Iain Atkinson

To write a blog, to write in direct relation to my day to day experience. Not planning some other work but just writing, recording, and creating. 

My romance for writing comes from seeing written works from my dad, grandpa, and great uncle on the large bookshelf in the living room of my home as a kid and teenager. I loved the sense that behind the affable expressions of a simple old man who smiled at me and bit my coins in a magic trick to prove they weren’t chocolate lay a wealth of knowledge and experience that was worth sharing. Files marked LRA in a green folder at the bottom of the bookshelf contained all sorts of reflections on the English language, lists of words of various properties, philological notes, short essays, and letters. The memory is too vague to know if they were notes or essays or if the file was green, so formative was the connection to words by Atkinsons.

Above that and later in life I would read full published books by my father. I took it for granted throughout my life that books and learning were what life was about, and discovered in myself an ambition to create beautiful written work throughout my twenties. Only at the end of that decade was that ambition interrogated to the extent that I could realise this reason I’m now explaining, and in the realisation of reason actually satisfy the ambition without accomplishing it. 

Or before accomplishing it, I could say, as I feel that in writing my Meditations on Mark I have written the work of a lifetime, something that is worth reading for anyone who cares about truth and wisdom. There I really wrote. That which was a side project to my dissertation to help me stay mentally engaged, that which began as a private devotional exercise, became the first thoroughly scripturally-based work of post-apocalyptic theology in history, as far as I’m aware. For me it was the first. I wrote completely originally.

So I write because my ancestors left nuggets of wisdom for me to find in written form — left coins for me to bite — and I now write seven months into fatherhood in the happy hope that I will be read by my grandchildren. Amos is currently asleep in the buggy as our train to Cambridge approaches Shelford. Maggie, Amos and I are going to see the Ogborns and some of Maggie’s school friends on this ninth of December. Stevie’s wonderful “What Christmas means to me” sounds in my ears and words pour through my fingers on this ipad screen. 

For whom am I writing? My PhD program ended because I couldn’t answer that question. Now, in the midst of the happy idea that my descendants will read what I write, I nevertheless answer not in relation to them, and I say that I am writing for you. This is the apocalypse, that writing is no longer recording but is creating. To write is not to note down for a scholarly community, not for posterity, but to differently mark and freshly create what had begun to be created by means of thought.

By means of my thought earlier today, for example, the World Cup was baptised into Christmas. This year is the first that the FIFA World Cup is being held in winter. Tomorrow England will play France in the quarter finals. I was reflecting today on a question that occurred to me as a child – why is the trophy a cup? The answer feels two-handled to me. On the one hand, everything celebratory comes down to getting drunk, so a cup stands for victory and celebration. On the other hand, cups have taken on singular significance as “the cup” through Judeo-Christian history. Christ drank “the cup” of his destiny, fulfilling the ceremony and celebration of Passover, in which the wine already represented blood. In other words, the World Cup is already Christ’s cup, the one he drank.

Interestingly, alcohol has been banned in the Qatar World Cup. That decision was made days before the tournament started, I understand. So this first Christmas World Cup is the first sober one. My mind’s eye saw today the attention of everyone in the world, through the image of the attention of certain men in my church, on the World Cup instead of on Christ, and yet I saw that this “instead” was mediated by the novelty of the event, by its sobriety and wintriness. 

Last Sunday one of these men in church preached on the meaning of Christmas, giving much more detail than needed or expected on the history of the festival. I enjoyed it, personally. He described the way Augustine of Canterbury regarded the winter festivals of the English as debauched, but was advised by the pope to “baptise it into Christ”, and so began or so was importantly modified the synthesis and syncretism of Christmas traditions in the Western world. This phrase was ringing in my ears as I pictured the world cup’s mixing with the Christmas spirit. My knuckles chapped as I delivered leaflets for our church’s carol service with an Iranian refugee brother.

A few days later and England are out of the World Cup, losing to France as Harry Kane missed a late penalty. Morocco are the African team and the Arabic team to have made it furthest ever in the tournament, into the semi-finals. Seen clearly, the World Cup mediates the world-historical politics spirits of the air. On the football field are played out all the rivalries of old. On them a comedy is made of the resentments of the nations. In the haircuts of the players are the demons of the world given vent and hung out to dry. In this sober winter of the West’s defeat and Arabic Africa’s promotion, the other saint Augustine is smiling. 

Of course writing is creating. One creates a written work. And yes it’s a record. But it’s also directly an act of creation of something else, something other. These words are the receipt of God’s having created Augustine’s smile. So writing today is a cooperation with Christ in creating the new beloved community. Saint Augustine comes to sit in this chair next to me, and I see strings over my hands, as Augustine uses me as a puppet to send his greetings to the descendants of Adam on earth – welcome to the kingdom, I say – A.

I later see the two Augustines conferencing.

So if words create, what shall I create?

Let there be communities of radical transformation across the earth.

Let there be many who like me see generations into the future with immense hope.

Let the prayers of Mary for the earth be answered.

Let the intercessions of Mary Magdalene be heard, Oh Lord.

See I don’t have much to ask, or to create. I defer my prayers to the Marys. I am all this creating, anyway. All is created and is creative, and these hands are all in all anyway. Let this blog, this bog of words, gobble up my prayers, as I leave it now, as I leave this cafe and go out into the first snow of the year.