Critic Cal

Of all my poems, this might be the one that’s closest to my heart. I wrote it in the aftermath of Christmas 2018, and was chuffed to have it appear in the  Winter 2019 edition of Preach magazine . THIS HOUSE   Oh come, oh come Emmanuel, and hurl Our order into holy disarray: Upend the tables where we wheel and deal, And scatter our accrued prosperity. Awake us, dancer on the dancing deep, From placid slumber; rock the boat; disturb The peace that we content ourselves to keep, And make us see the chaos we transfer. Confound our clarity, cut short our too long Prayers, take back the narrative and heckle Sermons preached to itching ears. Throw down Each stone in every separating wall. Do what you’re here to do … but, come what may, Rebuild the ruins of us, please – and stay.  Carolyn Whitnall, 2019. And then the pandemic. And the stuff of it all got a bit real. And no, I don’t mean any of the following: that “God has done this,” or that I wished f...

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There’ll be quite a lot of shouting. (Gustave Flaubert, in a letter to a friend, 1850). As far as I'm concerned, these 170 year-old words could have been written yesterday. And no doubt I could find even earlier quotes to similar effect (though the analogy would be hard to beat). I can't decide if the timelessness of impending cataclysm is more reassuring than it is horrifying, or vice-versa. ( Matthew 24:6 springs to mind). Is it too much of a cliché to say this isn't how things were meant to be? Is it too naive to suggest it's not how they have to stay? In The Very Good Gospel , Lisa Sharon Harper writes compellingly about the vision of creation's perfect 'goodne...

            THEN                         Later, there would be doctrine.                         After whispers and mayhem;             After dinner in a locked room and a show of hands;             After “mass hallucinations”, private consultations,             Promises and re-commissions;             After sea and sand and sunrise,             And a parting in the clouds.                         After fire falling, filling, overspilling;             Raging and enraging;             After news and bread and bodies breaking.         ...

I recently heard it suggested that church should aspire to be like the butterfly: beautiful and carefree, our days of darkness and enshroudedness past, existing only to reproduce and to bring joy. A lovely image – and I’m sure it resonated with those who needed it. For me, though, it registered a little … partial. There is so much about my Christian journey – raw, real, difficult-but-hope-filled good stuff – that is not described by such an analogy: times of personal struggle and limitation (often, for me, in the form of depression and anxiety) in which my faith is no less real, and God is no less faithful; times of heartache as I learn to lament the brokenness of a world in which there's no getting away from the fact that new creation life is ‘not yet’ as well as ‘now’ . It’s also, if you stretch the metaphor, a little bleak – the existence of a butterfly is famously fleeting, while the Christian hope is of something altogether more enduring. As I pondered this, a different ...

So, I've been writing about the importance of being real, especially within church community  –  real about personal pain, real about the brokenness of the world, real about (and repentant of) the role of Christianity in upholding and reproducing aspects of that brokenness. And I've been reading lots on the subject; our small group study series at the moment, for example, is Brueggemann et al. 's  Psalmist's Cry: Scripts for Embracing Lament , which seeks to lead us into greater openness with ourselves and with one another. And it sounds great, it really does, but I have to confess that I sorta haven't actually made it to any of the sessions, and it kinda might not be entirely accidental – a fact I feel appropriately sheepish about, given that, erm, it mighta been me who recommended the book in the first place. Thing is, thanks and all that for the suggestion, Brueggemann, but it's just not that simple, actually. When you've been hurt in the past and you...