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Earlier this week I was conducting the funeral service for one of those mythical “old ladies” who sits in the back seat of the church, and to whom in years past ministers were encouraged to preach. The ridiculous idea being that they indicated the accessibility level at which to aim. Patronising nonsense of course, because some of the finest theologians I know, and some of the most mature wise human beings it’s been my privilege to meet, inhabited (and still inhabit) those back seats!

And the woman whose funeral I took this week was one of those theologians; wise, experienced, faith simple and strong, but a faith tested in the hard places and tough times of a long life. She was a single mum in the early 1950's when there were precious few benefits and safety nets; she rented a two up and two down, converted the front room, and opened a corner shop open all hours; learned to drive and got an old Bedford van, became the taxi and supporter in chief for the local football team, and in the late early 60's was road manager for a couple of Manchester pop groups.

And there's more – but that's enough to rebuke the stereotypes. In an age impatient with age, and a society where being old is getting harder to be, maybe it’s those old women and men at the back of the church who can teach us a thing or two about what’s what in life. Edith’s favourite word was “trust”, followed closely by “risk”. And a favourite verse: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your paths.”

It's been some weeks since I was reularly posting here. Various reasons for this amongst them a short sabbatical from blogging – I have been at it for 9 years! It isn't that the world has become less interesting, or that there is nothing to be said or written about that same world in all its complexity, tragedy, potential and possible futures. More a sense that, life on this planet is beginning to feel like being in the passenger seat of a car with a driver hell bent on showing off how many risks he can take without crashing!

The epigraph of this blog is taken from the script of the play A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. Living Wittily is my way of describing that wit and wisdom that comes from trying to see the world from a Christian perspective. To love God with our minds, is to think about things always with God on the horizon, to think Christianly, and to be humble enough to admit that thinking Christianly is neither straightforward nor easily discerned. Not least because Christians think differently, and in their differences of history and context come at questions of theology, ethics, politics, economics, relationships and most other important matters, from their particular perspective, speaking out of their story, and with their limited vision and their unique experience. And their perspective, story, vision and experience are not mine – though if I listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully, what they bring will enrich and broaden, challenge and correct, many of my unguarded or unexamined assumptions. And out of that comes what makes our human existence and experience more humane, and I would argue, more Christian.

That's why Living Wittily has to be done in  the tangle of our minds. Wisdom is hard won, the precious deposit of decisions, choices, actions, insights, mistakes, memories, encounters and experiences; wisdom is what is left when we are humble enough to have learned from our lives up to now. So here is that epigraph again – a kind of manifesto of this blog, and a re-engagement with this God-loved, broken, beautiful, frightening and unique world.And that wisdom comes from many sources – as noted above our encounters and conversations, similarities and differences with others; our wrestling with Scripture through the long hours, refusing to let go until we are blessed and have some hint as to the name and nature of God, and some sense of what God requires of us. 

So have a look again at the epigraph at the top of this page: it shows the underlying presupposition of what is written on this blog:

God made the angels to show his splendour – as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds.

Robin Parry, Lamentations. Two Horizons Commentary on the Old Testament. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.)

At the very start of this fine book Parry comments on Western culture’s aversion to pain, tragedy and grief. He observes:

“We have been robbed of a vocabulary of grief and we suffer for it. The book of Lamentations accosts us by the wayside as a stranger who offers us an unasked-for, unwanted, and yet priceless gift – the poetry of pain. We would be wise to pay attention.”

Indeed. But it is a difficult book. Not only an alien and ancient text, and with its own exegetical conundrums and textual entanglements. But Lamentations is a howl of pain, exposing its readers to the raw brutality and anguished afterlife of disaster that ruins everything; city, worldview, economy, political structures, faith, society of family, neighbourhood and nations. The result is trauma, a disorientation of the soul, a numbing of the mind, and an emotional life blighted from fruitfulness into wilderness by events that were overwhelming. It is well named, Lamentations, a poetry of pain, recited in the desolating loneliness and emotional agony of lives evacuated of meaning.

