Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, joined Don Cupitt and Graham Shaw on the platform of the highly successful London SoF conference in April. Here he explains his unusual presentation, and below we print some of the texts and poems he chose for the occasion.
"I did not want my slot to be theoretical, because I knew that the presentations in the morning would be top-level discussions of what worship can mean to Sea of Faith members who believe that religion is a human construct. I decided to try something experiential, to do something that would be close to worship rather than talk about it. For me, poetry is a road to transcendence, to that level of experience that opens us to the wonder of Being and the beauty and tragedy of life. What I did, therefore, was to follow an ancient tradition called midrash, which is an imaginative re-working of scriptural texts to make them alive in the present. I chose a number of passages from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that expressed deep human meanings and read poems that expressed the same meanings in a different way or offered interpretations of them. Using two voices helped, one reading the scripture passages and the other the poems that reflected upon them. Showing the poems on a screen enabled the audience to participate and make it a group experience."
The Creation
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth... Genesis 1:1
Fellow humans, to whom a year is a long time, A century a venerable goal, Struggling for your bread, Tired, fretful, tricked, sick, lost; Listen, and it may be mockery and consolation. Twenty billion years before now, Brilliant, soaring in space and time, There was a ball of flame, solitary, external, Our common father and our executioner. It exploded, and every change began. Even now the thin echo of this one reverse catastrophe Resounds from the farthest reaches. From that one spasm everything was born: The same abyss that enfolds and challenges us, The same time that spawns and defeats us, Everyone anyone has ever thought, The eyes of every woman we have loved, Suns by the thousands And this hand that writes.
Primo Levi
Adam and Eve in Eden. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. Genesis 2:7
No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one summons our dust. No one. Blessed art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the nothing - the No-One's-Rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, oh over the thorn.
Paul Celan
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Genesis 2:22-24
Lying apart now, each in a separate bed, He with a book, keeping the light on late, She like a girl dreaming of childhood, All men elsewhere - it is as if they wait Some new event: the book he holds unread, Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead. Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion, How cool they lie. They hardly ever touch, Or if they do it is like a confession Of having little feeling - or too much. Chastity faces them, a destitution For which their whole lives were a preparation. Strangely apart, yet strangely together, Silence between them like a thread to hold And not wind in. And time itself's a feather Touching them gently. Do they know they're old, These two who are my father and my mother Whose fire, from which I came, has now grown cold?
Elizabeth Jennings
I know the things I've lost are so many that I could not begin to count them and that those losses now, are all I have. I know that I've lost the yellow and the black and I think of those unreachable colours as those that are not blind can not. My father is dead, and always stands beside me. When I try to scan Swinburne's verses, I am told, I speak with my father's voice. Only those who have died are ours, only what we have lost is ours. Ilium vanished, yet Ilium lives in Homer's verses. Israel was Israel when it became an ancient nostalgia. Every poem becomes in time an elegy. The women who have left us are ours, free as we now are from misgivings, from anguish, from the disquiet and dread of hope. There are no paradises other than lost paradises.
Jorge Luis Borges
David. And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth. 1 Samuel 17:49
Goliath stood up clear in the assumption of status, Strong and unquestioning of himself and others, Fully determined by the limits of his experience. I have seen such a one among surgeons, sergeants, Deans, and giants, the power implicit. Then there was David, who made a few assumptions, Had little experience, but for more was ready, Testing and trying this pebble or that pebble, This giant or that giant. He is not infrequent. How could Goliath guess, with his many assumptions, The force of the slung shot of the pure-hearted? How could David fear, with his few hypotheses, The power of status which is but two-footed? He shot, and shouted!
Josephine Miles
The Valley of Dry Bones
The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones... and, lo, they were very dry... He said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live... Ezekiel 37
nagging miracle makers, quiet! "All right, gentlemen who cry blue murder as always, Everything will be returned to its place, paragraph after paragraph. The scream back into the throat. The gold teeth back into the gums. The terror. The smoke back to the tin chimney and further on inside back to the hollows of the bones, and already you will be covered with skin and sinews and you will live, look, you will have your lives back, sit in the living room, read the evening paper. Here you are. Nothing is too late. As to the yellow star: immediately it will be torn from your chest and will emigrate to the sky."
Dan Pagis
Poetry as the Prayer of Contemplation
In a sun-crazed orchard Busy with blossomings This loafer, unaware of What toil or weather brings, Lumpish sleeps - a chrysalis Waiting, no doubt, for wings. And when he does get active, It's not for business - no Bee-lines to thyme or heather, No earnest to-and-fro Of thrushes: pure caprice tells him Where and how to go. All he can ever do Is to be entrancing, So that a child may think, Upon a chalk-blue chancing, "Today was special. I met A piece of the sky dancing".
Cecil Day Lewis (from Collected Poems, Sinclair Stevenson)
And seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying... Matthew 5:1-12
Those who carry grand pianos to the tenth floor wardrobes and coffins the old man with a bundle of wood hobbling beyond the horizon the woman with a hump of nettles the lunatic pushing her baby carriage full of empty vodka bottles they all will be raised up like a seagull feather like a dry leaf like eggshell scraps of street newspapers Blessed are those who carry for they will be raised.
Anna Kamienska
Co co co... And as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together... and the breath came into them, and they lived. Ezekiel 37:1-14
Draft of a Reparations Agreement
And he said, A certain man had two sons: And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me... Luke 15:11-24
His father gave him a box of truisms Shaped like a coffin, then his father died; The truisms remained on the mantlepiece As wooden as the playbox they had been packed in Or that other his father skulked inside. Then he left home, left the truisms behind him Still on the mantlepiece, met love, met war, Disorder, disappointment, defeat, betrayal, Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house He could not remember seeing before, And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from And something told him the way to behave. He raised his hand and blessed his home; The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders And a tall tree sprouted from his father's grave.
Louis MacNeice (from Collected Poems, Faber & Faber)
What Does It Mean?
He knew better than to admire a chair and say "What does it mean?" He loved everything that accepted the unfailing hospitality of his five senses. He would say "Hello, caterpillar", or "So long, Loch Fewin". He wanted to know how they came to be what they are: But he never insulted them by saying "Caterpillar, Loch Fewin, what do you mean?" In this respect he was like God, though he was godless - He knew the difference between "What does it mean to me?" and "What does it mean?" That's why he said, half smiling, "Of course, God, like me, is an atheist".
Norman MacCaig (from Collected Poems, Chatto)
Old Testament poems are from Modern Poems on the Bible (Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia). New Testament poems are from The Gospels in Our Image (Harcourt Brace, New York).