Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Declan Shanley: friendship and the bravery of a young boy.

    This is very, very sad. A wee lad playing with his pals, and one of them gets into trouble in deep water in the River Kelvin. And his friend Declan Shanley jumped in to help him, but was swept away in the current, and later found to be drowned.
    20100620130299531252087 He looks a smashing lad, and the tributes from his family, friends, school describe him as just that. You can read about it here.

    Tonight, a young lad I've never heard of before, moves to the centre of evening prayers. And his family too, in their bewilderment and loss, but also so proud of their son, brother, grandchild – they too are held in the place where we know God is – that quiet centre of communion, prayer and compassion, from which we reach out in love and mercy to people whose lives will never now be the same. I am persuaded, and I use the words deliberately as an echo of the King James Version's way of being certain, I am persuaded that the credibility of the mission of the Church that is the Body of Christ, is only as strong as the compassion and empathy that same Church as Body of Christ has for all those borne down under tragedies like this. May Declan rest in the peace of God, and his family be borne up on the love and prayers of the Church which, if it is the Body of Christ, then loves with Christ's heart, serves with Christ's hands, and goes to all the places Christ would go with his feet, and sits down there to be with and stay with those whose greatrest need for now is comfort.

    Lord have mercy:

    Christ have mercy:

    Lord have mercy.

  • Vermeer, Beauty and the irresistible summons to which we willingly surrender

     
    Pearl earring Recently while conducting a retreat my computer decided to teach me a lesson in panic. Not how to deal with it, how to remain functional while not dealing with it! Don't know what I did but after pressing some keys the entire screen inverted and I was looking at Vermeer's     Girl with the Pearl Earring upside down. Now that's a problem when the first ten minutes of the retreat session were to be spent contemplating beauty, and reflecting on human creativity as a response to those deep longings that impel our hearts outwards and our minds upwards. It doesn't work if the masterpiece is upside down. And it doesn't help when a retreatant suggests we all stand on our heads, a spiritual discipline I neglected to develop. But once we had found a way round it, by showing the painting the right way round, we were indeed able to contemplate beauty and be impelled outwards and upwards beyond the usual limits of routine.


    Viewofdelft Yesterday, continuing my explorations of beauty and theology, I spent a while gazing attentively at another Vermeer, "View of Delft". This painting was drawn to my attention by a Vermeer enthusiast and I can see why she loves it. The simple and initial response to great art such as this painting is the least complicated and perhaps therefore the most significant. Admiration, wonder, joy, a sense that the painting does something to us, and then a growing appreciation of what the painting does to us. Not so much what the painting says, which may come later, but what the painting is, the sense of real presence, that first urgent intimation and initial invitation that we look, and be captured, not by force against our will, but by the more compelling persuasion of beauty whose summons to surrender is both irresistible and willingly answered.

    Perhaps it's only after being arrested by beauty, taken unawares with all critical faculties stilled and silenced, that we are then able to look more closely and begin to understand what has happened to us. That's when we ask why and how beauty has such invasive and transformative power over us. It may be that the most important thing a great painting "says" is heard most distinctly through that summons to wait, to linger a while, to gaze slowly and to be affected, to appreciate and then reconsider, in the light of such an attended-to moment, what else relative to such commanding beauty, could we ever think was so important in our lives that we would so give ourselves to it.

    The connection between beauty and God doesn't lie only with the obvious overlap of creativity between Creator and creature. When God looked on all that was made and thought it very good, was that the first such willing surrender of heart to created beauty? I find the thought of God as artist, and as One who enjoys aesthetic pleasure, intriguing. And it makes me wonder if in the painting by Vermeer above, there isn't an intentional underlying recognition of divine presence, the subtle pressure of beauty as intimation of God. The skyline with its churches, the sky itself showing the blue of heaven, and that blue reflected on the water; and the reflection of sky on water of blue and cloud, the given mixture of divine and human, heaven and earth, human longing and frustration, human joy and hurt. And there in the forefront, people going about their work and their lives, and reaching across to them, the reflected spires of the churches. A harbour scene from Renaissance Europe becomes in its detailed composition and through the medium of beauty, a way of both communication and communion, a glimpse of a world where God is present, not overwhelmingly, but with subtle faithfulness, there.


