A FINNISH EASTER - The Tablet, 15 April 2006

Faith, culture and popular custom interact in intriguing ways in a Nordic celebration of the events of Holy Week



In Finnish one of the many different words for snow is karstanne. It’s a spring snow with a crust hard enough to support a man and which barely yields to his footprint. Tonight in central Finland hundreds of people will trudge through the frost and snow to St Nicholas’ Orthodox Cathedral in Kuopio for the Easter Vigil.

Members of Finland’s sixty thousand strong Orthodox church celebrate Easter according to the Western calendar (and not next weekend, as will other Orthodox Christians). After midnight, as St Nicholas’ fills with light and celebration, the congregation will exchange the age-old greeting Kristus on noussut, totisesti Kristus on noussut, (Christ is risen. Indeed He is risen.). After a four-hour service some will break their Lenten fast with the traditional Finnish Easter delicacy Mämmi made from rye flour and malt, served with a dollop of rich cream.

In Finland, faith, culture and popular custom interact in unexpected ways with evocations of the Easter story going hand in hand with folk tradition. This far north, willow twigs, garnished with feathers, or crepe shaped into flowers, were used in place of palms at last Sunday’s Eucharist. Afterwards, the children dressed as witches, rather like our Halloween, and made trick-or-treat calls on neighbours, tapping them with their ‘palms’, and reciting their begging rhyme: virvon varvon tuoreeks terveek, tulevaks, vuodeks……….

Part of Orthodox Christianity’s success here is that it went with the grain of native tradition and kept memory alive. After the reformation, the Lutheran Church, to which most Finns belong, condemned the old customs and many were lost. But they survived in areas where there were Orthodox clergy, and it is to them, in part, that Finland owes the survival of its national epic, the Kalevala. This mythological account of creation and of ancient warriors (with fleeting references to the Christian story) would have perished had not the Orthodox clergy encouraged the rune singers, who passed its verses from generation to generation until they were eventually written down in the nineteenth century. Unlike the Lutherans, the Orthodox priests did not see the old stories as a threat to their parishioners’ souls.

Even today Orthodoxism mines a deep seam into Finland’s rich subconscious. Its practice is public and passionate, in contrast to Lutheranism’s relative austerity. Both are state churches, with each tradition in a sense, the other’s shadow. Despite this, both come together in many common causes and in Kuopio they co-sponsor the city’s open-air Passion Play that has been performed in the Bishop’s Park just across the road from the Orthodox Cathedral every night in Holy Week.

It all began when Father Elias Huurinainen of the small Orthodox parish of Iisalmi, sixty miles to the north, devised a Via Dolorosa to heighten the drama of Holy Week for his congregation. While it was a pastoral success, attracting many visitors, it was too expensive for a small community. Now the play is performed instead in Kuopio, where hundreds of people crowded the city centre every night this week to watch a cast of more than a hundred local people re-enact the Easter story. In an almost Mediterranean spectacle the cast paraded through the icy streets downhill from the Lutheran Cathedral to the Bishop’s Park with an advance party of Roman centurions followed by jugglers, prostitutes, flame-throwers, moneychangers, and temple-dancers. “Welcome to Jerusalem”, they shout at passers-by. At the city gates, a wrathful Jesus stops this slightly surreal carnival in its tracks.

By now it’s ten o’clock at night and freezing, and the audience huddles in its seats wrapped in blankets. Akseli Pesa, the young actor cast as Jesus speaks – declaims, more like - his lines into a bitter east wind from Lake Kallevesi nearby (this is nothing special, he tells me; he is well used to performing in temperatures of eighteen degrees below freezing. It adds to the challenge, he says). This is a village play, following closely the text of St Mark’s Gospel. It has few pretensions, making its impact where it strives least for it. As Jesus breaks bread at the Last Supper, there is a sudden flurry of snow as a pale moon breaks through the clouds. No stage director could contrive such dramatic effect.

In the crowd I met Archbishop Leo, the Orthodox Primate of All Finland. He’s pleased with the play and at how it has set the scene for his Easter liturgy. “We Orthodox are a demonstrative people”, he told me. “Our services are also like plays – with great dramatic heights that congregations can relate to. And when we celebrate, we do it thoroughly. Easter is our most joyful time; it is something we want to share this with everybody.” (A contemporary footnote to the passion of Orthodox celebration; Minna Jaakkola of the Finnish Orthodox Museum told me how lipstick smudges from repeated kissing was causing serious damage to icons. It’s a big challenge to conservationists).

On the lake, just a few hundred yards away, the ice is still several feet deep. The change of season, any day now, will be sudden and dramatic. And as the snow and ice melt, the ground will crack open and blossom in a frenzy of growth. In medieval Finland, they hymned the onset of spring. The Piae Cantiones is a collection of Finnish sacred music published in the sixteenth century, one of the few windows on the country’s Catholic culture before the reformation. One set of verses, which celebrated the spring, linked it with Christ’s resurrection:

Tempus adest floridum, surgent namque flores
Vernales in omnibus, imitantur mores
Hoc quod frigus laeserat, reparant calores
Cernimus hoc fieri, per multos labores.

A time to grow,
As the good earth flowers again,
Its promise renewed.
A time to heal,
As the gentle heat soothes
the winter’s ravages,
And a time to toil.

Living alongside their Orthodox neighbours and their highly developed sacramentality, Finnish Lutherans have been encouraged to renew contact with their own roots in medieval Catholicism. In the absence of a strong contemporary Catholic culture in the country, they’ve drawn inspiration from Orthodox pieties, from the folk customs of Palm Sunday to the richness of the Easter Vigil. The Orthodox Easter Troparion (Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life) is also recited in Lutheran Churches. Small wonder then that the Lutheran Bishop of Helsinki suggested recently that Finland had the world’s most Orthodox Lutherans and the world’s most Lutheran Orthodox Christians.

Brendan McCarthy was a guest of the Finnish Tourist Board. http://www.kuopioinfo.fi/english/ for details of Kuopio’s Passion Play

Northern Light (from The Tablet, 4 September 2005)

Ilomantsi in Finland, just a few miles from the border with Russia, is the most easterly town in the European Union. This is Karelia, where two cultures taper across each other with land and soundscapes almost as suggestive of Stravinsky as of Sibelius. Sixty thousand Finns are Orthodox Christians - their church has established status along with the Lutherans - and Karelia is where most of them live.

As I arrive in Ilomantsi, bells clamour noisily across lake and forest on the feast of Saint Elias, patron of the local parish, and a procession is forming at the church porch. Behind a cross-bearer from the Finnish army, children from the village carry icons from the sanctuary, while young conscript soldiers form a guard of honour for the clergy and the Bishop of Oulu, Metropolitan Panteleimon, who is there to preside over the celebrations or praasnikka. It reminds me of my Irish childhood, of pattern days and visits to holy wells, and of the Irish army dipping the national flag to the Blessed Sacrament at the Corpus Christi procession.

Several hundred people wait outside the church, young and old, many of the women wearing the cotton feresi, Karelian folk dress, today in festive red. In the ambiguous light of a northern summer – this close to the Arctic Circle it’s almost never dark at the time of year - the congregation walks in procession along a narrow track to Ilomantsi Lake. Priests and choir chant in polyphony, their voices rising and falling on the morning breeze. Then on a wooded slope, the people gather about, as the bishop stands at the lake’s edge and blesses the waters.



In what is often thought of as a secular culture this is a real surprise. While the scene is almost more Russian than Nordic, there have been Orthodox Christians in Finland for almost a thousand years. The tradition was strongest in the nineteenth century, when Russia was the governing power and the country became for a time part of the diocese of St Petersburg. But even then there was a distinctly Finnish dimension, with the liturgy celebrated in Finnish and the parish clergy required to know the language. The decisive break with Russian Orthodoxy came with the 1917 revolution and the achievement of Finnish independence. It was compounded after World War II when Finland lost much of Karelia to the Soviet Union. Most members of the Orthodox Church in Karelia were evacuated – as many as 70 per cent – and it lost nearly all its property. Monasteries in areas now occupied by the USSR were re-founded at new settlements in Finland.

