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A Responsibility to Awe – Rebecca Elson

Rebecca Elson died in 1999, at the age of 39. She was an astronomer, physicist and poet. I came across her name and her work in Robert Crawford,(ed.), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford: OUP, 2006), a volume of essays and poems with responses from scientists. The book sets up a conversation between two apparently very different disciplines and discourses – with surprising and fruitful results. Elson's research was into dark matter, and the relationship between the quantity of dark matter, the amount of gravity it represents and therefore the rate and nature of the universe's expansion. Here is one of her poems, characterised by a remarkably reflective hopefulness, and a willingness to handle the biggest questions in two interrelated forms of human discourse and knowledge.

Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)

For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:

To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on
Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

The essay in which this was quoted, 'Astronomy and Poetry', was written by Jocelyn Bell Purnell who discovered pulsars in 1967. It is the best in the book, at least the one I enjoyed most. But all the essays are attempts to share in a process of mutual appreciation, 'the mystery and challenge of science and the sense of music and ideas in poetry'. My current interest in theology and poetry is taking me into unfamiliar terrain, pushing me out of that comfort zone we call our subject field! The poems of Rebecca Elson represent one of the rewards of taking that risk. Her poetry and extracts from her notebooks are published by Carcanet, A Responsibility to Awe.Could just as easily be the title of a book on worship, don't you think?

8 August 2008
Is this the most useless use of energy

You know these spiral shaped mobiles that are meant to blow in the wind? Like a Chinese lantern, but made of thin polished metal – they're called wind spinners, cos they spin in the wind, ken? They require a wee breeze to make them move – mobiles, you know? And for those who like the sight of light reflected from a spinning metal spiral, one of them hooked to a bracket in the garden will double as a deterrent for most birds – except magpies, pigeons and jackdaws which are the ones most people want to deter.

Well I was in a garden centre today, having a coffee with Graeme, and they had a stand with over a dozen of said mobiles (no not the phones, the spiral things). The stand was about 12 feet from the open air, in a sheltered spot, but the spirals were turning. Explanation. A fan – I kid you not, a fan, was hooked to the top of the stand, pointing down, to make the mobiles turn. Green question – why not move the blessed stand 12 feet and switch off the fan. The breeze – there's always a breeze – would turn the mobiles, and the fan wouldn't contribute to the problems the planet already faces. Mentioned it to an assistant, who shrugged his shoulders with disarming nonchalance, concluded I was more a nuisance than a threat, and sauntered off to see if he could help some more amenable customer.

A fan! An artificial breeze – in Scotland?! To move a mobile??! There are other big fans all over this country whose justification for being a blot in the landscape is that they produce power – to run fans in Garden centres for the most useless purpose I've yet discovered for a fan.

Rant over! But I ask you – a fan……to blow ornaments…..outside…..in Scotland….Hmmmmmmmmm!

6 August 2008
Carol Ann Duffy – Text, message and text messaging.

I’m not good at texting. It’s one of the aspects of my personal development that needs additional support and encouragement. If I ask why I’m so slow at becoming a skilled texter, allowing for laziness, technophobia, latent luddite syndrome – I become aware of an unexplained but persistent ambivalence I feel bout text-message communication. It’s something to do with the medium, the hardware and the software, my feeling that the actual process gets in the way of the human spontaneity that makes communication personal; or maybe it’s the way texting mangles language to make the text message carry the maximum message with the minimum words or even letters.

The poem below is a playfully serious piece of contemplation on the benefits and limitations of texting. It is one of the responsibilities of the poet to articulate the human and social consequences of cultural change, perhaps especially as they impinge on our uses and abuse of language – to gently warn us when we are being seduced into thinking that something that is good and useful has no down side. The poet is in love – and in the absence of the beloved the main source of relational sustenance is texting. At several key points in this poem, Duffy drops broad hints about the inadequacy of texting as a way of keeping love alive. And the last line pinpoints one of my own hesitations. It is precisely this ability of the poet to see and feel the impact of culturally celebrated technological arefacts on our humanity, and on language, one of the main arteries of cultural expression and human exchange. Which is why I think theology and poetry (theologians and poets) need to talk more to each other.

Text
I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture (London: Picador, 2005), page 2.

