guided each section of the choir through their parts. Aside from getting on top of the melodies and timing the entries of your part (while others are singing something totally different) there’s the challenge of forming and placing the precise vowel-sounds which create the resonance Handel was after. The process is really painstaking initially and you wonder if you will ever master it individually, let alone corporately. It’s wonderful when reinforcements arrive unexpectedly to bolster your section. In an early rehearsal three novice choristers were struggling with our bass line in “Glory to God” when Alex, a doctor, pitched up after a long day at work. This experienced and confident singer instantly transformed us as we clustered around him like tiny ducklings following mother! It’s truly magical when each section has mastered their part and you put it all together. You’re able to hold your own line and sing it with abandon whilst hearing the whole score swirling all around you as if you are caught up in the air with the angels on that first Christmas Eve.
It’s 250 years since Handel’s death. He died just five months before his Oratorio was first performed in a provincial church like ours (though considerably larger). Up till then “The Messiah” had mainly been performed in theatres and concert halls. That first performance in 1759 in a church in Leicestershire was also part of a festival organized by the local congregation. It cost five shillings and attracted two thousand people, though the rector estimated that around twenty-five thousand folk from the surrounding countryside jammed the roads into town eager to be part of the festival in some way. Accommodation over the weekend was so scarce that the Earl of Devonshire had to take a room with the local tanner. Since then The Messiah or parts of it at least have been sung by church and community choirs of varying standards all over the world proclaiming “good news” to generation after generation in “The Hallelujah Chorus.” We will do well to get 200 into our much smaller provincial church at a cost of £10 a ticket (not a bad increase considering inflation over a quarter of a millennium). All profits will be ploughed into our newly formed Space Arts Trust ensuring we can continue to pay the odd soloist from Glyndebourne and professional instrumentalists to make sure we do justice to works such as this for many years to come.

Back to School

As every parent knows, September and the start of the new academic year is a shock to the system, especially if both parents are teachers themselves. After several weeks of lying in of a morning, it’s back into the old routine; up with the lark to make sandwiches, get breakfast on the table and in our case chivvy the girls to do an hour of music practice before they leave for school. As I write this, I can hear Charlotte’s moody ‘Moonlight Sonata’ on the piano fighting Katy’s wailing violin from the adjoining room. Though they don’t always appreciate it, they’re fortunate to have a mother who can dart from one place to the other to keep them at it.

Like most Christian parents, Rachel and I have tried to encourage the girls to squeeze in a short time of prayer and reflection to the start of the day, but to be honest that has often been a struggle. One faithful God-parent has sent Bible notes from time to time, but Charlotte has rarely incorporated them into her daily life. We’ve also tried to persuade them to read good literature since they were old enough to do so for themselves, and we’ve certainly had more success over the years with this campaign. However, the telly and the computer are always a bigger draw after a long day at school for obvious reasons.

Nonetheless, in the last six months we have found a way of killing two birds with one stone! It began by reading a chapter or so of the Bible at the breakfast table. This was endured rather than enjoyed, to be honest, until I began reading them an excellent adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress by children’s author Geraldine McCaughrean. It’s an excellently written and beautifully illustrated abridgement of Bunyan’s original novel about Christian’s quest for the Celestial City and it has helped us to establish breakfast reflections as a permanent feature through reading a short passage from a novel each day.

Since then we have read ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Animal Farm,’ but the most popular by far has been ‘To Kill a Mocking Bird’ by Harper Lee. Was there ever a better book to impart the essence of Christian values to children, or maybe even more so to adults? Indeed, in the novel we see very clearly the tragic ignorance of the adult community through the eyes of eight year old Scout as she learns the facts of life from her wise and humane father, Atticus. This quietly heroic lawyer stands against the prejudice of a whole town to defend the Negro, Tom Robinson against charges of rape, but beyond that he gently but firmly combats his children’s innate impulse to dismiss others they have as yet barely understood. Toward the end of the story Scout, the narrator, sums up her father’s philosophy: “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really knew a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.” However, good novels like all the best art don’t impart values by preaching, but by enabling just what Atticus exhorts his children to do; they get us to see a vivid picture of the world through the multiple perspectives of their cast of characters and thus to recognize how complex morality can be. Through identifying and empathizing with a range of characters, we perhaps become more forgiving of ourselves and others. Above all good novels are able to transform us through stimulating our imagination as we construct the writer’s world through the building blocks of their language.

