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The Element of Surprise in an Advent Epistemology

During Advent I'll be reading the poems of astronomer and poet the late Rebecca Elson. The story of the obliging star and the gullible peripatetic Magi is an embarrassment to those whose religious reach can't get beyond verifiable empirical facts captured on digital camera. To anyone who has a sense of scale and the cosmic vastness of things, and for whom existence isn't measured by the arithmetic of the ordinary but by that capacity to be surprised which is a necessary presupposition for the deepest kinds of human knowing, to such people, stars and Advent are mutually referential, shedding light on each other.

"Arise! Shine! Your light has come!" God knows, our world needs light, and yes, a guiding light that tempts us to follow to the place where promises are fulfilled, where human life is redefined, and where fragility and danger do not stop hope from being born. Amongst the wise assumptions of the ancients, was awareness of the limit of human intelligence, and that awareness of limit the opening for a more adventurous epistemology. Well anyway, here's an Advent poem, not from Rebecca Elson this time, but from U A Fanthorpe's Collected Poems.

The Wise Man and the Star

The proper place for stars is in the sky,

Lighting the whole world but negotiating only

With the highly qualified – master mariners, astro-physicians,

Professionals like ourselves.

This one came unscheduled, nudged us roughly

Out of routine, led us a wild-goose chase,

And perching here, above unspeakbale rafters,

Common as a starling on a washing line,

Whistles to every calllow Dick and Harry,

Idling amazed around: "OK pals, I've done my bit.

Over to you now, Earth."

29 November 2009
Gary McKinnon, Asperger Syndrome, obsession with UFOs, and the wounded pride of Empire
Update, November 28, 2009.

The most recent decision by the Home Secretary to allow the extradition of Gary Mackinnon to the United States is not surprising. The absence of ethical content and responsible moral control in the decisions of the current government, its wholesale capitulation to the demands of the United States that US security concerns give carte blanche for political and military pressures, and that country's now expedient assertions about the importance of international law, come together against the ironic and morally tragic exposure of US and UK complicity that now forces seasoned diplomats, facing public enquiry, to openly question the legality and legitimacy of the war in Iraq.

I have little to add to the reflections I offered in August. Except this. I am ashamed of the failure of the UK government to protect its own citizen. I am ashamed of the lack of moral courage and legal wisdom on the part of the Home Secretary and the Government which, if they are now over a barrel because of a bad law, were the very Government that drove through its approval. Either way, Gary Mackinnon should not be the one to bear the cost of ill conceived legislation enacted by a supine legislature administered by a domesticated administration.

Gary Mackinnon's mother asks the right question – if her son's Asperger's condition and his current distress, which no one denies, do not constitute a fundamental threat to his well-being such that it compromises his human rights, then what in fact does? "How does a British citizen claim asylum in his own country?" is one of those twisted legal questions that exposes the nonsense of the Home Secretary's position. Rightly, this country does not send people away if they face a credible theat of serious harm abroad. We have had no medical report published by the Home Office indicating Gary Mackinnon's health will withstand the trauma of extradition. The impact of edxtradition, trial and sentence on a person with autism whose sense of self and the world is so fundamentally different, is so obviously severe that it would rightly be called inhumane. At which point I want to repeat here my post from August 1, and stand by each word of it.

…………………………………………………..

Disquiet. Unease.
A persistent mood of ethical anxiety.
Discomfort like toothache of the conscience.
Awakening suspicion that something is wrong.
Hard to place and hard to ignore anger.
An inner resistance to saying nothing.
1. No one denies that Gary McKinnon hacked into US computerised defence systems.
2. Computer hacking is bad enough. But to compromise high level national security systems is by any standards a matter of serious concern. In most cases it is also a matter of criminal intent and is rightly treated as such by the relevant legal and judicial systems. (Perhaps the vulnerability of such high level computer systems to attack from an amateur UFO researcher in the UK raises questions of incompetence or negligence which are themselves definable as criminal).
3. Extradition is an important legal process of national co-operation and of reciprocal help between nations in ensuring that it isn't possible for people to escape justice by virtue of living in another country. But for a nation to give up its citizens to another such laws need to be secure, fair, reciprocal and reviewable to avoid anomalies and injustice.
4. National security is the top of the agenda concern for the Unitred States for reasons that are obvious; the 9/11 attack and the determination to secure again the safety of the homeland, and as its inevitable corollary, the widespread hostility to the US and the UK amongst many Muslim countries and communities, many of the radicalised, following the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions by US and UK troops backed by other non Muslim nations.
So for Gary McKinnon to breach the supposedly elaborate security hardware and software of the Pentagon and other defence facilities, with their lauded military standard fail-safe systems, at such a sensitive time, raises questions that are both worrying and embarrassing for the United States and its global reputation. Somebody needs to pay.

