Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • The Angel Share – The Amber Liquid of Hope….

    Had a moving and hilarious night at the cinema watching The Angel's Share. I've heard about it from others who went, and missed it on general release but caught it on a one off showing in Aberdeen. The reviews describe it as a movie about a young ned with a last chance to make something more of his life. No big names in the film, but lots of acting talent and character portrayal – from the caricature to the stereotype.

    Angel
    Everyone will find their own window into this hard world of social realism at the tough end of the socio-economic spectrum. For me there were several stand out moments in a film that simply drew me into the dramas of several lives, as they slowly became the woven strands of the central drama – how to steal the world's rarest cask of whisky without being caught.

    When Robbie holds his new baby son, and calls him Luke, something changes in the way he looks at the world. When he then faces one of the victims of his drugs fuelled violence there are  several minutes of relentless emotional hammering as he hears from his victim, and his victim's mother, the cost and cosequence of his mindless violence. Through tears of bewilderment and guilt he hears the mother demand that he look at her. Look becomes an important word no matter how it is spelled.

    The amber liquid made in Scotland from girders is not whisky, but Irn Bru. And the Irn Bru bottles become central to the story as it twists and turns to its conclusion. The contrast between the Community Service Group and those bidding over a million for a cask of whisky is one of Loach's recurring themes of social justice, life chances and young people struggling to remain hopeful aginst all the social forces that do them down.

    The combination of humour and pathos, of tenderness and violence, of fluent obscenity and linguistic clarity, of friendship and enmity, and of hopelessness and hopefilled longing,  was just this side of confusing cynicism and sentiment. And the ending is both hopeful and ambiguous, which life tends to be, even for the most resilient.

    Theological reflection on such a film probably shouldn't be done the morning after. But one thought nags away – the love of a good woman, the birth of a child, and the stated theme from the start, of one more chance at life – this film explores the transforming power of love, whether the love of Leone for her and Robbie's son Luke, or the raging love of the mother confronting her son's attacker at the meeting for restorative justice. And woven throughout, the goodness of the Community Services Supervisor, who offers home, guidance and an expanding world to this Glasgow prodigal son.

  • Went to the University Library for a Holiday.

    DSC00371

    Yesterday I went to the Aberdeen University Library because I was on holiday. I didn't take my camera so this is the photo I took last year when I did the same. If holidays are about relaxing, finding space, being intrigued, discovering new things, having fun, ignoring the watch, then some hours in a book depository does it for me, every time.

    No it's not the same as being where it's sunny and warm, and where new cultural experiences, sights and sounds are all around, where food is different and reliably good, and where there is enough distance to feel the ties that bind slacken enough to give freedom from work, relaxing of usual circumstance and some reduction of the pressures of what we misleadingly call "life". 

    But then again – what worlds there are in a library; what new vistas to be opened up standing surrounded by thousands of books and free to open any one of them. It's a place of reflective silence, of respected space, of generous extravagance and freedom of movement, of deliberately created opportunity to think, and feel, and wonder. You can sit and read in the sun – as I did yesterday from Floor 6 looking out over the North Sea.

    DSC00373

    It so happened I was looking for paintings and sculpture – pictures thereof. So I was in early Northern Renaisance Netherlands, then Southern Renaissance Venice, then 19th Century Arles in France, before a flying visit to Victorian England. With a visit to Amsterdam looming I wanted to check on what I absolutely must see in the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. But I got waylaid at the end by the Pre-Raphaelite section as well.

    I've had several holidays in this same place, this green glass intellectual travel agency where the only limit on destination is imagination, thought and curiosity. Poetry, theology, philosophy, and art tend to my usual intellectual resorts, but with unscheduled trips to other, stranger subject areas. I'll be back, and long before next year….

     

  • Ricky Gervais, Kittens and Cardiff University – or ethics with our eyes open.

