International Times: Worlds of Creation and Destruction

My latest exhibition review for International Times is on 'William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy' at National Gallery of Ireland:

'by showing Blake’s extraordinary works alongside paintings and drawings by his contemporaries - those he admired and those who he inspired – this exhibition reveals ‘how British art was taken in exciting new directions in this moment’. We also see the greatness of Blake’s vision and work afresh.

To fully understand this, however, we need to see that Blake’s visions were not simply romantic fantasy but were of spiritual reality breaking into the material world.'

For more on Blake see here and here.

My earlier pieces for IT are: an interview with the artist Alexander de Cadenet; an interview with artist, poet, priest Spencer Reece, an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a profile of singer-songwriter Bill Fay, plus reviews of: Joseph Arthur in concert; installations by Chiharu Shiota and Yin Xiuzhen at Hayward Gsllery, U2's 'Days of Ash', Mumford and Sons' 'Prizefighter' and Moby's 'Future Quiet'; 'Collected Poems' by Kevin Crossley-Holland; 'Lux' by Rosalía; 'Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere'; 'Great Art Explained' by James Payne; 'Down River: In Search of David Ackles' by Mark Brend; 'Headwater' by Rev Simpkins; 'The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art' by Jonathan A. Anderson; 'Breaking Lines' at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, albums by Deacon Blue, Mumford and Sons, and Andrew Rumsey, also by Joy Oladokun and Michael Kiwanaku; 'Nolan's Africa' by Andrew Turley; Mavis Staples in concert at Union Chapel; T Bone Burnett's 'The Other Side' and Peter Case live in Leytonstone; Helaine Blumenfeld's 'Together' exhibition, 'What Is and Might Be and then Otherwise' by David Miller; 'Giacometti in Paris' by Michael Peppiatt, the first Pissabed Prophet album; and 'Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord', a book which derives from a 2017 symposium organised by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art.

Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford in 2022. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'. My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

IT have also published several of my poems, including 'The ABC of creativity', which covers attention, beginning and creation, and 'The Edge of Chaos', a state of existence poem. Also published have been three poems from my 'Five Trios' series. 'Barking' is about St Margaret’s Barking and Barking Abbey and draws on my time as a curate at St Margaret's. 'Bradwell' is a celebration of the history of the Chapel of St Peter-on-the-Wall, the Othona Community, and of pilgrimage to those places. Broomfield in Essex became a village of artists following the arrival of Revd John Rutherford in 1930. His daughter, the artist Rosemary Rutherford, also moved with them and made the vicarage a base for her artwork including paintings and stained glass. Then, Gwynneth Holt and Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones moved to Broomfield in 1949 where they shared a large studio in their garden and both achieved high personal success. 'Broomfield' reviews their stories, work, legacy and motivations.

To read my poems published by Stride, click here, here, here, here, here, and here. My poems published in Amethyst Review are: 'Runwell', 'Are/Are Not', 'Attend, attend' and 'Maritain, Green, Beckett and Anderson in conversation down through the ages'.

I am among those whose poetry has been included in Thin Places & Sacred Spaces, a recent anthology from Amethyst Press. I also had a poem included in All Shall Be Well: Poems for Julian of Norwich, the first Amethyst Press anthology of new poems.

'Five Trios' is a series of poems on thin places and sacred spaces in the Diocese of Chelmsford. The five poems in the series are:

• 'Barking';
• 'Bradwell';
• 'Broomfield';
• 'Pleshey'; and
• 'Runwell'.

These poems have been published by Amethyst Review and International Times.

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Van Morrison - Let The Slave (incorporating The Price of Experience).

Recent exhibitions visited

'Wright of Derby: From the Shadows' at the National Gallery is the first major exhibition dedicated to the British artist’s ‘candlelight’ paintings. The exhibition celebrates and looks again at his most admired works.

Illuminated faces gather around a variety of objects – from classical sculptures and scientific instruments to bones, bladders and animals. Through his unflinching scenes of people watching, Wright of Derby proposes moral questions about acts of looking. The strong light and deep shadows create drama, reminding us of great painters from earlier centuries like Caravaggio.

Challenging the traditionally held view of Wright of Derby as a figurehead of the Enlightenment, this exhibition contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the artist, portraying him not merely as a ‘painter of light’. More than virtuoso scenes of dramatic light and shade, Wright of Derby used the night-time to explore deeper and more sombre themes, including death, melancholy, morality, scepticism and the sublime.

Bendor Grosvenor, who wrote about Wright of Derby in The Invention of British Art (see my review here), has, in an interesting review, challenged some of the curator's assertions. In The Invention of British Art he writes that the essential point to grasp about Wright of Derby's work is that 'pictures like the Orrery, the Air Pump, and The Blacksmith's Shop were not precursors to our modern, scientific and secular world but a reflection of Wright's scientific but still deeply religious world.'

Also at the National Gallery is 'Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse'. In the 1750s, Stubbs spent 18 months in a remote barn in Horkstow, Lincolnshire. Hidden away, he devoted his time to studying and drawing the anatomy of horses. What resulted was the most thorough study on the subject for over a hundred years. 
Incredibly, Stubbs’s pictures of horses are still some of the most accurate ever painted, all while capturing their unique characters.

