On Easter Sunday, 1999, Pope John Paul II published his letter to artists, writing: “‘From chaos there rises the world of the spirit.’ These words of Adam Mickiewicz, written at a time of great hardship for his Polish homeland, prompt my hope for you: may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will open the human soul to the sense of the eternal.”
Just a few days after Pentecost this year, I attended an event in Dublin organised by Marcas Ó Conghaile Muirthemne from the YouTube channel More Christ. The timing was significant. Here, three artists came together answering the prayers of Pope John Paul II as the Holy Spirit filled the room where we gathered, and through Jonathan Pageau, Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth opened the human soul to that sense of the eternal. The place was also significant, the homeland of WB Yeats, who wrote: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
There is no doubt that we find ourselves in a time of great chaos, out of which have arisen, as Mickiewicz predicted, many prophetic voices.
I had spoken with both Pageau and Shaw before, but Kingsnorth was new to me. All three men had a gentle humility about them, despite their large and growing audiences. If it weren’t for Shaw’s ever-present hat, you could hardly have picked them out of the crowd in which they happily mingled.
Each spoke of the importance of story as a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us. Pageau, a French-Canadian icon carver, warned of the dangers of forgetting the story that we are in: “The Bible is our story, the human story, remembered over time and across generations.” This should come as no surprise to Christians – it was a story that Christ himself used when he taught. We remember parables, we recognise ourselves in them and can still apply them thousands of years later (whether Christian or not) because they connect in a way that only story can.
Myth man Martin Shaw spoke with a mischievous beauty, one sublime line after another tumbling out and impregnating his captive audience with wonder. He talked of recapturing an inheritance that the West has turned its back on, but that “we glimpse sometimes in fairy tales”, and about our need to regard language as a wealth with which we might restore the broken bridge linking us to our past.
Kingsnorth moved me most. I had come expecting wisdom, and found plenty, but what I saw in him was something else. I saw miracle.
When I was young, I had a sense that I could not easily explain. The closest I could come would be to call it homesickness. Experiencing it at home, I put it down to a yearning to be at my grandmother’s house in Ireland, but there too I was unsettled by it. I know now it was a homesickness for heaven, as CS Lewis said: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Kingsnorth talked of responding to this same homesickness, of being pursued by the Hound of Heaven and of opening the door to Him. This opening requires sacrifice, a climbing down from, and reordering of, previously held convictions. It requires the one thing modelled by all the saints – humility.
“I’ve been a writer for 30 years,” he said, “and always had some intuition about this culture wrecking the things that matter, and so I was an environmentalist for a long time. I was always trying to write a story that would explain what’s gone wrong and how we got here. I knew the last place to look was the Christian story because it was part of the problem.”
But, like Augustine before him, Kingsnorth came to recognise: “You were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The things you made kept me far from you.”
At a time when countless numbers are so enthralled with the world that they resist God’s calling, the voice of one who was there and now cries out from the Ark is a miraculously powerful one.
Over 100 years after Yeats wrote, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” I found in Dublin three of the best, brimming with conviction.
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