The Wicker Man and Derby Cathedral

There's a bit of a brouhaha going on in Derby at the moment. The Cathedral is showing a series of films next month in collaboration with the local arts centre QUAD. Some are "for the whole family" such as The Greatest Showman. Others have raised eyebrows, like The Wicker Man, Don't Look Now and The Life of Brian.

In his statement, Dean Stephen Hance has set out the Chapter's thinking about this. First, the Cathedral wants to reach new audiences who, it is hoped, will be drawn in by an adventurous contribution in a unique environment to the city's arts programme. Secondly, film reflects the power of story to engage the imagination, face uncomfortable truths about our human condition, and be made to think. This, says the Dean, is central to the way Jesus taught and how faith is transmitted. And finally, there is the financial aspect. The Cathedral has to find new income streams to fund its mission in challenging times. To me, this all seems entirely uncontentious.

So why the fuss?

It's true that all three films I've mentioned as eyebrow-raising are, to quote the Dean, "edgy". But that's because they all belong to cinema's front rank, all speak powerfully by exploring the "faith, doubt, fear and obsession" (to quote the Dean again) that underlie so much of human attitudes and motives. Whether it's the corruption of a society that embraces outright paganism (The Wicker Man), the crazying effects of loss where the grieving process is distorted (Don't Look Now) or the strange capacity of parody to highlight aspects of truth (The Life of Brian), these films confront us and ask us to reflect on our identity as men and women, what we believe about our place in the world, what our ultimate aspirations and hopes really are. These are, of course, profoundly spiritual and theological questions. So alongside the films, Derby Cathedral will be offering events to "help people reflect theologically on these films", says the statement. That's as welcome as it is necessary (but of course the media don't mention this aspect of what they love to call an "unholy row").

Take The Wicker Man. (I presume it's the original 1973 version we're talking about, preferably the director's cut, not the 2006 remake which, judging by the reviews, I've no wish to see.) If you haven't seen it and intend to show up at the cathedral for the viewing, I won't let spoilers ruin it for you. Suffice to say that this intriguing film is entirely to do with religion, specifically, an island community that has embraced paganism and thrown itself heartily into its attendant myth-and-ritual. Why and how this has happened is part of the film's interest. And yes, of course the eroticism and violence of naked (excuse the word) nature-religion feature, not least live sacrifice. It's disturbing and it's meant to be.

On to this seemingly innocent island an unwary Christian policeman sets foot to investigate. The brilliance of The Wicker Man is that we the viewer are unwary too, not ready for what is to come. We are shocked by a climax that's as powerful as any I can think of in films I've seen. And central to it is the head-on encounter between Christianity and paganism, not least in the policeman's tenacious adherence to his faith and his bravery in bearing witness to it. You couldn't have a more overt faith-related film than this. That it should have become something of a cult film among cognoscenti says something about the perennial power of religion to fascinate us.

Films like those chosen for the Cathedral speak for themselves. They don't need interpretation, though they do call for interrogation and reflection. But if we are looking for an analogy to help us see the value of showing films in sacred spaces, I would suggest the morality play. Popular in the late middle ages and the early modern period, morality plays like Everyman brought home moral and spiritual truths to their audiences by personifying fundamental values and their opposites like good and evil, truth and falsehood, wisdom and folly, weakness and strength, life and death. Over all these God presided, weighing up the destiny of mortals in the light of the moral choices they made. This, I think, is akin to what is going on when religion encounters drama or film within the setting of the sacred.

Of course, it happens in ways that are subtle and nuanced, symbolic and metaphorical and not always obvious at the time. We must also understand how the setting in which a film or drama are presented makes a difference to our reading of it. A sacred space conditions us in key ways. When we are sitting in a church, the questions that come to us will often be different from those we would put in the theatre, the cinema or in front of our TV screens. And the performance will put different questions to us too. We shall often find that in sacred space, we are unconsciously pulled towards a theological and spiritual framing of our questions that is different from anywhere else. The "reader-response" is as much about our own setting and context as it is about the art itself.

