Some Day I’ll find you...

Edinburgh University. 1988. Dexter is a lower second public school slob, Em a double first northerner. David Nicholls’ One Day logs their lives with unerring and sometimes painful accuracy, together and apart. Thereby hangs the tale. Each chapter is a closely observed annual diary of one day, 15 July, over twenty years from the day after graduation — “feeling twenty two acting seventeen”. It’s engaging, absorbing, good humoured stuff, high on characerisation, in which it’s easy to lose yourself. Whilst a surprisingly happy ending is stacking up, there’s certainly an unexpected twst on page 385. What remains is almost unbearably poignant if you have any instinct for time passing, beloved..

For any former student of a certain generation, this novel cuts sharp but kindly, andin fine close to the bone. Dialogue has been captured in fine detail by a discerning script writer’s ear. Nicholls takes a “God” perspective, seeing all characters continuously from the inside out. This raises some narrative challenges, because there is no room for the selective blindness of a first-person narrator, but it’s wonderful to see technique carried off as triumphantly as this. The way the story is told, it unfolds believably over two decades, noting with unerring accuracy and tenderness various cultural and personal distinctives along the way. It will make a good film, with a bit of Merchant Ivory treatment.

It would spoil the story to give away details, but relationship between these two highly educated people is far more driven by cock-up than conspiracy, and this in itself says something about the wisdom of seizing the day —“Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires,” said William Blake. There are no dress rehearsals. Today is the real thing, and the only one you’re giong to get. To quote the blessed Richard Branson, “Life is a hell of alot more fun if you say “yes” rather than “no.” That in itself is, surely, a life affirming message.

Passion Play in Great Missenden

Since the publication in 1986 of Lent Holy Week and Easter, churches have increasingly enriched their observances. Real ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palm processions, and the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday are now found all over the place where once they were rather top shelf activities.

This week Great Missenden Parish Church is putting on a simple Passion Play, locally produced, developed and resourced from scratch by a group of friends led by Brenda Harris. It’s certanly a fresh way of being drawn into the story. Being in the cast also draws people together, strengthens community, and enables everyone to experience the story from the inside out. What is lost in Broadway slickery is regained, and more, in impact when you know all the people on stage, and off. The short play comes with a simple meal in Church for those who want it, and 7·30 tonight is the last performance, for this year.

This is a brave and moving endeavour for a local Church. Holy Week is a time to explore the story personally, and this production certainly brought it to life.

The use of drama in Church grew through the middle ages, aided by Franciscan spirituality with its cribs and other visual aids. Plays became suspect, though, for their embellishments and, perhaps, their inherently hazardous blend of doctrinal creativity on the hoof and local colouring, seasoned by all the precariousness of a live show.

Afficionados of full-on Anglican Life and Literature cannot forget Reverend Wiggin’s Christmas Pageant at Christ Church Gravesend New Hampshire. This is one of the finest pieces of comic writing there is, in the Quintessential Anglican novel, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. The Christmas Pageant, recounted with undersattement and comic tension worthy of Joyce Grenfell, is an irrestible imbroglio from which Owen rises heroically

‘What’s wrong with the Christ-Child?’ Barb Wiggin asked.
‘ALL THOSE BABIES,’ Owen said. ‘JUST TO GET ONE TO LIE IN THE MANGER WITHOUT CRYING. DO WE HAVE TO HAVE ALL THOSE BABIES?’
‘But it’s like the song says, Owen,’ the Rector told him. “Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.”
‘OKAY, OKAY,’ Owen said. ‘BUT ALL THOSE BABIES - YOU CAN HEAR THEM CRYING. EVEN OFFSTAGE YOU CAN HEAR THEM. AND ALL THOSE GROWN-UPS!’ he said. ‘ALL THOSE BIG MEN PASSING THE BABIES IN AND OUT. THEY’RE SO BIG - THEY LOOK RIDICULOUS. THEY MAKE US LOOK RIDICULOUS.’
‘You know a baby who won’t cry, Owen?’ Barb Wiggin asked him — and, of course, she knew as soon as she spoke... how he had trapped her.
‘I KNOW SOMEONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,’ Owen said. ‘SOMEONE SMALL ENOUGH TO LOOK LIKE A BABY,’ he said. ‘SOMEONE OLD ENOUGH NOT TO CRY.’
Mary Beth Baird could not contain herself. ‘Owen can be the Baby Jesus!’ she yelled. Owen Meany smiled and shrugged.
‘I CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,’ he said modestly.
Harold Crosby could no longer contain himself, either; he vomited. He vomited often enough for it to pass almost unnoticed, especially now that Owen had our undivided attention...

I’m not sure people this side of the pond are yet ready for such glorious experiences, but, this worked better than that. Seeing neighbours and friends in the story helps us locate ourselves within the plot. The play was well-supported, and may well develop further in future years...

So long, then, John Updike

Since Roger’s Version, back in 1986, with its crazy notion of someone who thinks they can prove God on a college computer, and a sex scene with Tertullian on the side, I’ve been intrigued by John Updike’s playful mix of high theology well hidden, Song of Solomon sex scenes, and down-to-earth honesty about the frustrations of suburban captivity.
John McTavish says Updike was

a Christian, but not a Christian novelist in the sense that his work forces an explicitly Christian message onto the reader. On the contrary, precisely because Updike is a Christian he believes the novelist should portray the human condition with unsparing honesty, expressing his "basic duty to God" in writing "the most truthful and fullest books" he can.

