Hello, says God, Good Morning, Grantchester.

April 10, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

Two paintings by the Cam. Another six to follow. One Sonnet.

GOOD MORNING, GRANTCHESTER.
Hello, says God, Good Morning, Grantchester.
Today we have a rose and yellow dawn.
No need to hurry. Toast and coffee time.
It took me something like a billion years
To slow the Cam, long sedimentary work,
That none of you have seen, beneath the grass.
So start the day with joy and breathe in deep.
Make this day good, whatever work you do.
Keep selfishness at bay and look around
At all this glory, meadow, willow green.
Remember I like children more than you
And greet your Coton neighbours with a nod.
Accept this day from me. Let it proceed
In mill-pond peace and kindness to the eve.

Alan.

creativity exhibition, General

A BIT OF THE BIG PICTURE

April 9, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

So, first, the experience. Away at a meeting of Movement for Christian Democracy at Scargill House deep in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales perhaps two decades ago. Winterish, but with a wind and rain cleaned sky. Good meetings during the day and a walk along the valley about a mile to the small hamlet of Kettlewell to the pub. I was delayed and set out after the main party, or tried to. It was so dark, no moon, it was impossible to see your feet. So that was why they made a fuss about a torch. It was a step at a time, a sober drunk. But you could not look down. Overhead was the Milky Way a totally new view to my light polluted eyes, the biggest spectacle of our lives. You could see a trillion km of stars and gas clouds stretched out. It was unforgettable.

I tried a painting of a galaxy, black with a very little indigo. Checked colours with Derek our church astronomer, but it failed, not enough patience, too crude. Will bin it in the big clearout. So the sonnet is there, and no painting. But, I thought, if a photo is better than a painting, include a photo. But most of the photos, to get the remote light in, pick up a lot of light pollution. They are quite disappointing, hundreds of them. So no photo. Just remember what you have seen, but not in London

BIG UNIVERSE.
So cold, beneath the wide star studded black
This God created universe, this one,
With Catherine milky wheel diagonal,
Here in its edge, one little galaxy,
All smudges in this vast immensity,
Expanding from the first great divine “Yes”,
When everything was sorted as is now,
We live and look at twinkles in the sky.
This is not ours. We have a little share,
No rent, but clouds and rain and moon rich sleep.
To you-ward only can our lives make sense,
To come and go like charmed particles,
Good as you warm our souls to look beyond
And know ourselves eternal stayed in you.

creativity exhibition

Local glory.

April 8, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

We return to Durer’s clump of weeds, and local glory in our gardens and elsewhere. The sonnet is about a privet hedge and spiders and the painting about berry time in the garden.

PRIVET TIME.
The moment of each day awaits its time.
Today, the small leaved privet hedge,
Ignored again by every passer-by,
Is clothed in frost, minutely round each leaf.
Not overdone, white on a tailored coat;
The leaves themselves, cold darkened, have repose.
But now in grandeur small they hold their place
In God’s creation on this frosty morn.
But that is not enough. Now gone we know
Not where, the spiders, have abstracted out
Their great expressions, on the canvas hedge,
Amazing space, in diamonds, no flies,
with frost. I notice, as I walk, and stop,
the non-anthropic glory of God’s world.

creativity exhibition

SEEING CLEARLY

April 7, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

The way we see is not as unproblematic as it seems. The Christian faith is quite clear about that. We can see with motives of greed, lust, arrogance, in ways which are distorted. We can look at things which do us no good. We can focus on the wrong thing, like the trivial, be visually deceived and much more. The depth of this problem is conveyed by Christ’s words, “If your eye offends you, pluck it out…” Change what you see before it issues in something worse.. This sonnet tackles this issue. The painting is on the hill further up the Stour Valley and partly echoes the First Psalm. “His delight is in God’s law and on God’s law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither.” Not sure whether the water is, but this is sure a healthy tree.

SEEING CLEARLY

To see with holy sight each gift of God
can happen only when my ego’s gone.
A shallow self is grafted to my eye;
I see the world through mirrors which reflect
Back vanity, out angled stereotypes,
A hall of mirrors, pride distorting all.
The shaving image holds me in its grasp.
No smashing free, but to be seen through God,
Creature of millions, yet with numbered hairs,
No outward view, but loved with visage marred.
So, darkened, face each detail of the world
crafted by God, not other than it is,
and gasp in awe creation is so good,
so blind my normal use of human sight.

