Now here's an interesting observation:
It is a humorous paradox that in a faith that speaks about the "journey" of following Jesus, Christians claim to have total and absolute truth from the beginning, while scientists, who are supposed largely atheists and agnostics, are quite willing to work for decades knowing that their theories and hypostheses are merely provisional."
(The Naked Now, Richard Rohr, p.85)
Michaelangelo's First Pieta
Carve a compassion. Older than you are
He lies upon your lap. What can you do
But hold him with a trust you also fear.
Thus Micahelangelo
Saw what a girl may do for gods. O we
Have mercy on this man a woman holds,
God in the grip of our humanity.
All this the sculptor moulds.
But more. It is a prayer that he is saying
Wordless, except that written on her breast
He writes his name. This girl he is displaying
Has also brought him rest.
(New Collected Poems, 124)
Poem and sculpture,
word and image,
chiselled form and crafted articulation,
one representation seeking to interpret the other,
one medium mediating the ungrasped essence of the other,
compassion hand carved and hand written,
because passionately felt and expertly expressed.
Now and again we are treated to political statements that are genuinely constructive, considered and thoughtful, socially invigorating, morally courageous and a true reflection of what we should expect of those who represent us.
Baroness Warsi will later this week address the Pope in an address that affirms the importance in Europe of religious traditions, heritage and beliefs as essentials of cultural stability and integrity. Her argument is that firmly held convictions and intentional dialogue towards mutual understanding are more important than any falsely justified or mistakenly fumbled attempts to repress or marginalise faith traditions and their legitimate public expression.
Given the nonsense of last week's judgement about the legality of prayers before local government sessions, and the strident intolerance of secular humanists and populist atheists, it's time we had outspoken advocacy of religious freedom and liberty of conscience, not to mention mere toleration. The irony is the intolerant attack on religion per se by those who appeal to religious intolerance as a fundamental reason, on the basis of reason, to outlaw or ridicule or damn all religion.
My own Christian life has been spent within a small radically evangelical community which, sometimes to its embarrassment is reminded that religious toleration is in its DNA. Yes, Baptists emerged from religious persecution with a passionate commitment to liberty of conscience before God and freedom of worship and religious expression as that which the state has no right to promote for its own ends, or suppress in the interests of its own power. And since I graduated in Moral Philosophy and Principles of Religion, followed by a theological formation for ministry, I have held just as passionately to those early Baptist instincts about freedom of conscience, religious toleration and humble respect for those whose faith tradition is different from mine, but whose integrity and identity I am called in Christ to respect, and whose person I am called to love.
So dialogue between faiths is not for me a concession to compromise, but a commitment to communication and understanding rooted in theological realities such as imago dei, the communicative nature of God, the work of the Holy Spirit in human expereince and culture, and the call of Christ to love our neighbour as ourselves. Likewise, Ecumenical openness is not a sign of woolly thinking and fluffy goodwill, but a serious theological, ethical and pastoral challenge to recognise and respond in the Spirit of Christ to those whose experience of God in Christ, and whose living expression of their faith is different from mine, and if we are both honest and humble, is often richer than what I have known. And in a polarised world where hostility and suspicion are often the default dispositions of opposing religious traditions and cultures, I welcome every encouragement to people of faith, whatever faith, to begin by recognising the humanity of the other, and then to respect the religious commitments and traditions of the other, and then to respond in friendship and sincere interest in this other person, tradition, culture, with whom I share this planet, and this time in human history.
Is that too much to ask, of those who follow the one who is the Lamb slain, and before whose throne peoples of all tribes, nations, peoples and cultures will gather in the act of praise and worship? One of the missional essentials of today is a recovered sense of generosity that can only come from a faith tradition that stops being timid, protectionist and negative. Instead, with the courage of our convictions, and the exemplary generosity of God in Christ as our inspiration, and trusting the promised Counsellor who leads us into all truth, let us sit and think, and talk, and pray, and learn, and so come to understand, our neighbours, the strangers in our midst, and to greet and welcome others as God in Christ has welcomed us.
Some of what sparked these reflections can be read in the linked article below
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/stand-faith-says-peer-warsi-064447947.html
Elizabeth Jennings' poetry is replete with religious themes, experiences, aspirations, questions and speculations. Profoundly Christian yet alert to the ambiguities of human experience, immersed in the Catholic tradition but without unqualified surrender to dogmatic formulations, learned in incarnational theology and the astonishingly aware of the connectedness in Christian thought between the suffering of human beings and the passion of God.
Advent and Easter, year on year, provoked her to poetry, attempting again the impossible puzzle of arranging words so that eternal truth is sufficiently framed in language to embrace and communicate the realities to which language refers. Yet words we have, and limited though they are, words represent one of the great gifts of human exchange, and Babel nothwithstanding communication is a bedrock of culture, civilisation and human community.
So when Jennings writes a poem called 'Clarify', 12 brief lines making three short stanzas, she manages to make it a prayer for two great yearnings from our deepest being – the longing for meaning and the struggle for freedom, but meaning that is purposeful, and freedom that is not destructive. Lucid brevity, knowing naivete, self- knowledge
CLARIFY
Clarify me, please,
God of the galaxies,
Make me a meteor,
Or else a metaphor
So lively that it grows
Beyond its likeness and
Stands on its own, a land
That nobody can lose.
God, give me liberty
But not so much that I
See you on Calvary,
Nailed to the wood by me.
(New Collected Poems, 161)
Talking with a good friend after church about poetry – well, as you do, and why not? He was saying when he read poetry he often didn't understand what he read, but enjoyed reading poetry just the same. In our conversation I suggested perhaps sometimes poetry isn't meant to be understood, but rather, it helps us to understand – ourselves, the world, others, those perplexities and mysteries of the life we live.
In that remarkably evocative book, Mr God This is Anna, there's a definition of poetry that has always intrigued, and largely satisfied me: "Poetry is something made up of different bits that is different from all the bits." I too have come away from reading poetry with that strange intellectual and existential paradox – while I haven't understoood it, it would be quite wrong to say I was none the wiser. Because wisdom isn't only about knowing all the answers, or even knowing all the questions. Wisdom is to know the limits of the question and answer approach as the only way to understanding much that makes up our lives. Curiosity is its own justification; the inner search is not always the search for an answer. The quest for truth isn't so easily reduced to the limits of vocabulary. Poetry allows us to both think and feel, to search and only perhaps find, to question without being overanxious to fix, sort and nail down in words alone, those profound insights and experiences that like time and tide, climate and geology, give shape and character to our inner world.
So it's important who we choose as companions on the road, whom we invite to be conversation partners, those voices that can be relied on not to let us off with shallow and superficial answers, or predictable and unsearching questions. Amongst the poets I have several such critical friends, and readers of this blog will guess most of them. R S Thomas; Emily Dickinson; George Herbert; Mary Oliver; Gerard Manley Hopkins: Robert Frost; Denise Levertov; Elizabeth Jennings; Carol Ann Duffy; Seamus Heaney. There are others of course, and in any case one of my favourite kinds of book is the poetry Anthology of which I have several which are now as familiar as any collected corpus.
But this week I'm having an Elizabeth Jennings week on the blog. She is one from whose poetry I've learned amongst other things the importance of relationships in any spirituality that takes the divine and human intersections of our experience seriously. Here she is on friendship. And this one poem says why each special friendship is cause for celebration, gratitude and the glad recognition that such blessing is ours, undeserved gift, grace at its surprising best.
FRIENDSHIP
Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it’s gentlenessAnd understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I’m feeling for.Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.
Always we find ourselves at the divergence
Of two paths travelling out.
Otherwise, our questions
Would already have been answered.
………………….
Turning nightward in these domes
Our shutters opening like secrets
We set our silvered cups to catch
The fine mist of light
That settles from our chosen stars
On the edge of the unanswerable
Even here, our questions.
………………..
These are two samples of poetry written by a brilliant astrophysicist whose field of research was 'dark matter'. Rebecca Elson wrote as an agnostic whose religious scepticism was tempered by imagination, compassion and a visionary hopefulness for humanity and for a future worthy of the beauty and potential of a universe shot through with mystery.
Reading her poetry and Journal entries is like encountering a 20th Century Qoheleth, questioning, enquiring, redolent of responsibility, capable of awe and wonder at the sheer intransigence of existence in the face of the human urge to mastery and comprehension.
Reading her poetry is to have your too easily and carelessly held assumptions about faith and life interogated by someone who was an Isaac Newton scholar at Cambridge, and interpreter of the Hubble data, a Harvard researcher, and a poet whose precision with words had more to do with nuanced meaning than technical skill.
Reading her poetry is like standing in a hot shower when someone turns on the tap downstairs and suddenly the water is freezing and there's no easy or quick escape from its jetted cold.
Come Holy Spirit, Spirit of Love, Spirit of Discipline,
In the silence
Come to us and bring us your peace;
Rest in us that we may be tranquil and still;
Speak to us as each heart needs to hear;
Reveal to us things hidden and things longed for;
Rejoice in us that we may praise and be glad;
Pray in us that we may be at one with you and with each other;
Refresh and renew us from your living springs of water;
Dwell in us now and always, Amen.
The prayer is by Father Robert Llewelyn one of the accomplished recent interpreters of Julian of Norwich, and it's taken from his book With Pity Not with Blame. From a well stocked shelf of studies on Julian, this slim book remains a favourite, especially as a guide to ways of praying that have less to do with words and more to do with inner orientation; acknowledging Presence, practising stillness, listening with the heart, gazing with the eyes of imaginagtive faith, and learning the necessary tensions between the mind thinking, the heart feeling and the will responding.
The other day I spoke with our College librarian, Dr Edward Burrows, about George Herbert and my fascination with three chosen people of genius – Julian, Herbert and Charles Wesley. Amongst their many gifts, I value their capacity to invest words with more than meaning, but with the power to communicate spiritual experiences with such penetrating integrity that they radically transform by sometimes evoking the very experiences they describe and expound. None of them use the idiom of contemporary-speak, and I guess it now requires an investment of time to learn their way with words, but to those who take the time, they may well discover the spiritual equivalent of treasure maps and the call to seek till they find.
There are others in my canon of spiritual geniuses – but those three – Julian, Herbert and Wesley, touch on a form of spirituality that for all their diversity, carries with it what C S Lewis called the scent of the far country.
As a matter of irrelevant coincidence (or unpremeditated purpose) I typed out the above prayer while listening to Albinoni's Adagio in G Major – and some of what the prayer asked just sort of happened, as if Someone meant it……
"The biblical witness to God's revelation
leads to a response and participation in Christ.
This means in turn that epistemology is insufficient without ontology,
both in terms of the transformation of the believer,
and ultimately of the whole created order,
as the Incarnation makes knowledge of God
an engagement with being itself."
The words come from Karl barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, by Stephen Wigley. This is a rich and demanding study of the mutual respect and contested differences between two of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century.
Listening to Radio 4 last night on the way down from Aberdeen, there was a discussion about the appointment of the new BBC Science Correspondent whose remit is to make the leading edges of scientific knowledge and discovery "accessible". There was considerable worry that accessible means dumbed down, and that to popularise is to distort by simplification to the point where knowledge itself is dangerously reduced and pre-packaged.
The same holds for theology. By all means popularise, make accessible, eliminate needless jargon, be inclusive in writing, teaching and learning. But do not deprive key intellectual disciplines of the discourse needed for precision, necessary nuance, development of ideas, explorations of complexity and contested concepts. In other words, not all theology can or should be "accessible" if by that we expect to grasp, understand and integrate what we read on its first reading. If there are words we don't easily recognise, concepts that perplex and puzzle, sentence structures that force us to slow down, read again, and, bless us, think -then don't assume bad writing, or abstracted thought, or ideas under-developed or overworked. It may be that we are being educated, drawn out towards truth and insight beyond our comfort zones. Both Barth and Von Balthasar are such theologians, thinkers and intellectual mentors – if we have the patience and respect, to sit at their feet.
