Songs of Praise in The Jungle at Calais

I admit it: I'm not the biggest fan of Songs of Praise, though my wife and I watch it most weeks after cathedral evensong over a cup of tea. Put it down to my getting old and grumpy, but I find myself irritated by its relentless feel-good tone, its love of the bright, shiny and can-do, and the often jejune melodies and lyrics of its hymns and songs (and I don't just mean the contemporary ones). Sometimes it feels perilously close to religion-lite.

However, we all know that it has a devoted following. And the programme has at times achieved real depth. This has often been when it has explored the darker side of human experience such as human pain whether physical or emotional, relationships that are undergoing stress, remembrance of war and conflict, and death and bereavement. Such themes have brought out the best in presenters who show how good they are at interviewing people who are suffering with real sensitivity and insight.

This is why I was pleased to read yesterday that Songs of Praise is visiting the Jungle migrants' camp at Calais. I first read about it on the front page of The Sun. (What was I doing reading that particular newspaper? Answer: I was at our new house to see how the decorators were progressing. There it was in the kitchen. I couldn't resist the temptation to pick it up - it made a change from Friday's Guardian.) I tweeted: 'It's not often that mainstream Christian faith makes it on to the front page of The Sun'.

Then I looked inside. True to form, the paper fulminated self-righteously about what a wicked thing it was to do this. The BBC sending Songs of Praise to the Calais migrant camp amid the current chaos is like something from Monty Python. Will we get to see migrants wrestling with riot police and storming lorries as a choir stands at the Channel tunnel welcoming them with a rousing rendition of Jerusalem? The BBC is showing its trendy lefty colours once again. It shouldn't be supporting the migrants and making a political point out of them. It's the police and border personnel who are protecting our shores from migrants who are the real heroes and who deserve our support. The migrants must be stopped from trying to get into Britain. And so on. I've paraphrased.

So I want to applaud the BBC's decision to cross the Channel and broadcast from The Jungle. I have no doubt that SOP will do it compassionately and sensitively, but also intelligently and fairly. The Church already has a presence in The Jungle where a tent has been set up for migrants to gather and worship in. I'm glad that SOP can be there to give the migrants air-time in a broadcast forum where it would be so easy to pretend they don't exist. We need to hear their voices in other contexts than daily news reports.

What's the answer to the scornful Pharisees at The Sun? It's pretty obvious. Just ask what Jesus would do. He would be in The Jungle, of course, just as he kept company with a lot of other people the establishment of his day found it difficult to tolerate. It's not that Jesus didn't maintain a clear head about the weighty matters of the law such as duty and justice. Nor is it that he didn't grasp the endless complexity of human life. It's simply that where he saw people in need of touch, tenderness and a listening ear without the threat of sanction and exclusion, he was there with them.

'I am for the suffering people' said Mother Mary Pilenko, a Russian nun who championed Jewish victims of the holocaust. She herself was to die at the camp at Ravensbrück because she stepped in to take the place of a frightened woman who was waiting to go into the gas chamber. The church must always be for, and stand with, all who are victims and who are the suffering people of our time.

I'm very glad that Songs of Praise has made the courageous decision to be there too. Three cheers for the BBC once again.

Floods and Photography: telling all the truth

We have seen some unforgettable images of water in recent weeks. Water lying still and serene across half of Somerset; water hurling itself against the railway line at Dawlish; water unleashed from sagging rain clouds collapsing under their own weight. There is a kind of beauty in these sights, and our best photographers have not been slow to capture it.

What we know, however, is that this terrible beauty often belongs to the bystander, the observer who is lucky enough to be able to view it from afar. Not necessarily physically afar: it’s possible that the photographers who captured those extraordinary waves rearing up to the sky were at risk themselves. But some of these images seem to come from an emotional distance where the camera is uninvolved and safe, positioned on higher ground, so to speak, where it won’t get wet. And we who admire them are at risk of looking at them in the same way, seduced by what seems wonderfully fascinating and strange.

The truth of course is more ugly. I am guessing, but when your home or land has been under several feet of water for weeks on end, when you cannot get in or out of your village, when your crops are destroyed and your animals have to be transported far away, when everything you have worked for is ruined, when raw sewage is floating through your house, when you are old or sick or alone or just very afraid, there is nothing beautiful about this watery world. It is dirty, polluting and cruel. The camera does not easily go into these forlorn despoiled places other than to document them and thereby objectifying them, a pornography of disaster. It sells newspapers and draws us like a magnet to our screens. But it may not always help us to capture the merciless way life has been wrenched out of its normality. It may not stimulate our imaginations so that we begin to view dire events with real empathy.

The best photographers understand this. They take risks by getting involved, and their legacy is war photography, disaster photography or street photography that moves us not just for its artistry and technique but also for its honesty. The trouble is, photography also risks beautifying what it sees. This is fine (or is it?) if your subject matter is an idyllic landscape or building radiant in the sunlight. You crop out anything that compromises the vision, clone-stamp blemishes, adjust the colour saturation, and create a paradise. Even the violence of nature is susceptible to this treatment. Those sunsets over the Somerset Levels look gorgeous. Of course, photography didn’t invent this beguiling way of seeing nature. Painters in both the classical and romantic traditions did it freely, and photography has been heavily influenced by it.

