Birthday Poet

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Gaby Roslin.

This might not sound fantastic to anyone else, but I was dead chuffed the other day when I read that a previously unknown poem has been found in the files at Leeds University. It’s not just any poem, though – this one was written by the great CS Lewis (of Narnia fame). Apparently, he wrote it to say thank you to a couple with whom he had stayed in Manchester in 1935.

Can you imagine that? Getting a poem as a ‘thank you’? I’d love it. Words can say more – and more eloquently – than a bunch of flowers or a box of chocolates, can’t they? Well, I think so.

I’ve been thinking about this because today is my daughter’s birthday. I’m not going to tell you how old she is – that’s her business. I’d love to write something for her that would be special and which she could be proud of. And that’s where I get stuck. I read a lot of poetry, but I’m rubbish at writing it.

So, I turn to the Psalms, looking for inspiration. The Old Testament Psalms are made up of 150 poems – some long, some very short. They cover the whole range of human experience and emotion. “God, why am I in a pit and you seem a million miles away?” “When will the suffering end?” “I’m bursting with gratitude and praise, and the words keep pouring out.” “I look at the stars and my mind is blown by the bigness of the universe and the enormity of God’s love.” Stuff like that … but they say it more beautifully.

In fact, my daughter was the inspiration behind the engraving in my bishop’s ring: “Love that fires the sun keep me burning.” The words of a song by my favourite musician. Just a few words, but they encompass both the huge cosmos and little me.

And that’s how the words should work – opening up the imagination and the passions, not closing everything down to blunt statements.

Anyway, happy birthday to Melanie, my daughter. And how about this from me?

“Roses are red, violets are blue, words full of colour are my gift to you.”

(I told you I was a rubbish poet.)

 

Like a prayer

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Zoe Ball Show:

I am now on my tenth listen of Bob Dylan’s new album Rough and Rowdy Ways. And one of the lines that jumps out at me is this: “Be reasonable, mister, be honest, be fair, Let all of your earthly thoughts be a prayer.”

One of the surprising things to emerge from lockdown so far is the massive surge of people searching online for prayer or connection to some sort of collective worship. Researchers in Copenhagen saw a 50% increase in Google searches for ‘prayer’ over 95 countries.

And maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising, after all. For when things get tough, or life breaks down in some uncontrollable way, so the distractions from deeper questions fall away. But, I want to ask, what is this prayer thing all about, anyway?

When I was younger I used to think of prayer as an attempt to change God’s mind – urging an improvement in my own or others’ circumstances. When I grew up, and had a bit more experience of both the world and prayer, I moved to seeing prayer as essentially about changing me. The great writer CS Lewis once wrote: “I pray because I can’t help myself… I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”

Why did he think that? I think it’s because prayer involves being exposed to a view of oneself, the world and other people that challenges me to see, think and live differently. This is why Christians pray “in the name of Jesus” – you know, trying to see through the eyes of the Jesus we read about in the gospels. And the world looks different when seen through that lens.

Bob Dylan goes on to sing about a “gospel of love”. And by this he doesn’t mean something sentimental. Love is the costly outpouring of oneself and ends up being – in Christian terms – cross-shaped.

So, when I pray – wherever and however that might be … and whether alone or in a group – my eyes look to God and the world, but the change has to happen to me … so I can be part of changing the world.

Amen to that.

 

Shadowlands

Lockdown means working back through the films I thought we’d seen often enough. The other impetus is that we have a young Austrian student friend living with us and most of these films are new to her.

Last night I couldn’t find what I was looking for, so we watched Shadowlands, the beautiful film about CS Lewis and his relationship with Joy Davidman. I am not an easily weepy man, but the final scenes have me blaming the hay fever again.

The story shows how a cerebral man, an intellectual apologist for Christian faith, comes up against experience and finds that tidy rationality – even in matters of faith – is inadequate when confronted by love and pain and loss and uncontrollable grief. The unarticulated inhibitors of emotional freedom, displaced into the secondhand living-through-literature (which is not to diminish it), slowly dissolve into helpless exposure of weakness and need. Lewis finds that he has been found by love.

We know from what followed that Lewis’s apologetics were humanised – fired in the fulcrum of loss. A Grief Observed remains one of the most beautiful accounts of the power of grief and the uncontrollable experience of powerless submission to raw truth.

A bit like coronavirus, grief can’t be “fixed”or “defeated” or “controlled” – it has to be lived with and gone through and accommodated. And at the end of it all lies what Christians call grace – being found by love.

