Storyteller’s World

I’m perplexed about what effect it will have on our lives, that really big breaking news is now so visible and public. There’s already been a lot of comment on the way bloggers have been quicker to report some recent events, than the traditional journalistic media. And mobile phone photographers have filmed or photographed (and published) pictures of suffering and destruction, which the professionals might have had qualms about releasing.

You could argue that this is all to the good: “they” will be less able to pull the wool over the eyes of a public whose access to the facts “they” control. But given the problems we know exist with eye witnesses (cf. the Gospels), does this necessarily make us closer to the facts? We’ve seen people on the streets of Notting Hill talking about hearing shots. But were they really gunshots? Explosions? Grenades? Doors being smashed down? Cars backfiring? I don’t know that I could swear to being able to identify all of these.

We all saw pictures of half-naked suspects on a balcony, obviously recognisable as the men who were being hunted. It could be easy to forget they are still only suspects. And what happens when or if they are tried? “We all know they must be the bombers: we are all eye witnesses of their arrest.”

And what do we make of newspaper reports like the one in the Observer, about what the suspect arrested in Italy has said under interrogation? Don’t the Italians have laws about what can be printed, if it might prejudice someone’s trial? Is this fiction and speculation? How can the content of a police interrogation be made public like this? They surely weren’t giving the guy a press conference, were they?

If these men actually did what they are supposed to have done, I want them to be found guilty. I don’t want them getting off on a technicality because news coverage has made a proper trial impossible.

When I was a librarian, I don’t remember ever thinking twice about using these expressions:
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Library Science Jargon That Sounds Dirty

Are you suffering from blog depression? Am I?

Read this important public service pamphlet!

I suppose it started with reading Alberto Manguel’s Reading Diary, in which one of the favourite books he re-reads is, naturally, Don Quixote. At one point in his diary of that year he records: “It’s my birthday. I’m suddenly fifty-five years old.” And you are. Suddenly. When you still feel like you’re only 21 (except, thank God, you’ve come through most of the raging lack of self-confidence, and the need to discover your real identity - or maybe it’s just that you’ve realised you never will come through them, actually. “What do you mean, mid-life crisis? I’m on my third or fourth, already.”)

So you’re suddenly whatever age it is, and you realise that though it’s all downhill from here on in, you’ve never read most of the Great Books every educated person is supposed to have read, and even the ones you did read when you were young and had time for that kind of thing, you’ve completely forgotten about so you can’t tell your Prince Mishkin from your Sam Gamgee. At that point you think to yourself, “Life’s too short to waste even one day - or however long it’s supposed to take - on the Da Vinci Code. It’s time to read Don Quixote.”

Also, a couple of years ago the new translation by Edith Grossman was published, which comes highly recommended and attractive-looking, and weighs a mere 1.45 Kg, so I had it on my list of things I wanted to read.

The trouble was, I had never managed to get through it before, when reading the Penguin Classics translation by J. M. Cohen. I got frustrated by the stuff about chivalric romances, even when they were the object of the satire (which is, after all, the point of the whole thing). I found the stuff about romantic, pastoral love boring, and the stuff about aristocracy and honour repulsive. I found the violent slapstick humour cruel and unfunny. All in all, that’s a lot to struggle against.

But whether it’s something about Grossman’s style - which is very readable - or being suddenly 55, or just being more tolerant and prepared to let myself go and enter into the world of the book, this time around has been a delight, a newly discovered friendship. You have to let go of any desire to “have read” it. You have to read it as if you don’t care if you ever come to the end of it. (Wasn’t there some famous fan of the Don who said that though it was an enormous book, it wasn’t a bit too long for his taste?) You have to put aside the critical faculty which sees the violence as cruel, and get used to the conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and all the others. Even the interpolated novels of Part I become partly palatable - though I have to say I’m preferring Part II; but I gather there are partisans for both.

It’s a kind of spiritual experience. Not just in terms of learning to live in the moment and appreciate it, rather than hankering for some future which may never come. But in entering into an experience of the wisdom that exists in madness and simplicity, often deeper wisdom than is found in the sane and the great and the good. There is also the picture of a society and an age where there were inter-faith issues of tolerance and intolerance, with the ways Jews and Muslims and Christians treated each other, and those who resolved their situation by becoming converts or renegades. Some of this context of conflict along the borders between the Christian and Muslim worlds seems horribly contemporary (has it ever not been?)

