Category: living wittily

Driving along Glasgow Road, doing exactly 30 mph, a red Clio came up behind, and the body language of the car, never mind the driver, was impatient, aggressive, that kind of worldview where any other driver on the road is an inconvenience, a nuisance, a hindrance. So out the car shot to overtake me, and I prayed for the driver, not the charitable bless her anyway Lord, kind of prayer. I prayed that as she overtook and went round the corner at well over 40 mph she would encounter the mobile Speed camera van and I would then smile in self righteous satisfaction without a twinge of guilt. But no! As she cut in front of me I could see there was no divine, or police retribution.

But then. Just along the road were the roadworks, and the closed lanes, restricted access, and the temporary traffic lights with their long phased sequence. So I drew up behind the driver, and watched in amusement as she, (yes afraid this time it was a she), remonstrated at the traffic light, shook her head, looked at her watch, clearly enjoyed having a rant with herself as audience in the front row. But as I watched these histrionics and the head still bobbing up and down as the rant showed no sign of concluding, I noticed the Churchill Insurance dog, sitting on the back shelf of her car. And its head was moving slowly from side to side, in what I decided to believe was slow head-shaking disapproval, acute canine embarrassment at the irrational impatience and pointless annoyance of human beings behind a wheel. The spectacle of one vigorously tossing head asserting to the world how in the right she was, and one slowly indicating that the world took a different view.

So I prayed again. That this angry-in-a-hurry driver would arrive where she was going safely, and without screwing up someone else’s life by causing an accident. Made me wonder if there might be a case for an anger breathalyser – to catch those who drive like the unconverted Saul of Tarsus, breathing our fire and slaughter against anyone who gets in their way.

Yesterday was my birthday. One present was a subscription to a certain sports channel so I could see the Bayern Munich v Aberdeen game. Some might think since the result was 5-1 to Bayern Munich it wasn’t exactly the most affirming present. But we know our limitations – and live with them, albeit with grudged humility. Anyway, phoning up to arrange said subscription the service person asked for my exact name and title as on my card. It was the Rev that piqued up the conversation. What church? What College? Theology – very interesting she said. ‘Is that about God?’ I said yes. She said ‘I think God’s dead interesting’ I said, ‘God tends to be’. A few minutes later our deal was concluded, my details processed, and that was that. But I hope she goes on finding God interesting.

Then walking along the street I passed four musicians setting up their pitch to do some buskering. Spoke briefly to wish them a good day – only one of them had enough English to have a conversation. They were from Eastern Europe, and had brought with them their horn, a trumpet, a trombone and another brass instrument I didn’t recognise. By the time I came past again 10 minutes later they were playing a beautiful version of Ave Maria – outside the Rangers shop! I gave them a second donation, and grinned all the way back to the car. Multicultural Scotland doing its own wee bit to erode by muscial stealth the hard edges of a sectarianism often enough expressed in music of a quite other kind.

Left my keys at the Gateway cafe in the University. When I went back for them, it was explained that I forgot them because, and I quote, ‘Ye were too busy yappin’. I gently suggested that was a bit harsh so she rephrased it, ‘You were indulging in facetious conversation, then!’ Aye probably I was. But I love a world where in the space of a day, God is interesting, music undermines prejudice, and somebody knows me well enough to affectionately insult me, both in the vernacular and in overdeveloped discourse. And the chai tea latte was superb.

On my way to a funeral I was conducting and had to cross the Kingston Bridge at 8.30 am. Those who have to do this regularly have stamina, patience, and an abuility to endure tedium way beyond my meagre reserves.

But it wasn’t as bad as I thought and I was able to go into the Garden Centre off the motorway at 9.01 am. Which was a bit early for the counter staff who were still putting on the aprons and getting ready to serve us customers. I was there for a latte and a scone just coming out the oven, when I was given the best excuse / explanation / reason for being a wee bit late I’ve heard for a long while.

"Sorry I’m a bit later" she said. "Ah had that many Valentines tae open".

I’d just been listening to the radio and the news that to send an e-valentine is now considered by many employers to be an unwanted advance, and could lead to dismissal. I mentioned this to my Valentine delayed friend who snorted, (and I quote her exactly) " Whit? Valentines by email? Ah’d juist delete them. They’re beneath contempt! Naw. Ah like the Victorian wans, hand made, and wi’ the price still on them tae let ye see how much they spent!"

I hoped she was indeed late for work because of the volume of Victorian hand-made cards, with the price visible.

