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.