Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • How to save your local library

    N0170601295092622266A I love this!

    Go see!!

    And smile!!!

    Bibliophiles of the world unite!!!!

    Been having a down day till I saw this.

     

  • Being careful with words – is that part of the radical Gospel too?

    All depends how you say it.

    If a local councillor expresses mild concern at the inconvenience of temporary roadworks, the headline reads " Councillor slams rogue firms amid ongoing traffic chaos". Made that up.

    If a 24 year old high profile footballer for whom English is a second language comes to Manchester City and says the majority of manchester people support City, but admits he doesn't know much about Manchester, the headline reads. "Dzeco lays into United". "Star's first job to anger United". Not made up.

    English_notebook_cover The devaluation of words, the addiction to verbal hostility, the habit of rhetorical over-exaggeration, – the manufacture of news by inflating the commonplace – all of them signs of a decadent discourse. By the way, exaggeration should suffice – over-exaggeration should mean the effect is dissipated by dawning incredulity – fatal to all propaganda!

    Wonder how careful Christians are in the way we talk – Jesus' warning that we would have to give an account of every word we speak is another of those sayings sometimes reduced to manageability by saying it is recognised as Middle Eastern rhetoric, not literally meant. But suppose that's just the rationalising accommodation of Western minds trying to tame the wild words and moral demands of the Kingdom of God, in order to justify our own verbal proclivities? If I do have to explain every word I speak to One whose recall is entirely accurate and whose surveillance of heart, mind and voice is more comprehensive than any technology we can invent and install, I've had it. Or at least, I will have to do what in the end we all have to do – ask for mercy. But in the meantime – repent, and try harder to heed my words.

  • Why, now and again, I read the King James Bible now and again…..

    Notebook 001 It can't have escaped the notice of alert blog readers that 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publishing of the King James Bible (The Authorised Version). Leaving aside the issue of the textual reliability of the Received Text, and the reliance on Erasmus's Greek New Testament, itself an insecure textual foundation, and the wholesale borrowing from Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament and part of the Old Testament, the King James Bible remains a stellar achievement of English literature, and one of the glories of the English language.

    However accessible or contemporary, relevant or scholarly, all other translations by comparison dilute, diminish and render banal a text produced by a rich vocabulary distilled into stylistic concentrate, and then composed into sonorous prose and sublime poetry. Mixed metaphor? Yes. Exaggeration? Caricature? Possibly – but only slightly.

    Since the mid 20th Century, translation of the Bible has become a hugely profitable industry. Leave aside (yes, please do) the hundreds of sectional interest Bibles – I mean, recently we were insulted by the issue of the C S Lewis Bible. I can just hear Lewis delivering his lecture in heaven on the occasion of the publication of the C S Lewis Bible. And beginning with the acronym he used to describe the hated task of writing his allocated volume of the Oxford History of English Literature – OHEL!

    Leaving aside all that nonsense, there has still been a conveyor belt of translations sponsored by publishers and major church traditions. The RSV, the Good News Bible, Living Bible (described by Ian Paisley as the Livid Libel), Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible, The Common Bible, New International Version, Today's English Bible, New RSV, New Living Translation, Today's NIV. And yes, even a New KJV!

    There are now substantial books written to guide Christians to the right Bible for them. Criteria range from readability, accuracy, theological presuppositions, cultural resonance, and marketing terminology includes new, today, contemporary. I get all of that. And I recognise that reading the Bible isn't easy for committed Christians, let alone the casually interested or dismissively indifferent. So there is a good case for accessibility balanced with accuracy, and readability linked to reliability. And I have absolutely no brief to defend the King James Version as the best translation – it isn't. Nor am I saying that the others are inferior in all ways to the King James – they are most decidedly not.

      250px-JeanLucPicard But. If as an English language speaker and reader you want to hear the Psalms rendered into poetry written by a genius that sounds as if it was written by a genius – then read them in the Authorised Version.

    And if you want to be moved to the deep places in your soul and ignited in the complacent corners of your heart, read the Authorised Version of Isaiah 1 and 2, 35 and 40, 53 and 55, and catch a glimpse of images that flash from inspired words. The Beatitudes read and sound in the Authorised Version like promises that, if they were true would be miracles, and in the unforgettable rhythms of the Authorised Version they do indeed sound miraculous. The King James translation of Romans 8 is a text worthy of Patrick Stewart's voice as Jean Luc Picard of the starship Enterprise declaring that life and the universe are ultimately and finally redeemed.

    The scan of the big black Bible above is of my ordination Bible. And though seldom read in church now, and I preach from the New RSV (though I still love my even larger RSV!), now and then I take up this Bible with my name stamped on it in gold, and I read it. Not because it is accessible, relevant, the last word in textual integrity, culturally resonant or ecclesially approved – none of that matters. I read it because it is great literature. I read it because the cadences and rhythms of language are a joy to read and hear; because our language is sequined with words and phrases that still catch light and sparkle with meaning and point. I read it because it is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, and its language is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.

    188218main_188092main_D-Protoplanetary-082907-full_516-387 And I read it now and again, because now and again, in the dumbed down discipleship for dummies approach of much contemporary Christianity, I need to hear a language that reminds me that God is Other than us, that the transcendent God whose eternal love is known in Beauty, Truth and Goodness, is one who is beyond the language of the news bulletin, whose holiness and mercy eludes the appeal of the too-clever advert, and whose Being is way above and beyond the reductionism that tries to domesticate majesty, or dissolve indescribable mystery in a solution of oversimplified prose justified by the impudent adjective "New"!

    Feel better now. Sorry. Didn't mean to rant – much. Think it's time to remember the One who "maketh me to lie down in green pastures; [and] leadeth me beside the still waters…and restoreth my soul". Yea, verily…"my cup runneth over".

  • Literary criticism, love story and good poetry

    51ANHM6uS4L._SL500_AA300_
    I hadn't realised that Joy Davidman, who married C S Lewis, was such an acerbic but accurate critic in her own right.  Her letters are entertaining, educational, funny, understanding of what makes a human life well lived or not, and have a value beyond whatever light they throw on Lewis and her relationship with him. This book helps to establish her as a strong personality, and a complex rich character with her own indivoduality. An intellectually gifted woman of philosophical and literary sharpness, a writer for whom honesty and integrity  are essential for a valid and worthwhile aesthetic, and therefore a centre stage player alongside Lewis, not a foil for his cleverness nor a hanger on who eventually became a permanent fixture in Lewis's life and affections.

    These letters help explain why a man who was curmudgeon and children's writer, literary scholar and Oxbridge snob, Christian and confirmed bachelor with views that still anger even moderate contemporary feminists, ended up surrendering bachelorhood and all the other defining characteristics in the embrace of a friendship that grew into one of the great love stories that preserves love from facile romance or low commitment partnership. This was a marriage, the joining in companionship of two soul friends, a coalescing of life interests and startling life differences that had no chance of working except as two protagonists negotiated the risks attendant on an act of folly made only as secure as the commitments of love ever make anything. 

    And out of that relationship the late flowering and fulfilling of two people each having a second chance – Davidman post divorce and Lewis post bachelorhood. The love story that gave us A Grief Observed; there's a book to reckon with – little more than a long essay, but the most touching report from the far country of grief, concerning intense sorrow, theological dispute with the Almighty, and the searing honesty and bewilderment of a heart and mind cruelly robbed of their greatest treasure. The dramatisations in Shadowlands only approaches the impact of the book – but though Joss Ackland and Anthony Hopkins in two separate productions, capture the joy and grief of Lewis, neither productions does the same justice to Joy and her capacity to avoid the shadow of Lewis, and at times her ability to out Lewis Lewis.

    These letters are a delight to read. The several long ones to Aaron Kramer are amongst the most incisive criticism I've read in years. She must have been hard to keep as a friend, because she was hard on her friends. But Kramer had the sense to believe her when she tore into him "for his own good". I hadn't heard of Kramer before, and in a footnote she commends one of his 4 line poems –

    Tired

    Tired are my feet, that felt today the pavement;

    Tired are my ears, that heard of tragic things –

    Tired are my eyes, that saw so much enslavement;

    Only my voice is not too tired. It sings.

     

    How good is that. The last line is almost Isaianic in its defiant optimism, its hopeful perspective, its trust in music and the human voice as means of reconfiguring a world awry and broken by the unholy trinity of power, greed and inhumanity. This is a book that educates at different levels, and in several directions. That's often the case with the correspondence of the best letter writers.

  • Living Wittily is four years old

    1576871487_01_PT01__SS400_SCLZZZZZZZ_V1140649280_ It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line.  Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

    Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

    In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

    0038-0409-0815-2351_TN But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.

  • Vat increases and the unedifying spectacle of ethical deflation

    I am not an accountant.

    I am not an economist.

    I am not a professional poltician.

    The world of national, international and institutional finance is as complex to my mind, and as inaccessible, as an esoteric gnostic myth, written on a much used palimpsest, in an ancient language barely visible let alone legible, to my untutored eyes.

    But my uninformed gut feeling is that the impact of an across the board rise in VAT will make life so much harder for lower income people and families.

