Author: admin

Judy Collins and the Joy of Songs

"Songs are the heart of our memory and let us live the search for meaning in our lives again and again."(Judy Collins)

Judy Collins is one of the more thoughtful singers, whose singing and songs still speak to the deeper questions that persist and give life its poignancy, mystery, joy and longing. I've listened to her music off and on since I was a teenager, which was just when she was coming to the fore as a folk singer whose voice rang with musical and personal integrity.

I recently bought her album The Very Best of…, and she's right about memory, songs and the search for meaning. Some of the tracks I remember as singles and on albums I played over and over. Just listened to this CD again this morning, which happens to be my birthday, and remembered how her music, her voice and the words of the songs opened our eyes, nudged our imagination, appealed to those aspirations every human heart feels, and celebrated human love as gift and wonder.

And by the way – I love the way the last two tracks seem to belong together – the wistful melancholy of Send in the Clowns, and the best rendering I know of Amazing Grace – which was released around the same time as the pipe band version!

21 February 2014
Why I Miss Seamus Heaney

I miss Seamus Heaney. Not that I knew him, or met him. I only know him through his poems, a couple of documentaries, and a book of interviews. But I miss him. Yes I can read his poetry, some of it I know by heart. Some of his poetry about his father, his upbringing in the country, his shrewd and qualified love for the land expressed in poem after poem – these I read, and can reread to my heart's content.

But I still miss him. By which I mean I can see clearly the emtpy spaces in our landscape left by his passing. By which I mean my sadness that there will be no further words which so wisely cherish and humanely critique this fragile, frightening complexity of human life in all its potential for ambiguity.

I miss him, by which I mean the indefinable lift given to our hearts when we know that there are writers who understand, who care, for whom human tragedy is not always an inevitable given, and whose moral rigour is reserved for the unnecessary cruelties and intransigent prejudices of human behaviour.

I miss him because his own experience of a troubled land created a poet whose compassion and forgivingness are often given words in poems which are universal in their healing and appealing power, teaching through words those human feelings that are the ultimate glory of human community, in which love is lived out in generous and consistent goodwill, humane judgement and a passionate commitment to the other.

I miss Seamus Heaney, but I have his poems, like this one below, which does for me what a good poem should do.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

19 February 2014
A Very Fine Christology: Infinity Dwindled to Infancy.

I just read the notice of the recent death of Edward T Oakes. I was sad to read this, just because I only encountered him in his books, but I liked him! The picture we construct of an author we don't know except through their writing is entirely subjective, impressionistic but not without evidence, reliant on our literary tastes, temperament and the way our own minds work – but nevertheless intriguing. Oakes wrote with discernible passion in his theology, generous in his fairness to other views, and as obvious from the above poster, was himself a fine writer.

His book, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy is beautifully written, and is one of the best systematic Christologies around. The title is from Hopkins' poem "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe". I've read other books by Oakes, including The Cambridge Companion to Hans urs Von Balthasar, which he edited, and his highly prized study of Von Balthasar's theology, Pattern of Redemption.

It's one of the great mysteries of the faith, what our greatest theological thinkers make of the realities of which they wrote, when finally faced with the beatific vision, and still only having words as descriptors. As Barth's jaw drops, so will his pipe; Jonathan Edwards will have to learn to swim in 'the great ocean of love' of which he rhapsodised; Julian of Norwich will think this time she really has died and gone to heaven, and shout without decorum of her sourteous God, "My God, I was right! And all shall be well, and all manner of thing is well! O You Beauty!".

Pax Christi Father Oakes.

17 February 2014
Who do you believe on Welfare reform? And why it matters to Christians.

Archbishop Nichols, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in England and Wales, said the welfare state was becoming "more punitive".

"I think what's happening is two things", he said.

"One is that the basic safety net, that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart. It no longer exists, and that is a real real dramatic crisis.

"And the second is that, in this context, the administration of social assistance – I am told – has become more and more punitive."

"So, if applicants don't get it right then they have to wait and they have to wait for 10 days, for two weeks – with nothing, with nothing. And that's why the role of food banks has become so crucial for so many people in Britain today.

"And for a country of our affluence that quite frankly is a disgrace."

……………………….

A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions replied by saying the previous benefits system was "trapping" the very people it was designed to help.

"Our welfare reforms will transform the lives of some of the poorest families in our communities with universal credit making three million households better off and lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty", the spokesman said.

"It's wrong to talk of removing a safety net when we're spending £94bn a year on working age benefits and the welfare system supports millions of people who are on low incomes or unemployed so they can meet their basic needs."

………………….

RANT WARNING

Well, that's all right then. No worries, no problem, everyone is ok……Not.

