Loving my neighbour like myself

With my great churches

And my wealth

With his hunger

Hating the sin and loving the sinner

With my cruel words

And my punches

With his innocence

Being the Good Samaritan

With my suburban home

And my salary

With his poverty

Goodbye love

Goodbye sin

Goodbye Samaritan

With his death

Tagged: poetry, original, christianity, church, samaritan, love, sin, wilshere.

Labels: poetry

Just a quick post to let you know you can listen again to the Ascension Day service broadcast on Radio 4 tonight, in which my friend was the soloist (in the Mozart). We had our Ascension Day Mass tonight too, which went quite nicely: we did the Josquin Missa Pange Lingua, some Victoria and some Palestrina.

Update

By the way, I particularly commend Jeffrey John's sermon to you — about humanity and theosis — and celebrating our own and each other's humanity. Particularly resonant in light of Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine...

Tagged: radio4, radiofour, ascension, ascensionday, victoria, palestrina, josquin, music, choral, choir, soloist, stmartininthefields, jeffreyjohn, nicolamills, gracejantzen, theosis, christianity.

• Further to the Guardian obit, The Globe and Mail also carry a testimonial for theologian Grace Jantzen. Tagged: jantzen, gracejantzen, obituary.

Do you feel like a remnant

Of something that's past?

Do you find things are moving

Just a little too fast?

Do you hope to find new ways

Of quenching your thirst?

Do you hope to find new ways

Of doing better than your worst?

— Nick Drake, from 'Hazey Jane I', Way To Blue

It's a May afternoon and sunshine is occasionally interrupting my anticipation of the imminent downpour which the weatherman promised. Ephemeral clouds drift across the blue sky and it occurs to me that it is the tiniest and most fragile of margins which separates shade from shine; an inch of wind here or there that distinguishes a Nice Day from Not A Very Nice Day. It's a May afternoon, and who's to say it's different from any other.

I can't believe twelve months have elapsed since I finished my degree, and in a way I'm disappointed that I took this term off because now I feel like I haven't achieved anything all year, and it makes me call into question why I'm studying further in the first place, why people really do research, whether it's a worthwhile thing to be involved in, and so on. Recalling, and broadly agreeing with, Tom Coates' warning about doctoral research, and (ironically) considering Pierre Bourdieu's (1984/1988) study Homo Academicus, which problematises the place of education in the legitimation and reinforcement of the social structure, it is quite right to be sceptical about how much 'good' can be done in universities. Anyone who's spent time as a student in a department with eminent professors will be familiar with the double-edged sword of academics muddling in the ivory tower, and (particularly humanities) students doting on an ill-conceived and uncritical cult of personality. Nevertheless, university research does offer opportunities to conduct research that can be transformative: but if anyone wants to change the world through it, the only sensible conclusion seems to me that academic work is something valuable, but which must ultimately be moved beyond and put to use.

Highly politicised academic greats of the twentieth century, such as Adorno, Derrida, and indeed Bourdieu, as well as a good number of contemporary theologians, struggle/d to make the leap of faith from the Academy and into the world and as a result their theories suffer/ed from criticisms aimed at their lack of political action. When universities started expanding around the time of the Reformation, it was assumed that the Academy was and should be a focus for political activity; these days, academics who make a similar move into the world of political action — by writing more populist books, by appearing on television, by undertaking advocacy campaigns, by engaging with government — are often, it seems to me, looked down on as being less-than-academic and for undermining the esoteric isolationism which many university staff revel in, and, at the end of the day, allows them to take home a pretty comfortable salary and enjoy an excellent social life.

Tagged: university, academia, academy, bourdieu, adorno, philosophy, homoacademicus, politics, research, political, distinction, theology, theologian.

• If you're interested in reading the full text of the CULF report, 'Faithful Cities,' you don't need to fork out £10 for the privilege of reading the book. The complete report is available for download from the CULF website in PDF format. Tagged: church, churchofengland, culf, cuf, churchurbanfund, urban, cities, faithfulcities, report.

