Category: living wittily

I'm having a holiday week at home in Westhill. It's been a busy time with end of Semester and end of Session marking and processing, but now everything is tidied up. And before we begin the wind up to next academic year I'm having a week to let the horizons draw back again and look at all the other things in life that also matter, indeed yes, they do!

There's much to see and enjoy on our doorstep – castles and gardens, coastal and hill walks, we are bird watchers and coffee shop connoisseurs, I get to do the cooking for dinner, and if it's raining we have DVD's, the cinema – oh, and rain jackets. Will have a day in Edinburgh to meet some folk and I'll carve out an hour at the National Galleries.

Meantime there hasn't been a poem here for a while. remedied now:

Soloist

Seeing above Glen Lyon a forester

sawing in a shaft of sunlight so far

downwind the sound is drowned

by perpetual lark-song, I am drawn

to that sweltering auditorium decades ago

and Rostropovitch playing Dvorak's cello

concerto; folk melody rising, the soloist

silhouetted in a nimbus of gold dust.

                      Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room (Bloodaxe, 2010), page 54.

That's a holiday poem, and we will be walking in Glen Dye later this week, if there's a sunny day. I don't walk in rain for fun!

s!

Two incidents while driving my Honda Jazz, which I am still loving apart from a predilection for punctures, and a temperamental petrol flap which only opens when it feels like it (which could be a problem if it decided to stay shut when the empty warning light glows greedily). Other than that it's a fun car to drive and makes the weekly Aberdeen to Paisley jaunt a cruise – and the petrol flap is to be healed of its recalcitrance at the Honda correction centre this weekend.

Driving along the street I saw beneath the parked cars two small legs and a ball. I slowed to a near stop and just as in the road safety advert, the ball bounced between two cars and trickled onto the road and the wee legs followed it, by which time I was stopped. Oblivious of the stationary Jazz the ball was retrieved and the child safely on the pavement again. Not sure what you are supposed to do these days – do you get out the car and try to be nice to a young child who doesn't know you, or do you thank God (I mean it!) you saw the wee legs running and played safe with children playing dangerously?

Then last night driving back to where I stay when down at College, I turn the corner into a road with a steep hill. A parked car has its door open and a can of tomatoes drops out and starts rolling downhill. The driver standing by the car door on the mobile scuttled after it to retrieve it before this encroaching Jazz squished it! After she picked it up disdainfully and walked back to the car still on the phone, another can landed on the road and started to roll down the hill….. By which time I was slowly passing the car and saw the child in the car seat cheerfully chucking the shopping out the car door. I'm now wondering how long that game lasted!

Suffer the little children, indeed. But these two episodes made me think – about the preciousness and precociousness of children. When Jesus put a child in the midst he was doing more than using a child as the first children's address. He was pointing to that vulnerability, that combination of mischief and innocence, that imperative on our society to cherish children and make all the allowances needed to make the world safe. And when a child complains about mum ignoring her while on the mobile why shouldn't the child make sure mum gets the messages by chasing the groceries….I love it!

I like this!

Division of opinion, too often the fault line of human relationships, is, when we embrace it openly, what invigorates thinking and stirs new thought. It is the ground of new beginnings, the beginning of new insight, the foundation of new respect for the other. If anything sharpens the dull edge of a relationship it is often when it ceases to be boringly predictable. It is when everybody on two continents knows what we are going to say next that we know we have stopped thinking. Then we need to have a few old ideas honed. We need to think through life all over again. "Of two possibilities", my mother used to tell me, "choose always the third".

Uncommon Gratitude, Rowan Wuilliams and Joan Chittister, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), 41

Yes, I do like that. I seldom read Joan Chittister without nodding or shaking my head. She is a wise, shrewd, compassionate but unsentimental analyst of spiritual psychology and human relationships. Reading her is for me a form of therapy, if therapy is that process by which we are helped to think of ourselves and our world, and our relations to self and the other, with more compassion, insight and patience.

Her writings on the Rule of St Benedict are that rare thing in spiritual writing – well considered common sense, moderation without compromising on the essential, and enough humour to remind us that laughter is one of our most humanising and loveable traits. And she faithfully, persistently and persuasively urges Christians to see the world with eyes open – with creative thought and critical consciousness. As to creativity – "We fail to realize that it is precisely the ability to think beyond the context of the times in which we live that makes us fit to live in times to come." But also "Critical consciousness is the testing ground of new ideas, the gatekeeper of tomorrow".

