Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Vince Cable redefines the discourse of trust, trust me on this!

    Cable
    When is a pledge a promise? When is a promise binding? What is a promise worth if it can be unilaterally broken? Is a public pledge merely a statement of intent, or does it have moral force? The questions are important because on the trust of our promises, and the dependability of our words, depends the social fabric of a liberal democracy. Note, a member of which could be called a liberal democrat, which is a somewhat different creature from the members of the political party "Liberal Democrat".

    Which raises intriguing and disturbing dilemmas. Because there is no doubt that the Liberal Democrat Party signed a pledge committing them to oppose a rise in student fees. And now Vince Cable, mouthpiece of the coalition on such matters, not only wants to renege on the pledge, promise and commitment, but wants to redefine the discourse of trust. You can read the whole sorry episode of linguistic gymnastics and ethical obfuscation here.  

    What is particularly troubling is that Mr Cable seems to genuinely believe, or disingenuously say he believes, that breaking a promise does not reflect badly on the Party's trustworthiness. That can easily be tested. Ask how many students will now trust the Lib Dems. Are our politicians so inept at ethics that they do not recognise trustworthiness is the characteristic of those who have shown themselves worthy of trust? Are they so out of touch with their ethical side they don't understand that trust is a judgement conferred not a virtue claimed? So entirely otherworldly (intersting word for the culture of realpolitik and discourse revision) that they missed the rather critical point that a pledge, or a promise, or a commitment – he uses all three words synonymously – is only as trustworthy as the person who makes it proves to be?

    There are problems for all of us when public discourse is so malleable to political justification that reshaping of truth to Party expediency can be carried out with such sincere conviction and palpable evasiveness. If to "honour" the commitments made within the coalition require the breaking of promises in order to maintain the coalition, then either uphold the promise at the price of coalition partnership, or admit that you broke the promise and can't be trusted in your election pledges. It really doesn't work any other way. The only thing worse than breaking a promise is to insist you did nothing wrong, would do it again, refuse to apologise and insist that you are trustworthy and are working hard to honour commitments.

    I realise it may be simplistic, and is near culpable proof-texting – but Jesus did say "Let your yes be yes, and your no be no". Mind you, he was no great politician either – and he had little use for coalitions of self-interest.

  • Great little one, whose all-embracing birth Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

    Virgin adoring botticelli A large print of Botticelli's "Virgin Adoring the Christ Child" hangs above my desk. I bought it at the National Galleries in Edinburgh and I've been to see it three times this year. I've written about it before, and with Advent approaching I thought it was as valid an anticipation of Christmas as the switching on of lights events, the premature carol-fest in every shop with piped music, or the early intimations of panic that it's time to write Christmas cards to all those who might send me one:)

    During Advent I'll post a few meditations on several of my favourite paintings of the Incarnation. Some of the finest theology I've ever read explores the mystery of the Word made flesh, the paradox of how "unto us a child is born" could ever be made congruent with "Emmanuel", God with us.

    One of the significant deficits in the spiritual theology of Evangelicals is the loss of transcendent mystery, impatience with that which requires our silence rather than our words, suspicion of image, icon and symbol, and therefore an impoverished life of the imagination, an atrophy of the sense of wonder, and the loss of devotional nourishment sought beyond the usual preference for words over silence, ideas before image, and praise as experiential celebration of the personal. Or is that only me? 

    Ng_2709_before_cleaning_full The contrast between the restored Botticelli above, and the same painting before its recent restoration is, to put it in the wonderfully pompous language of the Victorian Sunday School teacher, "instructive". A layer of discoloured varnish accumulated over slow centuries, so tones the colour down that it lacks brightness and contrast. So the vivid colours and detailed symbolism is lost. A masterpiece now lacks vitality. The richly textured embroidery of the robe is hidden, the detailed beauty of the roses flattened, the variegated foliage reduced to blurred green, and the light and shade, so theologically precise as illumined night, merges into mere foreboding shadow.

    The restored painting recovers all that was hidden, overlaid, and deadened by decades of dust. Advent is a time when my capacity for wonder, beauty and adoration is in desperate need of the same process of restoration, recovery and enjoyment. Richard Crashaw's long poem, "In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord", describes the Advent disposition of wonder, and is perhaps the best commentary on Botticelli's masterpiece. The words would not be out of place as a description of the Virgin's thoughts – nor of our own awakening to the wonder and miracle that is Advent. 

    Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
           Eternity shut in a span;
    Summer in winter; day in night;
           Heaven in earth, and God in man.
    Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
    Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth.

  • Hauerwas on friendship.

