The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

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There was a reference to this novel in a book I was reading recently, but I can't remember which or even what the context was, although I have a vauge feeling it was something to do with questions of faith and hypocrisy …

The novel is acclaimed, the edition I read merited a literary introduction. This acclaim is mostly to do with the “form” of the novel – Sylvia claimed that there was no plot. There is perhaps certain unifying themes but there is not a narrative arc – there is not real “beginning”, “middle”, or “end”.

While this might have been a radical move for a novel when published in the late 1940s, the ensemble cast of Nuns, who come in and out of focus as the mini-dramas of their individual lives rise and fall, has the character of a soap opera.

It is a good read, but I struggled to see what it was that makes it a notable work.

Parliament, The Biography by Chris Bryant

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In this first Volume, Bryant gives a very readable account of the evolution of our Parliament over around 500 years up until 1800 – with a great focus on the Commons.

What is particular about this account is that Bryant picks up the individuals – refusing to subscribe to those that see great overarching dynamics – and is especially critical of the so called Whig history. For Bryant there was nothing inevitable about the moves toward democracy – expediency and opportunist action have shaped our history.

Many of those that were key to move the role of Parliament forward did so only from self-interest – democracy appears to be the unintended consequence of varying and completing efforts to feather ones nest.

This might sound like a depressing analysis – that we are the product of grubby deals rather than lofty ideals – but I rather like the humanising effect, the story is that people matter, with all the complexity of personality and relationships that they bring with them.

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The second part brings us up until Margaret Thatcher's departure from No 10 (although Bryant does in fact refer to some recent developments). This second part is arrangement more thematically, with chapters on the way War, Women, and Alcohol, among others, have shaped developments in Parliament.

One interesting feature is the growth in the power of the Executive, mostly during the two world wars, and so a weakening of the influence of Parliament. The arrival of democracy, in the form of universal suffrage, largely coincided with the grip of the Executive tightening. Bryant makes the point that in the 19^th Century there were complaints about 150 or so Crown appointments (mostly sinecures) which gave the Monarch control over Parliament, these were abolished, yet now the Government has similar numbers, with an army of junior ministers and Parliament Private Secretaries – we have come full circle?

As with the first volume this is a highly readable account, rich telling the stories of individuals, with the continuing theme of evolution by accident rather than design.

Abraham and his Son by James Goodman

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To turn to a book sub-titled “The story of a story” with many of the ideas of Pádraig Ó Tuama's In the Shelter still fresh in my mind seemed a right move – so much of what Pádraig shares is about the power of story. That there is very little ability to understand the world, or our place within it, without attending to stories.

I think that Goodman gives us a really important book, you know that I read a lot and yet this is one of the few books which I think is actually transformative. It is 250 pages, by no means long, but packed full of ideas, it is so rich.

The story is that of Abraham's (almost) sacrifice of his son Isaac. It is about 19 verses of Genesis. A short story but a big story.

Isaac's question “Here is the fire and the wood but where is the sheep for the offering?” are for me some of the most harrowing words in scripture, words that haunt me.

I have wrestled with it mostly within the context of reflections on Good Friday, probably a typical Christian encounter with the story – and so to approach it with the (secular) Jewish starting point of Goodman was to come to it afresh.

If this was just a book about that one story it would be interesting, well worth reading, and I will go on later to reflect more on what it says about that story, but in many ways these 19 verses are just a case study for an exploration which can be applied to Scripture in general. That you can write this much (and this in fact is little more than the abstract of what has been written) about these verses is proof about the endlessly contestable nature of the meaning of Scripture. (And that is even after you have decided it is Scripture with a capital S).

One of the frustrations about the way the phrase “Bible-Believing” is monopolised as a self-description by a certain party within the Church it that is assumes that what it is to “believe” the Bible is a simple and easily defined thing. And one of the things that I am grateful to Goodman for is exploding that myth. He shows the astounding range of beliefs that have been held about just 19 verses, and from that you when you then think about the Bible as a whole the idea that there is “a” meaning that can be believed surely can not be countenanced.

But I also think Goodman offers an important challenge to many of those who would fall into a bracket of “liberals” and who have a tendency to ignore any passage of Scripture that is uncomfortable. The process of formation of texts and the delimiting of the canon of Scripture was clearly complex – but I think that if we want to maintain that any of Scripture is worth attending too, and of course there are plenty who would dismiss the lot, but if we think any of Scripture is worthwhile we have to deal with the whole. That doesn't mean that we treat it all equally, but we must have some kind of relationship with it all.

