Liturgy

Here is the liturgy that was written by Sarah for the Ikon event at Greenbelt.

 

THE OLD OLD STORY

Stories make us; they breathe life into our bones, moulding and stretching us with their lingering footnotes and bright new chapters

May we be truth-tellers and myth-spellers and story-tellers

And telling old, old stories, may we all live well ever after…

 

REMEMBERING WELL

Stories take us, narratives which are centuries old shape our daily lives, tales of cities and towers and mega-powers

May we rethink our stories, faith and life with care, remembering that there is always more than one side to every story.

There is history & there is her story

 

MAKING THE PAST INTO HISTORY

Stories forsake us; sometimes memories can become a cover story

May we unfurl our grip on our dead end stories which repeat like a record trapped in a groove.

Making the past into history is a profound and delicate art

 

MAKING THE WORD FLESH

Stories became flesh. God is the plot and we are the writers; God is the writer and we are the plot.

May we embrace our INCARNATION in capital letters. For our chief end, perhaps, is to storify God and enjoy each other forever.

God is a story that loves to be told. Once upon a time…

The Story That Loves To Be Told

Shirley’s piece at the Greenbelt event was in three parts:

1.

We hear it said sometimes that God created people because he loved stories.

But once upon a time, God was a story who loved to tell himself. How can I tell myself forever? he thought. So God told a man and a woman in his image and he told them that man’s chief end was to storify god and enjoy him forever. After God had created the man and the woman he said ‘It is good. The story is complete. Let it be fruitful and as it multiplies God will be retold for as long as there are people on the earth’.

2.

God was almost right to think that he could be told in the story of human nature. He was close, so close. But the people he created in his image looked at him, as in a mirror, and failed to see themselves. And so the things they did unto the story of god failed.

So God thought again: How can I tell myself to the world, forever? He considered writing a book- several books- using wise people to record his thoughts and wishes and commands and his-story. It would be something that would be full of tales that would pass down through centuries and it would teach people how to live and love and how to be saved from death. It would tell them about how the story of god was being written amongst them and that if only they could recognise that the mirror they looked through was merely clouded with stories, they would see the true reflection of God in his good and perfect creation.

But the book of God’s story was also inadequate. The story of the story seemed to multiply with every reading. It became a story of a story of a story of a story of a story of a story of a story. Of the making of stories there was no end and the people became weary and confused. Each time they tried to look at God the mirror became more and more clouded by the stories they told themselves of what to expect and what they wanted to see. 

3.

God is a story that loves to be told. But he was perplexed. He felt as if all those years of trying to tell himself had only led to a greater distance, a greater un-telling. And so he thought again. This time, God thought, I will tell myself in my own flesh. People will see that there is nothing that need separate a man or woman from the story of god. And so the word became flesh, the story became flesh, hoping so hard that this time it would be clear.

Those Who Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It

Here’s Chris’s piece from our Greenbelt event this year:

‘Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ 

Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it. There is something inside each of us that is not interested in memory. It sparkles with something that we have called ‘life’. It cannot hope to make itself known – only felt. It is too much for anyone to hold. It pushes and pulses, stutters and starts. It rages and smiles, whimpers and moans, crackles and catapults, fizzes and frays. We find the edges of ourselves through hearing it speak, feeling it move, listening to it sing. It is waiting for an alphabet. Waiting for words. Waiting for stories.

Stories bind some of this intensity and allow it to make its way into the world. A good story is not interested in being remembered. It is interested in life. We don’t believe in stories. They take us somewhere. They hold us, make room for us, stretch us out, bend us inside out and outside in. They make and re-make our inside worlds and if they are good they allow more and more space for our desire to tell and to tell and to tell more stories. Stories create experiences that we can live. Live right to their limits until the experience is completely beyond use, until it has been used up, killed off by our desire and can thus make its way into history. The trace that is left by a good story is the desire to find new stories, new ways of telling the something that is inside. New ways of elaborating ourselves, telling ourselves.

But what if most of the time we are frightened? That what is inside us is too much? That it blurs us too much, that it asks too many questions that demand answers. That it makes us feel not free and alive but chaotic and diffuse.

What if at these times our memory becomes an emotional, theological, philosophical glue. What if the story called memory binds us up tightly and salves the chaos and confusion.

What if the story called memory creates more stories that comfort and control, sanitise and secure, operationalise and condition?

What if memory is just a cover story….a version of ourselves that is palatable and controllable? What if forgetting feels like an act of suicide to everything we hold dear?

Is it better to remember to forget or to forget to remember?

Isn’t it both? Isn’t it that the desiring, provisional, open self bursting with the thing called life is tempered by memory, remembering and ritual because without this we would not be able to sustain ourselves. Probably. But isn’t it just as true that memory is killing our future because we dare not disturb its fragile balance and risk falling out of our faiths into free fall?

