Expository Times, Aug 2009
Cynics point out that Edinburgh people go on holiday in the month of August mainly to avoid the influx of visitors who take over the city, its streets and its transport for the annual Edinburgh Festival. It begins with a service in St Giles’ Cathedral, and during the four years in the late sixties and early seventies when I was assistant minister there I was at four of these services to open the Festival. At one of them, the preacher was Lord Reith, whose sermon reflected gloomily on the state of the arts and who afterwards wrote angrily to the BBC which had the effrontery to pay him a fee of only £25.00 for televising his sermon. At another the preacher was George MacLeod, who infuriated the city fathers and the ecclesiastical procession by preaching a wild tirade against the war in Vietnam. And when publicly criticised afterward said “Do you mean I was just meant to be part of the show?”
Both these occasions were memorable, but neither as memorable as the service in 1971. The then minister of St Giles’ Cathedral, Harry Whitley, had always invited a guest preacher, but as he was to retire within the year, he decided to preach himself. The service was televised throughout the United Kingdom. It began, I remember, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by a young Andrew Davies, playing the overture to Die Meistersingers. Reminding the congregation that the first Edinburgh Festival was a glimmer of light in the days of post war gloom in 1947, Harry Whitley said “All human history is the account of the conflict between light and darkness. You can record it as cold fact, make a drama of it, or set it to music with the clash of cymbals and the roar of drums. The dark and light clash, and too often it seems that the powers of darkness prevail, and many times the light flickers and seems to go out.” The following Sunday the drama critic of The Sunday Times, Harold Hobson, wrote that the sermon “was one of the finest feats of oratory it has ever been my good fortune to hear. It was a great, sustained and haunted cry of lamentation that the old certainties had been eroded and the young despise them: the more moving because the preacher declared with superb and desperate defiance that the light which shined in darkness will never be mastered, despite the dark places which he sees in the Festival”.
A friend of mine, the late Ian Mackenzie, wbho contributed to this page, liked to recall a matinee concert in the Usher Hall on the final day of that first Edinburgh Festival, which united the conductor Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the Usher Hall in that first 1947 festival. Hitler, the holocaust and the war had separated them. It was a sparkling concert of Viennese marches, polkas and walzes. But what remained in Ian’s memory was the tears in the orchestra and on the face of Lotte Walter, and the conflict between light and shade on the conductor’s face.
Nowadays as well as a service in St Giles’ there is, quite properly a service to mark the opening of the Edinburgh Festival in the city’s Roman Catholic cathedral. When he was the kirk’s Moderator, Andrew McLellan was invited to preach at it, and in his sermon then, as well as saying pointedly that it was a lie that Protestants are opposed to Roman Catholics, he said that “it is a lie which you always hear at Festival time that Christians are against the arts. Were the churches of Edinburgh to withdraw their committed support for the arts, the Festival, and in particular the Fringe, would look very different”.
But it is far more than a matter of provide accommodation. It is a matter of Christianity providing a theology which entirely supports the creative arts. One of Andrew McLellan’s predecessors as the Kirk’s Moderator, John McIntyre, wrote that if we believe we are made in the image of a Creator God, then the way we reflect that is when we exercise our imaginations in creative ways. And so the creative artists are sharing in a creativity which Christians believe to be inspired by the God in whose image we have all been made.
And those who believe in Jesus’ form of communication recognise that the creative story is more powerful in conveying truth than the dogmatic proposition. As Don Cupitt has pointed out, asking “Am I in this story?” is a far more powerful invitation to join in a creative journey than “Am I in this statement”?