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The Frustrations of an Old Feline Ornithologist

One of the fun poetry games going the rounds in some blogs is called The Fib. You can find out about them here, at the site of The London Word Festival.

In brief, the idea is to write a poem of 20 syllables in which the number of syllables in each line is the total of the two previous lines – thus 1,1,2,3,5,8.

You can of course continue upwards so that the next line is 13, then 21 after which it gets too silly I think.

But it can make for a good semantic workout. A bit like Haiku. Decided I'd like to try it.

Over a freezing weekend, watching the small garden birds attacking the seeds and nuts, and watching our 16 year old cat watching them longingly from the warmth of our living room window, the following two TIMS eventually got wrote!

Birds

Coal

tits,

hungry

in winter,

raid seed silos as

nature’s precision plunderers

Cat

Crouched

cat,

hunter

of bird-food,

now too old to pounce,

yet young in imagination.

Going to try graduating to the 1,1,2,3,5,8,13 structure next time.

2 December 2008
Advent 2: It’s worship Jim, but not as we know it.

Went to an Advent and Carol service last night. It was highly liturgical, mainly choral music performed by a choir, rather than carols made accessible to a congregation. Delayed by a car accident on the way, we arrived just as the choir, complete with candles, had begun their introit. So we waited with the warmly welcoming door stewards, complete with torches as in the old cinema days, till the first hymn was being sung, during which we were able to slip in without disturbing the carefully choreographed theatre of light and darkness, sound and movement, words and music.

But we didn't have an order of service did we? All distributed before we arrived. And the service was intended to move without interruption so no announcements of hymns and numbers. In the absence of anyone looking upon us with compassion and sharing their Order of Service we were compelled to sneak looks over shoulders, glance sideways at other opened hymnbooks, play guessing games with the words to deduce the hymn we were supposed to be singing before the hymn ended, and while the rest of the congregation sung securely on. But in fact of the four hymns sung I only knew one anyway – and I thought I knew "hunners ae hymns".

All of which drove me to an inner reciting of the unhelpful and non-liturgical response, "It's worship Jim, but not as we know it". We did feel a bit left out. The unfamiliar place, sounds, content of the service made it feel alien, uncomfortable, almost like a different religion. That isn't an over-reaction – it's an attempt to find in our experience a parallel to a number of other people's experience when they come to our country and look for fellowship and welcome, and some reminders of home in Christian churches.

A week or so earlier at my own local church I'd had a greatly uplifting conversation with an African couple trying to get their heads round, and their hearts into, a form of worship which, compared to worship as they know it, lacked passion, colour, movement and sheer in your face God inspired emotion. They spoke so movingly of their sense of the strangeness of things, of wondering where the connection points are between worship as they knew it and worship as they now encountered it amongst people of another culture, country and Christian tradition. And all of that makes me wonder what it now means to say there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, because we are all one….. Yes I believe it. But how does that actually work? How in a globalised world can the Church, the Body of Jesus Christ embody forth that underlying unity that while expressed in almost endless diversity, nevertheless retains the face of our Lord recognisable to us all.

At that point I want to think about love, welcome, hospitality, and grace. Take grace for example. Our theology of grace as God's initiative of welcoming love, can surely guide us in our response to the strangers amongst us, and could be a model for Christians who are strangers amongst those of us who, for them, are "the others". I mean initiative that reaches out in friendship. The grace that goes before, that speaks first, that dissolves cultural and emotional barriers by an open and vulnerable acceptance, that enables us to look generously on other people's ways of telling God of their love and worship, or which looks with understanding and a willingness to accommodate the hesitations and confusion of those not familiar with our own ways. Grace which looks the other in the eye, smiles to convey the face of welcome, and looks on the other as a Charis, a gift of presence from God.

