Blessed Imp
  • Home
  • About
    • why blessed imp?
    • community at Milton
    • pen and ink reflections
    • transgender journeying
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Home
  • About
    • why blessed imp?
    • community at Milton
    • pen and ink reflections
    • transgender journeying
  • Blog
  • Contact
roaming reflections on life and spirit
TRANS SPIRIT FLOURISHING SITE
my sermons blog
1ST WAVE CHRISTIAN FEMINISM BLOG

in praise of a dangerous English woman

23/6/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture
Where do you find feminist religious inspiration when you need it?  Sometimes the answer is hidden in plain sight.  So it was for me at school.  For I was involved with a number of social transformations at my local secondary school, including being part of the first year of the historic admission of females.  This not only seemed a self-evident justice to me, but it was also a personal saving grace.  Indeed, in my final two years, I was part of otherwise all-female classes for most of my subjects, bar one other male assigned student (in religious studies).  Also, to the initial chagrin of some, our 19th century grammar school (founded in 1863 out of the medieval charity created by Thomas De Aston, a 13th century monk) two years later finally fully joined the modern world as a 'comprehensive' school: merging with the local 'secondary modern' school, whose pupils were traditionally divided from us by the selective examination known as the '11 plus'.   At which point school 'houses' suddenly appeared, under the names of the well-known local Lincolnshire worthies Tennyson and Wesley; the explorers (Joseph) Banks and (Matthew) Flinders (actually much better known in Australia than in their homeland); the fearsome Hereward (famed indigenous resistance fighter against the Normans), and, more mysteriously, (Anne) Askew.  Happily I was placed in her house, but who was this, to us, unknown woman?  Sadly, I never really found out then.  On asking, apart from guessing that she was the 'token' woman in the list, we were told she was martyred at the Reformation.  'Great', said most of the boys: 'not only do we not get to be associated with a fighter like Hereward, or at least an intrepid explorer like Flinders, but we get landed with a woman, and one whose claim to fame is being slaughtered.'  Even the girls had sympathy with the latter affirmation.  Yet, had we been given a richer explanation, we might have had a very different viewpoint.  For, of all the Lincolnshire icons, it is arguable that Anne Askew was the greatest of all.  She was not just a type of freedom fighter (like Hereward), an intrepid adventurer of the new (like Flinders and Banks), a poet (like Tennyson), or a model of renewing spirituality and freedom (like (the) Wesley(s)).  She was all these in one, and she did it all as a woman to boot...


Read More
0 Comments

beyond Bunnings - Poetry Pavilions for the Handyman Blues

13/12/2015

0 Comments

 
One of my favourite Billy Bragg songs is Handyman Blues (see below for a video version with leading British comics): a wonderful consolation to those of us who are deeply admiring of our fathers and others differently abled, but who are far more capable with words and images than nails and hardware.  I was thinking of this a few weeks ago when I made a rare trip to Bunnings Warehouse as part of a family wedding and move preparations in Canberra.  What would be the equivalent of Bunnings Warehouse, I wondered, for those of us cursed and blessed with Handyman Blues?  Perhaps it would be a Poetry Pavilion?  As it happens, this year's London Book Fair instituted a Poetry Pavilion for the first time to promote poetry more fully (see here for one poet's account). How encouraging!  In my soul's eye however, a Poetry Pavilion version of Bunnings Warehouse would be far more dramatic and quirky.  For a start, quite unlike Bunnings' admirable practicality, like a Celtic rune, nothing would be straight, never mind the aisles.  All would be curves and squirls, wiggles and squiggles.  In contrast to the predictable sausage sizzle at the door, food would be of all varieties, with sensational mixes of spices and scents, and delicious wines abounding  Instead of tools and serviceable items, in curious corners and angular alcoves, each decked with fascinating fabrics, metaphors and motifs would be hiding, with songs titles and dance themes a plenty. Nor would a single uniform be in sight.  Everything would be free but would cost all that the heart requires.
0 Comments

