Writing

Inching, inching, inching through the novel I am writing. Its working title is The Beautiful Thread, and feeling my way along a thread to an unknown destination is exactly what it feels like.

I’ve got to the place of falling down the well into that world, so I’m hoping that it will begin to form a little more easily now, but  . . .

Meanwhile, I’ll be interested to see how this book, out in July, is received. I’m pleased with it. Going back into it to chase down copy-editor’s alerts, it felt like a planet where I felt at home. Which may or may not be a good thing. My planet is as heavily populated as the Little Prince’s.

But I inch forward.

Waving to you xxx 

Ben Crystal on Speaking Shakespeare's English

Taks an hour and a half, so you'll need a cup of tea; but worth watching.

Thought thread

There’s always a word music to writing. That pattern can be what makes the content easily absorbed, because it’s comfortable to listen to. I would tell you the names of the patterns, but though I can hear them I can never remember what they’re called, because my mind doesn’t hang on to data. So, Shakespeare has his ten-beat pattern, which has a name – is that what a pentameter is? I don’t know. But it gives his writing a fluidity, a natural quality, so it slips through the soul like a river, as if it belongs there.

If music be the food of love – play on.

The path of true love never did run smooth.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

This above all: to thine own self be true.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Can one desire too much of a good thing?

Now is the winter of our discontent.

And so on.

Here in England we have BBC2, and Radio 4, and their programmes seem to me to be put together by similar people for a similar audience. They have special patterns to their word music, and to their humour.

The humour has a curiously 70s flavor – the pause for a laugh, the man with a falsetto voice. Jokes written by, and for, older men. People who use the word ‘chortle’, and even do so. People for whom terms like ‘sharp’, ‘science’, ‘spin’, ‘political’ and ‘intellect’, hold strong attraction. People in whose lives establishment and power are a given, and sophistication mistakenly assumed.

In the word music, interrupted flow and a heavy footfall characterize. Also, the use of well-worn similes/metaphors importing a wry humour – because never really believing anything is part of the stock-in-trade of this genre.

Erm . . . an example . . . Well – suppose it was a programme about railways in India. There’d be an in-depth on station personnel, a wrapping up about how the train would go on running and another day would dawn, etc – then something like (in a quiet voice with a humorous, reflective, semi-fading quality):

But for Sanjeev [pause] this may be the end [pause . . .] of the line . . .

It drives me wild.

In preaching, and in writing, similar conventions apply. The preacher who starts ‘When I was preparing this sermon’, the writer who starts by explaining ‘In this book . . .’ Yawn. I’ve lost count of the sermons I’ve heard, ministers’ letters in parish magazines I’ve read, that begin with a preamble describing the extreme hardship under which its creator labored – having to write the sermon/article, but being able to think of nothing to say. Double yawn. And then there is the preacher who, in getting down to tackle the subject, feels there are three points to be drawn out. No! Really?

To start without preamble at all, to finish while people are still listening, to write about what you hand-on-heart believe, to find the humour innate to a situation and paste on nothing extra, to catch the cadences of real speech and so tug the imagination – this is the art.

Every now and then you find it. The thing is, what is fresh and takes you by surprise, what is vivid and catches you off guard, is found not (most of the time) in media scripts written competently by a safe pair of hands, nor in sermons urging you, ‘like St Peter, to step out of the boat’. They always tell you, if you want to be a writer, the thing above all you must absolutely do is READ.

All my life I’ve heard this and kept quiet, thinking since there seems to be such complete consensus I must surely be wrong. Because I’ve always thought, if you want to be a writer, the thing above all you must do is observe; by which I mean, both watch and listen. The child who is frightened of what his father will say, the dying woman in the hospital bed, the senior executive who has to let people know his wife has left him, the dog who has delayed starting her chew with the sole purpose of tormenting the other (greedier) dog, the white inner eyelid of the crow, its broad shoulders and the sheen on its feathers; the way living things shine in the dusk. The endeavor is not a matter of crafting a neat turn of phrase, or making sure you have three laugh-out-loud jokes to the page, or stopping short of ever expressing any kind of real conviction. It’s just about really noticing; letting the funny, sad, terrible, pointless, beautiful realities of life seize your viscera and twist. Then write it down, and after that simply stop.

Being one

In the comment thread to the blog post before this one – about Quiet Church – Peter posed a question that entirely grabbed my attention: ‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’

It was in response to my explaining the reservations I feel regarding both the enormous expenditure of maintaining the infrastructure of an Anglican church, and the psychological clamour of church politics with all its pressures and agendas.