It is a hard but necessary read. At least it is necessary if faith is to be adequate to the brutal violence and calculated cruelties of war, terror, and destruction unleashed by those called the enemy, whose hatred is implacable and in whom mercy never took root. In a world where drones deliver death by remote control, and suicide and barrel bombs inflict death and terror, the victims and the bereaved utter their own bewildered, despairing laments. Words, the grammar of the voice, enable reality to be named, even if that reality is tragic beyond reason and is experienced as unassuaged grief, fear and rage.

The book of Lamentations was written to be read, and is to be read so as to be heard. It is a warning of the consequences of enmity let loose with weapons, of hatred equipped with imperial power, of all those acts and activities, attitudes and mind-sets, in which the destruction of the means of life, and the taking of life itself, are each seen as not only acceptable, but by twisted logic or toxic faith, are celebrated as offerings to god, or nation, or race.

Reading Lamentations is an exercise in depth explorations, a willing listening to the human spirit articulating its own shattered hopes. Commentary on the text must involve exegetical care, historical discipline and an alert sense of how poetry, image, theology, and faith are straining at the limits of meaning. So there must also be a further step beyond exegesis, historical context and constructive commentary. It is this further step that makes this commentary a quite exceptional treatment of Lamentations.

The Two Horizons Commentary aims at both traditional exegesis, but supplemented and developed by a series of theological reflections which send out new trajectories for further exploration and application of the text in question. That approach is made to work quite brilliantly in the exposition of this book so laden with sadness, so bewildered in its anguish, so vulnerable in its anger and guilt and loss, and yet, and nevertheless, defiant of giving in to ultimate despair.

The Introduction constructs the context, explores the genre of poetic lamentation, and seeks to show the canonical connections. A fine 10 pages looks at modern attempts to identify and explore the theology of Lamentations, and considers in brief essays “Sin and Punishment in Covenant Context” and “Hope in Covenant Context.” The theological oscillation set up between sin and punishment and hope, and these in the context of an unbreakable Covenant broken, takes us to the very heart of the book. Then for 125 pages Parry moves through the text, using his own translation, opening up the interpretive options, and demonstrating the rich tapestry of words woven together into poems and songs of lament, with occasional glimpses of hoped for recovery, restoration, and perhaps renewal of covenant faithfulness. This first horizon of the text is lucid, packed with interaction with secondary scholarship and making intertextual connections with the wider canon of Scripture. In particular, as brought out in two later sections, the relations of Lamentations to Isaiah 40-55 and to the New Testament.

The second section of the book is 76 pages of Theological Horizons which pick up a wide range of themes and connections which further illumine the text. Taken together, the two horizons fuse into a series of essays of varying length and development. One particular highlight for me was the connections made between Lamentations and Second Isaiah, and the significance of Second Isaiah picking up some of the key themes and in some cases the actual text of Lamentations, and showing how they are reversed. The “no one to comfort” of Lamentations, gives way to the call “Comfort, comfort my people”; the children as casualties of war give way to children being born and rejoicing in return. Lamentations as the cry of victims of anti-Semitic violence, Lamentations and political theology, particularly the critique of empire were further well-made implications for contemporary reflection and action.

Three more substantial pieces are on Lamentations and the Rule of Faith, The Place of Lament in Christian Spirituality and Theodicy and Divine Suffering. Together these reflections climb down into the theological crevasses that split across the human experiences that gave rise to Lamentations; and they provide us with profound reflections which compel us to hear those lamentations with 21^st Century ears, and to pay attention to the peoples of this world for whom the devastation of their cities, the blowing up of their hopes and the tearing down of their cultural identity are real, and now, and just as unforgiveable.

We are in debt to Robin Parry for a commentary that takes such suffering seriously, and has thought about it deeply. His treatment of divine suffering is theologically nuanced, careful but not constrained by those who would foreclose too early on divine suffering as an aspect of God’s willing love. There are a number of good commentaries on Lamentations, including Paul House in the Word Biblical Commentary (twinned with Duane Garrett on Song of Songs), Dobbs-Allsop in the Interpretation series, Leslie Allen’s Pastoral Commentary, A Liturgy of Grief, and Kathleen O’Connor’s Lamentations and the Tears of the World. I’ve used each of these with considerable profit and learning. But this volume by Parry offers more, and due to the format of exegesis and theologically reflective essays, more that is different. This is a commentary, read alongside one or other of the above, that makes Lamentations not only preachable, but important to preach.   

