Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Meditation on a Photo in 100 Words (5) Rosehips in October

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    Rosehips are the legacy left to us when the fragility and form of the rose has gone. Both are beautiful, but in autumn the defiant green refuses yet to fade, and sets off scarlet globes crammed with seeds. Such fruitfulness after the beauty of blossom, October remembering June, protecting the promised seeds of next year, and the next.

    So rosehips combine memory of beauty and hope of tomorrow. If Jesus had preached his sermon somewhere on the road to Bervie where this photo was taken, he might have said, "Consider the roses, and the rosehips…not even Solomon's glory…..

  • Keir Hardie, The Labour Party and the State We Are In.

    KeirI've been enjoying Bob Holman's study of Keir Hardie for various reasons. Professor Holman was one of the finest teachers I had at Glasgow University. Much of Hardie's life was lived in and around Cumnock, in Ayrshire, where much of my own childhood was spent. His background in mining, and the importance of the mines in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire resonates with my own family history in which back to 1860 on both sides, my own family were predominantly miners. And therefore his passionate outspoken criticism of wealth built on low wages and dreadful housing, of inherited privilege and its political protections, and his compassion for poor labourers, destitute unemployed and all but abandoned elderly poor likewise fires my own political and ethical opposition to injustice that is systemic and the valuing of human life on economic and financial scales.

    An intriguing series of parallels with Jeremy Corbyn makes it even more interesting. Hardie was mocked and verbally abused for daring to come into Parliament dressed in workers' tweeds; he was not prepared to validate the class elitism of the monarchy and on numerous occasions was outspoken about the cost of the monarchy, the indifference of the royal family to the plight of workers, and the validation of the Czar by a royal visit seeking trade agreements; he was vehemently opposed to militarism and especially the recruiting of working class young people to fight in the interests of Empire economics abroad. It would be too far to say Corbyn has modelled his political style and actions on Hardie, but there is strong DNA evidence of a common ancestry of ideas.

    Reading this story shows the vast distance that the modern Labour Party has travelled away from its social, ethical and ideological roots. In some ways it has had to adapt and develop, reshape and reinvent, in a rapidly changing world. But you are left with the question: If the blade of my spade wears out and I replace it, then the handle breaks and I replace it, do I still have the same spade – indeed, depending on what I replace the aprts with, do I still have a spade at all?

     

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    Have Mercy O Lord. The sea is so large, and my boat is so small.

    (Prayer of Breton Fishermen)

  • Shakespearean Party Song……

    Shakespeare

  • Martha and Mary and the Problematic Guest

    The past few days I've spent some study time exploring the story of Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary. You know the one – Martha banging pots, rattling dishes and cutlery, checking oven, swearing at the beeping microwave, piling everything in the dishwasher, trying to set a table while stirring a sauce, checking the recipe online, and Mary sitting at Jesus' feet. It isn't fair. Even less fair when Martha complains to Jesus and gets a telling off for getting so worked up.

    9-vermeer-christ-martha-mary-painting.previewWhat's that about? Well it's a long story trying to explain this short story. Martha is the one who welcomes and invites Jesus, assuming that for such an important guest everyone will muck in and get on with what needs to be done. Usually Mary and Martha are a team but this time Mary is sitting, all ears on what Jesus is saying. One of my favourite paintings is the Vermeer Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It's in the National Galleries in Edinburgh and it's now a regular stopping place if I'm in the city and it can possibly be done.

    This painting sent me chasing for other visual interpretations of this story and there are a lot. And they all tell the same story, but often with variations of how the scene is interpreted. Is Jesus annoyed or gentle? Is Martha criticised or consoled? Is Mary lazy or is she doing the right thing? Is conversation more important than food on the table when it comes to hospitality for a hungry guest? Does Martha miss the point, does Jesus overlook Martha's practical kindness or indulge Mary's fascination with the radical teacher from Nazareth? How has Mary chosen the better part and the one thing necessary? Does that mean that all those practical souls whose kindness and friendship is expressed through their own nature as doers of the word, are to be told what they are doing isn't the way to love God? As if those who pray and read the Bible are more in line with what God wants than the person who bakes the bread, drops in with the casserole, misses the prayer meeting to take someone for a hospital appointment?

    Yes, I know. Mary was listening to the word, and Martha was clattering in the kitchen. No amount of working, doing, activity is a substitute for prayer, devotion and looking after your soul. But Martha, if she ever gets a fair hearing, might want to say, "Well no amount of praying and Bible study and worship songs are going to feed the proper hunger of the body – give us this day our daily bread is, for a baker, a command to use gift and energy in feeding others." The word activism is a good put down word, usually used by those who want to be super-spiritual and dismiss the spirituality of those who like Bezalel in Exodus 31 was gifted by the Spirit with the practicalities of hand and mind to get the job done.

    EverettAnnette Everett created a beautiful statue of Martha and Mary standing together, back to back, the sculptor's way of saying that contemplation and action, listening and doing, being with Jesus and working for Jesus, are both required in the model disciple. This, and Vermeer's painting are interpretations in which Martha isn't put down, but helped to see that all the effort in the world isn't a substitute for attentive listening to what the guest actually wants, needs and expects. Hospitality is not to foist the host's agenda driven approach to making the guest feel welcome; it is to pay attention to what the guest says, to offer first the gift of presence and that precious time needed to get a good meal on the table.

