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A quick and not so quick think about spirituality

Just two links: the RSA blog looks to Jonathan Rowson on spirituality, and for awe and wonder can we beat the Mediterranean volcanoes that perhaps first gave the Peoples of the Book their definition of transcendent majesty? So here (not a very stable link, since it updates regularly) is Etna this mid-December weekend.

This is a quick think because all I’m doing is pointing to three interesting sources, but not so quick because I think they raise very interesting questions about the place of transcendence, whether spirituality is anything more than introspection, and (from an educator’s perspective) how useful either of these might be in, say, a Primary classroom.

And so the third source: a poem that attempts (and for me achieves) something of all the first two areas to ponder, but which raises the last: why do we (does one/do I) turn to poetry to look at spirituality?

Northumbrian Sequence IV – Kathleen Raine

Let in the wind,

Let in the rain,

Let in the moors tonight,

 

The storm beats on my window-pane,

Night stands at my bed-foot,

Let in the fear,

Let in the pain,

Let in the trees that toss and groan,

Let in the north tonight.

 

Let in the nameless formless power

That beats upon my door,

Let in the ice, let in the snow,

The banshee howling on the moor,

The bracken-bush on the bleak hillside,

Let in the dead tonight.

 

The whistling ghost behind the dyke,

The dead that rot in the mire,

Let in the thronging ancestors,

The unfilled desire,

Let in the wraith of the dead earl,

Let in the dead tonight.

 

Let in the cold,

Let in the wet,

Let in the loneliness,

Let in the quick,

Let in the dead,

Let in the unpeopled skies.

 

Oh how can virgin fingers weave

A covering for the void,

How can my fearful heart conceive

Gigantic solitude?

How can a house so small contain

A company so great?

Let in the dark,

Let in the dead,

Let in your love tonight.

Let in the snow that numbs the grave,

Let in the acorn-tree,

The mountain stream and mountain stone,

Let in the bitter sea.

 

Fearful is my virgin heart

And frail my virgin form,

And must I then take pity on

The raging of the storm

That rose up from the great abyss

Before the earth was made,

That pours the stars in cataracts

And shakes this violent world?

 

Let in the fire,

Let in the power,

Let in the invading might.

Gentle must my fingers be

And pitiful my heart

Since I must bind in human form

A living power so great,

A living impulse great and wild

That cries about my house

With all the violence of desire

Desiring this my peace.

 

Pitiful my heart must hold

The lonely stars at rest,

Have pity on the raven’s cry,

The torrent and the eagle’s wing,

The icy water of the tarn

And on the biting blast.

 

Let in the wound,

Let in the pain,

Let in your child tonight.

 

 

Whereof one cannot speak…

What to talk about today?
Goodness: from PISA to Tom Daley, there are lots of stories to look at, from (on a different tack) the HE action to odd but delightful metareporting  (Twitter – Guardian-Academic Journal) on academic blogging.

I’d like to make

  • some witty mash-up line about at least two of these (“Tom Daley came out yesterday, PISA came out today; I know one piece of news gladdens the heart,” doesn’t do it, really) or
  • some deep and meaningful connection between workload and blogging

or at least use the Wittgenstein line as an excuse to remain silent on all these subjects, since they are beyond my ken and  I will only talk drivel. But even using that as a line has been trumped by this from poetry rapgenius:

You probably need to read the whole book to get the punchline.

Yes, you probably do.

So here are the Guardian on PISA, the Indie on Tom Daley and the really interesting (and free access) article on academic blogging from Mewburn and Thomson. They can speak for themselves and I should be silent.

 

Highlight

An informative blog post from Ian McCormick in praise and dispraise of “said” prompts a quick thought from me today on the word “highlight.”

If you (or one, or I, and change the verb accordingly) use “highlight” it ought to mean what it says. A highlighter helps the reader understand by emphasising certain elements, for example. However, Humpty-Dumpty-like, we (you, one, I &c., &c) try and make a word mean what we want it to mean; we often misuse “highlight” as if it means “This is an interesting idea from [writer A] and s/he says…” It’s got two syllables and is something to do with presenting an argument. It’ll do.

But Ian’s thoughts on “said” made me think about the real words we need. Brookes’ ever-useful Upgrade service is on hand with all sorts of links on academic writing, such as this, Manchester’s Academic Phrasebank.  I’d just like to add my own thoughts here.

