The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is a bit of a hidden gem. Set just north of Edinburgh’s city centre in the picturesque and quiet Village of Dean, the gallery occupies two imposing neo-classical buildings facing each other on Belford Road. There are broad lawns which provide another setting for modern art installations. This season, grounds and building frontages are a modern canvas for some literary works.
Displayed over the front entrance of Modern One is Work No.975 by Martin Creed. It is a neon sign which reads ‘Everything is going to be alright.’
Across the road, in the lawn in front of Modern Two, is another illuminated art-work by Nathan Coley which in bright light-bulbs says, ‘There will be no miracles here.’
It’s an interesting juxtaposition of ideas, and here art is doing exactly what it’s meant to do – provoke and stimulate thinking. On one reading, blind optimism meets militant materialism.
‘Everything’s going to be alright, but there will be no miracles here.’ Is that how you see the world, and especially how you see it just a few days after the presents are unwrapped, the batteries have run down, the turkey is reduced to bones and most of the good television has passed? Yet if we don’t think about miracles, isn’t it harder to believe (in the non-technical sense) that everything will be alright?
Christmas, Christians argue, is saying that things will be alright precisely because miracles will happen here. And it’s possible to be quite down to earth about what’s miraculous. The fact that we are here is miraculous: that we are created beings, self-aware, with the capacity to sense and express concern beyond our immediate wants and needs. Theologically speaking, it is part of the miraculous that God has drawn close to humankind as a human. As a church we’re not good in believing in miracles because we think they need to be extraordinary. Can’t we believe in ordinary miracles, or the miraculous ordinary?
God does not come to be involved with a God-created world at the first Christmas. Traditional Christian doctrine has understood God is present in the created order from the very beginning of creation – from before the beginning of time (and there probably was such a time). The big fight in the early church was not about how holy and divine Jesus was, but about how down the earth he really became. The Gnostics refused to believe the perfect God of all could take on lowly, sinful, human flesh. But that is exactly what the Church has proclaimed for two thousand years.
God is with us: not in some magical, ‘wave a wand and all will be well’ sort of way. Yet God is with us, and there is the hope that tomorrow can be better than today. That will largely come about if we believe that there will be miracles here. Just behind the illuminated sign decrying that possibility lies the Dean Cemetery, a significant Victorian graveyard. The people buried there read like an Edinburgh Who’s Who. There are more medical pioneers than you could shake a scalpel art, leaders in developing Scots Law for two centuries, as well as the founder of the Faith Mission, also the social reformers Flora and Louisa Stevenson and John Spence, a pioneer of medical radiation and, in his time, the only radiologist at the Edinburgh Sick Children’s Hospital. Spence was widely respected both for his work and for his kindness. There are literally dozens of others whose life’s work and dedication in many fields of endeavour, research or life has changed our world.
I imagine all of them, in different ways, believed that there were miracles here. It was as they believed it and committed themselves to discovery or action that they brought some of them to birth.
The writer to the Hebrews is not afraid to state the miraculous: ‘Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity. … For this reason he [Christ] had to be made like them, fully human in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God.’
The miracle is that God has come among us, the creatures who were always understood to have been made in the image of the same God. This is astonishing humility, the modus operandi of a God who might be described as wholly, and holy, humble. Perhaps the mistake we make is not to believe that miracles can happen right here, among us.
However, the phrase Nathan Coley used isn’t quite what you would think. It comes from a seventeenth-century royal proclamation. The Crown, in France, made a ruling in a French town which was believed to have been the frequent site of miracles. It was a governmental prohibition on attempting the miraculous. The words in lights are, in their historical context, quite the opposite of a statement of fact. They were, initially, an attempt to dowse down unexplained, uncontrolled happenings which were attributed to the power of God.
There’s the real possibility that, if faith was extinguished, we might do the same. We might live as practical atheists, living as though the miraculous simply won’t happen here. A wildly materialistic world encourages us to think like this, as it denies the possibility of miraculous. At precisely the same time a technologically-advanced world encourages us to demean God’s work when it isn’t as bright and attention-grabbing as transistor-fuelled trinkets. There is, as some have said, a ‘globalisation of superficiality’ enabled, and perhaps encouraged, by technical developments in as few as fifty years.
By such things our minds are taken off the truth that God is present here and now. Maybe the witnesses we need to pay heed to are not the bright lights of our modern age, represented perhaps in Nathan Coley’s piece. Perhaps we should pay greater attention to what’s over the wall – or, at least, to what those over the wall paid attention to during their lives. For many of them were people of deep Christian faith who believed in a different world, and trusted in the presence of a miracle-working God. Such faith inspired labour developed medical technology, changed the way orphans were treated, discovered more of our extraordinary world and helped frame systems of relating well to one another, allowing justice to flourish. No miracles here, really?
Be careful what you read on buildings. ‘The words of the prophets [may be] written on the subway walls and tenement halls,’ as Simon and Garfunkel sang, but maybe not on museum elevations. It’s simply too blindly optimistic to hope that ‘everything’s going to be alright’. It’s not going ot be like that- at least, not for everyone. It won’t be today for many thousands who are seeking shelter, security, a home, peace, a more stable 2020 than 2019 proved to be.
But this can be a better world, where more is alright and less is awry. What’s more, we can contribute to that. Believing that there may be miracles even here might just prompt us to be part of their creation, just as it was in Victorian Edinburgh. Just as it was in a Palestinian stable.
If we become involved in the task of miracle-making, we might just recall that in doing so we are co-creators with the Creator who is present among us. For this is the miracle of Christmas: that God has come among us.
And that is entirely down to earth.
Learning Life 