Which perhaps brings us back around to the particular story. At the heart of Goodman's search I think are two key questions; What kind of God would ask a man to sacrifice their Son? and, What kind of man would follow that command? There is no easy answer to either question...

As a Christian there is an echoing on John 3:16, here Abraham loved God so much he was willing to give his only Son, and in it there root of a third question, What kind of God sacrifices their Son on the Cross?

Many take issue with Stuart Townend's hymn, In Christ Alone, for the line “Till on that cross as Jesus died, The wrath of God was satisfied”, refusing to accept the “wrath of God” as an explanation of the Cross. And some change the words so instead we sing “as Jesus died, The love of God was satisfied”. While I am personally doubtful about wrath (and the theology of penal substitution that it implies) I find I have even greater difficulty with the alternative – what are we to make of a Love that needs to be satisfied, needs to be satisfied by a brutal humiliating death?

There are parts of Goodman's book that bring you face to face with these questions and moments which made me question my faith. An uncomfortable experience, but not necessarily a negative one.

Like Jacob wrestling in the night with a man/angel/god we to must wrestle – and afterwards Jacob asks the man their name, but he doesn't get an answer. I think perhaps we live in a world that is too focused on answers – we have forgotten what it is to wrestle with unknowing.

One of the themes Goodman explores is the role (or absence) of Sarah in this story – she is a big character in most of the events of Abraham's life, a fellow traveller with him on his journey with God (some might suggest the Matriarchal character of Jewish identity might hint that Abraham was in fact a fellow traveller on her journey) . And so while women are under represented generally within the Bible, her absence here is particularly pronounced.

I write this just a day or two before it is Winchester's turn (along with Portsmouth and Salisbury Dioceses) to engage in the Church of England Shared Conversations about Sexuality. And this book speaks to that because much of the Conversations are not really about sex/sexuality but about our relationship with Scripture. Rather than bashing each other over the head with rival interpretations we need a bit more collective humility about what we can claim to know about the word of God (let alone the mind or will of God).

I have been sat here trying to think of a concluding remark, but I think the very nature of what Goodman shares is that the story of the story is open-ended and therefore rather than a conclusion all that you can offer is ...

In the Shelter by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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In this his latest book Pádraig shares some of the stories that go alongside his poems, when you hear him speak the poems are often the sort of punch line to a tale, an it is good to hear some of them again. But there is also a lot of more here, much of which deals with the pain of life.

There is so much that I could pick up on – I would be at risk of quotes the entire book – so here are just a few thoughts, perhaps at random, perhaps connected.

Among the quotes that stuck for me is “Whatever Jesus of Nazareth's death means, it doesn't mean something that can be written on a fridge magnet.” which speaks to the way the Church tends to reduce the complexity of God into manageable formula – but it also has the compact punch that would fit nicely on a fridge magnet, perhaps over a sun set or some other stock image.

There is a great richness in the idea of “story” for Pádraig, captured well as he writes “We are the stories we tell about ourselves and we are more than the stories we tell about ourselves. We fiction and fable our lives in order to tell of thing that are more than true and we lie – if only by omission – by reducing ourselves to mere facts.”

There are just a few poems included, and following on the theme of stories was “Returnings”

I see her, former colleague

in the baggage area of a

foreign airport.

Oh hi, she says,

looking awkwardly towards the

empty carousel.

Then she decides.

I hear you're gay now, she says.

Are you still a Christian?

Oh how will we tell this story?

She, to her friends, with

sadness, curiosity and prayers

for reorientation and returning.

Me, to mine, with sadness,

anger and prayers for

refocusing the lenses and returning.

And the anger was all mine,

but that question

was all about her.

Should we not just dance instead,

I should have said,

together turn a little waltz in

the chorus of our own bodies

while we wait and wait for something better

than the empty carousel of this question.

How will we tell this story?

How will I tell this story?

With sadness,

with practicings of little ballroom dances

while we wait, confidently,

for what is most important to be returned.

As with this poem, much of the wrestling within Pádraig's stories is on the fault lines of Christian and Sexual identities – and it was helpful to have him as a companion as I was trying to vote for General Synod, faced with a selection of candidates who would mostly draw the lines of faithfulness with me on the outside.

Among the irritants in their election addresses was the phrase “those experiencing same-sex attraction” and it took a while to work out some of the problems with it. One of the keys was Pádraig's reflection that in giving a group a (new) name you take power over them. I don't know any gay person who would describe themselves as experiencing same-sex attraction – I might say I fancy guys, but I would never say I experience same-sex attraction. Using this term takes away our self expression and tends towards dis-empowering and silencing the very people who are the centre of the debate.

