'Seeing' religious art

Some interesting discussion on The Guardian's Cif Belief pages at the moment responding to the question 'Do we need faith to see religious art?'  Here's a brief quote from Catherine Pepinster's response:

Is [religious art] really appreciated by those who don't believe? Can they fully understand it, indeed conceive of these other minds in another time and place where faith held sway?

That must depend on the extent to which the viewer can accept the possibility of the divine, or the existence of the religious impulse. I suspect that there is a growing tendency, for all Richard Dawkins's efforts, for people to accept that there is such an impulse.

Something understood

A happy conjunction between gifts and experiences shared with close friends in this quote from Pete Rollin's book The Orthodox Heretic.  Whilst it speaks directly of a specific kind of activity, this could equally be broadened out to describe something of religious experience more widely - 'something understood' in the terms of the poem from which this blog takes its inspiration:

In academic life the said is often privileged over the saying. What is important is that meaning is communicated and, as such, the way it is communicated is important only insomuch as it gets the meaning across. Yet there are forms of communication that give emphasis to the saying over and above the said. 

An interesting example of this can be seen at work in the music of Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland that employs what they call “Vonlenska” (or “Hopelandic”) in many of their songs. “Vonlenska” sounds like a language, however it lacks consistent grammar, logical structure, meaningful syllables, and often even discrete words. When a song is sung in Vonlenska, the words that you hear do not “mean” anything; nothing is said in their saying. Yet the saying itself invites a change in the sensitive listener. In contemplating the music, one touches upon a deep resorvoir of emotion that emanates from the song. This mode of “communication” is similar to what we see taking place between an infant and its parents. The grammatical nonsense that is communicated by the infant to the parent and by the parent to the infant is a discourse in which nothing is said, but a connection is established or deepened.

When we are facing difficult situations is it not true that the pastoral act is not one that offers some explanation for the suffering (the said) but rather is found in the act of who who offers presence to the other in the form of words and gestures (the saying)? Here it is not an explanation that brings healing and comfort, but rather the fact that someone is interacting with us, the fact that someone loves us and stands with us…

…This is pastoral care at its most luminous.

I'd broaden this out, to argue that to describe this change, brought about by ordinary things - in this case - listening to music, is to describe religious experience itself.

Lily Allen and the Bishop

The suggestion by the Bishop of Sheffield that Lily Allen's song 'The Fear' makes useful accompanying listening for a Bible-study course speaks into a 2,000 year old debate about Christians' attempts to ventriloquise secular or non-Christian cultural sources into speaking on matters of their faith. 

Paul famously tried this in a soap-box moment at the Aeropagus in Athens, quoting both Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus as speaking of the God known by Paul as a disciple of Jesus (Acts 17:28).  The narrative in Acts then takes Paul from Athens to Corinth, and there's the implication in one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church there that he'd reflected on the preaching technique used in Athens and (perhaps) rejected it as ineffectual:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  (1 Corinthians 1:1-5)

Strictly speaking, the use of the song in the course is not because it consciously articulates Christian doctrine but rather (says the Bishop) because it captures "something of the spirit of the age", and Lily Allen has endorsed its use in this way. 

I'd have no blog if I didn't think that cultural artifacts spoke both into, and from, religious experience but it leaves me wondering about an uncritical approach to this, or at least to an attitude that would view such approaches with great skepticism.

Defying Gravity

I think my love of words is becoming apparent.  I hope it's just a harmless eccentricity, albeit one bordering on the pretentious (numinous? I mean, really?).  Much of this has to do with ambiguity, and the ability of a single word to carry multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings.  The coining of new meanings creates new places for the imagination to play. 

'Gravity' is one of these words: first used in English in figurative senses, as in the quality of being grave or serious, its use in the physical (scientific) sense only came in the seventeenth century as in 'the attractive force by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth'.

In an imaginative space, the force becomes a metaphor for serious things, a (un)happy carrying of two sets of meanings in a single word.  Some examples would be the song 'Gravity is merciless', or Roger McGough's lament for a dying friend in his poem 'Defying Gravity':

Soon now, the man that I love (not the armful of bones)
Will defy gravity. Freeing himself from the tackle
He will sidestep the opposition and streak down the wing
Towards a dimension as yet unimagined.

Back where the strings are attached there will be a service
And homage paid to the giant yo-yo. A box of left-overs
Will be lowered into a space on loan from the clay.
Then, weighted down, the living will walk wearily away

Had they had access to this range of meanings the first Christians might have been happy with idea of the physical body as a 'box of leftovers' but probably less so with the idea that this was entirely dispensable.  For them, there was an intimate (but difficult to define) relationship between their present experience and their belief that Jesus' resurrection was an experience that they would share too:

But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?'  How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. (1 Corinthians 15:15-38)

So a single word can both define a measurable scientific reality and yet help us explore (using something we experience constantly) the unmeasurable territory of the inexorable passage of time into the future and the time-limited reality of our own mortality.  A love of words may be harmless, but it helps us in the serious business of living too, and as it's my blog, the last words on gravity are mine:

Ultrasound

I found you in my night sky
Picking out your constellation
Reminded by each single star
Of that moment
When all your future
Was crammed into a point of light

Coalescing towards me out of the dark
You will be caught
In my lifetime's gravity

Until this fades
And you spin away from my sky
Leaving my night starless

The Ox, and Ass, and Lobster

All sorts of animals crowd into the Nativity story, as in this piece of dialogue from the film Love Actually:

Karen: So what's this big news, then?
Daisy: [excited] We've been given our parts in the nativity play. And I'm the lobster.
Karen: The lobster?
Daisy: Yeah!
Karen: In the nativity play?
Daisy: [beaming] Yeah, *first* lobster.
Karen: There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?
Daisy: Duh.

Or in the carol In the bleak midwinter:

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Or in the mediaeval Latin text O magnum mysterium, often set to music, and for me most memorably by Morten Lauridsen:

o great mystery

and wondrous sacrament,

that animals should see the newborn Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy

to bear our Lord Christ.  Alleluia!

Lord, I heard your call and was afraid;

I considered your works,

and I trembled between two animals

Lobster, ox and ass are all missing from the narratives of the birth of Jesus in the 'canonical' gospels written by Matthew and Luke, as are any mentions of animals at all, apart from the 'flocks' watched over by the shepherds outside Bethlehem (Luke 2:8).

What interests me is the way in which the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are sparse enough to both beg, and to hold, an imaginative filling-in of details.  One of these imaginative 'fillings-in', and perhaps the source for some of the more traditional animal inhabitants of the Nativity story such as the Ox and the Ass, is the 8th century Pseudo-Matthew gospel:

And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave, and, entering a stable, placed the child in a manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by the prophet Isaiah, "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Therefore, the animals, the ox and the ass, with him in their midst incessantly adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habakkuk the prophet, saying, "Between two animals you are made manifest." (Chapter 14)*

What all these texts betray are two deep human desires.  Firstly, a curiosity about the details of life of Jesus, and in particular his childhood, which the New Testament both stubbornly refuses to meet but also (strangely) prompts by allowing so many empty spaces within which the imagination can work.  Secondly, a longing for the divine to be made real and understandable within the span of domestic experience; the Ox and the Ass provide the realism, the prophetic 'authority' of Isaiah and Habakkuk appear to provide a divine sanction for their inclusion - heaven in ordinary.

*The Isaiah quote is 1:3, that from Habakkuk is 3:2 but where the King James Version has 'O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.' the Pseudo Matthew gospel relies on the Septuagint (LXX) which translates the words in bold as 'two living creatures'.