Images. (November 24)

Dear Friends

A very recent and quick trip to London had me dropping in on a museum that I’m not sure I’ve ever visited, despite its multiple glories and vast expanse. For something like 160 years, the Victoria and Albert Museum has existed to showcase art and design, encouraging new generations to create and fashion the world. Some of you will be experts on its collections I imagine. For me, it was quite a revelation!

There could be many things for me to write up after this encounter with so much. But I find myself drawn to a huge art installation that occupied an entire room. Imagine a space painted entirely white: walls, floor, ceiling. Then picture row upon row of plinths about the size of the folding tables in our churches; all white and solid. Upon each table, rows of little polaroid photographs. In a corner on each one there are a series of numbers. And, constantly changing on the wall beside them, a further set of numbers counting downwards. Look again, and notice that each photo resolves itself to be a picture of the sky and clouds, as if the taker lay down and shot straight up. It is all very meticulous, regimented, orderly and stark. And then you read the little sign on the wall that tells you what is going on.

This room is Anton Kusters’ The Blue Skies Project. From 2012 to 2017, Kusters travelled to the last known location of every Nazi concentration or extermination camp. Today, most of these are entirely anonymous and unmarked; a history becoming invisible, just innocent bits of land beneath open skies. So, in each place, he photographed the sky. It created 1,078 images. On each photo are stamped the numbers of people who died in this place and its exact location from Global Positioning Satellites (GPS). Invisible history becoming tangible text and image and map reference. The unfolding countdown on the wall is an accompanying piece by Ruben Samama, recording the death-toll from the first camp’s opening in 1933 to the closure of the last in 1945.

I was alone in this room for quite a while. So many places. So much evil. So many lives. So much time devoted to murder and, now, so much time gently erasing the last signs that anything happened here. Part of what caught me was a synergy. On the train that morning I had been listening to a superbly crafted podcast called The Rest Is History. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I had been listening to a whole series about the rise of the Nazis. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are the historian friends in conversation each time. Holland began one episode reading a transcript from 1922. In it, Adolf Hitler describes in chilling, abominable detail, his hope to see all the Jews of Germany hung in public at every street corner. 1922! Few in Germany, let alone anywhere else in the world, had ever heard of Hitler in 1922. But here was the Holocaust, ready and waiting.

At the heart of our faith lies remembering. Reach for another table, and find the bread and wine. Open an old book, and out tumbles the lively Word of God. Sing the hymns, and words new and old give shape and form to the belief of centuries. Pray the Lord’s Prayer, and we echo Jesus himself. We remember because history matters. It teaches us that God created and still creates. It opens windows into all that humanity can do and be; from the glowing best to the ghastly worst. It teaches us and it challenges us.

We remember because God has chosen to enter in to this world of real people shaping lives and nations and writing history. God chooses to live into this risky reality. God does so as Israel’s history unfolds and prophets dream. God does so as a young woman nurses a baby at her breast in Bethlehem. And God continues to do so, as you and I live on, remembering and refusing to forget.

As Advent approaches once more, God bless you.

Neil