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  • Mary Oliver: Poetry of the Passion

    2358179450037305645yzihkm_th Mary Oliver writes in A Poetry Handbook, one of the finest justifications I know for writing, reading and cherishing poetry.

    "Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision, a faith, to use an old fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed."

    Fires for the cold, ropes for the lost, bread for the hungry – good metaphors for a sermon at its best too.

    Oliver is one of the most attentive nature poets, discovering in the world around, meaning that reflects back on human life – in this poem, ‘the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation’, is a line which, with what follows, takes me deeper into the meaning of Holy Week.

    “In Blackwater Woods”

    By Mary Oliver


    Look, the trees
    are turning
    their own bodies
    into pillars

    of light,
    are giving off the rich
    fragrance of cinnamon
    and fulfillment,

    the long tapers
    of cattails
    are bursting and floating away over
    the blue shoulders

    of the ponds,
    and every pond,
    no matter what its
    name is, is

    nameless now.
    Every year
    everything
    I have ever learned

    in my lifetime
    leads back to this: the fires
    and the black river of loss
    whose other side

    is salvation,
    whose meaning
    none of us will ever know.
    To live in this world

    you must be able
    to do three things:
    to love what is mortal;
    to hold it

    against your bones knowing
    your own life depends on it;
    and, when the time comes to let it go,
    to let it go.

  • Emily Dickinson: Poetry of the Passion

    200pxblackwhite_photograph_of_emi_2 Few of Emily Dickinson’s poems give up their meaning on a first reading. The enigmatic complexity of her interior life is often expressed in verses – even phrases- that simply can’t be opened like a packet of crisps and their contents scoffed.

    The fast food – junk food metaphor is deliberately crass, and should act as a warning to the age that values the sound-byte as a literary achievement, and a culture that idolises public success and equates it with celebrity.

    Throughout a life dedicated to solitude and celibacy Dickinson explored the frontiers of belief, its great affirmations and its great uncertainties.

    On Monday of Holy Week, reading this poem, I like the long view that looks through crucifixion to resurrection, without flinching at either.

    Poem112.

    "Success is counted sweetest”

    by Emily Dickinson.

    Success is counted sweetest
    By those who ne’er succeed.
    To comprehend a nectar
    Requires a sorest need.

    Not one of all the purple Host
    Who took the Flag today
    Can tell the definition
    So clear of Victory

    As he defeated — dying —
    On whose forbidden ear
    The distant strains of triumph
    Burst agonized and clear!

  • Poetry of the Passion: Palm Sunday

    G. K. Chesterton’s poem requires little imagination and some humour – but the donkey’s perspective on human behaviour carries rhetorical force because the dumb donkey speaks the foolishness of the human actors in the passion story.

    “The Donkey”

    by: G.K. Chesterton

    WHEN fishes flew and forests walked

    And figs grew upon thorn,

    Some moment when the moon was blood

    Then surely I was born;

     

    With monstrous head and sickening cry

    And ears like errant wings,

    The devil’s walking parody

    On all four-footed things.

     

    The tattered outlaw of the earth,

    Of ancient crooked will;

    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

    I keep my secret still.

     

    Fools! For I also had my hour;

    One far fierce hour and sweet:

    There was a shout about my ears,

    And palms before my feet.

    Did Karl Barth know this poem by the time he spoke the words Graeme quoted, from his 80th birthday party speech?

    Donkey “If I have done anything in this life of mine, I have done it as a relative of the donkey that went its way carrying an important burden. The disciples had to say to its owner: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ And so it seems to have pleased God to have used me at this time, just as I was, in spite of all the things, the disagreeable things, that quite rightly are and will be said about me. Thus I was used. I just happened to be on the spot. A theology somewhat different from the current theology was apparently needed in our time, and I was permitted to be the donkey that carried this better theology for part of the way, or tried to carry it as best I could.”

  • Palm Sunday Haiku

    Palm Sunday Haiku

    Behold your King comes

    with shock and awesome meekness,

    sovereign of peace.

    …

    Power tamed by love,

    redemptive strategies, are

    things that make for peace.