All of this connects with some of my planned advent reading. I'd already decided to read several novels located in cultures other than the one I know best, and from perspectives not only different, but possibly hostile to that worldview with which I have grown up. Given the journey of the Magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt, the Advent story opens many windows on a world where difference and otherness too easily degenerate into fear, violence and hatred. So as a way of critically exploring and enhancing my own openness, I'll be reading stories that view the world differently, and try to appreciate the difficulties and opportunities of encounter in a world uneasy with otherness. The four novels are:

A Thousand Splendid Suns,by Khaled Hosseini

The Islamist, by Ed Hussain

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

The Road Home, Rose Tremain

1 December 2008
Midwinter – My Advent CD

Last year I wrote about the music of Christian Forshaw, and the CD Sanctuary. You might want to read that post along with this one.

I've just bought the new CD Midwinter, a collection of music earthed in Advent, and celebrating the Incarnation, itself earthed in the historical particularity of the birth of Jesus. Several of the tracks are worth a post in themselves so I'll return to this CD between now and Christmas.

We all listen to music differently, I suppose. What we hear, what we listen for, is largely a matter of personal taste, but perhaps also depends on individual temperament and receptivity. But something else happens when the music you hear is music most of which you've heard before, because it is part of a known tradition. Memory triggers resonance, mind and heart are prepared with remembered thought and feeling, so the music has an emotionally enriched context.

Yes, but what if the familiar tradition is subverted by unexpected surprise? That is what Christian Forshaw and the Sanctuary Ensemble achieve in this (somebody suggest an alternative to the overused "stunning") extraordinary CD. Impatience with traditional form and content, the pursuit of novelty for its own sake, the assumption we can do better than the efforts of those before us – these and other dismissive shrugs towards tradition are not what Christian Forshaw is about. The music on this CD is widely representative of Christian traditional Advent music. So whence the unexpected surprise? It is in the way the Advent music tradition has been handled by artists who value what is essential, and repristinate the music to prevent it from falling into unexciting cliche.

The first impression on listening to the whole CD is one of paradox. The sound conveys vastness and intimacy, spaciousness and immediacy, as voice, saxophone, organ and percussion paint images of great harmonic power. The soprano soloist, Grace Davidson, brings a singular beauty and clarity to the prayerful longing of Veni Emmanuel. Throughout, the saxophone is used as a voice which communicates meaning in sound not only without words, but in ways that transcend words; at times reprising instrumental impressions of phrases still fresh in the mind, at other times developing themes which evoke in the listener that same Advent longing and looking towards light, and upwards.

Several times the way the tracks are arranged and produced, the power of the instrumental intervention, like a revelation, is sudden, unexpected but welcome. In places Forshaw rises to those high piercing passages that express not only musically driven aspiration, but the determined ascent of the heart and soul towards unreachable truth that nevertheless irresistibly beckons. The power of Forshaw's musical arrangements complements without dominating, virtuosity serving the music and empowering the hearer. It's characteristic of Forshaw's work that saxophone, organ and human voice, at times weave sound together and then separate into their own controlled virtuosity. On this CD the human voice is enabled, without diminishment, to articulate in clear powerful diction, that particular kind of truth-telling we call story, in this case Advent.

One of my favourite carols is Christina Rosetti's In the bleak midwinter. On this album the first verse is sung with aching restraint, followed by a passage of saxophone solo that is as near to a theology of hope as I've ever heard in music. The following verse about "What can I bring Him" moves slowly towards its simple resolved response, the only gift that makes any sense, because it makes no sense, "Give my heart".

This album is, in my humble but unprepared to be contradicted opinion 🙂 ! – music worthy of the great human themes, vast theology and great contradictions of grace and cruelty, gift and loss, celebration and fear, forever embedded in the Advent cycle, and waiting to be expressed in "utmost art".

If you want to buy the CD you can order it from Christian Forshaw's own website where at £9.99 + p&p it is cheaper than Amazon, and will come within a few days of ordering.

O Come! O Come! Emmanuel.

30 November 2008
Choosing Scotland’s Future?

Today I'm at a theological colloquium on Scotland's Future. A wide range of people interested in theological reflection on issues raised by nationalism, devolution, independence and indeed the theological significance of those political processes which underlie forms of government, and such concepts as self-determination, freedom and national and cultural identity. The National Conversation and The Calman Report, and a response from a working group from ACTS (the Scottish ecumenical body), have created opportunity and context for such theological reflection.