When the monks and nuns fled west, they re-established themselves near the town of Heinävesi. The nuns at Lintula Convent have been there since 1946. The Russian-speaking founders have been succeeded by a new generation of Finnish sisters and the community is now 16 strong. Sister Christadoule first visited Lintula when she was a teenager, her sense of vocation awoken when she sheltered on a cold day in the Orthodox Cathedral in the city of Kuopio as Vespers were being sung. She came from a Lutheran background and her story is not unique. Of the four Finnish Orthodox bishops, Sr Christedoule told me, three were former Lutherans, two of them former Lutheran priests.

Sr Christadoule’s first steps were not easy “There were old Russian nuns and it was very hard for a Finnish girl to join the convent. Instead Archbishop Paul suggested that I go to Greece where I joined a religious order.” In Greece she studied classical philology and she has now translated many of the Orthodox spiritual classics from Ancient Greek to Finnish.

The nuns at Lintula survive economically by making liturgical candles (but only in summer – it’s impossible in the sub-zero winter temperatures). The ethos is decidedly Scandinavian. “There is more democracy than when most of the sisters were Russian”, Sister Christadoule told me, “the abbess does not give orders and we discuss things.” The sisters are strongly ecumenical: there have been exchange visits with Catholic convents (Finland’s 8000 Catholics live mostly in Helsinki and the southern Finnish cities), while next month a delegation from Lintula will travel to Grottaferrata in Italy, the Eastern rite monastery in union with Rome, for celebrations of its thousandth anniversary.

At nearby Valamo Monastery there is a community of twelve monks. Their predecessors were evacuated by the Finnish army at the start of World War II. Valamo prides itself on being a window on Orthodoxy for the Western world and it also has a culture of ecumenism (in 1998 it hosted the European Catholic Bishops’ Conference). As at Lintula, the community is now essentially Finnish – the last Russian monk died in 1983. One monk, Fr Vladimir, who is an iconographer, explained his community’s sense of an interrupted tradition. “Our problem is that we do not have an older generation that we can look to for example. I refer to us as ‘book monks’, that is to say that we reconstruct our tradition from the literature: we read the books, we do our best. Hopefully a generation will look to us in time saying that there is something about our witness that draws us to God. When that happens, Valamo will grow again.”

The implied pessimism may be overdone. The real crisis was in the 1970s when the monastery almost closed, but a decision to try to attract tourists has paid dividends. The monks now run a hotel, and adult education courses are on offer in Orthodox spirituality and icon painting. Valamo now attracts 150,000 tourists annually. “In one sense tourism was a very good choice, Father Vladimir explained. “We are witnessing so much to the world. I could not do what I now in a city. We’re a completely open monastery and people come here because they want to hear what we have to say.”



Valamo’s tourist mission is part of a wider strategy. The Finnish Orthodox Church helps to market Karelia to potential visitors; the primate of the Finnish Orthodox Church even adds a piece to camera to a promotional video. There are strong reasons for this. While Karelia is a region of great natural beauty, unemployment there is twenty percent, twice the national average. Young people are leaving, and the fall in population is dramatic (the equivalent of a village’s population is lost every year). For a church that values community, tourism has become a key part of its social mission and its concern for its young.

The tourist product is not for the mass-market, but is more nuanced, offering visitors an insight into Karelian folk and culture. Even a commercial enterprise, the Bomba Spa Hotel built by the town council of Nurmes, is a cultural project with an element of recovered memory. The hotel is a reconstruction of an old Karelian village, now lost to Russia. In the grounds one pathway is marked ‘The way of silence’. It leads to a tsasouna, or oratory, beside Lake Pielinen. Inside the door, as in every Orthodox Church here, there is an icon of Saints Sergei and Herman: Sergei was the monk sent from Greece in 1325 to evangelise the northern peoples and Herman the pagan priest whom Herman baptised and who became his partner in evangelism.

Finnish Orthodoxy is in relative terms small, but for historical reasons it is strongly recognised in the life of the nation. On some measures Finland is more religious than its Nordic neighbours, with more people baptised and married in church than in Sweden and Norway. Even in the cities there are signs of public religiosity. Every March in the regional capital Kuopio (as also in the capital Helsinki), there is a Passion play. The participants in this Via Dolorosa walk through snow and ice from the steps of the Lutheran Cathedral to the Bishop’s Square outside the Orthodox Cathedral of St Nicholas.

I went to Vespers there a few Saturdays ago, the same service with all its sensuality and richness that so intrigued the young Sister Christadoule. The make up of the congregation was a surprise. A young cantor led the choir of six people. There were families with children. I particularly remember one young woman wearing a t-shirt with jeans cut to her knees, her face a picture of absorption. Finnish Orthodoxy is making an appeal to the young and educated: the church is attracting a thousand new members a year.

In the Ireland in which I grew up it was second nature to map the landscape in terms of saints, monastic settlements, and stories of miracles. Perhaps this is why I was so moved by this remote corner of Christian Europe with a landscape similarly touched by sacramentality. Here too religion is not merely a private matter but an important marker of cultural identity. Karelia with its cultural sources in the sensibilities of East and West offers an exceptional perspective on Orthodox Christianity.

At the turning point of a still world (The Tablet 21 May 2005

Tony Burke was deleting emails at his office in Covent Garden, when one message caught his interest. It invited volunteers from a “busy, modern, fast-moving, metropolitan environment” to take part in a reality TV series. Burke ticked all the boxes. He worked in advertising – and was also producing storylines for Bang Babes, a lesbian soft porn TV channel, run in tandem with a sex chat line.

The email came from the producers of The Monastery, the acclaimed BBC2 series, which is now in its final week. Set at Worth Abbey in East Sussex, it followed five contemporary men who took part in the life of the Benedictine community there for forty days and nights last August. The resulting programmes are a portrait both of monastic life and of the men and their spiritual journeys.

Tony Burke replied to the email and the producers chose him from several hundred applicants. In a dramatic sequence in next Tuesday’s programme, which ends the series, Burke is seen in the throes of what he understands very clearly to have been a spiritual experience. It was an unexpected and unsought end to his six weeks at Worth.

His personal history makes Tony Burke an effective and unusual witness. He has few illusions about himself and as an advertising copywriter, he has an instinct for words, along with the weight they carry. He had led a rather rackety life, with a trail of broken relationships, drug use and heavy drinking. His underlying justification was that ‘I work in advertising and I’m allowed to go out and do silly things’. The trail led, predictably, to a breakdown and a spell in a rehab unit. He had since recovered, gone back to work, and was “able to view the world with excitement again” when The Monastery email appeared in his inbox.

While Burke had no previous religious background, he had an open mind about the monastic experience. “I was prepared to believe. I was also prepared to expose it as a sham. If I came out after six weeks and said ‘do me a favour lads, this is a bunch of guys opting out, escaping from life, believing in a farcical nonentity’, that would have been fine. But I went the other way.”

At first he was sceptical, experiencing monastic silence as a ‘blank’, and finding it difficult to accept that the scriptures might shed useful light on human experience. The monastery’s routines tired him, along with the ceaseless recitation of the hours of the daily office. But as time passed, Tony Burke was seduced by the underlying search and, as the programmes show, he had an instinct for asking sharp theological questions. Friendships with the monks made a powerful impression. “It’s more than just going to church six times a day. The truth, the belief and the love that you get from these individuals as men reverses your scepticism. Monks have a hard job. It’s not an easy life. You realise that these guys are for real and they believe in what they are doing. You have to respect it.”


