Author: admin

Dorothy Day – the troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble

Paul Elie's book on 20th Century American Catholic writers weaves four lives together. One of them is Dorothy Day. One of the more sympathetic and thoughtful interpretations of what Day was about can be found in Volume 1 of James McClendon's Systematic Theology, subtitled Ethics.

Dorothy Day was about peacefully making trouble; and she was about guarding and protecting the vulnerable; and she was about building community using the flawed material of human lives often enough distorted through sin and suffering; and she was about hospitality as a habit of radical welcome in which each stranger is greeted as Christ.

Like many odd and hard to accommodate people, she was a Christian who inconveniently took Jesus seriously, and interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally. As if Jesus could have actually meant, seriously intended, that his followers should love their enemies. As if turning the other cheek was any strategy for changing the world. As if forgiveness and peacemaking could be practiced with any hope of curbing brutality, converting hatred to love – as well expect people to beat their swords into ploughshares and so cultivate food instead of killing the enemy.

When Dorothy Day boarded the Greyhound bus to travel to Koinonia Farm run by Clarence Jordan, she did so for reasons of peacefully making trouble, and in doing so trying to convert trouble to peaceableness. The farm had been attacked by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members offended by the racial integration practiced on the farm – drive by shooting, arson, assault, vandalism, were commonplace. Dorothy Day took her place in the rota of those who stood guard overnight, in a truck parked under a light, and the truck was shot up by automatic weapon fire. She was unhurt. It seems a futile, reckless and provocative course of action, to put yourself in the line of fire. Flannery O'Connor made the astonishingly dismissive comment, "that's a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc". There are those who would say that of Someone else – "that's a mighty long way to come to be crucified etc".

The picture of Dorothy Day shows the face of a troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble for the power holders, disturbing the peace of the status quo, a sharp fragment of gravel inside the boots of the troopers. The photo is a powerful Advent image. A poster sized copy is up on Stuart's study wall at the College – it is reproduced in Elie's book, and I think it is a stunning image of Christian resistance. Mess with the rest but don't mess with the best, huh?

8 December 2009
Hopkins, Hubble and Advent when “all is a prize”.

The image is the Hubble ultra image deep field. Now and then, well oftener than that, I go looking for Hubble images, clues not so much to the how of creation, but glimpses of the pure artistry of God. The beauty of space, where no matter how much we magnify and zoom, there is still the sense of infinite distance, unthinkable scale, not so much the final frontier as that which renders all frontiers relative. Sometimes image and poem coincide. Reading Hopkins I came across the poem below, The Starlight Night. Of course another of my favourite paintings is Van Gogh's Starry Night, and I like Don MacLean's rendering of Starry Starry Night as well.

Anyway. Advent. A time when stargazers saw something that changed the way they saw everything else. A time to have our frontiers rendered relative. A time when, as Hopkins says, all is a prize, and thus a time for prayer, patience, aims, vows.

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—

Ah
well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, aims, vows.

Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!

These are indeed the barn; within doors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

7 December 2009
Miscellaneous fragments of experience – or noticing the spirituality of the present moment

Tea Break Haiku

Two dunked ginger snaps,

Whittard's cinnamon chai tea;

nearly Nirvana!

…

A half sentence in Dorthy Day's Journal,

"How to lift the heart to God,

our first beginning

and last end…"

…

Shortest book review ever, of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.

Not a bad summary of Christian witness either:

"The way to seek God is firsthand,

through religious experience.

So I have done.

Here is the story.

Now go, and do likewise."

…

At the end of Merton's autobiography a Latin motto;

SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QAERENDI –

Let this be the end of the book,

not the end of the search.

Good motto for theologians who read their way towards God, and who believe much of the finding is in the seeking.

…

At church this morning we exchanged the peace.

An elderly member couldn't remember if she and I had already done it.

We had, but I suggested we do it again.

So we did – our own wee peace dividend.

…

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one's knees?

R S Thomas

…

The above miscellaneous thoughts come from the book I'm reading, the tea I'm drinking and odd moments of ordinary life. Spirituality is about all this kind of stuff – a good book, a favourite drink, the wish for peace, and for me as a reader and writer, those connections between thought written, read and lived in the flow of moments which accumulate into a life. Feeling wistful and uncertain today – and that's OK, I'm nervous about undisturbed certainty.

,

6 December 2009
Doughnut despise the day of small things :))

Grey morning mizzle,

forecast more of the same.

Leisurely drive to Largs on a mission

that proved fruitless.

Until….

Refuge in Nardini's

for a humanising pot of tea,

And a doughnut…..

A freshly made,

just tossed in lemon infused sugar,

3 inch radius and one inch deep,

crunchy crusted doughnut.

Our original mission forgotten.

For Mario the doughnut maker

mission accomplished….

two customers still smiling,

glowing all the way home.

