indicative power

Willpower is a notoriously sputtery engine on which to rely for internal energy, but a right image silently and inexorably pulls us into its field of reality, which is also a field of energy.

Eugene H. Peterson, Under The Unpredicatable Plant, p.6

edward shillito: jesus of the scars

If we have never sought, we seek Thee now;
Thine eyes burn through the dark, our only stars;
We must have sight of thorn-pricks on Thy brow,
We must have Thee, O Jesus of the Scars.

The heavens frighten us; they are too calm;
In all the universe we have no place.
Our wounds are hurting us; where is the balm?
Lord Jesus, by Thy Scars we claim Thy grace.

If, when the doors are shut, Thou drawest near,
Only reveal those hands, that side of Thine;
We know today what wounds are, have no fear;
Show us Thy Scars, we know the countersign.

The other gods were strong, but Thou wast weak;
They rode, but Thou didst stumble to a throne;
But to our wounds only God’s wounds can speak,
And not a god has wounds, but Thou alone.

the great songs (xvi) - the scientist

I know Coldplay come in for a lot of (sometimes deserved) criticism - taking themselves too seriously, overblown and underwhelming. But when they get it right, musically and lyrically, they get it well right.

The Scientist doesn't need much explanation, nor commendation; it's qualities shine through from first hearing onwards. It's simple, yet not simplistic. It is heartfelt, yet without angst. And the singing is probably Chris Martin's best.

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart

So: enjoy.

the great songs (xv) - i want you to be my love

This song is deceptively simple and potentially inconsequential. It doesn't mean to deceive; it isn't a set-up or a falsification. But it will only really make its presence deeply felt in the light of what preceded it: the breaking-point marital tension of Ohio. You can read about the trauma here but you'll only feel it by listening (without company) to Ohio.

And then coming to I Want You To Be My Love becomes what it always was for its makers: fresh, vibrant satisfaction in the solidarity of tested love.

the great songs (xiv) - and i love her

Well, who would have thought this would have been the first Beatles track to feature on these lists? Many others could have been chosen (Hey Jude is almost without peer). But a choice is made and it is this. You could do yourself a favour and buy A Hard Day's Night; then you'll not only get this superb McCartney love song but more fab songs than you can shake one of Ringo's drumsticks at.

And I Love Her is a simple enough song but that's probably its greatest asset. As simple as, say, Here, There & Everywhere (on Revolver) but this has something extra. Being in love can be a hugely difficult thing; songs like this are what blokes like me have always needed in traversing those choppy seas.

One particular memory is stirred by this song: lying awake in my room at college, late at night, early months of 1982, listening in the dark to Radio 2 (probably dear old Brian Matthews) and they played this song. In the stillness of the night, its simple purity struck me for the first time. But not the last.

the great songs (xiii) - the winner takes it all

There was a time when I would never have admitted to having a song like this in amongst my favourite tracks...but no longer. August 1980 was a halcyon month in the charts - ABBA and David Bowie vying for the number 1 slot with this song and Ashes to Ashes respectively before The Jam took over in early September with Start! Heady days, if we had but known it.

The Winner Takes It All famously documents the marriage breakdowns within the band (although they denied it was quite so explicit). In doing so, they crafted the perfect pop song: great melodies (as ever), perfect singing, lyrics that resonate with people like us, a video that laid bare the emotional traumas being sung and the final, desperate vulnerability in the singing of the lines,

I apologise if it makes you feel bad,
seeing me so tense, no self-confidence
but, you see, the winner takes it all.

ABBA were a great gift in the 70s and early days of the 80s.

the great songs (xii) - raise the roof

I could have populated this list with a number of songs by Everything But The Girl (possibly Apron Strings or maybe Mirrorball or Flipside) but I'm going to go for one of Tracey Thorn's solo offerings, Raise The Roof (off her 2007 album Out Of The Woods). Again, she could have featured more than once on this list - I have an intense love for Too Happy, the song that closed her short-but-sweet debut solo 1982 album A Distant Shore.

But I've chosen this one because of its instantaneous impact, the infectious beat and the (as always) gorgeous singing - it's got it all really. A song that guarantees I'll be dancing round the kitchen. Play it loud!

Put the music on
put the music on
put the music on
they all wanna dance....

And you do it with love!

I guess I ought to apologise to the kitchen.

Mary Oliver: Ocean

I am in love with Ocean
lifting her thousands of white hats
in the chop of the storm,
or lying smooth and blue, the
loveliest bed in the world.
In the personal life, there is

always grief more than enough,
a heart-load for each one of us
on the dusty road. I suppose
there is a reason for this, so I will be
patient, acquiescent. But I will live
nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting
equally in all the blast and welcome
of her sorrowless, salt self.


(from Red Bird, p.15)

dilemma

if a poem
is a
work
of art

and i write
a poem
but don't
work

on it,
shaping, sieving, splicing;

does that mean
it is simply

art?

the great songs (xi) - tears in heaven

It's only recently that I've come to appreciate Eric Clapton - in particular, his albums Slowhand and 461 Ocean Boulevard are hugely enjoyable and full of class. This song is not his usual milieu but is worthy of any list.

