Along Addison's Walk

On Tim Keller's Use of "Mythos"

2012-02-09T06:53:00.000-08:00

Tim Keller, the Thinking Evangelical's Favourite, has written a book on marriage. And it has caused much a goodly stir in Christian circles. Moi, I haven't read the book, but I did read Keller's far shorter essay on marriage and singleness, on which, by all accounts, the book is based.

The essay is excellent, not the least for his situating Christian singles and marrieds within the wider community of the people of God, and in arguing for theological reasons for marriage. Tim Keller is also a big C.S. Lewis fan, and is responsible for introducing Lewis to a whole generation of young Christians of the 21st Century.

However, as each new generation reads 'the old books' with the preoccupations of the present age, so what Keller uses of Lewis is reflective of what 21st century Western Christians are concerned with. There is a simplification of Lewis' thought, and, to a certain extent, the reinvention of an idea, or at least a far narrow application of a Lewisean theme.

A comprehensive Attraction

Keller's book on marriage contains a beautiful exhortation to wisdom in choosing 'the one to love.' Keller argues for a 'comprehensive attraction' between prospective marriage partners, one that is not based on superficiality nor sexuality. Rather, he advocates a love and commitment for the other person that is based on character, as well as their 'mission in life.' Such attraction encompasses not only who the other person currently is (imperfect as he/she may be), but who they will become - their hopes, their longings. One must love who the other person is becoming, and be committed in helping to bring about this future self:

'Marriage partners can say, “I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.'

These are lovely, profound ideas, which challenge the lens through which we might look at prospective marriage partners. Keller asks us not to necessarily look for Mr. Perfect-Epitome-of-Christ-Right-Now, or Miss-Paragon-of-Godliness-Already-Perfected, but to find someone flawed, but one who is growing, and who is willing to change and be moulded throughout their life by grace.

Mythos Misapprehensions?

But then Keller narrows his definition, to suggest that comprehensive attraction should be directed towards someone who shares your longing for God:

Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” C.S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favourite books, music, places or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God. Leonard Bernstein said that listening to Beethoven’s Fifth always made him sure (despite his intellectual agnosticism) that there was a God. Beethoven’s Fifth doesn’t do that for me. But everyone has something that moves them so that they long for heaven or the future kingdom of God (though many nonbelievers know it only as bittersweet longing for “something more”).

Sometimes you will meet a person who so shares the same mythos thread with you that he or she becomes part of the thread itself. This is very hard to describe, obviously.

This is the kind of comprehensive attraction you should be looking for in a future partner.

Again, this is thoughtful, sensitive and helpful advice (even if it narrows down my potential marriage partners to a possible 7 people in the world: 4 of them dead, 2 Octogenarians - one married, another still sexily single, and the final one probably yet to be born!) Keller is essentially arguing that we ought to look for someone who understands our Sehnsucht, our longing for something beyond this earth. All well and good, as far as it goes.

What makes me nervous, however, is that Keller inadvertently simplifies CS Lewis' argument regarding Sehnsucht/Longing. For readers of Keller who have not encountered Lewis, they might mistakenly understand Sehnsucht to be that quixotic mixture of deep joys and passions, which, if shared with you, will ear-mark someone as your 'soul mate' or 'kindred spirit.' It would also seem that Sehnsucht is located in the realm of romantic love, and is part of the mysterious magic of such. Sehnsucht then becomes subsumed within the search for the one who will understand and relate to such deep feelings within us, and who will, in Keller's words 'become part of the thread itself.'

I am not suggesting for the faintest moment that Keller is idolising Sehnsucht, and I would be the first to declare that a marriage founded on a weaved unity of 'secret threads' of joy must surely be beautiful and wonderful. But I cannot help but think that a cursory reading of Keller on this will lead to either a misunderstanding (and unhelpful idealisation) of 'Sehnsucht', or an over-zealous longing for romantic relationships that will recognise our Sehnsucht.

Mythos Realigned: Getting back to Our Source

For Lewis, Sehnsucht was never something to be found patterned in another human being. That is, while we might find some (or a great deal) of common longing in another, so that we might meet a person and exclaim: 'And so you like this too? But I thought I was the only one!', Sehnsucht essentially shows our aloneness, which longs for understanding, but which cannot be found fully in anything or anyone of this earth, but in God himself.

Keller quotes CS Lewis' use of 'secret thread' without elaborating the context in which Lewis makes his case (and really, how can he? Keller is after all writing a book on an entirely different theme - marriage!) The phrase comes from Lewis' The Problem of Pain, in which Lewis caps off his work on suffering with a moving chapter on the Longing for Heaven. This secret thread, while Lewis acknowledges others to possess, is uniquely our own. We rarely, argues Lewis, actually find many others who share the same pangs at the sight of beauty:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of ...

But such should not discourage us, but merely show us our essential uniqueness. Your soul has been made unlike any one else's, and, is always, utterly and bereftly, incomplete, until it finds its refuge and fulfillment in its Maker:

Our soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance ... [Sehnsucht] ... if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away, but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is ....

Sehnsucht is Augustine exclaiming in his Confessions:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

But what about Relationships in the Here and Now? Friendships? Marriage, even?

Of course, Lewis is not saying that we can't find fellow humans who see a similar beauty, or joy, or longing in the things of this world that stir it up in us. Indeed, he spends a lengthy paragraph, in The Problem of Pain, and in Surprise by Joy, as well as a whole chapter in The Four Loves, detailing the joyous meeting of such friends.

But in the end, Lewis' conclusion is that it is because the love of friends and the love of marriages fail, that Sehnsucht is seen for what it really is. Such longing cannot be fulfilled in human relationships alone, and our 'connection' with one another is limited. Sehnsucht points to the exclusive relationship that we, the created ones, must share with our Creator. That is the very nature of Sehnsucht - a tantalising teaser, echoes heard in song, and promises hinted at in sunrises - glimpsed in our relationships perhaps - but pointing to fulfilment elsewhere.

Romantic Love, or the love between friends, of the deepest and intimate kind, will never be enough. They are honourable, glorious things, to rejoice in, and not dismissed (as if we're cold-blooded cardboard saints who are beyond human relationships). But it is only when they are put in their rightful place is a believer's life, as one of the lesser gods, that the True God enters. And by entering, enable us to enjoy these lesser loves, in the whatever form he has chosen for us - be it in marriage, or in singleness with rich friendships and in solitude.

Please don't hear me saying that looking to marry your 'secret thread' friend and lover is bad. But that is not the point of Sehnsucht in our lives.

The very purpose of Sehnsucht is to point to something outside the relationship. Looking for a secret thread partner, as if he or she is the one to fulfill your Sehnsucht, is foolhardy and oxymoronic. And though it might be wise for a life-long relationship to begin with an understanding of each other's Sehnsucht, there is no rule that says that a secret thread of Sehnsucht must be the basis of any relationship.

To misunderstand the power and reason for Sehnsucht in our lives is a pitiful waste of a gift of God. Perhaps this is the hardest of all for single people, as we live in a world where romantic love is touted to be the ultimate union and connection two people can have together. What are we singles to do with such longing that seems to point towards fulfillment in another of flesh and blood, but there is none?

This entry is already too long for me to mount an argument that single people reflect the humanity that is to come, and plagiarise Halden and Myers, who suggest, with delicious provocativeness, that 'if Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness, since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.'

I can only acknowledge the unfulfilled longing of singles, and echo Walter Trobisch's challenge: "The task we have to face is the same, whether we are married or single: To live a fulfilled life in spite of many unfulfilled desires."

We live in a broken world. Not many things happen as we wish. But God is still sovereign, and our Father. What else is there to do, but to trust and obey; pleading for more faith and courage, each day? At the same time, we're allowed to rail and wail to God, and to question all we need. Just see some of the Psalms.

One must also understand that the secret thread can be found between friends, not merely lovers. The thread might come in singular, but the things that it ties together are plural. If we understand Lewis' argument regarding the individuality of each person correctly, one person will never fully share your Sehnsucht, but perhaps a number of dear friends (not excluding your spouse) might share in the varied experiences that bring you to joy.

In the final analysis, Lewis himself would have told you, that all longings (for marriage, for deep friendships, for understanding, for beauty, and for love), force us to go back to the Original Source, the love that is Christ's self-giving to us, and the glorious, 'big-picture' future that is already been secured for us:

But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand ... For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you - you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God has His good way, to utter satisfaction.

January Hymn

2012-02-08T03:49:00.000-08:00

The sun is scalding hot.
The pavement crackles with wind and dust,
And our skins blister, soaking up the brightness -
stretched with light until we can hold no more.

We walk,
Stepping carefully amongst the wreckage
Of December past.
The same gait. The same pace.

Our heads are always in the clouds.
People should look up more, you always said.
There’s so much to see in the sky:

The tips of old buildings. The light rounding out sharp corners.
The birds weaving like living smoke.
A lone geranium plant from a high window ...
We laugh ourselves stupid at cloud shapes.

(I’d built an edifice of my own, by this time.
A paper castle full of manuscripts and ideas.
Some in languages we know.
Some in ones we would learn together.)

And so we run.
Blithely, rejoicing in each other’s strength.
And we stumble, in the same ways -
Our feet fall on the same jutting stones.

But that’s the trouble, you say.
We’re too similar, without being the same.
We’ll never really run a parallel course.

Well my friend, as the song goes:
When your mind’s made up, there’s no point trying to change it.
So we'll close January and wait for February’s new.

I pray. Not knowing what to pray:
I shall always fight words that curtail your freedom,
Even if it means fighting myself.

So I ask God
For a cold day.
My eyes no longer streaming,
trying to see in the summer sun.
When I will go out,
Stepping on autumn leaves.

The light will be older then. Mellower.
And through the mist  I will see Keat’s fruit, ripe and hanging low.

Full to overflowing from two trees.
Yours and mine.  Side by side.
(Much like any others, really.)
 
And perhaps we shall see, what was always intended:
The strong independent roots. The distinct branches.
Yet the interlacing green. The shade they provide.

And the breeze,
When it whistles through the leaves,
Makes a sweet, straining tune.
You take the high notes, I the harmony.
The melody is (of course),
His.

New Year's Resolutions

2012-02-08T03:36:00.000-08:00

Written around the end of December 2011. But only found today...

**************

I'm quite a grump about New Year's resolutions. I'm realistic about myself, knowing that I am a fey and fickle creature, lazy to the bone, and can barely stop drinking coffee for a week, let alone keep a noble resolution for 365 days.

So I make some silly ones that are easy to keep, and over which I shan't pour scalding regret, if I did break them.

But this New Year's Eve, as I look back over my 20s and look forward to turning 30, seems a good junction to reflect, and ask myself some bigger questions about who I am, and who I would like to become.

I've never been much of a New Year's celebrator (I expend all my anticipation and excitement over Christmas), and I'm rather immune to the shiny excitment of a fresh new year (blank pages, unknown plans etc.) But Chesterton reminds me:

"THE object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."

-'Daily News.'

And so it seemed providential that this week's sermon at church mentioned Wesley's Covenant. Another local church had this in their weekly bulletin:

"John Wesley adapted a Covenant Prayer for use in services for the Renewal of the believer's Covenant with God. In his Short history of the people called Methodists (1781), Wesley describes the first covenant service; a similar account is to be found in his Journal of the time. Wesley says that the first service was held on Monday 11 August 1755, at the French church at Spitalfields in London, with 1800 people present. The prayer had some of its origins in the puritan, Richard Alleine. Services using the Covenant prayer have been included in most Methodist books of liturgy since. It has become usual to use this at New Year. We will offer the opportunity to pray this prayer today:

I am no longer my own, but thine.
Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.
Put me to doing, put me to suffering.
Let me be employed for thee or laid aside for thee,
exalted for thee or brought low for thee.
Let me be full, let me be empty.
Let me have all things, let me have nothing.
I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.
And the covenant which I have made on earth,
let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.

