Art, Social Justice and The Bible

The BMS (Baptist Missionary Society) have asked me to consider being part of some of their video material of third world mission. I am honoured but unsure I will be of use. They have asked me as a poet and my rhyming couplets are one of the things I have an inferiority complex about. Yet I have worked with them in the past, with my songwriting partner Sam Hill, so I know that they have considered it and I trust their judgment that whatever worth I am in that field I will fit their bill. That is not the thought I want to lay out here though. The thought I want to explore a little is not who they have asked but why?

It seems that one of their committee had heard an astronaut speak. He had been to the moon and was asked what he would take with him if he had a chance to go back. He replied, “An artist.” It is a profound answer and one that merges into many of my thoughts over the past few years and particularly in recent months. An artist? Why? I am told he went on to say that if you want to tell the story of the moon landings then technicians were not the experts you need. They are scientists. They can fly a rocket and land a capsule but the gifts of relating the magnificence of the experience to the world belonged to other people with different vocations and talent.

So, I get to join the team; sadly, not to the moon. If it works out I’ll get to travel somewhere and be around the margins, listening, focusing, picking up, dreaming, imagining, untangling, uncovering. I’ll be there to get inside the story, around the story, above the story. I will look at emotions, narratives, history, and context. The smells, the landscape, the clothes or lack of them, the feelings expressed in words and the smiles and the sense of justice and love and, maybe, the criminal lack of it. My aim will be to capture moments and people and hope and evil. To create an order of words to shape the truth so that that truth would not be confined, as words have a habit of doing, but to give them life so they can reach every part of our listening. Ears…yes… but beyond that, to our minds, hearts and souls.

What delights me most about all this is that I have recently undertaken a Masters in Theology looking at Social Justice and Art and how they are connected. So this project is perfect. That I have been asked to do it by a missionary society, for the reasons they have given, suggests to me that I am on to something.

These are my three passions; art, Social Justice and my Christian faith all blending into one. A key book in the process will be John De Gruchy’s book Christianity, Art and Transformation in which the South African Professor, at the University of Cape Town, looks at how my favourite three things blend in the context of South Africa. That South Africa is another of my favourite obsessions can only excite me more.

I have spent a lot of time in and around Cape Town in the last number of years. Indeed by July I will have spent a good eight months, in total, in that amazing place over the past ten years. South Africa celebrated democracy in the same year that we in Northern Ireland began a peace process with the historic IRA cease fire. When I am in Cape Town I often ask why they are moving forward much faster than us. I often conclude that their use of art is different and more transforming than ours.

For example, I went to the District Six museum for the first time in June 2004. This is an area of Cape Town that was designated white by the apartheid government, in the mid-sixties. It had, before that had a very bohemian feel with art and different colours and cultures mixing freely together. Once designated white though, a community was divided. People were ripped from their friends and streets and heritage. They were in the roughest of ways sent to the sandy plains of the Cape Flats to create townships while their homes were literally bulldozed to the ground. More than bricks and mortar, they smashed up lives. Holes were gouged in people’s hearts and souls.

When I got to the Museum, I was amazed at the way the place had been laid out with poems in various places, artistically presented. There was an amazing quilt of small sheets of cloth, with poems and reminiscences written on each. It was moving and challenging. I went to the little shop to get a history of the tragedy. There wasn’t one. There were, however, poetry books, photographic books and stories from the former inhabitants. They were telling the story of the injustice of District Six in art rather than history. I was challenged. It made me think about the role art was playing in not only the reminders of inhumanity but also in the healing of the present. There are many places around South Africa where you walk upon the bloody, vicious scars of history but find yourself light of heart and smiling. When you find that happening inside yourself you ask why? And the answer is that you are walking on redeemed ground. The horrors of the past never cease to make you angry but in South Africa there has been a turning around. It is an amazing place.

In 2004 there was also an exhibition at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town called 10 Years Of Democracy. Again, as I walked around it and saw the vast array of artists who had tackled the conflict and its on going resolution, I couldn’t help but ask what would be in the Ulster Museum’s Gallery if they did a 10 Years Since Cease Fire exhibition? Music and art were very important during the anti-apartheid struggle and continue to be after that struggle was ended. In Northern Ireland we have been quick to open inquiries to prove who was right and wrong and which side suffered most. There have been novelists and playwriters and musicians and artists who have looked at our peculiar troubles and their aftermath but how much it has been embraced by the general public and how much belief there is that it has power to transform is what I want to ask?

For me it will also reflect on the Biblical models. What does the Bible say about art and art’s role in change. How does the Bible use art to change us? There are many, within the “evangelical” community that I belong to, who are suspicious of any kind of art being used in any kind of Christian way. Artist have even looked at me a little cock-eyed when I suggest that they have a Biblical mandate, some even asking me to show them any art in the Bible. Yet, the Bible is filed with angry poet prophets, angry songwriting prayers and a story telling Messiah. The Bible is a library of books in various literary genres and is used by many who don’t believe as a book of great literature. Most of what God told us was not words dropped from heaven but dramatic pictures of who He is and what He does like a baby in a manger of straw. Extraordinary art! What role did God intention art to be used to transform? Have we lost that role?

So these are some of things I am looking at and pondering right now. As I study this Masters there might be less on the web page but I will be jotting down thoughts like this one as I untangle my brain. The invite from the Baptist Missionary Society gives me a chance to live for a time in that tendon that joins art and transformation. It will be a practical outworking of my theological study. I look forward to it.

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