reverence

Sunday was the Feast of the Transfiguration, and we had a sermon on reverence at church. In passing, our Reverend reflected on the lack of reverence in the modern world... he lamented the passing of a time when Australians were, by and large, godfearing and reverence towards things like sex and religion was part of the culture.
I've been thinking about the sermon and about the issue of 'reverence'. It seems to me that if it is indeed true that our society is less reverent, there are significant reasons for that. For most westerners at the end of the twentieth century, it might seem fairly obvious that reverence is a dangerous attitude. Reverence towards governments ends up with all your young men dead in wars that have nothing to do with you, reverence towards the church results in a nightmarish plague of abuse, reverence towards sex leaves people ignorant and afraid... and reverence towards God seems to create a culpable blindness that allows such horrors to be perpetuated. For us in the church, shouting at people 'BE MORE REVERENT' doesn't seem like much of a solution. And reverence in itself is surely not what God desires. It's reverence towards God, and God understood in all his grace and goodness.
Surely it's only as we reflect our own reverence for God... in a respect for his world, in a profound valuing of all the people he's made, in a rejection of the false gods of money and power, in persevering at building a community that is made up not just of people like us but of all who confess their need of God's grace, in the constant telling and retelling of the stories he has told us about himself, in a humility about ourselves and our own opinions... surely that's when people will see a reason for reverence.

writing and seduction

Another thought from the writing masterclass, on writing as a love affair. The speaker suggested that in a book (as opposed to in a thesis) we aim to seduce the reader, to make them fall in love with our voice. This means that the topic of the book is almost an excuse: we want the reader not to love our subject, but to love our 'take' on that subject. We are jealous (in the OT sense of a 'jealous' God!) of our readers' affections and attention, wanting them to be wholly ours. This has particular significance for the way we quote others. In a thesis, we quote others as 'authorities', because we are not presenting ourselves as authoritative. Their voices lend weight to ours. But in a book, we are careful not to allow the voices of others ever distract the reader from our, central, authoritative voice. To use the speaker's example, we would not want someone to sleep with us because we were friends with Kant'. But we might tell a joke about Kant to make ourselves look intelligent and attractive!
Again, I'm beguiled (I should say seduced!) by this analogy. But is writing really such an egotistical activity?

writing and virtue

I spent yesterday at a masterclass on writing for postgraduates in the humanities. A stimulating day, hearing from a number of academics who write for broader audiences than just those within their field. One of the speakers got me thinking about the importance of hatred in thinking and writing. He argued that (among other motivations) most of us are driven by a hatred of a particular approach to our subject. While this hatred is important and valuable as a motivation, it must not infect our writing, which has to be (his word!) 'lovely'.
Interesting! I realised that I do indeed hate (quite passionately) a particular, long-standing approach to Methodist history which to my mind has flattened an entirely fascinating religious culture into a bland, respectable, deathly boring set of theological propositions. And I am certainly driven by that hatred to write about early Methodism in a way that will somehow rescue it from that fate. The question is, do I embrace that hatred or regard it with suspicion? After all, I don't hate the people who've written the books I detest - I meet them at conferences and they are kind and delightful people. But hatred of an intellectual approach does spawn a lack of respect for people, an arrogance about my own ideas, a sneering attitude towards particular schools of thought. And that doesn't seem very virtuous!

At the tent flap sin crouches.

I've long been a fan of Robert Alter and his sensitive approach to the biblical texts. His book The Art of Biblical Narrative transformed my understanding of the OT. He has recently published a translation of the Pentateuch - James Woods has an excellent review here. Thanks to Greg for pointing it out!

right to work

In one of my first entries on this blog, I wrote about my time visiting asylum seekers in detention here in Melbourne. I haven't been out to the detention centre for a while, because there are hardly any asylum seekers kept in detention here anymore - the overall numbers of people in detention have dropped and those who are still in detention are kept well out of the public eye in desert centres.
The situation for those asylum seekers who have been allowed into the community is not great, however. In particular, there are around 7000 people who have been issued a visa called the Bridging Visa E. Under this visa people are not allowed to work and given no access to Medicare. That's right, they have no source of income and no way of paying their bills. If their children get sick, they can't take them to the doctor. I heard of one man who accidentally cut his finger off and didn't go to hospital because he knew he had no way of paying the bill.
These people are entirely dependent on charity. It is an absolutely disgraceful situation. The Uniting Church has begun a campaign to change the conditions of the Bridging Visa. If you're an Australian, please join the campaign. TEAR Australia has information and a letter-writing guide.

