Expository Times, Apr 2008
When I joined the BBC staff in 1987, the principal form of religious broadcasting on radio, in Scotland and elsewhere, was the broadcast act of worship from a church. I very quickly stopped broadcasting church services, not only because those who could make the imaginative leap from wherever they were listening into a church were becoming fewer and fewer, but because radio is a creative medium and religious broadcasting should be creative, and there is nothing creative about what a former Controller of Radio 4 described as “slinging a few microphones around as church and transmitting what happens”.
Of course I was criticised because the BBC was denying something vital to the old and the housebound who could not attend church, though in answer I tried to point out that technology was cheap and the congregation where I am a member distributes two dozen or so cassettes every Sunday morning to those who cannot get to church. I also tried to point out, quite apart from the implications of a regular diet of Christian worship for a multi-faith society, that religious broadcasting was able to reach those on the fringes of or outside the faith communities in a way that churches do not.
One of the programmes I devised to introduce people to the idea of the numinous was through the effect which different places can have on us, and so I devised a series of programmes called “A Sense of Place”. In one of them I took the poet George Bruce back to the Buchan town of Fraserburgh in the north east of Scotland, where he was brought up and which he called “a sea-washed town”. We went to Kinnaird Head, “the outermost edge of Buchan”, subject of one of his earliest and most famous poems,
“impregnable and very ancient rock
Rejecting the violence of water,
Ignoring its accumulations and strategy,
You yield to history nothing.”
George Bruce died when he was ninety and even in his last years his mind refused to stay still. In a poem he wrote as an old man called Cliff Face Erosion he simply reversed everything he had said about rock being impregnable.
“no more are you the bastion that you were,
resisting and denying access to sea’s force,
the great wave falling from you, and you
remained yourself.”
To write poetry that contradicts the poetry you have written is not just the evidence of an agile mind, but of a theological mind. And George Bruce’s theological mind was always focused on the present. “Now” was an idea to which he returned again and again.
When Bruce paid his first visit to the Royal Museum of Scotland, he bought a new pen in the Museum’s shop, and while some of us might try out a new pen with a doodle or an example of our signature, Bruce wrote a poem:
Tomorrow
will be
tomorrow
before I
am ready
for tomorrow
so
let it stay
today.
Moment of a
moment in time.
Blessed be the moment.
The writer George Steiner – a giant of an intellect – has written that we all of us, Christians and Jews and atheists, know all about the Good Friday of “interminable suffering, of the waste, of the brute enigma of ending”. And we all know about Sunday, “of resurrection, of a justice and love that have conquered death”. But then Steiner says of the time in between, Holy Saturday, that it is “the longest of days…..between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other”.
Holy Saturday isn’t to be skipped over.
Not because it is the day after Good Friday; and not because it is the day before Easter Day but because it is today.
Alan Lewis, the Scottish theologian who died tragically early, wrote a theology of Holy Saturday, Between Cross and Resurrection: “What confronts the church today is actually an Easter Saturday challenge: are we willing to enter a historical period of death and burial, a reversal of church history on the way back to the cross? Dare we enter an era when, visibly and concretely, the ministry dies to its old self, cedes its former glories, lets go the perqs of power, buries its hierarchy, its clericalism, its masculinity and its exclusiveness, yields its hold on control?…..Only after such an Easter Saturday time of termination and surrender, when yesterday’s forms of ministry have been laid to rest, could the church truly begin to body forth patterns of life which correspond to the ministry of Christ”.