    And my moral instinct is therefore that such a tax adjustment is demonstrably unjust, ruthlessly ideological, lacking in moral commonsense, devoid of political imagination and socially irresponsible.

    It isn't the big consumer goods – but the increased cost of fuel, domestic energy, clothes, basic foods, the necessities, that will erode the security of poorer people.

    Clegg0_1664134c Yet Tuesday morning we were afflicted by the sanctimonious tones of the Chancellor, Prime  Minister and Deputy Prime Minister that this is a tough call, but one that treats everyone the same. When will it dawn on them that to treat everyone the same is unfair, because not everyone is the same – else why a welfare policy at all!?

    My elderly friend getting by on her pension will now pay an even greater proportion of her income to the Government, and do so from a margin of financial security with few footholds left.

    The refusal to increase income tax we were told is based on the judgement that this would indeed hit the lower paid – well, how about increasing the threshold, or bringing back the 10p band compensated for by extra income tax further up the feeding chain – I use the slang deliberately, because this increase could well come down to choices about food for some people.

    As I said – it's all very complex and ordinary folk like me should keep their noses out of such specialist, complicated, technical financiology (new word?) – but noses are not only for sticking in, they are for smelling, and I don't like the smell of a policy that is indiscriminate, declared irreversible, and reeks of social carelessness – by which I mean demonstrates an absence of care.

    But I'm no politician or economist. Just a human being insisting that humanity is also an important criterion in socio-economic policy – and this tax adjustment seems to lack that entire dimension.

    The photo above betrays the ethical dilemmas facing the LIb Dems – and the runaway ethical deflation reducing their currency and credibility, as promise and principle dissolve into compromise. But once again, that expedient compromise, as with the pledge on student fees, is one which will impact most on those with least.

    Or am I wrong?

    Haven't done a fibonacci for a while. A poem in which the syllable count of each line is the sum of the two previous lines – it goes thus 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 and if you feel silly, 55!

    DRAT THE VAT! (A FIBONACCI SPAT).

    VAT!

    DRAT!

    Increase!

    "Tough but fair."

    "In this together."

    Chancellor Osborne's perspective.

    Single parents, pensioners, unemployed, low earners;

    all rightly sceptical about the Chancellor's perspective on what's fair or unfair.

    They ask, "Is it fair, a millionaire Chancellor, who has a Two/One in Modern History, from Oxford, should confuse fairness with justice?


  • Sin matters but God matters more!

    41yzANmNuIL._SL500_AA300_ Sometimes sin appears when you're not looking for it. Yesterday was a semi-holiday, by which I mean I was still off work, but spent some of the time reading God Matters, Herbert McCabe. When he died in 2001, the Church lost one of its sharpest minds and most gifted homileticians. It's dated now, but his critical review of The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977 (chapters 5 and 6 here) is a model of precise dissection worthy of Silent Witness! McCabe several times alludes to what he sees as a cardinal sin in theology, "intellectual muddle". His review provoked some of the "Myth's" contributors into an exchange they didn't win!

    However, back to sin. In this volume there is a long sermon for Easter, divided into three shorter chapters. In the first of these, on Maundy Thursday and the Eucharist, in several lucid sentences, McCabe sheds light on the dark shadowy mystery we call sin.

    "Sin is the disunity of people, their deep disunity. Sin too, is a mystery; it is not to be identified with what we see on the surface. I do not mean by this that sin is some hidden 'spiritual' reality quite distinct from the physical facts of cruelty and greed; I mean it is the depth within our quarrels and disunity and dislikes. Sin is the seriousness within human injustice, where it becomes a matter of what God we serve…. Sin is the mysterious depth within the alienation and isolation of people from each other. Sin is not to be identified with the more obvious signs of human separation, any more than real unity in love can be identified with superficial friendliness and cheerfulness."

    Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 2010)  pp. 79-80.

    03footwash_s The Eucharist, the table and what happens at it, is the context within which McCabe explores sin and love, human failure and divine response, the cosmic tragedy of evil redeemed by love on a scale capable of renewing and restoring creation to truth, beauty and goodness, a reconciliation of all reality on a Colossian scale. And the Eucharist is consequently the place where divine sacrifice is acknowledged and thanksgiving offered, the place where the Word of God made flesh and matter communicates itself to the gathered people and through them to the created and human world, so that the table is the one place where more than anywhere else on earth, the love and wisdom of God are celebrated, appropriated, shared and communicated to a God-loved world.

    The Eucharist, where bread and wine are offered and received, becomes therefore the place where sin is best understood and named as the alienating, isolating, life-denying contradiction of God's creative love; and therefore the place where sin meets its antithesis and its antidote. The table, and the celebrated Eucharist, is where as nowhere else, the Gospel is proclaimed and enacted, and points to what a very different theologian, James Denney, called "the last reality of the universe, Eternal love bearing sin", and so reconciling all things to God in Christ, making peace by the blood of the cross.

    It takes theology of that seriousness to instill in our practices and observance of the Lord's Supper, a corresponding seriousness…and joyfulness.

  • The table where love bids us welcome – and as guests we sit, and eat.

    "At the table as nowhere else, we are the Lord's, not ours. We are not ours and he is not ours. We need not worry there about our destiny. We do not have to justify our existence there.  I don't know about you but I find that freedom and gift nowhere else completely. Probably we have not been enough amazed at that incredible gift God has granted us in the mystery of the table. There we need only yield our lives over to God. That is all! As such, the table stands in contrast to, if not in protest against, all the ways we have to make it the rest of the time. Now I want you not to miss the polemical point I am suggesting by starting our discussion of shalom at the table. I have the impression that most of us, and perhaps we cannot do otherwise, want to talk about shalom as task, or as discipleship, or (perish the thought) as "works", as more we have to do. And if we start there, we not only betray the mystery of the table, but also we doom our shaloming to failure, either in pride or despair, before we ever begin.

    But it does begin at the table, it always does. And the promise to us is that the church that lets the historic mystery fashion its life can hear the word and be empowered to live in and toward the new age of shalom."

    Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision, page 143-4.

    Shalom Now, if you've a mind to, read the Brueggemann extracts from the last three posts one after the other, and feel the cumulative passion, harnessed to biblical conviction, and made the more persuasive by the pastoral plausibility of the implausible mystery he is urging the church to cherish and live within.

    I guess Brueggemann publishes too much, and that there is repetition and quality variation in the volumes that occupy at least a metre of bookshelf space in my studies (yes, one at home and one at College – a situation that has its own logistic challenges). But this early book on Shalom is still amongst the most pastorally engaged, and 30 years on speaks in its revised form with a voice that has learned much from the Hebrew prophetic literature he has spent a lifetime teaching. This book is for those who believe Christian existence is about being a witnessing community, embodying and practising our convictions in the lived realities of the Gospel, our lives both surrendered gift and flawed amateur performance of the way of Jesus. Here Brueggemann has the wisdom to underplay our urges towards controlled and managed discipleship, and to dare challenge our less than subtle belief in, dependence upon, our self-generated "works" based approach to church life. And nowhere more than in these several pages on the mystery of the table, where he restores the essential connection between the life of shalom and our recognition of our status – humble guests at the table where Love bids us welcome and bids us sit and eat. 

  • At the Table is where we encounter the Real.

    "At the table as nowhere else we are made aware that true life is in mystery and not in management. At the table there is now worry about members or budget, but only the reminder of meaning given  that we don't have to explain or manufacture.  It is overpowering, when we reflect on it, that all the key verbs  in that drama have him as subject and not us.  We are the subject of no important active verbs at the table. He took, and he blessed and he broke and he gave to us again. It is his table; we are welcome guests and we don't fix the menu or pay the bill."

    Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision, page 143

    L_transfiguration It's such concise theological guidance that makes this book one of the very best things Brueggemann has written – and it's amongst his first publications. His words come as such an effective antidote to the veiled selfishness that passes for our ecclesial activism, programmatic evangelism and missional (miss)-management. I wonder when evangelical activists will recover the real drama of God's mission, really and truly embodied and proclaimed in the broken bread and poured wine shared around a table that is not ours? In a digitally experienced and ICT expert culture, the simple enactment of breaking bread and passing a shared cup becomes a proclaimed Gospel, a gift of grace so framed in mystery and profundity it is scandalously enigmatic to minds used to more sophisticated encounters with virtual reality and impatient with the gift and demand of a Real Presence.

     

  • We shall understand shalom at the table….

    Palmcross At the table we eat and drink to another reality  and toward another order. And if we are to understand shalom at all,…we shall understand it at the table. It is at the table as nowhere else that we get our minds off ourselves long enough to think of His promises and His tasks. Most of the time the church is busy worrying about wellbeing, survival, reputation, success. At the table we occasionally get these temptation in perspective and see that they do not really matter./ No doubt it is not possible for us as the church, any more than any other commmunity, to live always with that demanding reassuring awareness. But what a marvel and a gift! We have given to us, and can value that moment of truth when we come face to face with realities  that let us get free of our immobilising self-preoccupation.

    Walter Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision (United Church Press, 1982), 143.