SOF 41 / May 2000 Madonna and second child It's an odd reflection on today's media values (and yours and mine too, since we buy the papers) when the news that Madonna is expecting a child - a second one - ousts the growing threat of starvation of eight million Ethiopians from the tabloids’ front pages.
But that's the pulling power of the most iconic unmarried mother since that other madonna whose unlikely story of an encounter with a holy ghost, birth in a stable and flight from Herod's death squad was talk of the town in Bethlehem a couple of millennia ago.
Our latter-day Madonna (who is rumoured to be intending to call her baby Immanuel - if’ he's a boy) is credited with doing more to empower modern young women than anyone since Bathsheba caught David's roving eye and became the mother of all who were born in David's line. An icon used to be a Greek or Russian representation of Christ, then it became a pop star or international footballer, and is now something you click on. How's that for changing meanings? And if the so-called secular world can do it, so, surely can the sacred. Particularly as we have now discovered that the secular and the sacred are one. by seafarer postscripts cS I TS Seen salvation?
Thad high hopes for the National Gallery's exhibition Seeing Salvation: the Image of Christ (which ends on May 7) after reading the gallery director Neil MacGregor, as follows: ; "In the hands of the great artists, the different moments and aspects of Christ's life become archetypes of all human experience. The Virgin nursing her son conveys the feelings every mother has for her child: they are love. Christ mocked is innocence and goodness beset by violence. In the suffering Christ, we encounter the pain of the world, and Christ risen and appearing to Mary Magdalene is a universal reaffirmation that love cannot be destroyed by death. These are pictures that explore truths not just for Christians, but for everybody." The pictures range from third to twentieth century, mostly Renaissance to Victorian.
This posed for me a problem of familiarity.
Not that I know all, or most, or many of those displayed, but I do feel I know the Jesus of all but a few of them: the cleanrobed, neatly bearded, fixedly compassionate, whiter than white Jesus of the Grand Tradition. And it is this image of Jesus which no longer turns me on spiritually. I'm much more stirred, intrigued, troubled, moved, by modern Jesuses - the Jesus illustrations of our own new Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up booklet, for instance (see page 18).
SOF 41 / May 2000 26 Resurrection means doing it again I chose to spend most of my time in front of one sculpture, one painting and one photograph. The sculpture, Christ on the Cold Stone, is by an unknown fifteenth or sixteenth century Dutch master-mason, and depicts a near-life-size Jesus, naked, his right hand holding an utterly weary head, his left covering his genitals: this is Jesus the man.
The photograph is of Mark Wallington's marble resin sculpture of Jesus as boy-nextdoor, which occupied the spare plinth at Trafalgar Square last year. The painting was Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham (1924-6), in which a remarkably maternal Jesus cradles two babies in his arms whilst presiding over a resurrection in which the dead rise from their graves in Cookham churchyard. "In this life", wrote Spencer, "we experience a kind of Resurrection when we arrive at a state of awareness, a state of being in love, and at such times we like to do again what we have done many times in the past, because now we do it anew in Heaven".
Heavens below Heaven, incidentally, was the title of an exhibition earlier this year at the Liverpool Tate. Interesting, isn't it, how our post-Christian, irreligious age falls back on a Christian and religious vocabulary when it wants to say something significant? An argument, perhaps, despite what the editor writes on page 3, that the old religious words can't yet be cast aside.
Doreet LeVitte Harten, the curator, writes in the catalogue: "Whether they want to admit it or not, people are and always will be religious beings, even in secular - times, and even when they call themselves atheists..." As the catalogue explains, "Heaven is an exhibition of contemporary art with a clearly defined theme...It opens up the discussion in an area that is currently of great interest and which fascinates media specialists, sociologists, anthropologists and art historians alike - that area is religion, and more particularly how religion manifests itself in a society that is formed by fashions and markets, a media-soaked society that craves networks of all kinds and which no longer pays allegiance to traditional notions of truth and reality but which has yielded to ‘spectacle’ for its own sake." Excellent SoFstuff. My favourite exhibit was a statue of Michael Jackson and his monkey, painted in gold and white - a parody of the shepherds, shepherdesses and farm boys of the rococo era. Heaven indeed!
God.com John Humphrys, he who makes his living interrupting waffling politicians on the Today programme, had a nice story in the Sunday Times: "The president of the United States decided... that he needed a grand project to impress the world. So he ordered that scientists should create the most powerful computer imaginable by linking together every computer on the planet. "The great day dawned when the project was complete and the president invited all the world's leaders to the White House to witness the awesome machine in action... ‘So now, gentlemen’, said the president [who had evidently not invited any women to this particular assignation], ‘we have the most powerful brain in history available to answer our questions. Who will ask the first one?’ "The Pope spoke first. 'There is only one question worthy of this historic moment. Does God exist?’ The question was entered. The machine buzzed for a few moments. The answer appeared on the screen: 'He does now SOF 41 / May 2000 RON ZON1 EPAGHE! I | M ACARON | ——— ) ) LP: 2 THe KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS 4 wi0 "POPE JOHN PAUL II ve ‘at See Fae nee Convenience store, USA Isn‘t it about time you joined the SEA OF FAITH is a network of individuals and local groups which aims to explore and promote religious faith as a human creation.