Just got in from performing at the Chorlton Arts Festival here in Manchester — a concert of madrigals, motets, and a bit of light music held in Manchester Road Methodist Church (pictured above). Went to the pub afterwards and, as seems to happen so often, a social situation forces you to put your muddled thoughts and concerns into some kind of coherent speech with a beginning, an end, and a central message, and hence crystallises in your own mind a sentiment, and narrates back to you a rationale, which could never have emerged had you not stepped into the encounter of That Conversation.

My outlook on the professional music scene (and the professional church music circuit in particular) is pretty cynical, I suppose. So many top musicians are so completely inaccessible, their performances so deliberately elite, their manner so isolating, that it is easy to lose faith in the richness of the music they present and fall into the trap of dismissing all composition since 1600 as bourgeois nonsense, written and performed to reinforce social norms. For this, I feel professional musicians must take responsibility and try to reform their own outlooks along more humanitarian lines. Compositions have a dignity independent of performance and sometimes professional irreverence for the piece-as-composed obscures what music has the power to do.

It is for this reason, I believe, that Franz Rosenzweig declares, "The heinous aspect of music is that it disintegrates real time with ideal times in its desire to be pure," and that, by making "the transition from concert hall to church" music "alights from the artificial frame of its ideal time and becomes wholly alive, for it is grafted onto the rich-sapped trunk of real time." (Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption)

Church musicians, however, can be the worst of the lot for being snooty, elitist, unapproachable, and inhuman. I have experienced this with our own cathedral here in Manchester. Former RSCM Director Lionel Dakers stated in his 1970 book Church Music at the Crossroads that it is one of the most important jobs of cathedral organists to be easily approached by parish musicians, and for cathedral staff to feel that they are first and foremost in the service of their diocesan congregations. Sadly, even thirty-six years on, and perhaps partially through much stricter professionalisation of church and cathedral music, these encounters are still fewer and farther between; this profound disconnection between parish and institution has been, I believe, the single most important factor in the decline of churches in Britain. The most shameful example of cathedral elitism I have experienced was at Canterbury Cathedral, no less; in spite of there being in excess of ten canons, plus the Dean, present at services during the week we sang there, we were not spoken to once, and the Dean failed even to show up to the meal that he purpotedly arranged for us at which we were to meet him.

All of this leads me to a schizophrenic outlook on music. It is at once omnipresent and nihilistic, not least in the concert hall; but churches and cathedrals do little to redeem it, often investing next to no resources in it or investing in it and then setting themselves apart from others in a way which is profoundly unchristian. This disillusionment with music means I don't really do any organ practice any more and I find it difficult to get motivated to do any musical study for myself — the only things I put time into are those that involve the choir at church, because for me, and the reason I continue with the church, that group of twelve moderately able singers do more to redeem music, do more to "[graft music] onto the rich-sapped trunk of real time" (Rosenzweig) than the best of professional musicians, because they do it out of service to one another and service to the congregation. So when my choir sings really well — and when I see my choir enjoying what they are doing, and when I bathe in their reflection, it is because they have made their music "wholly alive," and in that moment of service, surpassed the achievements of even the greatest of orchestras.

Tagged: music, rosenzweig, professional, christianity, church, dakers, lioneldakers, cathedral, composition, manchester, manchestercathedral, canterbury, canterburycathedral, chorlton.

I enjoy writing. But blogging seems to be becoming more and more of a problem for me. You see, I just never know what to write; and so, for now, I'll do what anyone would do in such a situation, and write a little about the experience of having nothing to say.

I've tried to rectify this problem by reading more closely some of the other blogs I regularly visit, hoping thereby to gain some inspiration or insight into the secret of being able to write things which are both worth saying and worth reading. I've discovered, however, that most of the blogs I read are either (a) about technology/the internet/social software or (b) worryingly extreme leftist political rants or (c) completely autobiographical. I've always avoided writing anything about (a) because I don't know anything about emerging technologies. I try to steer clear of (b) as I tend to find polemic patronising unless it is actually the result of solid research, and in any case, I'm not really sure why anyone would want to hear about my own political opinions and that's not what I'm really looking to explore. Increasingly I've also tried to avoid (c), not because I think there's anything wrong with writing autobiographically, but because, unlike the guy at Waiter Rant and similar others, my life is really just not very interesting, and I've sometimes felt uncomfortable with how close this weblog has come in the past to being a nihilistic egotistical Dear-Diary narcissistic vomitation of verbal self-pleasure.

