Have a look at the photo by clicking here on this link.
Until a few years ago this area of North Glasgow was heavily populated by families who for two generations lived and grew up and grew old in tower blocks known as the Red Road Flats.
Framing the Picture
I think this image is worthy of framing and hung on a wall as a tribute to a way of life that started full of hope and aspiration for families moving out of unhealthy and no longer habitable tenement housing. It didn't work out as the new world of social housing the planners had planned for. Within a decade or two the social problems of loneliness, drug culture, endemic poverty and social malaise had set in and were never to be sorted. So the flats were eventually emptied and demolished. Even the demolition didn't go to plan as several of the towers remained standing, almost as if, in true Glasgow fashion, they were reluctant to go without a fight
But the image of this lone tower should also be framed in another way, as a study of what a theology of place, hope and memory might look like. That naked tower block, with the exposed living space of a hundred families each with their story, now threatened by the long arm of the demolition digger. I love this image, for its beauty and its sadness. Indeed it's an interesting question, the relationship between beauty, sadness and our tears. This photo does it for me.
Theology as the Frame and as the Lens
So I frame this image within a theology of society that starts off with a view of human beings as inherently precious, beings for whom home-building and community forming is an instinct traceable to those deep origins of each human being as created in the image of God. Those who lived in the Red Road Flats, were most of them, hard working folk with their own social codes and the dignity and decency to try to make life work for them and for each other.
No it didn't all work out; and yes latterly life there was every bit as hellish as anything their parents had left behind to come there. But that broken tower, and those living rooms and kitchens stripped of their privacy, bear witness to people who lived there; who chose the wallpaper; who laid the carpets; who worried about the elctricity bills; who tried to get by when the lifts were broken and the stairs were dangerous.
And here's the question. Where are the folk who used to live in those exposed rooms in that tower? I hope they have decent homes, affordable, dry, safe and with good folk around them. Amongst the myopic habits of the church is when we think of the Holy Spirit as the agent of church renewal, poured out in church community building, giver of gifts and inspirer of mission. All true enough, but not true enough.
The Holy Spirit is much less manageable than that kind of domesticated theology allows.This is the Spirit who brooded on the primeval waters, and God spoke and there was light, and there was life. This is the Spirit who moved over the chaos, so that it was crafted and created into a world where life could flourish and human beings made in the image of God could live out lives of risk and possibility.
God and the Living Space of Human Beings
So I frame this picture within a theology of the Creator God always urging and pushing us towards the future which God himself inhabits. And I frame the picture within a theology of human being, made in the image of God, broken, sinful but eternally and redemptively loved. And in my mind's eye, and my heart's eye, I sense the presence of One who once looked on another city, and wept. But that One is now the risen one, whose resurrection was God's explosive Yes to life and renewal, and whose Crucifixion was God's final No to sin and death and all that each of those polarising negatives threaten against the eternal love that will not be thwarted.
That one photograph of the remaining ruined Red Road Flats is an image of life as it was and that has gone. But it is an image too that reminds of the people who lived there, and their ongoing story. Their story weaves into a new narrative the memories of the past, the realities of the present, and the risks and possibilities for human flourishing of the future. And in those risks and possibilities, we are called to discern the potent, patient persistence of the Spirit whose mission it is to brood over the world's chaos with healing wings, and with the gentle genius of the artist whose sympathy for the medium is expressed in creative mercy and understanding judgement.
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