    Ricky_gervais_01Now and again it's the comedian who, like the joker and jester of old, opens the eyes of the audience to unpleasant truth. Ironic that Ricky Gervais has opened the eyes of the wider public to an experiment involving sewing the eyes of 31 kittens closed, and once the experiment was complete, the kittens were destroyed. Cardiff University defends the experiments because they are aimed at understanding the signals between the eye and the brain cortex, an important area of ophthalmic research into lazy eye conditions in humans. You can read more here

    The University Ethics committee approved the experiment, which of course begs the question about which criteria are invoked to justify such purposeful cruelty. Interesting that in search of a cure for a human condition, inhumane treatment of non humans is spoken of not only as acceptable but as an imperative claiming moral high ground. Further, the very procedures required suggest a best an emotional confusion for the scientists and vets involved, who we believe are acting out of altruistic compassion. You have to be cruel to be kind isn't to my knowledge a scientifically established procedure. 

    On any ethically responsible investment portfolio it would be difficult to justify making money, or putting money into, what by any definition is such an extreme form of animal cruelty. What makes this situation more unacceptable is that tax payers' money funds this particular research project. I not only object to that; I protest against whatever guidelines make it possible to sanction such behaviour. 

    Then there is the question of animal rights which are the flip side of human obligations. What is it, what exactly and precisely is the basis for human beings treating other life-forms as if pain, suffering and abbreviated life is at the behest of human self interest? We rightly prosecute those who are cruel to animals. Why wasn't the Cardiff University experiment articulated truthfully and transparently, and only when outed is there the usual ethical smokescreen of the greater good?

    Is it really necessary cruelty? Even if it is necessary to find a cure for lazy eye, does that necessity and the perceived possible benefit override the cost to the animals, and the desnesitizing impact such behaviour has on human attitudes to other sentient beings? Sewing a kitten's eyes shut is rather different from recalibrating a tool, rebooting a computer, or trying out a new golf club! Different too from putting a car through a road impact test that wrecks it. I mean different in kind – inanimate as opposed to animate. Sentient life is not a mere commodity for human consumption, and animal suffering is not to be discounted merely because scientific research is furthered by it. The balance is finer than that, and the moral implications of sanctioned cruelty far more dangerous, and requiring higher ethical norms than utilitarianism. 

    University Research Ethics Committees are highly responsible, ethically informed and composed of people who combine commonsense, humanity and expertise. As such they are expected to acknowledge the profound responsibility of acting under public trust, and in decision-making be transparent and outward looking beyond the immediate interests of its researchers. This is true especially in areas of such heightened sensitivity as balancing animal welfare and perceived human benefit, or animal suffering and assumed advances in knowledge.

    This however, was not an experiment in the search for a cure of a life threatening condition. Even if it were, misgivings and safeguards ought still to be an essential part of a process that demonstrates there is no other way. Even then such a conclusion is not itself a sufficient reason for proceeding with an experiment of inflicted suffering. It is a legitimate question -where are the boundaries of human behaviour and inumane behaviour in pursuit of human welfare? 

    All readers of this blog know I'm a cat lover. But if the experiment were carried out on mice, rats or rabbits the arguments would be the same, and the outrage as real. So I'm not special pleading for my own pet preferences. Therefore no cute pictures of cuddly kittens in this post – and no distressing images of mutilated animals either. Instead I post a protest at the hubris and callousness of human behaviour towards creatures over whom we have absolute control and the power of death or worse. That power brings with it responsibility and the institutional imperative of a University that life never be discounted, and suffering of animals never be dismissed as the mere emotional inconvenience of an oversensitive public. 

    And as a taxpayer I express outrage that I am implicated through public funding in practices that would – rightly - have me jailed if done outside a laboratory. Public opinion may be deemed fickle by the scientific community who are well into data and statistics and social trends – but public instincts and disapproval are important guidelines for decision-makers. And there are times when what is done in our name is plain wrong – this is such a case.

  • A day on the Moray Coast

    Today we followed the sun up to the Moray coast, and spent the afternoon in Banff. By now we are all but acclimatised to wet, cold, mist and pretending life's happiness and contentment doesn't depend entirely on the weather. So this photo captures evidence to the contrary – happy folk on a North Scottish beach!

    DSC00715

     

    Walking along the costal trail the sun came and went, and the sky changed like the backdrops of a theatre show, quietly and stealthily shifting scene without giving the show away. Then I looked out at the sea and saw this, like a split photo in which one side has had the colour faded for effect. The mackerel sky and the blue sky reflected on the water. It was a magic moment.

    DSC00722

    And from the macro-picture to the micro-picture - a botanical juxtaposition.

     

    Flower

     On top of all this, a prolonged sighting of a seal bottling, suspending itself with its head and neck out the water like a curious tourist wondering where the best fish supper is to be had. And the school of dolphins tailing and piloting the Lifeboat out doing its routine training and servicing, graceful movement and the uncanny sense that they were the ones playing along with those limited intelligence creatures who need a boat to cope with water!

     

  • Puts You in the Holiday Mood – Ornitheology

    The Farnborough Air show brings in around £48 billion in trade agreements, many of them related to armaments, a trade-off which has its own Shard sized ethical question mark for those trying to live wittily in the tangle of our minds as followers of Jesus!

    Black_redstart3_180_180x240But I love it when God speaks ironically. Like when it is discovered that a pair of very rare black redstarts have nested in one of the show tents. And legislation and the commonsense of the powers that be, including contractors, have left the tent standing and the area immediately around it undusturbed. In a couple of weeks the young birds will have flown, and the world can get on with the business of selling air power, whether for travel or war.

    Look at the sparrows of the air, five for a farthing, and not one of them falls but the Creator sees it, notes it, and cares. For sparrow read black redstart. So while the big deals are being done, and the Billions are being traded, two birds weighing an ounce or two between them, go on doing what life does, reflecting the will of God like a sacrament of life and hope – building a nest, raising the next generation, and doing so as an endangered species. And we think humans are the apex of creation….hmmm. And I wonder if the Holy Spirit, the Dove of Peace, was brooding over Farnborough grieved by the uses we make of technology, but delighted with the joy of God at a fragile nest, with featherless nestlings, defying all the hardware, and just needing a little time and peace to show that life, with all its contingencies, is mystery and miracle that puts all our technology in its place. 

  • Two masterpieces in one day

    Yesterday's surprise was an accident of providence that forunately I was lucky enough to experience due to a remarkable coincidence of cirucmstances intersecting by pure chance! I was preaching in Fife despite being on holiday because I promised a year ago and I like the folk.It meant passing through St Andrews. And there was an exhibition of paintings by Samuel Peploe the Scottish Colourist artist. So on the way home we stopped to go see.

    In one afternoon I saw, enjoyed and digested two masterpieces. The first was a pizza margherita with black olives in Little Italy in St Andrews. One of the best pizzas I've ever had, with iced lemon water and time to savour. Each wedge able to be held and enjoyed without that disappointing wilt towards sogginess in the centre that is often the experience of the dedicated pizza connoisseur.

    Teapot

    Then there was Peploe's painting, The Blue and White Teapot. Don't ask me why I think this is a beautiful painting because analysis usually descends into explanation and diminishment. Aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual insight, emotional contentment, paying attention with both sides of the brain – all of these – but for me it's that inexplicable  power to command attention, that gently persistent summons to the desultory wandering Sunday afternoon painting spotter, "Stop! Look! See!.

    Like spending time with words and text in Lectio Divina, you are dutifully reading, and to be honest, often skimming, and then the voice is heard, the text speaks, and you listen, pay attention, or rather – give attention. Because I'm more and more convinced that in front of great art what is required of us is the willingness to give ourselves to beauty, goodness and truth. That's why I appreciate seats in an art gallery. Time to inhabit space not our own, intentional slow-down against the inner impetus to keep moving, permission to sit in front of a subject so Other that we ourselves are called into question. 

    God looked on all God created, and is creating, and saw that it was good. Strong echoes of that inward approval and appreciation are felt when we encounter that which addresses us, catches us unawares. I dare say that is the work of the Holy Spirit, leading us into truth, opening us up,to goodness, and silencing our nervous chatter as we encounter the Beautiful. And just in case we get too carried away by aesthetics narrowly conceived, there is the beauty of a perfectly made pizza! No photo of the pizza – by the time I thought of it it was gone! 

  • Being on Holiday is a Disposition as Well as a Journey…..

