The Burial at Thebes Sopholcles' Antigone Translated by Seamus Heaney

The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles' Antigone

At one level it is hard to think of much to say about this - but that is a mark of the success, there is an effortlessness and an integrity about it which mean you don't see the effort and the craft of SeamuHenna.

The play speaks as powerfully to the contemporary as it did to the ancient world, and I think this is particularly so reading it with the back drop of the unrest in the Middle East and the brutal repression that leaders there seem to think will save them - is not Creon the archetype of "the Strong Man" - they cling on to power yet in the end what worth is absolute power over dust and ashes?

Last Walk by Michael Hoffmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

The two of you, thirty-seven years married,
and only to one another, I should add -

some odd tone or metal for that, or medal –

arm in arm, old, stable (your new trick,

Expect at your age you don’t learn new tricks,

more as if all your lives you’d understudied

age and stability), me buzzing round you

like an electron, first one side then the other,

the long walk by the concrete-bedded river,

the Sempt, whose tributaries arrive in pipes,

the heavy July whiff of river and linden,

low water, weeds, a few fish,

the ducks beside themselves at nightfall,

the unfailingly noisy dog and cherished for it,

the last remaining farm in the new suburb,

alteingesessen, a hayfield among garden plots,

all the way up to the quarry pool,

the gigantic activity of the new airport

racing day and night to completion like a new book,

and somewhere in it all, your tenderness

for a firefly.

Directions by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

The new    south east cemetery
is approximately   nowhere
ten stops by underground   then bus
zigzagging   through the suburbs
as bad as Dachau   and you end up
still getting out   a stop early
at the old   south east cemetery
on which it abuts   tenements
market gardens expressways   and then
it's huge   carp in the ponds gardeners
drunks rolling on the paths   fighting
lavender and roses   round the corner
is a cafe   with an upstairs
long long tables   and slabs of cakes

New Monasticism as Fresh Expression of Church Graham Cray, Ian Mobsby, Aaron Kennedy (Eds)

New Monasticism

I finished this book so weeks ago but have been struggling to find the time to reflect on it, this is in part because I have been busy but also because it excites me and so caused many thoughts which need more time than usual to put into order.

Like many from the sacramental end of the Church I have some unease with 'Fresh Expressions', but I found this collection of essays reassuring.  I went up to London for a launch event and hearing some of the contributors speak alongside reading their words gives a strong sense of the integrity of them as individuals and of the communities they speak for, that these are people deeply seeking to will of God.  I suppose I need to be honest and say that this feeling was not completely universal, for example I don't get the Order of Mission and its 8 shapes - this might be my failing but I doubt I could ever discuss the Heptagon of a Vital Life with a straight face. There is also some rather uncritical and historically dubious references to the wonders of all things Celtic.

But putting the exceptions aside what makes the difference is their sense of the importance of tradition which seems remarkable for Christian communities which mostly have their roots and their being outside the 'Catholic' strand of the Church.  Linked to this is the centering of the life of the Fresh Expressions on prayer, understood not as some health and wealth shopping list but the attentive waiting on the Lord. 

Some of the images that are invoked are powerful, one essay reflecting on the raise of contemplatives as 'Christendom' fades quotes Jean Danielou "That age is passing - St Antony is coming back from his desert; there is no need for flight now that the Church is once again an army of martyrs, in the midst of a heathen society. 'My factory is my desert'."  While another essay concludes "Karl Rahner wrote that the 'Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.'  Beneath and beyond today's soulless hedonism lies a search for a meaning and a path.  The emerging faith communities need to offer a route into these, not into a religious  club that is over and against the human community, but into a renewal of the roots of the human community itself, which are divine." This vision of Fresh Expressions is in tune with my own underlining spirituality and so I found myself time and again agreeing out loud with this book (even, embarrassingly, while reading it on the train). But now and then you wonder how real all this 'end of Christendom' stuff really is - both because I think it in equal measure over states the level of 'faith' in the past and under plays the enduring place of 'folk religion'.

What sets this collection out most is that it views Fresh Expressions not as a re-branding, where the critical difference is not fancy coffee and scatter cushions, but as a rediscovery of the core essence of the Christian life, and once you are in tune with that core an authentic life of faith should blossom shaped by the cultural context. I think it is sad that so much of the energy being expended under various Fresh Expressions banners fails to live up to the ideals we find here, with the same old dears sat round tables, with doughnuts, told  they are now 'Cafe Church' and cutting edge.  This book should be a challenge and inspiration for us to reject such half-truths and demand seek a future for the Church that is found on a more costly and yet much richer path.