The Back of a Shadow

We have been looking at fatherhood and (not quite a coincidence) looking at the work of Alan Garner, and for me they came together here, in Ludchurch.

I am not going to draft out a whole history of Lud, or Ludd, or delve into the speculation the Internet loves of sun-worship and pre-Christian themes in some kind of Ur-Gawain, tempting though they are, but in trying to make sense of Ludchurch in the Garner landscapes I need at least to find a place for Lud.

There is a useful site here for the Gawain literature, and a good ME text here. From these I have picked out some of the points about the Green Knight.

Half etayn in erde I hope þat he were…

For wonder of his hwe men hade,
Set in his semblaunt sene;
He ferde as freke were fade,
And oueral enker-grene.

An Ettin, the other kind of giant from a þurs but clearly from the green world of magic, “he carried himself in hostile fashion,” or “as a Fay-man fell he passed.” Not someone to tangle with, his holyn bobbe in one hand, an axe in the other. The scene is about colour and movement and threat – while Ludchurch, although “oueral enker-grene” is enclosed, and (when we visited, and when the Man visits in Boneland) silent -a cultic space, not an agent.

The location of the Green Chapel has been discussed by others, including Alan Garner, and with more re-reading after visiting Ludchurch I am drawn to its cliffs and rocks and “knokled knarrez with knorned stonez.” In Gawain it is a place of an evil cult, maybe more than an echo of un-Christian practice.

Here my[gh]t aboute mydny[gh]t
Þe dele his matynnes telle!
‘Now iwysse,’ quoþ Wowayn, ‘wysty is here;
Þis oritore is vgly, with erbez ouergrowen;
Wel bisemez þe wy[gh]e wruxled in grene
Dele here his deuocioun on þe deuelez wyse.
Now I fele hit is þe fende, in my fyue wyttez,
Þat hatz stoken me þis steuen to strye me here.
Þis is a chapel of meschaunce, þat chekke hit bytyde!
Hit is þe corsedest kyrk þat euer I com inne!’

But in this place, and from the encounter with the half-Ettin Bertilak -and through the magic of the powerful Morgan –

(“Þe maystrés of Merlyn”…”Weldez non so hy[gh]e hawtesse
Þat ho ne con make ful tame–“)

– Gawain learns his lesson.

Do we meet in the Green Man a father principally as instructor and law-giver? And where does this father “sit”? I began to speculate on the landscape way back in my research proposal in 2010; perhaps I was too glib to write earlier about ” the world of the dad, not the desert of the Patriarch”? To move into my present concern for Alan Garner’s real-and-mythic landscape, how does an author concerned with real places manage their mythology while keeping them recognisable, in some sense “true”?

That Candle Thing

Way back, a long time ago – as in before I had become a teacher (i.e. before I had QTS), Lynne Scholefield produced an interesting article called ‘Can we do that candle thing again?’ (British Journal of Religious Education, Volume 5, Issue 2, 1983). I found it inspirational when, a few years later, I began to train, first as an RE teacher and then teaching in a variety of schools. That Candle Thing used a candle to focus a brief meditation session, an exploration of prayer that was part of experiential RE.

It comes back now as I prepare a series of short sessions for the Westminster Chapel here at Harcourt Hill, a non-faith-based experience of what I am calling “mental refreshment” which will draw on the traditions of mindfulness I first met the same year as I read Scholefield’s article, in the work of Thich Nhat Hahn.

Fifteen minutes of settling, sitting and then… well, classes for some, buses and the weekend for others. And a hope that I am doing something that people will find useful, not jumping on the mindfulness bandwagon.

Or at least jumping on it mindfully.

12:35 – 12:50, Semester 2, 2016, Westminster Chapel.

‘That Candle Thing’

A Return to Green Knowe

I want to come back to a previous post, in which I reflected on adult perspectives on children’s literature by asking what certain adult characters might have made of their part in a child’s story. Here, I want to reflect as an older adult on the transformative character of the Great Grandmother in Lucy Boston’s Children of Green Knowe.