Add now to these observations the equally undisputed fact that Gary McKinnon is a person with Asperger syndrome, obsessive about UFOs, and that his patterns of behaviour are classic expressions of a condition that essentially defines his way of relating to the world. Then ask what questions this raises about the legal and moral implications of a decision to extradite him to the United States, to stand trial for actions he does not deny, but which are explained by a pre-existing condition that is by definition related to compulsive behavioural patterns, and when the likeliest outcome is an inevitable and long jail sentence.

And this because the UK has a treaty with the United States intended to ensure co-operation in dealing with serious crime and terrorist threats, but which was intended for people with ambitions to kill, not persons with an autistic spectrum disorder. Add to this that UK Judges, charged with upholding the law, while acknowledging the severe impact of extradition on this man's mental health, which they themselves admit may be life-threatening, suggest nevertheless it would not be a breach of his human rights to extradite him to the United States. I find it profoundly ironic that Judges appointed to uphold law, including international and human rights law, take at face value "assurances of appropriate care", on the very same day it is reported that evidence about whether or not the CIA and british Intelligence knew of or were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mistreatment and alleged torture of a British citizen, could not be heard in a UK court, on the direct intervention of Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State. Human rights indeed! I am not reassured by the cynical ambiguity of the term "appropriate care" for someone who has so embarrassed the might of the United States, and whom the US sees as a continuing security threat.

I'm not arguing that Gary McKinnon should not face up to the consequences of what he did. He himself recognises that. But given his condition, there are issues of justice here that are deeper than the desire to put on trial, convict, sentence and make the public power statement that seems to be so important to the US authorities pursuing this extradition. The law is not there to serve the political interests of Empire, as instruments of power at the disposal of the state. Justice fundamentally involves using just laws justly, and for the purposes they were intended. Justice, and therefore moral and legal accountability, takes into consideration a person's capacities, intentions and ability to recognise how personal acts have social consequences. The proper administration of justice requires the law to take into account the reality of a person's medical condition and the impact of that condition, in this case autism, on a person's recognition of boundaries and the overall context of their actions – or why not arrest and try persons with Tourette syndrome for using obscene language in public space? As David Cameron said yesterday, in the application of law, justice is not incompatible with compassion in our ways of dealing with people. That is particularly important in a world where compassion now seems to be massively discounted, and hard edged "justice" understood as legal retribution is considered a high value virtue. Mercy does not undermine law, it enhances its authority, demonstrates its value to the community, and quality assures its expression for the public good.

What I miss in the judgement of the judges, and in the reiterated refusal of the Home Secretary to allow a trial in the UK, is the moral courage to discern more deeply, the mature wisdom to decide more humanely, and thus to raise our respect for the law as that which serves us fairly and well. Under this present Government, for all its hyped up claims about making our country more secure, our own citizens are considerably less safe. In the political and cultural background, can be heard the remorseless grind of the machinery of Empire, armoured and determined that those who threaten it will feel the full force of the law. Even when a particular law is badly framed, inadequately qualified and increasingly recognised as open to political manipulation.

That's why I'm suffering from

Disquiet. Unease.
A persistent mood of ethical anxiety.
Discomfort like toothache of the conscience.
Awakening suspicion that something is wrong.
Hard to place and hard to ignore anger.
An inner resistance to saying nothing.
28 November 2009
Recognising those smile moments as signs of sanity, sanctity or sagacity?

Recent reasons for smile and laughter

"Spooks" is back, plausible enough to be scary, implausible enough to enjoy.

A meal with two friends who are amongst the best conversationalists around

One of said friends recalled the job-interview question we all get asked – "Hobbies"

His description of the face of the high flying kingpin who asked, when he replied, "Tunisian Croquet and Gaelic singing".

A gift of another Poetry CD which will instill serenity, lift imagination and humanise thought during urban driving.

The face of a student at that precise moment when an important penny dropped with a life changing ping

The migrant redwings raiding the local rowan tree supermarkets as they stock up for Christmas and the long journey back to Scandinavia later

A Thornton's chocolate covered bar of marzipan delivered at the exact moment of need – though with me, when it's marzipan, each moment is exactly right

A friend who bought a new (not cheap) umbrella in M&S on the windiest wettest day of the year, and described its brief life and messy death on Argyll Street less than a minute later.

