Storyteller’s World

In this Year Of Big Books, the next one I have now embarked on is War and Peace.

It is a bit like Columbus setting sail for the Indies. I don’t know when, or whether, I will arrive at the destination. A thousand different accidents and mischances could happen to divert me on the way. I could be dead, we could all be dead, before I finish. There are the risks of piracy (being distracted by other things needing to be read) or shipwreck (just not being able to finish).

And like any round-the-world yachtsman, I have sought sponsorship; or in this case, dedicated this reading of War and Peace to a special person.

This reading is in memory of Dame Rosemary Murray. When Rosemary lost her sight through macular degeneration, she came to appreciate the value of audio-books. One of the ones she enthused about especially was War and Peace. She said she hadn’t read it since she was a young woman, when she had skipped whole sections of it that she found difficult, or not particularly interesting. But the great advantage of listening to an audio-book was, that you couldn’t skip anything! You had to listen to all the philosophical and political and historical discussions, and they were well worth it.

So, this reading is for Rosemary: an inspiration, and a dear friend.

“Before I came here, I used to think Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a fantasy. I’ve since discovered it’s a completely realistic description of life here.”

Here, through the open door in the N. aisle, you catch a glimpse of Alice’s garden.

It’s beautiful. I could really get used to living here. This is Tom Tower from the inside, from just in front of the Deanery, on an autumn evening.

And this is those Palladian buildings in Peckwater Quad. My room was on staircase 7. Bliss.

Read this …

Good Morning Silicon Valley: Massachusetts donates 50,000 copies of Office to hurricane relief

and get rid of yours too …

Now, how can I persuade Diocesan Church House to exchange files in OpenDocument format, instead of those infuriating .doc and .xcl files?

Slept better, but decided not to bother with shaving in the absence of a decent mirror; so I may well look like a desperado before I get home tomorrow.

This morning’s lecture was by Prof Ann Loades on Iris Murdoch, whom she helpfully located within the context of post-war Oxford’s theology and philosophy. I’ve read very little Murdoch, and feel again that she’s someone it would be profitable to read. It’s interesting that, while Murdoch had little time for a personal God or the institution of the Church, she believed passionately in the importance of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Losing these entailed a real spiritual loss, regardless of whether you believe in God or not. Can it be that one of the negative effects of new versions and translations, is to polarise the situation so that those who don’t believe as much or as fully as they think others do, feel themselves excluded and thus exclude themselves? Or is this just the way society has moved anyway, so that the “half-believers” of yesteryear now realise their position is untenable? Like the bourgeois people who rejected Christian dogma but wanted to preserve the morality, and now either realise it’s impossible, or have come to think, What the hell? what’s so special about the morality anyway?

Christ Church Incumbents are a strange and interesting lot. They tend to stay in post for longer than most clergy - because it’s not worth their while to move on. And many of them seem to be quite well-read in philosophy and other areas which are not always at the forefront of day-to-day parish ministry. I feel like a dunce in this company, until I get talking to some of my mates in the group who share a lot of my frustrations and aspirations, and are a holy if unruly group. The Church of England can’t be doing too badly with people like this serving its parishes.

The last lecture of the conference is by Hugh Rayment-Pickard on Philip Pullman and the Mysticism of Storytelling. He locates Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy firmly within the tradition of Christian visionaries and dreamers, going back through Blake, Dante, Julian of Norwich, and right back to Jesus as Storyteller. Rayment-Pickard says Pullman belongs within this tradition of Christian imagination, even though he would be furious to admit it.

“Is Pullman an anti-Christian writer, or not? Or is his story one of those ‘pagan Christianities’ [that C. S. Lewis talks about] which should not trouble us, but may even help us on our way?”

After dinner, a Recital of Spiritual English Song in the wonderful space of the cathedral’s north transept. Edward Jones (baritone) and Henry Parkes (piano) performed Richard Pantcheff’s Five Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dorian Le Gallienne’s Four Divine Poems of John Donne, Andrew Cruft’s Into God’s Kingdom (setings of poems by various poets), Harold Darke’s Three Songs of Innocence, Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs (settings of George Herbert). Heavenly sounds.

A few of us, to round off the Conference, adjourned to the Old Tom to put back a few single malt whiskies. The strange thing about this beverage is, it doesn’t seem to produce a hangover. Or did I just not drink enough?

