{mostly on fiction, poetry, spirituality, biblical studies and theology}
… the only hammer in the house belongs to Tony, and for anything other than simple nail-pounding she looks in the Yellow Pages. Why risk your life? … She has never seen the point of lawns. Given the choice she’d prefer a moat, with a drawbridge, and crocodiles optional.
No deep wisdom here perhaps, but I can relate to these lines from Margaret Atwood’s novel The Robber Bride. There are days though when crocodiles are a must!
… Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
From ‘The Bright Field’ by R. S. Thomas
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes
From ‘Aurora Leigh’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
To quote Malcom Guite one more time, here’s an excerpt from his poem ‘Maundy Thursday’, also published in The Word in the Wilderness:
In vain we search the heavens high above,
The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray him, though it is the night.
He meets us here and loves us into light.
The serious doubter, the sincere enquirer, the person who hesitates a long time on a threshold, these are all people to be honoured and encouraged, not, as is so often the case, either demonized or cajoled.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
We are living through a point in the history of Western academia so momentous it’s hard for us to wrap our minds around it – namely, the effectual end of universities as centres of humane critique, the effectual end of an enormously rich and diverse and valuable tradition, which has always had to struggle to carve out a task for itself that is often at odds with the priorities of society. Today, in almost every country in the world, academia is capitulating, almost without a struggle, to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism.
Thus Terry Eagleton in an interview published in Third Way, February 2015, who adds:
A couple of years ago, I was being shown around the biggest university in South Korea by its proud president and I made the unseemly blunder of saying: ‘There doesn’t seem to be anything critical going on here.’ He looked at me as though I had said, ‘How many PhDs in pole-dancing have you awarded?’ With the best will in the world, he had absolutely no idea what I meant.
The familiar face of the person we live with, the quality of their steadfast covenant love, can suddenly become a window through which the face of the God who loves us in and through them shines.
Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness
The way you tell the story about your world will … co-create that world.
Gareth Higgins, ‘Here isn’t the news’, Third Way, Summer 2014
Brief thoughts & quotes … 