Living Wittily

Poetry of the Passion

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

When funny money isn't funny

A City banker at Barclays netted £22 million last year

A City banker at Barclays netted £22 million in salary, shares and bonuses last year and owns stock in the group worth nearly £65 million, it has been revealed.

...

Bob Diamond, head of investment banking at Barclays, became one of Europe's highest-paid bankers after receiving the multi-million pound pay package, which dwarfed even chief executive John Varley's salary and bonus scoop.

...

Barclays, which is currently in merger talks with ABN Amro, said in its 2006 annual report that Mr Diamond was paid a basic salary of £250,000, with a £10.4 million cash bonus on top, plus £4.5 million in deferred shares, topped up with £7.7 million in cashed-in shares.

It also emerged that Mr Diamond owns shares in the group worth £64.9 million accumulated over his 11-year tenure at Barclays and is in line for a further bonus of up to £15 million next year, not including the 2.3 million shares he is set to gain in the group as part of an ongoing performance-related deal.

The above piece of nonsense (I mean in the sense of not making sense on any scale, register, or list of values I can find) is taken from here. The explanation given by Barclay's is that Mr Diamond (the name's appropriate anyway, is it no' just? Well no actually, the whole story is not just!) - well anyway, Mr Diamond makes them a lot of money. Oh, that's all right then. Now I could be accused of the politics of envy, and right enough, I didn't get £22 million last year. But I can see no valid moral or socially responsible case that can be made to justify such institutionalised inequity. This one man's salary would build a well equipped if modest sized school. Or is Mr Diamond's contribution to our society really worth the equivalent of a year's salary for 1000 trained nurses? And what would even half that salary achieve applied to any number of essential-for-life projects in developing countries?

I'm away to read Amos again - not that I don't know what he says - I just want to read it out loud and hear him say it, 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.'

Then I'm going to read Matthew's version of the Sermon on the Mount and consider the lilies........and the birds....and then Luke's much more in your face version, 'But woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort.'

Reading Books: a substantial world both pure and good

“Dreams, books, are each a world;

and books, we know,

are a substantial world,

both pure and good. Round these,

with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,

Our pastime and our happiness will grow.” (Wordsworth)

Margaret (an education and motivation for learning specialist) is wondering about the different ways of reading we have all developed. She is especially intrigued by how some people (me included) read several books at once - not all together, but moving from one to the other and back again. It's an interesting question(s) - how do we read and why do we read as we do? Thinking about it, I do usually have several books going at the same time, but that can be governed by a number of considerations.

I have set times in the day when I am likely to be reading - they aren't the only times I read, but reading is about the only thing I do at those times. Those who observe the details of my blog have noticed the early posting times - I've even had a row for it from Graeme. But because my mind is active and alert early, for an hour in the morning I tackle the substantial book on my desk. Substantial means intellectually demanding, taking me to new ideas, challenging my comfortable assumptions. That's when I'm reading John Swinton's, Raging with Compassion, at present for example. So I always have an early morning brain workout!

Alongside that I'm likely to be reading at least a couple more. Functional reading for my teaching is mostly done throughout the week at times wrestled free of other responsibilities that can often seem more 'essential' than the reading that informs a lecture and keeps it current. Currently Migliore's Faith Seeking Understanding, Joy Macdougall's book on Moltmann (on sidebar), and a couple of Galatians commentaries, are lifted and laid around my desk.

If I'm writing something, then material is chosen by the subject and the reading clusters around the writing time - whenever that too can be extracted from the routine of academic admin and teaching. Recently baptist stuff (small b in deference to Stuart) and George Macleod have cluttered my desk.

Novels,( a good murder story - Henning Mankell just finished), poetry, biography (and philosophy I'm afraid) and other reading-what-I-like-when-I-feel-like-it, type books is usually at night -often the book preferred to the telly. Not always though - I can't read a book and watch the telly. I have a friend whose daughter can read a book, watch the telly and listen to her Ipod without blowing any mental fuses! And for as long as I remember I've read in bed - but I am getting more and more like those dolls whose eyes are weighted to close as soon as they lie flat!

Now all that said - the question of how you read several books at once isn't really answered. It probably isn't timetable or routine or technique that's the main issue - but the way different minds work. Some folk simply don't move easily in and out of alternative worlds of fiction, biography, history, theology, poetry, psychology or whatever our different interests are. Concentration and afterthought aren't easily preserved if too many things are going on at once, and there can be a feeling of superficial non-engagement:

The elephant is a bonnie bird

it flits from bough to bough

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

So is it a habit that can be learned; or a difference in how our minds process and assimilate what we read?

Who retains most - the one book at a time reader, or the several on the go at once reader?

What do the rest of you think?

Why do you read as you do?

Are you a one book or a several book reader?

Do you retain what you read and manage to keep the plots / arguments / worlds / of each book separate?

And isn't the question of purpose important - Why I'm reading what I'm reading - for information, formation, recreation, inspiration?

One closing thought at this stage (cos I'm going to post a bit more on this) - having several books on the go at once, is that a multi-disciplinary way of learning, or is it pretentious dilettantism? Hmm? Come on Jim - own up - how much of that suff actually sticks?

Whodunnit as a study of sin

Just finished Henning Mankell's Firewall. The crime genre of fiction is an education in the experimental theology of sin. I heard Mankell interviewed on the radio, when he discussed his take on contemporary life, particularly the dissolution of moral disctinctions in key areas of human development and technological advance.

This novel is about murder, eco-terrorism, the power of the internet and the dependence of global financial and business institutions on computer security and integrity, the impact of global banking on the poorest nations - and at the centre is Chief Inspector Kurt Wallander, a flawed, fallible, likeable loner. That's as near to cliche as Mankell comes - he writes with psychological subtlety,convincing detail, narrative knowhow, and a refreshing lack of gratuitous expletives! This is narrative theology that IS readable!!

Play it again

Just watched Jo Brand on the new BBC programme Play it Again. She accepted the challenge to learn the organ in four months, and play Bach's Toccata on the five manual organ at the Royal Albert in London, in front of 8,000 people at the Christmas carol extravaganza. Along the way she played on the Blackpool Wurlitzer for some ballroom dancers,(see picture), and played Ave Maria at a wedding - and re-connected with her mother through the music.

As good a reality celebrity programme as I've seen - human and humane, funny and moving, and a fine example of how TV can provide insight into people's loves and fears and hopes and vulnerabilities, their loveability and annoying traits. And all without being either vulgar or voyeuristic, and leaving me at least with a feeling of admiration and contentment that, but for a couple of wobbles, she pulled it off!