Living Wittily

Category: Biography as Theology

  • Interpretation of scripture has to be biographical. Jurgen Moltmann again.

    Anastasis_resurrectionJurgen Moltmann has a wee gem of an essay in his book Experiences in Theology. 'Trinitarian Hermeneutics of 'holy scripture'' is a thoughtful statement on what makes writings 'holy scripture' for the Church, and how these scriptures are most fully and faithfully understood within the story of the Triune God.  "The New Testament talks about God by proclaiming in narrative the relationships of the Father the Son and the Spirit, which are relationships of fellowship,  and are open to the world."

    In that one sentence Moltman brings into dynamic relationship with the Triune God, the triune realities of Scripture, Church and Mission. Much 'missional' theology and practice tends to look to Scripture primarily as its mandate and defining source. As I read Moltmann here and elsewhere, I wonder if he is saying something much more about mission, and about Scripture. The interpretation of Scripture is at its most 'missional' when the hermeneutic lens used is the living witness of a community that embodies Scripture in a way that recalls, re-presents and effectively demonstrates the subject of Scripture – Jesus Christ.

    Now I concede that I may be over-reading Moltmann here, but if so it is a trajectory that would still be consistent with his theology. He goes on to reflect on the christological finality, the once for all-ness, of God's revelation and the witness of Scripture.

    Then he says this: "What God brings into the world through Christ is life. God the Spirit is the source, wellspring of life – life that is healed, freed, full, indestructible and eternal. Christ himself is the resurrection and the life in person. Those who believe in him will live even though they die, because to them life has been made manifest. They experience it with their senses. So the sending of the Spirit is at the same time the sending of life. From this we can conclude that a 'spiritual interpretation of scripture' has to be a biographical interpretation. Through the ways in which we express our lives we interpret the scriptural texts we live with….The book of the Bible is interpreted by our lived lives, for it is the 'book of life'….The sending of the Spirit (missio Dei) awakens life and multifarious movements of revival and healing. So life is the true interpreter. (146)

    Moltmann then explores briefly what life is, what enhances and what diminishes life, what furthers life and what hinders it. He wants the church to work out what in the texts furthers life, and through the texts subject to critique whatever is hostile to life and offers 8 guidelines – here is number 7

    What furthers life is, first and last, whatever makes Christ present, Christ who is the resurrection and the life in person; for in and with Christ the kingdom of eternal life is present, and the kingdom overcomes.

    Much of what Moltmann is arguing here is rooted in I John 1.1-4, Hebrews 1, John 1. The Trinitarian hermeneutic takes hold of Scripture in the light of the narrative  of the relationships between Father, Son and Spirit, as these are revealed in the Gospel story of Jesus. The overarching theme of this story is life, 'the word of life', the one who said 'I am the life' and who promised 'I have come that you might have life to the full', and whose ministry is enabled by the Spirit of life who takes of the things of Jesus and makes them known; the one in whom was life, and the life was the light of all people, this One, is the one who gives eternal life, and calls each person to a living out of the Truth of the one who said 'I am the Life'. In which case Moltmann perhaps helps us to understand more deeply a 'missional' view of Scripture – which is to read scripture in the light of the life of God in Christ, and live as an embodied, related, community of fellowship that is the church, the Body of Christ.

  • Denise Levertov. A Poet’s Life, Dana Greene

    What makes Dana Greene such a good biographer of Denise Levertov is Greene's respect for the mystery of her subject, and her honest, even glad acceptance of her own limitations as biographer of such a complex human being.

    "A biography tracks the arc of a life over many decades, narrating a story as a subject lived it temporally, appreciating flaws, misjudgements and achievements. It then translates life into art, and in so doing preserves it. Without the unity biography brings to disparate facts, a life would devolve into its various parts and disintegrate. Biography's mission is to rescue a life and make it accessible to future readers." (232)

    Referring to her research and reflection Greene closes her book with a statement that helps us discern what makes for a satisfying biography.

    "This biography was undertaken as an experiment in penetrating the inner life of Denise Levertov. The voluminous raw materials – diaries, written and oral interviews, correspondence, poems, essays – allow the biographer to investigate and intuit, patch and paste, imagine and verify. To gain a closer hold on Levertov is to discover that she remains elusive, much like the mountain – present and absent, her person never fully grasped, but only pointed to and honored."

