Subtitle: Believing in poetry,
by Mark Oakley
This book has been on my Wish List since the summer. Then I gave up and bought a copy myself: who knows if anyone else would have bought it for me, if not?
(If you’re near Blackwells, they have a £2 off offer on it; Amazon never give much of a discount on Canterbury Press books, so support your local bookshop!)
It’s a timely book; it’s a book I need to read right now, with all of the soul- and heart-and-mind-searching that has come with retirement. All the questions about: What is all this God-stuff about, anyway? Has the Church lost its mind? What the devil does it think it’s doing? (And I probably mean that in its ancient Prince of Darkness sense…) What is God up to, letting us and our religions get in the God-awful state they’re in?
Mark Oakley is Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, and poetry is one of his passions. In this book he collects nearly 30 poems, to each of which he appends a bit of introduction and explanation (but not too much) and a meditation on what it can help us to see about what God is up to, ‘the unignorable intuition that lies at the heart of everything written here, that God is in this world as poetry is in the poem’.
His introductory essay alone is worth the money. It made me laugh and weep and sigh with pleasure. (Also with envy that he’s so brilliant, but that’s another problem.) And want to learn it by heart so I can use it and pretend I thought of it. If you’re an underlining kind of reader, get your pencil ready: there is so much here you want to store up and think and think about.
One of my special favourites, among oh, so many, is his ultimate rejoinder and rebuttal of all those people who have conned us into thinking we must make Christian faith and worship ‘relevant’:
Christians should be poets in residence and their worship should be poetry in play because, at the end of the day, we are not seeking relevance but resonance — not the transient ideas of today that can convince for a time but the truths that address the deepest longings of a human life and a fragile world.
If you follow this blog you can probably expect lots more quotations from this book in days to come. Better yet, go out and buy it for yourself.
Godspelled 