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 .