Author: admin

Mary Oliver’s Poetry, and a moment of childhood wonder

My early years were spent in rural Ayrshire. My father was a dairyman and I lived my entire childhood at least three miles from the nearest shop and school. Oh, and we didn't have a car till I was at secondary school. Amongst the compensations throughout my life have been a love of the coutnryside, a lifelong passion for Scottish wildlife – flora and fauna, and a number of memories maybe not many folk my age will now have.

I remember discovering a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge and being utterly and almost tearfully delighted at the delicacy of shape and colour. To my young eyes this is what a jewel looked like – fragile beauty, grey mauve at the top, tapering to white at the point and traced with several dark elongated commas and question marks as if someone more clever than Faberge had randomly painted a one off egg for the life-remembered pleasure of an 8 year old boy in wellingtons jeans and almsot certainly a big wooly jersey!

So when I come across this poem by Mary Oliver I know exactly what she feels.

With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble

I do not live happily or comfortably

with the cleverness of our times.

The talk is all about computers,

the news is all about bombs and blood.

This morning, in the fresh field,

I came upon a hidden nest.

It held four warm, speckled eggs.

I touched them.

Then went away softly,

having felt something more wonderful

than all the lectricty of New York City.

………………………

Maybe somewhere in such memory there is for me the explanation of why I have always felt a deep resonant joy that Jesus saw connections between the birds of the field and air, and the creative care of God. Was that egg still beautiful if no one had ever seen it? You decide. Some day I may attempt the impossible and try to capture on tapestry that jewel of a moment, that awakening of childhood wonder at the random beauty of life's promise, a yellowhammer's egg, laid in a woven cup lined with moss, sheep wool, and feather.

20 October 2010
Tomas halik – a more humble listening – three simple strategies

As the Church seeks to adopt a more humble, receptive, listening and thus persuasive stance over and against the surrounding world, there are a number of strategies suggested by those Halik engages in conversation throughout his book. Here are just three from Paul, Von Balthasar and Thomas Merton:

The way of paradox – "great things are revealed in small things; God's wisdom is revealed in human foolishness; God's strength is revealed in human weakness"

The way of humility – the struggle against "that will to power disguised in the mantle of religion that drives one to assert one's own greatness instead of acknowledging that God alone is great…against every ascetical practice which aims not at God but at one;s own perfection, and which is nothing more than spiritual beauty treatment."

The way of Christlike living "What we are asked to do today is not so much to speak about Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him by feeling how he lives in us".

Paul's point is that God is not limited by our limitations, or boosted by our resourcefulness. Von Balthasar's point is different – the stance of power, of certitude and of self-righteousness negates a Gospel earthed in the humility of God in Christ. And Merton was quite capable of speaking for Christ, as we all are – but the primary speech of Christian existence is the life lived, the evidenced vitality of the living risen Lord in the life of individual and community.

.d b

19 October 2010
Tomas Halik – on not flat-packing the Infinite

The Renaissance of interest in Kierkegaard in recent decades is not without significance for Halik. The move in the 19th century from "study of God" (philosophical theology) to "an hermeneutic of the existential experience of faith" leads Halik to suggest that faith is the most radical existential expereince. And that theological tradition may have even more to say to our culture now than it did even in the existentialist high points of the mid 20th century.

"Out of all theological disciplines, that theological current is probably closest to spiritual theology; after all, spirituality is without doubt the dimension of Christian faith most relevant to the spiritual climate of present-day Western society. However if the theological impulses I have indicated are embodied in a lived faith and spirituality, then this liberation spirituality or exodus spirituality should not lead to shirking our responsibility for the society in which we have been placed. On the contrary, one of its essential tasks is sensitivity to the signs of the times in the cultural and political climate of today's world. "Solidarity with seekers" implies sharing in their seeking and questioning."

Here again Halik is arguing for a Church that vulnerably and willingly moves away from assertion and proclamation of claimed truth, to the much more humble position of listening, seeking and offering of truth from the experience of lived faith. To live responsibly in our culture, alert to the signs of the times, listening to the heartbeat and longings articulated by those who share our times and places, seeking a life more humane in which peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy are lived out precisely as principles of a Gospel of peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy. It isn't that the church should not be confident in the Gospel, but that it should stop being so self-confident that in its words and concepts, by its institutions and worship, in its history and traditions, through its theological articulations and apologetic arguments, it in any definitive sense HAS the Gospel as possession, has the truth in its finality, knows all there is to know, understands the incomprehensible, or conveniently flat packs the Infinite. The Church itself receives within its limited finitude only what it is given of the infinite riches of God in Christ, and so the Gospel is bigger than the church's idea of it, as Christ is greater than any formulation or conception purposed to contain Him.