    Stanley Hauerwas is as honest as the day is long in his theological memoir, Hannah's Child. The book is littered with insights that only make sense because they emerge from a life on which Hauerwas has reflected with honesty and reported with candour. And there are moments of delightful humanity, when Hauerwas contradicts the popular version of his personality as a truculent Texan of theological self-deprecating genius. Here's one of them:

    I discovered the gift of friendship. Indeed I discovered I had a gift for friendship. I love and trust people. My love and trust may at times be unwise, but I prefer the risk. I am not stupid. I do not like fools or pretension. But I love interesting, complex and even difficult people. Thank God, they often love me.

    I do not think that questions concerning the truth of Christian convictions can be isolated from what is necessary to sustain friendships that are truthful. I am not suggesting that Christians can be friends only with other Christians. Some of my most cherished friends are with non-Christians. Rather I am suggesting that if what it means to be a Christian is compelling and true, then such truthfulness will be manifest and tested through friendship.

    See! Self deprecating genius. That is as good a description of what friendship is as I've come across, and one which says well where I am myself when it comes to friendliness as a disposition towards others that is life enriching.

  • The radical disconnect between managerial leadership and the graced community

    What is the connection between leadership and management? And what then is the connection between leadership, management and grace? And finally what is the connection between leadership, management, grace and an authentic way of being the Body of Christ in the world?

    My problem is one of resistance to and suspicion of theologically misleading discourse. Leadership and management are about efficiency, control, direction, achievement, development, intentional actions, presumed effectiveness and humanly contrived success. All of which is fine in the company, the business, the  commercial organisation, the corporate entities that make up most of contemporary social structures. But is the church that is the Body of Christ a corporate entity of the same order as all the others in the world, or even entirely of the same ontological sphere?

    12899a559cb69bc6 The church exists to embody the life and reality of the risen Lord Jesus, the Body of Christ. And as such, its organisational principles, its ethos and values, its convictions and actions, are likely to be qualititatively different, perhaps even threateningly alien, to the principles, ethos, values, convictions and values of other corporate bodies with no transcendent affiliation. Or is that just too radical? Is such a disconnect between the culture of managed commercial and political society and the culture of the church just too unreal? Are the basin and towel embarrassing relics, revered symbols, sacred ideas – or are they part of a story that is to be lived, practiced and perpetuated in the witness of the church? And is the table, set with bread and wine, the place for private, individualised devotional reverie and remembrance, or the place where we are reminded of that vast disconnect between power and brokenness, between management and mystery, between the lust to control and the passion of surrender, and that surrender which is the Passion.

    Tokenz-dealwd023 So any discussion of church leadership which presupposes forms of management and hierarchical models of direction and authority, for me will always be judged by those radical symbols of disconnect – the basin, the towel, the table, and yes, the cross. Which brings me back to the awkward and disconcerting juxtaposition of the words management and grace. And to that table around which Christians gather to be reminded of how different from the pervasive cultural norms we are called to be. And to be recalled to a way of life, a form of being, a lifestyle of convictional practices that show why this disconnect, this radical difference is not only necessary, but is the benchmark of faithfulness to a Gospel of grace which enables and renews the mind, heals and restores the heart, beckons and summons the will, humbles and lifts the spirit, breaks down the barriers of our mistaken self-confidence, and remakes in us the capacity to trust, to love and to serve.

    Grace and management presuppose a different order of relationships; leadership and grace only co-exist in Christian discourse and practice when acts of service, not expressions of authority and power, bear witness to that example that was given at the heart of the Christian story, and is told out around the Christ-given table. At that place, the Christian table, the radical disconnect between the styles and activities of managerial leadership and the lived practices of the Body of Christ as a graced community are most visible, and there witness is borne to the way of Jesus.

    And if you ask what that means in practice – I'm sorry the specifics will only arise in each of our lives when we make those choices that mean for us what it meant for Jesus who laid aside the garments of status and took the basin and the towel; and when we learn what it means in our own living, in this particular relationship now, to not count our own status a thing to be clung to; and when grace as gift, as being weak yet strong, as being generously given thus a generous giver, as not looking to our own interests, when grace not our own overriding intentionality, takes of our not much, and multiplies it in blessing to others. Because that's what God is like.

     

     

  • Aung San Suu Kyi – the song of the ruthless is silenced

    Aung san suu kyi As heat is reduced by the shadow of a cloud, so the song of the ruthless is silenced. Isaiah 25.5

    Every generation has its symbols of courage, hope and freedom. For over 20 years Aung San Suu Kyi has spoken truth to power, and power has sung its ruthless song, seeking to drown out the melodies of hope, the anthems of freedom and the hymns of truth.

