The Artist: a preacher's notes from a great movie.

The Artist simply looks great. Glitz, glamour, artistry, and spectacle are all there, yet the blockbuster techniques of zappy special effects and sounds aren't.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say those things are there but hidden under the guise of 1929/30 equivalents.  Here is a fairly commonplace man and woman story that although told with pace and panache remains a simple tale.  And yet the movie holds your attention and provides an ending with a satisfying, even surprising, sense of completion. And there's certainly a lot to think about in terms of the speaker's art. That's a strange thing to say of a silent movie, but true nevertheless. Here, as a beginning, are four things that struck me:  

1. What we say or plan to say always has to work with audience expectations even before we open our mouths. The ticket seller warned everyone who asked for a ticket that the film was in black and white without speech. She told us, 'People don't understand what a silent film is, and we've had so many complaints, that I thought it best to be clear with people before they buy.' Likewise the narrative of the film has a direction to it which every viewer will instantly recognize. It's a love story that you know will end in love's triumph. Expectations are fulfilled, yet there is still surprise, satisfaction, and entertainment in the experience.

2.  What we say has to have a logic about it that the audience understands and can complete for itself. In The Artist questions asked in dialogues between characters are often displayed as texts for the audience to read. But just like the silent movies of old, the answering dialogue is usually not completed in text. The audience must 'read' the answer from what the actor does, supplying the words for themselves. Very soon you come to realise that this keeps the pace of the story going and you become unaware that the 'dialogue' is going on only in your own head and imagination. So often sermons and other speeches are rendered tediously slow and boring by the speaker completing everything and allowing no space for the hearer's imagination.

3.  What we say may be a story that is essentially simple but that doesn't stop it being riveting if it is well told. In this The Artist excels. From the beginning it's clear that the principal character is in for a fall. Likewise the young actress is clearly going to be fundamental to the outcome. A touching sequence early on, where the first filmed scene in which they act together has to be repeatedly re-filmed because he becomes distracted by dancing with her and can't concentrate on his necessary action, gives a clue to the whole story. And that clue gives shape to the evolving plot. In a sense the audience knows the outcome from that sequence onwards. The telling of the story becomes in itself the thing that engages. The shape of the story told shines through its telling - it doesn't matter that we know, or think we know the outcome. The preacher must have the same commitment to a telling that shapes and satisfies of itself. 

4.  What we say doesn't always have to follow the rules of what is assumed to be 'best practice' Peculiarly this silent film, which tells a story with nothing more than pictures and music, gives weight to the importance of words alone. The Artist reminds us forcefully that pictures can by themselves tell a tale. Pictures have about them a power of disclosure and engagement that goes way beyond illustration. That's a warning to any speaker. It's all too easy to fall into the trap of assuming that in 'a visual age' all words must be attached to seen images. The Artist warns us that doing so may tell a story quite different from the one being said in accompanying words. The pictures can easily obliterate the words. Casual 'illustration' of speech may in fact silence it; whatever words are said. If this is a televisual age in which images are all powerful in what they say, those who say things need to be much more savvy about what their hearers see, if those hearers are to hear anything.

Returning to a classic

'It is only in the imparting of an outward-turned Christianity that we have any hope of achieving Christianity.  ...  Christianity must be a force that moves outward, and a Christian community is basically in existence "for others".  That is the whole meaning of a Christian community.'

So wrote Vincent Donovan in his profoundly inspiring Christianity Rediscoverd: An Epistle from the Masai first published in 1978. Here he means 'force' in the sense of energy and dynamism. To be people of faith and mission we have to be people on the move, looking forward and outward, towards the rest of the world and the people we encounter. To be a static 'come to us' community is a corruption of the faith to which we are called.

I've thought of these words often over recent weeks whilst I've been working with different groups thinking about vocation and Christian action.  (Incidently time-consuming preparation and follow up to those groups is why there's been no blog for a while. You might like to take a look at some of work from one group at Soul Leadership.)  What struck me from all the groups was a recognition of a radical shift in the way faith can be communicated, or even heard, in contemporary society.  Out of that recognition there was also clear determination amongst everyone I worked with to find ways of speaking up and speaking out.  When it's all too easy to feel rather defensive about the life of faith, here were folks wholeheartedly striving for that outward-turned Christianity of which Donovan wrote.  Real inspiration.

