Richard Beck :
0:00
There is going to be a real rush to get back to normal and the lessons that we're gathering during this season are going to be quickly forgotten. And so I think that is something for the artists to do, that is something for us to do collectively is to remember what we're learning right now. And I just kind of go back to that Old Testament idea of memory and that being such a moral resource for us and so to me, what we need to be doing right now is capturing the experience.
Rina Atienza :
0:37
There's a fire there's a flood, much will be lost, much will be found. What should we file? What do we keep? What must be remember when we wake from this sleep? Welcome to Noah's Arkhive podcast. Apocalyptic memories for the new future. Episode one, the emerging memory.
Elysia Willis :
0:59
A+E - art and emergence there is a piece of art which I've always found compelling and would often invite my students to consider. It is by MC Escher and is called Three Worlds. It's not quite an illusion like Escher's other works, but more of an invitation to consider illusion itself and other perspectives. It is a black and white lithograph print and depicts a lake during the autumn or winter months. And the surface of the water extends the full rectangular frame of the picture. The title refers to three perspectives that gradually emerge, the more you look, consider and reflect. A journey I'd always love to take my students on. "Okay, where are the three worlds?" I would ask. Inevitably that be a collective, huh? Before I elaborated. "Okay, in the picture, are there any levels is anything above anything else or below anything else?". "Oh yeah. Oh yeah, there's, there's dead leaves on the water". A student would say, "Okay, good. world one. "Oh, and there's a fish a fish underneath the water", another student would say. "Perfect world two. So if world one is on the surface of the water represented by the leaves and world two is under the surface of the water represented by the fish, where is world three?". Blank faces. "Okay. What other objects can you see?" I'd say. There's some trees", one student would remark. "Okay, so the trees, are they actually in the picture like the leaves and the fish? Is there anything different about them?". "They're upside down", one student would say. " Okay, they're upside down. So why is that?". Then inevitably a student would put up a confident hand declaring, "They are upside down because they aren't actually the trees, they are the reflections of the trees that we can't see." "Congratulations, you've discovered world three. World three is in the surface of the water but it's actually showing us a world which is outside of the picture all together." Then emerges the collective noise that is music to all teachers ears - "ahhhh". I go on to make a profound point about how art can show us things that are outside of our viewpoints all the time, but they're still happily staring at a picture, which is now way more interesting than me. Escher, in his brilliance shows us how to make space in our imagination for new perspectives and emerging worlds. Making space for emerging worlds - sounds like creation to me.
John Featherby :
3:58
I think we'll look back of this at the end of our lives and think that is the moment things changed. I don't know, obviously, for sure, because I think I'm not saying it's gonna happen in six months. But I think firstly, you can't send 4 billion people back into their homes and not think that something else is going to grow out of it.
Alex Owusu :
4:24
Coming from my perspective, there's been some conversations that have been good and interesting look at people's perceptions of control and control that they have on their life and other things. And I think one of the themes that came up was, I guess, living in the societies that we live, you get focused into kind of thinking as we continue to progress in whatever sense that means that you have a lot more control in particular areas. And I think what this has done is been able to kind of strip that back and not look at us as we have no control whatsoever. But we have control in areas we didn't necessarily think we did. And I think that's been shown in those calls to action that people have had, that they've been stirred to essentially help in whatever way they can.
Andre Radmall :
5:14
It's been wonderful not to have to go to church even though I'm actually one of the pastors of the church. I have to admit, it's been glorious not having to go in for services and to service this thing, this machine called church. And so I've loved that and it's actually brought about a space and the freedom. I'm not sure what will come of that space, but it's bought something like air coming into the system.
Eve Poole :
5:44
And the other transformational thing you talked about the NHS being powered by love, and that speech that Boris gave, and I'm sure that's true, but what I see not just in the NHS, but in all the neighbourhoods and all of the local people wandering around putting signs up for each other and helping, it's actually about service. It's very specifically about service that we're all rediscovering that that's what we want to do we want to trot about helping each other. And we'd outsourced that through our taxes to the state before in this country, and I think that's very exciting that we've rediscovered our moral agency around helping and I'm hoping that might be transformational as well.
Peter Fitch :
6:29
It was about a week or two into self isolation, and I thought, it's like all the uncertainty is like living under a cloud of fear somehow, you know, and it just feels so strange and I thought living in this area would be like heaven, if that fear wasn't there, if that cloud of uncertainty wasn't there, it you know, I've got so many dear friends here, so many people I love and and if we could just stop and have a glass of wine at somebody's house and just talk to you know, that would be the most beautiful thing. And then I thought, well, I've been living exactly like that for a very long time but it hasn't seemed like heaven, because I was always too busy building, whatever it was that seemed like had to be done, you know? And and I thought, I wonder if on the other side of this that can realise it's heaven. That's, that was the takeaway.
John Featherby :
7:18
I think we're going to see a second Renaissance. This is forcing that kind of creativity that potentially the world hasn't seen before.
Vanessa Chamberlin :
7:28
And I'm thinking about that frustration with talking about our common life, resurrection of common life but still talking on this kind of political dimension and thinking about the dark night of the soul and thinking about the artists and at the moment they're the only ones I really trust to act like the next question is about action. Because they act to edge out more indeterminant space you know, to edge out more space for the unknown and more space for things to bubble up from underneath and I've been reading some of you will know her better than me, I've only just discovered her; I've been reading Katherine Keller's work on a political theology of the earth. And I've just discovered her and I can't believe I didn't know her before. And she talks about, it's not her idea she's she's taking it from black critical theory, she says, but she talks about the under commons rather than the commons. And it sort of relates to this image for me of all the stuff that's that's hidden down there and all the stuff hidden under these huge stones on the base of the ocean floor, that if only we will go down there we have a chance to lift and release and see what comes out and probably a whole lot of people will come but I would love to join with a chorus of artists and Walter Bruggeman's idea that the ones who are ready to hear the new song are the artists who are working in lyric anyway, so they're not interested in prose. They're not interested in stringing sentence together, they're working in song anyway. And then, the poor and the excluded, then the ones hidden under rocks at the base of the ocean for whom the previous song never worked anyway.
Andre Radmall :
9:12
Um, so, a long time ago, I used to work as an actor and I'm finding myself slipping back into a particular frame of thinking at the moment, which is to pick up on what Richard said, going to myself, this feels like a chasm opening up in Tesco, as it was for me, I want to remember this and I will remember this moment. That it's like capturing moments. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them whether I'll write them down in a play or whether I'll.. dunno what I'll do with them exactly, but I'm aware that I'm picking out moments which are like something being opened up and in and then something bubbling up from really deep down.
Peter Fitch :
9:59
I've been finding myself saying things that I don't normally say. And partly it's been returned to music, which was big for me many years ago, like decades ago. And then intermittently, but I found myself writing a love song to my wife, which I played her chorus it just, it just keeps popping out of my guitar one day and at the kitchen table, I'd play this and she said, Well, that is way too morbid, because I was beginning to imagine, in this song, what it would be like for one of us to leave now, you know, I guess it's because of the virus and also just old age and so she said that's just way too morbid, so I just forgot about it. Then three weeks later, and I'd gone to bed quite late, but I ended up with all these lyrics waking me up and I had to get up and record them over and over again. I had to do this about five times. I was so angry, I told the melody to go away. And later, I repented of that because I realised that I didn't, I'd forgotten to ask it with the melody of the music was I just had the lyrics. So I asked it to come back.
Andre Radmall :
11:12
I think that when I went through a little process, or shift in the middle of my wife being seriously unwell. And I went through a shift from asking God to heal her and doing all the things that as a charismatic evangelical I was brought up to do, and nothing happened. In fact, things got worse. And I felt that what ended up happening was being face to face with her mortality, and a sense of having to sort of take a position of surrender, rather than trying to make something happen using the leverage of prayer or a particular kind of approach to spirituality. And I think that did shift me more towards a position of contemplation, which wasn't about me trying to make something happen, but being with what was actually happening in a deeper and more profound way. And I think that, for me, was was quite a big shift. Now where that takes me next, I think is going back to something we talked about a lot at the conference was being hospitable. And I feel since then there's been a greater openness in me to the other, to other people in various ways. I found that I'm not trying to impose my will on a conversation or trying to get an answer. Come just listening and leaving space to see what emerges really.
Elysia Willis :
12:40
So, this is a quote I found in book, I went into a really lovely bookshop about a year ago and I'm one of these people that really does judge books by their covers, and I saw this book, which is amazing because it is big and yellow, and I thought that's going to look amazing on my desk. I wasn't so interested in what it was about but it's called altruism, it's very good. And it just sat on my desk for about a year and I thought I've got some time perhaps I should dig into it. And so I opened it up and straight away was this quote, it just sang to me. So, it's by Victor Hugo, and it's this, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come". And I love this because of the word 'whose' because it just, it gave a personhood, it gave a life, it gave a spirit to the sense of an idea.
Paul Milbank :
13:52
I've been reading the French theologian/sociologist, Jacques Ellul. He gives you an idea of being dialectical people. So it's sort of living in the space between two things that seem contradictory on the surface but being sort of curious about those paradoxes enough to see what sort of emerges out of them. So I think we live in cultures that are very quick to shoot to one side of a dichotomy or the other.
Nathan Mladin :
14:42
I'm grateful I feel the need to always caveat because I know all the complexity and suffering that's that is happening, will be happening in the months and possibly years to come, but I am actually grateful for the kind of global existential crisis this is creating. And also opening up the space to ask really big basic questions about our common life. What is valuable, who is valuable? Why do we value the things that we value? Is value really price, as in kind of modern economics, who really matters in an economy, who's around us who is present with us in this, so I really I think there is a genuine turn to the local. I mean, it's been there in kind of political theory and it's happened in some ways, but now I think it's more concrete, including myself and my wife. We feel more connected to the local community, which is a kind of been bandied about a lot, hasn't it, but more connected to our neighbours, we've now kind of met and talked, we know their name, we've joined the what's app group in the area. We know the shop keepers and the cafe owners. We've known them for a while, but really kind of gone deeper. So there's a genuine turn to the local, which I celebrate. And also, you know, what is community? What binds us truly. And I think we're seeing that it's mutual care and kindness that are really the glue that keeps us together. So I think I am grateful for the global existential crisis and the space for asking these questions.
Eve Poole :
16:32
And the other thing I'm finding very transformative and exciting is that Ann Pettifor was always complaining about quantitative easing and saying, if you can create money from nowhere to bail out the banks, why can't you bail out education? Why can't you bail out welfare? and it's brilliant that it's finally happened. So now we know that given that there is a magic money tree, you can create money for any reason you want. And I'm hoping that might, once you've got through this and realise what the cost of creating money is, have more sensible conversations about what money actually is and what we're trying to fuel and for what reason.
Mark Campbell :
17:06
One of the thoughts I've had is, this is an amazing time almost of people rediscovering what it is to be human, and some of the key characteristics and best characteristics of what it is to be human that are probably normally have been kind of painted over or obliterated by kind of our 'business as usual' kind of hyper consumeristic lives that we kind of normally live and, and the two sort of elements that I hear a lot kind of come out are creativity and connection. I think those two things we sort of obliterate in our normal lives, but people are rediscovering. And creativity, I think flourishes with limits and obstacles, you know, it's amazing how people are having fun, whether it's gardening or crafts or all the different kinds of stuff that's kind of going on, that kind of flourishes through. And reducing of options, which I think our consumeristic lives so often have just so much options. And, and I think it's amazing to see that and I think spiritually, that's an amazing opportunity for transformation. And the other thing is connection, you know, we're kind of seeing that hunger for connection, whether that's to the local and local businesses or to each other. And I think that's an incredibly powerful thing to be kind of unearthed. And I kind of see that in business as well actually, you know, there's a sort of connection to purpose. You know, that happens in business and there's a, there's a creativity and ingenuity that you kind of see as people evolve. But definitely one of the opportunities for transformation is seeing those kind of fundamental human qualities have a chance to flourish in a very changed and different environment.
