Arty highlights

A day off (apart from a meeting from 10am to 2pm regarding the process for appointing a new Dean of Bradford, followed by a trip to the best physiotherapist in the world ever…) and a moment to note the arty highlights of the last couple of weeks amid all the work stuff.

German friends sent me the new CD by a band called Silbermond. For English ears German rock is an acquired taste. Apart from Herbert Grönemeyer, who I once saw perform in Linz, Austria, not much gets me listening frequently. In a week I have listened to Silbermond's Himmel Auf a dozen times. A great female lead vocal is backed by a tight band and some effective guitar work. And the lyrics (which I have just read through) are sensitive, searching, sometimes poignant expressions of longing for depth in a superficial world. Try 'Wofür', for example. I love it.

I caught Kristina Train on the telly and loved her voice. Her new album is called Dark Black and deserves a wide hearing. Much of it seems to me to be stripped back in order to allow her voice to fill the space. Again, there is a poignant beauty to songs which are deceptively simple. And it brightens up after the opening track cheerfully declares: “Dark black is the colour of my life since you've been gone.” Lovely stuff.

Swiss friends staying with us recently left us a French DVD of a 2010 film called Little White Lies (Les petits mouchoirs). It is all about a group of friends who, when another friend is badly hurt in a road accident, discover how shallow their relationships actually are. What appears to be strong only conceals the realities each one is afraid to reveal, thereby putting a question mark over the reality of love, trust and friendship. It is funny, sad, entertaining… and features the excellent Marion Cotillard (La Vie en Rose, Inception) and Jean Dujardin (The Artist).

Books? Still reading Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies alongside Verstehen Sie das, Herr Schmidt? – a book of informal interviews with former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Loving both.

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Loving your neighbour

Back to Fulbert Steffensky again.

As indicated in recent posts from the United States, I have been reading a book of biblical reflections by the German theologian Fulbert Steffensky entitled Schöne Aussichten: Einlassungen auf biblische Texte. He brings a fresh perspective to some familiar texts and I haven’t read anything yet that was even slightly tedious. But, thinking about some of the questions raised about our culture, society, young people and values, Steffensky reminded me of a translation matter I had read a long time ago, but seem to have forgotten.

Jesus picked up the injunction in Leviticus 19 that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. Except that, according to Steffensky and others, he didn’t. What the words actually mean is:

Love your neighbour, he is as you are.

In other words, rather than inviting all sorts of twentyfirst century narcissistic agonising over whether I can love anyone else if I don’t love myself (or am not first fulfilled in myself), the point is that I am to love my neighbour because he/she and I are one. We have a common humanity. We are both made ‘in the image of God’. And that goes for my enemies as well as my friends, the aliens and strangers as well as my family, the weird as well as the wonderful.

At one point Steffensky says:

If I say: ‘They are not like us,’ then we are also saying: ‘We can do to them what should never be done to us.’

He then quotes the Jewish poet Erich Fried, who was once asked in a television programme how he would define a Neo-Nazi. He replied:

A Neo-Nazi is a human being who gets toothache like I do, who suffers for love like I do, and who can weep like I can.

The difference between us does not obviate this common humanity which must lie at the root of any Christian ethic. Steffensky is thinking through the assumptions about human value that underpin an ethic worth building on. To do as the tabloids do and portray appalling criminals as ‘monsters’ – thus making them ‘not like us’ – is to avoid the hard critique of ourselves as well as the societies we create. It is a self-justifying form of distraction therapy.

Steffensky goes on to explore the implications of this, rejecting along the way the suggestion that he is pleading for a ‘contentless tolerance or general relativism’. Rather, he warns those who wish to eliminate ‘difference’ against the temptation to ‘clean up’ the world – in fact, one of the glaringly obvious things Jesus challenged: the dangerous obsession with purity that eliminates the ‘unclean’. German history has relatively recent experience of what this looks like.

It might be useful if an English publisher would produce Steffensky’s book here.