    Levertov would approve the modesty and honesty of that statement. She was herself ambivalent about the created link between an artist's biography and their art. Yet she made available to the world an entire archive now residing at Stanford University, which includes some of her most personal papers, letters, and diaries. From these papers Greene has woven a credible, affectionately critical and illuminating account of a poet whose rich lived experience of joy and sorrow she distilled into poems that are both uniquely personal, and touch on the familiar and universal in human living and dying.

    This isn't so much a review of Greene's book as an appreciation for her work. And if I, a man, may say so without being given a hard time, Levertov's interior life is made more accessible because this biography was written by a woman. Yes, a scholar, one who uses words as a way of life, a writer whose stated aim is to make a poet's life accessible to her readers. But also a woman more likely to understand some of the hurts and healings, relational complexities and self-questionings which are woven into and throughout Levertov's life and personality. Having read this book I now read the poems with more understanding, both of the words, and of the woman with courage and vocation enough to write such words, and such words of life.

  • Trust is Backward Looking Too? If You Could, What Would You Change?

     

     

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    Sometimes when you look back this is what you see. Now it's an interesting perspective to think of your life as a journey and instead of its forward impetus and anticipated corners, you look back and see the way you've come. Except in this photo I didn't see much of the way I'd come because it's round the corner, behind me, out of sight. That too is an intriguing thought – not being able to see back round the corners you've just walked round so you have to remember what it was like, and memory is of course, selective.

    Looking back on the road into Kinloch Rannoch this is what I saw. The loch, 20 something miles long; mountains in the distance, layered, hazy and beckoning; less than a hundred metres of road I had just walked, sunlit and shadowed; and a canopy of trees enveloping the visible landscape. Robert Frost's poem about the road less travelled, and the road not taken is one of the great metaphors for reflection, regret, wistfulness or any other prompt for that unsettling question, "what if". What if I had chosen differently; what if I hadn't met this person; what if I had turned down the other job; what if I'd reacted differently; what if I'd shut up and listened. This can get really odd though – what if my mother and father had never met? What if I'd been born 6 foot tall – this is an impartial example, not a real regret – I like being small!

    My mother used to mock the 'what if' approach to life – with that mixture of Scottish commonsense and wry humour, "Well, if we'd ham we'd have ham and eggs, if we'd eggs", was her demoilition job on facing life's difficulties with a wish list. What that photo above teaches this man with a camera is that looking back, with apologies to Lot's wife, is sometimes as important as looking forward. And looking back honestly and humbly, the truth is we seldom see clearly the path we have taken, and even less clearly our motives and reasons for decisions, choices, steps taken on that road. The how and why we have come to this place in our lives we are convinced we remember well – but then memory is selective, partial, and as time and years pass, elusive. Sometimes it isn't the road not taken that makes us wonder – it can also be the road taken, with all its unforeseen corners, wrong turnings, confusing choices, impulsive maneouvres, strange meetings, near things, cliff edges, and just to make this string of metaphors utterly contextual and contemporary, pot-holes. 

    Looking back along this stretch of road, to the edge of the Loch and beyond to the mountains, with the road disappearing round the corner and the shaded and sunlit trees arching over it, I am OK with the journey so far. Would I have chosen differently – yes, maybe, sometimes. Were there wrong turnings – how can we know that? Would I wish some things to have been otherwise – oh I think so, I've never been able to say 'I'd never change a thing.' The two modern secular anthems, 'I Did It My Way' and 'Je ne regret rien' are way too arrogant for me to sing them – sometimes the things I regret are those things where I did it my way!!

    But what I like about that photo is the impossibility of the camera retracing my steps, the acceptance that past is past, that there are corners I can neither see round nor retrace steps towards. What I also see is beauty, distance, lancing sunlight, and green shaded shadow. And for all that, some small glimmer of what the Psalmist meant when he said "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life." Looking back I say that too, with varying proportions of gratitude and hopefulness, and I hope, with enough humility to acknowledge the privilege and gift that is the wonder of my life.

  • The Christian Theologian, Nuclear Weapons, Strange Love, Original Sin, and the Sermon on the Mount


    300px-Christ_of_Saint_John_of_the_CrossI still remember the chill and existential angst as an impressionable if more than a little rebellious teenager watching Dr Strangelove. Two years after the Cuban crisis, and one year after the assassination of President Kennedy, the film dropped into a cultural worldview already distorted by fear, suspicion and the growing insanity of language that spoke of MAD, as mutual assured destruction. The mad antics and the terrifyingly implausibly plausible script did nothing to reassure, nor wat it meant to.

