WordsOut poems by
Introduction
to Welcome To The
Real World
A poem is a door between two worlds.
A good poem opens from the everyday world of
circumstance in which it is being read or listened to, into a world of imagination
in which surprising things happen and in which improbable things exist side by
side.
If you are lucky, as you stand in the doorway that
the poem has opened, you will find that this glimpse of these other worlds
changes—sometimes forever—your understanding of the everyday world with which
you thought you were familiar.
Which of these worlds is real?
This book contains pieces written over a period of
twenty years. My first, home-produced, collection The Place Where Socks Go appeared in 1985 in
response to demand for copies of poems performed at concerts with Geoff
Shattock. This grew into Breaking the Chains (1992) which included The sailing of the ark, and
is reprinted here unchanged apart from minor corrections and some updated
references. The remaining poems, written since 1992, are published here under
the title Welcome to the real world in book form for the first time.
These poems are doors with locks on them. You bring
to the poem the keys of your experience, and because your history and mine are
not the same, not all these doors will open, or open completely, for you.
Anyone over forty and living in the
This is not a book of religious or devotional verse,
but its perspective is clearly Christian. There will be those who look here for
an underlying theology, to place it, for example, in an evangelical, or
liberal, or mystical tradition.
There is a binding logic to be found here:
that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus were both historical and
spiritual events, and are the defining expressions of God’s relationship with
humanity.
But a very big change is going on around us. At the
beginning of the 21st century we find ourselves firmly rooted in postmodernity,
the first radically new phase of western culture for over half a millennium
(though to be firmly rooted in anything postmodern is, of course, something of
a contradiction in terms).
Propositions have given way to stories, positions to
views. We have become defined by what we consume, not what we produce. Opinion
has supplanted truth, in our debating as much as our advertising. The exercise
of choice has become our principal form of worship, and we are tolerant of
anything except dogma. Our identities dissolve into a series of disconnected
images—we are what we seem.
This is a dramatic shift in our culture. The ground
was prepared by scientists: Einstein (with Relativity) and Heisenberg (with
quantum mechanics) discovered early in the 20th century that the workings of
our universe are weird—and its scale huge—beyond all imagination. Both time and
space are relative and unpredictable. More disturbing than that, at the extreme
limits of speed and mass, time and space become impossible to tell apart. In
the everyday world, nothing is really the way it seems.
The comforting certainty of
—this abomination
that brings desolation, this god of matter
to whose altar we have been dragged
(The
sailing of the ark, sonnet 11)
Now, driven by global commercial competition and the
24-hour casino of the stock market, we are rushing headlong into the next
phase, that of the Internet, in which the 'real' is replaced by the virtual.
The pace of technological development in computing and medicine over the next
century will be staggering: its consequences are unimaginable. Everything,
including life itself, is up for grabs.
All of this deals body blows to conventional thought
and behaviour. Formal Christianity is in the firing line as much, if not more,
than anything else. 21st century postmodernism smiles blankly and ironically at
evangelical phariseeism and declines to be interested in its tedious drawing of
borderlines.
Of course this is threatening. God as an objective
person is deeply unfashionable: in postmodern thought, everything is a view.
Already dismissed by philosophy as irrational and science as unknowable, God is
now redefined by popular culture as a consumer option.
But postmodernity is also liberating for
Christianity. It is no coincidence that “Jesus chose the parable”, and the
postmodern emphasis on stories rather than creeds brings us closer to the 1st
century than, say, the mid 20th.
One of the most empowering features of postmodernity
is that it is no respecter of person or tradition. It is not afraid to say when
the emperor has no clothes (or is at least clad in extremely threadbare
underwear). Christians have been doing the same and, having found they have not
been struck down with a thunderbolt for voicing their doubts and concerns, have
been encouraged to think that there may be other ways to embrace radical
discipleship other than those formulated in the middle of the twentieth century
around western prosperity and the Four Spiritual Laws.
The
sailing of the ark documents my own journey into postmodern
Christianity. As I wrote in the original introduction to this poem, I had found
modern evangelicalism a creed spelled out in black and white, and the God of
the manger and the wilderness was not to be pinned down so easily.
Postmodernism does not say there is no objective
truth: it only says that, if there is, we can never know it. Postmodern
Christianity agrees that we can only know truth “as in a mirror, darkly”.
Faith, hope and love are the means of access to the real world. Parable and
metaphor—that is, poetry—provide some glimpses of it.
In this book, ideas in different poems sometimes
appear at odds with one another; but life is not tidy, and for precedents I
point to Job, the Psalms and Ecclesiastes; more recently to Gerard Manley
Hopkins “terrible sonnets” and to James K Baxter, whose fractured sonnet form I
borrowed for the
The style of these pieces varies according to their
origin and purpose. Many were written with performance in mind (after more than
a decade of commissions for Christmas Carol services I think I have covered the
Nativity from every angle with the possible exception of the donkey). For those
who wish to read or perform some of these pieces in worship services or other
events I have provided some notes and an index of themes at the end of the
book.
Throughout 1999 I was determined not to write a
Millennium poem. Song
at the start of a century is it.
For ideas, encouragement, criticism and
(unpaid!) commissions I am especially grateful to Mark Bratton, Isobel
Montgomery Campbell, Stan and Judith Dakin, Gill Dallow, Colin and Mary
Duckworth, James and Mary Lazarus, Donald McRobbie, John and Carina Persson,
Jackie Runcorn, Geoff Shattock, Joanna Whitfield and most of all my wife Tessa,
children Emma, Joel and Adam, and mother Joan.
For help and advice in the production and marketing
of this book I am also indebted to Julianna Franchetti, Chris Gander, Colin and
Steve Taylor and Julie Woods.
All three sections of this book come to their
conclusive points at the cross. Christ’s instruction that “he who would find
his life must lose it” goes beyond both reason and common sense: love is, quite
literally, absurd.
But I have found these conclusions inescapable:
first, that God’s behaviour is subversive. Secondly, that all important truth
is paradoxical. And lastly, that love in the form of self-sacrificial
forgiveness is the most powerful force in the universe. These are co-ordinates
of the real world.