Hi and thanks for landing here. It might seem a bit backward, but I decided to start blogging only because I've been enjoying Twitter so much. While I love the 140 character limit of tweets, I realised that a blog would give me a place where I could have the luxury of saying a bit more. I've also set up here because I have a blogging project in mind... but more on that later.
Right now my face is stuck in the following books...
I took the ‘Which animal dropping are you?’ quiz and got ‘Elephant poo’
Posted on 13 April 2014, 10:28
Facebook has been swamped for a while with quizzes asking, ‘If you were a flower, which one would you be?’
Or which Muppet, prime minister, pop diva, Game of Thrones house, religion, 80s hunk or (Lord have mercy) character from Sex and the City are you? The question, ‘Which city should you actually live in?’ has apparently been liked on Facebook 2.5 million times.
So in an effort to maintain satire levels on Facebook, here’s my proposed quiz.
There’s an interesting piece on Slate about the phenomenon.
It’s not often a book keeps me up late three nights in a row, but A Vicar, Crucified by author Simon Parke kept sleep at bay this week where lesser books have failed.
It’s a murder mystery novel with a plot that has more twists than a hangman’s noose, written by a former vicar who has the inside story on the many reasons why parishioners might reasonably want to murder their priest.
On the murder most foul scale, this is close to the far end of foul, with flippant priest Anton Fontaine, vicar of St Michael’s Stormhaven (a quiet south coast town), nailed to a cross in his own vestry after the mother of all church meetings. The cast of suspects includes Bishop Stephen, who elevates himself by putting others down, Curate Sally, who likes to demonstrate she’s in charge, and youth worker Ginger, whose temper is on a hair-trigger.
Helping the police with their enquiries (as witness rather than suspect) is Abbot Peter, recently returned to Britain from running a monastery in the Sinai Desert. And helping him is the enneagram, the psychological profiling tool which gives the Abbot deep insight into the motivations of the suspects.
The dialogue of the novel is especially satisfying for anyone who fantasises about telling others exactly how irritating they are. ‘I sometimes wonder if you belong here, Peter?’ the Bishop tells the Abbot in a savage moment of passive aggression. ‘Have you ever thought of going somewhere you matter?’
Simon Parke, before he did his vicaring, was a scriptwriter for Spitting Image, and his satirical instincts are on fine display in the novel.
Most of all, though, I enjoyed the psychological insights of the book, with Abbot Peter lifting the lid on his fellow human beings as they manipulate others and reveal their own desires. That gave me plenty to think about when I wasn’t engrossed in the plot or trying to beat the Abbot in the race to discover the murderer. Which I didn’t, of course.
A Vicar, Crucified is the first in a series of at least three Abbot Peter novels, the second, A Psychiatrist, Screams, having just gone to the printer. I’m looking forward to some more sleepless nights when it’s out in the autumn.
I’ve never seen a saint bashing herself in the face with a pair of pincers before. But as I entered Michael Landy’s Saints Alive exhibition at the National Gallery this morning, there guarding the way in was a 3 metre tall St Apollonia, in a floor-length red dress.
You press the foot pedal at her feet, and lo! The pincers she holds with both hands jerk upwards into her face with a crash, powered by the wheels and cogs in her chest. All that’s missing is the opening of the Monty Python theme tune.
Michael Landy is famous for destroying all his worldly possessions in an installation art event called Break Down in 2001. He was invited to be the National Gallery Associate Artist three years ago and in that time has sampled and remixed images of martyred and wounded saints from the gallery’s huge collection of Renaissance paintings.
With the help of old prams wheels and bits of machinery salvaged from skips, flea markets and eBay, he’s turned the saints into large sculptures which alarmingly whirr into life at the kick of a pedal.
There’s a lovely bust of St Francis gazing adoring at a crucifix held close to his face. You pop a coin in the slot and the crucifix whacks him in the face. There’s a torso of St Jerome connected to a muscular arm holding a big stone. Hit the big red button on the floor and the arm bashes the stone into the chest.
This alarming sight is taken directly from the story of the saint taking his mind off the dancing girls of Rome in the way he found most effective. It struck me that the sculpture will probably destroy itself before it gets to the end of the exhibition’s six-month run. The torso is only glass fibre after all.
I’ve never seen anything like this unlikely marriage of Catholic piety and amusement arcade, and it provokes an equal dose of comedy and reflection.
Michael Landy, who was brought up as a London Catholic to Irish parents, is struck by the way the lives and sufferings of the saints, once popularly known through The Golden Legend and other books, have now passed out of popular (and even religious) culture.
Landy could have chosen all sorts of saints from the National Gallery collection, but as he says, ‘I chose the more destructive saints’. He was especially drawn to St Francis, as people drew a parallel between the self-sacrifice of Landy’s Break Down and Francis during the 2001 event.
Landy says: ‘When Francis sees someone wearing worse rags than him, he’s envious of them. We’re all envious, you know. The more stuff people have, the more successful we see them in our society. Saint Francis is the reverse. He wants your rags.’
In that sense, Saints Alive is an artistic take on people who were counter-cultural, who were determined to follow their faith to the point of self-destruction. ‘The saints are all very single-minded individuals. That’s what I like about them,’ says Landy.
Two of the exhibits were out of action this morning, one of them a headless, kneeling figure of St Francis, hollowed out. A mechanical grab suspended above the figure lowers into the body and if you’re lucky comes out with a t-shirt you can keep. The t-shirt has a drawing of a knotted rope with the words, Poverty Chastity Obedience.
I overheard a member of staff talking about the mechanical breakdowns and asked him about it.
‘I’ve been here a week,’ he said, ‘and every day at least one of the sculptures is broken. The machinery is made of salvaged motors and they’re not up to being operated so many times a day.’ They’re now waiting for new motors, so hopefully the saints will be moving mightily again soon.
He very kindly allowed me to take some pictures, despite the gallery’s no photography policy.
In keeping with the exhibition’s destructive themes of self-sacrifice, torture and martyrdom, Landy’s intention is that the sculptures will gradually wreck themselves, and the frequent collapse of second-hand components is probably part of that too.
It’s also a very good marketing ploy. I want to pay a second visit to have a go at getting that t-shirt.
She and I walked every weekday in the big spaces of Gunnersbury Park.
Late spring mornings, warm enough to tempt her into the pond for a swim. Lazy summer evenings, when she kept a sharp lookout for abandoned picnics on the grass. Gloomy ends of day in autumn when we walked the paths alone with mist filling the hollows. Winter days when she wore a flashing collar for the dark.
Her habitual sin was hanging back. She hung back in her endless quest for food. She was one-third Labrador, you see, even though she looked like a large fox.
She hung back so much, I spent half my time looking over my shoulder to check she wasn’t so far back that I couldn’t see her.
And generally there she would be, 100 metres distant at the least, her nose to the ground like a Hoover, her ears pricked forward, her splendid, bushy tail held high and proud as she brisked back and forth over the grass on a very promising scent.
But there could be the most amazing reward for all this looking back. If you called her name and threw your arms wide and held that scarecrow pose, she would break off her hunt, tuck her legs under her body and fly towards you like nothing else in the world mattered.
It was her sprint of joy.
Because as she closed the distance between her and you, there was intentness and joy in her face and eyes and in the way her shoulders and bottom bounded up and down. I always squatted down to her height, arms still thrown out, as she made her final approach, and then she’d fly past me, or run alongside if I pretended to flee from her.
She made me feel in those moments the physical exhilaration of being alive. I loved that shared creatureliness, where she was so much more than me.
Back home, she wasn’t much of a one for physical contact. She was reserved and liked her own space. But she allowed us to stroke and fuss over her.
She nibbled her front claws so loudly sometimes you could hardly hear the TV. Lying in the dark in the middle of the night, hearing her deep breathing or snoring, in her bed next to ours, was comforting.
Her ears were long and silky and sometimes went inside out. But we taught her to shake her head when we said, ‘Your ears are inside out.’
Roey took her to training classes when she was a young pup in the late 90s, and then to dog agility classes, and found she loved learning. Somewhere I have a list of 60 words and phrases we collected which she understood. I’m sure this isn’t unusual for intelligent dogs, but it’s just part of our story with her.
After she died, a year today, I carried on walking the park. Those first walks were hard. I walked looking back for her. Through the long avenues of trees, where I had so often glimpsed her in the green distance as she unhurriedly caught me up, she failed to appear.
I watched for her to amble from behind a tree trunk, late as usual, but she just didn’t.
I cried for her a great deal. I knew I would cry, but I didn’t know how much. I didn’t know how much it would hurt.
Somehow, in our lovely dog who was strong, fast and beautiful, but also vulnerable and uncomprehending of this world, in need of our love and protection, my griefs and sorrows were gathered up together.
I will always remember her, look back for her, throw my arms wide for her.
A new book came out yesterday… except, hang on, it isn’t new.
Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to Hilary Mantel’s brilliant Wolf Hall. It was published a year ago in hardback, and since then there have been book reviews (last May), Mantel’s winning of the Man Booker prize (last October) and of course 12 full months.
And now, finally, publisher Fourth Estate has released the paperback edition. I snapped it today in Foyles bookshop next to the hardback (pic above).
I understand why publishers produce hardback editions first – they want to maximise profits when their star books are in the spotlight and calculate their paperback print-runs intelligently. The hardback of Bring Up the Bodies is currently retailing at £20, twice the price of the paperback (£9.99).
But making readers wait a full year before releasing such a culturally significant and widely discussed book just seems greedy to me. And it surely can’t be great for the book either, since those of us who would like to talk about it but aren’t on the freebie review copy lists of Fourth Estate will only be getting our teeth into it this week.
I’d like to talk about what’s inside Bring Up the Bodies, since I found Wolf Hall such a powerful and almost unmediated doorway into past lives. But I’m wondering, why bother, a year later?
Leaning against the ferry rail, the black water of the Aegean slid past below me, lit by the full moon high above. I saw dimly a small island shaped like a flat pyramid, darkly mysterious, as we sailed past. I leaned out and far ahead in the night were tiny lights – the lights of houses on the island of Patmos. It was 37 minutes past midnight and the words of John’s Apocalypse came into my head…
After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in the spirit…
John, the author of the letters to the seven churches, was exiled here for his faith in the 1st century, and now, 2,000 years later, my father and I were arriving to complete our journey to this place where heaven was opened.
After our boat docked, we walked through sleeping streets pulling our cases on wheels. The hotel reception was closed, but five keys were on the counter with names sellotaped to them… none of them ours. So we took two at random and bedded down for the night.
I woke after an hour or two from a dream in which hundreds of people were walking up the street to our hotel, dragging their cases, the hundreds of rolling wheels filling the island with a great roaring noise, and all the people inexorably marching to claim the room they had booked and I had stolen.
Awake in the dark, it felt like a updated scene from the Revelation, with the Beast and the Whore of Babylon checking in their luggage. This island has something spookily spiritual about it.
Next morning, we walked down to the port town, Skala, which curls around a bay lapped by deep, transparent blue water. The sun was shining madly.
The town is all restaurants patrolled by cats, craft shops stocked with sponges and shells, narrow streets revealing whitewashed, domed churches, Greek men hurtling by on motorbikes, Orthodox priests flapping or pausing to pinch the cheek of a child, shop windows full of icons, fruit sellers at the harbour, men busy doing nothing at a taxi rank.
Over coffee at a streetside café we got talking to the owner and complimented him on the island. ‘It’s a beautiful place,’ I told him.
‘Yes,’ he agreed. And then with hardly a hint of smile: ‘But it is also a holy place.’
High over the town on a hill is the Monastery of St John the Theologian. Late morning a taxi bore us up a winding road through pine trees, past a stonemason’s yard with signs outside advertising petra and marmara (stone and marble), until we reached the Cave of the Apocalypse, below the monastery.
This is where the exiled St John received his Apocalypse, according to local tradition. And it is where our seven churches pilgrimage was completed.
It is 40 steep steps down to the cave and my father is 85, but he’s also intrepid and we made it down arm in arm almost without a pause. Over the doorway before you enter the cave is a bright icon of St John in red robes holding a pen in one hand while a pen holder is under his other arm. The book he holds is open at a page full of Greek text which reads: ‘In the beginning was the word…’
We stepped through the doorway and into the place where that word was alarmingly revealed. Although an Orthodox chapel has been added to the front of the cave, the powerful forms of the bare rock on your right are what immediately command your attention. The entrance to the cave is low, while the roof rises behind it, reminding me of a huge fireplace, which seems right. Holy fire touched down here.
In a deep recess is a place of prayer, marked by red velvet draped over the rock and hanging silver oil lamps above. The cave reminds me of the prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who stood in the mouth of another cave and experienced earthquake, wind and fire, but found God instead in a still small voice. St John’s writhing visions seem to be the reverse of Elijah. They have nothing of the still small voice, but all of the earthquake, wind and fire.
And yet the atmosphere in the cave was quiet and expectant. We were there entirely on our own, which I think must be quite unusual.
A small window shows the view from the mouth of the cave. Below are the trees, fields, hills and bays of Patmos, and then the sea, and then the eastern sky. As he sat here, St John looked out towards the faraway seven churches of Asia Minor.
I sat with my father on a wooden bench and we prayed together. The cave has a beautiful acoustic. It is a place where the door of heaven opened for St John like the door of a furnace. In a small way, it opened for us too, but breathed only peace at the end of a journey.
After a lifetime of familiarity with the Bible, it’s a strange thing to see biblical names on a modern road sign. But that’s what I’m seeing now as I look out the car window: a blue sign above a roundabout tells us that Efes (Ephesus) is 3km to the right, just a chariot dash.
Ephesus was one of the great cities of the ancient world, famous in its time, but more than that, it’s one the ‘ians’ and therefore famous ever since and for ever. Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, Corinthians, Ephesians… these ‘ians’ of 1,000 indifferently read lessons in church have made me very curious about visiting this city.
There are two letters to the Ephesians, of course: the long one which comes after Galatians, and the shorter one by John in his Apocalypse.
We started at the (ruined, naturally) 6th century basilica of St John in nearby Selçuk, which is an inspired choice as from the west end of the church you get an angel’s eye view of the geography of this place: the surrounding hills, the broad, fertile valley between them which ends in the distant sea, the small hill on the left behind which Ephesus is hidden.
By tradition, the church is the final resting place of St John and a white marble slab laid on the floor of the chancel, guarded by four columns, is the modern memorial of that.
In the church is an ancient stone baptistery which any Baptist church would be proud to have. It’s set in the floor with steps leading down one side into a small, circular pool, and then steps up the other side. Next to it is a square slot cut into the marble floor which archaeologists think was once filled with oil for anointing the baptized Christians.
Since it’s such an old baptistery I wonder if they followed the tradition of the early church by giving the newly-baptized milk and honey as they ascended from the pool: a sign of passing through the waters of Jordan and entering the promised land.
By the time we reached Ephesus itself, the day was hot and the tourists were out in large numbers. We worked our way down from the top of the site. Once you’re through the turnstiles, you’re basically following the main street down through the old town, with education, entertainment and distraction along the way.
Within a couple of hundred metres in a variety of temples, statues and carvings we met Hermes with his winged shoes, Tyche the goddess of luck, Hercules out walking a lion and the hissing hairstyle of Medusa. We saw the numerous cats of Ephesus lounging on mosaic floors or draped over column capitals. We paused at the famous bogs of Ephesus, where wealthy men sat on a marble shelf punctuated by holes and a channel of running water at their feet served in place of loo roll.
We spent a while at the Library of Celsus, which surely boasts one of the most handsome facades of all classical architecture. Looking at the way the lintels on the columns swap places between the first and second storeys, I wondered if it had inspired MC Escher in his drawings of impossible buildings.
The library opened for reading in AD 100-ish and issued its last book just 170 years later when it was demolished by an earthquake. Its columns were raised again in the 1970s. Four statues stand beside the doors welcoming readers, and I loved seeing Sophia and Episteme (Wisdom and Knowledge) among them. The whole building reads like a homage to the beauty and improvement of reading.
It’s easy to get classical overload here: the baths, the market, the fountains, the theatre, the advert for the bordello just up the street carved into the pavement. The house where Anthony and Cleopatra used to meet up. After a while your imagination collapses with the effort of trying to take in the idea that these things happened here, and that if you’d been here at the right time you’d have seen them happen before your eyes.
Visiting Ephesus wasn’t a spiritual experience for me. Instead it was merely amazing, with a new wonder around every street corner.
I think this place is powerful in opening you up to the classical and pagan context for early Christianity. It helps you understand why the faith of the early Christians was the shape it was. Somehow, seeing the hills John, Paul and the other first believers saw, and walking in their streets under the heat of the Asia Minor sun, gets you under the skin of the letters to the seven churches and the episodes in the book of Acts.
Even though I don’t know it for sure yet, I think visiting these churches will add a lot of width (and maybe even depth) when I read the texts of the New Testament.
Sardis, where John’s fifth letter to the churches was sent, is now Sart, a little village lost in the folds of lumpy hills at the foot of Mt Tmolus, which in contrast is a brutal slab of stone. I just had to stop the car and stand on the side of the road to get a picture of the village and its mountain as they look so good together.
I also asked a couple of local women to let me take their picture as they were (I think) knitting, with their feet up on chairs. Their brightly coloured clothes and headscarves are worn by women throughout this region of Turkey.
Back in the day, Sardis had one of the biggest synagogues in the western world, and we called in there today. Its vast size and luxurious mosaics tell us that there must have been a very big Jewish population living here in the 4th century AD. That was a bit of a surprise when archaeologists unearthed the synagogue in the 1960s, as it had been assumed Judaism was declining at the time, with Christianity taking off.
My father just loved being here in this synagogue and could easily identify the different parts of the building, including the marble sanctuary where the scrolls of the Torah were kept. He used to be a church organist, but when he was a student, he answered a newspaper ad from a synagogue which was looking for an organist, as he needed the extra cash. They appointed him, and he’s been there ever since, now over 60 years.
The place here which seized my imagination was the ruined Temple of Artemis, which is in a remote field outside town, overlooked by curious hills shaped like pointed hoods. The place is lonely, melancholy and haunted – and maybe a bit dark too.
The old temple and its columns are colossal and when you climb up onto the platform with its floor and steps infilled with grass, or walk among its avenues of broken, blackened columns, you get a real feeling for the occult potency of paganism. We were there in the late afternoon, with long shadows on the grass, which just adds to the feeling.
The worship of Artemis eventually came to an end, of course, after hundreds of years. Who was the last priest here, and what were his feelings as he left the temple, or lay dying, knowing that he was the last of his line?
When the temple was abandoned, the local Christians in the 4th century still feared the old building, thinking it was inhabited by demons. They apparently carved crosses into it to break their power. I went on a search of the east doorway to see if I could find them. At first I found only bees, which have built thriving nests at this end of the building, but then, in the massive stone doorposts I found small, roughly carved crosses.
I also found a little, brick-built Byzantine church tacked onto the southeast corner of the temple (pictured above), perhaps for the same reason, to negate the power of the old religion and celebrate the power and joy of the resurrection.
This church, like the temple before it, is also a ruin. It’s depressingly like finding the graveyards of two religions next to each other. The only religion in town is in the mosque. I can’t find a church, congregation or gathering of any kind (Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian or Protestant) in modern-day Sart when I look on the Net.
‘I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up! Strengthen what remains and is about to die,’ says Jesus in the letter to the church in Sardis. But nothing remains now.
There’s not much left of Philadelphia, despite it having the most modern-sounding name of all the seven churches of the Apocalypse. All that remains is a piece of ground the size of a postage stamp, and on it the noble wreck of a gigantic church in a garden neatly tended with rose bushes and palm trees.
The church is dedicated to St John, in keeping with its spiritual link to the visionary exile of Patmos. Churches with the St John name keep cropping up on this tour, with branches of the franchise in Ephesus and Pergamum as well as here. The names of ancient churches say a lot, and these ones tell us that the St John connection was deeply felt and treasured.
We drove to Alaşehir (Philly’s modern name) this afternoon after lunch outside Laodicea in a roadside restaurant the size of a palace, with its own luxury swimming pool. We luckily arrived just before a couple of coachloads of Japanese tourists debouched into the restaurant and began raiding the vast buffet of delicious Turkish food. These restaurants are definitely the way to go if you’re ever travelling in Turkey.
Ninety minutes of driving later and we pulled up at the St John’s postage stamp. It’s set in a sleepy neighbourhood of houses, trees, birdsong, men sitting out on the pavement talking and one or two shops. The little blue mosque opposite the church gate has a minaret that looks like Thunderbird One.
Beyond the gate, three massive piers which once marked the great church’s crossing erupt from the ground and tower over the garden, while only the footprint of the fourth pier remains in a great hole five or six metres deep. The piers were originally lined with slim slabs of fine marble, but now their naked Byzantine brickwork provides a nesting place for birds.
In a little office at the back of the site, Umit, a tall, handsome gentleman, the guardian of the monument, sits at his desk enjoying a quiet smoke and a cup of mud-like Turkish coffee. He tells Seher, our guide, that before the separation of the Greek and Turkish populations in 1923, the Muslim and Christian families here lived happily together, and remarkably, that some Turkish people became Christians.
He directs us to gravestones in the gardens which witness to this. They were brought here from the local churches when the Greek families left and the churches were turned into mosques. One of them from 1890 has the surname Lokman in Greek lettering. ‘It’s a very Turkish name,’ Seher tells me.
The sad exodus of the Greek population from their ancestral homes in Turkey to modern-day Greece marked the final full stop of the Christian mission to Asia Minor led by St Paul and St John in the 1st century.
‘These are the words of the one who opens and nobody shuts, who shuts and nobody opens,’ says Jesus in the letter to the Philadelphian church.
What does it mean when the most dynamic region of growth in the early church – this region of the seven churches – is shut with no possibility of opening 20 centuries later? What does it mean when the living faith of the Philadelphians ends up as a giant brick wreck in a garden?
I suddenly realise something obvious: every one of John’s seven churches is now dead. But it feels most obvious here in Philadelphia. Thankfully, we leave before the call to prayer can bang in the final nail.
Laodicea is a bad place to build a town. You wouldn’t think so as you drive up the low ridge it sits on, overlooking the flat and fertile valley floor with distant snow-capped mountains floating magically above the nearer hills.
Today, as we pass between the stone towers of the eastern gate, we’re surrounded by dense banks of spring flowers, the poppies the deepest red you could think of, and birdsong sweet and intense.
It must once have seemed a good idea to build here. The town is slap on the major east-west commercial road across Asia Minor and made itself rich in trade and banking just by putting itself in the right place.
The Laodiceans must have loved everything about their beautiful and prosperous setting – except for the earthquakes. Quakes visited the city in the 1st century reigns of the Emperors Augustus, Claudius and Nero, and that final one in the year 60 was a raze. Nothing was left standing. The city was rich enough to rebuild itself without outside aid, but it toppled again around the year 500 and then again around 600, after which they called it a day. There have been no Laodiceans in the 1,400 years since.
But one of the first things we see as we walk here today is a giant yellow hydraulic crane raising and positioning huge blocks of ancient stone. Sending one of those babies back in time would be an untold blessing to the ancient builders, I can’t help thinking. Turkey is putting vast sums of money into excavating and reconstructing the ruins, with hundreds of workers onsite. Laodicea is rising one more time, until the next seismic twitch.
We walk up the main street, the sun beating down, the lizards flicking between stones. Either side of us is an avenue of free-standing columns, and behind them are the broken walls and doorways of the shops which once did a roaring trade here. The arrangement of columns and shops is very contemporary and I feel at home.
For some reason, my eyes are drawn to the marble threshold slabs in the doorways, worn to a polish by the feet of customers whose shopping days are long gone, with the deep ridge cut in the stone where the vanished shop door would have shut tight. In the back rooms grass grows where wine, olives, fabrics, furniture and fruit were once stored.
At the top end of town we turn left and the street ahead is choked with large chunks of marble. Broken columns, snapped lintels carved with flowers, smashed slabs inscribed in Greek and even one or two battered crosses lie where they fell on a day of doom centuries ago.
We’ve seen a lot of ancient rubble the past couple of days, but the sight of this ruined street is oddly moving. All the beauty, ingenuity, aspiration and dignity of the Laodiceans lies wrecked here, down to the last little chip of stone with a bird carved in it, ground to forgotten gravel by the earth-shaking machine of time. Looking at it, you know it is also about you, and how you and your all-important life and culture will look a couple of millennia from now.
Having said that, Laodicea remains impressive and beautiful, from its elegant and spacious forum to the two theatres carved into the hillsides and positioned just right so they get air-conditioning from the afternoon breezes. The town had water piped in from the hot springs of Hierapolis, 8km up the road – although it arrived lukewarm. We see the terracotta pipes running down many of the streets.
That plumbing detail is an abrupt reminder of John’s letter to the Laodicean church, and it’s the most memorable of all the seven letters. ‘I know your works,’ says Jesus in the letter. ‘You aren’t hot and you aren’t cold. I wish you were one or the other, but instead you’re lukewarm. That’s why I’m going to vomit you out of my mouth!’
The ballsy language of that passage has always appealed to me. When you look at the wreck of the human home that was once Laodicea, you know that hard to hear, colourful language is sometimes the only thing that will do.
But actually, standing today in one of the empty streets, facing a doorway that was once someone’s welcoming home, but behind which is now a waist-high bank of earth carpeted in poppies, it’s the last section of John’s letter I hear in my head. The words are also famous.
‘I stand at your door and knock. If you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.’
As long as we have doors to call our own, as long as we have ears to hear a voice, as long as we have love to open our hearts, God can come to us.
We knocked off two of the seven churches of the Apocalypse yesterday – Pergamum and Thyatira – but we’ve been staying in Izmir, which is ancient Smyrna, another of the churches. The trouble with Smyrna is that it was never abandoned to become a ruin, but instead became a busy port and the third most populous city of modern Turkey. So there’s not a lot of the Roman town left on the ground.
Our guide, Seher, had given this some thought, though, and took us this morning to a living church, St Polycarp’s on Necatibey Boulevard, just a few blocks from our hotel. It’s a Catholic church, one of the oldest in Izmir, and has a splendidly ornate interior. However, ‘I don’t think we’ll be able to go inside,’ Seher told us, ‘as you need to make an appointment many days in advance.’
This sounded a bit odd for a church, and when we arrived there was a speakerphone on the metal gate which picked up and then went dead when we buzzed.
On the immaculately painted church wall I spotted some large graffiti in red paint and wondered whether that could be a clue about why the church is security conscious. A church member came up to us on the pavement and gave us some embroidered crosses which he and his wife had made – and this sweet gesture more than made up for the unresponsive speakerphone.