    I came across this clip here the other day and watched it with scared fascination. It isn't only the content, it's the jaunty optimism of the narrator describing the triumph of Britain dropping its first hydrogen bomb to explode in the atmosphere in 1957. At the time the fear was an icy terror, a remorselessly spreading glacial fear dubbed the cold war. Perhaps the upbeat BBC commentator was expressing relief that Britain was no longer defenceless against an evil and ambitious Russia. At the very least we could destroy cities of the perceived enemy in retaliation for any attack on our cities. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a million for a million, it's the same principle. It's called deterrence.

     



    MushroomThere has not been a nuclear exchange in the 56 years since that first successful atmospheric detonation of city killing bombs. Supporters of deterrence would say that's because deterrence works. Maybe. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are morally unjustifiable and pose an extinction level threat to human life, and indeed to the future of the planet. I don't know that the argument can be settled – by definition the proof would either never be forthcoming (in which case it worked, maybe) or there will be a catastrophic exchange in which case the argument becomes academic in a nihilistic sort of way.

    What's your point Jim? It isn't a global politicised point. I am not an expert in global security, military mind games, or defence strategy and policy. As a Christian theologian I have other concerns, a different perspective, alternative intellectual tools to think through the meaning of human existence and what makes for human flourishing. I watched the clip with a profound and solemn awareness that amongst the crucial components of a Christian worldview is an adequate doctrine of sin. The hydrogen bomb as it was then known carried a mushroom shaped shadow of ultimate menace for humanity's future – and the clip celebrates the success of British efforts to obtain this instrument of mass destruction. I use instrument deliberately – in the background of the clip it would have been entirely appropriate to play Holst's brutal and relentless Mars the Bringer of War to trumpet and announce the newly acquired capacity for orchestrated death on a symphonic scale.


    MacleodCelebrating the success of such a creation as nuclear weapon capacity is according to the late Lord Macleod, blasphemy, the original sin of creating from the foundation blocks of God's Creation, an instrument capable of global annihilation. I do not see that theological pronouncement as an overstatement. It is one of the most important prophetic denunciations of military and political power in the history of Scottish theology; theology, not politics. But it is theology effectively used to critique all intellectual accommodations to nuclear weapons as an option for the Christian mind. Of course not everyone agreed with Macleod; and not all will agree with what I'm writing here. But go back and look at the clip, listen to the narrative, and then read the Sermon on the Mount. How do the two inhabit the same moral, theological and political universe? 

    One further thought – the bomb lauded in the 1950's clip is a mere firework when compared with the destructive payload of current contemporary capacity. I recall Jesus argument from the lesser to the greater…how much more…?

  • Christian Leadership and the Life of Dag Hammarskjold

    It's probably another of the kinks in my way of looking at the world, and listening to the world, but there are a number of words on the back page of my mental Lexicon and Thesaurus that I treat with caution if not some disdain. I recognise the pervasiveness of some of those words in the discourse and thought inside and outside the church. But that simply adds to the suspicions that inform my hermeneutic!


    JobsOne of those words on my back page is 'leadership'. When most books on leadership are written by those who count themselves as leaders then an hermeneutic of suspicion takes on a different order of importance. Last week on Radio 4 there was a discussion on the 100 books recommended for leaders in the armed forces. They were books on the psychology of influence, biographies of movers and shakers, text books on tactics and management, the psychology of combat and command, military history and hierarchical systems. They weren't only books on leadership, but books leaders should read. Amongst the lives presented as a model of leadership to be studied and learned from was the biography of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.

    I was given that book for Christmas, and read it, fascinated by the courage and perseverance, the ruthlessness and cunning, his imaginative grasp of marketing linked to human  motivation, his insatiable desire to succeed and to dominate. No question – an impressive leader of a company that still leads in product innovation, market saturation, commercial savvy and gilt-edged instinct. Here comes a stupid question – would Steve Jobs have made a good church leader? Would the values and motives, his goals and management style have made the Church a leading global innovator in people transformation?

    I know, it's probably a question flawed by category confusions. And yet. None of the characteristics and qualities and values that drove Jobs sound strange in the receptive ears of a secular consumerism that provides the psychological engine of globalised commercial rivalry.