I wouldn’t want anyone to think this week was just a doddle. It’s hard work attending a Christ Church Incumbents’ Conference, with all the demands it makes on the intellect, the digestion and the organ of resilience.

First there are the small details like finding the loo. Peckwater Quad is a magnificent open space surrounded on three sides by fine Palladian buildings, and on the fourth by the classical pile of the library which Ruskin declared so hideous that he would prefer to live in Wormwood Scrubs than have to gaze on it every day. On each of Peckwater’s nine staircases there are eight suites of rooms consisting of a spacious sitting room, with two small bedrooms. These are the quarters that undergraduates share: but there is no sharing for Christ Church Incumbents, who each have a whole suite to themselves and could presumably alternate between beds on successive nights? But while the bedroom has a washbasin, there is no toilet en suite. You have to go off hunting up and down the stairs to find one. As far as I’ve discovered, there is one at the back of the building, at the top of the stairs leading down to the basement where there is a corridor with a bath and shower. If you press on further along the corridor and through the next door, there’s another toilet at the foot of stairs which, if you climb them, bring you out into the next staircase along.

I rise at 6.45 to face the challenge of shaving at a basin in front of a window looking out on Oriel Square. This does not reflect the face I need to see in order to obtain a clean shave, so I have to make do with guesswork and the sense of touch. Then Morning Prayer and Eucharist in the Cathedral, where I find they have abandoned the Prayer Book order of Matins in favour of Common Worship. Whatever next? They’ll be starting the service on the hour, instead of at “Oxford time”, five minutes later.

In a stressful programme, the next event after a cooked breakfast is coffee at 9.30 a.m., which I opted to miss, on the grounds that I didn’t want to be twitching through the next lecture. The Revd Professor David Jasper spoke about Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his significance for contemporary religious thought. All these lectures make me want to read more (or even some) of their subject; at the same time as I know, realistically, that I probably won’t. I tried dipping into Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, and found it pretty forbidding. But at least I’ve bought a copy, so maybe one of these days?

After lunch, a tour of the Upper Library, not usually open to visitors. I run into a friend from Kellogg College, Judith the archivist - always nice to see a friendly face.

Then at 4.30 Andrew Hass talking on Opaque Enigmas: W. H. Auden as Christian Poet. These highly intellectual and academic discourses on aesthetics, literature and the like, leave me feeling very unintellectual indeed. But I’m reflecting on the nature of art and creativity, and the difference between works of art that are “finished” (sculptures, poems, novels, paintings), which are partly created in performance (plays, poems read, musical works) and those which are practically unique to each performance (jazz, musical jam sessions, storytelling). Different standards of aesthetics will apply to each of these.

So it’s off to the Christ Church Incumbents’ Conference: an opportunity for the college to provide some TLC for the incumbents of the livings of which it is patron (of which Elsfield is one). As well as wining and dining us, they provide food for the intellect and the spirit.

Worship in Christ Church Cathedral: Choral Evensong; good food and drink; and lectures on English Literature and Theology. Kicked off by Professor Paul Fiddes talking about the “The Idea of Redemption in English Literature”. A kind of overview based on five tensions and spaces within English Literature from the Dream of the Rood to Iris Murdoch: between

• victory and suffering
• law and mercy
• sacrifice and sacrament
• compassion and selfhood
• suffering and death.

Then John Drury on George Herbert: not just the greatest of Anglican poets, but “the Poet”, according to James Fenton.

Thanks to Quentin for this link to some beautiful computer produced images at Complexification | Gallery of Computation.

Oh dear. There seem to have been more rants and moans here recently, than fun and smiles. I’ve even been getting some comments disagreeing with my rants and moans which is no more than they deserve.

Yesterday brought two emotional crises which I didn’t enjoy. Getting back from the supermarket, we found the kitchen sockets switch tripped at the fuse box, and eventually isolated the problem as the washing machine which, at a mere 8 years old, looks as if it’s giving up the ghost. My irrational response to this - as if the universe had it in for me personally by allowing this to happen on a Saturday - was more than a little suspicious.

Then the happy occasion of the diocesan ordination of deacons in the evening left me feeling overwhelmed, as usual, by the huge scale of this sacred calling, and my general unworthiness and uselessness at fulfilling it.

This feels very much like SAD, or something else, arriving early this year. It’s not even October - though we have had a few dull days recently, and the mornings and evenings are drawing closer together from both ends.

Brothers and sisters, pray for me. And if anyone can suggest something that’ll give me a really good laugh, it’ll be most welcome.

… is the title of a post I haven’t got the time, the energy or the heart to write. What is it about evangelicals, that they’re so obsessed with sex?

In BBC NEWS | England | Hereford/Worcs | Bishop defends transsexual curate we read

But Don Horrocks, of the Evangelical Alliance, said the Bible made it “absolutely clear that God created human beings as male and female”.

“Therefore there is absolutely no Christian acknowledgement of the 21st century human idea that it’s possible somehow for a person to take charge of their own destiny and to decide what their own sexuality is,” he added.

Once again their understanding (their understanding, mark you) of what God’s word says, overrides the actual reality of the world and of human experience.

“There is no such thing as gender dysphoria, because God made people male and female.”

Whatever next? No such thing as flight, because God made people without wings? Oh, no, of course they’ve no problem with that because it’s not about sex…

P.S. Though I suppose if a person is homosexual, Horrocks would say it was perfectly possible, nay obligatory, for that person to take charge of their own destiny and force themselves not to be. Silly me, I’m forgetting again that that is “absolutely” different.

For part of one night, all four of us were at home under one roof. Tui returned from the Doc’s, where they had celebrated his 21st birthday after getting back from Tuscany; and Li came home from Zakynthos where she had been with Alex. We’ve always thought that Alex looked kinda Mediterranean in colouring and complexion, so it was great fun to hear that when they were eating out over there, the waiters regularly came up to Alex and started speaking to him in Greek.

When they got to the airport yesterday they learned that the plane was still in England, so they were over three hours late and Li didn’t actually get in till 3.30 a.m. I wasn’t awake to hear.

In the day of rapid turnarounds, this was then the day of the University Run. (How many years have I been doing this, now?) At least we’ve got the art of packing the car to a fine art, to get Tui and all her stuff back to her University North of Here. It was not a nice day for driving on our fair motorways: heavy traffic, and rain and spray to match. Somehow I survived the lunatic driving of self and others to get there and back in one piece. There are guardian angels after all, I guess.

After her first year in hall of residence, she is sharing a house this year with two other girls. It all looks very bleak and unloved today, and once again she feels just like a little girl, starting out all on her own. Letting go is hard - for me. Especially as I never did this particular kind of starting out on my own - always lived in college or digs at uni - so it seems an impossible task she has set herself.

She’ll be OK, I guess.

So why do I have that knee-jerk reaction to the 100-Minute Bible? For sure I’ll have to read it, before I can really say what I think of this particular effort to distil the Bible. But while I’ve thought about it on and off since yesterday, I realise that it’s precisely as a Storyteller that I object to the idea of it. Because Story is so much more than the bare bones of what the story is about, that a mere summary of the plot is never anything other than a short-changing betrayal.

Consider what these stories are “about”:

Little Red Riding Hood
A girl visits her sick grandmother who gets eaten by a wolf. The wolf eats the girl too, but she gets rescued. (Or not, in some versions.)

Romeo and Juliet
Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl and marries her, boy loses girl. She pretends to be dead so that they can be together again, but he thinks she is really dead and kills himself. Whereupon she kills herself.

Jonah
A man gets swallowed by a big fish because he won’t do what God wants. Later he changes his mind and does it. But he doesn’t like the results and complains to God.

None of them quite does it, do they?

And what is the Bible about? You’ve only got to look at the Guardian’s News Blog to see some of the execrable attempts at answers. (Some of them will make you smile, too.) This is why I think we need to guard the Mystery, guard the Story. It’s not for the person who wants it in a minute, wants it without effort or cost. We should say to them, “If you want to know the Story, you have to sit down and listen. Make the sacrifice, pay the price.” It’s not, in all conscience, a very high one. They don’t even have to read the whole Bible - a book of Bible stories would suffice, though I think the Bible is often easier.

If you don’t always read the comments here, you should make an exception and read Trevor’s considered response to what I wrote yesterday. But I would respond to him, that there is just no excuse for anyone studying art or literature or history or indeed anything very much else, not to know the basic stories of the Bible. (Still less for anyone who is paid to teach those subjects!) You cannot claim to be an educated person, while remaining ignorant of these basic building blocks of our civilisation. And it isn’t the Church’s fault that people are this ignorant. It’s part of the prevailing mindset that thinks religion is unfashionable, or discredited, or only of importance to those who like that sort of thing, or who knows what all else? These stories are everyone’s inheritance and treasure, like diamonds lying in the street, and if they are too stupid or lazy to pick them up and appreciate them - well, they deserve to be the way they are.

