The Collage of God

Mark Oakley

Description

The Collage of God is truly a contemporary spiritual classic. First published in 2001 it has sold many thousands of copies and was praised by Andrew Motion, Rowan Williams, Wendy Cope and received many favourable reviews.
While training for the priesthood, a stint with a hospital chaplaincy team brought Mark face to face with a depth of suffering that blew his young, confident faith apart. Years later he was still picking up the pieces, but they began to show an entirely different picture of where and how God could be found. The Collage of God is for all who find it difficult to reconcile the realities of life with easy and comfortable notions about faith. In imaginative and beautiful language, and illuminated by many quotes from modern writers and poets, Mark Oakley reconstructs faith as a collage of traditions and texts, the myriad experiences of living, imagination, silence and prayer by which we respond to the grace of God revealed in fragile lives.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Inspirational
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781848255845
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE COLLAGE OF GOD

MARK OAKLEY

FOREWORD BY WENDY COPE

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint excerpts from these books: Bloodaxe Books Ltd for ‘Raptor’ by R.S Thomas, taken from No Truce with the Furies (1995); J.M Dent for ‘The Empty Church’, ‘Somewhere’, ‘Adjustments’, ‘The Kingdom’, ‘After Jericho’, ‘Kneeling’, and ‘Directions’, all taken from Collected Poems 1945–1990; Faber and Faber Ltd for ‘The Way’ by Edwin Muir, taken from The Complete Poems, ‘Lightenings’ by Seamsus Heaney, taken from Seeing Things, ‘Chorus III’ by T.S. Elliot, taken from ‘The Rock’, ‘Song VIII’ by W.H. Auden, taken from Collected Poems, ‘Whitsunday in Kirchstetten’ by W.H. Auden, taken from Collected Poems; ‘Strugnell’s Christian Song’ and ‘Some More Light Verse’ by Wendy Cope, taken from Serious Concerns; Oxford University Press for ‘The Minister’ by Anne Stevenson, taken from The Collected Poems 1955–1995.

© Mark Oakley 2001, 2002, 2012

First Published in 2001 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd.

This Edition published in 2012 by Canterbury Press

Editorial office 3rd Floor, Invicta House 108–114 Golden Lane London EC1Y 0TG

Canterbury Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient and Modern Ltd (a registered charity) 13a Hellesdon Park Road, Norwich, Norfolk, NR6 5DR

www.canterburypress.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, SCM Press.

Mark Oakley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

978 1 84825 238 7

Design by Sandie Boccacci

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

For Nanny and Bill with love and gratitude

… thus the human imagination, here as always uses what it knows well in pursuit of efforts to move towards what it does not yet comprehend. Margaret Donaldson, Human Minds: An Exploration

introduction to second edition

Since publishing this book eleven years ago, the Church of England has lost some talented and special clergy who in their various ways had encouraged me in my early ministry as a young priest. They include such people as Michael Mayne, Harry Williams, Bill Vanstone, Eric James and John V. Taylor. Though different, each of them was a theologian of experience. That is, they took human experience seriously in their reflection with and about God. They were also, as a result of this, courageous in their preaching, self-scrutiny and politics because their pastoral work had taught them things which they felt either the Church or society found difficult to hear or even acknowledge. I like to think of them as being naturally Anglican in their sensibilities. Pastoral insight was at the heart of their teaching and if their theology ever challenged the past it was understood as a theological hoeing, a turning over of the soil of tradition from which new things come to the top, and not as an arrogant discarding. I miss them and sadly it is hard not to believe that something vital about the Church of England’s contribution to the Christian church has died with them. In its very modest wayThe Collage of Godwas an attempt to add a little more water to this stream of spiritual reflection made reassuringly turbulent by its recognition of human experience. It is a youthful priest’s frustrated take on the restrictions of any systematic approach to theology that smoothes away such experience, dark or light, for the purposes of clarity, authority or prejudice. No doubt I would write a different book these days but I still believe the central premise that God is understood in collage – in a slow, patient and puzzled piecing together of hints and guesses, epiphanies and surprises that come our way through scripture, the tradition of faith, the many forms of reasoning and the living of life with all its loves and losses. The pieces of the collage don’t always fit together easily but there is an integrity about the provisional picture of God they begin to give shape to. I identified when I wrote this book some of the pieces that always seem to find themselves on my collage and today some of those have inevitably changed and some have increased. At the moment, for instance, my collage is more reliant on poetry than ever. I look for God in the world as I look for the poetry in the poem. There is little new to my approach in this book and it has been explored by greater minds than mine. In the nineteenth century in hisEssays Critical and Historical, John Henry Newman wrote:

No revelation can be complete and systematic, from the weakness of the human intellect; so far as it is not such, it is mysterious ...The religious truth is neither light nor darkness, but both together; it is like the dim view of a country seen in the twilight, which forms half extricated from the darkness, with broken lines and isolated masses. Revelation, in this way of considering it, is not a revealed system, but consists of a number of detached and incomplete truths belonging to a vast system unrevealed.

I mentioned priests who have supported me through the years and there have been a number of laity too who have shown me what fidelity to God looks like in the most remarkable ways. The late Monica Furlong gave me lunch whenThe Collage of Godwas published and was so positive and helpful, not least in telling me that my next book must not rely so much on the thoughts and quotations of others but must be more confident in my own voice. I suppose the point of my collage was to piece together what others had said and which had resonated with me, but I take her point and hope that she would be pleased to know that I am learning, slowly, to be a little less self-protective in my hiding behind others. She taught me that day what Martin Luther King Jr once gave voice to when he said that ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’. I hope that some people will find this book helpful. It tries to witness to a Christian faith that both informs the mind and forms the heart, that is unafraid to reason and unashamed to adore, that sees certainty as the opposite of faith because all our full-stops must be changed into commas if the Gospel is to do its work in us. The collage is never complete.

Mark Oakley