    …

    O Jerusalem!

    Jerusalem, how often…

    but you, you would not.

    …

  • Poetry of the Passion

    4 Starting Palm Sunday I am going to post a poem a day for Holy Week. Apart from an introductory sentence or two, the poems are allowed to speak for themselves. My own response to Easter is always enriched by the careful shaping and disciplined arranging of words and images that trigger surprise, subvert assumptions, and encourage theological imagination. Several poets have enriched and extended the range of my own imagination and sense of theological adventure.

    Few can chisel words more sharply and fit them more precisely than George Herbert, and at the same time achieve such an exact balance between emotion and intellect, intimacy and distance, trustfulness and truth.

    When it comes to alert critique of a world whose pain is mirrored in the cross, Denise Levertov articulates essential protest at such wounds as Vietnam, El Salvador and the various political cynicisms of her own times. Joan baez without the guitar.

    Emily Dickinson’s is a poet of the inner life, virtually a hermit all her adult life, but a militant soul for whom truth is to be told with rhetorical force – ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant’ – because the truth is ‘superb surprise’.

    R S Thomas is the poet who for me, best captures the interrogative mood of hearts that recognise the mystery and tragedy of life, and the doubting faith and angry questions hurled at God speak of a trust at times more secure than a less questioning acquiescence.

    C_wesley2 Several hymn-writers, from Charles Wesley to Brian Wren, create the kind of poetry that can be sung by those gathered together for worship – that essential fusion of singability, grown-up language that doesn’t try to bypass the mind, and words at the service of our experience of God, both articulating and at times replicating that experience – ‘my chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed thee’ –

    I sing that and I’m already on my feet hurrying after Christ!

    Some of these are going to be represented in this week’s posts, some not. We all are likely to have our preferred ways of coming at the truth of Holy Week. I hope some of these poets enrich and extend your own theological imagination as we move towards Easter Sunday.

  • Raging with Compassion 6: Recovering Lament

    In 1986 Walter Brueggemann published his seminal essay, ‘The Costly Loss of Lament’. It is one of the most important attempts to bring biblical studies and pastoral care into the service of those whose lives have fallen in on them and who have lost the capacity to make sense of it all anymore. Swinton makes good use of Brueggemann’s work, and significantly builds beyond it.

    Johnswinton_2 The previous post on Raging with Compassion ( See March 24) dealt with Swinton’s experience of contemporary upbeat church worship failing to take radical suffering and loss with liturgical seriousness. The large central chapter of his book, pages 90-129 provide a rich, informed pastoral response under the title, ‘Why me Lord? Why Me?’ Having explored the nature of suffering as an experience that often defies rational articulation, Swinton reflected on the cross and the silence of Jesus. (March 24 again).

    The next step Swinton takes, and invites us to follow, is recovering the practice of lament. The non-reference in church the following day to the Omagh bombing, distressed him but he suggests it was ‘psychic numbing and stunned silence…people lacked the confidence to ask legitimate questions of God…’ As in many places in this book, Swinton’s next move is dictated by his conviction that the key human response to evil and suffering lies in a creative dialectic between reticent silence and appropriate language. Out of the silence of suffering comes the cry of protest, and the lanaguage that is immediately appropriate is the language of lament. Referring to Jesus’ silence, and his cry of dereliction on the cross (taken from a Psalm of lament), Swinton senses there the clue to how human beings can be helped to respond to our own experiences of brokenness and despair.

    ‘…by rediscovering the "forgotten" language  and practice of lament we can develop a mode of resistance that can help us overcome  the hopelessness and voicelessness that result from evil and suffering

    080282997x_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ What follows is an account of biblical lament – honest expression of rage, the language of victim not culprit, questions taken into the heart of God, language of outrage against the status quo,- and thus not the language of escapist theologies of denial, but of trust despite apparent contradiction. It is the cry of the human voice against dehumanising experience, and its function is the rehabilitation of the sufferer. Disordered life is reframed; disorientation moves to re-orientation; alienation begins the long search for reconciliation. Because lament points to a crisis of understanding more than a crisis of faith; it is prayer addressed to God. Lament is then an act of faith and the remainder of the chapter explores what that might mean for the individual and the community, as through compassionate accompaniment and liturgical honesty, God and the experience of the sufferer are held together in raging compassion and trustful lament.