I recall a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni in Sheffield Cathedral. It was one of those cut down productions accompanied by a piano and small band. But it was sung in full. The actors deployed the spaces of the Cathedral brilliantly. As Dean I got to sit in the front row in my cassock. I was taken aback when the Don took up position in front of me, knelt down and sang the famous Catalogue Aria, that musical list in which he brazenly chronicles his seductions of vulnerable women across the continent. It was as if he was parodying the act of confession by singing that aria to a priest.

Beneath Mozart's ravishing music is a terrible tale of brutality, abuse and rape. And it was being acted out in my cathedral! But the whole point of the opera is that Don Giovanni gets what he deserves. At the brutal climax, the fires of hell open before him and swallow him up. Sin is punished, wickedness condemned, goodness vindicated, noble love honoured. Ethical order in the universe is restored. It's a pure morality play. And that's why it was good to perform it in a sacred space. It challenged its audience precisely because it was being staged in a church. It was an unforgettable spiritual experience as well as unforgettable opera. I could say the same of an unexpectedly powerful student production of Romeo and Juliet in Durham Cathedral during my time.

The church has always flourished when it has cultivated a close relationship with the arts, even if it can be tense at times. Earlier this month, nude paintings were removed from an art exhibition in Portsmouth Cathedral after complaints from worshippers. In Durham Cathedral in the 1990s, a video installation, The Messenger by Bill Viola, had to be screened off from open view on the advice of the police who thought it might cause public offence. When an episode of Inspector George Gently was filmed in the Cathedral in my time, I received letters from the public (interestingly, none from the North East) objecting to the firearms that were featured in that episode, though if ever a TV drama came close to a morality play where good and evil were clearly identified, this was it. Like the poor, offence-takers will always be with us.

So I don't think Derby Cathedral should be unduly worried that their film series has provoked debate. I'd say that was a good and healthy thing. Indeed, theology and film offer incredibly rich resources to each other, as a large and growing literature demonstrates. What matters is that when decisions of this kind are made, they are guided by the values the cathedral stands for, and the purposes it exists to fulfil. Does this proposal enhance our mission, or is at least consistent with it? Not everything is appropriate in a sacred space, even if it purports to be art. But the mission of the church would be severely compromised if it only said yes to art that was conventional and bland, that did not stretch horizons or provoke debate (in which case I doubt it would qualify to be called art at all).

What they are doing at Derby does push boundaries. That may have taken some courage. But as the Dean wittily said, they won't be showing God anything he hasn't seen before. This project is about engaging with what is real in life, both the light and the shadow. Cathedrals have always been good at that, delighting, stimulating, pioneering and provoking by turns. That's a gift we can be thankful for. It's one of the reasons we cherish them.

On Reading "The Diary of a Country Priest"

I've just finished reading this remarkable book. I've been deeply struck by it. I imagined I'd read it before, decades ago, but I now don't think I can have done.

For instance, I'd long imagined it was the real diary of a real country priest living in nineteenth century France. In fact it's a novel by the twentieth century writer Georges Bernanos who died seventy years ago this year. Its imagined depiction of parish life in the north of France between the wars won him the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. In 1950 it was named one of the twelve best novels in French published between 1900 and 1950.

I guess the reason it's so famous is the sheer vividness with which the author enters into the life of an impoverished catholic priest. You would have to have been a fervent believer to have written it. Not so much for the passages of theological and philosophical speculation about, say, heaven and hell, or social hierarchy in the countryside, or the nature of sin, but for the light Bernanos shines on the everyday dealings of a priest with his parishioners, his parish and his fellow clergy. And for the inspired guesswork (or maybe I mean detective work?) with which he tries to get inside the mind and soul of a character you speculate he has become intensely fond of. Does the novel represent a vocation Bernanos might once have had? 