Most of us are here tonight because of a story called ‘Belief’ which must not be forgotten. It weaves a powerful spell because it can hold inside itself without contradiction suicide bombing, misogyny, pro-life influenced murder and homophobia to name a few. It can become a form of remembering that protects us from the truth of our existence. A dead-end story that loops in on itself. Empty, dead words. Connected to nothing except itself. Story-less stories that burn those they touch and burn out those who live in them.

A story-less story cannot hold, metabolize and ultimately transform anything. Once the story is lost all one can do is comply to or reject what is now a belief. Remembering gives way to repetition. Our book of life, our book of stories now a prison of understanding.

Wilfred Bion, the great British psychoanalyst once gave the following advice to practitioners –

“discard your memory; discard the future sense of your desire. Forget both what you know and what you want in order to leave space for a new idea. A thought, an idea unclaimed, may be floating around the room searching for a home”

Don’t be afraid to forget. It is the only way to have something to remember. Do be afraid that the world might turn upside down and inside out because it might. The cracks that appear might be cracks in a cocoon.

Maybe consider doing your forgetting with other people. Maybe considering doing it with us here tonight. Read yourself between our lines, between IKON’s lines and IKON’s lies and find that place. You will know it. It is a place where your story is nothing and everything at the same time. It is a place where as you forget you are unwound and invigorated, pulled apart and together AND re-membered.

None of this is true.

It is completely true.

Look for us between the lines.

That’s where we want to be forgotten……………

We All have A Story…

Here’s Jon’s piece from the Greenbelt event:

‘Fuck Your Story’

Jon Hatch, Ikon, Greenbelt 2011

Yes, stories… We all have a story.

Our stories are living parts of who we are as individuals and communities. They give us birth, they help us grow, they help us discover, explain and heal.

Everyone has a story.

Ann Travers has a story:

It involves her father, Tom Travers (a judge, the primary target) being seriously wounded in a gun attack in 1984, her mother being alive because a second shooter’s gun jammed, and her 23 year-old sister shot dead.

Mary McArdle has a story:

It involves her deeply-held conviction that never has a nation been, for centuries, more wastefully, stupidly and cruelly mismanaged than Ireland by the British Crown, that Tom Travers was an intrinsic part of that mismanagement, that her part in his attempted murder was an act of war, and the murder of his daughter was (and I quote) ‘a mistake’.

McArdle was imprisoned for her role in Travers’ shooting. She was released as part of the Good Friday Agreement and is now a special advisor to the Minister of Culture in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Her appointment has horrified Ann Travers and other members of the Travers family.

What do we do when story becomes rupture, when there is no way to go back or forward?

What do we do when our stories are so divergent, there is no way to tell them together?

Sinn Féin assembly member Jennifer McCann has a story:

In 2008, she booked the Long Gallery inside the NI Assembly Buildings for a reception for International Women’s Day dedicated to Mairead Farrell, one of three IRA volunteers shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988. Unionists were outraged that public government facilities were being used to honour a woman they branded a terrorist, but McCann said that the event was not intended to offend unionists, nor did she expect them to support her plans or, indeed, to even attend the event.

“It’s not about agreeing,” she said. “I’m not asking anyone to agree with what I am doing, but I am saying they should respect it. (Government buildings are) a shared space and that’s the way it has to be seen. We have a right to hold the celebration there. I would never, ever say to unionists… that they should or should not be doing something. It’s International Women’s Day and we’re celebrating the life of Mairead Farrell. I don’t think that should offend anyone.”

Well, perhaps needless to say, McCann’s Unionist rival Jeffrey Donaldson, has a story:

Days after McCann’s announcement, he booked the Long Gallery to host an event in honour of the SAS who shot Farrell dead in Gibraltar. “I believe we should celebrate the lives of role models”, he said, “and it is right and proper that we should celebrate and commemorate our armed forces who stood against terrorists such as Farrell.”

This style of political dis-engagement, depressingly familiar in my part of this dis-United Kingdom, leaves us perpetually with the question: is this all to which we will ever reasonably aspire: to tell our stories separately; remember separately, in different rooms, out of sight, sound and mind of each other? Equal and alone?

What do we do when our stories are irreconcilable?

What do we do when your narrative of heroism is my narrative of grief?

What do we do when your story of strategic national interest and foreign policy is, for another, a story of an errant thousand-pound missile dropped on their home?

When your story of fiscal responsibility and the need for spending cuts is, for me, a story of a severed lifeline?

When your biblical story is my inability to stand in my Church and marry the person I love?

What do we do when the only commentary I can give to your story is ‘Fuck your story’?

Every Story Is Made Up….

