Many Christians hold doubts about Christ but religion has given us great art and music
So here we are, Christmas a week away and another year almost gone. Carols and other seasonal music fill both the radio waves and the piped Muzak of every shop. Far from encouraging me to spend, the Muzak puts me in a rather ba-bloody-humbug mood and I leg it to the exit.
But it has led to an internal debate about what do I believe about the central event which we are celebrating (and I don’t mean filling the tills). Was a child miraculously born to a virgin who had somehow been (how to put this delicately?) inseminated by the Holy Spirit. It’s the story at the core of Christianity but also accepted by the Quran. Or have we all been hoodwinked down the centuries by a myth?
Like the vast majority of people of my generation throughout the Christian world we were brought up accepting the broad basis of the story and to a very limited extent I still do. What seems clear to me is that a child who grew up to be a charismatic rebel was indeed born in the Middle East two millennia ago. He was a great populist, a socialist probably, who took on those in power and for that he paid the ultimate price.
I have no better idea than the Pope and assorted bishops, archbishops and the rest if he was the Son of God but it is clearly a story which has been the inspiration for many of the things I hold dear: beautiful choral music, great art and the building of some of the most awe-inspiring cathedrals and churches in the world. Something must have driven the creative juices of those artists.
Take Handel’s great oratorio Messiah: he wrote the music of his masterpiece in just 24 days in 1741 working at the harpsichord in his house at 24 Brook Street in what is now Mayfair. It is synonymous with Christmas and Easter and is certainly the most performed piece of sacred music, though by no means the only. Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Haydn right up to the great modern composers such as John Rutter have all written breathtaking works based around one central figure, Jesus Christ.
So it must have been with the greatest painters. Brave the queues to see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and tell me Michelangelo (and others working for him) were driven not just by the money to work for four years, at times more or less upside down, to paint those glorious frescoes which have the power to render viewers speechless.
Similarly, I marvel at the genius and craftsmanship that built the great soaring monuments to God which make up the cathedrals of the world, not in 24 days or four years but in most cases over a period of a century or more. If you put those three together and are fortunate enough to have been in the soaring chapel of King’s, Cambridge for the annual service of Nine Lessons and Carols, it is hard not to believe, however much that belief comes with caveats.
So how do we explain the sheer cruelty of the Christian Church over the centuries, the wars fought by its myriad sects, the punishments meted out by the Catholic hierarchy on poor unmarried mothers, many of them pregnant through rape or incest, or the evil committed by fundamental madmen like the so-called Doctor (a postal degree from Indiana), Ian Paisley, who was midwife to the birth of the Irish Troubles, by yelling out the addresses of Catholics so his mob could burn them out?
Don’t be fooled by his role as one part of the Chuckle Brothers when he finally knew the game was up: this was a very bad man who hated the Church of Rome and the established Anglican Church because of its ‘high falutin’ ways’. He was a brutish thug in a dog collar (I know of what I speak having had the displeasure of interviewing him) who once had my friend David Liddle beaten up when trying to do his job as a photographer for the Belfast Telegraph.
In the case of the Ku Klux Klan, it grew from a very silly social club in the good old southern states into an extreme Protestant terror group which vowed to return America to Protestant church values. Like lynching innocent blacks and hanging and burning them alive presumably…
Then there is the wealth of organised religion; the Vatican controls an estimated £12 billion treasury and the Anglican Church worldwide is worth about £10 billion. All this at a time of vast poverty and need throughout the world. What would the rebel Jesus, on whom these religions have their basis, have said about that?
I suggest we should ignore Christmas as a time to be kind and generous; how about doing it all year, listen to great music whether sacred or not, marvel at real art (the sort that wouldn’t bother the Turner Prize judges) and visit buildings whose construction in the Middle Ages leaves you asking one question: how did they do it?
Oh yes, do give Rachmaninov’s Vespers a go. I first heard them sung in the cathedral of St Sophia in Kiev and their sheer beauty reduced me to what Churchill called his ‘blubbing’. Fairytale of New York has a similar effect.
So now you know what to send me for Christmas: a box of finest Egyptian cotton hankies. Gieves and Hawkes please.
*****
It is difficult to say anything new about that thick, ill-mannered oaf known as Prince Andrew, the man who is totally devoid of judgment while knowing no boundaries to arrogance. How long will it be before we find out that the source of all that money he suddenly discovered under the mattress when he needed to stay in Royal Lodge originated in China?
But as the opprobrium piles up, all is not lost. His darling ex Sarah, my sacked friend, tells the Sunday Times Relative Values feature that Andrew is “the best, a great man with a great heart, and kind.” (note, no mention of a brain, great or otherwise.) “I won’t let him down, he supports me as much as I support him.”
There’s worse: “The (late) Queen never lost me ... the last thing she said to me was ‘Sarah, remember that yourself is good enough.’ It makes me cry... the Queen was much more my mother than my mother was ... I called her Mumma, she never let me down.” And so on (and on and on and on).
*****
Last word on Christmas. At the annual Express bash in 1983, the year Ross Benson won International Reporter of the Year, he and I were at the bar (obvs) when Sir Larry arrived with his wife Joan. They made a beeline for us whereupon Larry introduced her to Ross thus: “ Ross, I’d like you to meet my wife. This is Lady Lamb.”
ALAN FRAME
16 December 2024