Elie Wiesel has died. This man was a giant of our times, one whose humanity was lumninous with the complementary passions of peace building and resistance to inhumanity. A survivor of Auschwitz, he has spent the long life that was spared in the pursuit of truth telling, moral remembering, peace building and a more humane and humanising view of all human beings regardless of all things whatsoever by which they are different from us. There will be important things written in the obituaries, and as the fruit of his life is harvested in words, memories, tributes and evaluations.

I simply want to tell one story of my encounters with Elie Wiesel through his writing. Like many theologians and Christians keen to make sense of what it is I believe about how God works in the world, and how I hear God's voice. I puzzle over those moments of wonder when God's presence rubs against my commonsense, those coincidences of circumstance that couldn't be contrived, those times when you reflect on what has just happened and say, "You couldn't make it up."

We were on holiday in Yorkshire, in an old railway cottage near Goathland. It was a week of sunshine, the cottage had an old fashioned cottage garden, in full bloom, a small river running along the bottom edge, and across it a field full of cows. twice a day the Yorkshire steam train came through the tunnel at the edge of the field, puffing, and whistling as it exited the tunnel. There was a tree on the lawn which I sat under most days, reading. That holiday I had taken a bag of books – I know this because I always do – one of which was the recently published volume 1 of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea. 

On a sunny afternoon I sat reading his harrowing and deeply personal account of being transported to Auschwitz, and his continuing terrors years afterwards on hearing a steam train whistle. As I reached that part of his story, and just as I was reading his description of the steam whistle as a scream of fear, the Yorkshire steam train emerged from the unnel over the field and whistled. It was a moment heavy with a meaning I couldn't then, and still now, cannot fully fathom. It was eerily appropriate, the timing precise and the sound like an echo vibrating down the years as a reminder of how technology, machinery and industrial scale mechanisation, are forces for immense good and incalculable evil.

I remember closing the book, a hardback with its dustcover photo of Wiesel the survivor, writer of books that seared and commanded human conscience, teacher of peace and Nobel Laureate; and I remember thinking of how a teenage boy arriving at Auschwitz had heard that same sound, with a nameless dread that had crystallised through the years into an adamantine resolve that what happened would not be forgotten, or forgiven. Wiesel's life work was to be a witness; to tell what happened; to refuse any diminishment of the enormity and perdurance of those crimes of mechanised and state resourced genocide. Forgiveness is for God he has argued. His own refusal to forgive the unforgiveable is not a defiance of God, it is in obedience of his call to witness. But the complementary commitment is to peace advocacy, bridge building, support of humane neighbourliness.

That sunny afternoon, in a Yorkshire country cottage garden, seated in the shade of a tree, two worlds intersected, and I have a memory of a penny dropping into the fathomless depths of human suffering, and just the beginnings of understanding the capacity of this man to not only survive the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but to survive the attempt to destroy his own humanity, and that of millions of others. It remains one of the most solemn interludes of my life, and one of the most vivid experiences of learning that goes deeper than intellectual cognition – it was a moment of recognition. 

There are novels which once read become part of the way you think and look at the world. The story draws you in, you become identified with the characters and plot, you slowly invest yourself in the narrative flow and in the outcome and resolution of the plot. Chaim Potok's The Chosen is one such novel in my own life. I read it in 1974, on my way to University on University Avenue in Glasgow. I was in the upstairs deck of a double decker bus, it was dreich and wet and nearly dark, and I was lost in that first chapter about the baseball game and how an enmity turned into a friendship between two boys from very different Jewish traditions, living in Brooklyn in the 1940's.

I've re-read The Chosen several times since, and saw the movie which had Rod Steiger as the Rebbe and a cameo by Potok as a Talmud Professor. If you've never read it, do yourself a favour and do so, and the sequel The Promise which continues the story of the two friends, Danny Saunders and Reuven Malters.

