Author: admin

Susan Boyle dreamed a dream – bless her!

OK. So after all the hullaballoo earlier this year about Susan Boyle, the pros and cons of Britain's Got Talent, the ambiguous roles of three millionaire judges, and the impact of instantaneous celebrity status on a modest Scottish woman who seemed to be unravelling before ruthlessly voyeuristic cameras; the album is out, is selling in millions, and the woman herself much more self possessed and a pleasure to watch and hear.

I watched the repeated documentary the other morning, in which she did indeed sing with Elaine Paige – who was encouraging, supportive without a hint of patronising. We bought the CD for Christmas. And yes it's good. She has a voice that is versatile though I don't like the arrangement of several of the songs – Daydream Believer was never a slow croon.

But the overwhelming sense I had as I listened to the Cd, and watching the Documentary, was of a woman who had shown immense courage in ever going to those auditions at all. And then seeing it through, right through to a final in which she came second and ran out of places to hide. But there she is. Doing what she dreamed of doing. I don't buy into the "dream it and it will happen" approach to life. I've known too many people whose dreams just didn't happen for them. But unfulfilled dreams have never been a reason to stop dreaming; nor to depsise what we have, who we are and what is still possible. Still less to knock someone else whose dream has come true

I salute this brave woman. She should be made Scot of the Year. Her talent, her personality, her vulnerability and her sheer guts, her self effacing sense of who she is, make her the best kind of ambassador for Scotland, a country that too often blaws its own bagpipes while simultaneously letting the air out of the air bladder. Nobody can predict what will now happen for her and to her – but I wish her well, and have nothing but admiration for the way she has taken hold of her life, and walked into a different future.

We all know reality TV cans its audience responses and plays on viewers' mixture of gullibility and cynicism. The wide road that leads to exploitation is too easily taken. But now and again someone transcends the polyfoam programming. I for one will never foget that first night when she sang "I dreamed a dream" – that kind of moment transforms viewer voyeurism into a much more wholesome human solidarity, rooted in recognition of significance, beauty and the sheer triumph of immediate human gift over mediating technology.

28 December 2009
I've now spent the more
relaxing hours of Christmas and Boxing Day reading Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Soskice. It's the story of two women, twins born in Irvine in 1843. Their early years were spent in Kilbarchan before moving to London and then Cambridge. It's the story of two Bible-hunters, scholarly sleuths with brilliant linguistic gifts matched only by a capacity for hard work that's nothing short of stunning. Combine that with an adventurous appetite for travel, personal courage, infuriating determination and sheer intellectual obstinacy and you begin to get the picture.

The book reads like a novel but is deeply rooted
in meticulous research; it deals with an area of my own interest over
many years, the textual criticism and reception of the New Testament;
it champions two women whose story deserves more than one telling while
exposing the sheer weight of prejudice and social convention against
which they (and subsequent generations of women) have had to struggle
towards recognition. My enjoyment of this book goes alongside the
similar feelings I had on first reading Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation which places the discovery of key NT manuscripts in the 19th century against the larger background of palaeontology and archaeology.

Janet Soskice is a philosophical theologian in Cambridge University. This isn't her usual kind of book at all – but if it has been a mere diversion then it has been a very worthwhile one. This isn't a review of the book. It's a plug for the book;

if you care about how the New Testament text has been shaped by scholarly investigation, wheeling and dealing both honest and dishonest

if you care about the marginalisation of women in the academy and the sheer injustice of gender discrimination that arises from male sponsored small-mindedness

if you care about the stories of Scottish people who made their mark against the odds

if you care about those who care about ancient cultures, and who respect and learn deeply from cultures unsettlingly dissimilar to our own

and yes, if you care about history as the truth that isn't always told, but should be – get this book and read it.

