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

A brief interlude on questions...

though truth and falsehood be
Near twins, yet truth a little elder is;
Be busy to seek her; believe me this,
He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so.
Yet strive so that before age, death's twilight,
Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night.
To will implies delay, therefore now do;
(John Donne, Satire III)

Zero Yorkshiremen

Others will comment more eloquently on the literary merits of The King James Bible - published 400 years ago - than I can.  It's true that the influence of its language has been widespread: how could the following piece of parody from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail be possible if the words and rhythms of the Authorised Version were not so well known:

LAUNCELOT: We have the Holy Hand Grenade [...]
ARTHUR: Consult the Book of Armaments! [...]
BROTHER MAYNARD: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine to twenty-one. [...]
SECOND BROTHER: And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade that, with it, Thou mayest blow Thine enemies to tiny bits in Thy mercy.' And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats and large chu--
MAYNARD: Skip a bit, Brother.
SECOND BROTHER: And the Lord spake, saying, 'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'

The Monty Python team were also famously responsible for the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, but it's a source of mischevious delight to me as a 'Southerner' living in exile in the North that neither Yorkshiremen nor indeed Northerners of any description had any significant influence on the language of the King James Bible:

[W]ith virtually no exceptions, the scholars assembled [by King James I] for the purpose of translating the Bible were based in the South of England [...] Northern forms of English made little, if any, impact on the translation.  Alister McGrath In The Beginning - The Story of the King James Bible

Mischief aside there's an interesting feature of the language of the King James Bible which the Monty Python parody (unintentionally?) emulates, and which brings it very much into the world of this blog.  The Authorised Version uses the Thou/Thee/Thy forms of address for both God speaking to people, and people speaking to God, as in the 'Lord's Prayer': Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. (Matthew 6:9)

The (singular) Thou/Thee/Thy form of address had been used in Mediaeval England amongst family members; the (plural form) Ye/You/Your as a mark of respect when addressing a social superior.  Whilst this distinction was slightly old-fashioned by the time the translators of the King James Version set to work it fascinates me that the translation made this familiar way of speaking to God, as though to a family member, a commonplace in our language.  A relationship with transcendence might beg a respectful form of address; in the language of the King James Bible, people speak to God as though to a family member.  Heaven in ordinary.

The Ox, and Ass, and Lobster

All sorts of animals crowd into the Nativity story, as in this piece of dialogue from the film Love Actually:

Karen: So what's this big news, then?
Daisy: [excited] We've been given our parts in the nativity play. And I'm the lobster.
Karen: The lobster?
Daisy: Yeah!
Karen: In the nativity play?
Daisy: [beaming] Yeah, *first* lobster.
Karen: There was more than one lobster present at the birth of Jesus?
Daisy: Duh.

Or in the carol In the bleak midwinter:

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Or in the mediaeval Latin text O magnum mysterium, often set to music, and for me most memorably by Morten Lauridsen:

o great mystery

and wondrous sacrament,

that animals should see the newborn Lord,

lying in a manger!

Blessed is the virgin whose womb was worthy

to bear our Lord Christ.  Alleluia!

Lord, I heard your call and was afraid;

I considered your works,

and I trembled between two animals

Lobster, ox and ass are all missing from the narratives of the birth of Jesus in the 'canonical' gospels written by Matthew and Luke, as are any mentions of animals at all, apart from the 'flocks' watched over by the shepherds outside Bethlehem (Luke 2:8).

What interests me is the way in which the birth stories in Matthew and Luke are sparse enough to both beg, and to hold, an imaginative filling-in of details.  One of these imaginative 'fillings-in', and perhaps the source for some of the more traditional animal inhabitants of the Nativity story such as the Ox and the Ass, is the 8th century Pseudo-Matthew gospel:

And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Mary went out of the cave, and, entering a stable, placed the child in a manger, and an ox and an ass adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by the prophet Isaiah, "The ox knows his owner, and the ass his master's crib." Therefore, the animals, the ox and the ass, with him in their midst incessantly adored him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habakkuk the prophet, saying, "Between two animals you are made manifest." (Chapter 14)*

What all these texts betray are two deep human desires.  Firstly, a curiosity about the details of life of Jesus, and in particular his childhood, which the New Testament both stubbornly refuses to meet but also (strangely) prompts by allowing so many empty spaces within which the imagination can work.  Secondly, a longing for the divine to be made real and understandable within the span of domestic experience; the Ox and the Ass provide the realism, the prophetic 'authority' of Isaiah and Habakkuk appear to provide a divine sanction for their inclusion - heaven in ordinary.