hope in the harrowing

26/6/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
A chance visit to the Balaclava area of Melbourne led me this week to pick up a flyer in a cafe for a deeply moving documentary (entitled 'The Songs They Sang') on the experiences of the Vilna (one Vilnius) ghetto. Negotiating my way to the delightful, and somewhat accurately named, Backlot Studios, I was variously challenged and inspired by the horrendous inhumanity, and the courage, hope, poetic and practical resistance of those had lived and died in that terrible time. I was also reminded how important it is to keep hope alive, even in the most desperate of circumstances, and to carry forward memory, so that light can continue to shine and triumph again in our world's persisting darkness.  I was but one of a handful of people at the showing yesterday, and all but one other were older East European Australians. Yet the beautiful and poignant understated documentary, and accompanying CD of the songs from the ghetto, continue to share the story and lead to sanity for others too.

This work is timely, both for the Jewish community and for the wider global community as it endures further horrors of genocidal and ideological madness.  As the last survivors of the Shoah dwindle, it is vital that their songs and stories are shared. A major theme of the documentary is indeed that of the third generation of ghetto survivors and it begins with a granddaughter returning to Israel for her grandfather's funeral.  Like the Jewish children singing in Vilna today the ghetto songs, the affirmation of the later generations that 'we are here' is a powerful expression of hope and the reality of life surviving even abject and extraordinary death.  For the experience that is related speaks both of what was and what is and will be.

In the face of the ghetto's horror, and the daily encounter with death (close at hand or in the killing fields of the nearby Ponar forest), the Jewish community used theatre to keep the spirit alive. In this they were aided by remarkable people, such as Amroz Sutzkever. Probably the greatest Yiddish poet of the holocaust and one of the most outstanding poets of the whole 20th century, Sutzkever's words were both brilliant in their expression and amazingly strengthening amid the scarcely imagineable harrowing. Nor was he alone. One of the most powerful parts of the whole documentary is the song Mother, written by Chayele Posnanski after the murder of her mother. She herself also did not survive the war and this is the only legacy she left. Like Satzkever's work, the song acts as a means of transcendence, an affirmation of life in the midst of the almost unbearable grief of existence. Poetry is thus, like other arts, not just an essential expression but a necessity at  the very heart of life. It becomes prayer beyond prayer. In Sutzkever's extraordinary poem and song 'Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern' it is indeed prayer itself: 'under your white stars/offer me your white hand/all my words are flowing teardrops/I would place them in your hand.'  It is hope beyond the harrowing, beyond 'the murderous quiet'.

At the end of the documentary, one survivor, Theodore, reflects that humanity still seems to want more of such tragedy, not yet having learned its lessons. Like the story and the songs, it is a sobering observation. Like the story and the songs however, it is not an expression of defeat and resignation but of centred humanity and continued hope. There is appropriate 'forgetfulness' in the story, for many survivors the only way to survive. Yet this is also subversive memory and a life-giving poetry of hope.

0 Comments

a visionary for our day too - William Blake

26/6/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture






















If William Blake had lived today, I suspect he would have had a field day. He would have thrived as an all-round artist in our multi-media age and he would have been a vital voice for visionary sanity in our blinded days.  Such is my sense amid my deepened passion for Blake on visiting the current exhibition of some of his visual art in the National Gallery of Victoria this week.  For, despite the strangeness of elements of his work, what we continue to discover in Blake is an astonishing wholeness of vision, mediated by word and image, poetry and politics, religion and the secular, all held together..