(Book of Offices of the British Methodist Church, 1936)."

Perhaps, instead of resolutions, which look to the will and strength of the man or woman to accomplish, we could pray this instead. Every day, for 365 days. And trust that God will work this in us, hourly, daily, for this year, and beyond.

Listening to the Silence

2012-01-30T02:48:00.000-08:00

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.” - CS Lewis.

Die Bibelforscher

2012-01-25T03:02:00.000-08:00

(I don't know why I haven't posted this before, but this is probably my poetic discovery of 2011.)

Die Bibelforscher

For the Protestant martyrs of the Third Reich

By Waldo Williams (as translated from the Welsh by Rowan Williams)

Earth is a hard text to read; but the king
has put his message in our hands, for us to carry
sweating, whether the trumpets of his court
sound near or far. So for these men:
they were the bearers of the royal writ,
clinging to it through spite and hurts and wounding.

The earth's round fullness is not like a parable, where meaning
breaks through, a flash of lightning, in the humid, heavy dusk;
imagination will not conjure into flesh the depths
of fire and crystal sealed under castle walls of wax, but still
they keep their witness pure in Buchenwald,
pure in the crucible of hate penning them in.

They closed their eyes to doors that might have opened
if they had put their names to words of cowardice;
they took their stand, backs to the wall, face to face with savagery,
and died there, with their filth and piss flowing together,
arriving at the gates of heaven,
their fists still clenched on what the king had written.

Earth is a hard text to read. But what we can be certain of
is that screaming mob is insubstantial mist;
in the clear sky, the thundering assertions fade to nothing.
There the Lamb's song is sung, and what it celebrates
is the apocalypse of a glory
pain lays bare.

They also serve ...

2012-01-22T02:02:00.000-08:00

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

- John Milton.

O Heart Bereaved and Lonely

2012-01-19T01:38:00.000-08:00

O heart bereaved and lonely,
Whose brightest dreams have fled
Whose hopes like summer roses,
Are withered crushed and dead
Though link by link be broken,
And tears unseen may fall
Look up amid thy sorrow,
To Him who knows it all.

O cling to thy Redeemer,
Thy Savior, Brother, Friend
Believe and trust His promise,
To keep you till the end
O watch and wait with patience,
And question all you will
His arms of love and mercy,
Are round about thee still.

Look up, the clouds are breaking,
The storm will soon be o'er
And thou shall reach the haven,
Where sorrows are no more
Look up, be not discouraged;
Trust on, whate'er befall
Remember, O remember,
Thy Savior knows it all.

Fanny Crosby, you rock!

The Spoken Project

2011-12-29T03:36:00.000-08:00

My super talented friend and neighbour, Sophie, has started a bold and brilliantly creative venture, called The Spoken Project.

Sophie was formerly a journalist/news reporter in Sydney, before moving down to Melbourne.

Here's what Sophie writes about the aim of her podcasts:

The Spoken Project is about learning through living. It’s about being human. It’s stories that will move your heart, and strengthen your faith.

The first podcast is about Kate, her housemate, who speaks about having an eating disorder.

I listened to it today, while preparing to go out (it's a little over 15 minutes long, so a perfect length!) I loved its honesty, its unpretentiousness, its backing soundtrack - another friend of mine, Sarah, composed the music.

I was humbled by the power of the Story, and warmth of the spoken voice. I was reminded, once again, of the deep, hidden things in each of our lives.

I am in awe of Kate's courage, and yet realise that she's the girl with the wind-blown hair, who I see walking along Brunswick Road, carrying a green Safeway shopping bag.

Kate's story is unique, but she's also someone just like me. And the powerful, redeeming God who has gathered her to him, and whom she loves, is the same one whom I love, and who makes everything new in my life.

Gaude! Gaude!

2011-12-18T03:21:00.000-08:00

I fell in love with Latin as a teenager, because of sounds such as these. In the intervening time, the genitive absolute, Cicero, and cramming for Latin exams have made me forget.

It is, oh! so wonderful, to be reminded of an old, lost love.

A near perfect thing

2011-12-18T03:07:00.000-08:00

Tis a rare thing to discover a Christmas Carol that I didn't know before, and in a beautiful arrangement.

This one is thanks to Something this Foggy Day.

Now we must praise

2011-12-06T05:02:00.000-08:00

Edward Hirsch declared that English poetry began with vision:

" ... the holy trance of a seventh-century figure called Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman, who now stands at the top of the English literary tradition as the initial Anglo-Saxon or Old English poet of record, the first to compose Christian poetry in his own language."

According to Bede, the story goes that Caedmon, an old herdsman, would always flee when it came to his turn to sing during feasts. Being illiterate and unlearned, he was ashamed that he never had any songs to contribute. But one night, after he had once again left the banquet hall for the stables, a man appeared to him in a dream, and Caedmon was commanded to sing:

"Then [Caedmon] said: 'What must I sing?' Said he: 'Sing to me of the first Creation.' When [Caedmon] received this answer, then he began immediately to sing in praise of God the Creator verses and words which he had never heard."

English poetry also began with an imperative. A necessary urgency to praise. In this season of waiting, it seems good to be me to stave off the impatience with praise of God.

Here's someone reading Caedmon's Hymn. The Anglo-Saxon sounds are at once familiar and foreign.

Nu scylun hergan hefaenricaes uard,
metudæs maecti end his modgidanc,
uerc uuldurfadur, sue he uundra gihuaes,
eci dryctin, or astelidæ.

He aerist scop aelda barnum
heben til hrofe, haleg scepen;
tha middungeard moncynnæs uard,
eci dryctin, æfter tiadæ
firum foldu, frea allmectig.

Now we must praise The Protector of the heavenly kingdom
The might of the Measurer and His mind's purpose
The work of the Father of Glory as He for each of the wonders
the eternal Lord established a beginning.
He shaped first for the sons of the Earth
heaven as a roof the Holy Maker
then the Middle-earth mankind's Guardian
the eternal Lord made afterwards
solid ground for men the almighty Lord.

One of my favorite modern poets, Denise Levertov, tells the story from Caedmon's perspective:

All others talked as if
talk were a dance.
Clodhopper I, with clumsy feet
would break the gliding ring.
Early I learned to
hunch myself
close by the door:
then when the talk began
I’d wipe my
mouth and wend
unnoticed back to the barn
to be with the warm beasts,
dumb among body sounds
of the simple ones.
I’d see by a twist
of lit rush the motes
of gold moving
from shadow to shadow
slow in the wake
of deep untroubled sighs.
The cows
munched or stirred or were still. I
was at home and lonely,
both in good measure. Until
the sudden angel affrighted me—light effacing
my feeble beam,
a forest of torches, feathers of flame, sparks upflying:
but the cows as before
were calm, and nothing was burning,
nothing but I, as that hand of fire
touched my lips and scorched my tongue
and pulled my voice
into the ring of the dance.

A burning circle of joy and blaze. Be drawn in.

Study Notes

2011-11-24T23:07:00.000-08:00

In a little while I'll probably scribble out some thoughts on my first year at Theological College. But in the meantime, I found this, in my list of unpublished posts. It must've been written at the end of my first semester, about six months ago. Should be interesting to see if my reflections have changed, half a year on ...

***************

The last month or two has felt like a long, mad run as I plowed through essays, presentations, stacks of chocolate and Greek flash cards. I've been juggling my own study with work commitments: some casual tutoring work - giving feedback on students' research essays. I finally finished up first semester last Tuesday, but it's only been now that I feel relaxed and can say - let the holidays begin.

I've been surprised at how difficult it has been, getting back to the study. I'm much more disciplined that I used to be, and there's far less self-pressure/fear: I don't worry about what mark I will get at the end of the semester (though of course I want to do well). But theological study is for knowing God better, and loving him more.

So my conclusion is that theological study is difficult. Its difficulty is two-fold: not only is the content difficult, but the methodology - how to do it well, reveals much about the student. What theology requires of you, as a human being, is difficult.

Theology requires you to be:

- kind (to others, to the lecturer, to oneself)
- humble (Dealing with frustration, anger, grief, dissatisfaction, impatience)
- to pay attention (to the details of God's word, to the details of each others' lives)
- to look failure in the face (The Greek exam)
- to be honest (with yourself, and with others)
- to integrate theology with life, practice with preaching
- to be patient with God, with yourself
- to trust God - to throw oneself into his bosom, and trust that he'll take care of it

Prayer after a picnic breakfast with my children

2011-10-16T05:18:00.000-07:00

The writing is paltry and dry here, so I'm going to borrow a lyrical post from Ben Myers, to give you joy. The material world, in its innocence, its tangibility, is illuminated by our knowledge of God, and our love for him. Or, more correctly, our awareness of his love for us. Surely this is theology at its best! Theology gladdens our hearts, expands our souls, and anchors our daily pleasures in deeper Joy.

Theology that leads us into doxology.

Prayer after a picnic breakfast with my children

As a Theologian One Can Never Be Great

2011-10-09T05:54:00.000-07:00

“With horror I read [a] statement that I was the greatest theologian of the century. That really terrified me…. What does the term ‘greatest theologian’ actually mean? … As a theologian one can never be great, but at best one remains small in one’s own way…. Let me again remind you of the donkey I referred to [earlier]. A real donkey is mentioned in the Bible, or more specifically an ass…. It was permitted to carry Jesus to Jerusalem. If I have done anything in this life of mine, I have done it as a relative of the donkey that went its way carrying an important burden. The disciples had said to its owner: ‘The Lord has need of it.’ And so it seems to have pleased God to have used me at this time, just as I was, in spite of all the things, the disagreeable things, that quite rightly are and will be said about me. Thus I was used…. I just happened to be on the spot. A theology somewhat different from the current theology was apparently needed in our time, and I was permitted to be the donkey that carried this better theology for part of the way, or tried to carry it as best I could.”

[Karl Barth, “Speech on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday Celebrations,” in Fragments Grave and Gay, 112]

Whoa, nelly!

2011-10-09T05:48:00.000-07:00

This is - inspiring, much. Demanding, much. Beautiful, entire:

...theology requires a far great scholarly range than does any other humane science. The properly trained Christian theologian, perfectly in command of his materials, should be a proficient linguist, with a mastery of several ancient and modern tongues, should have a complete formation in the subtleties of the whole Christian dogmatic tradition, should possess a considerable knowledge of the texts and arguments produced in every period of the Church, should be a good historian, should be thoroughly trained in philosophy, ancient, medieval and modern, should have a fairly broad grasp of liturgical practice in every culture and age of the Christian world, should (ideally) possess considerable knowedge of literature, music and the plastic arts, should have an intelligent interest in the effects of theological discourse in areas such as law or economics, and so on and so forth. This is not to say that one cannot practice theology without these attainments; but such an education remains the scholarly ideal of the guild...

- David Bentley Hart.

Found here, with thanks.

Daily Rituals

2011-09-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

You offer two corners of the sheet
we fold over and over and over again
and then in the middle we meet.
-Darren Hanlon.