As I left she shouted, "Have a good Valentine’s day yersel".

St Valentine’s day is a celebration of love. I suppose a lot of what we say and buy and sing and do to declare our love can be transient and flippant, or funny and affirming, and maybe even genuine and sincere. Cards, flowers, daft verses, jewellery, romantic meals – a whole industry based on romance, and why not?

The funeral I was conducting was of a family friend, and he and his wife had been married for 60 years and 6 months. Now when it comes to declarations of love, I think 60 years of passionate caring, faithful companionship, shared journeying, and well kept promises, is a demonstration of what human love is capable of. Faithful friendship that grows out of the passionate yes of two people to each other sixty years ago, is a beautiful gift, both to those who make such commitments, and to those of us around them who see what love looks like when we are given the long view of it.

"Have a good Valentine’s day yersel" I was wished. For all the sadness that is inevitable in the separation of a lifelong relationship, that’s just what I’ve had. These three abide – faith, hope, and love – but the greatest of these is love. And sometimes its most beautiful face is old.

Gerontology is the scientific study of ageing. Growing old is the existential reality of ageing in people’s experience. Heschel’s remarkable essay, ‘Growing in Wisdom’ is remarkably prescient, given its date in 1964, and that this plea for a theology of ageing first appeared in a publication Geriatric Institutional Management. Even in the 60’s he recognised the dangers of celebrating youth at the expense of age. ‘Youth is our God and to be young is divine….The cult of youth is idolatry.’ Sounds like overstated rhetoric, but Heschel had already identified the impatience a consumer society with the less productive, less economically powerful. For many older people old age comes to be seen as defeat, a chronic form of capital punishment, because life, excitement, vitality, productivity now seems to be consigned to memory. The compassion and passion Heschel had for human beings, especially vulnerable human beings, gives his words an essential moral authority.

By what standards do we measure culture? It is customary to evaluate a nation by the magnitude of its scientific contributions or the quality of its artictic achievements. However, the true standard by which to guage a culture is the extent to which reverence, compassion, justice, are to be found in the daily lives of a whole people, not only in the acts of isolated individuals. Culture is a style of living compatible with the grandeur of being human.

The emphasis is his, and the statement is a searching performance indicator for our own culture, now, here. On free care for the elderly, Heschel asks, ‘Is there anything as holy, as urgent, as noble, as the effort of the whole nation to provide medical care for the old?’ His choice of words is odd, for a consumer society. Not a hint about affordability, budget constraints, waiting lists; instead care for the old as holy purpose, comfort of the old as humanly urgent, support for the old as noble task.

‘The aged may be described as a person who does not dream anymore…’ This for Heschel is a spiritual matter. To grow old should not mean the loss of dreams, but opening up of the self to whatever future awaits as goodness and mercy surely follow us, all the days of our lives. For that reason heschel insists that the spirituality of ageing is less important than the spirituality of the aged. With poignant impatience he observed, ‘to be retired does not mean to be retarded’. he identified three spiritual ills of old age that need to be addressed: i) The sense of being useless; ii) the sense of inner emptiness and boredom; iii) loneliness and the fear of time.

The essay title, ‘To grow in wisdom’, explains the profoundly biblical substratum of this way of thinking. To study, to grow, to toil and to mature, to work and worship, to live life in its fullness, both celebration and sorrow, achievment and failure, and to do so nourished by prayer and honoured in our humanity, that is something of the rich meaning of shalom. And for old people, that shalom will require a culture which honours the grandeur of being human.

Hain defends job for mother 80.

That’s the headline at the end of a week when polls suggest MP’s are unpopular, are in the relegation zone of the public trust league, when an MP has been suspended for employing his two sons for £45,000 worth of work for which there is no paper trail, and Mr Hain himself just over a week into a police investigation about undeclared donations. In the light of very dodgy forms of nepotism (promoting or rewarding on the basis of family connection rather than talent, entitlement or right) what offends me about the headline is the number 80.

Of what relevance is the age of a secretary who still does efficiently the job she began in 1991, and possibly better than younger alternatives when it comes to life experience, literacy, discretion and overall reliability? An octogenarian does a good, honest job, all above board, and is sucked into a row about dodgy deals involving MP expenses, and family connections.