    Vermeer-the-Milkmaid The divine in the midst of the human, the eternal mirrored in time, the surprise of beauty discovered in the ordinary, the composition of light and shadow, the juxtaposition of human bodies and human buildings and both as temples of God; such theological hints and clues may or may not have been in Vermeer's mind. No matter. Any theology of beauty requires the full range of height and depth, of simplicity and complexity, of concept and expression. Beauty and its transformative effects is a mystery profound, an experience of that which is Other and to which we are drawn without needing to know why, an encounter with the kind of truth that therefore requires of us adoration before analysis, and an inner surrender that is closer to contented wonder than frustrated intelligence. And as for the artist Vermeer, there is no need for didactic doctrine in paintings like his – the beauty of the human face, the loveliness of the world, the honouring of domestic life by portraying it, the contemplative care with which detail and story are told, are aspects of his art that should be all that the religious imagination needs. Any commentary on the paintings is all but superfluous – not useless, just unnecessary if the imagination is attuned to beauty.

  • Shakespeare disbound and diss-assembled by dissembling book thief

    Here's a story to break the hearts of all bibliophiles, infuriate Shakespeare scholars and admirers, and confirm the truth that for some people everything has a price, even a priceless folio. Paste the link below into your browser, a facility the Bard never dreamed of – imagine Shapespeare with an IPad :)) And then weep for the philistinism unleashed by the love of money – and lament the lack of cultural conscience in a person who can bring themselves to…..well, read for yourself :((

    http://news.aol.co.uk/man-mutilated-priceless-book/article/20100617111317194947074


    Shakespearenew_old On top of
    this, a new film titled "Anonymous" is currently being produced which plays out the controversy
    about the authorship of many Shakespeare plays. Was it Shakespeare or
    Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford who wrote those great works of genius? In the background of the literary sleuthing is the
    dangerous rivalry between the Tudors and the Cecils, scheming and plotting over the succession to the
    throne. And Vanessa Redgrave is an absolutely inspired casting for Queen
    Elizabeth.

    Oh, and I have an opaque blue china decorative plate of the bard in Question, that doesn't seem to go anywhere obvious in the new house. It won't scan so can't show it, but it's an impressive Victorian plate produced by Sampson Hancock and Sons at the turn of the 19th / 20th Century. It will however find a place – a reminder of what can be done with 26 letters arranged into a few thousand words, which in turn are arranged into sentences and scenes and chapters by authorial choices from a near infinite number of options. So a Shakespeare theme seems destined this weekend – I intend to have an early Saturday morning viewing of The Merchant of Venice, lent to me an unconscionable length of time ago, and my favourite Shakespeare play from school days. By early I mean, well, early. Will have watched a play by Will long before breakfast arrives for most other sensible bloggers. 

  • The last word from the barricades


    6a00d8341c675d53ef010536b1a32a970b-250si Stuart has announced the closing of his blog as from this week. His reasons are characteristically straightforward. Blogging gets the ideas out there for whoever wants to engage, discuss and think. But ideas and convictions though born from mind and heart, require to be lived, practised, embodied in a life. In other words ideas are for trying out; convictions are only convincing when those who hold them experiment and implement what is thought and said. Convictions are finally articulated and explained when they are demonstrated and bear witness to their truth not by argument only, but by embodiment in a life truly lived.

    So I understand why Stuart moves on from his blog. But I have also appreciated the sharp perceptions, the radical questions, the passionate edge, the dissenting voice, the genuinely baptist (small b) spirit (small s:) in which Stuart has developed much of his thinking. I hope he will occasionally guest here on this blog when the word from the barricades can still occasionally be spoken, whether shouted or whispered.

    For now, thanks Stuart for several years of good natured cajoling towards a more radical discipleship, for much laughter, and for introducing me to blogging as a way of inviting discussion, exploring ideas, and having fun at no one's expense because fun should always be our gift to the other, to build up rather than diminish. Unless of course the fun is satire, the laughter a judgement, and the joke on the powers that be who use power at the expense of others. At which point……

  • Books, good books and beautiful books

     
    51N78SNS1FL._SL500_AA300_ There are books, good books and beautiful books. And while the contents are the thing, the physical production is not an irrelevance. Can you imagine reading your favourite book in a brown edged, split spine, dried glue crackling, acrid smelling cheap paperback. Well – yes if it was my favourite book, and the only available copy. But the enjoyment would be seriously diminished.

    The ideal book is the one which has just what I want to read, well written, and contained in a volume that is attractively bound, printed on quality paper, a careful choosing of the right font, and even with features such as more than one ink colour. There is an aesthetic imperative in the production of a quality book. I'm much less dismissive of the softback or paperback than I used to be, but I can still be found guilty of paying much more for the hardcover when there is an option. There are well produced softcovers that do survive several readings, and can be opened a few years later without the spine disintegrating and the book being reduced to varied length pamphlets that need an elastic band to hold them together.

    All this is because I spent some time over the weekend reading several chunks of Margaret Odell's commentary on Exekiel. That weird prophet, whose chapter one became a chapter in Chariots of the Gods, a best-selling speculative effort by Velikovsky on space ships and bible times, takes a bit of understanding. And Odell is way ahead of others in trying to interpret the outpourings of a man deeply disturbed by catastrophe, and trying to make sense of a God who permits catastrophe within a covenanted relationship with the very people on whom such catastrophe is visited.

    But as well as the contents, which along with Kathleen Darr's careful and imaginative treatment in the New Interpreter's Bible are the best treatments around, Odell's book is a joy to use, read and handle. It is in the Smyth and Helwys series. It is inordinately expensive. The volumes are near impossible to source even from Amazon. The publisher's marketing approach is well nigh obstructive. But persevere. Phone Gracewing, the UK distributor. Don't visit their website unless you are an extraorinarily patient and understanding browser. Still. Several volumes including Odell's, are amongst the best exegetical helps around. Who wouldn't want Brueggemann on Kings, Fretheim on Jeremiah, Balentine on Job?

    The production is lavish, expensive, includes sidebars, text boxes, varied ink text, high quality binding and paper, and it looks and feels like a volume you won't ever want to lend to anyone. That said, if my favourite book was out of print and my copy was a beat up brown edged paperback, held together with an elastic band, I'm not sure I'd lend it either. But a commentary with pictures! And sidebars. And a searchable CD. Bound in hardback with a distinctive dust-cover! Cherry pick the series, and own at least one if you appreicate high quality production of high quality content.

  • Blessed are the Poor – Except in a Recession

    A conversation recently veered backwards to what I used to do before I was a minister. Long time ago. Hardly seems relevant it was so long ago. But then I began to think about it. In the years between leaving school at 15 and starting as a minister I was a tractor driver (16 the legal age then), worked in a Clydeside tomato / bulb nursery, did two years as an electrical engineer, worked as a brick setter in a brickworks, two summers at Easterhouse social work dept as a debt advisor, and one or two other bits and pieces including house plant cultivation and greenhouse glass repairing!

    The point is I learned stuff doing all these things, and what remains is a set of skills all these years later. I can still drive a 16 gear tractor, make a difference in any garden I'm let loose in, know a good brick when I see one, and have a deep sympathy and at times an angry solidarity with and on behalf of folk caught up in hopeless webs of debt. But more than residual skills, there's the hard to explain and harder to replace experience of finding out what I could do, what I was good at and not so good at. But also the sobering thought that a young and unskilled man with no educational qualifications managed to stay in work for 5 years to earn his way to University. Not sure what chances anyone has today of repeating that career trajectory. Had I needed to draw up a CV then, not sure there was enough relevant content to fill half a page – and much of what was relevant would hardly have encouraged an employer.

    But I was given life-chances. There were life chances to be given, and I'm not sure when that will be said again with some confidence about young people who don''t make it in the more fiercely selective and streamlined walkways to a career in a post recession culture sinking beneath the weight of its own debt, and looking to throw overboard anyone unable to pay their way. It's a hard time to be young….or middle aged….or old. It's a hard time. And I'm increasingly impatient with the rhetoric of politics, economics, and social theory that suggests we are all going to have to bear the pain. I'm sorry. But pain is relative, and during a recession there is no equal distribution of financial hardship, no common levels of anxiety, no universal experience of having to choose between food and fuel. Not all of us will have to make that kind of choice – we may have to pay more, but we will manage with a bit of adjustment. Not so for everybody.