Surely Odysseus could not have had a better ship
A grander sending off than this?
The sail unfurls

Transparent cotton
throws and scatters
chips of sun
on our bare feet.

We shall sail out into the day
each to work assigned
journeying through seas

Delighting in the waves
Chasing horizons and
Meeting our storms.

But in this moment we moor
set anchor

stay afloat
on shore.

You take two corners
And I the others.

The air whistles softly
Over our eiderdown harbour.

More than Me and Ted

2011-09-10T06:18:00.000-07:00

Of all the various components that might make up a prayer (adoration, praise, thanksgiving, confession etc.), I think I find the element of intercession most difficult.

I find it difficult because it's the most easy to forget. Intercessory prayer shows me my self-centredness. It's a time when I realise that my worldview is so narrow, air-less and cramped. My attention, for the most part, is directed inwards, at my thoughts, my preoccupations, my concerns. I bring myself before God, and fill his vision with all my anxieties, my wants, my feelings.

In one sense I think this is right. I am the child, who artlessly comes before my papa, clutching my worn-out and dirty, but well-loved teddy. I sit upon my father's knee and tell him about the day I've had with my bear - our adventures, our joys, our hurts and scrapes. Never mind the greater world out there, with its larger doings and going-ons. My pervue is only for me and my bear.

Intercessory prayer takes me out of my myopic vision, to ask: what are the needs of those around me. It require me first to know the needs of those around me - and therefore to climb out of my own head and preoccupations. It then requires energetic partnership with God: How can I work, through prayer, for them? For, despite it feeling like mere thinking, or words into air, prayer is labour, and as Christians, we know it works. As one friend once wisely said: "If people are thinking, then they might be acting. But thoughts alone won't help anyone. Whereas prayers are actions in themselves."

Here's Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the transformative nature of intercessory prayers:

All Christians have their own circle of those who have requested them to intercede on their behalf, or people for whom for various reasons they know they have been called upon to pray. First of all, the circle will include those with whom they must live every day. With this we have advanced to the point at which we hear the heartbeat of all Christian life together. A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another or the community will be destroyed. I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they cause me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is the blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others. As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife, that cannot be overcome by intecessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purified bath into which the individual and the community must enter each day.

Life Together, page 89.

Of Cabbages and Kings

2011-04-30T06:23:00.000-07:00

While most in Britain are gripped with Royal Wedding Fever, Australians are not impressed. A quick glance through my friends' facebook statuses (stati?) reveals that most will not have the TV switched on tonight, with one friend commenting: "I could watch the royal wedding, but I think there's a real possibility that the paint on my walls might dry out a little more tonight, and I think I'd better keep my eyes on them just in case."

A couple of good friends are so unimpressed as to rant about the hullaboo on their blog, making some good points about the unique way that Australians show affection.

I confess I'm not too excited about the whole thing either, and was tempted to boycott watching the ceremony on principle, because, well, people get married all the time, and no other couples get their faces plastered on tea-towels, mugs, ashtrays and notepads (although I guess that's not really Will and Kate's doing). Speaking of paraphenalia, you should really check out these knitted dolls! Why wed if you can't enshrine yourselves in finger puppets for your grandchildren?

However, I am going to watch the wedding, largely because I want to see what they'll do to the ceremonial side of things, and because I want to hear what Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury will preach ....

Here's a couple of thoughts on the Royal Family, however.

Most Australians, I would hazard, dislike the idea of a monarchy, because we believe in equality, and in the benefits of a meritocracy. It's foreign, that a particularly family should be exalted, simply based on pedigree. I think I am like that too: I believe in total egalitarianism (how else can a poor, immigrant child gain an education and earn a living?) And yet, watching the wedding and thinking about Royalty has made me question, whether hierarchy holds a deep truth for us.

As a child I loved the Medieval period best, because of the kings and queens; the pomp and circumstance; the pagentry and chivalry of knights and battles.

And then I grew up. I learnt about the market economy, the class argument, and the horrendous plight of the peasantry - all of which is summed up hilariously in this Monty Python sketch.

Yet the idea of Kingship, and the ideal Rule of Christ Jesus, figures hugely in the theological imagination, and thus ought to dictate our understanding of the world from a Christian perspective. It's something I find at once moving, and yet supremely difficult to reconcile.

So here are my scattered thoughts:

As I say, something about the idea of Kingship needs to be felt with the imagination. You have to 'taste' the word King - which its attendant associations of battle, splendor, power and mercy. (Think of what you felt in the more moving parts of 'Braveheart' or reading about Aslan when you were a child).

Yet kingship in our modern day and age is paltry, trite and often embarrassing. The people who we call 'royal' fail our imaginations - they are hardly heroic, glorious figures. They do not inspire confidence, let alone fealty. We speculate that Will and Kate's marriage won't last the onslaught of the years; we laugh at Eugenie and Beatrice's fashion faux pas; and even the Queen, who's my favourite of the lot, is often represented as a stodgy, stoic figure, trying to do her diplomatic best with some idiotic family members.

So we abandon kingship and hierarchy, and hold onto democracy and equality. It's the 'least worst' option, and a way of protecting human beings, from Lord Acton's dictum, that absolute power will corrupt, absolutely. Of course, it would be most sensible and practical, to abolish the English Monarchy entirely, and for Australia to become a Republic. But what if, in acquiescing to political pragmatism and modern statecraft, we cut the one remaining, tangible thread to a larger reality about what it means to be human? What if the monarchy is the one remaining conduit, through which to channel the best and noblest sentiments and ideals of citizenship - "loyalty, the concecration of secular life, and hierarchical principle, splendor, ceremony and continuity"?

For, whatever idiotic persons within the royal family itself, and whatever kind of lunacy exists in Royalty Fever, the British Monarchy reminds us of that tingly feeling we had, when we once loved kings and queens. Something of the magic of hierarchical representation and the noble idea of giving one's unreservered allegiance to one entirely beautiful and deserving, lingers on. (And a ceremonial monarchy, together with a legal democracy like what Britain has, is, I think, the best way to hold onto both.)

CS Lewis writes, upon viewing Queen Elizabeth II's coronation ceremony on television, that the ceremony wasn't conducted with a sense of triumphalism, but an overwhelming sense of pathos. The young queen herself, then only 20 or so, seemed to be visibly moved by the sacramental side of things. Those watching, felt a sense of

awe - pity - pathos - mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, and yet feeling so inadequate.

He goes on to observe that it is as if God says, in my inexorable love for you, I raise you from dust, from mere animal creatures, to a level of reason, of apprehension, in order that you might have a relationship with me. You are crowned a little lower than angels, and upon your head I lay responsibilities, splendors, glories and dangers that are beyond your understanding.

One misses the whole point of a coronation, a royal wedding, the existence of the royal family, if we do not feel, that in some way, we have all been crowned, we have all been married, we are all princes and princesses, though in a way that is deeply tragic as well as splendid.

One misses the whole point of human royalty as well, if we cannot see that all human kings fail, and cannot exist but as a pointer to the Real King Jesus, and the real rule of a perfect human being - righteous, and full of self-giving grace.

Well, carry on, carry on.

Locust Years

2011-04-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

Today I discovered the poet Billy Collins, who's written a couple of simple but poignant poems on forgetfulness and memorisation. I have a horrible memory, and gathering the past always feel like following a trail of bread crumbs - some have disappeared, some are lodged amongst bramble, very few are whole and worth the keeping. A slow and futile scramble.

I wondered if, in the new heavens and new earth that I look forward to, that my memory will be restored to me: all the jokes that were so good and that I swore to remember, the unforgettable quotes, consigned to notebooks but irretrievable to memory, the smell of a new city overseas, the indescribable look on a half-obscured face, countless sermons heard and gone the following week, lines of music, the lost optative verb forms, books, poems, dates, numbers, faces, places. Even the piercing moments of pain or shame, might they be given back to me, and take on a different shade of feeling?

I love that verse in Joel, when God promises, after a severe famine in the land of Israel, to "restore to you the years that the locusts have eaten." I hope those words apply metaphysically too.

*******

FORGETFULNESS

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

- Billy Collins

Rodrigo y Gabriela

2011-04-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

This makes me want to get up and stomp my feet. Brilliant.

Unintended audiences

2011-03-30T05:35:00.000-07:00

I've been intrigued to read the following article from Christianity Today.

While I might take issue with the writer's assumptions and approach, it did make me think quite a bit about what happens with blogging, and what sort unintended consequences it produces, once an idea has been unleashed into the blogosphere.

In his latest post, Alan Jacobs records a conversation with the excellent Miroslav Volf. It highlights, in passing, something about the nature of 'conversations' on the internet. He notes our inability to change and adapt our language rhetorically, as according to our audience (something we do naturally in conversations and in other written media - cf. persuasive essay, thesis, polemic letter to the editor.) This is because our intended audience, that is, the audience we're writing for, is too big, and too unpredictable. For good or ill, we don't know who's eavesdropping on our conversation. And that ought to have implications, not only for what we say, but how we say it, in our blogs. Here's Alan Jacobs, putting it more eloquently:

... while one might want to speak differently in different rhetorical situations, might strive to adjust one's language to suit different audiences that have different needs, in practice we do not live in a world with "bounded" rhetorical situations. "Everyone is listening," he said, thanks to the World Wide Web, as it is accurately called, which takes what you say to one audience and broadcasts it — as text, audio, video, or all of the above — to pretty much anyone who's interested in finding it.

One of the most fundamental principles of rhetoric has always been decorum, that is, suiting one's language to occasion and audience. Those of us who teach writing typically think it vital to get our students to think in these terms — to see that they must adjust style and diction, evidence and argument, to reach the readers they most want to reach.

Such imperatives will never cease to be important. But it also seems likely that we will have to train students to be aware — and will have to train ourselves to be aware — that much of what we say and write can find audiences we never intended. And the consequences of our words' extended reach will not always be positive ones.

Imitatio/Ersatz

2011-03-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying a show on ABC TV called Forger's Masterclass. The premise: John Myatt, a British art forger, evidentedly rehabilitated, hosts a show during which he shows three fine art students how to paint in the style of one of the great masters - Monet, Hockney, Braque, Van Gogh etc. It's brilliant viewing. Apart from the kooky art students, you realise just how difficult, technically, some of the deceptively simple works of modern art are. And, of course, in the imitation of others, one discovers something of one's own style.

So I'd been thinking about the art of imitation, when I got my first piece of German homework last week. We were given a painting (see below), and asked to write a 200-word story, about the three people in it. I was sceptical, at first (what were we, in High School again?), but soon fell into the project. It's a challenge, to construct something interesting within narrow confines.

I thought about Vermeer - how his pictures capture a moment in time in lives of his figures; a sharp juncture in the storyline. Amongst short story writers, the American Lydia Davis is well-known for her elliptical single paragraph or one page-long stories. And I've always wanted to try a story à la Peter Bichsel, my favourite Swiss writer. His whimsical, deceptively simple short stories often focus on the mundane - small incidents of everyday life - which, when at the centre of a short piece of writing, come into sharp focus, and reveal something deeply moving about human existence.

So here's my attempt at a Bichsel-Davis-esque piece. (I know it's pretentious, but I've included the German, 'cos it looks good. :P FYI: The German exercise was to test our knowledge of adjectival and article agreements - hence the plethora of them!)

Oh, by the way: While I was writing, I asked one of my housemate what the story of the picture was about. He came over to where I was sitting, and peering over my shoulder at the laptop, said: "Oh, that guy's lost his car keys over the cliff. She's pointing them out to him, while he's trying to get them without going over the edge. The other guy's just standing apart, laughing."

