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The Gossip Painting, Albert Edelfelt

If there's a tough discipline in listening well, there's an even more rigorous discipline in speaking well. No, not diction and articulation; not rhetorical power and verbal agility; not virtuoso semantics and linguistic improvisation. Speaking well is a different word game. I mean an ethic of speaking; the moral control and relational healthiness of our conversation; knowing when to speak and what to say, and when to be silent; and therefore a self-imposed quality control on our use of words.

Every year I choose a couple of Bible books to live with and engage with through the year, in the hope that deep and faithful engagement with the text will lead to a deep and faithful living of the text. This year it's the letter of James and the book of Ruth. More of Ruth later. But having just read James for the umpteenth time, it's hard to miss the fact that he has quite a lot to say about an ethical and spiritual underpinning of our use of words. In Chapter 3 James gets to the point, bluntly:         

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check.

Let everyone be quick to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger (1.19)

No I can't claim to be never at fault in what I say. In fact most of the time, being realistic, I'd settle for being a bit less at fault in what I say. A major study of James is titled Speech Ethics in the Epistle of James, near 400 pages of careful and penetrating exegesis of a text which has 32 ethical imperatives, and 28 of them are to do with speech.

Probably just as well James didn't have to contend with Facebook, Twitter and Emails in first Century Palestine. It's a cultural commonplace that these three modern media formats give a freedom of speech that has enormous potential for good and for harm. An agreed and supported ethic of speaking, writing, and social communication is hard to achieve, and yet the audience for what we say is larger than ever, and more immediate across distance, than even we might have imagined twenty years ago. So it's an interesting piece of speculation, "What would the Wisdom writers of Proverbs and James have advised would be Tweeters and image constructing Facebook users, about the use and abuse of social media?" That I need to think about a bit more.

Which raised the idea that each Wednesday for a while I'll do a post on the wisdom of James. The letter that is, not yours truly.

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Listen. If someone says that one word to us it's a summons to pay attention. Listen. Whatever else you're thinking about stop it. Whatever you're doing drop it. And the way the word is said can often be a clue as well. Is it a conspiratorial, "Listen", with the promise of gossip. Is it in imperative mood because what is going to be said is important, significant, "Listen". Is it confidentiality, something sensitive and not to be said too loudly is about to be spoken.

There's a self- help and personal development industry out there training and teaching us to listen well, to listen carefully, to listen effectively by paying attention, silencing our inner chatter and stilling the instinctive urge to compete in the word games we  sometimes call conversation. Recently I've been thinking of the power implications of good listening, and of non listening. To listen to another is to be silent and to receive this other person;s presence rather than project my own. Not that listening is passive, far from it. It is an active form of being present, but in a self-effacing way. P T Forsyth says that in prayer "our egoism retires, and into the clearance there comes with our Father, our brother". I think that's also a good description of genuine listening, when our ego retires, leaves room, and into the space we invite our sister and brother, friend and colleague, enemy or stranger.

Listening is a disciplined and generous form of hospitality. To waste precious self-promoting time being silent, present and aware of this other person is one of the true gifts of the hospitable heart. By listening I affirm the reality, the significance and the sheer human thereness of this other person. I used the word 'waste' intentionally. To listen to another person is to relinquish my self-interest in this encounter, and to seek instead to spend time, to give attention and to offer care to this person who has, just this minute, walked into this time and this space in my life.

I read the Gospels not just to hear what Jesus says, but to hear what he doesn't say. Jesus listening is as impressive and redemptive as Jesus speaking. Time and time again, Jesus hears the heart, listens to the emotions, is attentive to the needs, is utterly and at times exhaustingly present to all kinds of folk; this woman at the well, that curiously pedantic Scribe Nicodemus, this heartbroken Roman soldier desperate to save his lassie, that woman flung like rubbish on the ground in front of him while they all picked up stones. And I want to be a better listener. Listening is a pre-requisite of compassion, understanding, love, kindness. Listening, paying attention, being present and available, requiring my ego to retire to make room for this other person, learning the key Christian discipline of shutting up – who would have thought Christian discipleship could soar or sink on the basis of intentional listening. But it does. To be Christlike is to listen, because through the Incarnation, the Passion and Death of Christ, God has listened to the profoundest depths and furthest reaches of our broken and beautiful humanity. When we listen, we love and give ourselves for the blessing, healing and wholeness of this person whose place in the world, right now, is beside me. 

I love Vermeer's Jesus in the Home of Martha and Mary. It's an interesting question who is speaking and who is listening; who is present to whom, paying attention to whom; whose inner voices are so loud they can't hear what's going on around them, or what's going on within the hearts of the others.