    So my impatience extends to the church, and the lack of evidence for a new approach to missiology that borrows from Amos, the Lucan Beatitudes and the preferential option for the poor that is definitive of the Kingdom of God. Because wherever else Jesus of Nazareth might place his vote, it would certainly be on the side of those who are the easy targets, the marginal folk who are too easily deprived of social benefits rather than cost us more money in taxes. I just don't think an increase in VAT feels the same for me as it does for a single parent with several children and no full-time job, or an elderly person on a basic pension. The church's voice could do with being heard, and speaking with a Galilean accent.

    So that conversation about what I used to do? The great thing was, there used to be things to do that you could be paid for. Now an entire generation of people with skills, training, education, and life hopes and plans, are encountering a world no longer congenial to their life plans, and where life chances have to be fought for, and with no guarantees. Now whatever else I think the Gospel of Jesus means, it has to have something to say not only to people who are struggling to hope, but something to say on behalf of those who struggle to hope, in the face of massive economic and social forces aligned on the side of the haves.

      .

  • An unexpectedly graced hour amongst the dust

    Made a new friend last night. I was on a mission to procure ornamental aggregate for a garden feature. The merchant was in the process of moving premises – hundreds of tons of pebbles and cobbles to be moved from here to wherever. It was good of them to entertain a customer given the logistics of relocating fragments of a mountain, or at least a mountain of fragments. But I knew what I wanted – they said they had it – somewhere. So I arranged to meet the man, a very helpful if a tad late, man. 


    Moraypebbles30_50mml Waiting at the gate, no one around, phoned for the umpteenth time and discovered there are two gates, half a mile apart! No problem – my new friend said he would come and pick me up in his van, which he did. His apologies were genuine and his determination to fix the hassle I'd had just getting to the place was even genuiner! Should say I'd just finished at College and was dressed in some of my best clothes. So well dressed academic theologian and gravel shifting friend rummaged around the stacks of bags till we found what we wanted – no facilities for extracting the right amount I needed. So we started fishing for the best coloured and shaped cobbles in the 2 tonne bag. At which point my new friend suggested I take off my "guid jaickit". Right enough. 20 minutes later he decided we had enough for the job and we lugged it to the van, loaded it without a crane, and without doing mischief to muscle or disc, and dusted off hands, trousers and the "guid jaickit".

    The point of all this is really simple, but not trivial. Someone I hadn't met before put himself out considerably for a tie wearing, dark-suited, not over-big, academic, happily mining in a large bag of stones, and the conversation ranged from the chances of the business surviving, to family challenges, to the problems of being on a salary with no provision for overtime – the last point his complaint, not mine:) Part of who I try to be is someone who tries to see each person as someone like myself, just trying to make life work, and trying to make sure those who share our lives are cared for, looked after, and that if the choice is to make someone's day better or worse, will always opt for the former. My new friend seemed to see life the same way. He could have gone home. Switched off his mobile. Told me to come back he didn't have a key to the place. But decided to make my day better.

    So in the end, mission accomplished, conversation enjoyed amongst the dust, and two people who might never see each other again, spoke about important things, and reached out across those barriers too easily taken too seriously. It was an unexpectedly graced hour, and touched me in deep places that leave me still wondering about all those possible friendships just waiting the right encounter. Pondering too, how to live more generously and with that openness of heart that simply reaches out from one to another for no other reason than the recognition of someone else who happens to be here, now, and walking the same way.


  • Mary Oliver, Staff Retreat and learning to pay attention to our lives.

    Been away from here for a few days.But been doing other things that brought me into good company, lovely countryside and conveyor belts of rain! Been at Grasmere with the good folks of Northern Baptist Learning Community sharing their staff retreat and helping provide guidance and stimulus towards renewal and refreshment after a long demanding year. So we had some of Mary Oliver's poems, an eclectic choice of music that reflects my own enthusiasms, a number of pictures and images which express beauty and the joy or sadness that intermingles with our lived experience. And I shared a few soliloquies inspired by several biblical encounters with Jesus – never been sure if they were worth doing more with, but the consensus seems to be a yes. So we'll see.