 

Shipwrecked at the stable door

I saw a t-shirt in Chania, Crete, yesterday that asked a perfectly reasonable question: ‘Three reasons for being a teacher? 1. June; 2. July; 3. August. It must be the Greek version of English jokes about teachers always being on holiday. Knowing teachers the way I do – I go into schools most weeks – they deserve every day of holiday they get… but they could do with having them spread out a bit more effectively (and getting away from the ridiculous summer pattern we have inherited from the times when the kids had to be released from the classroom to help bring in the harvest).

I had no idea that Crete gets rubbish weather for most of the year. I just assumed it would be permanently sunny – after all, I have only ever seen sunny photos of the island. No wonder they take June, July and August as school holidays, though: too hot, full of tourists and a winter of cold and rain to look forward to.

Crete is where the Apostle Paul got into sailing problems and ended up shipwrecked in Malta. No wonder he was suspicious of Cretans. He wrote to the first Bishop of Crete, Titus:

It was one of them, their very own prophets, who said, ‘Cretans are always liars, vicious brutes, lazy gluttons.’ That testimony is true…

Not in my experience so far, it isn’t. Not one for holding a grudge or a prejudice, old Paul, was he?

Knossos (ruins of the ancient Minoan culture) was excellent. Bit of a problem for those who think the world is only six thousand years old, though: people have lived here since c.7000BC…

Anyway, apart from the touring and swimming and other fun stuff, so far I have relaxed and read the following books:

• Elie Wiesel, Night
• Robert Harris, Lustrum
• Robert Harris, The Ghost
• Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
• William Boyd, Ordinary Thunderstorms
• Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory

What unites these books – all considerations of the human condition under stress – is their treatment of guilt. The complexity of the human condition means that trite solutions to the haunting and debilitating destructiveness of guilt sound hollow. Bonhoeffer knew what he was talking about when, in his most famous book Discipleship (Nachfolge), he condemns what he calls ‘cheap grace’. With the Nazi jackboot soon to descend on him with violent vengeance he eschewed easy notions of forgiveness or bland resolutions to serious ethical dilemmas. (After all, not only was he a brave theologian and pastor, but he was also a double agent implicated in the plot to assassinate Hitler.)

The shipwrecks of people’s lives provide the raw material for good novels and music. Another artist to grapple with the complexities of guilt and grace is Bruce Cockburn. In his great song Shipwrecked at the Stable Door, he writes – as only the poets can when the deep stuff of human living needs some expression in words:

 The man who twirled with rose in teeth
Has his tongue tied up in thorns
His once expanded sense of time and
Space all shot and torn
See him wander hat in hand -
“Look at me, I’m so forlorn -
Ask anyone who can recall
It’s horrible to be born!”

Big Circumstance comes looming
Like a darkly roaring train -
Rushes like a sucking wound
Across a winter plain
Recognizing neither polished shine
Nor spot nor stain -
And wherever you are on the compass rose
You’ll never be again

Left like a shadow on the step
Where the body was before -
Shipwrecked at the Stable Door

Big Circumstance has brought me here -
Wish it would send me home
Never was clear where home is
But it’s nothing you can own
It can’t be bought with cigarettes
Or nylons or perfume
And all the highest bidder gets
Is a voucher for a tomb

Blessed are the poor in spirit -
Blessed are the meek
For theirs shall be the kingdom
That the power mongers seek
Blessed are the dead for love
And those who cry for peace
And those who love the gift of earth -
May their gene pool increase

Left like a shadow on the step
Where the body was before -
Shipwrecked at the Stable Door

 

Telling a different story

I am writing this before Liverpool play Manchester United this afternoon. This is deliberate on my part. I cannot bear to be ‘public’ if Liverpool loses its fifth game in succession – especially if it involves the long-lamented Michael Owen playing any part in a United win. Call me feeble if you wish, but when it comes to anything bad happening to Liverpool and anything good happening to Manchester United (Chelsea, Arsenal, Everton, etc.) I am actually pretty … er … feeble.

When I was asked last week about Liverpool’s loss at home to Lyon in the Champions League, I boldly argued that this was simply yet another example of Scouse generosity – giving space for the little clubs to have their moments of glory after Liverpool had dominated European football for three decades. Of course, this would have to end before too long because generosity has its limits; but Liverpool’s critics should change the way they think about the current run of form and recognise instead the glorious generosity of a morally superior club … and be grateful.