    DSC00553
    Can't think of a better poem for a holiday from home on Deeside and amongst the loveliest scenery in Scotland. I know Edna St Vincent de Millay isn't a Scottish poet – but what she sees and feels looking at this beautiful world through eyes that have learned contentment, is not geographically specific – it's the response of human createdness to the joy of being created and having a place in God's creation.

    Afternoon on a Hill

    I will be the gladdest thing
      Under the sun!
    I will touch a hundred flowers
      And not pick one.

    I will look at cliffs and clouds
      With quiet eyes,
    Watch the wind bow down the grass,
      And the grass rise.

    And when lights begin to show
      Up from the town,
    I will mark which must be mine,
      And then start down!

     

  • Why Theological Education is One of the Essential Disciplines of a Mission Mindset

    Website group
    Last week we had a party. A Graduation party. Five of our students came to the end of their time on College and move on the next stage of their life journey. They have been with us for four years, and brought into the College the gift of themselves, entrusting to us the wealth and wonder of who they are.

    To choose a place to study and commit to being there is an act of remarkable trust, and it requires singlemindedness, considerable cost of money and time, and an underlying confidence in the capacity of education to be informative, formative and transformative. By education we learn stuff, the stuff we learn changes us, and equips us to change the world for the better.

    We try in the Scottish Baptist College to create a Collegiate community, where each student is allowed to be who they are, and encouraged to be more and more who they have it in them to be. Yes there are academic challenges and intellectual work to be done; and yes there are discoveries about ourselves, disconcerting as well as reassuring. But beyond, yet within personal development, is the unsettling but exciting sense that God is calling us to service, and saying yes to that call takes us into new and life changing territory.

    It pushes us to those places where we discover the disciplines and desires of knowing God, studying theology, learning to love others and ourselves, and as ourselves.

    It provokes us to reflect on who we are and what we are for, and doing this with the Bible open, in common room, library, lecture room and coffee shop.

    It pushes and shoves us around by requiring that we read hard books, discuss big ideas frankly but respectfully, out of our convictions but with a mind and heart open to new truth.

    It converts our suspicions into growing confidence, so that we are prepared to ask questions not as expressions of doubt or adversarial interrogation, but as ploughshares that till the soil of our minds.

    It allows us, in trusted company, to pray and laugh, to be sad and pensive, to be patient and wanting to understand, as well as being impatient and desperate to be heard.

    And above all it gives us safe space to explore together what it means to follow faithfully after Christ, for us, here, now.

    And to find in these people, precisely these people, students and staff, a school of Christ, where learning and teaching is a sharing of truth from heart and mind, where we are supported, affirmed and accompanied.

    And recognising and accepting that to do all this is to take huge risks, to be outrageously vulnerable, to make of ourselves a gift to God and to each other, because without such gestures of trust, the Church and its mission have little future.

    Because risk and trust, cost and gift, need and grace, weakness and strength, humility and confidence, learning and knowing, perplexity and understanding, fear and faith, hurt and forgiveness, question and answer, I and Thou,  – these and many other tensions within and between us and God, and between ourselves and others, make up the raw material out of which God forms and shapes us towards that particular and precise obedience which God asks of us, and no other.

    All these students come to the end of a process which has changed forever their way of seeing themselves, others, the world, and God, who transcends our questions, defeats our cleverness, sanctifies our study, ignites our hearts and instils what one of the greatest books written on the spiritual life describes as "Love of Learning and the Desire for God."

  • Karl Barth on One of His Salutary Rants!

    Karl-barth-2I enjoy a good rant. whether it's mine opr someone else's. Strong feelings, passionate convictions, intellectual energy, just the right degree of unreasonableness, unshakeable confidence in the rightness of the cause and in the analysis of the problem, all of this harnessed to verbal facility with a strong rhetorical accent, these are the active ingredients of the effective rant.

    Karl Barth's writings are full of them – they are amongst his most enjoyable paragraphs. They can feel like a loud shout from someone who crept up behind you while you were minding your own business journeying purposefully through some well meaning theological reflection

    "Theology is…a function in the Liturgy of the church. One had better take ca\ution what he does, when he neglects theology, or takes it less seriously and thereby practically eliminates it, because it has only this one function. Of all the functions of the Church's liturgy none is to be dispensed with if the Church is to be kept totally intect.