Apart from the murky machinations of MP’s financial choices, it’s also been a week of widespread debate about massive shortfalls in future funding for care of the elderly. As each year passes our impartiality is undermined by the realisation that one day we’ll be old too. Given that we need a radical overhaul of policy, and a realignment of public and Government attitudes, and a recovery of the moral values that underpin a humane society, I am also in search of a theology of ageing. Such a theology grows out of the kinds of values that expose the above headline for what it is – a piece of engrained prejudice based on a narrow, utilitarian view of human capacity. And it disguises itself as a morally defensible enquiry about whether or not an elderly woman should be employed by her son and paid by taxpayer’s money.

At different stages of the church’s history specific doctrines have played a major role in overall theological restatement. Christological and trinitarian controversies dominated the first few centuries; at other times ecclesiology, the doctrine of justification and / or the doctrine of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit and again in the last couple of decades further review and reflection on the nature of the Triune God. But in an age of genetic technology, ecological crisis, globalised consumerism and religious transmutation from radicalism through extremism, it may be that the Christian understanding of the human will become a crucial counter narrative.

The dignity and value of each human person, the God-givenness of existence and identity, the common humanity of all and yet the scandal of particularity witnessed to in the incarnation of Jesus, makes a Christian anthropology an important line in the sand when we talk about how we treat the elderly, protect the vulnerable, cherish human life, resist dehumanising politics and protest against the bar-coding approach to the cost of caring for and nurturing human life throughout the life cycle. Practical issues of funding and resources may become acute; economic choices will have to be made, and that may not be to our economic advantage in the global market; and human welfare is sustained by finite resources just as our economies and communities are.

But what a Christian anthropology seeks to provide is a nexus of values that secures a reverence for human life, a respect for all who share this planet, and a working assumption for Christians that every human being is one for whom Christ died, who bears the image of God however dishonoured, and who lives in the tragic ambiguity of a fallen world. But a world invaded by the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ. Jesus the Jew was immersed in the spiritual wisdom of the Torah, the instruction of God that shaped and gave texture to the shared life of Jewish communities.

Which brings me to my favourite rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a quite remarkable celebration of age, wisdom and humanity. After fifty years, his essay carries the moral rebuke of a prophet who knew the importance of an anthropology rooted in the values of the Hebrew Bible. Here are the first two paragraphs:

I see the sick and the despised, the defeated and the bitter, the rejected and the lonely. I see them clustered together and alone, clinging to a hope for somebody’s affection that does not come to pass. I hear them pray for the release that comes with death. I see them deprived and forgotten, masters yesterday, outcasts today.

What we owe the old is reverence, but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be discarded and forgotten. What they deserve is preference, yet we do not even grant them equality. One father finds it possible to sustain a dozen children, yet a dozen children find it impossible to sustain one father.

I’ll come back to this essay. In its indictment of a culture impatient of the elderly, resentful and grudging of the resources that will be needed to care for the old, it offers an altogether different vision – in which octogenarians go on doing a good job without their age being held against them.

Walter Brueggemann explores the Psalms through the experience of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. The same approach can at present be applied to my study. The painter is half way through decorating it, and I’ve decanted books to various surfaces around the house, and sit here with abandoned bookcases, bare windows, painter’s sheets with a few years of paint drippings draped around the place, sets of steps standing at the door, the pictures removed – and a sense of inner disorientation to match the mess around me.

Remember – this is the guy who likes his books in neat rows on the bookshelves, the same distance from the front of the shelf, arranged in a system so familiar I can tell my PA at College exactly where a book is – bookcase, shelf and roughly where. Same at home; except tonight my study suffers the first two of Brueggemann’s rubrics – orientation has given way to disorientation. It will be Saturday before the painter returns, and probably Sunday before there’s a hope of reorientation.

No big deal to most folk I suppose. And I’ll survive. But moving 23 metres of shelved books is an exercise in dismantling the familiar which raises questions of attachment, comfort zones. Moving around the furniture reminded me of the elderly couple who first gave me somewhere to stay in Glasgow when I started University. Lily was one of the most unassuming, generous and open people I’ve ever met. Well into her sixties and seventies she went to the chapel next door to ‘the jigging’, while Bill stayed in the house and watched the telly. When I first met them and we agreed I’d be staying with them Bill warned me,

‘Son. When ye come in at night, put the light on before you get into bed. She’s aye shifting furniture, an’ yer bed might no be where ye left it’.

