Touching the Numinous

Last Saturday evening we attended a recording in the BBC Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House.  The show we ‘saw’ was Radio 4’s Museum of Curiosities in which three panellists ‘donate’ something which is important to them to this ‘virtual’ museum of the airways.  It was a fascinating night with lots of banter on stage with a recording that took 1 hour 45 mins – even though the programme is just 30 mins long – so a lot of the chat will end up on the cutting room floor!

Jo Band was participating and she was great fun – but the shining star of the evening was, for me, Sir Tony Robinson – otherwise known as the man with a ‘cunning plan’, Baldrick of the Black Adder programmes.

He was funny, quick witted, brilliant with words and had a presence that simply dominated the stage.

His ‘donation’ to the Museum of Curiosities was that final programme from ‘Black Adder Goes Forth’ – the episode that had Private Baldrick, Captains Darling and Blackadder going over the trenches of Flanders in WW1.  What was so moving was hearing from John Lloyd – that evening’s show host but, by coincidence, the onetime Producer of Blackadder – the story behind this sequence.

It was filmed in the days when the lighting crew had to be off set by 10pm.  The scenery was badly prepared and at times looked like the polystyrene it was.  That ‘over the top’ shoot was filmed at three minutes to ten and looked shambolic.

Well, what happened next transformed a piece of badly rehearsed and staged film into one of the iconic moments of 20^th Century T.V.

In the cutting room John Lloyd and his colleagues tweaked the footage by turning it into black and white, slowing it down, overlaying music, freeze framing the soldiers just before they fell and then turning the mud of the battlefield into a field of red poppies.  If you have ever seen this piece of T.V. perhaps, like me, your response has been a profound, silent appreciation.

John Lloyd said as they watched the finished production for the first time the cutting room team also feel silent.  He said only three or four times as a T.V. Producer had he felt he had ‘touched the numinous’ – and this was such an occasion.

‘Touching the Numinous’ – what a great phrase!  Describing those moments when we intuitively know we are witnesses or participants in something immensely life affirming or life giving.

I guess in the bible such ‘Touching the Numinous’ moments happened as Moses ‘meets’ God in the burning bush or as Mary ‘meets’ the gardener on the morning of Easter Day and then realises he is Jesus.

When have we, I wonder, ‘touched the numinous’?  For some it’s in worship, for others it’s whilst out walking in the country.  For some it’s a time of prayer, whilst for others it’s during a time with family.

I think I had it once when singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Malvern Festival Chorus.  We had a long ten-week rehearsal schedule as we practiced it in ‘bits’.  It only really came together at the last rehearsal on the Saturday afternoon of the concert, the first with the orchestra and boys’ choir.  I remember overwhelming moments that afternoon when I opened my mouth and nothing came out because I was so taken up with the beauty of what I was hearing all around me – a moment of touching the numinous.

We take such times and treasure them in our hearts – they give dignity to our humanity and whisper to us of the depth of the Divine.

Best wishes,

Ian

Ps. Blog holiday next week!

Collegial Creativity

I spent the first half of this week at our annual Ministers’ Conference.  Within minutes of arrival I felt I was among good friends (some going back almost thirty years!) with an endless supply of conversation because we talked, and talked and talked!!

So much about these three days was positive and affirming; and nothing more so than the last presentation before the closing communion yesterday morning.

One of our colleagues took us through Psalm 55, a Psalm of Lament.  She reminded us of the different types of psalms in the bible: some upbeat and confident whilst others are like Psalm 55 expressing honest, even ‘complaining’ prayer, ‘naming’ life as it really is and asking ‘why’?  Yet every Psalm of Lament in the Jewish Psalter (apart from Psalm 88) finds faith in God by its concluding verses.

Well it was a great and perfectly pitched bible study and then came the ‘activity’!  We split into groups of about eight and together wrote our very own Psalm of Lament.  To be truthful I’m not much of a ‘small groups’ sort of person but I loved our time together yesterday morning.  Our group seemed to ‘click’ very easily and creativity flowed!  The Psalm we came up with is not to be taken too seriously – yet there is an honesty behind the humour.  We entitled it: ‘The Pastor’s Lament’ and I suppose it’s a reflection on our struggle with difficult members of the congregation- and it’s perhaps not surprising that all eight ministers in my group seemed to have the same issues though we serve in different congregations.

Well, we didn’t take ourselves too seriously (and I hope you won’t take this psalm over seriously either!) but I loved this collaborative process of composing a psalm and here’s what we came up with:

I know you’re really busy, but can you fit me in!
I feel tired Lord.
 My faith is challenged by your inaction.
I’m disappointed in you!
I did not want an absentee God!
Day and night my inbox swells with their petty complaints.
If  only they had something worthwhile to moan about.
Strike down the grumblers Lord.
Empower the spam filters.
And send the complainers off to the Anglicans!
But you Lord called me here.
Help me to be loving and gracious.
Give me, O Lord, your heart.
For you never tire in doing good.

Well – we only had fifteen minutes!!!

Best wishes,

Ian

The salmon and the grizzly bear

Recently at AFC we sang what was for me a new song: Creation sings the Father’s song.  Just like the hymn I’ve chosen to sing at the start of this Sunday’s worship: All creatures of our God and King – it celebrates ‘experiencing’ God in nature.

Tomorrow I’ll be attending a Ministers’ Book Group and we’ll be discussing Places of Enchantment in which the author, like many people, is just so inspired by the beauty and wonder of the natural world that he finds no problem in singing with the psalmist ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’.

And, of course, we have just celebrated Harvest which, I suspect, is one of the most accessible festivals of the church year because for many it resonates with that popular maxim: One is closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth.  So on Harvest Sunday church and garden combine and this blended spirituality rings true for lots of people.

All well and good – until I sit down yesterday evening and watch a wonderfully filmed and truly beautiful programme about Autumn and I just can’t get one scene out of my mind.  It showed the tenacious salmon swimming upstream to spawn – having to jump some two metres up the rapids.  There to greet them at this point, as they flung themselves into the air, were half a dozen grizzly bears who caught them in their jaws, instantly crushing them with their teeth.  After catching and eating around thirty salmon each these bears retired to the bank for an afternoon snooze!

I love the rolling hills and wooded glade as much as the next person – but I’m increasingly aware of the harshness of nature, ‘red in tooth and claw’ – that the only thing that really matters is ultimately the ‘survival of the fittest’.  And I’m left pondering – does ‘Creation sing the Father’s song’?  Is God just on the side of the winners?  Does God condone aggressive violence in order that one species becomes dominant over another?

Nature, it seems to me, sends out an ambiguous message if aligned too closely with the character of God and I need more than the heavens to see God’s glory.

For me God reveals himself most in the character and teaching of Jesus.  I am totally inspired by his stories – about looking out for neighbour, forgiving enemies, offering kindness to the marginalised – and serving others because in doing this we are serving God.  I’m totally inspired by the cross when Jesus broke the supremacy of the ideal that only the fittest and most powerful prosper – and instead offered humanity an alternative model of self-sacrificial love -  that of giving up your own supremacy for the sake of another.

I think I would have to say that for me faith finds its brightest star in Jesus Christ – not the night sky.

With best wishes,

Ian