At the start of the Green Knowe sequence, Toseland – Tolly – is a rootless child, in need of a place to belong. I think that’s why I first liked him; I felt a connection. On the other hand, his great- grandmother, Linnet Oldknow has almost nothing but belonging, and it’s sometimes tempting to think that before Tolly’s arrival she has almost nothing but shadows. Occasional friends, some contact with her gardener and his family and then… then evenings in a big house full of history: whispers, half-heard singing, childhoods she can sort of remember, sort of touch. Evenings and evenings of silence.
As I grow older (and in welcoming my children’s children into our house I can see the pleasure she gets) I find myself wondering about what the incidents at the heart of The Children mean to her. She is challenged to allow Tolly into her life, and while she does so with exceptional good grace it requires her to share her history, good and bad with a boy passionate to share her sense of belonging, to share her shadows. Such, perhaps, is family.
What I share with my father and shared with his mother, was Lancastrian Catholicism, and the Laudian Anglicanism of the Oldknows both chimed with me and intrigued: like but unlike. I wasn’t much bothered about – and still don’t really know – how very minor seigneurial Catholics ended up in a terrace house in Blackburn (no Green Knowe for me!), but I was concerned with our family ghost, Lady Dorothy, and with our more-than-ghostly connection to a C17th past in Blessed John Southworth. My grandma went to Rome for his canonisation in 1970, much as, if she’d “been spared” (a phrase of hers) she might have come to her grandchildren’s graduations. Grandma shared stories of the Grey Lady at Salmesbury Hall, the stories of John Southworth, the stories of the Pendle Witches. I guess, to be crass, it’s called heritage, (and heritage was what Lucy Boston wanted (like Tolly), so she wrote herself into the history of her own house in the persona of the great-grandmother much like Kipling wrote himself into the valley where he lived). She -and my dad – changed our family into one full of possibility.

I am intrigued by how Mrs Oldknow reacts to Tolly in those first meetings: warm, but clear in her expectations, she leaves nothing to be unsettling and yet everything is unsettling – for both of them. Mrs Oldknow, as Lucy Boston writes her, brings out the stories she has lived with, in the ghosts and the artefacts of the ancient manor house and allows Tolly to be drawn into them with near-fatal consequences. At the climactic confrontation with the family’s curse she is almost powerless.

But it is her stories and her presence that brings all this to life: as they survive (and they do, through other books), her calmness, her understanding of the past transforms the manor into something truly wonderful. Story as represented by Linnet Oldknow (and my grandma) does not necessarily transform into a hubristic new-and-improved, but illuminates the past and therefore brings a greater understanding .

Reimagining Spirituality

Sometimes blogging takes off. In this case, Lindsay Jordan, a fellow academic and doctoral student’s reflection on the philosophy of education – sometimes hers, sometimes more generally – produces some really worthwhile stuff. Go and have a look: she makes a good case, for instance, here, around holistic views of higher education.

And this is why it was worth paying attention when Lindsay tweeted Jonathan Rowson’s report for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce on spirituality. It is a really good report. It says to me that the spirituality component of our Masters’ module on Children’s Imaginative Worlds should be asked to read, mark and inwardly digest it as a matter of course, and that it is a really useful document for the Undergraduate work on Spirituality that I’ve discussed before, e.g. here and here, where I start from Rowson’s blog.

At a personal level, the passage in which Rowson discusses “the myriad addictions of apparently normal behaviour and [how] what passes for everyday consciousness begins to look like a low-level psychopathology” hits me almost with the force of a passage of Lectio Divina. Perhaps I have to follow the instruction with which the report ends, where Richard Rohr exhorts us to “live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”

And this is where my own argument falters, and I have not yet worked out how to allow this holistic view of spirituality to develop my (sometimes uncomfortable) position as a member of a faith community teaching spirituality in a secular university. Perhaps, perhaps, it is time to move to a teaching of spirituality that is more open to (respectful) conflict and less eclectic, that allows, as one Muslim student remarked recently, “allows me to really re-evaluate what I believe – not so that I come to disbelieve it, but so that I know what I believe and I believe it stronger.” But does that mean that the academic demands are “best answered through practice rather than theory”? That the module looks at practising spirituality rather than examine it theoretically? Bonaventure, the great Franciscan theologian who recieved his doctorate at the same time as Thomas Aquinas is clear:

“…if you want to understand how this happens, ask it of grace, not of learning; ask it of desire, not of attentive reading; ask it of the betrothed, not of the teacher; ask it of God, not of humanity; ask it of darkness, not of radiance.”

Is this an anti-intellectual stance, or one that is simply demanding learning though practice? And what are its implications for the mixed community of a secular UK university?

Innocence and Childhood – thoughts for St Agnes’ Day

Some random thoughts here. Not sure I can bring them all together but here goes.

