Category: Texts I Travel With

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “To pray is to become a ladder….”

Prayer is our attachment to the utmost.

Without God in sight,

we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder.

To pray is to become a ladder

on which thoughts mount to God

to join the movement towards Him

which surges unnoticed

throughout the entire universe.

We do not step out of the world when we pray,

we merely see the world in a different setting.

The self is not the hub,

but the spoke of the revolving wheel.

in prayer we shgift the center of living

from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

God is the center to which asll forces tend.

He is the source,

and we are the flowing of His force,

the ebb and flow of His tides.

A J Heschel, Man's Quest for God, (Santa fe: Auroroa Press, 1998 reprint), page 7.

In one paragraph this Jewish genius has said more about prayer, God and the relation of God to each of us, than many a volume of mystical piety, practical devotion or spiritual theology. This volume of Heschel was a recent birthday gift from someone who knows well what makes me tick. Heschel is 'a theologian who speaks the heart's poetry'; in his writings I often recognise my own inarticulate longings articulated, not so as to explain them, but perhaps to explain why longing itself is a blessing.

And just in case anyone thinks Heschel was a Jewish mystic and that we live in a world of hard edged pragmatism impatient of such mystical sorties, this photo tells it different. Marching arm in arm with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, Heschel (second from the right), thoroughly understodd the world of politics, social action and their connectedness to justice, righteousness and obedience to God. The photo is now known as "Praying with their feet". It's a civil rights Icon, and if you look at it long enough and contemplate its meaning, like all good Icons it will draw you into the truth of what God is about.

16 January 2014
Christ who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet

For various reasons I've found myself reading in and around some of the parts of the Bible that were written out of suffering, loss, and the disequilibrium that can unsettle what we thought were the more secure anchorages. Harvey Cox's commentary on Lamentations in the Belief Commentary series is more a commentary on the experiences which generated the text than the text itself; which makes it a brilliant and illuminating companion when wandering through the dark nights of the soul of that text, written with blood and smudged with the tears of those whose world disintegrated before their eyes.

Sam Ballentine's commentary on Job is a masterpiece of theological reflection rooted in the text and nurtured by a faith unafraid of questions, and a sympathy with human perplexity and pain that turns theological erudition into an education in existential courage. And then there is Isaiah, those chapters from 40 onwards, hopefully imaginative, scornful of cynical realism, scintillating both in its visions of the incomparable and transcendent God, and in its demolition of the entire structures of idolatry and imperial power games.

All three compositions are work of the highest art. Which brings me to why I'm writing this. Re-reading the poet Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival I came across this passage which I marked.

'John Ruskin..writes in Sesame and Lilies:

"the more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel themselves wrong; – who are striving for the fulfilment of the law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining the more they strive for it."

There is a sense in which all art arises out of injury or absence, out of the artist's sense that there is something missing in him [or her].'

The connections between beauty and the wrongness of the world, between human losss and incompletion and creativity, are powerful, mysterious and defiant of our best explanations, which makes them often a source of further perlexity. Out of such human turmoil as inspired the poet who wrote Lamentations; out of such personal catastrophe when life's deepest ties are torn apart and explanations merely add to the anguish, comes a masterpiece of world literature like the book of Job; and out of such broken spiritual hopes and national humiliation, when exile in an alien culture is a relentless reminder that hope is suppressed by imperial hegemony, there erupts Isaiah's poetry of passion and power, of liberation coming with the certainty of Divine promise and, renewal envisioned on the scale of the God who is the Eternal and the Creator. Such beautiful art, the distilled essence of faith crushed like grapes for wine, and bearing a hope that springs from the same seeds, to grow again and turn into the wine of God's Kingdom – such beauty from brokenness.

And perhaps, with all our current fascination with words like discipleship and discipling, there is a deep corrective truth to be recovered; from the same root comes the word discipline. There is in Jesus call to discipleship a cross to be borne, a way to be travelled and a sacrifice of self made possible only because the weight of the Cross is more than balanced by the power of the resurrection. And when faith becomes weight-bearing, the great mystery of the Gospel is that our strength to follow the way of the Cross comes from the living Christ, who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet, but as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith; the living Christ in whom we live and move and have our being; the living Christ of whom Paul wrote "I am crucified with Christ; I live yet not I, but Christ lives within me; and the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me".

The photo is of the Shalom tapestry, a visual exegesis of selected psalms.

