Blog

Heading towards New Year I've been thinking about the church. 

Where in all the cultural flux of the times?

where in the midst of spiritual pessimism not unrelated to economic gloom?

where in the massed choir of competing voices that is our digital cyber inhabited environment; where in our confusion, anxiety and driven existence?

where, is there a place to stand, or to sit, and regain a sense of perspectve?

Where is there a centre that will hold against the centrifugal and centripetal forces of a world complex and dangerous, self-destructively greedy and unable to curb the human appetite to possess, have power over, and assert the will to life and power over against the imperative to be on the side of life itself?

Where is the place where the church's life is renewed, it's purpose reconstituted, its raison d'etre reaffirmed and its mission reconfigured.

The table, is where.

Gathered in Jesus' name, around the sacred table, sharing blessed bread and wine, hearing again the Gospel promise, giving again our deepest love, owning again our deepest longings, and realising that our loves and longings derive their importance from that which is prior to them – the love of God in Christ made known in the Spirit.

To the question where, the answer of the Christian heart will be – there, at the table.

How that works out in the theology and practice of each Christian community has been told with succint pointedness by Walter Brueggemann. The next few days I'll post Brueggemann's take on the central importanc eof the Gospel table, the place where shalom is proclaimed and from which it is to be lived.

I have a very good friend who has an all but uncritical enthusiasm for Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, the first of her books I read. Another friend, Geoff Colmer, has been at me to read Vickers' The Other Side of You. I'm getting there Geoff! But I recently picked up a couple of other novels by Vickers in the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an establishment I have no hesitation in advertising here. (Organised, discerning, reasonable prices, a proprietor who leaves you to browse without ignoring you – The Old Aberdeen Book Shop 140 Spital ABERDEEN Aberdeenshire AB24 3JU tel: 01224 658355 map.).

So having read Mr Golightly's Holiday, a strange novel, somewhere between modern novel, and timeless fable with religious overtones and metaphysical undertones, I've just finished Instances of the Number 3.

I'm beginning to notice recurring themes, recognise the wise interpretive voice of the author, and becoming familiar with the narrative contexts Vickers creates as she examines and explores the topography of human relationships. Mostly her novels are about love of one kind or another – its failures and triumphs, its capacity to mortally wound and miraculously heal, its puzzling complexity and frightening simplicity, its power to extend forgiveness to the heartbroken or to withhold absolution and peace from those who make life choices that deny love's sovereign demands.

But love is neither to be domesticated to human whims, nor limited by the all too human urgency of selfish desire which is indeed love's negation. Vickers is a Jungian psychoanalyst; she is also an accomplished literary scholar; in addition she is a consummate observer of human motivation, behaviour and character; which makes her a consummate novelist. So metaphysics, religious experience, supernatural phenomena, the world of high art and serious literature, become in Vickers novels important perspective giving lenses into human aspiration as it grows or diminishes in the life and circumstances of the characters she creates. And she creates characters who are immensely persuasive, attractive, instructive – the outcome of the story matters because the destiny of the characters matters to the reader. 

Instances of the Number 3 is a novel that requires of the reader certain things. First a more than curious interest in what it is we are all looking for, hoping for, longing for, suffering from in those relationships that matter most to us – love. Second, a willingness to read slowly, and read much of the novel more than once in the first reading, in order to apprehend, and comprehend, the comments of the authorial voice, less didactic than George Eliot, but often as ethically perceptive and psychologically enlightening. Third, a patience with a writer who assumes her readers know enough about art and literature to grasp the more important allusions in chapters and passages of pivotal significance. But fourthly, a willingness to learn the art of sympathy and hopefulness, because Vickers' characters are on the whole likeable, flawed, people caught in the snares of circumstance, or constrained by previous life choices, so now longing for new purpose, direction and meaning, and all of this within the sphere of human relationships.

  I've said it here before – there are entire mornings in pastoral theology seminars when students would learn so much about themselves by reading novels. How the human heart works, about the constraints and disappointments, the quiet patient sacrifices that love both requires and bestows, and about how there are experiences and situations in all of our lives that are not resolved by changing them, but by recognising that their givenness and intractable nature, and how we respond to them, is what makes us.  And no, this isn't a review of a Salley Vickers novel. It's more and less than that. It is a push and a plea to those who dare claim the work of the cure of souls is their vocation. To take time to read those writers who sharpen our insight, ignite our imagination, stimulate emotional sympathy, teach us to interpret a life story – our own and that of others, and do so by drawing us into and involving us in their stories, where so much of our own experience is rehearsed, or questioned, or touched with the coal from the altar so that we understand ourselves more compassionately, see ourselves more honestly, and so speak of ourselves more modestly, and mercifully.

As one reviewer said there is an "essential optimism" in Vickers' writing. And there are sentences in her novels that are amongst the wisest counsel I have ever received from the pen of someone who has never met me, but who has, it would seem, been reading my private journal and plagiarising my experience.

(The photograph above is included just because it is a great photograph of avid readers! It came from here and I gladly acknowledge its use.)

Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.

Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.

In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?

One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.

Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold – the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.

That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.