The Lion's World by Rowan Williams

The Lion's World: A journey into the heart of Narnia

Rowan Williams has a reputation, quite ill founded, for being unable to communicate clearly and accessibly which comes I think mostly from a wilful desire of many not to hear what he has to say.  It is delightful to find in this book such beautiful evidence to bury that reputation as he opens up for us such a rich encounter with complex ideas about faith and the world.

This is an interpretive work, as a companion primarily to the Chronicles of Narnia but ranging widly and freely over C. S. Lewis's othewriting, much of which will be unfamiliar to the general reader, and I will admit that while I know about the Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce it is only Narnia that I have actually read.  As an interpretive work it tells us as much about the theology and world view of Rowan Williams as about C. S. Lewis, I am not suggesting that there is some great distortion going on here just that the very fact that Rowan Williams sat down to write this book, and the themes which he felt were important to include is clearly an insight into his thinking so it is all the richer for giving us a window into two minds rather than only one.

My main encounter with Narnia was the BBC TV adaptations, I then in my late teens I did made my way through most (if not all) of the books, and more recently saw the blockbuster Film versions.  I am not someone with a deep knowledge of the text, a point I make to reassure you that reading this book is worthwhile even if you have only very limited knowledge of the "primary" material.

The major point that Rowan Williams makes is that Narnia remains an excellent tool for mission in a world where people are increasing interested in faith/spirituality but disinterested in "Church".  The trouble is mostly they have written off Church without encountering the true potential it has - "Sharing the good news is not so much a matter of telling people what they have never heard as of persuading them that there are things they haven't heard when they think they have." (p17) It is a vehicle through which people can see and feel what faith is like freed from the assumptions and baggage that have become encrusted around organised religion.

Rowan quotes a comment from Alsan about the Dwarfs "they have chosen cunning instead of belief.  Their prision is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out" and without him making about direct reference the mind jumps to the "New Atheists" and to Darkins in particular - when they not only deny evidence for God but desperately try and manufacture evidence for God's non-existence as if it is rational to bring forward empirical evidence of the non-observation of an unknowable being?

I think this book would make an excellent Confirmation present, certainly highly preferable to the usual flurry of stuffy prayer books that accompany that event.  Confirmation is often felt as an anti-climax, built up as a life changing event all too often followed by a sensation of a continuation of the horribly ordinary.  A book that looks at the depths of faith and look for those depths outside the "churchy" is just the kind of thing that you need at that moment. It would also make a useful basis for a study group or lent course.

Readings from the book of Exile by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Readings from the Book of Exile

For me this book has been long awaited for, as many of you will know, my appreciation of Pádraig and his work verges on the inappropriate.

He is very much a performance poet, and many of the poems in this collection I have heard him perform at Greenbelt, and so I don't just read the words I hear again the tone, the slow pauses, the lilt and rhythm of his performance.  But one of the joys of this collection was at times hearing the poems in my own dislocated but conventional English ascent and yet finding that they were still as powerful as ever.

Now I really want you to go and buy this book because it is brilliant and your life will be better for it (you can use the link above to get it from Amazon - but if moral scruples prevent you from using Amazon I am sure there are plenty of other places you can turn to instead) - so I am going to share just one poem with you ...

Ar eagla na heagla

There is your fear

and your fear of your fear.

There is your beginning

and your fear of where you are.

There is your body

and your words about your body.

There is your possibility

and your hatred of all failure.

There is the gaze

and your fear of the gaze.

There is your destination

and your fear of where you’re not.

 

Greenbelt 2012 Beer & Benediction

I find Blessed fascinating but not always entirely convincing as I think I wrote about the worship event I attended at Greenbelt last year.

Beer and Benediction was just one of a number of worship sessions they were offering this year, but the Beer element meant I felt this was the fail safe option!

The majority of the beer tent had turned into a sea of mud but thankful the annex "the upper room" had remained largely dry and this was where Benediction was to meet beer.

What I found was the smaller scale (last year I had been to a Mass in the Big Top) allowed you to feel like a participate rather than just the audience, also there were a few technical hitches which Simon Rundell covered with a humour that gave a sense of grounding and humanity that I think had been missing in earlier encounters with them.

After the Mass and Benediction we went on a Eucharistic Procession around Greenbelt (sadly due to licencing constrains this part was minus beer).  It was wonderful to see the faces of the Greenbelters we passed by - there was a wide range of expressions. Some clearly know what was going on, removing hats and crossing them selves as Jesus passed by, others clearly know what was going on due to a look of horror that such heresy was here at the heart of a "Christian" festival.  But for most there was a benevolent look of puzzlement with which you greet all sorts of things at Greenbelt - putting them down as "its ok - its Greenbelt".

