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.
Saturday, 19 December 2009
Monday, 14 December 2009
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