    But these too have their songs and their singers. In her first words to the gathered crowd greeting her release she said, "There is a time for silence and a time to speak."  In a symbolic act potent with its own meaning, wearing the trditional lilac dress, she placed a flower in her hair. Flowers, are fragile sources of seed, each seed itself latent with life and replete with new possibility. The great visions of freedom and hope that illumine Isaiah and Micah, look forward to days when human beings live without oppression, fear and confiscated speech – desert places burst into bloom and the wilderness is carpeted with flowers. This woman embodies that humane hopefulness, that yearning for liberation of mind and soul, that humanising hunger for freedom to speak the words that change the world. On a day when we remember the cost of freedom, and the sacrifices of those who died to preserve it, we require to give integrity to our rhetoric; our prayers of intercession should include people like Aung San Suu Kyi, Shirin Ebadi (Iran) and Liu Xiaobo (China):

    Lord silence the voice of the ruthless,

    and give voice to the words of the oppressed.

    And as Advent draws near, and we reflect on the people who walk in darkness, and languish in prisons of other people's making, it is central to the church's mission to articulate hope, to sing the song of the merciful, to speak truth to power and pray for those silenced by the songs ruthless. This God-loved world is a dangerous place, and there are deserts waiting to blossom, and other songs waiting to be sung.

     

  • Where does God live?

    JonathanSacksP Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is one of the spiritual treasures of contemporary Britain. Ever since his Reith lectures on The Persistence of Faith I've read and listened and learned from this thoughtful interlocutor to the cultural arguments of our times. In one of his radio broadcasts he tells a story and draws clear lessons – as good teachers do, the narrative telling of truth.

    "The Hasidic Rabbi asked his disciples "Where does God live?"

    They were stunned by the strangeness of the question. "What does the rabbi mean?, 'Where does God live?' "Where does God not live? Surely we are taught that there is no place devoid of his presence. He fills the heavens and the earth."

    "No", said the rabbi. "You have not understood. God lives where we let him in.

    That story has always seemed to me more profound than many learned volumes of theology. God is there, but only when we search. He teaches, but only when we are ready to learn. He has always spoken, but we have not always listened. The question is never "Where is God?" It is always, "Where are we?" The problem of faith is not God, but human beings. The central task of religion is to create an opening in the soul."

    Throughout the writings of Jonathan Sacks I hear echoes of that other great Jewish teacher, A J Heschel. It isn't that Sacks copies or quotes Heschel – it may not even be that he is all that familiar with Heschel's writing, though I suspect he is. But the spiritual honesty, the intellectual humility, the gentle confidence in the reality of God, the unswerving quest of the prophet for truth and integrity of life, and the instinct for prayer and devotion as essential human activities – these are held in common by Sacks, Heschel and those others who take the quest for God as the defining priority of the religious life and who recognise too that God is in quest of each of us.

  • Paying lip service to servant leadership – and the alternative

    In his book Prophecy and Discernment R W L Moberly describes in unmistakably kenotic terms the nature and practice of Christian existence.

    Because his message is "Jesus Christ is Lord", its corollary is that Paul's role entails not mastery over others, but rather service of them…to proclaim the lordship of Christ entails a revaluation of human priorities in the way of Christ, the renunication of self-will and self-aggrandizement and the embrace of self-emptying and self-giving for the welfare of others. This is not only possible for Paul because he has "seen the light" – the light of God's glory revealed in the person of Jesus; it is this knowledge of God that determines Paul's priorities.

    Quoted in New Perspectives for Evangelical Theology.Engaging with God, Scripture and the World, Ed. Tom Greggs, London, Routledge, 2010.

    My feeling is still that much breast beating rhetoric about servant leadership never quite engages with those other psychological drives more satisfied by being the leader, and more  emotionally content with discourse of authority, envisioning, initiating and the other euphemisms for having a sense of power. I'm not against power – it exists and has to be managed. But the questions will always be – who has power – how is power exercised – what quailifies, constrains, governs power? And in Jesus' case it was love. So when leadership is discussed, described, embodied, let's use the discourse of love for others rather than the discourse of authority over others. Hmmph!

  • Pastoral Care, unforeseen consequences and the undercurrent of grace.

    A voice from my past came back to bless me the other day, through an email from a friend. My friend was speaking to someone I had helped decades ago, and whose memory of kindness shown then, and non-rejection when life was messed up, remains blessing to her, and is now encouragement to me. That email touched into something that is a given in pastoral care – the invisibility in the present of later consequence. And for me mixed memories, of hard decisions, sometimes unrewarded effort, becoming the target of anger and frustration that has to earth somewhere, and the sense that an undercurrent of grace carries us along sometimes despite our best efforts to row in the other direction.

