Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Lent with R S Thomas: When Our Prayers Keep God Awake Forevermore.

    The Other.
     
    There are nights that are so still
    that I can hear the small owl calling
    far off and a fox barking
    miles away. It is then that I lie
    in the lean hours awake listening
    to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
    rising and falling, rising and falling
    wave on wave on the long shore
    by the village that is without light
    and companionless. And the thought comes
    of that other being who is awake, too,
    letting our prayers break on him,
    not like this for a few hours,
    but for days, years, for eternity.
     
    What happens when we pray? What happens to us when we pray? But Thomas explores a more unsettling question: What happens to God when we pray? If prayer is indeed relationship, what kind of relationship can it be? Who is this "Other" that we dare to trouble with our words and thoughts and desires and fears? In the stillness of the night there are the noises of the natural world, and hearing has the heightened sensitivity of solitude and the otherwise silent nightscape. Silent except for the two tone cry of the owl, the bird of prey hunting in the darkness, seeing but unseen, dangerously silent; and the bark of the fox, its yelp having the right frequency to carry from distance.
     
    DSC03849And that other sound so resonant for Thomas, the swell of the waves which originates in oceanic depths beyond imagining, but which then rise and fall and finally break "on the long shore / by the village that is without light  / and companionless." To be "without light and companionless" is a self-description of the priest awake in the small hours; it glints with lucid honesty, distilling into ordinary images and experiences a theologia negativa. But companionless is not the final word, nor is it's time-bound duration assumed to have ultimate permanence. Because there is an other Being, who like the long shore allows our prayers to break on him, and not for the limited duration of a tide in ebb and flow, but forever.
     
    Thomas is probing a theological axiom of the impassibility and immutability of God. He is imagining what it must mean that human prayers come from a swell in the deep oceans of humanity in extremis, and they rise and fall, rise and fall, wave on wave, on the long shore of God, not for a few hours but for eternity. Written like that, in prosaic clauses Thomas's speculative theology is startling enough. But written in the cadences of this poem, those closing lines evoke that strangest of responses, our sympathy for God, who is awake in the night hours, receiving into the reality of who God is, endless waves of human longing, rising and falling, originating in those Atlantic depths of existence beyond human telling, where hope and despair, love and loss, comfort and terror become waves which break on the shoreline of God's eternity.
     
    "There are nights that are so still…". Psalm 121 is a night Psalm, and has a similar image: "He who guards Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." But Thomas has taken that affirmative confident confession of faith to a different level of meaning. This "Other" is, like Thomas himself, unable to sleep; or perhaps unwilling, because letting "our prayers break on him". The poem finishes with a cyclic climax. God's willing enduring of wave upon wave of prayers is not for hours, or days, but for eternity. Love is eternally vigilant, eternally enduring, eternally willing to bear the prayers of a broken creation.

  • Lent with R S Thomas: “…love questioning is love blinded with excess of light.”

    There is no surprise that the eucharist is an important theme in the poetry of R S Thomas. Well of course it is, he is a priest, and when all else fails him there is substance and reality in the bread and the chalice, and again and again he alludes to the broken bread and body, the blood of Christ, the Cross and the chalice.  Likewise the sea and in particular its movement and noise, the waves and the wind, the tides ebbing and flowing, the unseen depths of an ocean filled with mystery and dark with secrets.

    The two images of restless sea and celebrated eucharist are brought together in a brief poem

    The breaking of the wave
    outside echoed the breaking
    of the bread in his hands.

    The crying of the seagulls
    was the cry from the Cross;
    Lama Sabachthani. He lifted

    the chalice, that crystal in
    which love questioning is love
    blinded with excess of light.

    DSC03809-1Here in an ascetic economy of words Thomas tells the double drama – breaking waves and breaking bread; seagull's cry and Jesus cry of dereliction; sun reflecting on the sea and light radiating from the silver chalice, and the vast ocean and the fruit of the earth and of human hands are each and all enfolded in love. This is Thomas at his most devotional, when love is allowed to be perfected as the radiated blessing of the Redeemer Creator. The chalice is "that crystal in which love questioning is love blinded by excess of light." So few words, such theological intelligence, an apophatic theology of illumination, an experience of love asking for proof of truth, and being blinded by what it cannot truly or fully ever see or comprehend.

