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

Culture

Film & TV

Psychology

4 September 2024

5 min read

Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.

Inside Riley's head.

Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us.

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture:

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.