Something understood

A happy conjunction between gifts and experiences shared with close friends in this quote from Pete Rollin's book The Orthodox Heretic.  Whilst it speaks directly of a specific kind of activity, this could equally be broadened out to describe something of religious experience more widely - 'something understood' in the terms of the poem from which this blog takes its inspiration:

In academic life the said is often privileged over the saying. What is important is that meaning is communicated and, as such, the way it is communicated is important only insomuch as it gets the meaning across. Yet there are forms of communication that give emphasis to the saying over and above the said. 

An interesting example of this can be seen at work in the music of Sigur Ros, a band from Iceland that employs what they call “Vonlenska” (or “Hopelandic”) in many of their songs. “Vonlenska” sounds like a language, however it lacks consistent grammar, logical structure, meaningful syllables, and often even discrete words. When a song is sung in Vonlenska, the words that you hear do not “mean” anything; nothing is said in their saying. Yet the saying itself invites a change in the sensitive listener. In contemplating the music, one touches upon a deep resorvoir of emotion that emanates from the song. This mode of “communication” is similar to what we see taking place between an infant and its parents. The grammatical nonsense that is communicated by the infant to the parent and by the parent to the infant is a discourse in which nothing is said, but a connection is established or deepened.

When we are facing difficult situations is it not true that the pastoral act is not one that offers some explanation for the suffering (the said) but rather is found in the act of who who offers presence to the other in the form of words and gestures (the saying)? Here it is not an explanation that brings healing and comfort, but rather the fact that someone is interacting with us, the fact that someone loves us and stands with us…

…This is pastoral care at its most luminous.

I'd broaden this out, to argue that to describe this change, brought about by ordinary things - in this case - listening to music, is to describe religious experience itself.

Prayer Places

I'm a great admirer of the work of Tom Hunter whose beautiful photographs I first met through his Living in Hell series.  Re-discovering him this week I've found his Prayer Places works - in the light of current conversations about the nature of church such as my previous posting, I think these are worth contemplating in the light of Magdalene Keaney's commentary:

[Tom Hunter's photographs] also make me think about what a church is. How do they exist outside ritual, once a congregation, the community that defines and activates them, have left? Or perhaps they are not empty after all.

What is your Religion?

Discussion over the question in the 2011 Census: 'What is your Religion?', with arguments that this is a leading question which actively encourages people to tick a religious answer, have reminded me of this piece of dialogue regarding market research methods from the TV comedy Yes (Prime) Minister:

Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."

There are more serious questions at stake - does a leading question lead to artifically inflated numbers of religious people in the UK, in turn create an unfair bias towards religous groups in the allocation of public services?  I suspect humanists and fundamentalists* alike might welcome a rooting out of 'true' as opposed to 'nominal' religous believers.

Whilst 'What would Jesus do?' is one of my own least favourite questions, closely followed by 'What would Jesus think?' I'm left wondering how this concern over religious identity squares with someone whose recorded teaching seems to resist the identification of following his teaching with membership of a religious organisation.  Jesus' teaching in the Gospels only explicitly mentions 'church' twice (Matthew 16:18; 18:15) and on both occasions what seems to be in mind is a much looser 'meeting' or 'congregation' of similarly commited people than a monolithic institution. 

*I'm using this word very precisely.

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

Seen / Unseen

In spite of some of my earlier posts I'm not always a fan of 'religious' or 'Christian' art, which can often be twee, or mawkish, or both.  Illustrating some of the narrative sections of the Bible can avoid some of these pitfalls, as in my posts on Elijah or the crucifixion of Jesus, but trying to depict some of the Bible's concepts can be more challenging.  Which is why I'm very fond of this photograph:

(Mary Gaston, Mystery & Ignorance, used with permission)

At first glance this both disturbs and baffles, creating a puzzle as we look at it.  Of course, this can and can't be read as a picture with a spiritual dimension and perhaps it's that level of uncertainty which creates the appeal for me.  If there's a link between this photograph and the Bible, I find it in words Jesus speaks:

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit." (John 3:8)

As in the picture, so in this statement, there are ways in which the unseen can become tangible, the spiritual part of our everyday lived experience.

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)