St John's in the snow

St John's Seven Kings at 7.30am this morning.

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Robert Plant and the Band Of Joy - Houses Of The Holy.

Dialoguing with Isaiah

Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has said that the Bible is the record of the dialogue in which God and humanity find one another. The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said that “… the Bible is not a closed object but a dialogue partner whom we must address but who also takes us seriously. We may analyze, but we must also listen and expect to be addressed. We listen to have our identity given to us, our present way called into question, and our future promised to us.”

Isaiah 40. 21 - 31 takes us into that kind of dialogue because it presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, this passage says that God “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” making us, its people, like grasshoppers to him. On this basis, we are as nothing to God and he can do with us as he pleases – we are pawns that he moves on a celestial chessboard, puppets manipulated by the divine puppetmaster - and so, we read:

“He brings princes to naught
   and reduces the rulers of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
   no sooner are they sown,
   no sooner do they take root in the ground,
than he blows on them and they wither,
   and a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.”

On the other hand, the passage also says that God calls each star into existence and that it is by his power and strength that they continue to exist. By implication the same is true of human beings – that God calls us into existence and sustains our existence too – as the passage says, he “gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.” In this part of the passage, God is not remote or distant, nor is he the chess or puppetmaster, instead he is alongside us as the creator and sustainer of life itself.

The passage is a dialogue and invites us to discussion and debate because the two pictures of God cannot be reconciled. God cannot be both the one who controls all things and the one who sustains all things in freedom. If God controls our every move then we have no free will but if we genuinely have free will then God must be limited in his power to control what occurs. This is a key part of the debate and dialogue – the conversation - which occurs in the Bible. It is a debate about the nature of God and it is a dialogue because these two different and ultimately irreconcilable pictures of God are presented.

Brueggemann has called these two pictures, the core testimony and the counter testimony. The core testimony is structure legitimating; that is to say it is about order and control – everything in its rightful place and a rightful place for everything. The counter testimony is pain embracing; that is to say it is about hearing and responding to the pain and suffering which is found in existence. The core testimony is “above the fray” while the counter testimony is “in the fray”.

The wonderful thing, it seems to me, about the Christian scriptures is that this debate and dialogue is resolved in favour of the counter testimony. René Girard writes that, in the Gospels, “God himself, the Word become flesh in Jesus, becomes the victim … The New Testament Gospels are the starting point for a new science or knowledge of humanity. This new knowledge begins with faith in Christ the innocent victim, and it becomes the leaven that will work itself out and expand to the point that the concern for victims becomes the absolute value in all societies molded or affected by the spread of Christianity.”

Similarly, Gerd Theissen writes that in the life, teaching and death of Jesus of Nazareth:

“religion takes an unprecedented turn, and becomes instead an agency of healing for the wounded. In the religion of the prophets, and in the religious commitment for which Jesus lived and died, we see the distillation of faith in a God who is on the side of the downtrodden rather than their oppressors, and who seeks to bring a new, supernatural order of justice and peace out of the natural laws of selection and mutation which spell death for the weak and powerless.”

Rowan Williams says that:

“All human identity is constructed through conversations, in one way or another. The gospel adds the news that, in order to find the pivot of our identity as human beings, there is one inescapable encounter, one all-important conversation into which we must be drawn. This is not just the encounter with God, in a general sense, but the encounter with God made vulnerable, God confronting the systems and exclusions of the human world within that world – so that, among other things, we can connect the encounter with God to those human encounters where we are challenged to listen to the outsider and the victim.”

All this means that we can and should pray for God to be alongside us to give us strength in our weariness and his power in our weakness so that we can soar on wings like eagles, run and not grow weary, walk and not be faint. In other words, that he will enter into our pain and enable us to live fully human lives; lives of responsible freedom, in contrast to the pawns and puppets who understand God to control their every move. Lives of responsible freedom lived for the benefit of others; lives lived listening and responding to the pain of those who are victims and outsiders.

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Joan Osborne - One Of Us.

Perhaps the most underrated band ever

"Rock'n'roll is a vehicle to express the emotions you are not allowed to use in everyday life. We shouldn't waste rock and roll. Rock should be looking at some of the big questions. At its best, it's an art form that inspires, sometimes teaches, sometimes threatens. Its only crime is when it bores." Michael Been

Michael Been, The Call's singer/songwriter, was born in Oklahoma City but migrated to California before forming The Call with Scott Musik. Sin and salvation were staples of the diet that The Call served up. Been thought "that every fault in the world is within him" and said that he had had "hundreds of born-again experiences" needing them because he is dead a lot of the time. "I believe in truth. Whatever is necessary for a person to experience to find the rock bottom, to know the darkness of his life, that's right. A lot of our music is confrontational, it deals with the dark side of life because that teaches us something."