5 August 2008
Thou shalt not covet what thou cans’t ill afford!

Strange kind of day, satisfying in an unintentional way; it just happened. I’m on holiday but as always takes a few days to get out of thinking about work mode. So we had a walk at Lochwinnoch as far as the Castle Semple Collegiate Church. Sun blazing one minute, and then cool and cloudy the next, and for most of our walk we weren’t sure if the tee shirt without the rain jacket was a mistake. But the sun shone sufficiently long on the righteous. The Collegiate Church is just over 400 years old, and if you use the link below you can read about its history, and connection with the battle of Flodden – one of the key dates for those still trying to understand why the Scottish temperament has a persistent note of melancholy. The loss of so many significant political and influential figures, and the sheer misery of the aftermath, makes Flodden as defining for Scottish identity as Bannockburn or Culloden. http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/lochwinnoch/castlesemplechurch/index.html

Spent the afternoon chasing stuff for my paper on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Loadsa stuff, but not always easily accessed – and much of it focused on her feminist credentials, and vaudeville style, rather than the specific aspects of her work I’m interested in. Browsing further afield I discovered Glasgow University Library has the new Cambridge Edition of the English Poems of George Herbert, edited and with a rich harvest of notes from Helen Wilcox. I’ve known about this book since it was announced, and looked at it often enough on the CUP website – but £85! Never mind the credit crunch – at that kind of cost it might need a mortgage. That said – the definitive edition of one of the finest poets in the language – with scholarly notes – and made to last. No paperback announced so won’t be around for a few years I suppose. How much should anyone pay for a new book? At what point is cost unreasonably beyond perceived benefit? A meal for four at a modest restaurant would knock you back as much as £85 – and a book lasts longer…….

Speaking of Herbert – I discovered Vikram Seth, the Indian novelist, bought Herbert’s house in 2003, and has recently written six poems as a tribute to Herbert. He includes in his piece, some lines of Herbert carved in stone on the north wall of the rectory:

If thou chance for to find
A new house to thy mind
And built without thy cost
Be good to the poor
As God gives thee store
And then my labour’s not lost.

Wonder if those lines are in the Cambridge definitive edition? Typical of Herbert – a default setting of holiness dressed as compassion!

Late evening sun, so spent an hour in the garden reading some of Classics for Pleasure. (on the sidebar) Dirda’s enthusiasm for books I’ve never heard of, or vaguely remember some obscure reference to, and some that, yes, I do know and have even read – but whichever he reviews, he’s interesting because interested, a critic who knows what critical appreciation means in practice. I’ve decided what it is I like about Dirdan: it’s the pervasive affection he has for those whose writing he has read and enjoyed. There isn’t a sarcastic or cutting sentence in the 200 pages I’ve read so far, but much praise tempered by honest recognition of genius and its limitations.

4 August 2008
Catherine and Ben Mullany: Pax Christi.

The litany of sadness and brokenness that seems woven throughout our 24/7 news-soaked daily lives occasionally still manages to shock. Sometimes the scale of the horrors visited on our planet, and the immediacy of camera, satellite and internet, create levels of information and graphic image that we simply have to filter them down to more emotionally manageable proportions. Compassion, moral revulsion, sympathy, anger, sadness, helplessness, hope, faith, all those feelings and passions that identify us as human, humane; if allowed full expression all the time would make despair and spiritual ennui inevitable.

Yet. There are times, usually when tragedy becomes personal, and touches the deepest places of our vulnerability and hopefulness, when we are, again, shocked and deeply, painfully aware of our feelings. I’m not the only one whose sense of what is important in life, what is real, valuable, to be cherished and never taken for granted, is heightened by occasions of brutal waste, when nothing can explain such senseless loss. Catherine and Ben Mullany loved each other, were on honeymoon on a Paradise island, had life and joy ahead of them, and no doubt their share of – well no one can know. I heard the news that Ben had died with a distressingly ambiguous confusion of emotions: relieved for him, profoundly saddened at the death of two people in love, angry at the needless anguish of so many people, and wondering again, yet again, what it means to live our lives in such a random, risky, world where beauty of love and lethal violence can inhabit the same few square metres of a honeymoon bedroom.