    "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not comprehended it", said John in a Prologue whose depth theology caused Thomas's heart to vibrate with sympathy, and with questions. And of the hardest question of all, about whether God's love is believeable, the answer is broken bread, a seagull's cry and a crystal clear chalice radiating the light of Creation and Redemption. The beatific vision may well be described in such terms, when "love questioning is love blinded with excess of light." Or in the words of another Apostle, when seeing through a glass darkly gives way to seeing face to face, because "faith hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love."

    (The photo was taken on the Aberdeen beach, the seagull obligingly posing on the horizon)

  • Jeremy Hunt, Junior Doctors, and the Health of Our Nation

    Junior-doctors-strike-action-contract-changes-620525So our Health Secretary intends to impose new contracts on Junior Doctors in the National Health Service. A democratically elected Government is seriously planning to impose contracts having failed to get its way at the negotiating table. The imposition of changed working conditions, pay, and contracted hours on the nation's front line medical care staff is stated in Parliament with attempted ministerial gravitas as if it were a decision to uphold the law against those who are wilfully and destructively breaking it. Junior doctors are demonised; the British Medical Association, one of the most highly respected professional unions in the country is labelled "totally irresponsible"; patients lives are being put at risk by unjustified and selfish resistance to necessary change to improve Health Service provision, or so it is claimed; and of course the Government has no responsibility whatsoever for the impasse, the misinformation, and the hardening of ideological positions.

    Jeremy Hunt has presided over the most confrontational episode involving front line medical staff in my lifetime. He is simply blaming others, asseting both his rightness and his authority, and yet is so uninformed of the actual experience of Junior Docotors' working conditions he resorts to misinformation and insinuation. Indeed he has been described by several eloquent and passionate doctors as a man who is lying to the public and pursuing a privatisation agenda that will endanger the fundamental principle of universal care at the point of need.

    There are many political points to be made here; how imposition of state contracts fits with our democratic institutions; ideological pursuit of privatisation; non-availability of additional funding to enable the proposed expanded cover to weekends; electoral promises which are selectively implemented and were selectively explained in the manifesto. But as a Christian I come at all this with additional questions, about ministerial integrity and honesty in speech; about Government responsibility for sustaining the capacity of our society to provide medical care for all, from the poorest to the richest; about vocation and calling and the protection of those whose passion is to serve and care, from exploitation of that life-transforming motivation to drive through policies that undermine those same ideals; about trust, the trust of patient to doctor and of doctor to the Government institutions which resource our nations medical provision. That's a long list, and each issue has profoundly ethical implications that overlap into theological considerations.

    The NHS is an institutional safeguard of our nation's humanity. The dignity, worth and place of each person is recognised and affirmed by the way our society treats each person in need of medical care. A theological anthropology underlies, or at least underwrites that view of each human being.

    The role of a Government minister is to govern, and in a democracy that means seeking consensus, negotiating around differences, building and sustaining trust within the structures and between the persons, and ensuring the interests of the Department are upheld within the wider concerns of Government such as budget, development and future human resourcing. The Christian ideal of conciliation and compassion seem to me to be primary absences in the current situation.

    Junior doctors claim they are vocation driven and that their commitment to the NHS is the real source of their opposition to the proposed changes to their role and conditions. Yet some have said their concern for the NHS might lead them to emigrate or go into private medicine. It is a hard ask to align such statements with the publicly declared commitment to the NHS as the underlying driver for BMA opposition to these changes. Thus on both sides a need for honesty about motive, and guarding against a fatal sclerosis of the conduits of dialogue to avoid our NHS provision and structures breaking down completely. An imposition of will by one side in a dialogue, is an act of unilateral deafness, and individual hubris.

    As to what can be done? Well I guess the Christian cop out is to say, we can only pray for a resolution to this quite dangerous precedent. And I agree. So long as praying is neither seen as cop out, or reduced in significance as mere last resort. The work of the Holy Spirit is to be looked for outside the church, abroad in our society, haunting the corridors of power, moving in closed minds and across emotional barriers. Peace-making, conciliation, understanding, changes of mind, new perspectives, forgiveness, confession of failures, mistakes and wrong turnings, resources of patience and goodwill – these are the fruit of the Spirit invading the market mentality, unhinging the closed door ideologies, rebuilding the fractured relationships where trust lies in pieces on the floor, recalling and re-calling people to the work for which God made them, and turning heads away from the intensity of confrontation to possible new horizons to which it is possible walk together. Yes. That kind of praying to that kind of Holy Spirit, set loose in our kind of world.

     

  • Lent with R S Thomas: “The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth’s castle.”

    ThomasNo one exposes the illusions and pretensions of the new and fashionable academic discipline of practical theology more effectively than those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, the service of the life in the service of those communities we call the church. Thus R S Thomas who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encoutners as qualitiative research using the hermeneutic phenomenology a la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and his disappoinments with his own fittingness to be a priest, R S Thomas sometimes nailed it.

    Nailed it! Now that's a contemporary term I dislike on semantic and aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image – perhaps because for a Christian to use the verb to nail we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross. And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologians of glory. 

    His prose-poem account of how he spent his days as a priest in a remote and hard to find corner of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

    "A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet…"

    I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts.

    "And yet…" Those two words are hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value, and the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened, but limping towards the dawn.

    DSC03535"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer; it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of frutifulness and harvest, a time for ideas to take root and grow.

    And it is a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet…", there is too, in study and field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

  • Lent with R S Thomas “…sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit.”

    The Collected Late Poems opens with The Echoes Return Slow, a collection of autobiographical poems in which the poet's own life is source and resource for some of his most searing questions and searching observations; at times Thomas writes a line, apparently incidental, an explanatory observation, only the reader hears it as an inner interrogation. Always the questioning, spirituality in the interrogative mood, an intellectual grappling with the world that doesn't depend upon, indeed is impatient with, that favoured word of our own times, "closure". Indeed for Thomas the idea of the pilgrimage is defining, the journey is from here to there and from loneliness to companionship, and the important and life-giving disposition is movement towards rather than arrival, longing rather than terminus, opening up to more possibility rather than the lid snap of a complacent closure.

    So in these autobiographical prose paragraphs and line poems, the poet looks to his future as an old man, by seeking clues in his past. These are deeply personal, private and guarded poems; suggestive rather than illustrative, oblique in their references but together a series of snapshots which capture more of Thomas and his quest and questions than any 24/7 cctv would ever record. This is I think why I find Thomas's poetry so satisfying and unsettling, so true and so real but not with easy truth or reality reduced to the bearable. 

    Thomas 1The poem in which he recalls his own ordination is a study in pastoral frankness; the inadequacy and limits of any human being when faced with grieving parents, bereaved widows, hopeful marriages and faces on a Sunday reflecting the diversity and fragility of human hopes. The prose poem reduces the high calling to be Christ's vicar to local contesxt – "this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river…" A lesson in reality awaits every Christian minister of whatever denominational hue, in this poem of confessed inadequacy. "The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit."

     

    I was vicar of large things
    in a small parish. Small-minded
    I will not say, there were depths
    in some of them I shrank back
    from, wells that the word “God”
    fell into and died away,
    and for all I know is still
    falling. Who goes for water
    to such must prepare for a long
    wait. Their eyes looked at me
    and were the remains of flowers
    on an old grave. I was there,
    I felt, to blow on ashes
    that were too long cold. Often,
    when I thought they were about
    to unbar to me, the draught
    out of their empty places
    came whistling so that I wrapped
    myself in the heavier clothing
    of my calling, speaking of light and love
    in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.

     

  • Lent with R S Thomas: The Cross on the Altar

    IMG_0275-1"Is God worshipped only in cathedrals, where blood drips from regimental standards as from the crucified body of love? Is there a need for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures? The Cross always is avante-garde."

    R S Thomas lamented the modernisation of liturgy, the modern fear of any terminology that is not current, contemporary, accessible, or, God help us, relevant. Against Thomas's apparent liturgical conservationist tendencies it may be that there is nothing to be gained by Christianity sounding like a mystery religion, or the Church adhering to a language no longer spoken, and now seldom understood outside the walls of Christian sanctuary. 

    But at the same time, in Thomas's defence, he feared that there may be a great deal to be lost if we surrender the language of faith, the vocabulary of the Spirit, the rhythms and cadences of hymn and liturgy which carry the freight of the Divine promises and presences and which sustain through those times of Divine absence. Thomas was a theologian of God's absence, a pilgrim familiar with the quiet and desolate places, and with an eye and ear observant of emptiness as of fullness. Not for him the easily recited propositions of the over-certain; not for him the substitution of banality and overfamiliarity with the Almighty, often considered by their exponents as informality and demonstrated intimacy, but which are in reality evidence of an absconded reverence and a trivialisation of the Transcendent.

    Whatever arguments Thomas had with God, and there were many – fierce, persistent, unrelenting one to one combat, resulting in inner anguish and spiritual wrestling with the One whose name was witheld and whose touch wounded to the quick – whatever the arguments, Thomas knew his place in the presence, or absence of the Divine. Like the great preacher Qoheleth Thomas knew, he just knew, "God is in heaven, and you are on earth, so let your words be few." Quite.

    The quotation at the start of this post is from a prose poem which introduces his reflections on entering a church and looking at the altar, the cross and then beyond these to the God revealed in such transiently simple and eternally durable realities. The brilliance of the last line illumines the whole poem.

    The church is small.
    The walls inside
    White. On the altar
    a cross, with behind it
    its shadow and behind
    that the shadow of its shadow.

    The world outside
    knows nothing of this
    nor cares. The two shadows
    are because of the shining
    of two candles: as many
    the lights, so many
    the shadows. So we learn
    something of the nature
    of God, the endlessness
    of whose recessions
    are brought up short
    by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

    (The photo is of the small panel of my tapestry, "Eucharist and Pentecost" currently underway)

     

  • Lent: Facing the Failures of faith, Confronting Bad Faith, Recovering Good Faith in God.

    ThomasPoetry is a gift with words that take us to places beyond words. When poetry is written as letters from a far country, they can become life-saving  missives for those of us who must eventually travel there. When it comes to faith, God, sin, love, loss, suffering, hope, grief and much else that confirms our transience, poetry often brings clarification and consolation, providing description of what seemed to us indescribable.

    The relations of poetry to theology, and of both to philosophy and science, have seldom been better configured than in the poems of R S Thomas. In a note on his poetry on my Faceboo page I wrote:

    They are so sharp, combining theological precision with theological hesitation – for Thomas, faith is not certainty, and God is not to be encapsulated in our words nor reducible to our cleverly constructed concepts. But at the centre of these poems is the Cross, the question mark, worship offered through open lips and gritted teeth, and a man whose cantankerous complexity was the vehicle for some of the loveliest lines I know about love, and that great Love that "moves the sun and other stars."

    During Lent I am reading through this volume of his later poems. The poems were likened by Denis Healey to Beethoven's later Quartets in their "fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death." For years now I have listened to Thomas give  voice to profound uncertainty, hesitant faith, pessimism which stops this side of despair, the elusive miracle of human love which transcends the best of the human intellect to define, delimit or explain away. His exploration of the outer landscape gives him clues to the changing inner climates, the varied landscapes of the mind and the heart and the spirit – I'm not sure Thomas would bother much about the anomalies and theological perplexities of such a tripartite view of the inner life of any one of us. He could be acid and ascerbic about theologians.

    So if Lent is a time for deep thinking; for stripping away illusion to better see what is, or is not, real; for re-aligning the loves of our life so that they nourish rather than devour each other; for facing the failures of faith, confronting bad faith, recovering good faith in God, and in ourselves and our sisters and brothers; then I know few guides more qualified to lead the mind, the heart and the Spirit through Lent and towards Calvary and beyond to resurrection.

    Throughout Lent I'll post some meditations on these late poems, these late Quartets of the the Welsh composer who, like Beethoven, understood the De Profundis, and the Alleluia of those for whom faith comes hard, and is all the more cherished for thattruth.

  • John Wesley’s Prayer: O Lord, Let Me Not Live to Be Useless

    IMG_0275-1For regular readers of Living Wittily apologies for the absence over the past week or two. There have been other fish to fry, other books to read, other places to be, people to meet, and things to get done with some urgency and determination. Of the things to be done the most 'need to get this done' obligation is all about pensions! It isn't so much difficult as serious when you are making decisions about the rest of your life, when a big chunk of it is already behind you! And the pensions adviser is asking the necessary hypotheticals about what happens if…..!

    This February I will reach retiring age, which for me living in 21stC Scotland, is 65, while for many younger than me that dateline age is a receding horizon; my children may have to work till they are 70 before state pension age. Inevitably, and quite properly, such a life event as a retirement date prompts some serious reflection on what has been and what still might be, what has been done and what can still be achieved.

    So here are some ordinary conclusions which have grown out of some thinking and praying, swithering and deciding about this quite remarkable gift which we are right to take for granted, life. To take something for granted is not to undervalue its reality, it is to receive it as a gift without spending life and energy feeling guilty about it. The proper response is gratitude, and the best gratitude is our joy in the gift and in the generous love of the Giver. 

    Retirement is both an artificial label and a fiscal reality. I have no intention of stopping doing what I have done all my working life, though I may do less of it, and have more choice how long and how much. I preach, spend time with people in pastoral friendship, read and write sermons, teach and explore theology. Those choices of how much and hor often and how long I work are made possible by an income now unrelated to work done and hours contracted out.

    Retirement from paid work is not retirement from vocation. Not everyone in our cultural climate would call what they do a vocation, a calling. But many do. And they are not just ministers of religion. Nurses, doctors, social workers, artists, teachers, IT specialists, pilots, fire service, police, naturalists, environmental officers – these are only some of the jobs that some of my friends would be just as passionate about as I am of being a minister. That's because they have a sense that what they do for money they don;t do just for the money. Unsurprisingly, that's also true of my own take on post 65 birthday.

    Retirement is an opportunity to make different choices and enjoy new opportunities. By the time you're 65 the bumper wisdom that says "Life is short, eat your pudding first" takes on a poignant urgency. So these next years it makes sense to do what you really want to do; to spend time with those whose presence and gift of themselves is fundamental to who we are; to gather the goodness of each past year into an external drive for safekeeping, there to ponder the grace that gave each day, grateful and glad for just being there to live it; to kick the bucket that holds the list and just do the blessed list! Well, within limits. Because there are limits. I've little patience with the can do mentality that seems to ignore all the reasons, good and real reasons of life obligations and resources, that stop us living every dream. But there are liveable, realisable, affordable dreams that still demand risk, energy, effort and the courage to reach out and embrace them in all their possibility.

    Retirement is not about me; it is about me in relation to others. I am also tired of the me, me, me, litany of life that pervades the social media like an unexamined credo of the self. My own happiness is not always the most important thing. What I think of myself is not always the best criterion for self-knowing, self-awareness and self-transformation. What I want is not a Christian categorical imperative if what I want is achievable only at the cost and loss it causes others. It is still the case that of all the ways of living our lives, young or old, "the greatest of these is love." If life till 65 means I am now a graduate in the skills and knowledge of living, then post retirement is post-graduate study, researching wider and deeper on the mystery and miracle of human beings and human being.

    So now that the forms are filled, the advice is taken, the process of pension calculation hums away in the background, very little has changed or will change radically on my birthday. But if as Kirekegaard urged, life can only be understood backwards and lived forwards, then I am also persuaded of the wisdom of Dag Hammarskjold: For all that has been – Thank you. For all that is to come – Yes.

    (The photo is a small central panel from the current tapestry I am working, "Eucharist and Pentecost". Tapestry is for me a contemplative form of art, or an artistic form of spirituality.

  • Beatitudes as Guides for Intercession

    ColossiansSunday past I was asked to preach on prayer, using a verse from James Montgomery's still remarkable hymn, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire". The verse I was to consider was

    Prayer is the simplest form of speech, which infant lips can try; / Prayer the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on High.

    As part of the service I wrote a prayer on intercession based on two of the Beatitudes. The reason for this approach was my feeling that prayers of intercession can be dominated by whatever is most urgent in our own lives, or in the headline news of the day as it saturates our awareness with images and sound bytes about the awfulness of the world. By using the words of Jesus there is some attempt at content control that is more than the loudest daily sound byte and less than a comprehensive listing of all that's wrong in the world. In other words if the Beatitudes articulate the values and goals of the Kingdom of God, then they have the capacity to carry the freight of our prayers as children of that Kingdom.

    Did it work? Who knows what in our prayers ever "works"? And who knows what "works" would look like in any case as we engage in conversation and heart work with God? But as a way of praying Scripture, of allowing the words of the Bible to inform and direct our praying, it did gather our attentiveness to the experience of people in other parts of this God-loved world. This God of love and reconciliation, of justice and righteousness, revealed in the redeeming vulnerability of Jesus crucified and in the risen life of the crucified, this God whose eternal purpose is the reconciliation and renewal of all things, is the one to whom we pray. What happens to our prayers, and to those for whom we pray, is best left to the loving wisdom of our God.