Tony Burke: "From that moment on, and ever since, everything has been different."

Invited to choose a spiritual director, Tony Burke found a kindred spirit, Brother Francis, who works outside the monastery in a hospice, where he nurses children in the final stages of cancer. “He has an amazing job - he’s a modern man, a monk who also lives in the real world. He is a sensitive, yet realistic, human being and I could speak frankly with him and sort out some of my own issues.”

His final session with Brother Francis was the trigger for Tony Burke’s spiritual experience. As television, the episode has a dramatic force, which is heightened by long silences. But the power of the moment is also sacramental. The prelude is a conversation about leaving Worth and readjusting to life in London. Burke is preoccupied by the tension between his need to earn a living, producing trails for Bang Babes, and the values he has learnt to appreciate at the Abbey. Francis replies that vocation is the lifelong search for one’s deepest identity, and that in its honest pursuit one cannot go far wrong. He hands Burke a white stone, a reminder of his ‘white stone name’ (a reference to the Book of Revelations), and a symbol of one’s truest self.

“What happened next”, Tony Burke told me, “was out of the blue and took me completely by surprise. It was a very frightening experience. The only thing to which I can begin to compare it to was coming up on ecstasy. It was a surge of energy, which paralysed me and left me speechless. I was scared and couldn’t move. Luckily I wasn’t on my own. I had Francis there.”

“I remember him smiling back and saying ‘It’s OK – you’ll be OK’. It went on for some time – just this constant swirling up of energy and it just gripped me. It was a very simple silent experience. On camera it looks as if I had had a few drinks, but it just went on and on and on. Then it subsided. Francis blessed me. It came again. Eventually Francis said, ‘do you want to finish?’”

As the TV crew stopped filming, Francis helped Tony from the room. “What the f*** was that?’ He said to me ‘Tony – you’ve done this on your own. You’ve listened. You’ve worked hard for this. Don’t try and explain the mystery of God’. Attempts to explain don’t do it justice. I felt that after a very exhaustive spiritual process of shifting perceptions, and listening, and working, I was being contacted and touched and rewarded for the work that had been done’.”

This intensely private experience will become very public, when it is broadcast on Tuesday night. Throughout the six weeks at Worth, Burke and his fellow retreatants were aware – in peripheral vision - of the production crew’s presence. But the footage of the encounter with Brother Francis has an unforced and un-self conscious quality. It is also something of a television miracle. According to the series producer of The Monastery, Gabe Solomon, he and his colleagues had a strong sense that “something was in the air that night. Often in television, you are fighting life. But sometimes things come together, as they did that night, and they just work.”

Religious mystics are careful to place spiritual experiences in context. For Thomas Merton their real value was the extent to which they returned the individual to the physical world with an enhanced sense of responsibilities to others. After he left Worth Abbey, Tony Burke returned briefly to Bang Babes, but did not stay there long, as he felt there was too great a tension with his newfound values. He now works in a mainstream advertising agency. Although still unsure about organised religion, he visits a Catholic church in Marylebone several times a week, and keeps in touch with the monks at Worth, where he has helped develop a special website for viewers of The Monastery. Already it has had many thousands of visitors and Burke hopes it will build a bridge to ‘the contemporary Londoner who’s a bit too cool to think about spirituality to consider instead that ‘perhaps there’s something for everyone in all this’.

After he returned from Worth, his friends were unimpressed. “I came out of the Monastery saying ‘Right – things have changed lads, things have changed a bit for me’. They said ‘Yea – whatever’”. On the night the series started, several friends turned up at his flat, uninvited, to watch. While they giggled through the opening sequences, they watched the rest of the programme in silence. “After the show we went to the pub and I’ve never seen them so animated. We had a lock in and we were there till half past twelve. I’ve seen these guys talking about football and shagging and all that normal kind of stuff. The debate didn’t stop and if I had sneaked out, the debate would have carried on. They are very cynical about organised religion. But they were spellbound by the programme and willing to take it on board and see the other side.”

Burke is unembarrassed by the BBC footage of his experience. He recently showed it to an art director colleague at his advertising agency. The director, a tough streetwise Australian, was sceptical until he watched the video, but was, Burke says, ‘gobsmacked’. Tony Burke is grateful for the tape. “Not many people can say they have a high definition record of a spiritual experience. As time moves away, you approach that experience in different ways. And you may begin to doubt it. Without that permanent record, you could start to doubt it. But that was the turning point in my life – that moment. From then on, and ever since, everything has been different.”


Worth Abbey website for The Monastery
http://www.worthabbey.net/bbc/index.html

The Tablet
30 April, 2005

A MIRROR TO THE SOUL
Brendan McCarthy

Last year five men, none of whom were Catholic, made a forty-day monastic retreat. A landmark BBC series traced their progress.


Two men in armchairs face each other across a low table. One is a Benedictine monk of Worth Abbey in West Sussex – and the other man is coming to the end of a highly unusual retreat. There is a television crew in the dimly lit room. A silence hangs heavily and continues, almost uninterrupted, for what in TV terms is an eternity. But the director stays with the shot -and the silence - defying all the usual rules of television. Later on, the retreatant, his voice breaking with emotion, makes a video-diary entry. “I didn’t want this to happen. But something touched me; something spoke to me very deeply. It was a religious experience. When I woke up this morning I didn’t believe in this. But as I speak to you now, I do. Whatever it is, I believe in it”

It is a climactic moment in BBC2’s three-part television series, The Monastery (from 10 May). Last year the Benedictines at Worth agreed to the BBC’s request to accept five outsiders into their community for forty days. The aim was to test the relevance of the monastic tradition for a group of contemporary men. Several monasteries had turned the BBC down, but the Abbot of Worth, Fr Christopher Jamison, believing that the Benedictine tradition has something of deep value to offer the modern world, welcomed a very public opportunity to prove it.

The BBC selected the five men from hundreds of volunteers. One worked on the fringes of the soft porn industry (“lipstick lesbian stuff”), while a second was a former protestant paramilitary from Northern Ireland, who had spent years in prison. A third was a retired teacher. There was a Cambridge PhD student with experience of Buddhist monastic life and a businessman from a legal publishing company. None was Catholic, one was atheist – three had little previous contact with religion.

Gabe Solomon, the series producer, told me that he had aimed to make a programme about spirituality for a mass audience that “didn’t feel like a religious programme and that spoke to more people than a typical religious programme might.” The Monastery is a ‘cross genre’ programme of a kind much approved by the BBC’s director-general Mark Thompson, in this case a hybrid of film documentary technique and of a newer style, ‘reality TV’.

‘Reality TV’ has achieved a dubious notoriety. It relies more on contrivance than on the techniques of pure documentary. Such series as Big Brother, I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and Jamie’s Kitchen, have prompted one senior figure in the TV industry to deride the genre as ‘lifestyle porn’. The monks at Worth weren’t exactly familiar with Big Brother, but Christopher Jamison isn’t daft. When the project was first mooted (and before a producer was assigned), there was a suggestion that the five men might dress in monk’s habits and ‘have some fun’. Carry On Up the Cloister, so to speak.

“We entered a negotiation”, Father Christopher told me. “I told the production company that their original idea was a very bad one, but that in dialogue we might reshape the idea into something that might work.” He was well aware of the risks. The history of television documentary is littered with the fates of institutions that admitted the cameras, only to fare very badly in the eventual product. Nonetheless he felt that there was an endemic distrust of the media in the Catholic community in Britain because of the media response to the child sex abuse scandals in the church. “Someone had to take the risk of rebuilding this trust. I believed that Worth was well placed to do that.”

