Stoptober

In one of those strange flights of lateral thought (if such a thing is possible), I found myself musing on the latest mangling of the English language, Stoptober, and what it represents, a no doubt admirable service aimed at helping people to give up smoking if that's what they wish to do.

My immediate reaction was to plan a counter strategy, that is to smoke a cigar every day in October. I won't degrade the activity with a name such as Stogietober, so please forget that you just read it, if you have. But it is something that I shall simply have to get on with.

Meanwhile, I thought, there must be something that I can give up, and it dawned on me. I shall cease from, desist from, refrain from, quit and stop the foul, unhealthy practise of trying to read the entire edition of Private Eye in bed in one go on alternate Wednesday nights. No more dragging on Strobes or HP Sauce through to Yobettes till the whole organ is empty.

Oh! The new health that I shall enjoy! Or I shall be able to listen to the Shipping Forecast, or Church Bells at Bedtime. Or read another chapter of Who Murdered Chaucer?

I am not so self-righteous, I hope, to pretend that it will be easy.

But, from now on, Private Eye will be kept Firmly Down Stairs.

Think of me in my struggle.

No Added Sugar

Tonight, gentle reader, was the new season's first rehearsal of 'No Added Sugar', a choir of now mainly adult voices and mine (the students of Teesdale School in Barmy Castille no longer being paid for by David 'We're All in the Choir Together' Cameron). We met, as arranged and booked in the Scarth Hall, Staindrop, at 7pm, for our 90 minute rehearsal, bright eyed, bushy tailed and in superb voice, only to find that we were to be booted out at 7.30 by something called the Zumba Class which, village Politics decreed, has always met then and there and it Could Not Be Altered.

So (if you are still reading this, ignore it if you aren't) our wonderfully multi-talented Choir Mistress Jane Ford taught us to sing  a rousing Nowell in a Beer Garden sort of song, and we then repaired to the Wheatsheaf to carry out further research and practice, with different words coming to mind.

Back at the Scarf 'All, the She Canon had entered the premises with that bemused expression which she wears when she thinks she is in the wrong place on the right day, or the right place on the wrong day, and was gently diverted by Ms Ford to the Upper Room where Deanery Synod in all its Glory was convening. Crisis alerted.

Note the name, (chosen from the back of a cereal packet): No Added Sugar. We have sung with Inter Opera, we have sung with Concordia, we have had many gigs, we sing a variety of music from Madrigals, to Baroque, Sacred, Popular, You Name It. We have bookings with the Staindrop Fifties and Sixties and at the Bowes Museum, and our diary is full for the next six months. When we are famous - we are already infamous - remember that you saw it here first.

Humbling and Wonderful

To meet  so many people this past weekend who, facing huge and seemingly insurmountable obstacles to life and hope, are coming smiling through:

People with life threatening illness

People hated, rejected, ostracised and dumped because of their sexuality,
or addiction in younger life, or for the courage to ask the question Why.

People in wheelchairs who rise beyond my level

A young widower with little twins finding joy and purpose and a new love.

Politicians may yearn to make us believe in Green Shoots of Recovery.

This is SPRING

Our own faces we can not see

10^th September 2012

Our own faces we can not see.

The mirror flatters to deceive,

or alarms by telling more than is so.

Our own voices we may not hear

as others do. The shock of playback

pricks vanity and disorientates.

Our own gestures when in full flow

may distract all but self,

and drum to a contrary beat.

On our own we are never complete.

Solace can not be had in isolation

from all that makes us what we are.

Unafraid To Be

16^th August 2012

Unafraid To Be

Unless you have a connection with Durham, you may not know the name Ruth Etchells, who died there recently at the age of 81. Or it may be one of those names which ring a vague bell.

