Category Archives: poetry

Righteous Anger? Herbert’s The Collar

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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Portrait of George Herbert

 

I struck the board, and cried, “No more; 

I will abroad! 

What? shall I ever sigh and pine? 

My lines and life are free, free as the road, 

Loose as the wind, as large as store. 

Shall I be still in suit? 

Have I no harvest but a thorn 

To let me blood, and not restore 

What I have lost with cordial fruit? 

So begins George Herbert’s poem, The Collar. Herbert loved playing with words, it’s one reason I love his poetry. At first sight the subject seems to refer to the limiting effects of a collar, most obviously, his clerical collar, but of course the word is, in its sound, similar to the word “choler”, or “anger”, as well as to the word “caller”.

According to the theories of early modern medicine, “choler” was the humour which made one angry, hence our word “choleric”, and this poem has that in abundance.

He begins with anger expressing itself in physical form. The “board” he strikes may be taken to be a table, but it could equally be the altar, and given the subject of the poem, that may be the preferred reading. Herbert’s patience is at and end, he’s leaving. The constant search for something he cannot have is, he declares, at an end. He’s telling God that that’s it! He wants to be “free as the road.” We might note in passing the echo of the “rood” or Christ’s cross, whose sacrifices the poet is now rejecting. He wants a secular life and its happiness.

“Shall I still be in suit?” he asks querulously. This is almost a tantrum. He feels he has no control, that he is always the petitioner; he wants freedom. All he feels he has is a thorn, and we hear the echo, again, of Christ’s crucifixion when he was crowned with thorns.

   Sure there was wine 

Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn 

Before my tears did drown it. 

Is the year only lost to me? 

Have I no bays to crown it, 

No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? 

All wasted? 

Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, 

And thou hast hands. 

Of all Herbert’s poems, this is the one closest to modern free verse. He eschews his usual style, and the poem sprawls across the page, as ill-disciplined as the poet’s temper. He looks back with anger at what was, and longs for something better. Then it occurs to him that there is still time to do so.

 

Recover all thy sigh-blown age 

On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute 

Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, 

Thy rope of sands, 

Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee 

Good cable, to enforce and draw, 

And be thy law, 

While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. 

Away! take heed; 

I will abroad.

He can reject the academic life and the discipline of theology and of God. The constraints on him are, after all, self-imposed, and he can, if he so pleases, loosen them and leave.

And so, as the poem itself rages on with the poet’s wrath, another voice, a still small one is heard off-scene.

Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears; 

He that forbears 

To suit and serve his need 

Deserves his load.” 

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 

At every word, 

Methought I heard one calling, Child! 

And I replied My Lord.

And in response to the “caller” Herbert’s “choler” subsides. Yes, it is his choice to follow Christ, and despite his anger and his hurt, he will do so. However much his human will rebels against God, the poet knows he cannot live without him, and when God calls the poet, like Samuel, may wonder “Is it I, Lord?” But he knows that, like Samuel, he will follow.

In many ways this is one of the most personal of Herbert’s poems, and for me, and I know others, one of the most reassuring. If a man like Herbert could so rail against God, then is it suprising that the rest of us have done so from time to time and wondered whether we could carry on living a Godly life in the face of temptation,  not least the temptations of our own wilfulness. But for me, as for the poet, when I hear “the caller” I, too, reply “My Lord.”

The church’s banquet

11 Tuesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Blogging, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry, Prayers

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I hadn’t realised how long I’d been away, and if you asked me ever so hard, I’m not sure I know why now broke the writer’s block, but people have been sweet, so thank you. I think it helped with Audre here. Having another female Anglican voice was somehow comforting – again, don’t expect me to say why, it just was.

I’ll apologise here for the passive-aggressive tone in some of my early responses on Newman. I don’t mean to come across that way, and don’t know I do it, so thank you to Phillip and C for both, courteously, pointing it out. As I said to Phillip, I will try to be good rather than be good at being trying! I have been reading back a bit, and would like to thank Nicholas and C who have done a great job of keeping this going, as well as Scoop and others who’ve played a noble part.