Wish I'd written that story! Hey, why don't you have a go at your own? Might be fun.

Kreidefelsen auf Rügen

Ihre Kutsche war zu schnell über den steinigen Weg gefahren, und armer Caspar hatte immer einen empfindlichen Magen.Hier lag er, wie eine große, schwartzbraune Motte, flatternd, auf dem grünen Gras. Sein Gesicht, blaß und schweißig, war genauso wie die weiße Farbe der Kreidefelsen vor ihnen. Er starrte ungläubig auf die kleinen Boote am Meer. In der Form ihres dreieckigen Hutes, schaulkelten sie auf dem Wasser. Ihre Bewegung ließ ihm wieder erbrechen. Diese Seeleute! Das war nichts für ihn. Er hasste Boote.

Their carriage was too fast over the stony path, and poor Caspar had always had a weak stomach. He laid there, like a large, black-and-brown moth, fluttering on the green grass. His face, pale and sweaty, was exactly the colour of the white chalk cliffs before them. He stared out, unbelievingly, at the small boats on the sea. The form of his three-cornered hat, they bobbed on the water. Their movement made him sick again. These sailors! That was not for him. He hated boats.

Christiane war auch dankbar für die frische Luft. Für sie hatte der Tag früh angefangen. Sie hatte nichts gegessen; hatte mit jedem gesprächigen Gast geredet; und jemand hatte auf ihrem Brautschleier getreten. Jetzt war es schön, einfach in dem hellen, winterlichen Licht zu sitzen. Sie beobachtete die Boote. Sie mochte ihr großes blaßes Segelwerk, so zart dennoch groß, das es einen Windstoß enthalten konnte. Sie hoffte, dass Caspar und sie segeln würden. Sie hatte nie gesegelt.

Christiane was also thankful for the fresh air. For her, the day had started early. She had not eaten anything; had spoken with every chatty guest, and someone had trodden on her wedding veil. It's lovely, now, simply to sit in the bright, winter light. She watched the boats. She liked their large, pale sails, so fragile yet capable of holding a great gale. She hoped, that she and Caspar will go sailing. She had never sailed.

Der Kutscher dachte, Es ist spät, wir müssen schon wegfahren. Er wollte nach Hause gehen. Er wollte seine Frau küssen. Er wollte sich zu Tische setzen und ein warmes Abendessen essen. Später, brächte er die Kleineren ins Bett. Dann säße er sich am Kamin, und mache ein kleines Segelboot. Das Segelboot wäre aus Holz, und war für seinen zweitjüngsten Sohn. Er pfiff lautlos, durch die Lücken zwischen seinen ungleichen Zähnen.

The driver thought: It is late, we must go soon. He wanted to go home. He wanted to kiss his wife. He wanted to sit at the table and eat a warm dinner. Later, he will put the little ones to bed. Then he will sit before the fire, and work on a small sailing boat. The boat was made of wood, and was for his second youngest son. He whistled soundless, through the gaps between his uneven teeth.

Poetry and Theology

2011-03-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

- Les Murray.

If ever I could write the syllabus for a theological subject, I'd make sure that the students' reading list included some poetry or fiction, as well as usual books and articles ... The imagination should should illuminate before God, even as Reason strain after Him.

New Project

2011-03-08T16:36:00.000-08:00

Well, a new year means a new venture.

Here's a project I've started with a friend. Inspired by Julia & Julie, we're going to try to read (and blog) our way through a wonderful list of 100 books.

http://www.whatisstephenharperreading.ca/

Unlike Julie's plan to cook her way through The Art of French Cooking in 365 days, I suspect we'll take longer to get through this list of books. In fact, we've joked about passing it on to our various imaginary and beleaguered children, and their children's children ... Or, more likely (and worse!), of passing the readership from our subscribers to their progeny.

Nevertheless, methinks an ambitious and perhaps noble venture. A bit of fun, at the very least.

Hope you can join us, some time.

A Girl who Reads

2011-03-08T00:58:00.000-08:00

Thanks to my friend Kate, I discovered this lyrical and joyful post: http://themonicabird.com/post/3273155431/date-a-girl-who-reads-date-a-girl-who-spends-her.

Hope you enjoy it too!

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

2011-02-27T04:28:00.000-08:00

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

- William Stafford.

Working towards God

2011-02-26T04:19:00.000-08:00

After a long and dreary day of work, and really, a long and arduous week of Arbeit, I read this, and it was good.

"Work puts human beings in the world of things. It requires achievement from them. Christians slep out of the world of personal encounter into the world of impersonal things. the It; and this new encounter frees them for objectivity, for the world of the It is only an instrument in the hands of God for the purification of Christian from all self-absorption and selfishness. The work of the world can only be accomplished where people forget themselves, where they lose themselves in a cause, reality, the task, the It. Christians learn at work to allow the task to set the bounds for them. Thus, for them, work becomes a remedy for the lethargy and laziness of the flesh. The demands of the flesh die in the world of things. But that can only happen where Christians break through the It to the You of God, who commands the work and the deed and makes them serve to liberate Christians from themselves."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p75.

Resolution

2011-02-23T02:39:00.000-08:00

Today I read through and marked 10 uniformly uninspired and insipid essays. I then resolved to never write a boring essay, ever again. Even if it's just to give my marker half an hour of happiness. My essays, shall, henceforth, be either entertaining under-researched, or spectacularly inaccurate, or grammatically imaginative.

Just. Not. Boring!

The Humanities: A diatribe

2011-01-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

A recent post by the admirable and eloquent Terry Eagleton:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/17/death-universities-malaise-tuition-fees?INTCMP=SRCH

has sparked some discussion amongst my facebook friends.

It sent me on a veritable verbal diatribe, some of which I'll replicate here, for your thoughts:

... Much as it pains me to admit it, the nature of the academy/public education, and how they handle the humanities degree (and especially the higher Masters & PhDs) need to change. The university was set up in a completely different culture and designed for a different age; with a different economic imperative, and a particular view of the mind.

Universities need to train "humanists" (for want of a better word. Is moral, critical, creative thinkers/actors a better description?) for the larger world - we want humanistic lawyers, engineers, doctors, street cleaners. We do this by connecting knowledge and skills for a continuously changing world. But currently, doing advanced training in a humanities Masters/PhD relegates the student to no other alternative except academic professorship (not that I have anything against that!). But there are no other jobs that respect someone with training in the humanities.

You can find a good article about this here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/05/24/krebs

Ultimately, what bothers me, is the dastard vagueness and confusion that characterises most humanities centres/departments. No one is really sure what the POINT of the humanities actually is. Talk to a English professor, a historian, a sociologist, or a lecturer in philosophy, and they will all give you a different answer (or no answer at all!)

To borrow, nay, plagiarise from Alan Jacobs (who got it from someone else), here is the problem in a netshell:

1) The scholarly performance of academic humanists is evaluated — by colleagues, tenure committees, etc. — using criteria developed for evaluating scientists.

2) Those criteria are built around the idea of knowledge creation.

3) But many humanists aren't sure what counts as knowledge creation for them, since they are not able to follow any agreed-upon method for testing hypotheses.

4) This problem grows more pressing as expectations for publication rise: scholars are asked to create more and more knowledge without being sure what knowledge is.

without being sure what knowledge is. Here, is the crux of the problem. We have access to so much information; so much knowledge, so many points of contact, so many articles to read, RSS feeds to subscribe to, that I think we've lost all focus. There is, in addition, no yardstick, no set methodology. (Arguable, this could breed creativity as well as stagnation ...)

Additionally, this is a very knowledge/information-centric way of looking at the world. I wonder what happens when we look at it from the point of view of people - individuals, and communities. The humanistic Arts, in ways which cannot be fathomed nor replicated by the Sciences, shapes the heart, soul and character of a person/people. Incidentally, didn't the Greeks believe that the sole purpose of education was to teach virtues, and to create people who lived the Good Life? (Because virtues, according to the Greeks, led to happiness.)

Most importantly, how do we use, create, imbibe and revel in the knowledge that the humanities give us, in light of it being part of God's creation, and in light of our ultimate aim, to love and know God more?

(It's an exciting, if somewhat trying time, to be a Christian, and part of the humanities).

Promise Keeper

2011-01-05T04:08:00.000-08:00

God does not give us everything we want, but God does fulfill all God's promises, i.e., God remains the Lord of the earth, God preserves the Church, constantly renewing our faith and not laying on us more than we can bear, gladdening us with Divine nearness and help, hearing our prayers, and leading us along the best and straightest paths to holiness. By God's faithfulness in doing this, God creates in us praise for God alone.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p206.

G. K. Chesterton: “Christmas Poem”

2010-12-25T04:46:00.001-08:00

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost — how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Taking part in the Conversation

2010-12-23T04:19:00.000-08:00

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

It is from this ‘unending conversation’ that the materials of your drama arise."

— Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)

Strange Fragments

2010-12-21T07:12:00.000-08:00

I discovered these lines, tucked between my copy of CS Lewis' "Letters to an American Lady." They were written, I think, a little before this time last year. From memory I'd just come out of the final CU Planning Days Meeting for the year. The late afternoon sun shone as bright as midday, and I was walking briskly to a dinner appointment with a friend.

Sylvia Plath says that "everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise" - I do believe I need some improvisation to make this work ... Perhaps some guts too!

So here's the bald unvarnished scribblings. They're a bit weird. A strange disembodiment, popping up a year later: out of context, and late in time.

What do you think?

*********

Here you sit
An elbow's distance away
I can touch your starched cotton wrists
Should I wish to reach

The sun warm our faces -
A near-perfect, halcyon day
The traffic dulls our senses
And your eyes dart
from face to face

(But never rest upon my face)

Question after question
You ask after my heart
My tongue seems to have struck rock
wedged between teeth and fear

You call me amazingly reserved
Yet I cannot fathom your face
No trace of blood nor flesh
Only chiseled holes
Where eyes, nose, mouth
And expression should be

So we have but words

Words choked by heads too hard
Words rooted in barren ground
Words that breathe dust
And endure still

Look to the lilies

2010-11-16T03:52:00.000-08:00

It had come upon me, gradually, but with increasing force (and attendant anxiety), that I won't have a job next year. And so for the last few weeks, I've been worrying about money. It isn't so much that I want a tremendous amount, I say, but just enough to pay the rent and food, and have a little left over for emergencies. And of course, it isn't about the money itself, but avoiding the sense of shame that would wash over me, were the end of month to arrive, and I couldn't amass enough to pay rent.

So it floored me when I read the following confession from CS Lewis:

I'm a panic-y person about money myself (which is a most shameful confession and a thing dead against Our Lord's words) and poverty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs: one is sometimes even tempted to say that if God wanted us to live like the lilies of the field He might have given us an organism more like theirs!

These seem fairly incongruous statements, until you realise that the man who said those words also gave two-thirds of his income away, and even then was not satisfied with the extent of his charities.

*********************

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
- Jesus.

Three Patiences

2010-11-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

One must have 3 Patiences: patience with God, patience with one's neighbour and patience with oneself. - CS Lewis.

What I carry in my pockets

2010-10-27T23:16:00.000-07:00

Today I discovered the old Hasidic saying that each of us should carry around two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. One piece of paper says "I am but dust and ashes": this is what I read when I'm feeling proud and self-important. But when I'm feeling worthless or ashamed, I read the other piece of paper, which says: "For me the world was created."

