A Change of Perspective

"Reflection"

I've spent some time reflecting on whether or not blogging is a creative and meaningful way to spend one's time, and I remain undecided. Perhaps it depends not only on the quality of the blog itself, but also on the quality of conversation and dialogue that it inspires. Clearly, with spontaneous blogging the quality is bound to vary, and so is the level of dialogue.

With all this in mind, I've decided to revive this blog as a space for sharing some of my lectures, talks and articles, rather than posting spontaneous blogs on issues that immediately catch my attention. So this is to some extent a substitute for my personal website, and a place for posting links to various materials which I'm working on or have published. In the case of lectures and work in progress, these are 'raw': references are incomplete and ideas are in development, so please bear that in mind when reading. 

It will take some time to put links to all the material I'd like to publish here, but I'm starting with my latest pieces and I'll gradually work backwards through the archive.

One positive use of a blog could be for the purposes of interactive research and conversation around 'big ideas'. I hope to get organised enough to put some of my current research up here, with a request for engagement and debate. Comments on all the material here are welcome, but I've decided to be more discriminating than I was before about which comments I publish. I hope that doesn't inhibit robust debate, but it is intended to inhibit some of the less helpful advice I've received through comments on my previous blogs.

And, because spaces should be used creatively, I shall also post poems, photos, links etc. Here is Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. This was the Poem of the Day today, on a great gadget you can download here for your personalised iGoogle page. I don't know if Angelou was thinking of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence poem when she wrote this, but I recommend reading them together, in the realm of possibility:

A free bird leaps on the back
Of the wind and floats downstream
Till the current ends and dips his wing
In the orange suns rays
And dares to claim the sky.

But a BIRD that stalks down his narrow cage
Can seldom see through his bars of rage
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
Of things unknown but longed for still
And his tune is heard on the distant hill for
The caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through
The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright
Lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged BIRD stands on the grave of dreams
His shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
His wings are clipped and his feet are tied
So he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with
A fearful trill of things unknown
But longed for still and his
Tune is heard on the distant hill
For the caged bird sings of freedom.

Feast of the Archangels

Sculptor Edward Robinson argues that "demythologisation" was an academic trend which deprived Christianity of its imaginative and creative forms of expression. He argues that we need a "remythologisation" of the Gospels, if faith is once again to become vibrant with a sense of mystery and spirituality. 

Today is the Feast of the Archangels, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. They are the only angels named in the Bible. Michael appears in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, as the one who leads the armies of God against the forces of evil. Devotion to the Archangel Michael and the angels originated in the East in the fourth century and spread to the West in the fifth. Gabriel appears in the Book of Daniel, but he is best known as the angel of the Annunciation, who appeared to both Zechariah and Mary in Luke's Gospel, announcing the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus respectively. The story of the angel Raphael can be found in the Book of Tobit in the Old Testament, but for a truly delightful encounter with Raphael I'd encourage you to read Sally Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel.

Gregory the Great says of the word "angel" that "it denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message." Like Thomas Aquinas's God then, an angel's being is synonymous with its doing, for just as God's being is the doing of God (and therefore the doing of the world), so an angel's being is to be discovered in what it does. (The sex of angels has been the subject of much serious theological debate, but I like to think of them as occupying the in-between spaces). 

If you Google the word angel together with quantum physics, you'll find there are a lot of people out there speculating about the relationship between the two. Some of it is highly esoteric, and some of it pedantically academic. Yet let me admit that, since reading Aquinas on angels, I find myself more amazed than before at what quantum physics reveals to us about the sensory world. There is something about that shimmering illusion of the density of matter which might just be the message of the angels, communicating not above and beyond the material world but within it and through it. What are they telling us?

The work of the young artist Mila Furstova is very exciting. Here is one of her Annunciations:

Annunciation I (2008), Mila Furstova

You can see more of her work on her website: Mila Furstova Etching.

Here is Hildegard of Bingen's "Antiphon for the Angels":

Spirited light! on the edge

of the Presence your yearning

burns in the secret darkness,

O angels, insatiably

into God's gaze.

Perversity

could not touch your beauty;

you are essential joy.

But your lost companion,

angel of the crooked

wings - he sought the summit,

shot down the depths of God

and plummeted past Adam -

that a mud-bound spirit might soar.

And here is Maya Angelou's poem, "Touched by an Angel":

We, unaccustomed to courage

exiles from delight

live coiled in shells of loneliness

until love leaves its high holy temple

and comes into our sight 

to liberate us into life.

Love arrives

and in its train come ecstasies

old memories of pleasure

ancient histories of pain.

Yet if we are bold,

love strikes away the chains of fear

from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity

In the flush of love's light

we dare to be brave

And suddenly we see

that love costs all we are

and will ever be.

Yet it is only love

which sets us free.