  This resonates in my own spirit on a number of levels. Whatever else it means to grow older, it cannot mean growing narrower, or being content with familiar and limited horizons. However else spiritual maturity might be evidenced, it isn't in static thought, contented convictions, complacent certainties, fixed ideas, or life still drawing on the capital of past experience. Wherever the future of the church lies – and I mean the Church Catholic, the Body of Jesus Christ in all its rich diversity, historic rootedeness and future possibilities – that future cannot be a perpetuation of the present, let alone a repristination of the past.

In all our lives there come times when we have to think beyond the context of our times, think creatively, and be critically conscious of who we are, how the world is, and what it might mean for us to live faithfully for Christ in that context. That can be a soul stripping experience, a re-orientation that can only take place out of experiences of disorientation. And at such times prayer becomes a crie de couer, a re-aligning of what matters as we discover what matters most. And at such times I find T S Eliot's words from Little Gidding express better than any words I could compose, the risks and consequences of any one life that dares to be open to the love of God and to the mystery and miracle of human life, the range and beauty of human thought, and to human relationships in all their complexity and capacity for wounding and healing.

You are not here to verify,
instruct yourself,
or inform curiosity or carry report.
You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more than an order of words,
the concious occupation of the praying mind,
or the sound of the voice praying.

It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line.  Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.

Roses

You love the roses – so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!

George Eliot

The greatest novelist in the English language – maybe. Not the greatest poet – in one textbook called a minor poet. But when she got it right she could capture in a poem those same human longings and dreams, frustrations and hopes, that add such texture to her novels.

I quote this poem for no other reason than I like roses, I like the poem, and clearly, George Eliot liked roses as well! Oh, and there are still roses in our back garden despite the snow that fell earlier this week.

Inspired a Haiku:

White capped red rose bud,

snowflakes on fragile petals,

summer meets winter.

My early years were spent in rural Ayrshire. My father was a dairyman and I lived my entire childhood at least three miles from the nearest shop and school. Oh, and we didn't have a car till I was at secondary school. Amongst the compensations throughout my life have been a love of the coutnryside, a lifelong passion for Scottish wildlife – flora and fauna, and a number of memories maybe not many folk my age will now have.

I remember discovering a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge and being utterly and almost tearfully delighted at the delicacy of shape and colour. To my young eyes this is what a jewel looked like – fragile beauty, grey mauve at the top, tapering to white at the point and traced with several dark elongated commas and question marks as if someone more clever than Faberge had randomly painted a one off egg for the life-remembered pleasure of an 8 year old boy in wellingtons jeans and almsot certainly a big wooly jersey!

So when I come across this poem by Mary Oliver I know exactly what she feels.

With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble

I do not live happily or comfortably

with the cleverness of our times.

The talk is all about computers,

the news is all about bombs and blood.

This morning, in the fresh field,

I came upon a hidden nest.

It held four warm, speckled eggs.

I touched them.

Then went away softly,

having felt something more wonderful

than all the lectricty of New York City.

………………………

Maybe somewhere in such memory there is for me the explanation of why I have always felt a deep resonant joy that Jesus saw connections between the birds of the field and air, and the creative care of God. Was that egg still beautiful if no one had ever seen it? You decide. Some day I may attempt the impossible and try to capture on tapestry that jewel of a moment, that awakening of childhood wonder at the random beauty of life's promise, a yellowhammer's egg, laid in a woven cup lined with moss, sheep wool, and feather.

  Had a great time with the folk who were at the Minister's Refreshment Conference at Hayes Conference Centre. The folk could not have been kinder in welcoming me .

Met a number of people I'd only had blog contact with before – which continues to persuade me that  virtual community is possible, providing at some stage faces, voices and presence are experienced in encounter. The faces matter  – if only to revise preconceptions of how we imagine people look! Myself included!!

Enjoyed the magazine section when people were able to tell stories of ministry in different ways and places. The common thread seemed to be that however it does it, the church is called to love, to serve and to accompany.

Met and made friends with several folk as we exchanged email addresses and made arrangements to meet or share ideas.

Got the chance to do my paper on kenosis – it was well received and encourages me to pursue further what can sound utterly preposterous, ridiculously pretentious and well-intentioned but hopeless – personal research into the love of God!

Amongst the highlights – a service of communion which included anointing for refreshment of ministry. I was privileged to share in offering this ministry – and at the end to receive it. No need for theological analysis – I am content with humbly receiving whatever God wants to make of such a gift and grace.

And finally. The opportunity to sit and talk at the table, or with coffee holding up a doorpost, or in the corridor or wandering round the lake – to share, listen, recognise that this ministry thing is a lifelong entanglement and a lifetime's investment in ordinary folk struggling to make sense of their lives, looking for comfort and support, and willing to risk belonging in covenant and community with others. So the great purpose of God moves on, towards the renewing and bringing to completion of a creation born and borne – born out of love and borne eternally in the heart of God.