Christianity Then and Now

I highly recommend the History of Christianity series with Diarmuid Maculloch on the BBC at the moment. It's a very engaging, broad survey of Christianity through the ages, and is suitable for those who know nothing about about it, and offering jogs of memory and intriguing new details to those who know a little more. So far two of the programmes have focused on the non-western churches - the Syriac tradition and the Orthodox church - of which most people in the UK are woefully ignorant.

I took the survery linked to on the programme's site, on what it means to be a Christian today. It has various questions in various formats, and at the end you can see pie charts of the standard responses by age, gender and location. One question is 'explain what your faith means to you.' It was interesting to try to summarise something so complicated, that should form the basis of my academic work but is often relagated to the background. I might not agree with what I wrote later (even five minutes later!), but here it is:

My Christian faith is as big a part of my identity as my gender or race. Being a Christian is who I am, but I don't have an easy or unproblematic relationship with my religion. My feminism and my sexuality mean that I am always wrestling with my scriptural and church tradition: however this is often a creative tension. The joy and sense of completion I gain from relationship with God - however unstable my definition of God may be ! - is inexpressibly valuable to me. I try to hold on to the loving example of Jesus Christ in my political commitments and my personal moral behaviour.

Pleasures and Frustrations

Next Sunday will be the first Sunday in Advent, which means, to my permanently trimestered mind, that it is Nearly the End of Term. And I don't feel that I have generated a lot of material since September: most of my energies have been devoted to the frustrating task of redrafting work in the hope of publication. I have two pieces that at least look like articles suitable for sending to academic journals (one of which I have, in fact, submitted) but I'm left feeling a bit glum, probably because all this painstaking fiddling with references will have to be done again, because in all likelihood I'll get rejection after rejection. I don't mean to be pessimistic: it's just that scholarly journals usually only publish proven scholars (i.e. with PhDs and jobs), and it's especially difficult because my work straddles gender studies, theology and literature, and isn't entirely at home anywhere.

But anyway, I have been cheering myself up knitting Christmas decorations (not hanging them up yet, but putting them in a box as I finish them).




Making silly, useless little things out of cheap and colourful acrylic reminds me of when I first started knitting, and the strange gifts I would make for my friends and family. Nowadays I mostly knit for myself, using natural fibres, but there's still a part of me that takes great delight in the 'bazaar knits' of people like Jean Greenhowe, and buys booties and egg cosies in charity shops, just because somebody ought to.

Remembrance Sunday

In church this morning I was extremely moved by our acts of remembrance. This surprised me: on my way to the service I was angrily ruminating on how, due to the nationalistic overtones and inherent conservatism of the poppy business, and despair at all the war that is still going on - expressed perfectly in this Guardian column - perhaps I should personally opt out of the annual national remembrance charade. But we held silence, and watched two short films about Henry Allingham and Harry Patch, the last remaining British WWI veterans, who died this year, and I was glad that I had entered into the spirit of the thing.

Yet I became even more convinced that there is not enough attention given to the anger at the futility of war and the political leaders that the veterans themselves have voiced. This Radiohead song, in tribute to Harry Patch, and based on his own words, is a beautiful example of that quiet rage. It's worth clicking the link to hear the music, but here are the lyrics:

Harry Patch (In memory of)

I am the only one that got through
The others died where ever they fell
It was an ambush
They came up from all sides
Give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
I've seen devils coming up from the ground
I've seen hell upon this earth
The next will be chemical but they will never learn

It's in the tradition of all that brilliant and furious trench poetry we learn so much of at school. Yet in our acts of remembrance, we're still parroting 'that old lie', talking about gratitude for freedoms won and 'no greater love' and that godawful 'age shall not weary them' poem, rather than the ones that protest that war is not noble, but brutal and ugly and (in the case of WWI, and those currently being fought in the Middle East) tragically, utterly pointless.

As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann

Lionel Shriver recommends this novel in the back of The Post-Birthday World, which was how I came across it. Apt, because, as in Shriver's novels, the reader has to contend with a narrator that one feels sympathy for when sympathy is the last thing their actions call for. As Meat Loves Salt is the story of Jacob Cullen: rapist, murderer, not very witty, not very bright. And still, right through all 532 densely worded pages, I felt for him.

