Still Quarrying: Seven Psalms.

 My first contact with the music of Paul Simon was at a BB District Service.  This must have been in the mid 1960s and as part of the service the young minister played two recorded Simon and Garfunkel songs, providing us with printed lyrics to follow.  One was definitely ‘I Am A Rock’.  I think the other was ‘You Can tell the Word’ from their first album.

 

This was the first time I had heard recorded music in a church service, and it made a big impact.  It made a big impact on our BB Captain also but it was not favourable!  But it  made me think that S&G were worth exploring.  I became a fan and over the years have found Paul Simon worth keeping in touch with.  From a Jewish background but nevertheless professing not to be religious he is among those artists who would describe themselves as ‘spiritual.’  I’m never sure what is meant by this but in Paul’s sense I think it means an appreciation of the ‘deeper’ things in life and an openness to the existence of God.  This has come out in albums over the years but never more clearly than in his latest offering: ‘Seven Psalms’.  

 

The title itself says something to anyone from a Jewish or Christian background.  The Book of Psalms has been described as the Prayer Book of Israel and the Praise Book of Israel.  It gives believers and opportunity to open up to God in praise but also to express the darker thoughts and emotions that commonly afflict them.  This is its greatest value allowing us to see that the life of faith is not always a travelling on smooth and fragrant ground.  There are dark valleys that cannot be avoided, and they can be bewildering and painful.

 

Paul brings this out in the first movement of the album, which is a continuous 30-minute unfolding, is called ‘The Lord’.  The idea of God brings out positive images:

 

‘The Lord is a virgin forest

 The Lord is a forest Ranger

 The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor

 A welcome door to the stranger . . . 

 

The seeds we gather 

 From the gardener’s glove

 Live forever

 Nothing dies of too much love.’  

 

That is a final line  destined to be quoted much!  But ‘The Lord’ ends on a darker note which we cannot escape when considering the God of the Bible, a book which Paul reveals in a recent interview is never very far from him:

 

‘The Covid virus is the Lord

 The Lord is the ocean rising

 The Lord is a terrible swift sword

 A simple truth surviving.’  

 

People of faith cannot really escape this.  The struggle we sometimes have in the promise that nothing will ever separate us from the love of God, not even the darkest,  the most painful experiences, and yet when they come they take us to the end of ourselves.   And yet Paul is not content to leave it there.  In ‘My Professional Opinion’, which is an aspiration to ‘carry my grievances /down to the shore/And wash then away in the tumbling tide’, he ends with a startling declaration:

 

‘All that really matters

 Is the one who became us

 Anointed and gamed us

 With His opinions.’  

 

If the sleeve-notes are to be trusted, then the higher case at ‘His’ belong to the author.  

 

So where does it all take us this quite remarkable album which has been attracting those proverbial ‘rave reviews’?  Some might say that it’s typical of the large community of ‘spiritual’ people who treat things beyond sight, touch and sound like a giant smorgasbord from which you can pick or choose whatever appeals to you.  I would not agree with this.  He may not have made the crucial breakthrough to faith in Christ but Paul offers us personal insight that leads to confession, an awareness of inspiration as a gift – Dip your hand in heaven’s waters/God’s imagination/ Dip you’re your hands in Heaven’s waters’ – and in the final song, ‘Wait’, there is a longing for completion in a life to come:

 

‘I want to 

 Believe in

 A dreamless transition

 Wait

 

 ‘I don’t want 

 I don’t want to be near 

 My dark intuition.

 

‘I need you here by my side

My beautiful mystery guide

Wait.’

 

Which in the end is where all people of faith arrive.

Still Quarrying: The Less Dead.

 Even hardened crime fiction fans can find Denise Mina hard to take.  The language, the violence, the psychological disturbance - too deep a descent into the darkness for some people.  The Less Dead might be an example of this.  Briefly, the central character is Margo, a doctor,  who was adopted as a baby.  She goes in search of her birth mother and discovers that she was a sex worker who was murdered, one of a series of women murdered in Glasgow at that time.  The killer has never been found.

In her ‘Acknowledgments’ at the end of the book Mina thanks various people who have helped in her research.  As the narrative unfolds it is obvious that she has engaged with many of the issues that surround sex work, not least the negative attitudes of society in general to the women involved.  The work is never commended but the lack of compassion for those who feel driven to the work and are constantly vulnerable to physical abuse and sometimes murder is highlighted and challenged.  The title of the book is a description apparently used by police to describe sex workers.  Nikki, who turns out to be Margo’s aunt, says: ‘When we get killed they call us the “less dead”, like we were never really alive to begin with.’  