In this exhibition, you’ll meet one of these horses, Scrub. Painted by Stubbs around 1762, we see Scrub rearing in a landscape backdrop — notably without a rider. In a nearby room is another monumental horse painting by Stubbs, this time of Scrub’s now famous contemporary, ‘Whistlejacket’. Painted around the same time, these are two of the first life-size portraits to depict horses without a human presence in British history. The paintings changed the spirit of equine art forever.

Grosvenor is again well worth reading on Stubbs suggesting he 'has been so identified with sporting art that his role in the development of British landscape painting has been overlooked.'

Where Grosvenor's book has a shortcoming is in its omission of any mention of William Blake and his circle, from which distinctively British forms of Visionary, Symbolic, and Fantasy art derive. Yesterday, 'William Blake: The Age of Romantic Fantasy' opened at the National Gallery of Ireland. Blake, as artist and poet, was a defining force in Romanticism. His imaginative and unconventional works continue to inspire today. This exhibition, curated by Tate in partnership with the National Gallery of Ireland, presents a selection of Blake’s most iconic works of art, alongside paintings and drawings by his contemporaries.

Blake’s world was one of fantasy, imagination, and the ancient past, filled with fantastical creatures and visions of the underworld, expressed through a wide variety of media. By placing him in context - among the artists he admired and those he inspired - the exhibition offers insight into an era of extraordinary originality and innovation in late-eighteenth and early nineteenth-century art. Featuring over 100 works, including by James Barry (1741–1806), Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779), Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827), and J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), the show explores how artists responded to a time of revolution and transformation, pushing the boundaries of their art into new imaginative territories.

The final exhibition I visited in the past week was 'Samurai' at the British Museum. The samurai is an iconic figure, evoking images of formidable fighters possessing ideals of courage, honour and self-sacrifice. Yet much of what we think we know about samurai is invented tradition.

Our concept of samurai today has its origins in medieval reality. A distinct warrior class – known in Japan as bushi – emerged and gained political dominance from the 1100s. But during a prolonged period of peace, beginning in 1615, the samurai moved away from the battlefield to become an elite social class that also included women. Samurai men formed the government, serving as ministers and bureaucrats. Many became leaders in scholarship and the arts, as patrons, poets and painters, in a world where intellectual pursuits were just as important as swordsmanship.

By the late 19th century, the hereditary status of samurai had been abolished and their supposed chivalric values developed into the myth of bushido, or 'the way of the warrior'. This new code, promoting values of patriotism and self-sacrifice, was harnessed during Japan's period of colonial expansion and military aggression. The modern mythology of the 'samurai' emerged gradually across the 20th century through interactions between Japan and the wider world, with idealised images of the historical warriors increasingly consumed by foreign visitors.

The story of the evolution of the samurai is told through battle gear such as the suit of armour sent by Tokugawa Hidetada to James VI and I, as well as luxury objects such as an intriguing incense connoisseurship game. From a Louis Vuitton outfit inspired by Japanese armour, to the popular, loosely historical videogame 'Assassin's Creed: Shadows', the exhibition explores the samurai's enduring legacy in games, fashion and film.

This exhibition was instructive as all I knew previously of the Samurai came from Shusaku Endo's novel 'The Samurai'. Winner of the 1980 Noma Literary Prize, this novel is a darkly absorbing portrayal of the first Japanese voyage across the Pacific. 

In 17th-century Japan, a diplomatic mission sets sail for the West. Among those facing the combined perils of the sea and foreign courts are ambitious Spanish missionary Pedro Velasco, and Hasekura Rokuemon, a disregarded samurai determined to recover his family’s standing. They travel to Mexico City, Rome and back – but Japan’s new rulers are persecuting Christians, and if the men survive the journey, they may not survive their homecoming. This true story of courage and endurance is told with Endo’s signature power and simplicity.

Endo was one of the greatest novelists of postwar Japan. Baptised as a Roman Catholic as a child, his work explores the relationship between East and West from his unique perspective as a Japanese Christian. Endo won the Akutagawa Prize and the Yomiuri Literary Prize, was nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, and received an Order of the Culture from the Japanese government. Among his other novels are 'Deep River', 'The Sea and Poison', and his masterpiece 'Silence'.

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Kathryn Kluge, Kim Allen Kluge - Only God Can Answer.

David Miller: Time, Wisdom, & Koalas

The latest book from the wonderfully prolific David Miller is Time, Wisdom, & Koalas, a new work of fantastic fiction:

"David Miller is a writer with not only fantasy, but a depth of feeling and philosophical content. Yet, one feels a sense of whimsy as well. What he imparts to the reader is often done with a gentle and beautiful subtlety that stays with one long after the book has been closed."--Gloria Coates

"Meet Norm. E. T. A. Hoffmann didn't write about koalas. He didn't write about Norm. But in a parallel universe, where Herne Bay had been a concentration camp, he could have. David Miller wrote Norm. Or maybe Norm dreamt himself, because Norm is very wise. And he sleeps. A lot."--Keith Jebb

"'Despite what the first pages may suggest, this is most definitely not a children's tale.' Or so we're told. It's more like what Byron thought about 'true poetry': that 'tis the part/ Of a true poet to escape from fiction'. David Miller escapes from fiction in 'spirit dreams' he learned from a certain Koala named Norman, who seems to have passed them along through a certain wombat named Archie. If I told you any more about David's escapes you'd think I was making it up, or maybe that I just dreamed it all. But as David once said - I think he was at Felpham - 'you can never tell about these things.'"--Jerome McGann

