Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Nihilism, alienation, the church’s mission and the Christian as upstart!


    Compulsory_nihilism_II_by_astrolavos Twice in an hour I've come across words that have serious consequences for human happiness. One is nihilism. It's a bleak word, and not to be confused with skepticism, cynicism, or even atheism. One of the most remarkable little books published 50 years ago was by Helmut Thielicke, a theological prophet of a past generation, and it was entitled, Nihilism.  Thielicke confronted the ethical and spiritual vacuum of post war Europe by contradicting the latent nihilism of a world coming to terms with the Holocaust, the Bomb, post war austerity and gradual transition to prosperity. Nihilism isn't simply an ideological stance based on rejection of value, meaning and significance. It is a world-view with its own ethic, its peculiar convictions, its practical consequences in how we live, regard others and look on the future with curtailed hope.


    Cording_binds Robert Cording is a poet working out of Holy Cross University, and Jason Goroncy has posted one of Cording's poems on Mozart's starling. It is a beautiful poem, a wonderfully imaginative celebration of life in ordinary, and taking joy in simple things. There is no surprise that Cording in ways very different from Thielicke, challenges the latent but sometimes blatant nihilism that runs through our culture. He does so in poetry, by the creative use of words, writing an alternative story of the world and its consequence, hinting strongly but gently of those spiritual intimations that whisper and murmur loud enough to be heard by those soul-sick enough to listen. Here's his own description of what he is about – and how we need more of what he is doing, taken from his own self-description on the website of the Journal Image, found here.

      "I am teaching and directing a creative writing concentration that
    is part of the English Major at Holy Cross, as well as working on my
    fifth volume of poems. My current work strives to reincorporate
    religious language and     content in a way that interests and wins over a skeptical modern
    audience. My work is rooted in the belief that words can invoke
    what the critic George Steiner calls "real Presences," and that
    these presences bring us back again and again to the fundamental
    question of being: that there is something, rather than nothing.
    The poems I'm writing lately try to criticize and call into
    question what we have rarely questioned—our own unexamined nihilism    ."


    Merton writing Writing over 40 years ago, Thomas Merton
    often reflected on the experience of alienation, another form of human diminishment so familiar to the modern
    western spirit. In our own age of self-obsessed concern for the self (and yes that is a deliberate solipsism), Merton's words come as yet another shrewd, compassionate and passionate plea for a much less artificial, posturing, exaggerated presentation of the image of the self we want others to see. Here he is, reflecting on the confusion of personas culture forces us to adopt, as it changes and fluxes, shape-shifts and dissolves only to re-form in new configurations, expressions and expectations.

    "The result is the painful sometimes paranoid sense of being always under observation, under judgment, for not fulfilling some role or other we have forgotten we were supposed to fulfill."

    "The peculiar pain of alienation in its ordinary sense…is that nobody really has to look at us or judge us or despise us or hate us. Whether or not they do us this service, we are already there ahead of them. We are doing it for them. WE TRAIN OURSELVES OBEDIENTLY TO HATE OURSELVES SO MUCH THAT OUR ENEMIES NO LONGER HAVE TO.  To live in constant awareness of this bind is a kind of living death."

    Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence, Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing, (ed), Robert Inchaustri, (Boston, New seeds, 2007), 72-3

    I'm not sure who has replaced Thomas Merton as the spiritual director of secular society, and as a prophet who often saw clearly what everyone else only vaguely guessed at. He lived the paradox of worldly contemplative, gregarious hermit, immersed at one and the same time in silence and solitude, and in the world of human affairs, and his heart was open to that world with an openness to risk on behalf of others that was truly Christ-like. Not personal physical danger, but the spiritual ambiguity of being a worldly monk, a vocation to detachment from the world combined with a vocation to attachment to that same world, living out a genuine love for the world that seeks to replicate the outgoing, self-giving love of God. Because whatever else contemplative prayer was for Merton, it was to love the world with the heart of God. 

    Nihilism and alienation. Two words loaded with spiritual toxins, diseases that affect the whole inner person – intellect, heart, conscience, will. While the church seeks new ways of doing mission, maybe it also needs to find new ways of bringing the good news of Jesus to bear on a culture in which nihilism and alienation remain favoured default positions. Whatever else the New Testament contradicts, subverts, challenges, confronts, it entirely and comprehensively negates these two enemies of human wholeness, healing and blessing. The church of Jesus Christ needs more Thomas Mertons, Robert Cordings, more of those upstarts who call in question the spiritual status quo of a culture desperately searching for whatever will fill its self-created emptiness, nature isn't the only force that abhors a vacuum – so does the divine love that seeks to fill all in all.

