We’ve been seeking that festival feeling for millennia

Why else do we endure discomfort, queues, and sleep deprivation?

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Associate Minister at Holy Trinity Clapham, London.

A singer on a stage holds out his arms to conduct the crowd.

Chris Martin enchanting Glastonbury.

Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why do we go to festivals? It was something I contemplated at 4am while trying to stop a marquee from setting sail into the air during a quintessentially English late July storm. Thankfully we pinned it down, but sometimes it seems we can't get a handle on something until it's been taken away from us. Lockdown allowed us to indulge in some soul-searching about our appetite for summer festivals. A Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee survey of 36,000 people showed that what people most missed about festivals during the pandemic was 'the atmosphere'. The atmosphere, much like that airborne marquee, is something difficult to put your finger on, but whatever it is, you do want to soak it up.

So, what contributes to that ‘atmosphere’? Harry van Vliet from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences compared over 20 studies into motivations for festival-going. He distilled them into: escape, family togetherness, socialisation, and novelty. Other researchers, such as Rippen and Bos, cite realising significance, giving meaning and giving shape, and deploying, developing and maintaining competencies. As abstract and ethereal as our motivations are, at festivals we want to ram the tent peg into the ground, staking the opportunity to escape or to imagine the future. Why else would you endure discomfort, questionable cuisine and sanitation, queues and sleep deprivation? We endure little inconveniences because we have bigger thirsts.

Then there's the gap between what people hope to get out of a festival and what the organisers are aiming for. Spare a thought for those who booked onto the FYRE Festival, which promised ‘a new type of music festival that would ignite the energy and power of its guests’. Instead, they ignited fury, lawsuits, and six years in prison for the founder. The driver here was greed. If festivals are an immersive experience, what the festivalgoers unsuspectingly immersed themselves in was the sad fruit of that particular rotten orchard. Instead of the gourmet meals and luxury villas, the staff ate sandwiches in styrofoam boxes and guests who’d spent up to $100,000 to attend fought over a limited number of mattresses and tents. One legal document from a guest claimed guests were lured into ‘a complete disaster, mass chaos and post-apocalyptic nightmare’.

The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine.

We know if we’ve immersed ourselves in something more hopeful. I’ve spoken to several people who’ve been to Taylor Swift gigs, all still ‘buzzing’. Cities and countries keep reporting the bounce, the economic uplift they’ve all experienced from a Swift visitation. Deep down, at concerts and festivals alike we all probably know that we’re not there to ignite the energy and power of us as the guests, but to spectate the energy of the maestro at work. They are the ones who plumb the depths of creative introspection for us. They are the ones who concoct, via musical alchemy and a large support team, something reaching transcendence. If we can immerse ourselves in that, then, however fleetingly, all the inconvenience will have been worth it.

Festivals, therefore, are a pick-n-mix of artistry that we can come up close to. And therefore, the thought goes, their creative genius. Which is almost as elusive as the atmosphere of an immersive festival itself. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, says it was a mistake when we placed the human at the centre of the universe, and the pressure that comes from having to be a creative genius. In her 2009 TED Talk she spoke about Socrates believing he had a daemon that spoke to him, and the Romans believed that they had a ‘sort of disembodied creative spirit’ called a genius. The performer, therefore, is like a prophet or a priest. We get to enter little portals to the divine.

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’

But what if the founder of the FYRE Festival was actually right? What if the guests themselves at festivals have energy and power, and not just Chris Martin? Millenia ago, this idea was once also floated at the festival of tabernacles, or Sukkot, where the Israelites made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem and would camp in tents for seven days.

The gospel writer John says that Jesus spoke to whatever it was people had pitched up tents by the temple for:

‘On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.’

John goes on to explain that ‘By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.’

Where the Holy Spirit had previously been given to specific people, for specific times and purposes, including creativity, here the Holy Spirit was promised to anyone who would believe in him. And as well as their own fulfilment, the divine creative energy would flow through them to others.

More than a mere atmosphere or nebulous spirit, Jesus claims to be one with the creative energy who hovered over the waters at the start of the Bible, the dwelling place at the end of the Bible where God will be with his people, and drove a stake, or a cross, into the ground to enable this to happen.

Maybe Coldplay can be right, when on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury they sang to tens of thousands, ‘you’ve got a higher power.’

Article

Creed

18 November 2024

3 min read

John Smyth: how evil masks itself as goodness

Be alert to the cloaked and warped wherever it occurs.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

William Blake's illustration of Satan, a winged angel, flying over a prone Eve.

Satan Exulting over Eve, William Blake.

Getty Museum, via Wikimedia Commons.

Much has been written over these past days about Justin Welby’s resignation and the turmoil in the Church of England. Attention has focused on who knew what, and who did or didn’t act on their knowledge. Less attention has been focused on the dark heart of this story – John Smyth himself and the way he conducted his sinister campaign of manipulation and harm. A campaign that was – the more I think of it – not just abusive, but demonic.

How could Smyth have got away with it for so long? How could he have persuaded these young men to go along with his sadistic beatings? Why did people try to ignore it, hoping they could keep it quiet?

If there is one note struck in the Bible about evil, it is its deceitfulness. Jesus called the devil ‘the father of lies’ – and lies always present themselves convincingly as the truth. St Paul once wrote of how “Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness.” The meaning of the name ‘Lucifer’ is literally ‘light bringer’.

This all reflects the ancient tradition taken up by John Milton’s Paradise Lost, of Satan as a fallen angel – one of the crowd of celestial creatures, usually invisible to humans, who appear at key moments in the Bible, like the visions of Isaiah or the birth of Jesus – one who unlike all the others, resented his subservient role as a messenger of God and set himself up as a rival instead. Yet the point is he still looks like an angel. And so, it seems, did John Smyth, with his fine words, clever sounding theology and earnest prayers.

A few days ago, I listened to an account from one of the survivors of the way John Smyth went about grooming his victims. Smyth presented himself as a father-figure for young boys away from home in boarding school, looking for older parental figures who would help guide them through the confusions and complexities of adolescence. To justify this, he would say that of course God is our Father, as Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer, but God is our Father in heaven, not on earth, and that he, John Smyth, was to act as their earthly father. And, as he claimed, fathers discipline their children, he had the responsibility to discipline them physically for their spiritual benefit, with the horrendous results with which we are all now too painfully aware.

The arrogance of this is breathtaking. For any being – human or celestial - to put themselves in the place of God, to presume to usher God into the distance and to step into his shoes, is an echo of that primal sin of Satan in the garden of Eden, who tells Adam and Eve that they don’t need to listen to God, but instead to him.

When you survey the carnage Smyth’s warped theology and evil practice has wreaked – most tragically to the lives of those he mistreated so deviously, it is hard not to see something more than merely sinful – but something demonic going on. John Smyth chose to obey the dark instincts of his heart, and to take the Faustian pact that grasps power over others at the loss of one’s own soul. He chose to give in to his evil desires entirely, cloaking them in phony but eloquent religious terminology.

Acknowledging the deceitfulness of evil is not to excuse those who tried to cover it up. In fact, recognising this is to hear a call to greater vigilance, in that when faced with something of this order we are not facing something obvious, ordinary, easy to spot. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,” says the letter to the Ephesians, “but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” If we in the Church have not taken safeguarding seriously enough, it is because we have not taken the nature of evil seriously enough. Remaining alert for the evil that masks itself as goodness – whether in the church or anywhere else for that matter - is a spiritual and moral skill we need to learn more than ever.