Reform October 2009

‘Having time and space seems to be an invitation for internal voices’

This past summer my pilgrim way has been through green pastures and by still waters. The weather (in Essex) has been lovely – temperate, with some heavy rain at night to keep the garden happy. We have mostly been at home,

with fewer meetings or deadlines or other commitments, and so there has been time for a little clearing out in the house and for some gentle internal stock-taking. We have had days out sailing our little dinghy on the Blackwater estuary – and because of time to think and talk through my long-standing fears, we have sailed more cautiously and I have actually enjoyed it. I have joined a

monthly circle dancing group and am discovering how refreshing it is for me, so often in the past the organising, responsible person, to just be told what to do and do it – and to do it to music too!

It is actually very difficult to write about a time of blessing – and it is even more difficult to whole-heartedly receive it as a gift from God. Having time and space seems to be an invitation for internal voices, which I am pretty sure do not come from God: “This good time won’t last, you know,” “What right do you have to be so happy when so many are suffering?” “It is not a good idea to be so relaxed – you won’t be able to crank yourself up into gear for September’s demands.”

Even the devil quotes scripture at me: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required (Luke 12:48)”.

I am slowly learning not to give these voices the time of day. I try not to enter into discussion with them as that only encourages them to put their case more persuasively. I try not to express the fears, guilt and lack of gratitude which they represent aloud to friends and family (so it is not really a good idea to be writing this!)

Instead, I have deliberately taken time to reflect on the fruits of this golden summer. There has been more time for people − time for a chat over a cup of tea with a poor soul who calls from time to time for financial help and whom we so often fob off without any real communication, time for an experimental open house event for the 20 houses in the road where we have lived for nearly 42 years and still do not know all the neighbours.

It is surprising how much courage (or is it faith?) it takes just to receive with open hands and be thankful.

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REFORM • October 2009 • 3

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Where should children learn about religion? How random is natural selection?Salley Vickers: What’s real may not be what’s visible

Contents

Columns17 Bible Study Susan Durber makes up her

own mind on Luke’s parables

19 Pilgrim Way Sheila Maxey overcomes internal voices

24 Starting Out Matt Stone fantasises over the perfect church

33 Notes from America Ron Buford searches for a moral impetus to health care reform

35 Eco-Mum Sonia Christie recalls how she came to be known as an Oompa Loompa

37 Stephen Brown reflects on how his artistic hopes were shattered

Regulars 4 Editorial 5 Letters 8 News29 Reviews34 Green page36 Puzzles39 Local Life40 Classifieds40 Reform subscriptions42 Onreflection/Poem

Cover image: Chris Andrews

10

Features 10 Reality and the novel An interview with

Salley Vickers

13 Promises promises Dr John Hayward suggests how we can best use our vote

15 Faith: an education Dick Wolff argues that religious education should be an opportunity for all

18 Ulaudah Equiano The extraordinary life of a slave who campaigned for abolition

20 Peaceful Pilgrimage Hazel Southam discovers lesser known holy sites in Jordan

22 Random but Divine Do we really have to choose between natural selection and divine intervention? asks Gordon T Rogers

25 Chaplaincy: a Prophetic Calling? Hospice Chaplain Susan Walker welcomes tough opportunities for Christian revelation

27 Graham Stanton: a tribute James D G Dunn celebrates the life of a distinguished biblical scholar

32 Equal in love How the Quakers became the first denomination to offer marriage equally to same and opposite sex couples

34 Moving boldly forward Climate change secretary Ed Miliband says Britain is on the side of ambitous green action

• October 2009 • REFORM10

“I thinkthere is an

invisible realm”

Bestselling author Salley Vickers talks to Kay Parris about the power of art, imagination, self-discovery and redemption



iNtERviEW

In your new novel Dancing Backwards we see a widow, Violet Hetherington, who’s on a transatlantic cruise, reflecting on what she’s done in her life; and ultimately she finds she can have a new stab at happiness. What do you find compelling in that set of premises?

