Ordinary Saints: a new website with poetry, painting and music

Self-Portrait by Bruce Herman

I am delighted to announce that a project on which I have been working over the last few months together with the artist Bruce Herman and the composer JAC Redford has come to fruition at last.

Over the last few years I have collaborated with Bruce and JAC on a sequence called Ordinary Saints which had its premiere in a live performance at Laity Lodge in Texas. It consisted of a series of powerful portraits by Bruce Herman of ‘ordinary’ people; family and friends, but with the aim of showing that as CS Lewis said, ‘There are no ‘ordinary’ people! I have written a series of poems responding to these portraits, and JAC has composed music responding to both the poems and the portraits. Our aim, throughout the project, was to explore what it means to be truly face to face with one another, how we might discern the image of God in our fellow human beings, and how that discernment might ready us for the time when, as we are promised, we will no longer see ‘through a glass darkly’ but really see God and one another face to face in the all-revealing, and all-healing light of Heaven. We had planned to take this exhibition and its accompanying music and poetry on tour and it was scheduled for Oxford this summer, but that has had to be cancelled because of Covid. So over the last few months we have worked together with an excellent web designer to create a website which should give you as close an experience as we can of that lost exhibition. After an introductory video you click ‘next’ and go to a ‘program’ page on which you can see all the paintings and hear all the music and recitations in the order we intended, and also, as you listen, zoom in on detail on any of the paintings. There are also tabs for you to click if you just want to focus on any one of the three art forms. The website is completely free, and you can find it by clicking Here. 

Bruce’s portrait of JAC

Bruce’s portrait of me made during the project