Iconographer's Notes

Thinking about the Holy Land

Sat, 28 Oct 2023 09:40:47 GMT

Some personal reflections

Here is a recording of some of my reflections on the situation in the Holy Land, of the conflict between Palestinians and Israel. Its not so much suggesting solutions but trying to map out the situation in a way that is a bit outside the box, trying to give an insight into the tensions and realities. In it I am trying to help people from the West to get a grasp of the subtleties rather than rehearsing old arguments and rhetoric.

You can watch it here:

Madagascar Pt 3

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:46:54 GMT

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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.

Madagascar - Part 2

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 07:23:33 GMT

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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.

Madagascar - New icon formation initiative

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 07:56:57 GMT

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.

Part One...

I seem to have a penchant for teaching iconography is outlandish places, places ‘on the periphery’ as Pope Francis might express it. Ten years in the Holy Land was one such experience. This past August I had another, this time in one of the poorest countries in Africa: Madagascar.

To be clear it wasn’t something I set up or was looking for, but it was in response to the insistence of a priest friend of mine, a former student from my time in Bethlehem, Pere Gabriel. He is a missionary who has committed himself to living all his life in Madagascar, a place that was chosen for him by his missionary society. People with such hearfelt commitment to Christ are hard to refuse. He has a passion for good liturgical art, and in Madagascar there is a complete vacuum as far as that is concerned, so he began a workshop to try and at least make some inroads into that.

Back in 2019 he began a mosaic project for the national shrine of the Divine Mercy. I designed and mapped out an image of the Divine Mercy, larger than life size, for the wall above the main entrance, using Affinity Photo - every single tesserae. (Originally I was supposed to go out and supervise its execution, but Covid intervened and there was no way to actually get into the country). At least I thought I had set it all up for them to follow - but it turned out that they never received the file with the face, so while the figure itself was all ready to go they ended up having to try and work the face out for themselves. Anyway, with the great help of various other artists the work was completed, blessed and now is a real landmark in the northern town where its located. Just being there, along the main road, is a powerful ‘silent voice’ that gently nudges people to sense that He is here.

Madagascar is virgin missionary territory. About a 1/3 of the country is Christian, mostly Catholic, but the presence is focused in the cities. In the rural communities a form of shamanism is prevalent, while the main spiritual focus is on honouring the ancestors. A country of diverse ethnicities and cultures, a common feature is music and dance. Visual art is mostly absent, even simple patterns or colour arrangements. Yet the natural environment is awash with a rich, vibrant colour palette, from mesmerising sunsets of molten golds to shimmering greens of endless varieties of palm trees and vegetation that seems straight out of Jurassic Park. And then there is the earth colours, rich African reds and ochres, which I began to explore as possible pigments with the students during the course.

The Atelier is a grand name for a very humble reality. The place has no glass in the windows, the upper section has a dirt floor, while the ground floor is a series of brick built rooms which includes a chicken hut and a rabbit run. The view is spectacular, sat on a hill on the edge of the capital city, but its exposure to the rather cold winter wind is the price you pay, playing havoc with your health and your sketches! Some of the students stayed in the workshop for the duration of the course - having travelled for many hours to reach there it was impossible for them to return home each night. So, they slept on the floor, one window covered with a grey, colourless cloth while the others were closed with metal shutters. The kitchen was an metal container of charcoal and wood moved inside and out depending on the weather. Water was from a tap way down in the grounds of the property.

Throwback... 57 years!

Wed, 10 May 2023 17:21:56 GMT

New title

I thought some of you would enjoy seeing me a few years back, complete with brush and hair!

The new manual!

Mon, 01 May 2023 09:56:38 GMT

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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!!

Our first in person Course AND its back in Bethlehem

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 09:12:28 GMT

Arbor Vitae Icon Academy in the Holy Land

This was our first in person course for members of the Academy Course in Icon Painting, hosted by Sr Marthe at the Emmanuel Monastery in Bethlehem.

It was here in 2010 that I began my icon school, which has now become the Arbor Vitae Icon Academy. We were a small group of English, Arabs, French, German and Americans who made our home in Bethlehem for the duration of Passion Week. Religious, solitary religious, housewives, small homestead farmers came together to contemplate the Face of the Crucified in line and colour, to participate in the rich Byzantine liturgy of the Greek Catholic monastery, and to paint.

Sr Marthe has been one of Ian's students for over 13 years. and has now established a workshop at the monastery where she takes commissions and tutors small groups of local students. For this she uses the Academy Course in Icon Painting and it was good to meet some of the wider part of our icon painting community while we were there. We were able to make use of the workshop's excellent facilities, including their dedicated gesso room, though a couple of us managed to lock ourselves in and needed to be rescued!

Most of the group had been meeting for several months for online tutorials to explore and draw the icon they came to Bethlehem to paint. This made a massive difference to both the experience of the time together and the quality of the work produced. Above all it wasn't rushed but without any compromise on depth or quality.

We were ably looked after by Nadeem, who helped run the courses at the Bethlehem Icon Centre in a previous incarnation, and who has a wealth of experience ensuring that everyone was very well looked after, from medicine for colds through to ordering taxis. Fasting meals were prepared by the sisters of the monastery for lunch, supplemented by a supply of warm bread, hummus, babaganoosh and falafel in the evenings. Nadeem took those who wished to make a short pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity, to the site of Our Lord's birth.

Arabic Icons

Wed, 01 Feb 2023 07:51:54 GMT

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.

Arabic or ‘Melkite Icons’

أيقونات عربية أو أيقونات الروم الكاثوليك

هناك عدة أنماط مختلفة لرسم الإيقونات، إحداها النمط العربي وهو المعروف أيضاً بِـِ: " الإيقونات الملكية). وقد تطورت تلك الأنماط من الرسم في الكنيسة السريانية الأرثوذكسية إبان إعادة الوحدة مع الكنيسة الكاثوليكية الرومانية في القرن الثامن عشر الميلادي، وأصبحت شائعة لدى كافة كنائس المشرق. وقد كانت مدينة القدس مركزاً هاماً لرسم الإيقونات في القرن التاسع عشر، حيث تُعتبر إيقونة سيدة بيت لحم في كنيسة المهد، إحدى الأمثلة على ذلك.

The Incarnation underlines the profound connection between faith and culture. Christian faith in God taking flesh makes the material world a profound medium for the sacred, and culture, be it music, architecture, literature, drama or art, as an important context in which faith can be expressed and explored.

Icons, as religious, artistic and liturgical artefacts root the Christian faith into particular cultures, at particular times and places. They are not simply reproductions of paintings made hundreds of years ago in Byzantine workshops. They are real, living expressions of the faith of people from as diverse places as the 6th century Egyptian desert, Venetian Crete and the renewed church of post-soviet Russia. Each of these times and places has thrown up new types, styles, themes and materials which has given iconography a rich history which continues today.

Christianity has been present in the Middle East since the time of the Apostles. Syria was the first place where the followers of Jesus were called Christians, and across the region there have been a great variety of national churches of differing theological convictions as well as styles of liturgy. For most of the past 2000 years most Arabs have been Christians of one type of another, though as time has passed the domination of Islam first politically, then socially and finally religiously has greatly diminished there presence and influence in the past 100 years.

Iconography in the region remained strongly aligned to Byzantium until its collapse in the 15th century. After this the main centre of Orthodox iconography moved to Muscovite Russia, newly emerged from the dominance of the Mongols. Thus in the Arab nations there was less central influence and control, and in the early 18th century a family of iconographers in Aleppo, Ysef al-Mussawwin; his son, Nemeh grandson, Hanamia; and great-grandson, Girgis, began developing something that became distinctively an Arab form of iconography known as the Aleppo School.

This family were Melkite Christians. This term refers to the ancient Christians led by the Patriarch of Antioch who accepted the Council of Chalcedon. The Patriarchs of Antioch tended to be sympathetic to the Roman Catholic Church and in 1729 there was an official reconciliation and the church became known as the Greek Melkite Church. This was a period of division with those who remained loyal to the Patriarch of Constantinople, and for a time the Melkite Christians suffered persecution from the Ottoman state. Yet, this time of upheaval and suffering also saw the birth an authentic Arabic school of iconography which in time was to influence not just iconography in those local churches in Communion with Rome but within Orthodox and Oriental churches too. The term ‘Melkite Icons’ to describe these Arabic icons was first used by Virgil Candea, a Romanian scholar, when he was consultant for an exhibition of icons from Lebanese and Syrian collections produced by the Sursock Museum of Beirut in May 1969.

