Festival of words and likeness*

By Laura Ann Phillips
It’s not often you visit another type of altar. But, if you attended any of the Bocas Lit Fest’s 2018 offerings, you may have thought you were, indeed, standing at one.

An altar erected to the written, uttered and sung word; not made of marble, but an assemblage of workshops, films and discussions. The zeal with which the “Caribbean’s Biggest Festival of Words, Stories and Ideas” paid unstinting homage to the word, moved me to review the kind of attention I give to the Word on which, and Whom, we profess our life to be based.

Certainly there were many parallels between the “word” at the festival, and The Word St John says was there “in the beginning”, Who was “with God… and was God” (Jn 1:1). The Word that is to be our subject, to be proclaimed, “welcome or unwelcome”, on which we are to “insist” (2 Tim 4:2), if we take the evangelists Sts John and Paul as authentic models.

As there were all manner of credible models presenting at myriad events over those days of the festival. I’d made space for the workshops, hewing time I didn’t have from days that weren’t possible. Would I have gone to such lengths to meet the Word at a prayer meeting? Or Mass?

But, it was generosity that caught my attention.

The workshops’ facilitators were largely established writers. I sat in each assembly, senses steeled as a California panner’s, ready for the work of plucking real, and rare, nuggets from the sludge of fluff and ego.

Finding, instead, a cadre of writers whose language was ever that of the Mentor, the Encourager. Cut-gems of structured critiques and tangible advice freely offered. Lighting fires under timid writers to spit that first sentence out! Precision tools given, instructions included, by which to advance or finish languishing work. Casting long lines into the literary deep, to draw up more of that elusive creature: the new Caribbean author.

The kind of good-will typical of the oft-hidden work of Christ.

God’s accustomed kindness, met unexpectedly.

For centuries, in Her official Morning Prayer, the Church takes up the song of the ancient Jews, praising a vastly generous God whose largesse cannot be outdone:

“You visit the earth and water it, you make it very plenteous… You prepare grain for Your people, for so You provide for the earth. You drench the furrows and smooth out the ridges, You soften the ground with showers and bless its increase. You crown the year with Your goodness, abundance flows in Your steps.” (Ps 65: 8-11)

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told His hearers that our, “Father in heaven… causes His sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and His rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike.” (Matt 5:45)

Those authors shared wonderful things with proficient and not-so-skilled writers. No aptitude tests, no closing exams.

Just good things, freely given. From the very hand of God, through the hands of His chosen children.