Let a place be made by Yves Bonnefoy (translated by Anthony Rudolf)

found in New Poems on the Underground

Let a place be made for the one who draws near,
The one who is cold, deprived of any home,

Tempted by the sound of a lamp, by the lit
Threshold of a solitary house.

And if he is still exhausted, full of anguish,
Say again for him those words that heal.

What does this heart which once was silence need
If not those words which are both sign and prayer,

Like a fire caught sight of in the sudden night,
Like the table glimpsed in a poor house?

What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Lydia Monks

What The Ladybird Heard

As I read this book today I best review it rather than screening it out and giving the impression that I only read learned tombs!

This is a bright colourful book with the promise on the cover of a glittery Ladybird on every page so I couldn't resist.

I am sure children will enjoy following the story with its rhymes and plenty of animal noises to join in with, and while the pictures are simple and 2D they are full of charm and character which allow the imagination to start to make up other stories about life in the farm yard.

I like it, even though it came nowhere near replacing The Bad-tempered Ladybird as my favourite Ladybird based picture book!  

Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice

found in Collected Poems

I have to admit that I don't  normally read poems it they longer that a single page and so this one at over 60 pages was for me an epic - however I was inspired to seek it out after it had been referred to by Theo Hobson in his book Faith and I am pleased that I made the effort as it is a really thought provoking piece.

MacNeice is writing as the world was been sucked, seemly inevitably, into the Second World War, and within the poem you encounter, and journey with the poet through, waves of doubt as an educated and 'cultured' man questions what value that culture, millennia of civilisation, has when it is clearly powerless to arrest the forces of evil that seem to grip the world.

Yet the poem end on a deliberately defiant note, with the choice to go on and go on with hope even when what is hope for seems implausible:
"Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
And walk out promptly through the open door;
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
You need not wake again - not any more."

It is this choice that interested Hobson - the rejection of a purely rational assessment of the world, which is inherent in religious faith, but also would appear to be essential to all human life if it is not to be overcome the negativity of the world around us.  Hobson was questioning how it is possible to be a hopeful atheist as it would appear that it is only by a leap of faith that we can hope for an irrationally better future.

Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim by Peter Owen Jones

Letters from an Extreme Pilgrim

I was a little bit suspicious of whether a 'celebrity' vicar writing a book as a spin off of a TV programme would be able to offer anything of spiritual depth and integrity - but in this book Peter Owen Jones manages both depth and integrity in spades.

The book is made up of Letters written to those very close to Peter and those (I assume) he has never meet, to those still living and to those who have departed this life. This format allows you to have very intimate insight into Peter's life, his relationships, and his loves and loses, without it becoming voyeuristic. His articulation of his angst around identity and relationships holds up a powerful mirror to the experience of some many of us in our so called 'post-modern' age.

I have been reading this book over the last couple of month a letter or two at a time - and this is the approach that I would recommend.  The letters have an intensity which means that they are best encountered like this - as I think that if you sat and read the book cover to cover you would be overwhelmed and it was therefore lose its impact.


The book is also in its own way highly political - in the sense that the criticism of our individualistic and materialistic society is a call for radical change.  If we are to overcome these faults, that Peter finds within himself as much as anyone else, then we will be living very different lives and the seemly essential glue of unending consumption would be removed from society.  But maybe it is worth the risk of finding out if everything would really fall apart without it.

The Worship Mall by Bryan D. Spinks

The Worship Mall: Contemporary responses to contemporary culture

I enjoyed this which book sets out to give an overview of worship movements that make up the 'contemporary' scene, and it provides a very useful introduction to the major components from alt.worship to mainstream Roman Catholic, from Amish to mega-church.

In order to cover the breadth of the contemporary scene the chapters are unable to going into any great depth - however with its generous references to other writers and researchers it makes a very useful resource for  those embarking on study of 'worship' or one of the particular expression discussed.

A significant amount of the book is given over to descriptions of the different expressions of worship  but the analysis and comment that is there, although fairly concise, is given greater impact by the feeling that it is grounded in the observations of the actual practices. Spinks comments as a 'neutral' outsider and while some of the analysis is fairly cutting when it comes to some of the rhetoric and self-understanding of the different churches he provides this without undermining the value of the churches as site of integrity and potential locations for the encounter with God.

For example in the chapter "What is Celtic about contemporary Celtic worship?" Spinks' answer is in no uncertain terms very little, claiming that "Comtemporary 'Celtic' worship services seem as much Celtic as... Taco Bell fast food is Mexican." but he goes on that "It is what stirs the heart, soul and spirit ... not whether it is rational or historically authentic" that is the significant issue in their success.

