A Few Thoughts on 'Beyond the Alps' by Robert Lowell

While many poets seem to have got their knickers in an unsavoury twist over royal shindig invitations, I (good republican that I am) have been thinking about Robert Lowell. More specifically about ‘Beyond the Alps’, which kicks off his most famous collection, Life Studies, and also the little Faber Selected Poems, edited by Michael Hofmann. I believe several versions of the poem exist, some with extra stanzas, but I’m going to stick to the one from the Hofmann Selected (two 14-line stanzas, one 12-line stanza and a final couplet). The poem isn’t online and I’m not going to reproduce it here (I can’t afford Faber’s copyright fees), so this post will continue a long line of Surroundings articles which have, at best, a limited audience. Given Lowell’s lack of popularity in the current climate, that audience may be almost nil, but not quite. This “not quite” is exactly what Surroundings is about and, I hope, it's a "not quite" that is set to grow.

Now, ‘Beyond the Alps’ is a fantastic poem. I love it! It concerns a train journey from Rome to Paris through the Alps, with various diversions – the failure of a Swiss group to climb Everest, the train stewards (from the restaurant carriage?) who, amazingly, go “forward on tiptoe banging on their gongs”, a “skirt-mad Mussolini”, and the Pope’s purring electric razor and pet canary. The poem is about Catholic faith, perhaps the loss of it or at least a distancing from its orthodoxy. The train moves off from Rome and heads into the mountains and, as it leaves the Alps and comes back to ground-level, each stark peak begins to resemble a “fire-branded socket of the Cyclop’s eye.” The landscape, where we might expect woolly snow, feels more like a barren burned-out desert: clearly also a psychological state. One of the main arguments concerns the ambiguous closing couplet:

Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up
like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

I stared at this for a little while, as it seemed a curious way to end. It contains the virtue of surprise, but also evades any sense of closure. Or, even if “closure” isn’t desirable, the couplet asks more questions than it answers and not all the questions stem from what’s happened previously in the poem. There is debate on this online in the New York Review of Books – Jonathan Raban and Edwin Franks debating with James Fenton. The debate sheds some light on the poem, I think. The reference to the Etruscans must have to do with a great civilisation, vastly influential in its cultural milieu, which nevertheless disappeared and left behind no literature and whose geographical power collapsed completely. The killer kings have themselves been killed by events, time, shifts of culture and power. Paris feels the same to Lowell. His world-view is disintegrating as he nears the city and he seems himself in it or, perhaps sees himself as it.

Paris would be black, as Raban and Frank suggest, because it would have seemed grimy at the time compared to Rome. However, why “our black classic” is the real question, as Fenton says. If something is “classic”, it is untouchable. It has status, accorded by the influential. A ‘Penguin Classic’ (Morrissey aside) or a “classic album” is such because it has been ‘canonized’ by those who have the power to make such decisions. Paris has that canonical quality. It is a great, iconic city. It is a “classic”, but a sooty, tarnished classic here. It mirrors Lowell’s internal crisis of faith, dramatized within the poem by the Pope (expressly exercising papal infallibility) making the Assumption of the Virgin Mary a dogma in 1950, the idea that Mary was bodily taken up into heaven at the end of her life:

The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
to Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird!
But who believed this? Who could understand?

Lowell’s loss of faith in strict Catholic dogma has led him to a city breaking up before his eyes, a city beyond the Alps where gods once held sway. It is a poem that still resonates in the shattered cities, physical and psychological, of 2013.

A Politically Correct Nativity

Joseph and Mary, in strict alphabetical order, which does not in any way imply that earlier letters are superior to those which turn up later in the alphabet or vice-versa, were on their way to Bethlehem, a small town in an area today known as the Holy Land, also known as the Non-Denominational Land, which includes all those who prefer through choice not to belong to any particular denomination. Moreover, we acknowledge that this is a positive choice as opposed to a failure to consider fully which particular religious or secular system or any other system of any description happens to suit them.

Mary and Joseph, this time in order of age at the time of travelling – remembering that ageism is wrong and that if a three-year-old proved able and willing to do the job of an atomic physicist, that’s OK – were going to Bethlehem because Augustus, democratically-elected Enabler of the People, had suggested that, if people were so-minded without any coercion on his part, there would be a census; a census that asked no invasive personal questions and gave full protection under current privacy and civil liberties regulations, which are fine as they go but are always open to suggestions for improvement.

