From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, 1601:
"...Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em"
(Malvolio)
Last year, while on a retreat at New Norcia (a monastic community just 132km from Perth), I spotted a notice on the pin-up board in the Guesthouse Parlour relating to 'Problem Psalms'. In an edition of the Benedictine's periodic magazine, 'Friends', the
head of the community, Father Abbot Placid Spearitt (left), wrote further about both the notice and the Problem Psalms—Psalms that make us a little uncomfortable and mess with our safe notion and dimensions of God.
Some Friends of New Norcia have never been to New Norcia and some have not been since I persuaded the brethren to allow me to put up the following notice in the church and outside the monastery oratory:Problem Psalms
You may be distressed by some negative and destructive things said in our psalms and other scriptures.
We have trouble with them too, but we keep using them, because:
• they show us the very slow progress made by Jewish and Christian people in the past in understanding themselves and the world in relation to God;
• they make us think more deeply about the things that are wrong now in our world, in our country, and in our own hearts;
• they help us to purify our idea of God.
The God we worship is total goodness, offering love and peace to the whole human race.
The worst of the problem psalms is 58 (59), in which the psalmist seems somewhat displeased with those who hold divine power (the princes? the priests?). He invites the Lord to break their teeth and tear out their fangs.Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime;
like a woman’s miscarriage that never sees the sun…
The just shall rejoice at the sight of vengeance;
they shall bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked.
“Truly,” all shall say, “the just are rewarded.
Truly there is a God who does justice on the earth.”
That’s not very nice, and I can understand the decision to censor verses like that when the Roman Breviary was translated for general use after the Second Vatican Council. But when I came to New Norcia I asked for all the cursing verses to be restored for our local psalter.
I am always nervous about any kind of censorship, though I realise some of it is necessary, for instance in restricting access by young children to certain materials. And a few years ago I delivered a lecture to a group of librarians on The Librarian as Censor, reminding them that they all exercise that function every time they make a decision on whether to buy/keep/publicise/hide or cull any given item for/in or from their collections.
But as the notice says, it is important with classical texts of any kind, religious or otherwise, to retain them intact, as evidence of what our barbarous ancestors actually thought, in this case about the nature of God and his relations with his chosen people on the one hand and the people he didn’t choose on the other hand. Our ancestors’ ideas were very limited indeed and we need to exercise our interpretive powers when using their writings. Most of the psalms would be less than 3000 years old, so we’ve come a long way in a short time in our understanding of God and his dealings. But we haven’t come the whole distance and we need to go on refining for ourselves the crude ideas of former ages.
We also need to be aware that our understanding is also very limited and will for sure be judged barbarous in its turn by generations to come. CS Lewis, in his introduction to the English translation of St Athanasius on The Incarnation of the Word of God (London 1944), remarks that in every age both sides of any controversy are secretly united by a great deal of common assumptions: they share a blindness that can only be overcome by reading old books, which also make mistakes, but not the same mistakes as those that belong to that particular time. “To be sure,” he adds, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately, we cannot get at them.”
I hope you and I don’t agree with the anti-Semitic sentiments of Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. But that’s no reason for not reading it and performing it as it stands, preferably with a discussion session to follow. Monasteries and their guesthouses, fortunately, are great places for discussions provoked by liturgical texts and homilies.
Reproduced with the kind permission of the designer of New Norcia's Friends magazine (with a more legitimate permission to follow)
Tonight at 9CC (a gathering of fine folk out the back of our place) we kicked off our series in the Psalms with Psalms of the Hymnic variety. 'The function of a Hymn or Psalm of Descriptive Praise is to praise God because He is God, and we know He is because we have cried to Him and He has acted. While Thanksgiving Psalms begin with deliverance of God in history and end in praise, hymns assume deliverance and God’s actions in history, and praise God for being the kind of God who acts in certain ways.'
One of the things we're encouraging within 9CC is the writing of Psalms and the sharing of those within the community. The plan is to write Psalms consistent with the next 9CC theme.
But why should you cacophonists miss out on the fun, eh? If you're up for it, write away and let's get an ensemble of them happening right here. Gidiup!
SO, to kick things off, here's a hymnic Psalm. Well it could be a thanksgiving Psalm, but it's somewhere in that ball park.
Magnificent
God is magnificent
Shout it loud
God is magnificent
Don't be half-hearted about it.
He redeems the sinner
He upholds the saint
He encourages the downhearted.
So many times I drop the bundle,
You pick it up.
You make me whole.
You empower me, cleanse me, renew me, resource me, equip me.
You lead me.
God is great. God is magnificent.
Wear him well.
Live Him loud and at high volume.
Be the best Jesus billboard you can be.
He's worth it.
He's a multiplier. He's a satisfier. He sets my heart on fire.
He is magnificent. He is my redeemer.
He is magnificent.
February 2003
Last week I heard someone speaking on the subject, 'Why Sing?' . One of their memorable points was this: some things can only be expressed in the poetic. We can write through reams of paper (or countless pages in a Moleskine), or get our theology on, or preach our heads off, and yet still only skim the surface of the succinct, captivating truth of 'Amazing Grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me' or 'Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so'.
I was thumbing through a book yesterday and re-discovered this superlative poem by a dominator in the metaphysical realm: George Herbert. And I remembered all over again, that there are some sentiments that can only be expressed through the richness of the poetic. From around 400 years ago...take it away, George:Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
-- George Herbert
Steve Turner is a British journalist and author. He's written books on Jack Kerouac, Johnny Cash, and Sir Cliff Richard. He's partial to U2 (co-authored Rattle and Hum), which will appeal to some Cacophonites, he's a poet and he can be seriously satirical.
