Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • The Snow Leopard – the most magnificent of the great cats

    Cubs1 I don't think you can have too many enthusiasms. Curiosity, wonder, pleasure, admiration, intellectual and emotional satisfaction, aesthetic insight, the joy of looking, gazing, seeing, taking in, revelling in – there is probably a thesaurus of descriptors for that human responsiveness to that which is beyond ourselves, and draws us towards it to be touched, enriched, made to pay attention, and somewhere out of our depths comes gratitude and the awareness that what we are encountering is blessing.

    That's how I feel about the snow leopard. When Peter Matthiessen's book was published 30 something years ago, about his journey to Nepal to try to see the snow leopard in the wilds, I read it and discovered a world of which I knew nothing. It's the story of his journey towards a healing of the heart after the loss of his wife – the seeking of the snow leopard almost a parallel search for the one he had lost. It is in my own canon of books, a great book.

    So the other day when aol posted this picture of snow leopard cubs, I was taken back to the summer I read Matthiessen's book for the first time. And the picture shows why that first paragraph of this post is struggling to define and articulate adequately, the wild beauty that inhabits this world of ours.

  • Praying to Paul for the blessings he describes!

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     Lead us, great teacher Paul, in wisdom's ways,

    And lift our hearts with thine to heaven's high throne,

    Till faith beholds the clear meridian blaze,

    And, sun-like, in the soul reigns charity alone.

     

    Elpis, wife of Boethius (480-524)

    Paul has come in for his share of criticism and even calumny in some circles of NT study – his views on a number of issues challenged, contested, the target for a dismissive reductionism. But there is great wisdom, and remarkable  intellectual vision in his writings. I've just finished yet another slow reading of Ephesians, and there are passages there that are amongst the highest points in all Christian literature.

    So the prayer of Elpis to St Paul – let's not get into the theological soundness or spiritual efficacy of praying to one of the saints, even if it is Paul. I'd rather just echo the prayer and discover that the blessing of God isn't so hemmed round by theological proprieties as we might think. The direction of the heart Godward seems more important.

  • Carefully Considered and Patiently Crafted Prayers – The Gift of Reverence

    O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,

    the life of the souls that love thee,

    and the strength of the wills that serve thee;

    help us to know thee that we may truly love thee,

    and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

    whom to serve is perfect freedom.

    Amen    (Augustine of Hippo)

    …………………

    DSC00199 There are few more decisive arguments on behalf of careful, considered and beautifully crafted prayers than a prayer like this.

    When all the valid arguments and reasons for extempore, unrehearsed, informal and immediate prayer are accepted, there is still an absolute necessity, when addressing God, to take care with the beauty of our language.

    It reflects the care we take with the shaping of our thoughts and the sharing of our hearts.

    And it reflects that essential courtesy that acknowledges the importance of the other by preparation, attention, attentiveness and the offering of that which has taken us some time and trouble.

     

     

    The picture is of the rose I bought for Sheila last year – it too is a carefully crafted celebration of beauty, compliments of the Creator!

  • The day thou gavest Lord, has ended – Sunset Hymn

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    The day thou gavest, Lord, has ended;
    the darkness falls at thy behest;
    to thee our morning hymns ascended;
    thy praise shall sanctify our rest.

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    2. We thank thee that thy church, unsleeping
    while earth rolls onward into light,
    through all the world her watch is keeping,
    and rests not now by day or night.

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    3. As o'er each continent and island
    the dawn leads on another day,
    the voice of prayer is never silent,
    nor die the strains of praise away.

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    4. So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never,
    like earth's proud empires, pass away.
    Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
    till all thy creatures own thy sway.

    Sunset1 

    The North east of Scotland has some of the most spectacular sunsets in Scotland. I know about the West coast, from Machrahanish to Ullapool, and I've watched sunsets there too. These pictures were taken last night, one of the most spectacular sunsets we've seen up here for years. Impossible not to link them with this evocative Victorian evening hymn. By the way, Lesley Garrett sings this hymn on her album Amazing Grace, and it is one of the most resoundingly over the top and enjoyable versions I've ever heard!

  • C K Barrett – New Testament Scholar par excellence

    John Readers of Living Wittily will know I have a particular interest in and affinity with the Gospel of John. It was the Gospel I worked through in the Greek text in College, guided by R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was peerless literature. He was a classic exegete, training us to explore the text by establishing the basis of the text, working through the grammatical and syntactical issues, carefully reconstructing background in cultural, social and historical contexts, and finally writing out the theological and practical implications of the text so explored.