The church is named for St Polycarp, who was a disciple of the apostle John back in the 1st century and was martyred here in Smyrna around the year 155. I’ve always loved his heartfelt and spirited answer when he was challenged by the local Roman proconsul to swear by Caesar: ‘Eighty-six years I have served him and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my king and my saviour?’
The proconsul’s response was to have Polycarp burned alive.
In the letter to Smyrna in the Apocalypse, Jesus says, ‘Don’t be afraid of what you are about to suffer… Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.’ It’s clear that St Polycarp lived those words. They could have been written for him.
Like everything in John’s Apocalypse, Jesus’s words are sharp and challenging, whether you’re a Christian living comfortably in the West, or the church of a minority faith on Necatibey Boulevard with a speakerphone that goes dead.
This afternoon, our driver Pala drove us for an hour from Pergamum through dramatic mountains to the town of Akhisar, which was once Thyatira, a town famous for indigo, purple and the dyeing industry in general. It was bathos to be here after the feast that was Pergamum, though: just the ruin of a church founded in the 2nd century that is bang in the middle of a busy shopping area.
While I was looking at the fallen masonry, the call to prayer from a local mosque started up, and within seconds, two other mosques joined in. I find the call to pray beautiful and beguiling in its way, but it was a sharp reminder here of how Christian faith can die and fall into dust; how it can become the fulfilment of the letter to Thyatira in the Apocalypse.
We were on the road out of Izmir by 9 o’clock, and Pala, the driver of our white people carrier who looks a lot like MP George Galloway and drives with the same sort of take-no-hostages philosophy, soon had us speeding away from the city. Our guide Seher started briefing us about the day ahead and showed us an excellent book we should have read before coming here, Mark Wilson’s Biblical Turkey.
Izmir is ancient Smyrna, the first of Revelation’s seven churches, but it’s now a city of 3 million people with houses densely carpeting the little hills, and precious little is left of the old Roman town. We stayed here last night, lulled to sleep by the neighbourhood mosque’s call to prayer and then rudely woken by it before breakfast.
Just over an hour later we stepped out in a wash of spring sunshine at the Pergamum cable car. Pergamum is perched on a rocky hill 300m above the valley floor and was once the ruling city of the region. It’s now a toppled ruin, with the modern city of Bergama sprawled across the valley below.
Exiting the cable car at the top, we were greeted by a small bazaar of colourful shops selling fruit, hats, postcards, t-shirts and little statues of the goddess Diana of the Ephesians. Handy if you want to take one home to worship.
Ignoring all that, we were soon on the ancient city’s acropolis, poking around the beautiful and melancholy fallen masonry of the Greek world. In the 1970s, some of the marble columns and lintels of the Temple of Trajan were raised from the grass where they had fallen centuries earlier, and they now crown the hill. There’s something timeless and dreamlike, seeing these gleaming white pillars against the deep blue sky.
The letter to the church in Pergamum in John’s Apocalypse says, ‘I know where you live – where Satan has his throne.’ John is highly hostile and exclusive in his faith claims, and all the temples, altars and shrines we saw today here – to Athena, Zeus, Demeter, Dionysus and the Emperor Trajan – must have riled John to bits and help explain his ‘Satan’ remark.
My imagination was snagged, though, by the Library of Pergamum, or what is left of it. The library was second only to the Library of Alexandria in the Greek world, and held 200,000 works in scroll and book form. In fact, Alexandria was so infuriated by its rival that it banned the export of papyrus in the hope that Pergamum’s supply of books would dry up. Pergamum responded by inventing parchment (the word derives from ‘Pergamum’) made of calfskin.
None of the works held by this amazing library remain here, though. All I could see was an avenue of broken columns where scholars once walked, and a wide pavement where the reading room once stood, with the wrecked base of a statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Athena is now in Berlin – she was carried off there by zealous German archaeologists in the 19th century – while the 200,000 books were all handed over to Alexandria in the end, when Mark Anthony gave them to Cleopatra as a wedding present. The librarians of Pergamum must have died of grief as their books were carted off for ever.
We walked down to the dramatic hillside theatre, the steepest of the ancient theatres, where 10,000 spectators once watched Greek dramas; down to the vast gyms, which were on three levels, for boys, young men and adults; and on through acres of ordinary housing which now lie under mounds of grass.
We found a decent-sized tortoise stuck in the upended stones of one house and rescued it. In a hall next to the temple of Demeter we saw fine floor mosaics with theatres masks – grinning and grotesque – depicted in medallions.
The vastness of the site gave me an appreciation of the splendour and power of Pergamum, and what the young church here was up against. To be a Christian in the early years of the faith, dissenting in such a potent cultural context, would require a lot of courage. Reading John’s letter again with the temples, roads, altars, gymnasia and theatre in mind, I can see him giving his readers some help by putting fire into their faith.
Early tomorrow morning, my father and I fly to Izmir in western Turkey for a week rediscovering the seven churches of the Apocalypse. We travelled together last year to Germany, visiting the towns where JS Bach lived in the 18th century, but this time we’re going back to the world of 1st century Asia Minor, to the roots of his faith and mine.
Aside from having our hearts strangely warmed, the temperatures are going to be in the mid-20s (or mid-70s in the old currency) and it’s going to be good sitting outside for seafood and wine after so many months of winter.
The Apocalypse, better known as the book of Revelation, was written on the Greek island of Patmos. It opens with a series of mini letters – almost postcard in length – written to seven churches on the mainland of what is now Turkey. The letters are colourful and strongly worded, with a mixture of praise and promise, criticism and warning for each church.
We’re going to be visiting each of the seven towns (most of which are in ruins) and then sailing to Patmos for the final couple of days. John the Divine, the author of the book, was exiled here for his faith in the 1st century, and a highlight will be visiting the Patmos cave where it’s believed he received his visions and prophecies.
The Apocalypse was a book which almost didn’t make it into the New Testament because of its bizarre and nightmarish content. It has choirs of saints and angels, beasts with multiple heads and on each head a crown, a pitched battle between the forces of light and darkness, a smouldering lake of fire for the wicked and paradise regained for the righteous.
The Eastern Orthodox still won’t allow the book to be read aloud in church for fear of its horrors and mysteries upsetting the faithful. This is probably wise.
I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in January and spent time looking at a vast 14th century triptych they have from Hamburg. It’s covered with scenes taken from the Apocalypse, and I snapped one of them, seen above. It gives an idea of the dense and fevered atmosphere of the book.
Will Self, in his combative introduction to a pocket edition of Revelation in the King James Version, says he found it ‘a sick text… a guignol of tedium, a portentous horror film.’
Aside from all that, I’m looking forward to immersing my head into the world which gave birth to the Jesus movement in the 1st century. Towns such as Ephesus are really familiar to me from reading the book of Acts, and the idea of actually walking those ancient streets is intoxicating. I’m hoping to blog about the experience day by day, so long as the bandwidth of Asia Minor holds up.
Descriptions of heaven are really hard to come by. Angels sitting on clouds strumming harps, or St Peter in a comedy beard ticking off names in a big book next to the pearly gates – these are the best known versions of heaven from the world of cartoons.
But I realised today why the Bible is so coy about providing a description of the life hereafter. It struck me with the force of full-blown revelation as I scrolled through the newly-released pics of Google’s new offices in Tel Aviv.
The offices include fruit trees, cafe seating made from motor scooters, a flume slide connecting floors, rafts of hanging flowers, stuffed armchairs, beach loungers, table football, wicker sofas, surfboards and pinball – and all with epic views from high above Tel Aviv. It’s rather a male vision of office heaven, but I wouldn’t complain about working there.
I think it’s a mistake though for Google to post the pics. It can only spread general misery about everyone else’s office arrangements. It’s a bit like that old saying, ‘When I heard about your amazing new job, a little part of me died.’
And maybe that’s why the Good Book leaves off the glowing descriptions of heaven. Love, not envy, is what God aims for.
Holy Saturday is the forgotten middle day of Easter. Where Good Friday and Easter Sunday are full of action (and church services), Saturday is simply the day when Jesus lay dead in the tomb. It is the eye of the hurricane of Easter.
I was powerfully drawn to this 12th century Greek icon for Holy Saturday (above) when I first saw it in the 1980s. Greek icons normally show Jesus as a powerful, commanding figure. Even icons of the crucifixion are entitled, ‘The King of Glory’. But here we see Jesus broken in the ultimate weakness of death.
The image puts us in the tomb with Jesus. And there we see suffering. This dead face is set in a frown. There are dark shadows under the eyes – the shadow under the left eye is like a bruise. The shoulders are hunched and tense, while the arms are limp and useless. The body of Jesus looks like a media image of a torture victim.
But we also see vulnerability here. Jesus has the mouth of a sleeping child, with the lower lip sucked under the top lip, for comfort. The head is bent as if in sleep. We see the openness of Jesus to suffering and death. We see God made poor, weak and helpless. I don’t think there is any other image which shows this with such depth of emotion and insight.
The icon shows us the beauty of Christ in his obedience to the will of God, at vast cost to himself, and also in his unconditional love for us. Because it is for us, for our sake, that he is here like this. And this creates longing. The Orthodox liturgy for Holy Saturday, the day when this icon was carried through the streets, has a prayer which gives words to longing.
‘O faithful, come, let us behold our Life laid in a tomb to give life to those who dwell in tombs. Come, let us behold him in his sleep and cry out to him with the voice of the prophets: You are like a lion. Who shall arouse you, O King? Rise by your own power, O you who have given yourself up for us, O Lover of mankind.’
Nathan Jenkins (my second offspring) joined forces late last year with Jesse Hackett in a musical partnership called Blludd Relations. They’ve just released the video of their new song Even Steven (view above), a track with a gorgeously retro feel that’s in no hurry to go anywhere. Now the music has some surreal video storytelling to go with it.
Even though there’s an almost obsessive attention to detail in both the music and the video, the atmosphere of both is laid-back and dreamlike, which is a great trick to pull off.
Nathan (aka Bullion) has launched his own record label Deek, featuring different artists who inhabit the same musical groove. Hear some of the Deek output here – I especially love Fixxx by Nautic.
I took part in Newshour (a BBC World Service programme) today to talk about an imaginary job interview for the next Pope. Or, as the intro to the programme put it: ‘Would the church stand a better chance of getting the best man for the job if they approached this as a standard job interview? And if they did, what sort of questions would you ask?’
Here are my top three questions. What would yours be? Comment below!
1. How’s your Italian? The Vatican is in dire straits. There’s Vatileaks. The sex abuse scandals. Losing its credit card facility in January because of EU questions about money-laundering. It’s such a nest of feuds, conspiracies and infighting that one commentator this morning compared it to the mafia.
In fact, the Vatican is in such bad shape that I’m sure a 24 hour watch must have been set on Martin Luther’s grave, just in case the old Reformer returns as a zombie to have a second go at Rome. It surely deserves it.
Sorting out the Vatican is going to be the hardest task of the next Pope, and to stand a chance of achieving anything, you have to have brilliant Italian. That’s because it’s the language of the Vatican, and anyone who didn’t have it would lack the authority to crack heads.
So although it would be great to see the first-ever black Pope, or a Pope from where the Christian faith is actually growing (Africa or Latin America), I think the crisis in the church calls above all for an Italian Pope who is angry about the ghastly state of things and is heaven-bent on doing something about it.
2. Do you tweet? We’ve just had the first tweeting Pope and I think following in the tweetsteps of Benedict XVI is going to be more critical than you might first think.
For the past three years, Benedict devoted his address on World Communications Day to social media, giving Twitter, Facebook and other channels some serious theological thought. He also offered some positive pastoral guidance. He told the world’s young Catholics to get involved, be Christians on Facebook, seize the opportunities offered by online friendship, make sure their offline and online lives were in balance.
In the past few months, he also practised what he preached by tweeting and taking questions on Twitter. He didn’t get round to sharing Instagram snaps of cardinals sitting on photocopiers, but it was a credible attempt to push the papacy into the 21st century.
So ‘Can you tweet?’ is a genuine question. You might be fine doing 10,000 word encyclicals and papal bulls and all the rest, but what are you like at 140 characters? There are only 20 cardinals on Twitter, and several of them joined just a week or two ago. So the list is small.
3. Got any skeletons? Skills are one thing, but what about the next Pope’s CV? Who is this person? What things has he done? What things has he left undone?
The top skeleton, of course, is the sex abuse scandal. SNAP – the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests – last week named a Dirty Dozen of cardinals they say would be the worst candidates for Pope based on their handling of child sex abuse claims, or for public comments they’ve made about it. Their list includes three US cardinals and nine from other countries.
SNAP has been attacked for having no credibility by the office of one of the cardinals, but it has been around since 1989 and its list has been widely reported in the media. It must have already been a factor in conversations among cardinals pre the conclave.
Since sex abuse by priests is such a devastating issue, a Pope with a clean pair of hands would be a huge asset in moving the church forward.
What do you think? What would be your top three questions to pitch to the candidates for Pope?
Photo: The BBC newsroom in New Broadcasting House at full tilt when I passed through at lunchtime today.
Late last week, one of the cardinals who will shortly be incarcerated in the Sistine Chapel to elect the next Pope, said that the new occupant of St Peter’s chair will have to be a tweeter. ‘Probably the most important aspect of my ministry, and I would project that into the ministry of the Holy Father, is bringing the gospel into the next generation,’ said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington DC.
The trouble is, the cardinal has not himself ‘Don Wuerl’ at tweeting (forgive me father, I have punned). Cardinal Wuerl has just 21 tweets to his name, and the last time he hit the Tweet button was over a year ago. Perhaps this is his way of signalling that he’s not in the running.
I’ve been able to identify just 13 20 cardinals (out of a total college of 208) who are tweeting or have a Twitter account. Top of the list is Cardinal Timothy Dolan (age 63), Archbishop of New York, who has over 84,000 followers. His tweets are direct and upbeat and it looks like he writes them himself. ‘We’ve got a Lord who’s not so much concerned with what we’ve done in the past as with what we’re doing today – so cast out into the deep!’ he tweeted in January.
In second place (follower-wise) is Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi (age 70) with over 42,000 followers. He’s President of the Pontifical Council for Culture in the Vatican, and is currently being talked up as a possible next Pope (he was on at 14/1 with tipster Paddy Power when I last checked).
Ravasi is a frequent tweeter. He posted several times a day last week because he was leading a series of spiritual exercises at the Vatican called ‘The Face of God and the Face of the Human Person in the Prayers of the Psalms’. He tweeted extracts from the meditations, beginning with ‘1st Meditation: breathe, think, struggle, love: the verbs of prayer’.
A couple of days later he tweeted: ‘[The Christ] is an abyss of light. You need to close your eyes not to fall in (Kafka)’. His meditations are being praised for their cultural connectedness, and hopefully will become available in English.
Ravasi is especially interesting because he has two Twitter accounts, in Italian and English, with 39.7k and 2.5k followers apiece. His English account was opened in September last year and maybe it served as a forerunner for Benedict XVI’s @Pontifex account, in nine languages, which launched three months later.
Next is Cardinal Odilo Scherer (age 63), Archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil, who has tweeted more than any other cardinal (1609 tweets in 18 months). Scherer posts in Portuguese, with quotes from the Gospels, greetings and encouragements to individuals, plus pictures which look like his own smartphone snaps. ‘Good Sunday to all “followers” by twitter!’ he tweeted over the weekend.
I’ve listed the 18 cardinals below (thanks, Fr James Bradley, for the extra cardinals since I first posted this), with the most-followed at the top. Fr James has a Twitter list of all the tweeting cardinals. Their average age is 70, while the average age of the college as a whole is said to be 78. Please let me know if you discover others not on the list and I’ll add them.
Noteworthy are Cardinal Mahony, retired Archbishop of Los Angeles, who is under pressure not to attend the conclave because of his actions in the child abuse scandal; and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna, who has opened a Twitter account but has not yet issued forth a single tweet and is not accepting followers.
It’s the safest of safe bets that a Twitter silence will descend on all these accounts when the cardinals disappear into the conclave. But it will be fascinating to see which cardinal is first to tweet once the white smoke starts pumping from the Sistine Chapel roof. Maybe the tweets will be watched as keenly as the smoke.
Follow the cardinals to find out.
Cardinal Timothy Dolan
Archbishop of New York, USA
First tweet: May 12 | Followers: 84.1k
Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi
President, Pontifical Council for Culture
First tweet: June 11 | Followers: 42.2k
Cardinal Odilo Scherer
Archbishop of Sao Paulo, Brazil
First tweet: July 11 | Followers: 24.1k
A feature I wrote on the artist Nicola Green was published in the Church Times this week. I visited Nicola, a portrait artist, at her north London studio a couple of weeks ago and had a fascinating conversation with her about her project In Seven Days… in which she shadowed Barack Obama during his 2008 campaign to become president. She created seven icon-like works out of the experience.
No one has ever been artist in residence to a US presidential campaign before. Nicola visited the campaign six times over the course of several months. She sat in the front row and sketched as Obama made speeches; she talked to staffers behind the scenes, citizens in the crowds and Obama himself at key moments in the campaign; and she collected magazines and ephemera along the way.
Throughout, Nicola took on a trappist-like vow of silence about the project, talking only to her husband and parents about it all. Back in her studio, after Obama’s inauguration in 2009, she distilled all those sketches, photographs and conversations to produce images which reflect on the impossibility of what Obama set out to do.
‘In Seven Days…’ is current on show at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
I was especially struck by the first of the images, ‘The First Day, Light’ (seen above). It came from the moment in August 2008 when a crowd of 70,000 people was waiting in a giant stadium in Denver, Colorado, to see Barack Obama stride out onto the Democratic Convention platform and accept his party’s nomination as candidate for the US Presidency. In the moments before he arrived, the crowd, electrified by the significance of the event, erupted into a Mexican wave, with everyone leaping to their feet.
Nicola told me that she leapt up with them, but commendably, she kept her artist’s head in the intoxicating atmosphere. In the speeches leading up to this moment she had sketched the expressive hands of people around her. And as the wave cascaded through the crowd she photographed the hands as they waved, pointed or reached up in expressions of joy and praise.
Says Nicola: ‘The seven hands represent the 70,000 people, but also the fact that everybody around the world was watching this story. It was also a clock and about the timing of this moment.’
For more, see the Church Times piece (you have to subscribe to see it online). Or visit Nicola Green’s website. I’m hoping to talk to her again sometime when her next project is completed.
Today sees the rooftop-rattling flyby of asteroid 2012 DA14, a 50-metre chunk of space rock half the size of a football pitch. At 7.24pm (UK time) it’s going to miss hitting Earth by just over 17,000 miles, 5,000 miles closer than the SatNav satellites.
To get an idea of why it’s a good thing not to have an asteroid smacking into your planet, a rock the same size gouged out the mile-wide Baringer Crater in Arizona when it dropped from the sky 50,000 years ago, and another exploded in the air over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, flattening 80 million trees in a blast thought to be 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima.
Collision with asteroids is a popular form of apocalypse these days, along with zombie attack, neither of which feature very much in the Bible’s versions of Last Things. The 1998 movie Deep Impact, for example, had a 7 mile wide comet steering for Earth to trigger an ‘extinction-level event’.
Talking of comets, the heavens won’t be finished with us when 2012 DA14 flies back off into space tonight. That’s because the comet ISON is set to skim the sun on 28 November.
ISON is currently being touted as a once-in-a-civilisation sort of comet. ‘The comet could outshine the moon,’ muses Brian Cox in The Sun (that noted journal of heavenly bodies), ‘with a spectacular tail sweeping across the night sky.’
Back in 1974 when I was a teenager, I was severely ticked off by comet Kohoutek, which was similarly hyped up but turned out to be a dud. This has given me a lifelong suspicion of the vanity of comets.
The soothsayers of fundamentalism are already pitching ISON as Jesus’s very own firework display in celebration of the second coming. It’s a bizarre meeting of astrology and theology.
WND Faith lists the comet as a ‘celestial sign of things to come’ and links it to four total eclipses of the moon, which are apparently set to happen in 2014 and 15. It’s during one of those eclipses that ‘the Second Coming of Christ will likely occur’. I hope Harold Camping is taking notes as he reads this.
Meanwhile, over on the somewhat excitable Above Top Secret website, the comet will be just one event in the Great Tribulation described in the book of Revelation. The website gives us the schedule: ‘Nov. 16, 2013 kicks off Trumpet 5 and starts the 1st woe. Comet ISON is scheduled for an appearance at this time – this is the false “sign of the son of man in heaven”.’
Comets have been seen from pre-history as terrifying signs of impending change and disaster. Along with eclipses, they pointed to the deaths of kings, the outbreak of plagues or the coming day of doom. They caused fear and panic in the mouths of caves when we still lived in them, and later on the streets of ancient cities from China to Babylon to Rome.
These visceral beliefs were reinterpreted by monotheism as the righteous judgments of God. Because comets disrupt the regularity of the heavens, they must come from the hand of God as portents of disaster on Earth. They’re especially at home in apocalyptic writings – as brought to us by Isaiah, Ezekiel, Joel, the book of Revelation and Jesus himself. Apocalyptic stocks its horror shows with falling stars, blood-red moons, fire from heaven, brimstone falling into the sea, the sun extinguished.
I’ve kept hold of a wonderful tract I found in the late 1970s about the line-up of the planets which took place in 1982 (pictured above). After predicting that the conjunction could cause storms on the sun, earthquakes on earth and even (shudder) disruption to TV programmes, the tract urged the following message on its readers:
‘All this means that the coming of the Lord is drawing very near. By 1982 our world could be feeling the wrath of God in the coming time of tribulation.’
The second coming – that most sci-fi of all Christian beliefs – did not happen on the strength of lined-up planets in 1982. And Jesus will not return riding on comet ISON (like the final scene in Dr Strangelove) in 2013. But that won’t stop Christians from co-opting comets and asteroids into their dark fantasies of doom for the next few months.
Accidentally saw an exhibition of photographs at the V&A this afternoon called Light from the Middle East. It brings together images by photographers in all the Middle Eastern countries, from North Africa to Central Asia, and opens up many of the issues facing people in this region which is so close to the West and yet so culturally distant.
Picking out just a few images which especially struck me…
Party, a series by Amirali Ghasemi (one image is shown above) blanks out the faces and flesh of people at unsanctioned private parties in Tehran. I love the graphic effect of that and the way it effortlessly evokes censorship.
Armed Innocence II by Nermine Hammam is of abashed young soldiers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the January 2011 protests. Hammam noticed that the soldiers wanted to be anywhere but there, and has placed them in sugary-sweet, postcard-like fantasy settings.
And Gajar by Shadi Ghadirian is a series of stagey portraits in the style of studio shots from the 19th century – but the sitters hold jarringly modern objects: a Pepsi can, a stereo, a mountain bike. Each picture is a little satire on the dilemmas of Iranian women caught between tradition and modern life.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of going to atheist church last Sunday was singing the hymns.
After a lifetime singing along to Charles Wesley, John Newton and Mrs Cecil Alexander, it felt thrillingly transgressive to stand up in church and launch into ‘Why do you build me up, buttercup baby?’ plus two other inappropriate songs which have certainly never graced the pages of a hymn book.
The songs we sang weren’t especially relevant even for an atheist service, as all of them were individualistic love songs. But when I watched the video clip above today, of a flashmob singing ‘Here Comes the Sun’ in a Spanish unemployment office, I saw how a song of hope can have a powerful effect.
In the middle of Europe’s horrible economic winter, in a job centre, the place where the freeze cuts most deeply, here is a song which dreams of ice melting and the sun returning. ‘Here comes the sun, and I say it’s all right.’
Christian hymns and spirituals have been a powerful source of hope and inspiration in our culture especially since the 18th century revivals. Several of them linger on in cup finals and rugby matches: ‘Abide with Me’, ‘Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’. They’re wonderful songs, but their language and imagery, steeped in stories of the Bible, come to most people from long ago and far away. They are disconnected from today’s world.
In contrast, what seems to be happening in the Spanish job centre is a song of our times, a song you’ve heard on the radio, a song you actually understand, coming to life in an unexpected way. It’s a moment to feed on something truly good. This lovely Beatles song is doing the work of a hymn.
As a Christian, I’m fascinated to see this happening. I’ve seen it in other flashmobs, where a kind of gospel joy breaks out in a train station or a shopping centre. How do I account for it, or think of it, when it seems to have broken free of the Christian culture which first shaped it? I’ve no answer for that, but the question is intriguing.
The Israelites in exile in Babylon asked (in Psalm 137) ‘How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ Maybe that’s our situation today. What do you think?
While I’m here, just to say that I’m going to be interviewed on several BBC local radio stations early tomorrow morning, Sunday 13 January, talking about my experience of atheist church last week. Here are the stations and times…
0710 3CR (Beds, Herts and Bucks)
0720 Humberside
0730 Hereford & Worcester
0740 Sussex and Surrey
0750 Lancashire
0800 Ulster
0820 Bristol
0830 Leeds
0840 York
0850 Derby
Looking forward to it, despite the early start. I’ll be cooped up in a self-service studio in the bowels of Western House, the home of Radio 2. If you hear one of the interviews (they happen live, in sequence), do tweet to let me know.
I was a bit late to this story, but just before Christmas, National Geographic announced that one of the world’s tallest trees, the 247 foot ‘President’, a giant sequoia in Prairie Creek, California, has had its picture taken. It’s a composite picture actually, stitched together from 126 separate shots.
I only mention it because I’d like to recommend one of the best books I’ve read recently called The Wild Trees, by Richard Preston. It’s about one of the last unexplored places on earth – the forest canopy – and tells the often hair-raising story of how the huge trees of northern California were first climbed in the 1960s and 70s.
The story is poetic, quixotic and often dramatic, with people climbing and then falling out of trees and trees themselves being felled by high winds. Since reading it, the book’s stayed with me and I still think about it.
Biologists were slow to realise that to study the canopy they would need climbing skills. According to one early climbing scientist: ‘People said, “What do you mean, you’re going up into the trees? There’s nothing up there. That’s just Tarzan and Jane stuff.” She believed that she was on to something. “I felt like, Wow, here’s this new place nobody’s been to.”’
I grew up climbing trees myself, so the book had extra appeal for me, but I recommend it for anyone who enjoys an unexpected and well-told story and wants to know more about one of the world’s last frontiers.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if you took the religion out of a Sunday church service.
For stratospherically religious services, the kind which run on gallons of incense, with bells ringing, deacons bowing, jewelled crosses being marched from A to B and priests scuttling behind screens, there wouldn’t be much left without the religion, of course, aside from the after-service gin.
