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| Subtitle | What makes us who we are? |
| First Written | 2020 |
| Genre | Theology |
| Origin | UK |
| Publisher | Canterbury Press Norwich |
| ISBN-10 | 1786221268 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1786221261 |
| My Copy | paperback |
| First Read | September 16, 2023 |
Holiness and Desire
Picked this up because I am (apparently?) a fan of Christian Thinky Power Couple Francis Spufford and Jessica Martin. I really love Spufford's novels and essays, and I have read and been amazed by Martin's work several times, notably her intro to Paradise Lost and some online sermons from Ely Cathedral. And that's saying something, I've got a pretty solid 'one sermon per week' rule, but she's got some bangers. SO: a whole book! Definitely going on the to-read list.
These aren't sermons, but an actual extended look at desire (in many forms) and what its theological implications are. I've just started it.
Noted on September 16, 2023
[ Martin notes that when Jesus says 'to those who have, more will be given... from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away' that this is following on discussing UNDERSTANDING. I've seen this as a reference to giving / taking material goods, but it sure makes more sense to be talking about how people understood his parables. ]
His remark sounds like harshness; but it simply describes the nature of refusal. It acknowledges the effects of using a form that requires responsive interpretative work from its hearers, hiding as it reveals and revealing as it hides. ... What you've already got within you will dictate the shape of what you are prepared to receive. This is realistic rather than hopeful. Forget the centuries of academic argument about whether salvation is predestined by God's will; it is your own will an your own prejudice he is talking about, how high you are prepared to lift your own eyes, how long you are prepared to go on looking.
Quoted on September 12, 2024
[Love a Traherne quote] 'It was no great mistake', remarks the seventeenth-century mystic Thomas Traherne, 'to say, that to have blessings and not to prize them is to be in Hell. For it taketh them ineffectual, as if they were absent. Yea, in some respects it is worse than to be in Hell. It is more vicious, and more irrational.'
Quoted on September 12, 2024
[re the movie Trainspotting:] But it is weirdly oblivious to the idea of heroin itself as the ultimate consumer good, a product that leaves nothing behind for your money except the need for more.
Quoted on September 12, 2024
Our vision of text as unbodied betrays us, and the mistake is remarkably modern. People were much more liklier to sound out words as they read a couple of hundred yeas ago, to learn things by heart. Words existed in lips and lungs and palates and breath as much as they existed in text. The young Florence Nightingale, furious in trapped rebellion as she searched for a way to pursue her nursing vocation, experienced someone reading aloud to her as assault:
What is it to be read aloud to? . .. It is like lying on one's back, with one's hands tied and having liquid poured down one's throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue and put a stop to the operation. But nothing would stop the other.
It's a particularly striking image - reading as waterboard-ing - a precursor too of the force-feeding that suffragettes would experience a little more than half a century later. That was how powerful the spoken word was to her. Words spoken aloud, in time and space and company, make things happen.
Quoted on September 16, 2023