0. Law

A text about law, and the proximity of this word to the name of God in Exodus 3:14, I AM.

The word law in reverse reads wall. This is because the law acts as a wall around private property; divine law acts as a wall to protect us from our enemies.

Consonants, the flesh of language, are divided into pairs. One such pair is l-r. If we apply this pair to law, we get war (again, in reverse). Law is a way of avoiding war, if at all possible. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t work and someone crosses the line between us with hostile intent.

But the most beautiful – and the most important – word connection with law is I AM (capital I and lower-case l look alike; w is m upside down). This is the name of God in Exodus 3:14, the name God reveals to Moses at the burning bush. The law is very important in the Old Testament (the law and the prophets, profits). God’s law is about truth, it reflects who he is. I think behind the human laws that we make stands God’s law, reflected in his name I AM. That is, everything is contained in him; we may think we possess things, but we only possess them as gifts from the Creator.

And this connection law-I AM is found in the New Testament, which is about Christ become man and the message he brings. He became man so that we could become gods by grace (not by nature), a process known as theosis. He shows us the way. This word is also in law if we remember that the semi-vowel y corresponds to i.

I AM-law-way is the message contained in the Bible. We can see that all three words contain the progression of the Greek alphabet: from A (the first letter, creation) to I (the Fall, the ego in English) to O (omega, written w in Greek).

If we delete the ego – that is, submit our will to God’s – we get a cross (†), which is also a plus-sign (+). This is the meaning of Christ’s injunction to lose our life in order to find it, a seeming paradox.

One way of writing this plus is ’n’ (as in rock ’n’ roll). If we take the progression of the Greek alphabet, AIW, and substitute the deleted ego, ’n’, we get ANW, which gives us man. This is the purpose of human life – to make this progression away from the ego and become fully man, a word that is linked to law. We achieve it by observing his commandments to love him and to love our neighbour.

This is the inner meaning of language, the one we do not see. We think of language as an external tool that we hold in our hands, but it is like nature, it has its own meaning.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 0/15

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Word in Language (0): Coronavirus – Human Voice

It is almost two months now since the Coronavirus has taken hold of our lives and we have been in lockdown, confined to our homes except for necessary trips to work or for food. People have fallen seriously ill, and some have died. Health workers have shown admirable courage and perseverance in the face of adversity, one of humanity’s greatest characteristics. There have undoubtedly been some positive aspects. We have had time, some of us, to recollect, to pay attention to aspects of our lives that we had perhaps neglected. Of course, no one wants this to continue for ever, but we have perhaps understood that life is not about production and movement, the earth is not an amusement park, the environment has had time to recover, CO2 emissions are down and fish have been spotted in the canals of Venice. We also have a heightened sense of our own mortality. This makes us humble and a little less proud. In a sense, we have been forced to listen, and this is important because to LISTEN you must be SILENT, you must slow down.

 

There have been various debates as to the cause of this outbreak: it escaped from a lab, it was a bat, it was poor hygiene in a fish market. I am not a scientist and I do not know the cause, but it seems to me that while there is always a superficial reason for something (something or someone we can blame), there is also always an underlying reason (where the blame has more perhaps to do with ourselves).

 

I work with word connections. Language is like the environment – there is much more to it than may initially appear to be the case. We treat them both two-dimensionally, as having been put there for our own use. But they have a deeper meaning, hidden secrets which only come to light when we stop to pay attention, when we look at them less for our own profit (in this case we see nothing at all) and more for what they themselves might have to say. Scientists examine life under the microscope, they observe and take notes, hidden wonders come to view that may have something to tell us about the way we lead our lives.

 

Language is just the same. Words have their own meaning, not just the meaning we would give them. And this hidden meaning can be very illuminating. This hidden meaning can be unearthed in the following ways: by rearranging the letters (sometimes reading them back to front) and by making changes to the letters according to where in the mouth they are pronounced (phonetics), according to their position in the alphabet and according to their appearance (a letter may be turned upside down, for example).

 

It seems remarkable to me that no one has noticed the name of the city where the virus began, WUHAN in China – if we rearrange the letters and turn the W upside down – spells HUMAN. I saw a video of some inhabitants of Wuhan describing their experience of the lockdown, and they were very much like anybody else – human beings with their family ties, their hopes and aspirations, their sense of humour, their sense of right and wrong. Isn’t that what defines us? Hasn’t the virus to some extent reminded us of what we hold in common?

 

The Coronavirus is often referred to by another name: COVID-19. Now this time instead of paying attention to the appearance of the letters, we are going to take a step in the alphabet. If we change one of these letters according to its position in the alphabet – and of course rearrange the letters – we get VOICE. So perhaps the underlying reason for the Coronavirus is to make us hear the human voice, to hear human need.

 

You may think I’m making this up. Well, I’ve worked with language long enough to know that these are not isolated examples. Let us look at the word VIRUS. I wonder if it reminds you of any other word in the English language. I have mentioned three ways of making word connections – it is also possible to repeat a letter or to add a letter (especially a final e). You will then see that VIRUS is in SURVIVE – the purpose of the virus is to survive, and our purpose, when we catch the virus, is also to survive. But surviving, as any adult will tell you, is not always easy.

 

Now here comes the difficult part, because you cannot make word connections without knowing your phonetic pairs – pairs of consonants that are pronounced in the same part of the mouth. One such pair is f-v  – both these letters are pronounced with the teeth on your lower lip, the only difference is that f is voiceless and v is voiced (you feel a vibration in your throat when you say it).

 

If we apply this pair f-v, it shouldn’t be too difficult to see that SURVIVE contains I SUFFER. Well, yes, we do suffer in this life, but isn’t that the point somehow – that we are meant to rein in the ego, not to succumb to our selfish desires, not to want everything for ourselves, but to love the other? To love the other – ah, there is the secret! Would it surprise you if I told you these two words, LOVE and OTHER, are connected?

 

The vowels, o and e, are the same. Then there is the phonetic pair l-r (both these letters are pronounced with the tongue against the roof of the mouth), and the alphabetical pair t-v (we take a step in the alphabet, as we did before with d-e in COVID, but in this instance we miss out the intervening vowel, u). After that, all we have to do is add the letter h, which represents breath; h and e are the most commonly added letters.

 

I think the Coronavirus has brought out much love for the other in society. While there has been much suffering, there has also been great appreciation for the work carried out by doctors, nurses, shop staff, factory workers, waste collectors, couriers… The people who help our lives to function. In a way, with the Coronavirus, life has been stripped down to its bare necessities, to what is necessary. This doesn’t mean we want to continue in this way – we don’t – but it does remind us of something important. Love for the other.

 

So language can be seen to confirm what many people have felt – that in this difficult time it is important to have respect and love for the other, to appreciate what people do to make our lives better, to hear the human voice of the other – not to see people as two-dimensional, as put there for our own use (like language or the environment), but rather as human beings with their own intrinsic value. This seems to me to be the experience of the vast majority of the human race. Language is just confirming it.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Language

Harmony and Language

In the documentary film “Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision” being released on Friday, His Majesty King Charles III makes the point that we should be living as a part of nature, and not apart from it. We should not see nature as something out there to be exploited, rather we should see ourselves as being interconnected with the rest of nature and reliant on it for our well-being (both physical and emotional). In this short piece, I would like to suggest that language agrees with him.

Let us start by looking at where the idea of separation comes from. You can only see something, such as the environment, as being there to be exploited if you view it as being separate from yourself. If it is a part of you, you won’t want to exploit it. Separation comes from our ability to count. To count something, you must draw a line around it, otherwise you cannot count it. This is why we have uncountable and countable nouns. Uncountable nouns tend to be concepts, things that are too large or woolly for us to comprehend (to draw a line around). Countable nouns are things we can contain – in our imagination, or literally, in a bag or a bottle – and they are preceded by the indefinite article a or an. So, we might have rice and a bag of rice, or milk and a bottle of milk. The first is something that flows constantly, it seems to have no beginning or end; the second is contained (and note that it is the container, the bag or the bottle, that causes so many problems to our environment, it is our drawing a line around something in order to trade in it – in order to count it – that causes pollution).

God is uncountable. He is without limits. He is too large for us to comprehend. In the Creation, recounted in the opening two chapters of the Book of Genesis, what he did in effect was make himself countable. He made individual creatures and a planet for us to live on. Creation is the act of making the uncountable countable.

The name of God in Exodus 3:14 (the name he reveals to Moses at the burning bush) is AM. If we apply the phonetic pair m-n to AM, we get an. Language here – with a simple change brought about by applying a phonetic pair – is showing us how God made himself countable, because the indefinite article precedes countable nouns. Read these two words, AM and an, differently, and you get a man.

Man’s purpose was not to create. That is God’s job. We cannot create out of nothing, we can only give meaning to what already exists. We are not authors, we are translators, since nothing begins or ends with us, things pass through us (and we pass through them).

Read the word man in reverse and add a final e (very common in English), and you get name. This was man’s purpose: to name the creatures (Genesis 2:19). By naming them, he gave them meaning, he said amen to God’s will. All three words – name, mean, amen – have the same letters.

But we can go a different way. If I take a step in the alphabet, from m to l, and add the letter d, from man I get land. This is where man lives (hence the importance of nature). If I apply the phonetic pair d-t and add the letter p, from land I get plant, because this is what man must do in order to eat something, he is reliant on nature in order to survive. And if I add the letter e, I get planet. This is what the planet is for – for man to plant crops. God has given him a home.

But whereas God made us countable in order that we might have free will and make our own choices, we have taken this countability to mean that we can do with other people and things whatever we like. We have abused the relationship. We have put the ego first (not God). This is the relationship that we need to repair.

Exploitation is a result of countability (you cannot exploit something unless it is separate). So, we need to repair this breach, or at least to view it in a different light (as something to be respected, for example).

King Charles III explains how nature works in cycles; language also demonstrates this. We start with a seed. The first thing a seed does is sleep. I have rotated the letter d and added the straight line represented by the letter l. This is what we do in our lives when we are oblivious to our surroundings. That straight line represents the ego (it doesn’t matter whether it is written with a capital I or a lowercase l). Once it is in the ground, the seed dies (front vowels e-i). But it dies in order to bear fruit, to become something bigger (a tree). Nature is showing us the path to be taken by the ego – it must die to itself, to its selfish desires and fears, in order to grow in stature.

The seed puts out first a root and then a shoot. These words are connected (mid-vowels e-o, phonetic pair d-t, alphabetical pair r-s, addition of h). The root divides into two, while the shoot – which, as it appears above ground, looks remarkably like a tooth – becomes a tree and divides into three. The tree puts out branches (it doesn’t remain as a straight line), it grows leaves (to harness the power of the sun) and flowers (to attract insects), and the flowers give way to fruit. Fruit is just root with an f on it, and so we return to the beginning… Language is showing how nature is cyclical (in fact, the word return is in nature).

I think this is what His Majesty, with his attention to the importance of the environment, is encouraging us to do – to return to nature. Not to see ourselves as being cut off from it, but as a part of it, reliant on it not only for our physical needs, but also for our peace of soul. It’s like a neighbour – if you are at odds with your neighbour, how can you live peacefully?

The environment attends to our physical needs (without it, we will not be able to eat and we will die). It is beautiful to look at and it gives us peace. But this is not its ultimate purpose. I believe that nature, the environment, is an example out there for what should be happening in us. We also need to bear fruit, not just nature. We also need to die to our selfish impulses for the greater good, just as a seed does when it sprouts in the ground.

In the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 13, there are two parables that teach us about this. One is the Parable of the Sower. This also is a metaphor out there for something that should be happening in here. A sower goes out to sow. Depending on the ground’s receptivity, the seed takes root or it doesn’t. This is really about our ability to hear the word of the kingdom and, having heard it, to bear fruit in God’s name.

If the earth is a metaphor out there for what should be happening in here, then what is our earth? The answer is very simple. Take the last letter of earth and tack it on the front. You have heart. The heart is the earth where the seed of God’s word has to take root and bear fruit. That is the message – of Jesus in the Gospels, but also of nature.

We have to be able to see and hear in order to bear fruit in God’s name – Jesus places great emphasis on our ability to see and hear – and for this we need to learn humility. The humility to admit that our sight has been imperfect, which ironically is what then enables us to see.

I mentioned the phonetic pair d-t earlier. Add this pair to see and hear. What two words do you get? Seed and heart. Language is telling us that when we see and hear the message of the kingdom, a seed is planted in the earth of our heart and we are enabled, through the intervention of the Holy Spirit, to bear fruit. Nature is a lesson out there for what should be happening in here. When we become spiritually healthy, then we will treat the environment as it deserves.

And just in case we were in any doubt, Jesus provides another example: the Parable of the Tares (again, in Matthew 13). Someone sows good seed – the wheat, the children of the kingdom – but an enemy comes in the night and sows weeds – evildoers. The slaves of the householder ask whether they should remove the weeds, but the householder says to wait until the harvest (the end of time), in case they uproot the wheat as well.

Weed and wheat are connected (phonetic pair d-t, addition of h). They look alike, just as people in society look alike and we cannot always be sure of their intentions. But there is one fundamental difference. There is something that wheat has that a weed doesn’t, and that is ears. Wheat is able to listen.

Nature is an example out there for what should be happening inside us. The seed is the word of the kingdom – to love the Lord your God, to love your neighbour – and that seed should be sown in our heart, just as a physical seed is sown in a field. When this happens, we learn how misguided we have been, we learn humility, and we redirect our priorities towards the kingdom (this is the meaning of repentance, metanoia in Greek). We also bear fruit, just as a tree does. And once we can see, the rest of creation rejoices. It recognizes us for the first time. We establish a relationship that is one of love and care, which is King Charles’s message in his film “Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision”.

Jonathan Dunne

http://www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Poetry

Apfelsaft

for my father

The sun set in the glass.

Did you know what was coming

when you crouched under the stairs

and listened to the bombs

drop on London?

Did you know what was coming

when your guardian travelled down

to see you

in the grand surroundings of Christ’s Hospital,

Vaughan Williams’s shock of white hair

in the chapel,

and shuffled off

in the growing darkness

to catch the last train home?

This was love,

wasn’t it?

Did you know what was coming

when you stuck it out

to become an officer

and were put in charge

of men older,

more savvy,

than you were?

Is this when your appreciation

of Bach

began?

Did you know what was coming

when you shared a bedsit

with your mother

and became determined

to better yourself

by listening to all of Beethoven’s symphonies

from the library?

Or when Eddie

took you to the terraces

at Brentford

(“make way,

he’s only a littl’un”)?

Did you know what was coming

when you measured up

to my grandfather

and married Mum

(early colour photos

of us pottering in the garden,

you look dashing in them)?

Clearway Promotions,

Claygate Dramatic Society,

Cancer Research Campaign

– you built yourself up.

You drove us

in the dark

to foreign countries

where they spoke funny languages,

you put us in tents

a stone’s throw from the water

(we would need those stones

to weigh down the corners

when the storm came along).

You took your responsibility

very seriously

and instilled it in us.

You could be bloody-minded

– I wouldn’t have wanted

to cross you –

you grew in stature

and yourself became a Samaritan

to those in need.

You were widely respected,

you were somebody,

an ugly sister, Bob Cratchit,

you had a sense of humour,

and that twinkle never quite

left you.

You liked in the early evening

to stand by the drinks

– yours was a G and T,

Mum’s was a sherry –

and while smoking a Silk Cut

to tell me what was going

through your mind.

It helped you to lay it out,

you were not one to leave things

to chance.

And so,

when we sat on the terrace

overlooking the Black Forest,

you poured sunlight

into my glass.

It was something new,

something I hadn’t tasted before,

and this gave you a great satisfaction.

I don’t know what we talked about,

you probably reminisced about your time

in Germany,

the dunes of Sylt,

but I have glimpsed that sunlight

ever since:

on the ghats of Varanasi,

on a starlit night in the Sinai,

sitting with Bedouins,

in Piornedo,

on a Sunday with a hangover,

on the rocks of Lakatnik.

I will keep it with me

for when the stormclouds gather,

it will be the stones that weigh down

the corners of the tent I inhabit.

And I give you a drop of the golden liquid

for your onward journey.

You have realized now

that the demons are insubstantial,

their only weapon fear

of what doesn’t exist,

and the easiest way

to unravel a knot

is to slice it.

You are breath and water,

creation itself,

the sound God made in the beginning.

You can sing to your heart’s content,

join in the chorus,

as when you sang an aria

from the Messiah

to the doctor

with a sheet over your lips,

except that now you are voice itself,

running water,

a ribbon that God laid

on the earth

to give us life.

Jonathan Dunne

Sofia, 24 December 2025

Posted on in Poetry

Deor

One of my favourite Old English poems, and my first translation from Old English! The translation is accompanied by a photo of a six-hundred-year-old downy oak at the entrance to Bosnek village, on the south side of Mt Vitosha in Bulgaria, which has resisted the twists and turns of life.

DEOR

Weland himself among worms experienced misery,

The single-minded nobleman endured hardships,

Had for himself as companions sorrow and longing,

Winter-cold pain, often found woe,

After Niðhad laid fetters on him,

Supple sinew-bonds on the better man.

That passed, so may this.

To Beadohild was not her brothers’ death

In mind so grievous as her own thing,

That she had readily perceived

That she was pregnant, could never

With courage have considered how that should be.

That passed, so may this.

We have heard that Mæðhild’s lamentations

Were endless, Geat’s wife,

That sorrowful love deprived her of all sleep.

That passed, so may this.

Theodric had for thirty winters

The Mærings’ burgh; that was known to many.

That passed, so may this.

We have heard about Ermanaric’s

Wolfish thought; he had widely the people

Of the Gothic kingdom; that was a grim king.

Many a warrior sat bound by sorrows,

Woe in expectation, wished constantly

That his kingdom would be overcome.

That passed, so may this.

Sits a sorrowful person, deprived of joy,

Grows dark in mind, it seems to him

His share of hardships may be endless.

He may then consider that throughout the world

The wise Lord turns constantly,

On many nobles bestows honour,

Certain fame, on others a share of woes.

As for myself, I should like to say this:

I was for a time the Heodenings’ bard,

Dear to my lord; Deor was my name.

I had for many winters a profitable position,

A loyal master, until Heorrenda now,

A song-skilled man, received the right to lands

The protector of nobles had previously afforded me.

That passed, so may this.

An Old English poem of consolation found in the tenth-century Exeter Book, translated by Jonathan Dunne. It is possible to view the manuscript of the Exeter Book online. The poem is on folios 100r and 100v. I first read the poem with the help of my tutor at City Lit, Stephen Pollington.

Posted on in Sermons

The Gift of the Church

Readings: Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

The Sanhedrin! Even the name sounds intimidating. One can imagine a row of austere, displeased faces, probably seated on thrones or a podium, certainly higher up, in ornate clothing, with ornate headdresses, peering down at these upstarts, Peter and his gang.

This was the Jewish legislative and judicial assembly. It met in the Temple in Jerusalem, in the Hall of Hewn Stones. It wasn’t disbanded until 425. It wasn’t so long ago that Peter and the other apostles had been beholden to such people, had owed them allegiance.

But now the situation seems decidedly unfriendly. The apostles “were brought in”. They were “made to appear”, in order to “be questioned”. They were informed in no uncertain terms that they had not being doing what they had been told. This small community was challenging the established order!