Blog

Cambridge Analytica/Facebook/Russia

April 7, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

Today there is a vast system persuading us to buy things. It is already corrupt in the sense that it uses psychological techniques, forms of bribery, convinces people to buy things they do not need or harm them and push them into debt. Consumption is the great god, albeit a pathetic one, of our age. It deals in fakes – promises, glamour, excitement, flattery – because you deserve it- and manipulation. Some industries like perfume, betting, cosmetics, alcohol, cars, drugs and food prey on people’s weaknesses and spoil their lives. The system is so big we do not notice it. And it has moved into social media. So now I only have to look for an item, and I am bombarded with pressure to buy. Let us look briefly at why this is usually unethical.

Open relationships are ones which give freedom to a person. Christ practised open relationships; even Judas going to betray Jesus was not prevented or made the subject of pressure. You can’t get more open than that. Our relationship with God is both the source and the centre of our freedom, and good relationships have the same character. Control, manipulation, social judgement and a whole load of other techniques for getting people to do what we want are wrong and multiple examples of the way these are destructive are emerging daily in public life.

For decades politics has moved from a personal engagement based on values which was reflected in a party commitment to a trawl for voters based on largely selfish appeals. “You have never had it so good” said Macmillan at the start of this process in the 1950s. Now consumerist politics is normal, ubiquitous. The parties largely tell people want they want to hear and are voted in. Manipulation is normal. Voting should be a free process, but has been engineered for a long while. Lord Ashcroft, Saachi and Saachi and other media companies have run the elections and the referenda for a long time.

More than this, the electorate has had targeted negative campaigning for a long while. Often, it has been personal. Thatcher, slit-eyed Blair, something of the night Howard, Brown with hidden microphone to catch a damning private remark, the hounding of Liberal leaders to keep them marginal, and the long attempt to murder Corbyn’s reputation by the rich who stand to lose.
In addition, fake news has frequently been used especially by the right to discredit those who might attack wealth. It happened in 1924 with the fake Communist scare Zinoviev telegram, and has happened ever since in the tabloid journalism of the Mail, Sun and other rags. There is the threat of economic collapse and the search for the news which will blacken. The work of Cambridge Analytica in support of Goodluck Jonathan in Nigeria in the 12015 election was not new, but just normal western commercialism, money for spreading muck. And big donors helped swing the referendum vote on Brexit.

So, the present fuss about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is not new. Zuckerberg is not a great social benefactor but the normal selfish US capitalist exploiting consumers and he has been caught out. Cambridge Analytica have some software which might target voters and sway them more effectively, though the Nigerian voters said, “Badluck Jonathan”. But what is interesting is that this whole system of using voters as consumers to buy your goods is essentially the product of western consumerist pseudo-democratic elections. Russian elections are so cooked that this kind of manipulation is not needed.

Perhaps, therefore, when we come to the Trump election and Russia a big question remains. Putin’s Russia probably tried to blacken Clinton, for reasons we could examine. But who carried out the main large scale manipulations of the vote in the Trump election? Was it Russia or the normal western financial interests backing Trump who set up the social media systems aimed at swaying gullible, consumer swamped voters. Which was the case should emerge as evidence over the coming months, but at present Russia gets the blame while the election manipulation of the rich operating through tried consumerist and advertising processes are ignored. Some blame will probably accrue to Russia, but the elephant in the room is western capitalism, cooking our votes in ever more sophisticated ways for decades, so that the rich can stay in charge. It’s time to see the elephant.

creativity exhibition

Constable or Turner?

April 6, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

For perhaps a hundred and fifty years most English people made a choice, conscious or otherwise, between Constable and Turner. You liked one and didn’t like the other, because they were different in their approach to landscape. Turner, as he developed moved towards greater abstraction. There may be other reasons why people would like “the Burning of the Houses of Parliament” in 1834, but Turner partly liked the subject because of its licence for red and orange and the swirling of flame. In his time and later, he was rightly seen as the creative artist. The subject matter tended to be bent to his artistic sense to create, as we say, a work of art. Perhaps the mountains went a little more vertical and the storm swirled more in Turner’s paintings. Many people liked his work and they fill the galleries of the land.

Rightly, he is seen as one of the main precursors of modernism. It is not a great jump from the works of Turner to those of the impressionists. Indeed, the influence was directly there, though the Impressionists were also critical of Turner. But they are on the same side, developing the creativity of the artist in their landscapes, using colour in all kinds of new ways, and beginning the transition into the modernist schools of the twentieth century.

So, what is wrong with Turner? Well, sometimes his trees are a bit naff, but let us focus on the moment when the painting viewer turns from the picture back to the normal world I which le or she lives. What do they carry with them? Possibly they retain the image. “That was a great Turner.” Or, “What an incredible effect!” Possibly, there is a disjunction between the world Turner has created and the natural world in which we live. Turner is striving for something more and the natural world is something less.

