5 reasons for not blogging

1. Trying to prepare a half-appropriate sermon for the Closing Service of the Kirchentag in Hamburg on 5 May. But, my head is full of 'stuff'.

2. Trying to sort chapter of academic book for the most patient editor in the world. Need to source quotes, but am away from my books.

3. Currently speaking at a parish weekend in Cumbria – two talks done, one to go (tomorrow). And the big yellow thing in sky has emerged, bringing with it warmth, people and lack of concentration.

4. Trying to read TS Eliot's Four Quartets, but too many other things keep intruding. Like the progress of my hopeless fantasy league football team.

5. Tired. Nothing to say.

 

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Memories are made of this…

OK, it’s a tacky title from a tacky song. But, I was reminded of it during a fascinating cross-cultural session at the College of Bishops meeting in Oxford today.

Bishop Wolfgang Huber had made some great observations about the need for the church in an ‘aesthetic post-modern culture’ to find new ways of engaging people with Christian faith. In Peru all those being confirmed are required to memorise passages of the Bible, creeds and other texts. The Bishop’s point was that memorising might not be exactly trendy, but it is very effective.

It is the memorising that grabbed my attention.

Charles Wesley (or his brother…) once said that we learn our theology not from what we hear from the pulpit, but from what we sing. His point was that if you put a good tune to something, it is easier to remember. Then he got on and wrote hundreds of hymns to memorable and easily singable tunes.

(This once led me to observe in a different context that if you sing rubbish, you believe rubbish. It caused me endless grief when taken out of context.)

Wolfgang Huber suggested that we ought to agree on a selection of texts that all Christians should be required to remember – to commit to memory. I agree with him.

We no longer require children to learn poetry or songs. After all, anything can be looked up immediately on the phone; so, why go to the effort of memorising songs or poetry?

Well, I am useless at it. The only poetry I can remember in full is from the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band (Neil Innes) and it helpfully reads:

“I am such a pedant,
I’ve got the brain of a dead ant,
All the imagination of a caravan site…
But I still love you…”

Not exactly Shakespeare, but it stuck.

I need to think further about the power of memorising texts that become part of you. Many people have experienced the power of repeated liturgy: prayer that eventually becomes so much part of you that it prays you.

Requiring candidates for Confirmation to memorise a creed or the Decalogue or the Beatitudes might seem demanding. But, the question is whether we are demanding enough of young Christians and whether or not the memorising of texts would be helpful in maturing them in the faith.

This is not the same thing as indoctrination. It is about creating the space in which people can reflect on what has become part of their ‘vocabulary’ – their mental and spiritual language.

I will take this to the Meissen Commission at the end of this week – of which more anon.

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Location:Oxford

 

Who’s writing which script?

It’s uncomfortable reading about (and watching) the riots in England from a distance. It feels wrong to be away when such violation is going on – especially when the violence of a relative few is damaging the lives of the many for a generation.

It’s also unsurprising to hear the riots being used to justify contradictory ways of ‘reading’ the world: blame Coalition cuts, the bankers, liberal spinelessness, right-wing ‘oppression’ of the poor, feminism, social inequalities, unemployment, poor education, wrong education, socialism, the Smurfs… There seems to be a justification for every ‘ism’.

Whenever we read a text we do so through the lens of our contemporary experience. On holiday (having already disposed of one novel) I have just started reading a section each day from a book I picked up at the Kirchentag in Dresden in May this year: Schöne Aussichten- Einlassungen auf biblische Texte, by Dr Fulbert Steffensky.

In his introduction Steffensky describes two ‘imprisonments’ from which people need to be released: (a) the tyranny of the text that authoritatively and self-evidently controls our understanding and experience of the world, regardless of the reality of our experience; and (b) the tyranny of ‘one’s own heart’, the textless individualism that rejects the need for a narrative, a group, a language that opens us up to the world. Both are dehumanising and both wreak havoc with people’s lives.

Steffensky goes on to suggest that ‘texts’ or ‘narratives’ are vital for individuals and groups. That is to say, we all need something beyond our own individual experience and emotion that opens us up to (or confronts us with) a wider, bigger, stranger world that goes beyond our immediate subjectivism. The lack of such a narrative creates people who are rootless and meaningless, casting around to create meaning out of self-interest.

Christians are incorporated into a narrative that is both God’s and ours: “This is his story, this is our song” as the Eucharistic prayer has it. We live in and into the story of God’s generosity we read about in the biblical text – the point being that God’s people should increasingly reflect the nature of the God who gives himself for the world. Hence the injunction by Paul to ‘imitate Christ’.