When we write “highlights” we might mean any number of different things, but chatting to “my” students on Becoming a Reader this week as part of their feedback session brought to mind the idea that what we often intend is simply a richer way to put “writes.” Here, then, in no special order are some I think may be preferable in this sort of context.

argues
suggests
claims
discusses
explores
surveys
explains
makes the point that
asserts
states
maintains

Health warning to students: Use a dictionary to make sure it’s the right word, and remember: a thesaurus is not a dictionary. These words all have their uses; they just may not all be exact synonyms.

I’m not explaining what a synonym is – not now, at any rate.

 

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean telt by hisself

Just some quick thoughts as a sort of review of David Almond‘s book, published by Puffin, 2011, which I used with my Y3 students reflecting on the literary representations of  learning to read. It could just as well have been for the Spirituality students next semester.

Spirituality
Almond moves through the issues of spirituality and transcendence in a number of works – perhaps most notably (until now) his masterpiece Skellig. Here again, themes (or at least images) re-emerge: wings, beetles, healing and decay, death and rebirth, as if to underline the similarity of the material. But this is a very different book: the narrator, moving through his life from infancy onwards (don’t worry; I will avoid a spoiler, since the final chapters are rather a page-turner) in the bombed town of Blinkbonny, reflects on his identity in a number of ways, most notably in who he is as a healer in his community. The storytelling is superb.
The premise of the book – that a child brought up in such unusual circumstances might grow up to be such an accomplished writer (despite his spelling – see below) gives the reader a lot to ponder. Is this a parable of “Becoming a Writer”? Is the folk-tale type about the Boy Overcoming Adversity? At one level, the child Billy has an upbringing that is difficult to comprehend: he grows up in near isolation, in a landscape and society destroyed by bombs, but has reasonable food, a supply of physical needs. I asked myself at various whether I should suspend disbelief (as one has to with Harry Potter, of course) about how well Billy grows up. Some entry into the fictional world Almond creates requires us to trust him in the improbabilities of the narrative, and some suspending of disbelief is certainly necessary, although some, perhaps, is not (and I’m avoiding a spoiler here): Billy is in the end faced with possibilities of escape and healing that are wholly consistent with his context.
So, this is a book about – hmmmm:  I fight shy of such a simple solution. David Almond deals with a tragic situation , with exceptionally complex characters in search of resolutions that do not neatly dovetail. And this, for me, is why this is a very deep exploration of spirituality: Billy and his mother Veronica seem to want one thing; Billy’s father, Wilfrid is desperate for another. The butcher seeks a realisation or a self-actualisation about himself as a father; the nurse seeks solace in seeking for the voice of her daughter among the dead. Not everybody gets what they want as they grapple with the “why” of the narrative. Or do they? The characters are all depicted from Billy’s point of view, from his erratic reportage and weird orthography. Maybe their search for meaning is realised.
Maybe I shouldn’t make such an immediate judgement.
Language
Billy, whose literacy education has been erratic, from his irascible and largely absent father to the planchette of his spiritualist neighbour, writes a curious phonetically plausible English. This is a taste of it:

But we kept on tryin & I kept on not lernin & 1 day hed had enuf & he got mad with me cos I wos so thik.

Some of his words look and feel like proper misspellings, and while some may not, arguing about Billy’s orthography is a pointless distraction. This makes the work a challenging read, but emphasises Billy’s background and allows Almond to create a genuine voice for Billy. The chapter “The World Within” towards the end of the narrative where Billy, weary of the role he finds himself in, expresses sadness and delight at what we might think of as a mystical spiritualty is as a powerful set of insights into spirituality and suffering as I have ever seen in a book for young people:

Its like I turn into the world and the world turns into me.
And when it’s a world of beests and dust & water & fish then its so fine. Its like I am dancing…
But at other times it is a world of pane & death and war. The bomin of Blinkbonny takes place within me. I see it clearly… I don’t want these things taykin plays inside me time & time & time agen. But ther is no way to close my eres & eyes no way to block it all out.
Mebbe this is how things become for God.

This unusual and inconsistent use of unorthodox spelling also allows a very subtle language play, where, for example, right is written rite but retains, from time to time, its sense of ritual as well. Almond knows what he is doing here, and with rite and childe and cum (this is a book for older readers, if we can make that distinction) he pushes language to express multiple meanings. As Billy’s life becomes clearer, there are times when his spelling also rights itself like a wobbly raft:

Like the stars the sand the sea is he astounding.
I watch him. I write him.