    And it is quite in order to say very emphatically today, that it is precisely this function, that of theology, this critical self-examination of the Church regarding its reason for existence and its origin, is not to be eliminated.

    Try to carry on your practice without a theory!

    Go on, praise "life" at the expense of intellectual work, knowledge or creed.

    Worship "reality" and despise truth!

    It will quickly become evident that the practical things are not all there is to it; it is only human endeavour, and yet, in  its own autonomous nature it is not a worthy human endeavour. Where such a path leads can be illustrated today before our very eyes, and concerning which the Churches of all countries have every reason to fundamentally rethink themselves.

    A Church without an orderly theology must sooner or later become a pagan church.!"

    That's what Flannery O'Connor meant when she said Barth throws the furniture around. When Barth takes on the role of exasperated Headmaster he can be fun, but if we laugh we tend to do it discreetly, and nervously, because underneath the impatience is the passion of someone who wants the best and sees it thrreatened by complacency, carelessness or self indulgent minds seeking amusement rather than wisdom. The quote is from God in Action, Edinburgh, 1936, page 49-50 

     

  • Reconciliation – the Epicentre of the Christian Gospel

    Anastasis_resurrectionI haven't posted on commentaries for a while but find myself this summer immersing myself in several biblical texts which will inform and underpin the new module I'm teaching, "Reconciliation: Theology and Practice". Already I think the title might be improved by adding just one letter so that it's a module about the theololgy and practices of reconciliation. We'll see – in any case a theology of reconciliation, like all genuinely academic and lived theology, will seek to explore and explain as the first step towards appropriating, applying and acting on the theology we say we believe, living out in the body and in communal activity, the convictions we hold in mind and heart.

    So when it comes to commentaries, I'm looking for information to shape into knowledge; guidance as that knowledge is then organised into coherence, and used to interpret my experience and deepen insight on the way towards understanding; then and only then can the text be allowed to be the text, and the words taken seriously as a lens through which we hear the voice of the living Christ and, interpreted and clarified in our thinking and praying by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the Exegete of God. Information, knowledge, understanding, and thence the growth in wisdom. And wisdom in the Bible is always about life pratice and lived practices. 

    Reconciliation lies at the epicentre of the Christian Gospel, the Christian worldview, and the Christian understanding of the Triune God. Spreading out from that dynamic core of Divine creativity and love, are the realities that give each human life its deepest meaning and highest purposes. For if we are created in the image of God, who is an eternal communion of self-giving and outward flowing love, then that which is unreconciled, which is fragmented, fractured, mutually excluding, sinful in the profound sense of separated from God and consequently committed to self-empowerment over and against all perceived others, then that which is inimical to the union and communion of God, is self-alienating from God and self-perpetuating in the human tragedy by every persistence in unreconciledness.  Perhaps the most destructive of human dispositions is to take that ugly ungrammatical term one stage further to define enmity as willed unreconcilability.

    No wonder Paul in 2 Cornithians 5 believes that reconciliation is inextricably linked with sin a three letter word that contains in condensed form, an entire lexicon of inner predispositions and lived practices, habitual, predictable, ingenious and toxic. The great themes of the good news of Jesus Christ are brought to bear on the intractable contradiction that a world created by God the Eternal communion of mutal self-giving and other regarding love, has broken free of that love and creative purpose. 

    The link between the drive for autonomy and the will to power is, for those made in the image of God, an ontological and existential contradiction. Reconciliation contains the moral requirement of that image made new, and with it the promise and enablement of new creation, and the enacted tragedy of He who knew no sin, becoming sin so that the inherent unreconciledness and willed unreconcilability of humanity might be overcome by a deeper, because costlier act of God in Christ – 'for God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, not c ounting their tresspasses against them'.

    This post has several long sentences. Sometimes I get a row for that from friendly critics. But sometimes complexity and multiplication of clauses is more than lazy writing – it is a long search for words adequate to mystery, a gesture of surrender to that which is beyond our conceptual and semantic control, an attempt to explain which is compelled by love but in the full knowledge that such truth remains inexplicable, and therefore the long sentence becomes a catena of words, arranged with as much precision as time allows, and offered not as theology but as doxology. And there I've done it again. Long sentence…..