The Collage of God

By Mark Oakley

The Collage of God is truly a contemporary spiritual classic. First published in 2001 it has sold many thousands of copies and was praised by Andrew Motion, Rowan Williams, Wendy Cope and received many favourable reviews.

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hymns Ancient & Modern
• Release date: Jul 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781848255845

Mark Oakley

How can we enter fruitfully into the seasons of the Church’s year? Why have the seasons become shaped as they have and what can we do to make them good? As Mark Oakley explains in the hugely enjoyable, earthy and wide-ranging introduction to this exceptional volume, we can experience them in stimulating company! Here are reflections by the most senior pastors and teachers in the Church today: SARAH MULLALLY, Bishop of Crediton, on A Good Advent, a season ‘pregnant with hope’, when our waiting is anything but inactive. ROWAN WILLIAMS, Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, on A Good Christmas, and the overwhelming surprise of ‘a God who values our humanity beyond all imagining’. LIBBY LANE, Bishop of Stockport, on A Good Epiphany, when through discomfort ‘we begin to discover at first hand the hospitality of God’. JUSTIN WELBY, Archbishop of Canterbury, on A Good Lent, ‘which takes hold of human sinfulness and, in an extraordinary way, makes space for the hope of Christ’. STEPHEN COTTRELL, Bishop of Chelmsford, on A Good Holy Week, when we ‘revel in the sensuous and very hands-on re-enactment of liturgical drama’. STEPHEN CONWAY, Bishop of Ely, on A Good Easter, which is ‘life lived shot through with grace and glory’. KAREN GORHAM, Bishop of Sherborne, on A Good Pentecost, when our life’s journey ‘brings us encounters, challenges and opportunities we can rise to, equipped by the Spirit of God’.

Book preview

THE COLLAGE OF GOD

THE COLLAGE OF GOD

MARK OAKLEY

FOREWORD BY WENDY COPE

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

© Mark Oakley 2001, 2002, 2012

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

This Edition published in 2012 by Canterbury Press

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

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

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

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

978 1 84825 238 7

Design by Sandie Boccacci

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

For

Nanny and Bill

with love

and

gratitude

… thus the human imagination, here as always uses what it knows well in pursuit of efforts to move towards what it does not yet comprehend.

Margaret Donaldson, Human Minds: An Exploration

introduction to second edition

Since publishing this book eleven years ago, the Church of England has lost some talented and special clergy who in their various ways had encouraged me in my early ministry as a young priest. They include such people as Michael Mayne, Harry Williams, Bill Vanstone, Eric James and John V. Taylor. Though different, each of them was a theologian of experience. That is, they took human experience seriously in their reflection with and about God. They were also, as a result of this, courageous in their preaching, self-scrutiny and politics because their pastoral work had taught them things which they felt either the Church or society found difficult to hear or even acknowledge. I like to think of them as being naturally Anglican in their sensibilities. Pastoral insight was at the heart of their teaching and if their theology ever challenged the past it was understood as a theological hoeing, a turning over of the soil of tradition from which new things come to the top, and not as an arrogant discarding. I miss them and sadly it is hard not to believe that something vital about the Church of England’s contribution to the Christian church has died with them.

In its very modest way The Collage of God was an attempt to add a little more water to this stream of spiritual reflection made reassuringly turbulent by its recognition of human experience. It is a youthful priest’s frustrated take on the restrictions of any systematic approach to theology that smoothes away such experience, dark or light, for the purposes of clarity, authority or prejudice. No doubt I would write a different book these days but I still believe the central premise that God is understood in collage – in a slow, patient and puzzled piecing together of hints and guesses, epiphanies and surprises that come our way through scripture, the tradition of faith, the many forms of reasoning and the living of life with all its loves and losses. The pieces of the collage don’t always fit together easily but there is an integrity about the provisional picture of God they begin to give shape to. I identified when I wrote this book some of the pieces that always seem to find themselves on my collage and today some of those have inevitably changed and some have increased. At the moment, for instance, my collage is more reliant on poetry than ever. I look for God in the world as I look for the poetry in the poem.

There is little new to my approach in this book and it has been explored by greater minds than mine. In the nineteenth century in his Essays Critical and Historical, John Henry Newman wrote:

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

I mentioned priests who have supported me through the years and there have been a number of laity too who have shown me what fidelity to God looks like in the most remarkable ways. The late Monica Furlong gave me lunch when The Collage of God was published and was so positive and helpful, not least in telling me that my next book must not rely so much on the thoughts and quotations of others but must be more confident in my own voice. I suppose the point of my collage was to piece together what others had said and which had resonated with me, but I take her point and hope that she would be pleased to know that I am learning, slowly, to be a little less self-protective in my hiding behind others. She taught me that day what Martin Luther King Jr once gave voice to when he said that ‘our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’.

I hope that some people will find this book helpful. It tries to witness to a Christian faith that both informs the mind and forms the heart, that is unafraid to reason and unashamed to adore, that sees certainty as the opposite of faith because all our full-stops must be changed into commas if the Gospel is to do its work in us. The collage is never complete.

Mark Oakley

July 2012

contents

Foreword by Wendy Cope

Prologue: THE COLLAGE

Part One: MATERIALS

1. HIDDENNESS

2. DISCOVERY

3. POETRY

Part Two: COMPOSITION

4. TRUTHFULNESS

5. PRAYING

6. SERVICE

7. LAUGHING

Postscript

foreword

Early in 1995 I was invited to do a poetry reading at the American School in St John’s Wood. After the reading a young man who had been in the audience introduced himself as ‘a local curate’, and told me he sometimes used my poems in his sermons. Of all the things that have been said to me about my work, this was the most surprising. All my published work had been written at a time when I thought of myself as an atheist, and there were quite a few poems I wouldn’t have chosen to show to a curate. Yet this one preached about them and not, it seemed, as examples of wickedness and folly.

After that we corresponded a bit, and I invited Mark to lunch – an occasion that turned out to be the beginning of a friendship I value. He is very good company, and I knew before I read it that this book would be good company too. Part of Mark’s charm is his ability to laugh at himself, and I’m glad to see that it has found its way into the text. The picture of the newly-ordained Reverend Oakley behaving ‘as if I were an extra from a Miss Marple film’ made me laugh out loud. It occurs to me that a willingness to see the funny side of oneself is an essential quality in a clergyman, although I’m not sure how those who control entry to theological colleges could test for it.

That this book is sometimes amusing and always readable is no surprise, but I must confess to being even more impressed than I expected by the author’s range of reference. Mark has been too busy telling funny stories to let me know just how well read he is. The pieces for this collage have been collected from many different centuries, many different places, many different kinds of writing – theology, philosophy, poetry, prose fiction, biography, theatre studies. Other pieces come from visits to the theatre and cinema. And some are the fruits of Mark’s own experience – moving stories about people he has known, telling reflections of his life and work and on the Church and Christianity today. To have composed this wealth of material into such a concise and coherent book is a considerable achievement.

As it happened, three or four months before I first met Mark, I had begun going to church again after a gap of more than thirty years. Having moved from London to Winchester, I went to the cathedral to listen to the music. The music was – and is – wonderful, but it wasn’t the only thing to draw me back again and again. I was deeply moved by the words of the Book of Common Prayer, remembered from childhood, and by the setting in which this marvellous act of worship was taking place. I became one of those people Mark refers to in Chapter Three, for whom ‘beauty of stone, liturgy and music’ lead to an ‘interest in the possibilities of God’.

As I continue to explore those possibilities I shall be glad to have this book with me. I’ve read it twice – from now on I shall dip into it, knowing that on almost every page there is something I want to be reminded of, so that I can keep it in my own collage of God.

Wendy Cope

November 2000

prologue: THE COLLAGE

If a man learns theology before he learns how to be a human being, he will never become a human being.

Ludvig Holberg

We are made like quilts, over time and with many hands, drawn together into what we are and not knowing which stitch it is that makes