Some personal reflections

The workshop was located on top of a small hill in the midst of the city, with spectacular views across the capital. However, there was no glass in the windows, just some metal shutters, which while not impeding the view made the strong chill wind that would swirl through the classroom a bit of a challenge. Especially as about 1/3 of us fell sick with a really nasty cold, which has lasted for me until now. Yet everyone reliably turned up between 8-9am, and we worked solidly until about 4pm, with a short lunch break. In preparing for the course, I felt a movement of the Spirit to just leave things and take them as they came along. With no real idea about the place, the people, the Church, the artistic background, the levels of understanding of religious and liturgical art, as well as tools, equipment and number of students, it was impossible to know quite what to expect. Yet, I had not the slightest anxiety. It was a very blessed sense, totally reliant on Christ to take care of it all. I just focused on trying to listen, and to hold on to this sense that all was under control and I just needed to turn up. So turn up I did, at 4.30am, after nearly 24 hours travel, and by 8.30am class had begun. Surreal is the only word I can find to describe it. And to reach the workshop meant sitting abreast the rear of a motorbike, weaving alarmingly between trucks, scooters and pedestrians, smothered in belching clouds of smoke. Yes, surreal. I found the Malagasy peoples - I say peoples because the country comprises of a series of distinctive ethnic groups - to be very quietly spoken, reserved, polite, gentle, keen to please, and with a sense of gratitude and positivity about life and others. Perhaps also a bit laid back and uncomprehending of the north European work ethic, valuing warmth and being present. I found them hungry for the spiritual depths of iconography, rather than enamoured by a certain esotericism. With little or no religious or secular art of any distinction, the whole world of art is either unknown or something commercial. In recent years quite a strong movement of modern painting has emerged, but this is strictly commercial and focused on the idea of prestige. Its a means of conveying a message or meaning, something to be decoded. Art as the pursuit of beauty is quite alien. Religious art is mainly rather sentimental, even kitsch. So the students really picked up their ears when I began to introduce them to art as a means of spiritual encounter, of creating thresholds where God comes to meet us as our Divine Friend, where artistic imagining comes from above, not from below, as a visual encounter with the Eternal, the Good and the True. To be honest I can’t really remember very much about what I actually said. I know we focused on the face, on the human person, and on transfiguration of time and space. I talked about grace building on nature, on power of creating images that capture a living likeness, not a dead resemblance, and icons as doors where God stands and encounters us. And so on.These were very new concepts, but they really chewed on them, treasured what they found. It changed them. We explored praying with our eyes, and the paucity of their own prayer life where the visual is ignored as having any importance in worship. It was a sort of visual catechesis. And by the end they had begun to get it. Its important to stress the visual poverty of the celebration of Mass there. I attended four Masses, two in the local parish, one in the only Benedictine monastery in the country, and one with the workshop participants. The singing was deep, heartfelt, and from the bulk of the congregations. They were also very well attended, with the local parish Mass, celebrated at 6.30am, being packed to the doors with hundreds of people. The style of Mass is very post Vatican II, respectful, prayerful but a relaxed liturgy with a focus on accessibility and participation, and a lot of speaking in the form of commentary which meant the length was never short! I found it a very prayerful experience, humble and lacking pretension. However, even at the Benedictine monastery, it lacked a sense of transcendence which I felt was a pity. This was reflected in the visual aspects of the celebration, which was disappointing and lacking in both finesse and depth. Some very basic sorts of decoration, for example swagged cloth along the gothic arches of the building, and an obligatory crucifix of little quality, really quite perfunctory. There was no interaction with the imagery that did exist, no sense of the transcendent possibilities of art to inspire let alone work liturgically. The one flicker of hope was in the stained glass, but this was very peripheral I felt to the whole experience.

