This week and next week there will be two Proost podcast episodes released, featuring interviews with musicians. The first one (out already) is with the rather wonderful Ant Clifford, of the band Lofter. Next week we will hear from our lovely friend Yvonne Lyon.
These chats are part of our on-going pondering as to the shape and purpose of a revival of Proost, an old publishing organisation. It might be interesting to note that before the old Proost took on the role of publishing loads of written material, video and animation etc. it was first concieved of as a record label.
The questions we are trying to explore are some of these;
What role does music take in our spiritual lives? More than just soundtrack, might it actually shape us in real and meaningful ways? If so, how?
What kinds of music might we want to showcase? Who might help us navigate a world we know little about, particularly the music being made by non-white,non-male, non-middle-class people like us?
What is the difference between worship music and ‘music of the spirit’ of the kind we are most interested in?
Who is making this kind of music? Are there people out there who should be heard, but are struggling with an indifferent music money machine?
Is there a need for a simple network to support grass-roots music that seeks to make a difference?
We have an inkling (particularly following these two conversations) that musicians need connection, just like all artists do. In fact, there may be particular reasons why musicians need this more than most. The music business has taken such a pounding in the last few years. The rise of streaming services has placed all the earning power out of reach of all but the biggest stars, and the pandemic left many performing artists in a hole. Meanwhile rising energy costs are forcing many vanues that previously supported live music to close.
As Yvonne points out, music is also relational at heart. The image of the tortured bedroom genius, making tracks on a laptop, might have some basis in reality, but actually, music flies when it is made in community, when it sparks between different creative inputs on different instruments. It comes alive when people listen. It creates a space in which people can transcend, almost uniquely.
But it can also be a hard road, and musicians need one another.
I am just back from leading a gathering of friends into what we call our annual ‘wilderness retreat’. These events have played a central part in my life now for… a long time. Decades. I could go back through the archive on this blog and chart each and every trip, remembering each one for a moment, or moments, but I would rather remember them in the form of friendship.
This year, 12 of us went back to an island called Garbh Eileach, exactly ten years after we were last there. It is part of an island chain called The Garvellachs, two islands down from the famous Eileach an Naoimh, with its monastery founded by St Brendan himself. Garbh Eileach is a different beast entirely, wild and wooded, exploding with life. While we were there, we saw deer, slow worms, white tailed eagles, golden eagles, a whale, some dolphins, seals, and innumerable other creatures, feathered, furred, scaled, crawling or swimming.
The island is also crawling with ticks. This caused a collective panic when we first landed. It would be possible to write a whole blog piece on this panic alone- on the ‘leadership’ nature of resolving it (which I carefully avoided as much as I could) and on the way that vulnerability in wild places might be psycologically and spiritualy significant – but this is for another time.
After all, no paradise is perfect.
Every year I spend a long time thinking about what we will ‘do’ as part of these retreat events. This usually comes down to a few ideas, a few scribbled words, along with a subdivision of time into ‘silence’ and ‘togetherness’ (although these are not mutually exclusive). The chat can be blue and profane, then will come a moment of deepest beauty and profundity. It is my experience that not only are these not mutually exclusive either, rather one can enable the other. The raw, earthy business of camping in wild places tends to be rather destructive to ‘nice’ facades, although some find this more true than others.
Unsuprisingly, given the recent output on this blog, this year my head was full of celtic spirituality, with the god who hides inside every living thing- even in us – discoverable not through addition but through subtraction, not by hiding our woundedness from the divine out of shame or condemnation, but by looking beneath it and through it, to that most foundational part of our being, which is god.
The mix of people who attend usually sorts out over the months and weeks- friends, and friends of friends. People have to drop out for all the usual reasons, but the boat usually stays full with others who take up empty slots. I hate to turn people who want to come away, but the limiting factor is always the transport – it is the only ‘cost’ – the boat charter being costly and tends to be in multiples of 12.
I confess to feeling slightly uncomfortable with the mix prior to this trip. Several of my dear friends could not come, so there were a number of new faces. Whilst I love to share these trips with new people, there is always a ‘getting to know the ropes’ phase. Not to mention missing my long term companions, because that is what these trips are for- to linger in wild places with people I love, and to dream of God, whatever of her remains within us.
It turns out that there is plenty.