The NGV has a surprisingly large collection of Blake's watercolours, engravings and prints and the present exhibition is the first  in fifteen years to showcase them. Not least this includes 36 of Blake's 106 portrayals of Dante's work, striking in their myth and meaning. It was a vivid demonstration of the importance of word and image in unity. Indeed I realised how much we often think of Blake as merely a poet and wordsmith (albeit such a great one), when his visual work is so central. He began his working life as an engraver and this was what brought him the bulk of his income, small though that remained throughout his life.  His biography is certainly also a reminder of that other England which is frequently overlooked and underestimated. This is the England of struggle and solidarity, of nonconformist humanity and the very best kind of eccentricity. It is the England of Milton and Shelley, with whom, with contemporaries like Mary Wollstonecraft, Blake forms a blessed genealogy, imbued with radical and  generous republican hope. Blake's vision is of a world in which Albion and Jerusalem are one: material and spiritual together, alive with grace and love. In the face of today's constraining functionalism, his is still such a liberating cry for freedom, and for imagination and not mere 'reason' as the source of life and joy. As he wrote, 'prisons are built with the stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion'. Instead, we need to cultivate the contemplative, being true visionaries of word and image, understanding and doing: ''To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in a n hour.'  For, in a vision as necessary today as in his own day, and demonstrated in the various interwoven facets of his life and work, Blake was right: 'A Spirit and a Vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapour, or a nothing: they are organised and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce.'  Not for nothing have I had words of Blake above my office desk for several years: 'Imagination is evidence of the divine.'

0 Comments

one wild and precious life

19/1/2014

1 Comment

 
Mary Oliver's beautiful poem 'The Summer Day' encapsulates so much of the real challenge of a spiritual life.  As she writes elsewhere, in 'Wild Geese': 'You do not have to be good./ You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting./ You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.'  How hard it often is for us to believe, and, still more, trust and live this.  We have so often allowed ideas of exile, death, sin and punishment to predominate in our psyches, rather than welcome, life, grace and forgiveness, which are so much more central and eternal.  All too often even so-called rebels, rakes and critics have protested, and lived, a false dichotomy between the material and spiritual, the now and beyond, the human and divine.  Mary Oliver instead calls us to attention, to the mystery of the everyday and everywhen, and to living of life in all its fullness. 
The final words of the poem 'The Summer Day' have also been ringing round my consciousness for the last two and a half months: 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?'   Perhaps this blog and website is but one small step for me in responding to that challenge, an expression of my own call to attention, and to expression of the mystery and meaning I glimpse and seek to live.  Maybe my good soul-friend Graham is right, self-effacement can be a frustrating buried treasure.  Graham introduced me to Mary Oliver's work and a wild and precious life certainly demands more.  That phrase also came alive for me this weekend as I pondered two men whose funerals I had been asked to lead.  One died only a year older than I am now.  Like Bob Dylan's admission about Lenny Bruce, 'maybe he had some problems, maybe some things that he couldn’t work out', but he was more spiritually awake than many.  Bruce Laurie was somewhat wild in several senses, but he was also precious and he lived life to the full.  The other man was a Toowoomba country man of the old school but of a high intellectual calibre.  His late wife Olwen was a weekly communicant in our Anglican parish but Reid was more complex, not just more shrewd but more sparing, in his spiritual commitments: perhaps his very unpretentiousness kept him from expressing publicly, or aloud, the deepest longings and experiences of his heart.  He was full of life and virtues however, which shine on in his grieving children.  He paid attention and seized life's opportunities and challenges, passionately but graciously.  Now he rides his wild horses beyond the western sunset and into a new summer's day.  He, like Bruce, would have loved to have argued and agreed with Mary Oliver's poet-forerunner Horace, drowning a beer together on the verandah (or in Bruce's case perhaps something stronger in a nightclub): Carpe Diem.  May they rest in peace and rise in glory, and may we attend and let the soft animal of our bodies love what they love.
1 Comment

    Author

    Jo Inkpin an Anglican priest, trans woman, theologian and justice activist.  These are some of my reflections on life, spirit, and the search for peace, justice and sustainable creation.