Updike slept with a well-thumbed copy of Karl Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans by his bedside. As you do. Clear Christian conviction, with zero pietism, underlay everything he wrote, like the drums in a jazz group. He produced some genuinely fresh expressions of faith:

if the first article of the Creed stands, the rest follows as water flows downhill. That God, at a remote place and time, took upon Himself the form of a Syrian carpenter and walked the earth willfully healing and abusing and affirming and grieving, appeared to me quite in the character of the Author of the grass..

No time to write a learned essay like the tremendous ones by Ben Myers and, especially, John McTavish, but could we all spare a reflective moment for an Updike poem about resurrection?

Seven Stanzas at Easter


Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

Now that’s theology for now! It doesn’t come from tinkering with the crown jewels, or swapping tough diamonds for smooth glass; you cut ’em rough and set ’em playfully where they belong... in the midst of life.

Sir John Mortimer RIP

I was delighted to read the Times account of Sir John Mortimer’s funeral at Turville Church, Buckinghamshire. Among great tributes from his massed friends and admirers, the tip of a huge iceberg, I am glad to know the Vicar did a good job holding things together in Church, and capturing the spirit:

“Sir John called himself an atheist for Christ. He always came to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But he emphatically did not believe in life after death.
My hope,” she added, “is that he has had a wonderful surprise.”

The C of E at its best, I thought. And the Atheism? It sounds as though God views atheism as a harmless eccentricity, which probably doesn’t really exist as much as people think, infinitely better than pretending to believe, which is a ruddy menace...

Dostoevsky: How to Read Rowan

Day off, and a chance to open Rowan Williams’ book on Dostoevsky, which arrived yesterday. I’m wondering how to eat this particular elephant. It doesn’t look like an in-flight job. Russian novels can be a tad complicated anyway:

And then, of course, Dostoevsky is stuffed with added complex metaphysics:

Think about it. Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky could take longer to read than it did to write. Well, I hope I don’t have to read the entire works of Dostoevsky to pass go, but it’s been a few years, so I've loaded up the eBook Reader with some (free) prime juicy Dostoevsky. Then it’s down to my patent method for reading Rowan's more “clotted” stuff:

• He’s really a poet, therefore it's densely packed with images. Often the images, in themselves are simple but surprising. That’s half the fun. Like all forms of poetry you have to unpack it yourself. If you only ever do bleeding obvious level sudokus, I can reliably suggest Rowan is not the writer for you. But if you like a good puzzle and learning by discovery, it’s magical stuff. Ideas are often approached by the side entrance, not the front door. It’s usually better to take things a chapter at a time, slow down, switch off the speedreading circuits, and relax. Like a poem, go with the flow and see where it leads. Don’t analyse, or you lose the flow! Read the whole paragraph, then stop and think it through.
  
• The writing often works on more than one level simultaneously. The secret is to latch onto the level that’s caught your attention, follow it through consistently, then review the chapter. If you pick up another angle follow that through in its own terms. If you accidentally mix ’n match the levels, it gets like controlling SuperMario on several levels at once, and you go nuts by the end of the chapter. You are allowed to read the book more than once.
  
• It rarely works to try and read the book at one sitting. Pacing chapters between, say, one morning a month sessions works a treat. I did once read a Rowan book on why history matters on a plane in under 3 hours; but historiography is my thing, and that was a one off achievement I don’t ever expect to emulate again.

Similar things could be said, perhaps, of Dostoevsky. So this is either gong to be a resonant match of deep speaking to deep, or a clotted expressionists Godzilla-meets-the-beast experience. I’ll let you know in, er, about two years time?

Farther up, and farther in!

Sad news — see NYT Obit from Sarx — that Madeleine L'Engle died Thursday in Connecticut. She was 88. See also Maggi Dawn's blog.

Not so well known this side of the pond, L'Engle believed everything hangs together in spiritual unity, and that religion, science and magic are simply different aspects of a single seamless reality. She said of children's writing, "You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children"

She produced what Ian MacDonald calls "Spiritual Toffee" — so here are a few nuggets on which to chew:

Those who believe they believe in God but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself"

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable.

We tend to defend vigorously things that in our deepest hearts we are not quite certain about. If we are certain of something we know, it doesn't need defending.

It is far too easy to take refuge in our little groups, rather than allowing the Creator to change us as he changed Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

agape means "a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other, to be thanked by that other, or to enjoy the process." Not easy. But if we can follow it, it will mean that we will never exclude...It teaches me not only about forgiveness but about how to hope to give guidance without manipulation.

Wherever there is unity in diversity, then we are free to be ourselves; it cannot be done in isolation; we need each other.

We have false expectations of our holy days, of our churches, of each other. We have false expectations of our friends. Jesus did not. He had expectations, but they were not false, and when they were not met, he did not fall apart. He was never taken in by golden calves! Friendship not only takes time, it takes a willingness to drop false expectations, of ourselves, of each other. Friends--or lovers--are not always available to each other. Inner turmoils can cause us to be unhearing when someone needs us, to need to receive understanding when we should be giving understanding

Rest in peace... Rise in glory!