Other groups and societies have taken other narratives and tried to live within and from them: for example, Communists, existentialists, anarchists, secularists, etc. The point is that we all need some narrative or other which gives a language for and a meaningful shape to our individual and collective lives.

Which brings me to the question through which I am reading Steffensky’s book: which narrative(s) are driving the people now rioting in England? To what stories or accounts of the world do they consciously or unconsciously appeal when burning cars or looting shops? Or do they not have one that transcends the purely functional one of power, narcissism or ‘respect’ – the questioning of which may justify any form of bad behaviour?

We can blame the churches for failing to establish the Christian narrative in our younger people, if we wish, but that won’t offer a solution. Churches cannot compel people to ‘come in’ or ‘own’ a story that is regularly dismissed in public as either irrelevant or embarrassing (usually by people who have never really encountered it). We can blame schools or the media or the shameless individualism of Margaret Thatcher, but none of that will help us repair the damage. Whatever we decide to throw at other people, the urgent need is to discover which narratives dominate and motivate our young people… and then learn to find a language with which to offer a better alternative.

It is no good to condemn what has gone wrong unless we can offer a realistic alternative that makes sense of the world, of our own experience, and links us to a greater community of human lives. Whichever narrative this might be, it will require (in Steffensky’s terms) a text that takes us beyond ourselves. In short, I believe (along with Steffensky) that we need to recover the Bible – not as an incontrovertible text of rules for keeping God happy and us in our place, but as a text to be taken seriously for intellectual curiosity, engagement, argument, imagination, poetic resonance, prophetic power: to offer a narrative in an against which the world might best be understood and lived.

And it needs to have big room for failure.

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Location:Philadelphia, USA

 

It’s not Shakespeare

It’s always an odd experience debating liturgy on the General Synod. Having been away for the last six years, not a lot seems to have changed.

How do you write poetry on a committee of 400 people?

This is the problem we had when we were ‘doing’ Common Worship a decade ago. Careful language is crafted… and then people pick away at it in order to remove heresy or imagination or to insert their crucial theological wordings. Then you get trade-offs to keep everyone happy.

No surprise that Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer reads like it was written by a single mind – and a single poet – and not referred to a committee.

I don’t see how this is going to change, though.

Ho hum.

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Location:York

 

The ‘singing’ thing

I am heading towards study leave starting in a few days time. First time ever and I can’t wait to get my head and heart refreshed in some space. So, on my way into meetings in London today I picked up the book of Leonard Cohen poetry I started ages ago – Book of Longing (Penguin, 2007) – and thought I’d dip into it. I think my attention span is reducing by the day at the moment.

Then I came across his poem Thing. It starts like this:

I am this thing that needs to sing / I love to sing…

It concludes as follows:

I am this thing

that wants to sing

when I am up against the spit

and scorn of judges

O G-D I want to sing

I am

 THIS THING THAT NEEDS TO SING

What is it about human beings that makes us want to sing? I remember Jim Wallis saying that when he and his colleagues were arrested in Washington DC they used to annoy the police officers who jailed them by singing all night. he said that you just can’t stop Christians singing. He is right (and not just about Christians).

 

One of the fallacies I grew up with in church was that God wanted to hear our praises at all times – even when everything is rubbish, we must praise God. When I grew up two things bugged me:

 

(a) I began to wonder what sort of God it was who urges his friends to lie through their teeth about what is going on in their lives and in their head. So, the worship leader would urge us to ‘leave the business of the day/week at the door of the church and bring our worship unencumbered by all the worries and troubles of life’… and I would think that was stupid.

 

(b) I read the Psalms and found expressions of regret, complaint, lament, shouting at God, questioning, whingeing, praising, asking, and just about everything else that goes into real life in the real world with real people in real relationships. Psalm 137 (‘By the rivers of Babylon’) wasn’t exactly a load of laughs.

 

Again, it is the poets and artists who put their finger on the truth. Human beings are made to be honest with God and each other – singing different songs at different times of life and not worrying about whether God can cope with our complicated emotions.

 

Tonight I feel like repeating Cohen’s lines. I’m just not entirely sure which song I want to sing.

 

Cheerfulness breaking through

With great relief I have just finished writing the final draft (from my point of view) of a new book. If the publisher doesn’t like it, I am well stuck because I don’t think I have anything else to say on the matter.