What I love about the book is its sense of parish. Early on, the country priest muses on the importance of loving your parish. Just three months today since my appointment to this parish. This morning I prayed hard for my parish, my poor parish, my first and perhaps my last. My parish! The words can't even be spoken without a kind of soaring love....I know that my parish is a reality, that we belong to each other for all eternity; it is not a mere administrative fiction but a living cell of the everlasting church. But if only the good God would open my eyes and unseal my ears so that I might behold the face of my parish and hear its voice....The look in its eyes would be the eyes of all Christianity, of all parishes - perhaps of the poor human race itself.

I found that an arresting passage, given our current preoccupations about the future of the parish system in the Church of England. The words seem chosen carefully. Bernanos could have said congregation or the faithful or the baptised. And maybe he's making all sorts of assumptions about his parish population (what Anglicans used to call "the charitable assumption" that presumes faith and principled motive on the part of those who seek the offices of the church). But I don't think he elides parish and the faithful. There's such a strong sense of sacred geography in the Diary, what Andrew Rumsey in his fine recent study Parish - an Anglican Theology of Place recognises as deeply embedded in our native traditions of public ministry.

Reading it, I was frequently reminded of a book I read in the 1980s while I was a parish priest in a rural market town. It's by Alan Ecclestone, A Staircase to Silence. A priest formed in the gritty realities of urban ministry, his remarkable books, all written in retirement, were the fruit of a rich lifelong experience of “parish” in just such worlds that Bernanos’ curé inhabited. It's not too much to say that Staircase turned round my entire attitude to parish ministry with the idea of which - I freely acknowledge - I was struggling at the time. His book is a study of another Frenchman and older contemporary of Bernanos, the poet and man of letters Charles Péguy. A chapter I recall being much influenced by was one entitled Mes Vieilles Paroisses Francaises. I need to read it again (was it there that I read about how, on a French parish festival, Péguy playfully imagined that Joan of Arc or Theresa of Lisieux had only just left the party a moment ago?). Péguy was writing about the corn fields of the Beauce across which you see the distant spires of Chartres Cathedral - but his spirit pervades Bernanos' world too. New bishops and incumbents could not do better than read all these books (Bernanos, Rumsey and Ecclestone) and ponder them at a time when the Church of England is putting every egg in the basket of growing congregations through project-based evangelism and at risk of starving traditional parochial ministry of sorely-needed funds in the process.

Back to the Diary. The central section focuses on a long and difficult pastoral encounter the priest has with an influential female parishioner. You feel for him as he tries to uncover the truth of her complex life, the courage it takes to "speak truth to power" in circumstances such as this. Most of us in public ministry have been there at one time or another. In the end, after what feels like a Herculean feat of theological and spiritual candour, he gets to an unexpected place of resolution. Here's how the diarist records the outcome. "Be at peace" I told her. And she had knelt to receive this peace. Oh miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shrivelling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I thought lost in me for ever, was given back to her by God and  - who can tell - perhaps in my name! Poor as I am, an insignificant little priest, looking upon this woman only yesterday so far my superior in age, birth, fortune, intellect, I still knew - yes I knew - what fatherhood means.

That remarkable passage, almost worthy of Dostoyesvsky, shows, I think, profound insight into the paradoxes of public ministry. But how many of us clergy are capable of scrutinising our ministry and ourselves with that degree of honesty? How many of us have sufficient self-knowledge even to understand the questions with which we need to interrogate ourselves? Bernanos writes elsewhere in the book, When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears? Diarists and bloggers, beware of being too kind to ourselves! Not to agonise in front of others necessarily, but to "tell all the truth", as far as we ever can, at least in private before God and ourselves. And even in a more public register, we need surely to be constant seekers after truth, even if we often have to "tell it slant".

I've often spoken to at ordinands' retreats on the importance of self-knowledge and self-awareness in any public role. I've found Bernanos to be a powerful impetus to try to practise better what I have been preaching for so long. Perhaps it's about the recovery of the joy and openness of our childhood, the kind of rapturous vision captured in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. Bernanos says: God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?” There have been times in my own ministry as a priest when I've needed to try to recapture what relentless public exposure had corroded. Bernanos understood that.