The greatest of the Aleppo school iconographers was Nemeh. He followed the Byzantine models but preferred a stylized naturalism. His figures reflect Arabic features, with angels and women have more pronounced oval heads, his young people have rounded faces; and his men possess large heads with bulging foreheads, prominent cheekbones and hollow cheeks. While the noses retain the Byzantine slenderness, Nemeh's saints have almond-shaped and heavily-lashed eyes. He also adopted more Arabic decorative motifs, for example creating alternating green and red borders covered with gold decoration.

Melkite icons came to be characterised by oval and softer facial expressions than in Byzantine icons of the period. The bodies are fuller and rounder with less of the modelling which is characteristic of traditional icon painting. There are also Arabic costumes, contemporary furniture, and daily household objects - all in sharp contrast to the other-worldly Byzantine icons. For example there is an early 18th century Melkite icon where the infant Virgin Mary is being rocked in a cradle, still in use in Syria and Lebanon. In other examples Abraham wearing a turban, St. John the Evangelist writing at an Arabic desk, and St. George brandishing an Arab sword.

From the outset one of the distinctive characteristics was the use of Arabic decorative motifs. Islamic culture, with its unease with portraying the human figure, developed the decorative motif into a style and excellence of its own and the Melkite iconographers incorporated it directly into their work. Borders, backgrounds, garments all were decorated using intricate decorations seen on brasswork, on Persian carpets, and on the brocades and wood panels of Damascus. Often, the entire background of Melkite icons are covered with floral, vegetable, and geometric designs, as twisted leaves, lotus flowers, pomegranates lilies, tulips, and palms all explode into a celebration of divine life. At different times this was more or less elaborate and dominant, but whatever the scale it was something distinctively Arabic.

Islamic culture also focused on the written text, and Arabic script and so it is not surprising that inscriptions, which are an essential element in iconography, became highly elaborated in an Arabic context. An icon of St. Spiridon was given to a Romanian church in 1794 by Sylvester, the Orthodox patriarch of Antioch and the salutations and blessings covering about one-fourth of the icon's surface!

This school spread its influence across the Arab Christian communities and went through various stylistic influences. An important off-shoot was established in Jerusalem, perhaps as early as the 18th century. This came to prominence in the 19th century as Aleppo itself began to wane in importance, in what is known as the Kudsi. This consisted of three Melkite painters Mikhail Mahanna, Yuhanna Saliba, and Nicolas Theodorus. Large brush strokes and simplicity characterize their works. Their saints have heads as round as oranges and faces touched with serenity. In turn this centre influenced the surrounding area, including Bethlehem which had an icon workshop until the 1940s.

The work of this workshop is to be seen in St Nicholas in Beit Jala and the Syrian Orthodox Church in Bethlehem. Devoid of any ornamentation, they still retain the strong Arabic features and the Arabic inscriptions, and a very simple, direct if somewhat romantic style. When I came to restore St Nicholas church I was immediately struck by how the faces resembled some of the Palestinian people I met. The large eyes, stocky figure, high foreheads were all classical products of the Melkite icon school, though much more simplified than the classical pieces of the 18th century.

Local people have at times referred to these as Russian icons, but that is a misnomer. Though Russian Orthodox influences are strong in Palestine during the 19th century, and undoubtedly influenced the decoration of churches, the characteristics of the Arabic Melkite icons are still to be seen. Often what people mean is that they are not Byzantine in style, somewhat naturalistic and rarely distinguish the local truly Arabic icons from the sentimental devotional art that came from a mixture of European and Russian sources.

Sadly the Christian presence in the Middle East has atrophied as its numerical strength has sapped, and iconography in general, let alone Arabic iconography, has withered away. Some iconographers exist in Lebanon and Syria, but those in the Holy Land itself tend to be from Europe, and few are full time iconographers, or part of a workshop. As iconography in Russia and Greece has been renewed in the past 40 years, it has eclipsed what is left of the local traditions, and its adherents have a somewhat evangelistic fervour, which looks on non-Orthodox iconographic traditions such as the Melkite school with deep suspicion. Its stylised naturalism is easily dismissed as simply a poor version of the naturalistic Russian icons so heavily influenced by Western baroque art and naturalism, and condemned in contemporary iconographic circles as decadent.

This is a real pity, as we have, in these Melkite icons, an example of a developed local iconography, and one which flourished within an eastern Church in Communion with Rome. At a time when centralisation seems the norm, and local realities are subsumed by global movements, a renewed sense of the Incarnation must mean the emergence of new iconographic local styles, and the renewal of existing ones. We have seen something of that in Egypt with contemporary Coptic icons, and perhaps the time is ripe for something similar to take place among Arab Christians too?

Pope Francis and the future. Pt 1

183:772501155 (Ian Knowles) — Sun, 17 May 2020 13:05:55 GMT

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.

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...

FACT: UK has a relatively low infection rate but a very high death rate when it comes to Coronavirus...

183:772501155 (Ian Knowles) — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 21:07:16 GMT

Lets get beyond headlines and dig into some facts...

How much of a mess has our government made of things? The focus on testing? Well, look at the chart above and you can see that we haven't been as bad as people might have thought, compared to France for example, and now our rate is not so dissimilar from South Korea. But how badly are we doing in containing the virus? Are we corralling it or is it whipping us?

Most new cases in absolute numbers:

As of today, April 20th, UK is no 2 in Europe , no.3 globally, after the USA and Russia, for new cases of infection.

Germany is 10th in Europe for new cases. Globally 18th. I will refer to Germany because it is a comparable developed nation, with a national health service and industrial base.

However, these are absolute figures, rather than compared to the population base. 100 infections in a population of 150 is far more serious than if the population is 100, right? So, let's be provisional in our judgment at this point.

Most new deaths in absolute numbers:

UK is number 4 globally, no 3 in Europe.

France is ahead of Italy for the most new deaths.

Again, no figures per head of population.

So headline figures put four of the five major countries of Europe at the forefront of the pandemic. Germany, the fifth in Europe, is not far behind in the global chart - ranking 12th. And remember that Germany is held up by many as the gold standard about what we should have done.

But let's look at this in terms of per head of population, a much more accurate indicator of how seriously the situation is in context rather than as a headline figure .

Total cases per 1m of the population.

As you can see from the table below,

UK ranks 20th,

Germany is 21,

Ireland no. 12.

Portugal no. 18.

So, in terms of containing the spread of the virus the UK has done relatively well, much better than say Ireland or Iceland or Portugal, all of whom have had very strong testing regimes in place. I am not saying testing isn't important, I am just pointing out that in terms of containing the spread the UK is not doing badly, at least so far. It could be a lot worse.

The death rate

HOWEVER, the worrying thing is the rate of deaths per infection. Here the UK has a poor record, and that is where our thoughts should be focused. Let's look at the figures. Its the column on the far right.

OK, so let's put aside the small countries as they really aren't a large enough sample to make a fair comparison. Belgium, Spain, Italy, France all have death rates per head of population larger than the UK and Spain, and Belgium by nearly 100%. We are bunched in the 'hyper category' of deaths, twice the rate of the USA. And given the high rate of new cases we can expect that figure to rise to be somewhat comparable to that of France at least.

It's this which no one has been talking about, with all the focus being on the infection rate and testing, while in fact we are actually doing relatively well at keeping that low. Can you imagine what the death toll would have been in the UK if we had the same infection rate as Germany, for example? It doesn't bear thinking about.

So, we need to be thinking hard about how we can lower the mortality rate. Thank God Oxford University is onto the case in developing a real hope for a vaccine, and unlike Trump's America we are not trying to get it for ourselves. The govt has been backing this, so credit where credit is due. A vaccine is desperately needed if the death rate is to be cut.

Home for Holy Week

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 09:23:44 GMT

The world is in silence, our society under the shadow of suffering and death...

We might be shut inside and cut off from our churches but we are united with Christ and with the whole Church with an intensity rarely experienced as the whole world from the pope to the homeless, from the Prime Minister to nurses experience the threat of infection, isolation and the threat of infection. Across the world we share the same fear, the same solidarity, the same reality of death, and a very real awareness of how our communities from China to Tunisia are responding to the same situation. We are isolated and yet bonded.

Holy Week is an invitation offered each year for the whole Church community to enter once again into the Mystery of Our Lord’s life, death and resurrection, the Mystery of our salvation.

Salvation is offered to those who live under the shadow of death, which the psalmist tells us ‘I shall not fear’. The current epidemic brings home our mortality in the most brutal of ways. Our loved ones are dying, and most heartbreakingly, they die alone without even the hand of mother or father, spouse or partner to hold. No prayers at the bedside, no priest to anoint them. And they die from a form of slow drowning, unable to catch their breath, and knowing what is happening. Perhaps the saddest picture of this time is the 13 yr old boy dying in a hospital alone, without even his mother, and then buried alone as his siblings had also succumb to infection. Death’s sting is brutal, vicious, devastating.