The monk, peace activist and writer Thomas Merton wrote a couple of poems on the child-martyr Agnes. The one here is in some ways the less accessible, with its interplay between English and Latin, and the references to liturgical practice, but does nonetheless have some things I want to explore.
St. Agnes: A Responsory

Cujus pulchritudinem
Sol et luna mirantur. . .
Hear with joy this child of God
Plays in the perfect garden of her martyrdom,
Ipsi soli servo fidem.

Spending the silver of her little life
To bring her Bridegroom these bright flowers
Of which her arms are full.

Cujus pulchritudinem. . .
With what white smiles
She buys the Popes their palliums,
And lavishes upon our souls the lambs of her confession!
Sol et luna mirantur,
Ipsi soli servo fidem.

Her virtues, with their simple strings,
Play to the Lover hidden in the universe,
Cujus pulchritudinem. . .
Who smiles into the sun His looking-glass,
And fills it with his glorious face:
Who utters the round moon’s recurring O
And drowns our dusks in peace.
Ipsi soli servo fidem!

The Roman captain’s work is done:
Now he may tear his temples down—
Her charity has flown to four horizons, like the swiftest doves,

Where all towns sing like springtime, with their newborn bells
Pouring her golden name out of their crucibles.

Two themes here, then: the martyrdom of eleven-year old Agnes moved the early Church partly because a child – and a girl-child at that – demonstrated her free acceptance of the consequences of her beliefs, in a way that ran contrary to the established views of childhood, in which subordinacy, docility perhaps, is key. Agnes is independent, willing to go to her death, and unafraid. It is a poignant picture, whatever you make of her decision. It is also touched by the tradition of the virgin martyrs (Cecilia, Anastasia – there is a list [in itself an odd document, if you don’t consider the context] on this site) many of whom chose Christian martyrdom rather than the “easy escape” of being married off. You might say that a child-virgin-martyr ticks a great number of boxes for Catholic Christianity, certainly in the early days.

Thus, Thomas Merton plays with the image of “the silver of her little life,” in the “garden of her martyrdom” (echoed in the penultimate line with “springtime” and “newborn bells”) to emphasise her childhood, but also depicts her briefly as playing a stringed instrument to her “Lover hidden in the universe.” Merton addresses a contradiction – as he does in his other, much darker poem on the subject.

The feast of St Agnes (21st January) challenges me to think about innocence and independence as I watch my granddaughters grow – but it also reminds me (as I prepare for the module on Children’s Spirituality this semester) of how important childhood is (or at least can be) in the formulation of Christian spirituality. Hans Urs von Baltasar (a theologian more or less contemporary with Merton) puts it like this:

The backward glance to lost childhood – as cultivated by Christian poets – is no longer just a romantic dream, but a longing for a lost innocence and intimacy with God that Jesus and Mary never lost… (Die Ganze im Fragment, cited in John Saward’s The Way of the Lamb).

I’d suggest that the early reflections on St Agnes are much the same kind of longing for innocence and intimacy, and that these are present in Merton’s poem. Both Baltasar and Merton, of course, might had had much to say about the scandals of abuse that now indelibly scar that vision.

Christian spirituality has had to grapple in various ways with the childhood and maturity of a God made flesh, and in orthodox Christian theology (East and West), the child fed by his mother is key. However, whether that child is a “mere” baby, or something more, visual and poetic depictions have often found hard to some to terms with: this is a child, but more than a child; a “silly tender babe” and “Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb.”

And perhaps this tension is itself creative, propelling Christianity to think about children as people – innocent but independent, people of many possibilities, and resilient. This is a vision that should, to my mind fly “to four horizons like the swiftest doves.”

Thoughts on Leadership, Management and Ethos

A colleague of mine, an expert in how groups and professionals communicate, once asked me what I felt makes a good leader. I gave her a copy of the Rule of St Benedict. Oxford Brookes, as I write, is searching for a new Vice-Chancellor; schools continue to face crises as they interview over and over for suitable candidates for headships; ‘my’ PGCE students are gathering their reflections of themselves as they prepare for the step into job applications, as they present themselves, even if only in an initial, local stage, as leaders in education. I still feel Benedict (and the tradition he gives impetus to) have a lot to offer in terms of insights on leadership.