Joseph and Mary – in order as their names appeared when written on rubber balls, spun around in a machine and drawn by electronic means live on BBC television with an independent arbiter present at all times in a manner acceptable to the International Code of Ethics and Fairness, directive 5/1.237 – were promised in marriage to one another. Marriage was not the only solution for them to work towards the aims and goals set out in their pre-birth, ideology-free mission statement, nor are religion, politics, gender, love, attraction, faithfulness, compatibility, or a shared interest in the scientific preservation of corn in tin ever relevant in discussion of marriage or its equal and entirely acceptable alternatives. Staying single, through choice or necessity, is also an equally valid lifestyle and we aim to affirm those lifestyles and all variations thereupon. A recently excavated document whose complete historical authenticity is maintained by formerly down-on-his-luck and now best-selling author, Bran Down, suggests that the ‘couple’ were in fact known to one another only through social networking opportunities and travelled virtually as tenuously-linked avatars.

Mary and Joseph – in the order necessary to balance up the ‘Joseph and Mary/Mary and Joseph’ thing, as we are committed to equal opportunities for all men and women and women and men, no matter what gender the men and women and women and men are or claim to be – travelled to Bethlehem and were in possession of the correct license and necessary permissions as recorded under the Freedom of Movement Act, section 4, part 3 sub-section 759. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the time came for Mary to have a baby. It would have been equally acceptable for Joseph to have had the baby or indeed for any other man or woman present in the town or other towns without reference to age, race, gender or other arbitrary measures of suitability, to have had the same baby.

There was no room at the inn, so Mary gave birth to the a baby in a stable, which had undergone the relevant health and safety checks as required under the Health Act of a non-specific year; non-specific to avoid offending individuals who prefer their own methods of calculating time, space and distance and who alone know where and when they are in relation to everything else. And that’s OK... We aim to meet the academic and emotional needs of anyone who evidences a challenging way of life. The stable’s work surfaces, appliances and hygiene were deemed to be of an acceptable standard, and a fire inspection and drill also took place several times during the labour.

A son was born, although it could have been a daughter or perhaps neither or both, and in no sense implies preference for one gender over another or any difference between genders. The child was wrapped in strips of cloth, and a social worker was appointed due to concerns over the parents’ inability to provide generally accepted accoutrements necessary in today’s competitive childcare market. A contract of care was agreed between the family and the Department of Community Education committing the parents to attend Government-sponsored parenting classes over a fifteen month period.

Angels appeared and sang a joyful song, although this part of the story has now been recognised as unacceptable to tone-deaf, depressed creatures without wings or halos. The term, ‘angels’, has been replaced in the story’s most recent editions with ‘journalists’ and the over-emotional reactions have become tabloid headlines which, as ever, maintain a careful neutrality in all matters. The music is now handled by the X Factor crew, featuring Little Mix's live concept album of Leonard Cohen covers.

The journalists soon left the couple and child to pass their days making sure they didn't get on the wrong side of anybody. At one point, the son, aged 12, got ideas above his station, but parents and child created a mutual agreement in which they agreed to tow the prevailing line, whatever that was at any given moment. They regularly visited the non-denominational and/or secular temple, in which all religious and/or humanist symbols were banned, and sat between the whitewashed and blackwashed walls thinking about nothing much until it was time to go home again. No one knew how it was all going to pan out.

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(photo from the photoscreen of Klearchos Kapoutsis, used under a Creative Commons License)

Harold Camping and the Non-Rapture

Apparently, a few people in California have been saying that the world is going to end today. Why this should be a source of endless chatter on Facebook and other social networking sites is beyond me. After all, if I said that the world was going to end next week and produced a bizarre calculation based on various biblical texts to prove it (easy enough to do, believe me), my friends might have their concerns for me and my employers might perform some kind of sanity assessment, but no one else would pay a blind bit of notice. So why all the attention for Harold Camping, a man who has already got the rapture date wrong once (he last predicted it would come in 1994)?

