Miracles and the Christmas story

I was too busy to post this at the time but Jeanette Winterson's Christmas piece for The Guardian, The last Christmas I spent with my mother, is well worth returning to:

'The Christmas story of the Christ Child is complex. Here’s what it tell us about miracles.

Miracles are never convenient (the baby’s going to be born whether or not there’s a hotel room – and there isn’t).

Miracles are not what we expect (an obscure man and woman find themselves parenting the Saviour of the World).

Miracles detonate the existing situation – and the blow-up and the back-blast mean some people get hurt.

What is a miracle? A miracle is an intervention – it breaks through the space-time continuum. A miracle is an intervention that cannot be accounted for purely rationally. Chance and fate are in the mix. A miracle is a benign intervention, yes, but miracles are like the genie in the bottle – let them out and there’s a riot. You’ll get your three wishes, but a whole lot else besides ...

Sometimes the thing we long for, the thing we need, the miracle we want, is right there in front of us, and we can’t see it, or we run the other way; or, saddest of all, we just don’t know what to do with it. Think how many people get the success they want, the partner they want, the money they want, and turn it into dust and ashes – like the fairy gold no one can spend.

So at this time of year I think about the Christmas story, and all the Christmas stories since. As a writer I know that we get along badly without space in our lives for imagination and reflection. Religious festivals were designed to be time outside of time. Time where ordinary time was subject to significant time.'

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Jackson Browne & Bruce Cockburn - All I Want For Christmas (Is World Peace).

Dealing with faith and with secularism is difficult but necessary now

Interesting to note that Michael Symmons Roberts' Drysalter which has just won the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection is being praised by the Forward judges for its powerful spirituality.

“We need to be able to talk of matters of faith and the soul, and how the soul intersects with the heart. What Symmons Roberts does is difficult but necessary now – it addresses a fissure in the human psyche: how we deal with faith and with secularism, how we find a life .. It is an outstanding winner,” said Jeanette Winterson, chairman of the 2013 Forward judges. She praised Symmons Roberts, an atheist who converted to Catholicism at university, for challenging the “fundamentalism” of militant atheists like Richard Dawkins.

The press release from the Forward Arts Foundation specifically notes that Symmons Roberts was a thorough-going atheist as a teenager, who chose to study Theology and Philosophy at Oxford University in order to “talk believers out of their faith”. The ploy backfired. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away.”

Symmons Roberts has publicly asked the question of whether it is possible to write religious poetry that communicates widely in an increasingly secular language, noting that "T. S. Eliot warned against a religious poetry that “leaves out what men and women consider their major passions, and thereby confesses to an ignorance of them”, but argued instead for “the whole subject of poetry” to be treated in “a religious spirit”. Symmons Roberts pointed then to the work of John Berryman as being one affirmative answer to that question. The response of the Forward judges to Drysalter indicates that his own work also genuinely answers that same question in the affirmative.

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Michael Symmons Roberts - The Vows.

Creatively communing with the Bible

Music, art, literature and film will be communing for an evening of performance and print, as the London Word Festival throws a four-hundredth birthday party for the King James Bible with a difference. Check out those contributing to the King James Bible Bash at Stoke Newington International Airport on Saturday 23rd April by clicking here. You’ll not see anything like this at your local church this Sunday.

On the same theme of the continuing inspiration of the Bible for creativity, writer Jeanette Winterson has been quoted by Genevieve Fox as saying:

"I do not think the inner life edited by AC Grayling is how I want to live. What secularists forget about Christianity is that belief in that system prompted the creation of an astounding body of imaginative work that in turn uplifts and alters the human spirit.

I do not believe in a sky god but the religious impulse in us is more than primitive superstition. We are meaning-seeking creatures and materialism plus good works and good behaviour does not seem to be enough to provide meaning. We shall have to go on asking questions but I would rather that philosophers like Grayling asked them without the formula of answers.

As for the Bible, it remains a remarkable book and I am going to go on reading it."

Artist Albert Houthuesen said:

"When you are a child and you read in the Bible of miracles, you wonder very much. Later all that changes and it becomes an amazingly imaginative idea of the world, based on truth, and written by great poets. Man, through this poetry, is trying to express about his life what is so terribly difficult to understand. He stands in mystery and through it he is trying all the time to understand.

At certain times, one may begin to make drawings and paintings of biblical things. The Bible is full of these tremendously imaginative ideas. They are profound symbols. The richness of the Bible is terrific. It is the greatest stuff that has ever been written."

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Wave Machines - I Go I Go I Go.