    Amongst R E O White's exegetical resources of first rank was C K Barrett, whose commentary on John was the class textbook. I have it in its revised form, and am sorry that when I bought the new edition I gave away my first edition – the one with the terracota coloured dustwrapper, a book whose very appearance conjured up impressions of serious, sober scholarship wrapped in unfussy but serviceable dustrwaps.

    Today we heard of the death of C K Barrett at the venerable age of 94. So I took my Barrett on John from the shelves and spent a wee while browsing, remembering and giving thanks for the scholarship and devotion to the text of C K Barrett. Pencil marks in the margin still mark places where I had my eyes opened by Barrett. Just one example –

    John14.6 is the famous threefold I am the way the truth and the life. Barrett is quite sure the primary claim is "I am the way by which men and women come to God". And he is certain that Jesus refers to his coming passion – "the way which he himself is about to take is the road which his followers must also tread. He himself goes to the Father by way of crucifixion and resurrection; in future he is the means by which Christians die and rise….Because Jesus is the means of access to God who is the source of all truth and life, he is himself the truth and the life for men and women."

    Page 458, The Gospel According to John, (SPCK, 1978 rev.ed.)

    51NY8J95RSL__SS500_ Barrett unabashedly acknowledged that even the 1978 revised commentary on John was then old fashioned. So it was, and is. But it is old fashioned in the same sense as any classic – that is, old fashioned does not mean irrelevant, unimportant, dispensable. On the contrary – a classic commentary remains relevant, important and indispensable! I have a shelf of commentaries on John, and some of them I have read through, others have been consulted times without number. It would be untrue to say Barrett is my favourite – I have several favourites for different purposes – and Raymond Brown's two volume commentary is my most used. But Barrett on John was the first Greek Text commentary I worked through with grammar and lexicon, and that habit, instilled by R E O White has never left me as my favourite form of lectio divina. R E O White used to quote Noel Davey, one of Barrett's close friends, who urged students to 'bury your head in a lexicon and you'll raise it in the presence of God".

    C K Barrett now knows the full depth of those words, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…" May he now, with gladness and gratitude, raise his head in the presence of God and know the fullness of truth and life. Thanks be to God.

     

  • Mozart, Christology, Ministry and the Truth of Impossible Realities

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     On the trip to Vienna I went walkabout with one of the friends we were visiting. Came across the statue of Mozart and this arrangement of flowers. There aren't many comparisons I would dare make between myself and Karl Barth and Hans Kung - but a love for the music of Mozart, and a sense of the theological inspiration it provides is one that seems safely modest.

    While posting this I'm listening to the Ave Verum Corpus which is one of the most beautiful and spiritually consoling pieces of music I know. The incarnation, the atonement and the humility of God are deeply embedded in this serene, composed and gentle hymn of divine self relinquishment.

    9780802865557_l This week is the anniversary of my ordination to pastoral ministry – the book I've bought to commemorate that milestone is Edward Oakes' new volume, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy. A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). Oakes is one of the best interpreters of Hans Urs Von Balthasar and has written a major study of Von Balthasar's Christology.

    Years ago the veteran theologian T C Oden wrote a three volume systematic theology based on what he called the ecumenical consensus. It remains a repository of ecumenical theology, both constructive and incorporating a wide range of voices from the diverse streams of the Christian theological tradition. This Christology is a major work of ecumenical and eirenic theology, an account of the person of Jesus Christ that seeks to be faithful to the ecumenical consensus but also considers and interacts with contemporary Christological thought. At the heart of hearts of pastoral ministry and Christian faith is the beauty and mystery of the incarnation, the intersection of eternity with history, the impossible reality of the divine becoming human, the majesty of love expressed in the self-surrender of God.

     It is that mystery and beauty and majesty and that impossible reality that is sung in Ave Verum Corpus. The combination of such musical truth telling and heart searching on the one hand, and an ecumenical essay in Christology that takes with utter seriousness the truth of God Incarnate on the other, is for me a reminder of the central core of faith – the mystery of Jesus Christ, revealing the self-giving love of God for a creation gone far wrong, but entered in the power of a love that suffers and absorbs that wrongness, reconciles the alienated, restores and renews so that once again life is lived in the fullness of God. To be a follower of Jesus Christ, a lover of such a God as Jesus reveals, an agent of the Kingdom of God responsive to the Holy Spirit – whatever else ordination means, it means surrender to truths of such magnitude that wonder, gratitude and love for God and all God has made are only the beginnings of an adequate yes to the divine call.