So for now the Bible has been left on the shelf at breakfast time, as we work through some modern classics. Yet, in truth, this sacred book is really a whole library of novels in itself, interspersed with much poetry (liturgical and prophetic), proverbial wisdom, a sequence of letters, and that strange apocalyptic work which rounds off the entire body of literature in the cannon. In my own times of reflection, I have begun to read ‘The David Story,’ Robert Alter’s acclaimed translation of the two books of Samuel in the Old Testament which tell the epic story of King David’s rise to power in Israel around 1,000 BC. In his introduction Alter encourages the reader to regard the telling of the story in much the same way as one would approach one of Shakespeare’s great history plays. In other words we should avoid the mistake of seeing them just as a chronicling of events from the life of King David in order to preserve a meticulous record of Israel’s history, but rather recognize the great literary technique employed to draw the reader into the intriguing world of court life in Israel at the time, and above all the inner lives of the protagonists. This craft of story-telling he argues enables us to explore the profound political and spiritual themes which interested the writer and to place ourselves in the shoes of the key players like Saul, Samuel, David and so forth. Moreover, some of the episodes like the slaying of Goliath, for example, clearly draw on universal narrative features such as the idea of an unknown warrior stepping up to deliver a King and his subjects from a monster in response to the reward of a princess. This literary model was later used in many of the folkloric tales of European literature. In literary terms the towering figure of Goliath takes on the symbolic significance of the gigantic obstacles we often face to put our faith in the living God. The figure of David who discards the borrowed armour from his King reminds us that “the Lord does not save by sword and spear,” but through our trust in his providence. In the same way Shakespeare’s dramatization of the battle of Agincourt may have taken some license with history, but through his characterization of ‘King Harry’ in the play, he reveals universal truths of the human condition which teach us much the same message as that of the Goliath narrative. Discussing the book of Samuel in his introduction, Alter states’ “the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of events through allusion, metaphor and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it.”

The vicar of my local church recently lamented the Biblical illiteracy of contemporary Western culture. I think this is partly because the Church has unwittingly turned one of the great literary masterpieces of all time into something it was never intended to be; a rather dry book of rules. Until we recover the magnificent literary dimensions of the Bible in the way Alter suggests my girls will perhaps opt to leave it on the shelf to gather dust. In the meantime we will shortly move onto another American classic, at breakfast: ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’

Greenbelt

For my family, like many others who make the annual pilgrimage to the Cheltenham racecourse at the end of August, The Greenbelt Festival is one of the high-points of the year. As a teacher whose life is structured by the academic year, it comes at just the right time as I take a deep breath before plunging into the furious current of the new school curriculum. It is an extraordinary event which includes a breath-taking range of literary and arts events for all ages, talks on hot topics from climate-change to the Palestinian occupation, to sexuality and spirituality. It exists above all to explore the relationship between faith, the arts and social justice and thus nurture the spirituality of thousands of Christians year after year who participate. This was the 36th festival in fact. The Greenbelt experience was beautifully encapsulated in an article by one of this year’s key contributors Andy Tate, a lecturer from Lancaster University. “ For an inveterate chatter-box like me, the plethora of opportunities to drink tea and gabble endlessly about music, books and ideas is very heaven…Greenbelt has always existed on ‘the dangerous edge of things.’. it continues to wrestle with issues of faith and justice and to recognize that good questions are more important than easy answers.”