One of the things we talked about on our trip was the old Celtic idea of an ‘Anam Cara’. Some of you will know the late John O’Donohue’s book of the same name, or even have heard the term used at weddings. It might have become mixed in with a lot of other celtic words and ideas that become so portable that they lose their meaning and power. So let’s reclaim it.
Anam Cara is not just a good friend, it is that friend who knows you. The one whom, when you are with them, you defend the least and share the most. More than that, Anam Cara is that friend who makes you a better person, just because of their friendship.
Not because they necessarily are better, more knowledgable, more spiritual, more mature.
Not because they are your elder, or your ‘mentor’ – at least of the one-directional kind. Top-down relationships are different. They can feel unequal. One big, the other small.
Anam Cara relationships are a soul deep connection that is somehow ‘enough.’
A connection that makes you more complete.
A connection to someone else which somehow intensified your own individuality, whilst simultaneously making us belong to something bigger.
Anam Cara is biased towards you – they are on your side – but they are not bind to your faults and limitations. In fact, because they know you, they know the faults better too – they may even call you out on them. You might do the same for them.
Anam Cara is something I have longed for most of my life.
Somehow, through these annual trips to make retreats to the wilderness, I have made connection with not one, but several people who have become to me, my own Anam Cara.
I have wondered how I came to be so blessed, and this made me realise that there was another ‘personhood’ in this Anam Cara relationship, and it is this.
The island.
If this sounds mystical and fanciful, perhaps it is, but allow we to explain myself.
For some time now, I have thought of god in a very different way to the God I was brought up with. Rather than God, the distant disciplinarian, who pre-judged me even before I was born, who made no allowances for my broken beginnings, whose favour seemed to rest only on my compliance with a narrow set of judgemental rules and commands (having said a single prayer that got me through the door), I instead began to catch glimpses of a god who loves things indiscriminately, wildly, with no thought of propriety or decorum. This god loved us so much that he unleashed herself on the world in the form of the Christ, who wears a coat of a million colours and in these parts of the world, many of them are green.
Then, through immersion in the Celtic wisdom tradition, it occurs to me that people have thought this way about god for thousands of years. Here is the god who animates blades of grass, who is in the weave of sinews that flex in the leg of a deer. Here is the god who lifts the arms of trees and is to be seen in snakes and crack addicts alike.
Remarkably, this is the god who lives in me. More than this, this is the god who IS me- not because I am god, but because through god, I am, and within me, is god. Because of my woundedness, the baggage I carry, the things I do to distract myself, the things I do that I should not and the things I should do but do not, then god is often obscured, deep inside, but she waits still, because like my Anam Cara, she is biased. She is after all, love.
As I seek to move in and to further understand this wisdom tradition, it seems unsurprising that when we linger in quietness in these wild places – particularly in the contained space of small verdant islands – our awareness of god who loves things by becoming them is closer. It enters into our relationships even, broken and imperfect as they surely are.
I feel a deep love for my friends, for those I share these islands spaces with. Sometimes this bursts out of me in unregulated and embarrassing ways. This is in part because I know them to be good, to be loyal, to be true, even to be slightly biased towards me and I towards them.
In part also, I blame the island, which embraces us all.
The Advent waiting is a framing of looking forward in hope towards a time of peace, but it is not a magical peace, brought about by a Messiah who creates peace by the slaying of enemies – this was one of the things that got Jesus in so much trouble. Rather it is a peace that is won by peacemakers, one small step at a time. Here is a statement that I am wrestling with this morning;
There is no peace without justice.
I think this is true. Making peace must involve at some level, the rebalancing of manifest unfairness, partiularly in relation to those who hold power, because power has this way of padding itself at the expense of others – not just materially, but in the way it feeds egos. By the same token, powerlessness debilitates.
This takes us towards another element of this peacemaking- the inevitability of conflict. At first this seems paradoxical, until you remember that as the advent story unfolded, it was full of conflict. Making peace involves challenging injustice.
The way we do this is key. The great protest movements – the marches, the mass demonstrations – championed by Ghandi and MLK give us heroic templates, but hindsight tends to gloss over the messy painful nature of the personal interactions, even when faced with injustice that (at least from our current perspective) is so transparent. Currently we see other mass protests on the streets demanding a cease-fire in Gaza, a cause which seems so right, despite the fact that some seem to think this protest is not ‘British’.
