Article
Belief
Creed
Holidays/vacations
3 min read

When the journey is the destination

Flights to nowhere and third spaces.

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

A large airport window silhouettes a bench at which one person sits.
Suganth on Unsplash.

'It's not about the destination. It's the journey.' Spare a thought for the British Airways passengers who left Heathrow to Houston, only to land back where they started at nine hours later. It's probably a little bit about the destination too. 

Even though BA195 was already flying over Newfoundland when the technical issue was raised, it made more sense to fix one of its Rolls Royce engines back at the ranch. In November an Air New Zealand flight also had a 'flight to nowhere' that lasted eleven hours. I'm not sure that's quite what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote: 

'We shall not cease from exploration 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time.’ 

Being stuck somewhere you don't want to be, let alone finding yourself back where you began, is a tad more prosaic. The never-ending journey can feel like a destination in itself. Which is exactly where you don't want to be. 

Airports and airplanes are neutral territory, not dissimilar to 'third places' as coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Home is the first place, workplace is the second, and then there's the third space in our lives. Some of the characteristics are shared: a neutral ground without obligations, a leveller where status doesn't matter, and also where conversation is the main activity. Clearly Oldenburg wasn't thinking of the tube and Londoners where the chat is minimal! Airports and airplanes are also not completely levelling, when a delay or diversion means some can wait well up in the pointy end of the plane or in exclusive lounges. 

Everybody knows each other's name, they celebrate together, mourn together - a compelling mixture of conviction, compassion and community. 

The other day I turned on the TV, a re-run of Cheers appeared, about the eponymous bar in Boston where characters from different backgrounds and perspectives mingle. My toddler asked 'What's that?' I thought better than beginning to explain the concept of a third place. Or drinking. But we're all trying to get somewhere in life. Whether that's to get ahead, or even if it's just away from it all: to a bar or a holiday. So, the frustration of being stationary and sedentary in life when you're supposed to be having upward momentum can be even more challenging than the inconvenience of being up in the air and flying backwards.  

But the Christian message is that the destination and the journey are actually inseparable.  

Firstly, the church, if small enough, like Cheers, is a place 'where everybody knows your name'. I was recently at a church on a council estate and next to a prison. Everybody knows each other's name, they celebrate together, mourn together - a compelling mixture of conviction, compassion and community. In larger churches, much like most 'third places' you won't know everybody's name, but there is the commonality of having the same destination in mind. The sceptic might say it's simply a ticket to heaven, but the picture the Bible paints of the eternal reality is distinctly mirrored in the week-by-week journey: a liminal place where every people from every tribe and nation gather. It's a place where we can be propelled into the future. 

Then there's the cross itself. The gospel writer Luke says that 'Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem'. He had his destination in mind. And on the cross there was finality for Jesus. But there was also an onward journey to come. Could it be that what the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus opens up for us is not just an eternal destiny in the future, but a journey today where keeping company with God is the destination too? 

Perhaps that's what entering a church can mean for us today: to cross the threshold into the future, and to know the place for the first time. 

Article
Art
Creed
1 min read

How the Creed connects us to a bigger history

Faint shadows in literature and dawning art give glimpses of greater things.

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

Painting of hand of God touching hand of Adam.
Sistine Chapel ceiling detail.
Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Singing the Nicene Creed on Sundays in Latin, a language I do not understand, does not detract from its meditative power. Admittedly not reading music, means attempts to pin the syllables to the blobs on the stave part company with the sounds of the choir and congregation, around the time we turn the sheet over, at ‘sedet ad dexteram Patris’. Sometimes I get back on track by ‘qui locutus est per prophetas’, and sometimes I wait until Amen. Either way it is a meditative experience, on a different level to day-to-day information processing. 

Even in a first language the Creed’s surface is oblique for the modern mind. This initial impenetrability accounts for why, outside the Church, celebrations for the Creed’s 1700th anniversary are niche.  

BBC Radio 4 is running a six-part series Lent Talks, with thinkers and theologians expanding on aspects of the text through personal experience.  