I wonder how Peter felt as he confronted them. Was he trembling at the knees? Was there a quaver in his voice? Did he feel belittled? Or was he so full of the recent experiences that he had cast all caution to the wind?

He says some things that must have sounded truly shocking. We must obey God over human beings (i.e. not you). He refers to Jesus, this man from Nazareth who had just been raised from the dead, they couldn’t find his body – “whom you killed by hanging him on a cross”. That’s a pretty direct accusation. He has been exalted so that he might bring Israel to repentance. The great House of Israel, of whom I’m sure the Sanhedrin felt like the legitimate representatives, the only ones qualified to discuss such matters. Not only that, but also to forgive their sins. They must have been reminded of the paralyzed man who was let down through the roof, so that Jesus could heal him (Lk 5:17-26). When Jesus told the man his sins were forgiven, there were murmurings among the Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting nearby. To indicate his authority, Jesus then told the paralyzed man to stand up and walk, which he promptly did, shocking them even further.

Peter ends with a reference to the Holy Spirit, “whom God has given to those who obey him”. That doesn’t sound as if it includes the Sanhedrin.

The whole of their world has been shaken, just as the foundations of the earth were shaken at the Crucifixion. Don’t we need something like that to waken us spiritually? I didn’t learn to drive until I was 48. My grandmother didn’t learn to drive until she was fifty, and I wanted to follow in her footsteps. So, I cadged lifts or walked everywhere for thirty years! I was the fourth child, and I think my father was a little exhausted of taking his children out for driving lessons. Anyway, I was more interested in books.

It took me until I came to Bulgaria to learn to drive, and I’m very glad I waited. My instructor, Mr Gujev, really woke me up. He made me realize that I wasn’t in an armchair, watching a film with popcorn, but I was in control of a machine that could kill people. He made me into a very responsible driver. One time, we were on Tsarigradsko Shose in the east of Sofia, driving towards the centre, and he told me to go up to fifty. I was quite happy going at 35, thank you very much, so he pushed his hand down on my right knee and forced the car to go faster. I was petrified initially, but then I began to enjoy it.

Isn’t that how it is with new experiences? To begin with, we’re reluctant, but then, with a guiding hand, we realize there are lessons to be learnt, boundaries to be pushed, and we’re often grateful afterwards. We realize that we have grown.

These men and women have certainly grown as a result of their allegiance to the Nazarene, the one who calls himself “the Alpha and the Omega” in John’s Book of Revelation. The appellation appears three times (also in 21:6 and 22:13), though it’s never quite clear if it refers to God the Trinity or to Jesus Christ.

The name “Alpha and Omega” refers to the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. He is the beginning and the end. He is the white space behind the language of matter. There is not a time when he was not, to refute the Arian view that Jesus was created.

In our culture, we are very keen on straight lines. We use them to package things. We use them to parcel out land, to create borders. The ego in English is a straight line: I. As is the number we teach our children to count from: 1. The line separates. It is a wall or a tower and liable to fall down.

I can see three ways to escape the line. We can make reference to a third point and form a triangle (a pyramid, which is much more stable). We can delete the line, draw another line through it. This forms a cross, but a cross is also a plus-sign (the meaning of losing your life in order to find it – Mt 16:25). And we can breathe air into the line, open it out – as when you breathe air into a plastic bag or inflate a balloon – and form a circle, in effect counting down from 1 to 0. The triangle, the cross/plus-sign, and the circle.

These three symbols, if you can picture them, spell the name of God in Revelation, Alpha and Omega (A+O). The triangle closely resembles a capital A. Then you have the plus-sign and the letter O. This is the spiritual meaning of the name – it is a call to escape our individuality, our selfishness, and to place ourselves in God’s service, which is the fullness of life.

It is a way of believing, and when we believe, we receive. The Holy Spirit, in the reading from Acts, “whom God has given to those who obey him”. “Life in his name”, in the reading from John. “Eternal life”, in the post-Communion prayer we will hear in a moment.

Jesus says to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” He is referring to us, the Church across the ages. He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This verse might be taken to support the inclusion of the filioque clause in the Creed, to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and from the Son. But this is not the Orthodox view. This clause was included after the Creed was composed in the fourth century, and it was included unilaterally, at the Third Council of Toledo in 589, not by the Church as a whole.

I believe that Jesus here is offering the disciples the Holy Spirit (“whom God has given to those who obey him”), so that they can forgive others their sins, just as a priest does in the absolution. This doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him, simply that the Holy Spirit is in his gift, and I think we would be very wrong to go against the authority of such an important theologian as Gregory of Nazianzus, who contributed to the writing of the Creed at the Council of Constantinople in 381.

Christ is the Word. The Holy Spirit is breath. Breath is in the Word, but it comes from the lungs of the speaker.

Do you see how Peter and the other apostles have filled Jerusalem with their teaching? This, despite the fear they felt of the Jewish leaders, which caused them to lock the doors. It is the Holy Spirit that releases us from our fear, that delivers us from the death of sin and enables us to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness. That, and participation in Communion, where we receive the body of Christ and his blood – “him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood”, as it says in Revelation.

Along with Thomas, the doubting one (and who hasn’t doubted? It is a part of faith), we should count ourselves blessed for these gifts – the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the institution of which we celebrated only ten days ago, and the reception of the Holy Spirit, which the Church marks at Pentecost. This is a time of giving, like the air we breathe, the food we eat, the blossoming of spring, not a time to count the cost. Christ has already done that for us when he went to the Cross.

We are language – breath, water, and flesh. Our purpose is to have meaning. We are words on a page, living in eternity. Our job is to believe, so that the Holy Spirit can work through us and we can be imbued with meaning.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Sermons

Ash Wednesday

Readings: Joel 2:1-2, 12-17; Psalm 51:1-18; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:10; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Sometimes, when I take my dog for a walk, he lingers behind, locating scents that only he can smell, and I wander ahead. He likes to come running after me and, like a good rugby player, to make a feint and dodge me just as he reaches me. It is a joy to see his ears flapping in the wind. But there are times when I turn around that he has disappeared, and I call to him. Has he followed some female? A golden retriever, perhaps? I stand, wondering whether I should retrace my steps, go looking for him. And then I realize, as I face forwards, that he is only five feet away, not behind me anymore, but by my side, discovering a new scent. I don’t know what the locals must make of me, this strange Englishman calling out to a dog that is right beside him. When I look back at the landscape behind me, it is as if he is invisible. He is unseen.