If you callenge power, you should expect it to get ugly.
Most injustices however are not on this scale. They are small, grubby ones that we encounter in the mess of daily life. I am struggling with one just now. I hate conflict but have found myself making a complaint to a community employer because of serious problems in the ways they are treating their staff. I now need to see this through, but today, I am taking pause, and asking these questions;
Is my cause just, or have I got things out of perspective?
If my cause is just, how do I seek peace alongside justice? How do I hold on to integrity?
It is easy to make war in the name of peace, so how can I treat my ‘enemy’ with compassion, whilst still seeking a just outcome?
It has always been a bit of a strange thing to me how followers of Jesus came to be seen as collectively ‘holier than thou’. How over the millennia we serially get caught up in elaborate morality systems, measuring others by how much they share the same code and punishing those who do not.
It is not as though this was the model for life that Jesus gave us. As far as we are able to understand his way of teaching, way of living, he seemed to react against those in his time who lived this kind of religious life. Remember all those exchanges with the Pharisees, who had a rigid rule to measure everything against. By total contrast, Jesus seemed much keener for his disciples to live deeply and fully, opening themselves up to the wild ways of the Spirit and subjugating all sorts of rules to the overarching principle called love.
Having said that, let us not pretend that morality has no place within the life of faith. It is not as if anything goes. Choices we make in life have consequences – even passive choices. But those outside the holy huddles will often accuse those inside of rank hypocrisy, suggesting that we do not live according to our principles, let alone live up to the life of Jesus. Remember these words attributed to Ghandi?
I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. The materialism of affluent Christian countries appears to contradict the claims of Jesus Christ that says it’s not possible to worship both Mammon and God at the same time.
Or these, which he wrote in his autobiography;
I heard of a well known Hindu having been converted to Christianity. It was the talk of the town that, when he was baptized, he had to eat beef and drink liquor, that he also had to change his clothes, and that thenceforth he began to go about in European costume including a hat. These things got on my nerves. Surely, thought I, a religion that compelled one to eat beef, drink liquor, and change one’s own clothes did not deserve the name. I also heard that the new convert had already begun abusing the religion of his ancestors, their customs and their country. All these things created in me a dislike for Christianity.
All of this starts for me to highlight the fact that although shaping our souls towards love may involve a constant processions of moral choices, morality itself should not be the starting point.
There was a story in The Guardian yesterday that made a rather different point about morality- suggesting that there might be an inverse relationship between highly developed ethical/moral belief and ethical/moral action. In other words, perhaps those who have rigid moral belief might be LESS likely to act on these beliefs.
Ethical philosophy isn’t the most scintillating of subjects, but it has its moments. Take, for example, the work of the US philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, who’s spent a large chunk of his career confirming the entertaining finding that ethicists aren’t very ethical. Ethics books, it turns out, are more likely to be stolen from libraries than other philosophy books. Ethics professors are more likely to believe that eating animals is wrong, but no less likely to eat meat. They’re also more likely to say giving to charity is a moral obligation, but they were less likely than other philosophers to return a questionnaire when researchers promised to donate to charity if they did. Back when the American Philosophical Association charged for some meetings using an honesty system, ethicists were no less likely to freeload.
One take on this is that ethicists are terrible hypocrites. As Schwitzgebel points out, that’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds: if philosophers were obliged to live by their findings, that might exert a “distortive pressure” on their work, tempting them to reach more self-indulgent conclusions about the moral life. (And there’s a case to be made, after all, that it’s better for people to preach the right thing but not practise it than to do neither.) But another possibility bears thinking about. It’s plausible to suggest that ethicists have an unusually strong sense of what’s right and wrong; that’s what they spend their days pondering, after all. What if their overdeveloped sense of morality – their confidence that they know what’s what, ethically speaking – makes them less likely to act ethically in real life?
Hmmm, what if our churches carry a similar kind of ethical corruption? Later the article describes something called “moral licensing”, the deep-seated human tendency that leaves us feeling entitled to do something bad because we’ve already done something good. It explains why people give up plastic bags, then feel justified in taking a long-haul flight, obliterating the carbon savings. It’s also why, if you give people a chance to condemn sexist statements, they’ll subsequently be more likely to favour hiring a man in a male-dominated profession.