 Contd.... So, we could say, this was rather basic. The students were a mixed bunch, some experienced with the mosaic others had never drawn anything before, Catholics and Protestants, lay and religious, and with ages ranging from early 20s until late 50s. Some of the students came from very far away - 12 hours or so, and so slept in the workshop, while the rest all arrived via the crammed series of minibuses that meander through the city while belching out dense clouds of carbon monoxide, or by bike or on foot. The eldest student, a wizened man whose wife is critically ill but without access to any serious medical care, came several hours each day on a rickety bicycle. There were also a couple of Claretan sisters released from their enclosure, a Jesuit postulant, and our cook who was a sister living nearby on her own I think, recovering from some illness. One of the students did live nearby, just up the road in one of the tiny houses built by a local priest as part of a vast rehousing and rehabilitation project trying to get the very poorest off the streets and into some for of productive life, one where there is some access to basic education, and support into finding a means of making some sort of income. But when you realise that the average monthly salary for a doctor is just… €400-500 a month… we aren’t really talking about an income for these people that we would recognise as even covering the basics. Some had a few pencils and paper, while others had nothing, nothing at all. So, for the most part, the workshop provided tools and resources such as Bristol board for monochrome work, and a couple of grades of pencil for drawing. I brought over some Kolinsky sable brushes as a gift, bought at cost by the kindness of Dal Molin in Italy, as well as some pigments, rabbit skin glue and a large container of fine quality gesso, which sparked some interest in airport security! The workshop provided lunch each day - we ate a lot of rice and vegetables, which was without meat as the budget didn’t quite reach that far. This was much to the disgust of the students who were quite put out because I wasn’t being given proper Madagascan food - which seemingly ALWAYS has meat! So I would say that my students for this course were pretty much the ‘anawim’, the ‘little ones’ as Scripture calls them. People with little of luxury, yet rich in spirit, determination, guts and hope in God. With a raw edge to life they cut through the dross, the self-indulgent winging of western, middle class life, and just get on with living and believing best they can and usually with a smile on their face, with a ready ability to laugh and smile, and with encouragement to give of their best with a generous spirit. God is very much the richness of their life, the strength to get up and face the very many challenges of each day, the joy that bubbles through to make life good despite the material challenges. Inspirational people in their simplicity and kindness. They made it easy to be there, and the experience of sharing what I know, a joy.

For two weeks in August I was in the capital of Madagascar, Antanavaro, leading an intense icon workshop for a new initiative aimed at kick-starting liturgical art in a country in the grip of poverty and paganism and with little artistic background.

New title

After three years the new icon painting manual is almost ready! You can see the cover above. At over 250 pages (and still growing) it is Volume 1, covering the basics from drawing through to everything you need to know about painting the face. Volume 2 will come in due course, focused on figures and garments. It is designed to accompany the Academy Course in Icon Painting, just as the original written to accompany the Prince's Trust School course in Icon Painting which I taught at the Bethlehem Icon Centre up until 2019. However, this version differs in a number of ways. Firstly, it is completely re-written, the content is systematic and directly relates to the Academy Course in Icon Painting. Secondly, it has integrated links to various video demonstrations so you have not just written instructions but short videos you can follow. Thirdly, this is fully interactive, linked to web resources you can access at a click of a button. Fourthly, it is commercially available and distributed online so everyone who wishes can have a copy! It is more than a simple paint an icon sort of book, but it is designed to help in the formation of an iconographer. Theology and spirituality are integrated into practice, fundamental principles into precise artistic skills. More details will come soon about price and launch date...watch this space!!

Arbor Vitae Icon Academy in the Holy Land

Melkite or Arabic icons....having spent much of a decade in Bethlehem here are some observations about the Arabic style of iconography that emerged from the Melkite Church in Syria in the 17th century, and came to flourish in Jerusalem in the 19th century.

