Windflower Books working with A Great Read Ltd

The news is out that Windflower Books and A Great Read Ltd are working together to build a new model for working with churches: http://christianbookshopsblog.org.uk/2012/02/16/microshops-the-way-forward-for-the-uks-christian-bookshops/

Richard Greatrex will be working with A Great Read, initially for the a 3 month period, to set up micro-site bookshops in local churches. If the project gets off the ground with sufficient vigour then Richard will remain to oversee, service, train and encourage. The potential for development is huge and the interest so far has been great.

But while Richard and the team at A Great Read are initially concentrating on sites within and supported by churches they are also very much aware of the unique ministry of high street Christian bookshops which are not affiliated to any church or denomination. So, they will be looking at further innovative ways to reach out to those many customers who need resources but are not keen to cross the threshold of a particular church.

The Word: Written on the heart or wiped from the screen?

The weekend I was made redundant from Christian bookselling I was at the Swan Theatre in Stratford watching David Edgar’s play ‘Written on the Heart’. There was a fractious symmetry in the events taking place on both the theatrical stage and on the floor of the shops I served. One day I was witnessing the sheer bloody vitality of the written text – the battles fought over translations of the Bible in the creation of the King James Version. The next I was pulling books from shelves and boxing them up to be warehoused. Here was a tangible and painful sign that the printed text was no longer king, the bookshop, like the library, was no longer a place of pilgrimage, the book as a repository of information was no longer a sacred and venerated object.

The King James Version of the Bible has never been my favourite translation. Of course there are times when I have revelled in its language – the compound verb ‘loving-kindness’ still  has a particular unsurpassed resonance for me – but at others I have been stupefied by the tongue-twisting pile-up of ‘thees’ and ‘thous’. I can admit to its crucial place in our history as a pivotal work in the maturing of both the protestant English church and the English language while at the same time retaining a deep distrust of its ancient manuscript credentials which render it inadequate to me and many other Christians as a true reading of the Word of God.

The same reservations I feel for the text seem to have been carried over in society to the mode of transmission itself – the printed book is giving way to an electronic ghost of its own  corporeal form. Despite many misgivings we are urged to see the rise of the e-book as not a loss but a gain, not depriving but enriching. It opens up new vistas for communication, new opportunities for evangelism, new ways of connecting with more people, more personally.

However, losing the physicality of the printed book is having repercussions in society as drastic and far-reaching as the invention of the printing press. Not only is text becoming more ephemeral – only lasting as long as battery-life, the chip it is stored on or until the electricity runs out – but text is losing its sacred nature. If it can be written over, erased and redacted at the stroke of a finger then much of its potency and authority is swiped away. If Moses received the Ten Commandments written on an Android tablet universal access would have depended on which version of the operating system it was formatted for. And how long would it be before the edited version went viral – ‘thou shalt commit adultery’ – with no chance of recall as with the Wicked Bible of 1631? Post-modernity’s credo of no meta-narratives is still in the ascendancy – the Reformation and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on the primacy of the word is in disarray – there is a paradigm shift in the exploration of texts that relies not on text in original context but text conceptualised to fit a plethora of contemporary contexts.

Which leaves the doctrine of sola scriptura searching for a new direction to counterbalance contemporary society’s profound dissatisfaction with a single over-arching authority. Of course, such developments provide opportunities for new expressions of faith. A revisiting of the power of symbol and action to convey aspects of the numinous is resurgent and suggests one way to draw the amorphous spirituality underpinning the lives of many into a Christocentric focus.

The decline of use of our libraries is a result of this fall from grace of the printed text. With so much of the traditional reference and entertainment aspects of the library now available online the whole establishment is under attack. Austerity struck councils see slashing the library budget as a fair reduction in what is deemed to be a non-essential service. Would you prefer not to have your bins collected every week on not to be able to pop up the road to borrow the latest blockbuster paperback? If it is true, as some statistics suggest, that the average number of books read per person per year is four then libraries, and for that matter, bookshops,  are very low on the list of social priorities.

Following the First World War, when church attendance began to decline steadily and severely, libraries took up part of the role formerly held by churches as the repository of the folk culture and knowledge for a locality. They became vital centres for community activity and education, the noticeboards of a neighbourhood. But the fracturing of society, which the individualistic policies of the Thatcherite governments of the 1980s and early 1990s did much to exacerbate, coupled with the rise of web-driven social networking within a global context, has rendered libraries as obsolete as the concept of a local community which they were founded to serve. They are proving to be extremely susceptible to closure by cash-strapped authorities and while their passing is mourned by a vociferous and insightful minority the majority has long since ceased using them and either stopped relying on print media or turned to the internet for access to reading material.

The issues driving libraries to the brink of extinction have doubly affected our bookshops whose reliance on market forces rather than the benevolence of councils acting in the public interest has made them intensely vulnerable in an retail environment which is withdrawing from the high street. Even some of the famous independent bookshops which once seemed to be deeply embedded in their local community have disappeared and the massacre of the chains has continued apace since the fall of Dillons in the mid 1990s.

Which leads us where? To a society that looks for intellectual sustenance, entertainment and information not in books, not in bricks and mortar public repositories but in the new online space. It is unfair to call the networks and communities formed by social media ‘virtual’ as if that is inferior to ‘physical’, geographically grounded ones. It is true to say that some of the aspects of what we have previously called ‘community’ are not so evident in these new emanations. But we need time to allow them to develop and to allow ourselves to adapt to new realities. There will be a place for bookshops for many years to come – in smaller numbers than before, probably on a smaller scale and with the uniqueness of each more easily definable than in the past – but their existence will depend on their adaptability to a swiftly changing market. Whether more than a handful of monumental libraries will exist in twenty years from now is impossible to tell, but their slide out of fashion is an opportunity for churches to reclaim the position as the social hubs for their communities – virtual, local, denominational, generational and political – as they seek to re-interpret and re-present the unchanging heart of the Gospel as a still point in a turning world.

Finally, we have moved way, way beyond the situation where the scholars, clerics and politicians behind the King James Bible were able to write on the hearts of the majority of the people one translation of Scripture, one model of faithful adherence to God’s Word. We are surrounded by a myriad of translations, they are out in the world each engaged in an aspect of God’s work. Now is the crucial time for all churches, denominations, scholars, preachers, teachers, missionaries, workers and believers in the Christian faith to find ways of ensuring that they do not create a babble of competing heterodoxies but instead develop a sustaining, engaging, inclusive and flexible orthodoxy which remains true to the resurrection message of Christ.

Richard Greatrex

Writing Happiness Onto Our Hearts

Christian writers seem to find the concept of ‘happiness’ as difficult to pin down as anyone else. In her book Happiness Joan Chittister claims that:

‘Happiness can never be found in the things of this world. Happiness requires more than the senses, more than pleasure. It requires that, though loving these things, we transcend them to become bigger than ourselves for the sake of the rest of the world. It requires a life full of meaning, full of purpose, full of a reason to be alive that transcends itself’.

Clearly this suggests that it is easier to describe what happiness is not rather than what it is. Yet her book is a fascinating and comprehensive examination of many dimensions of happiness, exploring what it might mean in a global age, defining it as a process, as a brain function and as a goal while also considering the differences between pleasure and happiness in psychology, philosophy and major faith traditions. Her meditative and discursive style supports her conclusion that there is no simple definition: finding happiness requires an involved and involving journey; it is always deeply personal, inextricably bound up with relationships. It is, at its core, a necessary part of what it means to be alive.