    HammarHere's a curious observation. Some of the most influential leaders did not set out to lead – they live a style of life that is attractive, impressive, influential, fascinating and even successful – however we define success. All of this comes out of my reading of Lipsey's biography of Dag Hammarskjold, and in particular the sense of the person Hammarskjold was. He started his tenure at the United Nations by stating the values by which he lived and would serve the UN. They are almost diametrically opposed to those of a Steve Jobs, perhaps because Hammarskjold's goal in life was at the other end of the human spectrum. Not self expression in global innovation in technology, but self-giving in global transformation of human relations. That all sounds judgemental, over-simple, and setting Jobs up for an unfair put down. But that isn't what I'm suggesting. Apart from anything else a strong case can be made for advanced computer technology as a real enahncement of human life, which was also part of Jobs' motivation.

    But the difference isn't only qualitative, it is a difference of worldview. Hammarskjold's values, principles and vision were formed in the depths of a personality that was self-consciously Christian, intellectually rich, emotionally painful and intensely, even ruthlessly ethical in its demands upon his own integrity. Reading of the determined force of his moral personality raises for me profound questions about the nature of leadership within the Christian Church. Yes Hammarskjold was engaged in the world of action; and yes he exercised considerable power, diplomatic, political and personal; and yes admittedly not everyone saw things his way and he had to fight to retain the freedom of the peacemaker and the confidence placed in a trusted mediator.


    Tokenz-dealwd023The time is long overdue when the church requires to examine critically the models of leadership it admires, the missional mindset it desires, and the vision to which it aspires. Because Christian leadership is essentially cruciform, inevitably sacrificial, inescapably accountable, and unflinchingly faithful to the one who was rich but for our sakes became poor; the one who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself; the one who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

    Without overtly saying so, Hammarskjold's life drew its energy, its ethical imperatives and its core values from a deep and enduring commitment to the imitation of Christ. The book of that name, along with the New Testament, were constant companions, reservoirs of spiritual and personal nourishment, and guides to an inner life that surged outward into a life of public service and high ideals. If ever we look for 100 books on Christian leadership, I would hope that somewhere on that list this remarkable man would appear as one who in the midst of his own days, followed faithfully after Christ.

  • St Palladius – Apostle to the Scots

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    St Palladius Episcopal Church nestles in Glen Drumtochty near Auchenblae. We spent a cold wintry afternoon driving over the Cairn O Mount and down to the Clatterin Brig, which has a really fine Cafe and restaurant. Which by the way, we always support as a local source of fine cake and coffee – paradise cake and shortbread yesterday for those interested in these things.

    Then we came through Glen of Drumtochty where the small loch was frozen in the middle, a silver grey disc with a dark peaty border, and almost invisble against it, a silver grey heron, standing disconsolately dreaming of a slithery takeaway. Earlier we saw the Red Kite patrolling for food up the hill, just as hungry but a much more impressive hunter, and the same camouflage as the red brown bird flew against a backdrop of heather and woods.


    PalladiusYou turn the corner and this church sits as an incongruous reminder of the saint known as the Apostle of the Scots. The bleak weather and the cold feel to the photo are however quite congruent with a saint whose life was hard, whose ministry was tough and whose sense of mission makes utter nonsense of the assumption that mission is a late comer to the theology and practice of the church. In the North East of Scotland the Light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

    I like old churches. They are reminders that we are the latecomers to the party, that the mission of the church is 2000 years in the making and may be another many a thousand years in the fulfilling. Because it is the mission of God, and is the realisiation in time and eternity of the reconciling love of the Eternal Triune God. In that mission, which the church is called to share, the righteous mercy of the God of grace and peace, works itself out in our history; and so we trust in the God of hope in whose purposes and power the ultimate hope of the creation rests, as it and we groan awaiting our redemption.


    DSC01163This stern old apostle gazes over the glen, with either serene patience or stoic indifference. Or maybe he glowers at the mess the world has become since his day and his time. That staff and mitre aren't the usual equipment for missionally challenged Baptists. Yet I wonder, for all our talk of strategy and resources, our plans and projects, our entrepreneurial enthusiasm and spiritual rationalising, I wonder if there is something we are missing in the courage and resilience, the willingness to suffer for the Gospel, the counter cultural offensiveness of 'in yer face' holiness, that characterised those earlier Christ-followers. I'm not appealing to a romaticised early Celtic whatever, but asking about the ongoing relevance for our cutting edge theology, of those ancient pioneers of mission who, unlike modern pretensions to the title, by their hardship and sacrificial faithfulness, earned the name apostle. Or so it seems to me as I look at this grey, lichen shaded statue of the Apostle to the Scots.   