5 December 2009
“Glory makes it possible to see glory.”

"Perhaps in no area of theology is it more improtant to keep in mind than in Trinitarian theology, that the object upon which we reflect is another 'subject' or 'self', namely, the God who relentlessly pursues us to become partners in communion.God who is Love chooses to be known by love, thus theological knowledge is personal knowledge.

Theological knowledge is as much a matter of 'being grasped by God' as 'grasping God', of 'being conceived by God' as conceiving God.

God can only be apprehnded, not comprehended, in the union of love that surpasses all words and concepts…to see God is to see with God's eyes. Glory makes it possible to see glory."

Catherine Mowry Lacugna, God For Us. The Trinity and Christian Life (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991), page 332)

Hey, we had a fire drill the other day. In a few seconds I found myself outside having left my working library upstairs in my study and never gave a thought to that cliche question, "If there was a fire, which few books would you make sure you saved?" But if I had thought about it, one of them might have been my hardback copy of this book. I'm on my third re-read.

Catherine Lacugna died far too young. A promising and gifted theologian whose theologising was conducted as a literary form of doxology. This is, whatever the adjective means, a "great" book. C S Lewis once decried devotional writing and opted instead for the kind of theology you read with a pipe gripped in your teeth. With apologies to Lacugna for commending her book on the back of comments made by an Oxford Don whose paternalism and patriarchal tendencies are all too apparent, and who thought hard intellectual work required such a masculine symbolic aid to concentration as a chewed pipe, but I know what Lewis meant. Lacugna's book is theology as doxology, passionate thought meticulously researched, written out of personal conviction and an inner vision of the glory and beauty and goodness and truth that constitutes the essence of the Triune God, personal holy love in mutual relation.

She was one of the more conciliatory and authoritative feminist theologians, unwilling to assume hostility in those from whom she strongly differed in theological emphases. Her relational understanding of God provides a foundation for an entire systematics that sadly she did not live to write. And maybe she wouldn't have 'done' a systematic theology – systems are about control, constraint, predictability and management of ideas. Lacugna's theology does not lack rigour – but it breathes the spirit of intuition, privileges relational wisdom, expresses a fearlessly constructive urge, exudes contagious living urgency.

This book is on any reading list I prepare for a study of contemporary thought on the Trinity. Like the best of T F Torrance's work, from which it deeply differs, this is the tue theologian who prays, whose inner life is responsive to the truth she seeks in the inner life of the Triune God. It is not theologically flawless, but as theology offered in the spirit of doxology, it is exemplary. And an important companion in my early morning Advent reading – has anyone ever come across a Trinitarian take on Advent……., hmmm?

5 December 2009
Short story writers and people who don’t get out much…..

Short stories are an acquired taste. Sheila enjoys them. I have to persevere.

Book reviews can be hacked out blurb, or carefully crafted appreciation which is neither gushing nor keen to put down.

Books and Culture is one of my favourite sources of advice and warning about what's what and what's good on the book front.

So if you go to Books and Culture here you'll find a carefully crafted appreciation of the most recent volume of The Best American Short Stories.

This
is a book review as it should be – makes me want to read the book.
Encourages me to go against the grain of what I usually like reading.
Invites me to persevere.

Wouldn't
you, once you are drawn in by the first few sentences of this review,
written by someone who clearly knows a thing or two about the
cruciality of story?

"Fiction writers, people who by definition have chosen
as their life's work to sit at home, alone—often in their jammies—and
make things up. The world, as seen by people who don't get out much.

But the facts are all there on the evening news (or
we'd like to think at least they once were). We are awash in
information. What we need is understanding, some way of puzzling the
whole thing out, deciding what to make of all the goings-on.

Enter the short story writer—in a bathrobe—with a cup
of coffee, a compass, a thermometer, a flashlight, a spyglass, a
decoder ring."

4 December 2009
The uneasy relationship between mystical philosophy and the Incarnation…..

Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (see the sidebar), combines literary crticism and biography. It is an account of the life and thought of four mid 20th Century American Catholic writers and activists, (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy). He weaves four lives together in a spiritual narrative that explores the dynamic sources of energy in the spirituality of these four very different people.

Here is Elie commenting on a decisive moment in Thomas Merton's conversion, his discovery of God as necessarily beyond the conceptual controls of human thought. While reading The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson,

Merton found a conception of God that he thought plausible and appealing. This God was not a Jehovah or a divine lawgiver, not a plague-sending potentate or a scourge of prophets, not the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or the stern Judge waiting just past the gate at the end of time, but the vital animating principle of reality – 'pure act,' being itelf or per se, existence in perfection, outside of space and time, transcending all human imagery, calmly steadily, eternally being. "What a relief it was for me now to dsicover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him."

Two things about this – first this was the kind of reconfiguration of the inner life of intellect and devotion, that developed in Merton into theological humility, and therefore spiritual integrity.

But second, there is serious thought to be given to Merton's overstated but still valid warning, "we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him." The abstract and near impersonal conception of God articulated in classic mystical thought, can construe God as the Beyond in the Beyond and thereby render God remote and inaccessible. This is not necessarily an improvement on simplistic reductionist conceptions, even distortions, clung to by those desperate to make God more graspable.

