Article in Stretton Focus, February 2016
Sydney Carter would have been 100 years old in this year of 2016. Ian Bradley has written a fine tribute to him, mentioning the hymns by which Carter will be remembered for the next hundred years and longer. These include hymns like Lord of the Dance; When I Needed a Neighbour Were You There; and One More Step Along the World I Go.
Carter was a Quaker with a deep spirituality, a wide religious outlook, and a questioning mind. He said that his hymns and poems were ‘a celebration of the question mark, without which there can be no faith or doubt, nothing but dead certainty’.
Bradley says that there is too much shallow certainty in contemporary Christian worship songs and Carter would have agreed with that, as the title of one of his books of poetry indicates, Nothing Fixed and Final.
The conjunction of those two words, ‘dead’ and ‘certain’ is very appropriate. Certainty is ‘dead’ in the sense it has nothing to learn, it has arrived, no more thinking and questioning needed, the mind has gone dead. How boring, and how dangerous!
Even ‘being certain’ of so-called facts, can be a risky claim. Any married couple will remember when they had a difference of opinion, with one of them being ‘dead certain’ they were right; until it proved otherwise, when a large piece of humble pie had to be eaten (always a good and healthy food!). It is even more dangerous when people are dead certain about God, and about what they consider to be the mind of God. The pages of history are strewn with human wreckage, victims of those who have been rash enough and foolish enough to be dead certain of what they believe.
Certainty is the opposite of faith, but faith is the only way of knowing God. Faith is the trust and the hope that love is eternal. It is a contradiction to say that you are certain of that in which you trust; all we can do is live in the light of it.
Donald Horsfield