Writing, and reading a blog, as I discovered, is either a routine you get into, or it doesn’t happen at all. Is that just me? I say that because I find the same is true of prayer. Prayer can seem an odd thing to outsiders. If God knows everything we need, why are we telling him? If God is omnipotent, why do we have to praise him and flatter him all the time? Such questions and comments fail to understand prayer, and I want to say why I think that.

Prayer is, for me, tuning into the God who is always there, and it’s about nurturing the relationship I have with him. That’s where church is vital to me, as the church is Christ’s. Routine helps me here in two ways. I pray the same three Offices every day at about the same time: Morning Prayer; Evening Prayer and Compline. It was C who recommended the habit to me and I am grateful. It helped me overcome two of my natural reactions to private prayer, one of which was that it was a bit of chore when I was tired or busy and couldn’t think what to say, and the other was an anxiety to try to be good for God and in some way win his approval. The words of Common Worship provide me with a text which I have come to love, and in the repeating of the words, I find they mean more to me; it is as though whatever ‘tuning in’ is happening deepens. It’s the same when listening to a beautiful piece of music, the more you play and listen, the more you get out of it. My prayer seems to me to become part of a bigger and ongoing prayer and the more I do it, the closer I feel I get.

And that’s where the bit about adoration comes in. When I say the Psalms or the Litany I’m not flattering God, I’m simply expressing my love for him. Prayer is who I am at those moments, it takes me deeper into the reality of Jesus. I feel as though I am stepping into an ongoing conversation. I marvel at God’s love and his glory. Its why I like that bugbear of some, icons. I look at him in my icons, in the same way I look at the Eucharist when, in church, I practice Eucharistic Adoration; looking is important. As some saint or other (someone here will know) once said about prayer: ‘I look at him and he looks at me.’

I love him and in those precious moments I can feel the love he has for me. I repent of my sins, but they pale because the overwhelming feeling is of his love and connectedness. I can set aside, because he has, my sins and concentrate on being in his presence, feeling his gaze on me, bathed in love. That’s the point I offer up my prayers for others, not because I think he doesn’t know, but just because being human, that’s the way I express my love for others too. And even though I am often alone in my room when I pray, I know I am praying with the whole church, here on earth and in heaven – so it seems natural to use ‘we’ rather than “I.’

Prayer is the way the church gives me to deepen my communion with Jesus, and I think of my beloved George Herbert’s poetry and want to finish this little piece with a poem of his which expresses all I just tried to say much better than I can:

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,

God’s breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

 

How are we to communicate?

03 Friday Jul 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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The question of language is a vital one for the Church. How do we communicate the Word of God? This is a complex issue, bound up as it is with questions of culture (local, national and institutional, to name but three), personal formation, and individual preferences.

For the longest time in the West, the preferred text of Scripture was in Latin, although, of course originally, none of the text was in that language. Across time, the result of this was that the Scriptures were the preserve of a small elite, and the growing feeling that this was hardly what Jesus meant led to an irrisistible demand for texts in the vernacular. Now, of course, this is taken for granted, and being what we are by fallen nature, we can now argue, instead, over which version of the vernacular we prefer; but at least the words of Scripture are now available to all who wish to have access to them.

There are those who sometimes wonder whether this is such a good thing, as people will interpret the texts for themselves, but then they always did, even when the only people with access to them were priests and bishops; as anyone familiar with the early Church can attest, limited circulation of the text did not mean that there was anything like a uniform interpretation available.