In the course of editing it I was listening to the newly-released double CD of Leonard Cohen’s Live in London, recorded on 17 July 2008 at O2. It is wonderful. The music is beautiful and the uniquely deep and expressive voice of the elderly man is utterly compelling. When he sings you hang on every note, every word. When he recites his poetry he sounds like he is exposing his soul – and mine and ours. Everyone should buy this album – the bloke deserves to have his stolen pension replenished. At one point he thanks the audience for being kind and for keeping his songs alive; but he had to write songs worth keeping alive in the first place.

Coincidentally, I am also reading his book of poems (Book of Longing, Penguin, 2006) and I find myself jealous of his facility with words, rhythm, language and experience.

There is a point early in the London gig when he recites the names of many of the drugs he has taken over the years (some for medicinal purposes). Then he says this: ‘I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through… There ain’t no cure for love.’ Cohen spent a decade up a mountain in a Buddhist monastery and much of the tension of this experience is evident in the poems from that period of his life. But I wonder about his conclusion!

I think many people unthinkingly think that religion is cheerless and philosophy unswervingly serious in a humourless way. Perhaps Cohen’s pursuit of self-fulfilment (or however he might wish to express it) in isolation form the world lay at the root of his dissatisfaction with its elusiveness. Christians, on the other hand, believe that the individual can only be ‘fulfilled’ in the company of other people whom we don’t choose (Jesus does). There can be no fulfilment in isolation; we need one another and the community preserves us from selfishness and narcissism.

I know exactly what Cohen means, though. The Christianity I grew up with through my teens and twenties was one that emphasised sin, failure, inadequacy and the need to please God (as a means of gaining his favour?). Cheerfulness broke through when I realised (over a long period of time) that the whole creation belongs to God and that we are free within it to enjoy (together) what God has given us. The world became bigger as God was liberated in my mind from the miserable tyrant, obsessed with any tiny naughty thought I might have, to being the creator and lover of the cosmos. Rather than this leading to a woolly denial of the brokenness and damaging elements of human being, it set it in its right place: God is not surprised by my failures, but loves anyway and invites people like me to walk with him and others who have also discovered that forgiveness is liberating and hope infectious.

Cheerfulness kept breaking through and still does. Or maybe faith is annoyingly cheerful anyway and it is the darkness that keeps breaking though. But, as John says at the outset of his Gospel, the darkness cannot overcome the light that has come into the world.

Thank God for Leonard Cohen!

 

Imperfect poetry

I spent a couple of hours on the train this afternoon and it gave me time to catch up with what the newspapers are saying about Jade Goody. The kindness is evident in most of what I read – and the recognition that she wasn’t able to be anything other than ‘in your face’. You could never accuse her of being a hypocrite.

This reminded me of some lines in a Leonard Cohen poem from 1996 called Better. He writes:

better than poetry

is my poetry

which refers

to everything

that is beautiful and

dignified, but is

neither of these itself

 

There are people who shine a (not always welcome) light on the world and place question marks about what we think is ‘normal’. This is the task of the poet. But it is also what I think has happened and is happening through the Jade Goody phenomenon: her transparent imperfection and other people’s treatment of her exposes the snobbery and prejudice we would rather not admit to. Stephen Fry on Twitter called her something like ‘Princess Diana from the wrong side of the tracks’ and he was right: much of the judgment piled on her during her notoriety phases appears to have been rooted in a sneering looking down the nose at someone ‘not like us’.

 

Cohen recognises that most of us are imperfect at how we express our lives as well as our art, but it is still the same beauty to which we point.

 

I just wonder what the atheist commentators actually mean when they say ‘Jade is at peace’. Genuine question.

 

 

Mystery

I was listening to the last Bruce Cockburn CD, Life Short Call Now, in the car this morning. Stuck in a miserable traffic jam, I heard afresh the deceptively simple song Mystery and the poetry hit me again.

‘You can’t tell me there is no mystery… It’s everywhere I turn.’

But it was the fourth verse that I had to play again and again: ‘Infinity always gives me vertigo… And fills me up with grace.’ Isn’t this precisely what the Psalmist was on about when he contemplated the vastness of the heavens and wondered aloud about the place and value of himself as a small human being? That’s the mystery that has to be lived with; when you think you’ve got that one nailed, you’ve almost certainly lost the plot.

Cockburn ends with the invitation: ‘So all you stumblers who believe love rules… Stand up and let it shine.’

(The new CD is released on 31 March 2009 and is called Slice o Life – a compilation of  live solo recordings.)