He wrote understanding why someone like me might want to walk out on it all, but questioning if one ever really can.

Well, I don’t think leaving a church is ever really possible. Such a thing is illusory. Jesus prayed for his household of faith, that we may all be one (John 17). He got very explicit about it, praying that we would be in him and he is us, just as he is in the Father and the Father is in him – that we might be completely one.

The epistle of James says ‘the prayers of a righteous man are powerful and effective.’

In late May of 1986, my friends Jan and Tim Leavers came to stay with our family, to do some of their wonderful presentations for children in our Sunday morning worship. During their stay, I happened to remark that this text made me uneasy because I was by no means thoroughly righteous so my praying probably would be weak and ineffective. Tim’s answer lodged right in my heart and has stayed with me to this day: ‘But Pen – you aren’t the righteous man; Jesus is.’ What a burden that lifted. Because Jesus has prayed for me (and for you).

Because Jesus is the righteous man, we can be sure that his prayers are powerful and effective, and he has prayed that we may be completely one – inextricably connected, in communion with Jesus in the heart of the Father for all time.

For this reason, a Christian cannot leave this church or that church and join another. There is only one Church, and all Christians are in it. Forever.

In the tussling back and forth about homosexuality and about women in the priesthood over the last few decades, I have been firmly in the inclusion camp for LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and not in favour of women priests or bishops only in as much as I think we should keep the women and get rid of the priesthood. I believe in the priesthood of all believers and am not sold on hierarchies. But whatever I think and however profoundly I disagree with my fellow-Christians, I have never gone down the line of talk about splitting the church. Not because it always felt comfortable but because I do not believe splitting the church can be done.

So when Peter asks ‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’ I believe the answer is ‘No’, assuming that by ‘institution’ we mean the church instituted by Jesus – the company of his friends, the ones who have given their lives to him.

Enlarging our horizons to include not just the household of faith but the human family – or even beyond that to the whole order of creation, I think the same principles apply.

I’ve been searching online for something I believe I read in a book by Wayne Dyer, but I just can’t find it now. My apologies for not quoting and crediting it properly, but I do believe it is Wayne Dyer I have to thank for the thought and the story.  

It concerns an Indian guru on his deathbed. As the great teacher neared the end of his life, his disciples, weeping, pleaded with him not to leave them. To which he answered something like: ‘Leave you? But where would I go? We are all now here.’

Not suggesting anyone reading this is dim or anything, but just in case you didn’t immediately spot it, that’s a kind of pun.

WE ARE ALL NOW HERE

WE ARE ALL NOWHERE

It is both true that our lives are all meaningfully, truly and immediately connected; and that all things are passing, transient and unimportant. It is all everything and all nothing – and this is extraordinarily hard to explain!

When we die, we are not lost, we are gathered up into the infinite – ‘into the mystic’. We are subsumed into life. Nothing is lost except form, and form is essentially illusory – a means of experience and communication. What we are – The I AM bit of us, the image of God in us – is energetic – like the Force of Star Wars. This is what makes the theology of transubstantiation workable for Catholics – the ‘accidents’ of physical form are entirely mutable, and the inner reality is both unshakeably true and pretty much impossible to pin down.

So, coming again to the question, this time with reference to the whole of life: ‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’

We are life. Holographically, fractals of the I AM, emanations of infinite mystery. Life is not something else. It is us, we are it. To escape one another or any aspect of life is a meaningless concept. As Thich Nhat Hanh put is, ‘We inter-are’.

A friend of my once commented that having a No Smoking area in a restaurant was as meaningless as designating a No Peeing area in a swimming pool. ‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’ No.

I tackled this issue head-on in dietary and lifestyle matters. Gandhi’s ahimsa means a lot to me, and I’ve spent stretches of time being vegan, which didn’t sit well with my physical constitution. But looking more deeply into it, I realized it was not that easy to escape our society with all its exploitative cruelty toward other living beings. Even a Jain who carries a little brush to sweep the path ahead, ensuring he does not tread on any tiny creatures might still inadvertently kill them with the brush. I’ve seen a dead badger electrocuted on the live rail of a train track; and I suppose there may be vegans who travel by train. Certainly vegans travel by car, and I don’t know about their windscreens, but mine is covered with the corpses of greenfly in the summer.

 So I had to face the reality that, as the old C of E funeral service put it, ‘In the midst of life we are in death’.

‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’ No.