One last passage from the Diary. It concerns the prayer and spirituality, a matter of recurring concern in the book as we would expect. Again, the author writes with a keen sense of how paradoxical the spiritual life so often is. The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!
 
If you haven't read the book, you won't know how it ends. No spoilers from me! But Bernanos gives us a profoundly moving and satisfying conclusion to the Diary. I won't say that it's a tidy ending - you wouldn't expect it to be from an author who understands better than many both the "mess" of the parish (his phrase, not mine) and the complexity of human life, not least his own. How could any ending be tidy? Having not long retired from a lifetime of public ministry as a priest, I know how untidy my laying aside that role was at the time, and even more in my subsequent memory of it. This is only one of many insights in The Diary of a Country Priest that I recognise from my own experience of ministry, that I dare to say we all recognise if we are sufficiently curious about God, humanity and our own selves to frame the questions he asks so bravely and follow them wherever they lead, however uncomfortable that may be. 

In the end, after a lot of pain and hardship, the Diary ends on a note of thankfulness. Tout est grâce is the conclusion, "everything is grace". That's the spirit that pervades the entire book. Despite everything, Bernanos' struggling, pain-ridden priest has emerged victorious. Which I think makes this marvellous book an inspiration for today's ministers, especially those travelling through dark times. "What will survive of us is love" says Philip Larkin in a famous poem. It could be the epigraph of this book. For everything is grace, and grace is everything.  

"The best things just happen to you."

It was the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that. I came across it while reading an intriguing book** by the child psychotherapist Adam Phillips. He is writing about how a lot of learning happens, not as a result of formal schooling but through hints and nudges. He means the things that "just happen" to us, inconsequential in themselves but for the fact that we remember them and find ourselves returning to them in our thoughts and reflections, even find that our lives were changed because of them.

He quotes a fellow philosopher who recalls a walk Wittgenstein and he were on. Wittgenstein "had seen a play, a third-rate, poor play, when he was twenty-two. One detail in that play had made a powerful impression on him.  It was a trifle. But here some peasant, some-ne'er-do well says in the play: 'Nothing can hurt me.' That remark went through him and now he remembers it. It started things you can't tell. The most important things just happen to you."

I stopped reading to think about that. Is it true, I asked myself? The most important things Wittgenstein says, not just happy conjunctions of events that please us but things that really matter, or as we might say, things of ultimate concern. Bishop Ian Ramsey of Durham, a philosopher of religion who was much influenced by Wittgenstein, spoke about disclosure experiences, "when the penny drops". Carl Gustav Jung would never use the language of coincidences. For him, the fact that we notice them at all, pay attention even fleetingly to how events have come together in a particular way, confers significance on them, gives them meaning. There are no coincidences. If they are important and matter to us, there are only synchronicities.

Personal experience has to be the test of Wittgenstein's dictum. What does my own memory tell me about this? How have the things that "just happen" been significant, touched my life in some way? Looking back over six years of blogging, I find I've mentioned some of them. For example: my love of maths that led me to read it at university; the part music has played in my life for as long as I can remember; the books in childhood that influenced me; my lifelong commitment to the continent of Europe that comes out of my having a British father and a German-Jewish mother; memories of Christmas past; and much more recently, the birth of my first grandson. In that last blog, I wrote about how I would always remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard that news. Most of us can tell similar stories about how certain events impinged on us: when our team won the Cup Final, say, or when we heard the news that someone close to us had died. Maybe that's one criterion by which we measure the importance that certain events hold for us, that in an instant, our lives as they were then seem captured as in a photograph.

But none of those can be described strictly speaking as "chance". They belong to contexts that up to a point were already shaped by upbringing or environment. What about the events that at the time seemed to "happen" out of the blue, unforeseen, unforeseeable, yet never forgotten? I've had to think about that today, but here are three I've come up with.

