Yours Truly Read online

  ‘Murray Watts is a master storyteller – and here, he’s telling lots of them. Expect twists in the tale, new takes on familiar traditions and an awkward look at yourself in the mirror afterwards. Spellbinding.’

  Paul Kerensa, comedian and author

  ‘Brilliantly written . . . Murray Watts is a master of words and has a unique and wonderful insight into the meaning of the Bible and putting it into stories. Through this short but beautifully crafted book, you will be entertained, educated and inspired to think, and your heart and faith will be enriched as a result.’

  Rosemary Conley, CBE, DL

  Murray Watts began his career writing and performing stories for BBC Radio Merseyside in 1971. He studied English literature and the history of art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he began writing plays. In 1975, he joined Upstream Theatre in London, founded by Richard Everett, as resident writer and associate director. He continued to work for Upstream for many years but, in 1977, he joined Paul Burbridge and Nigel Forde as co-founders of Riding Lights Theatre Company in York. He wrote and directed many shows for the company before leaving to join BBC Wales as an associate producer and broadcaster in 1987. Since then, Murray has written many plays for theatre and radio and numerous screenplays for TV and film. His award-winning play, The Fatherland, inspired by his theatre work in Soweto, South Africa, was produced by Bush Theatre at Riverside Studios in London in 1989 and, in 2012, a season of his plays was presented at the King’s Head Theatre in London. He is perhaps best known as the screenwriter of the film The Miracle Maker and as the writer and director of the play Mr Darwin’s Tree. Murray has also written many books since co-writing Time to Act with Paul Burbridge in 1978. He is the author of the bestselling Lion Bible for Children, now published in more than twenty languages. Twenty-five years ago, he moved to Scotland, where he founded the Wayfarer Trust, an arts charity based at Freswick Castle in Caithness, which provides encouragement and spiritual inspiration to many artists around the world.

  YOURS TRULY

  Parables and stories

  Murray Watts

  First published in Great Britain in 2019

  Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

  36 Causton Street

  London SW1P 4ST

  www.spck.org.uk

  Copyright © Murray Watts 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  SPCK does not necessarily endorse the individual views contained in its publications.

  Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version (Anglicized edition). Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica. Used by permission of Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, an Hachette UK company. All rights reserved.‘niv’ is a registered trademark of Biblica. UK trademark number 1448790.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–0–281–08094–6

  eBook ISBN 978–0–281–08095–3

  Typeset by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd

  First printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press Subsequently digitally reprinted in Great Britain

  eBook by Falcon Oast Graphic Art Ltd

  Produced on paper from sustainable forests

  For

  Jock Stein

  and

  Oliver Vellacott,

  with gratitude for years of

  friendship, encouragement and love

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Note on performing rights

  Introduction

  A Celebrity Questions Jesus

  An Artist Tries to Create the World

  The Christmas Letter

  The Village Secret

  The Plague

  The Greatest Discovery in the World

  An Atheist Troubled by His Doubts

  Talent Show

  Love Affair

  The Spider Who Believed in Himself

  The Angel of Light

  The Addict

  The Divine Call Centre

  Cruising Along

  The Lost Angel

  A Little Girl’s Letter to God

  The Ultimate Crash

  The Newcomer

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Tony Collins, who has been my editor, working on many books with me, for more than forty years. He has been a loyal friend, encourager and inspirer. It was Tony and the team at SPCK who persuaded me to take a handful of these stories, add to them and create Yours Truly. I did not expect to write this book and I am grateful that the wisdom and insight of others have gently but insistently nudged me into sharing some of the parables and stories in my archive and my heart.

  I would also like to thank Paul Burbridge and Nigel Forde, my dearest friends and co-founders of Riding Lights Theatre Company. Without their brilliant humour and invention and perseverance over the years, and their positive influence on my life, I doubt if any of these stories would have been created.

  My thanks go also to the supporters and trustees of the Wayfarer Trust, the arts charity that has been so central to my life over the past twenty years. The Revd Jock Stein, chairman, is mentioned in my dedication but alongside him, as he has offered his untiring service to the trust, have been trustees Geoffrey Stevenson (and former trustee Judith Stevenson), Luke Walton, Susan Masterton, Nicole Smyth, Simon West and, once again, Paul Burbridge. They have all been great friends, counsellors and advisers, helping me and many artists to keep going, frequently against the odds. My special thanks also to artist Monique Sliedrecht, creative director of the Wayfarer Trust, for the friendship, inspiration and support she has given to myself and many fellow artists through her work for the trust and at Freswick Castle over many years. My thanks too to a former trustee, Helen Davies, my aunt, who celebrates her ninetieth birthday this year and has been a lifelong spiritual guide, mentor and personification of the love of God to me. Writing plays and telling stories was not an expected career for me and I needed visionary relatives and friends, as well as my long-suffering parents, to support me and to believe in me. Thank you to Martin and Colleen Barlow too, for their love and encouragement in recent years.

  My gratitude also goes to actor Andrew Harrison, who has memorably performed in plays of mine over the years and has already brought some of these stories to the stage. By the time this book is published, he will be performing a oneman version of Yours Truly around the UK – a show fittingly premiered at the Greenbelt Festival 2019. It is not only his brilliance and great sense of humour that have given so much to me; it is also his loyal friendship.

  Above all, thank you to my sons, Fionn and Toby Watts, young film-makers who have wonderfully failed to ‘get a proper job’ and are showing all the courage and risk-taking qualities that are required to survive and flourish in the arts world with all its desperate ups and downs. I was able to develop my story-telling skills with them, when they were little, and now they are telling stories of their own. Their faith, their hope and their humour have made me proud and given me courage to keep going and to keep dreaming.

  Note on performing rights

  Please note the following regarding reading and performing this material in public.

  In all cases of public reading for non-paying audiences, in churches, schools and other contexts, please always state the title of the story, the book and the author, such as ‘ “A Little Girl’s Letter to God” from the book Yours Truly, written by Murray Watts (SPCK, 2019)’.

  All enquiries about public reading, stage performance i
n a professional context, publication or broadcast, should be addressed to the publishers.

  Introduction

  I have worked in theatre, TV and film for many years so have encountered a few celebrities in my time. I wrote the piece A Celebrity Questions Jesus for an arts conference at Schloss Mittersill in Austria. It was used as part of a discussion about fame and trying to keep our lives balanced and sane, whether at the lowest or the highest levels of media exposure. The tragedy of the ‘rich young ruler’ mentioned in the Gospels continues to have a profound relevance to our own age.

  Over the years, I have written quite a large number of stories for different contexts and the second story, An Artist Tries to Create the World, was written for La Fonderie, a group of French artists who had gathered in the Pavé d’Orsay gallery in Paris to consider the life of the artist. One of my themes was the perils of perfectionism. I have often been moved by the account of the creation in Genesis, which does not say that the world was perfect, but that ‘God saw that it was good’.

  The stories in this book often began with an ‘itch’ or an ‘irritation’, as a storyteller can be like a hapless oyster, producing something precious from an annoying grain of sand. The Christmas Letter began like that. After years of receiving many of these well-meaning round robin missives, I was finally compelled to write this.

  This book began its life at the Greenbelt Festival in the early 1980s, when I first decided to write a parable to illustrate a talk. The talk, about Christianity and culture, has been long forgotten, but the parable, The Village Secret, survives.

  Ten of the stories in Yours Truly were written specially for the book in recent times and The Plague is one of these. It began, however, as a thought that had been lurking in my mind since the late 1980s, when there was so much judgementalism regarding the HIV and AIDS crisis.

  New headteachers, inspirational CEOs, visionary church leaders, all face familiar resistance. I remember a story told by Richard Hare, former bishop of Pontefract, about a visit to a parish church in Yorkshire. The verger had been there for forty years and the bishop said to him, ‘You must have seen many changes in your time.’ ‘Yes,’ the verger replied, ‘and I have opposed every single one of them.’ The Greatest Discovery in the World is a dark little reflection on that perennial subject – the threat of change to the status quo.

  In 2009, I was commissioned to write a play about Charles Darwin for his bicentenary and the play was premiered at Westminster Abbey. Entitled Mr Darwin’s Tree, the play explores the life and work of Darwin and has been well received by atheists, agnostics, Christians and people of all beliefs and none around the world. One compelling element in the story, however, is Darwin’s beautiful relationship with his wife Emma, who deeply believed in God, while her husband gradually moved from nominal Christianity to agnosticism and finally to atheism. Emma would occasionally write loving notes to her husband to challenge him. One letter, which he kept close all his life, pleaded with him to ‘consider the chain of difficulties on the other side’. I was very struck by that phrase, because there are at least as many challenges to unbelief as there are to belief in God. Inspired by Emma’s ‘chain of difficulties’, An Atheist Troubled by His Doubts is a small contribution to the perennial debate about the existence of God.

  I studied the history of art at university and I have always loved paintings of Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, sitting at the feet of Jesus, quietly listening to him. There is no greater occupation than to sit at the feet of the master storyteller and, I think, in the early days of Riding Lights Theatre Company, that’s what we were doing when we dramatized so many biblical parables for modern audiences. I continue to reflect on these great parables and Talent Show is a ‘variation on a theme’, born from my experience of struggle, success and failure in the theatre.

  Another well-known subject in the history of art is Thomas examining the wounds of Christ, but I have come to understand that the significance of the risen Christ still bearing his wounds goes beyond the immense suffering of the Passion. Christ himself carries our wounds and the suffering of the whole of humanity, in profound compassion and total identification. Love Affair is a story that expresses this truth.

  The Spider Who Believed in Himself is a parable for millennials and for all of us who discover that simply ‘believing in ourselves’ (a phrase largely unknown before the 1950s) may not be the wisest path through life.

  I have spent forty-five years writing and directing plays, working with theatre companies and film producers, writing screenplays and trying to encourage a younger generation in the creative world through workshops and arts courses, so it is in the context of an extremely positive view of all arts and media that I offer the piece The Angel of Light. It is when something is essentially good, funny, moving and entertaining that it can also present significant dangers. Interestingly, this piece was written in the late 1980s, before the internet, social media and computer games, and I only had to adapt it slightly for the present time. The argument that there is so much that is good, educational or inspirational in our digital age is not a safe argument when it comes to dealing with the ancient and malign influence described in the Bible as an ‘angel of light’.

  The Addict is a gentle reminder that going to extremes (as we see in the lives of John the Baptist, Jesus and St Francis, for example) may have something to tell us in our attitude to giving and the stewardship of our material possessions.

  Hopefully, anyone who has been kept waiting for long minutes in call centre queues will identify with the emotions (the itching and infuriating grain of sand!) behind the story The Divine Call Centre.

  Another recent piece is Cruising Along. The last hundred years have seen a growing preoccupation with retirement and pension deals in the West and the whole of our society and our outlook on later life have been conditioned by this. In recent years (as I became a ‘pensioner’ myself), I began to wonder what our early Christian forebears might have thought about this.

  I have lived in the far north of Scotland for a long time and the two Christmas pieces were written for carol services at Pulteneytown Parish Church in Wick. The Lost Angel, however, could be true of any small town, anywhere in the world. Such towns may seem insignificant but have hidden beauties and glories to offer.

  A Little Girl’s Letter to God was inspired, many years ago, by the publication of real children’s letters to God, which were funny and often very moving. In this piece, I was thinking back to children I knew and loved in the industrial north-west of England. There are so many challenges for children today, but they continue to speak the truth to us: ‘unless you become like a little child, you cannot even enter the Kingdom of God.’

  The Ultimate Crash has been on my mind for many years, certainly since 2008. Yet, even such an apocalyptic scenario may have something to tell us about what life is really about. As with many of these parables and stories, it has something to say about the arts too – they will always be central to our humanity and our spiritual survival.

  The Newcomer was first written many years ago as a sketch for teenagers, in a touring show organized by the Church Pastoral Aid Society. The story of the thief on the cross, in Luke’s Gospel, is my favourite story in the whole Bible. Here was a man who had no chance to go off and live a good life. He was doomed. He could do nothing, yet he was saved. It’s a story of pure grace. And I couldn’t help feeling, when I thought about angels guarding the gates of heaven, that there was considerable comic potential here.

  If you read only one story, and take one thought away from Yours Truly, I hope you will make it this last one. Of course, I hope you read them all and that, whatever your beliefs and wherever you are on your journey, this collection offers some laughter and some tears, some light and some joy along the way.

  A Celebrity Questions Jesus

  A young man, who was a famous celebrity, came to Jesus and said, ‘I know you are a very good person and I admire your teachings. Please tell me: how can I find the
way to eternal life?’

  Jesus looked at him intently. ‘No one is good but God.’

  The young celebrity smiled, a little uncomfortably. ‘Of course, that’s a very good point, no one is ever good enough and there is always more we can do to help people – but everyone says that you are the One who really knows the secret of eternal life, so I just thought . . .’

  His voice trailed off into the silence. He was not used to a questioning gaze like this. Normally, people smiled and laughed all around him, nodding their heads, agreeing with everything he said and, of course, hordes of people would come waving their cameras, wanting a selfie, desperate for an autograph. Jesus, however, remained very still and there was a deep love in his quiet gaze. The crowd, normally so restless around the celebrity, were hushed into silence.

  ‘You know the Ten Commandments?’ Jesus enquired.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the celebrity. ‘“Do not murder, do not steal, do not tell lies, honour your father and mother . . .” I have kept all these.’

  Jesus nodded. He did not challenge the young man at all, but accepted what he said with great respect.

  ‘In fact,’ said the earnest celebrity, ‘I have tried my very best to live an honourable life. I have given away a lot of money to many charities, I have appeared on Children in Need and Comic Relief many times, I have worked tirelessly for the Prince’s Trust, I have made films for Water Aid and campaigned for refugees throughout the world.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jesus, ‘I know, and what you have done is very generous.’

  The celebrity smiled for the first time. He was beginning to feel at ease.

  Then Jesus moved closer towards him. ‘You want to know how to find eternal life?’ The question hung in the air for a while.

  The celebrity nodded, very thoughtfully. He was deeply sincere in his longing for a good spiritual journey.