I’m interested in people at points in their lives where they can go in many different directions and where their history might suggest a narrowing of possibilities, but actually in the course of the story they choose a widening of possibilities. So I think it’s the crossroads of life that is relevant, and I am interested in that because I think all our lives are made up of a series of crossroads. But of course certain characters will illustrate that more dramatically than others, and if you deprive somebody of their partner or if they’ve never had a partner, then the choices in some ways are more open to them.

There’s less art and religious imagery than in some of your other novels, but, Violet experiences an almost spiritual transformation doesn’t she?

With this book, I wanted to make it implicit rather than explicit. There’s a tendency to try to turn me into a “religious writer”, and I’m against that. It’s simply because I think that limits the scope of what I’m doing, and I’m not writing in order to promulgate a set of religious beliefs.

I’m interested in religion obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t write about it as I do, but I’m more interested in the wider sense of what you might call the religious dimension within human consciousness, whether people are actively religious or not. So I quite deliberately removed any kind of overt exploration of the spiritual side of things and made it implicit, but it’s still there.

What do you think it is about great art that takes us to a higher plane?

The character Thomas in my previous novel, The Other Side of You, says of [the 17th century artist] Caravaggio, that he was a liar, a murderer, womaniser, possibly a rapist …but he was capable of the most extraordinary representations of the divine. Then he says that a great artist doesn’t paint out of him or herself, he paints out of the other side of him or herself. I think that what any real artist will do is achieve an impersonal representation of human truths, which are capable of

touching people outside the experience of the artist and outside the viewer’s own immediate experience. I think great art will draw people from different backgrounds, different persuasions, different experiences and there’s a sort of meeting point there. I think that’s what great novels do, too, that they will bring together different aspects of experience, either within the reader or within different readers.

You’ve described yourself as a metaphysical writer. What do you mean by that?

I mean that I always have a very strong sense of the physical, so all the locations in my books, whether it’s Venice or Rome, or the Atlantic Ocean, will be locations I know very well from my own experience. I must know the physical location and ground of what I’m writing about, and that gives me, the ability to rise above that metaphorically and talk about those other intangibles

of human experience, which I write a lot about. In The Other Side of You, the psychiatrist David McBride makes the point when he’s giving a lecture in Rome about Caravaggio and about his patient Elizabeth Cruikshank. He says the audience can see my speaking, sweating outward form, but they can’t see half of me, because the real me, the person inside me, is not visible to them. It is the real half, which is invisible, that I’m interested in.

Maybe there’s something else as well, which is part of us and beyond us; you’ve called it a creative principle. Do you think that’s all part of the same continuum?

Yes I do. I think what is real is not necessarily what’s visible. What interests me is that refined particle physicists will agree with this, that our notion of this solid reality is rather illusory. What we know of this reality is shaped and informed by the mind, with which we observe and experience it. So by extension, what makes you or me real is not the voices we’re exchanging, but the kind of ideas that are coming into being all the time as we are speaking. I think there’s an invisible realm, not something wishy washy, or to be dismissed because it’s not testable. It’s really the most crucial thing about everybody.

Salley VickersBiographySalley Vickers was 50 when she wrote her first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel (published in 2001). The initial print run was only one thousand, but the book went on to become an international word-of-mouth bestseller.

The struggles of its just-retired protagonist to overcome loneliness and inhibition, her exploration, during a trip to Venice, of art, religion and new friendships, and the unexpected enrichment of her life – all are themes Vickers has returned to in different ways in her five subsequent novels to date.

In the latest of them, Dancing Backwards, Vickers focuses on another post-middle-aged woman taking what turns out to be a life-changing trip, just when she is at a crossroad in her life. Unlike the virginal and guarded Miss Garnet however, Violet Hetherington is a poet (one who incidentally made a cameo appearance in another of Vickers’ novels, Instances of the Number Three), who has

been unhappily married twice, and had love affairs and children.

Vi Hetherington’s transatlantic cruise to visit an old friend she once let down badly offers her an opportunity to relive and review her life, to reflect and to be transfigured – partly through the people she encounters on board – by new hope and understanding about love, friendship and the life choices she has made.

Salley Vickers’ father was a trade union leader and her mother a social worker in Liverpool, where both parents were members of the British Communist Party during her early childhood. Her parent’s Communists friends she likened in a recent interview for Woman’s Hour, to that of “early Christians – without God – hugely kind, hugely concerned about other people.”