By comparison with Turner, and many people did compare, Constable was a bit of a plonker. He just did landscapes. They were often big – his six footers – but they were landscapes, rooted in the Stour valley but extending throughout England. We are not concerned about status within the English art establishment – both had problems there and it was mainly a matter of selling and earning a living – but why was Constable different from Turner? He was a Christian. He would have done more explicitly Christian art but the Rector of East Bergholt Church did not pay him for the Resurrection painting he did. There is a lovely expression of his faith in the great Vale of Dedham painting in the National Gallery of Scotland. In the foreground, but quite hidden is a peasant woman’s hovel. It expresses Constable’s concern for poverty, but if you go up very close, round the head of the poor babe with her is a halo. Constable has put Jesus in his great painting. Constable was painting God’s creation. He loved it, and his landscapes are reflecting what was going on. To us the horses and barges are pre-industrial idyllic, but then they were normal rural life. Sometimes he overworked the skies, but Constable is never bigger than the Creator. The landscape is respected, studied, and understood, especially in his smaller cloud studies. The heavens are telling the glory of God.

Interestingly, the area where he tends to theatricality is around Salisbury Cathedral, partly because it became his spiritual home, especially after his wife had died. The views are a little too strong, romanticised, but we can forgive him that. Salisbury Cathedral Spire is an obvious indicator of the Almighty and he used it as such. So my choice is with Constable, because his painting, like that of the Dutch 17th century landscape painters from whom he draws, is painting God’s creation, is reflecting the same glory as I see each day, rain or shine.

In this era of digital cameras everywhere, we can all take landscapes anywhere, often without looking much at them, which are technically better than Turner or Constable. But Constable the artisan bearing witness to God’s creation talks to us even more strongly now. For a century human creativity has been loosed upon the West. It is interesting, sometimes perceptive, but often vain, whether in the Turner Prize – see the echo – creativity of arbitrary choice and self validation or in distorting or ignoring the creation in which we live. Human creativity is as a baby with a rattle in God’s creation, and our western culture is lost within God’s creation.

But Constable was not. Now, of course, we have to peel back nearly two hundred years, but we all need to understand that we are artisans in God’s world, not Creators in our own right, and that is a major cultural revolution. So the painting above is a homage to the Creator and to Constable. It is of the Stour valley slightly downstream from Constable’s main haunts. It is a great spot, but we all have Stour Valleys.

creativity exhibition, General

The Heavens are telling the Glory of God

April 5, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

Experiencing the creation as it is, this morning and every day, cannot be done without the word “glory” crowding in. Glory is everywhere in little things and big. It is the glory of God, the exquisite Creator in things big and small. For me glory to God painting starts with Durer’s big clump of weeds in Vienna and the sonnet reflects this. I think it was the first Creation sonnet I did. Millions of people especially on holiday take millions of photos of the creation when it looks especially awesome and we see them everyday. This painting is like them, Achmelvich again, on the longest day with a seal swimming lazily by looking at us, and the Creator showing off a bit. The heavens are telling the glory of God.

NO SIGNATURE
God, without paintbrush, come and paint the year,
Big canvas, never framed, and always here.
You take your time, build slowly, sort light dark,
Prepare the ground, earth wet, keep contrasts stark.
Start with dark twigs, drip wet with diamond snow
Or prick dot milky way on indigo.
Perhaps you need red tulip, hearted black
Before white wedding hedgerow, blue eggs crack.
Keep colours hidden fresh in little seeds.
Like Dürer, make a masterpiece of weeds.
My mother’s lily and my father’s rose,
like summer bombs, cool, livid love expose.
Time ochres, kharkis, russets grass and trees.
We view the final glory on our knees.

creativity exhibition

I CAN’T BELIEVE

April 4, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

This is another painting of Achmelvich not far from where Elaine and I were camping. It is the time of the incoming tide, that singularity that God has given the planet, within which we all live. The sonnet suggests the belief in chance is a bit thin.

So you believe no God created this,
no great design, but just a happenstance,
not personal, but rather hit or miss,
not even aim, but just a primal dance
of stupid chemicals. Yet even they
need pre-constructing into atom, quark,
from which non-aiming hits, you say,
the universe was made. Shots in the dark,
no guns, no big N “Nature” doing things,
sand with IQ (but not computer chips)
has done it all. The cosmic order springs
from elementary particles with slips.
I can’t believe – unless the quarks have phones
and don’t pay extra for more distant zones.

creativity exhibition

Fast and Slow

April 2, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

So, slowly I paint rocks for several days,
Building the texture, modulating greys,
Until Achmelvich’s sheep strewn crag appears
Clothed with stiff grasses, wind bent bouncing ears.
But you have started several billion years
Before my flat, pathetic, instant fix.
There is the era before molecules,
Space sprung gigantic galaxies evolve,
Slow without form and void throughout the earth.
Then, even slower, rocks as treacle bake
With crystals set in granite, lost to sight,
And buried to mature three billion years.
So shrinks our human quick fix arty stuff
Before the glory of your slow, worked craft.