Creed
by Steve Turner
We believe in Marxfreudanddarwin
We believe everything is OK
as long as you don't hurt anyone
to the best of your definition of hurt,
and to the best of your knowledge.
We believe in sex before, during, and after marriage.
We believe in the therapy of sin.
We believe that adultery is fun.
We believe that sodomy’s OK.
We believe that taboos are taboo.
We believe that everything's getting better
despite evidence to the contrary.
The evidence must be investigated
And you can prove anything with evidence.
We believe there's something in horoscopes
UFO's and bent spoons.
Jesus was a good man just like Buddha,
Mohammed, and ourselves.
He was a good moral teacher though we think
His good morals were bad.
We believe that all religions are basically the same-
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of creation,
sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.
We believe that after death comes the Nothing
Because when you ask the dead what happens
they say nothing.
If death is not the end, if the dead have lied, then its
compulsory heaven for all
excepting perhaps
Hitler, Stalin, and Genghis Kahn
We believe in Masters and Johnson
What's selected is average.
What's average is normal.
What's normal is good.
We believe in total disarmament.
We believe there are direct links between warfare and
bloodshed.
Americans should beat their guns into tractors.
And the Russians would be sure to follow.
We believe that man is essentially good.
It's only his behavior that lets him down.
This is the fault of society.
Society is the fault of conditions.
Conditions are the fault of society.
We believe that each man must find the truth that
is right for him.
Reality will adapt accordingly.
The universe will readjust.
History will alter.
We believe that there is no absolute truth
excepting the truth
that there is no absolute truth.
We believe in the rejection of creeds,
And the flowering of individual thought.
If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky
and when you hear
State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man
worshipping his maker.
I recieve a daily spam letter with some hoax share tips, and a nice little paragraph composed of what appears to be several articles sewn together with a sentence from each in random order.
So, here's todays offering, quite an example of creative writing with a bit more of a human rights/social justice theme than the usual company announcements they throw together in a the melting pot of gobbledegook. Make sense of it if you can, maybe there's a deeper message in spam for all of us.....
Angella Imoni, 21, was summoned by her husband to Jinja. "With multiple point solutions and multiple products you'll never be able to reach the next level of information rights management," says Holt. But the benefits of extending banking services to women entrepreneurs are significant. Her historical antecedents attested that she was worthy in word and character to play the complementary role. SAVVIS' security legacy dates back over two decades and has demonstrated proven reliability and a superior level of protection. And local leaders, parents and teachers must give special attention and support to 'invisible girls'," said Ms Nepaul. "She disclosed that her mother, who left school at the age of 14, was her role model, because she raised her children single-handedly. "The lives of countless Africans have been lost or harmed by war, crime, famine or disease and abortion, legal and illegal threatens to destroy the next generation of African children," he said. The project was funded by VSO-Namibia through the British High Commission's Volunteer placement Support Fund. "We were particularly interested in the power of the Cisco ASA, and the fact that SAVVIS can now deliver it as a managed service makes it even more attractive. "He said what women in Africa need is obstetric care to treat pregnancy-related diseases not abortion in any form. Once the electroscope is charged, the gold leaf lifts away from the stem as a result of electrostatic repulsion. "Girls remained at high risk of being sexually abused, exploited and trafficked for commercial purposes. Violence, she said, remained pervasive and was perpetrated by family members, strangers and agents of the State in all regions of the world. TWikiPreferences: TWiki site-level preferences Notes:You are currently in the Main web. It is like a teacher-pupil relationship. No country in the world has achieved equality of the sexes in the key areas of education, health, employment and politics. Clearly, Reich's value for g is slightly higher than the accepted value for gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface. The design of the Cisco ASA makes the creation of these independent networks less complex.
A prayer by Saint Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . . hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . . joy
Divine Master, grant that i may not so much seek
To be consoled . . . as to console
To be understood . . . as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . . that we receive,
It is in pardoning,
that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . . that we are born to eternal life
It's a spot of poetry to kick off the new week, innit?
I’m a work in progress
I’m not finished yet
I will continually fail in areas I’d love to succeed
I will continually over-promise and under-deliver.
You know that
You love me all the same
You know what lies within and what fuels my heart
And, somehow, you love every part of me.
One day, we’ll be fully united—
Body, soul, mind and spirit
We will dance. We will cry.
We will sing. We will laugh.
And we will be overjoyed that your work in me is complete.
I was listening to a podcast by Rob Bell while running this morning and he began quoting some fragments from an old song by Robert Robertson. While he was clearly afflicted by his parents to inherit such a repetitive name, Bob cast off the shackles and came up with some gold.
Sure, along the way he managed to utlise those oft forgotten words, Ebenezer and Hither and sure, he managed to incorporate 'interposed' within a song, but the gold is still there to be mined.
Come thou Fount of every blessing;
Tune my heart to sing thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above,
Praise the mount; I'm fixed upon it:
Mount of thy redeeming love.
Here I raise my Ebenezer,
Hither by thy help I'm come
And I hope, by thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home,
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love,
Here's my heart. O take and seal it;
Seal it for thy courts above.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wand'ring from the fold of God,
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed his precious blood,
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I'm constrained to be!
Let they goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love.
Here's my heart. O take and seal it;
Seal it for thy courts above.