(You might want to wait for the paperback – due late Spring 2010)

Here's just one example of why this is such a readable and important book. Soskice is helping us understand the initial collision but eventual collusion of two radically opposed views of sacred text, what it is and what we do with it. The Scottish Presbyterian widows, for whom the Bible is the text not the artefact, encounter in St Catherine's monastery, a procession of Orthodox monks following behind a jewel studded Bible, complete with incense and acts of adoration. The black, leather bound bible of Protestantism which the Scottish Presbyterian sisters revered, is contrasted with an Orthodox work of religious art, executed in gorgeous colour, copied with painstaking neatness, jewel studded and bound in the most expensive material, and then handled only with elaborate ceremony and unabashed adoration by the community.

"The monks at Sinai did not just honour but venerated their icons, regarding them almost as members of their community at prayer. For related reasons they also reverenced the physical form of their bibles and religious manuscripts, as well as the contents. For the Western visitors, the idea of processing with a Bible whose covers were studded with jewels and whose pages were illumined with gold, of incensing it and bowing before it was abhorrent. But to the monks, the Bible processed in church and embellished with leaf of gold was, metonymically, the Word incarnate present to their community…

Prior to the invention of printing, the reproduction of a book was a costly, lengthy and- for the monastic scribes – a devotional matter…For those who first wrote and read the manuscripts at Sinai, the formed strokes of ink that made up the words of the Gospels in a handwritten manuscript, the words laid laboriously letter by well formed letter on sheets of precious vellum, or the paints laid on wooden boards that were the images of saints, were emblematic of a God who indwelt the physical world as man."

27 December 2009
Easy pleased at Christmas.

Easy pleased so I am. Christmas come and gone and I'm happy.

The big read is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a book I've put off buying cos Aileen promised it and kept her promise. The combination of historical research and historical imagination when done well is almost irresistible to a mind like mine. History and good storytelling don't have to get in each other's way, and with a writer as good as Mantel, they don't. This is a historical novel that combines the best of both genres. If it is as good as Mantel's earlier To a Safer Place, which explored the inner dynamics and the historic and political consequences of the French Revolution, then it will be worth a long read.

But a good read needs a good drink, and Whittard's Cinnamon Chai Tea is as good as it gets on a winter's night, with a big book, in the front room while the others indulge themselves with Dr Who.

It was recorded so I will see it – but I don't want to wait a week between episodes, so later in the week.

Meanwhile what more than a big book and a good drink of spiced tea.

Well, actually some of these. Courtesy of Sheila who works on the assumption (mistaken obviously), that a large packet of small chocolates will last longer than a big bar.

So. Book. Spiced Tea. Chocolate Caramel Nibbles. Be interesting to see if the book or the chocolate is finished first! 🙂

Told you. I'm easy pleased.

Hope yours was as good as mine.

26 December 2009
The central mystery of Christmas and the human predicament

This blog began as a way of sharing much of what I think, feel and believe about many things.

I've kept it going because it combines the discipline of writing with the fun of sharing.

It's a forum for theological reflection on the stuff that happens, and also a place for exploring with others the fruit of reading and thinking.

Now and again, a blog allows not only wider conversations, but deeper ones – the old fashioned phrase "the human predicament" is only old fashioned in terminology, not in reality. As human beings we are indeed in a bit of a predicament – God help us!

And in addition to all that, this blog is for me some substitute for that part of me that always leans towards opening conversations with others around what it means in practice to follow faithfully after Jesus today.

That's all asking a lot, but there it is.

Sometime on Christmas Day the electronic counter will indicate that the 100,000th visitor clicked in. I hope the importance of that isn't only an ego thing – but an indicator that people find stuff here that is worth the bother of looking in the first place.

Anyway.

In a world where even peace prizes no longer seem to make a lot of sense

where post Copenhagen climate change raises major issues of justice to future generations

where religious ideological conflict is replacing the old cold war dichotomy

and where the economic and political self-interest of the rich create dangerous pressures against the poorer half of the world;

in a world like that, our world,

may we know the dawning reality of the Love that moves the earth and the stars,

may we gaze again on the central mystery of the Word become flesh whose glory we behold,

and may we live in obedience to Jesus Christ,

the One whose mission of peacemaking and reconciling love

defines the Christian God,

and sets the trajectories for our own life mission within and beyond the Church.