Nathan Mladin :
19:25
We're just going to say, for those of us who do want to kind of hold this space, and just wait to see a bit more how things can play out rather than rush in, and before the great unravelling happens, it will happen in the way we, some of us expect and pray that it does. If you want to do that. There's one thing that I've just realised only last night, but before the whole pandemic, kind of became a serious global crisis, I was haunted by a piece of classical music that I'd been listening to a while back so and it just came to me and it's Antonín Dvořák, symphony number nine, 'The New World' and I didn't really know why it was haunting me but I was like listening to it over and over again. And I listened to it again, actually the second movement, the Largo movement in the symphony number nine, Dvořák is what was really haunting me. And it's because I think listening to it last night, it captures a lot of, I mean, it might have had kind of a prophetic resonance for me at that moment because it was a picture of both of the kind of wreckage of destruction, but also something new emerging and hence the title new world. He finished it in New York. But for me, it carried something of a promise of something new emerging out of the wreckage, out of a desolate kind of space. And I had this musical kind of picture and was feeling things before things happened. So I don't know. If you want to continue exploring and praying and thinking about what you need to do, maybe you would want to give this a listen Symphony number nine, the second movement, in particular,
Alex Owusu :
21:35
"To a slightly younger Alex. Two years have passed and whilst the world goes through a severe period in 2020, it's unfortunately only the start of things to come. Despite this, please hear me when I say the outlook is not all doom and gloom. On a global scale, there's been a sharp increase in isolationism and deepening divisions between various nations, too many to name. We'd think this would be reflected amongst each of the populations but incredibly, it hasn't taken hold. Rather than general attitudes on people being driven from a top down narrative, we've actually seen a lot more independent thought not driven by rhetoric from governments and media. This has placed us in a moment in time where altruism throughout many nations has reached an all time high. People are beginning to see life more as a journey that can be marked by what they can do for others rather than just themselves. And I can't remember living in a period where this has been the case, especially given the ramp up of an Us and Them narrative from different governments. I'd be lying if I said that life in the UK has returned to anything close to what it was pre March 2020. The landscape of jobs and industries has drastically changed. The ramifications of the damage to the economy meant a large number of job losses, redundancies and businesses going under. In the midst of this towards the end of 2020, someone started up an initiative called My Preseny Purpose, which is taken off on a massive scale. It challenged all of us to look at ourselves as multifaceted, with an incredible amount of talents and skills that can be used in different circumstances to meet different needs and demands. The challenge for us was to look at how we can use these in the present moment for a purpose that benefits us as a society. So many have adopted that mindset and one of the ways it's manifested is in the massive increase in social enterprises up and down the country. The main message to take from this is life is often a double edged sword, and it's up to us, especially with the faith and hope we have to shine a bright light where the good lies, since it can be easily missed in this world. Keep hope and keep going. All will be well.
Elysia Willis :
23:54
This podcast has been created by the conversational and contemplative contributions of Richard Beck, John Featherby, Alex Owusu, Andre Radmall, Eve Poole, Peter Fitch, Vanessa Chamberlin, Elysia Willis Paul Milbank, Nathan Mladin and Mark Campbell. The music you've been hearing has been uniquely created for this podcast by Andreaz Heden and is entitled 'Emergence'. Here's Andreaz to tell us more.
Andreaz Heden :
24:26
It is an interesting thing for me to offer a musical perspective to the discussions on this podcast. The general process in this project for me is to start by listening to the other contributors and then kind of take off from there. This time, it felt natural to me to start from Dvořák's New World Symphony, since one of the contributors told us he'd lately been haunted by this piece of music. The thought behind my piece 'Emergence' is to use, recycle the beautiful things of the past as we engage in the constructive task of imagining and creating a new world post Corona, so to speak. So, I sampled parts from the second movement, I cut out pieces that felt especially relevant for us now, tweaked the material and I played it backwards. I even started to improvise over the musical landscapes that by now felt both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was like I found myself in a strange world turned upside down and was handed the task of creating a new possible world from the existing material.
0:00
There is going to be a real rush to get back to normal and the lessons that we're gathering during this season are going to be quickly forgotten. And so I think that is something for the artists to do, that is something for us to do collectively is to remember what we're learning right now. And I just kind of go back to that Old Testament idea of memory and that being such a moral resource for us and so to me, what we need to be doing right now is capturing the experience.
Rina Atienza :
0:37
There's a fire there's a flood, much will be lost, much will be found. What should we file? What do we keep? What must be remember when we wake from this sleep? Welcome to Noah's Arkhive podcast. Apocalyptic memories for the new future. Episode one, the emerging memory.
Elysia Willis :
0:59
A+E - art and emergence there is a piece of art which I've always found compelling and would often invite my students to consider. It is by MC Escher and is called Three Worlds. It's not quite an illusion like Escher's other works, but more of an invitation to consider illusion itself and other perspectives. It is a black and white lithograph print and depicts a lake during the autumn or winter months. And the surface of the water extends the full rectangular frame of the picture. The title refers to three perspectives that gradually emerge, the more you look, consider and reflect. A journey I'd always love to take my students on. "Okay, where are the three worlds?" I would ask. Inevitably that be a collective, huh? Before I elaborated. "Okay, in the picture, are there any levels is anything above anything else or below anything else?". "Oh yeah. Oh yeah, there's, there's dead leaves on the water". A student would say, "Okay, good. world one. "Oh, and there's a fish a fish underneath the water", another student would say. "Perfect world two. So if world one is on the surface of the water represented by the leaves and world two is under the surface of the water represented by the fish, where is world three?". Blank faces. "Okay. What other objects can you see?" I'd say. There's some trees", one student would remark. "Okay, so the trees, are they actually in the picture like the leaves and the fish? Is there anything different about them?". "They're upside down", one student would say. " Okay, they're upside down. So why is that?". Then inevitably a student would put up a confident hand declaring, "They are upside down because they aren't actually the trees, they are the reflections of the trees that we can't see." "Congratulations, you've discovered world three. World three is in the surface of the water but it's actually showing us a world which is outside of the picture all together." Then emerges the collective noise that is music to all teachers ears - "ahhhh". I go on to make a profound point about how art can show us things that are outside of our viewpoints all the time, but they're still happily staring at a picture, which is now way more interesting than me. Escher, in his brilliance shows us how to make space in our imagination for new perspectives and emerging worlds. Making space for emerging worlds - sounds like creation to me.
John Featherby :
3:58
I think we'll look back of this at the end of our lives and think that is the moment things changed. I don't know, obviously, for sure, because I think I'm not saying it's gonna happen in six months. But I think firstly, you can't send 4 billion people back into their homes and not think that something else is going to grow out of it.
Alex Owusu :
4:24
Coming from my perspective, there's been some conversations that have been good and interesting look at people's perceptions of control and control that they have on their life and other things. And I think one of the themes that came up was, I guess, living in the societies that we live, you get focused into kind of thinking as we continue to progress in whatever sense that means that you have a lot more control in particular areas. And I think what this has done is been able to kind of strip that back and not look at us as we have no control whatsoever. But we have control in areas we didn't necessarily think we did. And I think that's been shown in those calls to action that people have had, that they've been stirred to essentially help in whatever way they can.
Andre Radmall :
5:14
It's been wonderful not to have to go to church even though I'm actually one of the pastors of the church. I have to admit, it's been glorious not having to go in for services and to service this thing, this machine called church. And so I've loved that and it's actually brought about a space and the freedom. I'm not sure what will come of that space, but it's bought something like air coming into the system.
Eve Poole :
5:44
And the other transformational thing you talked about the NHS being powered by love, and that speech that Boris gave, and I'm sure that's true, but what I see not just in the NHS, but in all the neighbourhoods and all of the local people wandering around putting signs up for each other and helping, it's actually about service. It's very specifically about service that we're all rediscovering that that's what we want to do we want to trot about helping each other. And we'd outsourced that through our taxes to the state before in this country, and I think that's very exciting that we've rediscovered our moral agency around helping and I'm hoping that might be transformational as well.
Peter Fitch :
6:29
It was about a week or two into self isolation, and I thought, it's like all the uncertainty is like living under a cloud of fear somehow, you know, and it just feels so strange and I thought living in this area would be like heaven, if that fear wasn't there, if that cloud of uncertainty wasn't there, it you know, I've got so many dear friends here, so many people I love and and if we could just stop and have a glass of wine at somebody's house and just talk to you know, that would be the most beautiful thing. And then I thought, well, I've been living exactly like that for a very long time but it hasn't seemed like heaven, because I was always too busy building, whatever it was that seemed like had to be done, you know? And and I thought, I wonder if on the other side of this that can realise it's heaven. That's, that was the takeaway.
John Featherby :
7:18
I think we're going to see a second Renaissance. This is forcing that kind of creativity that potentially the world hasn't seen before.
Vanessa Chamberlin :
7:28
And I'm thinking about that frustration with talking about our common life, resurrection of common life but still talking on this kind of political dimension and thinking about the dark night of the soul and thinking about the artists and at the moment they're the only ones I really trust to act like the next question is about action. Because they act to edge out more indeterminant space you know, to edge out more space for the unknown and more space for things to bubble up from underneath and I've been reading some of you will know her better than me, I've only just discovered her; I've been reading Katherine Keller's work on a political theology of the earth. And I've just discovered her and I can't believe I didn't know her before. And she talks about, it's not her idea she's she's taking it from black critical theory, she says, but she talks about the under commons rather than the commons. And it sort of relates to this image for me of all the stuff that's that's hidden down there and all the stuff hidden under these huge stones on the base of the ocean floor, that if only we will go down there we have a chance to lift and release and see what comes out and probably a whole lot of people will come but I would love to join with a chorus of artists and Walter Bruggeman's idea that the ones who are ready to hear the new song are the artists who are working in lyric anyway, so they're not interested in prose. They're not interested in stringing sentence together, they're working in song anyway. And then, the poor and the excluded, then the ones hidden under rocks at the base of the ocean for whom the previous song never worked anyway.
Andre Radmall :
9:12
Um, so, a long time ago, I used to work as an actor and I'm finding myself slipping back into a particular frame of thinking at the moment, which is to pick up on what Richard said, going to myself, this feels like a chasm opening up in Tesco, as it was for me, I want to remember this and I will remember this moment. That it's like capturing moments. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them whether I'll write them down in a play or whether I'll.. dunno what I'll do with them exactly, but I'm aware that I'm picking out moments which are like something being opened up and in and then something bubbling up from really deep down.
Peter Fitch :
9:59
I've been finding myself saying things that I don't normally say. And partly it's been returned to music, which was big for me many years ago, like decades ago. And then intermittently, but I found myself writing a love song to my wife, which I played her chorus it just, it just keeps popping out of my guitar one day and at the kitchen table, I'd play this and she said, Well, that is way too morbid, because I was beginning to imagine, in this song, what it would be like for one of us to leave now, you know, I guess it's because of the virus and also just old age and so she said that's just way too morbid, so I just forgot about it. Then three weeks later, and I'd gone to bed quite late, but I ended up with all these lyrics waking me up and I had to get up and record them over and over again. I had to do this about five times. I was so angry, I told the melody to go away. And later, I repented of that because I realised that I didn't, I'd forgotten to ask it with the melody of the music was I just had the lyrics. So I asked it to come back.
Andre Radmall :
11:12
I think that when I went through a little process, or shift in the middle of my wife being seriously unwell. And I went through a shift from asking God to heal her and doing all the things that as a charismatic evangelical I was brought up to do, and nothing happened. In fact, things got worse. And I felt that what ended up happening was being face to face with her mortality, and a sense of having to sort of take a position of surrender, rather than trying to make something happen using the leverage of prayer or a particular kind of approach to spirituality. And I think that did shift me more towards a position of contemplation, which wasn't about me trying to make something happen, but being with what was actually happening in a deeper and more profound way. And I think that, for me, was was quite a big shift. Now where that takes me next, I think is going back to something we talked about a lot at the conference was being hospitable. And I feel since then there's been a greater openness in me to the other, to other people in various ways. I found that I'm not trying to impose my will on a conversation or trying to get an answer. Come just listening and leaving space to see what emerges really.
Elysia Willis :
12:40
So, this is a quote I found in book, I went into a really lovely bookshop about a year ago and I'm one of these people that really does judge books by their covers, and I saw this book, which is amazing because it is big and yellow, and I thought that's going to look amazing on my desk. I wasn't so interested in what it was about but it's called altruism, it's very good. And it just sat on my desk for about a year and I thought I've got some time perhaps I should dig into it. And so I opened it up and straight away was this quote, it just sang to me. So, it's by Victor Hugo, and it's this, "Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come". And I love this because of the word 'whose' because it just, it gave a personhood, it gave a life, it gave a spirit to the sense of an idea.
Paul Milbank :
13:52
I've been reading the French theologian/sociologist, Jacques Ellul. He gives you an idea of being dialectical people. So it's sort of living in the space between two things that seem contradictory on the surface but being sort of curious about those paradoxes enough to see what sort of emerges out of them. So I think we live in cultures that are very quick to shoot to one side of a dichotomy or the other.
Nathan Mladin :
14:42
I'm grateful I feel the need to always caveat because I know all the complexity and suffering that's that is happening, will be happening in the months and possibly years to come, but I am actually grateful for the kind of global existential crisis this is creating. And also opening up the space to ask really big basic questions about our common life. What is valuable, who is valuable? Why do we value the things that we value? Is value really price, as in kind of modern economics, who really matters in an economy, who's around us who is present with us in this, so I really I think there is a genuine turn to the local. I mean, it's been there in kind of political theory and it's happened in some ways, but now I think it's more concrete, including myself and my wife. We feel more connected to the local community, which is a kind of been bandied about a lot, hasn't it, but more connected to our neighbours, we've now kind of met and talked, we know their name, we've joined the what's app group in the area. We know the shop keepers and the cafe owners. We've known them for a while, but really kind of gone deeper. So there's a genuine turn to the local, which I celebrate. And also, you know, what is community? What binds us truly. And I think we're seeing that it's mutual care and kindness that are really the glue that keeps us together. So I think I am grateful for the global existential crisis and the space for asking these questions.
Eve Poole :
16:32
And the other thing I'm finding very transformative and exciting is that Ann Pettifor was always complaining about quantitative easing and saying, if you can create money from nowhere to bail out the banks, why can't you bail out education? Why can't you bail out welfare? and it's brilliant that it's finally happened. So now we know that given that there is a magic money tree, you can create money for any reason you want. And I'm hoping that might, once you've got through this and realise what the cost of creating money is, have more sensible conversations about what money actually is and what we're trying to fuel and for what reason.
Mark Campbell :
17:06
One of the thoughts I've had is, this is an amazing time almost of people rediscovering what it is to be human, and some of the key characteristics and best characteristics of what it is to be human that are probably normally have been kind of painted over or obliterated by kind of our 'business as usual' kind of hyper consumeristic lives that we kind of normally live and, and the two sort of elements that I hear a lot kind of come out are creativity and connection. I think those two things we sort of obliterate in our normal lives, but people are rediscovering. And creativity, I think flourishes with limits and obstacles, you know, it's amazing how people are having fun, whether it's gardening or crafts or all the different kinds of stuff that's kind of going on, that kind of flourishes through. And reducing of options, which I think our consumeristic lives so often have just so much options. And, and I think it's amazing to see that and I think spiritually, that's an amazing opportunity for transformation. And the other thing is connection, you know, we're kind of seeing that hunger for connection, whether that's to the local and local businesses or to each other. And I think that's an incredibly powerful thing to be kind of unearthed. And I kind of see that in business as well actually, you know, there's a sort of connection to purpose. You know, that happens in business and there's a, there's a creativity and ingenuity that you kind of see as people evolve. But definitely one of the opportunities for transformation is seeing those kind of fundamental human qualities have a chance to flourish in a very changed and different environment.
Nathan Mladin :
19:25
We're just going to say, for those of us who do want to kind of hold this space, and just wait to see a bit more how things can play out rather than rush in, and before the great unravelling happens, it will happen in the way we, some of us expect and pray that it does. If you want to do that. There's one thing that I've just realised only last night, but before the whole pandemic, kind of became a serious global crisis, I was haunted by a piece of classical music that I'd been listening to a while back so and it just came to me and it's Antonín Dvořák, symphony number nine, 'The New World' and I didn't really know why it was haunting me but I was like listening to it over and over again. And I listened to it again, actually the second movement, the Largo movement in the symphony number nine, Dvořák is what was really haunting me. And it's because I think listening to it last night, it captures a lot of, I mean, it might have had kind of a prophetic resonance for me at that moment because it was a picture of both of the kind of wreckage of destruction, but also something new emerging and hence the title new world. He finished it in New York. But for me, it carried something of a promise of something new emerging out of the wreckage, out of a desolate kind of space. And I had this musical kind of picture and was feeling things before things happened. So I don't know. If you want to continue exploring and praying and thinking about what you need to do, maybe you would want to give this a listen Symphony number nine, the second movement, in particular,
Alex Owusu :
21:35
"To a slightly younger Alex. Two years have passed and whilst the world goes through a severe period in 2020, it's unfortunately only the start of things to come. Despite this, please hear me when I say the outlook is not all doom and gloom. On a global scale, there's been a sharp increase in isolationism and deepening divisions between various nations, too many to name. We'd think this would be reflected amongst each of the populations but incredibly, it hasn't taken hold. Rather than general attitudes on people being driven from a top down narrative, we've actually seen a lot more independent thought not driven by rhetoric from governments and media. This has placed us in a moment in time where altruism throughout many nations has reached an all time high. People are beginning to see life more as a journey that can be marked by what they can do for others rather than just themselves. And I can't remember living in a period where this has been the case, especially given the ramp up of an Us and Them narrative from different governments. I'd be lying if I said that life in the UK has returned to anything close to what it was pre March 2020. The landscape of jobs and industries has drastically changed. The ramifications of the damage to the economy meant a large number of job losses, redundancies and businesses going under. In the midst of this towards the end of 2020, someone started up an initiative called My Preseny Purpose, which is taken off on a massive scale. It challenged all of us to look at ourselves as multifaceted, with an incredible amount of talents and skills that can be used in different circumstances to meet different needs and demands. The challenge for us was to look at how we can use these in the present moment for a purpose that benefits us as a society. So many have adopted that mindset and one of the ways it's manifested is in the massive increase in social enterprises up and down the country. The main message to take from this is life is often a double edged sword, and it's up to us, especially with the faith and hope we have to shine a bright light where the good lies, since it can be easily missed in this world. Keep hope and keep going. All will be well.
Elysia Willis :
23:54
This podcast has been created by the conversational and contemplative contributions of Richard Beck, John Featherby, Alex Owusu, Andre Radmall, Eve Poole, Peter Fitch, Vanessa Chamberlin, Elysia Willis Paul Milbank, Nathan Mladin and Mark Campbell. The music you've been hearing has been uniquely created for this podcast by Andreaz Heden and is entitled 'Emergence'. Here's Andreaz to tell us more.
Andreaz Heden :
24:26
It is an interesting thing for me to offer a musical perspective to the discussions on this podcast. The general process in this project for me is to start by listening to the other contributors and then kind of take off from there. This time, it felt natural to me to start from Dvořák's New World Symphony, since one of the contributors told us he'd lately been haunted by this piece of music. The thought behind my piece 'Emergence' is to use, recycle the beautiful things of the past as we engage in the constructive task of imagining and creating a new world post Corona, so to speak. So, I sampled parts from the second movement, I cut out pieces that felt especially relevant for us now, tweaked the material and I played it backwards. I even started to improvise over the musical landscapes that by now felt both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It was like I found myself in a strange world turned upside down and was handed the task of creating a new possible world from the existing material.