In the first episode theologian Frances Young perceived God’s almightiness in caring for her son Arthur, who was born with profound, life-limiting disabilities. Arthur’s presence in Young’s later-life, ordained ministry, underlined how almightiness is experienced through gentleness: “A hidden, elusive Loving and redeeming presence, gently transforming everything through sheer grace.”  For astrophysicist and theologian David Wilkinson, contemplating ‘That God made all things seen and unseen’, validated science as a Christian endeavour. Wilkinson recalled uncharacteristically hugging a fellow astrophysicist on a Durham street in 2015, at the news of the first direct observation of gravitational waves. The observation captured the earth moving a fraction due to a ripple in spacetime. Incremental glimpses of the workings of the universe serve as stepping stones to fully appreciating creation, and the awe of our place in it. 

Glimpsing a part of a concealed whole, leading to the understanding of greater things, features throughout the Bible. In the King James version of Hebrews we learn: “Who serve unto the example and shadow of heavenly things”. More modern translations use ‘copy’ instead of example. Endeavours on earth, done in the right spirit, can serve as a foretaste or shadow of heaven, of eternal life.  

While the language of the King James Bible offers all things to all men and is woven through literature, the Nicene Creed’s presence is scant. 

As a literary device, a part serving for the whole, or foreshadowing future events works in drama or poetry, but in novels there is less to see. Rectory-raised Jane Austen would have heard the Creed throughout her church going life, but church service scenes are missing from her fiction. Charles Dickens’ faith journey from criticising the established Anglican church of the mid-nineteenth century, to exploring Unitarianism, make the absence in his novels of the Creed, with its centrality of the Trinity, of a piece with his spiritual outlook. Raskolnikov’s glimpse of an icon in the pawnbroker’s home in Crime and Punishment, points to Dostoevsky’s greater ease with fragments momentarily illuminating the bigger picture: ‘in the corner an icon-lamp was burning before a small icon’. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief

Visual art's capacity for rendering the invisibility of the past, the distant, the imagination and the metaphysical, make it a more likely medium for extending the Creed beyond the walls of the church. 

In 1541 Pope Paul III allegedly fell to his knees in wonder in the Sistine Chapel, at the presentation of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement fresco on the altar wall. Michelangelo’s unorthodox, for the times, meditation on personal salvation depicted a cowering Virgin Mary, a beardless Christ, an unbiblical, pointy-eared Charon, the ferryman in Greek mythology, appearing in the underworld, and cascades of nude bodies tumbling towards their eternal fate. By the late1550s Michelangelo’s friend Daniele de Volterra was ordered to paint draperies on some of the naked figures, to correct indecencies. But the devout Michelangelo’s personal vision of the Creed’s ‘judge the quick and the dead’, had already been copied by numerous artists since its unveiling. Giulio Bonasone’s engraving, after Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1546, is just one example of the Renaissance artist’s contemplation of ‘the life of the world to come’, as he entered his seventh decade, taking flight into the wider world. 

Modern artists also offer transcendent moments of faith gesturing towards an overarching framework of belief. In turn of the century France, as the country underwent a Catholic revival, Gwen John was one of many artists working on making modern art full of religious meaning. Conventional paintings of the Annunciation show Mary with the Angel Gabriel, with the white-robed angel, spreading their wings. Drawing on her friend Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Annunciation (Words of the Angel), John created an Annunciation scene, with no visible angel. In Girl Reading at the Window, 1911, a young woman in contemporary dress, is illuminated by light coming through the window, as is the white lace curtain, gently blowing out to touch her dress. Setting aside the expected haloes and wings, John brings to life the Creed’s teaching ‘was incarnate of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary’. 

A dawning realisation heralding a far greater truth is also apparent in Emil Nolde’s Paradise Lost, 1921. In bright, unnaturalistic, colours and in a heavily outlined, naïve style, Nolde catches Adam and Eve’s expressions, as the full consequences of their banishment from Eden become apparent. A moment in time indicates the long road ahead to the promised world of the Creed. 

At the height of the Cold War in 1971, nearly three million Soviet citizens went to see Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic portrait of medieval icon painter Andrei Rublev, five years after the film’s original release. Despite censorship, monochrome projection and no posters advertising the screenings, people found a way to engage with a depiction of belief, creativity and a search for meaning, set against the viscerally brutal backdrop of Tartar pillaged,1400s Russia. 

In an age of Netflix narratives and individualism, connecting with the collective wisdom of churchmen in Constantinople from 1700 years ago can, unavoidably, feel like a stretch. But like the best art, the Creed offers the chance to step out of time, braiding us into us into the faith and vision of others, in ways none of us can understand. 

 

Listen to the BBC Lent Talks

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