Category: living wittily

‘Teller Number 4 Please’…..

Standing in the queue at the Bank is one of my favourite people watching sites. A good place to watch for glimpses of rehumanising behaviour. Those electronic voices telling next in line to go to teller number 5 please; cctv, plate glass, warnings about the time delayed lock on the safe; not the most congenial environment for friendly conversation.

In front of me an elderly man, scanning his shiny new bank card, reading it back and front as if memorising the numbers, or trying to decode the electronic logic that somehow translates swiped card into hard cash. As he does, a bigger younger man finishes writing out his pay-in/withdrawal slip, and simply stands in front of him.

Bad manners? Didn’t think? In a hurry?

Whatever, he stayed put and went next, to ‘Teller number 5 please’.

The older man went to ‘Teller number 4 please’ and told the teller (and anyone within 20 feet) he wanted to lift a hundred please. Trying to be discreet, which is hard when the customer is hard of hearing and there is plate glass between you, the teller tries to speak to him in a low voice.

‘Speak up hen; ah cannae hear ye,’ he said.

So she says more loudly, and we all hear it clearly, ‘I’m sorry sir; there isn’t enough in your account to lift that amount. Do you have another card?’

‘No’ he says. ‘But ah’ve two pensions and a’ thocht wan o’ them might have been paid in the day’.

‘I’m sorry’, said Teller Number 4 please. ‘Is there anything else I can do for you’.

To which the answer was a shake of the head, a smile over at the rest of us, and a dignified withdrawal, of himself, through the automatic door.

‘Teller number 4 please’, intoned the electric voice, and I went forward to do my business. Teller number 4 didn’t mention it, neither did I, but we looked at each other with the same sense of admiration at the equanimity with which the elderly man, and we, had just been told he didn’t have a hundred pounds in his only bank account. Not fair to mention Teller Number 4 please’s Christian name in this blog, though she should be named and famed; the way she treated her elderly customer makes me hope there are people like her at the bank when I am old, and not all that well off, and impatient to get my own weekly payouts on time.

These Haiku musings celebrate the gentle arts of courtesy,respect and the compassion that isn’t quite hidden behind the professional role of people like ‘Teller number 4, please’.

…

Clydesdale Haiku

Old man at the bank –

new card, empty account, so

he withdraws, himself.

…

Impersonal banks –

but embarrassed old man hears

kindness behind glass.

…

Blest are the tactful –

courteous empathy smiles

gentle refusal

…

Teller number four –

professional courtesy

preserves dignity.

………………

Prayer

Lord, none of us have enough in our account;

but your love isn’t hampered

by the rules of banking.

So once again,

replenish our poverty,

with the unsearchable riches of Christ.

And please bless ‘Teller number 4 please’,

for her gentle regard for age,

Amen

3 March 2007
Rehumanising: a hand, perhaps, to hold

A boy holding an orange in his hands

Has crossed the border in uncertainty.

He sands there, stares with marble eyes at scenes

Too desolate for him to comprehend.

Now, in this globe he’s clutching something safe,

A round assurance and a promised joy

No one shall take away. He cannot smile.

Behind him are the stones of babyhood.

Soon he will find a hand, perhaps, to hold

Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.

Lotte Kramer (1923)

It’s the word ‘perhaps’, that gives this poem its poignant pull; and how it is placed between ‘hand’ and ‘hold’, then framed in commas – the punctuation device that insists you, the reader, pause. Perhaps = uncertainty…. who knows what life will bring this boy – but perhaps, just perhaps, he has not lost the human power to imagine the better when faced with the worst.

…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,

Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’

Few gestures rehumanise difficult moments more powerfully than the hold, the touch, even the reaching out, of a hand. Those moments in the gospels when Jesus at the bedside of the dying child ‘took her by the hand’, or when against all advice and "good practice" he practiced goodness, reached out to the leper and ‘touched him’; and when Peter started sinking in the maelstrom of a Galilean storm Jesus ‘reached out his hand and took hold of him’. Moments of precise, intentional, kindness and comfort.

One way of rehumanising our culture would be for us to find ways of being to those who need it, "….a kind hand, perhaps, to hold….". And for the community of Jesus’ followers the challenge is to demonstrate to a culture confused about how we can touch each other in non-threatening, non-exploitative ways, how to perform acts and gestures of spontaneous and embodied kindness and comfort.

…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,

or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’

2 March 2007
Rehumanising the News

In conversation with Stuart (word at the barricades) on my current rehumanising campaign, we picked up on a number of what are called human interest stories on the news yesterday. TV News is usually dominated by the macro concerns of the 21st Century human community. ICT and economic transactions are globalised, products and cultures increasingly standardised, the language of diplomacy and policy militarised, and the economic, social, ecological and political consequences analysed!

So it becomes important to rehumanise the News, to tell and consider those stories that focus on the struggles and achievements, the joy and courage, the sadness and the dignity of ordinary people and their all too human, and therefore significant, stories.

The other morning a man spoke about early diagnosis of his Alzheimers condition and the drugs he is now taking. He tells of the joy of retaining his sense of self, the daily awareness of his grandchildren, the softening of his underlying anxiety about losing his hold on the deepest relationships in his life. But many of these drugs are expensive -and so not universally available – so what price on enabling a person to retain their identity, to maintain their friendships, and to be a giver as well as a receiver of love?

Altogether different, the story of an 8 year old boy whose weight of 14 stone is now of serious concern for those who have a duty of care. The papers were interested in the possibility of social work taking him into care – but the local hospital suggested a close tie-in with their eating disorder clinic. Whatever the rights and wrongs of how an 8 year old becomes three times the expected weight for a child of his age, there is no denying there are now huge ethical questions around food as a substance we increasingly abuse. Just what is it we are feeding, and how do we name, those hungers that come disguised as inner emptiness? How do we avoid uncritical acceptance of a culture where human beings eat themselves to death? In Elizabethan plain English, the words of another era are scarily and culturally precise – ‘whose God is the belly, whose end is destruction’. Both a warning and a description of a society where ‘enough’ is never enough, and more is always better.

And Josie Grove, the brave young woman who decided not to live at all costs, and who wanted whatever of life was left not to be diminished in its quality by chemotherapy. She didn’t blame her illness, leukaemia, for her distress; it was the treatment and its effects that she couldn’t suffer any longer. Surrounded by her family she gradually relinquished her hold on life – and again I’d never presume to say what anyone else should or shouldn’t have done. I simply admire the dignity and spirit of a young woman whose humanity was radiant with a gentle defiance of all that would diminish the human value of the time she had left.

Three human stories. And from my book of Poems for Refugees:

All you who sleep tonight

Far from the ones you love

No hand to left or right

And emptiness above-

…

Know that you aren’t alone

The whole world shares your fears,

Some for two nights or one,

And some for all their years.

Vikram Seth (1952-)

Incidentally, Vikram Seth’s Equal Music is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read (and I’ve read it three times). He understands the full range of emotions that provide the scales and structures, the points and counterpoints, of that music which is the human song. Music too is a rehumanising activity.

1 March 2007
Rehumanising

I’ve had a long standing relationship with Oxfam shops. Long before the word recycle began to exert some leverage on our throwaway habits, Oxfam was working hard at being honest broker, the middle man (sic) in transactions where they got stuff for nothing and sold it on for bargain prices. Books by the dozen, the occasional shirt (one suitably sombre tie needed while on holiday to attend a family funeral), a superb ratchet nut cracker more like a shifting spanner and a real mauler with almond shells, along with fair trade honey and coffee.

Bought another book the other day in the more upmarket branch in Hillhead, Byres Road! Poems for Refugees, originally published to raise money for the children of Afghanistan. I’ve enlarged the cover so you can see the sad beauty of this vulnerable, precious little human being. Her home – who knows? Her parents – maybe there, maybe dead. Her future – again, who knows. I took the book because of the picture – and also because of the poems – and mostly because something deep in my heart and spirit is simply not prepared to accept that this is the way it has to be for this child.

I used a rare word yesterday – I’d like to see it enter the common stock of everyday words. I haven’t looked it up in a dictionary, I’ve decided to define i for myself – to take it to mean what I think it means and should mean in the vocabulary of the 21st C!

Rehumanise (def): to restore human dignity to the dehumanised; to reinclude (another new word?) a person in the human community; to remove causes of dehumanisation.

Recently I’ve started to notice social situations, unhealthy relationships, institutional practices, political decisions, management styles, military protocols and commercial behaviour which undermine, deny, diminish, ignore, people’s humanity. This poetry book is essentially a protest on behalf of rehumanising practices. Its sections include

On Exile and the Refugee

On War

On Diversity

On Love and Loss

Consider for a second or two who you are, what you are – what matters to you –what you want from life –those you love and whose disappearance would deprive your life of an essential joy –

Think humanely, imagine and celebrate what it means for you to be a woman, a man, a child – and then look again at the book cover, at the bewildered uncertainty of this child, this small refugee human being, caught up in war, suffering God alone knows what love, and loss, and loss of love. Different from us but deeply, essentially, humanly, the same. And remember the rehumanising words of Jesus,’Let the children come to me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’. So how come countries which claim any moral continuity with Jesus can impose political and economic sanctions which inevitably lead to large scale suffering for children?

Aye – I know there are political realities, that the world is complex, and a dangerous world becomes positively perilous when spiritual and theological reasons are given as to why such policies are wrong. But I can’t get the thought out of my head, that Jesus is on the side of this child, these children. And that the Word who became flesh, cherishes and comforts the vulnerable beauty that is a human being, made in the image of God.

27 February 2007
The blade of the plough…….

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks. Military hardware recycled as agricultural implements, personal weapons reshaped into horticultural tools. The African-American spiritual, ‘Aint gonna study war no more’, protests the use of human ingenuity and creativity in the art of war, as if there were such a thing as an aesthetic of killing. Instead to lay down the burden, down by the riverside, and cultivate, nurture, harvest and then feed, nourish, share – to rehumanise (new word?).

The poet Daniel Berrigan, one time friend of Thomas Merton, grew up in a farming family. I learned that by reading his meditations on Isaiah 2 in his book Isaiah. Spirit of Courage. Gift of Tears. Most of the chapter he works away at thinking through what it means to beat swords into ploughshares. And he makes it personal by recalling his own childhood experiences of ploughing with his father. Several sentences triggered deja vu in my own memory and experience – I was also brought up in a farm labourer’s family. My father was a dairyman and ploughman – the picture shows him ploughing in the early 1950’s – with my mother,(I’m sitting on her knee!) and my brother (standing at the edge of the field)watching the world, and the horse, go by. So when Berrigan describes the tranformation of soil through ploughing the images resonate deep in my memory of childhood, my love for my father, and make me long for a more innocent time – except by the 1950’s, the last decade of horse drawn ploughs, nuclear weapons were the holy grail of post-war governments desperate to possess the ultimate deterrent. Here is Berrigan complete with American spelling:

Each spring I stumbled along after the plow as my father turned the earth, one furrow upon another. A sense of new life, damp, permeating, haunted with presences, arose in the mild air, so welcome after a killing north-country winter. I imagined that giants of the earth were turning over in sleep just before awakening. Or I thought of the furrows as great coils of rope, weaving, binding all things in one; earth and season, furrow and family, the horse plodding along, the planting, the harvest to follow, my father and me. It was all one. The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world.

I love that last sentence: The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world. Swords into ploughshares. Work that ‘rehumanises’.

Stuart has a characteristic word at the barricades, on the prophetic relevance of that short text for today (and I mean today, Saturday the 24 of February, the date for anti-war protests). See here. I’m blogging at hopeful imagination next Wednesday (Feb 28), on precisely this text, Isaiah 2.2-5. I’ll post the photo of my father there too; such human, humane labour, weaves the garment of the world…., and whatever else dad was, he was a man of the soil.

24 February 2007
hopeful imagination

Andy has set up a Lenten Blog to which I am contributing during Lent. I decided to do Wednesdays, which means I do the first one – which happens also to be my birthday! So the giving up for Lent bit is going to be in some tension with celebrating my continuing existence!

So every Wednesday for the next 6 weeks I will be posting at "hopeful imagination" See here . Meanwhile, before Lent begins, some verses from that spiritually precise metaphysical poet, George Herbert

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
      But is compos’d of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
      To ev’ry Corporation.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
      When good is seasonable;
Unlesse Authoritie, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it lesse,
      And Power it self disable.

It ‘s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
      Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior’s purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
      In both let ‘s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
      That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
      May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
      As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
      And among those his soul.

20 February 2007
‘A wee cocksparra…….

Being situated in the middle of the University Campus, and sharing the accommodation with all kinds of other classes taking place (from food safety & health to drug dependency, to corporate marketing), we often get folk coming in asking for directions, drinks of water, the use of the phone to check on lecture times, and various other requests. Last week a lecturer from along the corridor asked us to phone estates and buildings to tell them a small bird was trapped in the room and would need to be released before the weekend. He was quite insistent about the University’s duty of care in this matter, and as a bird lover / watcher I was fully supportive of his concern for the wellbeing of said sparrow (Passer Domesticus). He waited till the incident was duly phoned in and an assurance given of imminent liberation.

The bible verses are self -choosing:

Are not five sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of these falls to the ground but your Heavenly Father knows it

[In your house] even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest, where she rears her brood beside your altars. Psalm 84:3.

This particular sparrow later flitted off with a little encouragement from University security. Security – how apt is that, like?

19 February 2007
Committed or Committeed?

For God so loved the world that he did not form a committee…..

It’s easy to have a pot at committees, and sure there’s a lot of time spent talking, consulting, reporting, recording, remitting. A large American church has a consultative committee of the sub group on church committees. I’ve just come through several days of being over committeed. Days of talking in small select groups, around pre-arranged agendas. In all the talk surrounding Christian leadership, vision-building and development, there are times when it seems the consensual, consultative confabbing that goes on in committees, seems to slow down rather than facilitate necessary change and innovative thinking.

But I wonder if what is criticised is committee at its worst. Sure, at worst committees can be bottlenecks where good ideas are put on indefinite hold till the original enthusiasm and energy dissipate. ‘A cul de sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled’. At worst a committee can be made up of people whose ability to veto, delay, frustrate and revise innovative, risk taking and original initiatives, gets in the way of ‘real leadership’. Fibber Magee speaks of committees as ‘a small group of the unqualified, appointed by the unthinking, to undertake the utterly unnecessary.’ So that’s committee at its worst.

At its best a committee can provide important space for creative thinking, trusting conversation, collaborative discussion, in which expertise and experience are freely tabled in the interests of making good decisions and forming strategic initiatives. The good committee can also act as a corrective, a friendly critic, a cautionary voice, while also being an enabling resource and a permissive supporter of adventurous thinking. I happen to believe in committee at its best; the ability of a diverse group to meet, listen and speak, to think clearly enough and to be confident enough in their own insights that they are prepared to change their minds in the light of others’ experience. Of course it requires self discipline, humility to listen, trustfulness to speak, confidence in the reality of the Holy Spirit’s influential presence, discernment to know when someone else is ‘at it!’, and through the whole process a commitment to the communal and relational foundations of Christian fellowship. ‘It seemed good to us and to the Holy Spirit’ is one of the most intriguing statements about church administration in the entire NT!

Two further thoughts – If it is true that the saving work of Jesus was purposed and determined in the eternal relations of the Triune God, should we be so sure that ‘God so loved the world that he did not form a committee……???’

Isn’t it true that the gathering of a congregation as the Body of Christ, meeting to discern the mind of Christ by listening to God, listening to each other, and listening to God through each other, is itself a reflection of the relational mutual exchange of love and trust that defines the love of the Triune God?

