Eavesdropping by Henry Martin

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I found this collection of daily reading for Lent particularly engaging, grounded in real life and pushing at the boundaries of the safe and tidy Christian community. The focus is on prayer, the ways we pray, our motivations, and our expectations.

At one point he writes “I really do not understand the mechanics of what happens when we pray for others. The questions make for interesting theological discussions, but do not yield clear answers, at least not for me. However, the truth remains that it is good to pray for others and it is good when others pray for us.” This honesty, an invitation to share in exploration alongside him, not receive explanations from him.

One of the points that stuck most with me is the exploration of the story of the Widow that nags the unjust Judge into finally giving her justice if only to shut her our. We mostly read this as a story about how we should continue to ask God until he answers our prayer – but this would raise doubts about God, God is surely unlike the unjust Judge – and so Henry Martin switches it around, maybe Jesus is the Widow and we are the unjust Judge, Jesus continue, endlessly to seek relationship with us, will keep on inviting us to come to him.

This is the kind of refreshing approaches that are offered throughout the book – too many Lent books cover the same old ground, but this one got me thinking in new ways.

Forbidden Lives, LGBT Stories from Wales by Norena Shopland

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Telling the stories of LGBT lives is previous centuries and decades can be challenging.

How far should one draw people into the LGBT community or cannon who never (publicly) self-identified as LGBT?

Most LGBT people, even today, will at times self-edit their identity, and it seems the majority of biographers have applied a heavy edit to any evidence that might have been past down to us.

So for many we have only hints, glimpses, assumptions about our LGBT forebears – we can’t say how individuals would self-identify it they were alive today, but we can probably say that they lived outside the heretonormative cookie cutter identity.

But it is telling the level of outrage that can be felt when we then claim someone for the LGBT community, as the National Trust found out a couple of years ago https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/04/national-trust-facing-membership-boycott-gay-campaign/

This is deeply troubling – people still fear damage to someone’s reputation if we suggest they were gay – and that fear is exactly why books such as this must be written and celebrated.

The Solitary by Vuyelwa Carlin

One of the poems…

Guy Fawkes and the Torturers

A cobweb-scrawl – he could bearly hold the pen

he signed – just – a bag of loose joints for the flames.

He was racked for days, in the forbidden rooms,

the cellars of the dark soul, fallen.

One day, hour, minute more – to the God of pain

he clings; wrenches to mind the vales and loams,

beloved, where they crouch, the lodged names

- gouged at last from the deep bed, scraped from the bone.

The fracturing sticks of this incarnation,

its twisting strings: the torture-scholars grind

the rope and tackle: crush the shadow, blind

and dumb; they’d pincer out the nerves of God

if they only could – pay back the terrible Word,

the act, intolerable, of creation.

The Poet Prophets of the Old Testament by J. W. Rogerson

Rogerson makes a few key points in these lectures which suggest that the prophets have generally been misunderstood.

The first misunderstanding is to see prophets as fortune-tellers, it was not some magical knowledge of future events but the close and careful observation of the present that gives the prophets words they power – Rogerson terms this speaking of the “eternal now” - the depth of truth the prophets saw in their own ages allows their words to speak to the truth in our age too.

Linked to this, once you have freed the prophets for the fortune-tellers is the opportunity to recapture their poetry, and their poetic reading of the world. Rogerson sees a greater poetic relationship with the world as key to gaining a proper understanding. Poetry is, for Rogerson, the most effective medium to speak of depth truths.

Funderland by Nigel Jarrettt

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This is a collection of short stories that has a consistent power and punch. The lives shared in these stories while not exactly “feel good” are full of authenticity and there is a connection to the humanity of the characters does actually warm your heart.