The retreat was not ‘Benedictine lite’. Instead the volunteers committed themselves to the monastic disciplines of silence, obedience and humility for forty days and forty nights. They joined in the daily round of the Abbey, eating with the monks, working in the grounds, attending Mass, and joining in the hours of the daily office, from Matins to Compline. They handed over their CD players and their mobile phones.

The new arrivals were sceptical at first. In the words of one, “If you are looking for a career with guaranteed success, get yourself down to your local monastery, because I don’t think it’s the hardest job in the world and you could be easily very good at it just by toeing the line and not swearing. And not having sex with anyone.”

Discipline did not come easily. Two of the men broke the rules and left the monastery for an outing (“looking for virgins and cigarettes”) For Father Christopher this minor misdemeanour amounted to a misunderstanding of obedience, a core monastic value. At this (still early) point, Gabe Solomon, the director, was worried that his film might lack momentum. “Nothing happens quickly in a monastery. I feared it might be like this all the way through. We just had to trust that this had been going on for 1500 years and to accept Father Christopher knew what he was doing.”

But Solomon was initially tempted, the Abbot remembers, to see if he could engineer something into happening, as would happen in reality TV. “Gabe said to me: ‘You know – aren’t you going to tell them off about the trip to the shops? Isn’t this bad and aren’t you going to reprimand them?’” Fr Christopher was adamant that there would not be a big scene – but, rather, a quiet explanation of the reasons that the trip didn’t fit in with the values of monastic life. “The aim is to get people to internalise the values - to understand is that obedience is about listening; that silence is about space and that humility is about being realistic. So that the way of life becomes truly their own.”

In the event, Gabe Solomon had no need to load the dice. Real drama followed as two of the men became every bit as fractious as any of the inhabitants of the Big Brother house or the Celebrity jungle. Although the atmosphere was very tense, the Abbot was unworried. “I said to Gabe – ‘at least it will make great TV’ and Gabe said ‘I don’t know if it will make great TV. It’s the wrong kind of TV for this programme’. I said ‘Why?’ From our point of view, the emergence of this kind of conflict is part of what happens in community living. This is OK. This is monastic life. This is not Big Brother. Don’t laugh, there’s a chapter in the Rule of St Benedict entitled ‘Why Monks should not hit each other’. Gabe was really surprised. But when he saw how we contained the conflict and moved it forward, he then started to understand.”

For several of the participants the fruits were psychotherapeutic rather than expressly mystical: the slaying of old demons, acceptance of the need for personal honesty and a heightened sensitivity for others’ personalities. Peter, the retired teacher, although slow to surrender to the experience, admits: “I thought really ‘this is just going through ritual’. And felt even it might be a bit empty. But actually it isn’t.” Another participant began, after an initial enchantment with monastic life, to rant at a silent God. This was ‘a really good point’, Father Christopher told him. He replied sceptically: “It’s always a good point, isn’t it? No matter how bad things are you guys always say it’s a good point. You always turn it into the positive.” In the event – and the films reveal as much in the most dramatic way - it was a turning point. In Father Christopher’s words, it was the threshold of a journey into “scary territory - not psychotherapy ‘scary’, but scary because ultimately it’s to do with meeting God.”

Shortly after, one of the men has what he calls an ‘epiphany’ while sitting in the monastery church. “It was a real moment of clarity. I had an unexpected feeling of near weightlessness, you know. I felt as if a whole weight was lifted, physically lifted, off my shoulders – and I was incredibly happy.” The account sounded authentically mystical and Father Christopher concedes as much. “It’s not a moment when you particularly tried. The tradition would say to you that the beginning of any serious prayer and meditation is usually an uplift of some kind like that, which God gives to beginners.”

A visit to the Carthusian abbey at Parkminster and an introduction to the austere regime of the monks there (“it makes Worth seem like Center Parcs”) forces another of the men, Nick the Cambridge PhD student, towards his moment of crisis. “The degree to which the religious life is either truly sane or absolutely bonkers is pushed up to the absolute limit and you really have to decide what’s what. And what isn’t. And the scary thing is that place made a lot of sense.”

The striking thing about The Monastery is that the genius of the Benedictine tradition gives shape and coherence to the programme. Although life at Worth is refracted through the prism of ‘reality TV’, it is not distorted and the programme is not the calculated exercise in humiliation of a Big Brother but instead an honest journey, an experience of the psychology of grace, which affirms and makes whole its participants. It is dramatic evidence for Karl Rahner’s proposition that everyone is an incipient mystic. While there has been for some years a creativity crisis in TV religion departments, this is a programme, which will capture different parts of the television audience and for different reasons. Most of all, these are programmes which, as they are shown around the world, and repeated down the years, will be an enduring snapshot of the English Benedictine tradition, while presenting a benign picture of a healing Catholicism.

Father Christopher Jamison is delighted with the results. “We were amazed by what good TV this was. We knew that the monastic framework would enable the men to find a better balance in life and – at one level - a good ‘spiritual health farm’ experience. What we didn’t know was how people would respond if they didn’t share our religious faith. What surprised us, and that shouldn’t have surprised us, was to discover that the way of life leads inevitably to Christian faith. For us that realisation was a wonderful experience.”

***The Monastery, a Tiger Aspect production for BBC2 (10, 17, 24 May)

James MacMillan: Music mediates grace.

The Tablet interview: James MacMillan.

8 January 2005

James MacMillan has never lost the gentle courtesies of his upbringing in rural Ayrshire. He is soft-spoken and earnest; with the words he uses barely hinting at the elemental forces that resonate through his music. Few living composers – he’s 46 this year - are so animated by their religious beliefs. This is one reason why MacMillan’s voice is so distinctive. But while the sacramental dimension of music is all-important to him, he is different from other religiously motivated composers in his embrace of a faith – both religious and artistic - that has solid roots in the world and its struggles. Next weekend (January 14-16) the BBC Symphony Orchestra celebrates MacMillan and his music with Darkness into Light, an unparalleled survey of his compositions, which will be performed at the Barbican Hall (and nearby venues) and broadcast live on Radio 3 and on the digital TV channel BBC Four.

The series of eight concerts will include MacMillan’s massive choral work Quickening, a collaboration with the poet Michael Symmons-Roberts, which celebrates both men’s delight in fatherhood and their love of their children (Friday 14, 7.15 pm). There will also be the trumpet concerto Epiclesis (Saturday 15 1.15pm), in MacMillan’s words, ‘a big and gutsy’ work’ which explores the concept of transubstantiation, while the final concert (Sunday 16, 8.00 pm) will feature his percussion work Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, a dramatic anticipation of the human liberation promised by Christ’s birth.

“Catholicism was as natural to me as breathing”, he says of his upbringing. “My parents were enthused by Vatican II and they felt a sense of hope in their lives that was infectious for young people like me.” Even as a teenager MacMillan had a sense that he wanted to ‘give something back’ in his music making, and he remembers the life and substance the liturgy gave to his growing up.

However benign an adolescent’s experience of religious faith, the transition to university can loosen the ties. This did not happen to MacMillan, who at Edinburgh University became active in the Dominican chaplaincy, where he was helped “to make the transition from the dreamlike state of a Catholic childhood to the harsh reality of being Catholic in a post religious world.” Ever since, Catholicism has been woven into MacMillan’s internal monologue, and when he speaks about his work much of his language is expressly theological.

The BBC weekend’s theme, ‘Darkness into Light’, reflects the journeys which MacMillan travels in his compositions. “There is that sense of the abyss in some works which is redeemed in some of the more theologically motivated pieces. If there is an underlying theological theme in the range of works being presented, that is it.”