Pope Francis was recently interviewed by Austen Ivereigh, a UK journalist. The interview has been largely ignored but I think it is really quite profound and over several posts I want to share some of my own reflections on it. After reading it what has remained with me, quite powerfully, is how Pope Francis explores this pandemic from the perspective of humanity . It is clear that for him our humanity is revealed in the person of Jesus; he shows us who we are, and lays bare our struggle for conversion to become the people God has long yearned for us to be. And this is not some abstract theological construct but something lived deeply and personally by each and every one of us precisely because we are human. It is a real and deep Christian humanism and therefore it is something we know not from a book but from our lives and our struggles to live well and close to God. Francis puts the challenges of the virus, of what we are globally living through, in this context. So, for example, Francis begins with a reflection on his own situation, his own place in it all as a human person, and not with long reflections on Scripture or quoting the writings of others. He like us is living this, and he engages us at this level. " I’m thinking of my responsibilities now, and what will come afterwards. What will be my service as Bishop of Rome, as head of the Church, in the aftermath? That aftermath has already begun to be revealed as tragic and painful, which is why we must be thinking about it now." He places his reflections in the pastoral context and in the context of the Church's mission of universal brotherhood, of universal love. The anvil of reflection is for him his own walking with Christ, and people like Saint Teresa of Calcutta. He doesn't begin with the office of the pope, the throne of Peter, but as the humble, weak, frail human who sits on that throne. It begins how he, sitting on that throne with all its responsibilities for the Church and for humanity, how he as a human person is living this: " Of course I have my areas of selfishness. On Tuesdays, my confessor comes, and I take care of things there." Here he is just like us, as a person who needs to reflect in the context of taking ‘care of things’ in himself, his own interior struggle to listen, attentive to that which is beyond himself, aware of his fears, anxieties, his responsibilities towards others and towards God. The crisis demands of us to reflect profoundly in order to really hear God speak. Much is at stake, its something that the burden of his office imposes, but its one which is true of all of us. Hence why I think he lifts the curtain on his struggle. He is leading by example, not dishing out certainties as populists and others would do, but trying to get us to listen to God. In trying to hear God’s voice coming through these extraordinary events, Francis takes us beneath the surface, beneath the noise and chatter, the anger and fear that seems to ooze out of every orifice, from Facebook through the mainstream media, the news channels and across the political landscape. Reading his words, in contrast to the rest of what I was exposed to on Facebook or the mainstream, 24hour media, I felt that Francis takes us to a sort of glade in a spiritual forest to take some time away and really listen, think and dialogue with the Lord. Like Jesus, taking his disciples somewhere apart so they could be refreshed, pray and listen to God. He draws us aside with him so we can begin to really see what God wants to show us, a process that echoes the words of Thomas Merton, who wrote during the upheavals of the 1960s, “ This age which by its very nature is a time of crisis, of revolution and of struggle, calls for the special searching and questioning which is the work of the Christian in silence, his meditation, his prayer; for he who prays searches not only in his own heart but he plunges deep into the heart of the whole world in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depths.” This is what it means to search for the Truth as an active process that is not about ‘them’ but about my own conversion into a person embodying the Kingdom of God. "The creativity of the Christian needs to show forth in opening up new horizons, opening windows, opening transcendence towards God and towards people, and in creating new ways of being at home. It’s not easy to be confined to your house." And let's be clear, it is a struggle in lockdown to resist self-preoccupation, not least because we are isolated and thus restricted to just one or two other human voices around us. Nor is the internet necessarily an antidote: the internet funnels certain voices according to algorithms, be that on our Facebook feed or our searches on Google and Youtube, so we get sealed even more firmly into our own world, or to certain worlds and this shapes us, our mood, our thinking unless we are very careful. Cut off from our communities, our gatherings, we become sucked into not just physical and emotional isolation, but into a mental space that can become severed and increasingly self-referencing, trapping us in a world conjured up from our imagining, our wounded psyche, not a world as it is, greater than ourself. Mental illness can often be the context of people withdrawing from the world, and for those who live as hermits mental fragility is often a real problem. How much more so for those of us forced into this against our will. We become prisoners in a world of self-reference, and Francis presents himself as someone who has to resist this like every one of us. Isolation is not necessarily the gateway to profound self-awareness, and Christian monasticism often wrestled with the dangers of the hermit, and are to only embark on that life of isolation with great care and fortitude. The self-referencing brings a