 

JFK

This is the text of this morning's Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans Show in the presence of Billie Piper, Lawrence Fox, David Dimbleby and the wonderful Nell Bryden:

I don't mean to sound trite, but it's quite important not to die on the wrong day, isn't it? I mean, no day is a good day, but it's a bit sad when the significance of your own demise gets lost because of some other news. Think of mother Teresa dying on the same day as Princess Diana… or the great Christian writer CS Lewis passing away on the same day as Aldous Huxley and … er … JFK.

Of course, Lewis and Huxley died of natural causes, whereas JFK died at the end of bullets fired by an assassin. And it is this brutality that has haunted us for the fifty years since that day when I was sent to bed early because the world had gone mad.

It must be hard for younger generations to imagine how it felt back in those days: the Cuban missile crisis convinced many that nuclear obliteration was coming. The world, less than two decades out of a shockingly destructive world war, seemed very fragile. And then the great American hope – the epitome of youthful vision and reforming energy – gets himself shot by an attention-seeker in Dallas.

Well, what do we do with this stuff half a century later?

I think one thing we can do is remember that an event of massive historical importance is coloured by small human details – a bit like the pixels on your computer screen. In the face of this human tragedy and the emotions it ignited, ordinary people did significant things. For example, Lieutenant Sam Bird, who was in charge of the honour guard for JFK, heard a woman in the crowd shout to the coffin “That's all right, you done your best; it's all over now.”

Simple and direct.

History is made of such stuff. When the varnish of routine and self-sufficiency is stripped away, exposing our fears and vulnerability, we say what we really mean. I don't know what JFK's last words were, but I do know the last words of another world-changer who cried out from the gallows: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Direct, but hardly simple.

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

The end in the beginning

So, Christopher Hitchens has died. I, for one, am sad to hear this.

Any death ends a world for those who are bereaved. And the brutality of this rupture has been brought home recently in the premature deaths – by various means – of people like Gary Speed, the young family in Pudsey, the victims of Liege. Death strips from our ‘normal’ life the veneer of self-sufficiency and confronts us with the pain of our mortality.

The odd thing about the death of Christopher Hitchens, however, is the repeated suggestion that he was in some way (and incontrovertibly) a ‘scourge’ of religious believers, trouncing by sheer intellectual sharpness the nonsense of religious belief. He wasn’t and isn’t a scourge in any sense at all. The difficulty for Christians like me (and theists in general) was that that he wasn’t ‘scourge’ enough. I don’t need to repeat the response he got from Professor Terry Eagleton (among others). Along with Richard Dawkins, Hitchens set up aunt sallies which are not only easy to knock down, but which theists might also wish to knock down. Caricatures of faith might be convenient, but they are not thereby credible.

But, that said, there was always something admirable about Hitchens’ willingness to provoke. Polemic – whether entirely rational or not – is at least interesting. It is a pity that such material will no longer come from his pen.

However, his death provokes thought not only about the impact of lifestyle choices on long-term health, but about mortality itself. We shall all die – that is the fundamental fact of life. Heidegger described human beings as ‘beings towards death’ – and he wasn’t really being miserable. Hitchens went along (as far as we can know) with Bertrand Russell’s conclusion that ‘We die, then we rot’. But, is that all there is to say?

Faith is often dismissed as a crutch on which those who cannot cope with life as it is can lean for emotional support. Apart from the fact that this (lazy) assumption rests on a further and un-argued for assumption that the non-faith world view is somehow neutral, it also fails to understand what faith is. Faith, for the Christian at least, is not some sort of credulous and escapist wishful thinking about a ‘system’ derived from fairies; rather, it is rooted in a person, a judgement and an experience. Put very briefly, a Christian is one who believes there is more to life than death, sees God in the face of Jesus of Nazareth whom death did not contain, commits himself or herself to living a life that transcends the mere satisfaction of personal needs or fulfilment, and, in the company of others who have had a similar experience of being grasped by God (including intellectually – see people like CS Lewis and GK Chesterton among others), live life to the full.

The beginning of being a Christian is coming to terms with – by facing and naming – death. We are mortal. We shall die. But, the sting of death is drawn by the conviction that death neither ends nor ridicules all that has gone before it. No escapism here.

The end is in the beginning. At Christmas we celebrate God coming among us as one of us. In being born, death became inevitable – and, with it, grief, loss, fear, and everything else that makes us alive. But, as the great Bruce Cockburn put it:

Like a stone on the surface of a still river, driving the ripples on for ever, redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.