Jameswoodward’s Weblog

Thanks to Stephen Gardiner here is a play with some of the words in my blog…..

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

…

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W.H. Auden

If the Bible is anything to go by, such experimental approaches to the reality and the realizing of faith will not guarantee any one of us necessarily comforting and reassuring experiences. We may be taken out of the half-light of a pseudo-faith or semi-faith into the darkness of doubt which is the ante-chamber to the reality of God. But if the experience of the people of God is anything to go by, if the life of Jesus Christ is anything to follow and to gain hope from, then we may be sure that anyone who will throw in his or her lot with the people of God and who will join with them in going out into the world’s uncertainties and into the depths of their own perplexities will find, in God’s time and not their own, that they are not alone in this journeying. Rather they will learn that they are on the way to a city whose builder and founder is God and that on this way they are given enough knowledge of God or, at least, sufficient hope that God will be known, to continue hopefully. Together we shall find growing in us a Christian faith in God which is not shaken by ferment nor defeated by frustration but rather strengthened and deepened because its source and its end lies in God alone.

In a science museum, there is one exhibit in particular which attracted long lines of children: “Face Ageing”. A child sits down in front of an automatic camera and has their portrait taken. They wait and their digitized bust appears on a TV. monitor. Then, tapping a button like a VCR remote, each child could rapidly call up simulations of what she or he would look like at one year intervals, up to the age of 69. In seconds, the computer added grotesque pouches, reddy skin and blotches to their familiar features; the faces become elongated, then wider and then saggy. Lines become more heavily rutted. Boys lost hair, hair turned grey. The heads of both girls and boys grew then shrunk.

I watched on as an idle observer, amazed at the response. “I don’t want to get old”, said one boy while another child commented, unkindly perhaps, on a friend “he’s disgusting at 42”. Thanks, I thought to myself!

Nobody stayed in the booth long. Anyone could have stopped punching the button altogether at any age, or lingered longer at a particular age. But most swept through the changes of their punitive face course to the bitter end. They came out pre-occupied, distracted, some giggling recklessly, most edging away fast, not wanting to talk about the experience, not knowing what had happened in there. I think that most of the children came away feeling that they did not want to get old.

 As Virginia Wolf says, “If you are young, the future lies upon the present, like a piece of glass, making it tremble and quiver.” Because I think it is part of a wider and interesting picture of a society prepared to face some of the cultural challenges and opportunities of ageing.

People who are prepared to reflect on age, even if, or especially if, it fills them with fear, are surely all better prepared to think about the choices that might surround the shape of ageing for them as individuals or communities.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me
as angels, not polarities.
Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius
to spin and weave in the same action
from her own body, anywhere —
even from a broken web.

From Adrienne Rich, Integrity

He is known also as the Holy and Righteous and Trans­cendent One who is trustworthy. This is a thing which has been borne in upon the followers of God, those who have been called to know that they are his people through all the ups and downs of their lives, through all the muddle and chaos and frustration, as well as through all the joy and excitement and hope.

If we would only let the Bible speak for itself and just read it in simplicity, we would see that men do not believe in God because this gives them the answer to the problem of evil or because this shows what pattern things fit into. They believe in God because they discover him in their hopes and in their fears, constantly being renewed when they thought they were crushed; constantly being taken to higher hopes when they thought they had achieved all there was to be achieved; and what they have discovered about the Holy One who is involved with his people, is that he is wholly steadfast, trustworthy, the God who has a steadfast purpose which is expressed through the demand which he makes upon his people to follow him.

Moreover, in discovering the holiness and the righteousness and the otherness of God, and in discovering his trustworthiness, men have discovered that he is a caring God, that his steadfastness is expressed above all in love. We are talking, therefore, about the Lord who is steadfast, purposeful, demanding, promising love. We are talking of the Lord who is our God, the Lord who is my God, just as he was the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob; the God of David, the God of Peter, the God of Paul, the God of Jesus.

Belief in God today is what it always has been. A commit­ment to a way of living based on response to a way of giving – to the way in which God gives himself to us in Jesus Christ, through our fellow believers, through that of God in every man and in the possibilities of the universe. Moreover, belief in God is experimental living and it is experiencing living. It is not being sure of a set of sentences nor of a set of facts which tell us that God exists, For if God is God then he must establish himself. If he is not God then there is nothing whatever to be done about it. But I am bound to bear witness to you that he is God – the living God who is active today to smash all the idols of religion in which men seek to start him up, and active today to meet and fulfil all the needs and possibilities of truly human living, in this world and beyond it.

After a great deal of work Im glad to report the launch of my redesigned web page…..

take a look at www.jameswoodward.info and let me know what you think

I must move constantly between not needing to know and knowing that I do not know and thus commit myself to the process of finding out. I experience faith as a gift and as a question. The very nature of the gift requires that I face the question. If it is truly a gift of the Giver, a real response to a true God, then the questioning will enable the deeper receiving of the gift and a deepening knowing of the Giver.

If there is no Giver, then there is no gift, and the ques­tioning will expose the illusion.

 Nothing I can do can alter the ultimate situation here. I can only seek to put myself in the way of receiving an exposure of this situation. I must investigate. I must respond, I must see – and let be whatever I am brought to see.

Edward, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, was known as ‘the Confessor’ because of his deep piety.

Edward was the son of Ethelred II ‘the Unready’ and Emma, the daughter of Richard II of Normandy. The family was exiled in Normandy after the Danish invasion of 1013, but returned the following year and negotiated Ethelred’s reinstatement. After Ethelred’s death in 1016 the Danes again took control of England. Edward lived in exile until 1041, when he returned to the London court of his half brother, Hardecanute. He became king in 1042.

Much of his reign was peaceful and prosperous. Skirmishes with the Scots and Welsh were only occasional and internal administration was maintained. The financial and judicial systems were efficient and trade was good. However, Edward’s introduction to court of some Norman friends prompted resentment, particularly in the houses of Mercia and Wessex, which both held considerable power.

For the first 11 years of Edward’s reign the real ruler of England was Godwine, Earl of Wessex. Edward married Godwine’s daughter Edith in 1045, but this could not prevent a breach between the two men in 1049. Two years later, with the support of Leofric of Mercia, Edward outlawed Godwine and his family. However, Edward’s continued favouritism caused problems with his nobles and in 1052 Godwine and his sons returned. The magnates were not prepared to engage them in civil war and forced the king to make terms. Godwine’s lands were returned to him and many of Edward’s Norman favourites were exiled.

When Godwine died in 1053, his son Harold took over. It was he, rather than Edward, who subjugated Wales in 1063 and negotiated with the rebellious Northumbrians in 1065. Consequently, shortly before his death, Edward named Harold as his successor even though he may already have promised the crown to a distant cousin, William, Duke of Normandy. He died on 4 January 1066 and was buried in the abbey he had constructed at Westminster.