Honesty Box

There was a programme on a little while ago, and I can't remember whether it was on the TV or Radio, which sought to address the question about whether art could ever be a substitute for faith. I didn't find out any more than that, and my gut reaction might be summed up as “Maybe, but...” in the sense that art might well engage with the senses of otherness and the unaswerables of life, but couldn't in my opinion replace faith, although I'm sure others would disagree (although there could be a very interesting dialogue upon whether art can bring salvation.... and just what this salvation thing is anyway.)

This, however, is no more than a preamble, a setting of the scene.

I was providing the weekly free tea and coffee at the more arty of Poppleton's two campuses (campi?) this afternoon when a group of folks came along into the foyer and constructed nothing less than a black plywood booth, looking for all the word like a Confessional, although I'm not sure how many of the students would have even understand the term (after all I understand the concept although it is alien to my experience). But the similarities didn't end there. It turned out that this was part of a piece for Poppleton's main theatre – the Republican and Bradway. Students were being invited individually into this miniature version of the 'Big Brother Diary Room' (as the staff handling the task called it) to recount their tales of student drunkeness and high jinks, captured as a 'talking head' responding to questions being given by either an interviewer behind the partition wall or a very clever computer program (I'm unsure which). The end results were to be edited into a sort of rolling video montage for a piece of art entitled “Honesty.”

So why this little reflection? Well, on the one level I was struck by the similarities of an individual ensconsed within a plain box recounting their “sins” to a invisible listener, hidden behind a screen. Art, perhaps, imitating church, if not faith.

But then, maybe not so similar, perhaps? After all, here were willing volunteers (or at least compliant passers-by) recounting events or the sake of art. Events that, I strongly suspect, they would regard not as sinful, shameful or in any real way as wrong.

Initially I was a little worried that my presence there in the foyer might hinder the art work, but then I realised I was not even a part of the equation. If anything the presence of the project brought me, and by extension the Chaplaincy, to greater prominence, if only as a purveyor of warm beverages.

So the “Honesty Box” provided just that. Not, maybe, an awareness of sinful humanity's need for a gracious God, but a reminder of both the willingness of people to open up with true (or, from their conversations, not so true) stories, but also of the gulf between the givens of the oft-called Pre-modern mindset of faith and the Postmodern mindset in which we find ourselves.