In our church life, when committees meet, they begin in prayer – so the real chairmanship is already determined by the promised presence of the risen Lord; the discussion quality controlled by the fruit of the Spirit who indwells our hearts and reminds us we all call "Abba, Father"; the agenda open to revision because the Kingdom of God is leaven, new wine, mustard seed and many another metaphor for the uncontrollable activity of God in our midst; the fundamental relations are that of family, brothers and sisters and children of the Father, from whom every family on earth is named.

If our committee meetings are boring, frustrating, sterile, a waste of time, talk-shops, perhaps that is because we dampen our capacity to be what Elton Trueblood, that forgotten philosopher saint of the Quaker tradition once described as, the incendiary fellowship.

17 February 2007
jazz, tapestry and Moltmann

Years ago I stopped giving up things for Lent, and started taking up things for Lent. One year I asked a friend who is an expert on Jazz and the Bible to compile some music for me to listen to throughout Lent. I still struggle to ‘get’ jazz, but I do understand its passion, its rhythm’s, its re-construal of the world, the place of improvisation and collaboration and inspiration in music that celebrates human longing and creativity. The long track of Duke Ellington’s ‘David danced before the Lord’ I played endlessly in the car to my great blessing! I still think the drummer was a genius.

Another time I read through the poetry of Emily Dickinson and discovered a whole world of grace expressed in the oddity and precision of one who told the truth and told it slant. Another year I took up the telephone – as they say in cooking programmes – ‘you literally just’ take up the phone – every night of Lent I phoned someone for no other reason than to speak with them and wish them well in their lives. Since then I have seen the phone as a conduit of friendship, conversation, fun, comfort, and if occasionally an interruption, even these can be moments of grace.

After a long hiatus I have ‘taken up’ my tapestry frame, again. I am working on a new tapestry which will be my project through Lent, Easter and beyond. Working a tapestry is, amongst other things, a way of finding out how stressed you are! Doing it right and well, you mustn’t pull the thread too tight (so unclench the teeth and relax the shoulders); working on small guage canvas (26 to inch) you can’t work either mindlessly or rapidly (so rememebr, there is no deadline). Controlled gentleness and contentment with slowness gets it done……………………… eventually. I wish I could always believe and practice in my life, the observation of can’t remember who, ‘Snails do the will of God slowly!

I don’t do ‘kits’, I prefer to design my own tapestries, or work freehand from a picture. This one is a Celtic cross made up of five squares,(and made up out of my head!) with the interior of each showing intertwining celtic knots depicting the Trinity. It is being done in stranded cotton, the bright colours ranging through the rainbow, and the colours chosen randomly apart from the strong outlines of the Trinity symbols. (I’ll post a photo once it’s recognisably what I’ve described!!) Tapestry is the creation of a picture or image from thousands of intersecting stitches – no wonder it has been used as a metaphor of human life, its textures, colours, patterns, shapes and overall theme.

Not sure what it will look like but it is an attempt to show the relations between the suffering and crucified love of God in Christ, and the eternal loving relations of the Triune God. We had a class last year on ‘Rediscovering the Triune God’ basing much of our discussions around the theology of Jurgen Moltmann. His contribution to contemporary thought includes profound meditation on the crucified God, and the effect of the crucifixion on the eternal relations of Father Son and Spirit. As a Lenten theme it cries out for meditation and prayer.

16 February 2007
and a lover of souls….

I came across this description of teachers from one of my favourite browsing sources. It highlights a number of expectations which I think are valid, and not easy to fulfil. I’ve copied it twice, because the Desert Fathers also includes Desert Mothers!

A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vain-glory, and pride; one should not be able to fool him by flattery, nor blind him by gifts, nor conquer him by the stomach, nor dominate him by anger; but he should be patient, gentle, and humble as far as possible; he must be tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls.
—Benedicta Ward, Desert Christian

A teacher ought to be a stranger to the desire for domination, vain-glory, and pride; one should not be able to fool her by flattery, nor blind her by gifts, nor conquer her by the stomach, nor dominate her by anger; but she should be patient, gentle, and humble as far as possible; she must be tested and without partisanship, full of concern, and a lover of souls.
—Benedicta Ward, Desert Christian

13 February 2007