"It may be impossible to describe Time, Wisdom, and Koalas. It may be impossible even to think who might read such a book. But having written a book about philosophical frogs myself, I'm open to the possibility that there are sufficient numbers of wildly imaginative, erudite, fauna-loving readers ready for a serious romp through time, space, and the history of ideas, to make this odd book a best-seller."--Gail Holst-Warhaft

David Miller was born in Melbourne, Australia, but has lived in the UK for many years. His recent publications include SPIRITUAL LETTERS (SERIES 1-5) (Chax Press, 2011), Reassembling Still: Collected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2014), SPIRITUAL LETTERS (Contraband Books, 2017 / Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), TOWARDS A MENAGERIE (Chax Press, 2019), Matrix I & II (Guillemot Press, 2020), Some Other Days and Nights (above/ground press, 2021), Afterword (Shearsman Books, 2022), circle square triangle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), An Envelope for Silence (above/ground press, 2022) and Some Other Shadows (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2022). He is also a painter and a musician.

For his next publication (close), I've written the following appreciation:

"David Miller examines words and phrases as if they are displayed on a rotating stand enabling us to view them from a myriad of different perspectives. In his poetry, prose and prose poems, things are never simply what they seem; there is always something more, something deeper, something beyond. Whether creating expansive word collages or paring poems down to their constituent parts, he is a skilled craftsperson utilising concision, elision, contrast and paradox to open up meanings as one opens up Matryoshka Dolls. At the heart of his vision are pathways leading us to the experience of expanse."

In reviewing Some Other Shadows for Stride Magazine, I wrote that:

"David Miller, under the influence of the sublime RobertLax, is past and present master of just such a contemplative approach. Both combine close attention to each word chosen, the resonances of each word, and that word’s position on the page, with an equally close attention to the ordinary events of daily life and the depths that their words reveal of those events ...

Miller’s like and unlike images, questions and thoughts – affirmations and negations - are held together to form a whole that is simple yet complex, without contradiction because both are owned and honoured ...

Miller writes of Lax, that “it is the gentle yet strong focus, lucidity and faithfulness of the act of attention (to words, to the things and the people around him, to whatever he names in poems) that constitutes one of the most salient features of Lax’s poetry and also his life.” The same focus can be seen in Miller’s more diverse and genre crossing works and it is this core to his approach – whatever the genre – that becomes a model, not just for poetry, but also for life."

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David Miller & SpiritWORK - memory water flowing.

A Wizard of Earthsea: The real battle is moral or internal

In today's Guardian David Mitchell writes on one of literature’s most fully formed fantasy worlds, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin:

'From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”'

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Wizzard - Angel Fingers.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

'Joseph Pearce, who himself has written articles and chapters on the political significance of Tolkien’s work, testified in his book Literary Giants, Literary Catholics, “If much has been written on the religious significance of The Lord of the Rings, less has been written on its political significance—and the little that has been written is often erroneous in its conclusions and ignorant of Tolkien’s intentions…. Much more work is needed in this area, not least because Tolkien stated, implicitly at least, that the political significance of the work was second only to the religious in its importance.”

Several books ably explore how Tolkien’s Catholic faith informed his fiction. None until now have centered on how his passion for liberty and limited government also shaped his work, or how this passion grew directly from his theological vision of man and creation.'

The Hobbit Party, by Jonathan Witt and Jay Wesley Richards, fills this void by examining Tolkien’s exploration of totalitarian power and rings of power.

Witt and Wesley Richards write, in a post at The Imaginative Conservative, that:

'Tolkien’s ring is also used to sound a warning against any grand political plan that depends on unchecked power to get things done. The novel is about many other things, of course, but it is no overstatement to say the temptation posed by the ring conveys the novel’s central political theme—that, as Lord Acton put it, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So dangerous do the wise leaders among the free peoples of Middle-Earth consider this ring of power that they determine to risk everything in a desperate gambit to destroy the ring rather than using it against their enemy, the evil Sauron ... Tolkien, through faith in the transcendent God, understood the source of true sublimity. He also understood the source of the thirst for power for power’s sake: the desire to make of oneself a god in the place of God.'

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Howard Shore - Minas Morgul.

Fantasy vs Reality: Lewis and Tolkien vs Reed and Wain

'At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it.' (C. S. Lewis)

'The heart of a lyric for me has always been anchored in an experienced reality, whether it be Avedon's photo of Warhol's bullet-scarred chest or the sociopathic attitudes recorded in "Kicks" or "Street Hassle." So in answer to the question I am most often asked, "Are these incidents real?" Yes, he said, Yes Yes Yes' (Lou Reed)

I've been reflecting on the differences between so-called 'fantasy' and so-called 'reality' having watched The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug yesterday and while looking forward to the BBC4 tribute to Lou Reed tonight. Lou Reed, at his best, was trying to write the Great American Novel through music and, in line with above quote, might well have agreed with John Wain that the "writer's task ... was to lay bare the human heart." Reed achieved this end supremely with his desolatingly emotional song cycle Berlin.

Richard Purtill has an excellent discussion of this issue in the Introduction to his Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Fantasy and Philosophy in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien:

'In his [Tolkien's] view, fantasy has three purposes: Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. By Recovery, he means a "regaining of a clear view . . . 'seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them'". Familiarity has dulled our sense of the wonder and mystery of things; fantasy restores it ...

By Escape, Tolkien means nothing especially original. We must define Escape as the turning of our thoughts and affections away from what is around us to something else--the past, the future, a secondary world. Tolkien's originality lies in defending Escape when so many have deprecated it. His reasons are several. First, the modern world is preeminently something desirable to escape from ...

