Changing the story

Richard Pithouse, reflecting on the recent riots in England…

…The young people contained in decaying council estates are bombarded by relentless corporate propaganda conflating access to consumer goods with meaning, beauty and dignity. Cameron likes to say that there are communities in England that are broken. But it is a society that tells young people that they have to consume to live with dignity but denies them work or the money to consume that is broken.

In the age of enclosure, rioters tore down fences. In the age of mechanisation, rioters smashed machines. Its hardly surprising that in the age of consumerism some people should leave their grim and fearful council estates, with their stairwells littered with needles and rank with the stench of urine, to, for a night or two, occupy, smash and loot the temples of consumerism…

They have seized public space, desecrated the temples of consumerism, a religion from which they are structurally barred from full inclusion, and affirmed their existence in a society that holds them in contempt and insists that they keep to their place.

There has, to be sure, been vile and tragic behaviour amidst the upheaval. And while vile acts must always be resolutely opposed we should recall that in a riot, an event that is spectacularly outside of the norm, every perverse act is hyper visible and will be exploited to stand in for and to condemn the whole. In the everyday passing of time the structural vileness of society… is masked as normal and remains largely invisible.

from The Return of the English Riot

by Richard Pithouse

The over arching meta-narrative of consumerism – a meta-narrative we are not suspicious of, despite what postmodernism would have us believe – is not serving us well. Coupled with a ‘do whatever is right for you’ approach to morality, it isn’t working at all. Whether you are spinning corporate propaganda to convince a fifteen-year-old that new trainers are a matter of life and death, or whether you are a fifteen-year-old who believes you must satisfy your own desire for new trainers no matter the cost – what feels right to you may cause untold grief and heartache for someone else. Unfortunately, a society that privatises morality has no framework to address these issues.

What is needed is not an increase in wealth, or structural social changes so that the poor can participate in the religion of consumerism. What is needed is a change of religion.

People need to know they are valuable, not on the basis of what they own, or what they do, but on the basis of their humanity. Meaning, dignity and beauty are their birthright, not something they have to purchase on the way.

People need to know that it is possible to move from devastation and despair, through to peace and hope.

People need to know that mercy and forgiveness and grace could swallow up the whole world’s evil, if only we let them.

People need to know they are so loved, that God didn’t even spare His only Son, but sent Him to the cross and raised Him from the dead so they could be in a relationship with Him.

People need to know your story church.Tell it,  live it out. Never has it been more necessary.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

Today the last military leader wanted for war crimes during the Bosnian War of 1991-1995 was arrested.

On May 27, 1992, during the siege of Sarajevo, 22 people queued for bread, anxious to feed their families from one of the only working bakeries  left in the city. A shell hit the bakery and all 22 people were killed.

Observing the horror from a few feet away was Vedran Smailovic, principle cellist of the Sarajevo Opera. Grief-stricken at the way his city and its people were being torn apart, Smailovic responded in the most profound, and maybe only, way he knew how. He dressed in his formal concert attire, took his cello, sat outside what was the bakery and began to play Albioni’s Adagio in G minor, in mourning for his people.

He played there for 22 days, one day to remember each of the dead.

Over the next two years, Smailovic played his cello on the streets of Sarajevo, often playing for free at funerals, despite the fact that these were targets for Serbian snipers.

“What is the good of playing music in the middle of a war zone?” you ask.

Sometimes music is the only way left to respond, because some things are so terrifying and horrific that there are no words for them. Music is the only thing that can seep in between the brokenness and somehow give it an expression. There is no better place to articulate grief, loss and lament than in the middle of a war. There is no place where reminders of beauty, hope and grace are more desperately needed.

Moved by his story, English composer, David Wilde, wrote a piece for unaccompanied cello in Vedran’s honour, entitled “The Cellist of Sarajevo.” Yo Yo Ma played it at the International Cello Festival in 1994.

Paul Sullivan describes the performance this way:

When he had finished, Ma remained bent over his cello, his bow resting on the strings. No one in the hall moved or made a sound for a long time. It was as though we had just witnessed that horrifying massacre ourselves.

Finally, Ma looked out across the audience, and stretched out  his hand, beckoning someone to come to the stage. An indescribable electric shock swept over us as we realised who it was: Vedran Smailovic: the cellist of Sarajevo.

Smailovic rose from his seat and walked down the aisle as Ma left the stage to meet him. They flung their arms around each other in an exuberant embrace.  Everyone in the hall errupted in a chaotic, emotional frenzy – clapping, shouting and cheering.