Yes, I recommend it. Some people prefer summer reading that’s brainless and unwinding. But I reckon if you’ve got swathes of time for it, you might as well be reading something that might even make you a different or better person. Something you will be glad to have read.

The thing I’ve discovered about it, which everybody else has probably known forever, is that it’s so huge that you don’t so much read it as have to accustom yourself to living in it.

There’s a blog about it at 400 Windmills.

There are numerous resources online at the Cervantes Project.

Or you can consult the Wikipedia article, or visit the Virtual Museum.

Why can’t a Christian be more like a non-Christian? asks Graham at Leaving Münster: an occasional anabaptist blog.

And John has this to say: Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether we call ourselves “Christian” or not. What matters is whether we are travelling with Christ.

Wales has its own national website: icWales.

And the Prince of Wales has his own private income of £13.3 million, on which he voluntarily (!) pays income tax.

That’d go some way to helping some of the problems of poverty in the Principality, where household income is only 86% of the average for Britain. Don’t you think?

I was feeling a bit low today, with Alison away from home and two funerals to prepare for and a loooong list of things to do before we go on holiday, and, well, just needing the holiday. So it was good to run into a woman colleague at the crematorium who remembered hearing me tell the Gospel at the Diocesan Convention a couple of years ago.

She used to be a musician in an earlier life (well, I’m sure you never stop being a musician really), so she appreciated the similarity between biblical storytelling and playing a piece of music like a concerto.

Some people are surprised when you tell the Story using only the exact words of the text. “You mean you don’t use any of your own words?” No, the same way that if you’re playing a concerto you don’t play any of your own notes, only the ones the composer wrote. It’s all in the interpretation, that the personal input and creativity comes in.

It’s also the reason why this kind of biblical storytelling is a time-consuming and demanding, spiritual, discipline.

The trouble with any kind of force or violence is that it will not be your servant. It becomes your master. This is why it proves such a snare for democratic, free societies, and why our leaders get in such deep shit when they fail to use it only as the very, very last resort, and use it instead as the several steps away from last resort. The way Bush and his allies have been doing.

The only thing which may, by the grace of God, be a redeeming feature in this whole ghastly tragedy, will be if they really are sincere about doing this with good intentions. Meaning, the liberation of the Iraqi people from tyranny, and the stabilisation of the whole region. But even those of us who should be “on their side” find it hard to believe that’s true, all the time - their motives look so mixed, their decisions so compromised.

And when those who use violence have no trace of good intentions, but are filled only with rage and hate, the terror becomes their master even more rapidly and totally. We saw how the IRA became, not just a violent form of the protest against British occupation of Ireland, and for the unity of the Irish republic, but a structure for organised crime, bank robbery, drug running, terrorising communities and giving a violent kind of fame and power to its leaders. So Al-Qaeda - whatever it may be, and no matter how idealistic some of its foot-soldiers may be - has become a monster that threatens all law, government, civilisation, and the lives of any ordinary people who support those goods. They don’t even want to ‘win’ - they don’t know what that would mean - they only want the Reign of Terror to continue indefinitely, because that’s what gives them their authority and identity.

Call me naive, but I still have enough faith in human nature to believe that they cannot succeed in this. Sooner or later, the victims they try to win over to their cause will see through the lie. But we will make this happen sooner and quicker, if Truth and Justice are much more transparent in our policies towards the people who have all too often been the victims of Western policy.

Now that it’s all over …

I just about missed Oxford 2 Oxford. It would have been a lot of fun to read about Jo and Tim’s adventures while they were actually having them, instead of now they’ve finished.

There’s trouble brewing at Interfaith Relations, again. One of our members has expressed a view about the need for understanding and prayer about “Muslim violence” in many parts of the world, and cited two particularly obnoxious texts extracted from the Holy Koran about fighting against and slaying infidels, etc. as the teachings that underlie recent suicide bombings.

Aside from reflecting that we don’t often refer to “Jewish violence” in Palestine, or even “Christian violence” in invading Afghanistan or Iraq, I’m really agonising about how to deal with this. It causes deep offence and upset to some in the congregation, while the majority say nothing and so it’s hard to know whether silence indicates agreement, indifference, or disagreement but the lack of energy or knowledge to argue. I don’t like to gag or censor the expression of views in church. It’s not the Christian / Anglican / British / Western way. On the other hand I am the one sharing the bishop’s cure of souls here, with responsibility to do what I can to instil sound teaching and believing.

But it’s all further evidence for the argument that we shouldn’t base our attitude to other people’s faith on what we read in their scriptures. Perhaps we shouldn’t even presume to read their scriptures, until we know the people really well, and they invite us to share their holy things.

After all, whose Teacher is it who said, “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword”? Or which faith’s daily prayers include the amiable lines, “Yea, happy shall he be that rewardeth thee, as thou hast served us. Blessed shall he be that taketh thy children, and throweth them against the stones”?

Once again Jesus’ parable of the Dishonest Steward (Luke 16.1-9) is read in church - at the 8 o’clock BCP Communion service. And once again one of the congregation tells me that this parable worries her. And once again I’m driven another step nearer to complete conviction: if this story disturbs us so much, surely it must be one of the most important of all Jesus’ stories?

And of course it’s immensely topical, relevant and practical.

Listen, folks! If you are responsible for administering the debts that are owed to your wealthy master(s), and if you want the slightest chance of getting to heaven, the only way you’re going to do it is by writing off those debts. OK, Messrs Blair, Bush etc. - and all of us too - is that clear enough for you? Cancel unrepayable debts: make poverty history.

If you happen to be one of those who are the debtors: never forget that the God Jesus is talking about is a God who cares about you and wants you to be free of debt. These people who owe 100 measures of wheat or of oil: they are not capitalist entrepreneurs, you know. They are poor neighbours who have had to borrow wheat and oil, a measure at a time, in order to survive and feed their families. And because they never get out of their poverty, and never get clear enough to repay the first loan, they just get deeper and deeper into debt until they end up owing hundreds. When are we going to understand that debt slavery is an abomination, is abhorrent to God?

(I’m pretty sure the reason we don’t like this parable is because we never identify with the debtors. We always think of ourselves as the steward, and even then we fail to notice that we are about to become the next victim of the plutocrat. You can’t serve Mammon, you know. He will consume you in the end; that’s if he hasn’t consumed you already.)

If you are - God forbid - in the position of the ‘rich man’ who has been able to lend all those hundreds of measures of wheat and oil without even noticing it, without having to go without: there is no excuse, you should have been giving it to those who needed it. Why? Well, Jesus had a story about another rich man (Luke 16.19-31) that tells you why.

This is probably one of those passages we should preach about every week until the world changes.

In case you missed my last go at it, it’s What should we do with our money?

It’s taken us five years to get there, but within the next few days, work is going to begin on building the vestry extension.

Five years of planning, negotiating with planners and arguing with English Heritage who rejected the first design and insisted on something smaller, less useful to us, and much more expensive. With archaeologists, who find there is evidence of human remains in the ground around the church building. (Shock, horror!) With one complainant to the faculty who turns out to be a member of the congregation, and is a lone voice protesting about how the church will be ruined, when even the local branch of the Oxford Preservation Trust are on our side.

All to make this ancient building more suitable for contemporary church. To give us more room for clergy and choir to robe, to store vessels safely, to bring a water supply into the building, and crucially of course, to have toilets under the same roof - the absence of which is incomprehensible to many visitors (”What, no toilets?!”) and already prevents some elderly parishioners from attending.

And during those five years, the estimated cost has doubled. Naturally.

This morning we had a working party to clear the existing vestry. Churchwarden Geoff and I conspire to use this as an opportunity to get rid of some stuff we’ve had our eyes on for a while. Several dozen BCPs that escaped the last purge (No, Agatha, I replaced them: we’ve got nice new copies now with young Queen Elizabeth’s name in them). Ditto ASB 1980s. (Parishioner: “Surely we don’t want to throw these away, do we, vicar?” Vicar: “‘Fraid so, they’re illegal now, you know.” Parishioner [drops book guiltily]: “Oo-er!”) Bales of fabric embroidered by previous generations of Junior Church as banners, collecting bags, other unidentifiable artefacts - the embroiderers probably now mothers with grown-up children of their own.

And then - oh dear! - about a dozen assorted crosses and crucifixes. Somehow these are harder to get rid of. Every one has probably been given to the church at some time in memory of someone, maybe even used for a year or two until the next vicar who finds them too awful to contemplate puts them on top of the cupboard where they won’t be found till 2005. Crosses are not so bad: a little wrestling reduces them to two or more unrecognisable and unconnected pieces of wood. But what do you do with a crucifix? You can’t take it to the Oxfam shop, or throw it in the skip. It somehow feels sacrilegious. Yet they are so alien to our kind of devotion, and even if they weren’t, are so much in the taste of an earlier, like 150 year earlier, generation.

Sell them on eBay? All the crucifixes there are small items of personal jewellery. Slip them into the local boot sale one Sunday morning? Yes, but I’d be terrified these crucifixes were boomerang-shaped, and I’ve have someone turning up the next day saying, “Vicar, I found this yesterday at a boot sale. I thought, that’d be just the thing for St Nick’s. No, really, you don’t need to give me anything for it - look on it as my offering to the church.”

I think we chickened out and put them in the upstairs cupboard in the church hall. But if any reader wants to offer a crucifix a good home, they are not only FREE, but also on a FOUR for ONE offer. Drop me a line: first come, first served.

Yes, my use of the word ‘moderation‘ now seems to have been premature or naive. I suppose I had been thinking about that old world we used to live in, before July 7, where policemen arrived on bicycles and knocked on your door and asked if you minded them looking round the house for explosives and you said, “No, of course not, officer; why not let me make you a cup of tea while you’re looking?”

Of course if there’s any chance of a suspect having explosives strapped to his body and detonating them with his dying gasp, the police are going to make as sure as can be that there’s no gasp to do it with. And then it’s too late when they find out - as they probably will in most cases - that the suspect was unarmed and unexplosive at that particular moment - was just going out, in fact, to post a letter or buy some cat food.

In the mean time, the lesson to be learned is: if a policeman tells you to stop, you stop pretty damn quick, and then ask politely if you have stopped sufficiently for him. Which is all OK unless you’re a tourist with not much English, wearing a rucksack, and not sure what to do when you are pursued by what looks like one of those armed gangs that are reputed to prey on visitors to the UK …

I don’t often use commentaries nowadays - they so rarely answer the questions I’m asking, which I take to mean either the commentators don’t know the answers either, or I’m asking some very peculiar questions.

But today I did take down G. Campbell Morgan’s study of Acts to see what he says about Acts 12.1-17 that I’m preaching about on Sunday evening. It’s one of those moments of blowing the dust off the top of the book, wincing at the browned pages, looking at the front page: “St Albans, 31st August 1979″ - ah yes, I was an Evangelical back then, just started my first curacy.

But you know, I do expect the few commentaries I look at to be accurate, especially when they’re written by people who are supposed to be great Evangelical biblical scholars (if this isn’t a contradiction in terms?) What am I to make of this then, on Acts 12.17?

It is also an interesting fact that the words in the seventeenth verse: “Peter departed, and went to another place,” are the last concerning him in this history. In Galatians there is an account of his contention with Paul; and his letters certainly were written at a later date; but here he passes out of sight in Luke’s history.

Oh really? Then who is that addressing the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15.7?

Good job I spotted this, and took the bit out of my sermon about this being Peter’s final appearance, and last words. That kind of mistake could have totally undermined my pulpit cred.

The failure to explode of four more what-look-like-intended-suicide-bombs in London yesterday, is downright miraculous. Maybe all the prayer those of us offered, who turned to prayer rather than the bottle, has actually been working.

Not so sure about the fact that the alleged would-be bombers all got away in spite of being pursued by witnesses. Or perhaps that too may be a good thing, since when they are now caught by the police it may be with moderation. If I was one of a crowd that had apprehended someone I thought had just tried to blow us to bits, the temptation not to administer immediate justice might end in lynching instead.

What’s really terrifying is that there could be four young men who, in spite of seeing the human cost of what happened a fortnight ago all over the news, could still think they would be doing God’s will by doing it again. Even after all this time, I still find it hard to believe that religion - any religion - can become so perverted.

Some of my favourite books are the ones that feature in other books that I enjoy. It may be as the favourite reading of one of the protagonists, and it may or may not play a central role in the action. Quite a few of these books are classics in something like Mark Twain’s sense: “A book that people praise but don’t read.” That’s to say, I love the idea of them in the book I’m enjoying, but would probably hate to read them in real life.

An example of this kind of “book within a book” is Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, in Robertson Davies’ The Cunning Man. I’ve got it on my bedside reading shelf, but have never managed to get into it, even though Philip Pullman and others have described it as one of the greatest books ever written.

Then I think of Herodotus’ Histories, in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. And Bartram’s Travels in Charles Frazer’s Cold Mountain. Both of these were the single treasured volume in the possession of the central characters: the nameless Patient, and Inman; and both are the repositories of other memories: photographs or letters.