Three things come together this week all (perhaps it’s unsurprising) from Catholic Christian tradition. The first is just part of the publicity, if you like, around Pope Francis’ latest visits. It’s not explicitly Benedictine, but does have a lot in common with the Benedictine rule. Francis is praised for his “Humanity, Humility and Humour,” a “bridge-builder (the first meaning of Pontifex),” a “shepherd who smells like his sheep.”

The second is today’s minor feast of St Placid, the boy monk who almost drowned, and his rescuer, St Maurus, whose obedience to St Benedict (according to St Gregory) effects a miracle. The miracle story might be seen as a message of how important unquestioning obedience is; it might also be seen as a parable of how a leader perceives need, delegates – and (at the end of the story) is unwilling to grab the glory for themselves.

The last was the feast of St Aelred on Monday, whose success in building up the community of Rievaulx was matched by his own penitence (life was not easy in the monastery for a Refusenik of the luxuria of the Scottish court) and his wish to be gentle, kind to his brothers. A short reflection from the ever-busy nuns of Holy Trinity can be found here; a Dominican reflection is here.

Leadership, in these cases, all seem summed up for me in St Aelred’s reflection on being an Abbot. Aelred’s prayer, the Oratio Pastoralis, is poorly represented on the internet. Here is a taste of it, in my own very wobbly précis/translation.

Teach me, sweet Lord, to bring back trouble-makers, encourage the faint-hearted and support the weak. Let me adapt to the unique qualities of each person, to their character, their likes, their strengths, to their capacity to receive… and since (either because of my physical and spiritual limits or some deep-seated shortcoming) I cannot really help them develop through the example of my late nights or my penitence, grant me by your mercy to be able to edify them by my humility, love, patience and mercy.

And again, the message comes out clearly, even if through the stained glass of the Middle Ages: humility, humanity… Humour, perhaps, springs from the previous two: if it is a human function, perhaps it could be seen as a prerequisite of a human manager. There is an element of inclusivity here, a willingness to forgive, to develop people, to see them as individuals. How you might put all this in a job description for a leader, or to be specific an educational leader, I am not at all sure – but they are the essential qualities, I think.

Father Christmas: an apology

In Private Eye there is a running gag in which news media retract a statement about a celebrity and change it to the opposite: David Cameron is not a rich idiot but the saviour of the nation; David Beckham is not a great sports star but an over-paid underwear salesman – &c. You get the idea. In doing so they expose the volte-face of a shallow reporting. Here comes one of my own.

I have long been seen as a Scrooge-like figure in my own family, and this…erm.. ambiguity around late December festivities has extended to Father Christmas. I have often cast doubt on the usefulness of Fr C in proposing an authentic Christmas narrative. I am sure that, however I dress this up, part of it is the upset of ten-year-old me discovering, probably a couple of years after his peers, what the adult world made of Father Christmas.

But the difficulties of current Santa culture seem particularly sharp this year, and not because of typhoons, or food banks, or the Middle East, or anything grand. It’s just that two examples from this Christmas seem especially naff: the illogical stance of this campaign in which a child writes to Santa saying she is “too old for fairy tales” (or is this simply ironic?); the bizarre “Catholics Come Home” video which has Santa at the stable. Even if I wielded an autocratic power to ban such things, I have no objection to people who do not believe in the Incarnation having a December festival, even if its name is nicked (let’s face it, Christianity probably stole the feast off the Romans), and I am not seeking to ban Santa from the celebration of Christmas. There is, however, a blind spot here. It is as if we can have a Christmas without Christ, but that the festival must have “Santa.” Not St Nicholas, of course, not the fiery , Orthodox bishop who stands as a symbol for children, for travellers, against exploitation; we must have Clement Moore’s jolliness, a penchant for overeating and comedy, and gift-giving. We must have that by-now-ingrained picture of a red suit and a white beard. He must receive the petitions of children not to have to go to Church; he must be corralled into Church-going himself. It is as if the myth has to trump both the religious belief and the negation of that belief. Santa, the jolly Winter King, rules. To my mind the glutinous “Santa at the Stable” advert is just as empty-headed as the “Dear Santa” letter.

Calm. Calm. Calm. Here comes the retraction.

With my white beard, and a (provided) red suit, I will be in a local Nursery in a fortnight’s time, ho-ho-ho-ing about and eating pies – both the mince and humble varieties. The prancing and pawing on the roof will be my feebly held values, anxious to fly away like the down of a thistle.