The word 'trapping' used by this anonymous spokesman is such a tendentious term it makes it sound as if any change has got to be better. After all, there's nothing worse than being trapped on benefits! Yes there is. Being trapped without benefits. The word trapping is shorthand for a cluster of more negative comments that have to be dressed up to make them palatable, and they range from scrounger, to cheat, to neet. And in this welfare shakeup there are those trapped in houses with an extra bedroom, and compelled to choose between paying extra rent or rent arrears, and for some forced re-housing.There are people whose health assessment for fit to work has been ludicrously unrealistic as the DWP seeks to redefine the term invalidity and disability. Indeed you could be forgiven for wondering if the DWP is trying to invalidate invalidity by a redefinition that is driven more by benefit cuts than the very human predicaments of those who are long term sick.

As for the Archbishop. Why is it that church leaders are constantly rubbished when they speak out on social justice? Where is the Archbishop in error? There are, are there not, (A David Frost rhetorical trope) more foodbanks and more people depending on them? Why is that the socially responsible politician might ask? People are having to wait 10 to 14 days for any benefit payment if they fill in the forms unsatisfactorily? Is this denied? The basic safety net has been removed for some, has it not? And the phrase universal benefit is a strange name for a benefit being increasingly constrained by criteria of entitlement, and whose administration is hardly winning the efficiency plaudits of those who audit and review the performance of Government Departments. And Mr Spokesman from DWP, of course the welfare system supports millions – that is what we pay our taxes and National Insurance for. It isn't those who are in receipt of benefits that the Archbishop was speaking about; but those who are not, or whose benefits have been reduced.

The prophet Amos is another voice to hear to place against what I can only call the comfortable complacency of that response from the DWP – is there no truth whatsoever in what the Archbishop claims? Can no improvements be made in the administration and criteria implementation, and were no mistakes made? Is advice and feedback simply to be contradicted, and in tones that are paternalistic, words that are patronising, and a statement with not a shred of hope for those discenfranchised from the welfare system that the holes in the safety net will be mended.

And the Spokesman in genuine self righteousness asks, "Holes? What holes? A net is made of holes surely?" Aye, but this Government has made the holes bigger, and bigger, the logic of which must be that mopre people will fall through. Here's Amos the Prophet and patron saint of Ranters Against the Idols of Austerity, Deficit Reduction and Finance as its own Reward:

"Establish justice in the gate" (the place where wisdom, justice and compassion are to be dispensed)

"They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the heads of the poor into the dust" – I just want to point out that Amos does not speak of the deserving poor, ever – he does speak quite a lot about the undeserving rich though, with their luxury lifestyles, obscene salaries, voracious business tactics, compassionless extravagance and culpable non awareness of the hardship and exploitation that underpins their way of life.

So Mr Spokesman, don't preach your not so good news, though the word preaching is devalued by the use of cliched feel good words like support, transform, and universal, as if these applied equally and to all. It's because they don't apply equally to all that the Archbishop said what he did.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear, before he opens his mouth as Spokesman for a status quo that is increasingly heartless.

15 February 2014
“Science is not what they say..” a Scientist’s Intellectual Humility

Science is not what they say, so serious

The truth being what you imagine

Not what you see

And not something useful

Or something that pays

Rebecca Elson was an astonishingly gifted scientist, a researcher of "dark matter" and "globular clusters", an astronomer deeply involved in the Hubble project, researcher at the Harvard Centre for Astrophysics and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and one of the most imaginatives scientific minds of her generation. Her book Responsibility to Awe remains for me a precious book, containing her poems, fragments and an autobiographical essay that is both positive and poignant. She died in 1999 at the age of 39.

And it is such a person, of such rare intellectual curiosity and critical generosity, who wrote the lines above – unfinished, unpunctuated and all the more impressive as a statement of science as the servant of human flourishing, not its master, and a vision of knowledge that allows for more than utility and profit, the two wings of technological power. for

12 February 2014
The Moment When I Was Unique in All the World

On a day out doing stuff with Aileen, our daughter.

Waiting at an appointment I passed the time reading George Herbert's poems in my pocket Everyman edition – these are beautiful small hardbacks, and this one stays in the car for just such fugitive moments. I prefer Herbert to Hello magazine in waiting rooms.

Later in the supermarket she tracked me down to haberdashery, where I had discovered and was examining the selection of needles, looking for a particular size of tapestry needle. It hadn't ocurred to me to look in Tesco for tapestry needles. It hadn't ocurred to her that she would find her father enthusing about Tesco's needlework hardware.

While doing so I was whistling quietly – a habit that's really annoying if you're not me. The tune I was whistling, as often, was the one I;d just been playing in the car, John Denver's Poems and Prayers and Promises.

Put all three things together and she reckons I was, at that moment, unique in all the world. Who else would be sampling embroidery needles in Tesco, with a well used hardback volume of Metaphysical poetry in his jacket pocket, while whistling the tune to a cheesy country song by a now dead singer songwriter you either love or hate?