(With thanks to http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/2010/10/giveaway-butterflyfish-great-and-small.html)

An introspective string of words (Not again!)

2010-10-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

Like a patient I come to you
Like a doctor you diagnose me

Introvert? Extrovert?
Intuitive, A Feeler

Likes to keep her options open
Must be a Perceiver.

Ahh yes...

You've worked me out now.

Placed ticks in boxes
Chalked up the score

Pin me up
Like a recipe, a list

A judgment pre-made.

But these letters, these percentages
This definition of me

What do they know of ...

Cool linoneum on hot dusty feet

The lifting of heart
When seeing a kite
straining against the wind

The blood sizzling in the brain
At an idea

winding its way through airless tunnels
straining for words
the breath of life

The jump in the pit of the stomach
Upon sighting a small bird at one's feet
Fearless

What does they know of ...

Weeping that doesn't stop
with the coming of dawn?

Does it remember the barely audible roar
Like a beast in pain

The quaking within
What can you do with this humanly beast

Does it know of the waiting
Waiting for the remaking

Grant me death
So that in the drowning of life
A new creature might begin

There will come a time
When this brokenness will no longer contain

When the sunlight shall stream through my veins

I will not be contained

I will hold on
I will wait

My favourite blog of 2010

2010-10-15T06:30:00.000-07:00

Alright. I've been keeping this hidden from you - yes, all of you, numbering four, who subscribe this silent simulacrum of a blog...

But I think I'd better share. (And, in fact, I have emailed posts to one of you already.)

My friend Arthur linked me to an article from this blog http://faith-theology.blogspot.com/and I've been hooked since. It's a veritable treasure-trove of all my favourite things: theology, German writers, fiction, writing, philosophy, literature ...

I don't agree with everything, but the writing is so seductive and pungent that I am often tempted to agree with it, just to have the joy of form and content cohering into one perfect happiness.

But disagreements make one think harder, and it's a pleasant business.

Check out the series of 3 gelato stories, and generally the entries in "August 2010", which includes some poignant reflections on writing from Flannery O'Connor, Rowan Williams, and my favourite, the moving entry "On Theology and Friendship."

The Visual Mixtape on the Behance Network

2010-10-15T06:19:00.000-07:00

These be rather cool posters.

The Visual Mixtape on the Behance Network

Musing

2010-09-16T07:56:00.001-07:00

This shall be my shortest post ever. Here's a question:

I wonder if reading the Narnia series' particular brand of mythopoeia as allegory is reductionistic and ultimately stagnating. What do you think?

Three-Dimensional Human Beings

2010-09-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

Well, the posts here have been few and far in between. There's a lot of reasons for this, I suppose, when one sits down to think about it. I'm often very tired and my brain is mush; I haven't much time for reading and reflecting, and, in generally, don't have much time which isn't taken up with work, or friends/family, or just sleeping.

Perhaps it's a sign of intellectual rigour (what little muscle I had!) gone to flab. More positively, perhaps I am spending more time "out there" in the real world, with people, than sitting at home in front of the computer by myself.

In the final analysis, however, it boils down to "I ain't got much to say."

I do seem, however to have ample time to check Facebook, post articles, and click through the various albums of "a friend's friend's cousin's little sister's photos of her trip to that hip bar in Boronia."

Hmmm!

The internet is taking over my life!

While there's merit in just taking time to unwind, and allowing your brain to rest by clicking through a collection of cool photos on the internet, there comes to a point where you're simply wasting time. (Sounds obvious, huh?)

I've been mulling on the words of writer and English professor Alan Jacobs. On the enormous amount of internet "sharing" (blogs, FB updates, Flickr &c.) and passive online consumption that goes on, he comments:

What is necessary, I think, is for all of us to be engaged in some activity that challenges us, that tests our intellectual limits. For some people that might be reading Tolstoy, while for others it might involve writing code or learning Klingon. But as Lanier says, “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself,” and being somebody is an achievement. It requires intentional labor, and a degree of personal ambition — and anyone can work and strive, though some have farther to go than others. But a lot of fooling around on the internet is just that, fooling around: it doesn't test our resources or stretch our capacities. In many cases that’s fine, because we shouldn't be working all the time: but even if fooling around on the internet really does somehow increase social creative capital — which I have no reason to believe — it doesn't achieve a damned thing for the person doing it.

I ain't got nothing to say, because there's not much of me that is solid, and substantial.

Jacobs is a Christian, and no doubt hidden behind this statement is also a theology of humanity, that sees the inherent richness in each person - beyond personality, beyond mere intellectualism - that comes when we lose ourselves in Christ. He who created us knows that we are beyond a body to be fed, a functioning participant of society. We are ourselves, fearfully and wonderfully made, and there is no-one like us. Only, paradoxically, one must give away blindly, throwing 'self' away, to receive the mind and likeness of Christ, and in him made fully ourselves. For who knows us better than God who made us, "intentioned" us in our mother's womb?

Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. - CS Lewis.

Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. - Jesus.

On Revivals and History Lectures

2010-07-19T06:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight I attended the annual Charles Perry lecture at Ridley College. Named for the 1st bishop of St. James' Old Cathedral, the lecture series began in the 1990s; was abandoned some time after; and was then resurrected last year, with its inaugural speaker being no less that the Scottish historian David Bebbington.

The purpose of the lectures is for evangelicals to reflect and learn from their past.

As we were celebrating the 100 birthday of Ridley College, the lecture this year was on the state of evangelicalism in Victoria in and around 1910, with a particular concentration of the revivals that were happening around this period.

There was a lot of stuff going on - dates; references back to revivals in Britain and the US in the 18th and 19th century; influential figures who travelled to Australia ...But what I got out of the lecture were 2 things:

- Revivals happen because of prayer. "Extra-ordinary Prayer Concerts" was the phrase often employed to describe committed groups of Christians, gathering together regularly to pray specifically for God to work. These prayer meetings often lasted for years, before seeing fruit in revivals. They were also serious commitments. The Moravians, for instance, took shifts in praying, so that they were literally "praying unceasingly" day in, and day out.

- With regards to theology, all the leaders of the great revivals (Wesley, Edwards, Whitfield et al), had a sense of following in the footsteps the theology of the Reformers of the 16th century, without emendation. There was, however, one additional point which proved crucial: they were all deeply convinced that what happened at Pentecost with the Apostles could, and indeed, should be replicated in their current situations, within their community of believers. Their understanding of the Holy Spirit and what he could do in the present day was therefore paramount to fueling their revivals.

I came away from the evening with a deep sense of the power and need for prayer, before we come up with any strategies for how we do mission, or evangelism, or attempt to "transform the world for God."

Of course, the lecture raised more questions than it could possibly answer. Being a total ignoramus when it came to revivals, I wanted to know what exactly constituted a revival? And how do we measure, historically, what was a period of revival or not?

What is our theology of the Holy Spirit? Should we plead for revival now? And why didn't the 16th Century Reformers go for revivals, Day of Pentecost style? (Actually they were probably preoccupied with clearing the air re: Salvation by Faith alone - which the 18th century benefitted from).

******************

For someone who was reading the lecture out word for word, the speaker was quite engaging and clear in his presentation. However, the lecture would have confirmed the general suspicion amongst the populus, that, while history is Very Important and We Need to Know about It, the past is entirely and utterly Dull.

I hasten to add, that I doubt I could have done better with the material - dense and statistical - but it did lead me to ponder what makes a good lecture, and, in particular, a good history lecture.

Here are some thoughts, in no particular order:

1. judicial use of visuals: Speaking about historical figures is always so much more interesting when you chuck up a portrait or two, and there are so many wonderful paintings if you're in the right period.

2. ditto audio material (I once attended a lecture on Elizabethan England at the beginning of which the lecturer gave us a fine baritone rendition of "Greensleeves". It was relevant too!)

3. beware of chronology, for it's likely to slip into "and this happened, and then this person did this, and then this happened."

4. include funny anecdotes and quotations to "colour" the past (and because the truth is always stranger than fiction).

5. indicate at the beginning of your lecture the lay of the land - what you're going to cover, splitting the history thematically, if possible.

6. explain why you're covering the ground you're covering, and wherever possible, help make analytical links for your audience.

7. be excited! History is a great and exciting story, about real people, real passions, and often situations that no fiction writer could dream up. Tell it therefore as the ripping yarn that it is.

Summer Solstice in Berlin

2010-06-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

There's a time between dusk and dark, where the clouds over the city of Berlin gather like a pluckered garment, and the fading light dyes the entire city an eerie blue. This is the best time to travel across Berlin on a train - over the Spree River, catching glimpses of various catherdral tops, jutting out like sharpened pencils from out of the darkening depth beneath your carriage.

And I am struck once again by how wonderful this city is. It's not that Berlin is particularly beautiful - it isn't. There's no magic that hangs over it like it does over Paris: everything picturesque and infused with some marvellous bubbly stuff that makes one swing one's hair, and over-gesticulate (shrug, demonstrate insouciance by a mere flick of the hand, jut out your lower lip as you drawl out "Ben, [long pause, maybe time for another shrug] .... oui). Nor does it have the rugged and gothic grandeur of Edinburgh - the craggy hills always in the distance, even as you wind yourself down another wee cobbled close.

Berlin is flat, spread out. A vast cacaphony of Schinkel architecture, Corinthian towers and 18th century splendour. Bauhaus, communist high-rise flats, memorials and monuments to battles lost and won, bombed out shells of churches and monasteries, expensive shopping centres, all neighbourly with the latest and rebuilding, covering over scars left by the war.

Having just spent two days in the baroque harmony of Leipzig, with its churches that pay homage to Bach and Luther, I felt dizzy and irritated. Berlin is mad, messy, loud.

It's only when I stop trying for cohesion, that Berlin woos me, once more.

Berlin is not uniformly elegant, nor quaintly historical, though there is more history here than can be recounted. It is uncomfortable and confronting, and in its dissonance a strange beauty. It's the most alive city I've ever been to.

Everything here has a story. Most of it not pleasant, but all entirely human. Berlin is split into 12 Bezirke, or boroughs, and each has a distinct flavour of its own. Here's just a few, to taste. Tiergarten in the east is gentil, with wide, tree-lined streets. Kreuzberg is famous for its large Turkish population, and the best place for a 3 euro Doner Kebab. Mitte is the tourist centre, with checkpoint Charlie, the Holocaust monument, and three glorious museums on an island on the river ... the wide street that leads to Brandenburg gate is called - delicious evocation! - "under the Linden trees". My favourite quarter is Prenzlauer Berg, the rent being still cheap enough for artists and musicians to hang around.

Broken Bells

2010-05-02T03:00:00.001-07:00

Divest of beauty
The day crawls

Night edges out boredom
And lethargy takes its place

The ship has sailed
The glory departed

What is left but burnt cinder
And a cold cup of tea
left unattended?

This leaden body
This lenten season

This self-conscious word
This selfish soul

Languishing disaster.

And yet ...
When we cry out:
O God save us!
From the horror
From the terror of the midday shadow
From ourselves

You came.

infinity and eternity
reduced into a child's body.

This flesh, this blood.
Eat, drink.

Obsessions

2010-04-26T10:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I have to do a devotion in staff meeting with my colleagues. This involves selecting a passage from the bible, and reflecting on it for the benefit of the rest of staff. Sort of like a biblestudy, but much briefer, and more personal in content.

