Spiritual Uplift
24 May

As my birthday octave comes to an end, I've had quite a spiritual uplift.

On Saturday, Roland and I dropped in on Liverpool Cathedral's Lady Chapel for a performance by Ensemble 10/10 entitled Baltic Resonances. Included were Arvo Pärt's Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, Nunc Dimittis and Berliner Mass, Peteris Vasks's Dona nobis pacem and Ian Stephens's Shir Ahava.

This was one of those concerts which I had spotted in the Phil's prospectus this time last year and was quite excited about it. I mentioned it to Roland and, bless his cotton woolly socks, he went out and bought the tickets. Left to my own devices, I would probably have missed out on the occasion.

And I should have missed out on a real treat. I don't seem to do many live music performances these days but this was enormously spiritually uplifting in a very bracing manner. Quite delightful.

Further spiritual nourishment came from reading Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels. Earlier this year, I read her book on the The Gnostic Gospels. Although the book cover proclaims the content to be about the secret Gospel of Thomas, in actual fact it is more about the history of the early church and the way that, particularly, Iranaeus was responsible for shaping what was the agreed belief of the Christian church in the fourth century AD.

I found it eloquent and helpfully provocative. I can't say that I've absorbed all of the intellectual arguments of the book but it continues a process that I've been undertaking for some time of trying to get to grips with the fundamentals of the Christian religion. So, a good read.

In a different class altogether was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. I just can't praise this book enough. Along with Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, it has to be one of my books of the year.

Amongst other things, I just relished the sheer cleverness of it (and that's a word that quite often comes out as a pejorative). Six interlinked narratives set out in a palindromic chain working forwards and backwards again in time like a baton being passed on and back again. Thematic materials interwoven and modulated. Narrative brio and playing with form, a journal, letters, a detective story, a personal memoir, science fiction and a post-apocalyptic dystopia. And the humanity and hope of it all.

I've seen the book labelled as a damning invective against the possibility of true human happiness and progress. I see in it a heartfelt cry against the feeling of powerlessness that political structures impress upon us and a personal call to arms that, even if everything is stacked against us, then it is no reason not to strive for a better world.