Over the years I have taken enough funerals to know that the bewildering loss of bereavement, the disorientation and chronic ache of what seems a forever inconsolable absence, are part of the inhernent cost of love, passionate, long-faithful, life-shaping and self-surrendering – love. But when death comes from an act of callous violence, unlooked for, undeserved, inexplicable – then a further layer of despair-inducing misery falls on those left to cope with the aftermath of such loss. I pray tonight for those who now have to care for two bereaved families – three weeks ago celebrating a wedding. I pray for those two families, and wonder how any words, gestures or decisions can make any of this better, easier, less hellish But it may be that with the gifts of faithful presence, wise restraint of well-meaning words too quickly said, and tears which share both the baffled silence and raging anger, God will bring the touch of divine mercy through human compassion. As often now, when words don’t work, I hold my holding cross and think with compassion in the presence of Christ crucified and risen, and believe that even in such God-forsaken anguish, these two families will find strength, the beginnings of comfort, and in time some healing.

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

3 August 2008
The amazing grace of biblical scholars!

“Amazing”! Amazing how often the word is amazingly overused. Overstatement is one of the most insiduous and pervasive linguistic diseases afflicting contemporary discourse. It’s amazing we put up with it. If most things are amazing, then jaw-dropping, eye-brow raising genuine astonishment becomes a redundant experience, and wonder is also out of a job.So when referring to human achievement, I try to use the word “amazing” to refer to those things which can be truly praised to the point of admitting I don’t know how they did it, but in humble admiration I stand, (I use the word advisedly), amazed!

In which case I think Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, published in 1952 is an amazing work of biblical scholarship and human endeavour.

Consider.

It was in process during and beyond the Second War. Taylor was a family man and an active Methodist Churchman. Travel to libraries was limited, the scale of the commentary was towards being a comprehensive summary of previous scholarship with Taylor’s own independent judgement woven through. He was a practitioner of text, form, source and historical criticism, and by the time he wrote his commentary, a scholar immersed in study of NT christology and atonement, evident throughout his exegesis of the Markan passion story. And all this was done before PC’s allowed cut and paste, painless re-drafting, footnote and bibliographic software, file back-up – and before the internet gave access to the bibliosphere and that republic of information communication called cyberspace.

And there it stands. An amazing monument to meticulous, persistent, faithful, disciplined labour; described as a no-stone-left-unturned commentary. Part of the MacMillan series, those detailed examinations of text, syntax, Greco-Roman context, classical parallels, verbal studies – a thorough literary dissection aimed at all round textual explanation. The volume is a hefty repository of learning, set out in double columns of smallish print, few concessions to those untrained in the biblical languages, and here and there, in partial explanation of this labour of love, Taylor’s own faith appropriation of the text.

I remember R E O White telling a story (whether apocryphal anecdote or true memory I never confirmed) of Vincent Taylor and ten tons of topsoil. Asked how he had managed to keep going at the commentary he recalled the delivery of ten tons of topsoil to his front drive at the manse. Over the summer he moved it round to the back of the house to rebuild the garden, shovel by shovel, barrowload by barrowload, till it was moved. The commentary was tackled in the same faithful incremental way.

Study of Mark’s Gospel has moved beyond Taylor’s work, and the concerns of contemporary scholarship are very different. Numerous and various forms of NT criticism have come and gone, pushing study of Mark’s Gospel in excitingly different directions. But few commentaries today are written out of a lifetime’s textual cultivation of one allotment in the large acreage of biblical studies. Shovel by shovel, sentence by sentence, over the years, Taylor worked the text of Mark with the thorough patience of the gardener who knows the time it takes to build a garden, work the tilth of the soil, sow seeds and wait for worthwhile growth and eventual fruit. For that reason, now and again, I open Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on Mark, read him on some passage or other, and thank God for that unsung apostolic succession of those who have given their lives to scholarly study of the biblical text. They are God’s carefully chosen gifts to us.

3 August 2008
Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!
Years ago now I read Esther De Waal’s book Seeking God. It is an attractively written introduction to the Rule of St Benedict and introduced me to the central values of the Rule; prayer, manual work and study, or heart, hands and head, which is shorthand for a holistic approach to daily life. Ever since the Rule of Benedict has been a source of check and balance in my own occasional life audits – but has also been a regular quiet conversation partner. Balance is another important Benedictine virtue, practised long before our post-modern overworked culture discovered the urgent need of a life-work balance. I’m still intending to do some posts on thin books – and amongst the thin books whose importance is out of all proportion to size is this introduction – to an even thinner book – the Rule of Benedict which through the great monastic movements, decisively shaped the culture and civilisation of the Christian West.