5 October 2013
Dag Hammarskjold – and the importance of saying yes!

Dag Hammarskjold's Markings is another of those books I've had on my shelves all the years of my ministry. I first bought it in 1972. It cost me £2.25 and is a Faber paperback. I bought it because it was quoted in an article in the Expository Times and that single quotation has sometimes kept me afloat when not much else was giving buoyancy.

For all that is past Thank You;

For all that is to come, Yes.

We've become used to Journalling now. But in the 1950's and 60's there is something remarkable about this narrative told without plot but with purpose, a slow accumulation of received wisdom, distilled at times to sentences of Zen precision, with poetic rhythms reminsicent of Haiku, and occasional self revealing paragraphs of a mind and spirit refracted through profound moral awareness of the world around and the world within. If you don't know this book, then you are missing an encounter with one of the most fascinating and enigmatic minds of the 20th Century in which political conscience, personal faith and social vision combine so that you could equally say political faith, personal vision and social conscience.

Markings is the published version of those occasional jottings, found in a black note-book discovered after his still unexplained death in an aircrash. As the then Secretary General of the United Nations he had been on a peace making trip to the Congo. Since then his personal thoughts have given comfort, clarity, insight and encouragement to the readers of Markings. I have a 90+ friend whose yellowing copy is still to hand. Had Hammarskjold lived he would have been about ages with her.

Here he is on what it means to live a human life:

God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

What does that mean? Wrong question. It isn't an argument – it's a confession of faith in the worth of human life, and the conviction of Ecclesiastes the Preacher, 'that to be human is to be b orn with eternity in our hearts'.

13 August 2011
The Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity of A J Heschel.

"The beginning of prayer is praise.

The power of worship is song.

To worship is to join the cosmos in praising God. . . .

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive,

unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin

the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.

The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement,

seeking to overthrow the forcest hat continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision."

("On Prayer," pp. 257-267, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Susannah Heschel, ed. [Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996]).

And you wonder why I think Abraham Joshua Heschel is one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20th Century?

I bought this book while with Bob and Becky in Vermont, and the essays are amongst the finest examples I know of Jewish spirituality, passed through the bloodstream of a modern day prophet, and gifted to his generation and ours as wisdom that has, as the title says, Moral grandeur and Spiritual Audacity.

Can you think of a better description of prayer as subversion, as God's questioning of our cultural values, and of the role and mission of those who dare say they are followers of Jesus, lovers of God and bearers of the Spirit?

"Ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods". Now there's a mission statement worth putting on sleepy church agendas!

3 August 2011
When Comment is Superfluous: A J Heschel on Why Religion Declines

"It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy

for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats.

Religion declined not because it was refuted,

but because it became

irrelevant,

     dull,

          oppressive,

               insipid.

When faith is completely replaced by creed,

     worship by discipline,

           love by habit;

when the crisis of today is ignored

     because of the splendor of the past;

when faith becomes an heirloom

     rather than a living fountain;

when religion speaks only in the name of authority

     rather than with the voice of compassion–

          its message becomes meaningless."

— Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man. A Philosophy of Judaism.

Heschel is a privileged presence in my Canon of Essential Writers. The Anthology, I Asked for Wonder is a treasure. Few writers combine so powerfully fierce honesty, spiritual passion, and laser accuracy in detecting human fallibility, with a disposition of compassion fueled by faith in the transcendence and mercy of God.

27 July 2011
Martin Buber, Friendship and Some Limits of Social Networking

It was Martin Buber who called attention to the life-giving distinction we all must make if we are to value, respect, care for and take responsibility towards, each other. From the deep wells of Hebraic experience of God and community, Buber distinguished between relating to that which is beyond ourselves as "It" and relating to the Other who is beyond ourselves as "Thou". Only as I address the other person as "Thou" do I acknowledge the full dignity of their personhood.

And when that relationship of "I and Thou" takes root in the heart and in the will, then deeply human ties of respect, affection and shared commitments grow into committed and close relationships with those we call our closest friends. And within such friendship deeply human responses begin to be naturally expressed in trustful conversation, playful enjoyment of the other's presence, an inward orientation of care and commitment, and an investment of time and energy that is incalculable because unselfconscious, unreflective generous gift, the response of person to person and heart to heart. Friendship is not therefore a duty or a task, but the name we give to those few "I and Thou" relationships that not only enrich us but slowly and gently over time begin to define us by their very nature as gift and grace.