A deeper reason for Escape, however, is the human longing to flee from our limitations. First is the hardness of life even at its best; but beyond this is our isolation from each other and from the living world around us. Finally, the great limit, Death, is something that men have tried to escape from in many fashions.

Here Tolkien's discussion of Escape merges into a discussion of the third use of fantasy. Consolation is secondarily the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires, such as the desire really to communicate with species other than our own. But primarily it centers on the happy ending, the "eucata-strophe", the "sudden joyous 'turn'". This Consolation arises from the denial of "universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief".'  

Does The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug enable us to experience these three purposes of fantasy? Probably not. Its focus is mainly on escape. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, describes the film as 'a cheerfully exhilarating adventure tale, a supercharged Saturday morning picture ... something to set alongside the Indiana Jones films.' That it works in this way is, in part, because Peter Jackson focuses primarily on telling the story of The Hobbit rather than, as was the case with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, also giving equal time to telling the story of The Hobbit as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. It is in the whole arc of the story (and in the story's significance as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings), however, that we come closest to Tolkien's understanding of the purposes of fantasy. As an enjoyable and gripping film in its own right, though, The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug works because it sticks with the 'huge propulsive energy' of its humorous and exciting source story and whooshes 'the heroes onwards towards their great goal' rather than engaging more widely in the significance of fantasy and the setting of The Hobbit in Tolkien's wider canon.

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Lou Reed - Berlin.

The Hobbit: An Unnecessary Inflation

In The Lord of the Rings films, there is a fine balance struck between the seriousness (within the context of the fictional world created) of the unfolding narrative and the particular responses and stories (often incorporating humour) of the main characters. The main focus is on a state-of-the-universe narrative but the potential portentousness of this big story is leavened and humanised by the humour and humility of the central characters and the parts they play within this meta-narrative.  

The Hobbit was originally written by J.R.R. Tolkien as a children's story complete in it's own right and it only later became a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. Having reached The Hobbit by the opposite route seems to have meant that Peter Jackson is unable to tell the earlier story in its own right and for what it is in and of itself. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the first of a three part series which can only tell this the slighter of Tolkien's originally published tales of Middle Earth at this length because of the decision to also tell the story as an explicit prelude to The Lord of the Rings.

This has two implications. First, that The Hobbit films will only make sense to those who already know The Lord of the Rings films as the additional material doesn't progress the story which is actually told in The Hobbit but does fit that story into the bigger story of The Lord of the Rings. Second, the balance between seriousness and humour/humanity found in The Lord of the Rings films is lost here because of the decision to tell both the story of The Hobbit and the story of The Hobbit as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings. The story told in The Hobbit is a lighter, slighter tale which is well told in this film with humour (except when Radagast's distraction of a hunting party of Orcs is turned into the equivalent of a Benny Hill-style sketch) but this is then set against the seriousness of the storyline which explains how the events of The Hobbit fit into the state-of-this-universe narrative that is The Lord of the Rings. Instead of the leavening of seriousness with humour and humanity that is found in The Lord of the Rings films here we get a jarring shuttling back and forth between these two separated styles and stories.

This results, I think, from a lack of trust on the part of the makers in the ability of the story of The Hobbit to communicate in its own right and its own form. Jackson, essentially, does not trust that the seriousness of the tale and its links to The Lord of the Rings would emerge simply by dramatising the tale as told by Tolkien. In the story, as told by Tolkien, these aspects emerges from the lighter, humourous form of the story. It is the reverse of what is achieved in The Lord of the Rings films and it is ironic that Jackson having found for himself a balance between seriousness and humour for The Lord of the Rings films (as this balance is not in the book as written by Tolkien) has then been unable to trust the reverse balance which is naturally found in the original tale as told by Tolkien.

There is much to enjoy in the film and I'll be there with the many who will see all three over the next 18 months and then will watch all three all over again on DVD but, on a first viewing at least, my view is that the story would have been better told by reflecting and respecting the lighter, slighter nature of its form instead of this attempt to inflate it with the expansiveness and seriousness of The Lord of the Rings.

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Howard Shore - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Lion King: Aslan and Jesus

Aslan is the great lion in C. S. Lewis’ Narnia stories. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace says to Edmund “Do you know him – who is Aslan”?

“Well, he knows me” said Edmund.  “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor over sea, who saved me and saved Narnia”. 

There’s a key scene in both the book and the film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about the great lion Aslan. In it, Mr Beaver says, “Aslan is a lion – the Lion, the great Lion”. Mrs Beaver adds, “If there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly”.

“Then he isn’t safe”?  said Lucy.

“Safe”, said Mr Beaver, “who said anything about safe? Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you”.

He is King, he is good but he is not safe. These are three keys concepts about Aslan, the great lion. Goodness is a powerful concept and a powerful way to live but it can also be dangerous.  Not letting wrong or evil win can take you to dangerous places, in life and in relationships, at work, with friends and we’ll come onto that in a moment. But we begin with a different kind of power, the creative power of Aslan which brings the land of Narnia itself into existence.

In The Magician’s Nephew C. S. Lewis tells us how Aslan sings Narnia into existence using only his voice to create and then makes creatures and gives them a commission of stewardship telling them, “I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers…The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also”. Aslan, therefore, has immense creative power and authority over all he has made.