How might this play out in our religion? A focus on those parts of us that are good so we can blind ourselves to those parts of us that are not? A compartmentalism that means we can live externally moral religious lives whilst compromising on some of the most basic ways of loving our neighbours.
One reaction to this (a very common one in our churches) is the call from the pulpit to be MORE moral. The call to purify, to get our moral codes sorted and organised. The degree to which this ever works is rather doubtful, to my mind at least. We are all of us a complex mess of aspiration and failure at the surface and subliminal levels; old sinful habits die hard in me.
What we need to do then, we followers of Jesus, is to return to trying to understand his relationship with morality. We have to remember that the moral leaders of his day clearly regarded him as immoral. He drank, he mixed with the unclean and ungodly, he broke religious rules, he disrupted churchyness, smashed up tables, upset good people and seemed to prefer low-lifes.
Morality was something to be challenged, to be tested, to be subjugated towards love. Morality was not to be seen as the goal, or the most valid measure, not even of righteousness.
I often talk to people who tell me that they struggle with poetry. It is as if someone contorted the language it was written in and mixed it into some other dialect- more rarefied, pretentious and elitist. Thinking about it, perhaps this is exactly what was done to it at school…
Perhaps too they have read the wrong poems. Or even never really read any at all. Or (even more significantly) they have never written any.
I too struggle with reading some poetry- this may be because it is never instant. Poems are all about the gift of slow reading- immersing yourself in the opaque ink bath, knowing that some stain will remain. Poetry is about feeling more than understanding. It needs time, and most of us have little patience for time.
Back to Norman McCaig. Here are two of his poems. Think of them as two love poems, at desperately different parts of life.
In which poem was love the strongest?
TRUE WAYS OF KNOWING
Not an ounce excessive, not an inch too little,
Our easy reciprocations. You let me know
The way a boat would feel, if it could feel,
The intimate support of water.
The news you bring me has been news forever,
So that I understand what a stone would say
If only a stone could speak. Is it sad a grassblade
Can’t know how it is lovely?
Is it sad that you can’t know, except by hearsay
(My gossiping failing words) that you are the way
A water is that can clench its palm and crumple
A boat’s confiding timbers?
But that’s excessive, and too little. Knowing
The way a circle would describe its roundness,
We touch two selves and feel, complete and gentle,
The intimate support of being.
The way that flight would feel a bird flying
(If it could feel) is the way a space that’s in
A stone that’s in water would know itself
If it had our way of knowing.
Visiting Hour
The hospital smell
combs my nostrils
as they go bobbing along
green and yellow corridors.
What seems a corpse
is trundled into a lift and vanishes
heavenward.
I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.
Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,
here and up and down and there,
their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths, their eyes
still clear after
so many farewells.
Ward 7. She lies
in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand
trembles on its stalk. Eyes move
behind eyelids too heavy
to raise. Into an arm wasted
of colour a glass fang is fixed,
not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me
distance shrinks till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I
can cross.
She smiles a little at this
black figure in her white cave
who clumsily rises
in the round swimming waves of a bell
and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,
not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.
One often cited description that Mandelbrot published to describe geometric fractals is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”;[2] this is generally helpful but limited. Authorities disagree on the exact definition of fractal, but most usually elaborate on the basic ideas of self-similarity and an unusual relationship with the space a fractal is embedded in.[2][3][4][6][29] One point agreed on is that fractal patterns are characterized by fractal dimensions, but whereas these numbers quantify complexity (i.e., changing detail with changing scale), they neither uniquely describe nor specify details of how to construct particular fractal patterns.
The first two pieces in this series are here and here.
We are just back from our monthly Aoradh ‘family day’. This is the closest we come to a ‘church service’ that we do regularly within Aoradh. It usually involves filling up one of our houses with people, then one of us will co-ordinate a period during which a selection of folk – kids and adults – will take turns to lead others through a song, a prayer, some meditation, a poem, a clip from you tube. It is simple, messy and lovely.
Then we eat together.
Today I was thinking about the distance I have travelled within the scope of what ‘church’ might mean. I was playing my guitar along with William and Rachel, and really enjoying it, because this is something I do fairly rarely these days.
There was a time when it was my whole life.