    Mary Oliver's poem below expresses with psychological precision and pastoral prescience what that undercurrent of grace can sometimes feel like – the categorical imperative of caring.

    For Example

    Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

      from the sand.

    Let me fumble it into a box, with the

      lid open.

    Okay, I put the box into my car, and started

      up the highway

    to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

      such things can be mended.

     

    The gull at first was quiet.

    How everything turns out one way or another, I

      won't call it good or bad, just

        one way or another.

     

    Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

      the back of the front seat and

        punched me.

    Okay, a little blood slid down.

     

    But we all know, son't we, how sometimes

      things have to feel anger, so as not

        to be defeated?

     

    I love this world, even in its hard places.

    A bird too must love this world,

      even in its hard places.

    So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

      you have to do something.

    From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.

    7-injured-yellow-legged-gull The poet achieves accuracy in describing the ambiguity that surrounds those responses we like to think spontaneous, but are often either premeditated or arise out of habits of the heart. Three times she uses "Okay", and it can mean concession or defiance to those who might wonder why she bothered. Her understanding of the language of anger, and why anger may be all a person has to prevent being overwhelmed by circumstance, is one of those profoundly humane insights that makes Mary Oliver essential reading for those whose calling is the care of others. To love the world in its hard places requires commitment to act, without foreseeing consequences beyond that present immediate imperative, "to do something".

    The photo comes from here – where you can find a vision of an alternative lifestyle in an altogether different climate from Scotland in November.

  • Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur – a tribute 🙂

    Now I don't often advertise on this blog. But when it comes to food those roadside oases where weary travellers can stop and be refreshed by good food, hot drinks, pleasant service, – well, such places are hard to find. So when you find one, become evangelical about it. Witness to others about your experience. Share with other weary travellers the good news that there is indeed a place of quiet rest, of spread tables, where the body as well as the soul is restored.

    Helensburgh1 Now let's be clear. I'm talking about the food, the people who make it and serve it, the price, and its convenience to the road. I'm not talking about ambience, plush surroundings, expense generating window dressing. I'm talking about "Ye May Gang Faur and Fare Waur"; translation You Could Go Further and Do Much Worse".

    At the Stracathro Service Station, about 40 miles South of Aberdeen, this transport cafe is one of the best stopping places I know. Yes the tables are formica topped. The interior is about utility, hard wearing carpet, factory standard lighting. But the food. Honest, real, cooked on the premises and served by people absolutely confident that what you get to eat is substantial, not fast food, good value and no nonsense. Nonsense usually consists of high prices for low quality. This place reverses that – high quality low prices.

    Take last night. travelling from Glasgow to Aberdeen, I had a light meal with friends before tackling the M8 and onwards. Two hours or thereabouts gets me to beyond Dundee and near Brechin. Time to stop. It shuts at 9.00. I get there by 8.30. What do I have? Forget the coffee and expensive pastry! Or the Coffee and fat laden muffin! Anyway they only serve home baking done in house or locally. No. I have a mug of tea. And a bowl of baked rice pudding!!! Probably the same calories as one of those soft, wet gooey muffin things – but different culinary cosmos. Nutmeg skin, warm and sweet – and by the way I declined the jug of cream that goes with it. I was looked upon by the smiling no nonsense rice pudding dispenser as someone who had flipped their lid.

    "No cream? You want milk? Milk?? In my rice pudding???"

    I quote exactly.

    Rice By the time I got back in the car and started the final leg home, the inner man was renewed, a kind of spiritual glow that had little to do with religious devotion – unless rice pudding can be considered sacramental……

  • Mary Oliver – a poet’s gestures towards holiness

    Images Mary Oliver at her didactic best – which means she teaches us without trying to, what we learn being a by-product of what her poems do to us, in us and for us.

    "It is salvation if one can step forth from the

    clutter of one's mind into that open space —

    that almost holy space — called work.

    I suppose only a poet would talk about work like that? Or at least someone for whom work results in the expression of the self in creation towards communication. The fashioning of meaning, ideas and image from words, touching the inner lives of others through the shared currency of a vocabulary congruent with experience, discourse with a shared language though perhaps different accents, these are indeed gestures towards holiness.

    And then these lines –

    Lord, there are so many fires, so many words, in

    my heart. It's going to take something I can't

    even imagine, to put them all out.

    As a writer, a theologian, and a teacher, I recognise in these lines that same gesture towards holiness. The sacred source of ideas, meaning, and the words that enable one mind to share with another some of those fires, lies somewhere between the intellect, the heart and the will. She is describing something deeply and definitively human.

    (From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2010, page 52.)