Articles - From the Vicar

Last month we had a family outing to the Playhouse to see a production of the stage version of Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The novel, published in 1960, is set in the southern US state of Alabama during the 1930's, a world of stark racial divides, white bigotry and extreme poverty. Lee treats these issues by crafting a story based on a miscarriage of justice: a young black man, Tom Robinson, is wrongly convicted of the rape of a poor and ill-educated white teenager to whom he has shown kindness. The story is narrated by a young girl, Scout, whose idealistic lawyer father defends Tom Robinson; together these two men give the story its moral axis.

I greatly enjoyed the production but was disappointed by one aspect of it. At various key points in the play the drama is given forward momentum not by words but by the singing of Spirituals, hauntingly beautiful sacred songs that had originally been sung by black slaves in the American South. Spirituals were intimately bound up with the deep Christian faith of many slaves and allowed them to reflect theologically on their oppression, relating their condition to biblical narratives such as the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt. My one disappointment with the production lay in the fact that the texts of most of the Spirituals had been altered so as to remove any Christian imagery. The effect, though subtle, was significant: songs that had grown out of an oppressed community's collective and powerful determination to remain faithful to the Gospel hope of freedom in Christ had been cut off from their roots. The beauty remained but the power had gone.

As I have reflected further on my disappointment it has occurred to me that what happened to the texts of those Spirituals might fruitfully be developed as a metaphor for a wider malaise in the practice of Christianity in the west in general and England in particular: the malaise of form without content. Fine cathedrals that we wish to preserve rather than develop for more effective mission; musical idioms that we cling to, suspicious of innovation; Tudor texts that persist in our worship four and a half centuries after they were written, enthusiastically espoused by the heir to the throne yet virtually meaningless to a generation who communicate by text messages. Such buildings, music and texts are undoubtedly things of beauty. But is there room for the liberating power of Christ within the confines of such aesthetic sensibilities?

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay