Forgotten praise made visible

Breaking a long journey home on the M1, we pulled off at Junction 38 to enjoy the Yorkshire Sculpture Park again.

Mr Finch’s hand-sewn woodland animals – sort of higher-class textile Beatrix Potter illustrations – were hugely popular.  Apparently they are part of ‘a magical kingdom’ where their ‘job it is to collect and sort other creatures’ wishes, which are breathed into envelopes and posted in toadstool postboxes’. 

The imagination and workmanship were superb, but I couldn’t quite shake off the judgmental thought that this was typical of a nation which has largely forgotten how to pray, especially as we then, almost symbolically, walked across the grounds to the disused eighteenth century estate Chapel.

There we found it was full of thread woven together by Chiharu Shiota, a European-based Japanese artist.  She wanted the vacated and vacant silent space to make visible the music which has been offered there over many years, some sheets of which were intertwined in the thread.  Her work bursts out of the skeleton of a piano and forms shapes some of which are reminiscent of mediaeval stone arches and vaulting.

She writes of making a connection with the ‘collective consciousness’ of the Chapel, and it was an obvious step from there to T.S. Eliot’s often quoted

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion.  You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report.  You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

In fact I dwelt not on Little Gidding but on Common Worship’s

From the beginning you have created all things
and all your works echo the silent music of your praise.
In the fullness of time you made us in your image,
the crown of all creation.

You give us breath and speech that with angels and archangels
and all the powers of heaven
we may find a voice to sing your praise.

Some people find praying about an echo of silent music problematic rather than poetic, but here it was.  It took me back to what I take to be the phrase’s origin at the beginning of Psalm 19 (I haven’t yet been able to chase down a specific reference to justify the claim that the phrase is attributable in this form to John of the Cross):

The heavens declare the glory of God;
    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
    night after night they reveal knowledge.
They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.
Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world.

Looking up the Psalm now, I find that the use of the word voice may not be fully justified here.  Apparently, the Hebrew is (measuring) line, although early Greek, Latin and Syriac translations do have sound which is why this is followed in many English translations.  Perhaps it is the creator's metre which we detect in Chiharu Shiota’s threads – as much a reflection of invisible structures as an echo of silent music.