Answer, probably no one else. But George Herbert's is the poetry of religiopus genius; tapestry is its own art form; and John Denver was a supreme artist of music that celebrates humanity, our world and many of the things that matter and then some.

To be at one moment on a Thursday afternoon, someone in whom all three coincide is, to be able to smile at those quotidian intersections of circumstance when the contingent and the purposeful unintentionally embody the unique mystery that is any one of us. And a moment to be thankful for, in the words of Herbert:

Thou who has giv'n so much to me,

Give one thing more a grateful heart….

Not thankfull, when it pleases me;

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be,

Thy Praise.

10 February 2014
Caption Contest on Rembrandt’s Paul.

Some Captions as Hermeneutic Suggestions.

"How come they didn't find my sword when they strip searched and jailed me?"

"My feet are killing me!"

"Come on think, think! What was that guy's name again, came from Philippi, begins with an E…"

"Wish they'd invent email and data sticks!"

"God, I need a good PA – I hate paperwork."

Happy to hear other caption suggestions for this painting.

……………….

The above is one of my favourite portraits of Paul the Apostle. Not the armour clad Caravaggio's muscle bound warrior, more the frail and hunted ageing apostle much less sure of himself. Is he ever going to leave prison – he doesn't know, so he has one sandal on and the other under his foot to keep it warm, how beautiful the feet that bring good news.

The books on his bed are almost as big as some recent works written about him by Jewett, Campbell and Wright! More seriously, this is the premier theologian of the nascent church thinking his way towards an adequate theology of the One he calls Lord; or maybe he's wondering just what he needs to write to those migraine inducing Corinthians whom he loves and longs to see grow up!

The sword, lying against those massive tomes, is no longer the persecutor's tool of trade, it is the Word of God, cruciform, the sword of the Spirit. He is blissfully unaware that his own face is radiated by the light of Jesus Christ, he is no longer lost, just lost in wonder, love and praise – even if his expression is a mixture of apprehension and contemplative puzzlement

The stylus is in his left hand – was Rembrandt left-handed, the most natural explanation for showing Paul like this. And the stylus is inactive, awaiting the clarity of thought that perhaps only an apostle who doesn't have delete and cut and paste has patience for, and therefore what is written has to be first thought, because papyrus and ink are unforgiving materials in the service of a forgiving Gospel.

What particular thought is he struggling with – Perhaps that moment of illumination when he, like the rest of us was unsure of God's purposes, and as he weighs the possibilities, "For to me living is Christ, and dying is gain….I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you Philippians."

This portrait is of an apostle both vulnerable and uncertain, not a hint of self-confidence but somewhere deep in the heart's core, a love that inspired recklessness, persistence and some of the greatest thinking about God in Christ the church would ever know.

9 February 2014
Isaac of Nineveh and Micro Photos of Grains of Sand

I like Isaac of Nineveh who said, "Be a herald of God's goodness". Against all preaching and announcing of life's negatives, this 7th Century Syrian Bishop insisted that the vocation of the follower of Jesus is to herald God's goodness.

Not that I've seriously read Isaac of Nineveh, but I've come across him now and then. Most recently in Olivier Clement's The Roots of Christian Mysticism, a catena of patristic texts threaded by Clement's commentary. I keep it handy because it provides food for rumination on any page I open.

In a chapter on the difficult love, that is the demand and cost of loving God and neighbour, Isaac is quoted to show that the Divine Love outshines and indeed overwhelms our own effort, and in doing so doesn't obliterate them but redeems them.

As a grain of sand does not balance a load of gold, so the effect of God's justice does not counterbalance His compassion. As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of frail flesh as compared with God's providence and mercy. As a fountain that flows abundantly is not dammed by a handful of earth, so the mercy of the Creator is not vanquished by the wickedness of the creatures.

Now speaking of grains of sand – I recently bought this book as a visual tonic. The micro-photographs are amazing, exept our capacity to be amazed suffers from the deflation of that word being over-used. Likewise the word awesome. But using the words without the downward drag of careless overuse, the photographs do cause what Arthur Quiller Couch calls 'cerebral inconveniences', and their beauty does hint at the transcendent – so yes, amazing, and awesome.

Now when I read about sand in the Bible I have a much richer sense of what a grain of sand looks like – and the individuality and beauty of each and every one of them – that;s another overused cliche, often used in churches, as we pray for 'each and every one of them'. But I can think of few better uses of the phrase than sich an inclusive set of brackets – each and every one. Maybe the one biblical text where grains of sand don't get such a good press is when foolish builders build houses, not on solid higher ground, but on flood plains!