But for a low church service, with vicars in cardigans, lots of chat from the front, jokes in the sermons and a spot or two of worsh-u-tainment from the band, religion could quietly slip out of a side door without anyone really noticing it had buggered off.
I got the chance to test out a religionless church yesterday when I went to the opening service of The Sunday Assembly, London’s new atheist church. The church was dreamed up by comedians Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans who discovered on a car journey they were both interested in starting a local community for ‘anyone who wants to live better, help often and wonder more’.
Sunday’s service was in a big, old deconsecrated church in Canonbury, north London. The choice of building was quite brilliant. It had blistered plasterwork, crumbling gothic arches, gloriously shabby walls and basically looked like a set for a film called Wreck of Christianity II.
It’s not often that I’ve ever had to queue up to get into church, but amazingly 250 other curious souls had turned up for the service and there was a bottleneck at the door. Once inside I found a seat, but at least half the congregation sat on the floor, stood at the back or perched up in the precarious-looking balcony.
A small band – just like in real church! – was warming up at the front, led by Pippa Evans who launched into singing the service’s theme song in a voice which reminded me of Millicent Martin opening satire show That Was The Week That Was back in the 60s.
Sanderson Jones, sporting red trousers and a bright tie, took to the stage and led the service with energy verging on the Pentecostal and comedy which was genuinely funny. He is several inches over six feet tall and has the kind of long, fundamentalist beard which makes his claim, ‘I’m not trying to start a cult,’ flat-out unbelievable.
I only say that because he pointed it out himself, to a lot of laughter from the congregation. And then he added, ‘But that’s exactly the sort of thing I’d say if I was starting a cult.’
We stood to sing our first hymn. I was hoping it would be that rousing old Victorian standard, ‘At the name of Dawkins, Every knee shall bow…’ but instead we had Sam Cooke’s ‘Don’t know much about history, Don’t know much biology…’
It struck me as an ironic choice, since atheism stakes its claim on knowing a heap of stuff about history, biology, science book, etc. But then The London Assembly turned out to be refreshingly unpushy about its atheism.
As a believer myself I felt perfectly OK listening to the reading (an extract from Teddy Roosevelt’s The Man in the Arena speech), singing the other two hymns (‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and ‘Build Me Up Buttercup’) and putting something in the collection.
The collection was notable, actually. I’ve never heard anyone actually thank a congregation for what they’ve just given. Jones was overwhelmed by the response and thanked us all very warmly. It was one of several rewarding moments when the Sunday Assembly shone and which revealed the tiredness of church as I know it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the service has been launched by two comedians. I’ve thought for a while that standups have displaced preachers in popular culture. They spend a lot of time reflecting on the way humans behave, and in observational comedy it’s the jokes that are true to life which connect with people and move them to laugh.
Jones and Evans are most at home running a show with an audience, rather than a service with a congregation, so most of The Sunday Assembly ran as a sort of thoughtful comedy show. But in the service’s most fascinating moment, Jones bravely stepped out of his comedy persona and invited us to close our eyes and imagine how we might change over the coming year.
He paused for silence and I thought to myself, he won’t be able to leave us in silence for very long, as a quiet audience to a standup is like green kryptonite to Superman. And sure enough, 15 seconds later he said, ‘Well, I don’t know how long you want to think about that for…’
He needn’t have worried, though. As far as I could see, most people were ready for some quiet thought. As far as I could see, actually, there was quite a lot in the service which you could take as religion, even if it was presented under a different name.
After some post-service tea and helping to stack the chairs, I came away liking the Sunday Assembly and I hope it does well. I missed the familiar, faith-based aspects of meeting with others, but also realised that a good percentage of church – any church – is made up of friendship, listening, singing, laughter, giving, receiving and cups of tea.
It’s good to sit with atheists in their space and feel welcome. It’s challenging to think about living better, helping often and wondering more. I think this is a place where Christians should be.
Men think about sex every seven seconds, as the old saying goes, so at first blush Alain de Botton’s book, published earlier this year, looks like it’s pushing for some sort of Guinness world record.
But his contention in How to Think More About Sex is that we don’t give enough quality reflection to this fundamental human drive, with its effortless power to topple our rational priorities.
Although sex is everywhere in our culture, it remains well hidden. As de Botton says: ‘Most of what we are sexually remains impossible to communicate with anyone whom we would want to think well of us. Men and women in love will instinctively hold back from sharing more than a fraction of their desires out of a fear, usually accurate, of generating intolerable disgust in their partners.’
De Botton thinks through the pleasures and problems of sex with a disarming openness that encourages you to be honest at least with yourself. He covers love, lust, rejection, porn, loneliness, adultery and the erotic, and asks left-of-field questions such as ‘Can sexiness be profound?’
Unexpectedly, he gives kudos to religions for their serious take on sex and says they have basically got it right. ‘Only religions see it as something potentially dangerous and needing to be guarded against.’
Exercise the sexiest organ in your body (the one between your ears) with this thoughtful book.
Next Wednesday, an 85 year-old man will tweet and the media will report that it is news.
The Pope has debuted before on Twitter, in June 2011, when he sent a tweet to inaugurate the then-new Vatican news website, but this time he has his own Twitter account @pontifex. It’s clocked up half a million followers in the couple of days since the account opened for business.
That supernatural growth spurt is only one of the things that’s unusual about this account. For a start, it’s being run by a man who prefers writing in longhand to using a computer keyboard. And although the Vatican says the Pope ‘will tweet what he wants to tweet’, his involvement will be limited to signing off on the 140-character messages, which according to the Vatican Insider will be put together by staff in the Secretariat of State.
The Pope is apparently not going to follow anyone on Twitter. But actually, that’s not quite correct, as the @pontifex account is already following seven other people, who all turn out to be the @pontifex accounts in other languages. That means the Pope is following only himself, which isn’t very much in the spirit of things on Twitter.
Benedict will also not be retweeting anyone else’s tweets, although he will be replying to questions put to him on Twitter. That’s better than just delivering a monologue, although question and answer always puts the guy with the answers in the driving seat. Unsurprisingly, the @pontifex account has already been bombarded with questions and comments, ‘sometimes irreverent, often downright hateful’, according to Elizabeth Scalia, who blogs as The Anchoress.
The absence of retweeting, following others and actually writing your own tweets makes me wonder whether the whole exercise is for real. It certainly takes a lot of sincerity out it. I’m sure the more conservative sections of the Roman curia see this as a new megaphone for the Pope to deliver his one-way messages, but the world doesn’t work like that any more. It’s very Supreme Pontiff (pontifex maximus), and the @pontifex handle is a strong reminder of the worst aspects of the papacy.
However, there could be some promising signs. The Dalai Lama, who has thrived on Twitter for the past couple of years, is supported by a social media team which translates his teachings into tweets. That operation has not only worked well but seems to have been true to the Dalai Lama and true to the social medium too, so perhaps there is a model here that could work for Benedict. The Dalai Lama’s account, which follows 0 people and does not retweet, has 5.6 million followers, making him the 91st most followed person on Twitter.
The Catholic blogger Brandon Vogt yesterday offered five suggestions for the tweeting Pope. They included: engage in dialogue, be funny, and don’t be afraid. Says Vogt: ‘If you’re simply pushing out information, you’re not using Twitter’s full potential. The great power of Twitter is that it puts you in dialogue with a billion Catholics around the world – and billions of non-Catholics – most of whom see you as distant and inaccessible.’
The Pope has I think distinguished himself in reflecting on Internet culture over the past few years in his messages on World Communications Day. In his 2011 message, he talked positively about the way people can connect with each other through social media. He said: ‘Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others.’
If Benedict can turn that thought into action by breaking out of the confines of his office and finding an authentically human way of communicating with the social media world, that would be a very hopeful sign.
It’s a big thing to hope, but if the Dalai Lama can do it, maybe the Pope can too.
And while they’re about it, perhaps they could follow each other.
I couldn’t help being guiltily delighted by this evangelistic business card which I found on Reddit atheism this morning (thanks be unto rchayes89 for snapping and then posting it). In fact, I love it almost as much as I love my Barry Manilow record collection.
The card, which puts the cheese back into ‘Jesus’, is brilliant on so many levels. There’s the day-glo red card and the budget heat printing which dollops shiny black ink on the surface – both so 1970s. But best of all is the reversible type in the middle, straight out of the School of Heavy Metal. It’s tacky. It’s cheap. It’s in your face. What’s not to love?
From the scuffed edges of the card, it looks like this has been given back a few times. Which is a shame. I’d endure a 20-minute ear-bashing from a street evangelist just to get one.
P.S. Just to be clear, that Barry Manilow reference was ironic, OK?
I went to Croatia a few weeks ago and visited the seaside town of Poreč (a name charmingly pronounced like ‘porridge’, but with a ‘ch’ sound at the end), which is home to a very ancient Christian church. Still standing is a modest, 6th century Roman basilica, which is quite plain inside except when you look to the front and see beautiful, glowing mosaics filling the semi-dome of the apse. In the centre of the mosaic is an image of Mary holding Jesus in her lap, with a smiling angel on either side. It is said to be the oldest surviving image of Mary in a western basilica.
But outside are even more wonders, because right next door to the basilica is the footprint of an earlier, 4th century church, which astonishingly still has its fine mosaic floor, open to the sky. The sea laps the shoreline less than 50 metres away.
Guard railings prevent you from actually walking on the floor (thank goodness), but you can easily see the weather-stained geometric shapes, flowers and foliage which fill the space. But there’s something else in the floor, and it’s a surprise. In the midst of all the patterns is a solitary fish. It’s rather randomly placed, top right in a big square that’s been sub-divided into a checkerboard of nine squares, three to a side. It’s as if a fish fell out of a shopping bag onto a highly patterned Persian rug and was left there for no particular reason.
I knew the basilica had this fish mosaic, and it was the main reason I wanted to visit Poreč in the first place. The fish is one of the earliest symbols of the Christian faith, dating right back to the times when Christians were persecuted and needed codes and ciphers to communicate safely with each other.
The word for ‘fish’ is ichthus in Greek, and the individual Greek letters can each be used to start a word which then forms the sentence, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’. That’s how you turn an ordinary fish into a discreet little confession of faith. And of course this clever symbol has stood the test of time. You can buy cute versions of the same fish symbol and stick them on the back of your car to annoy the driver behind.
I was especially looking forward to seeing the fish of Poreč, because it was created in the same tumultuous century as the final persecution of the Christians, which was followed by the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome. For that reason, this particular fish was made by men within living memory of the persecuted church, which gave birth to the symbol.
But two things took me by surprise. First, inside the basilica’s museum, you can see a copy of the mosaic close up. And I just wasn’t expecting to see a fish which looked so aggressive, with spines and needle-sharp teeth (see the picture above, or a bigger version here). The fish, after all, is meant to signify Christ himself. My wife Roey voiced what I was thinking: ‘That can’t be the ichthus fish because it looks so horrible!’
This made me think that maybe the leaflet we’d picked up at the ticket office, which described the mosaic as a ‘Fish – Christian symbol’, might be wrong. It could be that the fish was just a fish, part of the decoration of this ancient Christian building, which also features fruit and vines, flowers and leaves, without each detail being deeply symbolic.
The second surprise, though, was seeing the fish in the actual mosaic pavement, where it had been placed 17 centuries earlier. It is the only animal in the whole floor, and there it is, at the very front of the church. It simply stands out as something exceptional and eye-catching. As something significant.
Maybe it’s just there because the merchant who paid for this stretch of mosaic was in the fish trade and wanted to be remembered. But the symbol had such resonance for the newly-liberated Christian community that it’s hard to imagine it landed there on a tradesman’s whim, stripped of its cherished history and hidden meaning.
In a fishing town like Poreč, the makers of ancient mosaics knew what fish looked like, and they drew them as they saw them in the market, teeth and all. The craftsman who made this fish also depicted the gills like a wound in the fish’s side, using dark red stones.
I think this is a genuine ichthus – unlike the Disneyfied version seen today on a thousand bumper stickers.
I love these illustrations from a clergyman’s fashion catalogue published in 1966. In the year when the Beatles started recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and mini skirts were all the rage, clergy were being told, ‘The clerical frock coat suit is still the correct wear for strictly formal occasions’. See scans of the pages here, including clergy raincoats, cardigans and dressing gowns.
They are from the May 1966 catalogue of clerical outfitters Vanheems. They were scanned by Steve Goddard, whose uncle, Canon Sydney Goddard, had kept the catalogue since the 60s.
This Land is Mine was the schmaltzy theme song from the film Exodus (adapted in 1960 from Leon Uris’s novel of the same name), which Wikipedia tells me was widely characterised as a Zionist epic. I can believe it, because the song has the most Settler-friendly lyrics imaginable, written by Pat Boone.
But now cartoonist Nina Paley has redeemed the song by making it the soundtrack of a satirical animation, which I’ve embedded above. Click here to see the movie in its widescreen and cartoon-violent glory. It’s beautifully made and the payoff in the closing moments gives the lie to the whole concept of the ‘Holy Land’.
Nina Paley’s blog has a very useful rundown of all the characters in the movie. Churches should screen this if they’re doing a sermon series from the more bloodthirsty Old Testament books.
If you like to think you’re a non-conformist, watch the video above. Things start getting interesting from about 1:05. There is one rebel who holds out past the 2 minute mark (far right, second from the front), but by 2:40 the game is over.
The experiment was filmed by Ikeguchi Laboratory in Japan, which studies nonlinear chaotic dynamics.
A lovely and intriguing piece in the Guardian today by my friend Matthew Cresswell, on how Nasa imposed radio silence on Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin when he took communion shortly after the first moon landing.
Nasa was being sued at the time for the religious content of the Apollo 8 mission, when 10 verses from the first chapter of Genesis were read out on Christmas Eve while the astronauts orbited the moon, so Buzz was told to play down his private act of communion.
Aldrin’s description of the moment caught my eye: ‘I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup.’
It reminded me of a cartoon I drew for my 1991 book of cartoons, When Clergymen Ruled the Earth, about the perils of hitting escape velocity during Pentecostal-style rave-ups on the lunar surface. Since the book’s out of print (although used copies are selling for one penny on Amazon, hallelujah!) I’m posting it here in celebration.
I’m a member of the team behind ChurchAds.Net, which has been producing national advertising campaigns for Christmas and Easter in the UK for almost 20 years. We’ve been running our ‘Christmas starts with Christ’ campaign for the past three Christmases, and the 2012 poster, featuring Godbaby, was launched yesterday. In the week or two leading up Christmas Day, Godbaby will be up there on billboards and bus shelters and outside local churches.
The poster comes with a choice of straplines. For a no-nonsense take on the incarnation, there’s ‘He cries. He wees. He saves the world.’ But for the faint of heart, which will probably include some churches, there’s the alternative version: ‘The gift that loves you back’. See both versions here.
I admire the poster for doing two things. First for talking in the language of today. During the autumn, advertising on buses, billboards and TV screens will be full of toys and products promising to make Christmas better. This poster will raise the same expectation, but it points to the Bethlehem baby as the one thing that can save us. And it undercuts commercial Christmas by saying in effect, ‘It’s not products you need, but Godbaby’.
Second, I appreciate its strong take on the God who becomes one of us to the point of bodily functions. For me, ‘He cries. He wees’ is a brilliant and unexpected connection between the world of dolls, where the hair ‘really grows’, and the world of the Christian faith, where God really becomes a living, breathing, crying, sneezing, weeing human being.
Some Christians will heartily dislike the boldness of that, which they’ll argue is irreverent or even blasphemous. In fact, hostile comment has already started to arrive, with someone emailing to call the poster ‘awful and repulsive’. That’s fair enough, as all Christians are entitled to have strong feelings about how their faith is publicly portrayed.
What do you think? Do you like the poster for its risk-taking attempt to communicate Jesus today? Do you disagree with it for portraying the Son of God as a plastic doll? Or what?
I wrote this piece early in September 1997 for just me to read. Fifteen years on, I think it’s a blog entry from the days before blogs. So here it is now. For the pictures I took of the scenes outside Kensington Palace, see my Flickr gallery, Mourning Diana, 1997.
4 September 1997
Tonight, Roey and I went down to Kensington Palace to see how the crowds are mourning the death of Princess Diana.
The first sign of the extraordinary is the traffic – our car forced to a proper funeral’s speed as we creep past Kensington Gardens in search of a parking space. And then, once we are parked, the crowds. It’s 11 o’clock at night, but the pavements are as busy as the last shopping day before Christmas – with one great difference: these crowds are quiet and subdued, sombre and thoughtful, and they hasten, like us, across the grass beneath the shadowed trees towards the Palace.
We pass a tree which is surrounded by flowers and candles and pictures of the Princess. Some of the bunches of flowers have been cradled between the branches of the tree, while others stand against the trunk. But ahead of us, an incredible scent – the smell of thousands and thousands of late summer flowers – calls us on. As we approach the great railings in front of the Palace, we see people bowing low to light candles, tenderly placing bunches of flowers and notes of love and affection on the ground or between the ironwork. I stop to look at this, but then Roey calls from a few feet away: ‘Come and look…’
What I see next takes my breath away. None of the press pictures had prepared me for this. Roey is standing with hundreds of others at the edge of a crowd barrier which surrounds the Palace gates. At their feet is a sea of flowers, an ocean of petals, sweeping across the grass in front of the Palace, lapping up against the railings, waves and waves of flowers in their wrappers, each with a card, or a piece of paper, or a loved photograph, and on them written tiny notes, or scraps of poetry, or longer tributes… And here and there is a teddy bear, a pink bow around its neck, or a flickering candle, or a child’s coloured drawing, or a balloon clinging to the railings.
And the people just stand there, young and old, parents carrying tiny children, older couples, groups of young people, gazing silently on this sight which they have never ever seen in their lives before. They stand before this great offering and outpouring of love for someone who never knew that this was how they felt, because they never knew it themselves, until now. And as I stand there, trying to understand what my eyes are seeing, I think: if flowers and tears and love could ever bring someone back from the dead, then this is where it would happen.
Beyond the gates are the darkened windows of Kensington Palace, the black trees, the cloudy sky, and a light breeze lifts a few of the flower wrappers.
I lean on the railings, numbed by this display of grief, and a note at my feet catches my eye. ‘Forever our Queen of Hearts’. And it is only the first. We walk around the edge of the vast crowd and find the queue of people standing in line waiting to add their flowers to the great sea of colour and scent, two policemen gently directing them.
And here we find other trees surrounded by flickering candles and with flowers peeping from between their branches, and around them are people tending the candles and laying down the flowers with great devotion and care. We discover park benches covered in lilies and roses and irises. We see playing cards – the Queen of Hearts – pinned to bouquets, the simple word ‘Diana’ written across their top edge. We walk along an ancient brick wall, 100 metres at least, with a seamless carpet of flowers at its feet.
We stop before a shrine assembled on top of roadside waste bin, the icons of Diana beneath a canopy of cellophane, covered with a sprinkling of rain, the prayers on scraps of paper heartfelt, the candles and nightlights winking as religiously as in any church. We see simple words: ‘Diana, we miss you’... And beautiful words: ‘A light has been snatched from this world to shine more brightly in the next’... And words which are extravagant in grief: ‘You should have been Queen of England, but now you are a Queen in Heaven…’
And as we read some of these, we cry. And as we read others, we are amazed. And as we cry, we walk, walking across the peaceful grass in this place of flowers and tears, in this place of stunning emotion, in this place where English grief finds such unexpectedly beautiful expression.
Saw this on Sunday right next to the inns of court in London. This is what happens when you spend too much time with barristers and lawyers. For more found faces, see my collection on Pinterest.
Which generates more social engagement: vacuous tweets by celebs with tens of millions of Twitter followers, or motivational tweets by religious leaders with followers in the thousands?
According to On Twitter, God is Greater than Glitter, a New York Times story, it’s the religious tweets which win out, with huge numbers of retweets and favoriting. All of which must be making the angels cheer while Lady Gaga and Rihanna slink back to their gilded hotel rooms sick with envy.
However, when you read the detail of the story, it quickly hits you that the religious tweets are really nothing to tweet about. Here’s Rick Warren’s offering, for example, which apparently gained a huge number of retweets…
Growing older is automatic. Growing up is a choice.
Meanwhile, Joyce Meyer opines…
God’s timing is perfect; He is never late…
Rick and Joyce may have 626,000 and 993,000 followers respectively, but on this evidence they are sending their followers tweets straight out of The Book of Well, Duh. (In fairness to Rick, not all his posts are this saccharine.) At least Lady Gaga’s tweet, which revealed that she glued pearls to a mask on a flight to Korea, was personal and intriguing, even if it didn’t raise a storm of retweeting.
But Rick and Joyce are not alone. You don’t have to search very hard on Twitter to find its deep stream of piety, with people happily announcing 24/7 that God never closes a window without opening a door (which frankly makes him sound a bit OCD), that they’re not looking for a hole in the ground but a hole in the sky, and that the Lord never sends us burdens greater than we can carry – an observation coined in the days before God gave us suitcases on wheels.
But out cliché-ing everyone else in social media is Jesus Daily, a Facebook page with approaching 13 million likes. Founded by Dr Aaron Tabor, an anti-aging skincare specialist, Jesus Daily was crowned most engaging page on Facebook in 2011, smiting Justin Bieber and Real Madrid into 5th and 8th places respectively.
Jesus Daily builds its incredible social engagement by posting platitudes, questions with ‘right answers’ and kitschy pictures of puppies, kittens and crosses in clouds (see above), all with the relentless invitation to LIKE. For example…
LIKE if everyone should be able to read the Bible!
LIKE if you believe ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE WITH GOD!
LIKE if you thank God for great mothers! We love you.
LIKE if JESUS is your BEST FRIEND!
That last example received 241,328 likes, 4,163 comments and 19,959 shares, which makes the Jesus Daily brand a Facebook success by any measure. But its easy piety, offered every day to its ‘me too!’ audience, is like shooting ichthus fish in a barrel. The page’s creators know exactly what to say and show to manipulate their followers, and the truthlets they peddle are so worn down by mindless repetition that the main thing they do is make people feel nice about their faith.
That, of course, is what piety always does. It pressures you to agree with its simple beliefs and then reassures you that you – along with 241,328 others! – are an accepted member of your religious tribe. Praise the Lord! Clicking that LIKE button tells me I’m among the countless saved, rather than the damned!
It reminds me of that joke: ‘Eat shit. One million ants can’t be wrong.’
Piety is a fake form of faith, as it can never be true to the messy experience of people who live as fallen human beings struggling in their journey to God. Jesus always resisted piety and instead said awkward and difficult things which were not designed to build audiences. He was the polar opposite to Jesus Daily, with its oppressively positive tone, not to mention its pictures of Jesus with shampooed hair, dirt-free fingernails and rugged good looks.
I know I’ve gone for the negative in this post, but for me piety has always been one of the big enemies of faith. I take from it all the challenge of communicating a truly human faith in the different online worlds we live in.
On the way into London on Sunday, under skies promising copious rain, I sat opposite this poem on the tube. To see the poem at a decent size, I’ve also posted it on Flickr. I always look for and enjoy the Poems on the Underground series, which take the place of the regular ads, and I’ve posted about one of the poems before.
I love the final ‘drop’ and ‘canyon’ lines… every deluge starts with a single, pregnant drop of rain landing on your face.
if you have ears to hear
listen on this May morning
in this moment
in this instant of a moment
in an atom of time
listen
life is calling to you from the branch of a tree
life is hidden in a mystery of green leaves
but its sharp song flies to your ears
urgent with hunger and desire
tune your ears
turn your face to the song
attend to the moment
open the valves of your heart
while the song flies
while the tiny tongue flutters in the bright beak
while the holy particles of time still flow
if you have ears to hear
listen with all the breath in your lungs
listen with all the joy in your veins
listen with all the love you have
before the atom splits
and the instant is lost
and the singer is silent
and the song is gone
Oh dear… there’s trouble in Chelsea. Or to be more precise, in Made in Chelsea, E4’s fake reality TV show. Jamie has been betrayed by his best mate Spencer, who knocked off his girl while they were both in Dubai. Jamie’s in a state of emotional collapse when his other mate, Francis, calls round with 12 cans of beer and an oven-ready sermon.
Here’s the dialogue (see it on the 4OD website, starting at 15:55)...
Francis: You know, look… when I’m, you know, trying to deal with betrayal, I think of what Jesus would do.
Jamie looks incredulous.
Francis: Jesus was kind of like a superhero, you know. He just… got shit done.
Jamie: OK.
Francis: Judas betrayed Jesus.
Jamie: Mm-mm.
Francis: What did Jesus do?
Jamie: Forgave him?
Francis: Exactly. What should you do?
Jamie: Forgive Spencer.
Francis: And Louise.
Jamie looks baffled.
Francis: You don’t want to forgive Louise?
Jamie: No!!!
Francis thinks for a bit.
Francis: I don’t know if Jesus would only forgive Spencer, though.
Thanks to Tali Garan (my daughter), who pointed me to this. ‘Best religious chat I’ve heard in a while,’ she said. Must run in the family, spotting religious comedy as good as this.
In the most surreal moment of my year so far, I took a trip down a catwalk yesterday at the Christian Resources Exhibition, which is a sort of Ideal Church Show.
The exhibition features everything a church could need, from bells and steeples to gospel puppets and motorcycle hearses, and whenever I’ve been there in past years, it’s been a happy hunting ground for holy hardware in every shape and form, with the Floating Cross Boxers somehow sticking in the mind. I snapped a few trinkets yesterday.
We ran a stall for Ship of Fools at the exhibition a few years back and served visitors to the stand rum and pineapple cocktails from a Baptist communion glass tray. Happy days.
But yesterday, the exhibition staged a fashion show called Clergy on the Catwalk, where a collection of haute couture vestments was taken for a swish along the runway before an admiring audience. Which is how I got to dress up in a crisp white cassock alb and put myself about a bit in three ecclesiastical creations.
The first piece was a stole featuring the 12 apostles in richly dark embroidery from Jackie Binns. The last piece was a very comfortable cope (which I guess is a sort of bishop’s overcoat) in glowing red and gold by Juliet Hemingray... and for that I got to fling a thurible about while the front rows scattered for cover.
The second piece was the crowning glory, however, and was a chasuble hand embroidered with minutely detailed images from oil paintings, by Vanpoulles. I’ve never been greeted with lots of people saying ‘oooh’ and ‘wow’ as I walk into a room, so that was a nice change. That’s me in it in the picture above, just after I was cleared by air traffic control for takeoff.
I noticed last year at the Royal Wedding that some of the most glittering frocks in the house belonged to the Dean and Bishops greeting the Queen at the door, and I’ve often wondered how these fabulous creatures feel as they float around. So thanks to the three design houses for letting me find out for just a few minutes yesterday.
