Mayday Notes For these occasional notes – grace notes with the occasional quaver or crotchet – I am adopting the penname Mayday because it is both a distress signal at sea and, on land, it is the spring holiday when the Earth is full of promise. sof 64 November 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11 In February 2003 millions of people world-wide took to the streets to protest against the proposed invasion of Iraq.
The Limits of a Metaphor
Being set on the idea Of getting to Atlantis You have discovered of course Only the Ship of Fools is Making the voyage this year As gales of abnormal force Are predicted.... and later in the poem he continues:
Remember the noble dead And honour the fate you are, Travelling and tormented, Dialectic and bizarre.
However, as in all metaphors the vehicle or image , in this case the image of the sea, the tide, voyaging, only partly corresponds to the tenor or what the metaphor is talking about, in this case, faith. They do not overlap 100%. To give another example, if I say ‘David is a lion’ (referring to one of my distinguished predecessors), where the vehicle is ‘lion’ and the tenor is ‘David’, I mean David has some of the qualities of a lion, but not all of them. I don’t expect him to eat me; I believe he’s a Quaker Attender!
Likewise the metaphor of faith as a sea or a voyage is illuminating but has its limitations. A traveller who was doomed to sail on and on and never land again was the Flying Dutchman and he was cursed. If discussions of faith are confined within this metaphor, they will share the limitations of its vehicle and many aspects and ideas will be excluded. Perhaps we also need other metaphors for other aspects, such as landing, putting our feet on the ground, building, getting our hands dirty, holding hands (as at Greenham) to say: ‘We shall not be moved.’ In SoF 66, Trevor Greenfield asks: ‘Is God actually an imaginative and poetic construction?’ Blake said so. Thinking about the uses and limitations of metaphor could also be fruitful here.
Liturgy
I was re-reading Anne Ashworth’s interesting pamphlet, The Elements of Worship: A New Look at an Old List, in which she re-considers traditional items of christian prayer in a nonsupernatural context. Her list is: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Intercession, Petition, Meditation, Dedication, Benediction (with blessing at the end). I think this list could be expanded, perhaps with some more symbolic and sacramental elements, such as ‘anamnesis’ (remembering) and communion. Ceasing to believe in a supernatural God does not mean people cease to want prayer and ceremonies. But can we create them with the power of the great traditions out of which we have come? Letters welcome.
I can’t resist one final note. At the end-ofconference liturgy the first hymn, Nada te turbe, was sung in Spanish and later another hymn had a rollicking German chorus: ‘Die Gedanken sind Frei’ (‘thoughts are free’). I looked round at all those sons and daughters of the Reformation, which struggled so hard for a liturgy ‘in a language understanded by the people’; or perhaps some of them once catholics, who could remember the Sixties and the same struggle taking place at Vatican II in the Roman Church four centuries later. I could not help smiling to see them all singing away. It looked as though they were thoroughly enjoying themselves!