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.’

Explainer

Creed

Faith

Justification by faith

15 April 2024

6 min read

The Rest is Luther

Did 'The Rest is History' get Luther right? Graham Tomlin gives his verdict

Graham Tomlin

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

Two podcast hosts in different rooms appear on a split screen talking to each other

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook rank Luther's influence.

I have to confess, I don't listen to every episode of The Rest is History - does anyone do that with the astonishing volume of material they produce? Yet when I see something that interests me – 1970s Britain, the Lost Library of Alexandria, the Easter Rising of 1916, I’m in. So, when I saw they were doing a series on Martin Luther, I just had to listen.

With much of what they cover - take the Lost Library of Alexandria for example - I wouldn’t really know whether they were telling the truth or not, having a passing interest and only a vague knowledge of the topic. Yet this one was different, because, without wanting to blow any trumpets, I do know a fair bit about Luther. I’ve written a doctorate, a biography and a couple of other books on him, lectured on Luther at Oxford University for many years, and spent a lot of time in libraries, poring over his commentaries and treatises, wading my way through dense books by German scholars picking apart the most minute aspects of his theology.

Very often when you hear something on the TV or radio that you know something about, you realise the journalists are winging it. They get away with it because no-one knows any better. So, I wondered this time, would I see through the boys on the podcast, and realise they were winging it too?

They made the Reformation sound and feel the dramatic and earth-shaking movement that it was.

Well, my admiration for Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland went up massively. It was brilliant. I once asked Tom whether they had an army of researchers doing their work for them and he told me they didn’t - they read most of the stuff themselves. So, to have them do five episodes on a topic that is not necessarily their specialist subject and get pretty much all of the story not just right, but really interesting, is quite an achievement. They made the Reformation sound and feel the dramatic and earth-shaking movement that it was.

They normally recount history with a good dose of humour, drama and colour. That is taken for granted. They know how to tell a good story. However, they also really know their stuff. Tom led the way, and I must say, told the story with a level of detail, accuracy and sympathy that was quite remarkable. They clearly enjoyed it too – they loved his earthiness, his preoccupation with the devil and excrement that is so distinctively Luther.

Martin Luther, as they said at the end, was no saint. He was a man of extremes. He could inspire devoted loyalty from his friends, and fury from his enemies in equal measure. He was never dull. He always said his besetting sin was anger – he claimed to write best when he was furious. That explains the vituperative language, the skill at invective, his genius for insults. He said terrible things about the peasants and even worse things about the Jews. Yet he also launched a movement that brought fresh dignity and purpose to countless people across Europe and beyond – he can be said to have touched the lives of the one billion Protestants in the world today. He literally changed the world. And Tom and Dominic helped us understand why.

Definitely a nine out of ten.

But why not ten?

Well, I did have one small quibble. Luther was portrayed as someone who struggled to know that God loved him. So far, so good. His great breakthrough was described by the excellent Tom Holland as “a personal experience of God”, whereby Luther found “a feeling of being washed in the love of God.” Luther’s new discovery was that “If God loves you, you exist in a state of grace… which is a feeling that Christ is present in you, in your secretmost heart, and the certainty of that grace gives you a peace of conscience.”

Now there is something of that in Luther, and it was close, but it’s not quite the way he would have put it.

Luther is really not that interested in experiences of God. In fact, he distrusts them. in 1521, a group of prophets arrived in Wittenberg from a small town called Zwickau claiming experiences of God, but Luther was having none of it. He asked about their experience – but not whether they had experienced the love of God, but whether they had experienced his absence. Had they experienced what Luther called Anfechtung – the experience of feeling God is against you, when you struggle with temptation, are driven to despair, when God doesn’t answer your prayers, and when all you know is your own shame, sin, and disgrace? What do you do then?

And that’s why the Bible was important to him – as an existential anchor when the storms of life hit.

The reason he asked about this was that such experiences so often are the things that help bring faith to birth, because they press the question of who you listen to, or trust, in such times – your own feelings of inadequacy and shame? Or God’s word that tells you something different?

Luther found peace of conscience, not in a mystical experience of the love of God, but in hearing again and again the Word which God had spoken to the human race in Jesus Christ. Against all the odds, and despite his frequent experience of God’s absence rather than his presence, he recalled that God had sent his Son, as a pledge once and for all, that God’s heart was full of love and kindness. In sending Christ, God had given himself (or technical language, his ‘righteousness’) to us in Christ, and the only fitting response, was simply to believe and trust that this is true, whereby that ‘righteousness’ becomes ours, and we are, to use Luther's language, 'justified'. Christians are therefore, in Luther’s classic and paradoxical phrase, ‘both righteous and sinful’ at the same time.

This was indeed profoundly emotional for him. It brought a flood of joy and relief. Yet that joy was the result of faith in faith in the Word, which was the main thing. The emotions followed faith, not the other way round.

He once put it like this: “God achieves his purposes through suffering, pain and anxiety. Yet of course these are not the things in which you expect to find God. As a result, most people do not recognise this as God’s work, because they expect God only to be revealed in glory, grandeur and splendour. The way God works confounds human expectations and so, faith is needed to see past the appearance of things to their true reality.”

This was the doctrine of justification by faith – not trying to be extra religious or having ecstatic experiences of God but simply betting your life on the notion that Jesus is God’s great gift to the world, a gift that tells us he is, despite everything that may point in the other direction, full of love and goodness – and not just to the human race in general, but to you, to me. And that’s why the Bible was so important to Luther – as an existential anchor when the storms of life hit.

Tom and Dominic did a fantastic job in their series on Luther. I really recommend you listen to it – you won’t regret it. Only remember, Luther relied more on faith in the Word of God than the fleeting feelings of his heart:

“Faith is a living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favour that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold.”