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Happy 400th Birthday John Milton

Today is the Quartercentenary of the birth of John Milton, a towering presence in English poetry and a significant player in the political theory and machinations of the 17th Century. The masterpiece Paradise Lost is a tour de force of theology as well as poetry, though for some a theology inadequately Christian. Milton's influence on poetry, and his contributions to political and moral thought have decisively shaped English culture.

Years ago I learned by heart his sonnet "On His Blindness", one of the most moving statements of non-resignation I know; I'm not at all sure that in this sonnet Milton is resigned to providence, and I sense behind the poem lies deep complaint, not silenced by the reply of "patience to prevent that murmur". In any case today is Milton's 400th birthday, and I've been reading some of those lines which poured from the quill of "that one Talent". Here's his sonnet "On His Blindness":

WHEN I consider how my light is spent

         E're half my days, in this dark world and wide,

         And that one Talent which is death to hide,

         Lodg'd with me useless, though my Soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

         My true account, least he returning chide,

         Doth God exact day-labour, light deny'd,

         I fondly ask; But patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need

         Either man's work or his own gifts, who best

         Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best, his State

Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

         And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:

         They also serve who only stand and waite.

9 December 2008
Advent and “My personal revenge”

My personal revenge will be your children's
right to schooling and to flowers.
My personal revenge will be this song
bursting for you with no more fears.
My personal revenge will be to make you see
the goodness in my people's eyes,
implacable in combat always
generous and firm in vistory.

My personal revenge will be to greet you
"Good Morning!" in the streets with no beggars,
when instead of locking you inside
they say, "Don't look so sad"
When you, the torturer,
daren't lift your head.
My personal revenge will be to give you
these hands you once ill-treated
with all their tenderness intact.

Tomas Borge was a leader of the Sandinista Revolutionary Front, imprisoned and tortured in Nicaragua during the struggles of the 1960's and 1970's. After the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979 he became Minister for the Interior, and faced his jailers and torturers in court. Given the freedom to choose the form and severity of punishment, he clearly stated his desired revenge – he chose to forgive them and in the courtroom declared them forgiven.

The above words are the song written by Luis Enrique Meja Godoy based on this redemptive scandal. Advent is a good time to remember events like this. As Harriet Walters said introducing the poem, this "is not wooly wishful thinking from a comfy armchair. It comes from the front line".

9 December 2008
Advent Reading: A Thousand Splendid Suns

There are plenty reviews of this novel, and no need to add to the superlatives and hesitations of established critics. I read this book in keeping with my Advent goal of reading several novels that take me into countries, culture's and views of the world very different from my own. This book about the struggles and courage to endure of women in Afghanistan, spanning the 30 years from the Soviet invasion, the resistance of the Mujahideen to the fall of the Taliban, is an apologetic for those same immensely resilient women. If at times Hosseini comes close to stereotyping the central characters, that is because as a novelist he has set out with deliberate apologetic intent.

The interweaving of violence, at once intentional and random, domestic and military, with human qualities of love, courage, forgiveness and unselfish kindness, creates throughout the novel a constant tension of low-key menace that at times erupts into catastrophe and loss – and made it hard for me to read on. And through it all two women, thrown together by circumstances at once inevitable and tragic, and yet through which they discover ways of transcending fear, hate and suspicion, find in their relationship a final resolution both redemptive and passionately defiant of the forces that destroy.

I heard Khaled Hosseini interviewed on radio, explaining why he had worked so hard to portray the harsh realities of life for women and children in the recent history of his country. His capacity to portray the inner lives of the two key characters Mariam and Laila, I found uncannily persuasive, unflinching in exploring their aching loss, describing the inner impact of systemic dehumanising treatment, portraying their protective tenderness to their children. There is harrowing realism in the scenes of brutality, but I never found them gratuitous, though at times near overwhelming. Why so much pain? Such scenes were however powerfully convincing, evoking in me responses of deep anger, particularly towards male characters whose religious rigidity or collusion in structures of cultural and social oppression of women, enabled, indeed required, such oppressive treatment systemic and sanctioned. There are times when imaginative literature of this quality is more effective than graphic TV footage – more morallly disconcerting, more emotionally galvanising. If that makes it a lesser novel, then perhaps there are times when the requirements of making truth heard are more urgent than the demands for technical literary excellence

Written by an Afghan novelist, set in contemporary international events, using the microcosms of two women caught up in personal tragedies that intersect, confronting in vivid storytelling the realities behind that evil euphemism "collateral damage", this is a novel intentionally making a point. Yet doing so not with comic-strip caricature, but by imaginative realism, creative empathy, and profound moral maturity in the handling of the unpredictable ambiguities and urgent choices that war and violence force on the innocent.