So I've eliminated (a), (b), and (c). Many people, myself included, try to fill up their blogs with daily links and so on, which is fine, because that function is something which inhered in blogs from their initiation. But links alone make for pretty dull reading, particularly if you don't have the time, knowledge or inclination to research particular threads of information available on the net, and thereby contribute seriously to the social functions of blogging & linking. I omitted, of course, the comedy genre (d), in which Scaryduck is surely the protagonist. Again, I must reject (d), since I'm just not very funny, aside from the stock why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road jokes, which I hold in a secret store in case I ever need to make small talk with someone.

So, dear readers, what am I to do? What on earth, or indeed any other planet, can I write about? How I long for the days when I was less educated and unaware of my complete ignorance on almost every matter of any importance, when I could make firm existential commitments and write with force without collapsing into an unresolvable Derrideian epistemological crisis and closing the browser window quicker than you can say 'Ferdinand de Saussure.' Woe is me, readers, for I am lost.

Tagged: writersblock, scaryduck, waiterrant, writing, blogging, blog, internet, socialsoftware, comedy, linking.

• Homo Ludens discusses the psychoanalysis of sadism/masochism. Tagged: sadism, masochism, sadomasochism, sandm, s&m, lacan, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, psychology, homoludens.

Whether it is because the faith which creates has dried up in me, or because reality takes shape only in memory, the flowers I am shown today for the first time do not seem to me to be real flowers...

Thus I would often lie until morning thinking back to the time at Combray, to my sad sleepless evenings, to the many days, too, whose image had been restored to me more recently by the taste — what they would have called at Combray the 'perfume' — of a cup of tea, and, by an association of memories, to what, many years after leaving that little town, I had learned, about a love affair Swann had had before I was born, with that precision of details which is sometimes easier to obtain for the lives of people who died centuries ago than for the lives of our best friends, and which seems as impossible as it once seemed impossible to speak from one town to another — as long as we do not know about the expedient by which that impossibility was circumvented.

— Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: The Way by Swann's, tr. Lydia Davis, Penguin (2003), pp 185-186.

I have made it my task this summer to read all 3,500 pages of Proust's seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time (which used to be translated as Remembrance of Things Past and which in the original French is titled A La Recherche du Temps Perdu). I am half way through the first book, The Way by Swann's, and so far Proust has described some of the personalities, events, and scenes from his childhood in Combray, largely structured by the experience of his walks, alone and with his family, along the 'Guermantes way,' the 'way by Swann's,' and the 'Méséglise way.'

So far the book has had the effect upon me that I imagine Proust intended it to have upon its readers: it has led me into a nostalgic childhood world and it has invited me to consider again the sounds, smells, images, people, houses, rituals, meals, walks, seasons, conversations which made up that era. About a hundred pages in, the narrative suddenly started ringing true, and as the characters — Aunt Léonie, M. Legrandin — were built up, I glimpsed what Proust's 'thick description' (a misappropriated Geertzian term) was all about.

This is the weather station in our garden. My dad used to take measurements from it daily and send his forecast for publication in the Leicester Mercury, and sometimes I would go out into the garden with him to help.

