Artistic apprehension

 

I’ve been helped by a gradual realisation that attending to chunks of John’s Gospel may work best if viewed as listening to music rather than following a line of reasoning.

My knowledge of music theory is minimal, but I’m vaguely aware of the way in which a theme might be stated by one instrument, repeated, picked up by another instrument or by the whole orchestra, developed, and revisted.  I can often clearly hear this going on and, whether I do or not, can often feel the emotional pull of the theme’s reappearance.  I am more often simply unaware that this pattern is what has given a satisfying shape to the listening experience.

So, as we work our way to the fifth of the five Sundays when the whole of John 6 is being read, I put away previous years’ irritation at having to preach around “I am the bread of life” so many Sundays running, and my desperation that the choice of appropriate hymns was exhausted in about the second of the five weeks.

From the opening hint that this is the Passover movement of the piece, and then the rehearsing of the feeding of thousand men, there is unleavened bread, lamb-blood-daubed doorposts, barley loaves and fish.  With a change of tune there is Jesus walking on water and the “I am” announcement.  Then the gift of manna in the wilderness is layered in, until the “I am the bread of life” theme is finally stated at verse 35, expanded upon, partially reflected back at verse 41, repeated at verse 48, and developed at verse 51.  Suddenly in that verse we have soared into eating flesh and blood, sounded out with variations in each of successive verses 53, 54, 55 56 and 57.

We haven’t been argued into a fresh understanding but swept up into it; our tune; the phrases which recur in our heads long after the music has stopped.

And then, for other reasons, I happened to take down William Temple’s Readings in St John’ Gospel * and found the third of three ‘general considerations’ he gives in his Introduction does not use the analogy of music but gets very close to the same awareness saying

One marked characteristic of the mind of the Evangelist... is... he does not argue from premises to conclusions as a method of apprehending truth.  Rather he puts together the various constituent parts of truth and contemplates them in their relation to one another.  Thus he seems to say ‘look at A; now look at B; now at AB; now at C; now at BC; now at AC; now at D and E; now at ABE; now at CE’, and so on in any variety of combinations that facilitates new insight.  It is the method of artistic, as distinct from scientific, apprehension, and is appropriate to truth which is in no way dependent on, or derived from, other truth, but makes its own direct appeal to reason, heart and conscience.

* Having coincidentally most recently posted about my paternal grandparents being cousins, children of sisters Jessie and Annie Mallam, themselves granddaughters of the Oxford Mayor Thomas Mallam, I mention in passing that the book is dedicated to the memory of Temple’s school friend Professor J L Stocks who was a cousin of both of my grandparents as a son of Jessie and Annie’s sister Emily.

Five generations back

 

Passing through Oxford at the end of last month, I sought out this 1840 boundary stone of which I hadn’t been aware until quite recently.

It is on the edge of Port Meadow at the point at which the city of Oxford’s common land abuts that of Wolvercote parish.  An extensive contemporary newspaper article gives an account of that year’s mayor (and a whole company) inspecting (rather than ‘beating’) the bounds of the city.  They discovered that the marker at this point needed renewing with a fresh stone – it is hard now to recognise the city’s coat of arms at the top and the names of the mayor (‘Mallam’) and sheriff beneath with the date.

My father’s parents were cousins, their mothers being sisters (Jessie and Anne Mallam, granddaughters of this mayor).  And his grave is here.

When soft voices die

 

The first night of the Proms and a new composition by Sir James Macmillan setting two short poems of Shelley’s.  Four contrasting soloists took a verse each, until the four voices wove together in the final verse (the second of the two verses of this the second poem).

Music, when soft voices die,

Vibrates in the memory -

Odours, when sweet violets sicken,

Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,

Are heaped for the beloved's bed;

And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,

Love itself shall slumber on.

The commentators were seduced by the fresh Prom experience, the opening word ‘music’, and the sense that the impact of music never dies – but the poem is about bereavement and the cessation of music just happens to be the first example

In my mind, the first verse could be about a walk home after a concert, possibly alone in the dark and cold and wet.  Not, Shelley says, a depressing lonely walk, because the tunes still echo in the mind, the scents of the evening (appetite sated and over indulged, perhaps) continue to enliven the spirit.  The warm glow of knowing that it been worth being there.

So, he says, bereavement ought to be like this.  What remains of what once flowered is piled wreathes on a grave (at least that makes as much sense of ‘the beloved’s bed’ to me as a petal strewn place to love and sleep), and what remains of what was once animated is accumulated reflection and insight (retiring alone to an actual bed now, not so much to ‘sleep on a problem’ as to ‘sleep on what love has given’).

In the morning, the final stage of the journey home from time with friends in John O Groates (where the pictures were taken) had been, unusually for me, by bus.  And there wasn’t Deborah, happy to travel anywhere without the car, the strap of her bag tightly round her coat, exploring fresh ideas in a book as she goes, most usually on her way into Bradford ready to help some refugees learn English or to engage with some activist or support group.

As a niece of hers commented on her obituary, ‘a reminder, always, of what goodness and grace really look like when out and at work in the world’.  Not just to catch still the tune, the scent of it, piled blooms and informed creative views, but, Shelley seems to say, to know these still to be the gift now however dull and solitary the walk.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether Mary Shelley, collecting together and publishing final work of her late husband including this fragment (whether a complete poem or something waiting to be worked up into a longer work?), had as much a sense of loss as a sense of what a privilege it was to have his work to share.

Political disconnection

I’ve looked at the actual figures for a third recent by-election and I can’t work out why the substantial fall in voter turnout is not being widely discussed. 

Some of those registered to vote in 2019 will have died or will have moved away since, and some of those registered to vote in 2021 will have only recently become old enough to vote or have moved in.  But broadly it is the same pool of people – and 18.9% of them (between one in six and one in five of them, about 15 000 people) voted in 2019 but didn’t do so in 2021.

To be clear, of the people who actually voted last time, more woke up yesterday and decided not to vote at all than went out and voted Labour, and more people decided not to vote at all than went out and voted for Conservative. 

Put it another way, in 2021 Labour held on to only 59.4% of its 2019 voters and the Conservatives held on to only 68.6% of its 2019 voters.  This will be expressed in the standard media as a ‘swing from Labour to Conservative’, but it is actually a heavy swing against both.  

There was a maverick candidate who came third in both 2019 and 2021, two quite different people.  The first gained the support of 8.1% of the registered voters in 2019 and the second 10.4% in 2021, about 1830 more voters in 2021 than in 2019.  But this is a much less significant fact than the striking one that more than half of those registered to vote did not actually do so.

There is now a Conservative MP for Hartlepool, a Liberal Democrat MP for Chesham & Amersham, and a fresh Labour MP for Batley & Spen.  They and their supporters will be pleased.  But is it the disconnected whose size of the vote surged in all three by-elections.

The pictures are both public artwork close to each other in central Bradford.

Discerning sacrificial discipleship

 

A portion of 2 Corinthians 8 set for services this morning, and I’m uncomfortable with what almost looks like Paul's manipulation across the wider section of this letter. 

He isn’t sure those to whom he is writing are really on top of the project in hand.  And his emissary has reported back that they aren’t that chuffed with his leadership, so getting them back on track will be tricky.  So he claims to admit that his last tough missive might have been ill judged, albeit somehow necessary.

He also lards in things like ‘I am not telling you what to do – but you’ll know to do the right thing’, ‘I’ve told people round here that you are on top of things – it would be so embarrassing if this turns out to be wrong’, ‘I’m not putting pressure on you to be more generous than you want to be – just remember that you owe everything to the generosity of Christ’.

My discomfort, to be clear, is that I recognise myself and the wider church of which I am part in this.  The echo of unintentionally hectoring clergy armed with calls to sacrificial discipleship sound around me and sound like me.  

‘Here is scripture, let us see how it applies to our life.’  A good call, requiring careful discernment.  ‘Here is a challenge in our life, let us see what insights scripture might have to be bring.’  An equally good call, one requiring even more diligent discernment.  But ‘I’m sure I know the answer, and this bit of scripture backs it up and explains why you should agree with me’, not so much so. 

So I was reflecting with people this morning about how I might preach stewardship as a call to overflowing generosity to family, neighbours and those in need (and, yes, the church), not as something motivated by the need to balance the books of our institutions.  The national misuse of the ‘first to the Lord’ text (from just a few verses earlier than those set for today) still at the front of my mind all these years later.

Or safeguarding as seeking to shape places where people will flourish (including, yes, rigorous attention to necessary awareness and procedures), not as something motivated by the need to match diocesan criteria.  The three-yearly renewal of my safeguarding training over the last few weeks was saying as much.

And, the rub for me this week as our Parochial Church Councils are able to meet for the first time in ages and we have to begin to tackle our sharply reduced post-pandemic viability, how can we see what God wants ahead of us, not how can we see that God wants us to adopt the schemes I think are the necessary next steps.

The pictures come from exhibitions in windows in central Bradford during Refugee Week.   

Placing trust?

Let me think what I’m not seeing said about the Chesham & Amersham by-election.

The non-Conservative vote simply didn’t surge.  There were relatively few former Conservative voters who chose to vote Liberal Democrat this time.

It was turn out which skewed the figures again: 76.8% at the 2019 General Election (a typical level for this constituency in the recent past) but just 52.2% at this by-election – a drop of about 17 500 people. 

Taking this into account, one notices that the Labour and Liberal Democrat share of registered electors was actually very stable (30.1% in 2019, 30.4% in 2021), albeit with a very striking strategic shift in which lots of Labour voters must have backed the ‘most likely to beat the Tories’ Liberal Democrat candidate.

And, if that is so, one notices that about a quarter of those who voted Conservative last time (that is the 17 500 missing voters – a strikingly high abstention rate), stayed at home this time; they knew that there was no risk of a Conservative Government being brought down.  They might have been miffed by the sorts of things which commentators are mentioning (in the last few days both lockdown extension and the revelation that the Prime Ministers knows his Health Secretary is hopeless, in the longer term planning worries about HS2 in the past and wider local development in the future), but this simply didn’t make them vote Liberal Democrat.  

At least, not in any numbers – some previously Conservative voters will have voted Liberal Democrat (by-election protests of this sort were once standard), in which case the maths says an approximately equal number of previous Labour voters would have stayed at home (which was a significant factor in Hartlepool).

Meanwhile, I’ve been dwelling through the middle of June on a reflection for St Barnabas’ Day.  This crucial figure sought out the previous persecutor Paul to minister in the new church in Antioch and later fell out with him spectacularly about recruiting the previous deserter Mark to minister across the new churches in Asia Minor.  If on a Sunday at the moment we read from 2 Corinthians (written by Paul) and Mark (just possibly written by this Mark), we are still reading what Barnabas’ two risky recruits went on to produce.

The picture is from a window in St Michael's, Haworth taken for use on Sunday when we will dwell on David’s lyre playing to sooth the mental disturbance of King Saul.

You must be mad

“You would have thought that people would be happy, that they were glad to be able to begin to get out, that there would be good will,” she said from behind the cashier’s desk at the petrol station.  It was her response to someone who was clearly a Vicar innocently asking how emerging from lockdown was going for the surprisingly deserted business.

“You would have thought they’d remember clapping for carers, becoming aware of how much they depend on those who keep basic things running, but they don’t.  I know what’ll happen.  It will be crowded in here later and then there will be a glitch – with the till, with someone’s credit card – and the queue will get long and unpleasant.  I had someone the other day push to the front, slap down some cash, shout a number and walk out.”

“Yes,” said the hotel manager I shared the story with, “they were really considerate for the first day or two, but many of them are now simply have their heads down to get what they want without much awareness of anyone else.”

So a slightly different light was shone across last Sundays’ Gospel (Mark 3.20-35) as I began to read it and prepare for the Sunday coming up.  The crowd, Jesus’ family and the religious scholars all seem to be making things difficult.

Jesus’ ministry explodes into Mark’s Gospel.  Thirty-five verses in, he has already taught, defeated the powers of evil, healed, and been pursued when he tried to escape somewhere quiet.  Things do not let up (there is fear of being crushed at one point) and now, two chapters further in, he has just established a group of twelve co-leaders of some sort perhaps to make things more manageable.

You would have thought people would be happy.  There was an opportunity to step away from everything which had restricted life.  New radical ways are being explored and demonstrated.  Not quite.

The crowd, it says, became so pressing that Jesus and his co-leaders were not able to eat.  I think of the long shifts key workers have had to endure without even time for a meal break, one nurse emerging early on to find the supermarket stripped.  Perhaps there are touches of a motivation to get the food on offer (John 6.26) or see Jesus as a performer (Luke 23.8).

Jesus’ family have been told he is not sane and have come to restrain him.  I think of worried partners and children whose initial admiration and support gave way to real concern which reaches the point of saying “you need to stop doing this now for your own health”.  I notice that it doesn’t say they thought he was mad or attempted to restrain him, only that they had been told so and had come to do what they might have thought was the appropriate things.

And the religious scholars roll up to say he is possessed and fundamentally mistaken.  We don’t know how mainstream they were, of course, so this may be a bit like the anti-vax movement weighing in, or flunkies of Presidents in denial.

In any other year, I would have been tempted to dwell on what Jesus taught.  About the scale of God’s real family.  About how misattributing God’s activity being about the only thing to put us finally outside the pale.

But this year, I simply wonder whether any stunning but challenging new possibilities (from Jesus’ radical new way to emerging from lockdown) will ever plain-sail its way across human nature, so we are likely to have a bruising time if new possibilities open up around us.