Do you still believe the story you’re telling?

As someone hoping for change, what are you currently putting faith in? Does your picture of something better, including your own better self, keep sputtering out? There’s a lesson for the Easter weekend to be found in art – and why it’s not just about whispering comforting stories to ourselves in dark hours.

Right now, what do you believe?

It’s Friday. But is Sunday coming?

Across the western Christian church, this week is Holy Week. It ends with Maundy Thursday’s long, dark, sleepless night, dawning into Good Friday’s early secret betrayal and its afternoon public execution.

Sounds about right for vibe at the moment, huh.

Are you ready for the very long weekend?

What story do you think you are in right now? And what are you picturing clearly enough to put a little faith in?

I know what I’m still putting faith in. And it’s not my own righteous intentions, that’s for sure.

If you still have goals, and go you, a mental projection of what you really want is, y’know, rather important to getting it. A real bugger for career trajectories is just not knowing what you’re looking for. Have you learned for yourself how all-too quickly despair begins to rot the bones when you can’t imagine a way forward? If that was true for the years you were stuck in a job, imagine the poor saps caught in a whole era of crisis… oh.?

A fundamental lesson to keep preaching from Unsee The Future , I believe, is our global lack of diverse tomorrows – alternative futures to the sacred cyberpunk corporate deathonomics that’s reaching out from the pulpit of every media channel. What are our believable, ready references of life beyond crisis, corruption, things feeling rotten all around us? Within us? Where do we look for what lies beyond our truly terrible business as usual?

..Hey, so Timo. Love your sense of mission, kid, but what can we most of us do? Resurrection, renaissance, rebirth, regeneration – such lofty words sound way too mythical-miracle, no? Unrealistic.?

A rather obvious note to inject here, then, is a reminder that you have less and less grip on what is real any more.

This week I’m conscious that my own rather solarpunk image of a gradually more regenerative late century ahead keeps flickering off and on like a breaching transmission. Along with my best intentions. Light and dark snapping between each other, trying to give me a migraine. How about you? Still have your vision and principles nicely intact? Mate, I do look up to you.

If you’re feeling more like me, however, is this too much expectation weighing on weak signals of possibilities… or just a very great deal of interference?

It’s worth saying that the Jesus story is, in-world, a spectacular switcheroo. From the back end of a collection of religious writings cannonised into sacredness as a holy edit in the early middle ages, it leads us up the Easter garden path to the very last moment, in a narrative so maddeningly domestic and un-Supreme Being-ish the religious leaders of the day lost all patience with it and had its protagonist bundled into the back of a van by the Feds.?

Wherein lay the plot-twist. Opening the way to a very definite end that was just the beginning. Blammo – death unstung, believers!

Now, Aslan hatching out of a chocolate egg might not tempt you to suspend disbelief very far this Easter. You’re far above all that sort of belief, and the chocolate is probably a long way from Fair Trade. ..But I’ll bet you’re secretly wishing for someone to show up in a very nice smelling dressing gown, offer you morning tea and declare the gates of hell closed forever, your debt wiped clean and a round of hot buttered toast on its way. Your late father just popping the marmalade on the tray for you now.

Look at the worshippers joining throngs everywhere. Being buttered up. Desperate to be raised up.

Dirty hands and divine touches.

In personal work, I’ve found myself mysteriously talking about sacredness, relics and identity this year, partly perhaps responding to an instinct about our networked world in 2024 – that the mythic, runic, ritualistic belief system running through its code is presenting itself more and more obviously. Spells cast in icons and sigils of certainty to march under, showing a phenomenal capacity and readiness to worship and surrender ourselves to fantasy.

But we’re a long way from Sunday school. The globalised world, badged with crusaders’ fading crosses, to me feels still in the gutting deep night before the arrests by the status quo. It’s still Maundy Thursday, dreading what’s coming – the fleeing of friends, the total aloneness, the complete separation from light and life. A night to consume the son of God himself with despair, staring into Satan’s pit.

A night to sweat blood.

Up in the night myself this particular Maundy Thursday, I found myself sensing that when something is a lot, sometimes you just have to sit with it awhile. Acknowledging its weight. That you can’t keep carrying all that. That you can't keep fighting.

Violence doesn’t honour life. Grief does.

This week is also currently Ramadan. A time of reverence and family, fasting and refocussing for Muslims. In the Holy Land, alongside Islam, there a strong tradition of eastern Christianity among Arab people, all so linked to Judaic heritage. Where is faith and where is future felt in Israel this weekend? It looks like a maw open to the unclean real workings of our current world.

I’m not sure I have much faith in myself. My best efforts seem easily flickered out. But I'll admit there's an ironic encouragement in the Christian story: Many of it's believers picture the Supreme Being of the crucifixion as a god with their sleeves rolled up. Planting, mending, serving. Sitting with, in the despairing dark.

Forget theology, that’s sounds like a sobering calling. And an oddly empowering one, requiring no further waiting for holy hero figures. Something that chimes with the practices of art and why I have so much faith in that.

Waiting for magic is literally waiting for illusion. What I've learned from faith long ago personally is that faith means doing stuff – it’s how it shows it’s there. What I’ve since learned from art is that doing stuff makes reality, changing it in you as you do it.

There’s your future.

So what do you believe in, right now? And what will you do next to realise it? You don't need divine permission or to be filled with sacred conviction. Writing, like all making, is a verb – you do it. And you do it in truth – the bedrock of storytelling. Bearing witness whatever the weather around you and inside you. And then the new world of it exists.

In darkest hours, forget saviours from on high, the real kings are servants. Doing it because they believe the story they think they’re in stretches way beyond the supposed end.?

Picture that over the weekend. And take heart. x

In this clip from a delightful interview with Matt Desmier at Bournemouth University recently, you can see something of my story as Momo, and what’s lead me to put a lot of faith in the realities of art. >