Living Wittily

Review of a New Psalms Commentary - Another Good One.

The Book of Psalms. Nancy deClaisse-Walford, Rolf A. Jacobson, Beth LaNeel Tanner. (Grand rapids: Eerdmans, 2014) 1051 pages ($60)

This book has xxii pages of preliminaries, 1010 pages of text and 41 pages of indices. It is written by three authors each of whom is a significant player in a vibrant and energetic generation of Psalms scholars working new seams of scholarship and bringing out of the riches of the Psalms treasures old and new. Psalms commentaries compete in a crowded field and their usefulness will depend on (i) whether the authors bring something new into the discussion; (ii) who is consulting and reading it and for what purpose; (iii) how it compares to viable alternatives.

So far as (iii) above is concerned, its closest rival in the field of Evangelical scholarship is the work of VanGemeren, published by Zondervan and recently revised in the Expositor’s Bible Commentary and running to over 1000 pages. It too deals with exegetical analysis and textual probing, historical and contextual details and theological reflection. Another rival is the three volumes of John Goldingay, published by Baker, which likewise brings traditional disciplines to bear on these rich and robust texts, but in the hands of an innovative and independent thinker with a firm commitment to the Old Testament as Christian Scripture, and as a confessed Evangelical. Allen Ross has already published two of a projected three volume exposition published by Kregel and also seeking to fit that perhaps too ambitious defined market of scholar, student and preacher. Given the Evangelical commitments of the New International Commentary on the Old Testament (NICOT), this volume on the Psalms inevitably has a number of similar commitments and scholarly presuppositions to these three substantial presences in the field. So what does the NICOT bring that the others have missed? How does the approach of the three authors differ from VanGemeren, Ross and Goldingay?

Having used all these commentaries now, it becomes clear that this NICOT volume pays more particular attention to the canonical shape of the Psalter and recent study of how and why it is edited and formed in its canonical order. This has significant implications for how texts are read and understood in their internal relations within the Psalter, and also for the intra-textual possibilities within the wider canon. Given there are three authors of this commentary, and they have split the Psalms between them, there are three different styles and approaches to the Psalms each has been allocated, raising the issue of comparison in the quality and depth of treatment. This also makes for a diversity of voices and this is no bad thing for a book itself diverse and complex. Jacobson in my view offers most help to those who want to see the connections between exegesis, hermeneutics and exposition. His Reflections section is thoughtful, avoids moralising and superficial homiletic hints, and is theologically alert and informed. He is the only one of the three who has such a section. The other two embed their theological reflection in the flow of their exegetical treatment, and the result too often is a token sentence or two of application or suggested theme. The editor should have encouraged a more consistent approach.

Decisions about detail of treatment sometimes appear arbitrary, especially since the following page allocation includes the translated text. Psalm 23 has just under 9 pages, Psalm 51 just over 5, Psalm 103 has 9, Psalm 119 has 7 pages of comment, excluding the translated text, Psalm 121 has 3, and the entire Psalms of Ascent, 120-134 a mere 54 pages averaging 3.5 pages each including the text. Jacobson and Tanner are typically fuller, Walford nearly always the most economical. This gives the commentary an unevenness of attention. Psalm 119 is a problem for commentators because of its length, construction, complexity, repetitiveness and subject matter. By far the most satisfying treatment is the 70 pages in Goldingay, while Brueggemann manages 3 pages! But in this level of commentary more is needed than is given on Psalm 119. Each Psalm is signed by the one who wrote the exegesis. An annoying consequence is that each Psalm begins on a new page, even if the previous page only has a few lines printed on it. This means the book has the equivalent of approximately 80 blank pages – could these not have been used to advantage in a more substantial exposition of Psalm 119? If that adds a few dollars to the price it would be worth it.

Alternatively, since almost every Psalm has a blank space after its entry, could there not have been some attempt to include a conversation with the tradition of Psalms reception in the Church? The index has Gunkel, Mowinckel, Westermann and Gerstenberger so the form critical tradition is well represented. But no single reference to Augustine, Aquinas, or Calvin, (though Luther is cited 16 times) or to the wider Patristic, Monastic and Reformation traditions comes close to what C S Lewis called chronological snobbery”. 

One particularly strong feature is a fresh translation supported by copious textual notes; all three writers are deeply schooled in the text, and have enjoyed the collaborative enrichment of working together for years on this commentary. Given that each section has been considered by three closely allied scholars, there is a sense that the final product has been carefully sifted and crafted. It is free of technical jargon and exegetical in-speak and is readable, accessible and carries an overall authority that comes from the authors’ familiarity with the texts and the conversations they inspire. There is little doubt in my own mind that this is a significant addition to the field of Psalm studies, not because it supersedes Goldingay or VanGemeren, but because it supplements them. Yes there will be duplication if you have all three and use them together, but there are significant differences of emphasis and exegetical style. These are rich, deeply dyed and thickly textured, sometimes unruly, often obstinate texts, in addition to which they are a treasure of the church and a deep abyss of possibility and demand. My own inclination is to read widely and deeply, comparing and questioning.

For example this NICOT volume read alongside Brueggemann’s recent one volume commentary, and Clinton McCann’s excellent contribution in the New Interpreter’s Bible would make for a fairly engaged three-way conversation. But I wouldn’t want to be without J L Mays, Artur Weiser, Robert Davidson and John Eaton and one or two of the older still experts on the theology and text of the Psalms. I intend to read my way through this commentary; it is as readable as that. For now my rating is a comfortable 4 stars. If you have VanGemeren and or Goldingay do you need this volume? That depends on who you are and what you use commentaries for, point (ii) raised earlier. Preachers will be glad of a substantial one volume commentary, up to date, alert to the relation of the Psalms to the life of the Church, and written by three scholars who clearly love and live in these texts. Scholars will want to consult the translation, notes and supporting exegesis which I found full of surprises and insights. Those who love commentaries, and I am one of them, will be glad of another addition to a commentary series that has established a reputation for faithful scholarship exercised within a faith commitment to the inspiration of Scripture.

Who would be a preacher?

I was preaching up the coast yesterday morning and arrived in Peterhead early. A Macdonald's cappuccino to go, and then the short drive down to the harbour view. So. Cappuccino in hand, the sun still early rising, listening to Sarah Brightman singing Ave Maria and hitting impossibly high notes, being watched by a row of man-eating seagulls perched along the rail in front of the car, I was left wondering about the oddness of it all.

At 9.37 I guess a lot of the good Peterhead folk would sensibly be in their beds. But here I was, 40 miles from home, admiring the view, drinking from a disposable carton with a plastic lid with a hole in it, sunglasses on to deal with the glare, listening to a Schubert sacred composition sung by the first lead part in the Phantom of the Opera, and being reminded of how Alfred Hitchcock used the unblinking malice and blaring alarm call of seagulls to spook those first time audiences who thought birds were harmless!

But that's preaching for you. Sometimes you go out of your way to be with folk so you can share from your own heart, open up some of your thinking and feeling, with considered and determined humility hold on to a text long enough to touch on the miracle of how Scripture becomes once again to each of us, a word from God. Preaching isn't something done; it's more an expression of who you are. Not words, an event, not so much spoken as happening. Less a gift you happen to have, more a calling you can't refuse. Never a playing after power, always a willingness to be played, and be a player, in the orchestra of God.

So as I sat there listing the incongruities, I became aware that the greater incongruity is to have such treaure as the the Gosepl of Jesus in earthen vessels like those who are called to preach. The Apostle Paul with his usual diplomacy laced with pragmatism, said to the Christians in the Roman house churches, "For I long to bring you some spiritual gift....that is that we might mutually encourage one another." Preaching is never the mere, sole, private gift of the preacher. To preach is to be trusted by those who hear. And the best of sermons depends on the responsiveness in the hearts of the people, and the intellectual welcome that is a mind open to new truth, humble about being reminded of old truth, honest enough to receive truth hard to take, and yet with enough faith to let those truth carrying words, in all their inadequate articulation, be transformative, subversive, comforting, reconciling, reconfiguring and ultimately life changing. 

And it works. But only, note this, only, because, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

...the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

All this from sitting enjoying a cappuccino and wondering at the joyous oddity of God's Grace, the well practised foolishness of human preaching, and the ridiculously generous privilege enjoyed by the preacher.

The painting is a cartoon by Raphael, Paul Preaching at Athens.

Reading C S Lewis's Science Fiction at Christmas

Over Christmas I've been reading C S Lewis. I haven't had one of his books off the shelves for a while, and his space trilogy I read long ago. I've just finished Out of the Silent Planet, and found it a strange and attractive story, old fashioned in its narrative structure, political incorrectness at times off the scale, characters nearer caricature than convincing weight bearers of the story. But the imagination to write what is effectively a moral fable, and to draw the reader into an alternative reality where Lewis persuades us to believe the frankly unbelieveable is why his books remain in print. We are persuaded to conceive the possibility of disembodied personality, counter intuitive affective responses to creatures normally repulsive to our tastes and aesthetics, and to do all this with a background mythology resonating with Christian theological themes of sin and evil, judgement and redemption, creation and uncreation and new creation.

Sometimes questions which haunted Lewis himself are evident in the telling of the story and the conversation of the characters. In a discussion of time and memory, pleasure and sorrow, one of the creatures is puzzled by the human propensity to possess, repeat, hold on to whatever briongs pleasure, thereby reducing the significance and joy by diluting it with repetition. The creature asks, "How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back - if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?" As a way of welcoming each day gratefully as gift and being content to live in the joy or pain of the moment and thr reality that is now, there are few more telling and moving questions. Wisdom sometimes exudes almost unconsciously from lewis when he is at his best.

The book was written in 1938. Reading it reminded me of the dated and contrived production of the 1960 film the Time Machine. Our contemporary familiarity with advanced technologies such as AI, nuclear science, genetic science, IT and the now ubiquitous electronic devices which reconfigure the very nature of communication, are so far ahead of Lewis's science fiction range that there is an inevitable naivete about his portrayals of human technology, scientific theory and cosmology. However the core of the story as fable and construal of human ethical failures and dilemmas remains as a moral narrative which still delivers. In any case I'm glad to have read it again.

Going to the Stable, "Hoping It Might Be So"

The Oxen

             Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Christmas celebrations sometimes resent uncertainty. Which is a pity. Sometimes God isn't so easily found, so readily available, so certainly there. If we're not careful our Christmas certainties divert us from those deeper realities shrouded in mystery, and which have more to do with longing than finding, are interrogative mood rather than indicative, and which give due place to a yearning that just may never be fully assuaged, thank God.

Those first shepherds were "sore afraid", and the idea that they had a theological epiphany and did a fun run to Bethlehem without a backward glance is wishful thinking, not narrative faithfulness. The three Magi followed the star, not because it was an astrological sat-nav, but because such movements in heaven were portentous, and for scientists such as they, you followed the data even into danger. Mary said yes, and sang the Magnificat, but her heart was stabbed through with the anguish of a mother whose child is forever flesh of her flesh, and whose future is beyond her power to guarantee.  

That's why that old doubter Thomas Hardy's poem jerks us back from the brink of mere sentiment, urging us to take our hearts seriously enough to take our minds seriously. Those last two lines of his poem are the true confession of one who never lost that inner hankering after meaning and comfort, but whose courage and honesty became a confession of hope laced with doubt, or doubt lined with hope. Sometimes in our lives we don't walk into a stable bathed in a light that makes it all make sense; and yet, sometimes too, out of the gloom, comes the cry of the Christ child and the soft whispering of His Mother. So we enter, and kneel, hoping it might be so.

Oh yes. I too love and sing till I'm hoarse of those events that speak of the deep reality at the core of existence, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God....and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." My life is lived in the truth of that universe transforming claim. Oh yes, "Light and life to all he brings, / risen with healing in his wings...pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel." This "Outcast and stranger, Lord of all" is indeed God come to us in the vulnerability of newly born humanity. And that is precisely the point; Christmas doesn't make us invulnerable to all that life throws at us. But in the gloom and uncertainty of that stable, under that star, we encounter One who was rich and for our sakes became poor, cradled in the arms of a teenage girl who has just given birth to the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. But to those who knelt it doesn't look that way; it doesn't feel safe, comforted and complete. No wonder poor old Thomas Hardy, despite his embedded doubts, made his way into the gloom and smell of the nativity, humbly, uncertainly, harried by questions, and "hoping it might be so".

And so do we. Kneeling in hope, trusting despite appearances, embracing our questions and owning the deep yearnings that make us alive with love and compassion for this God-loved world, "O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord...."

When Suffering and Sorrow Feel Like the Longest Night and Shortest Day

Jane Kenyon's poem, At the Winter Solstice, describes the effects of the longest night and the shortest day. It's easy to be negative about the mathematics of light, shortest day, longest night. But light isn't amenable to clocks; whether they go back or forward the sun still shines. The spinning of the earth, the pull of the moon, the orbit around the sun, these determine our allotted daylight and night. 

The pines look black in the half

light of dawn. Stillnes…

While we slept an inch of new snow

simplified the field. Today of all days

the sun will shine no more

than is strictly necessary.

This, the first stanza declines to be negative. The clue is in that last word, necessary. Light is necessary for life, and the sun will shine. As for the second last word. We live in a TV saturated culture where the word 'strictly' evokes quite different, less portentous, and more transient concerns! It's well into Advent: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light...the true light, that lightens every person, has come into the world."

The sun will shine no less than is strictly necessary is not what she wrote. This wise poet recognises that for some folk the sun doesn't always shine no matter how pleading the prayers or desperate the hopes. Or so it can seem.

Some full time carers, exhausted by the demands of their own loving, work on and on, driven by that potent mixture of guilt at not doing more, and love that wants to do its best.

People struggling with various forms of addiction, and their decision time without number to quit, to change, to reclaim their freedom, dignity and self worth. And still the night goes on, and light is hard to find.

Grief is one long, long night of looking for enough light to go on living by. Hope isn't extinguished, but for now it lacks the fuel of possibility, opportunity and new beginnings. Bereavement is one of the longest nights in the human calendar.

Modern praise songs lose much by their over-positivity, and their lack of accommodation to the soul shadowing realities of many who come to worship. Earlier hymn writers seemed to have a more mature range of emotional options. Maybe our so light ridden existence, flattened by fluorescent, illumined by light emitting diodes (LED), has made us less familiar with darkness, less sure of how to deal with those overshadowing experiences that are part of the rhythms of life. Those emotional long nights and short days are as much part of our existence as the lengthening and shortening days throughout the seasons, dictated not by our mood, but by gravitational pull and the orbiting spin of our planet. Amongst those earlier hymns I like this one, and in particular, this verse; a good late Advent verse:

Long hath the night of sorrow reigned,

the dawn shall bring us light:

God shall appear and we shall rise

with gladness in his sight 

 

Peshawar is an Obscene Gesture of Defiant Despair. Kyrie Eleison

There are moments in life when sadness descends beyond our usual register of pain, and we begin, but only begin, to feel the reality of Isaiah’s words throbbing with unexpected and personal disorienting anguish, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” The news from Peshawar is such a moment, slicing into our lives with savage disregard for our usual screening mechanisms, and exposing our hearts to the unassuageable suffering of those other people, who belong to our human family, whose times in history we share, and whose children have been massacred.

According to a Taliban statement this was a revenge attack on a school for children of the military, carried out by men whose own children and families were killed in the military action against militant militias in Pakistan. So it is claimed. Is that some kind of attempt at explanation? How do we follow the savage logic that offers such an inane and insane justification for murdering 132 children and 9 adults, numbers likely to rise further? The slaughter of the innocents, for whatever reason, is an evil born of fear, hate and despair. Fear of the enemy, hatred of those who are ‘other’, and despair of life itself – hence the calculated rage and essential evil of those whose greatest joy is the destruction of life in an obscene gesture of defiant despair.

As a Christian my tears flow from a heart unable at present to interpret itself. Baffled sadness, hard to acknowledge rage, hope confronting despair, desolation overwhelming any sense of consolation, streams of emotion and thought and prayer coalescing into a river of grief. I recall Paul’s use of Isaiah, when that same prophet looked on desolation and told it to God, “For your sake we face death all day long, we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered…” The killing of defenceless children by heavily armed parents of other dead children is as tragic now as ever or anywhere. Tonight, prayer seems such a feeble retort to such tragedy. But nevertheless. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….we are ministers of reconciliation….Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

So for those who have died, for bereaved parents, for a region in shock and anger and grief, I pray that were the earth is once more without form and void, and darkness is upon the face of the deep, may the Spirit of God move, and once more may God say, “Let there be light.” Kyrie eleison.

For those who plan and plot murder as the language of hate and fear translated into violence, who seek vengeance through the murder of children and unarmed teachers, I pray that minds and souls covered by such darkness upon the face of the deep, may be turned towards mercy and peace and the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all. Kyrie eleison.

Contemplation as Necessary Time Wasting For Followers of Jesus

The contrast between the contemplative and the active as styles of christian discipleship has an ancient and more or less homoured history in Christian thought and practice. The classic domestic scene where Martha works her pan out in the kitchen and Mary sits at Jesus feet engrossed in whatever Jesus is saying gives a foundational image to the contrast. Vermeer, in what I think is one of his too easily underrated paintings has a quite different take on the discipleship of the kitchen as opposed to the discipleship of the footstool. That loaf of bread is central to the picture and its eucharistic significance unmistakable. Somebody has to nourish, do the needful. I know, Jesus says one thing is needful, and he doesn't mean baking the loaf. His put down of Martha by saying Mary has chosen the better part shouldn't be too quickly seized on though. 

We live in an age of time poverty, time management and time miserliness. By which I mean there isn't a lot of space and time in contemporary existence for folk to "choose the better part and do the one thing needful". Mainly because we have evolved a culture of endless energy expenditure, and we have bought into it with eyes wide open. We have reconfigured our life priorities so that the things that are needful are productivity, efficiency, time-saving, multi-tasking and in which we admire speed, profit, status and whatever else our bondage to the market might earn. Contemplation is time wasting to the consumer mentality; contentment deprives the market of its power; silence and solitude are just so difficult to achieve in the noise and crowdedness of contemporary life. 

I was thinking about all this again while reading Divine Discontent, one the newest studies of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. The chapter on Merton the contemplative doesn't say much that is new, nor does it need to do so. Merton knew perfectly well the dangers of contemplation as escapism from life and its problems, ours or other people's. His answer needs to be heard by the contemporary church, and by each Christian community. Silence, solitude and contemplation are the dispositions which make it possible for God to be heard above the noise of our wanting. Contemplation creates space in thought and feeling for those concerns that lie light years beyond our own security, satisfaction and self interests - the concerns of God for a loved but broken world.

The contemplative is the one whose time of reflection and listening equips the mind and conscience to respond with integrity, immediacy and ethical urgency to issues such as those raised by the recent CIA report on torture as a State sponsored weapon. To be quiet is not the same as quiescence; to be inactive is not passivity; to contemplate is not to withdraw from the world, it is to immerse the mind and soul in the hurt and brokenness and wounds of the world. To love the world as God does, and to see it through the eyes of the Crucified God

In the same way, to be active in caring, faithful in protesting, outspoken on behalf of the poor, vulnerable and unjustly treated, need not mean we live only out of our own inner resources of conscience, emotion and thoughtful anger. That loaf in Vermeer's painting is unbroken, but no one looking at the painting can miss its significance about the bread of life, the broken bread given for the world. We are nourished in the Eucharist, sustained in those times deliberately taken to open ourselves to the presence of God, to listen more carefully to the Words of the living Lord Jesus, to receive as the very essence of our living, the renewing nourishment of the Holy Spirit.  In the contemplative receptivity of Mary, and the active giving of Martha, there is a necessary balance. We only give what we have first received; and only as we give to others, do we truly receive what God has first given to us. Grace is never a private possession; it is always a shared gift. In a hungry world, the same goes for bread. Vermeer knew that.

Lost in Next!

Went into the Next Department Store in Aberdeen.

It is an amazing maze of clothes rails.

Many of them deeper in the shop are above my head height - my eye level is around 5 foot.

Yes it is, you doubters. My height is 5'3"max

What we wanted to buy was at the back of the store by a meandering path, through Narnia type rails of clothes.

I got separated from Sheila and decided to make my way to the door and wait for her to emerge.

Manda Quick, next time you're looking for a Prayer Labyrinth try the Next shop in the Bon Accord Centre.

I wandered lonely as a cloud and found myself amongst kettles, lingerie and stands of what Nanci Griffiths in her song about Woolworths would call 'unnecessary plastic objects.

No phone signal so no point trying to phone Sheila to tell her I might be gone for some time,

No need to panic Jim. You came in, you'll get out.

A small elderly woman examining house coats and slippers, and clearly gifted in the empathy department, noticing my confused bemused unamused search for an exit said, "Aye, you need a periscope in here."

Sure do!

Racks of clothes, piped music, ceilings glaring from wall to wall with shadowless lights, crowds of self-absorbed strangers on their mission to consume:

The opening lines of Dante's Purgatory suddenly find a context in my life!

Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost.

Tomorrow I preach on hope, using the text "The people who walk in darkness, have seen a great light."

Not a bad piece of sermon preparation, lost in a shop! Unable to see which direction to go!! No, not dark woods, over-illumined shops. So many lights that look the same so that instead of clarifying they confuse with their featureless anonymity, their brilliant sameness, their shadowless display.

Yes. Don't be daft. Of course I got home. Close thing though...................    

Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck and the Importance of Literature

“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

Maya Angelou was one of the wise people. Wisdom is an endangered species in the information age. Information, knowledge transfer, unlimited cyber- data accessibility. It has never been easier, or harder, to learn stuff. Easier in the sense of information finding and retrieval; harder in the sense of understanding, assimilating, applying and allowing what is learned to become transformative of who we are. 

Angelou is right. Reading of literature allows us to enter stories not our own, and find ourselves there. A novel is not only a story, it is a world into which we enter, with people we encounter, conversations we overhear and circumstances we experience in the imagination, rehearsing the questions, experimenting with answers, and like pilots in a flight simulator, practice the moves and manoeuvres that might some day save our lives.

Can that same process take place watching a film? Reading an average novel takes 8 hours assuming 40 pages an hour or a 300 page story.  Even a long film is over in 150 minutes. Going by my own experience, and with no claims it has to be so for anyone else, I've found some films to be just as transformative as reading a novel. That said, the experiences are not comparable at the points that matter most. Written stories depend on words being chosen and crafted; context being created and made credible, at least within the imaginative world of writer and reader. But I wonder if novels depend rather more on description and imaginative sympathy in the reader, to enable characters to form and grow and become living agents in the story.

Yes there''s the film script, and the good direction that enables characters in a film to emerge into their identity and seek to win the assent or resistance of the viewer, just as in the novel. But the written story has the great advantage of slowed down reading, re-reading, pausing between chapters for seconds, minutes, hours, even days, during which time the story slowly seeps into the mind and emotional biosphere of the reader.On the other hand, in less than two hours a film can so impress itself on the mind and memory, the conscience and emotions, that seeing it the first time is a memorable and world-view altering experience. I think of Schindler's List, The Mission, Patch Adams, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Kite Runner, The Shawshank Redemption, The Reader, as films chosen at random which at the very least demanded, or at least encouraged, some reconsideration of how I viewed the world, myself or other people.

I suppose the adaptation of a book for the screen is a good way of understanding some of the differences and similarities of these two experiences of story - story read, and story viewed. Reading Pride and Prejudice is an education in manners, motives and mischief, conducted by an  author whose scalpel is precise and whose skill exquisite in opening up the inner machinations of social control and personal exchange; watching the BBC adaptation is an altogether different experience, but done faithfully to the original, it can achieve much the same effect. I recently watched Gregory Peck as the lawyer in To Kill A Mocking Bird; would I have needed to read the book to feel the ethical earthquake rumbling through that whole film? 

In a world now incurably visual, even digital in its story-telling, the written word, literature remains an essential humanising and transformative medium. Having just read Lila by Marilynne Robinson, I am persuaded all over again, the written story remains a means of grace. But then, having watched To Kill a Mocking Bird in all its black and white and grey portrayals of human moral behaviour, I'm equally convinced that film has the same capacity to shake our assumptions and shatter our complacencies.  

When God Almighty Came to Be One of Us.

This is one of my favourite carols. Written in the late 1960's by Micahel Hewlett, a C of E Vicar wanting to update the context within which God comes amongst us. It goes to the folk tune The Keel Row, and the good vicar was delighted to hear of a carol service in India which finished using his carol as the children danced down ther aisle and out of the church.

When God Almighty came to be one of us,

Masking the glory of his golden train,

Millions of plain things kindled by accident

And they will never be the same again.

Sing all you midwives, dance all the carpenters,

Sing all the publicans and shepherds too,

God in his mercy uses the commonplace,

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Splendour of Rome and local authority,

Working on policy with furrowed head,

Joined to locate Messiah’s nativity,

Just wehre the prophets had already said.

Sing all you tax-men, dance the commissioners,

Sing civil servants and police men too,

God in his purposes uses the governments

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Wise men they called them, earnest astrologers,

Watching for meaning in the moving stars,

Science or fantasy, learned or laughable,

Theirs was a vision that was brought to pass.

Sing all you wise men, dance all the scientists,

Whether your theories are false or true,

God uses knowledge, God uses ignorance,

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Sing all creation, made for his purposes,

Called by his providence to live and move:

None is unwanted, none insignificant,

Love needs a universe of folk to love.

Close friends and strangers, ethnic minorities,

Old folk and young folk and families too,

God on his birthday, and to eternity,

God took upon himself the need of you.