sunday morning

with forecasts of heavy rain to come i’m sitting in jayne’s backyard in glorious sun. jayne and willow are doing yoga inside and i’ve foregone same so i can catch up on the last 24 hours in iran over coffee, and enjoy the solitary stillness with the birds before a day of chat and art making takes over.

i liked this, from today’s writer’s almanac…

It’s the birthday of American writer John Edgar Wideman…

He said,

“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not allowing those things to destroy you.”

and ireland’s faith gets an intriguing mention in a recent SoF Observed, Yeats Reminds Me

“We are a nation of believers. We produce anti-clerics, but atheists, never.”
– William Butler Yeats

i’ve not a drop of Irish blood in me and have not (yet, anyway) taken citizenship, but i’ve lived on this island for not far short of 22 years, and inescapably shaped by this place. this line from Yeats is a provocation. my initial response was, “But there are atheists on this island”. a beat later i heard myself thinking, “But was it Ireland that “produced” their atheism, or influence from someplace else?”

raindrops are falling on my head. time to move…

LB

when all your plan As are in one basket

after 7 hours huddled over the keyboard filling out a now submitted application to university i am left with nothing but
(1) tears of relief to have beaten the most !@£$%^& annoying online form i have ever had the despair of encountering,
(2) a smidgen of hope that i might get accepted,
(3) a big dollop of fear in my gut that i won’t and i’ll have to come up with a plan B, and
(4) a burning pain across my shoulder blades that only appear eased if i avoid standing up straight and stay at the laptop typing.

but it’s not all knots of frustration…

i don’t know why the weather report to the right says mostly cloudly because the sun has been shining brilliantly all day with only the wispiest clouds high above flitting by. it’s made for a nice view from my desk.

and my day has been peppered with lovely back ‘n’forth emails with lovely people, and some surprise messages too, all of which have made me smile and feel warm gratitude at knowing the kind of folks that drop you messages for no reason than to say, “hello” and send loving words out of the blue.

oh, and this morning i submitted a piece for the Queermergent blog (linked in the side bar over there —>). so that feels like another little achievement. it’ll be published in a few weeks in two parts. i’d been struggling with it for weeks in belfast, but here at my desk looking out at the trees, my head seems mercifully less cluttered, and so tidying it up today came with refreshing ease.

right, i’m (hobbling like an 80 year old) off to my parentals’ to be fed a fry up for tea and then it’s into a scalding shower for me to try and work out these knots.

oh, and universe, if you should have a plan B in mind for this autumn, make it a good ‘un please. i’ve done the best i can manage with plan A and i sure don’t have an alternative waiting up my sleeve…

LB

judas recalled and some rambling thoughts

pete’s posted up a summary of ikon::recalls Judas, including our recordings of the reflections.

the live version of mine ended up being more like as i intended it – more pitching and heaving, fast paced and well… angry than the earlier recorded version. that said, the table was so crowded with folks that there was no room to gesticulate. my body felt like a coiled spring and there was no room to physically express as i’d have liked. jonny was behind doing the live mixing underneath our voices and commented afterward, it’s a shame you couldn’t stand. and this is what i love about the whole collaborative experiment, that we try stuff and it’s okay for it not to be perfect…
(i toned it down to a much more meditative level for the audio-only version. but, as an experiment, i’m glad we have kept a record for once. )

in the ’08 gathering, Satisfaction, and in our workshop at gb08, lessons in evandelism we recognised that it is disatisfaction that keeps artists making art, not success. you keep trying to make it better and learning as you go.
it was a real treat to back at the ikon table after leaving the cyndicate 6 months back and taking a break. i loved what everyone brought to the table, it really provoked me. i can’t wait for whatever we’re gonna try next.
even as an ikon::recalls, this was *so* different from the 2002 version of Judas, that it was still a one off.
we prepare, we do it and we move on to the next… Sunday night really got close to embodying what i think theodrama might be about…

on a not unrelated front, i haven’t watched all the videos, but in thinking over Easter about what the heck it is i actually mean when i say, i believe, i came across this theopoetics site, which i’m really enjoying exploring. and in a way, this gets the closest yet to articulating how i understand my belief, without making me feel boxed by the technicalities of labels such as Christian Agnostic or a/theist. this breaks something open for me. this video on bruggemann’s dialogue with the emerging church really did it for me. i kind of want to pull up a chair with david and sarah and this guy, and several folks besides. actually, no kinda about it.

i’ve been wondering for a while what would develop from my journey through deconstruction and the psychoanalytic, and have been in increasingly finding suggestions of narrative and the unsystematic and the poetic coming out of my mouth… embryonic unformed questioning attempts with several nouns and adjectives increasingly taking on a verb form. which probably stems from exploring in ’07 the idea of “G-D as event” (rather than as being) in The God Delusion. and i think it’s also been an attempt to wonder what category to put what i did at Vanderbilt last October into… i’ve been filling out a college application and trying to describe what i’ve been up to on the ikon journey has been wrecking my head.

the experience of ikon is very often doing something that i don’t know how to describe. and i’m willing to confess that it can be bloody intimidating when the kind of people who typically describe what you’re doing are philosophers like Jack Caputo. (there’s a reason why when someone approaches and says they’ve been reading Pete’s work and Caputo’s and they’re a big fan of ikon although they’ve never been and would love to talk about what we do that i typically respond, “let’s get a pint”. thank G-D we do a lot of stuff in pubs!) i love the conversations but man do i have to work hard at them. and i don’t say that to imply i’m stupid or ignorant, or that i have a problem with the philosophy that’s been used to describe and inspire ikon. it’s just i’m more comfortable with, and have been in want of, an alternative language set that allows for all the provisionality but which flows more freely rather than making me feel tongued tied beside the academics.

i suspect of a fair few of us collaborators in ikon have at this stage enough knowledge in our heads and have done the stuff enough times to get an honourary PhD in Philosophy but don’t realise it because we are doing it without the need, or indeed in some cases desire, to articulate or even understand it philosophically.

so anyway, all that is really meant to say, some helpful dots are being joined through this theopoetic stuff… this all intrinsically seems to make sense to me in a way that feels potentially liberating and worth exploring more. and my brain’s not hurting.

Reknitting our creeds light in hand
We are liberated by our uncertainty
Our fragile belief
where G-D is the wound, the hole in the weave
We discover the world
We face the other
Undergoing, Listening, Wondering, embracing
Asking, Is this how it could be?
…

Let our stories unravel and be told without conclusion
Let us knit our lives together
With meaning that cannot be grasped by our words

(from the liturgical poem i wrote for The God Delusion. seems to fit. somehow.)

Brook, if you read this – l’engle gets a mention on the theopoetics site, which brought you to mind.

LB