You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2011.
Wit & wisdom from Milton Jones
Whenever I teach students of preaching about the need to read their congregations, one of the experts to whom I turn is Milton Jones. A stand-up comedian might not be the most obvious source of wisdom for homileticians, but he has a lot to teach the preacher. A few years ago it was my privilege to watch Milton perform at the College of Preachers conference in Swanwick, Derbyshire. He performed an hour’s comedy set to one hundred or so preachers, and then deconstructed his performance in a forty minute interview. One of the things he talked about was the ‘ten seconds of grace’ which his zany hairstyle gives to him. He said that whilst people are staring at his whacky hair when he first walks on stage, it gives him ten seconds to read his audience- a reading upon which he will then base his election of gags for the perfoprmance.
Last month his new little book Ten Second Sermons was published by DLT. It is full of incisive wit and painfully accurate observation. I recommend it to any preacher, or indeed to anyone who communicates for a living. These little gems are the epitome of pith, and well worth the book’s cover price. As someone with a concern for communication, and for words in particular, I have selected this one as a sample:
If you get tangled up in Christian words you risk becoming one of those parts of the vine who lose their saltiness and therefore cannot finish the race.
See what I mean? I heartily recommend this little book to you.
Image: Amazon.com
On hijacking a cathedral
When interviewed on BBC Radio 2 last week Andy Flannagan, Director of the Christian Socialist Movement, was asked ‘what would Jesus do’ about the occupation of the precinct of St Paul’s Cathedral. The interviewer wanted to know whether he would side with the protesters or with those seeking to move them on. With great astuteness Mr Flannagan answered that it never goes well when any political cause seeks to recruit Jesus to their ranks. History bears this out. Slave-owners, emancipators, the architects of apartheid and those who brought it down would all have claimed Jesus as a recruit to their cause. I think Jesus expects us to make our own minds up about these things, rather than pressing him into service as a poster boy. Perhaps a little excursion to the woods might help with this one.
One morning rabbit was awoken by an almighty squeaking and scurrying outside her door. To her enormous surprise, a great crowd of thin and angry little mice had gathered on the ferny forest floor outside her burrow. ‘We are protesting’ they said, ‘those fat cats are making our lives a misery’ . They went on to explain that the fat cats were forever stealing their food, keeping them in a state of fear, and toying with their very lives. Rabbit tutted and furrowed her brow at this. ‘Well stay here for a little while and make your point then’ she said kindly. The mice were overjoyed, and began to organise themselves. Pretty soon rabbit’s front doorstep was a riot of colour and a medley of conversation. Soon, though, things started to get awkward for rabbit. Little piles of mouse food and other things began to litter the mossy floor. It was awkward for her to get in and out, and soon she might have to ask them to leave. The newspapers began to run headlines on ‘the oppression of innocent mice by rodents who should know better’. Others talked of the selfishness and folly of rabbit. Still others began to delve into the history of the forest and look for other examples of rabbit’s misdeeds. And all the while nobody, but nobody,was talking about the fat cats. They didn’t mind, though – they owned the newspapers.
Of course this is a gross simplification of a complex story. There is no desire to belittle a situation which has cost more than one servant of the church his job. However, we must remember that a critique of capitalism has now turned into a debate about the church. Why was BBC Radio 2 talking about WWJD, rather than discussing what the captains of industry have or haven’t done? A moment of kindness on the church’s part has turned into hours of debate about the wrong question.
How do we turn it around again?
Who Needs Words indeed!
Time to return from Wales and back to preaching tomorrow. However, before I do so, a brief stop in the Welsh Valleys. On Thursday I spotted a road-sign so obscure and intriguing that I almost lost my concentration whilst craning round to look at it. Thankfully there was another example a little further down the road, so I got a second bite of the cherry. As it turns out I was particularly fortunate – since only four examples of this particular sign exist in Wales. When I looked at it numerous possible interpretations sprang to mind:
- Danger of alien abduction (unlikely)
- Star wars testing range (improbable)
- No mobile homes with satellite dishes (feasible, in a popular holiday destination)
In fact, the signs were erected to tell the drivers of heavy goods vehicles not to rely on their sat navs to send them down these narrow roads, since many had come to grief by doing so.