  • Pastoral theology as a story to be told


    51iOTWolTrL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU02_ Some of the more annoying comments I've heard and read recently have come from those who describe a novel as a man's novel, or a woman's novel, and with a number of sub-categories also assumed. Now I do recognise that writers of big-selling novels write for target audiences, and are often pushed by publishers to stick with the known commercially successful formula. Fine, let them do what works for them. My problem though, is that some of my favourite novelists are women, some of my favourite novels are consigned to the constraints of the category 'woman's novel', and some of those are amongst the best explorations of female experience available to a man! Oh, and just to mix it a bit more, you then have a novelist like Colm Toibin who writes with understated and nuanced wisdom about the experience of a young Irish woman in the 1950's, finding herself, finding her way and looking for her place in a world that offers no certainties.

    This isn't in any sense a novel to be dismissed, stereotyped, or otherwise reduced in its achievments. If the novel is a literary form that enables human experience to be told, and if the telling of that experience cherishes and celebrates what it means to be a human being, and if in the telling what is cherished and celebrated is a life in which choices have defining consequences not only for what we do but for who we are, then this novel is a gem, glinting and glowing with humane observation.

    • The jealousies and commitments of siblings growing up and competing for the advantages of life but caring for each other's welfare
    • the struggle to make ends meet in hard economic times, and the reductionist snobbery of those who look down their noses on people who want to build their future
    • the loneliness and homsickness of those who move away from home and have to find their own place, rely on their own wits and work, and weave their own network of relationships within which to live
    • the ties and burdens of family responsibilities, and how these are almost never fairly distributed
    • the first intimations of love emerging from friendship and growing into a longing for permanence and faithfulness
    • the death of one we love, and have depended on as a landmark that makes sense of life's geography, and as a benchmark that demonstrates what a life well lived might look like
    • the dilemmas when two kinds of love threaten to cancel each other out, and love for lover and love for family force a choice in which it is impossible to avoid heartbreak

    In this novel, Brooklyn, all of these, and much else, are threads woven into a tapestry that has subtelty, variety, and central images which are cleverly connected to the whole canvas. Tobin enables us to understand the inner world of Eilis, who emigrates to America, and through her eyes and experiences we observe what it means for her to 'get on in life', and what it costs, and why in the end, she has to bear the weight of consequence that settles on her own choices. And any reader, regardless of gender, will find in Toibin's gentle probing psychology and his underlying affirmation of those human relationships that define us most, important clues to many of our own experiences as they coincide with the examples given above.

    And so yes, this is a book I'd ask a pastoral theology class to read. Apart from some obvious questions arising from the points earlier noted, I'd want them to reflect on how such sympathetic insight into human longing and failure; how such hopefulness and affirmation of life's possibilities, how such humane faith in people and their lives so replete with significance waiting to be discovered, how all that can be translated into a pastoral disposition that enjoys, likes and loves people.

    The Living Bible is hardly the most reliable rendering of tthe Bible text. But occasionally, it delights in its freshness.  2 Peter 1.7 is one such rare occasion: "enjoy other people, and come to like them, and finally you will grow to love them deeply." That is what Toibin is teaching in this novel. Oh, I know. The novelist may well laugh at any suggestion he set out to teach anything. So let me rephrase; that is what any careful reader of Toibin is more than likely to learn, that people, in all their complexity and fragility, in all their simplicity and strength, in all their potential and actual growing, offer no guarantees as to how their story will unfold. But they are to be enjoyed, liked, loved, precisely because they like us, are stories still in the telling.

  • I’m Back – Connected


    Smile3t After a conversation with a very patient and courteous support team worker,somewhere on the other side of the world, my broadband is now live and I can get back to doing the things that have been hard to do these past weeks. Email, blog, research, browsing, and the many other time saving and time wasting ways of being online.

    From the start I have wanted this blog to be updated and maintained on an almost daily basis, so that regular callers and new visitors are given something to think about, smile about, maybe even get passionate about. The hiatus has been frustrating and I hope over the next few weeks to get back into good habits. Strangely I can't say I have lots of ideas that have accumulated over those weeks – probably because I tend to enjoy the spontaneous rather than the scheduled.

    Meantime, thanks to those who kept faith, kept in touch, and trusted my promises to return to literary ways as soon as possible.