Despite this great power and authority Aslan sacrifices himself for the sake of those he has created. He saves Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy plus all of Narnia by allowing himself to be captured, humiliated and killed.  Aslan agrees to let himself be sacrificed in Edmund's place, the Witch binds him to the Stone Table and kills him there. He puts himself in dangers’ way for a reason as he later explains: "[…] when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead […] Death itself would start working backwards."

This is the amazing thing about Aslan's sacrifice: by taking Edmund's place, Aslan is able to save Edmund, but also to save himself and everyone else. There's a special power he can access by being a willing and innocent victim.

Through Aslan’s sacrifice we see that goodness is a powerful concept and a powerful way to live but that it can also be dangerous because not letting wrong or evil win can take you to dangerous places. You only find out if you are courageous like a lion when life gets difficult – when a decision has to be made, and the right thing to do is the most difficult. 

Another reason why goodness may be dangerous is that to meet Aslan is "to meet someone who, because he has freely created you and wants for you nothing but your good, your flourishing, is free to see you as you are and to reflect that seeing back to you".

In other words, to see yourself as others see you might be discomforting but it will also always be skewed by the distorting lens of their self-interest. To be unmasked as God sees you is painful because purgative, but is also a path to true liberation. It is merciful because without it we are left in a citadel of self-deception, life's energies being sapped and wasted on bolstering self-regard.

We see this most clearly through one of the most vivid scenes in the whole series which comes in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Eustace – the spoiled child of non-smoking teetotal vegetarians: never a good sign in Lewis – is turned into a dragon. He tries to peel off his skin but finds only another set of scales. It takes Aslan to cut his claws in deep and rip it off – a “feeling worse than anything I’ve ever felt”, as Eustace says – for him to be reborn. Aslan can dig deep enough into Eustace’s life - to his very heart - to make him a completely new creation.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Aslan tells the children that he is also in their world, but he goes by a different name and once, when a young boy could not figure out what Aslan’s name was in this world, Lewis wrote in response:

“I want you to guess. Has there never been anyone in this world who (1) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas (2) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor (3) Gave himself up for someone else's fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people (4) Came to life again (5) Is sometimes spoken of as a Lamb... Don't you really know His name in this world?”

Revelation 5:5 pictures Jesus as a lion king when it says: “Stop weeping, behold the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed. He can open the scroll…”

Like Aslan, Jesus is a creative force. In Colossians we are told that “God created the whole universe through him and for him.” Like Aslan, Jesus sacrifices himself for others. He has the courage of a lion. In Gethsemane, knowing he is soon to die, he prays, “Father let this cup pass from me” but then his courage says, “But not my will but yours be done”. Finally, like Aslan with Eustace, Jesus is the light which has come into the world to show up our evil deeds enabling us to repent and be transformed.

The things Aslan does and says in the Narnia stories are, as Lewis said, simply the things Jesus really did and said but the comparison of Jesus with Aslan brings out the sense “that something really quite fierce [or strong and powerful] has taken hold of people” when they turn to God.” As Hebrews 10. 31 says, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” As Mr Beaver said of Aslan, Jesus isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.

This sermon uses material from: http://www.shmoop.com/lion-witch-wardrobe/; http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Eustace_Scrubb; http://kezzie-kez.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/eustace-dragon-meets-aslan.html; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9429139/Rowan-Williams-Aslan-is-on-the-knife-edge-of-the-erotic.html; http://cocopreme.hubpages.com/hub/TheIdentityofAslanSymbolismintheChroniclesofNarnia and Stroud, ‘Chronicles of Narnia’.

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Switchfoot - This Is Home.

The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets?

The first in a series of five talks which will explore how the group of writers who clustered around C. S. Lewis in the middle of the last century were forging a vision that is vital for us in the 21st Century can be found by clicking here.

The series entitled The Inklings, Fantasists or Prophets? is being given by poet, singer-songwriter, priest, chaplain, teacher and author, Malcolm Guite.

My 'There were giants in those days' series of posts may provide an interesting supplement to Malcom's lecture series and can be found by clicking here, here, here, and here.

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Annie Lennox - Into The West.

Choose Together

“This place has known magic, very dark, very powerful. This time I cannot hope to destroy it alone. Times like these, dark times, they can bring people together but they can tear them apart. Evil will pass through from their world into our own – these are mad times we live in, mad – and the darkest hour is upon us all. In my life I’ve seen things that are truly horrific, now I know that you will see worse. You have no choice. You must not fail.”

These are words taken from the trailer for the film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; a film and a series which are about a battle between forces of darkness and light described in words and images that are not so dissimilar from those we heard today in each of our Bible readings:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armour of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” (Ephesians 6. 12-13)

“Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your forefathers served beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD." (Joshua 24. 15)

"Does this make you want to give up? What gives life is God’s spirit; human power is of no use at all. The words I have spoken to you bring God’s life-giving Spirit. Yet some of you do not believe." (John 6. 61-64)

Does this mean that as Christians we are actually living in the equivalent of a Harry Potter film? Life generally, although it is often a real struggle, doesn’t look or feel like that! Fantasy books and films can be a means of exploring the dark forces in life and the sense of a cosmic conflict in our world but they can also be a reason for dismissing, as fantasy, this Biblical sense of there being a cosmic conflict in which we are all in some way engaged.