And true enough. Lily was an experimenter with space and furniture. She was a tireless exponent of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

Bill painted the ships with red lead, and worked alongside Jimmy Reid. Lily served in the newsagent and grocers downstairs. She smoked like a chimney and always apologised for some of what she called her ‘bad adjectives’. They never referred to me as anything but ‘the boy’. They were at our wedding, and some years later, within a couple of years of each other, I took their funerals. And the two years I spent in the four up two room flat in Dumbarton Road made it possible for me to afford being at University. We had several arguments about what I should pay. Not how much, but how little – she was mortified, embarrassed, annoyed, when I paid the first week’s rent. In the end she agreed to take a fraction of what they could have asked. I look on their friendship as one of those gifts that teach us the connections between hospitality and humanity, and demonstrate the sacrament of unselfconscious generosity.

But Bill was right. Several times in those two years, I put on the light before getting into bed – to make sure it’s where it was when I left it! May they rest in peace, whose home was a place of reoritnetation for a young man whose life was going through that disorientation that is an inevitable consequence of hearing Christ’s call, and following.

Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ has been reproduced on jigsaws and biscuit tins. It portrays a different age, culture, pace of life; and it shows our wasteful, extravagant ways when contrasted with people whose daily lives depended on ‘what was left’. The large stacks in the background, the loaded horse and cart, the bundles of harvested straw and grain, contrast with the fingerpicking, back-breaking thrift of the gleaners. I don’t want to wish myself back into an era when so many of our technologically derived life comforts and provisions were uninvented or unavailable.

But a picture like this argues for a way of treating our world less as a machine that produces the goods, more like the place where we find what we need; what we need to live humanly and humanely, not what we need to live at the expense of life itself. Stewardship presupposes an accepted responsibility for looking after and using wisely, that which is entrusted, given and therefore not mine. It shoudln’t take an old story about a woman’s fight for survival to make us aware of the fragile hold we have of this delicately poised, gloriously gifted, and now humanly threatened place where we live.

Millet’s picture, those three gleaners who know the value of grain, and the story of Ruth and the providential accidents of divine happenstance, are enough to reflect on for today. I write this as the dustbin lorry comes up the street to take away our rubbish by the big bucket load – even our rubbish bins are getting bigger. I feel a lenten theme emerging here – suppose we give up producing rubbish for Lent? And suppose we apply the gleaning principle as a way of cutting down what we waste, throw out, use up? So instead of asking how much holier my soul is at the end of Lent, suppose I ask how much emptier the bin is of rubbish? Instead of denying myself luxury, I’ll deny myself the luxury of producing rubbish.

How?

Need to think about that – maybe I need to find a modern equivalent of gleaning, not wasting, valuing grain….

By the way, we have a wee cheap print of Millet’s masterpiece, in a wee cheap frame, which came from the home of one of the most generous, gentle and merciful people I’ve ever known. Married later in life, and a widow much too early, Ruth was her favourite book in the Hebrew Bible – which was only one of the things which she and I had in common, enriching a friendship founded on honest questioning about what God is about, turning lives upside down and yet, as Winnie believed, faithfully working all things together for good.

Came across an old journal I kept during a week at St Deiniol’s library, near Hawarden, a few miles from Chester. For those who don’t know this quaint, unique, old fashioned haven for Casaubon like scholars, religiously inclined eccentrics, aspiring eremites and many other interesting visitors, it still claims to be the Uk’s only residential library. It’s welcome is to ‘interested persons wishing to puruse divine learning’.

Gifted by Gladstone’s family after the great man’s death, it retains its Victorian ethos, with oak shelving, occasionally creaky chairs, the book shelves designed by Gladstone for maximum books in allotted space. It’s a mixture of the delightful and the odd; the community works to the gentle rhythm of matins and vespers; the bedrooms are basic, the food OK. But the setting and the building, the ethos and the very idea of a library you can live in!

While there I’ve noted in the Journal that Sheila’s uncle died, and we went to the funeral from holiday – which meant me searching Oxfam shops for a dark tie! We also did some "ye olde churche" viewing, chapels mostly. One of my study projects was to prepare a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer which would span Advent and the first three Sundays of the new millenium – I gave them the title ‘Is Your Faith Y2k Compatible?’