This is how we are to perform acts of charity, according to today’s reading from Matthew. When we give to the needy, when we pray, when we fast, we are to do it in secret and our Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward us. We are not to seek the praise of those around us. We are to do it for our Father, who is unseen.

Lent is a strange journey from glory to glory. Let us not forget the previous Sunday’s reading was about Jesus’ transfiguration on Mount Tabor, when he appeared alongside Moses and Elijah, the Old Testament law and prophets, and shone dazzlingly white. But as we are reminded, this is not a moment you can hold onto. Peter was mistaken, Luke tells us (Lk 9:33), when he suggested building shelters for the three of them. They had to go on from there – Jesus to the Cross, but ultimately to the Resurrection and Emmaus, where he accompanies us on the road; Peter to Rome; James and John to their places, not the least of which was for John to write his Gospel. If they had stayed behind to witness to one event, to try to grasp water, none of this would have happened.

We also are on this journey. Joel tells us that “the day of the Lord is coming”, but it is not a day full of wonder, as we might expect, it is “a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and blackness”. We are to “rend our heart”. As the Psalmist says in Psalm 51, “a broken and contrite heart, you, God, will not despise”.

We express our repentance. We are sorry that things are not how they should be. People suffer, are ill, are exploited. Others lord it over them. The journey as expressed in Psalm 51, a very important psalm which is part of Orthodox Morning Prayer (except that there it is numbered Psalm 50), goes from being “sinful at birth” to purity of heart.

Celtic Christianity would have a problem with the phrase “sinful at birth”. In their view, we are intrinsically good, just as the creation around us is good, and what we have to do is rediscover the sacredness within. But the journey is the same. To “be reconciled to God”.

I like to think of it in terms of language. The I, the ego, is a straight line, a kind of barrier. This word, I, sounds the same as the organ of sight, eye, and if we rotate the line by ninety degrees, indeed it looks like a closed eye.

So, we breathe air into the line and make a circle, the letter O. We open it out. “O” can be an expression of realization – “Oh!”. We become aware of God’s presence in our lives. It can also be an exclamation of repentance – “Oh!”

This realization, and repentance, is what opens our spiritual eyes and enables us to reach spiritual maturity. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” This is the doctrine of theosis, deification. St Athanasius of Alexandria wrote in his work “On the Incarnation” that “God became man so that man might become God”. He wrote this in 318, as a young deacon, before going on to help draft the first version of the Creed at Nicaea in 325. He also came up with the first listing of canonical New Testament books.

God became man so that we might become gods – gods by grace, not by nature – so that we might inherit eternal life, enter the land of paradox where truth resides. We are “genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”.

It is this recognition – realization, repentance, return, it doesn’t matter – that enables us to fix our eyes, open now, on heaven. And this, for me, is the most important line in today’s readings, the line that we can take with us through Lent: “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” We have rediscovered God, come to a realization, but there is a change in us. We do not return to the Garden of Eden, we do not try to hold onto the moment of the Transfiguration, to store it in a shelter or on film. We return to a state of innocence – a lack of willingness to do harm – but this time with knowledge. We must pass through the stage of physical knowledge in order to reach spiritual maturity, not only because it enables us to have children and so to be co-participants in the creation of man, but also because it teaches us what it is to hurt and not to want to inflict hurt on others.

Lent is a journey of endurance – troubles and hardships, yes, but also truthful speech and sincere love. We are poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. Deep inside us is a flame that, like the disciples of St Brigid or the inhabitants of the Hebrides, we must keep burning through the long winter’s night in the expectation that it will blaze up in the morning.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Sermons

The Nonduality of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 6:8-13; Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

The Creed, which we will recite in a moment, the Church’s Symbol of Faith, was the result of two ecumenical councils in the fourth century, the first at Nicaea in modern Turkey, and the second at Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Right belief, what the Church believes, took more than three hundred years to be written down. It was not a given. That is, it had to be defended, fought for, and there were several viewpoints, later declared heresies when they were seen to be inaccurate, that threatened the integrity of the early Church.

One of these is that Christ didn’t really become human, didn’t really suffer on the Cross, he only had the appearance of being human. This heresy was known as Docetism, from the Greek dokeĩn, meaning “to seem”. He only seemed to be human. On the other side of the coin, there was the false belief that Jesus was just a man – a very good man, to be sure, a man who reached an unusual stage of spiritual enlightenment that made him appear more advanced than others and become so spiritually advanced that God adopted him. This heresy was known as Ebionism.

These heresies – and there were others – served to force the early Church to delineate its beliefs. It took seven ecumenical councils in all – the first and last of which were at Nicaea in 325 and 787 – to establish what the Church believed. It seems that certain people could just not accept the idea that Christ might be both fully divine and fully human. And even when they did, there were those who claimed that he was fully divine and fully human in one nature. This is the Christological doctrine known as Miaphysitism, which is held by the Oriental Orthodox Churches and is the root of the far earlier schism between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox (six long centuries before the Great Schism between Catholic and Orthodox).

So, belief is not so easy. We find it hard to accept that Christ can be fully divine and fully human, and yet be one person. Either he isn’t really God or human, or his two natures must be subsumed into one. It seems we are unhappy with what we take to be some kind of contradiction – if he is fully divine, then he cannot also be human. He has to be one or the other.

I would suggest that this inability or unwillingness to marry seeming opposites is still very much alive and well today, in the twenty-first century. And this lack of ability to see unity in difference can be dangerous.

It is only two weeks since this year’s Week of Prayer for Christian Unity ended. Most of us have forgotten about it by now. It’s a nice idea, but impractical. Those people over there are never going to agree to it, and I’m certainly not going to change my position. There is some hope that Christians on both sides of the divide are going to be able to agree on a unified date for Easter, though most of us would be hard pushed to state simply how the two dates are arrived at (something about a spring moon).

Yes, but how does God see this? How does he see his followers, some saying the liturgy, others singing it, some with white walls, others with frescoes, some crossing themselves from left to right, others from right to left? Does he say, “You’re right, you’re in; you’re wrong, go back to the beginning”? Or does he weigh up the intentions of the heart, the faithfulness shown sometimes over years by ordinary Christians? I know what I would do in his position.

One of my favourite TV series is Battlestar Galactica, about a group of humans, reduced in number, who are attacked by the machines that they themselves have made, known as Cylons. After an attack on their capital, Caprica, the humans are almost wiped out. Only a few ships manage to escape the holocaust and they are then condemned to wander space, jumping from one set of coordinates to another, as they endeavour to dodge the Cylon menace. Their ultimate quest is for Earth, a planet – a dream, Admiral Bill Adama calls it – where they can finally settle down and breathe fresh air.