Apparently he runs a radio station, which reaches millions of people. He has also spent more than $100 million on an advertising campaign, warning people that the end is nigh. When you put that much money where your mouth is, I suppose people do take notice, if only to throw stones. Money gets attention.

One item of false information I’d like to correct is that Camping has predicted that Christians will all rise to be with God on this date, about 200 million throughout the world. In fact, Camping has condemned all mainline Christian churches and all who attend them as apostate. He doesn’t accept that the vast majority of Christians are true believers at all and the number of people he expects to rise is very small indeed. He has nothing to do with mainstream Christianity. In fact, he is hostile towards it.

He has achieved massive publicity for his campaign. I wonder what the fall-out will be: those mixed-up people who have fallen under his influence who now find themselves alive and well after his latest staged “rapture”. The reaction of some has been to laugh at them. I'm not laughing...

The Suspended Bishop and the Royal Wedding

I know this is now old news, but I’ve been concerned about the fate of Pete Broadbent, the Church of England bishop who criticized, on Facebook, the forthcoming royal wedding. The BBC reported that he was suspended from his post, even though he had apologised for the tone he had used and for any hurt he had caused by the content of his remarks.

This seems all wrong to me. First of all, I know that, technically, the Queen is head of the Church of England, but that’s a historical accident. I don’t know any Anglicans who don’t believe that Jesus is the ‘head’ of their church. The Queen is head as a constitutional, legal arrangement. Secondly, Anglicans, even bishops, have a right to freedom of opinion on any matters outside the fundamental substance of the Christian faith (e.g. crucifixion, Trinity, resurrection etc), so republican views are not at all unacceptable.

Add to this what he actually said. Stating that the marriage would be over within seven years was a bit silly – how would he know? He could be right or wrong, but there’s no logical reason to suggest this. However, also, according to the BBC report at the link above, he said that:

'Marriages should be about family, not “some piece of national flim-flam paid for out of our taxes, for a couple whose lives are going to be persecuted and spoilt by an ignorant media”. He criticised the monarchy for a history of broken marriages and a "corrupt and sexist" hereditary principle, before going on to attack the "gutter press" for "persecuting" the Royal Family.'

So he attacked the media! No surprise that the gutter press have made so much of it. What is really pathetic though is the way the church has so easily caved in to media pressure and hasn’t vocally supported Mr Broadbent on some of his points, such as the way the media act around celebrity and royalty, and for the appalling effect such media obsessions have had on our lives and culture. The church has kept quiet on this and has suspended the bishop, someone whose contribution in all kinds of important matters it had previously valued a great deal (or he wouldn’t have been appointed as a bishop in the first place). Richard Chartres, bishop of London, said he was “appalled” at Mr Broadbent’s remarks. I am appalled that the church appointed a sham trial and judged it according to the rules of media circus.

The Papal Tour

In the next hour or two, the Pope will pass within a few hundred metres of my house. I’m staying well away. I am no fan of Ratzinger/Benedict. As a highly intelligent young man, he was one of the architects of Vatican II which sought to change both the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church for the better. A few years later he must have had some kind of unfortunate ‘conversion’ experience because he has spent his life since trying to reverse everything that Vatican II might have achieved.

To an extent, he is more transparent that Pope John Paul II. JP II was an arch-conservative, but he was good with the public, so people tended to overlook the rigidity of his views. Benedict hasn’t a PR bone in his body, so what you see is what you get. On the other hand, JP II was very probably a compassionate, decent man in practice, despite his increasingly dogmatic views. Words like ‘calculating’, ‘ambitious’, ‘two-faced’ and ‘downright nasty’ could never have been fairly applied to him, but they don’t seem inappropriate for Benedict. It is shocking, of course, that someone who is supposed to represent Jesus might be associated with such words, but there is plenty of historical precedent for it.

On the ground, I am a committed ecumenist. It’s important to overlook the idiocy of leaders. Just as Americans were not all George W. Bush, so not all Roman Catholics, priests, and bishops are Pope Benedict. I don’t have any problem with him visiting the UK and couldn’t care less whether it’s counted as a state visit or not. The UK Government entertains many even more unsavoury characters, and my taxes pay for them whether I like it or not. But I do wish the RC Church would take a liberal turn in the near future, after Benedict has gone. Leonardo Boff, liberation theologian who was a thorn in the Vatican's side for many years (and has now left the RC Church), wrote on Ratzinger's accession to Pope in April 2005 - "I believe in miracles. Let's hope Benedict XVI becomes again the theologian I used to respect, who elicited hope, not fear." Sadly, the miracle hasn't happened yet...