Been’s focus on the dark side of life led to the band being labelled as negative and may have restricted their overall impact – their greatest success was with the deliberately life-affirming single 'Let the Day Begin' which reached number three in the American charts. Another limiting factor, in the UK at least, was that they were perceived as playing the ‘Big Music’ when the likes of U2, Simple Minds and The Waterboys had fallen out of critical fashion. The fact that Bono and Jim Kerr contributed to their albums didn’t help dispel this perception. In reality, though, the band that the Call most resembled (never more so than on Red Moon) was The Band, and both Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson contributed to their albums. Support was also lost among American Christians (something Been had been at pains to build up – he sent copies of the single 'I Still Believe (Great Design)' to Christian radio stations together with a signed copy of the Apostles Creed) when Been appeared as the apostle John in the Martin Scorcese film The Last Temptation of Christ. He was asked to take part as a friend of Scorcese – The Call were reputedly Scorcese’s favourite band – and got involved because he “wanted to show something of the struggle Christ had”. However a lot of people wrote to him saying, “Your records helped me when I was down. But now you’re involved in this film I can’t listen to them anymore.”

The Call’s original career may have ended with Red Moon but it ended on a high, that album together with 1986’s Reconciled representing the peak of their work. Combining literate lyrics with powerful anthems and genuinely encompassing despair, ecstasy and the stages in between, The Call are "perhaps the most underrated band ever".

"A preacher and a teacher, Michael was always much more than your usual 'ten-a-penny' careerist '80s rock star. As driven as he was with his beliefs, he was far from sanctimonious and always a hoot to be around. He had a similar soul that one perceives in true American greats such as Robbie Robertson, but he also had the wickedly spirited comedy of John Belushi draped all around him." Jim Kerr

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The Call - Let The Day Begin.

Mysteries and miracles

'The value of religion is that it points beyond anything that can be known by the methods of science, showing us that a mystery would remain even if everything could be finally explained. The heart of religion isn't belief, but something more like what Keats described as negative capability: "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".'

John Gray, 'Alain de Botton's atheist temple is a nice idea, but a defunct one' - The Guardian

A miracle (what else can you call it):
the sun rose today at three fourteen
a.m.
and will set tonight at one past eight

A miracle that's lost on us:
the hand actually has fewer than six
fingers
but still it's got more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the inescapable earth.

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.
Wisława Szymborska, quoted in her obituary for The Guardian

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The Call - Everywhere I Go.

God is ...

God is all powerful

God is all

God is power

God is all power

God is might

God is right

God is tyrant

God is made nothing

God is made

God is no thing

God is made no thing

God is human

God is slave

God is dead

God is all compassion

God is all

God is passion

God is all passion

God is present

God is gift

God is love

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The Call - I Don't Wanna.

Constructive Christian engagement with the collapse of our culture

Sam Norton, who blogs at Elizaphanian, has published Let Us Be Human, a book which brings together his thinking on many of the topics on which he has blogged and taught extensively over the past few years: 

"We live in a time of escalating crises and environmental disasters – how should the church understand them, and how should the church respond to them? In this short, readable and punchy book, Sam Charles Norton argues that the fundamental problem of our time is a spiritual one – that we have forgotten what it means to be wise – and that the path for the faithful through this time of crisis is to re-establish the priority of worship. Only by becoming more distinctively Christian can we engage constructively with the collapse of our culture."

I've appreciated Sam's take on these issues greatly in recent years, including taking a group from St John's Seven Kings to Mersea Island to hear from him, and am looking forward to reading Let Us Be Human as a result.

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Thea Gilmore - Bad Moon Rising.

Leonard Cohen: self-deprecating and humorous

One of the things I love most about the work of Leonard Cohen is his self-deprecating humour. Lines, which sound like personal credos although sung by the characters he creates, like, "I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that Time cannot decay/I'm junk, but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet" from 'Democracy', every line in 'Tower of Song' where Hank Williams coughs a hundred floors above him, or this, from 'Going Home':

"I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit ...

He will speak these words of wisdom
Like a sage, a man of vision
Though he knows he’s really nothing
But the brief elaboration of a tune."

There is real self awareness and humility here combined with the distance and irony of setting these lines ostensibly about himself in the third person. Victoria Segal notes Cohen's self-deprecation in an excellent review for Mojo of Cohen's new album Old Ideas.

Also included in Mojo's Cohen feature is a personal piece by Will Oldman describing Cohen's influence on his inspiration and work. In this piece he writes about being introduced to Cohen's music via The Best Of ... and Death Of A Ladies Man, the controversial 1977 Phil Spector-produced album. Oldham writes that he feels privileged to have been introduced to Cohen through the latter album "because to love something through its flaws provides a richer love."

Death Of A Ladies Man breaks the mould of the Cohen stereotype as sombre, introspective folk-poet by taking the vibe of Dylan's 'Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35' and giving free rein to the carnal, humorous aspects of Cohen's work. If you haven't heard it or have filed it away on a shelf somewhere, then get it out and allow your expectations of Cohen's sound to be shattered.

Oldman perceptively writes that there is something about Cohen's lyrics "that pullls you in without revealing itself entirely but it holds you there on each listen":

"It's a combination of of humour, modesty, nihilism, despair, joy and appreciation done by someone who has the ability to put language first as a poet.

Somehow he has the ability to shine a light on our finer qualities as people in a way that you feel that you have an ally: even if you're looking at the beautiful and the ugly in the world, you can value it. I can look around at the good and the bad and say, Well, this is humanity and I'm going to keep on dealing with it because I have this man who is doing that too."

For more perceptive words on Cohen listen to Malcolm Guite's On The Edge talk by clicking here.

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Leonard Cohen - Iodine.