Page 29 - Church Music Quarterly March 2018

thanks to God for a still more remarkable feature of his life. Encouraged and aided by Bishop George Bell, Walter Hussey set about recovering the historic role of the Church as a patron of art in the service of the Gospel. Bell described art, poetry and music as ‘indestructible ... auxiliaries to the Christian Religion’. Artists, he believed, should therefore live, work and worship with the Christian Church. Hussey went further. Commending the design for the Sutherland Crucifixion to the Parochial Church Council of St Matthew’s in 1947, he quoted
Bell’s friend Hans Feibusch:
To see the way some of our best church and cathedral builders decorate their work with nursery emblems, golden stars, chubby Christmas angels, lilies, lambs and shepherds, insipid sculptures and paintings of a silly false naivety, one wonders in what world they live. The men who came home from the War, and all the rest of us, have seen too much horror and evil; when we close our eyes terrible sights haunt us; the world is seething with bestiality; and it is all man’s doing.
There had been anxiety that the painting would frighten the children. In point of fact, this was not so, but for quite other reasons it disturbed their parents, as the Vicar and the artist had intended.
Very early in his time in Chichester, Hussey wrote:
The worship of God is our first duty, and the doing of this with all the care and beauty that can be managed. The Cathedral should set
a standard which can not only proclaim its purpose, but also be an inspiration to the whole diocese and to all who come here. I’m never tired of stressing the enormous opportunities for Evangelism which come to the Cathedral. Tens of thousands of visitors visit it every year. What they see and hear should leave them
with a vision – a vision not only of what the Cathedral did mean but of what it does mean now, to the people of today.
Art, for Hussey, was certainly a tool of evangelism, a way of communicating the deep experiences of life – not least, perhaps, those that touched him most painfully. But, and perhaps more to the point, by commissioning only the very best work,
Tapestry by John Piper in Chichester Cathedral
whatever the medium, he was articulating his own conviction about the centrality of Christ in a deeply troubled world. Gerard Hughes expressed the same truth:
The risen Christ is continually coming through the closed doors of our minds and imaginations, as he came through the doors of the room where the disciples were gathered. He enters our consciousness, closed through fear of ourselves and our fear of other people, and
says to us: ‘Peace be to you.’
The whole Church owes Walter Hussey a greater debt than has yet been appreciated, though there are signs of a significant growth of interest in art and spirituality, and commissions by cathedrals and churches of musical compositions and artworks of a quality comparable to those that he brought to Chichester. In the best of these, artistic quality and theological rigour come together. Both came unusually and naturally to Hussey, who understood that the arts tell us truths about ourselves, our faith and our whole lives. In his own words, ‘Their purpose is to teach, to edify, to suggest a glimpse of the Beyond, to which creative work in holy places should (always) point.’
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