Reading Buber again for quite other reasons, I've been reminded of how profoundly relevant his view of the world is, in a world which is increasingly enmeshed in the endlessly trivial and restlessly fascinating web spinnings of social networking. It may be that Buber's passionate advocacy of personhood as that in the Other which we address as Thou, offers a way of putting social networking in its place. Facebook, Twitter, even this blog, can never be a substitute for person to person address, an intentional relationship of I and Thou.

At its best social networking supplements, informs, communicates and provides fuel and energy for existing relationships. Friendships as personal exchange and attentive address are nourished by such communication. In social networking stories are not only told but written in the fragments of exchange, and changed as they are responded to in the writing. But there are essential and defining qualities of human relating that cannot be replicated in social networking – they are what Buber means with his distinction between subject and object, Thou and It, – a vital life-enhancing distinction between that which I use as an "It" for my own ends, and this person whom I address as an end in herself or himself.

Here's vintage Buber – I and Thou take their stand not merely in relation, but also in the give and take of talk…Here what confonts us has blossomed into the full reality of the Thou. Here alone then, [in human friendship] as reality that cannot be lost, are gazing and being gazed upon, knowing and being known, loving and being loved.

The interactive gaze of two people, the knowing and being known, the loving and being loved, talking and listening, laughing and crying, supporting and being supported, these and much more that is of the extraordinary ordinariness of human friendship, are only visible expressions and signals of that address that in the presence of the other always, and faithfully, says "Thou". That is why the conversation of friends is such a great sacrament, the grace of words and silence, both alike interpreting and articulating the shared experience of the mystery and mercy of the life that is ours to live, and to share.

11 April 2011
Thomas Merton and the Emmaus moment of invitation and recognition

There are some writers who become companions on your road. It didn't start out that way. Just that one day you picked up the book and in reading it you heard a voice that you liked, recognised tone and demeanour that was friendly, felt the kind of ease and trust that only comes when you know, you just know, here is someone who would be good company. And once you've walked the length of that book, there is a kind of Emmaus moment, a reluctance to let this companionship on this journey end. Because your heart burned within, the conversation brought healing, understanding, possibility of newness, opened up a different future, and the friend we met on the way is one we now want to spend more time with. And we have the feeling we didn't meet him – he met us, he drew near, at just that time and in just that place.

That's as near as I can describe my first encounter with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, seeker of solitude, peace activist, inveterate journal and letter writer, and mercifully fallible human being. Few of his books are sustained argument, constructive theology, or innovative spirituality. Most of his writing is informal, occasional, meditative. The best of it reads as distilled thought, not concentrate that is dense, but a cultivated lucidity, with sentences that have extracted from long thought and experience an uncluttered clarity, and confident humility. He is someone who has shared several decades of my inward journey, a writer to whom I've looked at crisis or pivotal moments, and been glad of his company, his conversation, his opening up of a truth I needed to hear. I'm reading him again.

Here is one of his long sentences, formatted as a prose poem, a constructive piece of spiritual theology that says so much about what is so about the life we each have to live.

Therefore each particular being,

in its individuality,

its concrete nature and entity,

with all it own characteristics

and its private qualities

and its own inviolable identity,

gives glory to God

by being precisely what He wants it to be

here and now

in the circumstances ordained for it

by His Love and His infinite Art.

(New Seeds of Contemplation, Shambala Library ed. page 32)

Love and infinite Art – to see our self as the cherished product of such purposeful creativity is as near to coming to terms with God, our life and ourselves as we can properly expect. I guess it would take love and infinite art to make something worthwhile out of the bundle of contradictions and cluster of insoluble enigmas that is the human being in all the glory and mystery of human living. When those reverberating questions of meaning and purpose and what makes for our happiness shake the foundations of our self, Merton quietly mentions the ultimate fundaments of human fulfilment – "His Love and infinite Art".

That's the kind of key that unlocks chains and doors. The life I live is sometimes glad and sometimes sad, at times exciting and at times exhausting, determined by my good choices and bad mistakes, touched by love and wounded by hurt, but nevertheless my life, the only one I have. Faith in God is the recognition that in that limited and constrained existence, His Love and infinite Art are what confer worth, affirm identity, and make possible the living of a life that is good, generous, joyful and ever capable of newness and surprise.