6 February 2014
The Unrecognisable, Unworship-able and Non-Existent “god” of the New Atheists

Some years ago I made my way (slowly) through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Inifinite. In the now legendary words of one of our Honours students, "This is a hard book". The student received the not too unsympathetic and the now equally legendary reply by the lecturer, "This is an Honours course!". That exchange still echoes year on year, in the collaborative and interactive conversations that take place as the preferred form of learning and teaching in our College.

The Beauty of the Infinite ranks with several other theological books I read through with an experience similar to a middle aged man starting on a fitness regime and not liking the hard work of the gym circuit, liking even less getting up early to keep the discipline of the daily jog and fighting against his badly educated neurotransmitters to lose the taste for junk food and chocolate! The benefits are not immediate, but they are life enhancing, intellectually renewing, they make for a healthier mind, and they open up horizons which previously could only be viewed from afar, or puffed towards, with a stitch in the side, and no guaranteee I'd ever get there.

Other hard books have a similar weight, importance and carry the same intellectual health benefits. Eberhard Jungel's God and the Mystery of the World; Kevin Vanhoozer's The Drama of Doctrine and Is There a Meaning in the Text; Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale; Barth's Church Dogmatics Vol II.1 and 2; Pannenberg's Systematic Theology, each of the three volumes a whole year's training circuit!

But then there are other kinds of 'hard books', not because they are intellectually demanding, loaded with complex concepts, rooted in disciplined philosophical and theological traditions, but because they demand the full attention of intellect, affection, conscience and personal responsiveness. These are not better than intellectually demanding books, they are different in the demands they make, but the aim is the same. They seek a similar response of self-giving to the task of faith seeking understanding, and mind and heart learning and living towards a deeper, clearer, more humble vision of the love of God.

My conversations with such books have included Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God; Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; The Rule of St Benedict; Julian of Norwich's Revelations; George Herbert's The Temple; Belden Lane's The Solace of Fierce Landscapes; the Poetry of R S Thomas, Denise Levertov, Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney; Catherine Lacugna's God for Us; Walter Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; the novels of Chaim Potok; Merton's No Man is an Island and Seeds of Contemplation.

All of which brings me back to David Bentley Hart, and his latest book. The Experience of God. Being, Consciousness, Bliss, (Yale University Press, 2013). Along with Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution, Hart's new volume is one of the most telling and serious riposte's to the intellectual deficits (by the way I miss-typed that word as deificits – is that a neologism for such rationally deficient atheism?) – anyway, Hart's riposte to the intellectual deficits and atheological naivete of the new atheist polemics against God, religion and faith as a way of knowing.

Hart's aim is quite simple, and quite ambitious – he offers an exploration of the concept "God" as the word and concept function within the great theistic faiths of the world. In doing this it becomes clear that what the new atheists so passionately hate, dismiss, deconstruct, fear and fight, is a concept of God unrecognisable by the people and traditions which can be named in any meaningful way as theistic. So this book is an attempt at explicating the conception of God in Christian and other theistic faith traditions, but articulated by a Christian who neither dismisses the authentic traditions of theistic faith, nor cedes to the new atheists the freedom to define the word "God" in terms that suit conclusions, presuppositions and prejudices already in place in such writers' world view.

Starting from next Monday I'll do a series of posts on Hart's chapters (there are 6 of them). .

4 February 2014
R S Thomas, the Expanding Universe and the Crucified God.

R S Thomas is best known as the poet of the absence of God, or at least of the presence of God made most acute by his absence. When he is in an angry interrogative mood he besiges the customer services department of the Divine, and with a determination and articulation that makes it difficult to pacify him, let alone satisfy him.

Tell Us

We have had names for you:

The Thunderer, the Almighty

Hunter, Lord of the snowflake

and the sabre-toothed tiger.

One name we have held back

unable to reconcile it

with the mosquito, the tidal wave,

the black hole into which

time will fall. You have answered

us with the image of yourself

on a hewn tree, suffering

injustice, pardoning it;

pointing as though in either direction:horrifying us

with the possibility of dislocation.

Ah, love, with your arms out

wide, tell us how much more

they must still be stretched

to embrace a universe drawing

away from us at the speed of light.

…

There is a surprising softness, even sympathy in the portrayal of love crucified, of God spreadeagled and hung in the ultimacy of human pain as it stretches to enfold the whole creation. The last five lines are the reluctant recognition of the poet that infinite suffering is beyond finite comprehension, and therefore the supreme scandal of Christian faith, that the stretched arms of the crucified Jesus are the embracing arms of God holding the universe in being and drawing all that is into the reconciling embrace of the Creator.

This poem echoes some of my own thought and feeling as I've lived within the text of Colossians 1.15-20. That hymn to Christ gives a theological vision which is complemented by Thomas's poem, and the poet's sense of God crucified underlies the cosmic oxymoron that is foolishness to rational minds, and yet is the wisdom of the redeeming God.

2 February 2014