In the mid 1980’s I subscribed for some years to the Journal Cistercian Quarterly. It contained many articles on monastic spirituality which then and since informed pastoral practice and personal maturing in Christ, and from a perspective so different from my own Evangelical viewpoint. The new monasticism is another of those eccretions emerging from the post-modern (or post-post-modern?) search into the disciplines and practices of the past – Brian Maclaren’s latest book is the latest to do this, with the usual blurb making it sound as if this is significantly NEW! Kathleen Norris, Esther De Waal, Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton have been diagnosing modern rootlessness and spiritual malnourishment going back half a century to merton’s Contemplative Prayer and Seeds of Contemplation, and prescribing a return to the practices that have been shown to shape community, instil stability, nurture Christian practice, and draw human personality towards maturity in Christ.

Among lessons learned from Cistercian Quarterly, which I took for the best part of a decade, are the following
- the significance of silence as an intentional disposition, to be encountered as both absence of external noise and presence of inner peace – an important spiritual constraint for a preacher, and talker!
- Stability as a willingness to settle in and accompany a community, so that relationships deepen, challenges are not evaded, and longevity of ministry is valued – one of the underlying principles of a life lived against pervasive short-termism.
- lectio divina as a form of reading, rooted in Scripture and branching into the great mustard tree of the Christian traditions where it is possible to find shelter and food – for a Baptist, the recognition that love of the Bible as transformative Word, is not, despite often inflated and uninformed claims, the monopoly of Evangelicals
- hospitality as an openness to people, other people and people who are other, but also hospitality as an openness to God, and to the Spirit of truth who doesn’t always leave our over-tidy minds as ordered as he finds it! – a predisposition to welcome, to greet the stranger as Christ, says most of what is essential in pastoral care.
The Cistercian Quarterly at that time was administered from Caldey Island. I still have a handwritten letter from the Brother who dealt with my subscription (and who was clearly intrigued by a Baptist minister with Benedictine tendencies), with kind words about something I had written for the Expository Times.

All of this came back to me when I read this morning that the monks of Caldey Abbey, on the Island ,have run out of patience with the slow speed of their dial-up internet connection. So they’ve installed fast-speed Broadband. The image of monks clicking impatiently, and getting into a spiritual stew about slow dial-up connection, made me smile. The image of monastic life as ascetic, pre-industrial, judiciously Luddite, sold on discomfort, is neither fair nor true. Online Lectio Divina, email as a way of maintaining silence while communicating with each other, surfing the world while enclosed in cloisters – the Lord bless them in their newfound freedoms! But the life they inhabit (by the way the use of that word as a recently introduced way of describing Christian character – “inhabiting virtues” from Alistair MacIntyre – carries rich semantic options – dwelling, dwelling place, monks clothing,) – anyway, the life they inhabit is an important witness to our overbusy, technologically addicted, fast-speed culture. And if Broadband contributes to the nurture and dissemination of such a witness to slowness, patience, and the virtues of balanced living, then Father Daniel the Abbott, may find his faith in the blessings of Broadband justified! Benedictine Broadband – I love it! Benedictine Broadband – now that’s living wittily!
1 August 2008
George Mackay Brown – and the music of poetry

Reading an essay on the poetry of George Mackay Brown, the Orkney poet, I came across examples of why his poetry can best be described as musical.

Whether the words are shaped to symphonic sounds, or set in the informal discipline of a sonata, or showing off like the soloist in a concerto, there are sounds and rhythms in his poetry, and a capacity to evoke both image and emotion, that I’ve always found haunting, in a comforting kind of way.

“I have a deep-rooted belief that what has once existed
can never die: not even the
frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet
stone. All is gathered into
the web of creation, that is apparently established and yet perhaps only
a dream in the eternal mind.“
from Finished Fragrance,

We are folded all
In a green fable
And we fare
From early
Plough-and-daffodil sun
Through revel
Of wind-tossed oats and barley
Past sickle and flail
To harvest home,
The circles of bread and ale
At the long table-
It is told, the story –
We and earth and sun and corn are one.
from
Christmas Poem,

See what I mean? I once knew a brave woman whose life had more than its fair share of pain, of hurt, struggle and wrestling with circumstance. She had lived in Orkney and knew George Mackay Brown. She loved his poems, corresponded with him till his death in 1996, and took comfort from his poetry (of which she had several written for herself). I can understand why. Her resilience and lack of bitterness was at least partially due, I reckon, to an instinct for the beauty and healing of words. Does remembering people before God, with gratitude, constitute praying for the dead? I hope so.