Elie's comment above includes amongst reductionist claims, "the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ". It is precisely the Incarnation which creates in Christian thought the meeting place of the beyond and the now, the divine and the human, the incomprehensible and the revealed.

"Being itself begins to be" as Charles Wesley's nativity hymn so succinctly puts it. "In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell….the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…."

Advent – the liturgical Alpha point of the Christian Year, the four week journey into the mystery of knowing the love of God….that passes knowledge.

3 December 2009
Advent, and those times when sureness falters

During her last months of her illness, Rebecca Elson wrote in her notebooks, thinking her way towards whatever meaning her life could be given. Her editors describe how and why she wrote:

"She wrote in pencil, legibly and freely, drafting and redrafting poems, stories and essays. She would tackle a difficult idea again and again to clarify its expression. Among these entries, she developed the habit of making verse notes, a discipline of observing and exploring, written at speed directly into the book. Occasionally she would draw on one of these entries to inform a poem, but most remain as they were first written — fresh, unguarded, illuminated by their own discovery."

The second half of A Responsibility to Awe consists of selections from those notebooks, the last entry written 9 days before she died. Reading them now you become aware of a mind that did not miss much, and yet wasn't gratuitously grasping. Intellectual avarice corrupts the soul of the scientist, and Rebecca Elson demonstrates in her poetry and her science rare gifts of intellectual generosity, of respect for what is, of curiosity that is never mere lust for factual certainties. The notebooks contain humour and wistfulness, regret and playfulness, engaging with existential dilemmas and deconstructing everyday routines.

Here are two brief entries in which the image of stones, – stepping stones in a river and stones placed on a mountain cairn, open in her mind sluices of uncertainty so that her "sureness falters."

Life a la carte, and why not, order it up

Not really understanding anything

just skimping across the surface

Like going upstream on stepping stones

You don't really know the meaning of river.

Cold wet feet, a current against you

You might get there, but you haven't understood.

So many stones

Building a cairn on a mountain top

Where few will go

I lift & place my few stones

And the wind and snow might knock them down

My sureness falters…..

The vulnerability and uncertainty of these lines is deeply moving, written a year before she died. Reading them during Advent invites an acknowledgement that this season of expectation, of hopeful looking forward towards the light, is not within reach of everyone's experience. There are those who feel they have nothing much to look forward to. There are those who, looking into the next few weeks and months, feel that their sureness falters. I've often felt that the great exhortations of Hebrews have a place in the Advent lectionary – "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard becuse of his reverent submission." (Heb. 5.7)

The risk of human birth, the contingency of growing up, the not knowing until incarnation the glory and frailty of human flesh, and yes, those times told in our Gospels when, even for Jesus, perhaps especially for Jesus, sureness falters. I don't see Advent as triumphalist denial of human suffering, but as a call to hopefulness for all of us when, like the Word made flesh, sureness falters. And perhaps the call of God to us this Advent, is to notice those around us who bring their stones to the cairn where wind and snow might knock them down – and to stand there with them as their sureness falters.

The photo used is from the site http://www.rogerwendell.com/hiking.html with thanks for its use.

2 December 2009
George MacDonald: A Preacher’s Repentance

George MacDonald is probably best known now as one of the defining influences on C S Lewis.

Originally fromHuntly in Aberdeenshire, before migrating to England and Italy, a Congregational preacher whose novels, fantasies and poems are amongst the best examples of Victorian Scottish literature. Here and there you still come across some of his verse.

This extract from The Diary of an Old Soul is a good example of MacDonald's theological generosity, and his psychological sympathy with people, even preachers, who struggle with the restlessly assertive ego, and often get in God's way, yet want nevertheless to serve God well.

Most preachers will recognise the inner sense of emptiness after preaching. But MacDonald also identifies the temptation to self assertion that, when mixed with sufficient humility, creates those mixed emotions best described in Jesus' words about us recognising, that when we've done our best, we are, at best, unprofitable servants.

A Preacher's Repentance

O Lord, I have been talking to the people;

Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zone,

And the recoil of my word's airy ripple

My heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.

Therefore I cast myself before thee prone;

Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press

From my heart the swelling emptiness.

1 December 2009
Advent – to wrest with mystery, and rest in, mystery.

Today I am publishing at Hopeful Imagination over here. This is an Advent Blog convened by Andy Goodliff and contributors are mainly Baptist but that means quite diverse – age, gender, theological style, vocational context, height…..well most of them are bigger than me :)).

No overall theme other than some reflective and theologically alert folk thinking about Advent, the state of our world, and the Gospel as the place where the God who comes and the world that waits, coincide.

My post at Hopeful Imagination today is "Advent – to wrest with mystery, and rest in mystery."

I continue to read slowly, the poetry of Rebecca Elson, against the backdrop of the great Advent reveille, "Arise! Shine! Your light has come!"

30 November 2009