Contents
Editorial
- Speaking for Myself
Articles
- Speaking for Myself: The Inessentials of Faith, Edward Nickell
- Creative with Our Faith, Robert Boucnik
- Speaking for Myself: Spiritualism and Religion, Bobbie Stephens-Wright
- The Body of Christ III: Real Presence and the Spirit, Stephen Mitchell
- Let Canaan be his Slave: The Stories we Tell, David Rhodes
Poetry
- The Gentle Bush, Kathleen McPhilemy
- Blessed are the poor, Grenville Gilbert
Reviews
- A Liberation for the Earth: climate, race and Cross, reviewed by Digby Hartridge
- In search of Julian of Norwich, reviewed by Kathryn Southworth
- Jesus’ Alternative Plan: The Sermon on the Mount, reviewed by Dominic Kirkham
- The Poison Glen, reviewed by Kathleen McPhilemy
Regulars and Occasionals
- New Testament Poems and Proclamations 5: The Shining City, Dinah Livingstone
- Letters to the Editor
- A Penn’orth: Penny Mawdsley thinks about surprise
Editorial: Speaking for Myself
Following the SOF Network March meeting in London, whose title was Speaking for Myself, that is also the title of this Sofia issue. The first article, which was the main talk at the meeting, is Edward Nickell ‘speaking for myself’ on ‘The Inessentials of Faith.’ Robert Boucnik follows with his piece ‘Creative with our Faith’. Bobbie Stephens-Wright speaks for herself about her struggle with spiritualism. Then, as Pentecost and the feast of Corpus Christi come in June, Stephen Mitchell, an Anglican priest, gives his take on ‘Real Presence and the Spirit’.
The front and back cover pictures both show famous examples of ‘speaking for myself’. The front cover shows the young poet John Milton on his 1638 travels in Europe meeting the astronomer Galileo, who was under house arrest for saying the Earth moves round the sun. Galileo was forced to recant at his trial by the Inquisition but afterwards famously declared ‘Eppur si muove: It does move.’ Milton mentions him in Paradise Lost.
Milton later also spoke out bravely for himself and for liberty in his February 1660 pamphlet opposing the restoration of the King – Charles II – whose father Charles I had proclaimed the divine right to rule absolutely. Milton wrote: ‘What I have spoken is that which is not called amiss the Good Old Cause.’
Historically, it has been harder for women to speak for ourselves. The Epistle to the Corinthians declared: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for they are not permitted to speak’ (1 Cor. 14:34). But as shown on our back cover, Queen Elizabeth I gave her brave example when she addressed the troops assembled at Tilbury to resist invasion by the approaching Spanish Armada – ‘when that great fleet invincible against the bore in vain/ the richest spoils of Mexico, the stoutest hearts of Spain.’
King Philip II of Spain had first proposed marriage to her and she had refused him. So then he tried to invade her (and England) by force of arms. Elizabeth rallied her troops: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too. I think foul scorn that Parma or Spain or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm: to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.’
Dinah Livingstone
Letters
Please send letters to the Sofia Editor: Dinah Livingstone, 10 St Martin’s Close, London NW1 0HR. editor@sofn.org.uk
Mystic Meg
Mystic Meg, Britain’s most famous astrologer, died aged 80 this March. Astrology – what a load of crap I always say. In the student canteen we had a breakfast ritual. Pass The Sun, tearing out page 3 of course, and reading each other’s horoscopes. Just for a laugh.
‘You will meet new love at a petrol pump, they will have an unusual form of identification’. Discussion begins. I can’t drive, so you won’t find me at a petrol station. We mourn missed romances and my motoring deficiency. On the other hand, my new Irish passport may be the ‘unusual identification’. We debate my national identity.
I admired the chutzpah of Mystic Meg. Her predictions were too specific, too risible, too easy to refute. Proof to me that her self-belief or delusion was genuine. Broken clocks are right twice a day, but they don’t start conversations, or turn acquaintances into friends.
Edward Nickell, London
Sofia 147
March’s Sofia (no 147) was pertinent to my current preoccupations. Ygdrasil (the ash) Tree of Life was on the cover and in Yate, near Bristol, where I live most ash trees have been felled, though my son may just have saved his from the die-back. Ian Harris writes plainly about my foremost concern, our eco-future.
Then David Rhodes’s article on slavery. Coming from Rhodesia I’ve always been very aware of race prejudice, that category of class prejudice that is supercharged by the visible ‘badge of colour’. And here the review of Justin Welby’s book comes in. I must read it because he knows that the answer to prejudice and polarised views is to listen and talk and, crucially, he has developed his ideas on the processes involved.
How to combat racial injustice? For what it’s worth, as a onetime archivist, oral historian and librarian of record, seeking to keep safe the sources rather than shape a story, when I stood back I found that many of those most effective in this regard were practical folk, farmers, businesspeople, extension workers, missionaries (as opposed to city clerics), even internal affairs officers (once called ‘native commissioners’), as likely to be doctrinally conservative as radical or liberal. In times of war, the military. The point is, they worked together on vital tasks and could not help seeing the worth of the other. In my limited experience most people are fundamentally decent and they are proud of their work, or wish to be given the chance to be. Naïve?
Digby Hartridge, Yate, Bristol
Eco-Human
The Eco-Human Future commended by Ian Harris (Sofia 147) rightly exposes unworthy motives accelerating climate change. That Prometheus was condemned for granting fire to then unwitting humanity begins to seem faintly appropriate.
Wilful disgraces of our dominion over this sin-doomed ‘vale of woe’ include the smug excesses of the very rich and the deliberate denial campaign (petrochemicals imitate tobacco) for business profit.
Worship of the natural world lingers in paganism. But we do not need to assign a conserving morality to Nature (biological competition and geological extinctions refute). The circumstances of our evolution and adaptation demand compatible regard as prudent and link aesthetic, ethical and spiritual.
Edwin Salter, King’s Lynn
Queer Holiness
I applaud the comments of Edward Nickell in his review of Queer Holiness that, ‘Theology needs to take human knowledge seriously’ – something which does not seem always to have been the case in recent Church of England synodal discussions, that often seem to have been characterised by a ‘God said….’, text-bashing mentality that simply puts a stop to further discussion. Apart from the actual issues what this lamentable mentality expresses is its ignorance of the way scripture itself has been composed, often by way of an evolutionary aggregation of attitudes that reflect particular historical epochs.
If scripture reveals anything it is that moral understanding evolves. But the very composition of scripture also reveals that such development is often resisted by reactionary elements: this is particularly clear in the New Testament where radical teachings of Jesus have obviously been later ‘qualified’. We are left with the paradoxical situation that it becomes possible to quote scripture against itself, depending on which bit one selects. For church leaders to be seemingly incapable of understanding this or oblivious to it is rather depressing.
Dominic Kirkham, Manchester