Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Justification for buying yet another new book on Vermeer!

    This morning a book arrived in the post, yet another book.

    This is an all but weekly occurrence that whether it puzzles others, frequently puzzles me.

    Whence the imperative to read, and to own and handle the word made matter?

    Is it self-indulgence, or sacrament – means of survival or means of grace?

    Philip Toynbee said books were his royal road to God.

    Not all books that lead to God are books about God.

    But

    To confer with and consult minds other than our own.

    To see what others point out to our limited sight.

    To feel the impetus of those who push us beyond the restrictive horizons 0f what we know.

    To revel in the intellectual humility that provides the humus out of which good learning grows.

    To keep alive curiosity and pay attention to the world and listen to our own lives.

    To take and read, and to wonder and ponder on goodness, beauty and truth.

    To nurture imagination, refresh the wells of thought, replenish our emotional capacity.

    41ASNT7T2HL__SL500_AA300_Books do this, and much more for me.

    And in that sense they are a means of grace, constant sources of new understanding, encounters with minds different from mine and no less valid.

    As a matter of interest the book that arrived is an updated classic of art investigation. Beautifully written, it explores the intricacies and complexities involved in establishing the provenance and authenticity of paintings attributed to Vermeer.

    But it is Gowing's analysis of Vermeer's temperament and character, and of how these inevitably influenced his technique and artistic expression, that makes this a profound study of genius. When much has been said about cultural milieu, historical context, social influences, and political background, there is still the mystery of temperament and personality, and the complex intertwining of accident, circumstance and personal intention. These may be all but insoluble, but in the attempt, much comes to light that otherwise would remain hidden. Gowing as noted above, is an impetus pushing the reader towards new horizons, teaching us to pay attention to our world, itself a sacrament of creation.

    Few artists paid more detailed attention to the sacrament of the ordinary than Jan Vermeer.

  • Buechner Week IV The Coincidences that Add Up to Vocation

    DSC00097Who knows where those life changing moments come from – the ones where we finally decide, 'This is what I want to do'. Not everyone sees a glowing bush over in a corner of the desert compelling us to turn off the beaten track of the routines and habits of our comfort zones. I doubt many hear that voice in the small hours insistently waking us up by saying our name, and even fewer think to say, Speak Lord, your servant is listening.
     
    No. Usually the voice of God calling us, (which is what vocation is), sounds most clearly in that coincidence of opportunity and circumstance, our own heart's desires, and that decisive act that enables us to put our lives where our best desires are, and to affirm who we are by putting ourselves in the place of new possibility. 
     
    I know of nobody who says that better than Buechner, in one of his finest pieces of applied theology and spiritual direction, reduced to essentials:
     
     
    "The kind of work God usually calls you to
           is the kind of work that you need most to do
                  and that the world most needs to have done…
    The place God calls you to
           is the place where your deep gladness
                  and the world’s deep hunger meet."
    – Frederick Buechner, "Wishful Thinking" – his definition of 'vocation'.

  • Buechner Week III Betting your life that God is Love.

    DSC00223Yesterday one of my dearest friends died. We first met 28 years ago, and from our first meeting we sensed an affinity that is hard to explain and requires no explanation because friendship is gift, grace, goodness and gratitude all bundled together in a congruence of mind and heart.

    In due course I'll say more. I mention my friend here because this is Buechner week, and I've been re-reading and re-thinking Buechner's wisdom. There is a spiritual family resemblance between my friend's and Buechner's take on God and the graced life. In 28 years we had countless conversations about the meaning of God, and love, and what it means to be human, and how to reach out to the other, and who Jesus is for us and our broken world today, and why blessing is the default setting of any heart openly receptive to the love of God that is always there before us, and behind us. When I read Buechner, I think he has been reading my friend's diary, overhearing many of those conversations, wishing he could interrupt and agree or disagree by saying, 'But have you looked at it this way?'

    Here is Buechner on love, words that coincide exactly with my friend's theology, and mine.

    Of all powers,

    love is the most powerful and the most powerless.

    It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer

    that final and most impregnable stronghold

    which is the human heart.

    It is the most powerless

    because it can do nothing except by consent.

    To say that love is God is the most romantic idealism.

    To say that God is love is either the last straw,

    or the ultimate truth.

    Wishful Thinking, 50-54

    The photo was taken a stone's throw from my friend's house. An exuberant garden was one of his delights, probably because such profusion of colour, variety and vitality answered to much in his own inner world.  

  • Buechner Week II Forgiveness, the Church’s Mission and the Moral Credit Crunch

    Forgiveness1Forgiveness is one of the hardest won and easiest forgotten hallmarks of Christian discipleship. You'd think in an era obsessed with branding, marketing, celebrity, fame, the product, that the church might have taken time to ask what it is that the world most needs, and how to offer it at an affordable price. If the 21st Century church is serious about mission, has a rudimentary let alone a strategic grasp of the Gospel, is 'missionally engaged' with the surrounding culture of debt and recession, entertainment escapism, technological idolatry, social fragmentation and relational maliase, then you'd think that the connection between a debt ridden world and a Gospel of debts forgiven might be an idea worth considering, demonstrating, practising, and embodying.

    Grace has to be one of the most ridiculously straightforward bargains a market idolising culture could ever be offfered, you'd think. Instead of buy one get one free, the invitation to come buy bread without money would be a game losing own goal for Supermarkets, but the ridiculously obvious life disposition of those who follow Jesus.

    After all at the heart of the prayer shared throughout the entire Christian tradition we pray 'forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors', and do so in a civilisation where bank bail-outs are a self interested emergency to prevent indebtedness engulfing the world economy. More outrageously still, in moments of the greatest agony and personal grief inflicted by others, Jesus prays 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do'. It isn't as if the ideas of grace and forgiveness are radically new. They are in fact radically old, they lie at the originating centre of Christian faith in the heart of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.

    Forgiveness is a fundamental responsibility of the Christian heart, a life-changing gift to be to be given and received freely. The coalescence in our hearts of responsibility and gift, and the life shaping power of forgiveness, should be eye-openingly obvious. The argument goes from the greater to the lesser – if God in Christ forgives me, I am a forgiven sinner, now a willing conspirator of the Kingdom, a grace inspired subversive, a forgiven forgiver.

    Buechner puts it more prosaically, but sometimes that's exactly what is needed for us to grasp what the Grace of God both demands and gives, as we try to faithfully follow after Jesus, whose harshest words were sometimes reserved for those who harden their hearts and refuse to be reconciled.

    When somebody you've wronged forgives you, you're spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience.

    When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you're spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride.

    For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins, and to be glad in each other's presence.

    Forgiveness is the word we live by, says Elizabeth Jennings in her poem, 'Forgiveness'. There would be more life and less death, more peace and less violence, more love and less hate, more joy and less anger, more gift and less payback, and therefore more grace and less retribution if in the world there were more live demonstrations of forgiveness. Now there's a missional imperative for a faith community called to be reconciled reconcilers, or in Paul's words, words far too often given their soteriological weight at the cost of their transformative ethical urgency, Jesus has given us the ministry of reconciliation.  

  • Buechner Week I – One of my Literary Angels

    P_profile_videobigFrederick Buechner is one of the angels in my life. I don't read him all the time, months can go by without me taking one of his books from the shelf behind my study chair at College. 

    In my life as in most lives, there have been moments of annunciation when I've been told I'm blessed whether I like it or not, times when good tidings of great joy have lit up my life around me, encounters when I've wrestled with my own struggles and found somewhere in the wrestling that I had a grip on God but God had a stronger grip on me, times too when I've sensed a guardian angel when walking through valleys of deep darkness. Most times those angels are people sent by God to be a friend and companion, and to voice in their actions the love of God. But now and again that angel comes in the holy words that speak heart to heart, and come from the writer to the reader through conduits laid by the Holy Spirit.

    Not many writers do that, and just as well. But when I turn one of those scary corners on my journey, find the wind constantly in my face and trying to push me back the way I came, or begin to find the upward road just far too upward, Buechner comes from the shelf, and time and again speaks the kind of sense I'd hear from very few others whom I read. Buechner's sense is uncommon sense, because he is unafraid of pragmatism so long as it's laced with grace, celebrates each precious moment of life not because they are all extraordinary but because they are possible at all because I am alive, shows me again and again that the most important gift is the gift of seeing and embracing the grace that is already there, of perceiving the goodness and mercy that dogs my steps, of discovering in the friendship of those closest to me the faithfulness of God, and in the company of strangers the friendship of God.

    So this week is Buechner week. He is now 86 years old, and the wisdom of those years has been generously and prodigally shared in novels, essays, sermons and autobiography. A very good friend introduced me to Buechner's work in 1985 – that was one of the annunciations I referred to above, and the friend, one of the angels.

     

    "Listen to your life.

    See it for the fathomless mystery it is.

    In the boredom and pain of it

    no less than in the excitement and gladness:

    touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

    because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

    and life itself is grace."

    Now and Then

     

    "The world is full of dark shadows,

    to be sure both the world without and the world within …

    But praise and trust him too

    for the knowledge that what's lost is nothing to what's found,

    and that all the dark there ever was,

    set next to light,

    would scarcely fill a cup."

    Commencement Address at Union Seminary, Richmond.

     

  • Books, Bread and Blessings!

    31qp1a-Y4WL__BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU02_Yesterday I bought two things with a combined price of £10 The first was the book in the picture, Paddison's monograph in the Society of New Testament Studies Monograph series, on Theological Hermeneutics and First Thessalonians. The copy was hardback in mint condition, was probably a review copy, and is currently priced at £65 – so when I saw the price was £4.50, I felt like a certain farmer ploughing in a field when his arms are jarred by the blade of the plough hitting treasure. I didn't buy the field but I grabbed the book and handed over my £5 note and fled rejoicing.

    As a lifelong bibliophile I am still like a child in a toyshop, or a chocolate factory, when I'm in a bookshop. And a Cambridge or Oxford hardback monograph is still a delight to hold, read and be able to afford to buy! I bought it in my favourite second hand bookshop, having stopped by on impulse, and the whole compexion of the day changed as my faith in providence was shored up by yet another coincidence of circumstance more theologically defined as a blessing!

    IMG_6283Later on the drive back I was an hungered. I lapse into King james language when still glowing with recent blessing, and I stopped at the Little Chef beyond Dunblane. I ususally sniff disdainfully as I pass and keep going to Baxters. But by now they were closed. Another good decision. I ordered scrambled egg on brown bread and a pot of tea well, to be exact toasted wholemeal bread and butter, and organic free range eggs, and a three cup pot of tea. For nourishment of mind and body it's hard to beat a good book and crusty brown bread!! .

    One of my favourite brief poems, which should be read occasionally at the Lord's Supper, is a reminder of the sanctity of the ordinary. Through the Incarnation of our Lord all matter is made sacred; at the centre of the Lord's Prayer is that petition that shakes us out of our spiritual reveries by addressing our most basic hunger, 'Give us this day our daily bread'; and on the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, and broke it……. and we call that, Eucharist.

    Be careful when you touch bread.

    Let it not lie uncared for – unwanted.

    So often bread is taken for granted.

    There is so much beauty in bread;

    Beauty of sun and soil,

    Beauty of patient toil.

    Winds and rain have caressed it,

    Christ often blessed it.

    Be gentle when you touch bread.

    ~Anonymous

    You can find the picture and the recipe for cider bread over here.

     

  • A Philosophical Theology of Prayer.

    I don't enjoy many books about prayer. That doesn't mean there aren't any good ones, just that I'm not sure one ever helped me to pray more, or better. I'd rather have a book of prayers that have been composed, written and prayed in language rich with those human experiences out of which prayer erupts, or is dragged, or writes itself in word and emotion that is the human heart seeking encounter with the heart of God.

    DurerWhen a renowned philosopher whose works on Theism are mind stretchingly challenging decides to explore the basis of Christian prayer, then I don't expect another how to manual, nor another here's my experience, it was great and I'd like you to have it too bestseller. Which is good – because this book is quite different. Owen is unafraid of the theological and philosophical questions raised by our praying – telling God what God already knows, asking for what is in our own interests, establishing any causal connection between our praying and whatever happens that we perceive as an answer to prayer. The main thrust of the book is that prayer is best, perhaps only, understood, in the light of our doctrine of God and our theological conception of what a human being is, and what the relations between God and humanity are, should be and perhaps must be.

    I learned so much from this book – The Basis of Christian Prayer, H P Owen (Regent College Pubblishing). Not about how to pray but about what prayer is, about the One to whom prayer is offered, and about the relational interchange that takes place between God and those who dare, and who desire, to address the God who first addresses us. "Prayer validates a personal, as against a non personal view of God. In prayer we address God as Thou." A page later (p.111) Owen quotes a most moving prayer of Anselm, from the Proslogion:

    O God, I pray, let me know and love you

    so that I may rejoice in you.

    And if I cannot in this life fully,

    let me advance day by day

    until the point of fullness comes.

    Let knowledge of you progress in me here,

    and be made full there.

    Let love for you grow in me here,

    and be made full there,

    so that here my joy may be great with expectancy

    while there being full in realisation.

    If there is such a thing as an eschatological spirituality, Then Anselm has gifted to the church a prayer that holds the Christian heart in that creative tension between now and then, here and there, Thou – and I.

    Durer's Praying Hands (above) suffers from over-exposure on Christian kitsch products fro m wall plaques to plastic models. But in the original etching the artist combines beauty with beseeching, peace with tension, surrender and expectancy – and few images are more evocative of our humanity than our hands, with which we make and caress, hold and relinquish, clench and open, embrace or exclude. To lift up holy hands in prayer, is therefore no straightforward spiritual exercise.

  • Afghanistan – our hearts diminished by the deaths of others

    Pieta4Vengeance is a visceral and violent response to what is perceived as morally unacceptable. Those who say vengeance is itself ethically indefensible adopt a moral standpoint that sometimes overlooks the complex mixture of tragic loss, indescribable suffering, inexplicable wickedness and downright dehumanising violence that triggers the desire to pay back, to seek satisfaction, to punish, to lash out in rage at those who perpetrate violent cruelty and mindless slaughter on other human beings.

    The Taliban have sworn vengeance on coalition forces in Afghanistan following the brutal murder of 16 Afghan civilians by one US soldier. Expressions of shock, regret, condolence and determined pursuit of explanation and justice are not likely to break the power circuits that trigger chain reaction violence. The tragic nihilism of cyclic hatred and self-perpetuating violence simply means more people will be maimed and murdered as a way of putting right what is universally recognised as wrong. Moral cliches like two wrongs don't make a right overlooks the all but irresistible urge, erupting from the molten core of human pain, to redress the balance of one community's grief by inflicting equivalent grief on the other. This isn't about reasoned calculation, but an instinctive scream of rage at the facelessness of fate, and the known human face of the enemy. There are no words I as a Christian can offer to the Afghan people, other than those of the penitent, the sorrowful and the heart diminished by the deaths of others.

    Neither are there words I can use to comment on the deaths of seven young British soldiers, killed by that same vengeance seeking Taliban. The oscillation of rage and outrage, makes it impossible to speak words that would be heard. The desperate search to find some tenuous strands of hope that can somehow be woven together, requires not so much words spoken, as heart going out to heart. And the abyss of sorrow and loss into which relatives are plunged, place a finger over our lips, so that nothing is uttered that interrupts the necessary anguished work of grieving. Perhaps all we can say, and should say, and must say, are those words that must always be said with utmost honesty, sincerity and awareness of what goes on in our own hearts:

          Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison.

    I have in my study a station of the cross panel, of Jesus being crucified, a gift from Professor Sandy Stoddart. It is a powerful statement through understatement, of the brutal banality of human cruelty. Not vengeance, but forgiveness, not hatred but love, not power but vulnerability, and not punishmment but mercy, are the springs that move the heart of God. At my best, I look out at our world, and pray "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do". Other times I look at that same world filled with despair because, more often than I might think, they know exactly what they do, and I find it harder to pray for their forgiveness.

     

  • The kindness of strangers to strangers…..

    Dont-let-the-worldNow here's something that doesn't happen every day. Monday was the best day this week, and I'd promised a friend we'd go out on the bikes for the first time after the winter. But the tyres of the bikes were soft and the pump connector unhelpfully burst – and it was well after 5pm.

    So in the car and out to look for a bike shop. Thought we'd found one at 5.30 but could only park across the road in a side street in the last space. The rush hour in full swing, the cars kept coming and the pedestrian crossing was a ways down the street. Finally got to the shop but the lights had gone out and the door locked. Looked in the window and the owner came and opened the door and asked if he could help. "No", he apologised – it was mainly a fish tackle shop – but we should try the new bike shop down the road.

    Ran down, hoping it was open, and it was. Asked about the connector, yes he had one. Went to pay for it. Had changed into different clothes and had no money – a suit and tie being less than helpful on a bike!

    "That's ok", he said, "hand it in next time you're passing".

    So in 10 minutes I'd been at a closed shop which opened, been kindly directed to an open shop but had no money, and still came away with a pump connector because the owner took a risk and trusted.

    There are days when it's all worth it – the hassle, the conveyor belt of stuff we all try to handle, the couldn't care-less-ness of much that passes for service in our recession ridden times. But the sun was shining, a closed shop was opened, a £3 connector was given away on trust.

    As we walked up the street we waved to the owners of the fish tackle shop, and got the thumbs up. And eventually got half an hour on the bikes before the sun set. The sun which shines on the righteous…..I know the rest of the verse about also on the unrighteous, but on Monday according to the Torah, these folk had been kind to strangers, and multiplied happiness, which is pretty righteous!

    The bike shop in question is Thomson's – its website is over here. If you live near Paisley I can recommend it for customer service and downright helpfulness – it also has loadsa bikes!

  • A Plea for Foolishness as a More Durable Wisdom?

    Tokenz-dealwd023This was published 50 years ago – tell me if it is now obsolete, dated, passe? I have broken up what is otherwise a sustained and relentless paragraph in critique of a fundamental assumption of contemporary Western existence. You may have to read it more than once – that may be because it seeks to expose what we would rather not see.

    The whole modern world is one great campaign against risk and uncertainty; as a money dominated world, it is a world of life insurance. 'The modern world as a whole is a world which thinks only about its own old age. It is a monstrous old people's home, an institution for pensioners.

    In economics, politics, and constitutional law, as in ethics, psychology and metaphysics, we should, if only we had better eyes, be able to see one thing and one thing only: how much this terrible need for peace and quiet is invariably a principle of enslavement. It is always freedom that has to pay the bill. It is always money that is the master. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.

    That is the real psychology of the contemporary idea of progress: man would like to live his life in the future, to live in advance of the event, so making his present into his past. Taking thought for the morrow, saving for the morrow, actually means throwing away its freedom, castrating its potency and fertility, which are the supreme blessings for human beings.

    Every financial transaction is an expense of spirit; the only genuine miser, storing up his treasures, is the lover. This is the most profound teaching of the the Gospel. And we are so much under the domination of money, the Antichrist, that even when we do not openly name it, we constantly take its name for granted. In this commercial world, everything is commercial, even metaphysics, and theology; they too fall into line and cease to have any true presence in their own right. Christianity, like everything else, is detemporalised and thereby deprived of its 'salt'.

    Avarice in the form of anxiety about tomorrow is the lord of all the world. The drying up of the heart makes itself felt both temporally and spiritually. The person who rejects the fluiditiy of the living heart, preferring the rigidity of money and conceptual thought, has already chosen the other kind of fluidity, the liquefaction of the corpse.

    The question is simply what in any given world is a commercial commodity and what is not. It is by this standard that every world will be judged.

    Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III A Theological Aesthetics. Studies in theological Style: Lay Styles, (San Francisco: Crossroads) 1986, pages 478-9

    Now I guess you could say those are the words of a grumpy old theologian, and that may be so. And it does seem a wholesale condemnation of economic activity for its own sake. But is he wrong? Does he exaggerate to the point where he can be ignored?

    Jesus said you cannot serve God and money – so how do we follow faithfully after Jesus in a money dominated culture? What would be the signs that our allegiances are at times tested to the point of capitulation? In the work of the Kingdom of God, how important are financial questions of profit and loss, assurance and risk, generosity and prudence – and should the Church learn again the counter intuitive practices of giving away, free gift, reckless compassion, unlocked resources – and those as acts of freedom and declarations of independence from a cash dominant culture. 

    Or is that the idealism of the fool, the naivete of the enthusdiast, the behaviour of one devoid of any practical, viable and responsible strategy? But maybe the strategy is precisely this, the sacramental use of money and possessions to subvert the secular sacraments of compulsive consumption within the free market by deliberate decisions and intentional actions that demonstrate a Christian use of money.

    If there is such a thing?