     

  • Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

    Theological%20Library%20Strahov%20Monastery Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

    The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life. 

    51C9htgwfjL__SL500_AA300_ And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs. 

    Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

    This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto – there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer – there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!

  • Confessions of a Bibliophile – The Hound and the Falcon

    I was recently asked to look through several boxes of books which came from  a house being cleared. If there was anything there I wanted just feel free to take it!

    That's a hard ask then, isn't it?

    Could I  make an appointment to come and browse them?

    Yes – how about this evening I said.

    Now the problem with browsing several boxes of books, any one or any hundred of which you are free to take, is that you begin to have daft ideas that you have enough time in life to read everything. Or if that unreasonable rationalisation isn't convincing, you begin to see each book as a possible masterpiece you have just overlooked so far for lack of opportunity – no matter that it is brown, cracked, smells musty and dusty and looks rusty. So there's a need for the fruit of the spirit which is self control, and a reminder that greed and acquisitiveness, possessiveness and an all embracing yes to intellectual appetite is indeed a work of the flesh.

    So from those five boxes I only took half a dozen, and three of those were novels which will find their way soon to one of the far too many charity bags now coming through the letter box. Another was one I knew someone else would like, Wild Swans, (in bookseller speak, ' nice fresh copy, hardback, binding solid, dustcover very good and unclipped). The other two I have kept. C S Lewis once said the sign of the well read person  is one who looks over the gathered miscellanea on the second hand book barrows in the market (O for such events and literary adventures to return alongside the book chains and Amazon) – anyway to look and find something you haven't read and now want to. And though you don't know the book you now have an instinct for that which is mentally nutritious, emotionally satisfying, and promisingly interesting – and this previously non-existent book now presents itself and demands to be read.

    41jtupqyDTL__SL500_AA300_ The Hound and the Falcon, by Antonia White answers all three criteria, and I'm nearly finished it. Not a novel, but the letters she wrote to someone called Peter in 1940,41 during the London Blitz. The letters are intense, regular accounts of a woman struggling to return to and hold on to her Catholic faith. At times searingly honest, she is both a profound critic of her Church and a conscientious practising Catholic. But for her practice is more important than dogma, and what she does and who she is matters more than the specific articulations of what she believes. In mind and conscience, in her spirit and emotions she collides with much popular piety and official dogma, and the result is a glimpse into the inner life of one who genuinely loves God and struggles with the institutions which claim to represent God on earth.

    Amongst her heroes (of whom she is also critical) is Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, whose letters are a strange mixture of teutonic reasoning and spiritual insight, stern doctrine and compassionate understanding of spiritual struggle. I've only read a few other books in which the authentic and costly struggle for integrity in spiritual life is so movingly recorded, so convincingly honest, and articulated in such penetrating yet personal prose to a friend she clearly had come to love and trust.

    They only ever met twice. The correspondence is one sided as Peter's letters are not extant. But she responds so fully and frankly that it's possible to piece together some of the content of the letters she answers. But it is her own search and struggle that is of interest here. Reading these letters from a woman impatient with metaphysics but who reads Aquinas, highly intelligent and likely to tear a strip off me for pointing that out as if that were unusual, devoted to the Gospel but sharply critical of the Church, Catholic to the core without buying into much she saw as superfluous or unnecessarily obstructive to faith, I have come away once again aware of two things.

    First, the letter is a magnificent lens into a person's heart and mind. The combination of personal relationship and inner journey is ideal for the articulation of faith. An exchange of letters is a thoughtful, considered dialogue. Some of the finest theological and spiritual writing is woven into correspondence. Second, the journey of the soul towards God, the longing for intimacy and belonging, the search for truth that can be lived, the love of beauty that can be adored, the yearning for goodness in ourselves and in others, the desire for God and the love of learning, – these are the signs of a soul alive, the evidence of spiritual awareness, the result of life received as gift so not taken for granted, but taken as granted, from God. Over the years I have met many in the communion of saints, which has absolutely no denominational barriers, who have so enriched my own faith and helped my own life, by the honest telling of their story.

    Books come into our lives by accident, by providence, by chance – who knows? And what does it matter? The Hound and the Falconis one of a number of special books on my shelves which could be labelled 'serendipity'. I choose to believe that the Holy Spirit is the bringer of possibility, the Divine opportunist whose nudges and pushes are as far as divine coercion will go, but whose wisdom is unsearchable yet searches us to the core of our being, and speaks truth. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Paraclete who leads into the truth, but taking the things of Jesus and explaining them to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the pure in heart, the meek, the person for whom Beatitude is to be found in God.