Anyway, this is the poem I wrote the day Ratzinger was elected Pope, published in the now unavailable The Clown of Natural Sorrow:

THE INVITATION

The bell tolls. I slop my hair in shampoo.
On the radio Ratzinger breathes Latin like a bell
tolling. The letterbox clicks like a book snapped

shut. Blessed art thou, mother of God. An envelope
greys the welcome rug, the scrape of my name
in fading ink. Abortion a grave and sinful

mistake. Kate’s sloping script. ‘Papa Ratzi,’ a DJ sniggers
at his own wit. The time and date for the funeral,
the child’s name. Last scraps of Catholic hope. No

flowers. Donations to the hospital please. I shape my hair
with wax. Bells and smoke. The umbilical rope round
the tiny neck. The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope.

Give Thanks and Go West

Henry Smith wrote ‘Give thanks with a Grateful Heart’ and published it in 1978, although it didn’t become a staple in Christian worship until after 1986 when it was recorded by Don Moen. Here it is, a fairly soporific version by the Maranatha singers (couldn't find a decent version of it on YouTube), but the similarity to another song is obvious:



In 1979, the Village People released ‘Go West’, more than a year after Smith’s worship song. I wonder if Smith was paid anything for it, as the similarities in the choruses are immediately striking:



The irony is that most people probably think the worship song was filched from the Village People. On some Internet sites, ‘Give Thanks’ is dated as 1986, but that was the Don Moen album release date. It was definitely first published and recorded in 1978 and I have the music in front of me to prove it. Not that I’d want a legal action against the Village People or whoever wrote ‘Go West’ because the VP appear to me to be having a great time in this video.

Dryden: Religio Laici

To conclude my brief series on Dryden, here’s Religio Laici. My Selected Poems only has an extract from this of the first 167 lines. The poem is essentially an argument for Religion over Reason. It was, I suspect, quite a counter-cultural poem. It was the Age of Reason and the Church of England was spending (wasting?) a great deal of its time in dialogue with a rapidly changing culture and felt the need to show how religious truths could be proved by human reason. Dryden wasn’t impressed by this:

Dim, as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wand'ring travellers,
Is reason to the soul; and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those nightly tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere
So pale grows reason at religion's sight;
So dies, and so dissolves in supernatural light

When I first read this, I assumed this was a conservative stance. He is, after all, defending religion against the claims of human knowledge, and there is, clearly, a conservative strain in his ideas. However, in doing so, he was arguing against the accepted mode of thinking in his day, even within the church. So Dryden is both conservative and radical and the poem may have been an attempt to find out what he really thought rather than a setting-down of prior certainties. Many people write poetry to find out what they think - it's as good a reason as any. These days, when I hear of an anti-Christianity book or poem being described as ‘radical’ or ‘daring’ or even (laughably) ‘blasphemous’, I wonder why a stance that accords perfectly with contemporary intellectual/media opinion is considered at all radical. Today, it is far more radical to offer intelligent reflections that stem from belief in God, however tenuous or questioning, than from disbelief.

In any case, those opening lines offer a superb extended metaphor and you don’t need to agree with Dryden’s conclusions to appreciate that. Dryden’s couplets often constitute complete phrases, so when he uses enjambment (i.e. when one line spills over into the next without a syntactical break), you really notice it. Here, he delays ‘Is reason to the soul’ until the third line after the slow second line, which gives the clincher maximum impact. There’s a lot for contemporary poets to learn from Dryden, and the clever manipulation of syntax would be one area worth taking a close look at.

Dryden had his own assumptions, probably held without much question. For example, on the subject of the Bible, he writes:

Whence, but from Heav'n, could men unskill'd in arts,
In several ages born, in several parts,
Weave such agreeing truths?

