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.

Summons to Life by Martin Israel

Summons to Life: The Search for Identity Through the Spiritual

Once I start a book I like to finish it but I have abandoned this one on p117 of 154,

Writing in the early 70s there is a stylistic barrier to get over, especially the gendered language which given the topic is "Humanity" and what it is to be truly "Human" leads to the book being full of "Man" and "his" search for the ideal life even though at one point Israel does himself problematise the use of the male pronoun for God "... thought it is more questionable whether the masculine qualities rather than the feminine should be exalted in the pronoun commonly used."

Overall I found the book tiresome, Israel's argument is almost entirely polemical with little or no evidence or reasoning, his notion that there is a single spiritual existence which unites all human souls might be attractive but seem rather fanciful.  He is a pains to show he is not privileging the soul over the body yet everything about his idea of the ideal human life runs counter to that assertion.
What I think I found most frustrating is that at its core I would agree with his argument, (the spiritual barrenness he sees in society has only increased in the last 40 years, and it is an enriching of the spiritual life that is the only way to address the deep discontentment within our society), however he makes this argument in such an obtuse and contrary way that so having started of agreeing with him for every page I read I became less and less sympathetic.  

The Dwelling of the Light by Rowan Williams

The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ

This is a little book full of big ideas, written in Rowan Williams' usual thoughtful and insightful way. In his introduction he gently explores the status of Icons which I would hope allows all but the most puritanical to see that Icons can be encountered as a devotional tool free from idolatry.

One of the joys of this book is that it offers an introduction to some icons which are unfamiliar to Western eyes while also allowing you a fresh encounter with others like Rublev's "Trinity" which have become so ubiquitous in recent years that they have been diminished almost to the status of wall paper. 

Each chapter takes an Icon in turn, but is structured in paragraphs which can either be read continuously or dipped in and out of from time to time (which is how I read it).