Luminaries by Rowan Williams

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Rowan Williams is turning out a consistent bookshelf of these slim and accessible volumes – and it is a great gift to the church that he is now able to share such insights widely in a way that as Archbishop the tangle of church politics denied him the time for.

I will share a few quotes that resonated strongly for me...

He quotes Anslem: “Taste the goodness of your Redeemer, be on fire with love for your Saviour. Chew the honeycomb of his words, such their flavour which is sweeter than sap… Lord, make me taste by love what I taste by knowledge; let me know by love what I know by understanding. I owe you more than my whole self, but I have no more...” (p34) There is an embodiedness that we have often lost as the “rationality” of the enlightenment took hold.

He sums up a shift in approach neatly “But we have at least begun to see that liturgy is not a matter of writing in straight lines.” (p45)

He quotes Wilberforce “If Christians, committed to personal responsibility and social justice, cannot keep before the eyes of the state and its legislators issues that are greater than security and profit, who can?” (p88) which feels like a sharp challenge within our contemporary public life.

“How do we make sense of these stories? Only by telling them over again. We may not – we don’t – have the words with which to compose a theory about what was going on in all that, but we can tell the story of lives that made sense, and try in telling to make sense of them for ourselves.” (p111)

“It may cost us everything we thought we needed to hang on to, but – as the history of Christ’s journey to the cross and the resurrection make clear – the end of the story is a fulfilment, a homecoming, for which we can never find adequate words. It’s the freedom to be what we most deeply are.” (p123)

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

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In contrast to rattling through Ragnar Jónasson this had to be a slower read as the emotional intensity was almost overwhelming.

Taylor writes about anxiety and depression with raw authenticity – and the intersection of race and sexuality which seems to box Wallace in, even within the purportedly liberal environment of a post-grad community, is portrayed with both a subtly and a punch that is profoundly unsettling.

How Wallace and Miller ache for each other, seem to struggle to know how to be with each other, how Wallace makes things harder than they maybe need to be speaks to the reality of relationships – two quotes capture different parts of this for me…

“But there is a difference between entering someone, being in someone, and being with that person. There is an impossibility to the idea of simultaneously existing within them and beside them, the fact that when you get close enough to someone, you cease to be discrete entities and instead become a single surface, glittering in the sun.” (p102)

“What he was about to say was that such a display would have felt vulgar in a way, that to make so gross a statement about his feelings, or his attitude, seemed too direct, too intrusive. Affection always feels this way for him, like an undue burden, like putting weight and expectation onto someone else. As if affection were a kind of cruelty too.” (p306)

How hard it is to like, or love, someone else when you are not really able to like yourself. You can’t imagine that they are genuine in their feelings for you, when you feel yourself so completely unlovable.

The punch about white privilege

“’No one said anything to him; no one did anything.’

‘I wanted to, but then, I guess, I chickened out.’

Wallace pauses, still in Miller’s arms. There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down...”

It is a punch that hurts, because it is so true – which of us white people can really put hand on heart and say we have never done that, excused ourselves that it is someone else’s fight?

But it is also the way that it is a drip drip drip that is always there – hard for Wallace to call out, because individual situations are not, taken in isolation, extreme and get dismissed as him being oversensitive but seen in the round the pattern is clear.

The way that loneliness and anxiety can sometimes make you self-destructive is given voice by Taylor and I think it is this that makes this a powerful and important story for people to hear.

The Golden Orphans by Gary Raymond

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The is something other worldly about this novel, and I think somewhere along the disorienting way I may have lost the plot.

Much is not as it first appears, and the layers of meaning and relationship are intriguing – how memory and place can twist and turn.

Cyprus a setting that lends itself well to all these themes.

The Art of Holy Week & Easter by Sister Wendy Beckett

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Following the format of The Art of Lent, this is a very nice presentation of words and images.

However its 30 images might be better, if less accessibly, titled The Art of the Triduum – as other than the first and last two the rest cover the sequence of events from Maundy Thursday to Easter Day.

Those are eventful hours and days, therefore there is plenty of images and plenty to reflect upon, but unlike The Art of Lent or The Art of Advent it is not really going to be a daily companion over a period of weeks, instead it will be a useful aid to creating moments of stillness in which could otherwise be liturgically cluttered days.

Stillicide by Cynan Jones

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With the same sparse style, dark yet jewel like, familiar from previous works Cynan leaves much space for the reader to do some imaginative work.

This time the setting is a dystopian near future, in which water has become a commodity of scarcity around which live has to revolve, but it is a story of human encounter. Ordinary human misery transcends the context in which it is placed.

Each chapter is an episode that could stand alone, product of its origin on the radio, and you have to fit them together unclear about the chronological relationship – in particular between the opening and closing chapters. Amidst the shadows are you putting two and two together and getting five? You can not be a passive reader, you have to read closely, and in a certain way you have to make the story for yourself.

Hidden Iceland (The Darkness, The Island, and The Mist) by Ragnar Jónasson

 The Darkness  Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is the first of the Trilogy although it main story is chronologically the most recent – however even within this book there is a layering of past and present – things hinted at, revealed and then corrected as more unfolds. There is a multi-generational character to the pain that is core to the narrative.

It is a thriller, and fairly light reading, I rattled through the 300+ pages in a couple of evenings – midway through I was rather uninspired - the lonely cop taken off the case on the eve of retirement was perhaps one cliché too many piled on - but then something shifted and drew me onto the conclusion – so rather than giving up I have now got the other 2 books from the library. 

 

The Island Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

Once again the narrative is driven by the revelation of secrets long held, piling the layers like an onion skin, but I didn’t find the same intensity of connection as in the first book – in part because the shadows in Hulda’s own past referred to here had been explained before. 

 

The Mist Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

During the first third of the book tension builds, to some extent, but it seems to slip away, and as the explanation of the events unfolds I found myself reading with no real interest or engagement in the characters.

Hulda’s narrative felt particularly lacklustre in this outing – we knew from the earlier books exactly what happened to her at Christmas 1987, and how that moment of tragedy shaped the rest of her life, there was nothing new said about it.

Also the chronology is bound by only a few months, and this narrowing compared with the Darkness is part of why this feels a much more limited and unambitious offering. 

On p271 of my library copy a previous reader had circled the word "mist" - while snow storms and winter darkness feature heavily, this is the only time "The Mist" of the title appears - I am not sure if that is a consequence of translation?

Who will I be when I die? By Christine Bryden

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Dementia and Alzheimer’s cast a particular spectre of fear – the stripping away of personhood somehow more difficult to face that those conditions that we perceive as purely a physical aliment.

Christine sharing of her own experience is therefore powerful, and the challenge of drawing out that this is not simply a fact of life associated with ageing is important.

Some of the ways in which social life becomes restricted – that in order to manage energy she had to refuse “invitations to noisy restaurants, and big groups of people, sticking to smaller places, quieter nights, and just a few friends” - points to a need for some deeper thought around how we create dementia friendly settings.

It is good that Christine also shares the role of her faith in her response to her condition, even if some of the ways she framed that were not ones that spoke to me personally.

Authority and Delinquency by Alex Comfort

Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk

First published in 1950, I was reading the lightly revised 1970 edition, and yet in many placed Comfort seemed to be speak very much of the contemporary era not an age 70 years past.

Comfort see “the persuasive, who replaces impact by the power of ‘selling himself’, is a conspicuous feature of democratic political life.” and Trump would seem to be a clear example of this dynamic at work.

He notes that “… governments seem to control the expert advice they receive, and ensure that it coincides with predetermined policy, far more by selecting advisers known to be like-minded than by attempting to bribe or coerce...” does this ring bells of requests for alternative facts? It always reminds us that “being guided by the science” is never as straightforward a process as we are encouraged to think.

On the potential for reform of society, and government, “the temptation is to hang on a little longer… implementation is something to be put off until ‘after the final victory’ or ‘after the end of the emergency’. Cultures which gravitate into a chronic emergency can postpone them indefinitely. The time for revolution is never ripe.” And so the “war on terror” was useful to some, as it was open ended, and therefore not only essentially unwinnable but also endlessly ready to be deployed as a justification to defer attention away from any particular domestic ills.

He also reflects on the move towards nuclear capability “…for while no sane tyrant will look with favour on a plan to end human history, the modern politician may do so – he needs a threat of this calibre to satisfy his own sense of importance and to enable him to compete with Superman and space fiction, but at the same time the tin soldiers and the imaginary bombs from which he derives such profound satisfaction in fantasy are being translated into real weapons by a minority of technicians who are uninterested in, or fail to recognize, the instability of the finger on the trigger.”

It can all feel a bit depressing, but maybe to end with a more hopeful quote “The dangers to humanity are, as always, grave; but at no time has man [sic] been better placed to deal with them. The true defence is not to turn back to anything but to turn forward – not less knowledge and freedom but more.”

New Year’s Eve by Annie Muir

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The pamphlet is published by Broken Sleep Books, inevitably a slim volume of poems but Muir provides a good range of ideas and images with a fresh authenticity.

Dreaming of Home by Michael Mitton

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

Somehow I found this to be less than the sum of its parts.

There are two tracks within the book, alternating chapters between them.

One is an imaginative reflection on a Pharisee (Reuben) being challenged as he listens to Jesus tell the parable of the prodigal Son, and ending in a family reunion of his own. It was fairly predictable but not a bad way of giving a different way to open up the message of the parable.

The other uses the metaphor of “Home” as a way of exploring mission, and how the sense of belonging that we might associate with “Home” is something we should offer people within Church.

Maybe it was reading this towards the end of the third COVID lockdown in England with the significant moving of goal posts on our relationship with “Home”, as we have worked from Home, churched from Home, and generally everything-ed from Home that it was just the wrong moment to deploy the metaphor, I am perhaps a little tired of being at Home right now?

The Forward Book of Poetry 2012

 Out of print, but buy it from abebooks.co.uk 

I put tabs on the following poems

At Stafford Services by Wendy Cope

At the Garnenia’s Entrance by Fawzi Karim

‘… Lay The Down’ by Tim Liardet

High-speed Bird by Les Murray

Looking Back by Anna Woodford