I am invariably challenged and inspired by the many great speakers who are invited to Greenbelt such as the late, great John O’ Donohue, an Irish poet and mystic who wrote the best-selling Anam Cara. I remember lolling on the grass and laughing in the sunshine as he held-forth in that inimitable Celtic brogue a couple of years ago. This time, however I was struck more than ever with the thought that no amount of discussion or analysis of spirituality and the arts can match the thing itself. There is, I suppose, that moment when we need to stop our chatter, and open our spirits to something more sublime if we are to enter deeply into the presence of the living God. The arts at their best can be for us at such times a form of prayer leading us like Moses up the mountain into “the cloud of unknowing.” This is the place where the air is somehow thinner, our breathing changes, and wonder is stirred as we see the world with fresh eyes. There were three arts events at Greenbelt this year which had something of this effect on me drawing me into what the festival organisers poetically termed ‘the long now.’

On Saturday morning we all went to see No Nonsense Theatre Company’s dramatization of the Old Testament story of Ruth which is about an old woman’s return to her homeland in a time of famine. This innovative drama group had developed their initial ideas for this production through a series of work-shops with economic migrants in the north-west of England. Since the company wanted to keep the play as accessible as possible for these women who had contributed their ideas during the planning stages, they told the story using masks and puppets against an evocative recording of middle-eastern music especially composed for the production. The masks like all the design elements of the show were beautifully crafted to bring the world of the characters vividly alive. Masks distil the essence of a stage character just as a painting does, by capturing a fundamental attitude in the features of the mask which is then heightened through the physicality of the actor. So, far example, the essential dignity and kindness of Boaz, the farmer who feeds and finally marries Ruth at the end of the story, was graphically illustrated in a way that goes far beyond words through the wide set features of the mask and the upright, rooted posture of the actor. I was struck as I looked round the all-age audience how attentively the young children were following really poignant moments in the drama. Before the Reformation and the Protestant Church’s preoccupation with The Word of God, the so-called common folk would engage with the stories of the Bible through the frescos on the walls of their places of worship. Sometimes when we strip away words we behold the beauty of human gestures as if for the first time and the meaning of the story comes into fresh focus. When Ruth silently receives a small sack of grain from Boaz after she has scrabbled in vain for the gleanings in his field, she notices there are some words embroidered across it in black letters. As the masked face angles to read them we see they spell KINDNESS. Nothing more needed to be said.

By Sunday afternoon, I was beginning to feel somewhat dizzy through the combination of the crowds of festival-goers, intense seminars and the constant noise that is an inevitable part of Greenbelt. It was time to seek sanctuary in one of the rooms in the Grandstand set aside for an exhibition called ‘Visionaries’-working in the margins. This was put together for the festival by Wallspace who run an independent gallery in the 18th century church of All Hallows on the Wall in London. Visionaries in this context referred to two kinds of work; that of the dreamer who attempts to depict another form of perceived reality in parallel with the material, everyday world and secondly, a more prophetic vision, a necessary critique of life and institutions as they are, in favour of a vision of how they might be or should be. As I began to look at the paintings I began to slow down. I realized I needed to forget about the time-table of seminars which animated the crowds below and that I had to switch-off whichever side of the brain is activated by theological conundrums. I needed to awaken to the language of colour, line and form. What a relief! I was also aware how I was inclined to systematically work my way through the gallery as though reading a book from cover to cover, or making my way to the local store for a pint of milk. This doesn’t really make much sense in a gallery since each painting is a world in itself inviting us to lose ourselves within its frame and leave behind our linear lives with their notion of getting things done. Would it really matter if I only beheld one painting for the rest of the afternoon if it so captivated me? As I yielded to process of contemplation I was wonderfully refreshed by the exhibition though I sense I have much to learn about appreciating the spiritual power of the visual arts. Looking now at a postcard of one of the paintings from the exhibition, ‘Downland Discourse’ (above) I am aware how the artist, Noel White, invites the spectator to turn away from the devilish world of wild, frenzied activity and walk instead the winding sun-lit path in the company of the iconic saint on the left. At first glance the painting seems rather simplistic with the crude division of the landscape into colour and black and white. However, the saint is dressed in the same grey colour as the demonic world on the right of the image, whereas the devil tones in with the colourful side of the painting. The man in the middle who we are presumably asked to identify with, is drawn initially toward the seductive figure of the devil, but the artist has opened a window, as it were, for us to perceive the darkness and danger of what the demon promises so theatrically . The muted figure of the saint does not wave his arms around but walks quietly by our side. If we can pull ourselves away from the dazzling demon on our right shoulder, we will find a glorious paradise of rest and renewal symbolized by the leaping gazelles, embracing couple and bird in flight across the green meadows. The painting is in fact an icon, calling us to prayer.

