This Post is not so much a Post as a Post Script to my last one.
For those who are browsing this Blog for the first time I should explain that I have written each of these Posts to explain the thinking behind Death of a Nightingale. I am not a little surprised that I have now reached No.40.
The reason is this. While the play focuses on Special Education and the policy of Inclusion, and I shall return to this with a real life polemic in my next Post – I am preparing for it now – the story is a vehicle in which I travel the world, sharing with you insights that have come my way during a varied and interesting life. I have had quite a number of insights, forty of them so far. This is how I came by them. I quote it at the beginning of the Prologue to the play.
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.
TS Elliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding 1942
I could not be more different from those I criticise, the Termites, who always see it as they saw it for the first time; some see it as their parents and grandparents saw it, others see it the opposite way. Either way the world then and the world now are very different, and is becoming more different by the day.
On this journey I have ventured into questions of faith, in particular, asking why individual faiths have been and still are at war with each other when all agree that there is only one God. That is carrying faith one bridge too far, and in the wrong direction as well. As mankind addresses the challenge of climate change I don’t think it can afford itself that luxury.
The fact that Death of a Nightingale has now been published and is in print cannot stop me thinking about this riddle. And now I have good reason to do so.
I have the services of a Dramaturge, Ninon Jerome, and she is helping me adapt the play for its first public appearance, a rehearsed reading at the New End Theatre in Hampstead on 22nd and 23rd November. She has urged me to develop further some of the characters in the play. God is not one of the characters, but has an important role in Act One Scene 4, a Music Lesson. Here I look at faith through the prism of music to get a better understanding of God.
I know that there are atheists around who think that is all Godlegook, but even for them the word “spirituality” in music may have some meaning.
So let me return to the closing words of my last Post and take it from there.
TRACY My Nana used to say that God was as near to her as a new born babe and as far away as the furthest star?
I say Amen to that.
But if God is where I say, and that is everywhere, where was God in the First World War when it was being fought out in the trenches. Was God at the Somme and at the Battle of Passchendaele when the fields of Flanders were soaked with blood? Where was God when the Nazi’s were murdering millions of Jews, gipsies, gays and others? If God is everywhere, was he present in Nazi Concentration Camps, in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Dachau, Drancy, Janowska, Majdanek, Maly Trastsianiets, Buchenwald, Sajmište, Sobibor, and Treblinka?
And, if God was not there, why not?
I ask this question every time I see pictures of the Holocaust. I asked it most recently when Antony Penrose included in his talk to the Tyneside Decorative and Fine Art Society on “The Lives of Lee Miller” – Lee Miller being his mother – photographs she took in Dachau Concentration Camp. They were a gruesome and never-ever to be forgotten reminder of the capacity of some people to try to justify the unjustifiable, and make human slaughter the leitmotif of their existence … God, or no God.
A typically Jewish answer to a difficult question as to where God is in all this is to ask another question. Here is a fine example of that. Where was God? No, where was Man?
That cannot be good enough. Can you give God credit for the good things, but absolve him from all blame and responsibility for the bad as easily as that?
So I take a different stance. Yes, God was there, but God’s presence is nothing like man’s, and God has his constraints just as much as we have ours, and we have to live with that.
You can see how I explain this in the new dialogue that I am adding to the play.
Emma Kirk, the Music Teacher at Brighouse School, plays the music from Schindler’s List. It is an example of music, not necessarily religious, but with a spiritual content.
Read the new dialogue that I have just written as my answer to the question.
TRACY That’s really sad.
PHILIPPA I don’t think it’s spiritual though.
TERRY And where was God, Miss, when all that murdering was going on? If he was a good God he would have put a stop to it.
EMMA KIRK The Bible gives an answer, Terry. Folk remember Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They forget the serpent. The serpent was part of creation too, and you won’t just find it in the Garden of Eden. God couldn’t stop Adam and Eve listenin’ to that serpent, and then eatin’ the forbidden apple. You see God had given them the choice of eatin’ or not eatin’ it.
TERRY Why didn’t he put a worm in it then?
EMMA KIRK Oh Terry. It was not God who had the choice. It was man. But God was there, yes right there in those terrible concentration camps, keeping the hope of alive of the tiny few who survived. That sure wasn’t easy, keeping hope alive in that hell-hole amongst the huge piles of bones and carcasses. God was there, as I am here. And that’s why God feels our sadness now. When I listen to that music I feel that sadness. Don’t you feel it, Philippa?
PHILIPPA I’m beginning to.
Emma may have started to persuade Philippa, but I don’t think she will have got very far with Terry.
Here are two more questions that are not easy to answer. I will play role of Terry and ask them here.
Does God take sides?
To make the question a little less provocative, see it in a sporting context. Think of Manchester United playing Arsenal. The players commit themselves to God as they make their way on to the pitch. For those players God is in the stand with the fans, and he can inspire his followers to excel themselves on the day; but the referee has a mind of his own and the football has a mind of its own as well.
I have already summed this up when I said that I do not believe that God has favourites. When you look back on the last two millennia, if he has, he has a strange way of showing it. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t there.
In simple terms, if you feel are in his presence, you will draw strength, comfort, solace and fortitude as circumstances require. That is not nothing when it comes to help. Where your faith comes from is not relevant.
The last question that I ask in the role of Terry is whether miracles are credible.
Here I say that there is so much that we do not understand and never will. Is that a cop out? I don’t think so. We may have evolved from apes but somewhere along the way God has given us something that apes do not possess, and that is the power of the imagination. This is a miracle. In God’s presence the imagination can and does work wonders.
What about luck then?
Strange to say I believe in serendipity. For example the Special School, of which I was chair of governors, would not have survived the attempts to close it but for a substantial windfall legacy that enabled the governors to ring-fence the staff while the parents were campaigning to keep it open. Broadly speaking I go with the old adage that God helps those who help themselves unless, that is, they try to help themselves to too much.
I leave the question whether God actually throws dice to Professors of Physics.
This is how I will express this in the latest version of Death of a Nightingale.
PHILIPPA Is “God Save the Queen” Spiritual miss?
EMMA KIRK Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s not God’s name that makes something spiritual. It’s God’s presence.
PHILIPPA Even when you pray?
EMMA KIRK Even when you pray? Especially when you pray. Now let’s round this lesson off with two pieces of fine spiritual music to help you understand this a bit better. It’s appropriate that one comes from my part of the world, the other from yours. The voices you’ll hear carry the spirit of God in them or, if you want, simply the human spirit. Take your pick. Either way enjoy, enjoy. First my childhood hero, Paul Robeson, singing that famous spiritual Deep River. And to finish, just listen to this: Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah.
TRACY Wow
PHILIPPA I really don’t know whether I believe or I don’t. …….. but I know that I’d really like to.
EMMA KIRK You guys will never be alone in life when you have found music. And one other thing. If you listen to spiritual music, really listen, you won’t worship a tribal God, you’ll worship God, the creator of everythin’ and everyone. God that will heal the wounds of mankind and give people hope if you give it a chance.
TERRY That would be a fuckin’ miracle.
EMMA KIRK Terry, don’t use that word in my classroom. Don’t use it ever again. But, for once, I am agreein’ with you.
You see I am a cockeyed optimist, a dope stuck with a thing called hope. And for those of you who think I am just cockeyed and way out of my depth here, back to Inclusion next time, with a vengeance.
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