And in the light of that – a joyous Christmas to you all.

25 December 2009
Nativity: Love both hazardous and purposeful

Voltage

Wet streets,

shining slates,

indigo on a tremble

as if dew

is wrung from it,

the mistle thrushes

of Paradise Street

nesting in January

on a lamp post

in Liverpool.

Casual, particular

as when Mary

in electric blue

before the angel,

kept the place

in the book she was reading

with her left thumb.

Pauline Stainer, Crossing the Snowline, (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2008) page 78.

By the time we get to Christmas Eve we are nine months after the Annunciation. But that moment when heaven articulated the divine love for creation, is the hinge point of salvation history. Overwhelming love refusing to overwhelm, and instead awaiting the yes of a young woman who could have no conception of what it might mean, to conceive and bear the life of God made flesh.

Stainer's poem (and El Greco's painting) is no easy exposition of this pivotal response, nor of the invitation that was not so much a request as an announcement. The freedom of Mary to say no is in tension with the purspose of God to redeem by assuming the flesh of creation; in the divine – human encounter, the will of God and the will of Mary, the condescension of God wins the yesfulness of a woman. But it is her yes to give, and God will not superimpose divine will and intention on human freedom to surrender by, simply taking her for granted. What this poem does, is point to the disconcerting fact that this most significant intervention is understood as no more than an interruption. And Mary keeping the place in the book she is reading signals Mary's intent to pick up life where it was left off to attend to that brief interlude on which the salvation of the world turned. When the angel left, life went on, but this brief interruption, signalled the irruption into history of love both hazardous and purposeful.

So when we get to the nativity story, and coat it in sentiment, there's a need for those poets who won't let us ignore the reality of a young woman, an unexplained pregnancy, and the astonishing risk she took in co-operating with the astonishing risk God was taking. Have a happy, and thoughtful Christmas.

24 December 2009
Dorothy Day and diamonds for the poor

Dorothy Day again.

A well dressed and well off woman went to one of the Worker houses and gave Dorothy a diamond ring. She thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later that day gave it to an old woman who lived alone.

Somebody protested the ring could be sold and pay the woman's rent for a year. To which the reply was let her sell it and pay the rent, or use the money for a holiday in the Bahamas, or just enjoy wearing it. Whatever choice the old woman made, it would be her choice and she would have her dignity.

Anyway, Dorothy asked, " Do you suppose that God created diamonds only for the rich?"

Those are the stories that enflesh the sayings of Jesus, have that recklessness of the Beatitudes, and echo another woman's act of extravagance.

23 December 2009
Ernst Kasemann – the provocative questioning of a great man

The 20th Century produced several great commentaries on Romans. Barth, Cranfield, Wilckens, Jewett. Then there were some very good ones, Sanday and Headlam, J D G Dunn, Douglas Moo, Jospeh Fitzmyer, N T Wright. The one that's missing is the one I found hardest to read, which says as much about me as it does for the book.

Ernst Kasemann's commentary on Romans was published in English by SCM in 1980, and bought with a gift from my first church who knew well my love of books. Because it was a gift, (and I chose it for goodness sake), I felt obliged to read it, not to waste a generous gift. For weeks, in my wee sloping roofed study, I slowly made my way up the steep brae that is Kasemann's dense style, theological wrestling and absolutely uncompromising approach to theological exegesis – something Kasemann was doing long before it has become a fashionable innovation to the hermeneutical industry. But I got to the top of the brae – I finished it, and it is one of those few books you begin as a chore, continue as a discipline, persevere as a matter of sheer determination not to be beaten, and then like climbing in low cloud, you move above the cloud base and see the view that makes it all worth it.

And the view Kasemann opened up changed our way of looking at things Pauline. Justification isn't to be limited to the specific individualistic benefit of the justified Christian; justification is cosmic in scale, is gift and power to accomplish, and is the dynamic reality that displays the reality and promise of the Lordship of Christ, now and in God's future for the creation. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a gale that blows you off your feet. For that reason Kasemann goes in the list of great commentaries.

And the man who wrote this dense masterpiece of exegetical toil? It takes a special kind of faith in God and faithfulness in discipleship to Christ, to take Isaiah 26.13 as the text to preach in 1937 Gestapo ridden Germany. Read the text and you'll see why he was arrested. In 1941-2 Kasemann argued passionately for the validity of womens' ministries. No surprise either, that he was a vociferous anti-nuclear campaigner. His daughter was killed in and Argentinian jail in 1977, an event that deeply affected him, pushing his theology in directions of radical critique of power, injustice and economic greed, and fuelling active inviolvement in the theology of world mission. He latterly became a Methodist – John Wesley and Ernst Kasemann!

There is a point to all this. In the Spring Eerdmans will publish collected sermons and lectures of Kasemann, who died in 1996 aged 90. The book cover is pictured above. In my view this is a publishing event. An absolute necessity in early summer will be allocating blocks of reading time to gather the fruit of what Kasemann was saying and writing to the so complex world in the last quarter of the 20th Century.

22 December 2009
Advent, Isaiah, and facing the things we are afraid of

Rebecca Elson's Diaries contain fragments and notes for future poems. Here and there a few lines are enough to indicate the trajectory of a thought:

When sleep won't come

And your whole life howls

And words dive around your head like bats

Feeding off the darkness.

What prompted those lines? The howl of rage, or fear? Those familiar with overanxiety will recognise that hyped up inner chatter in which we either rehearse our own reassuring speeches, or hear the imaginary criticisms of others niggling away at our self-confidence. Feeding off the darkness indeed – despair feeding despair, anxiety replenishing itself, and that prolonged state of inner red alert that induces exhaustion. Here and there, especially late into her last illness, Elson shows in these diaries an honest facing of the things we are afraid of. At one point, refusing denial as a coping strategy, she chooses instead defiance – "The thing is not to let the doctors take the poetry out of your body, your life".

And then this beautiful image of life still to be lived, and the sense of one not yet ready to relinquish life's flow, the middle line a hinge of refusal, "I'm not like that…"

"You think the river knows when it's getting near the sea?

Wide and slow & begins to taste the salt

Well I'm not like that

I still feel narrow, quick and fresh

Still somewhere in the mountains."

There are few more poignant poems than those in which the poet confronts their own mortality with dignity, reluctant resignation, and a deep knowing of those insights that define and exalt our humanity. Denise Levertov's late poems have that same quality of writing – there's a case to be made for the poetic fragment as a valid literary form, expressing life's transience and acknowledging the instransigence of that process of relinquishment we call dying.

If that seems too low key for Advent, then maybe that's because somehow we have lost that sense of the precariousness and preciousness of life, the utter giftedness of our own existence, and the great poetry of an Isaiah who recognised that all flesh is grass, but had also discovered theology in the declarative mood, "Thus saith the Lord, Fear not, I have redeemed you, I have called you by name….you are mine….

21 December 2009
The Incarnation of God in Christ, and convictional contentment

Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand;
ponder nothing earthly minded,
for with blessing in his hand
Christ our God to earth descendeth,
our full homage to demand.

King of kings, yet born of Mary,
as of old on earth he stood,
Lord of lords in human vesture,
in the Body and the Blood
he will give to all the faithful
his own self for heavenly food.

Rank on rank the host of heaven
spreads its vanguard on the way,
as the Light of Light descendeth
from the realms of endless day,
that the powers of hell may vanish
as the darkness clears away.

At his feet the six-winged seraph;
cherubim with sleepless eye,
veil their faces to the Presence,
as with ceaseless voice they cry,

"Alleluia, alleluia!

Alleluia, Lord Most High!"