susceptibility to imaginary dangers, to conspiracy theories and to clinging to ideologies that offer well trodden certainties. Being isolated can easily be a breeding ground for lunacy of many different forms. Yet time apart can also open up our eyes to perceiving things which are otherwise lost in the hectic nature of an active life. Francis is showing us how we can choose to enter this time in that way: not apart and looking in, but entering in and purifying our hearts so we can see and hear without distraction. It strikes me that Francis is very wise in starting out this way, even if only deftly and in a manner of a few words, because we live in a situation where many of us are grappling with real uncertainty and fear. This makes the chattering worse, we become jumpy, uneasy, we react, are pushed by anger, resentment, impatience and that spills over into the limited conversations we have and to the limited circle of people we are living with. We don’t know what to do and we are faced with four walls that can seem, at times, to be more and prison than a comforting home. And while we are cut off from our communities, we paradoxically get no space from each other. 'Its driving me up the wall' is almost literally true at some point or other for all of us. It's very easy to become sucked into a spiral of negativity and destruction, resentment and hopelessness. And so Francis begins by showing the way, not telling us do this and do that, but showing us an example. He thus begins by treating us as adults and fellow disciples, and challenging us to act as such, to reflect with him on ourselves, not to berate others for what 'they' have or haven't done but to see what responsibilities are placed in my hands for the future. This is a crisis that is to break us open to a deeper truth, not to be used to break others. We must not be seduced by our fear to avoid the real challenge and go seeking others to blame or to take responsibility, as though in doing so it will make things ok. It's first to be a journey of conversion for me , just as it is for Francis. Not once does he berate anyone, blame anyone, seek to point to the failings of politicians or so on. Rather, he draws us to look at ourselves. High or low, this is the first call, and in doing so to find a new life, a new energy, a new power of making, doing, building, shaping. We have to liberate ourselves from our fears and anxieties and worries so we can prepare for tomorrow. This is a crisis, a time of breaking open, a chance to break free from what was, the old norm, and to see the possibilities for what can be made new. I’m living this as a time of great uncertainty. It’s a time for inventing, for creativity... What comes to my mind is a verse from the Aeneid in the midst of defeat: the counsel is not to give up, but save yourself for better times, for in those times remembering what has happened will help us. The impact on living with such sudden uncertainty, this virus that has smashed its way almost overnight into our care homes, hospitals, airports, factories, buses, restaurants, churches, is that we feel lost, afraid, anxious and the suddenness of it all can make thinking about the future beyond us. I know from my own experience that recovering from a sudden shock, like a car crash when in a moment your whole world is smashed apart, the spectre of such a moment lying potentially around each and every corner can make thinking about the future a cause for a panic attack. Facing the future with hope is not some simple task in this pandemic, and the Pope is presenting us with the first task being to face down our own fears. Take care of yourselves for a future that will come. And remembering in that future what has happened will do you good. Take care of the now, for the sake of tomorrow. Always creatively, with a simple creativity, capable of inventing something new each day. Inside the home that’s not hard to discover, but don’t run away, don’t take refuge in escapism, which in this time is of no use to you. If you can’t dare to face the reality, then you risk being lost into a world of false securities, which cannot build a genuine future because its really just castles in the air, fashioned from our thrashing imagination rather than rooted in the real needs and opportunities before us. We can spend our energy in trying to avoid all danger, seeking safety above everything, indulging in moments of relief, or simply taking flight into denial that there really isn't a problem at all, conjuring up myths that its all exaggerated or its actually about an enemy I know and feel I can fight against. Browse through the newspapers and Facebook and time and again the tropes of left and right have sought to refashion the crisis around the old political headlines, be it about Democrats taking away freedoms from the citizen or Tories and austerity. They are the old tropes of the old world. What Francis is pointing us to, what God is pointing us to, is a new creative imagining. I guess it feels safe with our old prejudices being honed and polished, it makes us feel we have a grasp on this, that the old certainties still hold and we can get back to normal as soon as possible. 'I want my old life back!' But in this our ability to dream is crushed, our hope dwindles to extinction, we cling to false certainties and seek out messiah figures who will ‘make it all right’ be they religious charlatans or charismatic politicians; we erect such idols so we don’t need to think for ourselves and seek relief in demanding that we should be told what to do because then we don’t have to think anymore. Our heads ache, we feel vulnerable, and we want it to all go back to normal - but it refuses and we wake up every day in this dystopian reality. But there is another way. And Francis has invited us to follow...