Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Ultimate Grace for Our Ultimate Concerns

    DSC00331John Donne is one of the greatest English prose writers. He was also one of the most accomplished and metaphysical of Seventeenth Century poets. His sermons and poems are richly embroidered with imagery and allusions, classical and biblical, theological and philosophical, many of them obscure and at best enigmatic to those less familiar with Donne's cultural and intellectual worlds. He treated the big themes of human existence and the overwhelming questions posed to the guilty conscience by a God whose love and justice he saw as absolute, and therefore absolutely decisive for the destiny of each individual soul, including and especially his own.

    Anguish and ecstasy, fear and joy, guilt and forgiveness, desolation and consolation; such are the poles of human experience between which Donne composed his sermons and poems. And when allowances are made for the rhetoric and discourse of Seventeenth Century divinity, many of the poems still speak with universal relevance to those deep inner turmoils of conscience and those serial disappointments that can so dishearten us when we would be better than we know we are.

    First_046The tortured uncertainties of Romans 7 describe Donne's oscillation between regretted sin and longed for holiness. "For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do….O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

    Few poets have faced death with such honest human terror balanced by a faith "troubled on every side but not distressed…perplexed but not in despair,…cast down but not destroyed…" And he often finished his most searching poems with recovered assurance resonant with Paul's great sigh of relief – "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord…."

    Here is one of my favourite Donne poems – for those not familiar with it remember Donne's name was pronounced "Dun" – and so the wordplay becomes a playful dialogue with God in a prayer about Donne's ultimate concerns.

     

    HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
    by John Donne

    I.
    WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
        Which was my sin, though it were done before?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
        And do run still, though still I do deplore?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    II.
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
        Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
        A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    III.
    I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
        My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
    But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
        Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
            And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                        I fear no more.

  • Charity Book Shops, Machiavellian Tactics, and the Mess We Are IN!

    MchoThe other day I was in a charity shop having a good natured exchange with one of the staff who was trying to get me to buy books. You'd think that would be easy. Getting me to buy books is like encouraging me to eat chocolate. But it was gardening books she wanted me to buy, and I'd asked about art books, then it was celeb biographies when I asked about poetry. Eventually I found something, having decided she had tried so hard it would be discouraging for her if I walked out without buying anything!

    A pocket sized mordern edition, mint condition, of Machiavelli's, The Prince! Now this isn't a book about spirituality I know - though that week I was preparing a sermon on Jacob the self-interested cynical manipulator, and there seemed something appropriate, if not meant! No this is a book about bare-faced cynicism in the application of tactics of power, political survival, and developing skills of manipulation and getting your own way. It combines wisdom and ruthlessness, calculated risk with playing the percentage shots, distilled study of power, how it is gained and lost, while at the same time forming the inner habits, even an instinct, for personal advantage. Actually if you wanted a description of Jacob before Jabbok that just about does it!

    The book is an education in self-interest, cynical exploitation of those least able to resist, acting ruthlessly against those who might resist in order to preserve a personal power base, anticipating an opponent's next moves and subverting them, using power to make the powerful stronger, and generally excluding or eliminating anything that might hinder the exercise and retention of power, including considerations of compassion, justice, and overriding moral imperatives. I'm thinking that much of that mentality is abroad in the political and economic attitudes of recession haunted Governments.

    The word Machiavellian, which sums up all this ruthless, cyncial power hunting, is a bit unfair on Machiavelli. He was a Renaissance humanist. His book was written as a Power for Dummies,intended to win the favour of Renaissance Princes seeking to cling to power in the dangerous courts and corridors of 15th Century Italian Courts. But, as I say, it does raise for me the question of how far the word Machiavellian applies to the approaches and policies of the current Governement. 