*The Isaiah quote is 1:3, that from Habakkuk is 3:2 but where the King James Version has 'O LORD, I have heard thy speech, and was afraid: O LORD, revive thy work in the midst of the years, in the midst of the years make known; in wrath remember mercy.' the Pseudo Matthew gospel relies on the Septuagint (LXX) which translates the words in bold as 'two living creatures'.

A Christmas Carol

Re-reading Charles' Dickens A Christmas Carol at the moment.  I've been reflecting on what sort of Christianity it reveals.  In the basic 'moral' of the story, Scrooge's Zacchaeus-like (see Luke 19) conversion from "the love of money [which] is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6:10) to open-handed generosity, the narrator demonstrates a high regard for the New Testament's ethical teaching. 

Elsewhere, there is a degree of scepticism towards some of the manifestations of institutional Christianity, as in this conversation between Scrooge and the second of the Three Spirits (the ghost of Christmas Present):

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
      ‘Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘There is. My own.’
      ‘Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘To any kindly given. To a poor one most.’
      ‘Why to a poor one most?’ asked Scrooge.
      ‘Because it needs it most.’
      ‘Spirit,’ said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought, ‘I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,’ said Scrooge. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
      ‘I!’ cried the Spirit.
      ‘You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?’ said Scrooge. ‘And it comes to the same thing.’
      ‘I seek!’ exclaimed the Spirit.
      ‘Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,’ said Scrooge.
      ‘There are some upon this earth of yours,’ returned the Spirit, ‘who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.’
      Scrooge promised that he would;

True Christianity, within A Christmas Carol, is found in an everyday practical care for the poor and not pious legalism, perhaps reflecting Jesus' comment: "The poor you will always have with you" (Matthew 26:11).  Sunday is not kept sacred by taking away the possibility of a hot meal from the deprived.  Elsewhere, there's an echo of Jesus' identification of being a Christian with care for the poor: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40):

‘And how did little Tim behave?’ asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content.
      ‘As good as gold,’ said Bob, ‘and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.’
      Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.

So, for me, Dickens' morality tale portrays a Christianity strongly rooted in practical ethical action towards an ever-present poor - heaven in ordinary once more.

Meeting God in the pub

As I mention in 'About Me' inspiration for this blog comes from George Herbert's poem:

¶    Prayer. (I)
PRayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
     Gods 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’ Almightie, sinners towre,
     Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
     The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and  blisse,
     Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
     Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
 
  Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
     The land of spices; something understood.

Relevant definitions of 'ordinarie' from the Oxford English Dictionary below for those who like that sort of thing.  For me the point is in the potential play on words and definitions.  God might be met within the fixed and unchanging worship of the Church (the ordinary of the Mass), or in the pub; eating, drinking and all the activities of daily life can also be numinous or transcendent.

I. Rule or ordinance.
3. Christian Church. A rule prescribing, or book containing, the order of divine service, esp. that of the Mass; the established order or form for saying mass; the service of the Mass, or that part preceding and following the canon. In the Roman Catholic Church (usu. with capital initial): those parts of a service, esp. the Mass, which do not vary from day to day; spec. those unvarying parts which form the mass as a musical setting (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei). Also in extended use.

III. Something ordinary, regular, or usual.
12. a. Customary fare; a regular daily meal or allowance of food; (hence, by extension) a fixed portion, an allowance of anything. Obs
c. An inn, public house, tavern, etc., where meals are provided at a fixed price; the room in such a building where this type of meal is provided.

Revelation

Thinking about Revelation today. 

The images from John's vision echo in all sorts of contexts: from the enigmatic preacher/gun-slinger in Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider  - 'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death' (Revelation 6:8) to the rather less mysterious appearance of Death and the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence having retired in 1936 following the discovery of penicillin) in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's novel Good Omens.

David Miles' Apocalyptic Images* draw on the present and everyday - including images of people he knows, such as in the picture 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse' - to create representations of John's vision.  Heaven is found, or represented, in ordinary things.  As David Miles' writes:

Whether the reader of the Book of Revelation has, or has not, a specific understanding of this enigmatic book is, to some extent, of little importance. What is compelling is that all believers who, through subsequent generations, have encountered the book, have discovered that that which John ‘saw’ has a resonance with the times in which they themselves live.

* Further brought to life with music and words in the presentation Approaching Apocalypse.