Lily Allen and the Bishop

The suggestion by the Bishop of Sheffield that Lily Allen's song 'The Fear' makes useful accompanying listening for a Bible-study course speaks into a 2,000 year old debate about Christians' attempts to ventriloquise secular or non-Christian cultural sources into speaking on matters of their faith. 

Paul famously tried this in a soap-box moment at the Aeropagus in Athens, quoting both Cretan philosopher Epimenides and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus as speaking of the God known by Paul as a disciple of Jesus (Acts 17:28).  The narrative in Acts then takes Paul from Athens to Corinth, and there's the implication in one of the letters that Paul wrote to the church there that he'd reflected on the preaching technique used in Athens and (perhaps) rejected it as ineffectual:

When I came to you, I did not come with eloquence or human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness with great fear and trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.  (1 Corinthians 1:1-5)

Strictly speaking, the use of the song in the course is not because it consciously articulates Christian doctrine but rather (says the Bishop) because it captures "something of the spirit of the age", and Lily Allen has endorsed its use in this way. 

I'd have no blog if I didn't think that cultural artifacts spoke both into, and from, religious experience but it leaves me wondering about an uncritical approach to this, or at least to an attitude that would view such approaches with great skepticism.

Defying Gravity

I think my love of words is becoming apparent.  I hope it's just a harmless eccentricity, albeit one bordering on the pretentious (numinous? I mean, really?).  Much of this has to do with ambiguity, and the ability of a single word to carry multiple, and sometimes contradictory meanings.  The coining of new meanings creates new places for the imagination to play. 

'Gravity' is one of these words: first used in English in figurative senses, as in the quality of being grave or serious, its use in the physical (scientific) sense only came in the seventeenth century as in 'the attractive force by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth'.

In an imaginative space, the force becomes a metaphor for serious things, a (un)happy carrying of two sets of meanings in a single word.  Some examples would be the song 'Gravity is merciless', or Roger McGough's lament for a dying friend in his poem 'Defying Gravity':

Soon now, the man that I love (not the armful of bones)
Will defy gravity. Freeing himself from the tackle
He will sidestep the opposition and streak down the wing
Towards a dimension as yet unimagined.

Back where the strings are attached there will be a service
And homage paid to the giant yo-yo. A box of left-overs
Will be lowered into a space on loan from the clay.
Then, weighted down, the living will walk wearily away

Had they had access to this range of meanings the first Christians might have been happy with idea of the physical body as a 'box of leftovers' but probably less so with the idea that this was entirely dispensable.  For them, there was an intimate (but difficult to define) relationship between their present experience and their belief that Jesus' resurrection was an experience that they would share too:

But someone will ask, 'How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?'  How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. (1 Corinthians 15:15-38)

So a single word can both define a measurable scientific reality and yet help us explore (using something we experience constantly) the unmeasurable territory of the inexorable passage of time into the future and the time-limited reality of our own mortality.  A love of words may be harmless, but it helps us in the serious business of living too, and as it's my blog, the last words on gravity are mine:

Ultrasound

I found you in my night sky
Picking out your constellation
Reminded by each single star
Of that moment
When all your future
Was crammed into a point of light

Coalescing towards me out of the dark
You will be caught
In my lifetime's gravity

Until this fades
And you spin away from my sky
Leaving my night starless