Paul Clowney, who died on Good Friday, was a friend I loved and respected for most of my adult life, and so the thought of him no longer being here is as nonsensical and perplexing as someone saying the rain’s going backwards. Several days since getting the news, I still can’t take it in. How is it possible for Paul to be gone? I find death more astoundingly opaque as I get older, when I thought it would get more transparent.
A friend texted me on Good Friday afternoon, just hours after Paul died, to remind me of a meal we shared where Paul arrived, took in the smell of coriander coming from the kitchen and said, ‘Ah… coriander. Reminds me of Vietnam.’ I can hear him saying it, in that cool and calming American accent of his.
That story reacquaints me with one of the things I always appreciated about Paul, that he was from elsewhere, culturally. From Vietnam, as a photographer with Richard Nixon’s army; from Philadelphia, where his father, Ed Clowney, was professor in theology; from Amsterdam where he studied and met his wife Tessa; from Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker and ways of thinking about art and faith that were unfamiliar and highly creative.
Outstandingly for me, Paul was a maker. He knew how to make things that worked and fix them when they didn’t. He was a person who either understood or was so curious about objects that they would eventually reveal their secrets to him. If you were ever going to be stranded on a Pacific island with nothing to eat but coconuts, you would surely want Paul with you, because he would put Robinson Crusoe to shame for inventiveness.
Paul is the only person I know who would bring a set of chisels with him on a weekend break to Lyme Regis. He used them to crack open rocks on Lyme’s Jurassic beach and expose fossils which last saw the light of the sun 180 million years ago. He was a magician of that sort of thing.
Roey and I first met Paul and Tessa in 1978 when they invited us to one of their ‘Art at Home’ exhibitions in Ealing. They turned their home into a temporary gallery for an art show by painting the walls, removing all the internal doors and hanging pictures. It was a characteristically playful and effective concept of them both. We had just got engaged and were looking for somewhere to live, and they beguiled us into becoming their Ealing neighbours.
I can still see them both in that house’s conservatory, talking with friends under the leaves of their luxuriant vine while the music of Kate and Anna McGarrigle filled the house. And I can see Paul, with his long hair and dense moustache, sitting at the scoring end of a shuffleboard, offering encouragement and advice as various friends sent the pucks flying up the board.
I’ll always remember the beautifully calm and rational way he prayed grace before meals – prayers which were practical and simple, but borne out of a deep faith in the God who is there. Prayers which were a blessing not just of the food and wine on the table, but of us too.
I sit here now, writing these words after midnight, before I go to bed. I know Paul did this self same thing many, many times, because I used to call him at his agency, The Clearing House, after midnight when I had a technical problem I couldn’t fix, and he would simply say, ‘Come on over.’
And I think: All Paul’s deadlines, all his to-do lists and client relationships, and all his after-midnight tasks are now done. His great project is completed. As it says: ‘Blessed are those who die in the Lord, for they rest from their labours.’
And it also says this: ‘All you who, in life, have taken on you the cross as a yoke, and have followed Me through faith, draw near: Enjoy the honours and crowns which I have prepared for you.’
That is how I shall always think of Paul. My loved and honoured elder brother in faith.
Visiting relatives in Warwickshire on Sunday, I was handed a lovely old copy of the Prayer Book, with a publication date of 1760 on the title page. I dipped in, marvelling that Morning Prayer 250 years ago is exactly as I’ve experienced it myself – except that the letter ‘s’ is frequently shown as a ‘f’ (or a character very like an ‘f’), in that fweet old 18th century ftyle.
It’s not often that my mouth hangs open in slack-jawed astonishment, but when I turned to the back of the book, with its section of metrical Psalms, I encountered Psalm 8 in a version I’ve never seen before (and which I snapped above). The first few lines tell the story.
Now I know 18th century congregations could easily read an ‘f’ as an ‘s’ and would be able to sing the Psalm without any difficulty… but they also knew and loved the same Anglo-Saxon words we cherish today. And so surely, surely, even the most pious worshipper would have sprayed their communion wine over the pew in front when they read these words?
It doesn’t help your mood when your Sony remote is sitting on a nearby shelf looking mightily pissed off. It’s been glaring at me for a few weeks now, so I’ve decided to turn it round.
I’ve started collecting these random faces on a Pinterest board, Faces I’ve seen. It’s an example of pareidolia.
I get Google alerts whenever Ship of Fools appears in the news, and tonight we got a rare mention for a competition we ran back in 2005 called The Laugh Judgment. We asked our readers to send us their favourite religious jokes in two categories: funniest and most offensive. The winner of the funniest religious joke was a gag created by American comic Emo Philips.
The news item picked up by Google was for the reopening of a comedy club in Vancouver, where Emo is taking the first spot. The report said: ‘The 56-year-old American has been a staple of comedy clubs since the 1980s, but the highlight of his career might be having a joke that was rated “the funniest religious joke of all time” by the Christian humour website, Ship of Fools.’
Well, if true, that’s an unexpected career highlight for Ship of Fools too. In fact, we judged Emo’s joke to be the best religious joke not only of all time, but of all eternity. Here it is…
Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump.
I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’
I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’
I said, ‘Are you a Christian or a Jew?’ He said, ‘A Christian.’
I said, ‘Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?’ He said, ‘Protestant.’
I said, ‘Me, too! What franchise?’ He said, ‘Baptist.’
I said, ‘Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?’ He said, ‘Northern Baptist.’
I said, ‘Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist.’
I said, ‘Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.’
I said, ‘Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?’ He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.’
I said, ‘Die, heretic!’ And I pushed him over.
Emo Philips very kindly contacted Ship of Fools after the competition and offered us tickets to his show at the Newbury Comedy Festival, which is where the pic above of him and me came from. If you’re a fan (or if you’re not yet) visit his website to see where he’s playing after Vancouver.
‘Do you think Jesus had a sense of humour?’ The question was posted this afternoon on Twitter and was quickly followed by a chorus of right answers.
‘Yup He did!’
‘Yes, and does :-)’
‘Defo!’
Most Christians I know think Jesus could be funny, and that he did the 1st century versions of standup with gags such as the story of the exploding wineskin, or the chap happily walking round with a great big plank of wood in his face.
But when you think about it, being funny is only half the story. If someone’s asked, ‘Have you got a sense of humour?’ it usually means, ‘Can you take a joke?’ After all, it’s easy to be funny at the expense of someone else, but what happens when they do it back to you? Can you laugh at yourself?
So what about Jesus? Does he mind having his leg pulled? Is he OK if we crack jokes about him? Is he cool with ‘Jesus H Christ’? Something tells me that most Christians think not, and think not quite strongly, as they believe even mild jokes about Jesus are blasphemy. This unfortunately paints the Lord as someone who laughs at others, but gets monumentally angry when they return the compliment. It makes him look like a bully.
I’ve been thinking about this on and off the past day or two because a Red Bull advert being screened on South African TV was pulled when Christians (with Muslim backup) said it was deeply offensive. The ad features an amusing – to me, at least – cartoon where Jesus walks on water and the disciples question whether he’s been drinking Red Bull, as (in the product’s oft-used slogan) ‘Red Bull gives you wiiings’.
Jesus denies drinking Red Bull, and when one disciple asks if this is another of his miracles, he says, ‘It’s no miracle, you just have to know where the stepping stones are.’ He then almost slips off a stone and says ‘Jesus’ under his breath.
Cardinal Napier, Archbishop of Durban, issued a statement immediately after the ad was aired saying how ‘disappointed’ he was with Red Bull whom he chided for their ‘satirical manner’ and for ‘overstepping a mark’. He suggested that Catholics should fast from consuming the drink until Easter and added that Red Bull’s advertising and PR people ought to get some ‘sensitivity training’. My counter-suggestion is that the cardinal gets some therapy for sense of humour failure, especially focusing on the gift of humility which the Lord bestows when others laugh at you.
The advertising standards authority received over 499 complaints, at which point Red Bull withdrew the ad from broadcast.
In fairness to Red Bull, I think there’s something inherently funny about the walking on water miracle. The few times I’ve been to the Sea of Galilee, I’ve always seen people at the water’s edge larking about, pretending to walk on the waves and getting friends to snap them doing it.
It’s the flashiest of Jesus’ miracles, almost like a bit of divine showing off, and it comes close to Jesus indulging the second temptation, where the Devil tries to get him to stage this exact same miracle of defying gravity.
The story seems to attract humour like a magnet. Even the liberal rationalisations of it in weighty commentaries can’t help veering off into farce. One scholar suggested that Jesus walked on a hidden sandbank (which makes Red Bull’s cartoon look like the exposition of a viewpoint rather than outright satire), while another suggested he was just wading through the surf. In 2006, a professor of oceanography argued that Jesus walked on ice, which raises the question, why not throw in a pair of skates too?
Even before Jesus’ time, walking on water was spoken about as laughable. ‘He was rash enough to think that he could make ships sail on dry land and men walk over the sea,’ says a verse about an arrogant king in the Second Book of Maccabees.
My biggest problem with Christians who get uncontrollably ‘offended’ by mildly amusing cartoons such as Red Bull’s is not just that it makes Jesus look like a bully, but it undermines his humanity. I think I can just about make the case that refusing to countenance jokes about Jesus belongs to an ancient heresy called docetism.
In that heresy, the belief that Jesus was God was held so strongly that the belief in his humanity withered. The average docetist would say that Jesus only appeared to be human, and that he never actually ate, drank, slept, suffered, died… or had a physical life at all. It’s a very damaging belief, because if Jesus was only God, and was never truly human as we are human, how can he be ‘God with us’ and give us the help we need? It destroys the Christian story.
If Jesus was a real, living and breathing human being, then comedy given and received was part of his experience. And since Christians believe he remains human after his resurrection, then comedy, jokes and funny cartoons made at his expense are an expected part of the Jesus experience too. Most Christians (and probably 100% of cardinals) might not want to join in that comedy themselves, but they shouldn’t be surprised by it or nurture offence about it.
Edward Abbey, the American author and hellraiser, once said, ‘Jesus don’t walk on water no more; his feet leak.’ Now that’s sterner stuff, comedically, than the Red Bull ad. But it’s still a joke I think Jesus would be able to take without reaching for a thunderbolt.
Jürgen Moltmann has a very infectious way of laughing. He fixes you with his bright eyes, a smile spreads across his face as he’s talking, and then comes the almost soundless laughter that sweeps you with it. I really hadn’t expected that from one of the 20th century’s most brilliant German theologians, and even less so from someone who powerfully made the case, after Auschwitz, that God is a God who suffers.
I visited him at his home in Tübingen last week, after a 10 hour train journey. The magazine which sent me to interview him, Third Way, didn’t want me to fly by plane, for the greenest of reasons, but it was a long journey to make for a 90 minute meeting. It turned out to be beyond rewarding, though.
The French and then German countryside unfolding outside my train window was beautiful in the early spring sunshine, but I had my head stuck in a book most of the way. Like an undergraduate with a late essay to submit, I was deeply into Moltmann’s brick-sized autobiography, A Broad Place (408 pages), which turned out to be an inspiring read. By the time I sank into my hotel bed at 2am, I was ready with my list of questions.
Professor Moltmann retired in 1994, but since then, six new books of his have been published in English, with a seventh currently in the works. He’s now 85, but several years ago when he turned 60, he said that he unexpectedly ‘became young and lively again’. His youthfulness in old age seems to have stuck. The first sign I saw of it came after I climbed the road up and out of old Tübingen, along the valley above the River Neckar, and found that the car parked outside his house had personalised number plates. I spotted the ‘JM’ straight away.
Inside, after he’d made me a dish of very weak tea (I estimate Pantone 726), he took me into his study, which is a broad, beautiful, light-filled room looking down the steep slope of his long garden into the valley. I always enjoy seeing where people work, and this room, where so much influential thinking took shape, was everything you could wish for.
With no computer in sight, I asked him if he used an Apple Mac. ‘I am an old European,’ he replied, amused at himself. ‘I use telephone and fax.’ He writes his books by hand and corrects a typewritten copy. ‘I like the combination of mind and hand,’ he said, and then added, ‘At my age, I am writing more letters of grief and consolation, and I cannot type a letter of compassion.’
I’d asked to see his study because I wanted to know what pictures he had in there, as some of his thinking has been shaped by meditating on images such as Andrei Rublev’s icon of the Holy Trinity. He showed me a Greek icon of the resurrection on the wall, as well as a postcard image of Marc Chagall’s Yellow Crucifixion, which he had tucked inside a first edition of his book The Crucified God.
‘For a long time this picture was my companion,’ Moltmann wrote in his autobiography, ‘and was a symbol inviting me to theological thinking.’ I don’t know of many Western theologians who have done this.
At the end of our 90 minutes, I had to dash to catch my train home, but as I was packing up I couldn’t resist asking him what his favourite hymn was. It’s a bit of a cheesy Songs of Praise question, but I was interested in what a theologian would do with it. When he hesitated to answer, I expanded the question by asking what are his sources of inspiration and consolation.
‘Mostly watching nature – and especially the sea. From Hamburg, we always spent our holidays at the seaside. I was always fascinated and had mystical experiences! The music of the sea is like the tone of eternity. Because this was here before human beings came and this will be there when human beings have maybe vanished from the earth.’
I shot a video of the interview and will be putting some clips from it online soon. I’ll post here when they’re up.
It’s not every day you get to meet a 24 carat theologian, but next week I’m doing just that. I’m off to Tübingen in Germany to interview Jürgen Moltmann, who’s up there with Bonhoeffer, Barth, Bultmann and the other pin-ups of 20th century theology. The interview is for Third Way magazine, but some of the interview will be published on Ship of Fools and here.
Moltmann is probably most famous for his books Theology of Hope and The Crucified God, published in 1964 and 1972. But the things which have caught my eye so far in preparing for the interview are his experiences during and after the Second World War, where he fought as a soldier in the German army.
In his autobiography, A Broad Place, which I’m currently devouring, he says that he had no Christian faith then, but after he was captured by allied troops and held in a POW camp in Scotland, he started to read the Bible soon after he and his fellow POWs learned the terrible truth of what had been happening in Belsen, Buchenwald and the other concentration camps. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘every patriotic feeling for Germany – “holy Fatherland” – collapsed and died.’
In the early 60s, he travelled to Poland for the first time. He writes…
The most deeply emotional experience was to walk through the Maidaneck concentration and death camp, near Lublin. The plank beds in the barracks were the last resting places of starving and tormented men, women and children. Behind glass lay the little shoes of the murdered Jewish children, and hair that had been cut off from the gassed women. We saw the pits in which more than 10,000 people had been shot on a single day.
At the time I wanted to sink into the ground for shame, and would have suffocated in the presence of the mass murder, if on one of the roads through the camp I had not suddenly had a vision. I looked into the world of the resurrection and saw all these dead men, women and children coming towards me. Since then I have known that God’s history with Auschwitz and Maidaneck has not been broken off, but that it goes further with the victims and with the perpetrators. Without hope for the ‘new earth in which righteousness dwells’ (2 Peter 3.13), this earth, which has suffered Treblinka and Maidaneck, would be unendurable.
The experience profoundly shaped Moltmann’s theology in the 60s and 70s, which on one level responds to the question, How can you speak about God after the Holocaust? Where was God in the midst of that unimaginable suffering? His striking vision of ‘looking into the world of the resurrection’ is a pointer towards his theology of hope, where the kingdom of God breaks into the present from the future.
I’m hugely looking forward to meeting and talking with Jürgen Moltmann. If any readers of this blog would like to suggest questions to ask him, please post them here.
Last Wednesday, on the first day of Western Lent, I went down into the cellar of my house to clear out a small hidden recess. It’s round the corner from the steps down into the cellar and must be the darkest space in the house – and it was filled with kindling and bits of firewood. Many years ago, I used the recess as a prayer space, and there’s something in this year which is nudging me to pray there again.
Once I’d cleared out the wood, brushed down the flaking walls and swept the floor, I looked round the cellar for bits and pieces which would work as basic furniture for a would-be hermit. There was a chunky plank of wood by the electricity meter, so I cut it to length to make a low shelf, with two old paint pots (one at each end) to hold it up. I found a sawn-off block of tree trunk which was just begging to be sat on.
Then I brought down a candle, some sticks of incense, a Bible and a couple of prayer books, a hand-sized old Orthodox crucifix and a copy of an icon that has always meant a lot to me. And a box of matches, of course. Then I turned out the light and sat in the dark for about 15 minutes until my night vision started to pick up and I could make out a few fuzzy shapes. Although some dim, natural daylight filters down the stairs, this corner is plunged in near total darkness. So it was just me, God, and the occasional particle of light zipping through.
I first thought about creating a sacred space in the house when I read the journalist and theologian Margaret Hebblethwaite’s highly creative book Motherhood and God back in the 1980s. She made a place like this in a cupboard under her stairs, half underground.
When I sit in this little, low prayer place, facing the crucifix and the Shroud face, with the lighted candle below them and a narrow shaft of light from the grating slanting down from above, then I feel a great sense of spaciousness. Around may be the noises of the house… but I feel I am resting here in the centre of things, in the hidden centre of my home, in the secret centre of my soul, and that centre is a place of calm and light and space. Sometimes I stay less than a minute, sometimes more than half an hour. I am called away from it as often as I leave voluntarily. But I like to know it is there, even when I am not in it. Just to think of the place for a moment is a prayer.
Prompted by that, and by the Orthodox tradition of the icon corner, I’ve had a prayer space in my work room on the ground floor since the 1990s. But sitting in the dark of the cellar on Wednesday and lighting a candle, I immediately knew this would be the best place right now for the things that usually happen to me when I pray: feel God, feel nothing at all, get bored, get inspired, find peace, find turmoil – but most of all realise that just to sit here, putting myself where God can find me, is prayer itself.
And I like this symbolism. Prayer from underground, from the deepest part, in the rough foundations. Prayer from the inner workings – there is a labyrinth of old pipes above my head and a freezer behind me which quietly starts up and turns itself off every few minutes. Prayer in the dark, and from a place where you wouldn’t expect to find it. It’s nice to do something which might surprise even God.
I’m doing this because I’m not very good at prayer. But I’ve found over the years that the best thing I ever did about that was to set up my prayer corner, so that at odd moments I can go there to pray or simply to sit with God. And I’ve discovered, as Margaret Hebblethwaite did, that just to think of that place is prayer.
I’m hoping that having this more intense space in the dark, surrounded by the things which point me to God, will help me pray for friends who are going through truly hard times, and that it will bring a bit of fire to my weak faith.
When Salman Rushdie was given his very own fatwa calling for his death back in 1989, it was because he had written a large novel, The Satanic Verses. But now it seems you only need to post three tweets to get yourself a blasphemy trial and death sentence in Saudi Arabia.
Hamza Kashgari, a 22 year-old Saudi poet and former newspaper columnist, posted his tweets on Mawlid, the birthday of the prophet Muhammad (on 4 February) and fled the country a few days later. He’s now languishing in a Saudi jail while the talk among Muslim clerics is of a trial for blasphemy or apostasy, even though Kashgari has apologised. ‘I have made a mistake, and I hope Allah and all those whom I have offended will forgive me,’ he’s reported to have said.
Here are English translations of the three tweets…
On your birthday, I will say that I have loved the rebel in you, that you’ve always been a source of inspiration to me, and that I do not like the halos of divinity around you. I shall not pray for you.
On your birthday, I find you wherever I turn. I will say that I have loved aspects of you, hated others, and could not understand many more.
On your birthday, I shall not bow to you. I shall not kiss your hand. Rather, I shall shake it as equals do, and smile at you as you smile at me. I shall speak to you as a friend, no more.
It’s chilling (but not all that surprising) to think that such polite scepticism towards the prophet could lead to a Facebook group calling for your execution, with 25,000 members and climbing. Most of the posts there are in Arabic, but it’s worth looking at in a motorway rubbernecking sort of way. It’s a surprise that Facebook allows such a group.
Christians have no cause to be smug. Comments such as these expressed in the Middle Ages would have earned you an interview with your handy local branch of the Inquisition. And as recently as 1921, a Bradford trouser salesman, John William Gott, was sentenced to nine months in prison with hard labour for the crime of blasphemy. He had published a pamphlet depicting Jesus entering Jerusalem like a clown on the back of two donkeys. Gott died soon after his release.
I’ve never been able to get my head around the idea of blasphemy. I know as a believer that it can feel hurtful or embarrassing if someone ridicules the Lord or makes a joke about the crucifixion, but the idea that the honour of God might in some way be damaged by that seems laughable. The Victorian Baptist preacher CH Spurgeon once said, ‘Defend the Bible? I’d as soon defend a lion!’ and my take on blasphemy is that God is big enough to take it on the chin.
When the Saudi information minister, Abdul-Aziz Khoja, said that he ‘wept and got very angry’ when he read Hamza Kashgari’s tweets, I read his comments as the sort of pious grandstanding that has always given blasphemy its fearful power. After all, this is never a private ‘sin’. The discovery and punishment of blasphemy is always public, and it’s all about social control.
A Facebook page, Save Hamza Kashgari, has now been set up and has just over 3,000 likes (i.e. it’s eight times smaller than the group calling for his execution). Check it for comments and the phone numbers of Saudi embassies in various countries. People there are encouraging each other to give them a call.
Saturday 4th February: This morning, my father and I took a walk. Out of the hotel, along the slippery-with-snow street, down into the subway and then out onto Reichsstrasse in the old heart of Leipzig, going south. On either side of us were dire buildings from the GDR era, one of them covered in blue and yellow panels and looking like the sort of block which would disgrace a South London estate.
We cut through past the old town hall, an overcooked piece of gingerbread which is 50 per cent larger than it should be, and then along Thomasgasse. Suddenly the goal of our pilgrimage slowly revealed itself around the corner of a building. We stopped to admire the Thomaskirche, standing pale and beautiful across the wide square in the freezing February sunshine.
I don’t think I could have felt one tiniest bit less happy than a pilgrim who has dragged himself bleeding along the Camino in northern Spain for a couple of months and who finally spies Santiago de Compostella on his horizon. We just stood there for a while and I felt that kind of bursting happiness.
Not many buildings do this to me. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople certainly did, 15 months ago, but I wasn’t expecting to experience something of that feeling again with Johann Sebastian’s church in Leipzig, where he was cantor for 27 years until he died in 1750.
We walked around the west end of the church and stopped at the huge statue of Bach on the south side. I remember the statue from black and white record covers in my Dad’s classical music collection in the 1950s, and I just had to snap a picture of him with it. I owe him so much for introducing me to Bach through those albums and through his own music-making, and taking the picture completes a 50 year-old circle.
Then up the steps and into the church. We could hear organ music as we approached the door, and as it opened, the joyous music of Nun danket alle Gott came out to meet us and pulled us in. A small congregation was singing the hymn in the choir and its English words immediately came to mind…
Now thank we all our God, With hearts and hands and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In whom this world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today.
I’m not ashamed to say that the thought of my mother and the lifelong blessing she was to me immediately brought me to tears. Nearly a year after her death, I’m still in a winter of grief for her. And I wished, like Digory in CS Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, that she could be here, healthy and strong again, to be with me and my Dad, enjoying this amazing moment of arrival.
The church in its current incarnation is a whitewashed Lutheran hall. It has deep red tracery on the ceiling which falls into the pillars slightly randomly, as the pillars have somehow lost their capitals. The effect of that is a bit awkward and distracting. The choir is bent at a distinct angle to the nave for no reason I can imagine, but that feels loveably eccentric. The overall effect is of expansive, light-filled space, and when the organ ceases, the reverb is just right. The old building (just over 500 years) has an acoustic Bach must have enjoyed working with.
Standing with the other pilgrims on the edge of the choir, which was roped off, the large slab covering the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach was just a few feet away, alone in the centre of the paving, with flowers all around the edges. Bach’s unmarked grave was rediscovered in 1898 and his remains were moved here in 1950, 200 years after his death.
We had planned to cover various places in Leipzig today, but we basically spent the whole day in and around the Thomaskirche: in the shops, for example, where the Bach tat included chocolate coins, German wine and a USB memory stick, all printed with the bewigged head of JSB; and in the museum opposite the church, poring over the original, autograph parts for a Cantata played here in 1723.
Sitting in a cafe across the street at 2.15pm, drinking delicious, hot vegetable soup and waiting for the start of a motet in the church at 3 o’clock, I noticed large numbers of people arriving at the church door and kicking the snow off their feet, 45 minutes ahead of time.
The church stages motets every Friday and Saturday, and when we’d finished our soup and sat inside, the church was pleasantly full. I had thought we’d probably be there with a few diehards, since February is hardly the height of the tourist season.
The programme began with Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in C major (BWV 545). Its long pedal notes, sustained while the higher notes spiral around them, took me back to when I was a kid and I’d go forward at the end of a service while my Dad was playing the post-service music, and I’d watch him in a kind of awe.
He’d be sitting back a little on the organ bench, absolutely focused on the sheet music, his feet walking and then running on the pedals, his fingers glancing off the keys, his breathing sharp with the effort of it all, and the music lifting, rising, flying, soaring. It was the physical energy on the bench and the spiritual effect in the heart. And it was utterly magical, with my father as the magician.
In the Thomaskirche, I couldn’t help inclining towards him and noticing how he responded in this fulfilling moment of hearing Bach’s music, which he had made his own music, being played in Bach’s church.
Does it make any difference listening to the music of JS Bach in the church where he is buried? Do you understand his music any better if you walk his path to work? Is it odd to find it consoling that his bones must vibrate when the colossal, 32ft Großer Untersatz pipe sounds in the Thomaskirche? Why go on pilgrimage in search of Bach when you already have the music anyway?
I can only say, sitting in this church and hearing this music that is in my own bones, that I’m glad my father asked me to make this journey with him, first when I was a child, and then today.
Friday 3rd February: My Dad and I arrived in Weimar last night and this morning took a 20 minute walk into town to discover the meagre show the town puts on for Johann Sebastian Bach. He was here twice: for a few months when he was 18, and then again in his early 20s when he was organist and concert master at the overblown court of Duke Johann Ernst for nine years.
His stay here ended when he spent a month in the clink for telling the Duke that he wanted to leave and take a job elsewhere. Despite that local difficulty, these were happy years for Bach. He was newly married to his first wife, Maria Barbara, and their first kids were born and baptised here in the Peter and Paul Church. He was rapidly growing as a composer and absorbing influences from Italy and elsewhere.
You’d think that any city, given nine formative years in the life of the world’s best known composer, would respond by doing everything it could to celebrate such fabulous good luck. But not Weimar. It’s much too concerned with its contribution to in-house German culture in the form of Goethe, Schiller and Herder, to pay much attention to JSB.
The only public mention of Bach we could find today in the centre of town was a plaque on the wall where Bach’s house used to be. Why Weimar has rudely turned its back on Bach is hard to fathom. Maybe it’s never forgiven him for wanting to leave.
The city is beautiful though and proud of its appearance in a way that would put pretty much any British town you could mention to shame. Dad and I took a walk in the bright sunshine from young Bach’s disappeared house, across the Markt square, accompanied by the prettily ringing bells of the town hall, to the Schloss, the local Duke’s palace, where Johann Sebastian worked. His commute must have taken him five minutes, tops.
Every day he passed through the palace’s old gateway and beneath the tower, which survived when the palace Bach knew burned down in 1774. I can recommend following his walk to work as an act of pilgrimage. Anything which helps reclaim his place in this rather inward-looking town is good.
The Schloss has an extensive collection of paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, including several of the most famous pics of Martin Luther, but I especially enjoyed their collection of medieval altarpieces, crucifixes and devotional statues which somehow survived the Lutheran bonfires to end up here. I took pictures of several of them until a rather severe attendant shook her head at me. I’ve put a selection of my shots into a Flickr set called Devotional statues... they’re beautiful and moving, and clearly made by people who knew what death and suffering looked like.
Rivalling that for best moment of the day was a late lunch in the cellar bar of the famous Hotel Elephant. The hotel has been here for 450 years and is right next to Bach’s now vanished house, so he must have supped here whenever Maria Barbara wanted a break from the cooking.
As we ate our wild pork (with red cabbage, poached pear and walnut croquettes, served on nicely hot plates and easily the best food I’ve eaten out in ages) in the Elephanenkeller, our enthusiastic waiter brought us some info sheets about the hotel, which has a long and mostly distinguished history, including visits from Liszt, Tolstoy, Goethe, Hans-Christian Andersen and… er… Hitler, who used to address crowds in the square from his own little ‘Fuhrer balcony’ over the front door.
I was fascinated to read that in 1998, some newly opened rooms in the hotel enabled the ‘demythologisation of Suite 100, the rooms used by Hitler during his visits’. I had never realised before today that hotel rooms could be demythologised. But 10 out of 10 for them for being honest about their dark past, when swastikas hung from the hotel windows, and attempting to expunge it.
Thoughts of that past lingered as we left Weimar this evening. We passed two buses on our way to the autobahn. The first displayed the destination Planetarium. The second, Buchenwald. The concentration camp – the first opened by the Nazis – has been preserved and is just six miles north of the city.
Thursday 2nd February: We had to leave Eisenach today, and the classy Steigenberger Hotel, which serves the best breakfast this side of the 18th century. But before we left town, we called in on the Georgenkirche and then the Lutherhaus.
Bach was baptised in the kirche and Luther was a student in the haus, but sadly the latter wasn’t worth visiting. Unless you enjoy laughing at dented mannequins taken from 1980s shop windows and recycled to look like people in Luther’s time, and the whole thing failing really, really badly. Which I do, of course. But it’s not for everyone.
The Georgenkirche was something else, though. It’s where baby Bach was baptised just two days after being born in March 1685. In the porch we found an imposing statue of Johann Sebastian looking very angry indeed and with his left foot thrust forward, as though he’s balancing on a skateboard. He doesn’t look much like Bach, which is maybe why he’s hidden away indoors. But I noticed that the left foot is bright brass, while the rest of the statue is black, so the pilgrims must touch or kiss it as a sign of respect. I gave it a kiss on my way out as a thank you to JSB.
The church is baroque, with a vertiginous three-decker gallery, and right at the front, in the centre, is the font where Bach first made contact with faith. I really loved the church, which felt old and well used by generations of Christians, and (on a more trivial note) was painted in cool neutrals, which seemed strangely contemporary. High up in the gallery at the back, squeezed up against the ceiling, is the church’s organ. A leaflet on the bookstall listed all the stops on this three manual monster, very few of which I recognised.
Back outside (the temperature by now a painful minus 11), we picked up our hire car, found the 88 road and settled into the drive to Ohrdruf, where 10 year-old Bach went to live with his older brother, an organist, after his parents died within nine months of each other.
We drove along the edge of the Thuringian forest, the trees outlined by snowfall on the branches, the long shadows of pines corrugating over the fallow fields powdered in white, wood smoke lazily rising straight upward from the few houses we passed. The little, rounded hills were just as I’ve always imagined Bach country and I could easily picture the bands of the family’s musicians walking from town to town. The whole landscape feels rich with memory and nostalgia.
There’s a dark side to that, though, as these landscapes breed isolated villages and deeply conservative ways, and it’s where nightmares straight out of the Brothers Grimm can be hidden and then dramatically emerge. Driving through, I could feel that, alongside the sunnier stuff.
At Ohrdruf, the lumpy landscape has been ironed flat by God, and the town itself is dull and uninterested in its most famous resident. The whole place was closed up tight at lunchtime, when we arrived. Cafes and restaurants had their doors firmly shut. My advice is to put your foot down when you reach Ohrdruf as it’s not worth the stop.
As we drove on towards Arnstadt, where Bach got his first organist job at the age of 18, the flat plain suddenly gave way to a descending valley, the road at first passing straight between long avenues of trees, and then winding through fields and woods, the winter sun splashing through the trees onto the frozen earth. It was just magical, and I can’t think it’s better in summer.
We ended the day in the market square of Arnstadt, looking around the church of St Boniface, the ‘Bach Church’. It’s another baroque splendour, with wedding cake tiers inside and an angelic-looking organ in white and gold fluttering in the roof. This is where some of Bach’s best toccatas and fugues were composed and first heard by people sitting in the pews below.
But thinking about it, the idea of a first ever performance of Bach is a bit unimaginable, actually. It might be because it’s always been around, but Bach’s music seems eternal: he didn’t compose it, but discover it. Michaelangelo described artistic creation using the language of discovery – ‘Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it’ – and in Bach’s case it’s as if the music was somehow always out there and his brilliance was to hear it himself and then make it audible for everyone else.
But there was a first moment when those torrents of sound fell upon human ears. And it happened here. The old place feels touched by undeserved grace.
Wednesday 1st February: Waking up this morning and looking out of the hotel window confirmed what I thought from last night: Thuringia really is rather lumpy. Small hills rise on the edge of town and the biggest of them, a crag, stands over Eisenach and is crowned by the Wartburg, the ‘mighty fortress’ of Luther’s bold hymn, Ein feste Burg. That was our destination this morning, and we took a taxi straight after breakfast, as I think it would be an hour’s walk to get up there on foot.
Once there, we bought tickets to a guided tour, if only to get out of the icy wind swirling round the castle’s courtyards, but the tour (which was in German, with an English booklet for language sluggards like me) was through a series of interesting but unheated rooms with our guide staying a bit too long in each of them.
Despite its ‘mighty fortress’ reputation, the Wartburg’s contribution to Germany has been cultural rather than military. For centuries, it’s been a place of architecture, poetry and song and inspired Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser – not that I’d know, as I’m decidedly not a fan of Wagner – but my leaflet told me it was so.
I was amazed to read in it that according to the legend which inspired Wagner, a singing contest was staged here in the 13th century, in which six minstrels sang for the local ruler, Hermann I. Unlike The X Factor, the winner was not promised a recording contract and a guaranteed Christmas smash single, but the loser was promised immediate execution at the hands of the hangman. Surely Simon Cowell is familiar with this story? He must know that putting the losing contestants to death would build audience share. It’s the show’s natural next step.
Dermot O’Leary: What would it mean to you to win The X Factor?
Talentless contestant: Well, not being strangled on live TV would be nice.
But the reason my Dad and I came up here this morning was for Martin Luther. He was ‘kidnapped’ by masked agents of a friendly ruler, Frederick III, when his life was in peril in the winter of 1521-22 and hidden in the Wartburg. He spent those no doubt freezing months making the first translation of the New Testament into German, which was a hugely subversive act in those times.
Our last stop on the guided tour was the Luther room, his wood-lined pad during that winter. Even though it’s almost 500 years since he was here, seeing the round-topped door to his room ajar, I felt like knocking on it before entering. But the room is sadly empty of the fierce and impatient presence that once filled it.
Instead, the wood panelling is covered with carved graffiti from devout Lutherans who were here before me. IB was here in 1646, for example, while someone called Clueben left his mark in 1715. If this was in England, the room would be obsessively wired with CCTV to stop new carvings by fans, but thankfully that’s not happened here. Apparently, even the Stasi knew when to stop monitoring people.
Luther hated relics and risked his life to protest against them, but this room has that relic atmosphere to it. You feel in touch with Luther as you stand in it. Despite his many flaws and sins, you feel thankful for his stand against absolute religious power.
After a coffee, we went back down to Eisenach and landed in the Bachhaus, where it was once thought young Johann Sebastian was born and lived his childhood years. While that story has now been dropped, the house is a comprehensive Bach museum and performance place.
We arrived just in time for the house’s small collection of period keyboard instruments to be warmed up for a small, appreciative audience (of mostly Japanese students, plus me and Dad) in the instrument hall. I was pulled out of the audience to operate the bellows on a baroque chamber organ – pulling on two stout leather straps which gradually retracted into the organ case – while our guide-musician ran through some numbers from Anna Magdalena’s Notebook and other Bach pieces.
The house, which dates from Bach’s time, has been supplemented by a handsome building next door in the best German modernist style, with large, open, beautifully lit spaces. My Dad settled into one of the many perspex bubble chairs hanging from chains in the ceiling, and listened to Bach on a plumbed-in iPod. I walked round a brilliantly documented exhibition of how Bach has been pictured in paintings and engravings, and why it matters. Our three hours there simply vanished.
I hadn’t clocked before visiting the house how theological Bach was. He owned 81 fat volumes of theology at the time he died. But more than that, his huge copy of the Bible is filled with underlined words and notes jotted by him in the margin. The Bible is Luther’s, produced in the dead of winter in his lofty study in the Wartburg.
Bach’s Bible scribbles and the graffiti of Luther’s fans are an unlikely pairing, but they point to something out of this world happening in the unassuming town of Eisenach 500 and then 300 years ago.
Tuesday 31st January: I’m travelling today with my Dad to the little town of Eisenach in eastern Germany, which is the birthplace of Johann Sebastian Bach. We’re here for a week of pilgrimage, travelling to the towns and cities where Bach lived and worked. It’s a journey I’ve wanted to make with him for a long time, but family circs have prevented it from ever happening before today. So finally picking up our suitcases and heading off for the tube feels like a good moment to be alive.
There’s a lovely episode in Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood, which poetically captures life in a small (and small-minded) Welsh town. The church organist, who rejoices in the name of Organ Morgan, is having a conversation with his wife, who has been droning on a bit.
Mrs Organ Morgan: ... but they’re two nice boys, I will say that, Fred Spit and Arthur. Sometimes I like Fred best and sometimes I like Arthur. Who do you like best, Organ?
Organ Morgan: Oh, Bach without any doubt. Bach every time for me.
Mrs Organ Morgan: Organ Morgan, you haven’t been listening to a word I said. It’s organ organ all the time with you…
Organ Morgan: And then Palestrina.
My Dad is not quite Organ Morgan, but he is an excellent church organist with a passion for Bach that eclipses all other composers. He was king of the organ pipes at church when I was a young child, and I was in awe of the powerful and beguiling music he conjured from this Mt Sinai of musical instruments. I heard someone on Desert Island Discs a while ago saying that when they were little, they confused God with JS Bach, and I know the feeling.
For several years in my teens and twenties Dad gave organ recitals and accompanied the university choir my Mum sang in. And he remains the gentile organist at a synagogue in Cardiff, where he has been making music, kippah on head, for over 60 years.
Bach was frequently on the record turntable when I was growing up in the 1950s, and I often asked my parents when I was 4 or 5 years old to put on ‘Side Six’, the final side in their three-disc recording of The Christmas Oratorio, which maybe has Bach’s most joyful and danceable melodies. It was only in my 40s that I learned that the German lyrics to these closing arias and choruses sing of the triumph of Christ over death and the devil, a theme which has always been important to me.
Today’s journey, by rail from St Pancras in London to Eisenach via Brussels and Frankfurt, was simple in theory. Sleek German trains would speed us south from Brussels, wowing us with their cool efficiency. But instead, our ICE train, which travels at up to 300kph, was abruptly cancelled for no good reason and we were left at the mercy of plodding local trains (three of them) and a bus, which eventually disgorged us, mid evening, in Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. We caught the last train of the night for Eisenach and arrived to biting wind and minus 10 of frost. We’re deep in former East Germany, and on tonight’s evidence, it still knows how to put the cold in Cold War.
My Dad, 83, despite a day of lugging a case and climbing in and out of carriages, looks happy and content to be here on the platform of Bach’s birthplace. He stands patiently for an iPhone snap (seen above). He’s in Bach’s own country at last.
I was in Foyles (the bookshop equivalent of the Tower of Babel, so endless and towering is its collection of books) on Charing Cross Road the other day. I was looking for a good introduction to the Christian faith and was trying to steer clear of Mere Christianity.
No offence to CS Lewis, of course, but I find MC is dating quite badly. It’s sounding more and more like the voice of a great uncle who wears tweed suits and flannel underpants, smells of mothballs and tobacco and talks like a BBC newsreel. It’s not its own fault, poor thing – parts of the book date back to 1941. But surely someone’s written a classic intro to the faith which has the smell of today and can topple MC from its top spot on the Christian bookshelf?
Anyway, standing on the second floor, surrounded by enticing books on New York, Turkish cooking, hitchhiking in Patagonia, how the human eye works, London’s lost rivers, lives of Dickens – not to mention the miles of shelves devoted to novelists from Ackroyd to Zafón and back again, I noticed that the few shelves of the Christianity section have been shoved into an obscure corner, sandwiched between the paranormal and psychology.
As I struggled to find an alternative to CS Lewis, the weight of a million brilliant modern books pressed in on me and made me see in a new way how small, how pushed into a corner, how seemingly backward-looking and irrelevant my faith is.
I realised that if I wanted to buy a world class book, either because it was beautifully written, or groundbeaking in its ideas, or sharp in its take on life, or because it contained the best comedy or tragedy or sheer storytelling money could buy, then I would not find it here, in Kristianity Korner.
That in turn made me think how few of the people I really admire in mainstream culture – people who make me laugh, people who challenge me to think better, people who show me the world in a new way through books, films or TV programmes – how few of them have anything but scorn or apathy for religion.
Frank Skinner recently told Rowan Williams that many standup comics today, even if they have no particular gripe against God, will take a few minutes out of their set to say how hilariously awful religion is and how atheism is the answer. I’ve had to accept the marginalisation of my faith ever since I became a Christian, but somehow, standing there on the second floor of Foyles, it crashed in on me in a new way.
Christians who want to live their chosen faith wholeheartedly, but who want to live in our culture wholeheartedly too, have the Devil’s own choice if they think about it long enough. In my experience, we mostly duck the issue and get on with the practical business of standing by the faith choice we made a long time ago. But it’s painful whenever you do think about it, because the pressure of faith and the counter-pressure of culture act like a pair of pincers on the soul.
How do we respond to the spiritual pain of that? A widespread response among believers is to create bubbles within the culture where we can do our own little thing and pretend that nothing outside the bubble is truly important.
There are bubbles where Christians fantasise about revival or the second coming or the blessed return to Latin liturgy. There’s the bubble of church itself, of course, with its essentially medieval world of sermons, processions, reciting texts together in buildings with pointy windows, dressing up in clothes the Romans would feel at home in, and lighting candles in the age of the electric light.
It’s lovely, but it’s a lovely bubble, a little culture inside a bigger culture with less and less appeal to the world as it is out there. These rejections of the wider world are ways of turning aside the pain, of relieving the pressure which bears down so sharply on people of faith.
Another response is gradually losing your religion because it’s too hard to sustain, or because you finally need to call time on a faith which no longer has any immediate hold on your imagination. Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach, becomes a personal experience as the sea of faith makes its ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’.
I’ve always been something of a fan of the friction between faith and culture. I’ve believed it can be a creative, self-critical force, demanding the best from us in making the connection between God and the world of here and now. But I don’t see that friction producing bright sparks in huge quantities among Christians today. I don’t see much creative impact on the mainstream as I stand on the second floor of Foyles receiving my negative epiphany.
In the end, I ran out of time and bought Screwtape. At least it wasn’t Mere Christianity, but it was the very next book on the narrow shelf.
As part of the Ship of Fools Roll on Christmas project, which has been live on Facebook for a few weeks now and picking up increasing levels of players, I put a new video (above) online yesterday. Steve Tomkins and I shot it at the Greenbelt festival, asking women if they ever played Mary in nativity plays when they were kids.
Alongside that, we published the results of a survey about nativity plays, which backs up the video. It turns out that only 12% of women played the role of Mary when they were children. The reason? The women said that Marys were chosen because they were pretty (27%) well behaved (22%), or teacher’s pet (16%)... which shut the stable door on everyone else.
My partner in crime on Ship of Fools, Steve Goddard, commented about this: ‘We’ve unearthed a simmering tension among the tea towels.’
‘I wasn’t pretty enough to be Mary,’ said one woman in our video, who then added tartly: ‘That’s alright though. I didn’t want to, she was always a bit wet.’
‘There was definitely a hierarchy going on in churches about who could be Mary,” said another non-Mary. “She was always the good girl in the church, whereas the reality was that the original Mary wouldn’t have been perceived as a good girl.’
After reading my post about seeing Reverend Billy in New York, author and academic Andrew Walker, who has written extensively on Pentecostalism and allied movements in the church, wrote to me in response. Thanks for writing, Andrew… it’s great to have this as the first guest post on my blog.
It is hard not to admire the entertainer Bill Talen who is prepared to put his personal freedom on the line in his attack on consumerism, the financial shenanigans of the banks and the sheer stink of rank capitalism. But as I have been following him under the guise of Reverend Billy in occupation mode (from Wall Street, New York, to the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, London) something about his persona and public presentation worries me. I write as someone who is centre-left in politics, so in no sense can this be interpreted as pro-Republican agitation.
My first realization was that Reverend Billy is not funny. You may think this is of no consequence: after all, Bill Talen is a political activist with a serious message for the western world. This is true, but he is also an entertainer by profession and if he wants to draw people in he should entertain. How would he get on, for example, if he was a guest stand-up comedian on Britain’s Live at the Apollo or on North America’s Saturday Night Live? My guess is that he would bomb.
His weapons of humor are ridicule and sarcasm, but unlike Britain’s Peter Kay, for example, he shows neither empathy nor familiarity with the people he supposedly impersonates and represents. OK, he shows a nodding acquaintance with Billy Graham as the play on his name, the light suits, and the tinted, blown-up hair demonstrates. But Billy Graham is no Pentecostal, as Reverend Billy is so obviously intended to be. His attempts at speaking in tongues are embarrassing and the repetitious extemporizing of revivalistic praise falls dully on the ear. ‘Occupylujah’ and ‘revolujah’ just don’t work.
What would have been funny is either the slapstick humor of Chevy Chase in the movie Fletch Lives, where his take-off of slaying in the spirit in the healing line is hilarious but not distasteful. Or he could try farce. I defy anyone to watch disgraced televangelist Robert Tilton’s transformation on YouTube as the farting preacher and not laugh.
If Reverend Billy really wants to show he has done his homework, how about veering from farce to satire? Long before Benny Hinn became an object of opprobrium for his much-publicized, alleged adultery, he was a figure of fun with his unbelievable hairstyle and his even more unbelievable theology. His book Good Morning Holy Spirit said what no one had said before, that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three persons in one being, but nine. Yes, in case you are wondering, the Father consists of three persons, as do the other two.
A second realisation for me about Reverend Billy was that not being funny called into question his authenticity. He really has not got a clue about how Pentecostals behave, or about the decency of the predominantly working class people who make up the constituency he derides. I share Revd Winnie Varghese’s worry that his style might offend Black Pentecostals, but I would go further: it is an unfair treatment of Pentecostalism per se.
Pentecostals may have an historical tendency to be apolitical, but their commitment to the language of repentance is a genuine spiritual discourse to be treasured. It is precisely the sort of social capital needed in an economic and moral crisis.
I started this guest blog with a positive view of Bill Talen’s anti-capitalist stance and would like to end it with a friendly suggestion. Marshal McLuhan was not entirely wrong when he coined the phrase, ‘the medium is the message’. It helps explain why the televangelists of the 1980s sold the gospel down the river, because they were selling themselves and their products under the banner of ‘Jesus is Lord’. People were confused for they misread the signs.
Reverend Billy, I do not want to see you and your colleagues make the same sort of mistake. So here’s the suggestion. Sit down for a couple of hours and watch Robert Duval’s film The Apostle. Then when you have watched it, if it convinces you I’m onto something. you may want to seek out some Pentecostals and get them on your side. Or then again you might have a conversion and drop the pseudo-religiosity and continue to rescue shopaholics from addiction while saving the world.
Reverend Billy, the New York performance artist, street preacher, prankster and political activist is having an intensely busy time right now. A few weeks ago he was at St Paul’s Cathedral, washing dishes in the Occupy London Stock Exchange camp and preaching to an enthusiastic congregation on the cathedral steps.
Earlier this week he was invading a branch of Victoria’s Secret in New York, announcing the arrival of the ‘shopocalypse’, laying hands on the tills and exorcising them of the demons of consumerism – as featured in a fascinating interview with an unbelieving Glenn Beck.
But on Sunday afternoon, in the darkness of Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom, a paying audience of 200 or so people were sitting at their tables on the dance floor, waiting for the Reverend Billy to appear for the premiere performance of an oratorio for the Occupy Wall Street movement. I was there too, up in the gallery, as I’ve never been a fan of the stalls. From there, I shot some video of the event.
In the flickering candlelight, the Church of Stop Shopping Choir began moving between the tables, making their way to the stage, singing the words of the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and the press, and the right of peaceable assembly. It was hardly Cole Porter, but curiously powerful nonetheless.
Last on stage was the Reverend himself, in his customary white suit, blond bouffant hair, white cowboy boots, black frontal and deep dog collar in the Episcopalian style. As the choir sang, he prayed breathily into the mic: ‘We ask the God of the 99 percent to be with us. We’ve got some apocalyptic, direct democracy to pull off today! Revolujah!’
What followed was a political rally delivered with all the tricks and theatrics of a Pentecostal meeting, but stripped of its content. There was a testimony, not of a soul gloriously saved, but of Kendall Jackman – ‘Saint Kendall’ the Reverend dubbed her – who had her home repossessed by Bank of America.
There were frequent exhortations shouted by Reverend Billy: ‘Occupylujah, children! Do I hear an amen?’ There was the superb singing of the choir, performing the words of the Occupy Wall Street declaration to tunes straight out of a Broadway musical. There was even a moment of silence for Mohammed Bouazizi, whose death in Tunisia almost a year ago sparked the Arab Spring.
Finally, the audience started calling for a sermon from the white-suited one, which he delivered with a crowd-stirring peroration: ‘As the winter comes on and the police get permission to use rubber bullets, pepper spray and all the rest of it, we know that we’re going to continue to expand… We’re going to find places to occupy.’
Bill Talen has been channelling Elvis and Pentecostalism in the persona of Reverend Billy for more than a decade, and for some time was on the vestry committee of the progressive St Mark’s Church in the Bowery, until he left under a cloud of disagreement over making the church his base.
I went to see Revd Winnie Varghese, the priest in charge there, who told me that although his anti-consumerist message is ‘absolutely what we believe in as well,’ the relationship with St Mark’s and other progressive churches in the city is broken. ‘He performs in rental space and not in churches,’ she says.
That is perhaps not surprising, since his shows plunder the imagery and rituals of over-enthusiastic worship in a highly satirical take on Pentecostal religion.
‘I have smart friends who think he’s hysterical,’ says Winne Varghese. ‘They are also anti-religious, and I think that’s why they like it. They see it as very effective mockery of the black Pentecostal movement. I personally find that quite offensive. I’m kind of old school about racial politics, and I don’t like it.’
As soon as the show ended, American Christian satirist Becky Garrison took me over to grab a few seconds with Reverend Billy, who was just off the stage. He said he couldn’t talk long: ‘It’s part of my job, a pastor has to shake hands at the door.’ But I asked him if he felt his time had come with the Occupy movement after all his years of activism.
‘I know a lot of people need what we’re saying right now. But I know that when we went to Macy’s on Thursday, there were tens of thousands of shoppers there, and none of them had any idea who I was. So it was putting the stop shopping idea, like a seed, into the minds of a vast number of consumers, who will vote in the Iraq war, who will keep using fossil fuels and will march us off the cliff. So if I’m having a little bit of a flavor of the month experience right now, I’m not naive enough to think…’
He tailed off, but was clearly rebuffing my invitation to grasp a Messiah moment.
I was struck by his ‘pastor shaking hands at the door’ comment, though. He was off the stage and out of the spotlight, but still in character as Reverend Billy.
Earlier this month, Billy and his wife and partner Savitri Durkee, a theater director, took part in a conversation about their work which was featured in Religion Despatches. Savitri commented: ‘People cleave to the comfort of Billy being Reverend Billy. If we think that Reverend Billy would be Reverend Billy no matter what, that he would shout into an empty room, or wake up alone in the night in an anti-consumerist fever, if we believe that he isn’t “putting it on,” then, yes, we believe him to be more serious, more real.’
His final words to the faithful in the Highline Ballroom, delivered to huge cheers, were ‘See you in the tombs!’ – the holding cells of the NYPD.
Reverend Billy is not a real reverend. Sunday afternoon’s show though was a real and not pretend event. It seemed designed to put steel into the hearts of the protesters. He quit the stage as the audience chanted, ‘Whose occupation? Our occupation!’ It’s revival, but not as we know it.
I’m flying out to New York today to stay until next week, so on the tube out to Heathrow I read some chapters from the book of Job, as I’m sure everyone does.
It could be worse. A few years ago, I was flying out of La Paz, Bolivia, one of the highest airports in the world, and as the plane lumbered endlessly down the runway to the point where all the passengers lost hope that we would ever leave the ground, I caught sight of a man a couple of rows in front, head bowed over a book. Reassuringly, he was reading the words of the funeral service. I wonder if that comes as standard on Bolivian planes.
The book of Job was the first book of the Bible I ever read for myself as a teenager and I’ve ever since been a fan of its crackling final chapters, where God puts on a display of his powers for Job that is reminiscent of the ‘ignore the man behind the curtain’ scene in The Wizard of Oz.
