Apricots & Abraham.

Apricots! Growing in Barton-on-Humber, edible, sweet. Fit to give away (but not too many!). Eat them quickly before they become mishmish, the Arabic name for them, I'm told.

A few days on my own - t'owd man is away with the youth group - and in four days I've managed, thanks to apricots etc in the garden, to buy only a bottle of milk. I'm saving for my next camino, but if our garden is so productive, then some of the surplus cash really belongs to Africa. One of our congregation suggested that we should try to live a frugal week and give away what we don't need to spend.

There's not much blogging going on just now, because I'm busy on Sarah & Hagar. Because I no longer teach formally, I don't have to go through all the J,E,D & P stuff that I used to; and anyway, there isn't the confidence any more that this is the way or even (for some) a way to approach the Pentateuch, and so I'm free to look at other stuff treating the final form as something to read rather than to disentangle, and that's a great freedom. Not that that disentangling doesn't have its place, but thankfully it is somehwhat displaced from its previous head-of-table position. I really haven't considered whether any bit is 'J' or 'P', because for me this just isn't important for my purpose.  It's quite a depressing set of stories, since the religions which claim them as to do with their ancestral history often (not always though) seem to have carried on its theme of division, jealousies, non-communication and general human nastiness. So I want to make the piece I do in response to it contain some suggestion of a consciousness of its history through time as a source-book for squabblers. Whether I can complete the work in the allotted time-span, I don't know.

Hagar's stars

Sarah's stars

I'm happy with the idea that the OT broadly contains some stuff that is legend and folk tale, and that some clever people came along and did things with that, adding their own stuff to supplement it and give it new contexts and twists. I'm sure those ancient literary bods never just took over their raw material and left it unchanged. The result is a varied collection of genres, including narratives with very complex sets of events and characters and causes of discontent; and it's hard to exonerate the part God plays in these stories, since for a start he is prone to various degrees of favouritism (though in these stories, for some reason we have often failed to notice how he honours Hagar, but the word 'bless' is never used of her). Is this idea a natural way that humans respond to life's random unfairness? Is 'God did this to me' easier to bear than just 'I've been unlucky' or 'I'm incompetent'? And 'God has blessed me' is potentially something that could release a humility in us and stop us from feeling that we are responsible for all our own successes, unless we feel that it is our just reward for virtues.  Yet the very idea of 'blessing' is to me far too problematic to ever claim for myself, as it seems to create an un-blessed group, and I don't like that; even if Abraham is somehow meant to spread the blessing out. Mmmm. A big part of the glory of these stories is perhaps in the reflection they can provoke in the reader, if you can let go of wholesale identification with one or other of the characters. (Imagine if the whole nation were to get down to it instead of reading the News of the World or similar.) I could get stuck here going over and over things, but I'm trying to do something textile that embodies some of my musings, and it isn't easy. But then you just have to get on with it and 'cut something out', which in cloth terms is the opposite of what the phrase means in literary terms.



When Sarah & Hagar gets to a stage where I think it might work, then I'll put some of it here. Oh look! Some crept in, just so I can look at it and consider. This is stuff I've produced that will be cut up and applied in smaller bits, but it's nice in the piece. Abraham plays a part in making their descendants as numerous as the stars.

But this is also about apricots, and so here is our lovely visitor Fr. Patrick enjoying the one I gave him. I also converted him to becoming an enthusiast for Grayson Perry's art (it didn't take long as Patrick understands this kind of thing); subject of a future blog post, I think.....