The Procession ended in front of the Grandstand where a number of "worship collectives" were coming together for a shared service, sadly I could not stay for that as there was a talk elsewhere in the festival I wanted to get to. 

Lanark by Alasdair Gray

Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)

This is a very different kettle of fish from The Island which I have just written about and which I read in the middle of reading Lanark.  When we visited Glasgow earlier in the year we saw an exhibition of Alasdair Gray's art and getting home I looked in the library for the book of that exhibition, they didn't have that but they did have Lanark and so while it is a bit of a door stop of a novel I gave it a go.

The covers of the book are crammed full of praise, claiming that Lanark called forth a new era in Scottish writing which is almost as off putting as hearing a book won a Richard & Judy prize!

The 4 parts of the novel are arranged so you read part 3, then 1, 2 and 4 with the prologue and epilogue somewhere in the middle.  Parts 1 and 2 have only a very loose connection with 3 and 4 (something a God like character "the author" notes at one point in the book - a device that I have never found successful). Parts 1 and 2 are basically realist while 3 and 4 are a kind of dystopian science fiction, this is held up to parody when a teacher criticises the writing of Lanark/Thaw for trying to combine realism and fantasy - claiming this is something even the greatest of writers struggle with.  It is as if Gray is eye-balling you and daring you to say "nice try but maybe try something a little less ambitious next time..."

It is a political satire, and it is clear there is anger at the way Glasgow was declining with the collaspe of heavy industry.  But with his anti-hero Lanark/Thaw Gray seems only to confirm the hopelessness of the situation.  That those with the brains to understand the situation will either be depressed to the point of inaction or be corrupted by "the system" and despite continuing to spout proletarian rhetoric find their own beds feathered with others misery (Lanark ends up doing both in turns).  It seems to me this is an entirely bleak vision.

Given the novel is over 30 years old there must be a question about whether its politics has enduring relevance.  Off the back of the recent global financial melt-down much of Gray's more depressing depictions of the soulless system feel deeply contemporary - the "too big to fail" mentality fits into its picture of entangled organisations and the blurring of state and corporationl.  What has changed perhaps is the settling - it is not the streets of Glasgow (even the poorest of Glasgow's streets) where the full force of the financial annihilation is now felt.

The most hopefully message Gray seems to manage is that in the face of extremes of life the ordinary misery of the individual will endure - "I am miserable therefore I am"

The Island by Victoria Hislop

The Island

A book given to me to read by my Mother and invoking the snob in me by declaring on the back cover it is winner of the Richard & Judy Summer Read - however I did my best to not judge a book by its cover and all that.

Reading the book I was caught up in the multi-generational drama of the tale, but now having put it down I feel the characters were too often archetypal - the dutiful father, the amoral daughter, the rich trapped by pretensions, the poor the salt of the earth.  The question must be whether that really matters, this is a good read, it never asked to be judged as a sociological tract nor, I suspect, as literatry "high art" therefore it does all it ever intended.

It is the kind of book to bring the Shirley Valentine is us all, centred around the sea side taverna where we could "drink the wine in the land where the grape is grown", and that is probably enough. 

Greenbelt 2012 George Elerick Domesticating monsters.

George was a fast talking American but he allowed so many questions during the talk that it was very hard for him to get any momentum going, however these questions were fascinating because he was clearly rattling a few cages and Greenbelt’s “so bloody nice” mask was falling off a bit – great sport! His point, as far as I understood it, was that “mission” is often fundamentally flawed because it depends on establishing and policing the category “unsaved” and human rights campaigns are similarly flawed by the establishment of the category “oppressed”.  This links into the revelation of Dave Tomlinson that there are spiritual people outside the Church – to decide that someone is in need of salvation is to deny the works God is already doing in their lives, it is an act of violence to see their salvation in terms of a process of transformation from “them” into “us”.  He is a Greenbelt speaker who’s book I will seek out to read to see if without the heckling his argument is attractive.

Greenbelt 2012 - Padraig O’Tuama gets naked …

Padraig had a number of sessions across the weekend and I had to limit myself from going to them all and becoming an ultimate groupie (especially after last year’s drunken self introduction to him in the Jesus Arms!).  So the main session I heard was Padraig’s reflection on naked men in the Bible and in particular the nakedness of Noah.  This was not a poetry session and so there was not the usual joy of Pagraig’s verse washing over you and enfolding you (for this there are plenty of talks on the Greenbelt website to download and finally a book Readings from the Book of Exile ).  This was a different kind of joy.  To focus on one small incident of Noah’s nakedness is risky, and while a few other Biblical stories were drawn in there was not much of an engagement with the wider enduring worry that Jews had over naked men.  In a week when Prince Harry’s drink fueled nakedness was making headlines a consideration of Noah’s drink fueled nakedness was apposite.  We puzzled together over what it was that was so terrible about Noah’s nakedness that led him to curse his son Ham – it is hard to find anything within the story as it has come down to us that has the weight to justify this extreme reaction.  It is a multi-layered issue and there are no neat conclusions – even within art the male nude is still a problematic figure in a way in which the female nude isn’t (while the female nude is perhaps becoming problematic as we look with feminist eyes this is a very separate set of problems).  What Pagraig gives us is a space for some grown up thinking with a gentleness that does not exclude profound confrontations - this was the start of a conversation and not the neatly boxed agenda for change that so many other Greenbelt speakers try to lumber us with .     

 

Greenbelt 2012 Dave Tomlinson “Bad Christians” and a dazzling darkness.

For a copy of the book try Amazon How to be a Bad Christian: .. and a Better Human Being

On Greenbelt’s first evening I went to a “meditation” titled “a deep but dazzling darkness” prepared by St Luke’s the church lead by Dave Tomlinson.  There were two things which I found off putting.  First this meditation turned into a Eucharist, re-reading the blurb in the programme there was no hint that this session would have a sacramental element.  Now I would not want to appear to be critical of the Eucharist but the way it was celebrated did not, for me, connect with the theme of the meditation, it was not an encounter with the awful and unknowable God, it was a fairly causal encounter and gave me the feel they had run out of material and just needed something to fill the last 20 minutes of the session and thought “you can’t go wrong with a Eucharist let bung that in…” The second issue was perhaps more fundamental, the whole thing didn’t really seem to have the courage of its convictions. This darkness of God kept being watered down, we were told on more than one occasion that “some people” have an experience of God as darkness or absence – that is to say some OTHER people and not us ourselves, we need to help this poor unfortunates – it was nice that they felt that the encounter with God as darkness was OK but the session didn’t rest in the dark it kept trying to move us to the light.  Two days later I listened to Dave Tomlinson speaking in the Big Top – now I have never had much success with talks in the Big Top in part due to the same neurosis which blocks me connecting with mass worship events so to give Dave his credit he kept me listening for the full talk and I didn’t wander off part way through.  This talk was the plug to his new book “Bad Christians”.  The big news which he has discovered is than 1) there are spiritual people outside the Church 2) many of these spiritual people were Church goers but exactly because of their spirituality the religiosity of the Church drove them away 3) the Church would be a better place with more questions and less dogma.  The jaw dropping moment is when you realize that he is one of the brightest hopes for the Church and he has only just worked this out!  As a “Modern Catholic” I can call on generations of witnesses to these facts – we have been living them and our congregations have collapsed while dogmatic Evangelicals have set the agenda for the Church.  Dave Tomlinson has the right answer but I am not sure that he has worked out what the question is yet …

The Union-Castle and the War 1914-1919 By E. F. Knight

This is a forerunner to Sea Hazard (1939 - 1945) and includes both a Roll of Honour which runs to 11 pages of those who lost their lives and a account of the Union-Castle's role in the world.

It is clear that this is a two-fold act of propaganda as much as commemoration.  The way the narrative depicts the gallantry of "our" sailors in contrast to the "evil Hun" makes uncomfortable reading, even within those accounts of German actions which were criminal, such as the sinking of Hospital Ships and destruction of lifeboats.  To paint these acts, these atrocities, as resulting from the inherent nature of "the Hun" is distasteful.

There is also a heavy dose of racism within the narration, at one point it is commending the officers of vessel for there actions in the face of enemy action, the storm weather, and the ill disciplined and cowardly passengers who were "aliens of a certain type" and call the reader to think of the action of "our East End foreign Jews" in air raid shelters to get the idea of the sort of behaviour the crew were up against. This is not just shocking but sickening.

Later within an account of the desperate attempt to save a sinking vessel there comes a distinction between "the native" and "the white" crew - given the incident is happening somewhere in the middle of the North Atlantic the question native to where springs to mind but of course the category "native" has nothing to do with geography.  As things get worse the "native" crew are transferred to another vessel while "the captain, officers and white crew" continue their efforts to save the ship.  The writer feels quite happy to ascribe a lack of heroism, cowardice even, to these "native" crew members with out casting a shadow on the Union-Castle Line because within his mindset you couldn't expect anything more from them. 

I find it sad that this jingoistic and racist account unavoidably tarnishes the Roll of Honour it is bound with, I even wonder if that Roll includes the "native" crew who must have laid down their lives.

It is a fascinating document which questions the picture of the inter-war years as bohemian, enlightened, and peace loving.