I know some people can still talk away more or less every set of contradictory verses in the Bible, but I prefer to live with the contradictions and find them fruitful to explore. That is, in itself, a way of thinking popular with my era, as I’m well aware. We all live with assumptions, consciously and unconsciously, and may be confronted with them in reading Dryden’s poem. That’s got to be a good thing.

The Scott Rennie Case

I took a bus into Edinburgh’s city centre and managed to get in to see the debate over Scott Rennie live at the General Assembly. The public gallery and the video-link hall were both packed full. The debate lasted four hours and was (mostly) of a high standard, I thought. It was a court case carried out without public broadcasting cameras, so I don't want to go into detail on speeches. Kirk votes to back gay minister, says the BBC headline – and it did, by 326 votes to 267. Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church and the ratification by Aberdeen Presbytery have been upheld. I don’t know Scott, but I’m glad for him and wish him well. It was the right decision.

But the motion passed was more complex than the BBC make it appear. The motion recognised that the church has not yet expressed a clear-cut view on matters of homosexuality and ministry, and the decision on Scott Rennie was expressly stated not to prejudice that debate, which was originally to take place afterwards tonight in terms of the motion issued by Lochcarron & Skye Presbytery:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

However, due to the initial court case taking so long, it’s been postponed until Monday at 4pm.

In other words, the Church of Scotland General Assembly has decided that, under existing church legislation, the Presbytery of Aberdeen acted properly in upholding Scott Rennie’s call to Queen’s Cross Church. However, if the Overture issued by Lochcarron & Skye is passed on Monday, people engaged in sexual relationships, outside marriage between a man and woman, won’t be allowed to take up office as church ministers (in the future). So more or less everything is still at stake.

Live From The General Assembly

Those interested in following the Scott Rennie case at the Church of Scotland General Assembly (whether he, as a practising gay man, can retain his post as minister of Queen’s Cross Church) and the subsequent debate on sexuality, can watch it live from just after 6.30pm tonight. Whether it will be an edifying spectacle remains to be seen…

The BBC Report at the link states that "more than 400 Kirk ministers and almost 5,000 Church of Scotland members are said to have signed an online petition opposing the appointment." That 400 includes many retired ministers, and the 5,000 members belong to a Church denomination of over 600,000 members.

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Hmmm. I just read in today's Scotsman newspaper that the Church has chosen not to show this particular debate on its live stream because "the Assembly is meeting as a court." Well it's true that, in Scotland, the proceedings of a court can't be televised. I can see the reasons why court proceedings ought to be held in private.

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Latest news from the Church of Scotland website:

"Referred case: On Saturday evening the General Assembly will be exercising judicial functions, and like other British courts do not broadcast these publicly. Therefore there will be no webcast or Twitter updates of the Referred Case.

The webcast broadcast will re-commence with the beginning of the Overture from the Presbytery of Lochcarron-Skye. The timing of this event will be dependant on the length of the preceding material. We will annouce the re-starting of the webcast on Twitter on the General Assembly Updates page."

I guess this might read like double-dutch. Basically, the 'referred case' is a complaint made by certain individuals from the Presbytery of Aberdeen who feel that the Presbytery acted improperly in allowing Queens Cross Church to call Scott Rennie to be their minister. This is the court case, and will be in private.

However, the Lochcarron-Skye overture will debate the issue of whether churches will be able to call ministers in a gay relationship (or indeed in any sexual relationship outside of heterosexual marriage). The overture states:

“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, readmit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of marriage between a man and a woman.”

That debate will be live on the stream, using the link above. I suspect the outcome will be to delay having to make a decision for a few years...

Gay Clergy

There’s a fair bit of concern over the latest controversy to hit the Church of Scotland – the issue whether Scott Rennie, an openly gay minister, should be allowed to take up his new post at Queens Cross Parish Church in Aberdeen. Will it split the church? The Scottish Kirk, while it has made mistakes in the past (who hasn’t?), has generally been fairly liberal and inclusive. The identity of that church is up for grabs. Those who want the church to operate on a narrow theological basis and exclude those who commit specific sins they particularly disapprove of are making their push. On Saturday 23rd May, the Church’s General Assembly (top decision-making body) will debate the matter.