"I've never seen an ugly cloud."
Driving home last night with a friend I haven't seen for 15 years, we were admiring the evening sky and sunset over Aberdeenshire. Blue pink occasionally smudged by dark gray as if a Chinese brush artist had randomly played with tinted paper to include a few contrasting shadows, long, thin one-stroke lines - not too dark, but warm gray and feathered at both ends as the brush was flicked up. The finished sky looked like a delicate watercolour, which would have been spoilt if it had been framed.
At which point he said, "I've never seen an ugly cloud." What strikes me about that quite spontaneous observation was the affirmative worldview it revealed. That my friend is travelling a hard road just now made the words even more poignantly positive. There are moments of meaning when a chance remark gathers to itself a significance made up of coincidence of circumstances, emotional preparedness, shared memories and that profound mystery of heart reaching out to heart in agreement and thankfulness. That was such a moment.
Since last night I've let those words dwell in those deep places where meaning slowly forms and understanding is never more than humble recognition that somehow love and life and laughter are definitive of human fellowship. I've thought often and sometimes thought long, about clouds. And I don't mean in the sentimental and fluffy sense of silver linings, and naive denials that clouds are somtimes harbingers of storm and can be ominous and well as beneficent. Yet William Cowper, that gentle 18th Century rural poet, whose courageous battle with depression and an oppressive predestinarian theology brought him often to breakdown, could still write words that were first penned for his own encouragement:
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,
The clouds ye so much dread,
Are big with mercy and will break
with blessings on thy head.
At the other end of the spectrum of Christian spirituality the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, urged the Christian that you can apprehend God through the cloud of unknowing by love, but by thought, never. That cloud of unknowing represents the mystery and beauty of God, like Moses in Exodus, who drew near to the cloud of darkness, where God dwells. So much in our self-explanatory, information sated, google shaped omniscient culture makes it hard to appreciate, long for, be content with, contemplate with a proper sense of our own smallness, the mystery that lies at the heart of all existence.
Perhaps the clouds are there to help us recognise the obscurity that limits our knowing, and to make us respectful of those opaque experiences and thoughts that tease and trouble, lure and disturb, attract and pull our minds and hearts towards that which is infinitely greater than even our most inspired imaginings. Out of such attentiveness and receptiveness, perhaps we will discover also, there are no ugly clouds.
Or as another wise man wrote, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. ~Edward Abbey
Travelling down towards Laurenckirk on a frosty morning, the metal foliage called wind farms emerged from the mist. The gostly grey and filtered sunlight meant the occasional blade reflected the sun – I couldn't time the camera to capture that. I'm still pulled two ways about these massive mathematically precise intrusions onto a natural landscape. The argument about whether they are a viable or effective alternative is one others know more about. It's the aesthetics that perplex me. Are they a blot on the landscape or merely an updating of the pylon lines that criss cross some of our most attractive and sensitive landscapes? I've gotten used to them, but is that a de-sensitization that is mere tolerance of the inevitable and a concession to engineering ugliness as the solution to the energy problem?
Up here of course wind farms are politically contentious. A certain billionaire rages against the loss of aesthtic beauty for the new golf course if these turbines are installed offshore in the line of vision of the privileged golfers who can affford to jet in to the proposed world class golf course.
But whatever the outcome of our search for renewable energy, it seems that in my lifetime we'll have to get used to the sight of machinery that still looks otherworldly, and makes those who've read War of the Worlds a bit nervous.
On another line entirely – I start the course on trinitarian theology next week, and these three bladed power sources, merging in the misty mystery of a Mearns morning, are pictorial reminders of the significance in human thought and culture of threefoldness.
They also remind me of the early Ban the Bomb logo which was a badge I wore proudly as a teenager – a wee while ago…..