Before becoming a novelist Salley Vickers enjoyed two careers, as an academic teaching literature and as a psychotherapist. She now writes and lectures full-time.

Dancing Backwards is published by Harper Collins, June 2009

‘What we carry in our consciousness, is a lot more in line with the eternal, than is sometimes supposed’

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In the wake of a recent government consultation over what kind of religious education guidance should be provided to schools, Dick Wolff argues that RE should be an expansive learning opportunity for all and not a narrow domain for “faith schools”

Politicians think parental choice in education is a vote-winner. They like private/public partnerships so they’re quite happy for mosques to run schools on their behalf. But they also want community cohesion.

Faith-based schools can help build communities across nationality and race – in our local Roman Catholic congregation, 54 languages are spoken. But this is at the

Faith:an education

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Olaudah Equiano was one of the most prominent black residents in the UK in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century. Now, after nearly two centuries of neglect, he seems to be making it back into public consciousness.

In 2007 he had an exhibition all to himself in the main exhibition space of the Art Gallery and Museum in Birmingham and he has recently been portrayed in a number of historical plays and in the film about William Wilberforce called Amazing Grace (where he was played by Youssou N’Dour).

There were probably hundreds, possibly thousands, of people of African descent living in the UK in the late 18th Century. Several of them, such as Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cugoano, were men of letters who had collections of letters or substantial essays published at that time. Others, such as Samuel Johnson’s highly-regarded servant Francis Barber, receive mentions in the writing of others, but Equiano is alone in leaving us a book-length account of his own life and experiences.

This book, which he guided through nine editions between 1789 and 1794, was at once a successful commercial enterprise, a major contribution to the anti-slavery cause and a personal testimony telling of his conversion and Christian faith. It still provides a shocking account of slavery in action and an amazing personal adventure story. Equiano published it, as was common at the time, by acquiring a list of subscribers who undertook to buy the book in advance.

His subscribers included a wide cross-section of British society. The Countess of Huntingdon, Miss Hannah More and the Revd John Wesley are listed alongside royalty, nobility, minor gentry, bishops and members of the London black community. Equiano seems to have spent much of his time after the initial publication on extensive book tours all over the UK, giving talks attended by thousands in support of the anti-slavery cause and selling his book, which made him a fortune.

The book itself remains an excellent read. Equiano’s voice is gentle and gracious, but the story he has to share is often desperately ugly and distressing. He starts by telling of a childhood in Africa (in what later became Nigeria), a capture and a forced march to the coast, with separation from his also-captured sister. He

Marking Black History Month in October, John Campbell reflects on the life of Olaudah Equiano, one of the 18th Century’s most prominent African writers and campaigners against the slave trade

Olaudah EquianO:abolitionist and slave


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The premise that the natural world has intelligence and order beyond that attributed to man leads those who accept such a premise to conclude that some form of supernatural creator power must exist. If a supernatural power has

intelligence, then it offers an intangible, immortal link to the natural world – an underlying plan if you like, which carries some sort of instruction for making the world as it is. This is where science comes in, discovering God’s intelligence bit by bit.

But what do we mean by intelligence? Generally we refer to the power of learning and reasoning, which is very highly developed in the human brain. Intelligence is physically “of the brain,” but at the same time it is found in the “software” that our brain receives through life’s experiences, and it is impressed on the brain through neurone interconnectivity which evolves in the early years of our life.

If a supernatural power has intelligence then it offers us a spiritual and intangible link to the natural world, possibly akin to that “software” which carries some sort of instruction for making the world as it is. One can argue, quite convincingly, that this supernatural power imbues the heart of matter itself, from since the universe came into being. Physical and chemical processes over an immense period of time (over four billion years),

through divinely-supervised random selection and evolution, finally produced appropriate frameworks for natural physical and life processes to occur.

But how can something be at one time random and divinely supervised? Suppose we assume that the complex order in the world, by which nature and the physical worlds work, is indeed the result of random physico-chemical interactions, which in the course of time have evolved into the pattern of order which we know to be essential for certain processes to work. Can we still say this is God’s work? First, did God design the pattern which enables, say, heredity to occur, and secondly did God supply the starting point for the random interactions in the first place?