    Building on the important work of Brueggemann and contemporary Psalm studies, Swinton provides in this chapter a key resource for pastoral theology – and a crucial corrective to the triumphalist fideism that signals a loss of nerve that can’t cope with pain. In liturgy, at worship, within the community of faith, radical suffering and the evil that often causes it, are to be confronted, acknowledged and given language in prayers of lament. Only so are human beings who suffer taken with sufficient theological and pastoral seriousness.

  • Amazing Grace

    Th1q Regret, remorse, repentance – hard to find the right word to describe the emotional and mental legacy of John Newton’s years of slave trading. It’s too easy to take pot shots at him and mock the man who wrote Amazing Grace because he didn’t immediately see the reality of the evil under his nose and give up that involvement. But in this film Albert Finney captures with brilliant perceptivenes, the rough sentimentality, the emotional complexity, the sense even after decades that his part in the horrors of trans-Atlantic slavery compounded his unworthiness and self-loathing- so for me Newton and his tears of too late guilt was a crucial questioning presence in the film. Newton’s portrayal adds a dimension of pathos to the reality of structural sin, is a counterpoint to the power of institutionalised inhumanity whose default mechanism is greed, and whose interest is to frustrate every attempt at rehumanising the way our world is, especially if the argument implies economic loss. The interests of the Crown in the revenue from the colonies meant that the link was easily made between the movement for abolition, and disloyalty, even sedition, aggravated by the war with France. Some of this complexity was worked into the film and prevents it from being a pious and politically naive hagiography.

    Th2q So, the film Amazing Grace, (complete with pipe and wind band with drums at the end! – a blatant anachronism I greatly enjoyed without embarrassment!!) – was well acted, with a script that almost entirely, but not quite, avoids the cringeable, and includes just enough of the spiritual burden of Wilberforce the serious evangelical, to make explicit the connection between political activism and inner piety. The relational network between Wilberforce and Newton, and Pitt, and Foxe, and Clarkson and Stephen, was a convincing mixture of political expediency, moral concern and radical risk.

    Th1g The almost entire white cast made me uncomfortable – yet I wonder how else to convey the sheer weight of the political argument that had to be won, and to portray the pervasive ignorance of the brutal realities linked indissolubly to national self-interest. The truth is, the presence of African people in the circles in which Wilberforce moved would be rare – and the moment in the film when he has the chance to win the freedom of a slave in a game of cards was a finely observed piece of moral theatre – wasted for me by him returning to the gambling den to sing Amazing Grace! I could understand the bewildered outrage of those whose tavern singing was silenced by a Russell Watson soundalike!

    Th2w_2 The love interest seemed to convey the cliche that behind every great man there is a stunning redhead! The moment in the film when she convinces Wilberforce to take up the fight again, and to marry her, seems to make that a historical hinge point – well, since it is a film for general release that will do a lot of good by bringing Wilberforce back to our attention, as Barry Norman might ask, ‘And why not?’

    I enjoyed this film. There is enough historical accuracy and detail to root it in the realities it tries to engage. At times it was very moving, and the scale of the issue, morally, spiritually and politically, is communicated with considerable and convincing care. Evangelicals were portrayed with just that amount of seriousness and involvement that seems justified by the facts – by the way the cameo portrayal of Hannah More was sharply observed – a compassionate snob with a sense of humour and an ethical  edge to her piety.

    Go see before it moves away from the big screen.

  • Re-readings

    0374249423_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ This collection of essays on books which authors read early in life, and later re-read, is a fascinating study of how we grow and mature and change. We develop new values, broader perspectives, are less taken in by the sense of our own importance, and become more self-consciously critical of what we used to absorb with joyful and liberal imagination. Some of these essays are therefore about adult disillusion, or at least, disappointment. These essayists discover that a book which is remembered as formative, delightful, exciting, or perspective changing, on being re-read decades later is discovered to be shallow, narrow, tedious perhaps even harmful.

