Church of the Good Shepherd

I guess most creative people hope that their work, be it a painting, a sculpture, a piece of writing or a musical composition will last and be enjoyed by people long after they are gone. If I am right in this assertion then the soul of the late avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992, must be dancing for joy for, in an ancient German Church in the town of Halberstadt, his composition, “As Slow As Possible”, has been running for several years non stop; in fact the first three notes of the piece were played continuously for a year and a half and just today (Tuesday 10th February) another note was added to the already playing chord. Originally this composition was intended to be a twenty minute piece for piano, but a group of musicians, philosophers and theologians decided to take the title literally and work out how long a piece of music with such a title should last. They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

One of the organisers of this rather strange project was on the news at lunchtime today seeking to justify this strange undertaking. He suggested that we live in a world where everyone is in hurry and where we find it difficult to stop and listen. I think he made a good point but I wonder why this is so. Many of us seem to need to fill every minute of our waking life with activity or noise or something, it is as if we are frightened to be alone and silent. I must admit that the effect of a chord being played constantly in an ancient, ruined building was somewhat disconcerting when I experienced it on the news but it was also very powerful, for it somehow seemed to encapsulate the modern fear of slowing up. Psychologists see manic activity as a psychological defence against confronting some denied aspect of the personality. I think that perhaps some people fear that if they stop they will somehow disintegrate. In fact the opposite is true for when people overdo it they often disintegrate either physically or mentally and then they are forced to confront themselves and their true condition.

Lent has traditionally been seen as a time for self examination. The Church recognised early on something which the modern world has disregarded to its peril i.e. that our inner life, the life of our imagination, needs as much effort spent on it as does the mundane world of our outward activities and this takes time and discipline. I was fortunate in the summer of last year to be given time off to engage in something that felt like an elongated Lent, my sabbatical. I found this both creative and stimulating but also quite frightening which is why I asked a therapist colleague of mine to supervise my painting and writing as I revisited images and fantasies which arose in a turbulent period of my life some fifteen years ago. As you know I am going to use some of this material in sessions on a Sunday evening during Lent and again I am both looking forward to doing this but I am also more than a little apprehensive about being so self-revealing. However an important part of the Christian journey is learning to trust each other with our vulnerabilities and the things that matter to us most and so I hope that the reflections that others will bring to these sessions will help to expand my own self understanding and thus aid me on my journey and conversely I hope that my reflections and experiences honestly shared will aid others in their spiritual quest.

I started this month’s letter with the idea that the artist wants to see his or her work outlast their brief span of life and I guess this reflects a hope that what they have created has some kind of eternal significance. The Bible tells us that “God has put eternity into the mind of man” and I guess this is one way in which this truth manifests itself. But, beyond this, your soul and mine is being forged in the fire of human existence, in time, but its final manifestation stretches beyond the bounds of time into the realms of eternity. So this Lent try not to be in too much of a hurry, take John Gage’s tune as your signature tune and go “as slowly as possible”.

All the best – Fr Mick