Late on Sunday evening I took our tired girls to listen to their Mum playing selections from the work of one of the great spiritual composers of our time, Sir John Tavener with the excellent Greenbelt orchestra assembled by Harry Napier and conducted by the admirable Scott Stroman. Tavener’s music is inspired by the theology and liturgical traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church which he joined in the late seventies. The concert was staged in one of the vast conference halls from which all the seats had been removed which meant that many of the audience could stretch out on the carpeted floor below the stage. The house lights were dimmed leaving just a pinky glow bouncing off the high ceiling of the hall. This created the appropriate atmosphere of a vigil which many of the selections were originally intended for. For my children the music acted more as a lullaby and they slept through much of their mother’s heroics. Since many of the pieces were in homage to Mary the mother of God, that was perhaps exactly the right response for these worn out girls! The soloist was the cellist Matthew Forbes whose playing and instrument responded beautifully to the intense devotional mood evoked by the score. Perhaps music such as this is the most transcendent of all the arts drawing us beyond words and even images into silence and finally sleep. I left Greenbelt, as ever, ready for another year.

Bible Studies in the Sun

On “Desert Island Discs” guests are allowed to take a copy of the Bible along with their selected music to help them survive as castaways. One suspects that many of them would leave the “good book” to slowly disintegrate at the bottom of their sea-chest while they relived their past through their nostalgic melodies, lounging on their make-shift hammock under the palm trees. For many of the guests of Richmond Holidays, however, exploring the Christian scriptures is at the heart of their Greek island experience over the summer holidays. Rachel and I were thrilled to be invited to lead the evening meetings for guests at the Zefiros Beach Hotel on Samos for two weeks in August, and our girls certainly didn’t complain when we took them too!
During the rest of the day the guests can use the excellent water-front facilities and learn to sail or wind-surf and there are day excursions to key Biblical sites such as the island of Patmos where St. John received the revelation of the apocalypse, or the ancient city of Ephesus where St. Paul established one of the early Christian communities. The aim of the holiday is to provide both spiritual, as well as physical, restoration and to cultivate a rich sense of community among the guests at the hotel.
During the first week, I gave a series of talks on the story of Adam and Eve in the opening book of the Christian scriptures. I wanted to emphasize in particular the stark contrast between God’s essential creativity as he fashions a world and its inhabitants from nothing, and the ultimate struggle of the male and female to emulate this wonderful free-flowing artistry despite being made in the image of their creator. I tried to make a link between the Christian’s ongoing quest to return to God after their exile from Eden with our struggle to tap into our vast creative potential which is embedded within the depths of our being. After each talk, Rachel and I performed short dramatisations I had written based on the Eden narrative, including a speech in which a five hundred year old Adam admits to his mid-life crisis as he looks back on the early days in the garden. For the final talk of that first week I leap-frogged to the end of the Bible to explore God’s second creation, the New Jerusalem, the Holy City, which emerges from the skies at the end of time. Here one finds a community redeemed from the pain of the past and liberated to enjoy at last the fruit from the tree of life which now grows on the banks of the river flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. I suggested that much of the imagery of this passage reflects a community which is inspired by the wonder of creativity which brings healing and wholeness to all. Rachel played Massenet’s “Meditation” after this talk to provide an opportunity for deep reflection on this.
In the second week I gave a sequence of talks on the seven last words from The Cross. I wanted to emphasize just how resonant the most apparently innocuous line such as “I am thirsty” (the fourth ‘word’ Christ uttered) might be for us today. Each evening I finished with one of the sonnets I had written on these words for Good Friday earlier this year. Rachel introduced these with a few bars from Ernest Bloch’s “Abodah” a composition which was written for the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur. The last talk explored Christ’s dying words recorded by St. Luke; “into Your hands I commit my spirit.” I made the point that these words were characteristic of the one who entrusted himself to the unknown from an early age, one who embraced adventure and continually took risks. I emphasised how essential such an attitude was for the artist, too:

“As an artist, whether as a singer or an actor, a writer or director of theatre, I am aware of the frequent blocks and barriers which inhibit the flow of my creative energy. The mind can be terribly censorious, my imagination can be stubbornly sluggish, my body and voice are often tense and less expressive than they might be. To be effective as an artist, I need to continually work to remove these blocks and barriers and that can be quite a technical process. Beyond this, however, it is about taking risks; it is about trusting myself, trusting my material, and yes, ultimately trusting God. As I start each creative venture I can say with Jesus: ‘into Your hands I commit my Spirit.’”

What is true for the artist is also true for the aspiring Saint. Our fear of the unknown, our fear of failure and looking foolish can seriously stunt both our artistic and spiritual growth as we timidly remain within the shallow waters of experience. However, if we can manage to live with our fears and even befriend them, we may learn as Christ did to venture further out and even still the storms. Those of us who got into a dinghy or onto a surf-board over these past few days on Samos discovered something of the literal truth of this, too.
The Bible is indeed an essential item for either the short or long-term castaway. However, it should not be thrown into the trunk as an after-thought, nor read without taking a very deep-breath indeed; for as well as providing comfort for the disturbed, it swill surely disturb the comfortable.

Riding Lights

With the beginning of the holidays at the end of July there is the opportunity for the artistic soul to enrol on creative summer courses. Schools are increasingly finding it difficult to carve out sufficient time in the academic year for extra-curricula plays and concerts, so a residential course in the performing arts elsewhere, can be a really important milestone in a child’s education not to mention an adult’s. Our younger daughter Katy (12), a budding violinist, went to Suffolk for a chamber-music course for string players with Pro-Corda, and our elder daughter Charlotte joined my mother and myself for The Riding Lights Theatre School which takes place in Yorkshire every year. Riding Lights was founded by three graduates in the late seventies. It grew out of the life and mission of St. Michael le Belfrey’s Church presenting punchy, comic sketches on the streets of York and beyond. Since then it has evolved into a highly respected company with its own theatre in the city and a theatre-in-education troupe, Roughshod, who take shows into schools and prisons throughout the year. The summer school is arguably the highpoint of the company’s year as they host around 120 students from 14 to 80 plus who have enrolled on one of the various drama courses on offer. My mother who is 81 was the eldest person this year and like me she had signed up for the “Behind the Lines” course which looks at the crafty art of playwriting. We had also come to perform the one-act play about Christina Rossetti begun on the course the previous year by my friend and colleague Simon Machin. Charlotte had opted for the Riding Lights Express course in which a small group of 14-18 year olds perform an abridged version of a classic