    There is a rich and varied tradition of how this story has been used in the church down the centuries, across the world in different cultures, and often as a co-opted script to put women in their place! That's another story, but reader beware and be aware, Luke in telling this story has Mary doing what a man does and a woman is never expected to do in Jesus' time. And Martha's activism (a word too often used in a pejorative dismissal of people's hard work) is described as diakonia, ministry, service. Together these two women contain the rich diversities of Christian ministry and devotion to God, the love of neighbour and God, the practical kindness that prepares food and the attentive listening that receives the gift the guest brings.

    Such a rich story.

  • Autumn, Compost and Living Towards God

    DSC03601-1Autumn is one of the hinge seasons of the year, a turning from summer to winter through the slow process of maturation, fruitfulness and letting go. As a boy I helped my dad run a market garden sized greenhouse, growing and selling pot plants, many of them grown from cuttings. The compost was home made, a combination of soil (often collected from molehills in the spring), river gravel from the Nith, peat and finally leaf mould.

    The leaf mould came from one of the woods within walking distance of our cottage, that layer of rich, rotted humus accumulated over years and years of shed leaves, which felt like the richest pile carpet you ever walked on. With a hessian sack, a small riddle and a pair of old leather gloves I would happily go and collect a bag of leaf mould, riddled under the branches of beech, lime, oak, sycamore, elm and rowan trees. The smell of rich composting vegetation still creates for me images of a boyhood spent in fields, woods, by riverbanks, hills and small lochans.

    This time of year is an evocative month or two when, despite all the changes to the countryside, I walk in a state of moderate wonder-looking, or in the words of John's Gospel, 'beholding', 'gazing' and 'contemplating', the range of colours in trees on the turn. Leaf mould is a benevolent legacy, a gift from previous years, a store that nourishes and gives life beyond its own life. Each autumn, another downpayment to the fertility of our earth and its soil. One of the lessons learned in boyhood, but not realised till later life is the slowness and hiddenness of those layers of leaves, gently decaying into a medium for new life.

    In my mind perhaps a similar process takes place. Ideas that years ago seemed so gripping, real and certain, mellow into a maturing compost of thought, memory, experience and a restfulness no longer needing such gripping certainty, and content with a wondering thoughtfulness I take to be wisdom. Not the resignation of 'all passion spent', as if nothing mattered much any more. Rather, an intellectual steadiness and spiritual humility that looks on the world not as a competition to be won, but a game to be played, a play to be performed, a score to be improvised using as much of ourselves and our gifts and our hard learned skills as we can bring to it.

    It's over half a century since I went for sacks of leaf mould. I trust that over those intervening decades my thoughts and feelings, ideas and emotions, decisions and choices, words and silences, tears and actions, have settled like falling leaves onto the compost that is my life. And year on year that topsoil supplemented by the rich materials of a life lived so far as grace and love allow, towards God.

  • Meditation on a Photo in 100 Words (4) Kings College Chapel.

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     "The church is not the building, it's the people." Those words are a truth which, if pushed too far, lose their grip on the truth they affirm. A church is a people being formed in community, gathered and scattered and gathered again for worship. A church building is a place where prayer and praise, baptism and communion, year on year, are offered. The building is not sacred; yet what is done there, like slow falling rain, soaks the nutrients of holiness into the soul. In this building, over centuries, souls have prayed, and holiness has taken root in their lives.

     

  • 100 Word Meditation on a Photo (3) King’s College Aberdeen

    DSC03403August in Aberdeen, early morning mist, laden with drizzle, the crown and the cross silhouetted against soft grey skies.

    The cross that, when lifted up will draw all people to the Crucified, seen rising above the trees, the gentle wetness seeping through branches and leaves, coalescing in large drops that fall as tears on those walking below.

    The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous; not a thow-away remark, but one of Jesus' one-liners in which is condensed an entire theology of the love that falls with extravagant benevolence, and gentle mercy, on our broken, God-made, love drenched world.

  • 100 Word Meditation on a Photo (2) King’s College Aberdeen

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    Round your table, through your giving,

    show us how to live and pray

    till your Kingdom's way of living

    is the bread we share each day.

    bread for us and for our neighbour,

    bread for body, mind and soul,

    bread of heaven and human labour –

    broken bread that makes us whole.

    Dean Ramsey tells of the parish minister of Stonehaven giving thanks for the safe ingathering of harvest, "except for a few stooks between here and Bervie". Clearly it's good to be precise with the Almighty and the extent of blessing received, not to limit gratitude, but to earth praise.

     

  • 100 Word Meditation on a Photo (1) King’s College Aberdeen

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    The beauty of old wood, satin to the touch, warm and worn to a dust induced patina, painstakingly rubbed by accident or intent, polished by a procession of worshippers, done and dusted over decades.

    The interlocking triunity of carved circles are symbols of grace love and communion; creating, redeeming, sustaining, life, light and love; gifts of Father, Son and Spirit, set within garlands of fruit and flowers.

    The durability of cared for wood creates in King's College Chapel a sense of time, past present and hoped for. To sit and rest against wise old timber, is prayer.