Mother of God, Heather Pollington

Hello friends: such a lovely response to last week’s post. There’s been notes from all sorts of folk and communities all over the world. Carpenters, arts centres, church communities, wayward scoundrels alone on hilltops, clerics and coffee shops, even a couple of monasteries. (See links to a couple of our allies in The Merrie at the end of this post.) The comments section here was filled with insights. The joy of seeing where you took your response to the Merrie, your imagination and enthusiasm. Thank you! That’s kept me warm, whilst happily pushing my own notions along. I’m glad it feels invitational. I’m excited to contemplate this ember we are blowing on.

I’m pleased that we have a response below from Heather Pollington, who is the artist behind last week’s fabulous Merrie image, and a fellow Orthodox orientating her faith to this mysterious stretch of earth called England. My own weekly post follows. I think you’ll enjoy what she offers, and likely have lots to say about it. It makes me think of my dear mother, Sally Shaw, one of the finest painters I know, a deep Christian and great lover of trees. My own weekly post is underneath.

MAKING MERRIE

By Heather Pollington

When Martin’s dream of The Merrie first appeared in my WhatsApp account, I couldn’t resist responding to its call. It’s something I’ve been dreaming of myself for a number of years, but I didn’t have a name for it. I worked as an artist and designer in the Hollywood ‘Dream Factory’ for 20 years and so am used to being presented with big, impossible seeming dreams and visions. The more audacious the dream, the more I am attracted to it. I love to grapple with it, to try to understand where it has come from and where it wants to go. Then to try and make something material, usually an image. Even if the image, as it will, falls way short of the dream, the process of making it can help us. It shows us very quickly how we are perceiving it rightly or wrongly. We can think about this tiny process of making as incarnational. Martin committed his vision to paper and audio so it could be shared with me and you. I’ve now made a couple of drawings. This may be the end, but I hope that there’ll be more and that this could also be a beginning.

I noticed from reading the comments that Martin’s following are a learned and very poetic group. Sometimes I’ve found that poets and readers can be resistant to the image. Like the Protestant reformers, they find it too suggestive, too specific. It’s something in the material world that they’d rather keep personal and open to interpretation. Artists have to decide specifics – it’s this colour and shape, not that, then expose themselves to the immediate scrutiny that visual art is subject to. It’s a risky, difficult business, but one that is necessary if we are to carry things forward beyond the Substack and the symposium. Liturgy, Art and Architecture are the great visible ‘carriers’ of ideas that can transmit to the population at large, people of all ages and languages. In the medieval period, the churchmen painted their houses with saints and scenes to educate the populace. Now in an age of a high secular visual culture, that is almost Biblically illiterate, it’s time to look again at the role of art.

My own search for The Merrie has taken me on quite a path over the last few years. I’ve yearned for pre reformation church in England filled with the kind of things that Martin speaks of. I’ve struggled with the Protestant Reformers who destroyed many of the places and art objects that I long to see and visit. The journey eventually led me to Eastern Orthodoxy where this kind of integration between church, art, village and forest still exists. This year, on the Feast of the Annunciation, having spent now hours in splendid Orthodox liturgies in various languages, I started to yearn for a service in English. I found a wonderful one in Shrewsbury one bright Spring morning crowned with daffodils. Hearing the chanting in my own native language, I felt almost moved to tears – a deep sense of home and belonging. Then, as often happens in the Christian life, I heard the word ‘hypocrite’ ringing in my ears. Suddenly I felt very close to those sixteenth-century Protestants and ashamed of my naivety. I’ve come to realise that everyone is yearning for the incarnation, we might just be looking for it in different ways.

The point I’m making is, there’s no going back. As Martin says, it is not a re-enactment festival, we are not in the business of nostalgia. So how do we find a way to rekindle something for the modern age? If there are embers, where do we look for them and what do we do?