    41CU6Z6Ij7L._SL500_AA300_ What became evident though is that on a retreat occasion, a poet like Mary Oliver has the ability to open new doors of perception, encouraging a more attentive, less cursory viewing of the world – to gaze rather than glimpse, to notice rather than merely register, to greet whatever and whoever we meet, with "Hello", rather than to act ignorantly, that is in a way that shows we do not really know or want to know those other presences that would grace our lives if we gave them the time of day, and a little space.

    Throughout her recent work there are a number of light-hearted but not insignificant poems about her dog Percy. Here's one that I find irresistible because it is about a dog and books, or in any case about a dog impatient with stupid humans who bury their face in paper instead of looking at the beauty, the fun and the excitement of a colourful world laden with smell and sound.

    Percy and Books (eight)

    Percy doesn't like it when I read a book.

    He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

    He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

    The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

    The tide is out and the neighbour's dogs are playing.

    But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

    The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

    that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

     

    Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

    Let's go.

    With summer here, an academic year formally completed tomorrow, I'm with Percy. Let's go! Need a holiday and it will come in a few weeks. Meantime in order to enjoy it, I'm going to try to decelerate gently, a foot movement that doesn't come naturally to me. To help me I'll slowly work through several thin books of Mary Oliver's poems, and learn again how to pay attention, to say hello, and give time of day to whoever asks it, or even whoever doesn't.

  • Poetry, the hidden treasure of the heart, and being made to feel differently

    Amongst the subsidiary blessings of being a staff member at the Scottish Baptist College, is a generous books allowance to underpin our personal research and help us keep abreast of new work in the subject areas we teach. Of course there are those who call such blessings a perk – but that's cos they don't have the high vocational commitment of the bibliphiole for whom a book is synonymous with blessing, and reading an activity that Philp Toynbee called "the royal way to God".

    This week the book allowance for the next academic year becomes available. And I don't have what I often have, a long list of waiting to be bought goodies – perks – ehhh – blessings. Which said, there are a few essentials that are food for the soul, the heart and the spirit – before we ever get to the mind.

    51gbTlRCfvL._SL500_AA300_ Mary Oliver is a poet entirely comfortable swimming in the emotional depths, yet possessed of an uncomfortable and discomforting instinct for bringing our own more hidden emotions to the surface; not to embarrass or frighten, but to reconcile us to the richly textured, gloriously ambiguous world of our own deep feelings. And she does this in ways so deceptively simple that only because I know her ways with words, am I expecting to feel differently by the time I reach the end of one of her poems. But how I then feel, is still a surprise, because the reading of the poem becomes a medium of self-discovery, the poem itself a field in which, ploughing, I discover hidden treasure. Then again my own reading self is also the field in which the treasure is hidden – there but undiscovered, till her ploughshare turns the soil and there I am, laughing, or crying, daring or caring, restored or reconciled, interested or integrated, convinced or content, – the alternatives are endless, but the point is, I seldom read one of her poems without thinking and feeling differently about life, the world, me, those I love, problems I have or that have me, hopes fiercely cherished or disappointments that weigh heavy.

    I've often enough said that the poets are the ones who take us to the heart of things, and to the heart of our own hearts. Mary Oliver's best poetry performs such cardiac surgery using words as both scalpel and needle, skillfully healing and repairing that centre of our being which gives our lives rhythm, oxygen and the vital energy for life. And in the process, she brings to the light of our days, treasures we did not know we had, treasure we did not know we were. Tomorrow I'll post one such poem – read earlier in the week, in the middle of a jaded afternoon to each of our staff members, read and heard by each as a benediction framed in loveliness, and welcomed as a gentle corrective for lives perhaps too prone to self-important anxiety about getting the job done. Whatever is true of my colleagues, Mea culpa! 

  • The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

    021  Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world. 

    Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

    the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us…for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God… 

    The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

    My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does – persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.