A church confident in the Gospel is by definition one that should be the last to be guilty of self-confidence, and the first to confidently sit alongside the seekers of our age and culture and converse, explore, share and commend, review and revise, persuade and be persuaded as true, a way of life that in its embodied integrity gives credibility to those humble words we feel are capable of telling the truth, of bearing witness, to the reality of God as we have discovered that Loving Reality in Jesus.

I doubt if Halik would own all the weight I put on this – but I am largely persuaded for myself that such humble confidence, shared in the confidence of trust, would be a deep, and patient, and valid alternative form of witness to the One who once said to seekers who asked where he stayed, "Come and see". Confident in the Gospel of Jesus? Absolutely. Confident too, that the One for whom all things were made, who is the last word in wisdom and understanding, will lead those seekers in our own times, into that way that is truth and life. The role of the church may well be to create places of openness, moments of graced meeting and speaking, occasions of spiritual hospitality, encounters between those who seek and the One who is sought.

18 October 2010
Tomas Halik and the felled, lifeless trees of wrongly presented truth.

When I said I was reading this book slowly, I meant patiently, taking time to let a different voice say new things, or familiar things in new ways. I wasn't aware it would be read slowly, a page or two at a time, lying in hospital, with time to think between each reading, a miasmic doze, and the next couple of pages. Not sure anyone sucks lozenges nowadays – the word lozenge seems to refer now to a medically laced sweet from a bygone age. But as a sweet to be sucked rather than crunched, slowly ingested rather than consumed, enjoyed for lasting taste rather than eaten for short term satisfaction, the metaphor still works. This book is a lozenge type read.

The cliche graffiti story, "Jesus is the Answer" to which someone allegedly wrote below "What is the Question", may in the end be mere baseless anecdote at best; at worst, a preacher's invention. But Halik pushes the point and arrives at a different intellectual level. Quoting the philosopher Eric Voegelin, Halik asks whether the biggest problem for Christians today is not that they don't have the right answers, but that they've forgotten the questions to which they were the answers. Then Halik continues:

Answers without questions – without the question that originally provoked them, but also without the subsequent questions that are provoked by every answer – are like trees without roots. But how often are Christian truths presented to us like felled, lifeless trees in which birds can no longer find a nest?

There in a couple of sentences is the diagnosis of the church's contemporary malaise and missional confusion. We talk dialogue and practice assertion. We claim to present, embody, live by, know, the truth, but to put it in the words of that most unmetaphysical of movie characters, Jack Nicholson, "Son, you can't handle the truth!" Because the truth is bigger than our capacity; the truth is stranger than our conceptual field can contain; the truth is never our possession always our gift, and never entirely given. And whatever else I make of the Colossian Christ, the Johannine Logos, the Hebrews "God's last word" claim about Jesus Christ, whatever else I make of the NT claims to apostolic testimony to the truth, it never was that the church can simply take truth for granted. We don't possess it, it possesses us; we don't control it, truth compels and constrains us.

And while Halik can push too far his hesitations about just how much truth can be understood, held to, made the base convictions of life, he is absolutely right in his image of felled lifeless trees, truths nobody cares about any more; truths that don't shelter; truths that have lost the sap of life. And therefore truths cut off in the deforestation of a landscape that should include mystery, miracle, question, search, enquiry, discovery, newness, oldness, longing and finding, losing and recovering, sunlight and shadow, the colour and tone of life rather than the settled leafless skeletal greyness of what used to be a magnificent rain forest, a life-giving canopy under which human life is explored in the mystery and history of a God loved world.

And yes that is idyllic, and a bit overblown. But I do sense in our cultural landscape that deforestation of religious ideas is well underway, a land-stripping of those vast questions that have always fascinated and terrified, opened us up in mind and heart, to a universe at once alien and home. Which brings me back to the New Testament. Because I happen to believe its outrageous claim that in Jesus Christ the universe co-inheres, all things hold together. That in Jesus Christ, the Lamb Slain from the foundation of the world, the Word uttered by the Father, the Life that Lightens every human being, the heart of God is revealed. And the mind of God is glimpsed – not captured, not contained, not comprehended – but we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. And when it comes to beholding glory we can only glimpse - because to gaze would be blindness.