The humans regard Cylons as machines. They have a visceral hatred towards them. They refer to them as “it”, not “he” or “she”, and do not believe that they have any real feelings.

And yet it is apparent that they do. Even when they lose the ability to resurrect, something that set them apart from their human counterparts, they are still willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. And it is only in tandem with their now Cylon allies that the humans, what is left of them, finally make it down to Earth. One of the Cylons is Bill Adama’s closest friend and colleague, Colonel Tigh. But they overcome their differences, their different makeup, because their friendship is too strong.

I sometimes think in the Churches we see each other as humans and Cylons. We cannot accept that both black and white exist. Those on the other side, who do not believe the same as I do – or do not express their belief in the selfsame way – it is as if they are machines. We never attend each other’s services. It is the same with nationalities. When I am in England, I am shocked by how much people hate Russians – people who have never actually met a Russian or set foot in Moscow.

I am afraid that this continued entrenchment is good for business. I am also afraid that it is not good for our souls. How can we possibly be one body if we are constantly wanting to cut each other off?

There is a strand of Christianity known as Celtic Christianity, Christianity that spread to the north of England, in particular the Kingdom of Northumbria, from the small island of Iona in Scotland. It is linked very closely to the names of such saints as Aidan and Cuthbert (the latter’s bones were the reason for the founding of the city of Durham, the city was literally founded on his remains).

In an afterword to Michael Mitton’s book Restoring the Woven Cord: Strands of Celtic Christianity for the Church Today, Ray Simpson, the founding guardian of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, talks of “an act of unity with Jesus in various focal places”. He goes on to say:

I make an act of unity with Jesus in scripture (the Evangelical strand) and in Holy Communion (the Sacramental strand); in the poor (the Justice strand) and in the deep heart’s core (the Mystical strand); in the spiritual shepherds (the Catholic strand) and in the Living Tradition (the Orthodox strand); in nature (the Creation strand) and in the group process (the Community strand). These acts of unity do not require me to be unfaithful to anything I have learnt of Jesus.

This is a wonderful statement of faith. Different, yes, but I’m not your enemy. Before we condemn the others, should we not get to know them first? Should we not attend their services? My father liked to say, if it was left to the common people, there would be no wars. How much of human conflict could be settled by a bottle of brandy instead of a bullet? The truth must be defended. It is not subject to my whim. But there is room for all of us in heaven, and I do not believe that the Jesus who spoke so tenderly and fiercely to the Samaritan woman at the well, a double outcast (not only was she a Samaritan, but she had been married five times, she was an outcast to her own community), will reject the person who gets down on their knees, takes responsibility for their mistakes, and tries to do better.

Christ is one person, two natures. He became human so that we might become gods, not through our own efforts, but by the action of grace. He became human so that he could translate us into the language of eternity, a language we have yet to learn to speak.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Posted on in Sermons

Baptism of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

We all speak. That is, we produce sounds with our mouths. After the service, we will gather around the coffee machine and do this. We will discuss the week’s events and thrash out the finer details of this sermon. We will express opinions and hopes and desires. We will enquire after friends. And we will leave, having shared fellowship.

How strange it would be if we all gathered in the entrance hall and didn’t say anything! If we stood in each other’s company with our mouths closed. We might raise our eyebrows or wiggle our ears, but no further communication would be permitted. Eventually someone would snort or yawn, and the spell would be broken. We would laugh and launch into a discussion.

We worship a God, Jesus Christ, whom we call the Word. This is how John the Evangelist refers to him at the start of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And we read in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis that the world was spoken into being. Each paragraph begins, “And God said.” “Let there be light.” “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters.” “Let the dry land appear.” Etc.

And yet we pay very little attention to speech. This is unusual since I would say that Christianity is a religion of the Word and its ritual is based on the action of speaking. The first thing we do when we speak is breathe out. It is impossible – I think! – to speak as you are breathing in. So, the first element of speech is BREATH. Breath is represented in the alphabet by my favourite letter, the letter “h”.

Then we add voice to our breath and produce the vowel sounds. Think of a baby. A baby is a student of phonetics. It opens its mouth (hopefully not at three in the morning) and adds voice to its breath, producing vowel sounds that may range from an “oo!” to a long, drawn-out “ah!”. But it will generally not produce consonants because consonants involve blocking the flow of air with the lips or tongue and this is more difficult.

A vowel sound is what the doctor asks you to make when they want to examine your throat: “ah!” “A” is the most open vowel there is, so it involves opening your mouth to its greatest extent. It is what we do when we sing. The longer you hold a vowel sound, the more saliva will collect in your mouth, and you will have to swallow. This is because vowels are like water. It is as if a river was flowing through the canyon of our mouths. So, the second element of speech is WATER.

When we obstruct the flow of air with the lips or the tongue, we produce the consonants. Perhaps the easiest consonant to pronounce is the letter “m”. This involves pressing the lips together. “M”. And this is often the first consonant a baby will produce, when it says, “Mama”.

Since the consonants are produced by blocking the flow of air with our lips or tongue, we might say that the third element of speech is FLESH. So, we have BREATH (the letter “h”), WATER (the vowels), and FLESH (the consonants). The three elements of speech, which we practise unknowingly, as when we change gears in a car.

This is how I would analyze the action of speaking: breath, water, and flesh. In chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis, there is a second creation account, which involves the creation of man. In verses 6-7, it reads as follows:

A stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Gen 2:6-7 (NRSV)

Most of us, I suspect, would regard speech as the agent of creation as a kind of metaphor, but I think this is exactly what happened. Nowhere in the first two chapters of Genesis does it say that God made the world with his hands, like a potter fashioning clay. It says that he spoke. All through the first two chapters, we read that God said. And the three elements of speech – breath, water, and flesh – are clearly present here: God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”, “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground”, God “formed man from the dust of the ground”. We read later in Genesis 3:19, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This refers to our material body.

We find the same emphasis on the power of speech in Psalm 29: “The voice of the Lord is powerful… The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars… The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning… The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare…” That’s pretty impressive – to do all of that only with words. It doesn’t say that God did these things with his hands, and this is a constant in Christian texts and prayers.

We are not able to produce matter with our mouths, but with our words we can have a material effect on our surroundings. We can make someone happy by saying something nice to them. We can make someone cry by saying something hurtful. We can order someone to be killed. Or we can issue a pardon. Our words can be recorded and can influence future generations or even the course of history.

After the creation of man, man – the Hebrew word is “Adam” – is given a task. He is not asked to make the creatures – that is God’s undertaking. He is asked to name them. To apply a word to that particular creature. This occurs in Genesis 2:19-20. Most of us are not in the habit of adding words to the dictionary, of coming up with a name for a horse or a squirrel. But we do name our children, and names are important. They may not fix a child’s destiny, but they do, to some extent, determine their character. There is a Bulgarian name, Milen, which comes from the Bulgarian word for “kind”, mil, and I have noticed that many people called Milen are kind in person. It is as if they live up to their name.

A child is named at their baptism. The priest takes a bundle of flesh and douses their head with water three times, invoking the Holy Spirit. But hang on a minute! Aren’t those the three elements of speech – breath (the Holy Spirit), water (the water of the font), and flesh (the tiny baby)?

In effect, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, a child is being made into a word of God – not the Word (that is Christ), but they are being called to be Christ-like, to reject the devil.

And what happens in the sacrament of Holy Communion? The priest takes the bread, the fruit of the earth, and the wine, which is a liquid like water, and consecrates them by the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Again, the three elements of breath, water, and flesh are present. We find all three elements in bread, which is made from a dough of flour and water and has air in it.

And what about the first creation account in Genesis, where we read that the waters were separated from the waters and the sky was created, then the waters under the sky were gathered together into one place and the dry land appeared. Aren’t these again the three elements of speech – breath (the sky), water, and flesh (the dry land)?

I would suggest that speech is central to an understanding of the world around us and our place in it. It can effect change, it can bring people to their senses. It can give meaning, as when we take our child and name him or her.

When we are baptized, as Jesus was by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, we have a choice. We can choose what kind of people we want to be. We can decide on the words we will use, on the actions we will take, whether to tell the truth or lie, whether to help others or steal.

We are a word of God. We can choose to be wheat or chaff. We can choose whether to please God or to turn away from him. According to our life, so our definition will be. And this is why we need to cling to the name of Jesus, to think only of him, so that in our earthly pilgrimage we become as much like him as possible. We are made in God’s image, now we must become like him.

Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Photo caption: Letters make good staging posts. Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers from Thessaloniki who wrote the Cyrillic alphabet, outside the National Library in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Posted on in Sermons

3rd Sunday of Advent

Readings: Zephaniah 3:14-20; Isaiah 12:2-6; Philippians 4:4-7; Luke 3:7-18

The Book of the Prophet Zephaniah was written in the early part of the reign of King Josiah, between 635 and 625 BC. The name Zephaniah means “the Lord has hidden” or “defended by God” and it is thought he was related to an earlier king of Judah, Hezekiah. Most of the three chapters that make up this short book of the Bible are devoted to God’s judgement of human wickedness, but the compilers of the lectionary have taken pity and provided the short passage at the end of the book, which deals with final blessings, in which a remnant of the people of Israel remains humble and is saved.

So it is a book of warning: refrain from your wilful sinning, or else! In this sense, Zephaniah has a lot in common with the last of the prophets, John the Baptist, who also warned the social elite to refrain from their wickedness and hypocrisy. Both prophets were voices in the wilderness, calling for social justice and pure minds, a plea that was just as ignored then as it is today.

In Zephaniah’s time, the cult of other deities – false gods, idols – has developed in Jerusalem. He warns of God’s impending wrath, which will come with the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonian army fifty years later, in 586. This led to the Babylonian captivity, when large numbers of Judeans were forcibly relocated to Babylonia. This exile is later referenced in Psalm 137, “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion”, memorably turned into a song by Boney M.

So the warning goes unheeded. The Book of Zephaniah is often regarded as a reversal of the creation story in Genesis, chapter 1. After the wonderful creation of God’s world, order is now to give way to disorder and destruction. This reminds me of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted. Entropy, the gradual decline into disorder, is inevitable.

I have observed this. After you start something new, there seems to be a period of grace, a honeymoon period, when everything goes swimmingly and the earth appears to be a paradise. But then little by little things start to go wrong, difficulties arise that need fixing, a noisy neighbour moves in upstairs, the car breaks down, someone falls sick. Sometimes the obstacles to a peaceful existence pile up and they can appear insurmountable. Life on earth may not seem so desirable, as the aches and pains increase. But this is clearly a stage of human existence and, as such, we must understand it.

Clearly we are meant to be tested. The people of Zephaniah’s time must have felt that order as they knew it was falling apart all around them, as idol worshippers proliferated, forming a tide that King Josiah was unable to hold back. They are not the only ones. Those who trod the path to Babylon, condemned to exile, must have felt that God had abandoned them, just as the monks of Lindisfarne in 793 AD must have been dismayed when the Viking raiders arrived in their ships to pillage and plunder and a reduced group of the faithful – the remnant of Israel – plodded around the kingdom of Northumbria with their precious cargo, the incorrupt body of St Cuthbert, until founding the city of Durham and building a church to house the relics more than two hundred years later. Exiles are not short.

And clearly we are not meant to view life on earth as our final destination. We will be forced to move on. The Durham-born author Benjamin Myers has a wonderful book called Cuddy, in which he puts himself in the minds of that retinue of faithful followers who accompanied Cuthbert’s body on its exile from Lindisfarne. He describes this pilgrimage, this forced march, as follows:

Walking and thinking

         praying and fasting;

         the endless act of

         facing yourself.[1]

So perhaps this is a time for home truths, for facing up to ourselves and stretching our limits, the limits of what we believe to be possible.

We seek heaven on earth. We are uncomfortable with the idea of discomfort. There is a wonderful collection of stories on the Church of England’s website at the moment, “Women of the Nativity” (cofe.io/WomenNativity), which focuses on the experiences of women such as Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Mary. In the first story, Sarah grumbles and complains when she is forced to up sticks and leave her comfortable home in Ur, next to the Euphrates. In her experience, the Lord appearing to Abraham means nothing but disruption and dashed hopes. She talks about this God who keeps messing with her life. When Abraham’s younger brother dies, his father, Terah, announces that they are leaving. They trail across the desert for months and come to a place called Haran. When Terah himself dies, they continue to Canaan. Sarah talks about her laughter, which used to be spontaneous, but the older she gets, the more jaded it becomes. This is in stark contrast to the unfulfilled prophecies of Zephaniah – “Sing… shout aloud… Be glad and rejoice with all your heart” – a message that is repeated in Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord always.”

How many of us do this? How many of us “shout aloud and sing for joy”, as it says in the Canticle from Isaiah? Very few. That is because we are in exile, we haven’t arrived yet.