One of the huge benefits of something we now take for granted, that is the ready availability of the Bible in a language, and even in the version of it that suits our taste, is that we can engage with it as individuals. Surely that is part of being a Christian? We develop a relationship with Scripture as we do, through it and the Church, with God. These wise words by the Rev Jessica Martin struck me as I read them this morning:

Like all relationships, it will have appalling, jagged gaps, breakdowns that seem insuperable. I will sometimes argue with it, sometimes be angry, sometimes disagree. That is how conversation is. For scripture, its crucible of meaning is the receiving intelligence, history, body, and affections of the reader. Scripture makes itself vulnerable to my flaws and to my failures of understanding; the trust goes both ways. I am not expected to be “mute and spiritless” before its holy voice.

The whole piece is worth reading reflectively.

Here I want to focus on one part of what she has to say here:

we have a huge communication gap between our worship and our reasoning. In worship, we don’t talk much about how to believe in poetic connections. And we divorce our reasoning from our corporate worshipping life, and so from our communal heart.

There is much wisdom in this, too much for a short essay to unpack, but let me offer a few preliminary reflections and hope that your comments, and further thought, will take me forther.

It is easy for our worship to fall into one of two styles: the one formal, even archaic; the other informal and even anarchic. As someone whose preferences tend to the former, and whose character shies (literally) away from what I would probably (perhaps wrongly) call “over-emotionalism” (confession time, I am actually comfortable with sharing the “peace”), I would rather worship where there is due order and the rubrics are followed. But I try not to mistake my personal preference for any kind of norm, and I am alert to the difficulty that those who drop into Church for the first time might encounter. I suspect those difficulties exist in a similat way in Churches where the worship style is more informal.

That raises a larger topic for another day, which is how Churches interact not only with their regular congregations, but with those who might want to come to Church but not get terribly involved. One of the effects of the pandemic has been to emphasise how important the place of worship is. There are those who say that it does not matter that Churches have been closed, we can worship God anywhere. The latter part of that sentence is correct, the first part of it betrays, I fear, an impoverished view of how individuals react to the numinous. It is not, at least for me, just the absence of the Eucharist, it is something more imtangible and poetic. T.S. Eliot expresses this best in “Little Gidding”:

It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

That “kneeling where prayer has been valid” matters to me, because Eliot is right, prayer in more than “an order of words.” That takes me back to another insight from Dr Martin’s article:

When we reason at arm’s length with inert lumps of text, we cannot recognise how they and we communicate. But scripture in worship comes into the unfolding history of Now, binding together those who take part and making it more likely that they will take care with fragile shared meanings. Worship is recognised as a form of encounter. Enacted words are pregnant with change.

Just as in the Incarnation, the Word in becoming flesh, made Himself vulnerable to our frailties in order to heal them in His death and resurrection, so does His written word become vulnerable to our limitations of understanding, but through His Church and our worship, transcend them to help transform us.

 

 

The silent God?

04 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Faith, Newman, poetry, Prayers

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“Thus religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, which forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines and isolated masses.”

Religion without dogma made no sense to Newman; without that it was “mere sentiment” – and that was a foundation of sand. But he was well aware of the limits of humanity and acknowledged that the application of the intellect to religious matters might well produce a diminution of faith. It was, he commented, as though it was assumed that theologians were “too intellectual to be spiritual” and thus “more occupied with the truths of doctrine than with its reality.”

For Catholics the Church is the rock upon which dogma rests; we accept the historical reality of the Revelation it transmits to us. But intellect alone will not suffice; that is where prayer and devotional practices are needed; we do not worship by brain-power. For Newman,“Revealed religion should be especially poetical – and it is so in fact.” Prose was inadequate to convey the Truth of revealed religion, but, without an Authority to pronounce on revelation and tradition, private judgement would simply lead to the sort of chaos he came to discern within the Church of England in his own day. Thus, the mixture of light and dark in the quotation which heads up this essay.

Although we are each the subject of our own experiences, and whilst Christ came to save each of us, our egos are but a vehicle when it comes to understanding that Christ Himself is at the centre of our Faith. The central truth of the Christian Faith is the Incarnation. God became man and died that we should have eternal life. And yet knowing this, we can, nonetheless, in times such as this lose sight of this and, in despair, wonder why God is silent in the face of our prayers for healing and safety.