Here's Halik again

It takes the confrontation of questions and answers to return a real meaning and dynamic to our statements. Truth happens in the course of dialogue. There is always a temptation to allow our answers to bring to an end a process of searching, as if the topic of the conversation was a problem that has now been solved. But when a fresh question arrives, the unexhausted depths of mystery show through once more. let it be said over and over again; faith is not a question of problems but of mystery, so we must never abandon the path of seeking and asking.

I think Halik is, quite simply, right. And I wish the church was able to recover the intellectual humility to recognise that what is now needed is a reforestation of the cultural landscape, a church with a sense of the greatness of God's humility, a church unembarrassed by the vastness of the truth of who God is in Christ. And a church lost in wonder at a Love way beyond our mere intellectual constructs, but purposefully present and deeply entangled within those profound and mysterious depths of human brokenness and aspiration that define us as human beings, made in the image of God.

17 October 2010
Living Wittily Redivivus!

Hello – it's now over a week since I posted here. It's has been a difficult week spent in hospital fighting off a very nasty infection that erupted unexpectedly and caused considerable havoc with my pain thresholds! Home now and will recuperate for a week or two before starting back into those activities that we call our normal life.

However Living Wittily is back albeit having to live more gingerly for a wee while, and trying to follow advice along the lines of "be good to yourself". As if such conformist pressure were really necessary. The doctor wouldn't prescribe chocolate covered marzipan though as a substitute for antibiotics – seemed to think the suggestion had no clinical merit. Hmpphh!

Be back again the morn.

16 October 2010
Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize, Glass Houses and the Moral Imperative of Throwing Stones

The Chinese Government were never going to welcome the news that Liu Xiaobo had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. No Government is likely to be enthusiastic about its own internal dissidents being honoured by the rest of the world. And those of us who live in so called liberal democracies should perhaps hesitate and look carefully at what we hold in our hands before hurling it at others. We may break our own glass house. I say "so called liberal democracies", because I doubt if our society is as liberal as we'd all like to think; and not everyone would say that what we have is in any strong sense, a democracy.

Nevertheless. I risk the surrounding glass houses as I hold in my hand at least one smooth rounded stone. (By the way amongst my favourite objects are stones which have been rounded by the lapidary patience of water – a metaphor for slow but transformative change?) That the award of a Peace prize should be described as obscene is one of those paradoxical statements which betray irreconcilable differences of perspective. But then to talk of irreconcilable differences also calls in question the point of a Peace prize if conflicting ideologies are incapable of understanding, and even revision of thought. The Chinese Government has an entirely consistent record of putting the interests of the Party before the rights of its people. Liu Xiaobo was an activist during the Tiannemann Square protests, and has been in and out of prison since – currently serving 11 years for writing ideas contrary to those approved by the Government.

The West has little assumed moral superiority left. We have our own embarrassments, our own crimes against other parts of the world, our own problems of seeking a more just and humane society. People in glass houses…. But whether here or China, I refuse to have good called evil without rejoinder, or to have just protest silenced without protesting, and I want to describe as nonsense, literally and rhetorically, the notion that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to an imprisoned activist whose chief weapon was a pen or keyboard, is in any sense an obscene act. Rewarding peacemaking can never be anything other than transparently humane. That such an accusation could come from a Government which has the Tiannemann Square massacre in its recent history exposes the toxic political doublespeak that is the favoured discourse of those for whom human rights are cheaply negotiable. The statement is itself, an obscenity.

10 October 2010
What does that have to do with the price of fish?

Now here's a retail mystery that is hard to understand but easy to solve – if there's the will to do so.

I stopped on Thursday night for a fish and chip tea on my way to Aberdeen.

The menu offered for £8.15 small haddock with chips + pot of tea + buttered roll + ice cream.

I ordered but said I didn't want the roll or the ice cream.

Went to pay and was charged £7.55 for the fish and chips, and £1.20 for the tea – total of £8.75.

I said I had had haddock and chips (three hads in a row:)) tea.

No I hadn't had the ice cream or roll – but if I took them now I could have the cheaper price.

So I have to eat more calories to get it cheaper, huh?

Or I take the roll and ice cream, but leave them on the table, and get the cheaper price.