text. This year it was to be “Murder in the Cathedral” by T.S. Eliot which dramatizes the martyrdom of Thomas a Beckett using a chorus of women in the style of a Greek Tragedy. So there were three generations of my family at the school and I had a strong sense of things being passed down the line. I’m sure my mother felt it more profoundly still. However, she had not really performed on the stage since her mid-sixties when she brought her excellent career to a premature close somewhat ingloriously by appearing in the “Mousetrap” in the West End. She was as I suggested in an earlier chapter very nervous about playing the poet Christina Rossetti in Simon’s new play “Poison in the Blood,” despite my attempts to defuse the pressure by reminding her it was really just to show-case Simon’s work. The trouble is of course, live performance is, well, live and dangerous and if you freeze or forget your lines there are no safety nets unlike in films were you can simply start again. Some of the greatest actors of the age have fled from stage-work unable to cope with the intense vulnerability of being under the spotlight. The actor has to bare their soul in public and express intense feelings on stage in a way which seems natural and unforced. This ideally require the performer to be very centred and relaxed in spite of the pressure to please the sea of faces peering through the darkness at the brightly lit stage. This is one of the many tough paradoxes for the actor which has taxed practitioners and drama theorists from Stanislavski to the brilliant Polish director Grotowski throughout the last century. Oscars and Oliviers are awarded to a lucky few each year who manage this art with particular flair and integrity on the bigger stages or screens throughout the profession. My mother never won a ‘gong’ in her half a century on the stage, but she has always won praise from critics, colleagues and audiences whether delivering the witty dialogue of Noel Coward or identifying with one of Arthur Miller’s tragic stage characters in plays such as Death of a Salesman.” Acting is certainly a craft one has to work at, but it is first and foremost a gift from God. My mother knew she wanted to act well before she had heard of Stanislavski at RADA. when she felt the force of Joan of Arc’s passionate speeches as a school girl and knew she had found her vocation. Seventy years later she performed the dying poet Rossetti with the same intensity and moved the audience to tears at the Tom Stoppard Theatre in Pocklington. It was a pleasure to share the stage with her. A few days later Charlotte shone through on the same stage in her play and perhaps she will follow her grandmother into the theatre. The best actors must learn to become extremely vulnerable, both in rehearsal and performance, if they are to profoundly touch their audience. Grotowski saw his actors as a kind of priest and understood their performance to be a form of religious sacrifice. The vocations of both priest and performer demand no less than everything over a life-time if they are to be followed with integrity. Neither calling should be heeded lightly although this is easily forgotten in our celebrity culture. I think my mother discovered the truth of this all over again this summer.

The Plucky Publican: Parables on the BBC

There has been much controversy of late concerning the BBC. There were the scandals about the game-show prizes which appeared to have been rigged in some cases, and then more recently there was the outrage at Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand’s crude insensitivity toward actor Andrew Sachs on one of their so-called comedy programmes. Newspapers and the general public have begun to question the integrity of one of the great pillars of the media and entertainment industry. Many bemoan the deluge of reality TV programmes on all stations, and despite the huge choice available through the digital and satellite channels and the sharper high definition pictures as a result of advanced technology, there is a growing disillusionment with the black box in the corner of the lounge. There is, moreover, a concern that the BBC in particular has sold out in order to compete for viewing figures with the commercial channels. Whatever the truth of these allegations, there is no doubt that BBC drama at its best can still profoundly move mass audiences either with lavish period pieces or more gritty contemporary fare.
The first episode of ‘The Street’ starring Bob Hoskins as a plucky landlord who stands up to a local gangster, Miller, was an example of the latter. The play came across as a modern parable about courage, integrity, and parenthood and reminded me of the power of simple story-telling to bring home timeless truths more eloquently than any sermon or lecture by priest or politician. How we need such parables today! Christ was the master of the short story according to the Gospel writers, captivating his large and varied audiences by the Lake of Galilee with stories of good Samaritans, prodigal sons and foolish virgins. In a culture without TV, the internet, or even newspapers his topical tales did much to shape the mind-set of his local community and have since reached millions more across the ages; broadcasting at its best one might say! Of course the power of a story is in the telling as much as the content and Hoskins is a great craftsman of this with a face and voice that are utterly mesmerising. He plays Paddy, a landlord who runs the greyhound pub and his teenage family with the same admirable mix of firm authority and paternalistic care. When he catches a young lad, Callum, smoking in the pub loos, an offence which would cost his pub £5,000, he bars him, as he had another youngster a few weeks before for the same offence. Callum’s Dad the local gangster who pours much of his ill-gotten gain into the pub’s football youth team not to mention the pub itself, asks Paddy to make an exception with his son promising to deal with him at home. Paddy refuses to serve Miller a pint for his son, however, which causes a hush to descend on the noisy crowd around the bar. Miller prides himself on being the hard man of this suburban Manchester community and warns Paddy in front of the whole pub that he will break every bone in his body if he hasn’t changed his mind by tomorrow afternoon. So the landlord is left with a painful dilemma, potentially very painful indeed. Understandably Paddy’s wife wants him to remain in one piece and give in to Miller. On the other hand Paddy’s head-strong son wants to get involved in the fray and threatens to attack Callum if Miller lays a finger on his Dad. Paddy’s priority is to ensure his son goes back to his Uni’ the next day so he tells him he’s going to serve Miller and Callum just to make sure his lad keeps out of things and catches his train. After much wrestling with his conscience and various failed attempts to enlist support from the local community, Paddy is faced with Miller and son in a virtually empty bar at three in the afternoon. Paddy stands his ground provoking a gruesome ‘battering’ from Miller and is taken off to hospital. Despite broken ribs and an extremely fat lip, Paddy refuses to stay in hospital and is behind the bar later that night when Miller swaggers up to the bar with his son to order drinks. Paddy asks Callum whether he felt it was right that he’d been barred from the pub. When the lad meekly agrees that he does, Paddy gets him to admit that the only reason he's here is because his Dad’s made him. Paddy pours Callum a pint but serves it with a pink straw and yellow umbrella like a 'girly' cocktail in full view of the whole pub who gawp in stunned silence at the scene. As Miller glares accusingly at Paddy, Hoskins brilliantly delivers the first of the stories twin punch-lines like one of those gloriously poker-faced actors in the Westerns. He turns to the father and with that unmistakeable, husky drawl and glowering glance says to Miller: You’re bringing him up like a tart, so I’m going to serve him like one. At that moment all the resentment Callum feels towards his Dad surfaces and he storms out of the bar. Miller can find no answer to this damning indictment of his parental failure and slowly retreats from the scene. Paddy clears the pub of all the cowards who had deserted him at his hour of need earlier in the day leaving just a sad drunk who has witnessed both the battering earlier that day, and Paddy’s revenge. “That was the bravest thing I have ever seen” Tommy mumbles. Hopkins then delivers the line that encapsulates the meaning of the whole parable. As he gently escorts Tommy to the door he says, “it took guts, yeah; but you know what took even more guts Tommy? Doing it sober.” This confirmed what had been hitherto implied in the drama; Paddy was a recovering alcoholic who has learned the meaning of courage the hard way. Later, on the news, there were pictures of violent youths throwing petrol bombs during the Orange Order marches in Belfast, and British soldiers terrorizing Iraqi prisoners to extract information from them. Like Miller in the drama these real-life figures seemed no more than shadows of men; Hopkins through his beautifully under-stated performance of a plucky landlord showed us the real thing-just like that other story-teller from Palestine all those years ago .

Never too old, never too young!