I think the answer is yes on both counts. Whether the physico-chemical basis for genetic heredity is randomly arrived at or not seems irrelevant – it is the pattern that exists behind the process which is important and so awe-inspiring. In seeking after the laws of nature, the 19th Century chemist and physicist Michael Faraday – who is still acknowledged as one of the greatest of all scientists – believed that God had written these laws into the universe at Creation.

Science has shown irrefutably that hereditable information is passed on from generation to generation through our genes. In the last 50 years we have amassed much detail of this process, even to

Do we really have to choose between accepting that natural selection is random and ascribing creation to divine intervention? asks Gordon T Rogers

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I love my work as a hospice chaplain, which I’ve now been doing for six years. A typical day might look something like this – personal prayer; visiting patients and their families on the in-patient unit or in the day hospice; taking services of Christian worship; rearranging

furniture of the chapel for the Buddhist meditation group; offering individual support to members of staff through individual conversations, phonecalls or email; the inevitable institutional meetings and giving the occasional lecture in the education department.

Thankfully it will also include a nice lunch in the very comfortable hospice dining room and a rejuvenating chat and/or moan with friends about family, weather, work, lovelife, music, politics, fashion, the management or world affairs.

Working alongside mainly unchurched people is always stimulating – people don’t hesitate to challenge you with questions like: “Why is my Dad suffering when he doesn’t deserve it?” or, “Aren’t all religions basically the same?” These conversations can become opportunities for sharing one’s faith by taking such questions at face value and boldly, or gently, witnessing to the resurrecting love I know in Jesus.

And just being known as a person of faith and prayer is another way to witness to the marvellous and all-sustaining power and love of God, who chose to walk alongside screwed-up and suffering humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. So in these kinds of ways, hospice chaplaincy has always been a place where I have been free to share the liberating truth of the Gospel.

It is true that hospice chaplains are required to express an inclusive approach, whereby we offer spiritual care to people of all faiths and none, and that proselytising is completely off the menu. But the Gospel is far from being in chains.

And because chaplains are part of the furniture of institutions – insiders of the institutions which they serve, they are sometimes uniquely placed to inhabit a prophetic role, if only for a time. I believe my role became prophetic when something very sad happened

at the hospice recently. One of our inpatient unit nurses died very suddenly and unexpectedly. She died in her car, on her way home from work. Knowing she was unwell, she pulled over to a layby, called for an ambulance and simply stopped living. There was no warning for family, friends or colleagues no time to say goodbye. And by today’s standards, this fine woman was relatively young at 52 – leaving husband, children and grandchildren all too soon.

The next day was difficult; patients and relatives needed to be attended to, but our dear friend and colleague had died and we couldn’t understand how or why. On this extremely difficult and sad day, God created an opportunity for prophecy. Even before the chaplains had had the chance to offer their support

to staff, we were called upon by senior management to be aware of what had happened and to “do something.” I was asked to lead some quiet time for staff in the afternoon. My colleague

and I spent the morning sharing the shock and sorrow of our workmates, sometimes listening, occasionally speaking, sometimes holding people, often holding back our own tears – and more than anything, just being there. And although this may be interpreted as a traditional pastoral care role, of representative Christian persons offering love in the context of ultimate realities, I would argue that this could also be seen as a prophetic pointing towards God in the midst of this tragedy. Wasn’t Isaiah commanded to comfort the people when they were bowed down with sorrow and oppression? (40: 1-2).

Having spent the morning listening to people’s sense of shock and sorrow and wrestling with my own, I found that I could not offer a simple time of all-inclusive, non-religious quiet. I plunged into the depths of the URC funeral service and lifted a couple of prayers which offered true recognition of deep grief. These prayers topped and tailed an improvised liturgy.

The Janet Morley prayer, which begins, “O God who brought each one of us to birth and in whose arms we die,” seemed to release us to face our turmoil and the “Prayers for use in particularly distressing

Everyday chaplaincy is challenging, potentially rewarding work and, every so often, it presents unique opportunities for Christian revelation, as Susan Walker has discovered

Chaplaincy:a prophetic calling?

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Reform October 2009