Sep 19, 2023 | News
It is that time of year when the leaves change colour and many churches (even urban ones) hold harvest festivals. John Keats’s great poem revels in the sights, sounds and scents of autumn, and encourages its readers to do the same. He moves us from the voluptuous days of late summer, through the richness of harvest to the melancholy season of rapidly shortening days and coming cold. And he urges us to rejoice in all of it. The poem is filled with a love of life, even as it hints at an awareness of mortality. Barely a year after writing it, he was dead.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Aug 29, 2023 | News
Although best remembered for her novel Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë was a passionate poet. Although much of her work was destroyed some pieces were saved by her sisters and published in a slim volume. This poem tells of faith in an all-powerful, everlasting, and ultimately loving God who cannot be imagined by mere mortals. Our religious language and structures pale into insignificance beside the eternal, infinite reality. So indeed does what we, in this temporal world, understand as death.
No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear
O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in Thee
Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main
To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity,
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality.
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears
Though earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And Thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee
There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed.
Aug 24, 2023 | News
Secretary to the CRC
Andrew Walker, our Secretary, will be retiring in the late autumn. The Board is looking for someone to replace him in this responsible and stimulating post. Salary: £15,000 p.a. for a 17.5 hour week. Expressions of interest, and requests for further information should be sent to crcsec@transformingministry.co.uk You can also contact Andrew or Imogen Clout (Chair) Imogen.clout@btinternet.com to arrange an informal chat.
Website Editor and Communications Officer
CRC is looking for a freelance editor to manage the website and create electronic communications with members. We envisage the post taking a day a week. Applicants should be able to edit in WordPress. Expressions of interest and requests for an information pack to crcsec@transformingministry.co.uk
Aug 15, 2023 | News
Moving into film
Transforming Ministry is now experimenting with film reviews, and Andrew Carr has started the process with a review of The Hiding Place, about Corrie Ten Boom. We are keen for everyone to see this review, as it is a first for us, but we anticipate future reviews being available in the Subscribers’ area of the website.
If you would be interested in reviewing a film for Transforming Ministry, please contact editor@transformingministry.co.uk in the first instance.
The Hiding Place (2023 USA film)
Certificate: 12A
Runtime: 153 minutes
Director: Laura Matula
Cast: Nan Gurley, John Schuck, Carrie Tillis
Based upon Corrie Ten Boom’s memoir, this is an emotive film version of a stage play of her moving and powerful book. I was reminded of a quote from movie satire The Player (1992) “No stars, just talent!” which summarises the quality of the three lead performances, especially Carrie Tillis (Betsie Ten Boom).
It’s not an easy watch, its subject matter and theme are sombre, turning as they do to a dark page in human history. The staging and lighting with the narrative switching effectively between the characters’ past and their then-present is played out on a revolving stage. The theme broad – Anti-Semitism, Hatred of the Other, the Holocaust; the focus narrow – what would you personally have done in the same situation?
The sequences in Ravensbrück camp are powerful yet understated, the communion scene in particular is extraordinary. It stays with you… ‘forgiveness must first be a scandal if it is to have any power at all’ which is said and shown by Corrie (Nan Gurley) forgiving a former Nazi captor.
Not a film to passively watch, but to be engaged with and to ask ourselves why we are potentially allowing the circumstances that caused the events back then to happen again today?
ANDREW CARR
Jul 31, 2023 | News
Shakespeare’s contemporary Jonson is best remembered as a playwright, but in this poignant and very personal piece his own feelings are laid bare.
He ponders on the paradox of faith and grief – why grieve for someone who has gone to glory? Is it ourselves we grieve for in the absence of a beloved one?
The poem also plays upon the fact that both father and son have the same name – Benjamin (Genesis 35: 18). So the line between the child Ben and his father Ben is blurred. The father’s pain at the lost diminishes him. But by drawing attention to the meaning of the name, ‘child of my right hand’, Jonson recalls the biblical parallels – not only with the youngest son of Jacob but also with that other Son who now sits at the right hand of his Father. And this reminds us that God has walked not only the path of pain before us, but also the path of agonising grief.
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, ‘Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.’
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
Jun 30, 2023 | News
Like her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel, Christina was fascinated by medieval tales and imagery. But while it is tempting on a superficial reading to see this work as a straightforward love poem (albeit with rather fanciful language), there is another way to look at it.
Christina Rossetti was a woman of great faith, which combines with her love of the middle ages here. The poem recalls the mysterious language of the Corpus Christi Carol where Christ is portrayed as a wounded knight on a bed with rich hangings. Colour is important in both poems. And it is Christ who leads us in calm places of refreshment, who makes us fruitful, who brings us peace. It is in Christ that we are born again. The moment when we first become fully aware of Christ’s presence can indeed be described as the Birthday of our life.
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
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