    The two Beatitudes used were about peacemakers and the persecuted. Here is the prayer that was  in two sections, intersected by singing the Taize 'Kyrie Eleison' as the congregational response.

    The Beatitudes and Our Prayers of Intercession

    Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

    Peacemaking God, in Christ you were reconciling the world to yourself.
    We pray for a world unreconciled in itself, the countries and peoples of

    Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Pakistan, Israel and Gaza, Nigeria and Libya:

    where for generations fear and anger has blinded and divided communities;
    where grievances suffered and suffering inflicted leaves legacies of hate and suspicion;
    where history overshadows the present, and violence silences voices for peace.

    Help us to trust the subversive wisdom of your Spirit,
    teach us to speak the language of hope;
    as your Spirit brooded upon the waters of chaos,
    enshadow the countries and communities in chronic conflict, with mercy and justice, and peace.
    Prince of Peace and Living Lord – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

    Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake and the Gospel’s:


    O Lord of life and peace, who reconciles through the blood of the cross,
    We pray for Christians throughout the world who are persecuted for your sake.
    In India and Pakistan, where fundamentalist violence breaks out against small churches;
    For Christians in Gaza, in Iraq and in Syria, caught up in the violence and hatred of war,                            persecuted because of their faith in you, targeted by militant and violent groups:
    In all their suffering strengthen their faith, and give assurance of your presence, your help and your deliverance.


    Keep us faithful in our prayers, grateful for every opportunity to witness as ministers of reconciliation in our place and time – at work, in our neighbourhood, in our families.

    Restore our saltness, brighten our light, renew our lives in the love and peace and joy of Christ – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

  • “we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing…”

    This got me thinking again about austerity. Even if austerity was justified as an economic policy, that still leaves questions about priorities, and the criteria for choosing and implementing these priorities, and the even more contentious issue of who gets a say in the decision making.

    What gets me about this image circulating on Facebook is the astounding question behind that word if! As if there could be any doubt – music and art are the grammar of our emotions, the wings of the mind, the nutrients of the imagination, the tutors of the conscience and the proof and celebration of our humanity.

    We need music and art education like we need a heart, a brain, emotion and thought; we need music and art education because we are human beings and these are two of the most developed gifts of and to our humanity; we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing, the rhythms and cadences and melodies that make life dance, and weep, and love and leap; we need music and art education because there are pictures we dream and create out of the richly textured kaleidoscope of imagination, vision, longing and desiring that is the human hunger for meaning. 

    The removal of music and art education from the classroom is not austerity, it is the removal of opportunity and resources for children and young people to discover the joy and discipline of beauty and harmony. Budget cuts may be necessary to balance the books, but the targeting of music and art education will condemn those same young lives to an austerity of the spirit, an impoverishment of imagination, a limitation of worldview and a constriction of the understanding that through music and art grows into wisdom, wonder, purpose and vocation.

    A child learning to play the piano or guitar, a group of young people discovering the disciplined joy of choir and orchestra, guided by the conductor; a teenager with oil paint, brushes and canvas, or with clay and sculpting tool, mentored by a teacher who helps them to see, to really see; these are gifts we can provide for our children which make for a richer, expansive life in which the words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' and 'if only', are freed of their limiting power over the self that is each of these young lives.

    Utilitarianism is, paradoxically a useful philosophy, a rule of thumb that fits many if not most substantial decisions we make. The greatest good of the greatest number. But the word also has that undertow of negativity when things are valued for their practical usefulness. Allied to economics it is fatal to those dimensions of human experience which have little market value, which are not crucial to our employability, and which we can live well enough without – until the inner ache of hunger reminds us of their absence. Music and art education are crucial strands of our cultural fabric. To reduce them to market barcodes, budget mathematics, and austerity targets is to apply the utilitarian criterion in its most negative and least valid form. 

    If our school budgets cannot support adequate provision in music and art education that is an issue that ought to be placed way beyond the control and competence of budget number crunchers. Decisions made here affect the capacity of our culture to sustain and maintain a supply of creativity, discipline, confidence and ability sufficient to produce, enjoy and celebrate the intellectual, aesthetic, moral and cultural activities that are amongst our most human attributes.