The most helpful writer I have found on these themes to date is Stephen Verney, a former Bishop of Repton. His commentary on John’s Gospel, Water into Wine, begins by noting the way in which this Gospel consistently speaks about there being two different levels or orders to reality. What he means by this are different patterns of society, each with a different centre or ruling power. He gives as an example, the difference between a fascist order and a democratic order:

“In the fascist order there is a dictator, and round him subservient people who raise their hands in salute, and are thrown into concentration camps if they disobey. In the democratic order … there is an elected government, and round it persons who are interdependent, who share initiatives and ideas.”

So, what are the two orders that he sees described in John’s Gospel? In the first, “the ruling principle is the dictator ME, my ego-centric ego, and the pattern of society is people competing with, manipulating and trying to control each other.” In the second, “the ruling principle is the Spirit of Love, and the pattern of society is one of compassion – people giving to each other what they really are, and accepting what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability.”

I see these two different orders clearly defined when Jesus comes before Pilate, as I have described in the first of a series of meditations I have written on the Stations of the Cross:

Jesus and Pilate
head-to-head
in a clash of cultures.
Pilate is
angular, aggressive, threatening
representing
the oppressive, controlling
Empire of dominating power,
with its strength in numbers
and weaponry,
which can crucify
but cannot
set free.
Jesus is
curves and crosses,
love and sacrifice,
representing
the kingdom of God;
a kingdom of love,
service and self-sacrifice
birthing men and women
into the freedom
to love one another.
The way of compassion
or the way of domination;
the way of self-sacrifice
or the way of self;
the way of powerlessness
or the way of power;
the way of serving
or the way of grasping;
the kingdom of God
or the empires of Man.

These two orders or patterns for society are at war with each other and it is this struggle, against the rulers, the authorities, the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil, of which we are a part.

Now, in today’s readings, we are consistently asked to choose our side in this struggle. Verney writes of this being the key question for us as human beings, the question being “so urgent that our survival depending on finding the answer. He writes that:

“we can see in our world order the terrible consequences of our ego-centricity. We have projected it into our institutions, where it has swollen up into a positive force of evil. Human beings have set up prison camps where they torture each other for pleasure. We are all imprisoned together, in a system of competing nation states, on the edge of a catastrophe which could destroy all life on our planet.”

And so, as Colin Buchanan writes in his commentary on Ephesians:

“… the major battle in which we are called to engage is among the principalities and powers, in the structures of society, in the liberation of the oppressed, in the conserving of the environment, in the provision of housing and jobs, and in the protection of the helpless and innocent, such as the unborn foetus, and abused children.”

It is at this point that we often draw back and say what people often say about engagement in politics i.e. what different can I make? What different can my vote or my voice or my actions make? Aren’t we talking here about global order and forces that can’t be influenced or affected by individuals, so what possible difference can I make on my own?

But individual action is not what Joshua, Jesus or Paul were primarily talking about. Joshua was challenging a whole nation about whether they would choose to follow God corporately. Jesus was talking to the disciples who would go on to form the bedrock of the Church. And Paul, who had already written in Ephesians 3. 10 that “[God’s] intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God, should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms”, when he writes about the armour of God writes not in the singular but the plural. The armour of God is armour for us to put on and use together in the cosmic conflict.

Colin Buchanan writes that:

“Our being ‘drawn together’ by Jesus Christ, as denominations, church fellowships and individuals within those fellowships, is crucial to the fight … Paul may be telling us how to become a single army under the hand of God … So let the church identify the enemy and, as a single force – the body of Christ, go for the jugular. We have … God’s kingdom to bring in. We can only do it … together.”

We have seen this happen in practice in the various non-violent revolutions of the twentieth century; Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jubilee 2000 and other campaigns show what is possible when people of faith and people of peace come together in sufficient numbers to make a difference. Together we can engage the principalities and powers, the structures of society, to liberate the oppressed, conserve the environment, provide housing and jobs, and protect the helpless and innocent.

Together; we can only do it together. Joshua challenged the people of Israel, Jesus challenged the disciples, Paul challenged the Church:

‘Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the ego-centric ego, where people compete with, manipulate and try to control each other or the Spirit of Love, where people give to each other what they really are, and accept what others are, recognising their differences, and sharing their vulnerability. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Spirit of Love.’

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John Lennon - Come Together.

Cell Group retreat

Worth Abbey

Worth Abbey

Worth Parish Church

Relaxing at Worth Church

In the churchyard of Worth Church

Yesterday I got back from my annual cell group retreat at Worth Abbey. As in previous years this was a wonderful time of rest and refreshment with close friends who accept and support absolutely.

While at Worth we divide our time between food preparation, country walks, table communions, quiet spaces and worship with the monks in the Abbey Church. Most of which provides us with the time we need to share where we are in our ministries and to pray for and encourage one another. It certainly isn't a silent retreat as we discuss the issues we, and the Church as a whole face, together with swapping stories and advice on the practicalities of ministry but it is punctuated by key moments of quiet reflection in the Abbey's services and in time spent in individual prayer and reading.

This year I finished re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and also finished Tom Wright's Surprised by Hope before, on Sam's recommendation, starting James Alison's Faith beyond Resentment.

I enjoyed a more measured read through the Harry Potter than had been the case on reading it initially post-publication. The significance and strength of self-sacrifice is very apparent as the story reaches its conclusion together with the inability of evil to comprehend, as C.S. Lewis would have phrased it, the 'deeper magic' of sacrificing oneself for others.