  • Novels – core texts and essential reading in pastoral theology

    51iOTWolTrL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU02_ Reading Colm Toibin's new novel, Brooklyn. About the emigration of a young Irish woman to the United States, and the experience of separation, loss, disorientation and soul-testing loneliness that we call homesickness. Tobin is a beautiful writer, and writes about women's experience with sensitivity, insight, and a counsellor's sympathy, combined with an admirer's confidence in the resilience and dignity of this woman's ways of meeting circumstance and change. It doesn't make much sense to review a book only a third of it read, so I'll come back to this novel later.

    But even what I've already read shows why novels are essential reading for people whose calling is to the care of others through pastoral friendship. I'm often asked about good books on pastoral theology, or for recommended titles that get to the heart and the point of what real pastoral care is. You often see the skeptical, disappointed, even dismissive expression on the face when instead of the latest theological heavyweight, or practical how to do it manual, or popular pastoral care in twenty minutes kind of book, (has anyone written pastoral care for Dummies yet:))you offer a list of three or four novels. Now I'd want to add biography, poetry, and some philosophy as other required resources (alongside obvious pastoral theology texts), but for now sticking with novels, here's one novel of one writer I learned from and still do. (Going to do several more over the next couple of weeks).

    Good husband The Good Husband, Gail Godwin. A magnificent central character, Magda, is a literary scholar, a charismatic liberated and utterly impressive woman, is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her husband, Francis, who happily lives in her shadow, becomes the carer of a stellar woman facing the greatest challenge of them all. No it isn't sad, morbid, dark – it is humane, compassionate, incisive. Godwin dissects the responses and attitudes of those who come and go, gather and stay, accompany or stay away from Magda in her last months. But the faithfulness, the cost and the self-effacing but effective presence of the good husband holds the balance of a relationship that is both blessed and doomed. And I can't think of a more nuanced and gentle exploration from different perspectives, of the experience of dying, in any pastoral theology book. The wrong things said, the crass questions, the gentle unintended kindnesses as well as the intentional acts of care, the tongue tied visitor embarrassed by pain and diminishment as well as the caring silence of the one who simply sits, holds hands and speaks only in sounds of reassurance, and then the practical carers who get things done without fuss and without intruding, the medical procedures at times humiliating, at times restoring, and all this told by a novelist who should be given an honorary doctorate in the humanities for the sheer humanity with which she writes.

    I did a presentation on this book at a gathering of newly accredited ministers. It would make a too long post. I'll adapt it and post it over a couple of days next week – unless of course broadband is up and running at my new hoose up in Aiberdeen, like!

  • Tapestry, Birds, the Book of Kells, the Eagle Nebulae and Friendship

    Still spending time doing and designing tapestry. The wee bird one, (a stonechat), is finished, framed and hangs on someone's wall. Maybe as a reminder of life's colours, threads and patterns, and the strange miracle of how 15,000 tiny stitches eventually form a picture, and how the weaving and mixing of stranded cotton has its counterpart in those relationshiops of life that we call friendship. Three quotations perhaps explain how designing and working tapestry freehand is a way of celebrating beauty, acknowledging blessings often unlooked for, and affirming those friendships which provide the canvas and pattern of our own living. Following no set pattern, open to improvisation amongst endless options with freedom to choose, yet a sense of the whole, an instinct for what works and what doesn't, so that the freedom is within an existing commitment – like friendship. 

    You may hang your walls with tapestry instead of whitewash or paper; or you may cover them with mosaic, or have them frescoed by a great painter: all of this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake, and not for show: it does not break our golden rule: Have nothing in your house which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

    William Morris in 'The Beauty of Life' lecture 1880

    Destiny itself is like a wonderful wide tapestry in which every thread is guided by an unspeakably tender hand, placed beside another thread and held and carried by a hundred others.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet.

    “We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone, and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something.” Sandra Day O’ Connor.

    Hs-1995-44-a-web Last night a friend first met 26 years ago dropped an email, prompted a phone conversation, and added a few more stitches to a rapidly filling canvas. And she was the one, along with her husband, whose quiet enthusiasm for all things needlepoint, from quilts to crochet, from tapestry to knitting, got me started. Kells2

    Now beginning to think of some new projects – the Book of Kells, the Hubble images – imagine trying to do a tapestry of the Eagle Nebulae?!

     

  • Moments of grace, and how to spot them!

    Rublev Several moments of grace recently. Not the holy, theological, prevenient, or sovereign kind. but definitely the saving kind. Here's two of them.

    In Dobbies for a scone and a latte – a frequent sacrament of friendship with Sheila. On this occasion we had one scone broken between two so yes, a sacrament. At Dobbies you take your tray, choose your scone and butter and jam. Then you can bypass the cooked breakfast queue and head straiight for the coffee makers.

    As I begin walking the 20 yards to the coffee place, alongside me two women, mother and daughter. She eyes me, I eye her, she walks faster, so do I. Moral and pastoral question. Do I sprint and beat her to it, or do I slow down and let her "win". Being the last word in repartee I said, On you go". She grinned and said,"Thanks. I'd have beat you anyway." Much laughter. She ordered, I ordered, and my coffee provider worked faster so I got to the till first. Who won? Who cares? We both did.

    Having a bad day. We all have them, and I had just had one. All kinds of reasons and none of them really fixable in any quick way. You know the kind of day when you would feel more negative about things if only you had the energy. So as it is, and as you can only carry so much excess baggage, you give up  your aspirations to feeling negative+, and just settle for being, well, negative. And then a friend intervenes. Conversation, coffee, company, affirmation. And by the end of the day you are in that place in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, just moving from the thunderstorm to the peasant's thanksgiving and dancing, and the gentle persistent intervention of that beautiful melodic movement I never hear without thinking of all the good things that make it possible for us to look again and be surprised at how good life is. And all that negativity is discharged like lightning and earthed harmlessly, and the sun shines again. Well, that was yesterday.

    Grace is undeserved favour.

    Grace is the gift we never asked for, looked for or worked for.

    Grace is beautiful and makes beautiful.

    Grace looks you in the eye and says you matter, no matter what.

    Grace is two people with scones on trays inadvertently inventing a new sports event, the scone and tray race.

    Grace is the presence of those people who are like sunshine pushing through clouds, and inviting us to dance. 

    And yes, grace is what God is about, always and ever.

    And we often encounter that grace in the faces, and at the hands, of others who love us with the friendship of God.

    The Rublev Icon above is there because it is in my view one of the greatest Christian images of grace as loving welcome and attentive hospitality.

  • A Sunrise of Wonder Over Stonehaven, and the Blessings of Each New Day

    Now and then I wish the car rear view mirror was a camera. Not because of the irresponsible tail-gaters, and not to watch the car I just ovetook vanish in the distance, humiliated because overtaken by an elderly Corsa with a mileage that would take it round the world 3 and 3 quarter times. No. I want a rear-view camera not to glower or gloat, but to glory in the beautiful artwork of God.

    Sunrise This morning, around 5.15 am, driving round the sweeping corner towards Stonehaven, the sun in the space of several seconds, drew a brilliant fine line on the horizon using a fine-point silver and gold pen borrowed from a generous Creator. Just where sky and North Sea meet, the line became stronger in colour, broader in reflected brilliance. That was the rear view. In front of me a sky that was blue, long broad brushed clouds that were contrasting grey softened by projected, but out of place pink, except that it didn't seem at all out of place – it was beautifully apt, mixed on the palette of an expert in light, who knew how to suffuse greyness with glory, and how to draw a new day's dawn with pencil line precision.

    And today at College I read some of that beautiful, wise book by the late Michael Mayne, This Sunrise of Wonder. The title comes from words of G K Chesterton, quoted on page 7:

    At the back of our brains, so to speak, there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

    Now and then broad brush grey clouds all but cover our sky. Reflected glory, grey suffused with hope, this sunrise of wonder – this masterpiece of embroidered light and shadow, pink and gold and grey and blue, is God's intimation that as sure as day follows day, so new every morning are the blessings of God.   .

  • Broadband, Aberdeen and Shortbread….

    After 5 weeks of intermittent posting, when Living Wittily has had its longest interruptions by far, I have discovered our new postman has beautiful feet. He brings good news. My start up pack for Broadband has glided through the letterbox, with the proclamation that we will be online again on April 30 – a mere 43 days after going offline at our last home. Now I'm a patient person give or take a few rants; and I am an understanding customer, provided there is a service to be satisfied with; and I have tried so hard not act as if the whole universe depended on each entity having uninterrupted access to the internet. But 43 days, when staying with the same provider, and expecting to be able to work from home – a home into which we moved on March 24, so it will be 37 days without online facility.

    But I'm back regularly from May 1, allowing for a day or two to sort out any glitches, technophobic panics, computer hang-ups. Meantime thanks to those who left comments that had to wait till I could go online to moderate them. Margaret asked about perichoretic relationships – that will get its own post later.

    Now started the new weekly regime of days at College and days in Westhill, Aberdeen. Travelling is now part of what I do – so I'm looking for ways to make time in the car more than a mere hiatus. Music, Radio 4, – haven't started talking books yet – not sure that's for me but willing to try. And strap line spotting. Lorries, vans, bill-boards, all displaying clever and not so clever strap lines. Might decide to do a strap line of the week. Followed a large lorry carrying shortbread. How many shortbread fingers on a 30 foot truck? And each one around 200 calories? The back of it had this image of golden crumbly butter enriched shortbread. Made to the recipe of Helen Deans, this family has been making shortbread for two generations. The strap line: "History in the baking", written just under this six foot image of a crumbly, butter shortbread finger. I followed it for a while wishing I'd brought a packet……


  • Friendship and Prayer; when the global becomes local, and the international becomes personal.

    Funny how the global becomes local, and the international becomes personal, and major crisis for millions is felt at the level of individuals. Almost everyone in Western Europe is now likely to find that they, or someone important in their lives, is stranded abroad, and as of today with no clear idea of when they will be able to come home. Ease and safety of travel has become such an integral part of what we take for granted as normality, that this past week has created a new level of awareness of just how vulnerable technology is to the elemental physical forces that drive and shape our planet.

    Easy now to slip into apocalyptic scenarion; but just as easy to assume that once the direction of the wind changes the situation will revert to normal. Somewhere between apocalyptic meltdown and complacent unconcern is the harder reality of having created a world dependent on air flight, air freight and air defence systems. And for the first time total shut-down has simply negated that assumption. The unprecedented now has precedent. In a world where risk assessment, risk management and rehearsed emergency scenarios have become standard activities of corporate bodies, it seems this particular combination of circumstances escaped the risk assessors and the Hollywood script writers.

    I'm not sure what to make of all this. But I do have friends stranded abroad; and I am only too aware of how little can be done to help them from a distance other than support by text, phone and email. And it is when the global becomes personal that the issues of life on our planet become much more persuasively focused, and the unyielding limits of our can do confidence are exposed.

    Meantime our politicians are out electioneering. I may have missed it, but has there been any statement from our Government about what it will do to help our citizens who are stranded abroad. Governments can't fix volcanoes or change wind directions, but it's an interesting question whether a forthcoming election is more important than one of the most significant natural disasters to impact on our country for a very long time. We don't have a Parliament or cabinet sitting in emergency session – but we do have election battle-buses, road trips and hustings tours. Am I being unreasonable, or is there a lost perspective, a wilful blindness to the real world beyond the horizons of politicians and Govenrment ministers and officials.

    For millions of people in this country, who wins the political leaders' TV Debate is less important than what is currently happening to members of our family and our friends, and what our Government has to offer by way of help, support and credible response to a world where party politics is an irrelevance. Volcanoes are not influenced by rhetoric.

    Intercessory prayer in churches this weekend should be the longest part of the service. Earthquake in China, major disruption across Europe, the mourning of Poland, – and these are just this week's news. Across the world, their are situations of human suffering and loss of which we seldom hear, or which come to our attention and disappear under the constant pressure of the next story. And whatever else intercessory prayer is, it is the holding of a God-loved world before God, and a willingness to reach out in that same love for the healing, the wholeness and the blessing of that world – in whatever ways we can, and where we can't, in supplication to the Father of mercies.

  • Administration, preparation, re-organisation and the joys of tapestry

    Beautiful sunny day here in Aberdeen. Morning spent answering emails, writing a couple of admin things what need to be wrote, and reading in preparation for next week's teaching. Also perused a mass of documents relating to stuff I'm doing next week – I do sometimes wonder just how much documentation is needed to establish a new course, and how that compares with how much is required to wear out a shredding machine. I know! My mood of skeptical impatience is not helpful.

    It's been a mixed week of two days of meeting, course preparation and marking, rearrangements of books already arranged and rearranged, and in between in my leisure time I have cut swathes of organised space out ofa garage that was filled with all the stuff we didn't know what to do with under the immediate pressure of making sure the beds were up, the kettle was available, the painting was done for the carpet-fitters,  – oh, and the cold water tap on the bath was still secure…….

    Speaking of leisure. The tapestry of the redstart is finished and I think it works. I'll scan it one of these days before it's framed, but I've enjoyed playing again with colour and texture, of wool, cotton and canvas. I am also now well on with the Celtic Cross but I think it is going to grow into a bigger piece of work – it is also free-hand, and I've seen some of the most stunningly dyed wool from Uruguay in a local shop, and I want to use it. The ideas aren't settled yet but I know what I want to try to do – just don't know yet how! Amongst the theological hints I am trying to weave into this is a trinitarian theme and an expression of perichoretic interrelationships. I know. Nothing if not ambitious, but why shouldn't symbol, colour, shape and pattern work on canvas as well as icon wood or oil canvas?

    Off to read the next chapter of the new Bonhoeffer biography – in the sun, shaded, and with a large pot of earl gray tea. .  .