I was a ‘worship leader’ – one of those blokes (and they usually are blokes) who stand in front of people and whip up some spiritual fervour by the application of soft rock love songs to Jesus. I lived for those moments when the music took flight, and something kind of opened up. At such times, music was more than just notes. Performance became less about technique, and more about an attitude of humility and receptiveness.
But in the course of my journey from ‘organised’ church, other principles started to dominate the way I thought about worship. Primarily, I was convinced that the culture of ‘church’, with all its big and small liturgies, assumptions and traditions, easily came to be a black hole that swallowed people whole. It left us with no room for the other. It became about us, not about them. They were only important if they were willing to become like us. I was convinced that church should exist to send and to serve, not endlessly feed itself.
Our corporate worship was the same. It was all about music and preaching. Other ways if worshipping were not necessarily wrong (although some were guilty by association) but they were just not our thing. We knew what we liked and this was enough.
As I think about this now it is like a rainbow of only one colour. Still impressive, but monochrome.
It can also be so selfish, so self centred. Worship like this exists to make us feel good. The end we aim for is a spiritual/emotional high for us, dressed up in the clothes of adoration of the God that we make in our own image.
But I overstate my case. A monochrome rainbow can still be beautiful.
The word that came to sum up the change I was finding in my own aspirations in worship was this one;
Transcendence.
By which I mean the experience of God in the ordinary. The incarnation of the maker of the universe within the temporal, messy world in which we live and love.
Transcendent moments fill our lives if we look for them. And the more we attune ourselves to the looking the more we see.
They are everywhere in the natural world; sunsets, new leaves, mushrooms in caves, the lick of new born fur, the light of the moon on still water, the smell of rain on dry earth, the sea that goes on for ever. All these things will happen whether or not we are there as witnesses. But when we look in a certain kind of way a hollow space opens up in the middle of them into which we can meet with something transcendent. Into which we can invite/be invited by the living God.
They are everywhere too where humans also are. In conversations, in touch, in the longing for justice, in the decision to forgive, in the deciding to repay hurt with love, in the listening and in the laughing. Because God is a God of communion. God commands love, and love requires direction. Perhaps above all, the transcendent God is immanent when we come together in community.
They are encountered in art, because art can become a bridge to something beyond our business. Films, books, poems, paintings, sculptures, music.
They can even be encountered in church – for me, especially when we sing, when the chordal voices find the vault of the building and make it vibrate.
I had become so trapped in a view of God that was limited to one colour of the huge spectrum from ultaviolet to infra red and beyond, that I needed to go cold turkey. The guitar needed to go away for a while so I could hear the birds sing.
So I had some time to speak to people, with no agenda other than love.
So I could be creative, and make art in service of the Creator.
How about you? Where might your ordinary space become pregnant with the extraordinary, capricious, magnificent Living God?
It has been said that cricket was exported by the British Empire as a way of selling some kind of idea of ‘Britishness’- characterised by fair play, individual skills realised in a team context and adherence to rules. Cricket has moved on a long way since then- the seat of power has shifted firmly towards India, and there is a hard edged professionalism to the game.
However, the high drama of the international arena still has a way of throwing up controversies- there is a great test series being played between India and England at the moment- and yesterday one of the England players, who was batting brilliantly and playing his team into a potentially match winning position, found himself in the middle of a conflict with the laws of the game, and what cricketers still call ‘the spirit of the game’.
In case you are interested, this is what happened-
All very interesting if you are a cricket fan- but also, I think there is a useful theological parallel here. Much of the letters of Paul in the Bible constantly debate the primacy of the LAW as against the NEW KINGDOM- and the rule of love. More recently, this whole controversy has surfaced again with the discussions about what might happen to we sinners when we die (eg Rob Bell’s book ‘Love Wins’) and also all this discussion about homosexuality (see yesterday’s post.)
Our ‘modern’ interpretation of the law is characterised by an idea of inflexible, unyielding black and white rules, and whilst many who practice the law might suggest that this may well be an illusion, we assume that this is the kind of law making that God adheres to also.
But what if the universe has a higher court- not of law, but of principle- you could say the ‘spirit of the game’? What if ultimately, the rule of love will indeed overcome all- not to condemn the law, but to fulfill it. Not to ignore the law, but rather to dwell in the midst of the laws purpose?
this fragile tent 