Book Review: Strangely Warmed: Reflections on God, Life and Bric-a-Brac

Strangely Warmed: Reflections on God, Life and Bric-a-Brac
by Andrew Rumsey
Continuum Press, $14.95, 118 pages


Reviewed by Martha K. Baker

    Andrew Rumsey’s Strangely Warmed is a small book of Lenten meditations, and though its font is mighty teensy, its fountain is deep.  Although Lent 2010 has already pinked past Laetare, here’s a marvelous book to make up for lost time or to prepare for Lent 2011.     Strangely Warmed fills in its first gap merely by having been recently published. This book is more than just available, however: Rumsey fills in yet another gap with new, original thoughts on Lent, and Strangely Warmed zips up another “gap-o-sis” with Laughter. Turns out, that’s what many Lents have been missing heretofore. There’s a complementary reason one of the poets Rumsey quotes most often is R.S. Thomas.As Rumsey writes in his Introduction, “Christian satire has not exactly taken off as a literary genre, whereas the need for it remains as urgent as ever.”  
  
    Rumsey describes Lent as this “spiritually dyspeptic time of year,” a season “bookended with banquets,” but in his opening essay,  “The Lion’s Share,” he notes that only those of us who love chocolate [Guilty!] “...may truly, if grudgingly, let it go.” For Day 40 of this penitential season, Rumsey offers, “Live in Extraordinary Beauty,” an essay about faith and laughter, William Blake and Isaac (Sarah and Abraham’s funny boy), based on the shout of a billboard Rumsey found advertising a housing development: “Live in extraordinary beauty.”

    The essays between these two provokers cover such topics as reality checkpoints, Victorian hymns v. praise music (“gung-ho imperialism and laboured intimacy”), sanctimonious drivel, the Jesus nut (essential to helicopters’ loftiness), and “the pigeon of peace.”  Rumsey, vicar of Gipsy Hill in South London, writes beautifully with craft and respect for rhetoric and composition. He presents chewable ideas, such as Jesus’ prayer life passed on to his followers or “...you don’t escape the millstone of tradition by starting afresh.” Rumsey mints verbcoins like “tapeworms” for the movement of cars behind a slowpoke; he’s a good source of new words (for me: “busular,” “tannoyed,” and “curlew”). He makes up words where he needs them: “evandalism” is “an indiscriminate dumping of the gospel without thought to surroundings.”

    Rumsey offers clear definitions -- Nostalgia is “history after a few drinks,” for example. He writes guided meditations and liturgies with his ink-stained tongue in his cheek , and if these don’t make you laugh, then you need a tune-up. Oh, Rumsey has a few tunes for you, too. Best of all, his exemplary essays form tight little circles, the head biting the tail like a good, old fox stole worn by a beloved English teacher.

    Ideally, these essays should be read one a day, like a multi-vitamin, but it’s so hard to stop reading because they’re fine (especially “The Sea Is His”) and funny. Strangely Warmed makes you very glad that Lent refers to the “lengthening of days” because that means more time to read Andrew Rumsey, this Lent or next, or the whole year through.