Here is Cazi’s piece from the night:

Every Story Is Made Up

Every story is made up. Have you read ‘The BFG’? Roald Dahl? Yeah, it was made up. It’s a good story though. Every story is made up. Did you ever hear the one about the Moon Landing? 1969, man on the moon and all that. Yeah, it was made up. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. But the story you know is just a story that was made up. Just words… about an event. And I bet Neil Armstrong has a different story to you. It’s a good story though.

We Have Only Words To Tell Our Stories

Every story is made up. Made up of words trying to pin down and describe actual things, actual events and happenings, actual feelings. But the words never quite get there, do they? They can’t. The word ‘happiness’ doesn’t describe the experience of someone who is happy. It’s a just a word we use to point us in the right way.

Or, it’s like the story about the Inuit people having an unusually large number of words for ‘snow’, and we have, y’know, ‘snow’. Paddy Irishman, Paddy Englishman, and Paddy Eskimo make it back to the pub after getting caught in a snowdrift. But two of them are struggling to put words to their very similar experiences: “There was so much…snow…everywhere!” No vocabulary to tell snow from snow.

That story’s made up too as it happens – the one about Eskimos and them having lots of words for snow, it’s not true – but it is a good story, and it highlights the limits of language (all language) and makes the point that words fail us. Try as they might to be precise, they will always (and can only) generalise. Words and their meanings fall like precipitation; scattered and inaccurate.

How many words for ‘snow’ would be needed to describe every snowfall?

We Can Only See The World Through Our Own Eyes

Every story is made up. And so much of how we understand the world is determined by how that world has shaped us. Our template crafted through millennia of evolution, then personal experiences, all through the limits of our senses, and the moulding of the ‘self’.

We can’t understand outside our means; we can only see the world through our own eyes. Every story is made up. We will always see the world, not as it is, but as we are.

New Experiences Demand A Rewrite

So our beliefs, and the stories of how we understand ourselves, other people, the world, and even the divine, are inevitably flawed. It’s nothing clever; it’s obvious. And we’ve all known how new experiences demand a rewrite.

We should expect our beliefs to evolve, and want them to, and allow them to. So why do we ritualise our beliefs? They will change with time, and they already separate you from others. We should ritualise being human – this is what we share.

Yet, how often do we cling to our stories in the face of unfamiliars and unknowns? When we don’t have the vocabulary to describe snow from snow? Suddenly our stories are engraved in stone (by tradition, by deep-set desires and fears, by subconscious self-serving agendas) and they will not be re-written. We demand that this new reality and these new experiences fall into line – fall into our lines, on our page, in our made up story. When the plot thickens, we want to sift out the complexities and make a Mr. Men book out of a mystery.

But we shouldn’t worry or get too precious. We should be gentle and just remember that our story is made up and we’re allowed to change it.

There Is A Story Of God

There’s a story of God. God is a story. I have a story of God that I made up, and so do you. Parts of it were given to me, and I accepted them. Unknown to me there were parts I needed to hold on to, and parts I needed to abandon. Chapters I secretly edited and later found evidence for. Maybe God is a Big Friendly Giant. Maybe God is Dead. There are as many stories of God as there are possible experiences from getting caught in a North American snowdrift, and they’re all made up of words that fail.

The question isn’t whether your story is true (that’s easy – it isn’t). The question is whether your story is true enough. But how do we judge that? Our stories are precious, but they’re not as precious as the people around you. So when your made up story is helping others write their own beautiful chapters, keep it up. When your made up story is harming others, re-write it. If how you understand the divine leads you to love and include others, keep writing. But if how you understand the divine causes harm to others, reject your understanding. Shred it. Write it again. It might feel important, but you made it up.

Help ikon @ Greenbelt 2011

Here are some pictures of previous events we’ve had at Greenbelt. We are delighted to be attending Greenbelt this year where we’ll be staging an event in the big top. Exciting!! We’re right in the middle of preparing for the event at the minute and this year we really need your help. The more help we get from you, the better the event will be. There are three simple ways that you can help us with our event this year. Anyone can help with the first and last, even if you’re not going to be there.

1. If you have a Twitter account please send a tweet before 20th August telling your story of god. Please do not include any links in the tweet and please add the hashtag: #ikonstory If you want an example of what that might look like you can look at our twitter page, but there no rules other than these.

2. Please bring a novel to our event at Greenbelt. We would love everyone to bring a novel that they don’t mind parting with. During the event we will be using all the novels we have collected and we’ll do something with them afterwards. It will probably not be possible for you to get back the novel you bring, so only bring one that you’re happy to leave behind.

3. Please spread the word! Please use Facebook, Twitter, Googleplus, email or the radical medium of telephone or even letters to spread this message. The more people who participate, the more successful our event this year will be

Thanks so much. We can’t wait to see you at the end of the month!

A few photos from last night’s event…