beards

February heralds an influx of PhD students back into the building I work in, prompting the question: is there some kind of deep connection between PhDs and beards? I rarely see a beard away from university, whereas a male postgrad without a beard is notable. And once Andrew and I were at a work dinner for one of the organizations he works with... table after table of cleanshaven men in business suits. Andrew said he'd introduce me to some of the scientists who work for the organization - and there they were, a row of boys with beards. I felt immediately at home.
What's with beards? And is there a female equivalent?

Royal Society

After reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, I have the entirely ridiculous notion that I am on intimate terms with the 17th century scientists who were members of the Royal Society (Newton, Wren, Hooke and co.) I'm therefore delighted to see that the Society minutes have been discovered in someone's cupboard.

what I do (and why)

I recently applied for a writing course and was required to submit a 500 word piece of writing, describing my research in a way that would be accessible to the general (educated) reader. Writing it made me aware of how attached I have become to certain academic norms - it seems sacrilegious to include quotes without footnotes, and I keep feeling the desire to qualify every statement. Here's what I wrote:

The history of human suffering divides naturally into the time before the invention of anasthetics and the time after. We who live in the latter time may find ourselves reluctant to imagine the experience of those who lived without the comfort of relatively effective pain relief. Theirs was a world in which a blow to the head was one of the few possible preparations for surgery; in which toothache drove people to suicide; in which a peaceful death was a rare blessing. Theirs is the world in which I immerse myself, in my study of the experience of suffering in eighteenth-century England.

Consider the description of a mastectomy sent to Charles Wesley, the Methodist revivalist and hymn-writer, in 1758. Entitled 'An account of Mrs Davis' behaviour during the operation of her breast being cut out', it is written by a friend who attended the operation. She writes of Mrs Davis:

'When the inside of her breast was taken out, she asked if they had done cutting. I answered yes, and some thread being called for, she immediately said 'There is some in my work basket on the table'. While they sewed up the blood vessel, she said 'This pain is very great'. She called on the Lord to strengthen her and said 'I'm faint'.'

This account is matter-of-fact in its description of details: the call for thread, the calm instruction by Mrs Davis, the sewing up of the flesh. Reading it, the imagination revolts. How did men and women endure such pain?

The very existence of this account suggests the importance of this question to those who wrote and read this description as well. Charles Wesley and the anonymous woman who composed this account were involved in the Methodist movement. Methodism was a revivalist sect within the Church of England that grew with staggering rapidiy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming in the process an established international denomination. As this account suggests, Methodists took a profound interest in a person's behaviour while in the crucible of physical agony. Mrs Davis's self-control in the face of suffering was evidence of the strength of her faith and so worthy of description to her fellow-Methodists.

In their journals and letters, in their hymns and sermons, Methodists explored the meaning of suffering and the means by which it could be managed and endured. Through reading these texts, I seek to answer the questions that intrigue me. What did suffering mean to Charles Wesley and his fellow Methodists? What shaped their responses to the physical and emotional pains of life? How did they maintain their faith in a loving (if stern) God in the face of horrors such as these? The answers to these questions are not only important for understanding this influential religious movement and the culture within which it developed, but they also provide a historical context within which we can reflect on the hard questions that the experience of suffering continues to provoke.

quote

'Once during my time teaching in Wesley College, after four terms taking a particular class through the history of the church in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, one of my students asked in despair "But where is the good news in all of this?" It was a fair question, to which I could best reply that all the story was good news. The history of Christianity is frequently sordid and depressing, and very frequently, apparently sacred events turn out to have very secular causes. Christians will remain beginners in their faith if they do not face up to this. The miracle of the church's story is that after all its mistakes, bewildering transformations and entanglements in human bitterness, it is still there'

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Groundwork of Christian History, p 11.