Cervantes is particularly clever with the recursive trick of having Don Quixote feature within itself. Even in Part 1, there is the device about this book having been found, and being the work of the Moorish author Cide Hamete Benengeli. But in Part 2, a large part of the opening conversations concerns the reactions of the reading public to the first part of the adventures.

Umberto Eco also uses the device in The Name of the Rose, which is purportedly drawn from a translation into French of the original MS by Adso, the narrator of the story. This is fun, but not quite the same as the “book within a book” that I’m talking about here.

Nor do I mean the kind of book within a book that features in The Invisible Library: this consists of imaginary books that occur within other novels.

So what about it: what are your favourite (real) “books within books”?

It’s all very well making a resolution only to read books with pictures. The problem is, not many novels come with illustrations. So the next best thing is to read classics that have been illustrated by great (and not so great) artists, and look up the illustrations on the Web.

So, reading Don Quixote, I can choose the illustrations by Gustave Doré, Picasso, or Stefan Mart.

The edition I’m reading is the translation by Edith Grossman, which I’m getting on better with than any previous translation I’ve tried. With it, I notice (again) an interesting feature of my reading style - and general temperament - which I may even blog about one of these days when I have more time.

Drawn! The Illustration Blog

Drawn! is a collaborative weblog for illustrators, artists, cartoonists, and anyone who likes to draw. Visit us daily for a dose of links and creative inspiration.

Interesting, being a storyteller and showing an American storyteller around Oxford. The professions of tour guide and storyteller are not a million miles apart (there’s another job I could consider, if the C of E ever goes out of business). Whenever you’re asked a question about some feature you’re showing off, you can tell the story if you know it, make one up if you don’t, or if you’re too honest for that, change the subject to tell a story you do know.

The only one that really stumped me was when Tracy, who’d just been to Edinburgh and sung in St Giles’ Cathedral, stood with me at the bottom end of St Giles in Oxford after I’d enthused about the magical wonder of the St Giles Fair, and asked, “Who was this St Giles guy anyway?”

Turns out from the Penguin Dictionary of Saints that there isn’t really a story to tell. St Giles, though one of the most popular saints of western Europe in the late middle ages, is also one about whom very little is known. (Probably the best kind: you can make ‘em more completely in your own image.) His dates are unknown, though his feast day is September 1, and the centre of his cult was at St-Gilles, near Arles, where Giles may have been a hermit in the neighbourhood during the 9th century. A 10th century Life, written for the edification of pilgrims, “includes some startling wonders and anachronisms, and one celebrated incident.” The hermit had a pet hind, and one day when the Visigothic King Wamba was hunting in the woods his hounds caught the scent of this hind and went in pursuit. The king loosed an arrow into the undergrowth, and when he rode into the clearing he found Giles, himself wounded by the arrow, protecting the hind in his arms while the hounds stood rooted motionless by a miraculous power.

So what to make of St Giles? Another nature saint like Francis? A resister of monarchs, like Thomas of Canterbury? The prototypical hunt saboteur?

In fact he was looked on as the patron of cripples and the indigent (no, Charlotte, that does not mean a polite male person from the Sub-Continent, but someone who is poor and needy), and has over 150 churches dedicated to him in Great Britain alone, notably St Giles Cripplegate and the aforesaid high kirk in Edinburgh.

In the gruesome way of so many saints, his emblem is an arrow.

A day of Continuing Professional Development meeting up in Oxford with Tracy Radosevic, one of the leading lights of NOBS, and Dave Robertson, ditto the Telling Place. You don’t have to spend long with either of these guys to know why they are such stars of the storytelling (and in particular, the biblical storytelling) firmament. They can hold their own in any storytelling environment, but at least in this country, Dave doesn’t get asked to tell as often as he deserves, because there’s a prejudice against Christian stories. A couple of years ago he won a national competition, but the luminaries of British storytelling still won’t give him work. So if you want a storyteller who’ll bring any gathering to life, ask Dave.

Tracy was one of the first NOBS people I meet at the FG in 2001, and her workshop was the first I took part in at that Gathering. It was great to get her over to Oxford during her current British and European tour/holiday, to show her some of the sights and tell her some of the stories (British history from the particular unbiased slant of this storyteller!) And to have lunch and the odd drink or two at the Bird and Baby in St Giles.

Here’s the proof:

Three tellers, Tracy, Dave, and this Teller, at the Martyrs’ Memorial

And, Tracy is a Mac user!

American readers: Is this the kind of thing you would expect from a Brit doing this quiz? Or fellow Brits from other regions: how do you come out?