At the end of May 2002 Archbishop Rowan Williams and Age cartoonist Michael Leunig held a public conversation at St John’s Southgate on the things of the Spirit. Former ABC Broadcaster Terry Laidler chaired the discussion. What follows is an edited version (it was originally published in the anglican.com.au media files)
TL I was thinking that you are so similar in that you both speak of things of the spirit, one in pictures and the other in words. But there is another sense in which you are different: Michael’s message finds its natural home in a broad mass audience and Rowan’s message finds its home more naturally among a body of believers. So that got me thinking, why is it that the church finds it so difficult to speak to that mass audience?
RW There is a “good” reason and a “bad” reason. I think the bad reason is that religious language often comes across as possessive, defensive of its territory, and it can build up a very considerable sense of power and privilege. If you are talking about God, and God is the most important reality you can imagine, then you can think there is a lot of reflected glory, and want to hang onto it. And the bad reason therefore is something to do with the way in which religious language is meshed in with a particular kind of power. The good reason is that it ought to be difficult to talk about spiritual things to a mass audience, which is, of course, why it’s best done in pictures very often.
ML I agree with you Rowan. I find that a language has developed in journalism which is glib, facile and restrictive, and it’s difficult to talk about all manner of truths. And a cartoon is meant to break that. And yes, certain things can be touched on in pictures because they break through the cult of cleverness. We are trapped by an expectation that we shall be articulate and clever. Yet the closer we come to the nub of things the more inarticulate we become. But there is this restriction on being inarticulate and stumbling and we expect so little of our fellows in the way of patience that we have to get it right, and quickly. So there is always that problem in the media that you have to be slick. Yet spiritual matters are often awkward and embarrassing and all the things that society is not.
RW Two things come to mind about what language can’t do. One was the great remark made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that the words that once signified a real change in the world, don’t do it any longer, and so what do we do? We have to find other words, not to make it easy but to make it difficult again. The other thing I was thinking of was an extraordinary short story by Rudyard Kipling about three journalists coming back from South Africa on a ship and they are in the middle of a storm in the South Atlantic, and out of this colossal storm emerges a sea monster. And it’s described – fantastically. And the three journalists think “this is the greatest scoop of our career. Who is going to file the copy first?” And they all go to their cabins and try to write about it. And they find they can’t. They haven’t got any language left for real newness or extremity because the language they use as journalists all the time is about newness and extremity in a routine way, and so there is nothing left to talk about the really strange. And I think religious language suffers from that as well because it has become, as Bonhoeffer suggested, rubbed and worn and domestic. How do we use it to speak of something that is really strange and really frightening?
TL But Michael you almost actively avoid religious symbols, with the exception of angels.
ML Yes, the angels are there, but what else would be a symbol? I would have thought a flower is a religious symbol, or a duck. Or the way you draw a human face, might have a religious and iconic feel to it. It’s that feeling that life itself is religious.
RW I am fascinated by what you say, Michael, about the way in which the human face is actually depicted. The religiousness being the way it is done. That says a great deal about what I might want to call “religious art”. I think there are works of art with religious subjects which are irreligious in their execution. And the opposite applies, obviously. I don’t think Rembrandt, for example, was a “religious” artist simply when he was doing scenes from the gospels, but also when he was painting his mother, and when he was painting his mistress with her skirts up – it’s how you look. And to see that as religious, you have to do a bit of unpicking about what lies in the background, that there is a way of looking which is somehow aligned with a reality that is itself, as a whole, looked at by God, loved if you like…
ML Absolutely yes. I was going to say made with love is part of it, but you took it further that it has been loved and seen, and I think this is terribly important. And to draw a cartoon depiction of the human spirit, I suppose, that looks, somehow, secure in all its floundering and pathos… It’s the person that is a religious symbol for me, well not religious, but whatever it is, it’s real and it has been seen.
RW Yes. And to pick up something Michael said earlier. I think he used the expression “expecting a certain patience from people”. Most of our activities these days have in common a deep impatience. We need to be aware that some things cannot be done impatiently. There are certain aspects, even of the most apparently functional economic life, that you can’t do without taking time. I mean the exercises of life together, the exercises of patience, the exercises of the time taken to listen to someone else’s humanity, whether it’s locally or globally.
ML Yes, that is endangered perhaps, because it seems to me that speed is revered. And the problem is that certain human things cannot happen at speed. Can you love at speed, can love flourish at speed? That sounds glib, but the dreadful worry for me is that we tend to copy unconsciously our technologies. I think, for example, we imitate the way movies are edited. This cutting and close-up quick grab, this strange traumatic discontinuity, which we accept as normal, and we enjoy it because of its speed and its traumatising stimulus. And there we sit and expose our eyes, the windows of the soul, to this bizarre chopping up of reality. Now we say we can handle this, but I think one thing that’s doing us great damage is this visual cacophony as a depiction of reality. The eye makes great meaning out of life, much more than we understand. It tracks this room as it looks around: as one point leads to the next point, there is sense being made all the time.
