You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October, 2007.
I was recently told a story from Mullah Nasruddin, known as the wise fool throughout the Middle East and Central Asia.
Nasruddin thought he would gain something from learning a new skill. So he went to see the best musician in the village to ask him to teach him to play the lute. “How much will it cost?” Nasruddin asked. “Three silver coins for the first month; after that one silver coin each month” replied the musician.
“Excellent” exclaimed Nasruddin ” I shall start with the second month”
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Now playing: Aaron Copland – Hoe-down
via FoxyTunes
Great editing.
U2 Window in the skies
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Now playing: Walker Brothers – Make It Easy On Yourself
via FoxyTunes
One of the posts I first wrote which wandered off the digital highway on its own was about the Pope’s liturgical shoes which looked like this:
But these are better for any dance, liturgical or otherwise. Tanssitossut or dancing shoes for the very small or very large to dance together:
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Now playing: Madeleine Peyroux – You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
via FoxyTunes
Geoffrey Stephenson ran an event on preaching yesterday. There was a great quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on the place of imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, it is required in living the story we’re trying to tell. Taylor writes:
Imagination has no point to make, no axe to grind. It’s more like a child roaming the neighbourhood on a free afternoon, following first the smell of fresh bread in an oven, then the glint of something bright in the grass- led by curiosity, by hunger, by hope, to explore the given world from its highest branches to its deepest roots because it is wonderful and terrible and because it is there. When imagination comes home and empties its pockets, of course there will be some sorting to do. Keep the cat’s eye marble, the Japanese beetle wing, the red feather, the penny. Jettison the bottle cap, the broken glass, the melted chocolate with lint. But do not scold imagination for bringing it all home or for collecting it in the first place.
And it’s from the messiness that order and shape in preaching might emerge – rather than the other way round as it so often is. The quote is from The Preaching Life. (Barbara Brown Taylor’s also the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which might give the flip side to her preaching advice.)
Taylor’s quote about preparing to preach – however she feels about it now – reminded me that preaching is like writing just about anything – prose, drama, music, poetry. (Well perhaps not anything, although some of my report writing and income tax returns have been fantastical.) One of the best books ever on anything is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where she quotes a preacher as saying hope is a ‘revolutionary patience’. ‘Let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.’ Just like preaching.
The light through the woods was great too, and there was the non smokers’ equivalent of a fag break to nip out and roam the neighbourhood.
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Now playing: Amy Winehouse – Tears dry on their own
via FoxyTunes
Reading over the weekend Geoff Mulgan’s book Good and Bad Power
Politics is ‘the art of swallowing toads without making a face’
Carlos Fuentes
A day late for the blog. More information at Burma Campaign UK and Free Burma
Frederick Buechner writes about vocation:
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call ….There are all kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place Go9d calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Rilke was asked by someone whether or not he should become a poet. He replied, ‘The question is not ’should I be a poet, but can I bear to do anything else?’
And Thomas Merton in Seeds of Contemplation writes ‘Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or the particular monk that they are intended to be by God.’
Quoted in Finding Sanctuary
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Now playing: Denison Witmer – Little Flowers
via FoxyTunes
One for the postal strike today…
Karaoke words below.
Night Mail
This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers’ declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston’s or Crawford’s:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman’s knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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Now playing: Bruce Springsteen – Waitin’ On A Sunny Day
via FoxyTunes
Big cheer to Jonny Baker who had word of artist Cecilia Matson’s exhibition at the Curwen Gallery in London. It would be great if we saw the exhibition here too. It’s an optimistic expression of the current regeneration of Liverpool’s city centre.
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Now playing: Joe Purdy – I Love the Rain the Most
via FoxyTunes
