This is by way of an edit of my original piece, additions to inspire, as it were.

Over the last week two examples of the Art of Resistance have been on our UK media. The Promenade concert by the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, under Gustavo Dudamel, and the exhibition of works at the Asia House Gallery by the Burmese artist Htein Lin ‘Burma Inside Out’.

When I saw over two hundred young musicians packed together on the stage of the Albert Hall, I knew we were in for something interesting… that’s the equivalent of nearly three full symphony orchestras.

Under the baton of this young prodigy (I have rarely seen a conductor who communicates at this depth, and that, by and large, through irrepressible joy!) They performed the monumental tenth symphony of Shostakovitch, rather less successfully the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story (the orchestra was just too big to hold all the textures apart) and wondrously works by Mexican and Venezuelan composers. The encore was a phenomenon, as they all stripped off their black jackets to reveal coats made from the colours of the Venezuelan flag and then produced a reprise of Bernstein’s Mamba that defied anyone to stay seated, the orchestra certainly didn’t!

Their performance,however, is not my point. It is the fact that these two hundred musicians are also two hundred music teachers, working with younger people. It is the fact that this orchestra is the pinnacle of a movement now of more than two hundred orchestras in Venezuela. It is the fact that these two hundred represent two hundred and seventy thousand children and young people who are now registered in ‘the system’. And it is the fact that all these kids live in the various barrios and slums in Venezuelan cities, that they live with, or were involved with, drug crime, prostitution, destitution… if you have seen the film City of God (although set in Brazil) you get some idea of what this means.

The man they call maestro is still their leader and inspiration. Jose Antonio Abreu is a musician, a keyboard player and composer. As a young student he chose to study petroleum economics around his music studies, he says, because the course fitted in with his music tutorials. And it was as an economist, as President of the Economic Planning Commission and, later, as Minister of Culture, that he saw ‘the magnitude of poverty and misery in Venezuela’. From this, his act of resistance, inspired as much by his deep Catholic faith as by his love of music, began what is now affectionately called ‘The System’(as Ed Vulliamy notes in his Observer Article of July 29, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2133790,00.html )

The motto of the movement, the cry of Abreu, is “Play and Fight”.

When Simon Rattle (Music Director Berlin Phil) worked with them he said, “it is nothing less than a miracle. From here I see the future of music for the whole world. I see this programme not only as a question of art, but deep down as a social initiative. It has saved many lives and will continue to save them.”

When the great tenor, now baritone, Placido Domingo went to conduct them in a performance of the Messiah, he simply stood on the podium and wept.

Dudamel, once a violinist in the orchestra says, “These musicians are my blood, my best friends, my brothers and sisters.” A point demonstrated at the conclusion of the Shostakovitch last Sunday. When the audience erupted in response to the performance, Dudamel refused to take the conductor’s bow, he turned his back on the crowd and went and stood with the body of the orchestra, only acknowledging the stomping applause when he had his arms around two of his brothers.

Those who work in the arts, especially when deploying the arts into social and economic issues, are rather accustomed to the idea that, if the project succeeds, what you will get is benefit to the people, and outcomes that might be rather poor in artistic terms, qualified by their social good.

Not so here. Dudamel will take over as music director at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009. The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra has just recorded its second disc for Deutsche Grammophon. Dozens of the musicians from several of the orchestras are tipped for professional success. Recently a bass player was appointed as the youngest musician ever to go to the Berlin Philharmonic.

The inspiration of this work is manifold. The rescue of life and hope for a quarter of a million young people, the way they learn about life by learning about the balance between competition and cooperation in the dynamic of orchestral playing, and in the astonishing quality of what they produce, how the social dimension of their relationship drives forward such excellence and such profound readings of the music of Europe, Russia and North America.

Their resistance became a matter of wonder for this artist.

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If you get the chance to go to the Asia House gallery in New Cavendish Street, London, before October 13th, I’d encourage you to do so.

Htein Lin was imprisoned in Burma between 1998 and 2004 when he was released because the authorities could find no evidence for his supposed opposition to the regime. In that time he produced two hundred and thirty pieces, using techniques that he had to invent, dripping paint made from any substance to hand or smuggled into the prison by a few cooperative guards, from a syringe, with his fingers, his face, his feet, using bedsheets or other prisoner’s sarongs, purchased with cigarettes. A body of work that is ironic, wry, and astonishingly hopeful, a work of true resistance where the artist responds with raw truthfulness to the appalling conditions by expressing an opposite spirit, a refusal.

This is another lovely example of creativity as a salvific response to sin and degradation.

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I know that posts like this don’t often generate much response on this site, even if offered under the guise of applied theology, which the original was meant to be. But I do want to offer a challenge with it.

When I was telling the story of the orchestra to a friend on Monday, and we were talking about the ways in which this might be seen as an expression of the Kingdom of God, he made the perceptive point that the challenge is more about how we view this sort of thing Christologically rather than ecclesiologically or even missiologically.

I agreed with his suggestion and thought it might be interesting to explore more widely.

The questions such a thought inspires are, surprisingly, rather simple.

In what way, and to what extent, can a self-evident good be viewed (necessarily or not) as an expression of God’s intent, and in our current place(?) in the eschaton, therefore, as a work of Christ? Or is it better to view such things simply as a work which might enjoy God’s approval?

(I thought that was simple, it certainly felt as though it was until I wrote it down!!)

How do such things help us explore the need for particularisation with which so many of us are wrestling? In other words, the propositional basis of the gospel, the outcomes of which are measured by Christological confession, or joining a church which amounts to the same thing in modern thinking, tends to push us towards thinking that unless this orchestra changes its name to something religious (and certainly away from celebrating Bolivar and his strong Freemasonry)it carries no kingdom credential.

The question then focuses deeper, and simpler, in what way would a religious claim, implied by a religious name, make the work of that orchestra God’s work? And, of course, the opposite is also implied, does the lack of that imprimatur deny that it is God’s.

Answers on a postcard will fail to understand the question. The answers are likely either to be five thousand words or writable on the postage stamp of the postcard!

Happy thinking.