Category: living wittily

So many buildings around Paisley are grey, brown or some other tone that blends into a chronic urban sameness. But for two or three weeks in April, azaleas, rhododendrons and cherry trees defy the drabness, and wreck all this tonal monotony with outbreaks of vivid variety. In our own street a bright purple-blue azalea, half a dozen pink and several white cherry trees, and intermittent rhododendrons draw attention to themselves like fluorescent adolescents. The azalea was already in full bloom by Easter, but by now, all over Paisley and along the Glasgow Road, cherry trees are dripping with colour.

I suppose it’s the fragile transience, and the finely veined delicacy, and the sheer superabundance of petals, that give that sense of urgent beauty – show-off now, cos it’s a long time till next year, and you never know the weather in the West of Scotland – four seasons in 10 minutes. Either way, Cherry blossom (NOT shoe polish) is one of my personal religious symbols – and if you ask me what it means I’ll go all postmodern on you and say – it means whatever I feel, and what I feel has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with joy and hope! Hopeful joy and joyful hope. I’m off for a run, in the sun, along a road where there is a whole extended family of cherry trees having a riot. That’s where I’ll have my first breather.

Isaiah knew a thing or two about hope – "the desert shall blossom", he said, and in a number of urban desert corners around the town, the cherry trees are doing their bit for hope!

In one of the older Bible translations Paul encourages the Ephesian Christians to ‘walk circumspectly’, which might at a push also mean ‘live wittily’.(Eph 5.16-17) Both renderings are demonstrated in this photo of me on an ancient set of monastery stepping stones, while on holiday down at Haworth (Bronte country). I’ve decided that I look sufficiently careful where I put my feet (well some of the stones were shooglie -Scots word for ‘tottery, insecure’), that I’ll leave the photo on the profile for a while, to illustrate walking circumspectly, living wittily.

Ancient ruined monasteries are significant places for me – the care with which the sites were chosen, the craft and skill and hard labour of building such sacred space, their pivotal place in the local economy of previous centuries, but also the sense that these were places of prayer set to the rhythms of the day, and places of purposeful work and study, of industry and liturgy.

My favourite such place is Rievaulx in Yorkshire. Been there a number of times –

1. in the aftermath of two days rain when the mist clung to the trees but the rain had stopped, and there was a stillness and a sense of countryside drenched but refreshed by the water that makes life and growth posiible

2. on a sunny day when the tourist buses were like dodgems in the coach park, noisy children were making the kinds of noise that probably monastery walls were built to keep out, but there was a sense that the place itself was undismayed by the presence of folk, because that’s why it was put there in the first place

3. and my first visit, when I’d done my homework, knew the plan of the building, and went to do the educational thing, identifying the nave, the transepts, scriptorium, refectory, herb garden, dormitory – and simply admired the sense of permanence that such durable buildings must have given to the community over the generations.

Where there’s a monastery there is a river, where there are no bridges there are stepping stones – OK to walk across them on a summer day when the river is low, the stones are dry and I’m wearing New Balance trainers. Wouldn’t like to do it in February, across a risen river, stones wet, mossy and slimy, and the water freezing, and wearing leather open sandals or massive working clogs.

Three thoughts –

1. The thought that a community builds stepping stones across rivers is an interesting image of how a church serves its local community – the church helping people get from here to there, negotiating the difficulties with them
2. the thought that whether you’re a monk or not, none of us walk on water, some stones are shooglie and any one of us could slip and fall in, a reminder of our dependence on each other for care and occasional rescue
3. and the final thought – stepping stones get you there stage by stage -for the monks who put them there, stepping stones were a metaphor for walking towards God, using the means he had given, the stepping stones – scripture, community, prayer, bread and wine, praise, care for the poor and sick.

…And if the sleep has left your ears

You might hear footsteps

followed close by heavy breathing…

Reminded of this song (Elusive Butterfly) when I watched the Val Doonican nostalgia hour on telly last week – how sad is that you ask? Not the slightest, I retort – decent, pleasant, unassuming, he was the king of easy listening for a while – and he’s still easy to listen to – talking or singing. No – not sad at all…just a thoroughly likeable human being whose gentleness might not be as marketable as it once was – interesting comment on contemporary TV – why isn’t gentleness marketable? What do we prefer instead? HMMM?

Anyway, the three liner quoted earlier refers not so much to my murky musical past as my sweaty physical present. Recently I’ve started running longer distances building up to 10k – the heavy breathing, I’ve discovered kicks in seriously around 7-8k, after which – at my present fitness levels – it’s about gritted teeth, aching legs and a glowering or pleading relationship with each passing lamppost, keep going……….. just one more lamppost…………. then another………. come on wimp argue with the pain……  nearly there……   look at the watch.

Running as personal discipline.

…

The Rule of St Benedict starts with the Psalm verse ‘teach me to run in the way of your commandments’. So usually sometime during this self-chosen ordeal I think of the spiritual discipline / gift of perseverance and gulp in and out as a fervent prayer, ‘run with perseverance the race that is set before you…’. Now and again Paul’s words have a more critical note – phrases from my current study of Galatians ‘You were running well, who hindered you….?’ Running as training in perseverance and not giving up.

…

As an older man ( well I am, even if I don’t look my age – I’m not as old as Val Doonican and I’m not as old as I look!!!!!) – as an older man, I understand what it meant in Jesus’ unforgettable story that the waiting father risked doing himself serious mischief by running down the road to meet and embrace his son, without doing any warm-up or light pre-training. As the old biblical expositors used to say, stating the obvious because only then do we notice the obvious – ‘note the Son wasn’t at the door….nor was he just at the end of the street – no, my friends, it was "while he was a great way off", his father ran to meet him’. The distance matters, because the father probably ran the length of the village and out towards the edges of his own fields and then his neighbours’ fields – (maybe not 10k but a challenging middle distance jaunt just the same – and done at sprint pace for an ageing parent).

Running as love impatient for meeting, and running as love’s index of cherished significance.

…

Every one of the gospels speaks of disciples and witnesses running  to or from the empty tomb.

Mark says they ran away afraid, and if we’re honest so would we. Matthew has one lot of bemused ex-followers running to tell the other disciples and then they are all ex-ex-followers – the two negatives of restored faith.

Luke has Peter running to the Tomb urged on by that potent mixture of disbelief and unprecedented hope.

John has women witnesses running to tell the self-absorbed mostly male others; and then Peter and the beloved disciple (who weren’t in such good condition as the other disciples it seems) puffing and peching their way towards the miracle that would leave them speechless as well as breathless.

Running as excitement and urgency on the way to hope.

…

So maybe the sounds of my footsteps and my heavy breathing are not only my attempts to stay in some kind of condition, but are evidence that I too am in pursuit of something essential, desirable:

…across my dreams,

with nets of wonder

I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.

What has always attracted me to this song is that word elusive – and its combination of wistfulness, attraction and hopefulness that seem to me to lie very close to what faith is. And the butterfly, those fragile beautiful creatures emerging from their chrysalis, metamorphosed, transformed, glorified – symbols of the newness and the beauty of the life of Christ – the resurrected Lord, and His life in us, made known in a love that will neither coerce nor ever give up.

To live my life in pursuit of, and in the strength of that love, is the deepest purpose of my life, and well worth all the puffing and peching it takes ‘to run in the way of His commandments…to press on towards the high calling of God in Christ Jesus’. 

This coming week is a mixture of visiting friends, walking the east cost beaches and coastlines, having meals with other friends, reading a couple of saved-up books that you want to read with minimum interruptions, cooking and sharing a couple of our favourite meals, and doing a quality check on several of our favourite coffee / home-baking haunts. So no blogging this week till Friday, or even Saturday. Which is just another way of saying we’re having our Easter break.

But as a thought for the week following Easter, some words from James Denney, from an unpublished paper on The Gospel of Paul. They express Denney’s Colossian view of Christ, an understanding of Christ so radically renovating for the believing mind, that it required an entirely different worldview:

[Christ is] the last reality in the universe, the ens realissimum, the ultimate truth through which and by relation to which all things must be defined and understood…

The presence of God in Christ is the primary certainty; and that certainty carries with it for him the requirement of a specifically Christian view of the universe. Paul would not be true to Christ, as Christ had revealed Himself to him in experience, unless he had the courage to Christianise all his thoughts of God and the world…

He is not directly deifying Christ, he is Christianising the universe…he is casting upon all creation and redemption the steadfast and unwavering light of the divine presence of which he was assured in Christ.