The many hundredth affectionate dunt on the head from our 17 year old cat who uses the Glasgow kiss to focus the owner's attention on the absolute priority of the feline need for affection

A new book delivered – Oh come on! That had to be in any list of recent smile inducing events in my life!

27 November 2009
Becky Elson: an astronomer-poet and the intellectucal gifts of wonder and joy

Rebecca Elson was a remarkable human being. One of the best ways to persuade those who don't know about her that she was a human treaure is to point to this obituary from 1999. Becky Elson filled her 39 years with an astonishing range of human achievement, and would have been the first to dismiss living a full human life as any kind of achievement at all. Rather life is gift to be unwrapped and enjoyed, life is a love to be embraced, living is the response of the whole being to that which is, because it is. Ten years after her death, this astronomer poet, who climbed mountains and studied stars, who played football and taught creative writing at Harvard, who played the mandolin and understood the deep harmonies earlier generations called the music of the spheres.

I came across her work in a book on science and poetry, a juxtaposition of disciplines I still find intriguing. Even the title of her published work, Responsibility to Awe, tells you something of this woman's depths – intellectual, spiritual, emotional. She exulted in the physicality of life, the mystery of matter, the joyous enigmas of existence, the unimaginable vastness of a universe still expanding away from human attempts to calculate, control and bring under the domestication of intellect. Her poetry is a celebration of human knowing, its triumphs and limits, the textured varieties of human epistemology, and amongst the ways of knowing that she respects and from which she learns, those two words "responsibility" and "awe". Our age could lose its capacity for both, so superficial and mindless in ways of life that obsess on the transient and immediate, and ignore the vast mysteries of existence in a universe like ours. To enthuse about an awesome star more likely refers to a recent gig than a response to a several billion year old source of light that populates a night sky now permanently invisible above our well lit, energy greedy urban landscape. A recovery of responsibility and awe might be initial steps in that change of mindset needed to prevent ecological catastrophe and give impetus to a humane reform of the destructive economics of irresponsibility and avarice.

Rant ended. Here's a poem that says more, much more, about what matters, and why.

Carnal Knowledge by Rebecca Elson

Having picked the final datum
From the universe
And fixed it in its column,
Named the causes of infinity,
Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary I, it seems

The body aches
To come too,
To the light,
Transmit the grace of gravity,
Express in its own algebra
The symmetries of awe and fear,
The shudder up the spine,
The knowing passing like a cool wind
That leaves the nape hairs leaping.

26 November 2009
Evelyn Underhill on Intercession

The
great intercessor must possess an extreme sensitiveness to the state and needs
of souls and of the world. As those who live very close to nature become tuned
to her rhythm, and can discern in solitary moments all the movements of her
secret life, or as musicians distinguish each separate note in a great symphony
and yet receive the music as a whole; so the intercessor…is sensitised to every
note and cadence in the rich and intricate music of common life. He stretches
out over an ever wider area the filaments of love, and receives and endures in
his own person the anguish of its sorrow, its helplessness, its
confusions, and its sin; suffering again
and again the darkness of Gethsemane and the Cross as the price of redemptive
power. For it is his awful privilege to stand in the gap between the world’s
infinite need and the treasuries of the Divine Love.

Evelyn
Underhill, An Anthology of the Love of God, (Lobndon : Mowbray, 1953),
162-3.

Imaginative, theologically sensitive, a practical mysticism of intercession as love for the other and as redemptive activity. Writing like this is one reason Evelyn Underhill remains a spiritual writer whose work expands our sense of God, and helps us notice His work in our lives.

25 November 2009
Big Biographies – The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton

Between now and Epiphany I have a reading plan. Nothing all that ambitious. Just several big biographies I want to read or re-read. One I've just started re-reading is the still definitive biography of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott, published in 1986. Since then the seven volumes of Merton's Journals have been published and Merton scholarship has developed into a major and still growing field of academic research.

For myself, Merton has been a constant annoyance ever since I read his Thoughts in Solitude in 1976. I hesitated over that word, "annoyance", but it's the right choice. Annoyance tends to suggest something negative, irritating the way gravel in your trainers bothers you; something to get rid of. But I mean positively annoying, and Merton is annoyingly good. Take The Seven Storey Mountain, that great flawed masterpiece of religious testimony and autobiography, seen and told through the lens of the still to mature spirituality of an as yet unformed character. It is opinionated, self-centred in that negatively self critical way that still makes the self the centre of attention. He is dismissive of others, far too critical of good people, the zeal of the convert rubbishing alternative ways of discovering and following Christ. In later years the book embarrassed him, but for thousands of post war seekers for God, this honest raw account of primary religious experience touched the deep places, created an inner longing for somewhere firm to stand.

