The Longing

"Creation is the canvas upon which God has painted His character". Anon.

On a school trip to Olympia in the late 70's, I was overwhelmed as I encountered a wall of TV's projecting with the aid of quadraphonic sound the latest pop video by ABBA of their latest hit, Knowing Me Knowing You. It was a stunning, yet somewhat tragic moment, as the display was truly astonishing, but the song was a tale of the sorrowful end of romance and love.

The combination of media in this fashion, of course, has become commonplace over the length of my life, and yet, the actual ramifications of this are only just beginning to truly hit home, as I discovered in London this month.

Literally days after ABBA's new immersive concert experience opened in London, I visited the War of the Worlds experience, which, like the new musical extravaganza, employs both live action material and virtual avatars to re-create a 'larger than life' re-telling of H G Wells' classic novel, punctuated by the music of Jeff Wayne.

The experience was certainly totally engaging and allows an inter-action with the story that is unique, but the most enthralling part for me was the additional scene (derived from Wayne's musical version) at the end of the experience, where you take a final 'balloon ride' out of the atmosphere and find yourself looking down on the beautiful blue and green gem that is the earth, and out towards the moon and on into the gorgeous cluster of stars that is the Milky Way.

Nothing really prepares you for such a moment which, for me, was indeed breath-taking. It took the VR experience to an entirely new level, and answered the question for me of what it must be like to look down upon our world from the realms of space.

Virtual Reality on this scale is truly impressive, but the new ABBA arena has taken the concept to another level, allowing the 'image' and the music of this band from nearly half a century ago to be renewed to, in effect, look and sound as fresh as it did then.

The intention here is very clear. In their first number of the virtual show, the key idea in the performance is one of re-birth or a rejuvenation of what had been at the pinnacle of their careers. The invitation, then, is to embrace and participate in such a renewal, which then gently nudges its beckoning into various other parts of the show. Only in the final moment are the audience allowed to briefly 'see' the group as they were in the days when they became the characters that had been projected for the previous few hours - the intent was clearly to transcend such limits with something 'outside' of the present.

So, what do we gather from this new phenomena?

We yearn for such splendour because however harsh or cruel nature may be, however dark and dangerous the human soul can become, we still understand the 'sparks' that tell us continually that something more than such woes is actually vital to who and what we are - there is a genuine transcendence at work in these feeble forms of ours, and however old and frail our souls become, we know that the intent is for this to be woven into us, forever.

Escapism will always be popular because we know we need to be elsewhere in respect to essential nature - to inhabit somewhere where what is genuinely good is extolled and what is deplorable is concluded - that is the longing we all share.

A few hours spent in such recreation needs to remind us that only one far greater than ourselves can truly bring about a true renewal, an eternal home, for our benighted race, and that the reality of the cross makes that true for today, and ever more.