Living Wittily

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.

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?

Baptists and the authority of Scripture.

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

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

Angel's Song

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Blogging, the sense of loneliness, and the current cultural mood.

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

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

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

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

..........................................

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

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

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

River Landscape to Emmaus

Three men walking,

dippers working the water,

the river

writing its monograph

on mosses

 

Later,

the two disciples

watch him break bread,

lightfingered,

backlit.

 

Not nonchalant exactly –

for love is nothing

if not improvised,

wounds troubling the light

the art of extremity

 

Me and my Bible - is there a problem with the possessive pronoun.

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

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

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

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

Good news for "an age of paranoia".

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

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

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

You might want to go look.

Too many sparrows are falling to the ground........

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

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

So the Bible about sparrows, providence and responsible living.

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

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

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

Sure my sparrows are my own,
Let ye then my birds alone,
Come poor birds from foes severe
Fearless come, you're welcome here,
My heart yearns at fate like yours,
A sparrow's life's as sweet as ours. 

When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?

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

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

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

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

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

Peace

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

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

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

       Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ouch! Remember Lot's Wife?

Lot's wife. She looked back didn't she? The sensible way to move forward is to face the front. Yes?

Walking to the car park at Braehead I heard a horn blast and a screech of tyres. I turned round to see what was happening. Like Lot's wife, I looked back. But I kept walking at a brisk pace. Since nothing happened I turned round to face forward. My timing has always been good. Whether it's hitting a dead ball, volleying a high ball, or heading a ball providing I could reach it, the important thing to generate force is to co-ordinate the speed of the projectile and the co-ordinated speed of body and head or foot at the point of impact.

My timing is still good. As I turned round, still walking briskly, the side of my face connected with alarmingly good timing with a large cold, hard, shiny steel lightpost!

##@@**@@##!

My eyebrow, my cheekbone and my jawbone, propelled by my body speed and given added impetus by my head turning to the front, all made a precise and simultaneous connection with the post.

Result? A cut eyebrow that will almost certainly be a black eye in time for sympathetic pastoral comment on Sunday, a bruised cheekbone and a tender jawbone. Oh, and a badly bruised ego

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm not a Jonathan Ross fan. So please note that the book pictured here is by one Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven: Yale, 2001). This book is utterly absorbing because based on original research, with masses of material organised around an overall theme, and then written with verve and an evangelistic zeal to persuade. Rose has unearthed and illustrated the significance of the working class autodidact - the self taught scholar whose learning is the result of self-motivation towards improvement and a latent yet persistent intelligence and hunger for knowledge that will not be frustrated by being denied social opportunity.

Books about reading are irresistible to the long confirmed and happily resigned to their personal fate bibliophile. But when such a book is also a window on social development and human aspiration, and in addition acts as a catalyst for recalling my personal memories and reinforcing some of my least negotiable political convictions, then it is given a space on the shelf reserved for books to be read straight through, without the diversion of anything else being read at the same time. This is a book for those drizzly, dreich weekends, to be read while fortified by the good things of life. Not piecemeal chapter a day lift and lay, but wholesale undiverted attention.

Rose explains and illustrates why it is that reading and learning has been such a a formative human activity these past couple of centuries. reading him you learn the importance of the Everyman Library, consider the significance of facts like this - Scottish weavers were amongst the most literate citizens of 18th and 19th C Scotland; (David Livingstone wasn't the only one who propped latin books on his weaver's beam). No wonder the Scottish Lowlands had 'one of the highest literary levels in the world in the late 18th century', creating a community in which the Waverley Novels and the poetry of Byron and Moore fired the minds and imagination of thousands of day labourers. And then there was John Christie 'the literary shepherd', who amassed a library of 370 volumes which included complete sets of the Rambler, Spectator and Tatler, and who was one of an entire culture of self-taught agricultural workers who used their isolation in the bothy to read. And much more of the same. 

But Jones is pursuing an even bigger goal - he is exploring how working folk read - read texts of all kinds, including books, newspapers, lectures, sermons, plays, films, radio broadcasts. In other words this is a book about how people excluded from elitist education, nevertheless learned for themselves how to read the world. This is a history of working class independent hermeneutics, in which Rose provides "an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves". But who did, and with remarkable social and historical consequences.

My two grandfathers could remember older Lanarkshire miners in Shotts, early in the Twentieth Century discussing the atonement, socialism and other "intellectual" questions at the coal face, while eating their "pieces".* And my grandmother, the wife of a miner, (who had full sets of Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and several editions of Burns), knew as much about the Waverley novels, the social context of Walter Scott, and was as aware of the distortions caused by such historical romanticising of Scotland's history as any academic expert of her own time. Of my four grandparents, she is probably most responsible for that wonderful gene that makes a love of reading hereditary!

* A "piece" in Scotland refers to the home made packed food workers took to their work. And a "play piece" the food taken to school in the absence of crisps, chocolate and other unheard of extravagances!