Take for instance The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (Barbican and BBC Radio 3, 15 January 8.00 pm). Gowdie was one of many hundreds of women executed for witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland. She was tortured into an improbable confession in which she said she had been baptised by the devil and to having journeyed to the centre of the earth to feast with the King and Queen of the fairies. Afterwards she was strangled at the stake and burned in pitch. MacMillan was attracted at first by her story’s dramatic possibilities. But as the work developed, his Catholic sensibilities took over. He composed, in effect, a Requiem, ‘an act of retrospective compassion’, offering to Isobel Gowdie, on behalf of the Scottish people, the mercy and humanity denied her in her final days. The work, twenty-five minutes long, weaves into the violence of the central material strands of Scottish balladry, of Gaelic psalm singing and of Gregorian plainsong, which, though at first a distant voice, finally re-emerges to dominate and to resolve the struggle. In MacMillan’s own words, “It is as if an exorcism is taking place and Isobel Gowdie’s soul is traversing the violent passage of death and being released into an eternal light.”

MacMillan’s artistic motivation is never purely aesthetic. For him music is a quasi-sacramental art form, which works in ways that are analogous to the concept of grace, with the power to disturb and to transform the lives of those who hear it. Some musicians and critics are inherently distrustful of such language. In response, MacMillan claims that some specialists can be ‘very narrow’ about music’s wider social context and unable to engage with music’s theological dimension because contemporary culture does not equip them to do so. “You find them dismissing Messiaen’s Catholicism as a peripheral eccentricity than an absolutely core motivation, the implication being that he would have been a better composer if it had not been for his Catholicism.” That said, MacMillan is adamant that it is not necessary to share his beliefs to appreciate his music.

Three years ago MacMillan collaborated with the poet Michael Symmons Roberts and Archbishop Rowan Williams on Parthenogenesis (Sunday 16th 5.00, Guildhall School of Music and BBC Radio 3). This is a piece about human cloning, based on ‘an apparently true story’ of a woman living in Hanover who was caught in the blast from an allied bomb. She gave birth nine months later claiming that she had conceived without sex. Doctors and geneticists hypothetised that a dormant cell in her body had been so jarred as to bring about a natural parthinogenesis. MacMillan was fascinated by the story. “It has huge implications for us at a time when we are obsessed with artificial cloning and its implication for our creativity, what it is to create human beings who are not just copies of ourselves but free in our own right.”

Rowan Williams’ participation came about through the organisation ‘Theology through the Arts’. His theologising had a fundamental impact on both the music and the words, which is a conversation between a grown-up cloned child, her mother and an angel. The piece begins:
“I am. I am my mother’s twin,
her spirit-duplicate, her flesh-ghost.”
For Michael Symmons-Roberts the piece is “poetically the shadow side of the incarnation: a virgin birth in opposites with not God but human evil as the 'father' - a sort of negative-print of the nativity.”

A happy sequel was Rowan Williams’ invitation to MacMillan to compose an anthem for his enthronement as Archbishop of Canterbury. MacMillan subsequently dedicated A Deep but Dazzling Darkness to Rowan Williams (Sunday 16 January, 5.00 pm Guildhall School of Music and BBC Radio 3). When I asked MacMillan whether any one of his works was more revelatory of his musical personality than the others, he was reticent about the answer, but his pride in A Deep but Dazzling Darkness, a violin concerto, was evident. Its title comes from ‘The Night’ by the seventeenth century Welsh metaphysical poet, Harry Vaughan, and the lines:
There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! Where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.”

As with much of MacMillan’s work, the concerto has a tension at its heart. This sense of tension differentiates MacMillan from the ‘holy minimalists’, composers such as Pärt, Tavener and Gorecki. While he admires their music, MacMillan is an unashamed modernist. “The Holy Minimalists claim they are trying to avoid not merely conflict in music, but any sense of dialectic. They are trying to put themselves apart from the violence of a lot of modernism. But they are also putting themselves outside that tradition – people like John Tavener abhor the whole Western canon really from before Beethoven. This is the very canon I embrace.”

MacMillan has spoken in the past of taking his music to extremes and ‘doing battle’, an instinct which extends also to his political beliefs. In his native Scotland he has drawn much anger on his head for claiming that the country’s culture is still characterised in part by a resilient strain of anti-Catholic bigotry. Where once this was religious in origin, it now had a secular face. “There is a very smug left of centre secular liberal establishment that I feel drawn to confront. I have a thrawn cussed nature and I instinctively know and feel I don’t want to be part of this new establishment.” There is a flavour of MacMillan’s scepticism in his recently premiered organ work, A Scotch Bestiary, which was characterised by the Guardian as a “richly imagined spectacle of the grotesques of the Edinburgh parliament. “

What has deepened with the years, along with MacMillan’s sense of musical mission, has been his Catholic commitment. He and his wife Lynn are lay Dominicans, members of the chaplaincy congregation attached to Strathclyde University. He has been writing introits and responsorial psalms, suitable for congregational singing at the chaplaincy’s Sunday Mass.

James MacMillan’s major artistic projects in the coming years include a new commission for Welsh National Opera, again with Michael Symmons-Roberts. He is working with the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon on a score for a three-act ballet. And having already written a choral work for Holy Week, Seven Last Words, MacMillan plans to write a setting of The Passion for the end of the decade.

At the root of all the work is openness and a fearlessness of raw and authentic emotions. MacMillan disdains the abstract modernism, which often characterises contemporary music. His concern instead is with ‘humanity in all its messiness’ and to invest his work with a sacramental ambition, in his words, “to take this God-given art of music - this component of what it means to be human - to the world.”

Concert details at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/symphonyorchestra/news/macmillan.shtml
There is comprehensive live coverage of Darkness into Light on BBC Radio 3. The Saturday evening concert is shown live on BBC Four at 8.00 pm

IN THE EYES OF AN EXILE

The action of James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses took place on June 16 1904. This week Dubliners celebrate the centenary of Bloomsday.

“I have put all of the great talkers of Dublin into my book”, James Joyce told Vanity Fair in 1922, “they – and the things that they forgot.” This weekend ten thousand Dubliners, many in Edwardian dress, will gather in O’Connell Street for “a traditional Guinness Bloomsday breakfast” where, in homage to Joyce’s great hero Leopold Bloom, they will dine on grilled kidney, ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls’, washed down with the 'foaming ebon ale'. There will be Joyce look-alike contests, and even an Irish wake complete with story telling and traditional music for Paddy Dignam, whose funeral is recounted in Ulysses.
Dubliners have much to celebrate. In his depiction of “the dailiest day possible”, Joyce revolutionised the novel and memorialised Edwardian Dublin’s popular culture. With his fusion of narrative and internal monologue, he drilled deep into the city’s psyche, revealing the richness of the ordinary and making explicit the secret mental processes of his characters. Ulysses is not merely a triumph of the creative imagination, but is also a great sociological achievement, the prototype for the ‘global village’, in which everything is connected to everything else.
Nowadays official Ireland is proud to claim Joyce for one of its own. Politicians, whether they have read it or not, hail Ulysses as a work of genius. Fragments from the text are woven into the upholstery of Aer Lingus’s passenger seats. Bloomsday has become a national feast almost on the scale of Saint Patrick’s Day, but the celebrations are tinged with ambiguity. John McCourt, the director of the James Joyce School in Trieste, where Joyce began to write Ulysses, warns against an indecent appropriation of the author, in a “Hail Glorious Saint James" spirit. “We should not lose sight of the fact that Ireland is making amends to Joyce very late in the day.” he told the Irish Times.
While ‘Ulysses’ was Joyce’s love letter to Dublin, the city’s initial hostility to its publication hurt him deeply. The Dublin Review castigated Joyce, who, it said, “splutters hopelessly under the flood of his own vomit.” Despite the infamous literary censorship of the 1920s however, Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland. There was no need. There were very few copies and they would in any case have been seized by Customs. As for the Irish Jesuits, it was almost forty years before they felt able to acknowledge their most famous former student. When he died, the rector of Belvedere College was advised against an obituary in the school annual, although there are oblique references to James in a long, complimentary tribute in the 1941 edition to his brother Charlie, who died shortly after him.
Joyce was an outsider. Unlike such contemporaries as WB Yeats, he saw little to attract him in the Irish literary revival and nothing at all in the Gaelic revival. He was just as scornful of Britain. He wrote Ulysses from his self-imposed exile in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, never returning to Dublin, which he called “the centre of paralysis”. He nonetheless spent seven years reimagining it just as it was - street-by-street and hour-by-hour - on Thursday, June 16, 1904, coincidentally (or not) the day on which he met his future wife Nora.
Based on the mythic outline of Homer's Odyssey, Joyce’s hero, the Jew Leopold Bloom, was cast as the universal modern citizen and Dublin itself no longer an Edwardian backwater but the archetypal metropolis of western civilisation. Bloom had to be Jewish, because – in Joyce’s words – ‘only a foreigner would do’. In a provincial British city at the time only a figure such as Bloom plausibly offered the required exoticism. Aware of his own race’s persecution, he is a national anti-hero. Provoked to a pub discussion of Irish nationalism, he retorts: “It’s no use. Force, hatred, history, all that. That’s not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it’s the opposite of what’s really life.”
They were brave sentiments for their day. Leopold Bloom was an internal exile mirroring Joyce’s self-imposed exile. And this is why there is something unsettling about the ‘taming’ of Joyce and his sentimental adoption in today’s Ireland as ‘one of our own’.
Even now, Irish society struggles to tolerate its dissident voices. A secular intolerance has replaced that once associated with traditional Catholicism. Ireland likes to think of itself as a cosmopolitan, open society. With Catholicism and the Gaelic revival in ebb tide, it risks becoming little more than a regional British culture. It remains averse to inconvenient outsiders’ voices and to those of its own exiles, not to mention those of today’s refugees.
However closed a society Ireland was for much of the twentieth century, Catholicism offered a crucial window on the world and a counter to the long cultural shadow of Britain. According to the sociologist Liam Ryan, in such a suffocatingly closed society there was an intoxicating challenge for young men in going off to ‘convert China’. Joyce’s social class were the backbone of the Irish missionary effort. Indeed his own elder sister, Poppy, spent her life as a Mercy sister in New Zealand.

Joyce’s Jesuit education enhanced his sense of alternative possibilities. According to Fergus O’Donoghue SJ, editor of the Irish Jesuit review Studies, Joyce’s education was unusually cosmopolitan by the standards of the time. Several of the priests who taught him were foreigners, while even his Irish Jesuit teachers had been educated abroad. “They were unconsciously cosmopolitan and, knowing them, Joyce may have come to accept life abroad as a necessary condition for making himself cosmopolitan.”

Joyce’s mind was landscaped by the Jesuits. However he railed at Catholicism, he held to the intellectual categories in which his former faith was organised, acknowledging that his resilience in adversity might have owed something to the 'the influence of A.M.D.G.’ His Jesuit schooling taught him more than resilience: it enhanced his power of empathy, of imagining the outside and living there. Bloomsday this year is celebrated – rather appropriately - in Refugee Week. For the Irish author Joseph O’Connor, Joyce’s hero’s resonance is undimmed by the years. “Bloom stands for us all. In our own age when we speak of economic migrants, asylum speakers and refugees, we might remember that the greatest Dubliner in the history of Irish fiction is himself the child of an immigrant family.”

This article first appeared in The Tablet, 12 June 2004

This feature first was published in The Tablet on February 28th 2004

A woman of Byzantium

The legacy of one of the earliest known woman composers is honoured at a festival of Byzantine art in London.


The Troparion of Kassiani is one of the great hymns of the Eastern Church. The Troparion (a poetic hymn written for a particular feast day) is a meditation in Mary Magdalen’s imagined words, as she pours myrrh over Christ’s head before his Passion. In its unashamed sensuality it sheds light not only on Mary Magdalen’s emotions, but also on those of its author. Kassiani, a 9th century abbess, is the earliest woman composer whose work is still sung.

She came from a wealthy family in Constantinople. According to legend she was presented to the Emperor Theophilos, who was seeking a bride. As he was about to hand Kassiani a golden apple, signifying that she was his choice, he remarked that women were the source of sin, meaning Eve. Kassiani retorted that the Virgin Mary was surely a source of salvation and reproached the Emperor for not knowing better. Theophilos withdrew the golden apple and instead chose another bride. Whatever the truth of the legend, Kassiani retired to a convent and devoted her life to composing chants and epigrams.
For the Greek-Canadian composer Christos Hatzis the Troparion of Kassiani, which is sung late in the evening on Tuesday of Holy Week, is one of the highlights of the church year. When he was a boy growing up in Greece, he sang drones (a prolonged single note underlying Orthodox liturgical chant) in his church choir. For Hatzis the Troparion is quite different to other music in the Greek Orthodox liturgical tradition; it is a test not only of virtuosity but also of expressiveness and endurance. “It literally bursts at the seams with emotion and feminine energy. Kassiani’s Magdalen constantly bounces between the depths of despair and the heights of spiritual passion. Utter darkness and cosmic majesty are depicted often in a single sentence and there is a passionate pleading for mercy and an intense spiritual devotion that borders on the erotic.”
“Take my spring of tears
You who draw water from the clouds,
Bend to me, to the sighing of my heart,
You who bend the heavens
In your secret incarnation,
I will wash your immaculate feet with kisses
And wipe them dry with the locks of my hair.”
Hatzis had long hoped to bring his own creative interpretation to the text and he has now composed a contemporary version of The Troparion of Kassiani. Its world premiere (St Paul’s Cathedral 11th March) will be one of the highlights of this year’s Byzantine Festival in London. Although the music is anchored in Greek Orthodox idioms, Hatzis is eclectic in his reference to other musical traditions, at one point even asking his choir to improvise in the blues style. Far from being a stylistic smorgasbord, Hatzis insists, his musical eclecticism is intended to serve the emotional underpinnings of the text. The act of composition clearly touched Hatzis. “It brought me moments of pure spiritual delight and deep communion with our common source and ultimate destiny.” Intriguingly Hatzis’s version will be performed alongside John Tavener’s The Myrrh-Bearer, also inspired by Kassiani’s chant, which represents Mary Magdalen with a viola solo, rather than with her sung words.
The role of women is the central focus of this year’s London Byzantine Festival, which coincides with the 800th anniversary of the Sack of Constantinople by Christian Crusaders in April 1204. According to the festival’s artistic director, Guy Protheroe, the focus on women brings into relief the social history of Byzantium more effectively than a political focus on a particular dynasty would have done. The figure of Kassiani offered a compelling point of entry. Protheroe was struck by the parallels between her and Hildegard of Bingen, who lived three centuries later. “They were both leading spiritual thinkers. They wrote very personal, powerful, and sensual words in a way that perhaps a man would not have done.”
Byzantine music can claim a continuous tradition from the earliest days of the Christian Church, with even, according to Guy Protheroe, a relationship to Hebrew chant. It also has roots in Greek antiquity, where some evidence suggests women composers were often prostitutes. Because - in part - of this association, music was forbidden to young unmarried women in the early Christian period, even in the context of the liturgy. Although the prohibition was relaxed over time, evidence of Byzantine women liturgical composers is hard to find. Only Kassiani’s music and that of one other (the daughter of Ioannes Kladas - there is no record of her actual name) survives in manuscripts. Because there was a bias against the inclusion of hymns by woman authors on solemn liturgical occasions, they were sometimes reattributed to men, so that they could be performed.
For Judith Herrin, the Professor of Byzantine Studies at King’s College London, her discipline’s recent focus on women’s history has yielded a wealth of evidence about the society and culture of the time. Women exercised great – if indirect - power at the Imperial Court. They were frequently educated to a level, which would have been unusual in the West at the time. However the evidence of their achievements is often indirect. Kassiani for instance, exchanged letters with Saint Theodore of the Studios Monastery. While his letters are meticulously preserved, Kassiani’s are missing, presumably not thought important enough to be kept. Judith Herrin find the clearest hints of women’s authorship of chants in the outpouring of affection for the Mother of God, evidence she says of a feminine empathy with the Theotokos. However Judith Herrin is frustrated by the absence of Kassiani’s manuscripts, in contrast to those of Hildegard of Bingen. Both women wrote from a similar sensibility (although it is almost inconceivable that Hildegard could have known of Kassiani). But while there are rich manuscript sources for Hildegard’s work and thought, there are none for Kassiani.