I don’t really approve of the chapters (Job 38-42) as in them God makes Job shut up about his suffering by bullying him into submission, but the poetry remains intensely beautiful and I find the overall point, that we humans should be properly awed in the face of mystery and immensity, a good thing to ponder. Especially when boarding a plane weighing hundreds of tons which will shortly launch itself and me into nothing more than thin air.
So, on the tube, reading the King James version on my iPhone, God asks Job (and me) his series of impossible questions.
Can I lift up my voice to the clouds and bring forth rain? Have I entered into the treasures of the snow? Do I know the path to the houses of light and darkness? Can I command lightnings that they may go and say to me, ‘here we are’? Have I given the horse its strength and clothed its neck with thunder? Have the gates of death been opened to me?
Well, no. And in these moments of quiet before flying, I can only bow to the truth that my life, which in an everyday light seems to be in my control, is actually held by powers much bigger than me. I must use all my human skill to understand them, but in the end, I have to accept my place at the atomic level of everything that is.
At the airport, at Gate 19, I enter my own Leviathan. It’s not like Job’s monster, whose nostrils poured forth smoke and whose face was like doors no one could open. My Leviathan has broad wings and a round belly, and hundreds of tiny windows, and wheels on which, impossibly, it rolls and runs and throws itself into the sky. It’s no less mysterious to me than Job’s fabulous creature as it rides high above the Atlantic deep.
‘He maketh a path to shine after him,’ says God about Job’s Leviathan. As does mine, all the way to JFK.
The UK Methodist Church pulled the plug last year on a Twitter communion service planned by a Methodist minister, but today it backed a remembrance service (entitled ‘Tweet Remembrance’), with prayers, responses and a sermon delivered in a burst of tweets around 11am – plus a two-minute silence.
In fact, when @Poppy_Tweet, who was running the service, hit the Twitter ceiling of 1000 tweets per day and was unable to post further, @MethodistMedia, a Methodist Church account, took over for the final three minutes. The service was live-blogged on the UK Huffington Post.
The service, the first of its kind on Twitter, was put together in very short order by James Thomas from Cardiff. He said, ‘I started the project on Wednesday night when I realised that no one had done a Twitter-based Remembrance service before.’ The @Poppy_Tweet account was set up the next day (i.e. yesterday) and currently has 1622 followers, which isn’t a bad rate of growth for a couple of days online.
I like the way the service used responsive prayers, for example…
@PoppyTweet Will you seek to heal the wounds of war?
Response #wewill #weremember
... and I also like the creative way they linked to music on YouTube for the Last Post and the song Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, as well as to a livecam in Trafalgar Square for the silence.
The service will run again on Sunday from 10.15am (UK time). Here are @PoppyTweet’s thoughts after the service…
@PoppyTweet We literally had no idea how it was going to go until it started happening… and then people retweeted, named love ones, cried (e.g. me)
@PoppyTweet Towards the end it was a complete outpouring of emotion and it had gained so much momentum!
@PoppyTweet Another thing I want to say is that this project has been a massive team effort – we planned everything as a small group.
@PoppyTweet And I think the group aspect of it all was what made it so good.
@PoppyTweet That’s all for now, I think… but we hope to retweet some of your opinion later on… and join us again on Sunday!
We use one word, ‘book’ to describe such amazingly varied things. In the past few weeks I’ve encountered one book which made me sit up in bed reading way too late (the sci-fi novel Ready Player One), another I bought because I loved its gloomy illustrations (a vast black Victorian Bible), and one or two others I’ve gone to for tiny, sought-for quotes or poems.
And then this book, How Are Things? by Roger-Pol Droit. I’ve had it since the beginning of the year and it’s become my regular squeeze. The writing is casual and unexpected, it has short little chapters, and it makes me think… I love books like this which don’t demand to be read all at once.
Droit, a philosopher who likes to be popular rather than academic, spent a year recording his encounters with unremarkable objects, the things we meet and use every day. In How Are Things? he gets you to stand back and see them as if for the first time. One of these short meditations reminded me of my first mystified and magical encounter with a chest of drawers, something I hadn’t thought about from that day to this.
The objects Droit looks at don’t at first seem very promising, but in his patient hands they open up their secrets. The remote control: ‘a thing of magic, a thing of sorcery’. The drawer: ‘it offers up its contents to your eyes and fingers without quite leaving its cave’. The freezer: ‘a victory over time, over decay, over death’. The supermarket trolley: ‘vast capacity, intended to make one forget just how much’.
Here are some of his thoughts on the mobile phone…
Here we have a thing that emits incongruous tunes, or vibrates, or flashes, just to let you know, inside your pocket, or strapped to your belt, or in your car, or even in close proximity to your heart, that there are people who want to speak to you, urgently, this instant, to get information out of you, to offer you work, to make plans, to give you their news. And who want to speak to you here and now, in person, wherever you are, whatever you might be doing.
You know as well as I do that it does not succeed. There is a whole range of tricks that enable one to outflank this permanent invasion of unwanted voices wherever one goes. The voice mail, the text message, the call-return and other such tactics allow you to put off and postpone. Nonetheless, you are supposed to pick up and return your messages as soon as possible, throw yourself upon them breathless with attention and just a touch of guilt, as soon as you are back online. Since the basic principle, the entire rationale and avowed ambition of the portable phone is perpetual connection, non-stop, limitless, lifelong, night and day.
Read one of his meditations per day and see the universe in a grain of sand, as Blake said.
Since we’re now in the season of the church year when Last Things are on the menu, here’s an interesting take on the apocalypse which I read about on the wonderful BoingBoing site. I hadn’t realised that serious Lego enthusiasts have been creating post-end of the world scenes for several years using the world’s favourite Danish plastic bricks.
Following in the footsteps of Mad Max and other post-apocalypse movies, the Lego creations feature shattered highways and buildings, and heavily armed groups of plastic figures trying to lash together their own shanty-style refuges in a newly hostile world.
That sounds bleak, but the best brick-built creations are full of ingenious and humorous detail as they try to capture life after The End, however it’s come about: nuclear exchange, pandemic, global meltdown, alien invasion, zombie attack… take your pick. I haven’t yet found any Lego creations modelled on the Rapture or the Great Tribulation of fundamentalist theology, but they must be out there.
BoingBoing recommends the work of Kevin ‘Crimson Wolf’ Fedde for sheer ingenuity (that’s his piece in the picture above).
A group on Flickr, ApocaLego, has over 1,000 members who post pictures of their best end-of-civilisation scenes. They ran a contest in 2008 called ‘Picking up the pieces: the world has ended, but hey, life goes on’. The blurb gives an idea of the mood of the whole genre: ‘The key to the contest is that the post-apocalyptic survivors should be actively building/creating something important to their continued survival. What a refreshing change from the usual gloom and doom!’
Yesterday afternoon I took the tube into London for a first look at the Occupy London protest camp. Walking with the crowds from the station to the cathedral, I fell in with a group of older men with posh accents, joking with each other.
‘Have you got your camping stove?’ asked one. ‘Have you brought the champagne?’ laughed another.
One of them quickly waded into the camp, loudly asking any young protestors who caught his eye why they weren’t working and how dare they desecrate this hallowed place.
But to my eye, the cathedral has never looked better, with colourful tents lapping up against the steps of the great west front, and with an impromptu community of young people bringing warmth and life to Wren’s often chilly looking building. I’ve posted my pictures of the camp on Flickr. Despite its hippy feel, the camp is highly organised, with tents for information, first aid and food, notices posted by the protesters’ assembly strictly banning alcohol from the site, and even disinfectant handwash dispensers gaffer-taped to a pole in the waste recycling area.
Everywhere I went, I was never out of earshot of debate. Capitalism, poverty, Jesus, the Kurds, freedom of speech, the church, corporate lobbyists, and much more, discussed loudly and quietly, passionately and rationally. I really love hearing debate on the streets of London. It reminds me of something from the days when the early church was debating the trinity, and a Greek theologian complained how the arguments had spilled out onto the streets:
‘If you ask a shopkeeper for change he will argue with you about whether the Son is begotten or unbegotten. If you inquire about the quality of the bread, the baker will answer, “The Father is greater, the Son is less.” And if you ask the bath attendant to draw you a bath, he will tell you that the Son was created out of nothing.’
Seeing large crowds milling around cathedrals was once a common sight. In medieval times, fairs were pitched around them, festivals were celebrated here and they were places of news, debate and entertainment. St Paul’s is a highly appropriate place for people to gather, protest and argue the big issues of the day, because that’s how it was for centuries. St Paul’s always was the cathedral of London’s common people, leaving Westminster Abbey to do its royal thing.
Just a few yards from the eastern edge of the camp is a monument marking the spot of St Paul’s Cross. Originally a stone cross where preachers stood, and later an open-air pulpit (see picture above), it was the place where Londoners gathered for several centuries in folkmoots, or general assemblies of the people.
Paul’s Cross was where you heard news and announcements and took part in debate and dissent. This is where victories were cheered, heresies condemned, Papal Bulls proclaimed, and where the people were sometimes required to swear allegiance to the king. Copies of Tyndale’s New Testament – the first section of the Christian scriptures to be printed in English – were rounded up and burned here by the Bishop of London in 1526. At Paul’s Cross, people who had fallen foul of the church or state were made to do fearful public penance.
But as well as being a place of propaganda and control, it also witnessed popular protest and new ideas. The revolutionary doctrines of the Reformation, which overturned the established Catholic faith, were first argued here before large and noisy crowds. London was converted to the Protestant faith at Paul’s Cross by anti-Catholic preachers. They made it the most famous pulpit of England.
In her book, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, Mary Morrissey says that access to the pulpit was controlled by three authorities: the Crown, the Church and the Corporation of London. Each of them had their own agendas and sometimes used the pulpit to attack each other. So it was here that the people of London were educated in conflicting ideas and interests and learned to make up their own minds.
It’s fascinating that the area where the protesters have camped is still owned by two of those authorities: the Church and the Corporation. Both were threatening to evict the camp, but the Church has now apparently dropped that approach, leaving the protesters to the all-powerful Corporation, which runs the City. George Monbiot gave an excellent exposition of its unrivalled powers a couple of days ago. It is a formidable foe. Even the government bows before it.
On my way back home, I stopped at the lonely monument where Paul’s Cross and all its tumult once stood. It’s in the cathedral churchyard and I have never seen any activity around it… until now. On the side of the monument is this inscription:
‘On this plot of ground stood of old “Paul’s Cross” whereat amid such scenes of good and evil as make up human affairs the conscience of church and nation through five centuries found public utterance.’
As then, so now. I hope St Paul’s Cathedral keeps its word and wholeheartedly embraces its young protesters, welcoming them to this home of English debate and dissent, and seeing their presence as an opportunity for well-argued mission. It’s a big ask for an established church to welcome dissenters, but this is also an invitation to engage in a highly visible way with the biggest issues of the moment.
I know the workings of the BBC are utterly mysterious, but when I got a call late this afternoon from the BBC News channel asking me to get into a studio and talk about the implosion of St Paul’s Cathedral, I was left wondering why they had chosen Ship of Fools for comment.
Bishop Nick Baines has helpfully blogged today about why the UK’s bishops have taken an oath of silence on the matter which even Tony Soprano would admire, and my guess is that since the media can’t get a cleric to talk, they’ve had to resort to lesser fry like me.
The request from the BBC was a bit urgent, since a third clergyman threw himself off Chris Wren’s famous dome today, careerwise. I think the Occupy London camp would have considered it a result if their protest had prompted a few bankers to leap to their deserved doom off the NatWest Tower, but the cathedral resignations have probably been as much a surprise to them as to everyone else.
As far as I can discover, Graeme Knowles is the first Dean of St Paul’s (and there have been a lot of them, including the poet John Donne) to resign. Many of them have moved on to become bishops and even archbishops, and it will be fascinating to see what job the C of E rustles up for him next. Will the church reward failure in the same way as the banks?
St Paul’s has lost the plot. Their PR, which for Byzantine reasons is run from the obscure town of Brough in East Yorkshire by Rob Marshall’s 33rpm, was taken to the cleaners in PR Week a few days ago. Their fake concern about health and safety was exposed as a ploy to get the protesters out in the New Statesman. But worse than that, St Paul’s has lost the Christian plot, the whole reason it is there.
What happened two weeks ago on Ludgate Hill is that people came to church. The protesters turned up at St Paul’s by accident and decided they wanted to stay. There, on the cathedral’s doorstep, they set up camp. And in doing that, they gave the church a new congregation. Here was a fabulous opportunity for St Paul’s to shed a bit of pomp and hauteur, to bring the faith out of doors, to do some services outside, to be a bit spontaneous, to provide the protesters with some spiritual nourishment, to rediscover a connection with ordinary people, to have a conversation.
Lucy Mangan, the Guardian columnist, wrote about this fantasy version of the cathedral with real feeling last week in her piece, St Paul’s – embrace your new flock. ‘These are your people,’ she told the cathedral.
But instead of rising to the occasion, and to huge disappointment, the cathedral’s instinct was to shut up shop and get in the lawyers. It’s hard to think of anything more negative and dispiriting than St Paul’s actually shutting itself down. Christians around the country of all traditions have been left banging their heads against the wall in frustration at the sight of the church behaving so badly.
What makes it worse is that church leaders don’t seem to understand just how epically they are screwing up. (‘Screwing’ isn’t quite strong enough, but this is a family blog.) There was no word in this direction in Dean Knowles’ resignation statement, which was instead full of personal and institutional self-pity. And as Nick Baines knows, the silence of other C of E leaders is a huge let-down for Christians across the country. It’s actually a betrayal in the name of not rocking the boat. The bishops have lost the plot too.
It is hard to imagine Jesus in the Deanery, sherry in hand, consulting his lawyers. On the other hand, it is easy to imagine him in the camp, sitting in a tent, talking to the people who have no voice but who want to find it and be heard.
But beyond Jesus’ compassion and engagement with ignored people, there’s something else. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple because they filled their own pockets by ripping off the poor. He was angry with them and treated them like the dirt they were. The Occupy London protesters are making the same point about the bankers, but the church, the advertised followers of Jesus, are telling them to shut up, pack up and go home.
With the welcome departure of Dean Knowles, St Paul’s now has an opportunity to reconsider its position and find not merely ‘new leadership’ as the Dean put it, but a new direction. Is it too much to hope that a cathedral could start taking some creative risks for the gospel? If St Paul’s fails to seize the moment, then its mission is lost, and its inspiring building an empty icon.
I’ve always loved St Paul’s – ironically, the church of the tentmaker. I’ve found it a place of wonder and mystery ever since my first visit to London at the age of nine. I believe it can recover its mission, but only if it dramatically changes course. Whether the people now in charge of this glorious architectural Titanic have the imagination and strength to steer it through the icebergs remains to be seen. They deserve our prayers.
Coffin-shaped sandwiches, anyone? Or how about a battery-operated grim reaper – only £10? Yes, the frightful festival of Halloween is upon us, although the supermarkets, in their eerily efficient way, have been flogging the grizzly merchandise of the season for several weeks.
Like Christmas, Halloween has a tangled story. Its roots can credibly be followed back to the Celtic festival of Samhain, which means ‘summer’s end’. The medieval church dressed it up in Christian clothes (as it did for Yuletide), and declared it to be All Hallows’ Eve, the evening before Hallowmas, or All Saints.
The church’s creation of Halloween was intended to divert people from telling Celtic horror stories, and instead to get them thinking about the heroic stories of the saints. The clerics of the time must have rubbed their hands over their cunning plan. Paganism was defeated. Job done. But a peek into a supermarket now shows that the strategy has failed spectacularly.
In more recent times, the church has been fighting back against the advance of Halloween. Christians in the more excitable pews paint the festival in the most lurid colours, condemning its imagery of death and horror, accusing it of dabbling in the occult, and sounding the moral trumpet at its naughty pranks.
And they have another cunning plan. They want to give Halloween a second baptism. Most attempts to do this come down to running ‘Bright parties’, or the marginally more inviting ‘Saints & sausages’ parties, where activities for kids are organised by grown-ups. Mercifully, these plodding attempts to domesticate Halloween are doomed to failure because they misread what it is all about.
Halloween is a feast of fools, where the normal rules are reversed for one night. Kids go out after dark. Frightening others is good. You might bump into a ghost. You can dictate terms to a grown-up with trick or treat. You can expect lots of sweets. For a child, this is exhilarating stuff.
This is why Christian attempts to impose an adult-led, rules-based alternative is so misconceived. It misses the point with pinpoint imprecision.
What happens at Halloween is play. The themes of this, like all the best play, are serious: darkness, horror, monsters, decay, phobias, danger, fear and unpleasant surprises. Children want to think about these things – in fact, they need to, if they are going to grow up as people who can cope in a threatening and uncertain world. They play in the dark in order to tame it.
Halloween derives its appeal from an unreconciled relationship with death, and the playful elements of the festival are, however trivial, an attempt to make terms with the great enemy. In northern latitudes, it is the steady creep of autumn evenings, leading us into the approaching gloom of winter, which turns our thoughts to Last Things, and which also lends Halloween its Gothic flavour. Just as spring turns us to life and love, autumns turns us to death and the dark.
Perhaps the church needs a new cunning plan if it wants to engage successfully with Halloween in its natural season of the year. Invite all the little witches and werewolves, zombies and ghosts into church. After all, your church is probably the most Gothic and spooky building in the neighbourhood. It’s the perfect place for Halloween.
So how about Halloween in the crypt, with hideous laughter? It’s such a shame that churches have crypts, but don’t know how to ham them up. If some churches can welcome Santa Claus into the service on 25 December, why not ghouls and mummies on 31 October?
Like Christmas, Halloween is one of those rare moments in the year when gospel and culture share the same space. It is a moment when Christians have good and positive things to say in response to what is happening on the streets and in people’s homes.
If churches can let Halloween playfully ask its big questions about the dark side, and welcome people as they are – costumes and all – then there is a golden opportunity to talk about Jesus, who faced horror for our sake, overcame the Devil, and destroyed the power of death.
Perhaps more than at any other time of the year, this is when we need to be as wise as serpents, but harmless as doves.
I was accidentally introduced to the Devon boatbuilding town of Appledore 10 years ago, because a friend has a holiday place nearby. We’ve been coming here for holidays ever since. It was only this year, after my Mum died, that I found a photograph (left above) she had taken of her parents, Tom and Eveline, on their own Appledore holiday back in August 1941. I’ve walked past the place where they’re standing without ever knowing its significance.
The buildings seen in the background of the photograph are still there, on Appledore Quay, looking straight out onto the estuary of the River Torridge as it flows briskly into the sea. This morning, in bright sunshine, Roey and I went there to take the above right picture of me on the same spot, 70 years after my Mum took her snapshot. (I’ve posted the picture at a bigger size on Flickr.)
I never knew my grandfather, as he died in 1949. It’s a shame, as he drove steam engines, which would automatically have made him a childhood hero for me. I did know my grandmother, though, as she lived until I was 11. She and Tom were close all their lives, as I think the picture shows, but now they are gone, and my Mum is also gone, so the only thing which remains from this tiny fragment of time is the image my Mum captured in the flicker of a camera’s eye.
It’s curious what you discover when you do something like this. Like my grandparents, I discovered how bright the sunlight is on Appledore Quay on a clear morning. Tom had sensibly brought a trilby with a pulled-down brim so he wouldn’t have to squint into the sun as my grandmother and I did.
But also, looking at the different directions of our shadows, it’s clear that Tom and Eveline got up much earlier than I did this morning, as the sun in their faces is from almost due east. It looks like they had just turned out of their bed and breakfast for an early morning stroll along the quay. I like the way the picture yields its secrets to those who search for them. It adds depth to an image which could so easily lose its meaning.
A new book by Simon Parke is out on 1 November. It’s called Solitude: Recovering the power of alone. The past decade has seen us make huge strides forward in banishing the experience of being on our own. All you need is a smartphone and you can text, tweet and browse your way out of aloneness. How desperate does it feel to find you have left the house without your mobile?
Solitude is written as a dialogue, which I like, as it makes a good percentage of the book ask questions. And it has short chapters of four or five pages each which are designed to make you pause and think about the issues which orbit around spending time with yourself. For the flavour of the dialogue, play the film above. Simon has also written about the book on his website…
Lady Gaga, never knowingly under-exposed, dug deep into the basket of self-revelation recently when speaking to Star TV. ‘I am an artist,’ she said. ‘We wallow in loneliness and solitude our whole lives… Yes, I’m lonely. But I’m married to my loneliness.’
How are you feeling about that? Perhaps you’re nodding your head in empathic agreement, but I’m shaking mine in frustration. Millions hang on her every word, but her words perpetuate a falsehood. Solitude is nothing like loneliness.
‘Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone,’ writes Paul Tillich. ‘It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.’ It’s important we keep them separate, otherwise all hell will break loose.
Solitude is different. Solitude is the state of being alone without being lonely; of being happily alone. It is a positive and constructive state of engagement with oneself, and through oneself, with God and the world around. Solitude is something desirable, something to be sought; a state of being alone in the good company of your self.
Hearing the sad but expected news of Steve Jobs’ death yesterday morning, I went to the Guardian website and saw that shrines had started to appear outside Apple stores in Beijing, Tokyo, New York and – of course – San Francisco. Large stores are often referred to as temples to consumerism, but Apple Stores consciously present themselves as quasi-religious spaces, with Zen providing the template for their cool, meditative feel. I always feel like crossing myself when I enter an Apple store.
I grabbed a camera and headed into the West End as soon as I could, because I knew the same thing must be happening outside the Apple stores of London. At the door of the Covent Garden store was a modest few bunches of flowers and messages, with the large portrait picture of Steve Jobs that is currently filling the homepage of Apple websites worldwide. Even so, this small tribute to Steve was surrounded by media camera crews and onlookers.
I went inside the store and was surprised to see no reference at all to Steve’s passing on the many video screens. Death and the grave must give way to shopping, even in the kingdom of Jobs.
I talked to a couple of Apple staffers, asking them what the mood was. ‘It’s sad, obviously,’ said Becky, ‘but in a way it’s another sales day like any other.’ I told them I’d bought my first Mac in 1988, and we talked for a while, sharing our Apple testimonies. I told them I’d been wondering if anything dramatic might happen the third day after Steve’s death, and Jon said that perhaps Siri (the new talk-to-your-iPhone software) stood for Steve Is Really Immortal. ‘Maybe that’s him now.’
Over at the Regent Street store, the pavement was heaving with people, standing around a large shrine of flowers, post-its, candles, cards and… of course… apples, most with a single bite taken out of them. Fascinating though the shrine was, the behaviour of the crowd was more so. I quickly learned how you venerate a shrine these days, and that is by taking pictures.
Everyone there was holding up an iPhone or an heretical Android, kneeling reverently to take pictures of the messages, bowing low to get that perfect close-up, and then getting some shots of others in the congregation, also taking pictures, just like you. And then, just a few seconds of furious thumbing on the keypad and they’d posted the pictures to Twitter or Facebook, or texted them on to friends, to say: Look at this, I am here, I am part of this global thing that is happening right now, Isn’t this insane? Wasn’t Steve an inspiration? Their actions expressed these and the 1001 other reasons why people pause at roadside shrines.
It was an appropriate way of remembering the great Steve Jobs. No liturgy or homily. No conversation with the people there, either. Just you and your iPhone and an invisible moment of communion with those you know over the Net.
I’ve enjoyed the Pope’s messages over the past three years on World Communications Day, which was created by Vatican II to provide an annual message to the church and the world on the subject of media. Benedict has done some very creative theological reflection on social media and the new possibilities for relating with others through them.
If there’s another major church leader providing this sort of thinking on new media, I’d like to know who they are.
Although the 2012 event is eight months away (it happens on 20 May), in a miracle of forward planning the message will be published in January and the subject of the message was announced today. The Vatican displays a level of OCD that others can only dream of.
But I do like the sound of the message, whose theme, unexpectedly, is silence.
In the thought of Pope Benedict XVI, silence is not presented simply as an antidote to the constant and unstoppable flow of information that characterises society today but rather as a factor that is necessary for its integration. Silence, precisely because it favours habits of discernment and reflection, can in fact be seen primarily as a means of welcoming the word. We ought not to think in terms of a dualism, but of the complementary nature of two elements which when they are held in balance serve to enrich the value of communication and which make it a key factor that can serve the new evangelisation.
AD and BC, even though they’re 2011 years in the past, still have power in the present to razz up the partisan press. According to the Daily Mail, a new ‘BBC diktat’ has consigned all mention of AD and BC to the trash, and programme producers must now use the politically correct CE (common era) and BCE (before common era).
Schools and universities in the UK have been using those terms for several years, of course, but that seems to be news to the Daily Mail. Christian leaders of the ‘new whine’ tendency happily supplied rentaquotes to the Mail for the article, and I guess ordinary believers are now supposed to see the retirement of AD and BC as an outrageous attack on the Christian faith itself and get terribly offended by it.
Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester who always reminds me of a tetchy car alarm that goes off for no good reason at 3.30am, said, ‘I think this amounts to the dumbing down of the Christian basis of our culture, language and history.’ Hmm. It sounds like it might have been a slow day at Nazir-Ali Towers.
I remember as a child puzzling over the mysterious meaning of AD and BC. I grasped they were about the way we count years and that BC meant ‘Before Christ’, but like many people my guess was that AD meant ‘After Death’ – although that didn’t seem quite right, as it put the 33 years of Jesus’s life into a sort of dead zone. But at least I didn’t make the same mistake as the school kid who wrote in an exam that AD stood for Anus Domini.
When my Dad finally told me it was the Latin Anno Domini, ‘the year of our Lord’, I was frankly a bit disappointed. I thought it sounded dodgy. It was a religious statement in a way that ‘Before Christ’ was not. BC is mostly factual, whereas AD is something like a confession of faith. As St Paul said, ‘no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit’.
A couple of centuries ago, the phrase sounded even more elaborately religious: Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, ‘the year of our Lord Jesus Christ’, which makes explicit the rather huge faith claim hiding in AD’s seemingly modest abbreviation. The BBC’s religion and ethics department says AD and BC are religiously loaded, and I think they have a point.
I wouldn’t expect someone of another faith – or of no faith – to call Jesus ‘our Lord’, and for that reason I think it’s unreasonable for Christians to demand that AD continues past its natural retirement age. These little markers, like am and pm, or like N, S, E and W, should be neutral and descriptive, and the fact that over-sensitive Christians are fighting for AD is a clue about its religious value for them. It’s just bad religion and they need to give it up for the good of everyone, including themselves.
Personally, I’m much happier with BCE and CE. To me, they invite the question: when and why did we move from one to the other? It’s much better to be asked a question and be given the chance to tell your story of faith than to insist everyone tells it for you, whether they like it or not.