Or I don't take them at all, and pay 60 pence more for less food.

Now how does that work?

I reasoned reasonably, persuaded persuasively, charmed charmingly, looked pained painfully, and eventually was charged for the fish tea at £8.15

That was at the Bridge of Allan chip shop – and let me say, the fish and chips were superb. So not knocking this fine establishment, (which I've patronised for years and will again), just asking them to not create the kind of offers that either waste food or waste waists!

Fish Supper Haiku

Light, crisply battered,

deep fried piscean banquet,

served with chips, and tea.

Buttered roll, ice cream?

Superfluous additions

to a perfect meal.

Fish Supper Fibonacci

Fish.

Chips.

Enough.

Fish and chips!

Forget the ice cream!

Battered haddock, not buttered roll.

Calories, cholesterol and saturated fat

are all fine in moderation, so choose your vice carefully and stick with fish and chips!

9 October 2010
Patience with God, Tomas Halik – to be read slowly, and patiently….

I'm enjoying a slow read of Patience with God. Tomas Halik's writing is beautiful even in translation from the Czech, and there is a quite different sense of the importance of religious experience and of God from someone whose early background is in state communism, but now is a priest free to practice in a Westernised country which has less sense of God!

Oh God, how I pray for the church to fulfill St Paul's vision of a body in which all the parts complement each other in their diversity and respect each other's specific purpose, where the eye doesn't say to the hand or the head doesn't tell the foot, "I do not need you". How I wish that we could realize at last, with all its implications, that the "body of Christ" needs eyes that look progressively ahead, feet that stand firmly on the soil of tradition, hands that intervene actively in the world's affairs, and attentive, hearing ears that silently and contemplatively liste to the beating of God's heart.

Page 79.

8 October 2010
daft maths and why sometimes the politics of envy is a morally defensive position…..

With objections too numerous to enumerate, and with arguments too obvious to argue, and for reasons to reasonable to rationalise, the following report of the financial activities of Manchester City FC are morally unacceptable. Not singling this Premier League English club out, (so I've shown Chelsea players – apparently one on £150,000 per week) just offering an example of ludicrous extravagance that is so morally compromised it is hard to get any ethical handle on it. Please place the figures below ( the published audit figures popularised for public consumption) alongside the realities of poverty and struggle for individual people who are unemployed, chronically unwell, single parents, or low income families. And then recall the Amos vision of a just society, preceded throughout his prophecy by harsh questions to the extravagant grinders of the poor, and luxuriating mega-rich on their Bentley sofas – ok forgive the anachronism:

But let justice roll down like waters

and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

"The figures also show details of City's astonishing spending spree on players and salaries which have led to record losses of £121.3million. Although City's turnover increased by 40% to £125m this has been swamped by total salary costs of £133.3m, a £50m rise on a year ago.

The annual report also shows that the club's net spending on transfers has totalled a staggering £403m since 2008. City's net spending this summer was £96.6m – they actually spent around £126m but recouped £30m from the sale of Robinho and other players.

As of June 1 2009, £185.2m had been spent on transfers and this was followed by a further £145.4m in the following 12 months offset by sales totalling £24m.

The good news for City is that their turnover has also risen hugely, mainly due to a large increase in commercial income, from £87m to £125m."

Sometimes the politics of envy is a morally defensible position. I covet the money that pours Niagara-like into football -not for myself.

I wonder what difference it might make to a hundred families to have the equivalent of the cost for one of those famous celebrity / footballer parties?

Or the difference it would make to the hospice provision in this country if for a year ten footballers decided to take their £100,000 per week every second week and donate the alternating payment. Daft maths I know but we are talking daft maths anyway. The answer is £26,000,000 give or take.

I'm not blaming the footballers – I am asking about the ethical maturity of a culture that has no problem with such daft maths. And I'm not pointing the finger as if I stood outside all this nonsense – I am part of a society that has lost its sense of proprotion, that has mislaid its capacity to measure value, that long ago silenced its ethical klaxons where money is concerned, that lives in a cultural world where virtual fantasies about being mega-rich occlude the counter-experience of many for whom poverty and lost life-chances are not a virtual but a real nightmare. The published finances of a football club such as those quoted above are worth considering alongside the massive cuts about to affect many vulnerable people in our society.

5 October 2010
Hubble, Poetry, Creation and Christ
CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

by: Alice Meynell (1847-1922)
3 October 2010