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Yesterday I went for a walk around Drum Castle and the Drum Estate. The ground was squeclchy and it was more about leg stretching and aerobics than leisurely reverie. I took some photos, none of which will win any competitions. But a couple of them might be worth a second thought.

 

The tree on the left is entirely covered in grey-green lichen, one of my favourite natural colours. Close up it resembles ancient sea coral, and has some of the most intricate and delicate patterns of living filigree.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's what I mean. You could be looking down on a coral reef, or a forest. The subtle play of light and shadow on tones and colours that vary almost imperceptibly, make these fragile outgrowths master works of nature's art.

 

 

 

Then we came on this. The aftermath of the recent gales, with trees fallen, some snapped mid trunk and evidence all around of that other side of nature's power. Even trees are fragile in winds up to 100mph.

 

Rather easy to moralise and do a wee homily on the power of nature and the transience of life, and the fragility of beauty extravagantly displayed in grey-green complexity, and how the providence of God pervades and invades our world. Actually, I just enjoyed the walk, contemplated the lichen, and scrambled through the arboreal debris wondering how many wrens would build a high rise nest in the huge uprooted root systems. As for God – I guess God was in the mighty wind that breaks trees, and in the long slow persistence of lichen, pushing towards air and light for life. Instead of quoting Job, I recall a non canonical writer who sang, "Ah think to ma'self, what a wonderful world".

 

 

Last Christmas I was given a book by a friend who knows me well enough to make good choices about books. Faith Maps by Michael Paul Gallagher is about ten religious explorers from within the Catholic tradition. I read it slowly earlier this year and have revisited one or two chapters again during Advent. The chapter on Bernard Lonergan opens up a remarkable mind, and hints at the intellectual precipices Lonergan scaled in pursuit of a way of knowing that did not invalidate religious truth. He insisted honest enquiry must pay due attention to the actual experience of human knowing, deliberate attentiveness to what goes on inside us when we pay attention, seeking the insight that comes from looking critically inside, pursuing the discovery of oneself in oneself so that the authentic self can be exposed to the truth encountered in God.

But it is the end of the chapter that glows with Advent hopefulness, as Gallagher puts into Lonergan's mouth an interpretation of the Magnificat that is the distilled essence of Lonergan's view that passionate love for God, born of God's love for the world, is what gives life its meaning, purpose and worth:

As we look back on our lives we see that "in the whole outward and upward movement of our heart, God was active. But when we come to recognise this, and to speak to the Artist of our love in prayer, a new situation comes to birth. 'This complete being in love is the reason of the heart that reason does  not know.' It is the eye of faith that sees everything differently, life and death, joy and tragedy, the struggles of history; all is now the theatre of God's call and companionship.

Here the Magnificat becomes magnificently true. God has done great things, meeting our deepest hungers. All is God's doing. We walk in the flow of divine creativity, even when we think it is all our own doing. God's promise is received and fulfilled in the slowness of our daily learning. At the peak of our freedom the music changes; it is no longer our effort that counts but our yes of recognition, of gratitude, and of an authenticity that is not ours. Yes, faith, born from love and giving birth to love, is the God intended crown of our long journey towards a fullness here and hereafter."

(Pages 76-77) 

Driving to work this morning it  was dark, overnight gales persisting, heavy rain slanting down as if some demented supra-gardener was waving a watering can in time to Carmina Burana. In the dimly lit street I saw a car door open and close. I came closer and saw water spray bouncing off the car. At 7.05 am, in a howling gale and torrential rain, in near total darkness, someone was washing their car with a pressure hose. As I passed there he was, leaning against the gale, assiduously washing a car that was being rained on in a gale.

Only one question occurs – Why?

But the puzzles of the day kept coming. The floor director of the Silverburn shopping centre was being asked about the plight of the retail sector, and the mega-malls as customers seem less reluctant to throw money away. Amongst the comments he made was that families were not spending enough dwell time in the centre. Now "dwell time", suggests a place to stay, a settling down, maybe even home. The idea that a retail temple is a place to spend dwell time just about says what it is that makes contemporary life such a kaleidoscope of impermanence.

I've no answers to the man with the pressure hose, or the customers who need to spend dwell time in Silverburn Centre. Just the perplexity of one who tries to live wittily in the tangle of my mind – and make some sense of this odd, loveable world.

Sometime today Living Wittily will have received 200,000 hits, which is no great milestone for a blog, even though the blogger eschews Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social communication. Interesting use of both social and communication when they become married without a conjunction. Social communication should be a tautology, if it's communication between human beings then it's social; if it's social then it involves inter-communication of those who can express themselves in terms that each understand. I suppose the question is, are all forms of communication social? And if they are, how to we differentiate between conversations face to face, conversations on phone, Facebook, Twitter with known friends, and conversations with that world out there with whoever reads something and responds to it. Which raises further the question when does an exchange of information, opinion, comment, gossip become a conversation rather than an impersonal exchange of floating data, random thoughts, serendipitous exchanges, and uncontextualised trivia?

I think it's when the communication is between people who even if they don't know each other, are looking for more than a forum to opinionate, and more than a network to barge into with self-expression intended to make that particular self noticed – and that as a process of self-identity construction. Such communication will only become conversation when it produces one of the most important strands in human relationships – continuity. It's the continuity of communication, the desire to turn comment into conversation, and offer personal opinion not as the put down answer but as the gift of further questioning in which each side enters a partnership of respectful speaking and listening.    

I can think of a few reasons for keeping a blog and offering thought, and viewpoint and insight – and whatever wisdom we learn, to whoever will read it. For me it's quite simple. The offer of all the above to whoever is patient, interested and trustful enough to read and ponder, to offer their own wisdom and insight, to value their own experience as well as the experience of the writer. When that becomes an exchange, conversation begins. Most folk who comment on Living Wittily are people I know, or have come to know, and quite a few of you I've not met. Some email and these become private conversations, and often they have enriched and persuaded and edited my thinking and sharpened my view of the world.

So in a life a wee bit busy just now I still try to keep Living Wittily going, offering a voice amongst the voices, and now and then offering my five loaves and two fishes into the mix and flux of this kaleidoscopic second decade of the third millennium, and hoping that readers might have some nourishment, and not expecting there are too many baskets full left over. Blog posts are like the water in a Scottish burn in spate – they swirl downstream and quickly disappear. But in the flow of words, the aim remains the same, and the motto from Robert Bolt's "Man for All Seasons" still expresses my own spiritual and intellectual disposition. There are few pursuits in life more fascinating, fulfilling, frustrating and fruitful than seeking to serve God in the tangle of our minds, and doing so as those who try to keep the first and greatest commandment – to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.