Preaching In-carnation



Ecce Ancilla Domini 1850

Christmas troubles me as a preacher.  The incarnation is surely God doing a new thing, but it’s so hard to express the wonder and shock of it.  Often it feels as if it’s all been said.  And I certainly don’t want to go down the weary path of complaining about consumerism.  There’s a kind of ‘expected part of the show’ element to Christians whingeing about how Christmas in celebrated popularly that I think is counter-productive.  What I’m looking for is some way of telling afresh how stupendous this birth is.  I want to convey that amazing but often tearful joy of when ‘the penny dropped’ for the first time.

That might be the retelling of those ‘penny drop’ moments of my own past: standing in the gloom of an ancient abbey as part of the bass line of a school choir and suddenly realizing with dub-struck awe the significance of the words of O Come, O Come Emmanuel; seeing the light of something beyond words in the sparkling eyes of an Alzheimer’s sufferer’s rare smile at the pulling of a Christmas cracker; recognizing in the playful determination of a small dog in deep snow a thread of life-joy that mysteriously connects sensate beings; or finding a gaggle of excited young children suddenly still and quiet as the story simply told touches them.  Fortunately I could tell of many such instances, but their power, though real, is so hard to recreate as a third party retelling.  Where then should I look for inspiration?

As is so often the case, looking back might be a key.  Looking back at what the stream of tradition we inhabit might offer.  And that brings me to a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation), painted 1849-50.  What Rossetti portrays is the frailty of a young woman, a slip of a girl; a simple shift clinging to her figure, her arms bare, suddenly awoken from sleep perhaps, her knees drawn up, she cowers against the wall of her sleeping room.  She is thin, troubled looking, and possibly feeling threatened.  She avoids looking directly at the presence that has invaded her room.  She certainly doesn't look as if she considers herself favoured - much perplexity sums it up.  As one scholar suggests, Mary's exclamation at the end of the encounter, "Let it be to me according to your word" is more a shrug of resignation faced with the inevitable within the world of the sexual politics of first century Palestine, than the triumphant consent we usually take it to be.  The painting is suggestive of that fearful acquiescence.

Rossetti's version of the story of the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary her pregnancy and its purpose has none of the studious contemplation and noble acceptance of traditional renderings so beloved of Renaissance artists.  This is a radical reinterpretation in which the humanity - the bodiliness if you like - of Mary is plain to see.  Her holiness is apparent by the halo, but the posture and the look make her clearly a woman not a superhuman saint.  The women figures of the pre-Raphaelite painters like Rossetti do have a romantic, otherworldliness about them - but those ethereal faces and forms all the more emphasise the feminine, passionate, mysterious and sensual nature of flesh, human flesh.

The picture is almost wholly restricted to white and the three primary colours - a curious goldness hangs around the angel’s feet, blue drapes signify heaven and the virgin, red hair brings to mind Christ's blood, and the whiteness of cloths and the lily mark purity.  The symbols that any earlier artist might have used are all there - yet the picture makes a new statement.  When it was exhibited in 1850 criticism rained down on Rossetti and he vowed never to show it again in public.

The Church sees fit to label this cowering girl the Blessed Virgin Mary – we should hear that not such much as a title but as a description of her body.  Virgin here can designate nothing else but a body.  Her swollen womb is just that, her carrying as tiring as any mother-to-be's carrying, her labour as painful and exhausting, her birthing as bloody and as emotional as any birthing.  God will be born a body of a body.  And we will carol the promise of long ago made new again in amniotic fluid spilt, a slimy form squealing and stretching in air for the first time, and breasts heavy with milk.

That's wonder; that's gospel.  God is born a body to make holy every body.  A place to begin .....

The sermon woven from this strand is here.

Preacher be scared.

with acknowledgement to Churchill Centre and Museum

At over four million words, Churchill’s collected speeches run to eight volumes. His was a ministry of words comparable to any lifelong preacher. Indeed between the years 1900 and 1955 his usual average was a speech a week – a score similar to many regular preachers. That he was such a seasoned practitioner and that so many of his phrases remain familiar, might suggest that public speaking came easily to him. In fact that was far from the case. As Sam Leith points out in his brilliant recent book, You Talkin’ to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama (Profile Books), Churchill was often nervous to the point of nausea before addressing an audience and was completely incapable of speaking off the cuff.

Churchill’s evident mastery of public speaking was entirely down to sustained preparation and pre-event practice. Amongst the techniques he used were: reading the speeches of the ‘greats’ and committing them to memory; the composition of extremely detailed scripts for himself which included stage directions; rehearsal of speeches in front of a mirror (and in the bath!); writing speeches whilst listening to music that evoked the emotion to which he was aiming; and the reworking of phrases from the past to carefully suit the needs of the present. Each of those tactics could profitably be used by every preacher. To my mind the preacher’s golden rule is ‘prepare as if all depends on you; deliver as if all depends on God,’ and Churchill’s example reinforces that conviction.

Similarly, I think his nervousness also has something to say to preachers. I understand his anxiety had its origins in his speech defects – he both stammered and had a lisp. Although training enabled him to successfully contend with these disadvantages, the anxiety they had prompted never left him.

Preachers are always called to give voice to things that are beyond their vocal capabilities. We all do well to recall frequently that our speech is defective in terms of the holiness and graciousness of God. There is a nervousness about giving voice to ‘Godly speech’ that should never leave a preacher. That doesn’t mean embarrassed hesitance in what we say and how we say it; but it does mean an abiding consciousness that we are called to a task for which are not naturally talented. Fear that this task may be beyond our capabilities keeps us striving to work at our skills and the execution of them. That in turn gives an ‘edge’ to what we say and guards against complacency.

A kindly and experienced lay preacher took me aside many years ago when I was still new to preaching and said, ‘From where I sit I can see you’re very nervous every time you preach; you’ve no need to be, your preaching is fine.’ I appreciated his encouragement and thanked him for it warmly, but I had to say that I couldn’t ever imagine not being nervous about preaching. Almost forty years later I still can’t imagine ever not being nervous.

It behoves a preacher to be scared. A nervousness that is conscious of words as ‘words of eternal life’ is a witness against the verbiage of contemporary discourse. Nervousness keeps the preacher striving to name the purposes of God in ways that challenge and inspire.

Onlookers and Participants

How is Christ's mission accomplished in a complex and ever changing society in which it's hard for many to take the very idea of church seriously?  Following my last post I've been idling through more of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and I came across 'Watching the church'. This isn't a picture I know anything about but again like Friendrich's many other works it's worth pondering.             I think it's evening. The falling sun of the lengthening day makes the outline of the gothic church stark. The gothic form is clear and detailed despite the sharp light. Indeed the light suggests promise and hope radiating from that gothic shape.The two viewers are intent on the church with no hint of present conversation between them. They are themselves framed by an arch in the garden, perhaps part of a larger wooden structure, but its shape is much simpler than the complex building towards which they are staring. Have they come from evening worship and are pausing to look back and consider what has been? Or, is it that they haven't got as far as the church and its worship? The density of the foliage just in front of them suggests the latter. Today, at least, they haven't got as far as the church.

The artist is clearly 'at home' with the structure of gothic architecture - and yet there is a hesitation or reserve expressed in the watchers. They are obvously attracted by its beauty; but only from a distance. Like so many they 'look on' and wonder. Maybe they are longing to be part of this distant beauty, but maybe they are not. Will they join the artist at being 'at home' in this structure? We don't know. The artist poses the question whether his vision can be theirs?

It's so easy to assume that others long to share a living faith when in fact all they wish to do is to 'look on.' Like the artist those of faith have to be thoroughly 'at home' in ancient forms so that those forms remain clearly living traditions, but that doesn't necessarily turn onlookers into participants.

Realistic or Romantic memory

The landscapes of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) offer much food for thought. Every one of them has some symbolic twist that offers more than a simple comment on a country scene. I was intrigued therefore to find Friedrich’s famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (pictured here) as a marker of the argument presented in Alan Roxburgh’s latest book on church leadership.