Much prose has been given over to the problem of why God allows mankind to suffer – the technical term is theodicy. But the intervention which speaks most to my heart is the poem, “Denaill” by George Herbert:

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder

This is no intellectual exercise, it is the heart-felt anguish of the poet who agonises at what he feels is God’s refusal of his prayerful requests. He feels abandoned, as though his soul has no mooring. It is only in close reading that we see that the poet is, himself, in “denial”. Each stanza concludes with a last line which does not rhyme – except for the last one which concludes:

 O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhym

Which, of course, is a rhyme. God has answered, it is the poet who has been in denial. God’s answer may not be the one we expect; it maybe that we are not listening.

We are made in God’s image; but we are not God. How much we long for a God whom we can understand, as well as worship, how often we think that God is absent; but how often to we think that it is we who are absent, we who are deaf?

T.S. Eliot, as so often, expresses it best in the first part of Little Gidding:

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

We have to put away our worldly concerns. Our intellects can rest secure on the rock of the dogma proclaimed by the Church. What should concern us is prayer, and even the best of prayers is but the antechamber to our encounter with God. We intersect with the past and the present, the living and dead, and above all with Him whose Kingdom shall have no end.

God is not silent; we lack the ears with which to hear Him if we think so.

George Herbert: seeking the face of God

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Faith, poetry

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Yesterday was is the 500th anniversary of the birth of George Herbert, a favourite poet of Jessica, and one of the greatest of theologians, if, as we ought, we define the term as being to talk about God. We proceed, as Herbert saw, from the consequences of the Fall. Once, mankind walked with God and saw His face, but we pursued the devices and desires of our own hearts, we thought to be as wise as God – an endeavour showing how foolish we are as a species. So we were banished, and we no longer see Him face to face. One consequence is that, like Isaiah we fear to see His holiness for we know we are men of unclean lips. And yet the Psalmist expresses what is in the hearts of all Christians when he writes

‘My heart says of you, “Seek his face!” /  Your face, Lord, I will seek.’

Augustine says the same thing and extends it when he says that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God, and if we will, even for a moment, turn from the clamant noises we seek and which fill our ears, then our hearts too, will tell us this; the Spirit reaches out to us all, and we know that even though we are far off, God reaches out for us. George Herbert puts it well in his poem, The Pulley

But keep them with repining restlesnesse:

Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,

If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse

May tosse him to my breast

That emptiness we strive so hard to keep at bay, is the longing to which we yield when we give in – as Herbert suggests, it is a natural process designed by God. When we think we know better, we strive and use our strength, as though we really can take the kingdom of heaven by storm. However, if we will strip away our pride of self, if we will receive him as a small child, then that balancing of which Herbert wrote, can take place.

Sometimes our theologising with our heads misses what our hearts tell us – which is that we are loved of God. Herbert caught our feelings so well here:

‘Love bade me welcome.

Yet my soul drew back
God, being love, does not, in the poem, accept our refusal to look on Him, but rather:
“Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?”’

Like the Prodigal, Herbert’s sinner cannot accept the love, but offers rather to be a humble servant – to which God/Love responds:

‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat / So I did sit and eat.’

If we will but ‘sit and eat’, then our restless heart will find fulfillment in Him.

“If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Lent, poetry, Politics

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T.S. Eliot wrote that: “If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again and you cannot put on a new culture readymade. You must wait for the grass to grow …”

The classic liberal secularist response to this is summed up here:

There is, of course, a double dishonesty in all of this. There is the assumption that it is not possible to retain, in a secular society, those values which we have learned as matters of good sense from a Christianity in which they were supported by revelation; it is a standard trope, unsupported by reason of modern conservatism that if we discard part we stand to lose all of our historical culture – and Eliot was too clever a man not to know that this was, and remains, mere assertion.

