Kingdom come

There’s something special about encountering a great work of art for the very first time. Until it was televised as part of the BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall I had never listened to Edward Elgar’s oratorio, The Kingdom.

The theme of this masterpiece is the birth of the Christian Church. Following Jesus’ return to the dimension he had come from, his followers wait, in hope; they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit with them and within them, a gift which enables them to heal people, and to preach fearlessly despite opposition; they find settled peace and security in knowing themselves God’s precious children.

Thousands of listeners in the Royal Albert Hall were joined by a prime-time television audience in hearing an exquisitely-crafted 100-minute exposition, using the words of the Bible, of the very heart of the Christian faith.

I’ve loved Elgar’s music since I was a teenager, beginning I suppose with his Pomp and Circumstance marches and the Enigma Variations. I remember many years ago being troubled by The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s setting of a poem about an old man facing death. The poem reflected the Roman Catholic beliefs shared by its author Cardinal Newman and Elgar himself.

Not comfortable with Catholic views on Purgatory, I was puzzled that such heart-meltingly beautiful music could be expressing something I deemed untrue. ‘Can’t you simply enjoy the loveliness of it?’ said a friend who was an atheist. But I didn’t think I could.

I wonder what folk in the Proms audience who were not Christians made of The Kingdom. Perhaps they were able to simply appreciate the splendour of it, while viewing it as a fable. But dramas resonate with us because they reflect something in us, some struggle, some goal missed or attained. And if you don’t believe in the God who was central to the first Christians’ thinking, the God through whom ordinary people do extraordinary things, what would the work have to say to you? But I’m convinced that some would have had their eyes opened for the first time to the wonder of the Christian good news.

The irony is that Elgar was losing his own faith at the time he wrote The Kingdom in 1906. Some have questioned if he was only ever a ‘cultural Catholic’ with no deep personal faith, but this seems unlikely. He said of Gerontius (1900) that it contained ‘the best of me’, expressing his ‘insidest inside.’ But six years later as he struggled to complete The Kingdom his faith was crumbling.

This is hard to believe, since he is still able to articulate the faith in music with such insight and apparent conviction.  It makes us question ourselves: do we find ourselves still articulating the faith with what looks like sincerity when we are actually questioning if it is true of us any more, or true at all?

Edward Elgar seems to have moved from faith to an up-beat humanism majoring on hope and love in the face of tragedy.  And still he wrote music of intense beauty – including the poignant Cello Concerto and the breathtaking loveliness of the First Symphony’s slow movement.

It seems to me that if God exists and God is good, then all beauty is in some way an expression of God, a pointer to God. I wonder if all of us who appreciate beauty, all of us who express beauty in our lives, our relationships and the things we create have glimpsed something of God, even though our understandings of truth might be widely divergent. Truth-seeking is important, but in beauty God gives all of us an insight into the divine.

We may be concerned about those who have once believed but have lost their faith. We can entrust them to the grace of a God who forever calls us home.

And what about ourselves, if we feel we’ve only ever been ‘cultural’ Christians, or that we’re singing the old song but no longer with conviction, or that we have simply walked away from God, or fear we no longer believe but lack the courage to admit this to ourselves let alone anyone else.

May we hear as if for the first time the story The Kingdom tells, a story of the bigness of God’s love, the God who speaks to us in a myriad of ways, including through Edward Elgar’s sublime scores.

The Church, as the last gentle pages of The Kingdom reminds us, is a gracious gathering together by God of those who have been separated – by geography, or ethnicity, or guilt, or unbelief.

‘As this broken bread was grain scattered upon the mountains and gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the bounds of the earth into Thy Kingdom.’

(Christian Viepoint column from the Highland News dated 31st July 2014)