Abbot Christopher Jamison’s Finding Happiness is clearly written with a straightforward  structure built upon the simple premise that ‘happiness comes to us indirectly as the fruit of defeating the causes of our unhappiness’. Taking the monastic insight that the negative preoccupations at the root of our unhappiness can be placed in one of eight categories – those of the body: gluttony, lust and greed; those of the heart and mind: anger, sadness and acedia (spiritual carelessness or apathy); and those of the soul: vanity and pride – he then opens up an analysis of each condition and possible ways to fend off or neutralise it. It is a gentle, generous and practical book which repays thoughtful reading.

As does Jeanette Winterson’s recent memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal? It covers much the same ground as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but reaches beyond to examine the impact her upbringing left on later life. Despite the almost unbearable agony inflicted by her adoptive mother’s ultra-strict, highly skewed brand of apocalyptic Pentecostalism, Winterson’s respect for the Christian faith is profound: she is immersed, steeped, saturated and to some extent preserved by the language of the Bible. Her unfolding life continues to accommodate a generous spirituality. Among the strong, arresting images, there is much to ponder in this seemingly candid memoir that takes by turns a tortuous and an euphoric journey towards a state of relatedness to the world that encompasses a sense of happiness conspicuously rejected by her adoptive mother who lived by the mantra of the title quotation.

So, finally from happiness to joy, and while C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy might be the classic on the subject, I would like to put in a plea for the poetry of St John of the Cross (try the translation by John Frederick Nims for an accessible modern rendering). Born out of terrible suffering and sparked onto the page by the imprisoned John hearing a drunkard in the street singing a bawdy song to his girlfriend, these poems are bubbling over with the ecstatic, uncontainable joy of the lover for the beloved – the overwhelming, exuberant and transcendent love of Christ for each one of his children.

Richard Greatrex

Joan Chittister: Happiness, DLT, 9780232528909 (£12.99)

Christopher Jamison: Finding Happiness, Phoenix, 9780753826096 (£7.99)

Jeanette Winterson: Why be Happy When you Could be Normal, Jonathan Cape, 9780224093453 (£14.99)

C. S. Lewis: Surprised by Joy, Harper Collins, 9780006280835 (£7.99)

St John of the Cross: The Poems, (translated by John Frederick Nims), Chicago University Press, 9780226401102, (£9.50)

Other recent Christian books on ‘happiness’ worth looking at include:

J. John: The Happiness Secret, Hodder, 9780340979303 (£8.99)

While Chittister and Jamison each include a short excursus on the relationship between the Beatitudes and happiness J. John takes writes a whole book about them. He knows that you can’t exactly equate ‘Blessed are the…’ with ‘Happy are the…’ but in an accessible, unglamorous and practical way he takes time to unpack each of these sayings of Jesus in turn and show how if applied to our daily lives they might transform both them and the society around us.

Nell W. Mohney: Just Choose Happiness, Abingdon Press, 9780687647231 (£8.99)

When I read that the author was a popular motivational speaker I wondered what I was going to find in the book but it is actually a very practical and sensible guide to finding happiness in our lives. The starting point is that Christ should be the centre of our focus and the centre of our hearts and every page is filled with relevant quotes from the Bible and from major Christian authors. This is a gentle introduction to the joys of a spirit-filled life.

Welcome to Windflower Books

Windflower Books has been in existence since 2007 as a small scale concern selling secondhand and remaindered theological books on the internet, supplying bookstalls for communities and events and publishing small runs of specialist material.

2012 sees a change in the Windflower venture as we seek to supply the needs of individuals, churches and communities in the South West who have lost their own local Christian Bookshops.

From a small start we hope to develop a system of bespoke bookselling tailored to the specific needs of each community we are working with. We are in the process of negotiating our first sites for enhanced bookstalls in local churches. Keep checking our blog, our Facebook page (Windflower Books) or our Twitter feed (windflowerbooks) for further details.

In the meantime, we would value your prayers and support as we develop Windflower into an ecumenical service for all seeking a good range of Christian literature in the South West.

You can purchase some of our current stock via:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/shops/windflowerbooks

We look forward to hearing from you with your comments and thoughts as to how we might best serve you.