A painting of a hand writing a letter by candlelight.

Writing it Down

I wonder how many of us can remember learning to read and to write? They are apparently very different learning processes and our individual experiences of learning these processes are shaped by our brains as much as by our teachers. For all our brains learn in subtly different ways as they forge the essential neural pathways, linking the many parts of the brains that are connected with the skills of reading and writing. I loved learning to read – my memories are of a dawning realisation of just how liberating reading could be. Learning to write felt a far more laborious and painstaking process, because simply holding a pencil firmly enough can be a challenge for a young child’s hand. And I was luckier than my two left handed brothers, who struggled with teachers who thought that being left handed was not acceptable. Our relationship with reading and writing will have been shaped by our early experiences – be that for good or for ill. And as I’ve crafted this service around the theme of ‘writing it down’ it felt important to acknowledge the pain as well as the pleasure of the process of writing. If you are someone who has struggled with dyslexia, for example, my hope is that in adult life you have found ways to access the pleasure of the written world, ways to express yourself that work for you.

Because writing is a way to express ourselves, to let the world know something of who we are. And this is well described in a story of the Sufi Holy Fool, Mulla Nasrudin who had, it is said, one day invited a well-known philosopher round to his house for conversation of an intellectual nature. The philosopher arrived at Nasrudin’s house at the time they had agreed only to find that no-one was at home to greet him. Nasrudin had forgotten their appointment and was in the local tea house, playing games and telling stories with his friends. After waiting some time the philosopher grew angry. Picking up a piece of chalk he wrote ‘Stupid oaf!’ on Nasrudin’s door and left in a huff.

As soon as he got home and saw this, Nasrudin rushed round to the philosopher’s house.

‘I had completely forgotten our appointment’ he said, ‘and I do apologise for not being at home. Of course, I remembered the appointment as soon as I saw that you had left your name on my door.’ (from a version in Elisa Pearmain’s ‘Doorways to the Soul’.)

A couple of years ago there was a series on Radio 4 called The History of the World in 100 Objects. Written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, this was a sweeping tour through world history, told through the stories of 100 carefully chosen objects from their collection. So enjoyable were these programmes that I went out and bought the book – it’s weighty and wonderful and in it you can find, amongst so much else, the history of writing. It’s intriguing to think of a time when nothing was written down, pre-history as it’s known because it was before the time when human beings were able to write their historical records. Elsewhere in the newsletter you will find photos of our recent trip to the stone circles of Avebury – a trip I think we’d all recommend, despite the icy winds that day. As we stood by the ancient stones, our guide reminded us that most of what she was about to tell us was mere conjecture – because the people who first erected the hundreds of stones at Avebury, both in circles and in long avenues, had no writing, they left no written records.  We have to piece together an idea of who they were and what was important to them from what they have left behind. And much of what they left behind has vanished in the mists of time – what remains are the items that do not rot – stones, flint axe heads, bones, and bits of pottery.

Some of the early work at Avebury was happening around 3,500BCE. Around that time, in at least four distinct parts of the world, a few people were starting to write – in Mesopotamia (now Iraq), China, Egypt and Central America. The earliest forms of writing were pictograms – where a shape reflects what it is meant to represent – and as Neil MacGregor explains –  earliest writing was not literary, it was bureaucratic, for record keeping and administration. This was a time before money and these early pieces of writing were all about keeping a society functioning efficiently. One of the earliest stone tablets kept by the British Museum, for example, is a record of the amount of beer given to workers as wages.

The next stage in the development of writing was to move from pictograms to phonetic symbols, with signs to represent sounds.  Just imagine how exciting that process of creating written language must have been for scribes. Little wonder that for thousands of years scribes were people with great power and prestige. And when writing becomes part of human culture, it gradually enables us to deepen our creativity and to deepen the complexity of our thinking. Without writing we would not have been able to develop complex societies and governments, or money and higher mathematics, or philosophy and theology.

Our order of service mentions the removing of clothes in the British Museum, so let me tell you that story. We humans didn’t need writing to develop storytelling for that was an ancient oral tradition but around 3000BCE scribes started to write these ancient stories down and literature began. The very first written story is now generally considered to be The Epic of Gilgamesh, a mythic tale which includes reference to a great flood. A clay tablet which has this story written on it is in the British Museum and in the Victorian era nobody was able to read it, nobody that is until one George Smith took an interest in the clay tablets. So intrigued was he by them that he eventually managed to decipher their cuneiform script, made by a reed wedge pressed into damp clay. That a Hebrew Biblical story of The Flood should already have been told on a Mesopotamian clay tablet was an astounding discovery, as Smith knew. For it meant that the Bible’s place as the Word of God , or the only word of God, had been compromised.

Listen to this contemporary account of Smith’s moment of discovery;

“Smith took the tablet and began to read over the lines which the conservator who had cleaned the tablet had brought to light, and when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said ‘I am the first man to read that after 2000 years of oblivion.’ Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!”

A remarkable thing to do but it marked a truly remarkable discovery – one that was to disturb contemporary society just as much as Darwin’s work on evolution contained in his book On the Origin of Species.

This service is being held to honour our congregation’s book group which has its 100th meeting in late March. If you’ve not yet had chance to read last month’s newsletter (March 2013) I recommend the sections where people choose their favourite books. This morning we’ve thought about the history of writing – spanning back 5,000 years to those early beginnings when The Epic of Gilgamesh was at last written down to become the first literary work. The British Library now holds about 14 million books – and that’s just books and that’s primarily just books published in the UK. That is an overwhelming number – and I haven’t even managed to read all of the 100 book group titles yet, which you can find listed on our website.

And writing of course is not just about books – for most of us use writing all the time – in our shopping lists and other lists of things to do; some people still write letters and cards – and some of us really appreciate receiving them; we write text messages and emails; some people write diaries and journals to record their lives and their thoughts; many of us write little notes to ourselves and to others, so we don’t forget something vital. We use writing to help shape our relationship with ourselves and with the world around us. For writing allows us to make sense of our world – be that through a simple list of what to buy when next we go to the shops, or through a deep process of writing of our inner world, our dreams, our spiritual musings perhaps.

Writing, however, isn’t always a positive thing. Nasrudin’s philosopher friend writing ‘stupid oaf’ on his door is a mild example of the hurt that writing can cause us. Anyone who has ever received a wounding email or letter will know that the old adage of ‘sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting us’ is far from the truth. Words can bring great pain and when the words are written down there is such a temptation, isn’t there, to keep returning to them – to read them once more, to mull over them.

Perhaps that’s why I find a particular line in John’s Gospel so very intriguing. You may recognise it: ‘Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground’. Older translations describe him as ‘writing in the sand’. The implication is that whatever he has written can be wiped away and yet the message, whatever the message was, has been delivered to those who need to hear it. This is the story of the woman about to be stoned for adultery. The scribes and the Pharisees are testing Jesus, trying to trick him, to force him to say ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ to the teachings of Mosaic law, which would condemn a woman caught in the act of adultery to be stoned to death. Jesus leans down and writes something in the sand and then invites anyone who is without sin to cast the first stone – and then once again he writes in the sand and the crowd melts away one by one, leaving Jesus alone with the woman whose life he had saved that day. We will never know what he wrote in the sand and, with that unknowing, let us leave this celebration of the gift that is writing. And I wonder what private message you might write to yourself in the sand?

Rev. Sarah Tinker

Sermon – 17th March 2013