31 July 2008
I just want to say I’m a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl

Sarika Watkins-Singh, excluded from school for wearing the kara, a wrist bangle which is an important expression of her Sikh faith, has just won her case at the High Court. I find it interesting that political correctness, originally an approach to language and behaviour intended to avoid exclusive or discriminatory attitudes and actions, becomes in some contexts, precisely that – exclusive and discriminatory.

Now I understand the school policy of prohibiting the wearing of jewellery -which suggests decorative and ornamental objects worn for cosmetic purposes. But I would have thought such a policy would accommodate the wearing of jewellery recognised as an expression of a person’s religious identity – Sikh, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and other acknowledged faith traditions. As a Baptist Christian I have heightened sensitivity to infringements of religious liberty, and belong to a historic tradition that upholds the right of people to express their faith without fear of persecution. I don’t think for a minute the school intended to be discriminatory, though it has been found that Sarika was a victim of religious discrimination. And I don’t think the school intended to curtail Sarika’s religious liberty, though the consequence of a strictly applied blanket policy had that perhaps unintended consequence.

But when the policy was formulated why didn’t religious jewellery feature as an issue; in a pluralist multi-cultural ethos that question should now be standard. And if it had unintended consequences, why fight it in court – admit the flaw in the policy and sort it. Whether the veil, the cross, the kara, the yarmulche – the symbols of a faith tradition are not to be assessed on the same level of social significance as cosmetic jewellery. A school, of all places should be a place where that distinction is recognised and respected – how else teach young people tolerance, respect, and acceptance of the other person whose way of life is different. What is the message to a young Sikh woman if the only options are change your religious practice or be banned from school?

Following the court judgement Sarika said: “I am overwhelmed by the outcome
and it’s marvellous to know that the long journey I’ve been on has
finally come to an end. “I’m so happy to know that no-one else will go through what me and my family have gone through.”

She added: “I just want to say that I am a proud Welsh and Punjabi Sikh girl.”

Hope the school learns its lesson.

29 July 2008
Refined embarrassment

Miss Cranston’s Tearoom is one of the more select places of refreshment and consistently reliable civility as a given of customer service. Located in Gordon Street (a name almost synonymous with civility as those who know me had better testify), in the centre of Glasgow, it’s within a minute’s slow walk from Border’s Bookshop. If you are there at the right time you are shown to a window seat from whence to watch all kinds of people anticipating, transacting or reflecting on their various retail experiences; conversing, arguing or walking along in silence – companionably warm or post-stooshie chill. Sit long enough you see both.

On my recent visit I ordered the individual rhubarb tart and a cafetiere of Blue Mountain coffee. In the discreetly sedate surroundings, sitting at the table with the crisp white cover, and enjoying the joys of refined and leisurely self-indulgence, I discovered the embarrassing problem of the cafetiere with the stuck plunger. I began with a slow even pressure downwards, intending to watch the coarse ground coffee being gently pushed down as the dark brown liquid gathered above. Feeling some resistance I pushed harder, then a little harder, and on the assumption this was an easily overcome technical challenge, a little harder still. The result was an impressive impromptu coffee fountain accompanied by a loud attention drawing clatter of metal on glass. The consequences were neither discreet nor pretty. And within seconds the manager was over, took away the tray, cleaned the table, apologised for the mess (which I’d made), and brought me a fresh and bigger cafetiere of that kind of coffee that makes you aware that not all blessings were lost in the aftermath of the Fall.

As mentioned, Borders is only a minute’s walk away and I was on the hunt for a book for Sheila. Milan Kundera’s elegiac novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, is a profound narrative reflection of the nature of human choices, which tend to be risks we cannot assess beforehand, guesses at happiness, decisions which all but determine the future. Ah but I wasn’t after Kundera’s considered probing of the human capacity to build, break or endure relationships. I was after a novel with only one word of difference in the title, The Unbearable Lightness of Scones, by Alexander McCall Smith. Holiday reading as a gift. To give a story as a gift is to encourage those we care about to take an inner holiday, the rest and recreation that comes from going someplace else through imaginative literature. In that sense a gift wrapped book is a package holiday.

Not a bad Saturday morning.

Two Cafetiere Disaster Haiku

One

Showing off brute strength,

malfunctioning cafetiere,

coffee eruption.

Two

Coarse ground coffee grain

spews and spreads like speckled mud,

‘I’m that embarrassed!’

27 July 2008