And yet the Lord says, ‘do not be afraid, it is I’. The Christian Mystery is that God does not leave that boy or our grandmother or anyone alone in death, but has not only been there but remains there to hold us and guide us through the dark labyrinth of dying through to the gates of Paradise which He throws open in welcome. Even to the thief nailed on a cross next to Him Jesus said, ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’. No one, however guilty and draped in shame, no one is excluded from those words, from being saved from the chill and loneliness of death and the threat of remaining excluded from Paradise. And that is as true today as it was 2000 years ago on the hill outside Jerusalem called Calvary.

Holy Week retells the long story of how God sought to bring us all to Paradise, to rescue us from damnation, of being shut away alone to rot in the tomb. This Mystery is something so deep that you can’t ever totally explain it, but rather it is best grasped as a story where the core meaning echoes through again and again, and which we can grasp at different times and stages of our lives.

Holy Week tells the story of our salvation, partly in myths as old almost as humanity itself, partly through historical events involving the peoples of the Middle East and especially the family of Abraham. Out of this family came the great figures of the Old Testament, Kings like David, and Prophets like Moses through whose lives and words God gave hints about what He planned to do to bring us all back to Him, to break the curse of death that hangs over us all and to fulfil the hope of love and life which remains in each and every human heart. The life and death of Jesus came as the culmination of these lives and messages.

Holy Week rehearses all of this story in one dramatic, prayerful re-entering. We don’t just read about it, hear about it as events long lost in the past but through a special form of prayer called The Liturgy find ourselves taken there to relive this story where we are not just recipients but participants. Its not just about hearing words and having ideas in our head, its about a lived experience in the here and now, something that touches us in our complete humanity, not just in our ears and minds. Its telling a story as a living action rather than something simply in a book. Its done in poetry and music, in art and symbol, in gesture and movement.

Our current situation

The coronavirus is unprecedented as something experienced globally. We are all aware of death as they happen from China to New York. Modern media exposes the raw emotions of staff and relatives of the dead. We walk through this epidemic with our eyes glued to the news, and our minds racing with the deluge of social media posts which range from the profound to the profane. We keep Holy Week in this context as well as that of being locked into our homes or working flat out as a key worker exposed to infection.

We are also incredibly blessed that we are in a time when mass communication is at its zenith, with the celebration of Mass being streamed live. We can log in to Mass with Pope Francis, or our local parish, or a million other venues at times of our choosing. However, we are only just thinking through the etiquette and theological and spiritual reality of this experience. As a result, we are largely being left to go it alone.

We also have the means to order supplies, even religious supplies, online. We have incredible access still to physical resources. The internet also gives us ready and immediate access to materials we can use, from images that can be printed out to prayers and reflections that can be shared.

We also have time. So many millions now shut up in their homes with ‘nothing to do’, and a world which is suddenly hushed from its business, its pollution, its distractions. No chance for going to a football match, or a nightclub or the pub, no coffee mornings or gym sessions. Our whole world is more silent and still, and is ecologically healing after being swamped in man-made pollution, and in this silence of time and space we have a chance to recover something of recollection and stillness. However, most of us are clueless about how to do this. We need some clear wisdom from our monastic traditions about how we can engage with this new emptiness, and how move from loneliness to solitude, as Henri Nouwen put it.

We should also, perhaps, be cautious about some alternatives for the use of this stillness such as yoga and the like which offer a very different philosophical and spiritual path which the Christian community has some long standing hesitations about endorsing. There are perhaps good things here, but we need guidance by those with real understanding of what we can learn and benefit from, but also where dangers and distractions can lie.

So, Holy Week presents us with the challenge to tell our salvation story and celebrate it in the context of a global experience of death and suffering, and with an acute deprivation of our sacred spaces but with many new tools and opportunities at our disposal. Our faith gives us a long tradition of engaging with silence and for spiritual growth through times of trial. All of this comes together in this Holy Week of 2020.

The situation is also one where our common future is being questioned. Life as we have known it is being torn up before our eyes. The economic fall out from this virus is unquantifiable, and the shape of the world order unknown. We have already had the environmental crisis played out across our cities, with the effects of global warming being experienced with devastating effect, and with demands for a radical change in lifestyle to enable the planet to breath and sustain human life. We are also aware of the massive advances in irradicating global poverty and bringing equality which has marked the past 30 years of international action being thrown in crisis as these other issues impact globally. We face a very uncertain future, and serious questions about the values which have shaped our lives over the past two centuries. This time of quiet is one where we can also begin to reflect more deeply on what shape we hope our world should take as we move forward from this crisis. Perhaps this time of pause is a gift from the Lord to enable us to do just that?

All of this we bring to this coming week. I have not the ability or the resources to respond to all of it, but I know that we, as the People of God, the followers of Christ do. The Holy Spirit has been poured out again and again upon those who in their desperation and brokeness find the grace to ask Him to come and raise us up, just as He raised up Jesus from death. This is the context of our celebration of Holy Week – not as a historical re-enactment but as a living encounter with today as the day of salvation. God’s love for us and the world and indeed his whole creation is not something restricted to a moment in the past but an enduring reality made know with blinding clarity on Easter morning.

Thus the re-telling of this story of salvation, framed by the Liturgies which the Church continues to celebrate through her priests, has the chance to be opened up in a profound way this year, a chance that will not come again in our lifetime. Let us rise to the challenge, let us open the Scriptures, let us create sacred spaces, thin spaces in our homes, let us gather online, let us pray, reflect and enter into the silence of this time, the silence of the tomb, and let our hearts seek to find the Lord there with the desire greater than our fear, the desire of the Lover and the Beloved, the one who cries out ‘I would stay in your temple all the days of my life’. Let us go deep, let us dig deep, let us tell the story of salvation, let us look death in the face with faith in the Lord who dying destroyed our death, and who entering the tomb brought hope to the world.

Locked down and locked out - Holy Week under the shadow of coronavirus

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 18:16:23 GMT

Some suggest that we don't really need to be in church to be the Church, and that receiving the Sacraments physically is something extra as God can give us the grace whether we take them physically or not. Here I want to argue that in Christianity 'matter matters' and no more so than in the way we pray. While we might of necessity for the common good be locked out of our churches this Holy Week that is no excuse for not worshipping with our eyes and our bodies. Indeed, it's absolutely vital we do so and the bishops need to be taking a lead on this.

I think that many of us feel somewhat bereaved at being deprived of our lives beyond our front door, and for those among us who are Christians that is particularly acute because we really miss being able to visit our churches or cathedrals. Quite rightly we need to make this sacrifice, to ensure that this dreadful virus has less chance to spread and to spread less rapidly, in order to save lives and enable the infrastructure of the health service to adapt to these unprecedented demands being made upon it.

However, that having been said being deprived of our churches is not to be underestimated in terms of its impact upon our spiritual wellbeing. Some people are almost happy that people have to give up being in church and receiving the Sacraments, chiding those who feel its loss acutely as having a superficial faith that doesn’t root itself in the knowledge that God is everywhere, and that He doesn’t need Sacraments etc in order to impart grace.

I am a liturgical artist, that’s my job, I would say my vocation. As such I spend my life making beautiful images to grace churches as part of the physical dimension of the celebration of Christian liturgy, and some of these assumptions hit near to the bone for me. It is a reminder that very few people in the Western churches have the faintest idea about just how important physical space and matter are as far as a healthy Christian spiritual life is concerned. In fact I would go so far as to say that those so keen to dispense with the material expression of our faith are the ones with a shallow grasp of what Christian faith really is.

Let me explain what I mean, as that last sentence might appear to some as rather arrogant and offensive. I don’t say it lightly, and I beg your indulgence as I tease out what I mean by that.

A millennia ago the conversion of the Rus is related primarily to the experience the envoys of Prince Vladimir had in the vast cathedral of Hagia Sophia in what was then called Constantinople. Mesmerised by the sheer transcendent experience of the liturgy in that most exquisite of ecclesial spaces they believed that they had somehow entered heaven in a way that no other liturgical or religious experience had managed to do. For the Orthodox of the east the material aspects of Christianity, that is the liturgy, the sacraments, the rites and rituals that accompany the Christian’s life and death, are not some sort of add on to the ‘real’ thing, the ‘spiritual’. In fact the duality behind juxtaposing ‘material’ with ‘spiritual’ is anathema to them as indeed it is to all Christianity rooted as it is in the belief in the incarnation.