We've been studying the book of Luke in some of the students' bible study groups, so it's a case of 2 birds and 1 stone that we've also been using it as the scripture text for devos. I've been encouraged enormously by the ones that the other staff have done. They've taken the parables of Jesus, and challenged me enormously on my use of money, my trust in God's mercy for the day's bread and work, my passion for the spread of the gospel, in light of the reality of judgment.

So what am I going to talk about? I have no idea. I'm reading through Luke now, trying to gain a whole picture of the text. Partly this sense of empty-headedness comes from not knowing my scripture well enough, nor applying it hard enough in my life. One lesson I've learnt from one of my colleagues is the practice of looking at my life - examining the minutae, for it isn't mundane to God. She is adept on reflecting, as the Psalmists do, on the past mercies of God in her life, and drawing upon them, as from a well-spring, when she's dry.

But thinking about Luke, and the Gospels in general, the story that immediately comes to mind is the Transfiguration. I realised that I am a bit obsessed with the Transfiguration story. It is such a strange story. In a book that feels functional - full of parables that need to be worked out, like puzzles, it's a conudrum of a different kind. Why is it there? Why does the disciples witness it? Are not the miracles of Christ enough? Why the blinding light? The glory?

Perhaps it's there to remind the disciples that Christ is beautiful. That the future is bright. That eternity is beckoning. It's to pull the curtain aside for one moment, and see who Christ is.

That glory is not just revealed in deed, but on the imagination.

A Farewell to Arms

2010-01-31T06:03:00.000-08:00

"Patience," said my friend, "is a virtue. And everything depends on right timing."

"That's real deep." I exclaimed, laughing. "And applicable to so many situations."

"I know." She smirked.

**********

Right timing is very important when it comes to our hot water system. A delicate work of surgery precision, every movement is registered, and has a resultant effect. Taking a shower has become a matter of strategic planning, as my housemates and I swap our various tactics against either an early death from pneumonia, or a hospital stay due to third degree burns.

My housemates all have different systems in place to combat this. Between munches of toast I discover that one housemate opts for the simple water-saving option. Just have quick showers, he says. In and out. Another relies on the precision of geometry: one twist of the hot tap anti-clockwise, and then 3 rapid turns of the cold. I measure heat by the number of body limbs washed. One clean arm and two legs under the lukewarm hot tap, and then it's time to turn on the cold water tap before I burn to death.

We are military strategists, the four of us. We plan our lines of attack, and, armed with towel, sponge and rubber ducky, plunge into the deluge. Mostly we emerge clean, pink and steamily triumphant. A few times, with a roar of pain or a shriek of shock, we stumble out, admitting defeat by the flaying of arms to keep the circulation going. Sometimes the white towel is hoised, and a truce is called. No time for conditioner, but at least the soap's been washed off.

My fourth housemate won't put up with it though. My morning shower, he explains, is like other people's morning coffee. Necessary. Like a good diplomat, he has surveyed the scene, observed the carnage, and decided its time we put down our arms and appeal to a higher authority.

He is right in his wisdom. We'll be ringing the landlord tomorrow.

Piano Lessons

2010-01-12T18:02:00.000-08:00

Once, in an expansive mood of vaulting arrogance, I remarked during a dinner party that I don't bother reading books written after 1970. They're all crap, I said dismissively, and there are already enough disappointments in life. Besides, I was a pedant, and once begun a book, needed to read through to the end. No matter how bad. Only, with rubbish books, I'd skim, impatiently turning the pages, picking up a stray sentence here and there with my eyes, stringing together the plot in my head, keeping a finger tabbed on the last page and feeling with my hand the volume of words I had to go before I could put the book down, onto my Finished Pile.

Reading as I would eat a rushed meal. Gobbling, barely digesting. Not for taste, but for the sake of accomplishing the task.

Recently however, I've been influenced by friends who do venture into the 20th Century and beyond, to read into the present. Mostly, I've forgotten what I've read, but a few books have been gems.

Yesterday I used up my Borders voucher to buy Anna Goldsworthy's memoir, "Piano Lessons". I began reading in the bookshop, and my eyes barely left the page as I clambered on a tram home. I stayed up until 2am, when finally the book slipped out of my fingers as my head lurched forward in fatigue. This afternoon, in between coffee and conversations with my housemates, I finished it.

There are two photos of Anna Goldsworthy in the book. The first is on the front cover - a faded image in 70s russets of a small, chubby child in a hand-knitted jumper, smiling into the camera. Chin upturned, mousy brown hair dumped like a bowl on a moon face, hand awkwardly holding on a large, rectangular suitcase, body leading slighly off balance on the stoep of a suburban house. The smile takes you by surprise - no teeth, but how a closed, upturned mouth could exude such cheeky exuberance, such expression that draws you into a great cosmic joke.

I turn to the back cover for the other picture. A more recent and familiar image of Anna Goldsworthy - the dark curtain of hair, the palest of porcelain skin, a long white neck, deep blue eyes, a small and perfect red-ribbon smile. I'd seen this tall elegant woman on advertisement broschures for the Seraphim Trio, a statuesque presence at the piano. Later I glimpsed the same calm, reserved woman in the Ormond College SCR. A more human presence then, flanked by her Italian husband. Her children clambered onto the worn leather couches, and played havoc with the cushions. Her husband pulled one boy towards him, and quietly told the other to behave. The children switched effortlessly between English and Italian, while speaking to the parents.

Anna Goldsworthy's memoir spans the period between these two photos, recounting the path to becoming a concert pianist. The continuous thread is found in piano lessons, and indeed lessons in music and life, from her Russian piano teacher, Mrs Sivan. In between are conversations with an incredibly supportive family, a swathe of academic and musical awards, the awkwardness of growing up and entering high school. Mostly tho', there are the lessons learnt at the piano - phrases of illumination and wisdom that translates just as well into life as onto the musical stage. Lessons in how to live for a passion, to carry a legacy, to know that one belongs in a long line of musicians, men and women who grappled with beauty, with being human, with expression, and communication and oppression. With wanting to touch the face of God. We get to know the composers through their music.

Above all is the relationship between teacher and student. Mrs Sivan's extraordinary pedagogy - a genius teacher - conveyed to the reader through meticulously remembered phrases. The broken English only enhancing the richness of her emotional range, her joy in music, her drive in carrying that, instilling that into her young charge. What is intuition, she'd say, it's tuition, that is IN the student.

The writing is elegant and lyrical. Anna is after all, the daughter of Peter Goldsworthy, whose novel "Maestro" upturned my life one summer in my final year of High School. Cool heart, warm brain, Mrs Sivan had taught Anna about the art of pianistic interpretation, and it seemed to have carried over into her writing, which is clear without being mechanical, compact and economical, but rich in poetry, intense but not bleeding with passion.

A wonderful, self-deprecating, enlivening read, whether fans of memoirs, music or pedagogy.

Half a Review

2010-01-05T05:24:00.000-08:00

Last night Flick and I took advantage of cheap Monday tix at the Nova to watch "In Search of Beethoven". Two and a half hours of sublime music and an epic saga of an extraordinary talent, a supreme confidence, and suffering ameliorated by a terse, agonising hope. The hope of happiness.

One of the loveliest things was the way Garbralsky weaved interviews from pianists, composers, historians, conductors. With an handheld camera mostly. There is the Beethoven worshipper, a owlish man who bounces on his feet in enthusiasm and affection. There is the respectful historian, who circulates around to the truth, to talk about Beethoven with diplomacy, forgiving his temper tantrums, his neurosis, his recusiveness. There are the pianists, who talk of Beethoven with a honest affection, as of an intimate friend. Commenting on his freakish fingering; the impossibility of his piano sonatas. The conductors, who speak with a mixture of jocularity and admiration for the genius that is Beethoven. The radical nature of his compositions, breaking all convention. The sheer arrogance of the 26 year old to write such music, to be so confident of his talent.

And the self-consciousness of Beethoven. His frequent desires to suicide, his ability to hold onto life, to keep writing, all the music in his head. His disorganisation, his lack of hygiene in the latter years, and yet, despite appearances, the very orderliness and control in his music. It's a common misapprehension that Beethoven's passion was barely contained, his intensity and temper wild and unpredicable. Perhaps it was so with his social life, and yet his music was deeply controlled, organised, intelligently wrought.

Intermission

2009-12-11T02:01:00.000-08:00

Let the music stop
The ghastly clamour cease

For one moment.

Put down the bow
Untune the string
Muffle drum and dampen keys.

Let stillness reign.
Let silence hang.

Erase flesh and beating heart
Chill the blood which throbs in vain.

Throw down the baton
And mark today

With a stop.

Put in the rest notes
Count the beats
I am tired, and in want of sleep.

Four beats of stillness
Let my mind be freed

A two-quavered hiatus
Let shattered body heal

A dotted breve
To solidify my soul

And into the mute void
The lion's roar.

A new sound.

Listen.

A Grief Dismissed

2009-12-10T08:29:00.000-08:00

I've a less than 48-hour old grief. A fresh wound, but old enough that I can begin to write about it.

I skirt carefully around my grief, poking it a little, making concentric circles, closer and closer in, until I stare at it, peering at its form. But it's only for a few minutes, before I have to withdraw.

The trouble with grief is that of course one can't just look at it. One doesn't walk around it as if at a museum, studying an exhibit encased in a glass box. Grief is a writhing, living, growing thing. One has to handle it, touch it, throw it about.

Only, it's bigger than me, more like a body of water. I have to enter into its silent immensity. I hold myself there, forcing myself to sit still in its centre. I can only manage a few moments. Like holding your breath under water. Grief is that split second just before you have to resurface: your lungs are almost out of air, but still holding out, and there's a panicked moment of paralysis, before your legs wake up, and propels you out of the water.

It's momentary, quick jerks of intense anguish. Impossible to sustain, even if I am willing to sustain them. Very quickly my mind turns to self-mockery, or tries to rationalise the situation. Reason acts as rudder, pushing distance between me and memory. Away from raw pain.

It's all relative, I know. I've just read the blogs of two families who have lost loved ones. A wife and a son, both to cancer. What do I know of such loss? What is my "loss" in comparison? A loss of future hope, a mirage of a dream. Nothing but foolish musings for addled brains.

Footloose

2009-11-23T03:49:00.000-08:00

They say we dance through life
A dance macabre with death

You say we dance in Trinity
A dance of eternal love

We dance in bodies
We dance in The Body

Slow Waltz? Quick foxtrot?
Who knows the steps?

Tiptoeing, testing
Afraid of false moves

Enter into Your rhythm
Following Your lead

Slowly, stumblingly
we mirror, we trace

dancers for grace

A Wedding

2009-11-14T00:58:00.000-08:00

I have just come back from easily one of the best weddings I have ever had the privilege of attending. Something has shifted within me, and I shall carry this day with me for a long time to come. I am writing, trying to distill it, to memorise it, and to come back to it for renewal when I might need it for the future.

The day slips away though, as I am trying to remember it. It's a bit like an impressionist painting - the overall image, and the sensation, stays. But soon as you try to focus on an individual part, things blur. But let's try anyway.

Some things I loved about this wedding. The surprises:

Matthew and Miranda are some of the most intelligent, witty, character-full and educated people I have ever met, so I was expecting something unique and sophisticated with the service. I think I had in mind something formal: hymns echoing to vaulting ceiling, a long, white lace train, lilies, and words sung in Latin. Instead, it was held at Queens' College chapel; we were crammed in, and the heat was making everyone somewhat sticky.