In Missional Map-Making: Skills for Leading in Times of Transition, Roxburgh suggests that churches have come to rely on rational processes and planning as means to attract people to faith. In doing so, communities of faith have tied themselves to the strategies of modernity at the time when those tactics no longer work. Or, to use his terminology, the maps used to determine where we are and where we might go no longer achieve those things. What the churches need are new maps that take account of radically changed circumstances.

And that’s where Friedrich’s painting demonstrates the point, according to Roxburgh. The solitary individual (actually Friedrich himself) stands in the foreground of a massive, mountainous landscape. He can see their impressive bulk before him; but what he can’t see through the fog is the confusion and ugliness of industrial life below him. The fog represents the pollution, disorientation and disarray of urban life that stands in the way of a majestic and clear vision. Friedrich, the paradigmatic Romantic, stands above the fog and achieves the perspective that none of those below can have.

Roxburgh writes, ‘This is the kind of Romantic temptation I fear we can fall into right now. Like the wanderer standing alone above the swirling fog, we, in the midst of a strange new space, can be tempted to believe that we too can get above the fogs of confusion and see a new solution, find a new method for making the church work as it once did. The truth, however, is that at this point in time, there are no formulas that will give us back control and no ideals in the forgotten past that can become the means for making our worlds work’ (page 110).

I’m with Roxburgh until that final clause of the last quoted sentence: ‘no ideals in the forgotten past ...’ What makes Freidrich’s landscapes so haunting is that their symbolism is shot-through with a profound awareness of the past. That past may indeed be overly romanticised but it is nevertheless the lens that gives Friedrich his vision. Those enveloped in the fog can no longer see the contours of existence the past provides. They are literally blinded by that forgetfulness. It is not that the Wanderer considers himself to have a superior view that’s above others’ confusions, but rather that he still has a memory that can spur his imagination and insight.

I believe regaining the memory of Christianity as a distinctive way of living and thinking is vital to mission in our times. To do that, we have to quarry our heritage and build from it a new house of being. This need not be, indeed it should not be, anything about romantic nostalgia nor overly rational dependence on the recovery of process. Instead it is a watchful and humble searching for resources of Christian memory that can sustain faith in secular times.

Hassle-free sperm donation?

“A growing number of young women in Britain have lost patience with the dating game and are turning to sperm donors to start one-parent families,” reads a story in yesterday’s Sunday Times that is quickly spreading across Internet news sites. The article went on to say that dozens of women in their early 20s – including graduates, nurses and bank workers – have posted appeals on Internet sites citing impatience and frustration with relationships for their decision to take the step into parenthood alone.

I’m not sure how seriously to take this piece. Let others examine the issues and the veracity of the evidence. The only point I want to make is that the story is believable. Most people, I think, would admit the possibility that a significant number of young women may have given up on personal relationships to achieve the motherhood they desire. The idea seems to fit with social changes of which we are all aware. Britain is becoming a nation of ‘aloners’: more people are living alone; lots of organisations have falling memberships; the ubiquitous use of earphones makes casual conversation impossible; knowing your neighbours seems more difficult that previously; and individual choice is the ideological ideals in most areas of life. We don’t seem as able to connect with one another (no pun intended!) as readily as we formerly did. Yes it’s all too easy to imagine that some young women have decided inter-personal relationships aren’t worth the hassle.

And yet at the same time our ‘alone world’ is more connected than it has ever been. All those mobile phone calls can’t be to automated digital services! As is constantly said, the digital revolution opens to all those connected opportunities to communicate beyond the wildest expectations of our forebears. At one and the same time we are more connected and but also more alone. Whether it’s actually true or not, that appears to be a widely held perception of our social world: too many possible relationships, too few real ones.

For a faith with communion at its heart the issues are pressing ones. Christians have to turn communication—real, attempted or idealized—into communion. And that turning is now more difficult than it’s ever been, perceptually and actually. And yet I take some encouragement from that very difficulty. Connecting is troublesome in every area of life; it isn’t a problem unique to the mission efforts of Christianity. The decline in church participation is part of a wider social phenomenon. Creating social communion is counter-culture—literally. Creating intentional communities where communion can flourish is our aim. Such communities are signs of better things for everyone—an antidote to ‘inter-personal relationships aren’t worth the hassle.’