Image: presettext.com
The thing is, with signs as with sermons, unless they are clear, there is little point having them. A pictogram like the one above must make sense instantly if it is to be of any help at all. Maybe this is why only four of the signs were ever displayed?
Yesterday Nick Baines, who wrote the Foreword to my book Who Needs Words, was kind enough to blog about it. He writes that it gives ‘confidence to those who feel a bit daunted by the plethora and complexity of modern communications media‘ and that it offers ‘good stuff to anyone interested in communicating better’.
Hopefully all of us want to communicate better. I know that I shall never remove my ‘L’ plates in this particular field whilst I still have the power of speech. As a communicator and preacher, though, I shall keep the picture of the little sign above in my head – and try to prize clarity over obscurity every time!
An encounter with a wishing tree
Earlier this year, on a post about images of trees, I alluded to a poem by Kathleen Jamie “The wishing tree”. The poem is a description of a lonely tree, standing on the border between parishes, into which many a passing stranger has pressed a coin in the hopes of having a wish granted. The poem, which you can read in full here, is full of evocative phrases such as “the common currency of hope” and “choking on small change”. Until I read the poem I had never heard of a wishing tree, and until this week I had never seen one.
I encountered this one on my visit to Portmeirion. Up in the woods outside the pretty faux village is a tree stump, with aged and battered coins sprouting all over it like a fungus. I found there to be something unbearably sad about the sight. Like the statue of the patron saint of lost causes, all but buried under the wax of hundreds of hopeful candles I had seen years before in Belgium -it represents a human ache of longing. This is odd, since I have never felt the same seeing coins tossed into a fountain for luck. I wonder why?
Have a look at the photo and let me know what you think.
click for full-size image
…or recapture the past?
Spent yesterday in the quirky, pastel-shaded oddity which is Portmeirion. Visionary and architect Clough Williams Ellis bought the unloved site with its tumbledown waterfront hotel in 1925 . After restoring the hotel, he spent the next fifty years lovingly creating a mock Italianate town, cascading down the steep promontory to the water’s edge. It is undeniably pretty, with its gaily painted buildings, salvaged porticos from much older buildings and clever trompe l’oeil paintings wherever you look. Through it all, right on into his 90s, Ellis was driven by the desire to:
Cherish the past
Adorn the present
Build for the future
There is no doubting his vision, energy or creativity.However, I was left wondering whether you really can cherish the past by adorning the present in yesterday’s guise. Underneath all the prettiness the visitor to Portmerion is left with a taint of the faux. The buildings, solid though they are, feel a bit like a two-dimensional movie set which might wobble if you leant on them too hard.
For me, the two windows below summarise the dilemma. In the first the perfect blue sky and the delicate tracery of the trees is framed in the window. In the second, an artificial reflection of the Welsh Hills and the sparkling water is painted onto the concrete wall to look like a window. Which would you rather have?
Click for close-up of the painted window
Confessions of a blogger
If you’ve ever watched any medical drama, from Emergency Ward 10 to ER, you’ll know that ‘flatlining’ is a serious issue. The term refers to that moment when the patient’s heart monitor switches from a steady bleep with a rising and falling trace to a single monotone bleep…and a flatline trace.
I am on holiday just now in a lovely old cottage in the Welsh hills with an internet signal about as steady as the stock market. I am posting this today, but may be unable to do so on other days. Whatever will I do if the trace below turns flat? Many of the things we do online are based on a system of rewards for clicks. A click here brings up a graphic there, a “like” on this site brings a “like” on that and so on. This is one of the things which makes our time online enjoyable. However, they can be quite addictive too. It can be a short step from monitoring our stats, to stressing about them. What should be read as a thermometer becomes instead a heart monitor – a vital sign of online life. (See this other post) When the trace turns flat, we start checking ourselves for signs of digital health.
For the time being, I shall leave my worries about the trace to one side. I’m sure they’ll look after themselves, and in the meantime I’ll concentrate more on the horizon outside – which is far from flat, and all the more lovely because of it.
