Halloween, and Tales of Terror
I've been talking through mentoring issues with a couple of people today – how to get a grip on what they do and make it better. One of the topics of conversation was how to present preching better. There's a whole lot of ways you can use a five minute preaching slot; you can teach a concept, analyse a word or phrase, make a connection between readings or liturgical themes, draw out the meaning of the season. Or you can tell stories.
Becoming a good story teller is an invaluable skill for someone who presents ideas in Church (or anywhere else for that matter). People engage with stories – the heart and soul get touched as well as the mind, and it's a combination that makes people more likely to remember the material, and more likely to internalise it.
How do you learn to be a story teller? (I'll teach you that in detail if you want to pay my hourly rate!) But one way is to read other people's stories and learn what works.
One rather brilliant story teller is an author, a friend of mine who lives a couple of streets away. His "Tales of Terror" get under your skin and give you goosebumps. The perfect thing for a Halloween weekend.
7 Responses to “Halloween, and Tales of Terror”
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Maggi has kept a blog since September 2003, writing about theology and faith, the arts and literature, and a little about life and random nonsense...
In an increasingly secularised society few people have a good working knowledge of the Bible. Yet a great deal of our culture is built on stories or ideas that come from the Bible. Literature, art, music, language and even the fabric of our society - such as our justice system - are built on Christian concepts and biblical references. The Writing on the Wall provides a fascinating introduction to the Bible's best-known, and most influential, stories. Each chapter gives some background to the text of the Bible, and shows how the stories have become enmeshed in Western culture. Adam and Eve, the ten plagues of Egypt, The Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene all feature - along with how the Bible has influenced everyone from Shakespeare to Monty Python, and Caravaggio to Banksy. 
Giving It Up explores the Lenten idea of 'giving up', taking it beyond the traditional idea of simply abstaining from something, and suggesting instead that what we need to give up is our existing ideas about God. With a daily readings for each day of Lent, from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, it follows the heroes of the Bible who had to give up their own too-small ideas about God.
This is Maggi’s bestselling book of daily readings for each day of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany. Advent is the beginning of the Church year, and marks the anticipation of the coming Messiah. These readings explore how beginnings and endings in our own lives are illuminated by the different Gospel narratives of Christ's coming.
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Drawing on my inside knowledge of such matters acquired through St John’s College Cambridge, may I commend Dyson in F? With a suitable treble soloist it’s the most fabulous setting ever written (that’s my funeral taken care of). There’s also a Unison setting in C Minor for those occasions the choir doesn’t turn up and you want the congregation to sing something richer than a chant.
Funny thing about Dyson is that his day job was designing Mills Bombs at the Woolwich arsenal; but that’s another story…
Maggi,
Your American readers can’t download this via Amazon UK due to licensing constraints. However, we can download it via the ITunes Store at the link below.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=307686075&s=143441
It’s also available on itunes – you can download just the one piece or the whole album.
It’s even on spotify…. just search for Dyson in D
I remember a version of Nunc Dimmitis being sung at the end of the 1970’s dramatisation of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” with Alec Guinness. No idea whose version, though.
It’s by Geoffrey Burgon, Tony. Very lovely. The original, if I remember correctly, was for boy soprano and trumpet, but a later version was made by Aled Jones singing tenor and another boy soprano.
The remarkable thing is how different (though equally lovely) the D and the F are: one big-scale and the other intimate and even a bit bluesy. Even more gorgeously atmospheric than the F is the Benedicite. And even more splendidly wham bam than the D is the Ps 150.