And within this new name there are other moves at work. For example by not saying “people who are gay” but rather “people who experience same-sex attraction” you externalise the “problem”. As a category you move from “people who are...” say male, or black, or gay to “people who experience...” say headaches, delusions of grandeur, same-sex attraction. In so doing you open the door not only to fully embrace the “love the sinner, hate the sin” nonsense but also, more significantly, to the fact that “people who experience” something can generally become “people who used to experience” it. So what seems at first to be a value neutral descriptor suddenly becomes loaded with justifications for gay cures.

Last Call for the Dinning Car Edited by Michael Kerr

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I got this book out the library along with a number of guidebooks when we were planning our trip to Canada, so probably sometime in 2012, and have been dipping into it from time to time over the intervening years.

It is a miscellany of railway related writing that has appeared in the Telegraph over a century or more.

Some are charming snippets, comments on a particular historical moment in railway history.

Some are more traditional travelogues – but for example the pairing of different eras of journeys on the Orient Express, when it had gone to seed and in its current revival, play against each other for added interest.

While some of the more exotic journeys sound great adventures, such a crossing the Andes, most failed the test of suitability for holidays. Many had a little too much in common with Griff Rhys Jones' recent programmes “Africa by train” for which a better subtitle would have been “the continent's best rail-replacement bus journeys”!

Home Movies by Claire Jenkins

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I guess I have to begin by admitting a potential bias as Claire is an old school friend (although I think neither of us would dwell on the “old” part...) but thankfully I found this a book that does require rose-tinted glasses to review.

To apply intellectual rigour to the lightweight output of mainstream Hollywood is important as these are the movies that have a mass audience and as such these have far greater cultural influence than many films which would receive critical accolades.

It is perhaps no great surprise to find that Hollywood is ultimately culturally conservative, however it is interests to explore the ways in which moments of seeming diversity or progressive portrayals are in fact constrained.

Diversity is OK in Hollywood, as long as you are middle-class and in the long run fall into the basic pattern of the nuclear family. There are Black families, but they are firmly middle-class, there are Gay families, but not only are they also middle-class there is a strong binary gendering of the familial roles adopted by the partners. There are single-parents but their narrative resolution almost invariably the establishment of a relationship (very often with the other biological parent of their child).

Superficial differences are accepted but underlining these is conformity. And that message of conformity is all the more pervasive when clothed in trappings of diversity.

The Spiritual City by Philip Sheldrake

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There was much that I liked about this book, and it felt right to be reading it while I was in New York, in the context of a prime example of “the city” as we now encounter it.

While the arguments for taking the City seriously as Christians were well made what seemed to be missing was how to actually deal with the City of the 21^st Century. It is clear that many of the thinkers who used here lived in cities whose populations were counted in hundreds of thousand rather millions and scale is key to the functioning of communities. Also we have to take into account the differences between our infrastructure rich “western” cities and many of the vast cities in other parts of the world where significant proportions of their populations live without access to effective infrastructure, be that transport, sanitation, utilities etc, and therefore their participation in any common life of “the City” is difficult.

While we were in New York we when to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) which among its exhibitions would currently showing one on Architecture in Latin America from 1950s to 1980s. Its focus was on the planned urban developments, including its completely new Cities such as Brasilia. Much of this work seemed to run counter to the ideas that Sheldrake was putting forward. Urban planning of that era in the UK is generally derided and an equivalent exhibition for the UK would likely be dominated by a catalogue of grand follies and relief at visions that were never realised. This was not the tone of the MoMA exhibition – it seemed to be looking back with positivity.

One of the quotes I particularly liked follows on from this “Stories are more than descriptions. They take ownership of spaces, define boundaries, and create bridges between individuals. The narrative structure of local communities enables people to shape the world that surrounds them, rather than be passively controlled by it.” (p109) It is key that local communities have the opportunity to describe themselves – too often poorer communities find that it is only the (negative) descriptions of others that are given validity – we might recall the post-War “slum clearances”, where many now talk of the strength of the communities that was lost in the move to new housing estates and tower blocks – call it “slum clearance” or “destruction of community” the lens you use determines what you will see.

While another quote “Memory is redemptive in that only by handling the past constructively are we able effectively to shape the present and name a future that we may aspire to.” (p122) hints at the reason why much urban regeneration fails, too often it involves wiping the slate clean and trying to start completely afresh – leaving whatever is created soulless and without roots. Better to work with the past, being adaptive and reshaping.

Whatever the city is, it will always be a melting pot – however much those with “power” might try to regulate and sanitise the population there will be places beyond their reach – with so much life in the city there will always be some that is overlooked – and perhaps it is in those overlooked places that the greatest creativity is found.