Christianity

Christ’s Defeat of the Cross

March 31, 2018 Alan Storkey Leave a comment

The Cross is sometimes not understood by non-Christians. Why should Christians venerate this awful event, and even, to use Paul’s words, glory in the Cross? It seems perverse. The opposite is true. This is where human sin and evil is thrown in the face of God and God’s response is not to leave us in our sin, but to carry our sins in Christ’s body on the cross. It is proactively goodness in action. The Good is there first. There is a deeper truth than the sinfulness we all evidence and it is God’s eternal goodness, and then forgiveness and grace. We get what we do not deserve, God’s love. Even when we are lost in our wretchedness, God’s love reaches out to us, even when we are locked into our human failures, we are welcome, as was the thief on the cross. The words of Jesus on the Cross, “Father forgive them; they know not what they do” shouted through excruciating (sic.) pain show that even though we are locked in failure and the tramlines of sin, the Son of God is with us. By his stripes we are healed. This is the place where the clarity and truth of all human existence is evidenced in God with us and not against us, even though we are usually against God and lost in our own ways. All of this, and more, is true about the universal significance of the cross for human life – for redemption, being saved, being born again, dying to self, taking up the cross, counting all things but loss compared with knowing Christ and knowing him crucified, knowing atonement for our sins. There are many central Christian themes we could open up here, but it has been done by many others you could better read. Here we focus down on our theme of militarism and see what it says to us.

The Cross was the product of militarism. It was the Roman fear machine. Josephus describes the process in Christ’s infancy when revolting men were strung up on crosses in Galilee and elsewhere to eradicate rebellion.
Upon this Varus (the Roman commander) sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those who had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were most guilty, and some he dismissed; now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand: after which he disbanded his army…
The crucified bodies by the roadside worked. Rebellion was nearly eradicated for a lifetime. Fear is the currency of militarism – “Do our will or we will kill you” is the mantra. All military power hangs on that, and our leaders use fear day in day out to keep the military strong. Crucifixion is the ultimate expression of this militarist drive. When you have seen one, you do not want to fight. This is what We can do to you. We can publicly torture you to death. But people need reminding. We forget that two others were crucified with Christ, petty criminals, to keep the fear in people’s eyes. This will happen to you. This state of fear is epidemic now. Crucifixion was the demonstration of killing, not just the act, so that the people might fear. It is the warning of murder on stage. It is in your face militarism, part of the equipment which spread Roman rule among rebellious peoples around the “known” world.

Christ had already stood against this in his teaching; he insisted, “Do not fear those who can kill you, but fear God. This is not a gratuitous statement, but an attack on the principle of the Roman Empire, inviting the disciples to go beyond death to the God of life and death. It is undermining the whole basis of militarism. It is the key strategic move. It is not foolhardy. Jesus warns his disciples about the coming sacking of Jerusalem and says, “Keep away, because appalling things will happen.” And throughout his ministry he did nothing which would put the lives of his disciples in jeopardy. There is a part of Jesus prayer with his disciples in the Upper Room which reflects this.

“Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name – the name you gave me- so they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.”

Jesus’ Name is Son of God and the disciples, as peacemakers, are children of God, and protection is a major motif over them, but on other terms than those of militarism, as of course we now protect through law, inspection, care, mentoring and moral probity. Judas was lost through suicide, but this emphasis on protection is part of the package and in turn devolves on us, as Jesus’ warning about any damage to a child emphasizes – “It were better that a millstone were hanged about his neck and he were thrown in the sea than to cause any one of these little ones to stumble. So, this call not to fear is not arrogant, but addressing the underlying strategic issue of disarming military fear and replacing it with protection and peace. Christ extracts this fear of death from us and lives the truth of peace. For some it has meant martyrdom, not the martyrdom of killing others, but the martyrdom of being killed, but they are the exception, living good in an early death.. As this battle against the fear of militarism comes to a conclusion, Jesus is suffering pain and laceration, yet without revenge.

Many of us now just go about our daily business without the fear of being killed arising, but we do not ask how this situation came about and the earlier courage that millions have had to show in the face of threats of attack and war. More than this, we are not aware of this issue because we, with machine guns, bombs and missiles, have often been the ones dishing out death or threatening to do so, and we cannot put ourselves in the place of those who are continually threatened in “our” colonies and vassal states. We have not even turned up for this issue, except to soak up the messages of fear dished up by our militarists.

The problem of the Cross for the Temple Party was that Christ was fearless. They had to kill the Best, the healer, helper, affirmer, the good man, or else their empire, giving them immense wealth, would be threatened. When Jesus cleared the Temple of moneychangers he made a joke of it. “destroy this Temple and I will rebuild it in three days.” He was destroying the Temple system and they were defending it. Forty six years it took to build. What is he on about? They could not understand God with us or see through to the resurrection. He confronted the Temple system without fear, identifying its hypocrisy, and he had to go. Many evil leaders have tried that route since. To silence the good and the true, they have to die.

Christ had fully set out the way of peace. He warned, “Those who take the sword will perish by the sword.” And “Love your enemies.” And “Don’t retaliate.” And “Blessed are the makers of peace.” And “Sort out your quarrels fast.” He taught his disciples to pass on peace, extending its scope, and required them to forgive others. It was the recipe for good living together. But then, as now, those who want power through might oppose and fear this message. So, Christ had to be killed. He went, after a bogus trial, to the Cross, to be killed on it, and so defeated, the King of the Jews and the Son of God. He knew the other way. He wept over the carnage coming to Jerusalem as he looked down on it. “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace – but now it is hidden from your eyes…” and he detailed the coming crisis when the streets near the Temple ran with so much blood that it put the fires out and a million died. He saw it coming and warned. He was no insurrectionist; indeed, Barabbas got off and Christ was sentenced by a manipulated rabble before Pilate.

Jesus was nailed on the Cross, the fear machine and said, “Father forgive them. They know not what they do.” It was the understatement of all time, nailing the fatuity of all militarism, the broken legs and spear in the side arrogance of might. Our stupidity and evil can be forgiven and healed. The Cross was defeated by the One on it. The fear of death was faced and overcome. The bluff of militarism is called.

The Resurrection and the Fear of being killed.

On the first day of the week, with soldiers at the tomb he rose again, and kept reminding the disciples, “Do not fear”. Emboldened by the Resurrection, they did not. They were persecuted for being peacemakers, the great perversity of militarism, hauled in front of rulers. Sometimes, they were martyred to kill their way, but the victory over militarism started, the not quite Holy Roman Empire, peace movements, the gentle spreading of the Good News, and even nation speaking peace to nation and the good sense of God’s peace, sometimes courageous, but usually quite ordinary. Christianity has spread through most nations on earth through word of mouth and word of life, not through the sword and the Good News of the Gospel of peace has spread.

Frequently, we have partly seen though the militarists. We know Hitler has only got one ball. Still the militarists come back, justifying their weapons and controlling political leaders. They try to teach us to fear and make money from weapons. Yet in Christ this system is defeated. The Lamb is on the Throne, not the military dictator. The Good News of peace, far easier than war and armament, can flow across the globe, blessing ordinary people beyond measure. We need learn war no more. The cross, the instrument of military control over conquered populations, was itself conquered to become in part a symbol of the defeat of militarism. We wear it round our necks, jangling as we run, and mark its defeat. Because of God’s greater power, the gentle kingdom still grows, despite Christian failings.

This is only part of the significance of cross and resurrection of Christ, but it is an important part. After the resurrection Jesus insisted more than once on saying, “Peace be with you.” Its meaning is powerful. Peace be with you. Peace be with you. Peace be with you. Peace be with you. May God’s peace indwell you, by faith and obedience. Carry God’s peace with you. Let it be carried person to person. The transmission of peace from ordinary person to person is part of the way the kingdom grows. As Jesus had earlier said to the disciples, “As you enter a home give it your greeting. If the home is deserving, let your peace rest there.” We are all ordinary people with failings and weaknesses, but we can, by faith, carry Christ’s peace and pass it on to others. We are called to peace. We can be thousands, millions, billions of people of peace, who deconstruct this great militarist edifice of evil and destruction, who end the next wars ten years before they might arrive and who find our enemies become our friends. And so, the early Christians come to understand that the Lamb is on the throne, the small, frisky, woolly, cuddly lamb is the Christ, replacing the power of Caesar and the oppressors and militarists down the ages, and the Lamb shall rule us all.

God has said to us. Be still, listen to me.
I forgive your past sins.
Put away your weapons and love your enemies.
My Peace be with you always.

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