Of all the books on Shriver's recommended list, this was the one I most wanted to read, being just cup of tea: a queer romance, set during Civil War and the radical movements of the time. And it is full of fascinating details of the period, and Jacob moves from being a servant to the landed gentry, to a soldier in the New Model Army, to a printer publishing radical pamphlets in London, to a Diggers' commune trying to work the common land, to finally setting off on a voyage to the New World. He moves though many of the facets of this singular period in British history: but isn't particularly interested in any of them, or what they mean. From the moment of meeting him, Jacob's only interest is Christopher Ferris, the idealist that Jacob follows through all of his projects and plans.

Ferris is as good a man as Jacob is bad, and for that reason lacks a certain realism. Though we only see him through Jacob's blinkered eyes. Perhaps this is why it is hard to understand Ferris's longstanding loyalty to Jacob, other than sexual attraction. The event that finally severs their relationship, and ultimately and indirectly leads to their ruin, is horrible to read, and seems to come from nowhere, but really ever since they met it has been leading up to this, ever since very early on when the reader suddenly discovers that their seemingly naive narrator is actually a monster.

The Voice that Jacob hears doesn't redeem him, nor his grief at the consequences of his actions: it never translates into remorse. What kept me wishing him well throughout the course of the novel was the strength of McCann's writing, which submerges the reader into the mindsight of her creation.

As Meat Loves Salt is worth reading as a detailed and convincing historical novel: it is even more valuable as a testament to moral terror.

A great poem I found, whilst looking for something else

psalm

I am not lyric any more
I will not play the harp
for your pleasure

I will not make a joyful
noise to you, neither
will I lament

for I know you drink
lamentation, too,
like wine

so I dully repeat
you hurt me
I hate you

I pull my eyes away from the hills
I will not kill for you
I will never love you again

unless you ask me

- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Praying Like a Woman, by Nicola Slee

I’ve had this book of prayers for about a year, but it has only been recently that I felt any compulsion to write about it. I suppose this is because of the conflicts brought about by my recent decision to renew my commitment to my faith, and to Christianity, by becoming confirmed in the Methodist Church. The sense of belonging and a quiet sort of grace has been lovely, but I still struggle with what I believe in and find it hard to achieve any sort of rhythm in prayer or meditation. I love thinking and writing about a concept of the divine that is murky, slippery and unutterable, but I’m Protestant, not raised in the negative way. I want a God I can talk to. Which is where the poem-prayers in this book have been a blessing.

I bought this book because I love the title, but I didn’t have high hopes for it. Whilst I’d come across Nicola Slee before (many academic years ago now, in Ann Loades’s Feminist Theology reader) I didn’t know a great deal about her, and I think I was expecting quite a comforting, woman-affirming collection of prayers that would probably mention the sacredness of having your period, a meditation on meeting Jesus at the well, a bit of feminist anger at women’s undervalued role in the church, but nothing that you’d turn to in the hope of articulating that deep howl of pain and rage in the middle of the dark dark night.

What I didn’t expect was the loss in having a hysterectomy, anger at friendships gone rotten, the bestial delights of choosing to be hairy, real, profound rage at the Bible’s texts of terror, and a sense of a God that will not be pinned down, that hovers on the edges of experience whilst at the same time being all-encompassing and overwhelming in both presence and absence.

I have an abiding love for the prayers written by Janet Morley, whose All Desires Known collection is the definitive collection of prayers informed by feminist theology: they are beautiful and rooted in ideas of justice. But Slee’s writing is shot through with anger and anguish, which, sometimes, is what a woman needs when she comes to pray.

Aspirational Blog-reading

Prompted by the discussions on Karie's blog here and here.

I think we can all tell what stage we are at in life by what blogs we read to aspire to, that we read because we enjoy wallowing in envy: blogs by teenagers and students whose lives flitter from one gig/party/essay to the next, all the while with perfectly messy looking hair and boots that look lived in but not scruffy, no longer do it for me. I shrug, that's one class of inadequacy that I've graduated from.

No, the aspirational blogs that I read and feel envious are one's that are wholesomely artistic and intellectual, like needled and The Domestic Soundscape - published academics, beautiful patterns, photography, lovely walks, allotments! And these are wonderful women, but I have to remind myself that their blogs just aren't bringing up all the imperfect things in their lives.

But I am sitting here in a lovely clean flat in a lovely part of a lovely city. having just swept and scrubbed whilst listening to my music as loudly as I want, surrounded by all my books and handmade things, with a ball of dough proofing in the bread-bowl. Anyone peering into my window would think I had a nice, tidy life, to match my nice tidy self - something that just isn't who I am, however much I have to be grateful for.