Scunnered. (Definition and illustration below).

I’ve heard this word several times in the past few days. It’s one of those to be cherished Scottish words whose meaning is almost onomatopoetic – just saying it, with the right inflection, and the precise balance of vehemence and resignation, communicates its meaning.

demotivated

frustrated

disgusted

nauseated

sick of it

had enough

I’m outa here

The synonyms are like downard steps towards that point when scunneration (noun: a state when demotivation process nears completion) reaches crisis point and we are ready to walk away.

For one person, who works for a big organisation, the scunnered experience is caused by a relationship at work that’s just so draining, the colleague so negative that there seems neither willingness nor point in persevering with ideas, encouragements, suggestions, offers of help, support, all the positive things that come naturally. Someone else is scunnered because the most important relationship in their life is beginning to crumble, and with it the sense of life’s structure, purpose and direction as a shared project of faithful love and mutual accompaniment. The third person wants to buy their first home, nothing more than a wee flat, but even with a good salary, the prices are just getting further away month by month. Saving for a deposit is an exercise in proximate futility – you nearly always nearly have enough.

Scunneration is a problem then. Being scunnered isnae funny. It feels like emotional defeat. It describes what Jesus called ‘burdened and heavy laden’. To be scunnered is to detect that depleted feeling of having run out of one of the essential fuels for creative, purposeful living – ideas linked to self-confidence, linked in turn to a trustfulness that despite it all, life is good, precious and to be endured as well as enjoyed. It’s going a bit far to call being scunnered the equivalent to the dark night of the soul, but it does feel lonely, unaccompanied and emotionally arid.

At the same time it becomes an act of faith and a gift of grace to recover our balance, re-establish our equilibrium, adjust the persepctive, and recognise that perhaps after all the universe does not work for the purposes of our personal fulfilment. And I wonder if being scunnered can become a mild form of the prayer of lament – asking God ‘how long’ this particular scunneration will last, describing said scunnered experience in the clearest terms to God, but defiantly finding reasons still to praise and give thanks, because goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives…and thank God the divine patience never runs out, and God never gets scunnered with us!

My friend Anne Muir has recently completed a major project on an oral history of the early days of the Iona Community.

She sent me the following snippet which is a good illustration of why oral history is irreplaceable as a source of gossip, perspective, and testimony.

Speaking of Karl Barth, here’s a wee extract from one of my  Iona interviews. It’s with a mason called Adam Campbell who was one of the first craftsmen to work on the re-building of the abbey during the war. He’s telling me about the young ministers who used to come and labour for him.

We got permission, through the Church of Scotland, to work the glebe at the manse, and some of the young ministers went out to cultivate it. They had a cart with a donkey – ‘Nebo’.  If I mind right, it had to work every second day, and I think the beast knew it, because it was stabled in one of the ruins, and it  would get out of there easy enough, and away up the road, braying. “Hee-haw! Hee-haw!”  You heard it in the Evening Service in the summer time. The chap that took charge of the donkey was a minister. Marcus. Marcus Barth. I think his father was a theologian – Karl Barth was it?  Aye, Marcus was the only one that could make that donkey work.’

Anne will be the keynote speaker at the first meeting to launch the Centre for the Study of Scottish Christian Spirituality, on March 24, from 10.00a.m. till 1.00p.m.

The theme for the meeting is ‘Persepctives on George Macleod and the Iona Community’.

The venue is the Scottish Baptist College, Block K, University of Paisley, at 10 o’clock. Email me if you want more details.

Dag Hammarskjold is one of my spiritual heroes. Diplomat, statesman, ambassador, politician, arbiter, peacemaker – and a man of granite integrity. His book Markings I’ve bought three times. The first volume, a Faber paperback, eventually split into a pile of pamphlets as the glue dried out. The second I gave to an older friend who loved the oblique wisdom of someone who looked steadily into mystery without jumping to easy conclusions. The third I’ve lost, and don’t know where – and I will buy a fourth copy! Hammarskjold famously identified the radical differences that modern life imposed on our understanding of Christian sanctity and goodness: "In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action".

But it is one of his more astringent comments on a life of self-disciplined service that I have often gone back to as an ideal of ministry – though I’d want to live this goal with a sufficient and divine grace presupposed.

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.