And this is an astounding book.

Hallows? Thoughts about Hallowe’en

Three aspects of Hallowe’en and a reflection.

This is going to go on a bit, I’m afraid, as I want to look at

  • Hallowe’en and its modern popular expression.
  • Hallowe’en and Christianity (the longest section)
  • Hallowe’en and UK schools

“When I were a nipper” – the argument from memory comes first, here – Hallowe’en was overshadowed by the much more exciting Bonfire Night, which had a run-up in collecting for a guy, &c., carving a lantern from a swede (a labour of love) and somehwere, for a Catholic child, the Holyday of All Saints followed by the day of prayer for the faithful departed, All Souls (a reasoned, modern Catholic view of this day is to be found here, in the Dominican student pages, Godzdogz). For for my mother, as a war widow, the day of remembrance and the military solemnities around it, were especially important, too – something Dave Aldridge has written about  thoughtfully. This was all about the dead, but not all in sorrow: fireworks, and mischief were mixed up with sadness and silence, with black vestments and red poppies.

This is not the modern landscape, where the American Halloween (note the spelling) occasions fancy dress, trick or treat, pumpkins, and a much greater sense of gleefully enacted horror. I won’t bother with many links here, despite the fact that the bounds of taste do get overstepped in an effort to maintain the frisson. Yuk.

So Hallowe’en has become a feast of horror in some eyes, where the dead, the uncanny and the downright nasty are mocked and celebrated by small children and adults alike.

But what about Christianity? Where does Hallowe’en sit?

One of the key books in the history of the Reformation has got to be Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic, one of those books that, when I first read it, changed my opinion about so much I had been brought up with. After all, I had lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill, the stories of the witches and the story of my family’s struggles with Protestant Christianity part and parcel of the culture.  The overall premise – this is a gross over-simplification – is that the Christianity of the Word that comes in heightens a growing mistrust of popular practices from beliefs in fairies and spirits to dealing with “cunning men and women.” This is not to put Hallowe’en (yet) into a Merrie England which includes a pretty and rational Roman Christianity (I am choosing my words here) – but to suggest that opposition to it has a connection to a (very seventeenth century?) vision that any divergence from a particular view of Christian practice is wrong, evil, Satanic. A very broad brush-stroke account of this argument is to be found here, although the details are a bit dodgy.

Its roots with regards Christian practice, are in some ways about the celebration of a major feast, All Saints. Hallowe’en, as a name, is after all, shorthand for the Vigil of the Feast of All Hallows, or All Saints.  It might be that we should see the week or so of Church and popular festivals that occur here as having very different roots but all coming to express something similar: a celebration of the oncoming of Autumn, of shorter days and longer nights, of the dying of the light, and therefore the remembrance of the dead. Christians celebrate the same things as non-Christians at this time, maybe always have done. By this argument, this All-the-Dead celebration is just one more Christianisation of a different tradition; Christianity’s magpie proclivities are seen as stemming from the appropriation of the synagogue service and Passover, through Roman cults and the imperial court. Any purging of Christian practice has been a pick-and-mix approach which chooses one lump of tradition to keep and another to discard.

And yet, partly because of  its opposition to (or distraction from) All Saints and All Souls, or because it looks at the dead as menacing, some thinkers from Pope Francis to US Evangelicals have seen this is something to be viewed with a deep mistrust. As one writer puts it,

“…the underlying essence of our celebrations of Halloween is based upon  modern Wiccan interpretations of pre-Christian paganism and involve occultic  rites and practices that Christians should have no dealings with.”

Once upon a time, the missionary elements of Christianity might have been tempted to view the unchristian as anti-Christian. Matthew 12:30 (perhaps contra Luke 9:50) suggests that Jesus’ teaching backs this up; certainly “He who is not with me is against me,” and other similar sentiments, suggest an uncompromising attitude. Modern opposition to any kind of syncretism uses these texts, and lines from Paul about “having no dealings with darkness.” There is another strand to this, however: when Gregory the Great writes concerning the mission to the Angles he exhorts Mellitus to baptise, rather than destroy the pagan temples, so that “seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God.” It might be that this leads to a syncretism that Christians (or maybe some Christians) would find theologically unsound. I can’t make the time to rehearse this argument, from Basil on the use of pagan “classical” authors through to musings on Christian/Jewish or Christian/Islamic relations in Vatican II (and beyond), but there has been at least some uneasy dialogue with culture outside orthodox Christianity throughout its history, maybe from the moment Luke quotes Euripides in his account of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.