Just listened to Christian Forshaw's arrangement of "Let all mortal flesh keep silent", from his CD Sanctuary. Each time I read these words, listen to them sung, and especially the last Sunday in Advent, I'm left with a sense of wonder, awe and a feeling of convictional contentment. The Incarnation rightly understood, and properly expressed in beauty of image and precision of language, is a doctrine profound in its truth of the self-giving Triune God.

Convictional contentment is light years away from convictional certitude, or faith as ideological imperialism, or faith that as the complacency of the dominant has lost its sense of historic humility and rootedness in the nature of the God who comes. By using the phrase I mean an inner sense of fittingness, a way of thinking about God that is inexhaustible in truth and inexpressible in words, and thus yields a profound allegiance of heart to that glory which is full of grace and truth.

Content to live my own life on the conviction that the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us

Content to be a practitioner of reconciliation on the conviction that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself

Content to live in the joy, the peace and the hopefulness that is in Christ, on the conviction that joy, peace and hope are the will of God for the fractured reality that is our world.

Content then to embody the conviction of God incarnate in Jesus, in a life that likewise reaches out in love, resists injustice, models forgiveness, pursues peacemaking, encourages laughter, accompanies the lonely, welcomes the other, receives in grace the service of others, and is open to the will of God in trustful hope.

Content to live the conviction, to follow after Christ by the grace of God and in the power of the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts as unreliable as my own, and as unworthy.

The words above are from the Liturgy of St James, and carry within them theological immensity. The image is from the Hubble telescope and give a sense of vastness as beauty. The track from the CD combines organ, human voice and saxophone, three sounds in triune harmony. Coming at the end of the Daily Office of the Northumbrian Community they leave me with what I have tried to describe, the contentment of faith, rooted in the conviction that the God who comes is the one known in Jesus Christ, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

20 December 2009
Christmas and remembering that the giver is the gift.

End of Semester. Marking and grading, composing feedback that builds up rather than tears down.

Meetings. The kind that make you want to live longer with more energy, and the kind that sap the will to live.

To do lists. Unrealistic in length, unhealthy in guilt production, so unlikely to be done.

Too much sitting, talking, desk addiction, computer and mouse attachment like umbilical cord or intravenously administered information.

Need exercise. So last night spent a while on the exercise bike listening to a Christmas CD with some wonderfully therapeutic music. One track in particular, Gesu Bambino, sung by Luciano Pavarotti. Made me slow down.

Which brings me to an odd observation I want to make and then think about. One of the best Christmas presents Sheila and I ever received came two or three years ago. Couretesy of our daughter Aileen. Two tickets for Pavarotti live at the Glasgow Exhibition Centre the following July. I don't mind telling you. The best part of £200 for them, and considerable online activity to get the pick of the best seats. Then we heard Pavarotti was ill with cancer, and soon the concert was cancelled. Later Pavarotti died and our chance was gone. So we never got to use the tickets. And know what? In one very important sense it doesn't matter that we didn't get to hear one of the finest voices in our lifetime. What mattered is that the gift was given, the intention was clear, a once in a lifetime chance and no expense spared. Of course we were disappointed. But these two tickets had already worked their magic; they'd said important things every parent needs and wants to hear.

So. How important is the actual gift, compared to the love and kindness and intent that thought up the idea, and made it happen? Sitting there sweating away on the exercise bike, listening to the voice we nearly heard live, not for the first time I was reminded of the sacrament of generosity, within and beyond our families.

And the quite remarkable and unsettling thought that generous intention and costly expense are themselves the gift – the giver is the gift, and the gift itself merely the evidence of that which represents value of a higher order.

Och Christmas. A lot of sentimental nonsense, just a time for rational calculation to give way to uncalculating extravagance in the good cause of the other person.

In other words, the gift of Christ was never meant to make sense in any way we can get our own heads round. A time for the foolishness of generosity, an opportunity to say things too easily left unsaid, and to do it in ways that lack ambiguity. The generous act is a relational statement – which amongst other things is why when we think of God's coming amongst us in the gift of the Word made flesh, we are confronted with self giving love, making itself real, and known, as gift.

19 December 2009