The Byzantine Festival will run throughout March. Already Guy Protheroe is well pleased with the initial reaction. “We opened a door and discovered so much. There is a tendency to think of Byzantium in terms of ‘the dark ages’, because we were not part of it. But this civilisation continued classical culture and its ideals for a thousand years.”

The Legacy of Kassiani, St Paul’s Cathedral, Thursday 11th March 7.00 pm http://www.byzantinefestival.com


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A Silence, not a void (from The Tablet)

James MacMillan’s third symphony, to be performed at the 2003 BBC Proms season, challenges the conception that silence is empty. On the contrary, it can be a sign of God’s presence.

James MacMillan’s music is rooted in his political beliefs and in his Catholicism. Music has a transforming power, he argues, but like true spirituality it should be rooted in the struggles of everyday experience. The composer describes himself as a “happily paid up member of a secular society”, who values many of secularity’s fruits as the outcome of the Christian quest for justice throughout the centuries.

MacMillan is angry when the secular world caricatures people of faith as fundamentalist and reactionary. This is simply naïve, he says. “Faith isn’t like that. Many live with uncertainties and failures in their lives. They wonder what the great love of God actually means. We live in a century in which God, on the evidence of outward signs, seems to have abandoned humanity. Yet faith prevails. The quest for the love of God goes on.”

Such questions underpin MacMillan’s third symphony, subtitled ‘Silence’, and inspired by the powerful novel of the same name by the Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo. Endo set his story in 17th century Japan, with his main character a Portuguese Jesuit priest at the height of the persecution of the country’s small Christian community. Francis Xavier and two fellow Jesuits had landed there in 1549. The first fruits of his mission were spectacular and within a generation there were 300,000 Christians. Then the shoguns withdrew their toleration of the new faith, expelled the Jesuits and forced Christians to renounce their beliefs. Many of those who refused were executed. Reprieve was granted to those who apostatised by trampling on the fumie, an icon of the Madonna and Child. The persecution of Japan’s Christians almost annihilated the church. Many were burnt alive, while others were tortured by being hung upside down into pits filled with human excreta.

Endo’s protagonist, the Jesuit Sebastian Rodrigues, becomes an apostate in his turn, but only after enduring torture himself and being told that many others will die unless he too recants. He steps on the fumie. Only as he does so, does the hitherto silent Christ speak to him. "Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross."

A fellow-Scot, the Jesuit John McDade, told MacMillan about Endo’s Silence, and suggested it might be material for an opera. When he read the novel, MacMillan was intrigued by Endo’s description of Catholicism as – in contrast to other faiths - “not a solo, but a symphony”. He was attracted to Endo’s repeated use of sound and musical metaphors for silence. Endo’s silence was never emptiness, but a presence, be it the song of the turtledove, the rustle of leafs or the slap of the sea against the shore. “Silence is the midwife to music”, MacMillan says, “One brings forth the other.”

He hesitated before setting to work on his symphony, wary of seeming to pay homage to the imperialism that went in hand in hand with missionary work of the time. However, the tension between the Hellenistic Christian tradition and animist Eastern culture seemed a perfect metaphor for symphonic reflection. Crucially for MacMillan, Endo was a Japanese writer reflecting on human values in a way that transcended cultural context. Endo was profoundly respected in his own country and able to interpret Christianity to the Japanese imagination, which has not in the past grasped its concepts easily, in particular that of the Resurrection.

Endo’s genius, in MacMillan’s eyes, was to open up a deeper meaning of the Christian message, one which could be strongly resonant not merely in Japan, but for Christians everywhere. This identified Jesus with those who fail, who are ineffectual, and who experience shame. It brought into sharp relief the scandal of the Cross - and the defeat it represented.

MacMillan wrestled with the musical colours, which would be appropriate for the work. He thought of using the shakuhachi, or bamboo flute, which is closely associated with the Buddhist Fuke sect, which came to prominence in Japan at the same time as Francis Xavier and his fellow Jesuits made their early conversions. Fuke adherents believed that music was intrinsically sacred. Despite the obvious attraction, MacMillan in the end decided against the shakuhachi, because he was nervous of “dilettante dabbling with other people’s cultures.” However he listened extensively to recordings of shakuhachi music, while he was preparing to write the symphony and this helped him to root the work in a Japanese musical setting.

The score itself has an intimate and anguished quality, echoing Endo’s text. MacMillan deliberately uses small chamber groups within the orchestra as the music builds. Using clusters of instruments helped him to approximate the music of the shakuhachi. The intended intimacy is reinforced with solo passages for violin, cello and piano.

While the work is a symphonic reflection on Endo’s text, it does not echo it in every detail. MacMillan thought hard about how he might represent musically the fumie, the stepping on the face of Jesus and Mary. He rejected every possible solution as somehow too literal. Instead, the sense of betrayal and of spiritual death is inscribed in the music. The reflection was a powerful experience for MacMillan himself: “Would one die for Christ? I was brought up venerating those who died for their faith, and I knew deep down I couldn’t do that. What does Christianity have to say to people who cannot rise to these heroic heights?”

In the slow section of the symphony MacMillan portrays musically Endo’s Swamp, a place of desolation and emptiness, incapable of producing life. Endo described Japan as a swamp in which roots rotted and leafs withered. “We have planted the sapling of Christianity in this swamp”, one of his characters exclaimed.

However, MacMillan adds an optimistic note of his own: the final section of the symphony begins with a deliberate allusion to the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, signalling a new life emerging from the depths and darkness. MacMillan’s meditation on “the Swamp” is also, he says, a comment on Western society. “Our society is a swamp. Christian values and genuine love of God – and I am not saying this in a reactionary sense at all – finds it difficult to take root in a society beguiled by materialism, hedonism and egotism and dominated by a selfish political creed, now dominant and lacking opposition.”

The symphony ends with a bar of silence – the conception and metaphorical point of the entire work. Music and silence are partners for MacMillan, their relationship echoing that between belief and non-belief. Himself a person of faith, he feels great empathy with those of no faith, but who have struggled with the same questions.

Like Endo’s novel, MacMillan’s new symphony is an act of faith. Both works find their deepest hope in the characterisation of Jesus as a companion in disgrace.


James MacMillan’s Symphony No 3, ‘Silence’, BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Albert Hall, Thursday 24th July, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, BBC Four TV and on the internet at http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/

As well as editing The Tablet's arts pages, I am associate editor of the dance website www.ballet.co.uk . On this site, I hope to republish my writing for The Tablet, together with other non-dance material, while on my other blog, http://dancelog.blogspot.com/ , I will be publishing some of my material from ballet.co .

I used to be a producer with BBC News. It has been upsetting to read about the price paid in death and injury by journalists covering the war in Iraq. Stuart Hughes, John Simpson's producer in Northern Iraq, has had his foot amputated and he describes his feelings about the operation on [Link:stuarthughes.blogspot.com/|his own website]. When I read ihis account, I wondered at his motivation. I expect that he has been functioning in 'journalist mode' in all his waking hours for weeks. Despite his trauma he cannot stop and he attempts to deal with his feelings by continuing to function journalistically. I feel very much for him and wish him the best.