From my notes I have a comment from Gerhard Ebeling’s The Lord’s Prayer in Today’s World. There is a combative, non-submissive note to Ebeling’s theology of prayer, reminiscent of P T Forsyth’s insistence that prayer is a struggle of wills, and petition and intercession are God’s call to us to trust, to believe, to defy the will-lessness and resignation that too quickly become a giving in to the way things are. Importunity, sheer dogged desire for change is a more Christian spiritual virtue than passive or premature surrender to things as they are. In speaking of the Father who is in heaven, Ebeling warns:

It seems religious to put God beyond time, as the Eternal, and to keep time well clear of God, as being something limited, earthly, human. But with this kind of piety we make God unreal, and reality Godless. (page 72)

I still remember the thrill of reading that, and still find that comment a needed corrective to over spiritualised prayer. Into the limited, earthly and human, comes God in Christ, with love unlimited, holy love incarnate in the earthly and human, transforming existence, human life, and creation itself. The one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in whom creation is summed up and comes together, and who reconciles all things making peace by the blood of the cross, is not one who can be placed beyond time. So why should prayer be timid, or resignation to circumstance be deemed a higher spirituality?

It’s a year today since I gave up lurking and started blogging. Enough folk have been positive and encouraging about their visits to livingwittily for me to feel that, though it’s a place where I can think in words and try ideas, others like those reading this now, are listening / reading / commenting / appreciating – and that, whether or not you are agreeing.

373 posts represents a lot of words, ideas, time and work – so the question why I go on blogging needs some justification, if only to me.

1. a place to think in words
2. a forum to try ideas
3. a way of enhancing the good stuff in life by noticing it and telling it
4. a regular excuse to celebrate the joy and contentment of reading
5. a meeting place with others who are usually critically appreciative companions
6. a voice that tries to speak truth about what it means to be human, and to care about justice and long for peace
7. a form of theological reflection aiming at acting faithfully by living wittily!

I suppose I could keep the list going, but most of these are reason enough, at least for me and for the moment. I don’t doubt that communication technology, developments in software, social habits, will mean folk move on to new things, or maybe blogging will exhaust itself as a useful, or amusing, or socially relevant form of virtual or literary conversation.

This week sees the birth of a Scottish Baptist College Blog. You can find it here. This won’t be updated daily or anything like as often. But it will feature a number of posts a month, ranging from College news, information about previous students, book reviews, theological reflections on this and that, and some ongoing discussions about such obvious areas as training for ministry, theological education, changing patterns and approaches to how we express our life together in a Scottish Baptist context, and anything else we think would be interesting, important, aye, and fun. Where significant new posts are added I’ll mention them here.

I haven’t forgotten the Haiku Introduction to the NT. All NT books are now done – but I can’t get the software on Typepad to accept large chunks of cut and paste without it doing daft things to it. So in spare moments, I’ll begin to type up the end result and post it when it’s complete.

Two consecutive news stories this morning.

This is the day in the month of January when a large percentage of UK citizens have no money. The post-Christmas pay-check isn’t due, the credit card and store card bills are due, and apparently the option for many is more credit or use savings. The Finance Adviser was asked how people can avoid such levels of personal debt – apparently a significant number of us are still paying off Christmas 2006. Her advice was straightforward – re-schedule existing debt to as favourable a rate as possible; make a payback plan and stick to it; don’t spend more than you can afford; save modestly in an ISA. Overall advice, spend less.

Second story. The high street retailers are anticipating a difficult time between now and the summer, and particularly up to Easter. The credit crunch, the big Christmas overspend, the overall uncertainty in the financial world, are all leading to a slowdown in spending and a lowering of consumer confidence. Even if interest rates come down that might not be enough. And if businesses fail, jobs are lost, credit remains unpaid, mortgaged homes are at risk, so we need to stem a rising tide of threatening business liquidations. The answer – consumers need to spend more.

So to avoid debt, spend less. To avoid recession, spend more. Consumer prudence and consumer confidence, with mutually exclusive results, it seems. Now Mr McCawber was no financial adviser, and had he lived in our era of Credit Card Consumerism he’d have ruined himself in a week. But he still had the right kind of idea even if he couldn’t live it.

Income 20 shillings a week, expenditure 20 shillings and sixpence a week – result, misery.

Income 20 shillings a week, expenditure 19 shillings and sixpence a week, happiness.

OK if you can do it. But I’m left wondering about the relationship between consumerism and contentment; and about the connection between the urge to buy and the hunger for personal value; and about how as Christians we live wisely, and follow Jesus faithfully, in a society where spending  and not spending can be at one and the same time social virtues, and moral problems, or social problems and moral virtues!

What would it mean to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness in a society where moneylessness and money availability, credit and consumerism, are apparently both necessary for our common life to function? Forgive us our debts………hmmmm?