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The
sailing of the ark
First published in 1992 as part
of Breaking
the Chains.
The sailing of the ark is a sequence written
between December 1987 and December 1991. It
is an expression of the meaning of
Christian faith within scientific postmodernity, and what you make of
it
will
depend on your starting point.
If like me you have some roots in a
modernist evangelical Christian
tradition—by birth or choice or both—you may like or dislike it
according to
your present frame of reference. Some have found it
negative and others
have described it to me as a 'lifesaver'. If you
carry no such baggage you may find it obscure.
It
charts my grumbles with the presumptions of the evangelical
worldview, in particular its sometimes near-deification of the power of
logic. The poem has four phases. Sonnets 1-13 are weary and bruised as they
recount the emotional cost of balancing dogma with experience. 14-22
deconstruct the main paradoxes of faith and the problem
of biblical authority. 23-36
find God in obscurity, tracing the incarnation through the history of
Israel and the nativity to the crucifixion and the paradox of the dying
immortal. The final section (37-45) reflects some of the personal
consequences of this.
In the commentary The challenge of the Ark
I have added
some further reflections on the story of Noah's Ark and its
implications,
written in 2011 after I had prepared the poems for this website.
The sequence is in the form of a
letter to my friend
Andrew Cornes. I have made some minor recent changes
to the
text to enable individual sonnets to stand more easily on
their own.
The style of the poems—a loose form
of sonnet
without rhyme or strict metre—was derived from the late New Zealand
poet, James K Baxter.
The
drawing of a crucifixion, which inspired sonnet 37, is
based on sketches of a wood and steel sculpture by Scilla
Verney, made shortly before her death from cancer. It
is
reproduced with the kind permission of her
husband Stephen.
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Dedication
Sonnet
1 "Andrew, another year has stripped..."
Sonnet
2 "Well, Andrew, we've reached life's middle ground,"
Sonnet
3 "Balding, overweight, at night I plod..."
Sonnet
4 "It's a numbers game."
Sonnet
5 "At thirty-five thousand feet,"
Sonnet
6 "Some of our friends who came so earnestly..."
Sonnet
7 "The wind roared unannounced..."
Sonnet
8 "The siren voices of false certainty..."
Sonnet
9 "So much that at one time seemed unassailable..."
Sonnet
10 "You're writing about marriage—"
Sonnet
11 "The world is spoiled and cannot be redeemed..."
Sonnet 12
"What little I know of scientific method..."
Sonnet
13 "The ark sailed sometime in the 1980s."
Sonnet
14 "Here is the plain good news—"
Sonnet
15 "And still there is the old familiar puzzle:"
Sonnet
16 "One hundred million years ago..."
Sonnet
17 "We must return to sources,"
Sonnet
18 "It would be hard to get the New Testament convicted..."
Sonnet
19 "The Jews I think say there are ..."
Sonnet
20 "God had the choice of technologies."
Sonnet
21 "Who sanctions this search..."
Sonnet
22 "Imagine one more myth."
Sonnet
23 "We do not find God by theology..."
Sonnet
24 "That he should choose obscurity..."
Sonnet
25 "The history of Israel is a black cloak of
failure..."
Sonnet
26 "From his first word..."
Sonnet
27 "Finally it seemed God had given them up..."
Sonnet
28 "The word said 'Become like this...'"
Sonnet
29 "The word was squeezedout like a drop..."
Sonnet
30 "'Fear not' the herald said—"
Sonnet
31 "The ark sailed backwards through the centuries..."
Sonnet
32 "This was no rehearsal."
Sonnet
33 "The Bible says Jesus loved Lazarus so much..."
Sonnet
34 "These poems should have been about the cross,"
Sonnet
35 "Put down this bag of words,"
Sonnet
36 "This is where faith begins,"
Sonnet
37 "We move with a certain grace,"
Sonnet
38 "For what is it we pray?"
Sonnet
39 "I'm no raving charismatic..."
Sonnet
40 "Our African friend Kenneth says..."
Sonnet
41 "For two thousand years..."
Sonnet
42 "You won't take offence at this,"
Sonnet
43 "A friend gave me this picture..."
Sonnet
44 "Eleven thirty."
Sonnet
45 "I remember how one night some years ago,"
Commentary: The challenge of the ark
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