Yet into that warm, gathered silence, they came. Singing. The opening song was also the processional for the bridal party. The "best men" were women - Emma and Benita, and amongst "bridesmaids" was a man - Matthew's brother Michael. And then Matthew and Miranda walked in. Together. She wasn't on the arm of her father, and he was obviously not waiting at the front of the chapel for her. Matthew had said to one of my friends that he was planning to break tradition, by going back to an older, Mediaeval tradition - that of crossing the threshold together. Entering, the promised land, as it were, side by side.

There were no flowers. Flowers are lovely, but Miranda didn't carry a bouquet. She simply walked in with the bridal party and then promptly sat in one of the pews, as a member of the congregation. The minister had declared, at entrance to the chapel door: "Let us worship God together!", and so it was. Incidentally, that's one of my favourite things about Christian wedding services. It's about the community of saints, gathering together. The bride and groom, beautiful and central as they are, merely pointers, to the greater grace of God with us, God in us, God amongst us.

The girls in the bridal party didn't wear matching dresses. They wore party dresses that they obviously enjoyed and reflected their personalities. Benita is Matthew's little sister and bears the Champion family resemblance: dark-haired, long-legged and lithe like a gazelle. She had on a simple sleeve-less shift in blocks of navy blue and black. Rachel, Miranda's sister, is the funkier, edgier one, and came striding in a back satin dress with black and white Japanese inspired ruching pieces and lots of marvellously complicated tied bits that I find hard to describe.

The music. They had a choir. There was harmony (seriously. You could take alto sheet music from the ushers). And, as one friend commented - robust, proper hymns. Nothing twee or sentimental.

I loved the way the minister conducted the service, he didn't try to bring his personality into it too much, simply announcing when we were to stand and what we were to sing. But he placed his gifts and attention into the prayers and sermon, beginning with a prayer in the tradition of the Jewish "baruch ata adonai elohim" (Blessed are you, Lord God) - or, as he phrased it: we praise you Lord ...

The wedding vows themselves took the shortest time. There were no promptings. They memorised their promises to each other, and spoke, while exchanging rings. The kiss came as a surprise: he simply leant over and embraced her after the vows were done. Without the inevitable and cheesy "and now you may miss the bride" and giggles from the congregation. Natural and understated. No ostentation.

And then the sermon. I don't remember having ever wanted to cry at a wedding; I just am not that sort of girl who gets sentimental at weddings. I rejoice and I laugh a lot, sure, but never cry. Crying, I suspect, I reserved for the sublime: the beauty or humanness that moves me. This sermon made me cry. I don't think I can talk about it properly, even, and I won't be able to capture the entirely of that wonderful piece of truth, beauty and god-ness (for want of a better term).

The passages were difficult, I thought, and certainly not common wedding scripture that I've ever heard. Deuteronomy 26:1-11 marks the entry into the Promised Land by the Israelites. Thus begins the covenant relationship between God and his people, so integral that we can no longer, after this, speak of Deity without speaking of Relationship; of a God that is always with his people. It was a hard passage, and the minister did his best to contextualise. Then a seamless move into the NT passage, II Corinthians 1:16-20. So seamless that I've almost forgotten how he did it!

I liked that the minister related it to current culture, without too much contrivance. He's very much an "ideas" preacher, reading the signs of the times in terms of changes in thinking and assumptions. So he spoke of promises, that our society is fearful of the air-tight certainty of promises. Promises that seem tyrannically, unchanging despite a changing world. Are Christians naive, blindly walking into something so binding? Making vows to another person for a lifetime. A commitment that says, regardless of the future unknown, the uncertainty, the changes and losses that shall come, that I will commit to you. Not a contingency plan, a phrase about how I shall be your wife/husband until I no longer feel love for you, but a life-long commitment, till death do us part. Unambiguous words. An unambiguous yes.

Such a commitment, he went on to say, is not possible, until we have heard and understood the promises of God. If we believe in a history; a past, a future and a present that is not constructed by chance, by happenstance, but shows the hand of a Creator, a relational Father, then, and only then, can it be possible for a man and a woman to make such promises. Oh, but he put it better than that ...

Christians marry in Church in order to be ikons: in the man and woman we see the promise of God. In the Yes that resounds in us, we see our God. Our response, for those of us who have heard the Yes of Christ, must be, is compelled to be, a Yes, and an Amen.

Thus, we enter courageously and confidently, into the Yes of marriage. Into the Yes of a friendship. The Yes of a Conversion too, I suspect.

Amen, amen.

I'm making a little list

2009-11-07T13:39:00.000-08:00

I am terrible at making lists of "favourite" things. I've always thought it's because my opinions were not strong enough, or perhaps my personality wasn't defined sufficiently. I still don't have a favourite colour (it's buried somewhere amidst the changing colours of the sky); I'd be hard pressed to list my favourite books (there are so many and for so many different reasons); and I maintain my permeable status as both a chugger of coffee and a sipper of tea.

I once asked a good friend the usual banal barrage of 20 questions - what was his favourite food, his favourite colour, blah blah. His response was strangely affirming. He liked most food, and his favourite colour used to be, in principle, red, but now he finds he gravitates towards blue. I suspect I would have gotten a more spirited reply had I asked - what was his favourite virtue, or his fondest childhood memory, or his favourite piece of music to listen to when he was sad. But really, he wasn't a "favourites" kind of person, nor a type to make lists and commemorate themselves thus.

He had no preconceived notions of hierarchical structure. He wasn't going to allow experiencing the world as it comes be him, sweeping and fragmented, be forced and bent out of shape by too many value judgments. He had strong opinions, but on things that actually mattered. Things that were Right or Wrong. True or False. And it wasn't that he didn't think it important to talk about the respective merits of tim-tam originals and the new flavours, or Bach vs. Beethoven (who will knock each other out in 3 rounds?!), he just didn't hold to those ideas so tightly, and was happy to adapt, or have his opinion swayed. It wasn't symptomatic of a man lacking in passions, or a weak personality.

It reminds me of the confusion of conflated categories that CS Lewis famously described in the Screwtape Letters. On the modernist thinking clouding the mind of Wormwood's patient:

He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "contemporary", "conventional" or "ruthless". Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about.

Conversely, we seem to take singular pride in having strong opinions on such trivialities as TV shows, favourite actors, favourite ice-cream flavours, as if our character, our personalities, are defined by merely these tastes. In our topsy-turvy world we place defined ideas where a string of adjectives might better go. We argue naive matters rather than weighty truths of eternal import.

And then we judge each other by these: he's very cool because he's into entry-level Indie music, she's nerdy because she praises the inside of the Bodleian library... and so on.

I like Chesterton on this too:

"What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place ... A man was meant to be doubtful about himself. but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert - himself. The part of doubts his exactly the part he ought not doubt - the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubt if he can even learn ... The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping' not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility mad a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

(Altho' this is moving us into the mountains of epistemology, which wasn't where I was intending!)

I don't mean to say, let's not ever have silly conversations. We need to laugh, to play at argument simply for the joy of flexing intellectual muscle (and helping me exercise off the flab of mine!). But a balance must be struck. And judgment remains with God, not with us.

Next time someone asks me whether, stranded on a deserted island, whether I'd like to have Fuji apples or Granny Smiths with me, I shall smile, and say both. They will frown. They will say: but if you had to choose one. Ah, but I like them both. One is honey sweet, the other tart with skin glossy and gorgeous. I shall reply. I feel no need to have a strong opinion on this. They will judge me bland, and the topic of conversation shall move elsewhere. I shall sling back my wine, thus adding to my beverage options, and move on too.

Hermeneutics

2009-10-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

Bring meaning to my text
Oh Word of God

The daily tasks
The minute, hour, day

Page upon page
Life upon life

You were there
In the beginning

You shall be there
At my end

Book of Life
Inscribe your text on me

Poem

2009-10-21T18:43:00.001-07:00

Lord, on mornings like this one
It's hard to believe you exist

The birds splutter out joyous song
Light shutters through the window

And my heart crashes
Shipwrecked and ripped at sea

My soul a tea strainer of tiredness
Squeezed out into a chipped cup

Joy does not come in the morning
And I find that dreary night is more preferable

In darkness at least we can hope
Uncertainties leading to leaps of imagination

In blinding sunlight
Our dreams are revealed for mirage

Chiasma which do not hold water
And reality bursts upon the brain

Are you there, Lord?
Are you true, Lord?

It's me.

You are too far for me to reach
My arms go only to trunk of bark

Then you must hold onto me, Master
Breathe fire and life into cold bones

Tree of Life!
Feed me with your healing leaf

Wrap me in splintering shadows
My faith is but gossamer thin

Your love is warp and weft
You mend and make sufficient

Succour me, sustain me, carry me Lord
Into the blithe continuum of joy

Fiction

2009-10-20T05:29:00.000-07:00

These days, everyone is writing. Everyone wants to be a writer. Everyone has things to say: advice, profundities, rants, opinions, stories: a personal, individual take on life, the world, the bigness out there. To some extent I shouldn't be complaining - I'm part of this herd. And it's great! What a wonderful gift, being able to see the world through someone else's eyes. But what is a writer anyway? Why are we so precious about it, giving it a title, a role? Defining ourselves by it? It's something that everyone does! Literacy gives everyone a chance, language belongs to the hoi polloi, and the blogosphere makes it all the more easy.

What makes one person a published writer, another an itinerant blogger, a third a sometime letter writer? Does it all matter? I know some writers. Quite a few are self-absorbed. Brilliant, to be sure, but anxious for fame, for self-expression, defining oneself against others. Hoping to be better. Is there merit in this?

Maybe. Sometimes one's vision is such that others might revel in it. Laugh, cry, be shattered, become expansive. See by its beacon something else in the world, and beyond this earth.

And I understand the need for creativity. Or better, for making. In being makers, we reflect God's creativity. The great, only real creator, who made all things from nothing, ex nihilo. While we merely play with the lego blocks that God has already provided.

Writing should be like breathing. Words to sustain one's passage through the world. Walking. Looking. Listening. In, out, along the edges of the world. Moving beneath the superficialities, and grasping the mundanity - seeing it for the beauty and brokenness. Writing should be about other people. Should be about transcendence. Moving beyond the scope of oneself.

Guess I'll never be a writer. Le shrug.

3-D People

2009-10-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

I am starting to really appreciate blogs. Not my own, but other people's. I am learning all sorts of things about my friends that I didn't know before, and hearing their writing 'voices' - which is so often different from their normal selves. I am discovering their passions and ambitions, daily reflections, witticisms, aspects of themselves that I guess are often lost in the everyday, or don't necessarily come to the fore.

We are all so multi-faceted. There is so much more under the surface that we'll ever know, even of ourselves.

Oh, to know, and be fully known! Who of us can truly say we know a friend so well? What is true friendship but this? To be like God in this! Glory.

Tonic

2009-08-12T05:06:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had the joy of listening to Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Alice Pung read from their work: Chris from his varied books of poetry; Alice from her autobiographical work, Unpolished Gem, and from a short story she'd written about a family holiday.

They didn't have powerpoints. Without the pondering heaviness of academic learning, though ladened with sharp wit and intelligence, the night was for the Spoken Word. Two voices, two vocabularies. The presence of two very different writers, and yet what held them together was a joinery of honesty, of reality, humourous presented. Mundane realities - saucers; white goods; mobile phones; a part-time job at Retra Vision; the daily task of making up a bed.

Neither writers romanticised reality, tho' perhaps by virtue of the act of description, or the lyric of poetry, one elevates the mundane. At any rate I came away with a sense of seeing (rubbing my eyes clear), and a deeper appreciation for truth telling.