22 March 2011
The Gospel of John – not being afraid of deep water

Since College days when I patiently and conscientiously worked through C K Barrett's commentary on the Gospel of John I have loved this New Testament text. And alongside those evenings slowly turning the pages and making notes I still have in neat handwritten, pre-computer script, we were walked through the text by our New Testament teacher, R E O White. It was an immersion in text that taught me to swim, and not to be too afraid of deep water. In the years since I've slowly worked through numerous commentaries and monographs and tried to stay current with Johannine scholarship. Some big names are familiar companions – Barrett, Brown, Schnackenburg, Morris, Carson, Beasley-Murray ( a scandalously restricted volume in the Word series given the three volume sprawlers on Luke and Revelation) – more recently Moloney, Lincoln, and monographs by Ashton, Koester, Robinson, Bauckham et al.

And then there are those books which use John for spiritual formation, from Jean Vanier, to William Countryman to Francis Moloney. I have to say I'm less enamoured of such attempts to feed the Gospel of John through a Christian spirituality grid. Lesslie Newbiggin's The Light Has Come is a different category altogether. A theological gem.

But the reason for all this Johannine enthusiasm is the imminent arrival of John Ramsey Michael's commentary on John. I met him once when i was teaching in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is a wise, shrewd and deeply learned man, whose scholarship range is wide and deep. I was teaching on Julian of Norwich, George Herbert and Charles Wesley – he was teaching on John Bunyan. His literary sensitivity, theological resourcefulness and open minded interest levels made him a source of much fun and much learning. His commentary is already being described as readable, progressing Johannine scholarship, and a gift to the preaching of the church. Not surprised. And it will be the commentary I'll saunter through for the next few months – if it arrives by Advent it'll be fun reading him on the greatest advent hymn of them all – "In the beginning was the Word…..and the Word became flesh…" So swimming at the deep end, standing at the edge of the reservoir, not being afraid of deep water – my theological hero James Denney had his own take on the deep water metaphor – about Jesus and his passion he urged that we hear 'the plunge of lead into fathomless waters'. That's what happens when I dive into the text of John's Gospel.

23 October 2010
Augustine and Kierkegaard; On not trying too hard to understand

Some theological writers are as hard to understand as other creative artists, and what they write is to be appreciated in a similar way to other works of art. Indeed we might be doing a disservice to them and ourselves if our primary purpose in reading them is to "understand" what they write, or understand them through what they write. I'm thinking of those times when reading something, I become aware of its power, its capacity to affect me, that something or other that alerts in me the crucial appreciative quality in the theological reader, and not to be easily dismissed, of being mystified. At one level I do understand what is written, but at a higher (or deeper?) level there is something elusively present in the writing that seems more important than my own cognitive grasp, that evades intellectual control, that gives what is written an authority over my conscience and will and affections. That makes me say Yes, more from intuition and instinct than crtical analysis

Augustine was good at this kind of thing. In Book 1 of the Confessions he tries to tease out by talking out, the relation between his own existence and the Eternal Being of God. He compares his own sense of being time-bound, time limited, dependent on Divine will that he exists at all.

"Because your years do not fail, your years are one Today. How many of our days and days of our fathers have passed during your Today, and have derived from it the measure and condition of their existence? And others too will pass away and from the same source derive the condition of their existence. 'But you are the same', and all tomorrow and hereafter, and indeed all yesterday and further back, you will make a Today, you have made a Today.

If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say 'What is this?' (Exod. 16:15). So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable"

Confessions (Trans. Henry Chadwick) (Oxford:OUP, 1991), page 8.

This line of thought, (about what some theological writing does to us rather than what we do with it), was triggered by reading a brief passage of Kierkegaard the other day. It bothered me in a positive kind of way. It made sense at a deeper level than seeming straightforwardly reasonable. It isn't the kind of passage with which you agree or disagree; as well try to agree or disagree with a sunset. It is precisely a passage that mystifies, unsettles the conscience, evokes an immediate and appreciative Yes, while also saying "What is this?." Yet though inwardly I assent, not without misgivings that, if Kierkegaard is right, then much else I swallow uncritically about how to live my life in the world is wrong.

The passage itself? Tell you tomorrow 🙂

18 January 2010
Frederick Buechner on theology

"Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study humanity and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise."
(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC. (New York: harper, 1973), page 91.

Ever since Kate introduced me years ago to Frederick Buechner, he has amused and informed me, sometimes reverencing the holy, other times debunking anything even sniffing of spiritual artificiality. He can write like a country western crooner with a gift for folksy theological reflection, but more often as a serious novelist for whom God is the essential character in an as yet unresolved plot, but whose love and mercy drive the story towards completion. He is the best kind of holiday reading – because reading him is like giving your spirit a holiday.

9 July 2009