Merton is one of those select spiritual writers who is at his most penetrating in his critique of heart and conscience, often when he doesn't mean to be; for example when he is writing out of the need to articulate his own heart, and through his writing, build an hermeneutic of the self and his own experience of God. That experience combined frustration with longing, gregarious need for others with a desperate desire for solitude, and so set up a permanent inner tension between contemplative prayerfulness and activist urgency. There are astonishing juxtapositions in Merton's life and writing of contemplation and action; spiritual retreat and world engaging critique, a coalescing of passion for personal sanctity and social justice, a lived through contradiction of desires that at times felt like crucifixion.

One of the signs of an interesting saint is that they defy our ad hoc criteria for sanctity. There are few entirely reliable benchmarks for holiness other than encountering the real thing, that which is almost by nature indefinable, elusive, enigmatic. That's another reason I find Merton annoying. He doesn't give up his "secret", solve our "problems", dispense straightforward "answers", accede to our demands for practical solutions to spiritual dilemmas. He could never have written a handbook on holiness, say Sanctity for Dummies, or one of those pragmatic, technique, do-this-and-it-will-work books on Christian living and existence, purpose driven or otherwise. Books like Love and Living, Contemplative Prayer, No Man is an Island, New Seeds of Contemplation, are so different from the run of the mill books on prayer and spirituality, they should be on a different shelf. They are in a separate class from much of the mass produced, word processed, consumer oriented, short shelf-life spiritual journalism flitting across the 21st Century Christian consciousness.

For those looking for spiritual guidance that has psychological depth; for those determined to be honest and authentic before God; and for those who courageously seek God in the ambiguous reality of their own experience and the unreliable company of their own hearts, Merton is a gift from God. The four books noted above are amongst his most important – and in each of them the reader is infected by Merton's enthusiasm for God, and unresigned frustration with his own limited capacities to write and pray, and act and live, and feel and think, in ways sufficiently lucid and fluid as to capture enough of what makes life vibrant and full of meaning – God.

And then there are the Journals, the five volumes of Letters, the books on spiritual themes and social criticism, on monastic practices and political ethics, the poetry and the prayers, a smorgasbord of spiritual reflection, theologuical engagement, social comment, political critique, poetic yearning. Again Merton is annoying, annoyingly diverse, impossible to reduce to a few major themes and concerns. He defies the compulsion of scholars to find a "centre" to his thought, an "explanation" of his popularitry as a spiritual writer, a few primary themes to extrapolate into a valid thesis that would inevitably be reductionist. That said, Michael Mott's biography is one of the most comprehensive and plausible attempts to help us understand the enigma of this strict order Cistercian whose vow of silence compelled a writer to become one of the most important voices of 20th Century Christianity. It would be an interesting exercise for 2010 Christians to read and discover some of Merton's best writing, to see if Merton's voice yet speaks with considerable corrective force and in tones of urgent compassion, to a 21st Century world where truly prophetic voices of the Spirit are rare, so very hard to hear, and increasingly costly to listen to.

24 November 2009
Prayers of the Ark – the gift of naivete.

The Prayer of the Dog

Lord,

I keep watch!

If I am not here

who will guard their house?

Watch over their sheep?

Be faithful?

No one but You and I

understands

what faithfulness is.

They call me. "Good dog! Nice dog!"

Words…

I take their pats

and the old bones they throw me

and I seem pleased.

They really believe they make me happy.

I take kicks too

when they come my way.

None of that matters.

I keep watch!

Lord,

do not let me die

until, for them

all danger is driven away.

Amen

Ruth shares my enthusiasm for The Prayers of the Ark. The above prayer is Ruth's choice. I detect a pastoral sub-text in this prayer, about faithfulness that is immune to self-interest, and is based on the faithfulness of God who gives up on nobody. It is such insight, lightly woven into the text, that gives these prayers a rare combination – the gift of naivete and perception at once sharp and gentle.

