Thank you for drawing my attention to the Rev Giles Fraser’s contribution to Radio 4's Platitude of the Day slot. While you are at it, why not give me a nice paper cut and pour lemon juice on it?
Thought for the Day is a very tight form, a little like a fugue or a haiku. You have to start with something from the news (“I wonder if you have noticed that a lot of people seem quite worried about a virus right now. I know I have.”) Then you have to connect it with something from the Bible or the liturgical calendar. (“In the Bible, the word for pandemic is “plague”. There is a story in the Bible about how a man named Moses sent ten of them against Egypt.”) You then develop both themes in parallel, flipping from one to the other. (“A lot of us find staying at home during lockdown a real nuisance. But I am sure that the children of Israel found leaving home and going out into the wilderness a nuisance too. Some people in my Facebook group are complaining that Waitrose has sold out of yeast; and the Israelites weren’t allow to put any yeast in their matzos”.) After exactly two minutes and forty seconds you bring the two themes together into some kind of edifying conclusion. (“And in a very real sense we will be able to celebrate that the virus has passed over us, as well.”) But you have to do this without saying anything which can be construed as directly proselytising your chosen deity.
This is the real reason they won’t let Richard Dawkins have a go, I imagine. He is no more capable than Billy Graham of seeing a microphone without proselytising into it.
Giles Fraser's starting point was a classic of the genre. We can’t have church services right now because it is dangerous to have a lot of people in one place all breathing at the same time; Sunday is Pentecost; Pentecost is the coming of the Holy Spirit; the word translated as “spirit” also means “breath” so Pentecost is about the coming of the breath of God. And so, in a very real sense...
“This important word [breath/spirit] is used in the opening passage of the Bible in which God breathes into creation, giving it life.”
Well, up to a point. The Rev has two different texts confused. The first creation story says that “the Spirit [weruah] of God moved on the face of the waters”. The second one says that God formed the adam out of clay and then put the “breath of life” [nismat] into him. He obviously has the creation of Adam in mind, because he likens it to a kind of spiritual mouth-to-mouth. But it’s the first word, “weruah” that he says means “breath” as well as “spirit”. At any rate, Genesis nowhere says that “God’s exhalation animates all things”. The point of the second passage is that Adam is different from everything else because he has God’s breath inside him and the other animals don't.
This sort of playing fast and loose with the text is scary when fundamentalists do it, but apparently liberals are allowed to.
And now we come to the point. Giles likes this idea — the idea of the Creator breathing the universe into being — because it allows God to be un-masculine.
“In contrast to the rather more macho creation image of a powerful God throwing stars into space this mouth-to-mouth idea is almost uncomfortably personal.”
Where does the more-macho-creation-image come from? No-one chucks stars around in the Bible. It is very unlikely that the Genesis-author had a concept of “space” in the way we do. The stars are lights in the bowl-shaped style to help us keep track of the seasons. The phrase “Hands that threw stars into space” comes from an evangelical hymn.
Of course it does. Giles never misses an opportunity to slag off evangelicals. Nasty death cult started by Constantine and popular with right wing Americans and the headmaster of his nasty public school. The mouth-to-mouth God he just made up is much more cuddly than the star-throwing God who Graham Kendrick (the hymn writer) made up. Evangelicals are baddies and liberals are goodies.
The line comes from a hymn called "The Servant King" which is specifically from a hymn about the humility of God — one which points up the incongruity of the powerful creator presenting himself to the world as the vulnerable Jesus. The actual line is “hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered”. I don’t know what Giles believes about the crucifixion this week. Last time I looked it was all about mimetic desire and the scapegoat mechanism. But it certainly isn’t an image of power and machismo.
Mr Fraser is an asthmatic and lots of people in hospital are on artificial respirators and Tennyson said that God was closer than breathing and some kinds of prayer and meditation use inhaling and exhaling as a rhythm. How very true that is even today. And now, back to the studio.
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