  • The Enduring Melody – the fellowship of joy and of suffering

    41FVBQFN2WL__SL500_AA300_ My friend Geoff Colmer – whom I see about once a year at a UK Baptist conference, has gently encouraged me for some time to read The Enduring Melody by Michael Mayne. I first encountered the work of Michael Mayne in his volume This Sunrise of Wonder, which I consider one of the most life affirming and theologically literate books I've ever read. So my slowness in getting to The Enduring Melody is only because other things were pressing, and I know a book of such richness isn't one to skim, cram in, flick through or read dutifully. It should be read – and the verb to read means something much more than mere perusal or hurried shopping down the supermarket aisles grabbing what my limited time allows to throw into the mental trolley.

    So for a week now I've been reading The Enduring Melody, and found myself in the company of faith, courage, beauty, wonder, loss, love, pain, anxiety, enjoyment and much else that is expressed in a book that alternates between very personal journal and beautifully crafted essay. In that sense there are two books – the diary of an illness that proves terminal, and essays on some the things that made up the enduring melody of Michael Mayne's life as a Church of England priest, a vocation lived with the classic pastoral genius of Anglican spirituality at its most inquisitively affirming.

    The only other published Journal that comes near this for honest spiritual search, human and humane longing, wise reflection on the meaning of this person's life, regret that life is shortening but gladness for what it has been and still is, are the two volumes of Philip Toynbee, Part of a Journey, and End of a Journey. I remember very clearly reading them, the time in my life and the places I was when I did read them. And I remember too some of the moments when I simply nodded in mute but sincere recognition of those deep undercurrents of faith and fellowship that enable us to say I believe in the communion of saints. I'll write more about Toynbee soon.

    Over the next week or so I'll write about The Enduring Melody. Not a book review, more reports of conversations between pilgrims who know, you've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk there by yourself. But pilgrims who also know that you don't ever walk by yourself, even if that is the way it feels. You walk with the company, felt or unfelt, of the One whose rod and staff comort; and you walk with those friends and companions in life who also walk their road and ours; and you walk, or run, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, with perseverance looking to Jesus.

  • The Environmentally Friendly Nature Loving White Van Man

    Dont-let-the-world White van man and woman are one of the easy targets for derision, criticism and general opprobrium.

    They drive selfishly, assume a sovereign claim on highway territory, behave like gladiators wielding a weapon, and have made an art form of the tailgate intimidatory tactic.

    This morning white van man was in front of me.

    He braked suddenly and hard, and a squirrel went scampering safely across his absolute right of way.

    As the squirrel settled on the garden wall and looked askance at white van man, the driver window opened, a hand appeared, and that squirrel got a finger wagging telling off that would have done credit to a teacher instilling some health and safety consciousness into a jay walking student!

    I like white van man.

  • “…all pure art is praise…” John Ruskin

    DSC00228 "We express our delight in a beautiful or lovely thing no less by lament for its loss, than gladness in its presence;

    Much art is therefore tragic or pensive, but all pure art is praise…Fix then, this in your mind…your art is to be praise of something that you love." 

    John Ruskin, "The Laws of Fesole"

     

    Victorian rhetoric, the art of the prose poem, the fusion in mind and emotion of contemplative insight and apt, indeed artistic expression – Ruskin is one of the great masters of English descriptive writing. I suspect the quality of the writing is directly indexed to his quality of seeing, and responding to what he saw. Thinking about the nature of the contemplative disposition, I recognise the lure of the beautiful, the frisson of pleasure in the encounter with that which awakens longing.

    The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botaninc gardens, and is a case in point

  • Eucharist – Giving thanks for bread or giving thanks for money?

    DSC00188 Sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing. I mean by that, you are happily reading something, minding your own business and a perfectly good train of thought is interrupted by who knows Who?

    Last night after a satisfying day of travelling, preaching, talking and catching up with various folk, I'm lying in bed reading, intending to lull myself closer to that edge where the closing of the eyelids gets easier than the holding of the book.

    Then I read this from Nicholas Berdyaev, whom I hadn't anticipated as a voice in this book:

    There are two symbols, bread and money; and there are two mysteries, the eucharistic mystery of bread and the Satanic mystery of money. We are faced with the great task; to overthrow the rule of money, and to establish in its place the rule of bread.

    At which point thought, prayer and a sense of having been addressed took over. Oh, and when I say "sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing", I do mean us – each of us – all of us. While the politicians from Cameron to Blair indulge in diagnosis skewed by questionable political assumptions, Berdyaev's contrast of the two ways human beings live gets much nearer the reality - bread  or  money, and only one is eucharistic, that which proclaims the celebration of thanksgiving.