Abstract
This is without question a remarkable book from an author able to draw on her earlier professional expertise as a teacher of literature and lifelong familiarity with what she indicates as ‘songs’ (complete with online references), all embraced by skills required to interconnect ‘sociology of culture’, theological and scriptural reflection with a multitude of unpredictable resources. Canon Martin’s initial address ‘To the Reader’ makes it quite clear that she is exploring and recommending to others a ‘call to holiness’ – i.e. how to live well and expectantly in dark times (p. xiii). ‘All the places that bring human sympathies to a standstill, that darken human comprehension, unreeling the heart towards meaninglessness – those are the places God inhabits with special care. There are no locked doors in the divine imagination’ (p. 32).
Such mercy is explored via three parts of the book. The first is on Scripture/reading – in effect ‘reception exegesis’, appealing to personal experience and to different cultural voices, ‘as well as speaking with and to the scriptural voice’ (p. 22). That said, no one need anticipate anything other than a profoundly discomfiting ‘read’ through the second central and most disquieting part on ‘Desire’. In its first section, ‘Longing’, we learn to understand that we live with ‘the message that desires ought to be quickly satisfied rather than interrogated, harnessed or denied’ (p. 38). Moving on to ‘Looking’ (pp. 41–79), we turn to a critique of ‘scopophilia’: that is, the desire to look without being seen, shifted from internal visual narrative inside one’s own head to the digital world. This may indeed make possible sympathy and conversational communication, but it largely exists with neither ‘not-forgetting’ nor forgiveness (pp. 60–2). ‘Looking and the soul’ requires us to attend to the miseries of ‘screen porn’, including ‘child porn’, and how people may precipitate themselves into ‘a hell they had not quite planned to visit’ (p. 76), significant both for someone’s mental health and for social disaster. ‘Joining’ includes ‘Memory’ (how it was then) and ‘Maps’ (how it seems to be now), plus pages on the Church of England’s ecclesiologies and consequent interplay with debates about sexuality (pp. 98–103). We may well ask whether the underlying issue is what (if anything) the Church is called to stand for in wider public life (p. 100). Some suggestions emerge in the last few pages of the book.
Supposedly ‘adult’ ‘Mores’ and ‘the cultural over-valuation of sexual pleasure’ (p. 120) have produced a situation in which one-fifth of the UK’s children grow up with one parent, 90 per cent of whom are women. While Martin explores the habits of irresponsibility now so characteristic of UK society, someone could take her critique further and examine its consequences for the prospects and suicide rates of 17–25-year-old ‘white’ males, which are worse for those not in ‘higher education’. In the meantime, as it were, her commendation of ‘Marriage’ (pp. 121–8) is that ‘it is one of the ways we might have a glimpse of the cost involved in the project of time-bound loving, but also of the vastness of its blessing’. The final reflections on ‘Desire’ include an indispensable preliminary to the final section of the book: ‘Self-fashioning’ (pp. 129–53) includes a brief but harrowing account of Martin’s personal experience of anything but ‘time-bound loving’. Together with her seven-year-old daughter (from a relationship in the transition from school to university), she tried to sustain an impossible life with a dangerous drunk, with the consequence of personal ‘soul-loss’. Of central importance here was her experience of ‘Redemption’, which began with a paradisal memory, ‘a shining presence’ (p. 152) that impelled her to leave, clutching her daughter, to seek refuge initially with a friend and then the long haul of ‘soul-cure’ (p. 153).
Thence, in a brief final section on ‘Holiness’ (pp. 157–77), Martin edges her readers towards the stability we need despite the seductions of desire and provides a page of questions to enable us to identify what it means to ‘Go home’ (p. 168). Living in ‘dark times’ in the context of the renewed communities that could result (p. 169, 175), we may there learn about ‘the exclusive tenderness of God for each fragile soul one by one’ (p. 177). We may well hope to hear more from Canon Martin.