    Archives

    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014

    Categories

    All
    1 John
    2 Corinthians 5
    2D
    360
    ABM
    Aboriginal
    Abuse
    Acland
    Activism
    Adnate
    Advent
    A.J.P.Taylor
    Alan Webster
    All Saints
    Anglican
    Anglicanism
    Anglican Overseas Aid
    Anglicare
    Angligreen
    ANZAC
    Apology
    Archbishop Of Canterbury
    Art
    Asylum Seekers
    Athanasius
    Attention
    Aunty Mary MItchell
    Aunty Rose Elu
    Australia
    Avrom Satzkever
    Azim Khamisa
    Baghdad
    Baha'i
    Baptism
    Barnard Castle
    Battle Of One Tree Hill
    BCP
    Beach
    Beauty
    Bendigo
    Berlin
    Bible
    Billy Bragg
    Bio-technology
    Birth
    Bishop
    Blackadder
    Blessed Imp
    Blessing
    Bob Dylan
    Body
    Bonhoeffer
    Border Crosser
    Bouddi
    Bridge Building
    Brisbane
    Britain
    British
    Bruce Boase
    Buddhist
    Buderim
    Bunnings
    Bunya
    Burstows
    Calvin
    Cameron Venables
    Campfire
    Canberra
    Candlemas
    Candles
    Canoe
    Carnival Of Flowers
    Cathedral
    Catholic
    Celebration
    Celtic
    Central Coast
    Change
    Chaplain
    Chartres
    Children
    Chipping Camden
    Christ
    Christian
    Christian Feminism
    Christian Socialist
    Christina Beardsley
    Christmas
    Chumbawamba
    Church
    Church Of England
    Civil War
    Clergy
    Climate Change
    Coming Out
    Communion
    Community
    Community Of Aidan And Hilda
    Compassion
    Conflict Resolution
    Conscience
    Consecration
    Contemplative Prayer
    Contemporary
    Corinne Ware
    Courage
    Creation
    Creativity
    Cross
    CSG
    C.S.Lewis
    Culture
    Cunnamulla
    Dadirri
    Dales
    Data
    David Brown
    Death
    Deborah
    Democratic
    Development
    Dialogue
    Diversity
    Drama
    Dream
    Dreaming
    Durham
    Easter
    Easterfest
    Ecology
    Ecumenism
    Eddie Izzard
    Education
    Emmaus
    England
    English
    Enlightenment
    Eric Hobsbawm
    Ethics
    Europe
    Evangelical
    Evangelism
    Faith
    Family
    Fasting
    Fear
    Female
    Feminine
    Feminism
    FIve Lands Walk
    Flag
    Flag Washing
    Football
    Forgiveness
    Formed Faith
    Foucault
    Francis
    Frederick The Great
    Freedom
    Future
    Gallipoli
    Garden City
    Garnet Lehmann
    Gateshead
    Gay
    Gayby Baby
    Gender
    Generosity
    Generous Love
    Geoff Garner
    George Monbiot
    George Tyrrell
    German
    Germany
    G.K.Chesterton
    Glennie
    Glory
    God
    Goodwill Committee
    Gosford
    Gospel
    Grace
    Grafton
    Gratefulness
    Great Dividing Range
    Grief
    Gutierrez
    Handyman Blues
    Haniff
    Harari
    Harmony
    Healing
    Heart
    Hills Hoist
    History
    Hitler
    Holding The Man
    Holy Spirit
    Holy Week
    Home
    Homophobia
    Hope
    Hospiltality
    Hospitality
    Humanism
    Human Rights
    IDAHOT
    Iftar
    Imagination
    Incarnation
    Inclusive
    Inculturation
    Indigenous
    Inter Faith
    Inter-faith
    Intersex
    Iona
    Iraq
    Isaiah
    Islam
    Jacob
    Jacob's Ladder
    Jamaica
    Jennifer Herrick
    Jerusalem
    Jesus
    Jewish
    Jim Thompson
    Joanna Macy
    John-arlott
    John Donne
    John Main
    John Maynard
    John Odonohue
    John Seed
    Jonathan Sargeant
    Joseph
    Joy
    Judith
    Julian Of Norwich
    Justice
    Kader Attia
    Kathe Kollwitz
    Kathy Galloway