In my passion of grief over environmental degradation, and longing for a simpler, purer way of life, I had to realize that even if I went to live in a croft in the wilds of the Scottish hills, I’d still breathe the same air and bear the same responsibilities and still be part of the human race. ‘Can we ever completely escape the institution, even if we wanted to?’ No.

However. An orchestra plays in harmony, not in unison. Each instrument has its own score, its own part, its own contribution.

Each one of us has to work out when to be silent and when to speak, which activity to take up and which to put down, which values to espouse and from which to step back.

In our choices – what we do and what we don’t – we make our souls and we set an example, we hum a tune that others around us pick up without realizing and start to  join in.

The Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, the Methodists, Baptists, Quakers – the monastics, the laity, the ordained people – they are not different churches one can join or leave (even if they think they are). There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism. ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.’

In my thoughts about Quiet Church, I am not thinking of leaving anything or anyone – because we are all now here – but trying to work out how I, being what I am, may more constructively play my part.

It’s because you can’t have a No Peeing area in the swimming pool that understanding my instrument and finding the part I must play does really matter. I belong to the whole. I owe my best to the community. I’m trying to feel my way to what truth looks like from exactly where I stand, because as I see it, that’s what I came here to do. If that makes sense.

Maybe a kind of quiet church. Hmm.

Friends, a thought has come to me.

In the last year or so I have gone less and less to church, and that grieves me. I never thought it would happen. But two things have changed – one is me and the other is the church.

As I grow older, through middle age and onwards toward old age, I find myself (whether I welcome it or not) following the same trajectory as my father did, needing solitude and quietness, avoiding groups and gatherings. I love my family and my friends, and I delight in the theology group that meets at our house. I find parties difficult, and anything multi-stranded where there are several personalities to concentrate on at once, and the space is full of stimuli. I feel so intensely the power (I don’t mean they are dominating or strident, I just mean their soul vibration) of each person I meet that it makes going to church difficult – many people want to greet me, often with special voices on communicating something about my not having been for so long. They are kind and loving but it feels unbearable and I can’t face it. I love the prayers and hymns, the communion; and in Quaker meeting I love the silence and the Light. But the web of interactions is too strongly felt, so that most of the time I cannot muster the force to encounter it.

So I have changed, but so has church. It used to be not a very social occasion, focusing on prayer and singing and quiet homilies, then going home. It has changed – and for the better, I’m sure – to feature more variety, electronic media, opportunities to interact, and a greatly increased focus on community and friendship. And inclusiveness (for which I worked so hard in my own time as a minister of religion) has brought a change in ambience, with children playing in a loud and lively manner, Church is, among other things, community. I don’t regret or object to these changes, but the end result is something I can’t relate to.

Quaker meeting is lovely, but it is not particularly Christian. If you see what I mean, I’m fine with people not being Christian but I would choose for the worship to be Christian. As it is in our Theology Group; you don’t have to be a Christian to come, but it is Christian theology we study and discuss. I love Buddhism and Taoism; I am so grateful for them, they have taught me as much as I have learned in church about how to live as a Christian. But I don’t want to become an actual Buddhist or Taoist, because for me Jesus is the centre.

I miss the quiet gathering for worship of God in Jesus. I miss it a lot.

And the thought came to me today of Quiet Church. I googled to see if anyone else had thought of it and is doing it, and it seems that within the context of regular church communities there is a phenomenon of Quiet Church – basically a bit like Quaker Meeting or a Julian meeting. Just sitting together in silence. But that’s not really what I mean.

If we could ever have a musical accompanist – pianist or guitarist, I’d be happy to sing a hymn or song or chorus. I’d like sometimes if we could break bread in an agape. I’d be happy to use a minimalist liturgical form sometimes. I’d be happy to include an exposition of a scripture.

What I have in mind is just a gathering you could come to, similar to a prayer meeting I suppose, an hour long and no longer, with no refreshments or socializing, only for the worship of God. No money involved – no plant to maintain or preacher/musician fees. Just the people, just in our home.

And, to be clear, this would be inclusive church. Anyone could come who loves Jesus and can sit quietly for an hour. I know babies can wake up and fuss a bit in worship, but the occasional squawk from a baby would be okay, and it would be fine for a mother to breastfeed. Just so long as it was all held within the peace. No chatting, no commotion. And LGBTQ friends would of course be most welcome.

Low-key, peaceful. One hour. Quiet. Holy. On a Sunday morning. Perhaps not every week. Maybe once a month.

What do you think?