* Last summer I participated in the O’Driscoll Forum on Preaching and the Arts at the Vancouver School of Theology, led by Bishop Todd Townshend and Rev. Louise Peters. This is my reflection paper on the experience.*
The story of Christ, Herbert O’Driscoll suggests, is in a relationship of tension with the great forces of culture that shape our world – in tension, but not necessarily opposition. The story exists within the world, despite the world’s violence. I found this idea compelling. The world is so vast, diverse, complicated, and changing. O’Driscoll mentioned the “earthquake of the past three centuries.” And yet, I felt in O’Driscoll’s address that the world, despite its explosiveness, can be held in our hearts and accepted, and that the “broken face of Christ” can be rebuilt in the midst of it.
The walls of our classroom were covered in art, and stations for painting and crafting reflected an idea explored in the course: beauty as a pathway to the gospel. Beauty seemed described as an encouragement, a hallmark, a signpost; even a pleasure to be enjoyed. The church is perhaps ready to re-embrace beauty, after an austere Protestant tradition.
At the same time, to make beauty an end in itself is to overshoot the mark, so to speak. “Beauty would domesticate God if it became a goal in itself rather than a value that emerges in service of God,” writes Paul Scott Wilson.[1] He cites William Carl Placher who “critiques the modern period for attempting ‘to subject the divine to the structures of human reason.’”[2] I become uneasy when Wilson himself writes that “Beauty is fruits of the Spirit: mercy, love, reconciliation, hope, healing, food for the hungry, jobs for the unemployed…” – portraying beauty as a kind of wholesome goodness. In reality, beauty, as Wilson himself acknowledges elsewhere, can also be tricky.
The Canadian author Kim Thuy, whose family were boat people who fled Vietnam, speaks about beauty as an anchor, in an interview:
“Living is the most difficult thing. Right? Just waking up in the morning to start your day is difficult. […] But there’s learning because there’s beauty in everything. I really believe it. As much as Leonard Cohen says there’s a crack in everything, I would say there’s beauty in everything. And I learned that from Tim O’Brian actually. He used to be an American soldier during the Vietnam War and he said that they always walked in one line to avoid mines. But when one comrade, one soldier, would step on a mine, you know exactly what would happen, right – as soon as he takes his foot off, he would be shredded into thousands of pieces and the blood would spill everywhere. But he said just before that, there’s that split second where the pressure of the mine would push him up and he would be just hanging mid-air before exploding. You know the atrocity that comes but your eyes cannot help but see the beauty of that angel hanging midair. And I think we should allow ourselves to see beauty and to use that beauty as our anchor to continue.”[3]
Thuy captures beauty’s strangeness, its unlikeliness – beauty as not even a consolation sometimes, so brutal are its circumstances – but there it is, nevertheless: undeniably attractive, like the otherworldly glow of a forest fire. If our hearts must be haunted by sermons, as O’Driscoll says, then beauty will do it.
Our course, and Wilson’s book, discussed postmodernity, which has brought about the end of metanarratives. These are totalizing truth claims such as, for example, that as we grow in knowledge, we move toward a goal of universal peace.[4] The postmodern era is one where metanarratives fail, where truth is relative, or “in the moment as an event” rather than “for all time.”[5] Beauty, at least, retains value in this world.
Herbert O’Driscoll provided a visual image to support his call to make the story of Christ our own in a world of cultural upheaval. In 1969, on a trip to Palestine, he came across two university students putting together a broken mosaic of Christ’s face. He felt an instant vision of his vocation, which remains with him to this day: “to put together again the shattered face of Christ. Shattered by the cultural earthquakes of the last three centuries. That’s who I am.”[6]
O’Driscoll’s voice and writing exude an acceptanceof the world, despite its continuous tumult and turn away from the church. When he spoke to our class, he placed us in the sixties, when he was a young Anglican priest. He painted a picture of a wild decade, when doors opened that had never been conceived of, when the world was redefined, when the walls of a more conservative past fell down. And yet, “it petered out.” This new energy “didn’t grasp the church because it remained an individual hobby,” O’Driscoll told our class.[7] O’Driscoll felt this same energy for a new future was alive, however, today: “I think of us as second-time-rounders.”