Here are a number of reasons why I think this is a wonderful novel, and transformative of the way we look at the world

This is the story of a friendship. Two 15 year old students become friends after they have a serious confrontation in a baseball game, injected with religious hostility between two different ways of being Jewish. Reuven's father is a professor of Jewish studies, expert in historical criticism, liberal in his methods and conclusions, but nonetheless devoted to Talmud and Torah as the foundation of his people's identity. Danny's father is the Rebbe of a local Hasidic sect, a powerful and charismatic religious leader of conservative and even reactionary views about Talmud, and the Messiah the hope of Israel. Through the two friends, these two cultures clash, and the friendship is threatened by the collision of two worlds.

Throughout the story Talmud, the text, has the significance of a pervasive character, which takes on a life of its own in the studies, discussions and collision of ideas as Jewish faith either accommodates to or confronts the modern world. The historical critical methods call in question the fixed integrity of the text and look for meaning through scientific research and text critical methods. The vast traditional oral and written commentaries provide the given options for the conservative Talmudists of the Hasidic community. The confrontation of these approaches to Talmudic text at several places is a revelation of the piety, passion and devotion of both traditions to the text, and these are embodied in the two friends, and their fathers. 

A major theme of the novel is silence. The use of silence as a formative imposition on Danny by his father the Rebbe, the enforced silence between the friends by the Rebbe's reaction to the foundation of the State of Israel, but also the times of silence for healing, grieving, listening both to the world and to others. In libraries the two friends find a place to meet and talk and think; not so much silence as a congenial place for listening, another major theme woven throughout the story.

The novel begins with an eye injury, and then time in a hospital ward where others have eye problems. All the main characters have spectacles, and different eye problems, whether from lack of sleep, tension headaches, overwork in studying and writing, and these background references are subtly suggestive in the accounts of reading and studying Talmud, Danny's feverish study of Freud, and also in the background a refrain from the start of the book by an eye-injured boxer that the world is cock-eyed.

These and other elements of Potok's novel are interlaced with the main theme of friendship and its tensions, and the place of religion in the modern world. That the friendship survives and indeed flourishes points to the possibility of religious accommodation, mutual respect and an alternative to the need to negate the other in order to secure one's own identity.

I'm reading a number of Potok's novels again. And being made aware of the significant nudges still felt in the reading. The Palestine and Israeli conflict and the exclusion of Torah from the political and civil legislation of Israel; the dangers of both fundamentalism and of scientific criticism when they claim a monopoly of authority, methodology and interpretive validity; the importance of the sacred text in a religious tradition, and its capacity to be a power for enlightenment or ignorance, or its capacity to bring together or divide. This is a novel written in 1966 – 50 years later it still has prophetic echoes.

Reading a review of Landmarks, by Robert Macfalane, by the excellent essayist Alan Jacobs, I came across a lexical controversy I had forgotten. Jacobs who is an expert in words and reading, brought it back to mind. By the way when I say an "expert in words and reading" I am not being merely rhetorical or spouting ill-considered exaggeration, as if the same could not be said of every good writer. Alan Jacobs has written important work on A Theology of Reading, and The Distracted Reader, as well as numerous volumes of essays known for their literary range, psychological astuteness, theological and philosophical awareness and, as important as each of these, their ability to educate both intellect and heart.

Here is an extract from the review:

"Near the outset of Landmarks, Macfarlane describes a controversy that emerged only at the beginning of 2015, though it centered on something that happened in 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary appeared:

A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

A representative of the press explained the ratonale for this decision: " 'When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance … that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed." A number of writers, including Macfarlane, protested this change, and one of them, the poet Andrew Motion, commented with some heat: "Their defence—that lots of children have no experience of the countryside—is ridiculous. Dictionaries exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know or half-know."

Jacobs goes on to point out that the important issue at stake isn't the retention of the words in the dictionary, but the loss of knowledge, experience and awareness that underlies the redundancy and then excision of words from the language of ordinary experience. My reasons for thinking more about this go deeper still. The learning of language, and the associated tasks of education, interpretation, writing and communication, are each dependent on the availability and currency of words. If words are removed from use then the world is reconfigured around their absence, and shaped into the future by the presence, and often the aggressive presence, of new words, many of them related, as indicated in the quote above, to technology and IT.