    That's another post perhaps – but Granny Tax I, the mooted Granny Tax 2, the pastry tax, the capping of charitable donations, the rhetoric but non-action against Tax avoidance by the wealthy, the comprehenesive and unsympathetic re-configuring of criteria for Benefits but little progress on reining in bonuses and extravagant salaries, the change to VAT criteria for churches.These are the mere headlines of an approach that seeks economic prosperity by risking being morally bankrupt. Alongside The Prince, I suggest a reading of the Prophet Amos, who had a few things to say about Machiavellian politics – I know, the anachronism is blatant. But the history of power as morally ambiguous and dependent on the moral character of those who exercise it, is a history that cannot be dismissed so easily. Whether it's the privileged rich selling the poor for the price of a pair of sandals in ancient Israel, or the privileged powerful of a Renaissance Court doing whatever is necessary to cling to power, or the social impact of the policies of a modern democratic Government hard-wired to an economics of global growth, the result is the same and the same two non Machiavellian questions remain. Compassion? Justice?

     So anyway, I asked how much? Which side of the shelf was it on, she asked. I showed her the gap and said 'There'. That OK she said. That's 50p – if it had been further along it would have been £1. Then in true Machiavellian fashion she said, But you could just pay the £1 – which I did!! Oh, and inside the front cover is a label that says Happy Birthday – now was the gift intended to cement a friendship, bribe a colleague, a veiled apology, an act of crawling……oh stop it! And get a life…

  • Reeds blowing in the Wind and the Word of God

    DSC00505I I know I'm not very tall, but this photo was taken standing up in high reeds and exuberant gorse.Whenever I'm standing with things growing all around me ( and sometimes above me) I often think of the Sermon on the Mount – about the grass of the field, the flowers, and the pretensions of all those Solomons who think they are eye stoppingly glorious!

    More seriously – yesterday I was chasing a number of biblical themes and passages and came across several suggestions that certain biblical texts are particularly fitted to where we are now, in our time, at this place in our history as a world in a mess. Suggestions included Qoheleth (the fatuity and vanity of so much contemporary culture), the Tower of Babel (the power of the Web and Social Network), Amos (inequity and injustice pushed to extremes of social situation). It made me wonder about how we each find a canon within the Canon, selected Scriptures that seem really to 'do it' for us! And one of the ways that might happen is when certain Scriptures seem to have a deep moral and human resonance with our contemporary history – personal  social, global. Those Scriptures may bring hope, warn of judgment, describe and analyse our fears and anxieties.  Which means that Christians who claim to be biblical in their thinking, ethics, world-view should perhaps stop insisting loudly on their own view of what the Bible says, means. And as an act of obedience to God listen for the still small voice of a text that bears witness to Christ, and like Him will always call in question our assumptions, challenge the closedness of our certainties, undermine and expose the toxic roots of our prejudices, open our eyes to the blind spots we can't see because our cultural lenses have visually impaired our insight.

    It will require a deeper more disruptive encounter with Christ the Word for us to hear, and then amplify his voice, which is the voice of self-giving love, reconciling judgment, renewing mercy, the Voice of the Crucified Risen Lord of Life.

  • Chichester, Chagall and Visual Exegesis

    470960_49c77260The Chagall window in Chichester Cathedral is on my must see list.

    It's a 20th Century Jewish pictorial exegesis of Psalm 150, created to enhance Christian worship.

    It's a startling and beautiful work in stained glass, one of my favourite things to look at. Baptist churches should have stained glass windows may be a minority view of one, but I struggle to see any valid objection to visual beauty as an aid to worship.

    It's an interpretation of written text in image, form and colour. Along with music, such art provides an exegesis that is neither more nor less important than written commentary or spoken exposition.

    It's a picture of exuberance. I don't mean it's an exuberant picture, but that it represents worship as praise, gratitude, wonder, noise, dancing, walking, climbing, arm-waving; it represents joy embodied and laughter in movement, the human spirit doing what it does best in response to the exuberance of God, the shared exuberance of Creator and creature, of imago dei answering to our Original.

    It's a psalm in glass, and in colour, and looking at it is intended to create in the heart the words it depicts – exuberant praise of God. 

  • Being an Ecumenical Evangelical

    Tokenz-dealwd023There was grace, generosity and humility behind this remarkable proposal adopted at the Inaugural Conference of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846. The contemporary ethos of Evangelicalism seems less gracious, less generous and less humble given the turf wars between factions who want to define Evangelicalism by defining others out.

    My own ecumenical sympathies, balanced by the convictions of a Baptist identity, are able to co-exist much more fruitfully in the kind of atmosphere out of which the EA emerged. With the chronological snobbery C S Lewis memorably scorned, we look back on the earlier years of Christian tradition uninformed of the spiritual values that gave birth to our tradition, therefore much of our thinking unformed and uncorrected by that earlier generous spirit. Or so it seems to me as I browse and ponder on that Evangelical fractiousness and fragmentation that pretends to defend the truth and merely succeeds in reducing truth to the capacities of minds lacking precisely that grace, generosity and humility in which we greet each other in Christ

    "That this Conference, composed of professing Christians of many different Denominations, all exercising the right of private judgment, and, through common infirmity, differing in the views they severally entertain on some points, both of Christian doctrines and ecclesiastical Polity, and gathered together from many and remote parts of the World, for the purpose of promoting Christian Union, rejoice in making their unanimous avowal of the glorious truth, that the Church of the living God, while it admits of growth, is One Church, never having lost, and being incapable of losing its essential unity. Not, therefore, to create that unity, but to confess it, is the design of their assembling together. One in reality, they desire also, as far as they may be able to attain it, to be visibly one; and thus, both to realize in themselves, and to exhibit to others, that a living and everlasting union binds all true believers together in the fellowship of the Church of Christ."

    Report of the Proceedings of the Conference, London, From August 19th to September 2nd Inclusive, 1846, page 44. Quoted in One Body in Christ. The History and Significance of the Evangelical Alliance, Ian Randall and David Hillborn (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001) page 55.

    The sculpture below is by Scott Rogers, and is called "That they all may be One".

    Scott rogers the-lastsupperps2-800

  • “Each little flower that opens…” Thank God for all things bright and beautiful!

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    Less than a centimetre across, a single flower, and the only one I saw on the St Cyrus path through the dunes. We think it's a dwarf Storksbill – but prepared to be corrected. How could this little beauty not remind me of Emily Dickinson's playful poem, which like all her poetry, nudges us out of our mental laziness and dares us to think! Life isn't all available on Google – thank God – there is still mystery, surprise and wonder – Emily Dickinson celebrates both. 

       

    As If Some Little Arctic Flower

      S if some little arctic flower,
      Upon the polar hem,
      Went wandering down the latitudes,
      Until it puzzled came
      To continents of summer,
      To firmaments of sun,
      To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
      And birds of foreign tongue!
      I say, as if this little flower
      To Eden wandered in–
      What then? Why, nothing, only
      Your inference therefrom!
      (Emily Dickinson)

  • Patrick Kavanagh, Primrose.

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    Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer
    Of one small primrose flowering in my mind.
    Better than wealth it is, I said, to find
    One small page of Truth's manuscript made clear.

     

    I looked at Christ transfigured without fear–
    The light was very beautiful and kind,
    And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed
    I read it through the lenses of a tear.
     

    And then my sight grew dim, I could not see
    The primrose that had lighted me to Heaven,
    And there was but the shadow of a tree
    Ghostly among the stars. The years that pass
    Like tired soldiers nevermore have given
    Moments to see wonders in the grass.

  • A long walk on the cliffs and the beach at St Cyrus – “to consider the flowers…”

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    This is where we went yesterday – a walk along the 220+ foot high cliffs and the sands at St Cyrus. Used to have family holidays at a farm cottage 6 miles inland and spent days here – most of those I remember were sunny.

     

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    I love the contrast of yellow gorse and everything else around it, especially on a gray, cold day. Walking along the track below you come to corridors of gorse, inhabited by the usual small birds, goldfinches and great tits – no linnets – I miss them, they were very common in Ayrshire when I was a boy.

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    The Scottish Primrose is one of the delights of Spring.

    Everyone should have some in their garden, but not purloined from places like this.

    Flowers are masterpieces of precision and profusion. There are banks of them here, celebrating Easter.

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    DSC00500Alfred Noyes described gorse as "great glory of ragged gold", – and close up or far away, it's a sight for sore eyes.