But more than that, this controversy is about a person. Scott Rennie was minister of Brechin Cathedral for nine years. For several of these years, he has been in an openly gay relationship, and no one thought to protest. By all accounts, he was good at his job and well liked by everyone. He applied for the post at Queen’s Cross and was accepted in a vote by a healthy 86% of the congregation there. The Presbytery of Aberdeen sustained the appointment by 60 votes to 24. The petition to the General Assembly seeks to overturn these decisions. If carried, it will, in effect, exclude gay clergy from applying for church-minister posts. They will either have to conceal their relationships and live a lie, remain celibate for their entire lives, or give up their vocation.

The stress Scott already has gone through must have been considerable. If the petition to the General Assembly is passed, it will leave him not only without a job but with the sense that he, as an individual, has been rejected by the very organisation he has given so much of his life to. The human cost of all this appears irrelevant to those opposing him. Truth, they say, is more important than any sense of compassion for a human being. They mean their sense of truth, of course, their prejudices and fears, their opinions. They claim the Bible is ‘clear on these matters’ but it is clear only to them. The Bible suggests that menstruating women should be placed outside the camp for a number of days. It also says that people should not eat meat with blood in it. I presume that people who profess to take the Bible literally take those commands to heart as well!

The passages that are often cited from the New Testament concerning sexual practice are deeply ambiguous. Their exact meaning is unclear and the context even less clear. In some cases, it’s unlikely that they refer to homosexuality at all. In other cases, they certainly don’t refer to committed, loving relationships. Rather than living with ambiguity, fundamentalists always want to nail things down, which always means (somewhat ironically) nailing down anyone who gets in their way.

It’s intriguing, to say the least, that Jesus himself had nothing to say on the matter. Clearly, he didn’t consider the issue important enough to pronounce on, which simply begs the question why the matter has become of such central importance for the conservative wing of the church. Why this ’sin’ as opposed to all the others? The fundamentalist wing of the church seems strangely obsessed with it. Why? And why get so hot and bothered over what people do in the privacy of their bedrooms and, simultaneously, remain virtually silent on the fact that two-thirds of the world’s population live in poverty, that millions of children die every year of easily cured diseases like diarrhoea? Aren’t these sins more worth getting obsessed about?

The truth is that, while fundamentalists claim their liberal colleagues are ‘selective’ over which verses of the Bible they choose to take account of, the fundamentalists are every bit as selective, if not more so. The difference is that they are blind to their own prejudices. They don’t even realise it. That’s what makes them impossible to argue with. I only hope the General Assembly sees sense on 23rd May and allows Scott Rennie to take up his post and – in doing that – stands up for an inclusive church and an inclusive Scotland. I have a degree of confidence that they will indeed do that and I hope my confidence is not misplaced.

There is a Facebook Cause Group which you can join in support of Scott Rennie.

And this is an interesting and personal reflection by Stephen Glenn on the subject of church and sexuality.

Zagajewski on Religious Poetry

Fascinating interview with Adam Zagajewski (who I mentioned in my previous post on Adam Kirsch’s criticism) at the Poetry Foundation site. The whole article is worth reading, but I found the section on how religious/spiritual poems might be written in the 21st century particularly interesting.

Milosz once said that “we are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a conversation with Pope John Paul II, who commented upon Milosz’s work, saying, “Well, you make one step forward, one step back.” Milosz replied, “Holy Father, how in the 20th century can one write religious poetry differently?”

Zagajewski concurred: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from ‘professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”

His view is a counterpoint to the current fashion of irony, which he decries. “I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus, but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance,” he said. “How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small, but it’s my space.”

Most contemporary openly-religious poetry I have read has been terrible. Perhaps that's because the writers take two steps forward rather than one back? Perhaps because the poems outline something already discovered rather than their language contributing to an ongoing discovery process? Perhaps because they haven't found that space between irony and fundamentalism (much easier to jump to one or the other)? I think Zagajewski is onto something.

Salman Rushdie Knighthood

It seems as though the Pakistan and Iran governments are upset over the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. Iran claims the knighthood reveals an Islamophobia among British officials. A Pakistani governmental minister said that “if someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honour of the Prophet Mohammad, his act is justified.” Now, that’s the sort of statement that really could lead to “Islamophobia,” but I don’t envisage the Iranian Government condemning it any time soon.