Banksy at the MOCA, L.A
Several years ago a local police officer came to ask me for some advice. A local pub was displaying a print of Banksy’s image “Christmas?”, depicting a crucified figure weighed down by shopping bags. Some local Christians had expressed their outrage and she wondered what I thought? I’m not sure how much help I was really, since I actually found the picture provocative and thoughtful, rather than offensive. Yesterday somebody drew my attention to this collaborative work created by Banksy and a group of students at the Museum of Contemporary art in L.A. I wonder what you think? My own initial reactions are below.
Image: flavorwire.com
- Set ‘out of context’ like this, the stained glass window looks like more of a magisterial work of art than ever.
- We are often given the impression that people would rather avoid the church because it does not reflect the harsh realities of the street – yet here is an ecclesiastical image as urban art.
- Stained glass windows only ever come alive because of the light behind them – has the artist posited a church behind the wall?
- The figure in its hoodie (or is it a cowl?) is apparently kneeling in prayer – asking for forgiveness for desecration, or offering an act of consecration , I wonder?
After discussions on art and its role earlier this week, it would be great to get your reactions on this particular piece of ‘plumbing’.
Like this:
The death of Muammar Gaddafi
I have the luxury of writing this as a person unaffected by the brutality and unconscionable violence which marked Colonel Gaddafi’s regime. I did not lose sons or daughters in Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, members of my family did not disappear into Libya’s dark prisons, never to be seen again. All that means that I cannot possibly imagine the joy or relief of those for whom Gaddafi’s regime is over.
However, that does not prevent me recoiling from the wanton repetition of footage of a barely alive and bloodied man being tossed from one fighter to another like a rag doll. When definite news was scarce yesterday, news services chose to loop the shaky mobile phone footage of Gaddafi (or was it his corpse?) over and over again. I felt like I was watching a kind of victory porn. Isn’t the nature of porn that it diminishes both watched and watcher, making them less than human? Doesn’t it turn victims into objects and watchers into voyeurs? There are reasons why we have conventions on these things, I believe.
Maybe this photo , by Goran Tomasevic, says more than any number of images of Gaddafi’s bloodied corpse. Where is Libya heading now?
Outfitting the protesters
As anti-capitalist protests fan out across the globe there are, not surprisingly, winners and losers. Whoever the losers might be, the manufacturers of masks based on the 2006 film V for Vendetta are definitely amongst the winners. The masks have given a common ‘anti-establishment’ identity to the protesters and have been spotted in capital cities around the world. The thing is, as the protests spread, supply is outstripping demand. The official masks are running out and so somebody is knocking out cheap imitations – thereby denying the exceptionally wealthy film industry of their cut. The irony is hard to avoid.
Its not just Warner Brothers whose nose it out of joint though, it would seem. For some a counterfeit anti-establishment mask just isn’t good enough. One person wrote in to a website selling them:
‘the strap on these ones are thin and flimsy unlike the actual thick ones on the genuine masks; the V for Vendetta sticker on the back of the mask has a spelling mistake and finally, the masks are extremely poorly cut’
I suppose it is those who see the masks, rather than those who wear them, who are meant to be uncomfortable?
Image: BBC - click here for more on the story
Reflections on CNMAC11 -number four
A little while ago,a friend sent me this video. It maps one 24 hour period of global air traffic. There is a strange, hypnotic quality to it. As you are drawn in by the strange beauty of the patterns its easy to forget about the destructive emissions and focus instead on the thousands of stories caught up behind those little glowing dots. Where is each person going, and what is their journey all about? Are these just stages on a much longer journey, links in some kind of chain?
On Saturday at CNMAC, an idea came to me. Like the idea I wrote about several weeks ago, it had been on a journey. Before it reached the threshold of my mind this idea had travelled from Israel, to Germany, to Brooklyn, to Amsterdam, and then onto London for the day. In CNMAC’s final session I had my eyes opened to the role of the Maggid, or storyteller, by a professional Jewish storyteller from Brooklyn now living in Amsterdam. The Maggid, unlike the more academic teachers in the synagogue, was the weaver of stories and the illuminator of truth. People who were looking for truth dressed in the everyday clothes of real life rather than the dusty robes of academic theology, would gather at the feet of a Maggid. As a person committed with my heart and soul to storytelling as a vehicle for truth, I must learn more about this. It matters because I want to tell better stories, and it matters because I want to understand Jesus better as storyteller.
Watch this space…
preachersa2z
.