Some Ship of Fools news… Steve Goddard and I have been working with the UK’s Bible Society over the past year to create a Facebook app in time for Christmas. Roll on Christmas is a two-minute movie in which you cast your Facebook friends in a nativity play, with their faces appearing on animated characters made from toilet rolls.
I don’t want to post any plot spoilers, but suffice it to say that the traditional nativity story quickly goes down the toilet, with the enthusiastic help of bungling angels, a dastardly King Herod and some inappropriate gifts.
We’re working with interactive agency Complete Control of Bath for design and animation magic, and Brandmovers of London for the social media wizardry, and the whole thing has been made possible by a generous grant from Jerusalem Productions, who funded The Ark back in 2003. It’s our biggest project since then and we’re hoping it’ll create a similar splash.
Our launch is set for the end of October.
I’ll post more on this shortly, but for now, if you want to be among the first to support Roll on Christmas, do Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. For more about the project, see this Ship of Fools feature.
I did myself a favour this afternoon and downloaded a couple of MP3s from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s website. I wouldn’t normally, but the ABC had a public conversation with comedian and Catholic Frank Skinner last Friday in Canterbury Cathedral, and Frank always has perceptive and colourful things to say about being a Christian.
They talked about many things, including the quality of sermons and why Frank isn’t a priest, but I especially liked it that Frank picked up on how atheism is almost part of the job description for being a standup comedian right now. I talked about that with Marcus Brigstocke when I interviewed him for the Church Times a few weeks ago. Here’s Frank’s take…
I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but on the comedy circuit now, it’s incredibly cool to be an atheist. I was in Edinburgh recently and I saw several comedians’ shows, and even if they were nothing to do with religion, they’ll take a little three or four minute slot and say, oh, by the way, I’m an atheist, just to make sure they’ve ticked the box of cool comic. You have to wear tight jeans, you have to have hair that looks like a chrysanthemum and you have to be an atheist if you want to be a cool modern comic.
Now, you need to sort that out. [Audience laughter]
It’s very bad that being an atheist has got to be the cool position, because that could be very serious as an end result. We might see atheists like we see people who deny global warming. You might celebrate their freedom of speech and their opinion to deny global warming, but if they’re wrong and millions of other people have taken their view, then it could end in a terrible, terrible disaster for a lot of people. And the church just seems to be letting it get cooler and letting it dominate more and more.
Zooniverse is a crowdsourcing website which made its name by asking Internet volunteers to help identify galaxies from vast numbers of astronomy photographs. That project, Galaxy Zoo, quickly attracted more than 80,000 volunteers who made short work of 10 million images of galaxies, deciding whether they were rotating clockwise or anticlockwise, for example.
Now Zooniverse has launched a new project, Ancient Lives, with the same aim of clearing the in-tray of experts and making new discoveries. This time, volunteers are being asked to transcribe fragments of Greek papyrus recovered in 1897 from a Roman-era town, Oxyrhynchus, which flourished in the Egyptian desert, but has since disappeared into the sands.
The fragments are from the town’s ancient rubbish dumps and include everyday stuff such as contracts, shopping lists and tax returns – but also long-lost books, plays and even gospels. One century on from when they were pulled from the sand, only a small percentage of the half a million scraps of papyrus have been deciphered. The job of identifying Greek handwriting on bits of rubbish that were sent to the dump some 2,000 years ago is much more of a challenge than galaxy-spotting, I think, but this sounds like a great project, especially if it speeds things up. The Ancient Lives website says…
For classics scholars, the vast number of damaged and fragmentary texts from the waste dumps of Greco-Roman Egypt has resulted in a difficult and time-consuming endeavor, with each manuscript requiring a character-by-character transcription… An immense number of detached fragments still linger, waiting to be joined with others to form a once intact text of ancient thought, both known and unknown. The data not only continues to reevaluate and assess the literature and knowledge of ancient Greece, but also illuminates the lives and culture of the multi-ethnic society of Greco-Roman Egypt.
The data gathered by Ancient Lives will allow us to increase the momentum by which scholars have traditionally studied the collection. After transcriptions have been collected digitally, we can combine human and computer intelligence to identify known texts and documents faster than ever before. For unknown documents, we can isolate them and begin the long process of identification.
Like any other scientific project, the data will require a lengthy process of vetting and analysis. There are no quick answers or discoveries. We want to make sure our findings are accurate. However, instead of just a few scholars going through the collection one fragment at a time, users of Ancient Lives are allowing professionals to process large batches of data at any given time.
Interested in eavesdropping on the citizens of ancient Oxyrhynchus? Visit Ancient Lives.
I was in the basement of Quinto’s second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road the other day and came across a slim, battered volume from the 18th century with the gloriously misspelled title, The Tryal of the Witnesses of the Ressurection of Jesus, by Thomas Sherlock.
The cover was falling off, but in the musty pages I was surprised to find a little work of fiction which presents the case for the resurrection as a courtroom drama. The story is that a group of m’learned friends fall into a conversation about the resurrection, and agree to stage a trial for their own entertainment. When they next meet, their project has drawn a small crowd, so they elect a judge and jury and start to interrogate the accounts of the key witnesses in the four gospels.
The book concludes with the judge asking the jury, ‘Are the apostles guilty of giving false evidence in the case of the resurrection of Jesus, or not guilty?’ To no great surprise, the verdict of the jury is ‘not guilty’.
This copy of The Tryal of the Witnesses was published in 1794, the year The Terror ended in France. I was intrigued by its age, because the standout book for me arguing the resurrection forensically is Frank Morison’s celebrated Who Moved the Stone? which was first published in 1930 but has been in print ever since. That book was written by an English advertising exec (real name, Albert Henry Ross) whose ad agency also employed the novelist Dorothy Sayers as a copywriter and whose greatest success was the ‘Guinness is good for you’ campaign.
Morison borrows the language of the courtroom in examining the death and resurrection of Jesus, with breathless chapter titles such as, ‘The real case against the prisoner’, ‘The situation on Friday afternoon’ and ‘The evidence of the principal fisherman’. Thinking about it, those headlines sound more like the work of a tabloid hack scribbling at the back of the courtroom than a learned barrister.
Despite that (or maybe because of it) Who Moved the Stone? remains a classic on both sides of the Pond partly because Morison started writing it as a sceptic who wanted to disprove the resurrection, but ended up convinced by the case he sought to destroy – and no Christian can resist a testimony like that. It has something of John Newton’s ‘I once was blind, but now I see’ about it.
Frank might have written a memorable book, but he was not the first to tackle the gospels like this. I did a small amount of digging and found that ‘resurrection meets forensics’ goes back much earlier than 1930. It goes back 80 years earlier, in fact, to 1846. That’s when snappily-titled An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists: By the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice, by Simon Greenleaf, was published in Boston, Massachusetts. (You can buy the book on Amazon or read it on Google Books.) Greenleaf was one of the founders of the Harvard Law School, where he was Professor of Law.
What made Greenleaf’s book special was that he used technical legal tools for examining the reliability of the gospels and for cross-examining the testimony of the claimed eyewitnesses of the resurrection. His methods and arguments have been followed by Christian writers ever since, up to and including tireless apologist Josh McDowell.
However, even Greenleaf must give way to the little book I found in the basement room of Quinto’s, so far as originality goes. The copy of The Tryal of the Witnesses I stumbled on was published in London in 1794, but the first edition hit the bookshops in 1729. When I found that out, I realised that despite its size this must be a significant work. Any book still in print after 65 years (and with 15 editions under its belt, one every four years or so) is worth a second look.
Like Greenleaf’s book, it’s full of the detailed, lawyerly argument you would expect when the resurrection stories are put in the witness box. For example, here’s Thomas Sherlock’s defence lawyer quizzing the testimony of the Roman guards who claimed the disciples stole Jesus’ body while they, the guards, were fast asleep: ‘I wish the guards were in court, I would ask them how they came to be so punctual in relating what happened when they were asleep?’
Thomas Sherlock was a Bishop of London, although he wrote the book while he was further down the food chain as mere Bishop of Bangor. He produced several books in response to the anti-miracle arguments of the Deists, this one included, and he’s regarded as an important figure in the history of apologetics.
So who invented this idea of taking Peter, Mary Magdalene and Pilate to court? If it wasn’t Thomas Sherlock, he must be an early adopter of the genre, and I think the fact he wrote a fictional narrative makes him highly creative. The Tryal of the Witnesses, despite its ancient-looking title, is still entertaining and readable. It’s not Twelve Angry Men, but it’s good nevertheless.
Amazingly, Amazon is selling The Trial of the Witnesses, which is still in print after 300 years thanks to a specialty publisher who describes it as ‘one of the most famous – and least read – works of Christian apologetics’. That sounds about right. The text of the book can also be read online for free.
Exiting the tube in London last Sunday I caught sight of this smirking face in the kerb as I crossed the street. The unexpected faces I sometimes see seem to be enjoying a secret joke… maybe the universe is a friendly place after all.
My lifelong fascination with ‘the far side’ of Christianity easily includes the Catholic Chuch’s love affair with relics, although I must confess some sympathy with it all. It’s a deeply human thing to show respect to what remains of those we’ve loved after they’ve died and the photographs, letters and books of people in my family which have come down to me are beloved things.
So the early Christian practice of meeting at the gravesides of the martyrs and placing their portrait paintings in churches seems absolutely right to me, even though it’s not for everyone. But what about collecting bones and skulls, inspecting the bodies of dead saints and parading their body parts through the streets? Call me squeamish, but it just seems macabre and obsessive, not to mention terminally out of step with modern culture. Believing the Christian faith is hard enough these days without throwing in veneration of the big toe of St Bob the Bizarre.
Back in May this year, a syringeful of John Paul II’s blood, taken from him before he died, was venerated in his beatification mass in Rome, while another found its way to Krakow in Poland. His body has already been moved upstairs from the basement of St Peter’s into the church, and it’s a disturbing possibility that the Vatican’s resurrection men might be visiting his coffin for bits and pieces sometime in the future.
Which is why I was curious to get hold of a copy of a new book, Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics, by Thomas J Craughwell. This is a book which knows where the bodies are unburied. If you want to get on a plane to go and venerate one of the many skulls of St George, the Holy Bench Jesus sat on during the Last Supper, the eye of Blessed Edward Oldcorne (don’t ask), the humerus of St Francis Xavier or even the skis of John Paul II, this is where to start.
I’m disappointed though that Craughwell doesn’t pass much critical comment on the history or authenticity of the relics he lists. Many of the saints’ relics are genuine, but all the claimed biblical objects must be regarded as frauds perpetrated on credulous believers.
It’s a fraud the Church has colluded in over the centuries. Take the Holy House of Nazareth, for example, where Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived, which was flown by a team of house-moving angels to Loreto in Italy in the 13th century. A virtual queue of Popes visited the house to bless it and bestow privileges, and only Julius II demurred by adding the words, ‘as is piously believed and reported’ to an account of the shrine’s legend.
However, there are some signs of change, as witnessed by the curious story of the Holy Prepuce (the foreskin of the infant Christ), which was the subject of another book, An Irreverent Curiosity, which I read a few months ago.
According to the book, written by American journalist David Farley, the Holy Prepuce was venerated every January 1st (the feast of the circumcision of Christ) by the people of Calcata, an Italian hill town. This went on for almost four centuries without a problem until 1900, when Pope Leo XIII took the highly unusual step of censoring all mention of the relic on pain of excommunication. The blessed foreskin had become an almighty embarrassment. But then things went further.
In 1983, the priest of Calcata told his congregation that the Holy Prepuce had been stolen from the shoebox in his wardrobe, where he had kept it for safety, and it has never been seen again. Locals believe it was snatched by Church officials to be ‘disappeared’ into the Vatican. Other uncomfortable relics, such as the breast milk of the Virgin Mary, have also been sent into retirement.
Like most traditional elements of Catholicism, the cult of relics has been enjoying something of a revival under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Their Church has renewed its love of bloodstained shrouds and holy bones. For them, God moves not only in mysterious ways, but in medieval ones too.
‘What kind of an almighty God couldn’t make the world in seven days?’ asks Milton Jones, in his new book, 10 Second Sermons.
Milton’s one-line gags and glassy-eyed delivery have always seemed to me to come from some unhinged parallel universe. And I’m not necessarily talking about the Church of England. In this book he give us some equally unhinged angles on church, faith, God and all that.
Looked at one way, this is a slim but lovingly produced book of short jokes and observations, illustrated with Milton’s Thurber-like cartoons. We get his deadpan take on the ups, downs, disappointments, surprises and downright weirdities of faith. But on another level, they live up to the ‘sermon’ tag by delivering stuff which makes you think as well as laugh. (Hang on, when did a sermon ever do that for me?)
For instance…
Church should be everyone arriving with one piece of the jigsaw.
As we know, Jesus was a very humble man who said ‘I am God’!
Christians sometime shout ‘Once I was dead but now I’m alive!’ But then so do zombies.
Every church toilet should have one. Every church minister should have one. They could use one of Milton’s jokes to open the sermon and then shut up and sit down.
My bedtime reading at the mo is the engrossing Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which is just out in paperback. It’s a novel set in the year 2044, 30 years into a great depression so bad that the final decades of the 20th century look like a golden age. Our man on the spot is high school student Wade Watts, who lives with his aunt in the stacks, mobile homes stacked 20 high without proper sanitation, and which give ‘trailer park trash’ a whole new depth of meaning.
Cline has given his novel a thriller-like plot, but what is fascinating me as I read is the book’s reflection on Internet culture and online worlds. Social conditions in the story are so dire that most people escape by immersing themselves in the OASIS, a virtual universe of cosmic dimensions which provides them with all the education, entertainment and relationships they need. In this sense, the novel is a credible imagining of how the virtual world might develop.
A well as peering into the future, Ready Player One cleverly invokes the familiar past, as the culture of 2044 is fixated on the 1980s and the beginning of the digital era. The novel is rich in references to the TV shows, computer games, movies, comic books, magazines and other cultural debris of the 80s, and this scheme, where the reader is in the time between Wade Watts’ world and the Thatcher-Reagan era, is as beguiling as can be. It evokes nostalgia and futureshock in one hit.
Some reviewers are hailing the book as a worthy successor to William Gibsons’s landmark 1984 novel, Neuromancer, which fixed the term cyberspace in modern culture. Whatever the unlikely merits of that comparison, this is a book worth reading in its own right, both for sheer entertainment and thinking about the state of cyberculture.
I met the comedian Marcus Brigstocke in a West End cafe last week and this evening started writing it up into a feature for the Church Times. We had a lively and enjoyable talk about his book, God Collar, which started life as a standup show touring the UK in 2009.
Marcus doesn’t believe in God, but would like to, if someone could show him a God worth believing in. The book starts off from that point and follows his search for God, which even to a religious person like me sometimes seems a bit obsessive. ‘I’ve never stalked anyone before, but if God had bins I’d definitely rifle through them,’ he confesses. The book is a comedy, but the search is serious.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book, and our conversation, was his enthusiasm for attacking his own (lack of) faith position. He greatly disappointed the atheists in his audiences when he told them they weren’t cleverer than anyone else, for example. I haven’t found that spirit of self-criticism in many public atheists.
And I like his openness to what other people say. He told me this story from the end of one of his shows…
‘You always go for a pee after a show and the worst case scenario – which happens very, very often – is that the punters who have just watched the show will come and have a pee next to you and talk to you while you’re having a pee. Anyway, this guy came and spoke to me and said, “Oh, I just watched your show.” He didn’t really say whether he liked it or not, which is always a bad sign. He waited and then said, “I just wanted to let you know that when you’re ready, Jesus is waiting for you.” My initial response was right, here we go, we’re off to the races. And then I thought, no, actually he paid to come to your show, he listened to you for an hour and has now had the good grace to share with you something that worked for him and say, I hope you can have a piece of this.’
OK, it’s 750 light years away from me, so I’m unlikely ever to encounter it for myself. But there was something to make the blood run slightly colder in last week’s news that a planet orbiting a distant sun is the darkest world ever discovered.
The planet, with the catchy (and French-sounding) name of TrES-2b, only reflects a miserly one per cent of the light that falls on it from its nearby sun. Which means it’s as dark as coal. Close up, it must be hard to see against the blackness of space, and you would only know it was there by the stars it would blot out – which would be rather a lot, given that TrES-2b is the size of Jupiter.
David Spiegel, one of the astronomers to make the discovery, says: ‘It’s not clear what is responsible for making this planet so extraordinarily dark. However, it’s not completely pitch black. It’s so hot that it emits a faint red glow, much like a burning ember or the coils on an electric stove.’
TrES-2b immediately reminded me of one of the stay-with-you episodes in CS Lewis’s Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In it, the Dawn Treader sails into a darkness in the middle of the open, sunlit sea and finds it a place of terror and madness, where escape again into the light seems impossible.
But it also made me reflect on the opening words of Psalm 19...
The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
‘Glory’ is a first cousin to the words we use for light, so if the stars of the universe speak of the shining glory of God, then what do the dark objects say about him? The writer of Psalm 19 couldn’t have imagined that the night sky above him contained not just brilliant stars, but also black holes, occult planets and dark matter.
I’m interested in this because Christian theology doesn’t seem to have made much adjustment to the huge amount of new information about the universe that has accumulated in the past century. In the 1920s and 30s, Edwin Hubble and others discovered that the universe doesn’t consist of just our galaxy (as was argued at the time) but countless galaxies – at least 100 billion, according to the Institute of Physics, each containing anything from millions to trillions of stars.
So while it was credible back in the days of Psalm 19 to see the stars as a kind of celestial wallpaper, put there solely for humans to admire and praise the Lord who made them, the vast scale of what is actually out there makes that model look like over-engineering on a cosmic scale. For me, the incredible size of it all and the discovery of objects such as TrES-2b is a severe challenge to the New Testament’s assertion that the human story is critical to the story of the universe as a whole. Our size in the mind-boggling scheme of things is surely too microscopically tiny.
So what does TrES-2b tell us about God? Maybe it speaks of the hidden side of God, the God who ultimately cannot be known, the darkness of God. These themes have been explored by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and other offbeat theologians, but has its roots back in the early books of the Old Testament. On Mt Sinai, for example, ‘Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.’
So here’s to TrES-2b. A dark and unknowable world reflecting nothing but the darkness and mystery of God.
Tired of the endless books, tributes and general hoopla surrounding the 400th birthday of the King James Bible? Take comfort in the fact that your great-grandparents had to endure the same sort of thing back in 1911, the 300th anniversary. This British newspaper ad of the time cashed in with a 6.5 inch lectern bearing ‘the smallest Bible in the world’... yours for just 17.5p in today’s money. Here’s the sales pitch…
‘Bibles were so rare in olden times it was necessary to chain them to lecterns and other places. The chain is a facsimile of what may be seen in Hereford and other cathedrals and parish churches all over the country. The Bible can easily be read with a magnifying glass, which is supplied.’
There’s an interesting conversation happening over on the Big Bible website, where Tim Hutchings is posting good stuff on their blog about online church. Even though the Net has a large number of groups which identify themselves as religious communities, Christians have remained suspicious and wary of them. As Tim says…
‘However sophisticated online churches get, whatever new parts of the Internet they find to grow in, they still make Christians REALLY uncomfortable. If you’re a Christian, and you’re writing a book about the Internet, you’ll almost certainly end up throwing in a grumble about online churches. Online-church-bashing has become one of the most predictable and unimaginative clichés of Christian writing about technology.’
I’ve been thinking about the ironies of this situation for a while, partly because the few Christian conferences I’ve been to in the past year have featured speakers warning against the dangers of false identity on the Internet… a warning so past its sell-by date that it could walk straight out of your smelly fridge and put itself in the bin.
So, a couple of things to say on this.
First, it’s somewhat ironic for Christians to be extolling the virtues of physical communities (‘real-life’ churches) and attacking virtual ones. After all, the whole Christian belief system is based on things that are unseen, including God of course. Our faith may be expressed physically, but the heart of it is virtual. In prayer and worship Christians consciously enter the virtual realm, either closing their eyes to block out the physical world, or looking up to where they imagine God and the spiritual realm to be.
Which makes me think that it is slightly ridiculous for Christians to object to online community on the grounds that it is unreal. It is no more unreal than important aspects of my faith.
Second, online communities are often held to higher standards than we expect from offline communities. For example, here is the Pope (who in fairness has given three thoughtful reflections on digital media in as many years) listing the limits of online communication: ‘the one-sidedness of the interaction, the tendency to communicate only some parts of one’s interior world, the risk of constructing a false image of oneself, which can become a form of self-indulgence.’
Those are good points, but they could equally well be made about the face to face relationships of people in the local church. Creating a fake identity, acting in a superficial way or posing as a pious person were not invented by the Internet – Chaucer had a go at those very human vices in The Canterbury Tales. It’s obviously prejudiced to compare the worst of virtual church with the best of physical church.
In reality, online churches can be just as challenging, boring, exciting and revealing as the church round the corner from you. I don’t see how it could be any other way, since real people, body and soul, make both kinds of church happen.
Not being a Catholic myself, I always experience an illicit thrill when walking into a Roman church, long-lost black sheep of the family that I am. I feel like I imagine a nun must feel walking into a lap-dancing club… just a bit out of my depth.
I do know how to find my way round, though. How to fake the sign of the cross, how to find a friendly saint among all the bleeding and weeping statues, where to buy a candle, where to sit quietly to think and pray. The thing I’ve not been able to crack is the confessional box. I’d love to sit inside one of the frightful old things with their creepy Gothic look, except I’m sure they have central locking triggered by a priest watching on CCTV and walls that close in on you.
But confessional boxes just got a whole lot friendlier thanks to the open-air models that have been knocked together, IKEA-like, in a park in Madrid. They’re part of World Youth Day, a big Catholic event happening this week. Now you can get your sins off your chest in the sunshine and fresh air instead of behind a pair of heavy velvet curtains sourced from the set of The Addams Family.
The Diocese of Madrid is even offering women who use the prefab confessionals forgiveness for having an abortion, which is normally an excommunicating offence in the Catholic Church. That would be really nice of them if excommunication wasn’t such a cruel and bizarre response to the pastoral situation of abortion in the first place.
I’ve owned (ok and treasured) a copy of FontBook, the world’s best catalogue of typefaces, since its 1993 edition. There’s something strangely beautiful and reassuring about the rational world of type, and FontBook is a book of endless exploration and even consolation for a typography freak like me.
The book not only displays over 8,000 fonts, but also provides historical references such as dates and creators for each typeface. One of its editors is the legendary Erik Spiekermann, creator of FF Meta and Officina Sans, who writes Spiekerblog.
The huge amount of information in FontBook is perfect for translation to iPad, and this has now been fabulously realised in the FontBook app, launched a few days ago. I’m just starting to use the app, but it apparently features over 620,000 typeface specimens from 110 type foundries.
You can delve into fonts by alphabetical listing, by class (serif, sans, script, display, etc.), by designer, foundry and even year. I’ve really enjoyed using the year lookup, finding out the ritzy typefaces that were hot in the late 50s, for example.
At £3.99 (or $5.99) from iTunes, this is an education and an entertainment at an amazing price.
I skipped church this morning and went to see the National Gallery’s Devotion by Design exhibition instead. It wasn’t a bad swop, as the exhibition is about Italian altarpieces from before 1500, and these amazing creations were presented in darkened rooms with the sound of liturgy and music in the background… all very atmospheric.
The exhibition, which runs until 2 October, is quite ‘how to’. That is, it’s very interested in how these multi-image pieces were constructed, allowing you to poke around behind two huge altarpieces to see the carpentry beneath their glittering, golden faces, and the surgery they have endured over the centuries.
One room explains how the people who commissioned and paid for the altarpieces imposed their own choice of saints and sacred stories on the artist. If there was more than one institution commissioning the piece, then the haggling over the cast list of who should appear in the picture could go on for a very long time.
What I missed was a good explanation of the role of altarpieces in church worship, or their impact on the ordinary worshipper. After all, in the age before television and giant advertising images, these pictures must surely have had huge impact, especially as they were positioned so you were looking right at them during the high point of the eucharist. The hyper-realism of some of the painting also draws you into an encounter, despite yourself, with the saints shown there.
I leafed through the exhibition catalogue in the shop afterwards, and it had good material on the place of altarpieces in the church’s liturgy, so it’s a shame that wasn’t reflected in the exhibition itself.
That said, Devotion by Design is thoughtful and intriguing, especially if you’re interested in the construction, technique, negotiation and contracts that underlie these powerful images used in Christian worship.
A South Carolina couple, Jacob and Gentry, went shopping in Walmart for pictures a couple of weeks ago. They found a picture which made headlines around the world, but it wasn’t one of the ones they bought in the store. Because a few days later, as Jacob was walking out of his kitchen, the Walmart receipt, lying on the floor, caught his eye. It had strange, dark markings on it.
‘It was like it was looking at me,’ he said. ‘The more I looked at it, the more it looked like Jesus.’
Stories of Jesus appearing on household objects are two a penny on the Net. It’s a rare month when Our Lord isn’t turning up on a tortilla or a cow’s udder somewhere. Such reports trigger a torrent of comic tweets, as well as punning headlines in newspapers. One appearance of Jesus in a British steak and kidney pie produced an inspired headline in The Sun newspaper: ‘Jesus Crust!’
Curiously, spontaneous images of Christ have a long history. One early legend, dating back to the 6th century or maybe earlier, tells of how Jesus turned down an invitation to pay a visit to the King of Syria. He RSVP-ed by sending the king a cloth he had used to wipe his face. When the king opened it, the face of Jesus was printed on the fabric.
Art historians say legends such as this were developed to provide much needed theological support for the explosive growth in popular images of Jesus, Mary and the saints. Christians of the time were using mass produced holy images in highly superstitious ways, hanging them up in their homes and workshops as good luck charms. Those who championed this popular devotion promoted the legends in a brilliant (and ultimately successful) piece of PR, saying that images were ok because they originated in a miracle of Jesus himself.
With all due respect to Jacob and Gentry, Christians who get excited about God performing a conjuring trick with a Walmart receipt are also perilously close to crossing the line between miracle and magic.
One of the questions always raised by stories such as this is why a stain looking like a man with a beard should always be identified in the media as Jesus? People posting comments on blogs and Twitter over the past week said they saw Charles Manson, Josef Stalin or Rasputin, rather than Jesus. ‘Even a blind person can see that this is Osama Bin Laden,’ said a commenter called gotjapanka on YouTube.
But Christianity has form in this area. Stories of plaster saints which weep and bleed – and even wink or lactate – are still quite common, and although they can also occur in Hinduism, for example, it is the Catholic stories which are strong in Western folk memory.
