Lent Talks

A Collection of Broadcasts by Nick Baines, Giles Fraser, Bonnie Greer, Alexander McCall Smith, James Runcie and Ann Widdecombe

BBC Radio 4

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780281078639
• eBook ISBN: 9780281078707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What does Lent mean to you?

Whether it is six weeks of restorative reflection or a blur of busyness in the lead-up to Easter, this hand-picked selection from BBC Radio 4's popular Lent Talks will help you to discover anew the meaning of Jesus' ministry and Passion.

Over the last 10 years BBC Radio 4 have hosted Lent Talks that, across the country, provide a place for people to engage with, and reflect upon, core ideas of faith. They explore Jesus' ministry, the story of his death, and their personal responses to Lent. Leading voices including novelist James Runcie and MP Ann Widdecombe draw on their own unique responses to Easter, and address what they find in the annual looking-back-to of Jesus' death.

Following a dynamic Foreword by Christine Morgan, Head of Radio, BBC Religion and Ethics, six well-known writers and broadcasters offer fresh and arresting perspectives on the life and death of Christ.

This brief but insightful book provides something for everyone on this year's journey towards Easter.

Week Two: Names

Bonnie Greer

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 12 March 2014

Bonnie Greer OBE is an American-British playwright, novelist and critic who has lived in the UK since 1986. She has appeared as a panellist on television programmes such as Newsnight Review and Question Time and has served on the boards of several leading arts organizations, including the British Museum, the Royal Opera House and the London Film School. She is also the Chancellor of Kingston University in Kingston upon Thames.

In the late 1980s, when I still lived in New York City, some friends and I decided to bring a play over for the Edinburgh Festival.

For my friends, it would be their first trip outside of the States. No one in their families had ever been abroad. Our families and our ancestors just didn’t have the freedom of movement. We black people were restricted from going where we wanted to either by law or by custom.

That was our history.

So this trip to Scotland was all very exciting and we were brimming with things that we wanted to do.

We, my friends and I, were all in the theatre, so one thing we wanted to do was a bit of ‘living theatre’ while in Scotland. The idea was to do something that seemed real to another person and – we hoped – make that person see the world in another way, change his or her perception.

We decided on this: we would pretend to be American heirs. We were coming to Scotland to look over our individual inheritances.

And if we could claim them, we would claim them.

So we bought a bit of tartan, made it into scarves and we were ready to roll.

We decided – being New Yorkers – that the first person to be a part of our little experiment would be a taxi driver; taxi drivers can usually spot an ‘act’ in the back of their cab. If it worked with the driver, then maybe we could go Scotland-wide, take a little theatre back to Manhattan.

We landed, made our way to Waverley Station and hailed a taxi. The streets were teeming, as they always are during the Festival, but the driver who picked us up took the time to be friendly and very chatty.

Eventually he got around to the question I suppose everyone in Edinburgh asks a stranger there in August: ‘Are you doing a play or are you visiting?’

We were ready.

‘Oh, we aren’t coming to do a show,’ Bobby replied, ‘we’ve come to claim our inheritances.’

I said, ‘We thought this would be a good time. I know people are probably on vacation in August, but, hey, we’ve got nothing to lose, plus we can get to see some plays and stuff, have a good time.’ My other friend, Dana, said, ‘We’re in the theatre in New York, so we’d really love to see Scottish theatre, see what you guys do over here . . . while . . . we claim our inheritances.’

I think that the silence from the driver lasted about five minutes.

If it didn’t, it felt that way.

He stared briefly at us in his mirror. You could see his mind working, the words running through his head: ‘our inheritances’?

‘Oh?’ he finally said quietly.

‘Yep,’ my friend said.

And then we did our real street theatre bit, the pièce de résistance. We pulled out our passports and showed them to him.

Pointing to me, my friend Bobby said, ‘She’s Greer, I’m McGregor and she’s Ferguson. That’s our names.’

The poor driver tried to move the subject on, but I think he was just too stunned to say anything coherent.

I would have loved to have heard what he said at the supper table that night!

* * *

The most poignant and powerful time for me in the film 12 Years A Slave was not when the beatings took place or the general degradation meted out to the hero as a matter of course or even the general the terror of his life.

No. It is very quiet, very matter-of-fact: our hero is told that he will be called by another name from now on. He will no longer be Solomon Northrup.

He is now ‘Platt’, the name of a runaway slave from Georgia.

The name of someone else.

He is frightened, confused, beaten and humiliated, and now he must answer to another name.

A name given to him by someone else, a name given, ultimately, by conquest, a name that was not his choice, not his wish, a name that would be tied to him like the ropes that bound him and which he could not shake, could not undo – a name that would define him for ever.

He couldn’t change/couldn’t alter his reality.

At first he resists and demonstrates this by saying ‘Solomon’ when he is called ‘Platt’, but gradually he comes to learn that if he does not do as he is told, does not come when his new name is called, does not work, nor eat, nor sleep, nor run or play his fiddle or do nothing at all when he is commanded to under this new name, then the consequences for him could be dire . . . fatal.

In the end, he is freed because he does not forget his name.

His own name, the name he’d been born with, the name, I suspect, of his father, had been thrown away, just as blithely as you blow away leaves or throw something into the trash. It was to be banished, never heard of again.

As ‘Platt’ the slave who ran away, Solomon Northrup has no ability to change his situation. He has no power.

In the end, he is freed because he does not forget his name.

* * *

We American, British, European Western peoples of West and Central African descent are here for one simple reason: our ancestors were brought here. Our identities, our customs and practices, our religions, our families, our dreams were taken away in order to feed a massive industry.

Scripture records that Adam named the animals: ‘And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast in the field.’

We may have been stripped of our names on the way down to the Atlantic coast to the ships or in the holding pens at the slave fortresses that dot Ghana’s coast or perhaps we were stripped of our names on board the ships of our captivity, ships that were named The Lord, The Ann – owned by the United States Senate – and The Good Ship Jesus, one of the first slave ships ever built, and purchased from the Hanseatic League by Henry VIII.

It was necessary to take away our identities because once that is successfully done to a person or to a people, once it is impossible to alter your circumstances, your reality, to master your life and your fate and the fate of those you love, then the process of captivity, of enslavement – both physical and mental – can begin.

We are human beings, and we name things.

Scripture records that Adam named the animals: ‘And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast in the field’ (Genesis 2.20 av).

Naming is one of the key elements of our ordering of the world, of our placing ourselves in the world. Because, if we have our own names, that key to the citizenship of ourselves, then we can be free. We can be free to say ‘yes’, to say ‘no’ or to say nothing at all.

It becomes our choice.

We don’t really know what trauma has been passed down from generation to generation, what the mental and emotional scars are that have been left upon us; our inheritance as the descendants of people who were treated less than human.

We...

Table of contents

• Week One: Mystery by James Runcie
• Week Two: Names by Bonnie Greer
• Week Three: Goodness by Ann Widdecombe
• Week Four: Sacrifice by Giles Fraser
• Week Five: Abandonment by Alexander McCall Smith
• Week Six: Vision by Nick Baines