    Keir Hardie
    Kingdom Of God
    King's Cross
    Labyrinth
    Land
    Lansbury
    Laurence Freeman
    Law
    Lazarus
    Lesbian
    Leveller
    LGBT
    LGBTI
    LGBTI+
    Liberty
    Life
    Lincoln
    Liturgy
    Lock The Gate
    London
    Loss
    Love
    Love Of God
    Luke
    Lust
    Magna Carta
    Magnificat
    Male
    Mark Copland
    Marriage
    Marriage Equality
    Martin Luther
    Martin Luther King
    Mary
    Mary Oliver
    Masculinity
    Maundy Thursday
    MCG
    Meditation
    Megan Defranza
    Meiling
    Melinda Tankard Reist
    Men
    Messy Church
    Middle East
    Milton
    Mining
    Ministry
    Minster
    Mission
    Monk
    Mosque
    Movie
    Multuggerah
    Mural
    Muslim
    Mystery
    Mysticism
    Myth
    NAIDOC
    Nandjimadji
    Nation
    Nauru
    Needlework
    Neighbour
    Nepal
    New Creation
    New South Wales
    New Year
    Nonviolence
    Oprah Winfrey
    Ordination
    Orlando
    Orthodox
    Oscar Romero
    Oscar Wilde
    Owl
    Pacific
    Pacifism
    Pain
    Palestine
    Palm Sunday
    Pankhurst
    Paris
    Parish
    Parliament
    Passion
    Pastoral Care
    Paul
    Paul Kelly
    Peace
    Peace Day
    Penny Jones
    Pentecost
    Peter Catt
    Pethick Lawrence
    PFLAG
    Philippines
    Pilgrim
    Play
    Poet
    Poetry
    Poland
    Police
    Politics
    Pope Francis
    Post-Enlightenment
    Potsdam
    Power
    Prayer
    Prayer Book
    Preaching
    Presence
    Priest
    Principle
    Promise
    Proselytism
    Psalm
    Pure Land
    Puritan
    Queensland
    Queer
    Qu'ran
    Ramadan
    Rangeville
    RAP
    Reconciliation
    Reformation
    Refugees
    Religion
    Remembrance
    Repair
    Repentance
    Resilience
    Resistance
    Resurrection
    RI
    Ritual
    Rodney Croome
    Rosa Luxemburg
    Royal Commission
    Running
    Sacrifice
    Salvation
    School
    Scotland
    Scottish
    Scripture
    Secularism
    Seder
    Service
    Sexism
    Sexuality
    Shakespeare
    Shame
    Sharon Roberts
    Shelley Argent
    Shoah
    Sibyls
    Simplicity
    Sin
    Singapore
    Social Justice
    Solidarity
    Solomon Islands
    Songline
    Soul
    Spiritual Direction
    Spirituality
    Spirituality Wheel
    Sport
    Stanhope
    St Brigid's
    Steffan Van Munster
    Stewardship
    St Francis College
    St Hilda
    St Luke
    St Luke's
    St Mark's
    Stonewall
    Story
    St Paul's
    Streets And Lanes
    Subversive Memory
    Suffering
    Suffrage
    Suffragette
    Sufi
    Susan Cottrell
    Sydney
    Table Top
    TACAPS
    Taize
    Tea
    Terrorism
    Thanksgiving
    The Glennie School
    The Green House
    Theology
    Thomas Berry
    Thomas Merton
    Toowoomba
    Torres Strait
    Tradition
    TRAMS
    Trans
    Transfiguration
    Transformation
    Transgender
    Transition
    Trasnition
    Treaty
    Trees
    Trust
    Truth
    Uncle Darby McCarthy
    UNESCO
    Unity
    USQ
    Vancouver
    Venerable Master Chin Kung
    Vicar Of Bray
    Violence
    Vocation
    Voluntary
    Volunteers
    War
    Warriors Chapel
    Warsaw
    Water
    Watershed
    WCC
    WCCM
    Wedding
    Weird
    Wellspring Community
    Welsh
    Whitechapel
    Wild Goose Publications
    William Bartholomew
    William Blake
    Wisdom
    Witness
    Women
    Women In Harmony
    Word
    World Council Of Churches
    Worship
    Woy Woy
    Young People
    Youth

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly