Category: living wittily

The Wisdom of Desmond Tutu

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.

Language is very powerful. Language does not just describe reality. Language creates the reality it describes.

A kid asked me a few years ago, "What do you do to get the [Nobel] prize?"

I said, "It's very easy, you just need three things – you must have an easy name, like Tutu for example, you must have a large nose and you must have sexy legs."

The above are randomly chosen words from one of the greatest living exponents of Christian discipleship. No wonder Tutu likes to dance. Humour, humanity and holiness all rolled into one flawed but joyful Christian. Few people can preach an entire sermon, change the course of a conversation or interview, or restore trust to a relationship, with a smile. Tutu is one of those special people whose view of the world is itself a gesture of healing.

25 September 2010
Coincidence, providence, random Bible verses and guidance or what?

A week or so ago driving down the road and looked at the mileometer.

Total miles travelled, though I didn't reset it before leaving, 114.9 miles.

At the same time I'm passing a petrol station where unleaded petrol is 114.9 pence.

Now I don't do the random open your Bible and see what it says thing, so deduce this is sheer coincidence.

Begin to worry about the word coincidence when providence, or guidance might be more theologically responsible words.

Run through in my head whether this could be a Bible verse – if so, could only be Psalm 114.9.

Still don't do the random Bible verse thing, but just in case….I check, but it's OK.

Psalm 114 only has 8 verses, so couldn't be guidance.

Spoke with a friend about this coincidence, and received the following email reply, which is worryingly worrying!

"As I'm sure you've already checked – Psalm 114 sadly only has 8 verses – however the 9th verse on the 114th page of my NIV says "If it is spreading in the skin, the priest shall pronounce him unclean: it is infectious", is that of any help!! This guidance thing is difficult."

Now supposing petrol goes up in price, what verses might be appropriate guidance from the relevant Psalm.

I've looked – most of them are quite comforting – 140.9 is a good one for my enemies! As are 141.9 and 143.9.

And I like 146.9 as a message of comfort and inclusion for those who have little sense of belonging.

No. I still don't think random verses are the way ahead. Anyway, I hope petrol doesn't go up that much anytime soon!

20 September 2010
The Spiritual Quest of John Henry Newman and Lead Kindly Light as a Hymn for Postmodern doubters?

John Henry Newman is by any standards a giant of the Victorian age. A supreme literary artist, a profound religious thinker, a man of delicate feelings and gifted with a conscience which sought and found its magnetic north only after much wavering. His conversion to the Catholic Church shocked and shook the English Establishment to its foundations. His spirituality is rooted in an intellect suffused with deep religious affections, informed by long immersion in the Church Fathers, disciplined and kept alert by a conscience both precise and commanding, nurtured and nourished by prayer and meditation on the mystery and majesty of God. Newman loved God first with his mind, then with his heart, and finally with his whole being.

Much will be said about him today, and there are over a dozen new books to coincide with his Beatification. But you know, there is probably no more appreciative and careful assessment of Newman in print than that written by Dr Alexander Whyte, in which warm admiration, reverent and restrained criticism, and spiritual affinity are distilled into an essay replete with sympathetic insight and balanced in generous judgement. It is one of the great acts of ecumenical courage that Dr Alexander Whyte, Minister of the Free Church of Scotland, the most influential preacher and churchman in his denomination, a Moderator and Principal of the Free Church College in Edinburgh, should be one who on his CV had a warm and friendly visit to Cardinal John Henry Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. Whyte was an example of the "hospitable hearted evangelical" a phrase he himself coined, a man of catholic spirit, theologically generous and for these reasons, in the view of many in his denomination, a maverick.

But in Cardinal Newman, Principal Whyte found a kindred spirit. Both were men of principled conscience, devotional constancy, intellectual range and grasp, first class literary and theological scholars in an age of information explosion, loyal and tenacious to their respective church traditions, and exemplary in the living out of their respective spiritual traditions.The Dream of Gerontius Whyte thought the best religious poetry since Dante.

But it is Newman's best known hymn I'm reproducing today. Why? Because it is an honest expression of doubt, uncertainty, wistfulness, self-knowledge, and hard won trust. There are few times I've sung it – it's now too gloomy for contemporary worship tastes, it's plummeting down the list of funeral choices, and as with much else Victorian it's simply too cleverly written for an age more attuned to strap lines, sound bytes and alternative devotional books like The Dark Night of the Soul for Dummies!

But as an articulation of what it feels like to not be sure, to have lost your bearings, to pray for re-orientation and recognisable landmarks;

as an affirmation of trust that is half way between defiance and surrender, and lives the tension between fear and faith;

as a prayer that reads like the experience of looking into a dark night, hands groping forwards to intimate danger, feet inching and feeling their way but going on nevertheless;

as a poem that uses words as a means of grace, and shapes them to the needs of the human heart

All this and much else makes Lead Kindly Light a devotional treasure that belongs to the whole church. Today is a day he would have been embarrassed by. Not because he did not believe the Church should canonise its finest examples of Christlikeness; but because he would never have thought himself worthy. And self-disqualification may be the more important qualification for sainthood. Anyway, as I make my way to church, I read again, slowly, this hymn for pilgrims.

Lead, Kindly Light, amidst th'encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus,
nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path;
but now lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will. Remember not past years!

So long Thy power hath blest me,
sure it still will lead me on.
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent,
till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I
Have loved long since, and lost awhile!

19 September 2010
Benedict XVI in London, Education, Dialogue and Freedom ( I )

When Tony Blair famously said the priorities for a 21st Century economy were "Education. Education. Education", he said more than he meant, and New Labour delivered less than he promised. Long before him the Scottish Reformation Kirk aimed to have a school in every parish, an historic decision Pope Benedict XVI commended in his response to the Queen's welcome. Education remained closely related to the Church in its various expressions in the following centuries, Catholic, Established and Nonconformist, until from the mid 19th Century onwards the state increasingly took responsibility for universal education. The resources needed, and the economic implications of having an educated, skilled and trained population capable of competing in modern industrialised societies, made it increasingly necessary that Government rather than Voluntary Agencies should drive educational provision.

Alongside state provision in Britain, the Catholic Church has had its own established network of faith schools. Education remains a primary goal of Catholic social policy and theology today, and involves massive commitments of resources worldwide. When Benedict spoke on Friday to several thousand young people at St Mary's University College he spoke of those things that make life good and make for human happiness. To be happy is to be a friend of God. To live well there must be good models, those whose lives are worthy of imitation. There is much in Benedict's public discourse, and in his message here in Britain, that reflects the profound thinking of his encyclicals Deus Caritas Est and Caritas in Veritate. To be friends of God is a description of a relationship in which love is the exchange of divine grace and human response. He spoke of God's love, and God's desire for happiness and holiness as essentials of a full humanity, and did so as one who has thought profoundly, and spoke simply.

This is a Pope whose theological emphases decisively shape his public discourse, and he talks with ease and practised confidence about the love of God, but also about those cultural and intellectual trends that undermine and erode the humane goals of education as a humanly formative activity. To talk theologically, and with a heightened social conscience in a showpiece Catholic educational establishment, is to introduce a quite different level of discourse about the meaning, significance, purpose and practice of education. Whatever arguments there may be about the place of faith based schools in a pluralist culture, they provide an important corrective and in a democarcy a required alternative, to secularised education evacuated of religiously formative education.

John Henry Newman's Idea of a University reads today like an impractical, unaffordable, unwanted and idealistic educational utopia. Unless of course you want to challenge the prevailing secular view that education is a process whose primary goal is economic growth and development, student employability and mass produced graduates. But I'm reluctant to concede the inevitable and final necessity for such educational reductionism, or that these are the only or best educational goals. It may indeed be inevitable that state funded education in our universities has to bend to the economic priorities, and available funding of the Government of the day. But there will still be, in my own view, a place for those institutions which exist to serve more humanising ends, including religious instruction, moral formation, humanising values, intellectual humility, and these explored within a faith tradition both itself open to critique and yet critically aware of alternative worldviews.

Benedict has a similarly rich and humane view of the purpose of religious encounter between different faiths. Such meeting he said yesterday, is a necessary expression of human formation, cultural development and social interaction. Co-operation and dialogue engender mutual respect, and enable faith traditions to support each other in seeking freedom of worship. of conscience and of association. Nor should such co-operation and mutual understanding be selfish, but provide a platform from which faith groups can work for peace, mutual understanding and witness to the world. Living alongside each other and learning and growing in respect and knowledge of each other, provides a fertile soil for peace, justice and works of compassion to grow.

Whatever else can be said about this Papal visit, each time Benedict has spoken he has been generous in spirit, rigorous in intellect and both warm and dignified in his responsiveness. And the issues he deals with are of common concern to all humanity – justice and peace, the foundation of moral standards, religious freedom and freedom of conscience, the nature of education, the relations of faith and reason, and of spirituality and secularity. This is a man of courage, conviction and adamantine firmness on dogma; he is also a man of intellectual power, pastoral passion for the global church and ranks as one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the past 50 years. Interesting that the current Pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury are both regarded as scholar theologians of the first class, at a time when intellectual range and depth are discounted in the markets of contemporary communication culture.

18 September 2010
Once upon a time, in the days before Xscape, Xbox and WiiFii…..

The painting is by W H Y Titcomb and is called The Sunday School Treat. It shows children defying all the health and safety rules as they embark from a Cornish harbour. This image is from the back cover of David Tovey's biography, available from Amazon. Another of Titcomb's better known paintings is The Primitive Methodists at Prayer, (below) another of those closely observed historical snapshots of another era, another culture, now gone.

22 August 2010
A week of Enjoyment – A Confession and an Explanation

This is the first post at the beginning of Enjoyment Week.
This is an idea I've had for some time to counteract a recently diagnosed
tendency to slow onset grumpiness, a condition that is not specific to me but which is like a virus, reaching epidemic status and from which the church seems to have no immunity.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace (and
six others). But joy comes second only after love. Enjoy is an
interesting word – from old French, "to take pleasure in" – like
diving into deep water and swimming, so being immersed in pleasure,
reveling happily in the environment that is our life and in which we live our days.

But does joy
refer to a preferred disposition?

Is enjoyment a way we choose of seeing and responding to
the world?

Or should such an intense word as joy be reserved only for
those occasional bursts of extraordinary pleasure we can't predict and make happen?

Can joy, and
enjoyment, be an act of will, something we set out to feel, a habit to
be formed?

Or is joy a gift that sometimes comes unexpectedly and
unbidden as gift and surprise?

Enjoyment surely can't be a constant
state – a life of unmitigated joy would self-destruct from an excess of
sameness and exhausted emotions!

Still.
I do think that joy and enjoyment have some moral content. Is there not in
all of us, an obligation to look on life without sourness, to be
receptive to gift, to detect and reject those first negative impulses
that once welcomed become complaint, and before long distill into
bitterness, or worse still reduce to concentrated cynicism?

En-joy-ment – to be on
the side of joy, to opt into fun and laughter as an affirmation of what
is good for us, and good for others. Because selfish joy is an
oxymoron. The connections between celebration and community, between
enjoyment and wellbeing, between laughter and contentment, humour and humanity, are not coincidental – they are creative links between the life we are given and the lives of others.

So a week of enjoyment means finding and making en-joy-ment in my own life; and making and giving en-joy-ment in the lives of others. And the week I've chosen for this experiment is the first week back at work after a long holiday. So if enjoyment is something we can make happen, for ourselves and for others, this might be a good week to try and prove it. One other thought.

There is a mini-lexicon of words that cluster around enjoyment, and are spiritually if not semantically related, and which if not the same thing, each contribute to that same inner sense of en-joy-ment.

You can even do a fibonnaci poem about them – just for the enjoyment of it :))

Gift

Praise

Laughter

Gratitude

Appreciation

Achievement and encouragement

Plus. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,

kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control. Live by the Spirit – and enjoy!

Part Mary Oliver's poem Meadowlark Sings and I Greet Him in Return, helps get the sense of all this:

Meadowlark, when you sing it's as if

you lay your yellow breast upon mine and say

hello, hello, and are we not

of one family, in our delight of life?

You sing, I listen.

14 August 2010
An unexpectedly graced hour amongst the dust

Made a new friend last night. I was on a mission to procure ornamental aggregate for a garden feature. The merchant was in the process of moving premises – hundreds of tons of pebbles and cobbles to be moved from here to wherever. It was good of them to entertain a customer given the logistics of relocating fragments of a mountain, or at least a mountain of fragments. But I knew what I wanted – they said they had it – somewhere. So I arranged to meet the man, a very helpful if a tad late, man.

Waiting at the gate, no one around, phoned for the umpteenth time and discovered there are two gates, half a mile apart! No problem – my new friend said he would come and pick me up in his van, which he did. His apologies were genuine and his determination to fix the hassle I'd had just getting to the place was even genuiner! Should say I'd just finished at College and was dressed in some of my best clothes. So well dressed academic theologian and gravel shifting friend rummaged around the stacks of bags till we found what we wanted – no facilities for extracting the right amount I needed. So we started fishing for the best coloured and shaped cobbles in the 2 tonne bag. At which point my new friend suggested I take off my "guid jaickit". Right enough. 20 minutes later he decided we had enough for the job and we lugged it to the van, loaded it without a crane, and without doing mischief to muscle or disc, and dusted off hands, trousers and the "guid jaickit".

The point of all this is really simple, but not trivial. Someone I hadn't met before put himself out considerably for a tie wearing, dark-suited, not over-big, academic, happily mining in a large bag of stones, and the conversation ranged from the chances of the business surviving, to family challenges, to the problems of being on a salary with no provision for overtime – the last point his complaint, not mine:) Part of who I try to be is someone who tries to see each person as someone like myself, just trying to make life work, and trying to make sure those who share our lives are cared for, looked after, and that if the choice is to make someone's day better or worse, will always opt for the former. My new friend seemed to see life the same way. He could have gone home. Switched off his mobile. Told me to come back he didn't have a key to the place. But decided to make my day better.

So in the end, mission accomplished, conversation enjoyed amongst the dust, and two people who might never see each other again, spoke about important things, and reached out across those barriers too easily taken too seriously. It was an unexpectedly graced hour, and touched me in deep places that leave me still wondering about all those possible friendships just waiting the right encounter. Pondering too, how to live more generously and with that openness of heart that simply reaches out from one to another for no other reason than the recognition of someone else who happens to be here, now, and walking the same way.

11 June 2010
The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world.

Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us…for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God…

The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does – persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.

1 June 2010
Why we are not a waste of time and space

I like this. Not the final knockdown argument that demolishes Dawkins et al. Too subtle for such intellectual dogmatism. And why demolish straw anyway?

No. This is affirmation, hopefulness, trustful optimism that this glorious, beautiful, perplexingly addictive world around us, is more than the collisions of infinite variations of chance. I like the thought that beautiful music skillfully played is a crucial clue to why life matters, and matters to more than ourselves.

For today let's pause

At my first groping after the First Cause,

Which led me to acknowledge (groping still)

That if what once was called primeval slime

(in current jargon pre-biotic soup)

Evolved in course of eons to a group

Playing Beethoven, it needed more than time

And chance, it needed a creative will

To foster that emergence, and express

Amoeba as A Minor.

Martyn Skinner, Old Rectory, (Michael Russell Publishing), 1984, Quoted in This Sunrise of Wonder, Michael Mayne, (London: DLT, 2008), p. 110

28 May 2010
End of session marking, Mozart, Country Western and Simon and Garfunkel

The absence from here is entirely due to a conveyor belt of marking, collating and responding in feedback to student essays and other assignments. All now safely negotiated and only the final confirmations within the Quality Assurance processes now required.

At this point some unhilarious alleged friends or acquaintances suggest we are now finished for the summer. Once they recover from the instant shock-wave of unspoken but eye-glinting caution to not go there, I explain that the summer is not less busy, just differently busy. Any further attempts at having a go at the alleged easiness of life in the College are not treated with such commendable if barely controlled verbal restraint.

So what happens next. Next year's timetable to be fitted as best can be around the various needs and availabilities of around 40 students doing some of the 50 or so modules. Arranging teaching of modules, accommodation and equipment needs. Aligning College practice and documentation with UWS policies and good practice. Refreshing the Website with next year's information. Research stuff to be progressed and moved towards delivery / publishing. Entire curriculum rebuilding in preparation for revalidation and Subject Health Review. Reconfiguring all our working remits to align our activities with the College Development Plan for the next 5 years, which presupposes extensive personal and institutional development. Oh, and given that we don't take holidays during Semester time which is 30 weeks of the year, there is the not small matter of trying to fit holidays into our lives. These are some of the reasons for the "eye-glinting caution" that greets frivolous comment about life in theological education 🙂

Last night I travelled home to the accompaniment of Mozart. The Exsultate Jubilate is one of the most sublime pieces I know – yes, my repertoire is limited, but music which has the line (translated) "the skies sing psalms with me", played as I drive alongside a low sun and distant hills. Well – it beats any praise song I can think of, and a lot of them I don't want to think of much. One of the interesting reflections on regular long trips in the car, and listening to some music more than once, is the capacity of music to change my inner climate. I can be quite buoyant till I hear, for example, the slow movement of Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, and I move to a wistful longing that fills the mind and heart like a prayer – not asking for anything, just longing for God knows what. That phrase, "longing for God knows what", isn't a careless irreverence, it's a careful reverent recognition that we are beings whose affinities are with that in life which touches us with wonder, gratitude, possibility, hopefulness and goodness.

Likewise I can put on Mary Chapin Carpenter singing her song about John Doe, which tells the story of a child with special needs, told through the mouth and eyes of that same child now as an old man, remembering how he was pitied, institutionalised and treated as less than the full human being he is. And I then know why I am so passionate about affirming and embracing the full humanity of each person, and why I so agree with Jean Vanier that every human being has needs, and is special. The same CD has her song Stones in the Road, and Jubilee – and they remind me why being angry with systems, powers and people whose wealth and power-games presuppose the poverty and exploitation of others, is not only allowed, but obligatory. Or I put on Simon and Garfunkel's live concert and simply explore the infinite range of human expereince and emotion in songs that are still for me definitive of modern popular music that touches the heart because it celebrates life.

The journeys in the car are not time wasted when keeping comapny with such articulate humane travellers on that journey we are all sharing.

27 May 2010