Thoughts on ‘The End’

We appreciated this review of our Greenbelt event ‘The End’ – published online at Church Times. 

http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/30-august/features/features/greenbelt-2013-life-begins

‘There is a well-known spiritual exercise where you imagine your own death. Only Ikon would do this all dressed as Elvis in his Las Vegas days. And only Ikon would find, too late, that the requisite dark glasses meant they couldn’t always see their scripts and computer keyboards in the dim lighting. . .

When, at the entrance to Ikon’s “The End” on Sunday afternoon, participants were given a balloon and string with the instruction “This is your life. Tie it to yourself and blow yourself up,” it was ob­­vious how the service would end.

Before the balloon popping, the congregation wrote what they hoped their lives’ legacies would be, only to have them ridiculed, and stuffed into a child’s potty (another Elvis reference).

The underlying message was an invitation to give up the comfort of a God who will make things right, and to embrace a community of decay. Like the invitation to leave the venue blindfolded, with which the service ended, that was probably still a step too far for most par­ticipants.’

(If you know of other reviews, comments, or sources of pictures, please let us know and we’ll link from here).

• A review in Dutch: In the dark

The End Blindfold

From ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. Photo by Stephen Caswell.

Cover Your Eyes

From Ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. By Padraig O Tuama.

Before the beginning
nobody said ‘let there be darkness’
because it was already there.

Nobody said ‘Let there be darkness’.

The light shines in the darkness
But the darkness was there first.
Cover your eyes. 

See the darkness that is always there.
Cover your eyes.

See what Nobody gave you.

Cover  your eyes. 

There is only you. And before you, you were nothing.
Cover your eyes. 

This just might be the end.
Cover your eyes. 

Nobody told you nothing, but nothing tells you everything.
This is the end.
For now.
Cover your eyes. 

How will you live when you longer live? – a liturgy

From Ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. By Chris Fry.

If there is nothing hiding behind the stars…
How will you live when you longer live?

If your body swirls toward the dust…
How will you live when you longer live?

If your papers and books and your precious wonderful words fade like dew on sun kissed morning…
How will you live when you longer live?

All sing: I’ll be gone in a day or two

If your goodness and perfect belief cannot conjure heaven’s gates…
How will you live when you longer live?

If your every cell protests its plight…
How will you live when you longer live?

If your loving children let go of your shadow and leave you quietly in the darkness of your grave…
How will you live when you longer live?

All sing: I’ll be gone in a day or two

If when you stare deeply into the falmes of hell and discover there a mirror, a mirror in which you see a little-you tortured by your ordinary distracted mother and your tired and bored father. A little-you scared by bullies and exclusion and hurt and the first time a loved one tore you from yourself with their touch and their words until you thought you might die with pleasure. And then with that same tongue unwanted you, uncoiled themselves from your arms and left you alone. A little-you full of rage and punishment. If you stare into the flames of hell and see your forgotten hurt self trying to make its way home…
How will you live when you longer live?

If every incantation you wield falls foul of the current of decay and your tired bones ache with each step and stair. When the darkness opens its unyielding maw…
How will you live when you longer live?

If your poetry and your pictures and your words are blindness upon blindness, fortresses of hope fashioned from doubts and loves. Desperate attempts to cast your memories into a future that cares nothing for you. If you do not want to be forgotten…
How will you live when you longer live?

All sing: I’ll be gone in a day or two

Give the end a beginning

From Ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. By Stephen Caswell.

While you have not yet ended, you find yourself at The End.

Let the end begin; give it a birth in your mind. Someday, somehow, somewhere, The End will greet you.

Give the end a beginning. Let your mind know what your heart knows already; that its beats are limited, that your thoughts will dry up, that you are dust and soil and mud awakened.

The End will greet you and you will be nothing. No thing at all. All these dusty things gathered here tonight will be greeted.

Are we to be afraid? You might take comfort in the stories you’ve heard. You might take comfort in the stories you leave behind. How will they speak of you when you’re gone? Will they speak of you at all? How will you live when you no longer live?

Are we to be thankful? Thank god there is an end. With an end, every moment inherits infinite worth; with no end, every moment is paupered.

Now awakened, would you deny yourself the chance to face it; stare at its looming; attend to the emptiness of The End? What soil can consider such things?!

My Last Words

From Ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. By Shirley McMillan.

I

My last words will be whatever you first remember of me when I am gone from you forever.

There are things that I foreground in my life in an attempt to manipulate my legacy, and I don’t think that this is wrong. I want those who have known my darkness to find it easier to reflect on my light when I am gone, so that perhaps some of the light will remain. I want the lessons that have been hard won in my life not to go missing whenever I do, so I write them down for my daughter, and I write them into poetry and novels.

Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy about me, I want people to meditate on such things, and to this end I have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and a blog, and when I reflect on my mistakes in public I am hoping that the legacy will be that good people, such as myself, reflect on their mistakes in public. There will be no vicar searching for words to say at my funeral, because words are what I leave behind, and I set out the best ones like books about art on a coffee table, as if those are the ones I choose most often from day to day.

There is much said about the falseness of such an attempt to present the best of ourselves, but I don’t think it’s wrong. I am making it easier for those I love to feel that I haven’t really gone. I will still be there. The words on my pages are the same yesterday, today and forever.

II

My last words might be silenced.

What if my words get lost? Or worse, misinterpreted? What if the lessons I learned are not the ones my daughter needs to learn? Who do I belong to when I am not here any more? If the words that I left were altered, then I would disappear for good. It would truly be the end of me. It would truly be the end.

III

My last words are nothing. Whether I spoke them, or not. I have no way to live on, because I am not living. The words are out of my mouth, out of my mind, and I will not be there to claim or explain them. All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, and they are lost forever, and their words are lost forever. Their words are lost forever.

“Welcome to ikon” – Greenbelt 2013

The opening video from ikon’s event ‘The End’ at Greenbelt Festival 2013. 

Molly Bloom and Belfast

From the ikon event ‘Yes’ held on 10th February, 2013. By Jon Hatch.

My name is Jon, and I want to say ‘Yes’.

I first came to Belfast in 1991. At that time, city hall had a large banner across the dome that read ‘Belfast Says No’. I wasn’t as familiar with the details of Northern Ireland’s history, so I asked one of my hosts- who were East Belfast Presbyterians- what it meant. He said, ‘It’s about rejecting the Republic of Ireland’s interference in the running of Northern Ireland. How would you feel if a foreign country was being given a say in how your country was run?’ At the time, the answer didn’t make sense to me, as I didn’t see the Republic as a ‘foreign’ country, or not ‘foreign’ in the way that, say, France or China was foreign. Plus, I pointed out, in a globalised world most countries had some kind say into how other countries are run. I immediately got the feeling that this was the wrong answer to give…

I also wondered, was there anything to which Belfast  might say ‘yes’?

It made me think of the last bit of Ulysses, where Molly Bloom’s speech is punctuated by dozens of the word ‘yes’. The last word of that great novel is ‘yes’. Joyce felt that Ireland was filled with ‘No’. Irish Nationalism, Irish Unionism, Catholicism, Protestantism- to him, it all seemed to be saying ‘no’ to any number of things. He wanted life to be about saying ‘yes’.

I’ve worked in the field of peacemaking and conflict transformation in Belfast for over ten years now. I’ve always wanted my work to be about helping individuals and communities say ‘yes’- to examining their situation, to consciousness, to a view of life that said ‘yes’ to those that were different.

I still feel like I’m searching for ‘yes’ in Belfast. As I sat in my window last summer and watched the fires of Ardoyne, and even now as I watch the flag protests at Cambrai Street out the same window,  I still wonder:

How does Belfast say ‘yes’?

The ‘Yes’ of Yes

From the ikon event ‘Yes’ held on 10th February, 2013. By Chris Fry.

Most of us have come this far on the negative.  It has served us well.  We have used its energy to purge and winnow, decimate and destroy, break up and shut up many, many, tired, tired, double-binding, constricting and restricting systems. We gathered the ‘no’ to our hearts like armour, forged it into weapons and chanted its name on dead-end streets until the fabric of those cul-de-sacs fractured and split open into bright new mornings that shimmered with hope and possibility.  We loved the ‘no’.

But this meeting is about what is left.

With your back to the torn cul-de-sac what do you see?

Now I think I want to know if I can say ‘yes’.  I want to know if there is anything left to say yes to.

I want to know if I can say yes to the ‘lack’ inside of me that can never be filled.  To a war that can never be won.  To a desire which turns me upside down and inside out and seeks only more and more and is never enough.  A desire that is never fulfilled and eats question after question with an insatiable lust and never gives up on itself, never rests, never wanes.

I want to know if I can say yes to the strange god of the bible who sets his own decay in motion and drags into death with him the suffocating deceptions of wholeness, completion, perfection and peace and comes alive in the smile of a small child and the eyes of an enemy.

I want to know if I can say yes to the new horizon that opens up when we stand together in the aftermath of the death of meaning and find in each other pieces of a fragmented and broken puzzle which never quite fit but make new pictures that dazzle and transfigure us, that inspire us to keep trying, keep moving, keep loving.

I want to know if I can say yes to the horrible beauty of the ‘other’ that brims up inside myself and in each and every other person that I come into contact with and can never be understood or forgiven or healed or categorised but can only be heard and elaborated and moved toward.

I want to know that I can say yes to singing the song of myself in the presence of mystery and ask for nothing but questions that bind me to life which is in the end a life with others.

I want to say ‘yes’….’yes’

ikon yes

ikon yes

(click image for facebook event)