    Others re-visit their chosen book and discover that the intervening years have given them deeper appreciation of what they earlier sensed, and wonder how they could have missed so much in their first reading. Perhaps all this is because we read what we read at a particular time and in life’s circumstances as they are given to us, and by the time we re-visit the book years later we are no longer the same person. We are more mature, worldly wise, more questioning – whereas we used to be children, naive, more trusting; the world was different and so were we, and we are remembering it from a different world too.

    Mdg21_2 I had the same kind of experience when I revisited a couple of the places where I grew up as a child. The burn wasn’t deep and dark and exciting to cross on the stepping stones, it was really a jumped up ditch; the trees I climbed weren’t of amazon rain forest proportions, they were – well, just wee trees. The wood of fir trees that was a half day’s trek away when I was 10 could be reached in fifteen minutes by car. The school (pictured here, one of 14 schools I attended) had become engineering offices. What changed – not the places, at least not only the places, but the person visiting. Reading this book called Rereadings, set off a related but different train of thought – about the books I have re-read, and what I gained in the re-reading. It’s a truism that as we get older we do less new reading and some more re-reading – perhaps so.

    Here in no order or categories, are some books I have read more than once – and may read again, and even again. Some are by authors whose other books I’ve also read. They wouldn’t be the same for any of us – and I’d be interested in what others think worth reading more than once. Or does no-one else re-read?

    Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, W H Vanstone

    My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

    The Outline of Literature, John Drinkwater

    The Interpretation of the New Testament, Stephen Neil and Tom Wright

    The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jurgen Moltmann

    The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

    Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, (ed) B. Holland.

    An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

    Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  • Using words with hopeful imagination

    Today it’s my turn to blog at Hopeful Imagination – some reflection on the Letter of James and ‘An Ecology of Words’. You can find today’s blog here.

    The Living Wittily contribution for today (posted below) continues my self-indulgence going on about reading, this time about novels. Trawling my memory for words that suggest going on and on about things, I can come up with ‘yabbling on’, ‘wittering on’, ‘yattering on’, new one in the office, courtesy of Joyce ‘vagueing on’ – I’m happy to add to this impressive list of semantic put-downs if you have any helpful suggestions??

  • a novel approach to reading and learning

    0099778017_01__aa240_sclzzzzzzz_ One of my friends doesn’t read novels. Why read about something that never happened, he asks? His preferred reading is history and biography, trying to understand the world and human behaviour by understanding the lives and times, the struggles and realities, of people in other places, at other times. However that only works if it is good history and good biography. Leaving aside whether anyone can or should write objective, impartial history – and whether even if possible, that would give us more insight than the passionately told narrative of what ‘happened’, the truth is,good history, good biography and a good novel are each capable of deepening our understanding, broadening our sympathy, stretching our imagination, sharpening our moral understanding, and extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

    0140036423_01__aa180_sclzzzzzzz_ I am an unembarrassed novel reader. Literature of the imagination, stories that grow out of the rich loam of human relationships, excursions into other times and places and lives, enable us to enter worlds otherwise inaccessible, and to observe and consider what other people’s lives, (and perhaps our own) are about. I used the word ‘good’ – not exactly a term of academic precision, thank goodness! Novel reading for me has nothing to do with analytic literary deconstruction – a good novel is capable of doing for us some of the work mentioned above:

    deepening our understanding,

    broadening our sympathy,

    stretching our imagination,

    sharpening our moral understanding,

    extending our knowledge of who we are, where we are and perhaps even why.

    Limiting myself to just one book by some of my favourite authors, here is a list of good novels that I’ve read more than once.

    The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok

    The Deptford Trilogy, Robertson Davies

    The Patchwork Planet, Anne Tyler

    A Burnt Out Case, Graham Greene

    Father Melancholy’s Daughter / Evensong, Gail Godwin

    Grace Notes, Bernard MacLaverty

    An Equal Music, Vikram Seth

    Unless, Carol Shields

    Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver

    The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery