LONDON - 4 September 2 2006 - 880 words
Drama at Greenbelt: A modern Eden where science in shaped by story
Rima Devereaux send this review of a play which was performed at Greenbelt last week.
Cushions for the audience, a mandala-shaped pebble design with strategically placed candles, light music, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke on the wall, nature photography on a small TV screen in one corner I was at a performance of True Lies, a fable told by an experimental project in Brighton called The Garden. Actors recounted the story of the creation of the universe, symbolised by the lighting of candles from a centre candle in the pebble design. The audience participants or worshippers would be a better description of what the project aims to achieve by collapsing the boundaries between ctors and spectators were invited to listen to and so to help create myths and stories for modern times.
The value of listening lies in the way it reveals the unity of myth and science conveyed by the voiceovers. The story told is that of science, but as one listens, it becomes a modern myth, a narrative that loses nothing of its precise scientific truth while conveying a sense of wonder and reverence at what is described successively as energy, sacred otherness, what cannot be named, God. The listener has only to listen to take part in the centuries-old tradition of oral story telling, but the story told is that of present-day scientific understanding. The effect is to give the listener the gift of seeing a full degree of wonder in a full participation in human life.
This participation is a privilege, not a due. It brings with it both pain and pleasure, and an awesome risk and responsibility. Watching and listening are acts of worship as well as ways of creating a twenty-first century myth. The stone design not only invites the participant to meditate on his purpose, his part in the whole and his commitment to the world. It also stands for the humility of man's place in the cosmos, where meaning is derived from connections: 'Stand under the stars, say what you want to them; the universe will not answer, but it will have spoken.' 'True Lies' is effective in conveying the message that life is a gift from God precisely because it doesn't spell this out in so many words.
By insisting on the importance of experiencing the silence of the cosmos, the fable does contemplation a favour, reconciling it with ordinary 'secular' life. The voiceovers refer to the medieval German theologian Meister Eckhardt on nature, and to the monastic tradition of sanctifying ordinary rhythms of the day with offices.
This is an experiment in 'exploring that bit of culture formerly known as religion'. It restores a full measure of wonder to science, and at the same time gestures towards, even though it never embraces fully, the Christian belief that the universe was created by God. It provides a spiritual answer to the atheist humanist's questions: why do we need a God, when the world stands for itself as its own witness? Aren't we belittling the world, isn't it good enough in its own right? The fable seems to have been written and performed as a gentle response to this aspiration to love the world for its own sake. It has to capacity to show that where myth and science meet, it is God who brings them together.
The fable's concept of God is vague. It says nothing of the God who incarnates himself in his creation. Its perspective is that of religion for the 'post-everything' generation but as such its power to mediate an experience of a God who cannot be bound or defined, who is mystery, is phenomenal. It takes as its premise the idea that direct ways of talking about spiritual things no longer speak to people sufficiently clearly to convey their message. Yet although it uses the language of science and poetry and shuns that of spirituality, its guiding principles are more those of theism than of secular humanism. It describes itself as an experimental project but was billed on the Greenbelt programme as worship. It is hard to define.
At the end each member of the audience
is invited to take away a quotation written on a slip of paper.
Mine is by the Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 'Not everything
has a name. Some things lead up into the realm beyond words.'
This could seem a strange complement to a fable that has celebrated
man's conquest of knowledge about the universe. But the Garden's
recreated post-secular Garden of Eden invites its audience to
take the plunge and bridge the gap between the act of naming things
and the ultimate act of allowing them to remain nameless. In so
doing it puts the spiritual back into spirituality.
© Independent Catholic
News 2006
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