RW That image of the eye making sense as it surveys seems to me fundamental. Our seeing is also interpreting and therefore our interacting. It is not just the registering of an image on a screen.
TL That rings real bells for me of things that I have read from a tradition that is still there in Christianity but very little heard these days, the monastic tradition. You don’t hear many Christian leaders anywhere these days, publicly at any rate, counselling the great virtues of monasticism.
RW OK, well let me come out – a closet monastic! I think that the recovery of what that is really about is imperative for Christianity. And it’s very easy to trivialise all that and say well it’s about denial, it’s about withdrawal. But there is, as I think you were intimating, in the monastic tradition, quite a lot about seeing, about how you see. The word “contemplation” is just a long way of saying “looking”. Now if the monastic tradition is about contemplation, it is about ways of seeing, and part of the monastic experience in the early church speaks of the whole practice of that life as an education in seeing. There is the looking at your own reactions, your own emotional rhythms, and the careful, truthful monitoring of those responses. Then there is the looking at the structures of the universe as patiently and faithfully as you can, to see what the rhythms are there, and feel those rhythms. And then if you are learning all that, then maybe, by the grace and gift of God, you end up aligning yourself, not only to the rhythm and pattern of the created universe, but to the rhythm of God’s breathing in and out. Now all of that is bound together – the truthful looking at yourself, the truthful looking at the environment which requires space and time and patience. And that seems to be what the monastic enterprise in Christianity is very deeply about, and we have lost that. We have lost, I suppose, that sense that our religious belief and practice is about education, and it has something to do with the way, back to where we started this evening, in which religious talk can be treated as if it were a matter of conveying little gobbets of information, and if this happens to be information about God rather than information about nuclear physics, same sort of thing, it is just different subject matter. And it’s not like that!
ML What you’ve said has made me think of reverence. It’s about a way of looking. I notice children tend to have a natural reverence. It’s what they like to do: to get down on their hands and knees and look very closely at things and be absorbed in them and that to me is a sort of reverence, it’s a real looking. Now, in our culture – there’s an Australian pride in our irreverence. And yes, it’s a healthy irreverence, but I always feel it’s sad that children are often asked too young to abandon their natural reverence. I find as a cartoonist if I am looking at the world more reverently rather than sarcastically, I can actually get somewhere.
RW I am thinking of one particular visual image which I for years have found very powerful. It is one of Stanley Spencer’s sequence of paintings of Christ in the Wilderness. It is called “Consider the Lilies”. Christ is a very bulky, rather graceless, middle aged man, shabby haired and heavy browed, on hands and knees, in a sandy waste looking at a very tiny flower. It makes those words, “consider the lilies”, quite different and quite fresh. The sort of vague pious feel that that quote so often has suddenly becomes real because it is visualised in a very bizarre and challenging way as God’s reverence for God’s creation.
ML And coming into the world of bombs dropping on Afghanistan and the Middle East, what place does reverence have here? I mean, there’s this natural impulse to want to get down on your knees and care whether the ant is going to make it across the rock. That’s what children do, and that child is still within us. We still care about the ant or the spider in some way, let alone the human, and so there is this dreadful distance between the ant and a village being bulldozed with people in the houses.
RW Distance is, of course, one of the words isn’t it? Years ago, at the time of Vietnam, I remember hearing a Roman Catholic theologian in Britain saying (in an image I have never forgotten), if you told someone to pick up a child in their arms and pour napalm over it, they wouldn’t do it! But if you can do it at a distance of a few thousand feet, it doesn’t feel the same. Now most of our military technology is devoted to doing it from a few thousand feet so that it doesn’t feel the same. Now what sort of education is going on that allows you to be content with that sort of difference, that distance?
TL I wasn’t going to throw this one in tonight, but it sort of grew out of things that each of you said. What is the right relationship between us and the physical environment? It is easy to say we need to be vigilant to the rhythms in the natural world, or that we should slow down and watch the ant crawl across the rock. They are nice images, but we have to confront the big question: how should we relate to this whole system that we are part of?
RW Well, when you start thinking about the scale of changes that might involve it is quite intimidating, because it does entail our living less comfortably. I doubt whether many governments get elected on that platform, and so it doesn’t get to the top of the agenda very quickly. But it does seem to me that there have to be questions raised. Let’s take the most obvious one: oil consumption. And I say it’s obvious because that’s the one we see most clearly around us, it’s what drives a great deal of foreign policy in some of the most powerful countries in the globe. It’s therefore what (I choose my words advisedly) fuels the murderous conflicts of vast tracts of the globe. Now there is something we are all involved in – I came here in a car tonight – but the spiral of consumption there is one of the things which I think most urgently needs addressing. And government after government seems to withdraw from tackling that. But it can be named publicly and that’s why I am going on about it frankly!
ML I am not sure what we can do. I do like Ghandi’s idea that in the face of problems anything we can do will make very little difference, but it is absolutely essential that we do it.
Edited by the Revd Gregory Seach, curate of St John’s Camberwell.