However, Laila Lalami no doubt speaks for the majority of Muslims. At least, I hope so.

This might be a good time for the Governments of Pakistan and Iran to consider giving their minority Christian populations full equal rights. I mean, if these governments demand consideration for their own feelings, they should show a similar consideration for those groups they currently oppress and, every so often, persecute. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

God and Christopher

I haven’t read Christopher Hitchens’s book – yet another book attempting to discredit religion and argue that there is no God (is anyone bored yet?) – but I did enjoy John Crace’s treatment of it in The Digested Read. Very funny!

'The purpose of this book is not to prove God doesn't exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.'

Heh heh.

From Islam to Christianity

A couple of days ago, Malaysia’s highest court rejected Lina Joy’s appeal to have her conversion from Islam to Christianity recognised and to remove the word “Islam” from her identity card. It decided that only the Muslim Sharia court could recognise such conversions, but under Sharia law, conversion is illegal.

Outside the court, 200 protestors shouted “"Allah-o-Akbar" (God is great) when the ruling was announced. "You can't at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another," said Malaysia’s Chief Judge, Ahmad Fairuz. However, it’s now six years since Loy changed her religious affiliation – hardly whim and fancy. She has had death threats, as has a Muslim lawyer who took on her case.

It’s similar to the case of Maria, who is so afraid of her Christian identity being discovered that she kept it a secret, except that her family were demanding her Christian boyfriend convert to Islam before they got married.

I understand these stories demonstrate the tensions that exist within a country, nominally a secular state, where one religion, Islam, is determined to hold onto, and increase, its power. People like Lina and Maria are pawns in the game.

But it does seem weird. Lina is not a Muslim. She has converted to Christianity. However, as long as the courts continue to maintain that she is Muslim on paper, people chant slogans, and are euphoric that she has not been allowed to convert. It’s as though these people are more interested in making her life as miserable as possible than in winning the battle for her soul.

Scotland Revisited

Brian Johnstone, director of the StAnza festival has blogged about Alastair Reid’s Scotland poem.

It’s a good article. I like the quote from Alasdair Gray, "work as if you were living in the early days of a better nation", itself a quote from Canadian poet Dennis Lee. Although I don't think I want to be quite as "free of it" (i.e. the attitude of the poem) as Alastair Reid and Brian Johnstone do.

The other day, I was in a car. One woman said, "It's such a beautiful day." The guy beside her, who was certainly no Calvinist in a religious sense, replied, "Ach, by next week it'll likely be snowing." Anyway, I turned round, gestured to the sky and said, "Yes, we'll pay for it!" and they all laughed.

Chocolate Jesus Cancelled

The “chocolate Jesus” exhibit has been cancelled from the art show due to open on 2 April at a New York gallery.

The gallery’s artistic director, Mark Semler, said the decision to cancel was a result of "strong-arming from people who haven't seen the show, seen what we're doing.” I wish he’d taken the decision to explain what they were doing rather than simply cancelling (although I don’t think the cancellation will be of any great loss to art history).

However when he says that “the timing of the exhibition - when Christians mark the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ - was coincidental,” he really has to be kidding!

He didn’t realise it was Holy Week? He forgot? I wish people would at least be honest… Is that too much to ask?

But I'm equally dis-satisfied with the attitude of the Catholic League. Their spokeswoman says:

"They would never dare do something similar with a chocolate statue of the Prophet Mohammed naked with his genitals exposed during Ramadan."

True enough. But if the issue is the showing of genitals, then they have no grounds for objection. Criminals were crucified naked, without a loincloth. One of the main theological motifs of the crucifixion is its offence - the symbol of a humiliated God who was stripped of all dignity and still died forgiving. The loincloth is a symbol of human inability to face up to that.

Chocolate Jesus

Artist, Cosimo Caravallo, has created a life-size crucified naked Jesus
made from chocolate, titled My Sweet Lord. It’s to be exhibited from 2 April in the Lab Gallery at the Roger Smith Hotel in New York.

The sculpture has attracted criticism, both from critics and from religious groups such as the Catholic League, which has called for a boycott of the gallery and hotel.