The burden of proof here rests, it seems to me, on the person making the assertion. Values need to be rooted in something. Christianity values the family and all human life, and if I ask whether this society does so I would query a positive answer, and more than that, I would point to the breakdown of the family in the UK and America and ask how far many of our social ills stem from that? I would also ask how far a society where the public discourse has become as crude as it has, has been coarsened by its attitude to the unborn and the elderly, where it seems that a more utilitarian attitude now prevails – one where sentimentality scarcely conceals a selfish desire that the individual’s own comfort should come first? These are important parts of our historical culture, and the fact that they are attenuating most where Faith has vanished most, may be a coincidence, but it suggests that the optimism of the critic is unfounded. In Eliot’s day this process was not very far advanced; it is now. But Eliot saw clearly that:

“a society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices have been abandoned [and when] when behaviour ceases to be regulated by reference to Christian principle, and when in effect prosperity in this world for the individual or for the group has become the sole conscious aim” (Christianity & Culture, 9–10).

The critic’s other caveat of Eliot’s position is one I think we should take more seriously:

The other dishonesty is that Eliot’s Christianity, like that of many rightwing intellectuals, is an underpinning of the status quo rather than a force for social justice or the ecstatic joy of Easter Day for believers.

If by ‘social justice’ is meant a bias to the poor and a concern for them, then it is, alas, true that too many conservative Christians react to this as though someone were suggesting that Jesus was a communist. His concern for the poor and the marginalised is not one which conservative Christians tend to stress. As for the joy of the Resurrection, again, the critic has a point. To what extent does the experience of the Resurrection inform our attitude to others and to the world? Do we express that optimism that in the end all will be well, and all manner of things will be well, or do we retreat into an entrenched conservatism which rejects the world because it cannot cope with it and prefers to see it as the enemy rather than as a target for conversion?

How, though, does, or should, our Christianity inform our cultural encounters? How do we hold on to the best that Christianity has given our culture without also insisting that there is only one way – a conservative way – of portraying this? It is to some of those questions that I hope to return during the Lenten period.

O Adonai

18 Sunday Dec 2016

Posted by in Advent, Bible, Faith, Julian of Norwich, poetry

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O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai:Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

The second of the ‘O Antiphons’ points us back to the appearance of God to Moses in the flame of the burning bush, as well as forward to those tests of our faith by fire of which SSS Peter (1 Peter, 2:7) and Paul (1 Cor 3:12-15) speak. They refer back to what Isaiah prophesies when he wrote: ‘Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction’ (Isaiah 48:10).  This is a theme taken up in many other places in Scripture. Malachi (3:1-18) writes:

But who may abide the day of his coming? and who shall stand when he appeareth? for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap:

3 And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.

If you have ever seen a sliver-smith at work, you will have an idea of the intensity of the fire, and that image of the impurities being melted away is a powerful one to our fallen humanity.

Eliot uses the imagery in Little Gidding:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.

The brief sun in the darkness is that Light which lights the whole world, though the world knows it not, but it can light our cold hearts and become, as Eliot has it, that ‘pentecostal fire’ which marks the coming of the Holy Spirit upon us. He writes:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one dischage from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

We are redeemed from the fires of hell only by the purifying fire of Pentecost. Who shall abide the day of his coming?

Why ‘Adonai’? This ancient title, ‘Lord’ was uttered because we know ourselves to be men of unclean lips – the the four letters known as ‘The Tetragramaton’ – YHWH – could not be was not to be spoken by fallen mankind.  The sense of our sinfulness oppresses us, even as we receive the remedy for it. He assumed our flesh to redeem it, he took on the form of a slave for our sake. What a mysterious fire is this where the maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things, seen and unseen, became man, entered into our darkness to bring the light that would light our way to Heaven. The name that could not be spoken, the Word who spoke the world into existence, came in flesh to us, and in dying in that flesh entered into the great silence of death, only to overcome it and to become the first fruits of our redemption. Just as the bush burn and was not consumed, so too did Christ die and yet was not, as we are without him, consumed by death.

In that place where all lights fail, we have one light that will not fail us. And as Eliot reminds us at the end of Little Gidding:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

[There is a wonderful reading of the whole poem by Jeremy Irons here]

Leonard Cohen RIP

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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His last album, just released, was entitled ‘You want it darker’; now he is gone and it is darker. I can’t remember why I bought Cohen’s ‘The Spice Box of Earth’, except that as a young adolescent I read poetry with the avidity of someone who, lost in the desert, stumbles across a lush green oasis. So when I saw an LP with his name on it, I bought it; The Songs of Leonard Cohen was the first LP I bought. It hardly seemed worth buying any more LPs as this one had it all – but when I discovered there were others, I bought them. My musical choice was, to put it mildly, unpopular at home; but that simply reinforced the feeling that here was someone who mattered in a way the wailing pop-stars did not. For the last 50 years Cohen’s music has accompanied me on my journey. I ordered the last album earlier in the week. I knew, by instinct, it would be his last – although of course it won’t be, there will be more as his archive is examined; but it is the last to be issued in his life.

The tributes have been coming in since the news of his death broke. Most of them have emphasised what appealed to me about him – which was an essential seriousness. Schooled in Scripture, Jewish and Christian, Cohen had a range of religious references which would once have been a common part of our culture; but he was one of the last generation of artists to able to take that for granted. I wonder how many of his news fans got the references in the second verse of “Hallelujah” to ‘ your faith was strong/ but you needed proof/you saw her bathing on the roof’? For him the spiritual and the erotic were intertwined. Like so many of his generation, his spiritual search took him to some strange places, but it was a consistent search to find a meaning in life that he knew was there – if he could only find it. To some that made him a pessimist, but as he said a pessimist was someone who was waiting for it to rain – ‘I am soaked to the skin’. Not everyone got the black humour, but a man with his voice who could sing of being born with a ‘golden voice’ was teasing himself – and his audience.

His renaissance as an artist after 2008 was prompted by the fact that his long-time manager had emptied his accounts whilst he had been in a Zen monastery; this could only have happened to Cohen, who then turned to touring to make up the deficit. This gave him a new generation of fans. His appearance at Glastonbury in 2013 book-ended his famous appearance at the Isle of Wight in 1970 (when he came on after Jimi Hendrix

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It marked, it was thought then, a sort of finale. But since then we have had two new albums which showed that age had no effect on his creativity.

There is, as Cohen reminded us, ‘a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’ – worth remembering that one.

The illusion of progress

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, poetry, Politics

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Second Adam

At the heart of the attitude evidenced in the comments of the Clinton campaign about Catholicism is a common enough attitude. The person making the comment, like the person to whom he or she is making them, is aligned with the spirit of the age and is the modern day Pharisee – thanking fate (he or she does not, of course, believe in God) that he (or she) is not like those backward looking folk hanging on to their guns and their religion. They have advanced far beyond such things and entered into the Nirvana of contemporary thought where the only bad thing is to be sure about anything except the backwardness of those who do not agree with the common wisdom of the age. That such ‘wisdom’ is untested and untried is no bar to those who hold these things on no more than the authority of the fact they wish to sound ‘cool’ and what used to be called ‘with it’. ‘Group think’ is a very powerful phenomenon, and not least among those who like to think of themselves as intellectuals.

And yet, and yet, there are very many men and women of intellect who believe in God, and who are humble enough to admit that the secrets of the universe are not wholly revealed to mankind – whatever its high opinion of itself. There was that brief moment of utter hubris in some circles after the fall of Communism when people were bold enough to say that history had ended. But the Gods of the Copybook headings had their revenge – as they tend to. As we survey the chaos that is the Middle East and watch its ripples spread to the corners of Europe, we might well wish history was ended. Instead, we see those instruments of post-1945 civilisation such as the UN and its various agencies, and NATO, all powerless to intervene to do anything to save the millions whose lives are being wrecked by the violence.