Coincidentally, in that my mother and I were travelling down to Salisbury for a family funeral and Leicester was just a stop-off on the way back, I have just spent a few days back at 'home,' where for me, as I think they can for anyone, those Proustian sentiments started to resonate. My life is still structured by the ideals of childhood, I still judge the Here and Now by the expectations of There and Then. But this is not so much an ethical as a natural threshold; we cannot help hearing birdsong, smelling cut grass, experiencing an embrace, and being transported back to a world where every tiniest aspect of the environment was rich with significance and which filled us with the security and force to live. But moving away from this world, as we must and as Proust never truly did, is a necessity, but a highly traumatic one. Here in Stockport most of the streets are still a mystery, and the place is not mine. Looking out of the study window and onto the cobbled alley, row of back yards, regular chimneypots, cannot reassure me one bit, because these are not the alleys and gardens that I played ball games on when I was small, nor the streets around which I walked with my father in his orange coat, nor the houses in which those friends lived — those friends who establish forever the friendly archetype, even if they have long been lost through arguments, space, or death. Even the things which infuriated me about home I miss now, because they all issued from a structured life whose security I miss, and today's infuriations seem all the worse because looking out of the window offers no comfort, and the touch of the brick walls across the street here do not bring back any memories of relationships and encounters that I treasure.

Sewer cover in our back garden. It wobbles slightly from side to side, and I remember standing with one foot on each corner and pretending I was a surfer. I also remember filling the holes in it with mud, because it was fun.

Proust, then, has not yet offered a set of ethics for understanding this childhood world. It is not a rose-tinted nostalgia; for Proust described his tears at being parted from his mother in the evenings; his anger which leads him to strike the trees with his umbrella on one of his walks; the cross purposes at work in ambiguous conversations his family had with friends. It is not a negative outlook either; Proust's account is completely rambling, and at the end of the first part of The Way by Swann's I am left ambivalent, but awakened to Proust's world and mine.

• More photos over on Flickr.

Tagged: proust, marcelproust, insearchoflosttime, remembranceofthingspast, childhood.

• As I mentioned the other day, Grace Jantzen in our department died a couple of weeks ago from cancer. Here is her obituary in The Guardian, where you can read about her publications and life's work. I promise to write at much greater length about Jantzen before long.

Tagged: gracejantzen, theology, obituary.

Self

Squirreling away the hoards of teabags

Down Tomorrow Street:

Dropping them down sewers

Every other week.

Tagged: poetry, original, wilshere.

Labels: poetry

It's been one of those weeks. A fellow singer with the chamber choir, whose illness I mentioned over Christmas, died from cancer; my second cousin succumbed to an indeterminate immune condition; and theologian Grace Jantzen, who retired from the department on medical grounds at the start of this year, passed away too. Yet the sun is bright and warm, the grass healthy, the tree blooming, and the world full of life.

Do we need the extramural hope of symbolic or even real resurrection? Could we not embrace life, and with it, death, and live all the same, imbued with a worldly hope which enables us to act in the here and now? Too often the healthy teleologies of religion collapse into a neurotic asceticism which negates the hope which they initially offered us. We are lead into the illusion of a Life which is only ever to-come, a Life which forgets the life we live now: but our life should be full, overflowing with love: and if we overflow with love our lives have been full.

What drives us to do the things we do? Why are we passionate about certain hobbies, rituals, and jobs? Where do we get our work ethic from? How do we keep going without disillusionment and apathy vanquishing our good intentions? Technology has met almost every demand we have asked of it, and as a result, our lives have the potential to be much more leisurely, and far less easily directed and driven towards a projected future identity. We don't need to do the washing-up, we don't need to walk to the shops, we don't need to cook; everything can be supplied by a service provider. We are at once liberated from 'traditional' roles demanded by necessity; but we immediately teeter on the edge of a teleological abyss, lacking as we do any 'automatic' resources to identify our Place In Society; this abyss is typically filled in by the metaphysical myth of 'career.'

This crisis of meaning, this Torschlusspanik, is a moment of decision which confronts us all and determines whether our lives will be lived in spite of the knowledge of this abyss; or whether we will turn away from life and pretend that the abyss is not there, preferring the ephemeral veneer of corporate meaning which would so readily fill our every waking moment. There is no 'career' possible for someone who recognises the abyss: but if I can stand naked in the midst of this void, and still live, I might one day be able to turn away from my materialistic self and my materialistic aspirations, and instead live for others.

This day remains a very long way off.