It was clear that for O’Driscoll, these societal movements, such as the dynamics that made up the nineteen sixties, are larger than the church, and that the church itself is vulnerable to them – that opportunity opened for a moment in time, then passed. There is a similar acceptance of the world in Thuy’s words: a refusal to negate the place where we are, despite contradiction, pain, strangeness and death.
Perhaps similarly, Wilson seeks to accept the postmodern world. Movements such as postmodernism involve all of us, and cannot be un-said or undone. The world is large, and the world spins on. “Postmodernity is a not a problem for most of the young; it is their way of thought. It is a problem for those who have inherited modernist assumptions.”[8]
O’Driscoll’s message centred on what Marilynne Robinson calls the “great narrative,” or what C. S. Lewis calls “the great story” – in a nutshell, the story of Christ, made actual. “There is something about being human that makes us love and crave grand narratives,” Robinson writes.[9] This narrative, for her, is something more strange than Wilson’s metanarrative, and I get the impression that for O’Driscoll, it is something that we have to discover for ourselves, that its mystery is what makes it compelling. Yes, it is the story of God, but not in the sense of a totalizing truth claim. It has the flexibility of metaphor; a vagueness that comes not from second-guessing but from not-knowing – an attempt to imagine something unimaginable. The great narrative is “the story that forever eludes telling.”[10] Each generation must make it its own. O’Driscoll paraphrases a Ray Bradbury story, “The Million Year Picnic,” in which a family arrives on Mars, and the father promises the kids that they will get to see Martians. While they hope for a strange alien creature, he ultimately has them look at their own reflection in one of the planet’s canals, and they realize that it is they who are, in fact, the “first Martians.” To make something your own is to know it again for the first time, someone said in class.[11]
If cultural upheaval is the earthquake that has shattered Christ’s face, O’Driscoll adds that the earthquake itself is not the problem. It actually comes to show what will not be shaken. If Thuy says “living is the most difficult thing,” we could say the same of faith, which faces quake after quake. “Art does not come easy,” writes Makoto Fujimura. “It is hard work to live into this generative love, and it is what we are made for…”[12]
Marilynne Robinson says the “great narrative” encompasses all that there is, and all that ever was; that “within the arc of it civilizations blossom and flourish, wither and perish.”[13] Her philosophy embraces secularism, whose pluralistic worldview has protected many religious groups. Overtly religious societies often led to religious nationalism and the persecution of minorities. “Since my own religious heroes tended to die gruesomely under these regimes, I have no nostalgia for the world before secularism,” she writes.[14] The breadth of science, culture and consciousness is almost infinite, and to try and banish secularism is to limit God’s reach.
In a similar vein, Todd Townshend talks of our immersion in the world, and how we can never really get out of it. “[T]he encounter with God in this time goes through others. It goes through mediations of one kind or another. […] [E]verything around us, every person here, every sound we hear, every image we have, all the stories that come together are constantly like fish in water. […] We are surrounded by these things into which we come to be. […] It is not an instrument [with which] we can stand outside of reality and point to it and assess it. We are plunged into these things, and they are the mediation that’s necessary, because God is so totally other.”[15]
To tell the great narrative is also to tell our own story. And “to preach means that we reveal much about ourselves,” O’Driscoll says.[16] He, for one, seemed so at ease in front of us, so casual and eloquent, at 94. There was a longing in his voice, maybe even a nostalgia, and tremendous clarity. As he talked about the lost opportunity of the sixties, did he express the regret of a lost generation? He did not seem discouraged. Perhaps his preaching revealed his courage, in hoping for a future that he, himself, would not get to see.
When a voice speaks to you deeply, you can hear something in it that you recognize, without being able to say exactly what it is that moves you. It almost doesn’t matter what it is that the person is saying.
I can’t help but keep returning to the image of Kim Thuy, talking about beauty – she also describes, in the same interview, being welcomedto Canada, and having never felt so beautiful. She was 10, coming out of the plane in Granby, Quebec, after time spent in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Much of the town came to meet the plane. She remembers that she, her family and their group were covered in mosquito bites, malnourished, and dirty.