The disarming nature of honesty! I had not, until now, seen honesty as an exacting but fair friend, who welcomes you to sit and speak. A friend once told me that she makes a policy of "honouring honesty" in her life, and has found that honesty repays her, and honours her in return.

I have often seen honesty as a cruel taskmaster. One that reveals the horror, the ugliness within. A master who forces me opened upon a surgeon's table, at worst for the gawking masses, to bear witness to the cruelity and sin, at best for the Master Surgeon to work upon me, cutting and tearing what is diseased.

Tonight, through Alice and Chris' words, I understood that honesty could be gracious and affectionate, tender and nuanced, rather than honesty that is always blunt, cruel, blistering. Honesty that is can be more than simply the opposite of niceness or disimmulation. Honesty that could see reality, and yet not break your spirit. Honest that does not judge.

O LORD, you have searched me and known me! (Psalm 139:1)

God sees us honestly. We are transparent as glass before him.

So should it be with ourselves, and with each other. Looking inwards, looking outwards, looking upwards. Sometimes it feels easy. Mostly the looking at others bit. Sometimes it takes effort, and discipline, not to forget to look upwards. Looking at ourselves? That takes courage, that kind of seeing. Constant and conscious acts of everyday bravery.

For who of us can really bear that much honesty? Emily Dickinson once said that "the truth must dazzle gradually, else everyone be blind." One online commentator, obviously American, likened it to "not yanking up the blinds in the morning in a dark room or the outside sun is going to be blinding!"

Emily's advice then? To tell all the truth, but "tell it slant".

I think I can see what she's getting at. Speak honestly, but indirectly, with nuance and subtlety. In the rest of that poem she talks about "success in the circuit" -moving around the truth, spiraling to reveal, rather than blurting it all out. I'm not sure I entirely subscribe to that, being someone who appreciates directness, and finds subtle circumlocution somewhat patronising and occasionally false (I can see what you're doing, y'know, just tell it to me straight!) But I would definitely say: our words should be considered, carefully picked like choice fruit, and lovingly appropriate for the occasion and person.

Further on, Emily uses the illustration of children, who, initially frightened by lightening, become easy by having the phenomenon explained to them. So too us, in our "infirm", must have the splintering brightness of truth "eased", by its being told it kindly. Our tone (for what is content without form?), ought to be sweet. Our intention not to accuse, but to elucidate, letting, in Emily's words again, the truth's "superb surprise", come to us, dropping slow, and lightened by understanding. For there is joy in truth, just as the morning sun is a delight, as long as our eyes can adjust to the sudden light slowly.

And, I think, as imitators of Christ, we can go one better than Emily in why and how we tell the truth. God saw us, and he judged his Son instead. Unexplainable logic! impossible grace! We have freedom, but we live with the responsibility of mercy.

"Tell all the truth, and tell it in all grace." It doesn't scan as well on the page, but I think it'll work OK in life.

Present Tense

2009-08-06T23:49:00.000-07:00

I am by nature not a very present-minded person. I'd much prefer to dream about the idealistic future. It goes without saying that dreaming of future hope might often marr our ability to live fully in the present. I keep expecting long stretches of contentment, only to find that happiness comes now, in small moments, sharp and stabbing, or soft and barely registered, momentary breaths of a sleeping babe.

I am in a bookclub, and we recently read the dystopia novel "Brave New World". (By read I mean I skimmed!) But one of the central thesis of the book is that it is better to have continual peace and comfort than any extremes of emotion.

CS Lewis once remarked that it is in these momentary moments of joy, rather than in the settled comfort and heartsease, that the past is transfigured, and shows forth its eternal quality.

So here are my moments of happiness for the last few days:

Sitting on the black snail sculpture at uni, eating cherries with Sandy and engaging in a pip-spitting competition.

A barrage of bad puns in a facebook message with a friend. Plantea (plenty) of Plan and Tea was the worst.

Finding Jalna yoghurt on sale at Coles.

Funny Italian chap at Brunetti's who threw the plastic lids of coffee cups on a pile like a frisbee and then apologised for his agression.

A baby who couldn't stop laughing at me at the stoplights on Lygon Street. I don't know what about me made her laugh, but she didn't stop.

The bane of being busy

2009-06-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

Lately I've become increasingly (and painfully) aware of my reputation for busyness. This came to a head yesterday when I offered to catch up with a friend over the weekend, and her response was: "But you're too busy."

My busyness has gotten to such as state that my friends don't even trust my word anymore.

On any given day I find myself beginning conversations with students at breakfast with: "Got a busy day ahead of you?". I always have to "rush off" after scoffing down a hurried lunch, and I have begun a habit of taking early dinner, as I don't have time to attend Formal Hall and coffee in the SCR afterwards. My invariable response to the question of "How are you?" seems to be: "Good, but ... busy!" It's funny tho', I don't think I always mean it when I say it - it just seems to be easiest thing to say. No-one questions you, and most nod their heads respectfully, or click their tongue in sympathy.

Busyness has become a by-word in our society for our self-importance; a badge of a person's success. The more tasks we have to do, the more important/interesting/needed we feel. Our identity is placed in being strong, action-filled people, and we pride ourselves in being able to juggle multiple jobs at the same time. Busyness, I suspect, also means we can hide in our work, and avoid having a real conversation. It's a way of hiding from our fears. By getting caught up in the pressing minutiae, we don't have to lift up our eyes to look at the bigger picture of our lives, and where we're going. But busyness saps our lives of beauty. When was the last time I went for a long walk and looked at a tree? Or spend an afternoon with friends, unfettered by nagging thoughts of unfinished projects, my brain empty of calculations of rescheduling my timetable so that I can squeeze in an extra hour of admin in the evening?

Of course, I'm not decrying work. Work itself isn't bad. In fact, it's very good. There are many valuable things to be done, and idleness is as much a danger as busyness. Sometimes we simply have to work mad hours and numerous jobs - the reality of life is that there are responsibilities, rent that needs to be paid, assignments that need to be turned in, deadlines that need to be met. But work will always want more of us, and when busyness become a habit, and you give the impression of not even having time for friends and family (let alone God!), then you've got to wonder.

Jesus understood this very well. We've been working through the gospel of Mark at Christian Union this semester, and students have picked up on the almost ritualistic regularity of Jesus' departing to a high mountain to pray. There couldn't have been more important or urgent work than the proclaimation that the Kingdom of God had come near, and yet the Son of God took time out to spend with his papa.

So, I'm going to make a conscious effort not to be so busy, and, perhaps more revealingly, not to appear as if I'm too busy.

*****************

The formal rituals of liturgy really help in regulating rest and work. There is the Jewish Sabbath or Shabbat, a day of rest between Sundown Friday and the appearance of three stars in the sky on Saturday night. It's a time of rest, of celebration, of reflection and prayer. (Compline and Evensong, services within the Catholic and Anglican tradition, echo similar concepts in the closing of a day's work with thanksgiving and prayer.)

Shabbat is ushered in with the lighting of candles. Traditionally, the women of the family lead the prayers. Hands are drawn over the twin flames of the candles towards the face, welcoming in the light of the Sabbath day into oneself. (In fact, in one of the songs, Shabbat is conceptualised as a bride or a Queen, to be welcomed into the home). Then the festivities begin, as the family gathers around the table for the evening meal. Prayers and blessings are recited, there is singing, and bread and wine is shared.

Saturday is then spend in enjoyment and play, the contrast being not to engage in activities that are considered to be 'creative', by way of exercising order/control over our environment.

My favourite part of the Shabbat ritual is the Havdalah, the service that marks the end of Sabbath. Again, a braided candle, symbolizing the light of Shabbat, is lit. Wine, as always a symbol of joy, is passed around, so that people can take a final sip of the joy of Shabbat.

As one of the final acts of Shabbat, spices, such as cinnamon and clove, are placed in a box, and passed around, so that everyone might smell the fragrance. The sweet-smelling spices symbolize the sweetness of Shabbat, and the idea is that worshippers breath in sweetness of Shabbat in one last time so that it might sustain them through the week to come until Shabbat can be welcomed once more.

Havdalah is intended to require a person to use all five senses: taste the wine, smell the spices, see the flame of the candle and feel its heat, and hear the blessings. Thus the sounds, tastes and smells of Shabbat brings the holiness (ie., the set-apartness) of Shabbat into the rest of the week.

Whatever you might think about the divide between the sacred and the ordinary, or the role of ritual and liturgy in daily life (and I'm certainly not into forbidding certain tasks and abiding by strict laws on the Sabbath), the sentiment deserves consideration. This is one of the occasions I find myself deeply grateful for our physicality. Time and meaning are marked through our bodily senses. God dignifies and enriches our mundane, transitory doings with glimpses of eternity, as we echo his pattern of work and rest in creation with our own.

Capitulating to the inevitable

2009-06-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

Good grief! Not another blog?!

Not another computer screen full of half-baked ideas, maudlin sentiment and introspective drivel? Lashings of well-worn metaphors, multi-clausal sentences? Argh. Run away, run away now! (Also, I must to say, as self-proclaimed Luddite, who advocates the return of fountain pens and parchment, this feels the oddest thing!)

The world doesn't need another blog, so why am I doing this?

The blog is called "Addison's Walk" for a number of reasons, and maybe an explanation of some of the thoughts that went into the name might help.

Firstly, it's homage to CS Lewis. If ever I had a spiritual father in the Christian faith, it would be CSL. On warm summer nights, CSL and his friends would stroll along Addison's Walk, a side path on the grounds of Magdalen College, that runs past the river Cherwell, in Oxford. CSL was converted, in part, due these long walks with his friends. CSL, Tolkien and Dyson got into some heated arguments - hammer and tongs - long into the night; lasting till early hours of morning. (Then, being the freakazoids that they were, instead of going to bed, they wrote poems, summing up their arguments in verse. Tolkien's "Mythopoeia" was the result of one of the most significant of those summer walks.)

And so, in a cheesy turn of metaphor, this blog will like an Addison's walk, in tracing the passage of a life after conversion. I hope, if this blog continues, that it'll help me see God at work in me, and encourage me to take captive every thought, decision and act for Christ.

Another thing about Addison's Walk: I've always enjoyed talking the best, when it's coupled with walking. And I love the image of friends walking and talking together. I think this is largely the reason I've chosen this public platform, for what otherwise would be private musings. By nature unhealthily private and introspective, my thinking needs to be aired - taken into the sunlight, as it were - and then (trans)formed by being challenged by others wiser and clearer-thinking.

I have a memory like a sieve, and am incredibly scatter-brained. So I also write so as not to forget - a rather desperate grabbing before the waters of Lethe drown out all. Perhaps it's my training as a historian, but I find time and memory incredibly sad concepts. The reality is that all things shall pass and be forgotten, and their value lost along with the ones who found them precious. So this blog will try to capture transitory moments in reality, and, to borrow a phrase from Updike, "to give the mundane it's beautiful due." (The assumptions/world view underpinning that phrase are profound - but perhaps more on that in another post!) Of course, it's only God who Remembers, and all this is but my playing 'grown ups' in the dress-up box.

So! Adding to your plethora of on-line reading material, email updates and general grey cell exertion, here is my humble little patch of cyberspace. I pray that sometimes it might be useful for you, and enjoyable, as you stroll along Addison's Walk with me. It's mostly harmless. We'll see how it goes, anyway.

WHAT THE BIRD SAID EARLY IN THE YEAR

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

- CS Lewis.