How stories help us make sense of the world.
On Easter Sunday, 1999, Pope John Paul II published his letter to artists, writing: “‘From chaos there rises the world of the spirit.’ These words of Adam Mickiewicz, written at a time of great hardship for his Polish homeland, prompt my hope for you: may your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will open the human soul to the sense of the eternal.”
Just a few days after Pentecost this year, I attended an event in Dublin organised by Marcas Ó Conghaile Muirthemne from the YouTube channel More Christ. The timing was significant. Here, three artists came together answering the prayers of Pope John Paul II as the Holy Spirit filled the room where we gathered, and through Jonathan Pageau, Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth opened the human soul to that sense of the eternal. The place was also significant, the homeland of WB Yeats, who wrote: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