At the centre of it all stood these two men, hugging and crying unashamedly…

We were all stripped down to our starkest, deepest humanity at encountering this man who shook his cello in the face of bombs, death and ruin, defying them all.

Everyday Greatness.

 

The Beauty-Salvation Myth

Maybe you’ve seen the Dove Evolutions video before. The first time I watched it with a bunch of teenage girls, there was a split second of shocked silence at the end of the clip. Then outrage as they literally started to yell: ‘We’ve been lied to!’ All talking at once, they figured out that the images they had been comparing themselves to in magazines weren’t even real women.

The second video, 34x25x36, I saw on Jamie Smith’s blog. It’s a short film made in a mannequin factory. At the beginning, the designer says:

‘the ideal body doesn’t exist – WE make the ideal body.’

He later describes that the idea of a mannequin is to stir up adrenaline in the buyer to say, “hmmm… I could look like that.”

The designer goes on to talk about the evolution of mannequin production, and how it is a continuation of Renaissance French religious art, where a particular saint was fashioned out of wood or wax to help people envision what they might be like.

In a similar way, he says, ‘we replicate what the perfect girl is… you could see it as worshipping, giving people something to aim for.’

‘Do we worship perfect women?’ he asks.

He explains that in religion, the ideal to aim for is salvation, and again, asks an astute question:

‘What is our current salvation as a society?’

‘Oh, beauty is only skin deep,’ we say. But we consume these images every single day. ‘It’s playing with people’s minds of what their ideal is,’ says the mannequin designer.

Never have our minds been so screwed up in relation to what we look like.

Subconsciously, we are living the narrative that the ‘good life’ is looking like that girl, or being with that girl; that girl, who has been so enhanced and edited that she is literally unreal.  We are looking for salvation in something that doesn’t even exist.

I wonder what would have happened if the French religious iconographers would have taken seriously the command to ‘beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female’ (Deut. 4:16). I wonder what would happen if we took it seriously?

The depth of the problem was underscored for me by my own reaction to 34x25x36. I am a rational, well-educated, grown woman. I know these images are unreal, and looking like them won’t make me happier or more fulfilled. I have a healthy relationship with my own appearance. And yet, honestly, one of the first things I thought when I saw this the film? ‘I wonder if we have a tape measure in the house? I wonder what my proportions are? How far away am I from the ideal woman? Do I measure up?”

And then I got mad.

WHO DECIDES ALL THIS ANYWAY?! Who decides what this ideal is? Who decides what the perfect proportions are, and what we think of as beautiful?

Our society’s current beauty-salvation myth is destroying us.  It causes women to wage war against their own bodies in order to live up to an impossible, unattainable ideal of perfection. It causes us to produce and consume in ways that are detrimental to the planet and its poorest inhabitants. It teaches us to worship idols and look for salvation somewhere it can never be found.

Perhaps its time we start teaching an alternative story about beauty?

Why I am not a theologian

I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

Haruki Murakami,

South of the Border, West of the Sun

These lines from a story have haunted me lately. They seem to ring true in so many ways. People do inflict wounds on people they care about. I know, I have done it. And doesn’t it sometimes feel like your wounds will never heal? Your heart is broken in the same place so often. You are in pieces, and don’t think those stress fractures inside can ever be knit together. You have stopped imagining a time when you will feel whole again. I know, I have felt that.

The despair in this story is tangible. But as I read it, I was reminded that this is not the only story I have read. I know other stories about other people, like this one:

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—
to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of joy
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called mighty oaks,
a planting of the LORD
for the display of his splendor.

They will rebuild the ancient ruins
and restore the places long devastated;
they will renew the ruined cities
that have been devastated for generations

Isaiah 61:1-4

This is why I’m not a theologian. I don’t have clever answers about God, or how the universe works. I am not skilled in theological debate and cannot answer questions greater minds than mine have grappled with in the past. I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, or why good things happen to bad people.

But I can tell stories…

I write to remember that there is more than one story. That you and me, we are not limited, forever destined to hurt people as we try in vain to stem the flow of blood from our own gaping wounds.

There are other stories, other authors, other narrators, other ways of seeing and being in the world. There are stories of healing and grace and forgiveness. Beauty does grow up out of ashes, joy does come in the morning. There is hope of a steadfast love that never ceases, never leaves or forsakes. There are stories that end well, where the people are comforted, the land is healed, the King returns for His bride and the Kingdom is restored.

There is more than one story. The choice is, which one do I read? Which one do I tell myself and the people around me? Which one is my story?

“And they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony…”