For these reasons, despite its apologetic tone, I still think this is a great novel – because it is a story hard for economically comfortable, culpably cocooned Western minds to credit unless it is writ large in the emotional drama of suffering and redemption. By which I mean it deals with immense issues of what it means to be human in a brutal world, to endure and sacrifice for the sake of the other. Great also because it is I believe a morally honest book. Under the Mujahideen and the Taliban the brutal violence against women, the suppression of women's educational and cultural potential, the warlords' complacency about women and children as necessary casualties on the road to influence and political power, is a story that both needs to be told and needs to be heard. Hosseini is not suggesting the situations in this book are universal in Afghanistan – then or now. But they are not uncommon. The great novelist is as necessary as the great journalists, poets, reporters, photographers and other chroniclers of our times.

I wanted to read several books that would widen my perspective – this one did, and I hope enlarged my capacity to understand, and care, more. The very strangeness of its context and tragedy, took me much deeper into the why of the Incarnation – a world broken but beautiful, where evil often flourishes but where love endures, and God is.

7 December 2008
Living wittily, but not always comfortably, in the marketplace

Walking through Buchanan Galleries (Glasgow's upmarket shopping mall), past the open stalls in the walkways. Ahead of me two assistants at a cosmetics and cream stall for men and women are accosting passers-by to come and try the various beauty products and processes for sale. The three people ahead of me were all stopped, invited and given an advertising flyer. I wasn't. I suppose they recognise a lost cause, eh?

Sitting in one of our favourite coffee haunts that does the most outrageously good meringues – so big I haven't risked one yet! The three women meeting up for their afternoon refills are asked for their order. Two of them go for cakes to die for – the third says, "Ah'll go fur the low calorie option. Kin ye gie me a meringue wi' less cream?" That would be called creative calorie accounting then?

In Borders I'm engrossed in the poetry section. A tall man in a leather jacket, iron filings for hair, says to no-one in particular and anyone who's listening, "Onybody heard of Edgar Allen Poe? He writes stuff". I asked him if it was for a present, and was it poetry or stories. It was stories he was after – his daughter was "intae that stuff". We headed to the fiction, arranged alphabetically, came to P and there was Poe's tales. "Ah don't usually come intae bookshops, ken. And there's too many books in here onyway." Decided not to disagree, since by then we were getting on fine.

Later, on the hunt for a fleecy throw of a particular colour for someone who'd asked, noticed Primark sells 8 pairs of cotton socks for £2. That's 25 pence a pair. Today they are accused of paying 7p an hour to workers in Bangladesh where there is 70% food inflation and the going rate of pay has stayed at 7p for 2 years (£19 per month). War on Want (see here) accuses Primark, Asda and Tesco of not matching previously given commitments to ethical standards of pay in developing countries. They of course have their answers – but am I the only one that thinks 8 pairs for £2 means somebody somewhere is getting a very bum deal? Who? Not us. Not Primark. So who?

n

6 December 2008
That highly charged place between prayer and protest….

I am posting today over at Hopeful Imagination, so if you're visiting here you're invited to there!

More than ten years ago I received a Christmas card made by refugees in Beirut. The card and its story still touch deeply into who I am and how I look at the world. I've tried to say why, both in prose and poetry (of a sort).

5 December 2008
In Memoriam: William G Placher and the narrative of a vulnerable God.

Yesterday the death was announced of the Reformed theologian William Placher. I first came across his work in his Narratives of a Vulnerable God, and The Domestication of Transcendence, two books which sought to recover the biblical paradox of a God who relates to creation as vulnerable yet transcendent, and in so doing correct those all too human urges to either foist on God our notions of power, or treat God as if that power could be co-opted for our projects and prejudices. His latest book The Triune God: An Essay in Post-Liberal Theology, explores the complexities and limitations for human beings of personal relationships, and seeks to ground them in the relatedness of Love and Being that is the Triune God of the Christian Gospel. The pastoral alertness of Placher's theology can be sensed in words like the following. They demonstrate why his death is a significant loss to the work of relating Christian theology to the realities of life in a post-most things world. How much our world has to learn, and to learn quickly, if we are to learn to live creatively with human difference:

"We human persons are always failing to be fully personal.
As persons, we are shaped by our relations with other persons. Yet we
always deliberately raise barriers or cannot figure out how to overcome
the barriers we confront.

When those we most love come to die, or in
the dementia of old age are no longer able to understand what we may
most want to say to them, we realize how much there was in our hearts
that we never shared with them.

When we best articulate our ideas, we
cannot escape the feeling that there was something there we never quite
captured. When we most rejoice in sharing with someone different from
ourselves, difference nevertheless scares us.

The doctrine of the
Trinity, however, proclaims that true personhood, however impossible
its character may be for us to imagine, involves acknowledging real
difference in a way that causes not fear but joy."

The man who wrote like that, also spoke like that. In a sermon in College Chapel he urged, "The way we best show our love to the whole world is… to love with a particular passion some little part of it."

We need more, not fewer theologians like Bill Placher.

3 December 2008
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