Diocesan News
Opening address at the Flower Festival in Belleek Parish
Friday 22th May 2009: Opening of Flower Festival, Belleek Parish ChurchAddress by the Right Reverend Dr Michael Jackson, bishop of Clogher
Revelation 22:2b: The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations.
Beauty is truth and truth beauty; that is all on earth ye know, and all ye need to know – so wrote John Keats and I have no real doubt that he is right. However, even for me to say this sort of thing in 2009, is a massive leap of faith and a mighty gamble. Many of you might be bristling and saying: Does he not realize that there is a Credit Crunch going on and an economic melt-down? Others might be saying: What about Zimbabwe, what of Darfur, what of Pakistan and does he not know what is rumbling and bubbling in the Sudan? Or: Does he not remember how he himself encouraged people, including us, to respond to the human crisis in Gaza as 2009 dawned? And most pertinent and galling of all: What about the tens of thousands of people who have suffered unspeakable abuse, lasting humiliation and wilful degradation of their dignity as human beings in our own country, systematically and shamelessly, as is only now coming out into public view?
All of this I do remember. And I want us in these few moments to remember all the people at the heart of these and countless other human tragedies as we feast our eyes on the beauty, the skilfulness and the directness of colour, light and nature. It is surely a tribute to the visionary imagination of this Parish of Belleek that we have today’s double celebration of the creative spirit, in the weaving of pottery and in arranging of flowers, in the year when we celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth. For, had it not been for his own particular pursuit of truth in the heart of beauty, we would be abysmal in our ignorance of how nature works and functions.
Flower Festivals and Glorious Glass point us through visible beauty to the meeting-point of the recklessly natural and the carefully organized. This is the tension and the achievement which manifests the gift of creation and the gift of arrangement in everything we see and do. We are privileged to see both of them come together with such electrical excitement in this church this afternoon. The heritage of Belleek Pottery, local and international, ancient and modern all in one, stands behind and before us. The inventive skill of workers in glass stands to the East of us. The careful, thematic positioning of flowers and greenery enfolds us. We are here to breathe deeply and to enjoy delightfully as reality and aspiration are refracted through sense and sensation.
The healing of the nations takes us, in the belief-system of Christianity, to the most profound meeting of beauty and truth. Revelation, the last, strange book of the Bible, culminates not in the hatred, violence and punishment of apocalypse as popularly understood but in the water of life, the tree of life and the healing of the nations. This vision takes us beyond every organized beauty to the grace of reconciliation as a work of God. The pressure is on, the urgency is there to draw in all nations before the End Time and to reconcile squalor and beauty, falsehood and truth – in that most difficult of ways, lovingly. The promise is that the servants of God shall, in seeing God face to face, look God and one another in the face. Reconciliation of what we see here and what we do to one another out in the world beyond – this is the inspiration and the imperative which we can all draw from being in the nearer presence of beauty itself and seeing in its face the truth of love as that which overpowers and conquers evil.
Isaiah 35.1a: Let the wilderness and the parched land be glad, let the desert rejoice and burst into flower.
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