It’s a powerful book focussing not just on the ‘issue’ but on the conditions that drive women to  this lifestyle and the dangers they face when involved.   Sometimes it does feel more like a polemic than a narrative, and at least one critic I have read recently, is not happy with the tendency of some crime novelists to use their work to ride their hobby horses.  I take this point but if you have a deeply felt concern and you are gifted as a storyteller then this can be a powerful medium to alert others to things that need to be exposed and changed.  Ian Rankin has recently written:

‘While I have written in a variety of genres, I continue to find the crime novel the perfect vehicle for a discussion of contemporary issues in the most unflinching terms.  After all, the detective has an ‘all areas pass’ to every aspect of the contemporary urban sene, and this is the way for the crime writer to take the reader into forbidden territory . .  .’   

The he danger for the writer is that the ‘contemporary issues’ can dominate to the detriment of the narrative thus affecting the reader’s engagement.  But I have to say I am grateful for the experience of reading The Less Dead.  Great plotting, well-drawn characters, some brilliant turns of phrase and it took me into  that ‘forbidden territory’ which exists beyond the novel.  

Thoughts of the Incarnation of Jesus were never far away.  The apostle John tells us that ‘The Word became flesh’, not in an sanitised, uncomplicated world.  In the Israel of Jesus’ day women sold sex, tax collectors swindled the poor, wrongdoers could be stoned to death or nailed to a cross.   John writes: ‘The Word became flesh and lived among us.’    (John 1: 14)  Among us!  The original Greek of those words can be translated: ‘The Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.’  Jesus never excluded himself from any area of society, even that inhabited by ‘the less dead.’   The religious establishment of his day were scandalised by his keeping company with the sex workers of his day.  They could not grasp that to find the lost sheep you have to search, to raise the fallen you have to get alongside, to heal you have to reach out.  

The Less Dead has no one that might be described as a conventional ‘hero.’  But there are women who may have made self-destructive choices in their past but who have a deep inner strength.   This has enabled them to endure violence, addiction, injustice, rejection, and yet still to care for others who have fallen into the darkness they have known.   God is a faint echo in the world of this book but we are drawn into the world of individual women and men, human beings who Scripture tells us are created in the image of God.  Someone has said that no matter their moral and spiritual condition His fingerprints are on their lives, shown in those things said and done that enhance the lives of others and strengthens community.  And according to the teaching of Jesus no one falls out of the loving focus of God.  In a recent interview Denise Mina describes herself as ‘a hopeful person’ and that this is her personal choice.  She doesn’t go into the reasons for her hopefulness.  But I can hope because of the love shown to the world in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.  It was his destiny, in the words of Isaiah, to be ‘despised, and . . . held in low esteem’ (Isaiah 53: 3) He was among the ‘less dead’ of his day.  But the forgiveness that flows from his death and the renewal promised in his resurrection has given us a strong foundation for hope.    

Still Quarrying: Core Strength

An article by Alex Massie in the Sunday Times caught my attention more than usual.  He was examining how adherents of a particular political party allowed their allegiance to define the ‘core of their being’.  He supported this by reference to a recent survey which showed that a majority of this party’s members took personally any criticism of their party or their party’s leader.   

I suppose this could be extended to many different areas of life.  Football teams, authors, singers, church traditions.  The list is endless.  A blow against any cherished part of our being is a blow against us.  And experience shows that it can affect personal relationships.  Love me love my politics, my team, my church.   If any of this, and this is just a small representation, has allowed to sink so deeply that it defines the ‘core of our being’ then we need to be concerned.

Thinking about this my mind was drawn to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.  Some years ago he went public over his discovery that the man he had always thought was his biological father was not in fact.  He told the complicated story but in the end said that although he had been shocked, and there were issues arising from this he would have to deal with, he was reassured in the knowledge that his real identity was in Jesus Christ.  It was this that defined ‘the core’ of his being.  

This issue of who we are in Christ comes through powerfully in the thought of the apostle Paul.  In Philippians 3: he reflects on the things that defined his core being as an orthodox Jew:

‘ . .  . circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless.’  (Vv. 5-6)

But he goes on:

‘But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ.  What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things.  I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ . . .’  (vv. 7-8). 

All these influences that shaped his inner being he know regards as ‘rubbish’ compared to what he has found to be true in Christ.  It is this which must shape his core being.  Having pout his trust in Jesus, and received His Spirit, nothing should get in the way of the Spirit’s work, to shape him from within according to the pattern of Jesus’ life, to produce ‘love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.’  (Galatians 5: 22-23.). 

You have no doubt heard it said the God works in mysterious ways.  He certainly works in surprising ways.  I am grateful to a Sunday Times journalist in leading me to a serious spiritual check-up.  People have been scanning, examining and probing me in various ways over the last three years or so.  I am grateful for this.  But nothing is more important that those occasions when the Spirit opens me up and lays bear the core of my being.