    Christopher Smart wrote, "For there is a language of flowers, for flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ." I owe that quotation to Bob MacDonald's blog heading – it's a lovely line from an unjustly forgotten poet (who loved cats!).

     It was a good day, in which the isness of flowers was paid attention to!

    "Look at the flowers of the field..if God so clothes them, how much more..

     

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  • “A billion times told lovelier…” Gerard Manley Hopkins poem to Christ

     

    Seeing, really seeing, isn't as easy as looking. I like the older word "behold", its sense of recognising the isness and reality of that which we see, and holding what we see in our attention, paying attention, a phrase that says exactly what is required to see, the cost of attentiveness.

    Gerard Manley Hopkins saw, beheld, paid attention, acknowledged and recognised the isness of what he saw around him. He was often thought eccentric, odd, introverted – but perhaps the oddity was due more to that propensity for attentiveness, his instinctive perception of the reality and value of the other, and the Other who was encountered within and beyond the self.

    Anyway, I've been reading some Hopkins and it so happens there is a kestrel family along the road between here and Aberdeen and one or other can be seen hovering at just about telegraph pole height, defying gravity, reflecting sunlight, moving with grace, precision and beauty. It reminded me of Hopkins poem.

     

    The Windhover
     
     
    To Christ our Lord
     
     
    I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
      dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
    High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
    In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,         5
      As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
    Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
     
    Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion         10
    Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
     
      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
    Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

  • Always Have a Volume of the Church Dogmatics Handy…..

    The past two days on holiday the weather has been wet and cold. Didn't stop us going out for a walk along the front at Aberdeen, getting soaked and cold but doing it for the coffee and bacon roll at The Pavilion cafe afterwards. As well as walking in the rain, I was putting up a couple of new blinds which needed the width adjusted before hanging them.

    That's where Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics came in handy. During Holy Week I'd left my favourite volume IV.i lying around the living room so I could pick it up and browse in it at random when I had free time or coffee, or nothing on the TV I wanted to pay any attention to. It was an interesting experiment in spiritual reading piecemeal, or ad hoc theological reflection. It was well worthwhile – not the same as a determined, steady, continual reading through one of those impressively heavy volumes with their pages packed with granite theology mined from the deepest quarry of divine mystery.

    A brief read at a paragraph became a page, then a bit more, then …the phone rang, or the tea was ready, or I was engaged in conversation. Over the week I probably had it in my hand several times a day. Sometimes it was like looking at Everest, the height of the Divine love. Other times it was like looking at Niagara, a cataract of passionate exposition of the cross. Or like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, vast, spacious, deep and utterly there, as that which puts us in our place. Times too when a line or two was quite enough to be going on with – and I wrote it down in the wee notebook, and thought about it – a lot.

    Jesus-kneeling-sculpture-gethsemane-8Pages 259-273, are on the meaning of Jesus' temptations, indeed Jesus' temptability, from his baptism to Gethsemane. Reading these pages none of the metaphors above are exaggerations of Barth's theological capacity – Everest, Niagara, Grand Canyon – none of them answers fully to Barths exposition of the mysterious depths and wonders of the Divine reconciling love, or to the fixedness of the determined Yes of God in Christ, or to the height and majesty of the Divine purpose to redeem and reconcile and renew the image of God and the gift that is Creation and New Creation. Not many theologians compare with Barth when he takes off his shoes to stand on the holy ground around the cross. His interpretation of the Gethsemane prayer, "Father, if it be possible let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will but yours be done…" was, for me, breathtaking, a masterpiece of imaginative hermeneutics and constructive Christology.

    From the sublime to the ridiculous – remember the new blinds – well, cutting them to the right width is tricky, and it needs the end of the blind anchored so that it won't move as it's measured. Volume IV.i, still lying to hand on the coffee table, served perfectly. But all those jokes about big books and door-stops are mostly the words of the ignorant. It's no disrespect to Barth that one of his volumes comes in handy as a make-do weight. My real estimate of the Church Dogmatics is that while I was doing DIY, a volume was to hand!