It’s unclear to me precisely what the Catholic League find offensive, even after reading their website. It might be that Jesus is naked on the cross, without a loincloth, but this is historically accurate. The humiliation of nakedness was part of the punishment.

It could be that the League views the very idea of a chocolate Jesus artwork as offensive in itself, but why that should be is hard to explain. Trivial and stupid perhaps, but not offensive.

Apparently Caravallo has invited members of the public to eat the statue at a certain point, but this invitation has only recently been made and can’t be the reason for objection.

The exhibition has been timed to open during Holy Week, which is an obvious provocation. I suppose it makes me suspect the motives of the artist. It looks like a cheap shot at publicity. He no doubt hopes that shock value might get more people through the gallery doors and get him in the public eye. I don’t find that kind of thing offensive, only pathetic.

The gallery’s Creative Director Matt Semler says, ''The sign of any great artist is how their work affects the observer." It’s that word “how” that’s the key. If it merely offends people’s beliefs, or if it gives viewers the impression of a publicity stunt, I don’t how that’s any sign of a great work of art.

So what is the point of it? I guess ideas like society's over-indulgence, faith (or perhaps postmodern art? heh heh) as transient commodity, religion as a sugar-coated pill etc might be banded about as giving meaning to the piece. But such labels are just psuedo-intellectual commentary. Looking at the picture at the link, and trying to imagine it real-size, I can’t say it says much to me.

NUNS

It’s Lent, a time when Christians are supposed to practice self-denial and everyone else looks on, or not, with bemusement. But Aisha requests that we join in with NUNS – No Unnecessary Needless Shopping – until Easter Sunday on 8 April. I’ve had to exempt tickets for StAnza events (not much point being at a poetry festival and not going to anything), but other than that, I’ve signed up.

Bible Scholar Me

Well, here’s a surprise.

You know the Bible 100%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

Complete nonsense of course...

But courtesy of Terminal Chaosity, here’s a much wittier quiz from Dan Halberstein.

God, the Via Negativa, and Beyond

Todd Swift, of Eyewear, makes some very interesting observations about being in search of God.

Most dialogue about God at the moment is on the basis that God, if he/she exists, should answer our questions and conform to our methods of exploration. And if he/she doesn’t, then the Deity must either be a human delusion or simply (and for some, sadly) inaccessible to those who can’t ‘make themselves’ have faith. Questions are then aimed at those expressing faith, questions which originate with these assumptions.

But Eyewear takes a different approach to faith:

God is the despite, is the still, is the just about, is the almost - may even be simply the perhaps, or it could be. God is the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone. As such, it is a via negativa, and one's faith can only be fully sounded when the instrument one plays is beyond need, is denuded of the self - when one mourns not for one's own self, but for a greater love of another.

This made me think of a passage from one of the letters that theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, wrote from the Tegel prison in Berlin in 1944 before being sent to Buchenwald and then Flossenberg, where he was hanged for his involvement in the bomb plot to kill Hitler. Bonhoeffer tried to find a way of expressing faith in an inhuman time, and the instrument he is playing is certainly “beyond need”:

Religious people speak of God when human perception is (often just from laziness) at an end, or human resources fail: it is in fact always the Deus ex machina they call to their aid, either for the so-called solving of insoluble problems or as support in human failure – always, that is to say, helping out human weakness or on the borders of human existence.

Of necessity, that can only go on until men can, by their own strength, push these borders a little further, so that God becomes superfluous as a Deus ex machina. I have come to be doubtful even about talking of “borders of human existence.”

Is even death today, since men are scarcely afraid of it any more, and sin, which they scarcely understand any more, still a genuine borderline? It always seems to me that in talking thus we are only seeking frantically to make room for God. I should like to speak of God not on the borders of life but at its centre, not in weakness but in strength, not, therefore, in man’s suffering and death, but in his life and prosperity.

On the borders it seems to me better to hold our peace and leave the problem unsolved. Belief in the resurrection is not the solution of the problem of death. The “beyond” of God is not the beyond of our perceptive facilities. Epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is the “beyond” in the midst of our life.

And it’s worth remembering what “life” he is placing God in the midst of. In that existence, God is also, I think, “the despite, the still, the just about, the almost… the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone.”