Interesting that these prayers were written around the same time as another French religious was writing prayers in the vernacular conversational style – Michel Quoist. Does anyone still read him? His Prayers of Life, published in 1954, were a breakthrough in spiritual writing, earthing devotion in everyday events, ordinary living, unremarkable human exchanges. Some of them are dated in the situations envisaged, they were written for a particular time, and spoke out of a mid century, post-war zeitgeist. But several of them continue to do what good devotional writing should do – disturb us with their passionate love for God and rebuke complacency and motivate our compassion by an equally passionate care for human beings who suffer, whoever and wherever they are. His 'Prayer Before a Five Pound Note' is clearly now dated in terms of money values, and the options for spending it. But it doesn't take much imagination to update it for our own time when money is as morally ambiguous and as attractively idolatrous as ever.

What other books of prayers do you use regularly, or used to use and still hang on to as important stepping stones in your own crossing of the river…..

23 November 2009
Oppression, Occupation and The Prayer of the Butterfly

Decided earlier this week to quietly change the colour and format of my blog.

Chose a cool blue-green with minimal ornamentation.

Wasn't sure if I liked it. Seemed too, well,… cool, in a cold kind of way.

Nobody else said anything – didn't notice? Didn't like it? Too polite to say?

I didn't like it much – so back to my Art Nouveau design with the red butterfly.

One of my favourite thin books (cost me £1.80 I see) is Prayers from the Ark, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold (translated by the novelist Rumer Godden). Mademoiselle de Gasztold started writing poetry during the German occupation of France. When confronting tyranny words matter – and in times of oppression poetry is the art of making words matter.

After the war she was helped to recover from serious illness in a Benedictine Abbey just outside Paris. This became her long term home as librarian and fitter of stained glass in the windows. Her poem prayers were first circulated privately then published in 1953 in French and in 1962 in English.

In this slim volume the prayers express the joyful response of each creature to God, the words capturing the unique character and beauty of the creature, expressing the mind of the Creator. One of them is the Prayer of the Butterfly. It reads well in English, but at times the subtleties of humour and allusion that convey precision of feeling and meaning are muted but not lost, in translation. A prayer expressing the fluttering delicacy of the fritillary captures exactly the restless inattentiveness of those of us who, seeing so many possibilities to experience, are frustrated by the finitude of time and the brevity of life. A kind of Ecclesiastes moment, this prayer.

The Prayer of the Butterfly

Lord!

Where was I?

Oh yes! This flower, this sun,

thank You! Your world is beautiful!

This scent of roses…

Where was I?

A drop of dew

rolls to sparkle in a lily's heart.

I have to go…

Where? I do not know!

The wind has painted fancies

on my wings.

Fancies…

Where was I?

Of yes! Lord,

I had something to tell you;

Amen

22 November 2009
Walter Brueggemann – Bible teacher, man of prayer, spiritual upstart.

Walter Brueggemann is amongst the most important voices in biblical theology and church reflection on mission and ministry. I can learn as much about how to let the Bible speak its truth from one page of Brueggemann, as from whole chapters, even books, of those who recycle received and safe but tired ideas that end up domesticating and subduing the restless,demanding urgency of Scripture text.

In recent years some of Brueggemann's prayers have been published – they too have a startling freshness, a disturbing originality to ears more used to extempore carelessness and informality oblivious of required reverence. The faith of an Old Testament scholar and biblical interpreter inevitably informs and fuels their scholarship, and reading Brueggemann's prayers makes me inexcusably jealous of those who over 40 years have sat in his classes and felt the Bible go red hot in their hands!

Here is one of Brueggemann's prayers at the start of his Old Testament Theology class:

With you it is never "more or less"

We will be your faithful people –

                                   more or less

We will love you with all our hearts –

                                   perhaps

We will love our neighbour as ourselves –

                                   maybe.

We are grateful that with you it is

                                  never "more or less"

                                  "perhaps" or

                                  "maybe."

With you it is never "yes and no,"

                  but always "yes" – clear, direct,

                  unambiguous, trustworthy.

We thank you for your "yes"

                 come flesh among us. Amen

From Awed to heaven – Rooted to Earth, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 139.

21 November 2009
Thomas Merton on the humility of the theologian who dares to write about God

I wish I could write better out of respect for God, who gave me these small and very usual and familiar and unstartling and generous graces…

But if I am humble I will write better just by being humble. By being humble, I will write what is true, simply – and the simple truth is never rubbish and never scandalous – except to people in peculiar perplexities of pride themselves…

May I write simply and straight anything I ever have to write, that no dishonour come to God through my writing about Him.

Thomas Merton, quoted in Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon, 1986), 191

20 November 2009