In Surprised by Hope Tom Wright makes a strong case for the biblical vision of the future being 'life after life after death' i.e. 'rest' in paradise prior to resurrection into the united new heaven and new earth that will be the kingdom of God come on earth as in heaven and towards which we work by creating anticipations of this hope in the present through justice, beauty and evangelism.

I'm particularly looking forward to reading further in Faith beyond Resentment, in part because Alison writes from a Girardian perspective but also because, to judge from the first chapter, his readings of scripture will feed in to my posts on 'The Bible - open or closed?'

Post Remembrance Day and pre-Advent is a great time in which to go on retreat. I went to Worth feeling overtired and overburdened by issues and challenges. Rested and refreshed from stimulating conversation, wonderful countryside, transcendant worship, stunning architecture, committed friendships, and challenging reading, I feel more able to tackle the issues and opportunities of parish and deanery ministry with renewed vigour and hope.

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Extreme - Stop The World.

Prince Caspian

Have been to see Prince Caspian and thought it an excellent meditation on the difficulties and dangers of belief.

The film sees the characters move beyond the separation into camps of the good and bad towards which the allegorical structure of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe leads its characters.

Prince Caspian sees its characters struggling with the nature of belief and destiny, making mistakes but finding strength in adversity. Those who act heroically are often those who are small and ordinary while even enemies are shown to be human and facing their own inner conflicts.

The storytelling is tight and the additions to the book add both to the action and character development. Once again, director Andrew Adamson’s evocation of Narnia is full and compelling but also laced with a mordant humour that brings a down-to-earth realism to this tale of heroism and fantasy.

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Regina Spektor - The Call.

Dark Materials?

Philip Ritchie has an interesting post which summarises an article in which the His Dark Materials series is seen as a concerted attempt to deconstruct and reverse the meaning of the Christian story. My view is that despite Pullman's expressed intention there is more of Christian spirituality in the story than one would expect precisely because Pullman is a novelist first and a polemicist second. Philip thinks that many Christians seem ill equipped to engage in these discussions because of their own lack of knowledge and understanding of the Christian story.

I was discussing with Philip today how the second and third films could continue the story without linking the Church more specifically to the Magisterium and so it has been interesting to read Pullman's own comment on this issue in an online interview:

"As for the "Authority" business, I've always made it clear that theocracy - the political exercise of religious authority, which is what the Magisterium in the story embodies - is a special example of the regrettable tendency of humankind to believe in "one size fits all" answers: to cling to the extreme of dogmatic fundamentalism whether religious or not. In fact (and I've pointed this out too many times to go through it all again) the purest example of theocracy in the twentieth century was Soviet Russia. So I have no problem with the way the film has put the emphasis; it could hardly have done otherwise."

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Rush - Farewell To Kings.

The Noble Warriors

William Nicholson has said that his Noble Warriors trilogy is about the search for God. As a result, the trilogy has parallels with Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials which could be said to be about the death of God.

Unlike the world Pullman creates - which is governed by The Magisterium, a maelevolent version of the Church - the major power in Nicholson's world in beneficent. The Noble Warriors or Nomana are a relatively small band of handpicked women and men who eschew violence in the service of the All and Only. From their base, the Nom, the Nomana spread throughout the world using mind control to force those using physical violence to lay down their weapons and kneel in surrender.

If you think that there is something contradictory containec within that last description, you would be right, and the trilogy explores issues of the exercise of power through the journeys and experiences of its three central characters, Seeker, Star and Wildman. The central narrative line is of a life lived as an experiment in seeking truth.

The peace created by the Nomana comes under threat from forces seeking temporal power through physical force manipulated by spirits seeking eternal life. The journeys of Seeker, Star and Wildman begin as they seek to counter these forces but the journey of Seeker goes further and deeper into the nature of power, peace and, ultimately, of God.

Through its many twists and turns, Nicholson's plotline opens out into a pantheistic resolution. The All and Only is not where he is thought to be - a parallel experience to the death of God in His Dark Materials - and is not constrained but is all around, in all and with all, if only all could see and understand that all are gods ourselves.

Unlike Pullman's world where the Magisterium is clearly evil and God is to be killed, Nicholson does not set up a simple good versus evil paradigm. Here, Seeker needs to understand the limitations of the Nomana, whom he loves, in order to reach the story's resolution. How he will do so keeps the reader turning the pages as Nicholson's plotline (as one would expect from a someone with his screenwriter's experience) is the strongest element in the style and structure of the trilogy.

The Noble Warriors is a trilogy that stands alongside His Dark Materials, in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings, as a well constructed, page turning exploration of issues of power, love and the search for God.

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Percy Sledge - Bring It On Home To Me.

The Golden Compass

The Bible Society's Newswatch email reports that The Golden Compass, the film version of part 1 of Philip Pullman’s bestselling His Dark Materials trilogy, is provoking very mixed reactions from church organisations.

On the eve of the film’s release (5/12) the Catholic League in the USA has condemned the movie for promoting atheism and for its tyrannical ‘God’ figure. Closer to home, however, Evangelicals Now counsels parents to ‘watch the movie with [their children] and then talk through the issues raised’. The Church of Scotland’s Mission and Discipleship Council go further, commenting that the film ‘provides a golden opportunity to stimulate discussion on a wide range of moral and spiritual issues’. It sees Lyra, the central character, as ‘one of the powerless who turns out to be a saint’ and says the film invites discussion on ‘human purpose and destiny, the abuse of power, the making of choices and the meaning of life’. The Church will distribute a resource to churches across Scotland.