Even though Christians brought up on Monty Python are able to laugh at reports of Jesus and Mary appearing on a pizza near you, I think many believers are slightly beguiled by the stories almost to the point of wishing they were true. There are good reasons for this.
Firstly, these visitations are invariably tacky. I’m thinking of the toasted cheese sandwich which looked vaguely like the Virgin Mary and which ended up being bought by an online casino for $28,000. And also the Jesus-shaped shadow cast by a tree on a caravan park fence in Australia which caused the person who saw it to exclaim ‘Jesus Christ!’ – and not in a holy way.
These are tales of transcendence meeting trailer park. That is what makes them hugely entertaining, of course, but it also has a certain appeal to Christians, because holy things appearing in humble locations is what the faith of Jesus is all about.
Added to that, the images suggest God is breaking out of organised religion and into the grittiness of everyday life. One comment posted on Huffpost Comedy made a fair point when it said, ‘God appeared to Moses as a burning bush, as a pillar of fire to the Israelites, as an angel to Abraham etc… and we get a Walmart receipt?’
Well, yes… but isn’t that so New Testament? Jesus was born in a barn. So is it any surprise that he shops at Walmart?
If Jesus is going to appear anywhere today, then a pizza shop, supermarket or casino sound exactly right.
However, any Christian tempted to believe that God engages with us today via fuzzy images of a man with a beard should remember some of Jesus’ last words to the first disciples. He told them to go into all the world. It is surely through flesh and blood human beings, rather than stains on checkout receipts, that Jesus touches the earth now.
Walter White is sitting in a physician’s office at the hospital in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, staring into space in a lights on, no one’s home sort of way. On the other side of the desk, the physician’s lips are moving in slo-mo, but Walt is fixated by a tiny stain of mustard on the lapel of the man’s pristine white coat.
‘Mr White? You understood what I’ve just said to you?’
‘Yes, lung cancer. Inoperable. Best case scenario, with chemo, I’ll live maybe another couple of years.’
The scene, like a ball of sodium dropped into water, sets off a chain of action and reaction in Breaking Bad, a US television drama series, which fizzes and bangs with tremendous energy throughout the three seasons and 33 episodes which have aired to date. Vince Gilligan, executive producer of the show (who also produced The X-Files) says that ‘breaking bad’ is a southern colloquialism for ‘raising hell’.
Walt (played by Bryan Cranston, best known from the comedy series Malcolm in the Middle) is a struggling high school chemistry teacher who supplements his meagre income by working at the local car wash. His wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) is pregnant with their second child, while their first, Walt Jr (RJ Mitte), has cerebral palsy.
With no savings to help pay the medical bills, Walt decides to help himself and provide for his family when he’s gone by cooking crystal meth (methamphetamine) and earning money beyond the drug-fuelled dreams of avarice. It turns out that his dull chemistry career has been the perfect apprenticeship for his new secret life as a narcotics master chef.
Gazing in awe on Walt’s first gleaming tray of crystals, his sidekick and former failed student Jesse says, ‘You’re a goddamn artist. This is art, Mr White.’ The two of them form an unstable chemical bond which gives the show its elemental energy and frequent meltdowns.
Breaking Bad is part Book of Job, part Dante’s Inferno and part Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Walt’s descent into the drug underworld, which is unfolded in scenes of suspense, dark comedy and occasional horror, is not the easy trip to the bank he hoped it would be. Gradually, this shy and mild-mannered family man is revealed as a resourceful and ruthless protagonist caught between his life of quiet domesticity and the savage world of the drug cartels.
Despite this, Walt remains the hero of the story partly because he is fully aware of the dire consequences for his family and for others in the cruel moral choices he is forced to make. His journey is that of a damned soul through the most colourful regions of hell – many but not all of them inside his own head.
It’s no surprise that Breaking Bad has been praised by Stephen King, who hails the series as ‘the best scripted show on TV’ and Walt as ‘an American Everyman living under a constant Condition Red threat-level alert’.
The praise from King and a host a TV critics is well deserved, because the show easily takes its place in the tradition of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire and other superbly realised shows flowing in this golden age of American television drama. It’s produced by AMC, formerly an unremarkable cable channel also enjoying well deserved critical success with Mad Men, set in the world of 1960s advertising.
The only fly in the ointment (or smell in the lab) for British viewers is how hard the television companies have made it to watch Breaking Bad legally. No UK channel has bought the series for broadcast, which is a surprise given its commercial success in the US. Unaccountably, BBC Four is airing the plodding spy thriller Rubicon, also from AMC, which was cancelled after its first season.
Seasons one and two of Breaking Bad are available in the UK on DVD, but the first of them was released almost two years after the US audience started to watch, tweet and blog about the compelling episodes. With no word over the past year on whether season three will ever be released here, illegal file sharing is currently the most plausible and straightforward distribution channel for fans of the show who want to continue beyond season two.
It’s no way to treat a global audience. But somehow it seems fitting that this 21st century morality tale poses moral issues for those who simply want to follow it.
A new titanic Jesus statue seems to be going up every year. Last November saw a local Catholic priest realize his dream to put up the world’s tallest Christ in Swiebodzin, Poland, and this year it’s the turn of the President of Peru, who has fast-tracked a gargantuan Saviour for the city of Lima.
The statue, which will face the Pacific, is to be unveiled this month, and will ‘bless Peru and protect Lima,’ according to the President.
There’s some confusion, though, about whether this will be the tallest Jesus of them all. Media reports say the Lima statue will be 37m tall, but that appears to include a 15m pedastal, which reduces our Lord himself to a mere 22m.
Excluding their pedastals, here’s how the world’s other giant Jesi stack up…
Hopefully more news soon on the thrilling question of who has the biggest Jesus of them all, a revelation which is possibly of more interest to male readers.
The Roman Church may be semper eadem (ever the same), but will the Vatican website ever change its design? It seems unlikely, despite the ‘redesign’ currently being hailed by Catholic commentators. The website was launched on Christmas Day 1995, and its parchment-look background has always started to look tired after even a few visits, so I’ve been interested to see when it would be dropped.
Sadly, the only thing to change in the current shakeup is the homepage (pictured above, or click here for the real thing), which now looks to me like a Casio sports watch straight out of the 1980s – packed with features that make you ask, where do I begin? I can count no less than 45 links on the page, which is hardly the simple welcome to visitors you would expect from such a heavily visited domain (almost 14,500 websites link into vatican.va).
Most of the other pages in the site look as they’ve always done – narrow columns (of about 600 pixels) packed with brown text which scroll forever with hardly a picture to break the monotony.
Refreshingly, the website is run by a woman, Sister Judith Zoebelein, who is editorial director of the Internet Office of the Holy See. She’s been at the helm since the Vatican went online, and her role as founder of the website was recognised by the Pope earlier this year. He gave her the highest honour possible for a nun: a sign of his esteem for her, of course, but also of his esteem for the Internet.
In a fascinating ad hocvideo interview in 2007, Sister Judith spoke to journalists about the vision and practical work that goes into producing the Vatican website. Asked how many people work on it, she replied, ‘Seventeen. Too few, believe me!’
She seems like a sparky, progressive person, so maybe the slow pace of change could be explained by something she also said.
‘We’re trying to integrate something of technology into a 2,000 year-old institution. Sometimes I feel that the echo waves have to go all the way back 2,000 years and then they come back up again and you find the integration or the mix between the technology and the institution. To me that’s been a challenge, but it’s also fascinating.’
It looks like the challenge might currently be winning out over the fascinating.
I’ve worked with Richard a lot over the past 15 years on photo shoots with several of my clients, and aside from his brilliant photographer’s eye, it’s his warmth and ability to connect with people which help to capture truth and depth of insight in his images.
The exhibition brings together Richard’s photographs of people who survived the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and something of the stories of the people shown. The picture above, for example, shows three year-old Andy La Martiniere, who was playing happily with his brothers and sisters when the earthquake hit Port-au-Prince.
His right arm was trapped when a piece of concrete fell from the ceiling and pinned his body to the floor. Andy’s arm was so badly damaged it had to be amputated. The family were helped by Tearfund, with a cash grant that went towards their medical expenses.
But his father Louison says their needs are still great. ‘We have nothing at all. This time last year he had two arms. Just this morning I stared at him and got really sad.’
Richard spent a total of eight weeks in Haiti for Tearfund in three visits since the earthquake. It’s been one of the most complex disasters there’s ever been according to the UN, as 17 per cent of government people were killed and the reconstruction has been complicated.
The role of journalists and photographers often verged on the pastoral, Richard told me. ‘Everybody had lost someone, so the problem was, who do you talk to? As journalists going in, there would be groups of maybe about 30 people around us, and people would be chipping in and telling their story. That was the first time they could talk to other people about what they had suffered.’
I asked him how the experience compared for shock with his other visits to countries which have suffered disasters.
‘It’s the weight of concrete that is most shocking. You can almost feel the weight of these buildings that have collapsed. The ones of three or four storeys which have come down into a height of about 10 feet. You just get a sense, standing next to them of how much force is involved. That lingers with you. Everywhere I went in Haiti I was always thinking, what is the way out of this room?’
I spent today at King’s College, London, at a one-day conference in honour of my old friend and partner in crime, Professor Andrew Walker. In the 1990s, Andrew and I jointly edited Leading Light, the journal of the CS Lewis Centre – which was not, I hasten to add, a fan club for Aslan, but an organisation launched by Andrew for studying and promoting ‘gospel and culture’ issues.
Andrew has just retired from King’s and was paid handsome tribute by his friends and colleagues, including Alister McGrath, Pete Ward, Martyn Percy, Luke Bretherton and Billy Abraham.
Martyn Percy focused on Andrew’s book from 1985, Restoring the Kingdom, which gave a brilliant guided tour of the House Church Movement, as it was then known. The book has Andrew’s characteristic blend of journalistic detail (he interviewed many of the big cheeses in the individual House Churches) and penetrating anaysis. He was the son of a Pentecostal household and so he was sympathetic to the movement, but was also only too aware of the history of how revivalism plays out.
I was also fascinated by the paper given by Pete Ward, the author of Liquid Church and Gods Behaving Badly. Part of what he said delved into the relationship between Andrew’s work and that of Lesslie Newbigin, the godfather of the gospel and culture movement. Pete said that in this (and other areas) Andrew was ahead of the game…
While his academic interests neatly coincided with those of Lesslie Newbigin I would argue that Andrew was more attuned to contemporary culture and the social reality of the Church and as a result his work, though less well known, was actually more useful to those who were buying into a missiological vision for the Church…
Andrew was deeply appreciative of Newbigin but it is my sense that he was too much of a sociologist to see philosophy as the arena in which to do battle. In Telling the Story, Andrew showed how theological ideas are situated in communities and communicative practices. He was one of the first to put his finger on the way that religious faith and ecclesial cultures arose from innovations in media.
Andrew has written and edited a large number of books. One of his great gifts is his enthusiasm in bringing people together to work on projects, and so his multi-author books are really worth reading alongside his solo works. Here’s my recommended Walker booklist…
I’m talking about the cult of Apple in London next Wednesday, 18 May, so as an appetiser, here’s my Mac testimony.
When I bought my first Mac (the Macintosh SE, with its colossal 20Mb hard disk and 9 inch black and white screen) in 1988, it felt like coming to Jesus all over again. I’d spent the past year working with Macs in the design agency where I was at the time, but now at last I was making my own personal decision, asking Steve Jobs to change my life, becoming part of the Apple Family.
Like every disciple, I knew I would need to renounce the Devil (Bill Gates) and all his works (Microsoft and the PC), and become a fervent Mac evangelist. Even today, 23 years later, I still have a devout hatred for PCs and their clunky interfaces, and a zealous desire to witness to others about the blessings of Mac.
Although I’m naturally thrilled about the missionary success of Apple, which has seen it lay claim to the whole of our technological lives, with phones, music players and tablets headlining an impressive product list, in my heart I still yearn for those early days when I was one of the chosen few. When I was a red-hot Mac believer. How blessed was I to wake up each morning to the joyous startup chimes and the Happy Mac icon!
If Apple is a religion, what kind of religion is it? Umberto Eco whimsically remarked in 1994 that ‘the world is divided between users of the Macintosh computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers… I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.’
And it’s true that Steve Jobs is a good stand-in for the Pope, dressed in black turtleneck rather than white robes, but issuing Encyclicals and Bulls in the absolutist Roman style. But when I think about the cult of Apple, it’s more complex than Catholicism. It’s a faith that’s as preachy as Billy Graham. As ascetic as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. As hooked on miracles and spectacle as Benny Hinn. As Manichean as… er… the Manichees. And as smug as Alpha.
I’m going to be exploring all this next Wednesday, 18 May at 7.30pm, at Apple on Apple, the 11th Apple forum hosted and run by Kester Brewin. Just come along, grab a pint and some food and join in the discussion upstairs at The Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL, close to Farringdon station.
There will naturally be an Apple Mac relic at the event, for veneration by the faithful.
I went to church last week, which is rare for me these days, but then it was the ‘don’t even have to get out of your sofa’ church experience of St Pixels, the online church.
St Pixels has been around since 2005 (when it took over from Church of Fools), but it’s always been a website based community. Last week was different, though, as the church is flirting with the idea of moving its live services off its own sacred IP address and on to Facebook. This is rather fascinating, as I don’t think anyone’s tried it before.
Unlike the experience offered by online campus churches such as LifeChurch, which broadcast their services on the Net to a passive audience, St Pixels offers something potentially more satisfying and Web 2. Everyone who checks in for a service can see and chat with everyone else. And that makes the whole experience – including a cascade of typed prayers as well as rude asides during the sermon – a lot more human and churchlike.
On the down side, the readings at St Pixels are accompanied by pictures of puppies, sunsets and snowy trees, enough to make the hardened designers of Hallmark cards weep. But then that’s just like church too, or churches fixated on PowerPoint, anyway.
After the Facebook service, where I joined 22 other people for bells, prayers, readings, a sermon and a corporate typeathon of the Lord’s Prayer, I spoke to Mark Howe, a leader at St Pixels and the chief mover of the software side of things, about the Facebook initiative, which has been beta testing and launches properly next week at the Christian Resources Exhibition.
These days, he said, you need a multi-million dollar budget if you want to launch a new virtual world from scratch. But Facebook offers the chance to do something really effective and at low cost, because the infrastructure is all there.
‘There are already lots of people on Facebook,’ he says, ‘and there’s an open model of how to communicate with them. You write your code, plug it into Facebook, and amazingly it works. It’s the complete opposite of getting apps into the Apple Store.’
Who else is doing this? ‘I don’t think anyone else,’ says Mark. ‘Christians are setting up Facebook groups, of course, or micro-blogging about their ministry, but there’s only a limited amount of synergy and interaction.’
And looking at the wider commercial scene, no one is really offering a real-time experience where lots of people can interact at the same time. ‘If you look at the big Facebook games, such as Farmville, they only offer an individual experience. They’re not offering “I’m online, you’re online, we’re here together” – which is what we’re doing.’
Mark thinks the demand for what St Pixels is doing could be quite high. ‘Facebook users will be just two clicks away from joining a St Pixels service,’ he says. That’s a big change from what we currently offer, where you have to go to the website, find the right page, register, download the software and then log in for the service. We think people will like the idea that they can simply say to their Facebook friends, click this and come to church.’
The launch services on Facebook are next Tuesday, 10 May, at 1 and 3pm. But beta testing is continuing at the moment – check the St Pixels app on Facebook for details.
I went yesterday to the British Museum’s press launch for their major summer exhibition, Treasures of Heaven. The show promises to shine light on one of the most curious – not to say bizarre – aspects of the Christian faith: the devotion shown to relics.
Statues of saints and their relics were smashed or forcibly removed from British churches in the 16th century Reformation, and might seem like an obscure historical footnote now. But as Neil MacGregor, director of the BM, pointed out at the launch, relics were hugely significant objects in medieval Europe, bringing power, prestige and wealth to towns and cities, especially if they became the destination of pilgrims.
Talking about one of the exhibition’s star relics, a thorn said to be from Christ’s crown of thorns and housed in a kitschy gold reliquary (seen above), MacGregor quipped that ‘at the second coming, Christ would make a point of coming to Paris to collect his thorn.’ It was this kind of belief about relics which put medieval cities on the map.
The exhibition will bring together relics, reliquaries, manuscripts, prints and pilgrim badges from more than 40 institutions around the world, including the private chapel of the popes in the Vatican. The chapel is sending the Mandylion of Edessa (or a 5th century copy of it, at any rate) which is rarely seen in public, so that will be an event in itself.
I was told that staff at the museum are expecting some visitors to venerate the relics during the show.
Karen Armstrong, also at the launch, talked about the difficulty of relics for post-Reformation people. In fact, she said they were possibly ‘rebarbative’ (repellent) in modern culture, not a word you hear every day. The pilgrims who travelled to venerate the bones of saints and martyrs ‘confronted death but also discovered something which transcended death.’
She recalled the death of Princess Diana and how people lit candles and heaped up bouquets of flowers on the streets, ‘so that London seemed like India because of the smell of rotting vegetation!’ The cult of relics and the cult of celebrity may be a lot closer than we think.
Treasures of Heaven will run from 23 June to 9 October and tickets are now on sale.
Pastor Terry Jones of Florida finally got to burn the Qur’an on 20 March, months after he put the holy book on death row and despite appeals for clemency from Barack Obama. Bizarrely, Jones’s church, the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, subjected the Qur’an to a show trial, and four forms of execution were considered: burning, drowning, firing squad or shredding.
I don’t think shredding was available in medieval times (thanks be to God for that), but the popular practice of burning, always such a crowd-pleaser back then and a favourite of the church, won out in the end, and the Qur’an was soaked in kerosene and burned to a crisp.
As a direct and easily forseeable consequence, protests were sparked in Afghanistan and five UN staff killed, allegedly by agents of the Taliban. Pastor Jones, clearly a man of limited imagination as well as charity, is reported to be unrepentant.
Writer and publisher Jon M Sweeney wrote an interesting piece in the Huffington Post in response, reflecting on the correct way to dispose of unwanted holy books. Copies of scripture which are worn out are honourably buried and shown the respect given to human beings when they die, he said. This is how old and ragged scrolls of the Torah are laid to rest, as well as ancient copies of the Qur’an.
Jon Sweeney himself has buried Bibles with cracked leather covers and well worn pages in his back garden, and he imagines future owners of his house puzzling over what they find when they do some gardening.
The respect normally given to the scriptures of almost all religious traditions highlights the incredible shock value of Pastor Jones’s Qur’an burning. When violence is done to a book which is normally treated with reverence and care, the impact is emotional.
Jon Sweeney’s piece reminded me of something I’d read a long time ago about orthodox icons and what happens to them when their images fade beyond recognition. I actually have an old icon in that state, and I’ve been reluctant to simply throw it away. How are sacred objects treated at the end of their working lives?
Fr David Moser, a Russian Orthodox priest in Indiana, asks ‘what then do we do with those things – dried bread, old icons or other holy items – of which we wish to dispose in a respectful manner? Such things should be burned and then the ashes buried in a place where they will not be walked upon.’
The Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Washington DC agrees: ‘A holy item, even if it has lost its original appearance, should always be treated with reverence.’
But it wasn’t always like this. Writing in the 7th century, this is how St Leontius, a bishop of Cyprus, defended icons against the charge that they were idols: ‘If it is the wood of the image that we worship as God… then we would not throw the image into the fire when the picture fades, as we often do. And again, as long as wood is fastened together in the form of a cross I venerate it because it is a likeness of the wood on which Christ was crucified. If it should fall to pieces, I throw the pieces into the fire.’
Leontius’s approach sounds very straightforward and robust. His description of ‘throwing the image into the fire’ does not sound like disposing of something ‘in a respectful manner’ to me. Possibly he is exaggerating in his eagerness to show that icons are not idols. Or maybe his bonfire of old and unwanted icons reflects a time when sacred objects were handled with more confidence and less fear.
Either way, how we behave towards the precious and revered objects of our own faith and other faiths, and why we do it, deserves careful thought.
BBC cold case crime series, Waking the Dead, got its religion in a glorious twist last night.
The story centred on a black family whose mum is a Christian fruit and nutcase, and therefore opened with a black Pentecostal service with everyone on their feet waving hands and Bibles in the air, ululating and praising the Lord, even though the preacher was insisting what a load of miserable sinner they all were. So far, so predictable.
Next thing, we saw that mum had made a sort of shrine in the back garden for her son, who had been missing presumed dead for the past six years. And like any good Pentecostal, she included plaster statues of saints in her shrine, plus a nice big one of the Virgin Mary. Because as everyone knows, Pentecostals are really, like, huge on the Virgin Mary.
A few minutes later, one member of the police team told another that mum (by now revealed to be violently anti-Muslim) is ‘an evangelical’. So which is it, then? Is mum a raving Penty, a weird traditionalist Catholic or a Muslim-hating Evo?
The answer seems to be all three at once, because whichever office junior was tasked with researching the religious backstory simply went to the BBC filing cabinet, looked into the ‘crazed religion’ folder and used the entire contents, including all its tired stereotypes, instead of picking just the one.
I’m looking forward to the concluding episode tonight, when mum will turn out to be a swivel-eyed Ulster Hot Prot with a borderline-sexual fixation on the Anglican Prayer Book.
I’ve been reading two books alongside each other in bed at night. It’s not something I would normally do as it’s too ambitious just before diving into sleep, but one is more of a serious read, while the other’s a graphic novel, so they make a good contrast.
John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? is in the Penguin Great Ideas series, and it’s a slim, readable book of short pieces in which Berger reflects on the dwindling and marginalized role of animals in our world. His argument is that humans once visibly shared the world with animals, who were present all around us, even in our cities. Animals were once ‘with man at the centre of his world,’ says Berger.
It’s hard to believe now that only a century ago, street life in London was full of horses who pulled carriages and buses and delivered goods. The invention of engines and the spread of towns and villages has driven domesticated animals and wildlife into retreat, while around the world animals are confined to safari parks or are becoming extinct.
The net effect, argues Berger, is that animals have ceased to be our companions and have either become pets, where they are accessorised into our lives, or a spectacle, like the creatures in zoos or the animals captured by the lens in David Attenborough programmes. ‘Everywhere animals disappear,’ says Berger. ‘In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.’
I’m only halfway through Berger, but I finished the second book, Laika, by writer and illustrator Nick Abadzis, last night.
Set in the Cold War, this comic strip novel tells the story of a stray Moscow dog who became the most famous canine in the world when she was rocketed into space in 1957 by the Russians, just a month after the launch of Sputnik. Her name was Laika (Russian for ‘Barker’), although American newspapers quickly renamed her Muttnik.
The price of her fame as the first life form in space was high: there was no return to earth provided for Laika and she died of stress and overheating just hours after reaching orbit. The book tells her story poignantly, the words and images forming a meditation on trust, love, betrayal and the alienation of human beings from animals and each other.
There are frames in the comic strip which deliver emotional impact in a way no words could ever do, and there is poetry as Laika is shown flying in the dreams of the little girl who lost her forever on the streets. The final section of the book summons up fear and dread in the face of implacable events as powerfully as in any film. I finished reading in the early hours of the morning, long after I should have turned in for the night.
Nick Abadzis carried out detailed historical research in writing and artworking his book, but he also invented characters and situations to create a sort of myth of Laika, which like all potent myths gets to the deep heart of the story.
The book concludes with a genuine quote by one of the scientists, who said, 40 years after the Laika mission, ‘Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us. The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it.’ Betraying the original companionship of animals carries a high price.
Just been catching up with The Big C, the TV comedy show which opened last night with a cancer diagnosis, ha ha. Cathy, a Minneapolis teacher, has just been told by a handsome young doctor that she has incurable skin cancer and then flashes him – which sets the scene for a sudden liberation from her previous, pre-diagnosis life.
Cathy decides to have a pool put into her pint-sized back yard, and also decides not to tell her family about the cancer, a script decision which has drawn strong criticism in the States.
Although the opening episode felt like a sitcom version of real life, I enjoyed the comedy a lot, especially as its funniest moments were also its most shocking. How can a bathtub suicide possibly be laugh-out-loud funny? Watch The Big C to find out.
There was a nice exchange between Cathy and her grumpy older neighbour Marlene…
Cathy: ‘If you were ready to go, did you ever think about just going?’
Marlene: ‘Think about it all the time. But I just keep waking up.’
The show’s dark subject matter reminds me of Nurse Jackie, with the brilliant Edie Falco (of Sopranos fame) in the title role. There the unlikely comedy premise is Jackie’s addiction to prescription drugs at the hospital where she works, and her unravelling home life.
Both shows follow an instinct that comedy can not only help us cope with heavy issues, but give us a unique insight into them.
The Big C is on Channel 4, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Nurse Jackie Series 2 is currently showing on BBC Two on Saturdays.
In Koenig Books on Charing Cross Road yesterday, my eye fell on Holy Crap. It’s a paperback printed on cheap paper, with gold spray-painted edges, like an old-fashioned Bible, and a hole punched through it so you can hang it up in your toilet. And inside are hundreds of black and white pictures of US church signboards, which have long been the home of smug comments, pious puns, and sacred sayings which unexpectedly turn out to have a second life as jokes about bonking…
The best vitamin for a Christian is B1
The most powerful position is on your knees
You give God the credit, now give God the cash
Family altar or Satan will alter your family
There can’t nobody do me like Jesus
The book is a project by New York artist Rob Pruitt, whose work often uses comedy to comment on mass and trash culture – such as his 1998 show, Cocaine Buffet, which consisted of a very long line of coke on a mirror on the floor of an artist’s studio. All of which was obligingly hoovered up by the show’s visitors.
In the intro to Holy Crap, Pruitt says, ‘I love multitasking, like driving and having a religious experience at the same time.’ Which is funny, but I’m more interested in what he said in a press release for the book’s launch last year: ‘We had a discussion about the Church, the Church signs in the US along the streets, about their poetry, about seduction, repression and basement tapes. The fact that these Church signs make you laugh, but that the Church isn’t funny, not the Catholic Church, none of them, no.’
We’ve been collecting church signs and religious gadgets on Ship of Fools for years, mostly playing to the comedy aspect, but this is a good reminder of the unfunny heart which lies behind it all. The humour is provided by the ironic take of Ship of Fools and the viewer’s enjoyment of that, rather than by the people producing the church signs or the holy hardware, whose intent is serious.
Elsewhere, Rob Pruitt describes his mixed feelings towards the cultural excess he depicts, which sounds like it’s coming out of the grey area satirists work in: ‘On the one hand I want to celebrate it, because it’s who we are, and on the other hand I want to condemn it. I think it’s always like a ping-pong match for me.’