The first is a very archaic memory indeed, probably my earliest, but it's as clear as anything I can recall. We were in Germany where my mother needed to travel regularly to sort out her family's affairs after the war. My parents had found lodgings under the eaves in a back street of Düsseldorf, my mother's home town. My mother told me once that I could not have been more than just over two years old when we stayed there. What I remember was seeing the outline of a church tower and spire out of the window not far away. It was black, dramatically silhouetted against the sky. That evening, something awoke me. It was the sound of church bells being rung in that tower - not change-ringing as in England, but that random tolling of great heavy bells against one other that every European traveller has heard on a Sunday morning.

To me that sound seemed to penetrate my being from top to bottom. This primitive sound that seemed to batter my heart was deeply frightening, even dread-ful, yet somehow, in a way I didn't yet have words for, enticing as well. It felt as if it mattered. Was it my first encounter with that mysterium tremens et fascinans which is how some writers have characterised religion? That it was my earliest conscious religious experience I now don't doubt though I couldn't have described it in that way for many years. And while it was one of the most important experiences of my life, it did "just happen". It still colours the way I think about the Divine, that as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God". It taught me even at that tender age that religion is a serious business, not a plaything or a hobby.

The second event was altogether happier. I was in my early twenties, arriving at theological college to begin training for ordained ministry. This was a few days before term was due to start. My longsuffering parish priest in London had kindly agreed to transport my books and me to the college in his Mini-Traveller and help me settle into my room. We arrived and parked the car. No-one was around except for a young man of about my age who was busy painting a side door at the foot of a staircase that led up into the building. With the warmest of smiles he explained that he too had arrived early and was busy making himself useful. By the end of the afternoon I was established in a room next to his. Why is that day etched on my memory? Because the person concerned quickly became my closest friend and has remained so for the best part of half a century. We still talk about that day we met for the first time when our friendship was born: a time of gifts if ever there was one. The only detail that maddeningly escapes me is the colour of the paint on that door. I must ask him.

My third reminiscence is about my love of photography. By now I was in my fifties. My youngest daughter had asked for a camera for Christmas, so we had bought her a digital compact. I had no interest in photography at that stage (so much so that on a pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine a few years before, I was the only person not to bring a camera. When asked why not, I pompously replied that for me, images were best encapsulated in words, so I was keeping a journal instead.) I thought nothing more about my daughter's camera until she told us that she didn't want a digital after all, so would I buy it off her so that she could get a traditional film camera instead? I agreed. It lay around unused for a while. But then I got to thinking, I've paid good money for that instrument. Maybe it's time I started using it. Living as I did in Durham's world heritage site with one of the world's greatest buildings a few yards away across the garden, I began to realise what opportunities for photography were all around me. The rest as they say is history. I can't now imagine a life without photography, just as I can't imagine one without music. And if I'm asked where I learned what I've been able to grasp as a photographer, I always say: Durham Cathedral was my teacher.

I think I can say that all three of these stories are about what "just happened". None could have been foreseen or planned for. And all three have been amongst the most important experiences of my life. There are many more, not all of which it would be right to blog about. What matters is the spiritual exercise of asking the question in the first place. An earlier generation of spiritual guides like the great eighteenth century French priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade spoke about how we must reflect often on divine Providence, discerning how God comes to us in "the sacrament of the present moment". That's the theme of one of the best English hymns from the same century, William Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. Maybe I'll blog about that one day. For now, enough to affirm that whether in light or in shadow, our experiences can convey gifts that transcend the circumstances themselves and, even if we don't know it at the time, prove with hindsight to have transformed us in some way.

Yes, "the best things just happen to you." But we must practise how to pay attention and notice them. Who knows what has passed unnoticed in front of us a thousand times a day with the potential to give us something wonderful, undreamed of, and we missed it? That's the question I find myself asking late in life. It's not about regrets but nurturing a thirst to be more alive, being as fully present to the gift that I am alive at all as it's possible to be. I am a slow learner, but I can now add Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Adam Phillips) to the lengthening list of wise teachers to whom to be grateful. 

 

PS The friend I wrote about above has just read this, and sent me some lines from Mary Oliver:

Let me
keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

**Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, London (Faber), 1998, p70.