  • Tired of giving in – Rosa Parks and a new missiological disposition?

    Amongst the most remarkable and inspiring people who show us the ways of righteousness is Rosa Parks. I came across her name again in parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  The people who matter in a community are those who embody, enact and embrace their convictions, and in the demonstration of a life lived well, wisely and with disturbing courage affirm their identity and integrity. So when she sat in the whites-only section of that bus over 50 years ago, Rosa Parks asserted her humanity, affirmed her identity and confirmed her integrity. Not by words, but by an action that declared "her heart's knowledge of her own humanity". Why on that day did she sit there and refuse to move?

    "People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually wasat the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of meas being old then. I was forty two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in"

    Rosa-parks-slide-1 Tired of giving in. Weary of wearing the weight of the status quo. Exhausted by the tedium and tyrranny of laws formed by imprisoned minds, intended to imprison the minds and hearts of others. By the simple act of sitting, Rosa Parks defied an entire mindset, challenged a racist worldview, embodied a protest against inhumanity by placing her human body in the way of harm and witnessing to the value, dignity and equality of each human being.

    Now it would be easy enough to identify in our time those social practices and political policies, those economic decisions and legal impositions that diminish, devalue and demonise others. But instead of doing that simply the question, what have we too long given in to? Put up with? Culpably tolerated? Too easily accepted? And will we reach the stage where we are tired of giving in to institutional and unchallenged injuistice? What is our equivalent of sitting in the wrong place in the segregated bus? That I think might be a missiological question, and one the churches of Jesus Christ could do worse than address – and then find the place where we are called to sit.   

  • Biography as Theology – communal self scrutiny

    Talking with Stuart yesterday about our mutual interest in biography as theology. McClendon's book, Biography as Theology, may not be the first use of the phrase- there's a chapter title in the William Stringfellow anthology that uses the same phrase, possibly earlier. No matter. My own interest in biography as theology was quite unintentional and for years I was unaware that was what I was doing. I've read biographies all my life. Hundreds of them. Archbishop-medium From Rowan Williamsto Yehudi Menuhin, Mahatma Gandhi to Vincent Van Gogh, George Macleod of Iona to Einstein, Dorothy Sayers to Thomas Aquinas, Emily Dickinson to Marilyn Monroe, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel to Martin Luther King, George Eliot to Elie Wiesel, Shirley Williams to Rembrandt, Katherine Hepburn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Diana Princess of Wales to Sir Alec Guinness, Dorothyday Dorothy Day to Abraham Joshua Heschel, Beethoven to Bernstein to U2, and so on. Poets and trade unionists, artists and politicians, inventors and theologians, novelists and engineers, celebrities and explorers, travellers and stay at homers, doers and thinkers, the nice and the not nice, historical and contemporary.

    Biographies can be hagiography or muckraking, tragic lives (a whole new genre) and blessed lives, authorised and thus sanitised, or unauthorised and sometimes destructive. Not all biographies are good – by which I mean accurate, fair, dealing with significant experience, contributing to our understanding of human life by examining and telling the story of a particular human life. And then there are the autobiographies, written to self advertise, or as catharsis, or as serious life evaluation, or as either perpetuating self-importance, or genuinely offering experience that is reflected on, assimilated into a new and mature self-awareness, with lessons learned and gratitude not absent.

      Caravaggio_calling_of_peter_andrew_large Biography as theology is a way of reflecting with critical sympathy, believing that in the living of a human life, there is the raw material that helps us understand what it means to encounter God, and for life to be changed by that experience. The underlying premise is simple – how we live is the demonstration of what we hold as our convictions. If we don't practise it we don't believe it; our practice exposes the convictions that move us to such actions. The life we live is the expression of those convictions that do indeed, practically and decisively, shape and form us. Not what I say; not what I think; not what I believe – well, all of these, but all of these translated into human practice in that performance of daily life that is the final, convincing evidence of what it is we actually do, when it comes down to it, believe.

    More about this later. Here's McClendon:

    "Undertaken in Christian community, biography can be a mode of communal self-scrutiny…the exercise in which the community holds a mirror to those it finds its finest in rder to discover what God has been doing in its midst…- if such communal self scrutiny is undertaken under the eyes  and in the light of God, then it may be a prime example of what we prioperly call theology. This is biography as theology."