The reference is to WB Yeats' 'Song of Wandering Aengus' and I have added the text below. I am the arts editor of The Tablet, a liberal Catholic weekly based in London. This first post, so to speak, clears the site. I hope to add over time some of my material for the Tablet and for other arts websites.

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire aflame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

-- William Butler Yeats

From The Tablet, August 2001

Many who work in television speak sentimentally of a golden age when creativity was the watchword and the medium was in the vanguard of new cultural movements. They recall how ITV screened John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger only months after its first stage performance in 1956, and got a 62 per cent share of the audience. In the 1960s on BBC1, classical music documentaries frequently pulled in audiences of seven million viewers. Such numbers for pure arts programmes are unimaginable today. Viewers’ tastes are increasingly diverse, and the arrival of satellite and cable television has fractured the audience. In the face of this changed situation, television executives have been accused of losing their nerve.

When ITV’s director of channels, David Liddiment, spoke recently at the Edinburgh Television Festival, he argued that the very soul of British television was at risk. Television, he contended, was finding it increasingly difficult to value creativity for its own sake, and had become fixated on audience size. In Liddiment’s words, “Numbers now seem to be the only universal measure for excellence we have: how many, how much, how often”.

He laid heavy blame on the BBC, accusing it of failing to give creative leadership to the rest of the broadcasting industry. His case was that the licence fee allowed the BBC elbow room that its commercial competitors lacked. But instead of using this opportunity, he said, the Corporation was now so aggressively commercial that other channels had fewer chances to take very many risks of their own. Liddiment accused the BBC of limiting ITV’s margin for innovation by scheduling programmes against it in an aggressively commercial way. As a result, he declared, all television channels were replicating each other’s ideas and squeezing the available space for originality. It is a fair charge, and one with which many programme-makers agree.

Nearly every recent speech about broadcasting has invoked the virtuous rhetoric of “creativity and innovation”. The issue fascinates business school academics. Their research shows that creativity can only flourish if workers feel they are trusted, if managers are pastorally sensitive to their subordinates, and if organisations disavow cultures of blame - creativity needs licence to fail. The most important finding is that creativity is born out of intrinsic motivation. This implies that the best programmes happen when producers believe in their ideas and their craft. A former controller of BBC2 once said that good programmes should be “hand-made and not manufactured”. his successors would doubtless nod agreement. but the truth is that today’s television executives have imbibed the rhetoric of creativity and innovation while failing to grasp the underlying implications.

The BBC can take risks more easily than its commercial competitors. Each year it has a guaranteed income of almost £2.5 billion from the licence fee, which will increase by 1.5 per cent above the rate of inflation every year until 2006. By contrast, the ITV network has no financial hammock, and as the British economy slows down, faces its most serious drop in revenue for a decade. This breeds caution. ITV must pause before spending heavily on projects such as its forthcoming drama documentary on the events of the Bloody Sunday shootings in Northern Ireland.

The issue at stake is not merely the BBC’s preparedness to take risks, but also its capacity for distinctive imagination. It is not just the BBC that makes public service programmes. So do the ITV companies and Channel 4. All are creative organisations in their own right, says David Liddiment, and have a duty “to keep television alive as a creative force at the centre of our cultural life – to feed its soul”. But with specialist channels such as Artsworld or The History Channel now showing programmes of a kind once found only on the BBC, the case for public service broadcasting is not as self-evident as once it was. David Liddiment argues that the BBC deserves the licence fee only if it “has soul” and embodies a distinctive creative vision.

Much of the argument revolves around the identity of BBC1. When John Birt was director-general, he diverted funding to news and current affairs, much of it at the expense of drama and light entertainment on BBC1. As a consequence, the BBC came to be accused of “super-serving” the middle classes. Greg Dyke, Birt’s successor, was determined to change this perception and to make BBC1, in his words, “the gold standard for television in the digital age”. He decreed that the channel should become more overtly entertaining. While factual programmes would continue to be shown on BBC1, they would be more in keeping with the channel’s more populist identity. Some producers chafe at this definition: last week one of them complained to me that the channel’s commissioners were now mainly interested in “soft-edged” programmes.

Meanwhile, there has been a parallel evolution of BBC2 into a general channel, with its more challenging output about to be diverted to an “unashamedly intellectual” digital BBC4, a television equivalent of Radio 3 and Radio 4 based around arts, music and ideas. The Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, is expected to give the plan the go-ahead next week. BBC4’s annual budget, initially £26 million, is miniscule in television terms, and its programmes will initially be available only to a small audience. There are fears that many of the BBC’s more adventurous programmes will be exiled to the margins of what some critics describe as a “digital dustbin”.
Mark Thompson, BBC’s Director of Television, is adamant that the hours devoted to arts, religion and current affairs on BBC1 and 2 will remain steady, but the reality is that there has been a sharp fall in BBC2’s arts coverage. Music and dance once found on BBC2 is being diverted to the BBC’s digital channels. In the case of religious programmes, only the worship strands are scheduled routinely on BBC1, while BBC2 has been less than receptive to religious subjects, which in time could also disappear to a little-watched BBC4.

Many of the BBC’s decisions about television are driven by its failure to connect sufficiently with viewers under 35, a large number of whom are indifferent to the value of public service television. To attract them, the BBC intends to spend £95 million a year on BBC3, a digital channel for the young – a budget more than three times larger than is proposed for BBC4.

The BBC has a real dilemma. Audience research shows that more than 40 per cent of viewers who have cable or satellite television prefer themed entertainment and sports channels to generalist channels such as BBC1 and BBC2. But if the BBC were to embrace themed channels too early, it would disenfranchise a very large audience, for two thirds of the population of Britain has access only to the five terrestrial channels. Moreover,an important part of this audience from the BBC’s perspective is the middle class, which has until now been stubbornly resistant to cable and satellite. The BBC derives much of its legitimacy from the support of the middle classes, yet its new programme strategy risks driving to the margins some of the programmes most valued by this audience. If the BBC is prepared to take risks only on its less-watched channels, but not where it counts, on BBC1, it will properly be accused of losing its creative nerve and retreating from its public service mission. Which is exactly what David Liddiment did.

Although the BBC is a leader among the creative industries, it has given relatively little thought to the circumstances in which creativity can flourish. One BBC manager who visited the American paper manufacturer 3M was astonished to find there a significantly greater attention to the fostering of creativity and innovation than the Corporation could claim. A particular obstacle is the cumbersome way in which the BBC commissions programmes. Creative blocks will continue until the best producers are free to make some programmes on the basis of intuition without having to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops first.

It is hard to justify public service broadcasting that merely replicates what the private sector does. But the BBC faces an almost impossible tension between its commitment to groundbreaking programmes and at the same time the need to attract enough viewers to justify the licence fee. Controllers might feel freer to encourage untrammelled creativity if the Culture Secretary were to decree in firm language that audience ratings were not to be the decisive measure of the BBC’s success.
The licence allows public broadcasters a freedom not available to their commercial counterparts. The implied bargain is that they use their space ambitiously, failing magnificently if needs be. The charge against the BBC is that it is failing to keep its side of the bargain.

The BBC is conservative. It learnt fear during the Thatcher years and will unlearn it with difficulty. So long as the achievement of a constant share of the audience remains to be a condition of the licence fee, the Corporation’s creative blocks and, by extension, those of broadcasters in general, will remain in place. As David Liddiment argued at Edinburgh, “It is not enough if you call yourself ‘public service’. There has to be a margin for the unexpected, serendipity, a margin for programmes that the public has no idea it wants until it sees them, a margin for backing your own judgement and taking a punt on talent”. The duty facing public service broadcasters is to lead audiences and not merely to follow them.