The background to the song is well-known (the death of his young son in an accident) and it may well be that such a harrowing genesis puts the listener in a difficult position: to dismiss the song could be thought heartless, and to enjoy it, macabre. In that way it bears some resemblance to Yoko Ono's work Season Of Glass.

Well, it isn't enjoyable and it ought not to be dismissed. It is harrowing and painful. It asks profoundly difficult questions. Isn't that what music ought to do, if it is being honest? This is not art as artifice; it is the expression of life on fetid ground, within a stained cosmos and in search of genuine hope.

The question, 'Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven?' is heavy with pathos; how could a parent bear an answer that was negative? And his observation, 'I know I don't belong here in heaven', is searing. Why not? Because your life is not yet ended? Or because it is a place of innocence and innocents and you know you're neither? It is a comment that ought to compell all gospel servants to stand alongside the broken and lost.

Too profound for a list like this.

Too important not to be on it.

two new books

I know, this seems to go against what I blogged a few weeks back - I'd only buy a new book when I'd finished three old ones. But who's to say I haven't just finished six books that were already on my shelf? Prove me wrong if you can....

Anyway, I'm 'fessin up to the following new books and will try to write mini-reviews in due course.

Darkness is my only companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight (subtitled: A Christian Response To Mental Illness)

The God I Don't Understand - Christopher J h Wright

Worth checking out, methinks.

thhe great songs (x) - thrasher

Agricultural mechanisation as metaphor for the challenge of time and change in personal relationships? It could only be Neil Young.

His 1979 offering, Rust Never Sleeps, marries one side of acoustic material with one side of full-out rock. It opens and closes with the same track, giving the album its thematic cohesion but the two tracks that ultimately define the album and corral its essence are Thrasher (acoustic) and Powderfinger (electric). Both are worthy of appearing in this list (and checking-out on Spotify) but the former will have to suffice.

Many have seen references in the song to Young's relationship with the other members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and it's hard not to see their shadows in its lines:

I searched out my companions
who were lost in crystal canyons,
when the aimless blade of science
slashed the pearly gates.
It was then that I knew I'd had enough
burned my credit card for fuel;
headed-out to where the pavement turns to sand.
With a one-way ticket to the land of truth
and my suitcase in my hand
how I lost my friends
I still don't understand.
They had the best selection;
they were poisoned with protection.
There was nothing that they needed,
nothing left to find.
They were lost in rock formations
or became park bench mutations;
on the sidewalks and in the stations
they were waiting, waiting.
So I got bored and left them there;
they were just dead weight to me.
Bbetter down the road
without that load.

And yet the song is not merely personal; the metaphors work well and burrow deep. Time works ravages - for persons and societies. Not all progress is really so. And a day will come when hands will be raised, no longer in resistance and yet not in surrender; rather, they will be raised one final time to herald the end with dignity:

And when the thrasher comes
I'll be stuck in the sun,
like the dinosaurs in shrines.
But I'll know the time has come
to give what's mine.

A long, rambling song, fit for a long and rambling life. Long may you run, Neil.

again: Mam

Mam

mary oliver: red bird

Red bird came all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else could.

Of course I love the sparrows,
those dun-coloured darlings,
so hungry and so many.

I am a God-fearing feeder of birds,
I know He has many children,
not all of them bold in spirit.

Still, for whatever reason -
perhaps because the winter is so long
and the sky so black-blue,

or perhaps because the heart narrows
as often as it opens -
I am grateful

that red bird comes all winter
firing up the landscape
as nothing else can do.


(Mary Oliver, Red Bird, p.1, Bloodaxe Books 2008)

becoming real

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

"I supose you are Real?" said the Rabbit. And then he wished he had not said it, for he thought the Skin Horse might be sensitive. But the Skin Horse only smiled.

"The Boy's Uncle made me Real," he said. "That was a great many years ago; but once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always."

extract from The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjery Williams

Ferguson on Calvin on Jesus' humanity

From this interview, these words:

In my own view probably no theologian has understood the deep humanity of the Lord Jesus better than Calvin, and it seems to me that is often the measure not only of a man's mind, but also of his heart.

the great songs (ix) - pressing on

This great song is off the much-vilified Bob Dylan album, Saved. Because of his declared Christian faith, many people disliked the previous album Slow Train Coming but it seemed to fare better in the review-stakes than its successor did. But I've always had a soft spot for it and this song in particular (I ought to add that I only came to know it much later than when it first appeared in about 1980).

What I like is the intensity of the song and the way it builds & builds. I also love the observation,

Temptation's not an easy thing,
Adam given the devil rein;
cos he sinned I got no choice,
it run in my veins...
but 'm pressing on.

That's what I want to do, too.

84

was your mother's number
and now you've made it
yours,
but not by
choice or design -
too early
and far
too soon.


(for Mam)

r s thomas: a marriage

We met
       under a shower
of bird-notes.
       Fifty years passed,
love's moment
       in a world in
servitude to time.
       She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
       closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
       'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
       partner for
the last dance. And she,
       who in life
had done everything
       with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
       for the shedding
of one sigh no
       heavier than a feather.