It is good to see that, on balance, Church responses suggest engagement with the issues raised by the Philip Pullman's books and the film version. One thing that is often missed in the discussion of Pullman's attack on organised religion and the death of the 'god' figure in the book, is the extent to which there is a spirituality that informs the book.

That spirituality is primarily Blakean with the book's 'god' figure resembling Blake's 'Nobodaddy', the old stereotype of God as an old punishing father in the sky (which in Blake's mythology also equates to the image of reason). Against the elevation of reason as a set of universal principles Blake (in an anticipation of post-modernism) "celebrated ‘minute particulars’; the ‘lineaments’ of bodies, and his works of art favoured bounding lines and distinct forms. He privileged difference over identity, becoming over being, the body over reason, and energy over states. Blake engraved his positive images of the spirit and gave them dynamic and sexually different bodies. He did not believe in generalities (‘One law for the lion & ox is oppression), and he insisted that the tyranny of reason could only be overcome though the dynamism of conflict and contraries: ‘without contraries there is no progession’."

The god figure that dies in His Dark Materials can be understood as a Nobodaddy figure whose opens the way to the Republic of Heaven. For Pullman, this is a vision of all that is good in the world including all that is good in the Church. It involves, he says, "all the best qualities of things. We mustn’t shut anything out. If the Church has told us, for example, that forgiving our enemies is good, and if that seems to be a good thing to do, we must do it. If, on the other hand, those who struggled against the Church have shown us that free enquiry and unfettered scientific exploration is good – and I believe that they have – then we must hold this up as a good as well.
Whatever we can find that we feel to be good – and not just feel but can see with the accumulated wisdom that we have as we grow up, and read about history and learn from our own experiences and so on – wherever they come from, and whoever taught them in the first place, let’s use them and do whatever we can do to make the world a little bit better."

Pullman set out his debt to Blake in an New Statesman article from last year where he outines what is basically a humanist re-interpretation of aspects of Blake's mythology.

It should also be noted that there is no place for Jesus in the Magisterium (the Church that features in His Dark Materials). This is something that Rowan Williams notes in the public conversations he had with Pullman in 2003/04. In those interviews, and in an interview published in Margaret Barker's An Extraordinary Gathering of Angels, Pullman is fundamentally positive about the person of Jesus: "in the context of this notion of wisdom that works secretly and quietly, not in the great courts and palaces of the earth, but among ordinary people and so on." "The liberating angels," he feels, "continue to work in secret, by inspiring great human teachers like Jesus." It has also been little remarked that Lyra makes a Christ-like journey to bring those who have died from the land of the dead.

One of the reasons why Pullman is interesting as an author is that he goes where his story takes him even if this leaves him puzzled from the perspectives of his personal beliefs (which seem basically agnostic although veering towards support for several of the political positions taken by the British Humanist Association). It is this willingness to follow the story, as well as his fascination with Blake and Milton, that seems to open up space for a sense of spirituality in the trilogy. This sense emerges from the fascinating interview that he gave to Third Way when he discusses the relationship between Mary Malone, Lyra and Will. Mary Malone is the Satan figure in the trilogy who leads Lyra and Will to a fall into grace. As such, she is the closest to a representation of Pullman's views in the book and yet Pullman allows the story to involve the separation of Lyra and Will in a way that is, in effect, a renunciation of Malone's understanding. Pullman felt that this was essential for the story but is puzzled as to what it means. Clearly, though, it opens up the possibility of understanding aspects of the story in a way that differs from Pullman's own understanding and which could involve a spirituality that differs from the materiality that Pullman, as humanist rather than author, tends to invoke.

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Rush - A Farewell To Kings.

Stardust and Seeker

Stardust is a feel-good fairy laced with wit and irony. Michelle Pfeiffer is a wonderfully wicked witch and Robert De Niro is hilarious as the lightning catching camp pirate.

Seeker has a gripping and original plot line which keeps you hooked all the way to the fascinating but briefly described denouement. The storyline is the book's strength and compensates for the rather plain style in which the story is told.

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Young Disciples - Apparently Nothin' (Soul River).

The Christian motifs of Harry Potter

Fascinating to see from the latest of the Bible Society's Newswatch emails that, "Harry Potter creator JK Rowling has told a TV audience that her stories draw on Christian themes and reflect her own ‘struggle’ to ‘keep believing’":

"During a question and answer session on an NBC news magazine in the USA on 29 July, she said that calling Harry Potter ‘the Chosen One’ revealed the series’ ‘religious undertone’. She said ‘it had always been difficult to talk about’ because divulging some of the books’ Christian motifs ‘would give away a lot of what was coming’. Deathly Hallows, published last month, shows Harry visiting his parents’ grave where the headstone bears the inscription ‘The last enemy to be destroyed is death’. The finale features Harry choosing death so that others might live and includes a last battle resulting in death and resurrection. On her own faith, Ms Rowling said she is a Christian but her ‘struggle really is to keep believing’."

Given the ill-informed criticism of the books from many Christians, based on the simplistic equation that writing about witches and wizards equals promoting the occult, it is amazing that Rowling should wish to emphasise this aspect of her work and discuss her faith. Thankfully, Giles Fraser is around to reassure us that not all Christian comment is so simplistic as he gives a resounding vote of approval to Deathly Hallows in his current Church Times column, which should only be read if you have already finished the book!