Blog

Today I
will be conducting the funeral service for my aunt, the last member of my
mothers family of four sisters and three brothers. Included in the service will
be a prayer written into a book of prayers that she used, well thumbed
and occasionally marked. It is a precis of a life well
lived.

The prayer is by
Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest musicians, and I think one of the great
human beings of the 20th Century. I remember reading his autobiography Unfinished Journey, years ago, while lying in a caravan, near St
Abb's Head, in a week of gales with horizontal rain, a fractious toddler (not
telling you what one), and a cupboard full of "spoil me I'm on
holiday" food. Yehudi Menuhin's story of how he grew from child prodigy to
one of the most accomplished and respected musicians of at least two generations,
is told in a way that was neither self-promoting nor self-centred. Instead he
wrote movingly of the musician's demeanour of humility before the music, the
importance of those teachers and companions who encouraged and drew out the
best, a sense not so much of his own greatness as a talent, but of his
obligation to fulfil his gifts in the service of human compassion and joy. And
through it all a deep and growing sense of gratitude, of indebtedness to life for its
opportunities, its blessings and late in life its still unexhausted possibilities.

 
So the prayer we will
say today, as the last will and testament of my aunt, is as much a blessing
offered at the end of life, from one human being to the wider human family, as
a religious devotion offered to God. But the truth is, gratitude is its own
prayer, its own form of address to Whoever is believed to be the author of such
blessing. In fact my aunt was the author of considerable blessing herself. From
as early as I can remember, until the year I was married, at birthday and
Christmas I received a card with money that was to be used for whatever I
wanted. So in the late fifties it was a ten bob note (10/-) that was inserted. Just to explain
relative values; the purchasing power of 10 shillings in 1958 was equivalent to
£22.50 today; put another way, it would have taken my dad 3 hours work to earn
10 shillings. Such long term and uninterrupted generosity comes from
the kind of person for whom this prayer was significant as her final word on
her own life, a word of contentment tinged with regret, but suffused with a
luminous gratitude. 

May those who survive me not mourn but continue to be as
helpful, kind and wise to others as they were to me. Although I would love to
enjoy for many years the fruits of my lucky and rich life, with my family and
friends, my many projects, and this whole world of diverse cultures and peoples
– I have already received such blessings as would satisfy a thousand lives.

Amen, and Amen

In the absence of Exit Interviews, an important source of insight for organisations and movements haemorraging recruits and support, David Hempton has done what's the next best thing. Evangelical Disenchantment is a phenomenon that goes back to the early generations of the movement and has remained a significant outcome for many who put their hands to the plough and looked back – or looked elsewhere. What makes this book so interesting and challenging for contemporary evangelical self-understanding is the account it gives of faith found and lost, of the weaknesses and strengths of Evangelicalism viewed through the lenses of human personality in cultural context.

George Eliot combined intellectual power, moral imagination, philosophical rigour and psychological insight, making her a formidable opponent with previous insider knowledge.  Francis W Newman was the brother of John Henry Newman. His experience as a missionary in Baghdad, his encounter with the Muslim world, his disillusion with millenial theology that looked to the Christianisation of the globe, the anti-intellectualism of fellow evangelicals, pushed him towards a position much more open to modern advances in knowledge. He came to see Evangelicalism as pathologically scared of the mind, holding to an infallible Bible often at the cost of authentic spirituality, trusting in Christian evidences, naively unquestioning of core dogma, and unchristianly hostile to those like himself who could no longer sign up to a faith demanding detailed doctrinal rectitude.

Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the great anti-slavery patriarchs of the 1830's and a convert of Finney's revival activities. He broke with Finney over whether priority should be given to revivalist conversionism or reformist zeal in transforming the social and moral life of the nation.

Three women activists, Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Frances Willard are treated in one chapter.

Why?

Hempton acknowledges that such women are an essential though largely missing part of a more truthful, alternative, and as yet unwritten history, a required corrective to the distortions of male-focused narrative. But from the writings and accounts these three women Hempton builds a composite picture of the crucial connection and eventual conflict between their feminist principles and the biblically underwritten constraints imposed on them by church sponsored theology and politically legitimated male empowerment in society. My next post will review this chapter along with the last chapter on James Baldwin, sub-titled Evangelicalism and race. 

The chapter on Van Gogh on secularisation (the focus of the previous post on January 31) is followed by a careful and balanced exploration of Father and Son, one of English Literature's classic accounts of Victorian childhood. By the time Edmund Gosse wrote Father and Son, he was established as a literary critic and writer of independent mind. Brought up in a narrow Plymouth Brethren home, Gosse and his later autobiography provide a fascinating, at times embarrassing account of Evangelicalism and childhood. I remember the first time I read Father and Son. And coming to the end of it where the last line says so much about the impact of powerful religious convictions, conveyed through parental approval or disapproval, and reinforced within a small religiously intense community where conversion and baptism as a believer by immersion were paradigmatic and required experience. The book ends by insisting on "a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself." And in that culminating observation lies an entire critique of what Gosse himself saw as a well meaning but personally damaging process of indoctrination.

Hempton is even-handed in these studies. Disenchanted critics are listened to, their grievances heard, and the validity of much of their complaints acknowledged. Their own oddities of temperament, gift for shooting themselves in the foot, attempts to have their evangelical cake and eat it, these are also noted and fitted to what is an overall balanced exploration of a movement and its dissidents. The concluding chapter helpfully gathers the main causes of intellectual and spiritual disenchantment and personal disaffiliation. Some reflection on these will be the final post on this fascinating education of a book.

At times R S Thomas reads as much like a Zen master, as a Welsh Anglican priest. His resistance to certainty, and reluctance to make dogmatic faith claims, betray a mind restlessly, at times angrily, interrogative. He came to a faith intuitively hesitant in his recognition of a Reality detected if at all, by hints, half-heard intimations and those unattended moments when truth invites attention. Distilled into this brief poem, are serious playfulness, unsentimental wistfulness, resilient hopefulness, and a capacity to make the uncertainty of 'maybe' sound like a promise, but not to be taken for granted. Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well", transposed to the minor less confident key of "Maybe…, after all…, all shall be well".