The are also some moments that within the deadpan delivery of an academic work which made me laugh out loud, such as the discussion of the sexualised nature references to the believer's relationship with Jesus within many charismatic churches - which includes the quote from a spontaneous song "I can feel your love swelling, swelling and growing inside me/swelling and growing deeper and wider inside me"

It was also personally very pleasing when he points out that some of the 'hippest' innovators of alt.worship etc are in substances only doing things that have been around since the 1960s just with a few added lasers.

This is an excellent book and it merely wets the appetite to find out more about the weird and wonderful things that are going on out there under the banner of Christian Worship.

Under the Stairs by Caitlin McLeod

I am in the middle of a book so here is something from New Poems on the Underground to keep you going

She has a small shop under the stairs
where I buy black beads and velvet cloth
and the little pleasures of a shiny green apple sticker.

But I am older now and I act as if I don't
remember what it was like to pretend
because she is my sister and I am alone.

The blue airplane has no wheels.
The bucket filled with yellow stars
has no handle. The pinwheel does not turn.

I like those best because they are like me.

The Progressive Patriot by Billy Bragg

The Progressive Patriot

I didn't have high hopes for this book - having decided to read it after it was referred to a couple of times in other things.

I felt you could have got rid of a couple of chapters and the book would still have made its point, also the way that Billy jumped backwards and forwards in time was unhelpful. This jumbling of the chronology did not seem to add anything to the argument and did not appear to be an intentional juxtaposing of eras, and even if it was intentional for me it was mostly irritating.

What was worse than this however was the way the Billy without any apparent self-awareness decided to have his cake and eat it by showing simultaneously that the working class radicalism that he delights in was both a major break from the old political order that gave us Magna Carta and the Great Reform Act and also the natural heir to that tradition.

Also it is important to note his idealisation of the working class and vilification of the rest of us - which through the force of argument he tries to leave as unchallengeable. However as someone without a working class family tree this move is unhelpful.

Yet while my forebears have enjoyed relative wealth I don't think them spent as much of their time trampling the poor as Billy seems to make out and you are left with the sense that the book will embrace everyone as English except those of the traditional upper and middle classes.

While the historical narrative might have some merit and the anecdotes of Bragg family life down the ages of some interest, the programme he puts forward for consolidating the values of England are laughable.

He think we need a written constitution the core principles of which will be summed up in a few bullet points that can be printed on the bad of our ID cares as a constant reminder of both our rights and responsibilities.
This constitution will be written via a nationwide network of local meetings feeding their ideas into a central drafting committee and adopted by popular vote.
With this as the 'answer' and hopes that the book might be a useful contribution to the civic life of the nation are well and truly dashed.

Faith by Theo Hobson

Faith by Theo Hobson

This book starts well with the introduction giving us a clear roadmap for the journey that Theo wants to take us on - he is going to show "Whether one likes it or not, the strength of the word [faith], its ability to mean really determined optimism, is due to its religious history."

He moves on with an opening chapter 'Against Faith' on the critics of faith - militant atheists - who have made a renewed and forceful attack on the place of faith in society over the last few years, and he is able to show some of the flaws within their own arguments.

However in the rest of the book he seem to fail to make a compelling case for faith.  This is in part because while critics of faith can make a general attack on faith for the advocate the general condition of faith does not exist.  The faith you have is particular to a religion, and Theo while exclusively talking about Christian faith he tries to maintain that he is giving a general account and this contradiction is his undoing.

The general defence faith as a positive contributor to society has to ignore the major point that a religious faith is for the believer faith in something that is true.  We struggle in a multi-faith society - where there is general recognition that all faith communities are good are providing support and stability - to deal with the issue that faith in the truth of one religion is at some level an absence in faith in the truth of another religion.

What we are left with, as this book shows, is the assertation that it doesn't matter what you believe because the aspect of faith that is good for you and for society is not the content of your beliefs but the warm and fussy feeling that believing in something - anything - gives.  And for me that is a disappointment.

Introduction

I have decided to start this blog to share with the world what I think about the books that I have been reading.
It is a fairly simple idea - and the content will, of course, be dictated by the eclectic mix of things that I happen to have read.

I will be including links to Amazon where use can buy the books - and through the Amazon Associates scheme part of the price that you pay will go towards the Small Pilgrim Places Network www.smallpilgrimplaces.org