THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

The playwright Sarah Kane, aged only 27, died last week having apparently taken her own life. She had just been working on an adaptation of Goethe’s Young Werther, where the love-stricken hero, failing to achieve the object of his desires, kills himself. We seem here to have a case of ‘nature imitating art’.

Sarah Kane was the author of several plays, notably Cleansed and Blasted, which were, according to ones taste, either distorted, repellent and obscene or masterpieces (or possibly both). They address almost all the taboos of modern society in provocative ‘in-your-face’ form, and for many, including hardened theatre critics, they were almost unbearable.

Sarah Kane always denied that the violence in her plays was gratuitous, but she did not deny that it was real. In fact, she claimed that the ultimate source of her inspiration was … the Bible. In her teens she lived a very intense form of Christianity, strongly Biblically based, within the context of her family. "The reading I did in my formative years was the Bible, which is incredibly violent, full of rape, mutilation, war and pestilence." What is more, it is God who seems to sanction or indeed instigate all these horrors in the Biblical pages. Nor can we say simplistically that the Old Testament is all violence and the New Testament all love: look at the Book of the Apocalypse. Sarah Kane renounced her Christianity when she left her teens, but the legacy remained with her.

God’s word is alive and active and, says the Letter to the Hebrews, penetrates to our very joints and the marrow of our bones. But through the vehicle of the Bible it needs interpreting for every age, or this same word can be a most dangerous weapon. In particular we are helped here by scholars of the Bible who have helped us see how it came to be formed, and how it represents developing stages of human awarenesses of God, inspired by God himself, but capable of endless refinement – as all human beings are. Otherwise it is like partly cooked food, and we all know how dangerous that is.