How the curious react to creativity in a cathedral

The moved, confused and impressed.

Stuart Haynes

Stuart is communications director for the Diocese of Liverpool.

An art structure of a circular peak sits on the chequered floor of a cathedral.

Monadic Singularity, Anish Kapoor, Liverpool Cathedral.

Rob Battersby.

In the summer of 2024 thousands of visitors came to Liverpool Cathedral and encountered the challenging artwork of celebrated international artist Anish Kapoor. In his first exhibition in Liverpool for over 44 years these works were displayed as part of our centenary celebrations.

They caused a stir. Some were moved, some were confused, many were impressed but there were not many who entered our building that did not have an opinion. As a surprise to us we did not get many questioning why we allowed these pieces into the sacred presence of a cathedral church disrupting the places where worship occurs. Most recognised that this carefully curated exhibition used its artwork to speak to both the building and the pieces themselves.

But we must ask ourselves the question what is the point? What does a vibrant worshipping community such as Liverpool Cathedral stand to gain? Our architecture is impressive, you can’t miss us in the city so why rock the boat by bringing in work from an artist of great renown and great controversy?

The creativity comes through the careful curation of work that speaks to the human condition and ultimately our relationship with God.

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The answer surely lies in two places.

Firstly, there’s the long tradition the church has in using art to tell Jesus’s story to the world. Visit any church and you will likely see a stained-glass window impressively depicting a biblical story like a medieval Banksy. Our worship services can be seen as theatre and performance with choreographed liturgical movements, stunning choral pieces or magnificent contemporary music. The communion prayer acts like a Shakespearian soliloquy retelling the dramatic story of Jesus’s death and resurrection. Art and theatre are intermeshed with the church. Liverpool Cathedral has a number of permanent and temporary art works including work from Elizabeth Frink and our iconic Tracey Emin neon light.

Secondly, like most cathedrals in the modern age Liverpool Cathedral walks the precarious path between commerciality and spirituality. To be sustainable without regular governmental support we must raise substantial money far beyond the reach of the traditional giving of a congregation. We need to be creative, we need to do things, put on events, host exhibitions to reach beyond the bounds of a traditional church audience and connect with a wider public.

Liverpool Cathedral has done this for a number of years, welcoming Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon before hosting his Gaia exhibition and then starting a long association with Peter Walker through Peace Doves, Identity and the very popular Light Before Christmas shows. These are not chosen simply to draw in the masses. That would be short-sighted, counterproductive and create the false narrative that cathedrals are more interested in money rather than the worship of God.

In Liverpool our attempts to attract people to these exhibitions are predicated on the notion that whatever a visitor's motivation when they arrive they will encounter us and through us encounter God. Last year 31,000 people saw our Christmas Sound and Light show and as a result that led to greater numbers coming to our Christmas Eve services. People want to make the connection, we need to help them in that.

If a cathedral is to use this work successfully it must help us and our visitors ask searching questions. Sure it is great fun to have a picture with one of these exhibits and most of what we do is deliberately Instagramable. However, the creativity comes through the careful curation of work that speaks to the human condition and ultimately our relationship with God. The museum of the moon and Gaia provoked many interesting conversations and debates about the relationship between science and faith alongside the age-old question of how creation came about.

Peace Doves brought together a post covid community trying to come to terms, both individually and collectively, with the impact of the Lockdown years. In bringing together a piece of community art we were able to focus minds on loss, healing and hope.

It isn’t direct, it isn’t overt but we are also not shy of the fact that we are a cathedral and we do God.

So, to Anish Kapoor. When he was Dean of our cathedral, Justin Welby, challenged us to think of the cathedral as a safe place to do risky things in the service of God. Many could say that hosting an exhibition by Anish Kapoor encapsulates that risk. Challenging, controversial and provocative his work attracts thought and creates a stir. The exhibition stands firmly in our tradition of using art to ask questions. The introduction to the exhibition booklet states that the exhibition encapsulates “the artist’s exploration of the physicality of the human body, the title – Monadic Singularity – reflects the interrelation of human existence and the universe” yet again showing a connection to God and our faith.

It isn’t direct, it isn’t overt but we are also not shy of the fact that we are a cathedral and we do God. People came to the Kapoor exhibition for a multitude of reasons. We had fine art students able to contextualise, theorise and talk sagely about Anish Kapoor and the meaning behind his work, we had families with young children enjoying being able to run around and interact with the works, we had people completely bemused or making wild guesses as to what it all meant. That gives an opening to help us have the conversation about the God that means so much to us and how we interpret this art in the light of our faith.

Cathedrals are places of creativity and need to remain that way. Cathedrals have the opportunity to bring many people through their doors every day. Art can do that and as we have seen since mediaeval times can help us and others understand God and their place in life.

Article

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

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My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.