My eighty year old mother was off-loading her growing anxiety about the new one-act play we are due to start rehearsing shortly: “darling you, don’t understand! It’s my short-term memory that’s going. Even when I’m giving talks, I can’t seem to find the right words anymore.” Most people would be filled with compassion at this complaint which conjures up images of poor Iris Murdoch as portrayed by Judi Dench in the film about the writer’s tragic loss of memory in later life struggling to understand straight-forward questions in a television interview. I, however, am my mother’s son and share with her an impatience towards the moans and groans of others. Moreover, although I am approaching fifty I am still relatively fit and healthy and find it hard to appreciate how the brain gradually loses some of its basic functions in advancing years. In fairness, I also know my mother from of old and am used to her initial resistance to stepping out of her comfort zone. “Just you wait to till you’re eighty,” she declaimed. “I would be delighted if my children still wanted to work with me by then,” I reposted. We shall see, we shall see. This new play is about the Victorian poet Christina Rossetti, and is written by my friend Simon Machin. Simon is around the same age as me and has spent most of his life dealing with numbers as an accountant, despite reading English at Oxford. He feels as though he’s buried his literary talent in the earth for too many years, and having completed the play, “Poison in the Blood” Simon declared he had at last found his vocation. “You’re never too old,” I replied, sharing his enthusiasm. His play is partly about the realities of old age as Rossetti faces her final ‘bleak mid-winter’ in her house in Bloomsbury. Knowing death is imminent, the poet is concerned to protect her legacy from prying biographers (yes, I suppose we are guilty here, too!) and thus she is destroying old letters which might be misinterpreted. More importantly, Rossetti is concerned to preserve her soul from the intrusions of predatory priests keen on extracting death-bed confessions from such an eminent public figure. The poet was by all accounts a somewhat haunted figure right up to her death in spite of her robust Christian faith, and this is reflected in much of her brooding, melancholy verse throughout her life. Poems such as ‘Think of me when I am gone,” are often read at funerals. Simon’s play sensitively depicts Rossetti’s ultimate triumph over her dark side without ducking the complex factors which contributed to much of her unhappiness. At the end of the play, having politely declined the reserved sacrament for the sick and dying offered by the intrusive priest Rev. Gutch, Rossetti bites into a juicy ripe peach allowing the syrupy juice to trickle down her neck in a most inappropriate way for a Victorian lady. This fleeting gesture graphically symbolizes the character’s ultimate discovery of the sheer sensual joy of life once she has freed herself from the binding constraints of a censorious society. Such a world as this with its rigid, moral codes and religious fundamentalism suffocates the soul like a whale-boned corset. If the play has a simple message at its heart, it might be: “you are never too old to find salvation, you are never too old.” The reminder that we are never too old for all sorts of things, was beautifully captured in a recent documentary presented by Alan Yentob about ‘The Company of Elders,’ a dance troupe funded by Sadler’s Wells Theatre whose members range from sixty-one to eighty-five. This company travels around the world performing complex modern choreography in internationally renowned arenas, as well as off-beat community venues such as a gay bar. The choreographer working with them on their current piece remarked how these elderly dancers brought a quality onto the stage which younger performers in their prime found elusive. This was perhaps a generosity of soul ripened through good times and bad. This was most apparent when they work-shopped a scene about their memory of the blitz and the reality of evacuation. The stooped figures with those deeply-lined faces lit by haunting, sunken eyes captured an image of childhood vulnerability relived from a distance of many years. The choreographer could hardly speak when he debriefed the exercise; he was extremely moved. One of the many follies particular to our age is to assume that only the young and beautiful can reflect the power and the glory of life. This is often apparent in Hollywood especially for female performers who are discarded as soon as their skin sags. It is also implicit in many other walks of life today such as in politics where each of the current leaders of our main parties are still learning how to raise young families. God reveals his majesty and might (which includes his child-like vulnerability and profound wisdom) through the whole spectrum of humanity and often most poignantly at the extremes. “Out of the mouths of infants you have ordained praise” declared the psalmist. Never was this more powerfully demonstrated to me than by a choir of seven year olds from Southwater Infants School in Sussex. They were performing in the chapel of Christ’s Hospital School along with some older children. I was particularly struck by their rendition of an up-beat version of “The Lord’s My Shepherd.” They sung the refrain ‘And I will trust in him alone’ with such disarming conviction that I am sure the most militant atheist would have melted in their pew. At the end of the concert the choir filed out of the chapel to a spontaneous standing ovation. I spoke with the director of music at Christ’s Hospital about the infants from Southwater and he highlighted the sheer visceral impact of untrained (though not untutored) voices singing for the sheer joy of being alive. You’re never too old, and you’re never too young to serve the living God.