“I looked up and I still remember, in their eyes, that was the first time that I saw myself again, and I had never been so beautiful. I was beautiful in those eyes and I’m telling you I have never been as beautiful again. That was it! That was that moment, that second. And so that’s how we were welcomed here. And so I think that’s why I cannot write in any other language but French.”[17]
She tells her story: opening a restaurant and cooking only one dish on the menu, because that’s all she could make. Then she started writing lists when she kept falling asleep at red lights, to keep herself awake. When she got tired of lists, she wrote stories. Someone at her restaurant happened to be a publisher, and asked if he could look at her work. The rest is history.
We all have these moments of grace, even if they are not on the scale of Thuy’s – moments when we are saved, or given a chance, for no apparent reason.
On the last day of our class, we shared our own sermons and artistic performances, which seemed appropriate given O’Driscoll’s emphasis on experience over conceptual knowledge. “We don’t learn by the head [who Christ is]. We learn by experience. We become haunted,” he said.[18]
When I decided to write a song for the course, I did not know where to start. And then, “I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun,” as Darcy says in Pride and Prejudice.[19] I sat down at the piano, and just started playing some chords, and soon I heard some words and a melody.
Somehow, it is the beginning that is so difficult. The middle, in a way, is like the mediation that the world provides. When you are in it, you know what comes next. When you know where you are, you know where you can put your next step. And when you are in the world, fully present, you find pathways to God.
Bibliography
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Charing Cross, ON: Big Cheese Books, 2023.
Fujimura, Makoto. Art and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 14.
Montreapolis: People Making Modern Montreal (podcast), Interview with Kim Thuy by Steve Rukavina, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, May 15, 2017.
O’Driscoll, Herbert. Telling the Story: Some Thoughts About Christian Preaching in the Twenty-First Century (excerpts from a forthcoming book). Herbert O’Driscoll: 2023.
Robinson, Marilynne. “Wondrous Love.” In When I Was a Child I Read Books, 125-141. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012.
Wilson, Paul Scott. Preaching as Poetry: Beauty, Goodness and Truth in Every Sermon. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014.
[1] Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry: Beauty, Goodness and Truth in Every Sermon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 30.
[2] Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry, 30.
[3] Montreapolis: People Making Modern Montreal (podcast), Interview with Kim Thuy by Steve Rukavina, timecode: 23:20, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, May 15, 2017.
[4] Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry: Beauty, Goodness and Truth in Every Sermon (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), 111.
[5] Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry, 111.
[6] Herbert O’Driscoll, Introductory remarks to Public Lecture by Bishop Todd Townshend, “Taking the Plunge: Biblical Patterns for Coming to Faith in Christ.” 11 July 2023, Vancouver School of Theology.
[7] July 11.
[8] Paul Scott Wilson, Preaching as Poetry, 3.
[9] Marilynne Robinson, “Wondrous Love,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2012), 126.
[10] Marilynne Robinson, “Wondrous Love,” 140.
[11] I think it was Todd Townshend. Or was it Herbert O’Driscoll?
[12] Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 14.
[13] Marilynne Robinson, Wondrous Love,” 140.
[14] Marilynne Robinson, 135.
[15] Public Lecture by Bishop Todd Townshend, “Taking the Plunge: Biblical Patterns for Coming to Faith in Christ.” 11 July 2023, Vancouver School of Theology.
[16] Herbert O’Driscoll, Telling the Story: Some Thoughts about Christian Preaching in the Twenty-First Century: excerpts from a forthcoming book (Herbert O’Driscoll: 2023), 21.
[17] Montreapolis: People Making Modern Montreal (podcast), Interview with Kim Thuy by Steve Rukavina, Timecode: 14:30, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, May 15, 2017.
[18] Herbert O’Driscoll, Introductory remarks to Public Lecture by Bishop Todd Townshend, “Taking the Plunge: Biblical Patterns for Coming to Faith in Christ.” 11 July 2023, Vancouver School of Theology.
[19] Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Charing Cross, ON, Big Cheese Books: 2023), 513.
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