Contents
Editorial
- Praise
Articles
- I’ll Sing as I Love, Alison McRobb
- Cosmic Gratitude, Tony Windross
- Mary’s Touch, Grenville Gilbert
- Free at Last, Dave Francis
- Praising, that’s it!, Dinah Livingstone
Poetry and Stories
- Sonnet to Orpheus I:7, Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Martyn Crucefix
- Skype, Martyn Crucefix
- Canticle of the Creatures, Francis of Assisi, translated by Dinah Livingstone
- Pied Beauty, Gerard Manley Hopkins
Reviews
- Pauline Pearson reviews Bread of Life in Broken Britain by Charles Roding Pemberton
- Andy Kemp reviews Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
- Frank Regan reviews The Cry of the Earth and the Cry of the Poor by Kathleen Rushton
- Kathryn Southworth reviews Counting Backwards: Poems 1975-2017 by Helen Dunmore
Regulars and Occasionals
- Letters to the Editor
- Revisiting: Martyn Crucefix revisits Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke
- As I Please: Plague – 2020 Style, John Pearson
Editorial: Praise
‘Praising, that’s it!’ says the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus. Reading or listening to the media you might think ‘Blaming, that’s it!’ Bad news is more newsworthy than good news. But there is so much to praise, so many extraordinary and ordinary kind people, so much beauty on Earth. So the title of this Sofia is Praise.
Our first article, by Alison McRobb, is on music and singing. She has suffered from group singing being banned during the lockdown and had to go out into an empty field to sing her favourite hymns alone on Easter Day. She says: ‘I’ll sing as I love.’ The postponed SOF London conference on music will take place next year.
Vicar Tony Windross, who has a ‘non-realist’ view of God, writes about liturgy as ‘Cosmic Gratitude’. In ‘Mary’s Touch’, Grenville Gilbert describes a loving and loved woman who died during the lockdown without her friends being able to say goodbye.
Dave Francis, Deputy Chair of the Religious Education Council, writes about the struggle to broaden the school curriculum from ‘Religious Instruction’ to ‘Religion and Worldviews’. He asks: ‘When a young person successfully completes their eleven years of compulsory school religious education, what will there be in their knowledge and understanding of the world and themselves that will be worthy of praise?’
Martyn Crucefix revisits Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, written in three weeks in a ‘savage creative storm’. We also have Crucefix’s own poem ‘Skype’ and St Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures.
This will be a short editorial because I offer some thoughts on praise in my article on page 16. There are the usual reviews, John Pearson’s As I Please column, this time on ‘Plague – 2020 Style’ and the Letters to the Editor. Please continue to write in to inform, dispute (or praise!).
Dinah Livingstone
Letters to the Editor
Sofia 136
I am just writing to say that I enjoyed this month’s Sofia. From Stephen Mitchell’s ‘There is no God, there are no Acts of God’, to Patti Whaley’s ‘Death is what gives life meaning’ (Have you read Martin Hagglund’s This Life: Mortality Makes Us Free? – an excellent book), through Bobbie Stephens-Wright’s ‘one can learn a lot as one passes through life’ to your ‘Keeping Faith’ and ‘Word embodied in humanity’, there are some very interesting thoughts and ideas. Well done and well done also to those who produced Sofia in difficult circumstances! I have found the time very creative as have a lot of my literary friends.
Grenville Gilbert, Ottery St Mary
Particularly appreciated your forthright editorial on pointless prayer, sanity in a peculiar world.
Edwin Salter, King’s Lynn
Like so many of us, I guess, I was particularly struck at the end of last week that under normal circumstances I should have been enjoying my much looked-forward-to annual reunion with SOF friends old and new in the peaceful setting of one of Leicester’s university halls of residence in Oadby. The contrast between this late July and previous years was more poignant than ever, not only because Leicester City – and the suburb of Oadby itself – had been locked down owing to a local spike in Covid-19 cases but also because SOF member, Hugo Freeman, had brought my attention to one of a large cluster of recent newspaper articles about the appalling conditions still pertaining in the many small garment factories of inner-city Leicester.
There have been worrying reports about pay and conditions in these places over many years. A 2018 report by the House of Commons Select Environmental Audit Committee on this matter chaired by ex Wakefield MP Mary Creagh (HC 1952) has received no serious press coverage so far. Although we have an Independent Anti-Slavery Commissioner the matter is ultimately one for the Home Office. I wonder whether our Trustees could add SOF’s voice to the others protesting about the slow Government response to this particular version of Modern Slavery.
Penny Mawdsley, Bodfari, Wales