Listening To The Echoes

For the first time in many years the clergy of this diocese got together for a conference, we were fortunate on two counts, we got an excellent presentation from Lorna Finley on dealing with the media, and we were privileged to spend time with Archbishop Rowan Williams as he spoke about his poetry and then was one among us for the rest of the day.  Afterwards I couldn’t help wondering if he ever gets the opportunity to spend that kind of time with his own clergy.

Unlike Kelvin whose blog about the conference you can read here, I did see a link between the two and it was all to do with echoes.

As Rowan Williams explained to us his process of beginning to write a poem was partly about listening to the echoes and that process becomes one of discovery and can lead to a final destination which is unknown when the initial call is heard, sometimes it might even lead to the dreaded rhyming couplet! 

Lorna had wonderfully demonstrated the way a media headline can impart a different slant to the same story by taking the story of the Prodigal Son, and showing us how the broadsheets, the tabloids and the weekend papers all take the same story and put their own emphasis on it. 

Echoes are dependant on where we are in the valley as to how we hear them, are they loud and clear, soft and wavering, are the trees beside us muffling some of the words, is the echo going to resound just once or multiply times, is there one word, one phrase that catches our attention drawing us down one avenue.

Since my return I have found myself listening to the echoes of the conference, of what Lorna said, of what Rowan Williams said, the echoes that resounded around the wonderful Bute Hall of Glasgow University, the echoes of the Bible readings, the echoes of the chatter of staff just outside as they prepared lunch, of the many conversations I had.  Listening to the various resonances, it would appear I have heard different harmonics to those which Kelvin has heard, but then that is what happens, that is the very nature of poetry and of life.  We see and hear the same things slightly differently, neither maybe being wrong or right while the same input started the whole process.  Words can not always express what we want to say, but the media likes and revels with words – all the better if there is a good picture to demonstrate the words such as the Gadget Vicarhas on his blog as he took a picture of Rowan Williams just as he said ’snapshot’, soundbites are wonderful if not taken out of context and not miss used, but in today’s world they all too often are.  It is not just the media either, wanting to hear the story behind the headline, the soundbite means we add to the words by expanding them to try and make them more meaningful, but in doing that we run the risk of taking away the impact of the initial meaning those very words were there for.  As was pointed out when we were at Glasgow University listening to the conversation between Rowan Williams and Professor Mona Siddiqui (what is the collective noun for a group of clergy standing outside Glasgow University on a cold evening waiting for their bus to return?).  During the discussion the advertising campaign on London buses came up ’probably’ a wonderful soundbite from their point of view “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”  For me that soundbite echoes as a statement of doubt; probably, well in that case it could also be said they are stating that probably there is a God.  On the whole we do not deal with confided boxes the 2+2 equals 4 scenario, faith has the capacity to live outside the box and live quite comfortably with the human dignity of saying 2+2 can equal 5.  I can certainly live with the idea of ‘There probably is a God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life!’

As the conference drew to a close I found myself thinking as Kelvin did it just wasn’t quite long enough, maybe next time.