The nineteenth century was full of thinkers such as Macaulay who imagined that they had entered some new age marked by progress – he could barely imagine how people had managed to survive in Elizabethan manor houses or castles, and rejoiced in their destruction and replacement by ‘modern’ architecture – a view which has not survived in that sphere or, it might be added, in others. Mankind, as Kipling’s poem implies, remains much what it has always been – the the dog returns always to its vomit.

Nor should this surprise us, because it is precisely what our Christian faith tells us, that however hard man tries to do what he knows is right, he does not what he wills, but too often what he did not mean to do. The words of the old Anglican general confession ring true – ‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us’. Nor is there. Had there been then the Lord Jesus would not have needed to have become Incarnate, suffered and died and then rose again to save us. There is one name alone which saves us – and it is not that of any politician. The works of men are vain, empires rise and they fall, and for all save a few, their names pass away and are forgotten. True ‘progress’ is possible only in cooperation with the wisdom of God. But we have eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil, and have exiled ourselves from Eden.

On a darkling plain?

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Faith, poetry, Politics

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One of Jessica’s reflections on Arnold’s Dover Beach, came to mind as I pondered yesterday’s post and some of the responses to it. If you follow the link you will find the full text of the poem, in which the poet responds to the ebbing of the ‘sea of faith’ with the reflection that the lovers should cling to each other, as that was all they could know to be true in a society where the certainties were fading away. She suggested that there might have been a spot of self-indulgence in the attachment to despair. That may well be how it might strike a younger person, but to an older one, it seems a realistic enough reaction to an otherwise intolerable situation. She also mentioned Larkin’s line from An Arundel Tomb that ‘what will survive of us is love’. Larkin, of course, calls this an ‘almost true’ ‘almost instinct’. hinting at the difficulty the modern sensibility has with something that looks like a sincere expression of deep emotion; there seems to need to be at least some nod toward the direction of a knowing cynicism. That, too, is part of the modern malaise. In losing God we lose also that sense that we are loved, loved unconditionally, and that we have a unique value simply by being who we are. In losing that, in losing God, we lose an anchor which holds us to a place our ancestors would have recognised, but which is increasingly foreign to us.

We are not ‘alone’ as on a darkling plain, we are children of the living God, and as such we are part of a relationship, even as the Trinity is a relationship between its three persons; as it is characterised by mutual love, then so, too, should our fellowship with each other. Christ the Word became Incarnate, thus honouring our flesh; we are not simply creatures of spirit, we are material beings, and the material world in which we live, not least its local manifestations such as our churches and homes and communities, matter to us; they help nurture and support us, and we do the same to them. Traditional religion has contributed immensely to social cohesion and our sense of justice; indeed it has helped define our society and our laws; it helps locate us where we are, and, at the same time, to connect us to the transcendent. Catholic social teaching has much in it from which a society lost in materialism could still learn. The social order cannot, or should not at any rate, be reduced to a set of market transactions; culture is not simply a commodity to be traded at whatever price can be had for its material artefacts. If there is no more to the world than secular materialism, then there really is not that much purpose to life beyond eating, drinking and being merry, because tomorrow we die. But not can eat and drink, and many cannot be merry, and so what purpose did their lives serve? Down that road lies an instrumentalisation of the human person, where it seems quite ‘normal’ to celebrate the ability of one person to exercise their ‘freedom’ to realise their ‘happiness’ at the cost of a a human life in the womb, and where to argue over what everyone used to call a ‘baby’ seems wisdom rather than folly.

Is democracy simply a means to the end of the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or has it some more moral purpose? Even to ask such a question in a society which lacks a common morality (or at least in which this is increasingly so) is to realise how far we have come from ‘Dover Beach’.