So what of schools and Hallowe’en?

There seem to be two different practices developing here: one is to ban it as a modern invention, as American and/or anti-Christian (I’ve heard a teacher say she wouldn’t have it in her class “because it’s contrary to my belief”), as in the arguments glanced at above.  The other is to allow, or encourage some forms of celebration, whether with the whole pumpkin and fancy dress thing, or with a more muted event, with maybe a ghost story and witchy songs.

The first has an odd lack of logic, at least in a state school (not controlled or aided by a religious group): if Hallowe’en is the pagan festival of Samhain, then surely the school’s equal opportunities comes into play. The pro viso – as with any celebration – is that there should be some sense of respect and real knowledge, and that it should fit with the long-term planning for a school, or a class. And this is the caveat for the second: it’s got to be a learning opportunity. But then again, so has Christmas.

This has hardly been a proper sic et non, so my final reflection only hangs to the above by the fingertips, but here it is.

Winter is on us, or just around the corner. Our food is changing, too, and tomatoes give way to squashes. The days are shorter, darker. And when you are four, or five, or six, these are big changes. In particular, the child that is afraid of the dark, or who now has to come to terms with coming home in the dark after After School Club, needs time to explore it. They also might need a way of celebrating their control of it – through lanterns, through the sanitised parade in fancy dress, through seeing this potential occasion for fear minimised and mocked. Look it in the face and see it as something to play with.

There is certainly unthinking excess, a possibility for going over the top with children, and adults have a role to play here, but I would end with a plea: take Gregory’s injunction to baptise the nefas, to take the secular and use it. We live with this at so many levels; why not counter fear of the dark, the gloom of winter, with saying “I am bigger than this”? It’s not a bad message for children, after all.

 

Suffering from Childhood

Again the thoughtful and thought-provoking Ken Robinson talking about the nature of learning. http://embed.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_how_to_escape_education_s_death_valley.html
Learning or compliance? Teaching or testing? I won’t comment much more, but it does tie in to some extent with last night’s post about my position as an HE lecturer; what he says about teaching children also applies, mutatis mutandis to many University classes, too.

Maybe that Latin tag is ill-advised?

Soporific

I was asked today for the meaning of this word.

I have absolutely no problem supplying a definition – and equally no problem in being asked by a student to provide it. This is not a moan.

What I’m trying to ponder is two-fold: the possible complexity of my language and why a student whom I have known for two and a bit years should seek to ask me for a definition now.

I made a joke about how perhaps a two-hour class after lunch was itself likely to encourage sleep, and asked them to note the use of the word in The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  But I was still nagged by the asking.

I don’t think I have changed my vocabulary, although I do know how to use words in different circumstances and with different audiences.  It is more than possible that I am pretentiously latinate (I know both of these are pretentiously latinate words), especially when cornered, although today was a very pleasant discussion with ten of the keenest of our students, those who had braved the rollercoaster of timetabling and stuck with our new module on reading.

Ah. There’s the key. These were students in a quiet, small group, who felt confident in expressing themselves, in asking questions, in asking for definitions. We talked about attitudes to reading, about phonemes and graphemes, Jolly Phonics and an article on under-ones and reading – and the meaning and use of the word soporific. We also looked at a number of research reports from NFER to PIRLS and an odd report on the latest stuff from Save the Children via the Guardian. And then one short excerpt from the PIRLS publication (Ch 6 on School Climate, linked here) struck me:

The PIRLS 2011 School Emphasis on Academic Success scale characterizes five aspects of academic optimism:

  •  Teachers’ understanding of the school’s curricular goals;

  • Teachers’ degree of success in implementing the school’s curriculum;

  •  Teachers’ expectations for student achievement;

  •  Parental support for student achievement; and

  •  Students’ desire to do well in school.

Do I have well-matched expectations for my students’ achievement? Do my students desire to do well? Or do I parade a faux-scholarship so that students can only ask me what the Hell I’m talking about in their penultimate semester, and in a small seminar group?