Where does that put me as cynic and hard-line Santa-doubter? I’m really not sure. But I will throw myself into Santadom with abandon and I fully expect to love it.

Thirteenth Night

Richard Greene is a scholar (his University page from Toronto is here), a wit and a friend. He is most widely known, I would guess, for his excellent work on literary biography. However, he also a poet of no little distinction (his latest, Dante’s House is both monumental and accessible) and for the night after Epiphany I should like to offer his short, early poem, Thirteenth Night, on tonight’s dies non.

I hoover up the rubble of Christmas,

Bright shreds of wrapping, carpeted biscuit crumbs,

Ornamental shards of a fallen angel,

Satsuma stems, red and green ends of string.

Now, the night after twelfth night, old Christmas

Growing older, the tree standing one last hour,

The house must turn to the simpler regime

Of school-going, work, library delving,

Lives which will prosper through unfestive months

Of England’s wet winter. Waybread in season:

The last dark fruit-cake one wise elf hid.

Calleva Atrebatum and all that

It hardly seems worth putting links to the claims and counter-claims that have followed Michael Gove’s irascible statements about Blackadder views of World War I. Perhaps the best (and genuinely critical) précis of the [can I call it?] debate, is to be found here, in a blog post on the Imperial and Global Forum from Marc-William Palen at Exeter. In any case, it’s not the argument I’m really interested in, and Dave Aldridge’s work on remembrance (see his blog for a taste) already goes way beyond what I could say.

What prompts a blog post tonight is a quotation in Charlotte Higgins’ book Under Another Sky, which I was given at Christmas and which I am really enjoying. In exploring Roman Britain she has moved from messy Londinium to the quieter and more ordered Silchester – Calleva Atrebatum – only to reveal it, too, is a site where tangles of Romano-British religious practices, loyalties and rivalries do not make for a straightforward narrative. She contrasts this with Rosemary Sutcliff’s vision of Calleva in “The Eagle of the Ninth,” and quotes Sutcliff saying that she is “happiest…in Roman Britain:”

“If I could do a time flip and land back in Roman Britain, I would take a deep breath, take perhaps a fortnight to get used to things, then be all right… I have a special “Ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling…”

One way of looking at this is to say that it is part of our own spiritual and cultural identity that we construct a world we feel we would like to be at home in; Rosemary Sutcliff had a great gift for portraying that home, and giving flesh to long-dead bones, stories to long-forgotten artefacts. I could feel the same about some parts of the Middle Ages – but I know (as I suspect Sutcliff knew) that this is fantasy, really. Sources help us do history better than stories do – although stories have a part to play.

I am less sure that some of the voices raised are clear about this themselves, when we/they discuss World War I. I suppose I can claim to have had a Grandpa in the Boer War and in the trenches – I still have the touching and eye-opening letters he sent the young woman who was to become my Grandmother; I have met people who were there, listened to the way they avoided talking about the enemy as a group of people, only as a single, dehumanised Enemy. I guess there are quite a few people who have similar experiences. I guess most of them, like me, will not claim, on the strength of that, to pontificate about what it was “really like” in the trenches.

My worry is when politicians, rather than historians, start telling us what must be taught in schools about how things were. Myth-makers with the power to wreck history?

Tim Whitmarsh’s review of Charlotte Higgins’ book in the Guardian makes an important point:

The temptation to retool our Roman heritage so that it looks the way we want it to can be overpowering.

Perhaps the “Great Times in WWI” story is a rewrite that seeks to up the patriotic flag in history; I think it has badly backfired. I think at the heart of Whitmarsh’s caveat is something that historiography always seeks to explore; the temptation to which he refers is something that perhaps the Secretary of State and some of his opponents have succumbed to. A group of people want World War I to be glorious sacrifice, or the noble and legitimate struggle for freedom; another group want it to be mindless, a massive slaughter of young, uncomprehending men rising from lousy, mud-swilling trenches to their deaths.

In some ways, now-quiet Calleva stands as a very good warning to people seeking to make history fit their view of what it should have been. It is not only ancient history that makes myths. Higgin’s chapter ends with an example from a schoolboyish copy of a scene from the Aeneid (itself, of course, a reworking of an imagined history – but let that pass) where the guests at a feast are hushed:

But for me the clamour of the people of Calleva Atrebatum is forever stilled. I will not – I cannot – hear them. The silence is not the hush of expectation, but the chill of secrets.

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.