A sermon by the Reverend David Moore
The Bible is jam-packed with truly remarkable stories and we ruin them by believing that they are literally true. Not for a second am I suggesting they are untrue, but I am saying - truth is more ethereal, more elusive, more wonderful, more life-giving than any form of certainty.
Today it is story time! Three stories that have crossed my path, or have been my path, showed me the wonder of the uncertainty of truth. I start with my friend Tom, a vicar from South London - four or five times a year we have a day out together in London. The pattern is always the same - exhibition in the morning, pub lunch, exhibition in the afternoon and then the bookshops.
Last November it was Tate Modern - the Gerhard Richter exhibition. This was my first exposure to the work of this artist. My immediate reaction was muted, cautious, uncertain, but bit by bit his painting unbuttoned my resistance, opening my eyes and mind to things new.
Many of his paintings had a hard-to-define quality - he seemed to paint as if the subject was just out of focus and this irritated me, that is, until I was confronted by a painting of his wife as a young woman. She was full-frontal naked walking down the stairs towards the viewer. This painting had the same ‘out of focus’ element which stopped her being seen as a sex object and affirmed her simply as a statement of fact - this was a woman walking down the stairs!
I continued through the rooms of the exhibition, seeing more slightly ‘out-of-focus’ paintings, and then I am confronted with ten sheets or so of glass - 3m x 2m x 25cm. They were vertical, leaning against the wall and arranged so that the gap between each piece of glass was the same at the base but the gap at the top gradually became narrower.
I approached this installation from the side. My first reaction was to sniff and make an unrepeatable comment under my breath! Then I stood in front of these panes of glass! Looking straight through them to the wall behind - but then my eyes readjusted from the wall to my own reflection which seemed to come from the middle of these standing sheets - and I too was slightly out of focus, I too was somehow being placed beyond being caricatured.
Now my mind is buzzing - the nature of light, reflection, refraction, the definition of refraction, the mystery of seeing and being seen! Now my head is full of other stuff - the words of Jesus ‘I am the light of the world’. For me, that refracted light, as in Richter’s paintings, of seeing certainty less clearly, started to remove the male dominance of God - by definition God cannot be male. Is this the confusion/conversation those disciples grappled with on that transfiguration mountain with Jesus?
I will not ask for a show of hands of those who have not taken a good look at the carvings at the back of the church. I drove to Nottingham to get these for the Holocaust Memorial Service and also visit friends near Wakefield and to visit the new Hepworth Museum and then the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, where yet another transfiguration occurred.
We were at the Sculpture Park the day before a huge exhibition by Jaume Plensa finished - how lucky we were. I can only tell you a bit.
There were two heads made of fine wire, facing each other. These were probably 4 meters high - set on a large sloping lawn. We walked up and around the lawn, viewing the heads from 100 yards. As we walked, the heads appeared to move around to follow us. I just could not believe what was happening!
Because it was possible to see through the wire, wherever you were, you could see the trees beyond but you could at one and the same time see the eyes, nose and ears and your brain did the rest ... reconfiguring the disparate facts to make the face. Light-sight-brain within each of us continually battling for comprehension. Now, that really lit me up! Literal trans-figure-ation.
Next we entered the underground galleries which were linked to the outside by a glazed corridor. Along this corridor hung 4 inch metal letters, one above the other - dozens and dozens of vertical sentences - moving slightly as they were touched, played with or walked through; the sunlight reflecting off the aluminum letters. Each string of letters was a phrase or sentence from the Song of Solomon. The movement of the letters was reflecting also the movement, the tussle of the mind in comprehension. Transfiguration indeed.
There’s more!
Entering the first underground gallery, still filled with the excitement of that metallic waterfall outside, everyone was immediately stunned into silence. A half-lit room with 15 alabaster heads, each 6 feet tall. My mouth was dry with what I can only name as adoration and wonder. Was it the size, shape, the colour, the dim light - whatever it was communicated ‘the other’.
The next gallery only allowed 15 people at a time. A large room, again dim golden glowing lighting, and a circle of 5-foot brass gongs, each gong with a large mallet with a fabric head.
Strangers making music, each isolated within their own world of wonder and listening. Listening to unique sounds, freshly made, then disappearing like a blown out match, but with a trace of mmmmh on the air. Occasionally all that wonder triggered over-enthusiasm and some poor soul was mortified by a boom! Strangers intimately cooperating with the sound - sound the twin once removed of sight.
How was it that the experiences we long for in prayer and meditation were so readily available without tuition or authorisation? Complete strangers were sufficiently uninhibited to join in. Once again my heart and soul were ablaze, transfiguration in the gloom of a ‘cave’. We have our golden ‘gong’ but how do we truly authorise each other to fully participate, imagine in ways which produce in our souls our fresh loaves of insight?
One last story: The last Thursday evening in January, here, was the Milton Keynes Holocaust Day Memorial Service with a range of participants. As always, the contribution from Leon School was outstanding. Each year pupils from the school visit Auschwitz and two of them made a presentation here. I won’t go into what they said, but as always they stole my heart and I want to testify why this is so.
These unprepossessing young people were transformed from the normal ‘insignificance’ of their daily lives by having the opportunity, for once in their lives, to be dealing with primary sources - more than books, more than teachers - as important as they are. These youngsters had been, looked, thought and prepared an absolutely riveting presentation. In their heads they had gone beyond books, beyond photographs, beyond tuition - they, as it were, by their visit, by their conversation, by their shock, by their friendship had been up the mountain - they may not know the words or the story but they knew the wonder and confusion of transfiguration.
Of course I realise that all of this is so powerful to me because I was young once, I was a bit of a misfit, an under-performer at school, an outsider who became gripped by a story and, as a result, have for almost 60 years wrestled with that story of Jesus and it did, and still is transfiguring me. A brief journey sideways!
Butterflies get all their living from the flowers. You often think they are resting, but they are really getting their food - sipping honey from thousands of blossoms. But they did not always do this. Once they could not fly at all, and wore very dark coats, and crawled on the ground.
After a while their coats burst open, all down the back, and they came out in dresses of quaker grey. Then these poor, creeping things went to work and spun little silken cords, strong enough to hold them, and swung off from the under part of some leaf into the air; there they swung for more than a week, rocked to and fro by the wind, just as if they were going to sleep. Then a sudden crack in the light grey coat aroused them, and they began to get their sleepy eyes open, and look about. Such beautiful golden wings as they saw, all bordered with black and yellow, and covered all over with the tiniest feathers, only you could not see them with your naked eye. In a very short time the sun and the gentle winds dried up these beautiful wings and taught them how to use them. Off they went, over the tallest trees, to join the rest of the family, who had been transformed just as wonderfully as they were!
How could they believe their senses when they found that all this beauty really belonged to them? The transformation from a worm-like creature into the splendour of a butterfly is one of nature’s greatest wonders. Or as Jesus put it - you must be born again!
Transfiguration does occur - turning young kids, or older people into more than they can imagine - and for me art is doing that all the time! We celebrate the transfiguration of Jesus not because we know it is true from being in the Bible but because it is connects with the truth in our lives.
David Moore is a retired Methodist minister, a sculptor and member of the Church of Christ the Cornerstone.