No idea how it will go, what will come out of it. But Christians should have some informed and responsible sense of how political processes of change impinge on the wider community life – and should have a view of what that will mean for Christians looking to follow faithfully after Christ in a less than straightforward world.

Might report on it eventually – but not over the next couple of days – Advent itself has rather much to say about power, politics, identity and our human future. Would be interesting if today's colloquium kicked off with a robust reading of the Magnificat, eh?

29 November 2008
Baptists and the authority of Scripture.

Blogging elsewhere today. I've just posted a report on the first meeting of the Scottish Baptist Theological Society which took place last night. Around 20 of us gathered to hear Dr Stephen Holmes, Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of St Andrews, deliver the inaugural lecture: Baptists and the Authority of Scripture. You can find it here at the College Blog.

Not everyone is into this kind of thing though. So here's a poem from U A Fanthorpe (a poet my friend Kate pushed me towards)

Angel's Song

Intimates of heaven,
This is strange to us,
The unangelic muddle,
The birth, the human fuss

We sing a harder carol now;
Holy the donkey in the hay;
Holy the manger made of wood;
Holy the nails, the blood, the clay.

Christmas Poems, U A Fanthorpe, (Enitharmon, 2002, 15)

We got our first two Christmas cards this week – one from Australia and one from nearer. Years ago I inadvertently threw away a Christmas card I meant to keep. I so wish I hadn't been so careless…

It was made by Christian refugees caught up in the conflict that tore the heart out of Beirut. The picture was of a woman holding her baby, standing in a doorway at night, illumined from behind by a large bright star. Her shadow fell forward in the shape of a cross, as her two arms, half open holding the child, and her upright but tired body, intersected in the light, and cast history forward.

This Sunday is Advent – my favourite liturgical season. Those who pass by this blog – what are you planning to read / listen to?

28 November 2008
Blogging, the sense of loneliness, and the current cultural mood.

"Since the underlying reason for writing is to bridge the gulf between one person and another, as the sense of loneliness increases, more and more books are written by more and more people, most of them with little or no talent. Forests are cut down, rivers of ink absorbed, but the lust to write is still unsatisfied….If it were only a question of writing it wouldn't matter; but it is an index of our health. It's not only books, but our lives, that are going to pot."

W H Auden is a difficult poet. He is at times hard to read, and I wouldn't personally like to plough through his entire Collected Poems. But in his prose writings there are sharp-edged observations about what's going on, and about the state of cultural health. The above was written in 1932, (quoted in Charles Osborne's biography of Auden) – and long before the current blogging outbreak of literary loneliness! I have a feeling this least indulgent of poets would have fulminated against this "everybody thinks their opinion is worth hearing" social game we call blogging. So is blogging popular now, as Auden thought mass publications were in 1932, because of "our sense of increasing loneliness", and evidence "that our lives are going to pot"?

As a writer Auden seems to be wanting some form of quality control in the dangerous and exciting marketplace of ideas, not only over the ideas themselves, but over the literary artistry (or lack thereof) with which they are communicated. And any of us familiar with the blogosphere know only too well that everything from mediocrity and tedium, and from malice and terrorism, to narissistic trivia and embarrassingly detailed confession, can now be aired on a blog. Yes, but. Some of the most creative, funny, informative, artistically inventive, theologically humane and intellectually satisfying conversation and discussion can also be found in responsible blogs. What impresses me about Auden in the above quote, though, is his willingness to attempt diagnosis, to seek explanation, to understand what in his day was a phenomenal rise in the publication of ideas and self-expressed concerns. And that as a poet he felt it his duty to ask the human question underlying social changes and phenomena – as he did in 1945 when he defined the zeitgeist as The Age of Anxiety.

Makes me wonder who are the contemporary poets who are ruminating, probing, engaged in diagnostic reflection and articulating the current cultural mood.

……………………………………

And because I can't resist. I've just been reading Crossing the Snowline, the latest collection of poems by Pauline Stainer.

Immense grief and family sadness explain her silence for over five years. This volume of poetry breaks that silence. More about this later.

But here's a poem about Emmaus, a story that I am living with just now.

River Landscape to Emmaus

Three men walking,

dippers working the water,

the river

writing its monograph

on mosses

Later,

the two disciples

watch him break bread,

lightfingered,

backlit.

Not nonchalant exactly –

for love is nothing

if not improvised,

wounds troubling the light

the art of extremity

27 November 2008
Me and my Bible – is there a problem with the possessive pronoun.

Recently was away from home for a few days. Forgot to take my Bible. Now there was a Bible there, but it wasn't my Bible. It isn't the first time I've gone away without my Bible. But the unmistakable sense of loss, the definite feeling of non-attachment to other available Bibles, the apparently irrational annoyance that I didn't bring my familiar 20 year old re-bound but otherwise quite ordinary Bible, all got me thinking.

What exactly is it I don't have, if I don't have my Bible? How far is familiarity with one particular Bible a significant element in my relaxed contemplation of "the Word"" in the words?

Does using an unfamiliar Bible deprive me of familiar context; render less accessible that acquired inner mapping of literary memory that is the geography of this specific Bible I know so well; dissipate that resonance and reassurance that comes from knowing and finding yourself in familiar places? Well, yes, probably.

But does all that invest the physical printed object (the unavailable my Bible) with more significance than it should? After all I still have several Bibles I've used, each of them for years, before replacing them with the next.

26 November 2008
Good news for “an age of paranoia”.

Blogging over at the Scottish Baptist College today. About paranoia and the Gospel!

A recent report by a leading psychiatrist at King's College, London, describes the 21st Century as "the age of paranoia".

Question. What is the good news of the Gospel for such an age – and how do we live in such a way that our words are made credible by a way of life in which our faith in Jesus makes us demonstrably different?

You might want to go look.

25 November 2008
Too many sparrows are falling to the ground……..

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground but your Father notices it." (Matthew 10.29).

Even the sparrow and the swallow find shelter in your temple (Psalm 84.3)

So the Bible about sparrows, providence and responsible living.

In a world made already much more precarious by the way we hammer and hack the environment into submission to our self-centred goals, sparrows are an ecological smoke detector. So it should give us even more pause for thought that the house sparrow has declined by around 60% in the last decade. Lock block drives, front gardens turned to parking spaces, the popularity of cheap non-native plants, square kilometres of decking, urban pollution reducing botanically based insects, are only some of the reasons.

Don't know about you – but I'm rapidly running out of optimism about our capacity to reverse the damage we do. The whole depressing story about the decline of the house saprrow can be read here.

Meanwhile, John Clare, the finest writer of poetry about birds, lived in such a close rapport with the natural world that he sensed the significant fragility yet irreplaceable wonder of life for each creature. His own remembered experience of mental ill health (his madness, as he called it) made him uniquely qualified as an advocate of compassion and care for those vulnerable and far from insignificant lives that share our planet, and whose interests intersect with our own.

Sure my sparrows are my own,

Let ye then my birds alone,

Come poor birds from foes severe

Fearless come, you're welcome here,

My heart yearns at fate like yours,

A sparrow's life's as sweet as ours.

24 November 2008
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
When an ex Secretary General of the United Nations and an ex President of the United States are refused visas by Zimbabwe, the world is expected to be impressed by more petty power games of a corrupt regime.

But for the people whose suffering is intentionally orchestrated in the power-hungering and power-mungering across international borders, this is no game.

I turn to a poem by a Victorian Catholic, one of the finest peace poems in our language, I think. Hope and disappointment, longing and endurance, impatience and trustful waiting, the rebuke from the heart of the oppressed tempered by a hopefulness driven underground seeking means of survival, and finding it – believing that eventually, one day, peace will come.

The tyrant who causes other people's fear to hide his own insecurity, can't forever silence voices, crush human spirits, exclude hope. The Spirit of God needs no visa, is subject to no exclusion orders, and when He comes 'He comes with work to do'.

And so I pray, "When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?

Peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite

To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.
22 November 2008