In fact ACW members and the wider church owe a very great debt to this lady, humble disciple and friend of Jesus, greatly admired poet and preacher, innovative English lecturer and theologian, adviser to an Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference, and first woman to be head of an Anglican Theological College. Generations of her students have been affected for good and for God. Universally loved, very highly respected, she was a witness to his truth and a force for change, bringing St John’s Durham from relative doldrums into the first class of achievement. She was also unafraid to challenge the status quo in church politics, whether to do with women’s ordination or lay people‘s own distinctive ministry, separate to and different from that of the ordained. Readers of her various books are also much the better for the treat, beginning from her trail-blazing “Unafraid To Be” first published in the early ‘70s, a look at contemporary literary giants such as Pinter, Osborne and Beckett, and how they deal with issues of life and meaning. But more than that, she taught that we can have confidence in the Gospel message as we weigh literature against it. Ruth was a humble person who gave others confidence.

On a personal note, she was also my friend and mentor as a poet. I owe her, under God, far more than I could ever say. We would meet at her retirement house overlooking the River Wear opposite Durham Castle and Cathedral. Always, before we got down to her kind but firm dissection of my early efforts in poetry writing, she would ask about me and the family. I was struggling at the time with the after effects of breakdown, my family coming to terms with a non-Vicarage way of life. In terms of mentoring she was what we all need, someone who will affirm and enable what is good and promising, and not hesitate to point out the flawed and feeble.

We need not fear true criticism of our work. We should be unafraid to be people with something worthwhile to say. We serve, after all, the Word himself, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

 

First published on the web site of ACW, the Association ofChristian Writers

Hmm

Well, after so much trouble trying to activate a blog with a similar service, this is as easy as could be.
So I recall a saying my father was so fond of, with a slight difference:

"If at first you don't succeed, try something different"

On Poetry Writing

In a sense I never learnt to write poetry. We did the usual things at school, and I was good at Eng Lit, but I couldn't really get a handle on rhymed verse, and metres and feet. So, for years, it passed me by. Doggerel was another matter. I could do that, which proved very handy in parish ministry in replying in kind to various 'oddes' (sic) composed by certain parishioners.

Twelve years in to ordained life I suffered a severe nervous breakdown which proved to be the precursor to retirement on health grounds, starting effectively twenty five years ago. Some months in, while I could not sleep one night a line that I knew I needed to write down would not leave my mind. So I got up and wrote it down, followed by dozens more till a prose poem emerged.

And so it started, my vocation to write, first as catharsis and therapy, now as ministry to many others but always, I think, a word to me first of all.

I had the privilege subsequently of sitting under the feet for ten years of a most accomplished poet and theologian who took me under her wing (if you can be in both places at the same time, that is). She corrected my many facile mistakes and ineptness, but never attempted to force me into a 'classical' form of style of poetry, rather to discover my own.

And what is my own? Oddly, I'm not sure! I do know that I have my own particular 'voice' and preferences in the way that I write. However, for me the way a poem is written depends upon its subject matter, which may not emerge till after I've begun to write. Often a phrase or an image occurs to me that I know I must write about  - now! So off I go and out it comes. I do some editing, of course, but usually finish very swiftly and follow the urge to share it immediately, which email makes possible. A poem is not complete until it is read, preferably heard.

The word poetry comes from the root 'to make'. It's part of the creative purpose that God has sub-contracted to us humans, so we do well to be delighted when we make a poem. That's not to say, naturally, that it shouldn't be critiqued, corrected, rejected as bad, if it is. Better to know than to be self-deceived! But if a poem can 'say more in less' to someone, even just one person, then it's done a job.

The poem (I call them pomes so as not to get ideas above my station) that follows, written after midnight today) is a good example of my writing.

6^th September 2012

Waning, then Waxing

The Moon retreats towards the blankness of its regulated rhythm.

Life here, on Earth, would be unimaginable

without her silent obedience

to her barren, lifeless calling to hang there

in the sky,

keeping us in balance.

God be praised who designs the chance,

knock-on effect of the collections of rock,

who spins such an intricate web of planetary interaction.

Mind in man, no accident,

rises through space and time

and is given the ability to choose,

should it so choose,

to commit to the astronomical risk of faith

in the one who became so frail

in order that it may make its way

to all that is impossible yet to grasp.