It is the work of people like Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin, Nan Shepherd, three of the best British nature writers of the past century, to chronicle the surrounding natural world, to conserve the richness of language and naming, to describe what others may not have the opportunity or inclination to see, and thus to keep our semantic currency rich in traditions local and parochial, and therefore capable of maintaining the richly woven fabric of description and meaning that such humane writing preserves. The idea that we could ever think, let alone make lexical and publishing policy of key reference texts, on the assumption that a child does not need a description of an acorn because they may never see one or come across the word, is one that should alert a culture awash with technologisms to the dehumanising effects of language culling.

Yes, I do. I mark my own books, with a system I've used since University and College days. Always in pencil, and books I know I will want to revisit, consult, read again, and books I want to review, precis and take notes from. There is a discipline close to an art form to marking up a text that has been studied, read closely and deeply, listened to and heard. Personal notes in a personally owned book are like footprints left on the journey, or guideposts left as aids for the next time we pass on this particular path.

And that's the thing. Personal notes in a personally owned book. The first two photos on this post are of books in the University Library in Aberdeen. Disfigured, vandalised, rendered all but unreadable by anyone coming after the perpetrated horrors of ink, highlights and addiction to underlining. The readers who did this, students or staff, have stolen the property of the library as surely as if they had shoved the books up their jumpers and sauntered out into the sunshine carrying, irony multiplied, books about the providence of God! Paul Helm's lucid survey of this difficult yet comforting doctrine about the God who sees and foresees, is an unreadable mess of ink from pens leaned on so hard that the pages are indented on the back as well as defaced on the print side. The use of liquid ink makes it even worse as the ink bleeds through to obscure the print behind.

It's an interesting, and surprisingly depressing exercise to ask what goes on in the mind of a person who takes a book from the shelves which is the property of all students, and feels free to lay it waste as an aid to their education. Education, that process that seeks to make us more informed, wise, responsible, civil, equipped for life in society, open to new ideas and willing to question our old ones. How do you educate people to not destroy the means of education? Or how can you alert potential readers to the privilege, gift, responsibility and opportunity that is a library, and that all that richness and possibility depends on the integrity and stewardship of the hundreds of thousands of volumes held in trust for the purposes of humane learning? And that's the other word, trust. These photos are accurate diagrams of broken trust; they are blueprints of a selfishness that unless converted or checked, will carry on into the world after graduation, as an assumed entitlement to take rather than give, possess rather than share, lay waste whatever can be consumed and steal whatever they want enough to have, but don't want enough to pay for.

Now this picture is different. These are two dilapidated, almost disbound books sitting a couple of feet from each other on the shelves. They are surprisingly unmarked by readers, of whom there have been hundreds. Bultmann on John's Gospel and Carson on John's Gospel. Goodness! For those not familiar with New Testament Studies, the approach of these two scholars could not be more different – almost all they have in common is the title, and it is a given! The issue slips inside have been replaced countless times; they have been consulted, read, studied, plundered, referred to, for years. They should really be sent to be rebound, and no doubt some time they will. But there is a noble shabbiness in such well used books, and honourable dilapidation of burst spines, bumped corners and frayed hinges.

If there was a library sale tomorrow, I'd buy these. They are witnesses to the discipline of study and the durability of classic works. Because different as they are, Bultmann on John is a classic of 20th Century exegesis, famously described as a volume in which Bultmann asked all the right questions and gave mostly the wrong answers. And Carson represents a tradition of conservative scholarship, alongside Leon Morris, which takes the historicity and theological integrity of John with great seriousness. I am a bibliophile, and few sights are more satisfying than books which have enriched generations of students, and have the wear and tear to prove it. There are many books on those shelves, some as old as these, which have hardly been disturbed since acquisition – that doesn't make them worthless or useless. But these books, and others like them, they carry the fingerprints of many readers, the bindings are shaken and split, but their worn shabbiness has its own poignant beauty.