The incarnation is the Christian understanding (dogma) that the Word, who is God, became flesh and lived as one of us. God was no longer other to matter and the physical cosmos but had himself entered into it and taken it to himself. That God, He Who Is, He Who is Without circumscription, should be found as a part of his creation is baffling philosophically as a sort of juxtaposition of opposites, something offensive to Jew and Muslim alike, but it stands as the definitive dogma of the Christian faith as definitive of our understanding of who Jesus is, and the purpose of his life and death on earth. As the New Testament explains, “All was made through him and for him. He is before all and holds all things together in him” (Col.1:16-17), and “ God has made known to us his mysterious deign, in accordance with his loving-kindness in Christ. In him and under him God wanted to unite, when the fullness of time had come, everything in heaven and on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10).

In fact this intimacy between God and matter, between God and Creation has many hints in the Old Testament. God walks in the Garden of Eden as the friend of the first Man, Adam. God manifests himself in material ways, as a group of angels to Abraham, as a burning bush that speaks his name to Moses, as the silence witnessed by Elijah at the mouth of the cave on the side of Mt Horeb, and as majestic visions to various prophets. In the life of Jesus this is taken to a new level with such events as the Transfiguration when Jesus is changed into a figure of light and flanked by heavenly figures. These are what we call theophanies, manifestations of God in physical, material ways almost always associated in some way with Light.

With the conception of the Word in the womb of the Virgin Mary things however are taken to another level. God takes matter, flesh and blood to himself in the most personal of ways and for all time matter now matters as never before. It is not just that God’s presence is found in nature, but that nature is found in God. Matter, matters.

Thus it is not surprising that as Christian life developed it has had a profound relationship to the physical world, shaping it and liberating it in quite mind-blowing ways. At the Last Supper Jesus took bread and made it into his flesh, and made wine into his blood, but not flesh and blood in a earthly limited sense but as the very life of Christ as the Word, the Lord, the Redeemer. It was matter taken up to another level through being fused with the Divine. Thus the Christian cult, that is the way in which faith is expressed as prayer and as something communal, has been rooted in the taking of material things and transforming them into the stuff of heaven. Bread, wine, water, oil, the human body itself, even sexual intercourse all opened up to being vehicles of heavenly power to bring about the transformation of human life from everything that smacks of death, sadness, brokenness. Life and love become touched in the most concrete of ways. This is the very nexus of Christian life, belief and hence of its prayer.

Leonid Ouspensky, one of the great theologians of the revival of iconography in the Orthodox Church of the 20th century explains the implications of this incarnational faith for how we worship. “ The foundation of the Christian life... is the birth of a new life, an intimate union with God which is essentially fulfilled in the sacrament of the Eucharist. A church, as the place where this sacrament is fulfilled and where men, united and revived, are gathered together, is different from all other paces and buildings”. This is merely an articulation of an understanding consistent, universal and enduring centuries in the Christian mind. For example, St Maximus the Confessor could write in the 7th century, “ Just as in man, the carnal and spiritual principles are united, even though the carnal principle does not absorb the spiritual, nor does the spiritual principle absorb the carnal into itself but rather spiritualises it, so that the body itself becomes an expression of the spirit, so also in a church the sanctuary and the nave communicate: the sanctuary enlightens and guides the nave, which becomes its visible expression. Such a relationship restores the normal order of the universe, which had been destroyed by the fall of man. Thus it re-establishes what had been in paradise and what will be in the Kingdom of God.”

The church building is not some utilitarian space dispensable and largely secondary to the life of faith. In a very real way it is an integral expression of it and something which cannot be lightly put aside in a Christian’s life.

To bring this down to earth a bit, if you think about the great cathedrals or those ancient village churches, even the most hardened atheist cannot but be touched by something special about them. Its not really their age, or the majesty of their architecture or just their enduring place in the English landscape, though all of these are true. There remains a numinosity, a sense of it being a thin place where heaven seems just a small step away, angels hanging in the air. This is what Christian sacred space evokes and you don;t have to have faith to sense something of it. Its very real, tangible and precious in its sublime beauty. It is the sort of beauty that makes life far more than existence.

To draw out what I am getting at think of visiting a house when house hunting. Places often have an atmosphere, it might be good, bad, uneasy, peaceful. Somehow places take an imprint of what takes place there and we can sense it, some it must be admitted perhaps more than others. There is far more to spaces than meets the eye, and our interaction with space is something more than use or abuse. Space that has been set aside for Christian use, that has been consecrated for use for prayer, becomes imbued with that coming close of heaven to earth to the point that it ‘hangs in the air’ even when words, music, ritual have ceased.

As a liturgical artist i seek to paint images, known as icons, to enhance these special spaces and to draw out this significance, enabling people to pray with their eyes and their souls to be caressed by grace-filled images. In many churches icons radiate as thin spaces within thin spaces, not so much windows into heaven but doorways from heaven. Heaven breaks through in some sort of sensual, tangible way caressing our whole person, body, soul and spirit. Its a complete, holistic experience of the Divine which has profound implications. It places God in the world and not above or removed or remote from it. This intimacy provides the impetus for the Christian’s work for social justice, for the dignity of every human person, for the important of providing food for the hungry, shelter for the homeless, refugee from those fleeing violence and war, defending the life of the smallest unborn child. Strip away this material context and Christianity is nothing, nothing at all. As St Ireneaus said, that which is not assumed is not healed.

Therefore, when we think about being excluded from these sacred, consecrated ‘thin spaces’ its a very healthy instinct to rebel against this. They touch us in ways even more fundamental than food and drink, and while God is certainly not limited to these humble means, they are the means he chooses to show, express and embody his love for us because it is as material beings, not dismembered spirits, that he has made us. Its like a mother unable to hug her young child as he lies on a hospital gurney dying of the virus. Its that deep, and we are foolish to minimise both the hurt and the impact.

Part of surviving this pandemic is ensuring that we remain as healthy as possible. We take exercise, even if for short walks, or home made gyms. Even I am doing my little exercise routine! The material aspects of our spiritual welfare is just as important, indeed I would argue more so. God is not some remote emotion buried in secret within my metaphorical heart. The Church is not some invisible thing that floats in the air. Or at least thats not the case for Catholics and Orthodox. Protestants might see things a bit differently. But for most of us the Church is a material reality whose absence we feel keenly and the lack of which threatens long term spiritual harm.

That’s a big claim, so let me explore this a bit further. As human persons we are complete and entire, not a duality between body and spirit. There has always been a temptation among Christians to succumb to some sort of dualism, with devastating consequences such as Albigensianism or those in Paul’s time who believed that as they were saved spiritually they could do whatever they wanted materially. Matter didn’t matter, so do as you want.

A long term exposure to a materially minimalist form of Christian liturgical life will corrode the ways in which we as human beings, made of matter, experience God in the fullness of our humanity. Prayer is not just words in a book, its not just sitting still and closing our eyes, in fact it is very little of that. Prayer in Christian terms is something complete and holistic involving all our senses and binding us to one another physically and to the created order around us. A religion of disembodied words or ‘consciousness’ is a religion of gradual irrelevance - out of sight, out of mind.

Sure, for a while we can sustain something healthy but it is foolish to underestimate the consequences not least as this lock down is looking likely to last weeks, and for the most vulnerable - which constitute our main age range within church congregations mind you - for three months at the least. We therefore need to get beyond platitude about God doesn’t need sacraments to give us grace and truisms that the church isn’t a building and start something a little more informed and compassionate, as well as realistic about how we pray as Christians.

Part of that should be about re-educating ourselves about the space we live in and the place of some sort of material marker as to our faith. The Orthodox home usually has its icon corner, and many Catholics have a holy picture of some sort somewhere. However, in our secularised age these practices are somewhat embarrassing and awkward when the rest of the household doesn’t share our faith. So we hide our faith away, understandably. We don’t want to impose our faith on others, and we often have no real understanding of just how fundamental praying with our eyes and the rest of our bodies is.

However, we have to balance all of this with our spiritual health, for which it needs to be expressed and nurtured in physical ways, so we can pray with our eyes, our bodies and not just in our heads. God is not just an idea in our minds, but we are in relationship through and in our entire person. We need to think how we can shape some of our physical space as a ‘thin space’, as in some way set apart for sacred use.

It is here that liturgical art (rather than just religious art) has a crucial role to play. Icons are shaped by and expressive of the Church’s liturgy. They aren’t just an expression of personal faith. Its the same comparison between the Scriptures and a collection of homilies. One is something enduring and universal, the latter something particular and personal. There is a place for both, but we shouldn’t confuse or replace one with the other. Icons are deliberately not naturalistic, somewhat abstract in what we might call an ascetical aesthetic. They are not designed to replace the realities they make present, but to melt away so we can connect with the realities reaching out to us through them. They don’t seek to work on our imagination, transporting us somewhere imaginary, but to be conduits in the present moment of spiritual realities that are actual present even if not visible. You could put it that they contain their own irrelevance - ‘Don’t look at me, but to the one I make present!’

Icons come in many different styles, so its not very prescriptive or limiting. Russian ones tend to be very ethereal, Cretan one’s highly stylised and rigid, contemporary English ones more painterly. Just a quick browse on Pininterest and you can find a vast range - though not all are good so it needs careful selection. Educating oneself about what icons are good, and how they function is another good step to take, so you can select and arrange images in a way that opens up a little bit of the church sacred space in your own home. An icon of Jesus, whether Pantocrator or on the Cross or in the arms of Mary should take centre place. Flanking them should be angels, archangels and seraphim, the spiritual powers. Then come prophets and evangelists, our patron saints (personal, local and national). In creating this visual space we are opening the doors of heaven for these saints to come and be a part of our home.

While we cannot physically celebrate the Divine Liturgy as it is usually done in our churches, we can participate in other ways. The Divine Liturgy (the Mass) is an enactment on earth of something taking place in heaven, its reality breaking through from heaven to earth. As it says in the letter to the Hebrews, “But you have come near to Mt. Zion, to the City of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem with its innumerable angels. You have come to the solemn feast, the assembly of the first born of God, whose names are written in heaven.”

We can glimpse something of this in the Book of Revelation which some scholars maintain is a description of the Mass as experienced and understood by the early Christians. Whether that is so or not, the understanding of the Church has been well articulated, that what we do on earth in our liturgy is but a shadow of what is taking place in heaven. Our pale shadow enables the worship of the angels and archangels to be opened up for us to participate in, to stand with the whole company of saints, martyrs, confessors etc as they worship our Heavenly Father. While we can’t ourselves celebrate the Mass without a priest, we can allow something of those heavenly realties to nevertheless break through in our homes every time we pray.

This is much more than just listening to the Mass on our iPads or smart phones, good as that is. It is about creating a similar sort of space in our own homes, however small and discrete or elaborate and substantial. Through setting aside a physical space and shaping it with imagery that draws out what is taking place there as we stand before God and pray united with the priest offering the Mass online, we can begin to pray not just in our minds, but with our bodies and with our eyes, something more complete and healthy and more fundamentally connected to one another in physical space. In keeping to the communal actions of our church liturgies, such as making the sign of the Cross, kneeling or standing, blessing ourselves with holy water or kissing icons or touching them, we unite ourselves materially with the whole Christian community as it participates in Christ’s Mysterious Presence in these common rituals. It helps bind us to one another despite the physical distance.

This is going to be acutely important in Holy Week. This is THE liturgical celebration of the Christian year, something which is so holistic and complete as an experience of salvation it is rightly the defining Christian ritual. It takes us liturgically into the realities of the Passion and Resurrection not simply in our memories but in our experience of God in prayer now. What was eternal and enduring breaks through to us, and draws us in, it refreshes our faith, renews our hearts, lances our sins and fills us with the Divine Life. It is a complete ritual spanning an entire week, by consecrating this week we make all weeks holy. Its a way of handing our lives, our time, our thoughts, actions back to God in order that we might ourselves become ‘thin spaces’, like the icons that hang in our homes, and the churches where we normally gather to pray.

We need to think carefully about how we pray. Simply sitting in an armchair is not perhaps sufficient as our only way of worship. Bows, making the sign of the cross, standing and sitting, kneeling all can have a part to play. This is going to be critical during Holy Week because that is the time each year we enter deeply as a community into the great Mystery of our salvation. We need to re-cement the spiritual bonds between us in material ways, not simply slipping into our own individual made up routine, but developing something together, using the common gestures and features which would normally feature in and decorate our churches during this most sacred time. Ideally our bishops would take a lead in this, and not leave it up to individuals and local clergy to muddle through. However, if that is missing then we can at least take the idea seriously, understand that it is important to nurture the physicality of our worship and to create some thin space with icons and so forth as a lynch pin in keeping our spiritual lives alive and incarnational.

Dad's Army: the Corona Virus on the Home Front

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 12:22:52 GMT

We're Doomed! Don't Panic! Time to binge watch Dad's Army...

Like most other folk, I am not a specialist in medicine, or health care, let alone in immunology, let alone a speciality in SARS or these other very particular viruses. I scour the newspapers, serious programmes like Andrew Marr this morning, flick through social media and read a variety of posts trying to get a sense of what this thing that is impacting my daily life is, and how best to respond. And I find this is true for friends in the USA and Tunisia, Italy or Bethlehem. We simply don't know really what we are dealing with. It's confusing, we are having to second guess and it's understandably driving us nuts.

This morning I went to Mass, the early one which isn't crowded, and chose a seat where there was no one within two metres of me. I didn’t touch anything with my bare hands, not a hymn book (there weren’t any) but no door handles either. Came, prayed, received Communion on the hand, left. All very calm, sensible, reassuring, safe.

I then popped into Sainsbury’s on the way back, the local high street branch. Not many folk there... but NO TOILET ROLLS. The last time I bought a pack was in November, and I have just two rolls left. So, I thought to replace it. Nothing doing. It's just fortunate that I have a bidet! Perhaps my neighbours will have developed a new found spirit of togetherness and pulling together and give me a roll of theirs?

I try to avoid the tabloids and the sensationalists. That’s not easy. We are all worried, and some people are very afraid. My mother is elderly and my step father has a weak chest prone to pneumonia. For him and a lot of others like him this could be terminal. Death is very much up close and personal. The Prime Minister has said we will lose many loved ones before their time. And as a society we ‘don’t do death’. Its something we prefer not to deal with, and when we do we throw a blanket of sentimentality over it as few really know what to make of death. Green fields, light, niceness – saccharine comfort that gets us through another funeral and then back into the usual world where death just doesn’t impact.

Then there is the conflicting science. Leave the armchair pundits for a while, and just read the scientists and immunologists and the SARS specialists and you find real disagreement among them about what we are dealing with and how best to deal with it. France, for example, has warned people not to take anti-inflammatory medicine such as Ibroprufen, while one researcher claims that the process where the virus enters the system is the same as that used by medicine used by diabetics among others to reduce blood pressure, which would explain why diabetics are among the highest risk groups. But neither of these are on the UK or Chinese or Singapore official responses, but they are scientific and they do make sense but there is no consensus and the information is not widely available.

All of this sort of information presses this crisis into our domestic space where we expect to feel safe. Suddenly we don’t even know if there will even be enough toilet paper. Its very basic, and fear breeds fear. This epidemic is really, really unknown and scientists are not on top of this thing scientifically. There is a lot of ifs, buts, maybes and that doesn’t make us feel very safe. In fact, it can make us feel very insecure indeed.

Looking at social media posts you can see that we all respond to type, to the ways we respond to other scary realities. Fear makes us even more ‘reactive’ and we hunker down into what feels most familiar, however unrealistic or appropriate it is to the problem we are facing. Acute situations reveal our deeper fault lines, the schemas out of which we deal with any crisis. The way in which our personalities have been formed in our childhood and those catastrophes that sometimes crash into our lives along the way all spring into action. We are not just dealing with a disease of the body, we are dealing with a situation that crashes into our mind and emotions, unleashing the demons that lurk there. Fear in a whole host of forms springs to life as much as the microbes in our blood system and we scramble to respond to what feels very threatening and de-stablising out of some very basic neurological pathways. And for those of us with very deep traumas our responses tend to be passionate and that can be very ‘infectious’ because if feels so convincing, even more reassuring when the people that really do have expertise are so unsure. Hence people get into long queues for toilet paper and we go into panic mode.

Does this help, knowing this? Well depends on your approach to knowing anything. Looking at social media posts we all react to this like we do to everything else. Those who want to blame someone do so, quick to find fault with ‘them’, especially politicians and especially politicians from opposing tribes. Lots of talk about coming together, but it hasn’t seemed to have penetrated the tribal mentality that is so deep in our public discourse. People manage to stay silent at best, and few are breaking ranks to show appreciation and support for those having to bear the enormous responsibility for taking these decisions with enormous implications for all of us, the politicians, the civil servants, the Establishment. It's easy to appreciate the doctors, nurses and others who are already high in our estimation and emotional register of ‘good people’. Empathy for the ‘other’, those who are not ‘our’ people is where compassion and empathy as a virtue seem to regularly fail in our society and its telling now. Without a more developed ability to reach beyond our tribes then solidarity and togetherness is all hot air.

Knowing as much as we can informs how we behave. Infection containment, controlling how fast it spreads, managing risks demands information and being informed. It is not about waiting to be told not to do something. We are not school children, but people with responsibility for our own lives and those of the people with whom we live. If the science is saying stay 2m apart then don’t stand close behind people in the supermarket queue. If the science says the disease spreads through touching with hands, then don’t just wash them, avoid touching door handles with your bare hands. If you know that people are panic buying hold back and buy responsibly from what is available, leaving some for others. We have a responsibility to apply what we know, not just run round in a mad panic. We have a duty to handle our fears, not ignore them but handle them, and to hold onto reality.

On that note, perhaps it's time to abandon the toilet paper hunt, stay indoors and binge watch Dad's Army for a little sanity.

Who is St Editha of Tamworth????

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 23:17:00 GMT

For my latest commission I need to do a bit of research to try and identify who the saint actually is whose icon I am trying to paint. Sometimes saints really are lost to us in all but name, but where possible it is important to try and be as tuned in as possible to the saint as a living person whose commitment to Christ was lived out with such luminosity. I thought people might find it interesting and iconographers in particular might find it helpful to see how you can sometimes mine information in order to dig a saint out of historical obscurity in order to shine more brightly among the acclaimed saints in a church.

The commission is for an icon of St Editha for the Catholic Church in the centre of Tamworth in Staffordshire. The ancient Anglican church in Tamworth is dedicated to her, but it is not clearly identifiable which St Editha this is.

Early Sources:

The earliest mention associating St Editha with TAMWORTH is the celebration of a Mass in her honour there in the 9th century. (Christine Smith, online article).

St Editha is mentioned as St. EALDGYTH in the SECGAN. This an 11th century Anglo- Saxon list of where English saints are known to be buried, and hence where their relics are to be found and venerated. Her relics are listed as being buried at POLESWORTH on the River ‘Oncer’ (now ‘Anker’). All of the identifiable saints on this list date to no later than the 9th century, so this is evidence to suggest that the St Editha of Polesworth is an early Anglo-Saxon saint.

But why would St Editha of Polesworth be the same as St Editha of Tamworth?

Geography:

Though Polesworth is in Warwickshire, and Tamworth in Staffordshire, they are actually neighbouring settlements . Polesworth is a neighbouring village to Tamworth, and was under the same feudal lord in the Norman period. Thus we can safely associate St Editha of Polesworth with Tamworth as being part of the same feudal district.

Polesworth was, it seems, a monastic foundation that was suppressed by the feudal Lord Marmion in the 12th century. He was also the Lord of neighbouring Tamworth castle. According to legend St. Editha, a former abbess of the monastery, appeared in a dream to remonstrate with him over the eviction of her nuns.

Conchubran of Ireland and Abbot Geoffrey of Burton

The main hagiographical source for her is in the “Life & Miracles of St Modwenna ” by Geoffrey, Abbot of nearby Burford in Satffordshire, 1114-50AD, the monastery where St Modwenna's relics were kept. When he took over the abbey he was concerned to compile a definitive text outlining her life, and apart from oral sources which he considered reliable, there was also one ancient text in which Abbot Geoffrey was certain St Modwenna was mentioned.

This was a "Life of St Monenna" ( sic ), an Irish noblewoman, abbess and saint, by Conchubran, an Irish monk. Geoffrey was somewhat critical of this source - “the style was displeasing and some parts of the book were, so to speak, a disorderly jumble” but he believed that the St Eadgyth who was a companion of St Monenna during her travels in England and on pilgrimage to Rome, was the same as his own St. Eadgyth (Editha) of Polesworth.

As the good abbot acknowledges he supplemented and altered Conchubran’s Life in the light of other sources and his own conjecture, thereby seeking to make sense of what even for him seems to have been places and events difficult to identify. As a result he makes some errors which make it very confusing for us, but with a little attention to detail, and allowing that to challenge the bigger picture, I think we can find a reasonable answer as to who this St Editha was.

The Tamworth Legend.

This is the legend that comes to us from Conchubran via elaborations by Abbot Geoffrey, which then becomes the source from which a series of Medieval compositions are subsequently derived, all of which make changes that then make it difficult to identify who is whom, and who did what and to locate that with any historical certainty. So, perhaps its best to outline the Legend, and then examine what seems to be reasonable historically to deduce from it.

At its core is Conchubran's story of how one nun, Ite (Editha), living with another, Osid (Osgyth), sent her to take a book to a third nun, Monenna (Modwenna), living a little distance from them. On the way she falls into a river and drowns. Three days later, after the saints had prayed, she was returned to them healed, and with the book intact.

Modwenna (I will use Geoffrey's form of the name from now on to save confusion) had previously healed an English king’s son, called Alfredus, when he visited her in Ireland. When she had to flee her own country, she came to the court of Alfredus’s father at Streneshalen seeking help. In gratitude the king allotted her a parcel of land on the edge of the Forest of Arderne where she founded her monastic cell with her companion Athea. The king entrusts his sister (at this stage an unnamed princess we later learn is called Ite (or ‘Ita’ or ‘Eda’, Conchubran alters the spelling throughout his text, but they are phonetically close enough to be one and the same as Editha) to her care and she enters as a novice.

Modwenna subsequently returns to Ireland leaving the others at Streneshalen, but when she returns on her way to Rome she takes them with her. On their return she stays with them for three years before she takes these two plus Ite’s sister Osid to a new location. Here they build two small enclosures with a chapel. Ite and Osid stay in one, Modwenna and Athea in the other. It is here that the miracle at the river occurs, the only narrated miracle of Conchubran’s compilation.

According to the legend Edith sends Osid with a book for Modwenna who is living a little distance away. On the way she falls into the swollen river and drowns. Three days later, after the prayers of the two saints, Osid rises from the dead, unharmed and with her book intact.

Subsequently the group expands to five with Lazar, and they build a church dedicated to St Andrew on a small island called ‘Andreseie’ which is opposite Burton in the middle of the River Trent. Ite and Osid then return to their original foundation.

Fragments of a holy life

The above narrative hangs together quite well, but in doing so a lot of additional information has been excluded which appears in later sources as well as in Abbot Geoffrey and Conchubran’s narratives. Those elements are those which try to identify these people with known personages of the times.

The conundrum that puzzled these chroniclers was which king was St Editha’s father. That her nephew was called ‘Alfredus’ immediately suggested King Alfred the Great. But it is no more than an assumption, with nothing in the text to remotely suggest that. Obviously it gives prestige to have the saint associated with such a giant of English history, but it has nothing more to commend it than that, and so it is best to jettison that notion at the outset.

Others suggested that she was the daughter of Edward the Elder, sister of King Aethelstan who had his court nearby in Tamworth, which they identified as the mysterious Streneshalen, that Conchubran said was where the king had a ‘villa’. His sister, who was unnamed in the early records, was married briefly to Sihtic, King of Dublin and York, and being quickly widowed she retired to a monastery, which realistically could well have been the foundation at Polworth given its proximity to the royal court at Tamworth.

However, a villa is hardly a palace, and suggests a ‘home away from home’ at a lesser but nonetheless significant centre. Geoffrey guessed at this being Polesworth, while others later still guess at Tolworth. However, Streanæshealh was the old name for Whitby , where St Hilda had her prestigious monastery. Given allowances for phonetical spellings, this would make sense as the narrative records that Modwenna and her companion Athea stay there for three years on her way back from a pilgrimage to Rome, more reasonable if it was a centre of spiritual rather than just temporal power. However, it was also closely associated with royalty, many of the nuns coming from noble families, as was its most famous abbess Hilda. Whitby is a much more likely location both because of the close similarity in the sound of the name, and that it was a place closely associated with royal power. It was ruined by the Vikings by 870AD and thus would push our characters back again towards the golden age of the evangelisation of the North, the time of Chad and Wilfrid and of Hilda in the 7th and 8th centuries.

In any case, the identifications with Aethelstan are late, no earlier than the 12th century, and there is one very substantial problem – Aethelstan was king in the 10th century, which would be precluded by the dates from the Secgan and the votive Mass mentioned above, as well as making any rendezvous with the Irish Saint Modwenna impossible as she dates from the 7th century. So, it seems best to also put that assumption to one side.

So what does seem verifiable?

Examining the story as retold by Conchubran, Geoffrey saw clear typographical evidence of a match between this 7th century saint and the saint whose relics were held in his monastery in Burton, which still holds up to examination today.

The King gives St Modwenna land at the edge of an ‘Arderne Forest’. Polesworth is on the edge of The Forest of Arden, as it was known in Geoffrey’s time. A forest was a ‘wild place’ and so associated with those doing battle with the devil in the desert after the example of Christ, which applies to one of the core aspirations of monastics. Irish monasticism was known for its love of nature and its incredible dedication to the most arduous demands of extreme monastic life. The narrative speaks of St Modwenna and a very few companions, and when the number increases to five they separate into two groups even if located in close proximity, suggesting that these were not coenobites but anchorites seeking to live in isolation. In time many such holy mothers attracted a number of disciples and these formed regular monasteries. This has been a regular pattern since the very earliest times.
The river at Polesworth is called the River Anker, in Geoffrey’s time the 'Anchora’ or ‘Nunnepool’. ‘Anchorite’ is the name for a hermit, ‘nunne’ is obvious in its monastic association. It suggests that something of significance took place for the river to be named after the nuns or anchorites who lived there.
The nuns build a church at ‘Scalecliff’ near Burford which Geoffrey translates as Mons Calvus, today known as Scalpcliff opposite Bourton.
They build another chapel on the island which Conchubran calls ‘Andreseie’. In Geoffrey’s time there was an island in the middle of the River Trent called ‘Andressey’.

So, the account seems to be rooted in actual history rather than religious imagination, located with real places that weren't all known to the writers. So, working on that assumption, we can tentatively push to assume that the fundamentals of the story about St Modwenna correct, that she is an Irish saint, and of royal stock, an anchoress, maybe having founded a number of small communities around her in Ireland. There seems to have been a pattern of such royal females in Ireland around this time, and we know from St Bede and other Chroniclers that it was a practice among English royal families too.

Northumberland is where Whitby, Streanæshealh, is found and the royal family of the 7th century followed the same pattern in this as their Irish kin. This was a place of intense spiritual life and culture, a place where secular and religious converged at the Synod of Whitby, and where royal princesses were nuns and rose to become abbesses and saints. It was a place of coming and going from far across Europe, and the meeting point between Irish and Continental Christianity.

The description of Modwenna as a royal monastic on pilgrimage to Rome stopping off at such a place for a significant period of time would make perfect sense. Her missions to Polesworth and Burford and the attempts to establish small hermitages would also fit in with the expansion of monastic missions from these spiritual centers across the north of England, spearheaded by such figures and Chad and Wilfrid. It was exactly what the spiritually fervent were doing and encouraged to do by the Church.

However, can we find any historically verifiable people who can help turn a possible to a probable?

What for example of the figure named Alfred, which the medieval scholars were so quick to assume was the great Alfredus from two centuries after St Modwenna? There is another Alfred(Ealhfrith), the son of Oswy. His mother was an Irish princess, and he spent quite a time in exile in the Dal Riata which spanned western Scotland and north east Ireland. It would explain why this young man or boy was in Ireland and in need of the help of St Modwenna, and why he was so deeply devout and steeped in the ways of the Irish Church as Bede tells us he was. It would also explain why she would, in turn, flee to that kingdom when in danger herself.

It was also Oswy who called the Synod at Whitby in part at the instigation of Alfred, which establishes a close royal association with Streanæshealh which is an essential element in the Conchubran story. In fact Oswy 's daughter was a nun there and rose to become both the abbess and a saint. It would therefore be far from fanciful to suggest that another close, female member of that royal family would be both inspired by and entrusted to this saintly and courageous Irish cousin. And much of the energy for which stemmed from Whitby was an essential impetus is the spread of monastic Christianity across the north.

Making a Connection

There is also a St Eadgyth of Aylesbury, also known as Eadridus. From the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Secgan she is said to have been the daughter of Penda of Mercia, one of her sisters was Cyneburh, who was married to Alfrith in 653 according to Bede, the very same Alfred we have been discussing above. This marriage was contingent on Penda converting to Christianity. He accepted this and at that point an evangelisation of Mercians began.

Relations between the Mercians and the Northumbrians were volatile and often violent during this period, but as this attempt at a royal matrimonial alliance illustrates, attempts at co-existence were also strong, moves which intimately concerned the Christianization of the peoples of these regions. We have noted how fervent and devout the House of Oswiu was and how important this was as a domestic policy under successive kings.

So, perhaps St Editha is Alfred’s sister-in-law, rather than his sister, an easy confusion that an oral tradition could make. It would also explain why the small group decided to move to the region near Tamworth and the Forest of Arden, on land which the King had given. This was part of Mercia, so it would be the princess’ father, Penda who gave her the land, and part of the post-matrimonial rapprochement between the two royal familes, and part of the agreement to convert the Mercians.

St. Edith of Aylesbury is also said to have another sister, Wilburga who married Frithuwold of Chertsey, and their daugher was...St Osyth who, it was said, grew up in the care of her maternal aunts. This corresponds with the Osid who was the woman raised from death in the river, who had been added to St Editha (her aunt) and St Modwenna’s monastic group immediately prior to the move to Polesworth, and thus possibly part of the wider post-marital arrangements.

Working from these guesses, we can summarise the life of St Editha as follows:

Born into the royal Mercian household as a daughter of King Penda, Princess Editha had entered the monastery at Whitby alongside other English noblewomen, perhaps under the influence or at the direction of St Modwenna but certainly her eventual companion. Despite her father’s paganism, like her sisters she was a Christian and devout.

As part of the rapprochement between Penda and Oswy she is given a parcel of land by her father King Penda near Tamworth, in what is now Polesworth, to found a monastic settlement. This is likely to have been a small community of semi-hermits, with Editha living with her sister Osyth. A further foundation is then made at Burton led by Modwenna. Editha returns to Polesworth where she is the superior. It is there that she is buried, her cult being a local one that is centred on Tamworth which later becomes the seat of the Royal Court.

Quite possibly the association of the Royal Court with the renowned local and royal saint would have been seen as important. It would be quite possible that later royals associated with St Editha were in fact closely aligned with her cult and her monastic foundation, for example as a refuge for widowed princesses, as in the sister of King Aethelstan.

I don't think we can push much further than this in identifying exactly which member of the Northumbrian royal family Editha is, but I think it at least gives us some clues as to the sort of person she was, her background and the sort of Christian life she led. She was not a member of vast community but of a small semi-hermit community, inspired by and trained in the harsh asceticism of the Irish Church, living in demanding conditions and in a time of uncertainty, part of the deeper political upheavals between Northumbria where she was born and the Kingdom of Mercia to which she came as a missionary. She was a pilgrim to Rome, with the fervour to endure the arduous trials of such a journey. She was a scholar, for there were books in her community however small it might be, and this would not be surprising given that she lived just as the Golden Age of Northumbrian culture was beginning. She was a person of sufficient faith that miracles were associated with her in her lifetime, and inspired other women to join her over time so as to establish a community strong enough to endure into the Norman age. She was also a humble woman, who has not incised her name in the annals of history other than in a modest and hidden way, but bore witness in her own corner of the Kingdom enough that her memory lived on among her neighbours for centuries to come. She was a saint and the friend and the companion of saints, born into the nobility but choosing to life in a harsh and diminished state, a woman of faith in a time when paganism was in retreat and the light of the Gospel was reaching out powerfully into every corner of our country, re-shaping its culture and uniting the nation with a new vision about what it meant to be human made in the image and likeness of God, living on the edge of eternity.

The Tamworth Cross

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 11:25:39 GMT

New Icon of the Holy Cross for the sanctuary of Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Tamworth

The Tamworth Cross

The Mystery of our salvation is deeper than any ocean, and now words or images can even begin to exhaust its meaning. No symbol embodies this Mystery more than the Cross, already a symbol when Christ mounted it and made it the place of the ultimate sacrifice that would bring about the reconciliation between humanity and the God from whom humanity had wandered so far.

The Tamworth Cross has been designed to hang above the altar in the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart, and so the emphasis in the design has been the Mercy of God. There are two explicit references to the Mystery of the Sacred Heart, at the top and the bottom panels, and to the celebration of the heavenly liturgy which is echoed on the celebration at the altar below, in the side panels.

Above Christ is the Blessed Virgin who presents to us the Sacred Heart (please note note this is not the Mary’s Immaculate Heart). With a sorrowful demeanour, the Mother of Sorrows invites us to see the ultimate manifestation of Divine Love for us in the self-offering as Christ who has, through her, become one with us and so able to be the High Priest who can offer himself truly on our behalf and yet as true God can stand before the Father as the Perfect Offering, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Either side of the Sacred Heart of Jesus are two seraphim, mystic beings that worship ceaselessly before the Throne of the Most High. According to Teilhard de Chardin these fiery beings waft the boundless energies of God’s Divine Love to the furthest corners of the Creation. Thus what is offered to God on the Cross is shared back to us in the form of God’s Divine Mercy that brings forgiveness and peace.

In the readings for the Mass of the Sacred Heart the Gospel tells the parable of the lost sheep. And so the skull of Adam, our first ancestor and who’s sin led to humanity being banished from Paradise and lost in the wilderness, is replaced by the Lost Sheep with his injured leg, who looks longingly at the Lord hanging above him.

According to an ancient homily for Holy Saturday Jesus “goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.” Thus the link has been there since the earliest times between Adam, his death, and the parable of the Lost Sheep. Christ’s death is the work of a loving and merciful God who seeks out the lost and brings them new life.