And now we come to the nub of the matter. As Sarah bemoans her fate, Abraham turns to her (in the imagined version by Paula Gooder) and tells her to “have patience”, to “have faith”. We are in the season of Advent. This also is a time of anticipation, of looking forward to events that have yet to happen. In this sense, perhaps the meaning of Advent is the closest to that of the lives we lead. The singing and rejoicing that they all seem to talk about haven’t happened yet. We are still on the way.

So we have a stark choice, like a path that forks before us. We can choose trust or we can succumb to its opposite, fear. I suspect most people’s faith is a combination of these two things. We would not be human if we didn’t feel a certain trepidation, especially when events seem to be spinning out of control. Where is this rejoicing, this singing for joy?

John the Baptist provides part of the answer. In today’s passage from Luke, he places great emphasis on bearing fruit and I have noticed that even in harsh circumstances, when the sun is beating down or the tent has a hole in it, it is still possible to bear fruit – if we put our mind to it. We need to do this, as well as avoiding the excesses John warns the tax collectors and Roman soldiers about.

When we put our trust in the Lord, we are tested, certainly. Every pilgrimage has its blisters. But can we see through the whirling storm to the calmness within? That is the question we must ask ourselves. What is our faith worth?

What touches me most about Zephaniah’s final epiphany is the way it will not just be us who are rejoicing, but God as well. “He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” God will also be singing. We all long for that look of unconditional love, the love of a parent, of a father in the home. We don’t want to be a wandering people forever. But God’s word is true. Sarah conceived Isaac. Abraham became the father of a great nation. Mary gave birth to the Saviour while remaining a virgin. All the women in these stories – Sarah, Huldah, Abigail, Elizabeth… – show one quality in common: patience. They have often waited twenty or thirty years for the outcome they wished for to disentangle itself.

It is patience that makes what appears impossible to become possible in time.

Let us pray:

Almighty God,

purify our hearts and minds,

that when your Son Jesus Christ comes again as

judge and saviour

we may be ready to receive him,

who is our Lord and our God.

Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

[1] Benjamin Myers, Cuddy (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), p. 111.

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Review of “Songs of a Lost World” by The Cure

“Songs of a Lost World” is The Cure’s fourteenth studio album and was released on 1 November 2024. It has created a lot of expectation among diehard Cure fans, such as myself, because it comes sixteen years after their last studio album (“4:13 Dream”, 2008). But I think it’s more than that. Who among Cure fans of the eighties remembers an album called “4:13 Dream”? I certainly don’t. For me, there’s the first four albums – “Three Imaginary Boys” (1979), “Seventeen Seconds” (1980, with the epic “Forest” intro, though I was always very partial to “M”), “Faith” (1981, my God, that album got me into Oxford, no, not the album, the 12” version of “Faith” with “Charlotte Sometimes” on the other side, listening out of my bedroom window before going to bed), “Pornography (1982, somehow I feel this should have been their earliest album) – plus “Disintegration” (1989). I left off listening to The Cure after “Disintegration”. Was it that awful album “Wish”, or just the fact my life took another direction, I went abroad and had other things to think about? “Songs of a Lost World” has reunited us all with our past.

And it was an epic past. Robert accompanied us through adolescence and into adulthood. He formed us, somehow. Most of my university friends will remember me for liking The Cure. That was a defining characteristic, something that set me apart. It may even have taken me off the rails. I underperformed at university, and I think that is due, in part at least (add in the fact that no other decade has surpassed the eighties in terms of quality music), to my obsession with The Cure.

Now, “Songs of a Lost World” makes all of that (and believe me, there has been some soul searching along the way) worthwhile. Robert gifts us a look into our past, just as with the epic “Endsong” he himself looks into his past, standing outside in the garden with his father at the time of the Moon landing in 1969 and wondering if there could really be people up on this white, blood-red orb.

What sets Robert apart as a musician is that he doesn’t mince his words. He doesn’t claim that there is some small light at the end of the tunnel most of us find ourselves in. There is simply “nothing”. That old world, the world we felt comfortable in, the world of the eighties, has disappeared and, much as we might wish it would return, it won’t. We are faced with economic instability, environmental degradation, and not enough time for anything really. It’s like time, which used to be so generous, suddenly became stingy. We are rationed. We grab some release here or there, but soon it’s back to the grindstone, trying to keep up, without the possibility of taking a step back and considering where our lives are headed because they seem to just be going round and round in circles. We are donkeys chasing our tails in a pathetic attempt to pay the bills.

Robert gives us time. He makes that time available. He hasn’t changed. Even if he says he is “left alone with nothing at the end of every song”, he carries on writing them. He can’t stop himself. The creative urge is irresistible. We know we’re not going to succeed – life, that hungry animal, is going to get us in the end. But we continue regardless. Because what other choice do we have? We can’t just down tools, go on strike. We have responsibilities.

There is a moment in this album that makes the last thirty-five years of waiting worthwhile. It is the instrumental bridge in the middle of “Endsong” (7:59 mins). I think at this point Robert and his fellow travellers – Simon, Jason, Roger, Reeves – grasp something of eternity. Damn, they take hold of it by the tail and fly off into the night sky, laughing inanely as the sparks scatter all around them. So, for all the times we have been fucked, all the times we have been treated badly, all the times life has let us down and there hasn’t been an answer, we have our moment of vindication, our moment of glorious, exploding hope.

Yes, tomorrow it will be back to the grindstone, to all the bureaucracy and demands that humans impose on each other because they can’t think of anything better to do. But now, even though we know the whole system is flawed, a human construct based on the desire to possess, we have our secret weapon. We have seen.

And this is what Robert gives us – vision. One of my favourite tracks on the album is “Warsong”. Honestly, it reminds of my late wife’s family. “All we will ever know is bitter ends for we are born to war.” This message could be taken to be pessimistic. Much of the album could be understood in this vein. It doesn’t seem to hold out much hope – of a better world, of kinder relationships (which is all we really hanker after), of a better understanding of our environment, the nature that gives us life and should be at the top of any political programme. This is why older people become so attached to animals. They see the goodness in them, the lack of deceit.

And yet it gives hope. It gives strength. And this is what Cure fans are so grateful for. Thank you. That rocket-speed launch into eternity is all I need. To know that it exists. What every human being is waiting for, and not getting, is a just world order (and perhaps not to have to die). This is the basis of all world religion – that we can be better than this, that we can act with kindness, that someone out there cares about us. Life is a journey towards the realization that greed, self-interest, the desire to possess, needs to be reined in. What life is there without forgiveness? Without mercy?

“Left alone with nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.” This is how the album ends. Yes, but it’s not “nothing”, is it? It’s something better than this.

Review by Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com