I didn’t even convince myself. And now I’m worried about this afternoon’s game and the future of Rafa Benitez as Liverpool’s manager. When the club’s owners articulate publicly their support for the manager’s position, you can’t help feeling the severance package is already being worked out behind closed doors.

So, let me make a leap from one challenge to perceptions (of Liverpool’s ‘failure’ or ‘generosity’) to another.

Some time ago I was asked to write a book about Christmas – re-telling the story and reclaiming it for what it should be. Well, the result has now been published and has the following to commend it:

• It is short: only 75 pages.
• It is written in accessible language and should be easy to read and follow.
• It is written for people who might not be part of any church and, therefore, is written in language that isn’t ‘churchy’.
• It is a celebration of Christmas – even the dodgy accretions of a consumerist culture – that re-tells the story in different ways and tries to place it in the real lives we live in Britain during a financial recession.
• It has a nice cover.

People’s perceptions of Christmas can be weird – hence the bizarre staging of school nativity plays that include all sorts of characters who do not appear in the original story: lobsters, kangaroos, etc. God gets confused with Santa Claus, the ‘stable’ with Santa’s grotto, the shepherds and wise men with Santa’s elves… and so on. I was once told that the main character in the Christmas story was Cinderella.

So, we need to offer people a different ‘take’ on the over-familiar story that people think they know, but have forgotten. And the story needs to be told in a way that ordinary people can grasp – or be grasped by. And if churchy Christians hate the way I have written it (as some did my last book – which was also not written for them), then I have probably succeeded.

After all, we need to recognise that angels are not fairies, Santa is not Jesus, shepherds were dodgy, Magi were not kosher, Jesus grew up (and probably did cry) and carols sometimes give the wrong impression.

 

A view from afar

I’ve found a cafe in Kendal that has wi-fi if you buy a drink. I’ll be buying loads. The sky is emptying its load on the old town and walking in the hills is not an option.

What I love about holidays is the sense of perspective you get from stopping, reading, sleeping and thinking… all without the pressure of the next deadline or the next appointment. It frees the mind and lifts the soul. But is also sends me back into questioning my memories – which I’ll explain in a moment.

So far I have read Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father and am nearly half way through Philip Norman’s excellent John Lennon: The Life. What both books demonstrate is the complexity of any individual life. Obama’s search for his origins and his evolving ruminations on his own identity are beautifully recorded; but it is the emotive power of his emerging questioning that impresses most. I read this wonderful book reflecting constantly on how impenetrably and (ultimately) unresolvably the identity of any human being is constructed – shaped both by nature and nurture.

This makes me even more suspicious of the drive we all seem to have to categorise people or force them into conforming to a particular anthropological ‘shape’. What often looks ‘good’ always turns out to have a dark side, and vice versa probably. The oft-lauded community and extended family character of African society is shadowed by the lack of responsibility it engenders in favour of dependence on (or exploitation of) the ‘head’ (which means ‘most successful or affluent’) of the clan. Obama confronts this and it is hard to hear his speech in Ghana a week or tow ago without reflecting on his own experience in Kenya as it is recorded in the book.

Obama reflects on the origins of humanity in the Rift Valley and comments: ‘If only we could remember that first common step, that first common word – that time before Babel’ (p.357). Wherever human division manifests itself in all its greedy and self-promoting pettiness, that question needs to be heard.

I’ll come back to that in another post. But the thing about John Lennon is that Norman’s description of Lennon’s school days involves a roll call of people and places I grew up with. I also went to get my hair cut by Harry Bioletti at Penny Lane. Mr Burrows, formerly his English teacher at Quarry Bank, also taught me at the Holt Comprehensive. I remember him showing us an exercise book of poetry and doodlings by John Lennon, but this memory has been questioned by people who think I must be making it up. Philip Norman records it and my own doubts can be put to one side.

Lennon was complex, too. Reading about him, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for the complexity of his own upbringing, loves and losses. If such a mess can be made of one individual, how is it possible to generalise about anybody?

I actually think this is something Jesus rumbled in the Gospels – in the face of opposition from those who found that categorising people (in their own interests, of course) was politically or religiously more useful.

But for now, back to the valley where we don’t even have mobile phone signals…