I was in town yesterday and passed GoMA, Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art. There has been a lot of discussion about the defacing of the Bible in an exhibition about socail justice whih they do every second year. This year the theme is sh[OUT]: contemporry art and human rights. One of the artists had an open bible, hoping that people would add themselves and their stories into the scriptures where they feel they and others have been left out. Mostly people have done exactly that but others have defaced it and this has upset folk greatly.
When I first heard of it (mainly because of the way it had been reported) I wanted to write to Glasgow Culture and Sport and complain about their thin sense of understanding towards holy texts. Would they have allowed that to happen to the Qur'an?
But of course there is another side to the story. There always, always is, especially when something like this is reported in the media: there is always a spin. Nothing is reported honestly or in a balanced way (a bit like the Bible perhaps!?). The artists is a Christian who feels there have been groups of people left out from Scripture and I agree with her. From my experience of reading and living with the Bible it shows quite clearly that it has been written by humans in human situations trying to make sense of what is happening. Where is God in all this? Why is this happening? Look at Job. Look at many of the Psalms. Job particularly becasue his three friends are doing exactly what the artists in the sh[OUT] exhibition are living through: questioning, seeking, wondering, hurt by who folk have used scripture to exclude and force people to put up with what is limiting, dehumanising and hurtful. Job's friends are brilliant at that and they are meant to be the ghood people.
No, we wouldn't do that to the Qur'an. But we would do it to the Bible because that, uniquely, is the drawing togetehr and seek starkness the Bible is about. It is the evolving relationship between divinity and humanity. It is a political book in many ways where stuff has been used to exclude people, or provide a polemic against a certain group that suited those who were powerful at the time (Hebrews and the Philistines, Hebrews and Caananites, Exile and Babylonians etc).
But is this not the story of the Incarnation. If we believe in incarnation which is fairly unique to Christianity, then we have to agree that Jesus was born into a world that would deface him, slander, shout, question, dehumanise the very Word of God. And look who was doing all that: the folk who took that very God as their own. They came at Jesus from their won narrow, limited, conservative positions of power and tried to stop him changing that balance.
It didn't work, or has it? The Bible is a unique set of scriptures because it is not worshipped (or shouldn't be. Perhaps the complainers are doing just that) but is living, questioning us, reflecting what we have done to God and how we have interpreted God's engagement in the history of the world. Do we not deface the Bible every day when we ignore the calls from it's pages for a more balanced, justice, equal society, where the hungry are to be fed and weapons destroyed, the assylum seeker welcomed and the poor given life, the prisoner set free and the orphaned cared for. There are many ways to deface a Bible.
Sadly the Bible in GoMA is now under glass: preserved, frozen, out or reach. Ha! I wonder who has won this battle. Is that not what we prefer to do with the Bible all the time: not let it be handled by those on the underside of history but keep it as a preserve of the conservative righteous. Is this not what we prefer to do: to take the danger out of it, and just accept it unquestioningly and unthinkingly and let it die from lack of questions. That is far more dangerous than letting people respond to it's content and story and truth.
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