Traditionally Golgotha, literally the ‘place of the skull’, is associated with the tomb of Adam, and St Jerome attests to the early belief that Adam was buried close to the place of Crucifixion. Adam is our ‘first parent’ and thus represents all his descendants, who like him have found their way to the grave where death has swallowed them up. Thus in this icon of the Cross the reference to the Lost Sheep is made explicit, the image of the sheep placed beneath the Cross in the place usually reserved for Adam’s skull. Here, in death, all of us wait as lost sheep to be rescued and delivered from the clutches of hell.

Meanwhile on the extremities of the arms of the Cross we see two angels, both clothed in heavenly blues and greens. They carry things used during the Liturgy - a thurible and a candle, just as the altar servers do during a solemn Mass. The worship we offer on earth around the altar is merely a shadow of what is being offered in heaven continually. The altar servers and the priest are shadowing the heavenly realities and enabling the worshippers who gather with then to enter into its Mystery. Before the Cross angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim bow down in awe at the sheer Beauty if Christ’s offering of pure Love, at the dignity which he brings to all human beings as the highest of created beings made in God’s image and likeness, as the priests of creation. Before the Cross all heaven and earth must bow down and worship, overwhelmed by the sheer height and depth of God’s love.

In the midst of all of this stands Christ on the Cross. He is almost walking off the Cross. He offers Himself freely. He is bowed with sorrow but not defeated by death. His face is peaceful and not deranged, agonised but not blood-spattered. We are being shown Christ reigning from the tree, his deeper peace at giving himself completely over to the will of His Father even as his body is twisted and tormented. We are being invited to look deeper, to see beyond the blood and gore, beyond the ravings of the guards and the torment of the crowd and to gaze into the Heart of Christ as He who is without sins hangs in self-offering for us.

He bears the wounds made by the nails and the lance but is not reduced to a tortured corpse. Rather he is the King of Kings, the King of Glory. His royal status is proclaimed as King of the Jews by the notice pinned to the top of the Cross by order of the Roman governor, and his status as King of Kings by the golden and bejewelled girdle that holds his loincloth in place. This is found on many Anglo-Saxon and early English crucifixes and is especially appropriate as Tamworth was the capital of one of the kingdoms of that period. The loincloth is arranged as though torn and pouring out, just as the curtain in the Temple was torn in two as Christ poured out His life in death.

Psalm 80 is an excellent exposition of this depiction of the Cross, with many of its themes being represented within it. This makes a neat Biblical commentary on what is shown here on the Tamworth Cross.

The psalm is a cry from the lost: ‘God of hosts bring us back’. It is a plea for salvation, ‘let your face shine on us and we shall be saved’. What more fitting set of words for anyone who comes before the Cross and gazes up at the face of the Saviour?

If we set lines of the psalm alongside verses from the Passion, we see that the psalm describes how the One on the Cross has taken on himself the condition of the lost:

‘How long will you from on your people’s plea?’

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mk. 15:34)

‘You have fed them with tears for their bread , and abundance of tears for their drink’.

‘This cup is the new covenant of my blood which will be poured out for you’. (Lk22:20)

‘You have made us the taunt of our neighbours’.

‘As for the leaders they jeered at him… the soldiers mocked him too… one of the criminals hanging there abused him.” (Lk 23:35f)

In the psalm reference is made to God’s People being like a vine which has ‘stretched out its shoots’ just as Christ here stretches out his arms on arms of the Cross which is here budding into life, only to be ravaged, being ‘plucked by all who pass by’. The Cross is here shown as a vine bursting into foliage, as the Tree of Life which stands in the heart of the New Jerusalem and which once stood at the heart of the Garden of Eden (Rev.22:1-2), whose leaves are medicinal and for healing (Ez.47:1ff). The place of the fall becomes the place of healing and redemption.

The psalmist then returns to his theme of the Face of God, but this time he laments, ‘may they perish at the frown of your face’. In the Tamworth Cross Christ is shown with a deep frown, but not of judgement but suffering with and on behalf of his tormentors. For in the Cross Christ shows God’s love even for His enemies. He comes not to condemn but to have mercy and his frown is as he takes the place of his enemies out of love for them who ‘do not know what they are doing’. His wrath is not shown to them, but to the real enemy - death itself.

The psalmist concludes: ‘May your hand be on the man you have chosen, the man you have given your strength.” Here he seems to acknowledge that the Chosen People are to be redeemed by the Chosen One, and that He will achieve their deliverance by the strength which the Lord will give Him. Here on the Tamworth Cross Jesus is shown with a certain strength, seeming to almost walk from the Cross as He seeks to ‘trample on death by death’. It is the strength of the meek and lowly, the One who has totally embraced His Father’s will and purpose even at the total cost to Himself.

And the psalmist concludes, ‘And we shall never forsake you again: give us life that we may call upon your name’ a fitting refrain for the response of those who await deliverance as the sons and daughters of Adam from the desolation of death.

On the edge...

Sun, 31 Mar 2019 11:29:21 GMT

Chaos, civilisation and love

The icon I painted above, is of Our Lady and the Patron saints of Europe, and Blessed John Henry Newman. It was a gift to the then Anglican Bishop of Europe, Geoffrey Rowell. It shows the Mother of God enthroned, herself a throne for her Son the Saviour Jesus Christ, within a mandorla of Divine Light. Around the throne gather the patron saints of Europe who in various ways bore testimony to the civilisation of love which Jesus came to establish among the peoples of the earth. Behind stands a church, a symbol of the People of God who gather as the redeemed in the House of Faith. The church is placed in a Garden, the new Paradise to which our sojourn on earth is directed and from which point the struggles and joys of life make sense.

In the all consuming cacophany of Brexit it is easy to loose perspective. Belonging to Europe is more than being a part of the EU, yet being part of the EU is something of a progression of the deeper current of development rooted in the evangelisation of the peoples of Europe. Brexit has reduced our Parliament to a babbling, incoherent and lost political dystopia where the issues are subsumed with plays for petty party advantage, a sounding box for hard core ideologues, and a playpen for the political class which has no idea where it is heading let alone supposedly leading us to. In other words, it is chaos.

Chaos is the antithesis of civilisation and the death knell of love. Chaos makes us afraid as we face annihilation, death, confusion, darkness. This was the situation western and northern Europe faced in the aftermath of the collapse of Roman power. The ravages of tribal marauding bands, Viking raids, and the rise of an ever warring feudal oligarchy plunged Europe into chaos. Some have even called it the Dark Ages. This imploding, segregated and violent time was challenged by the establishment and growth of the Christian Church. It gradually re-shaped this fragmenting Continent into a new, unified identity based around the Gospels, the Sacraments and the life of the Church.

The patron saints of Europe all testify to this deep movement towards civilisation, towards beauty, integrity and vitality. From Benedict and his movement of Benedictines to Benedicta of the Cross and her testimony in the midst of Nazism, theirs have been voices which have called and which the great peoples of Europe have responded and within which found their own particular greatness. In England it was the Benedictines which shaped generations of people around the vision of a world to come which transcended the petty realities of day to day life, which raised up vast public edifices of incredible beauty and which educated rich and poor alike. The values of Christ underpin the English process of law and the assertion of human rights embodied in such things as the Magna Carta.

However, these were elements of a deeper, wider movement of civilisation which pulled all of Europe towards a sense of unity and common purpose, all of which presaged an era of peace. Common ideals, shared goals, a sense of an identity as a Christian that transcended national or tribal bonds created open channels through which not just trade but also learning, art, architecture, music and the whole stuff of a flourishing humanity was able to flow creatively. While medieval Europe began as a blood drenched patchwork of tribes it rose to become a beacon of democracy, human rights and aspirations not of conquest but of peace between peoples. The EU is a fruit of such aspirations, however imperfect it might be.

Europe transitioned from being a series of conquering imperial powers to being a conglomeration of nations, which some wish to propel into a new super state. That is a shame, because rather than a unity in diversity, one which enables the richness of difference to flourish it suggests conformism and a new sort of European nationalism. Fortress Europe as some call it. The stifling of national identities and the imposition of this new European identity was I think a real political failure and it is largely to blame for the wide ranging rise of an ugly, xenophobic sort of populism. The genius of Christ inspired unity is that each person and group finds its own identity deepened, not extinguished. Crush that for a new dominant identity and you burst the movement apart, and back into chaos. It then is fertile ground for the likes of populist characters such as Boris Johnson who can make hay even while the rain pours.

The Brexit debate desperately needs to get re-grounded in the common European civilisation to which we belong not by virtue of any treaty but by virtue of our history and the beliefs we hold. If political discourse was fermented out of common grounding, if it was the fruit of re-engaging with the primal sources of our identity then a way forward that could command common respect should just be possible. May the saints of Europe pray for us!