We thought water was our friend: life-giving, cleansing and refreshing. But we have seen the shadow side of water, its capacity to despoil and threaten with a relentlessness that is without mercy. It can be the quiet relentlessness of rivers slowly rising up to the bank top, of water creeping silently beneath floorboards and front doors and French windows. It can be the furious relentlessness of the whole gale from the south shattering puny defences and driving seas inland where they have no right to be. Like the Hebrew psalmist complaining that ‘the waters have come up even to my neck’, victims must feel helpless against its power. How is that to be conveyed in images that can make a difference to how we respond?

Perhaps still photography has to admit its limitations. The photographer is not usually the one who is dealing with a crisis, and this at once makes a difference to how it is seen and responded to. I recognise that the same is true of much of the commentary, like this blog. But when a voice speaks directly out of the waters themselves, it is vivid and authentic. Reading some of the tweets that have come out of south west England in recent days has touched me*. I don’t know how anyone has the time let alone the will to write even 140 characters. But these first-hand accounts of what it feels like to be flooded are compelling not simply because of events themselves, but their effect on the men, women and children caught up in them. These are our fellow-citizens who are suffering. We should be in solidarity, not bystanders but friends who weep with those who weep and do what we can to help.

We need to remember this when we are dazzled by a great photograph. It may not tell all of the truth.

* For example, @SouthWestFarm. Farming couple living and working on a farm surrounded by vast amounts of water in the heart of the Levels. Please support our ongoing battle to #dredgetherivers. Somerset.

 

On Hearing Wagner at the Proms

This 200^th anniversary year of Richard Wagner’s birth has been a great celebration for his admirers. I had better admit that I am one of them. I write this having just listened to a marvellous performance of Götterdämmerung from the Proms. For me, the greatness of Wagner is not so much the theatre as the music. The luminous orchestration, the seamless marriage of instruments and voices, the use of distinctive musical themes or leitmotifs that act as musical and emotional signposts – all this adds up to an incomparable experience.

Someone once told me off when I was an undergraduate for listening too much (as he thought) to the Ring and trying to play parts of it on the piano. ‘It’s like a drug’ he said: ‘before you know it, you’re on a high and risk taking leave of your senses.  Look at Ludwig the Second who was seduced by Wagner’s music and went mad as a result. It’s what led to Hitler (a notorious admirer) and the death camps. Stick to Bach and Beethoven. At the very least, try to have an uneasy conscience about it’   

I’ve blogged on this site about my semitic background, and have paid tribute to my German-Jewish grandmother who was one of the most important influences of my life. Before the Third Reich, her family of assimilated Jews loved opera, especially Wagner. And even after she had survived the holocaust and made her home in England, she could never quite get it out of her system though I think she tried. When I was old enough, she asked me to play for her the ravishing Quintet from the last act of Meistersinger. Then it had to be the Prize Song, and then the Prelude. This gave me the permission I needed.

At theological college, one of my lecturers (Dr Jim Packer) asked if I would like to listen through the Ring cycle with him, one act every afternoon on the 24 (or so - I've forgotten how many it was) LPs of the legendary 1954 Fürtwängler version. (You have to have a lot of time for Wagner.) After each act, there was tea and then an hour’s conversation (more a tutorial) about the significance of Wagner and the Ring. JIP loved the cycle because, he told me, it was a profound myth of redemption. Its central theme was salvation through suffering: sacrifice offered so that the era of the corrupt gods could be ended and a new humanity be born. What could be more Christian than that? he insisted. Coming as it did from a highly conservative evangelical theologian, this was a remarkable insight for me as a raw young biblicist student barely out of his teens. I don’t think JIP ever wrote it up, but I have never forgotten it.

Rossini once said unkindly that Wagner had good moments but bad half hours. He is not everyone’s cup of tea, especially not, perhaps, those who are just as enthusiastically  marking this year’s other bicentenary, the birth of Verdi or the centenary of Britten's birth. I can only say what his music does for me. And that is, to touch me in places few other composers can reach.

I once went to a performance of my favourite of all Wagner’s music dramas, Tristan and Isolde. My wife bought me a ticket for the front stalls as a birthday present but didn’t come with me because, she said, she doubted if she would stay awake. It was staged in a self-conscious symbolist way that for me lost the naturalness of this profound story of human passion. So I decided to close my eyes and listen, lose myself in the waves of sublime music rising up from the orchestra pit a few feet in front of me, and imagine the 
drama in my own way. It was one of those experiences I knew I would never forget.

Should I as a Jewish-Christian man have an uneasy conscience about something that has touched me so deeply? To love the music is not to endorse the notorious self-serving egotism the composer was famous for, let alone the anti-semitism he purveyed. But the Jewish Daniel Barenboim, conductor of the Proms Ring, has had to negotiate this issue for himself. That he could give us such a rapturous series of performances speaks for itself. At the end of tonight’s Götterdämmerung it was several seconds before anyone could bear to break the long pregnant silence that followed the final cadence.  It was truly spellbinding. (Listen to the last 20 minutes on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer and judge for yourself.)

Like Caiaphas in St John’s Gospel, I think that Wagner’s music-dramas speak beyond anything the composer himself could know. Their universal vision gives the clue as to how our broken humanity can be put back together again.  Wagner spoke about the ‘music of the future’. It is – not just because it was artistically ground-breaking, but because of the range of its perspective and embrace. Like all great art, it speaks into our contemporary lives and dilemmas. It recognises who and what we are.

But for now, as the continuity announcer gently reminded us after the broadcast, ordinary life goes on. Tomorrow it will be Monday morning.