Golly, this sounds kind of harsh. But remember this is the Storyteller speaking. And what is the content of so much of Story? Just this:

A wise person tells a younger person not to do something, or dire consequences will follow. The foolish young person does it anyway, and sure enough, the dire consequences follow. Sometimes the foolish person is saved in spite of themselves. Sometimes not. But there are always consequences of our choices.
That’s why choices matter.

P.S. And it doesn’t even include the story of Ruth! “which we just could not get in”, says the author. Enough said, I think.

Thoughts and hearts go out to the Southern United States, again threatened by storm, and with millions evacuating their homes. This time my kid sister Jan and her husband, who live in Texas, have had to face the agony of whether or not to move out, and decided it was better to join that terrifying exodus.

God be with them all - and with those who are unable to leave this time, too.

Wow! Storyteller’s World quoted at Guardian Unlimited Newsblog

And all within minutes or hours of posting. God, I love blogging!

Why am I not feeling overjoyed at the news (BBC NEWS | England | Page-turner Bible set for launch) of the release of the 100-Minute Bible?

Because it’s yet another example of Christians selling out to a vapid, trivial, and shallow contemporary culture that wants everything now and for no effort, instead of resisting all that and telling the Truth.

A 100-Minute Bible is like One Minute Sex, or the One Minute Marriage. It’s like alcohol-free lager or decaffeinated coffee. Promising something, but failing to deliver the real point of it.

I long for more Christian leaders to come out and say that being a Christian is not a cheap, quick-fix solution. If you want wisdom, if you want depth in your spiritual life, if you want God, it’s going to cost you. It’s going to cost you everything, in fact.

We do considerably less well than many other faiths and spiritual paths in getting this message across. So it’s not surprising if people reject the Christian Way as being shallow and unworthy of serious attention.

Christina Odone’s Godless Britain, broadcast last Tuesday evening, was so irritating that I didn’t even manage to watch it right through to the end.

The worst annoyance was the little trick of editing. I’m sure there’s some highfalutin’ name for this way of cutting between shots, but I don’t know what. Each new talking head was introduced thus: A second or two of film of said person talking. Cut, with the effect of interference and static across top half of screen, to a mute-colours still photo of same, with name and title, while the voice continues. Cut back, with same effect, to moving film again.

Odone’s basic thesis was OK. It’s because the British people have turned away from God and the Church, that modern Britain is in the state it’s in now: crime, loutishness, binge drinking, promiscuity, teenage pregnancies, abortions, debt, marriage breakdown, and the like. It’s not like the Church(es) haven’t been saying that for ever.

But after that it all got pretty confused and confusing.

Journalist Odone said, the Church has failed to get its message across because in general it hates the media. Instead of being anti-media, it needs to work with them (and, e.g. hire media consultants and advertising agencies) to improve its image. But wait a minute, Christina: it’s mostly because of the media, and their hostility to Christianity and the Church, that people have turned away from God. Now you want us to employ Satan to be God’s PR man? I think you need to think it out again.

Then Roman Catholic Odone was of the opinion that to regain lost ground, the Church needs to preach a strong faith and a strong morality. Don’t allow any dissent or difference from orthodoxy. Condemn divorce and abortion (and presumably homosexuality - though interestingly she didn’t mention it) a bit more, and people will come flocking back. There wasn’t any suggestion that you could draw distinctions between some of these areas. Be strong on the importance of faithfulness in relationships, yet compassionate to those whose relationships have foundered. Strong on moderation in drinking, but not extreme on temperance. Strong on abortion being wrong, but not condemning those who have felt forced into choosing it.

You could hardly imagine more “godly” societies than those of the US, or Iran. Yet no one could seriously hold them up as models for the rest of us to live by, with respect to the bigotry that some forms of their “godliness” take.

And then there was Ann Widdecombe, God bless her! Moaning about the worst sin in our godless Britain being envy, of all things. And this is rich, coming from a member of the Party whose whole raft of policies is centred on creating greater inequalities between rich and poor and then rubbing it in their faces. But I forget: part of the strong Church’s teaching will be the require everyone to know their place and accept it as God’s will:
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate …

Well, the series was called Don’t Get Me Started, so I suppose a certain polemicism was to be expected. But I suspect it got most of the viewers started pretty well. If there were any - which the lack of much comment about it makes you wonder.

At least Sun didn’t make me sneeze, yesterday.

When I first started in the business of meeting couples to arrange to marry them, it was common for young women to douse themselves in gallons of scent before going to meet the vicar. I never managed to ask or find out why: perhaps it was nerves, or maybe personal hygiene wasn’t quite so extreme in those days.

Whatever the reason, the small study in which these conversations took place would soon be saturated with powerful scents. And I used to be more allergic to a lot of things when I was younger. On quite a number of occasions I spent the rest of the evening sneezing, after the couple had left. Sometimes even had to leave the room in mid-interview, to breathe some fresh air.

So, a lot has improved over the years, in the general lowering of perfume use. Or my decreasing sensitivity to it.

Sun and Rufus were in Oxford for the weekend and wanted to come round to do the paperwork about the Next Wedding (August next year). Since I was Home Alone again, they had pity on me and took me out to lunch.

I thought this was an even better idea than Tom’s alleged practice of doing marriage preparation in the pub, and may well make it obligatory: from now on, couples wanting to get married in this parish will have to take the vicar out for lunch. (Or dinner will do just as well.)

It was a seriously weird feeling to be talking to my own daughter about all this stuff: legal preliminaries, things to think about in choosing hymns and readings, numbers of bridesmaids, who’s going to give her away, what parents and other relatives will be there. It makes me realise the very flimsy effect that formal marriage preparation can have. If we haven’t prepared this young woman for marriage by now, and if life hasn’t prepared her, there’s not much the old vicar can do to get her ready for it. She’ll just have to learn the same way we all do: by doing it.

It doesn’t seem yesterday - though actually it was 24 years ago - that she was playing in that sunlit garden in St Albans, stepping on snails under the coal bunker because they made such a nice crunchy noise.

She’s the one I wrote those haikus for:

Haikus – For Martha

1
Child of my body
Laughing in the green garden –
What will your world be?

2
Curling brown hair
frames a small person’s face.
She smiles, with dark and deep eyes.

Discovered this classics blog: rogueclassicism

But no RSS feed?

Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow turns out to be a great spiritual read. The author was inspired to write this book when, rushing through an airport departure lounge, he was seriously tempted to grab a book from the bookstore entitled The One Minute Bedtime Story. Suddenly the thought of trying to find shortcuts for the precious time he spent reading bedtime stories to his young son, revealed to him the crass inhumanity of the modern world’s obsession with speed. He realised he needed to slow down.

Honoré considers what it is that shapes our current attitudes to time, and looks at a number of different ways in which people in many countries are trying to set up a resistance against the cult of speed. Slow food; slow cities; meditation and super-slow exercise; slow medicine that gives more time to simply listening to the patient; slow sex; efforts to work less hard; slow forms of leisure pursuit (gardening, knitting, reading). Some of the people in his case studies are, frankly, idiots (the parents who packed their 4-year old’s life with so many extracurricular activities that he was in danger of burnout): but you get the point.

As someone who works in a traditionally Slow occupation, I suppose I ought to be able to say: I know all this stuff. What could be more prayerful, relaxed, people-friendly, unhurried and stress-free than the life and work of a parish priest? But even the clergy have been taken over by the frenzied spirit of modern living, and are just as likely to be trying to squeeze too much into our time as anyone else. Certainly reading this book has felt like an encouragement to me to go slower in the sense of having a more relaxed, less rushed attitude to getting through the day and its tasks. And to re-discover the depth of the present moment. Simple example: If something seems to be taking for ever, becoming boring (like the psalmody of the 15th evening of the month ) instead of rushing it, slow down! Try it, it really works. Even in the supermarket.

Honoré’s book is full of great thoughts and quotes. Some of my favourites:

• Studies in several countries suggest that children from families that regularly eat together are more likely to succeed at school and less liable to suffer from stress or to smoke and drink at an early age.
• Niwa, the Japanese word for garden, means “an enclosure purified for the worship of the gods.”
• Amos Oz says, “I recommend the art of slow reading. Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.”
• Mahler is said to have told budding conductors to slow down, rather than speed up, if they felt the audience was growing bored.
• The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things. (Plato)

Don’t rush out and buy this book and read it quickly! Saunter out and buy it at the natural pace of your own body, and savour it slowly…