Over Christmas I've been reading C S Lewis. I haven't had one of his books off the shelves for a while, and his space trilogy I read long ago. I've just finished Out of the Silent Planet, and found it a strange and attractive story, old fashioned in its narrative structure, political incorrectness at times off the scale, characters nearer caricature than convincing weight bearers of the story. But the imagination to write what is effectively a moral fable, and to draw the reader into an alternative reality where Lewis persuades us to believe the frankly unbelieveable is why his books remain in print. We are persuaded to conceive the possibility of disembodied personality, counter intuitive affective responses to creatures normally repulsive to our tastes and aesthetics, and to do all this with a background mythology resonating with Christian theological themes of sin and evil, judgement and redemption, creation and uncreation and new creation.

Sometimes questions which haunted Lewis himself are evident in the telling of the story and the conversation of the characters. In a discussion of time and memory, pleasure and sorrow, one of the creatures is puzzled by the human propensity to possess, repeat, hold on to whatever briongs pleasure, thereby reducing the significance and joy by diluting it with repetition. The creature asks, "How could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back – if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?" As a way of welcoming each day gratefully as gift and being content to live in the joy or pain of the moment and thr reality that is now, there are few more telling and moving questions. Wisdom sometimes exudes almost unconsciously from lewis when he is at his best.

The book was written in 1938. Reading it reminded me of the dated and contrived production of the 1960 film the Time Machine. Our contemporary familiarity with advanced technologies such as AI, nuclear science, genetic science, IT and the now ubiquitous electronic devices which reconfigure the very nature of communication, are so far ahead of Lewis's science fiction range that there is an inevitable naivete about his portrayals of human technology, scientific theory and cosmology. However the core of the story as fable and construal of human ethical failures and dilemmas remains as a moral narrative which still delivers. In any case I'm glad to have read it again.

There are moments in life when sadness descends beyond our usual register of pain, and we begin, but only begin, to feel the reality of Isaiah’s words throbbing with unexpected and personal disorienting anguish, “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.” The news from Peshawar is such a moment, slicing into our lives with savage disregard for our usual screening mechanisms, and exposing our hearts to the unassuageable suffering of those other people, who belong to our human family, whose times in history we share, and whose children have been massacred.

According to a Taliban statement this was a revenge attack on a school for children of the military, carried out by men whose own children and families were killed in the military action against militant militias in Pakistan. So it is claimed. Is that some kind of attempt at explanation? How do we follow the savage logic that offers such an inane and insane justification for murdering 132 children and 9 adults, numbers likely to rise further? The slaughter of the innocents, for whatever reason, is an evil born of fear, hate and despair. Fear of the enemy, hatred of those who are ‘other’, and despair of life itself – hence the calculated rage and essential evil of those whose greatest joy is the destruction of life in an obscene gesture of defiant despair.

As a Christian my tears flow from a heart unable at present to interpret itself. Baffled sadness, hard to acknowledge rage, hope confronting despair, desolation overwhelming any sense of consolation, streams of emotion and thought and prayer coalescing into a river of grief. I recall Paul’s use of Isaiah, when that same prophet looked on desolation and told it to God, “For your sake we face death all day long, we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered…” The killing of defenceless children by heavily armed parents of other dead children is as tragic now as ever or anywhere. Tonight, prayer seems such a feeble retort to such tragedy. But nevertheless. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself….we are ministers of reconciliation….Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

So for those who have died, for bereaved parents, for a region in shock and anger and grief, I pray that were the earth is once more without form and void, and darkness is upon the face of the deep, may the Spirit of God move, and once more may God say, “Let there be light.” Kyrie eleison.

For those who plan and plot murder as the language of hate and fear translated into violence, who seek vengeance through the murder of children and unarmed teachers, I pray that minds and souls covered by such darkness upon the face of the deep, may be turned towards mercy and peace and the light of God in whom there is no darkness at all. Kyrie eleison.

The contrast between the contemplative and the active as styles of christian discipleship has an ancient and more or less homoured history in Christian thought and practice. The classic domestic scene where Martha works her pan out in the kitchen and Mary sits at Jesus feet engrossed in whatever Jesus is saying gives a foundational image to the contrast. Vermeer, in what I think is one of his too easily underrated paintings has a quite different take on the discipleship of the kitchen as opposed to the discipleship of the footstool. That loaf of bread is central to the picture and its eucharistic significance unmistakable. Somebody has to nourish, do the needful. I know, Jesus says one thing is needful, and he doesn't mean baking the loaf. His put down of Martha by saying Mary has chosen the better part shouldn't be too quickly seized on though. 

We live in an age of time poverty, time management and time miserliness. By which I mean there isn't a lot of space and time in contemporary existence for folk to "choose the better part and do the one thing needful". Mainly because we have evolved a culture of endless energy expenditure, and we have bought into it with eyes wide open. We have reconfigured our life priorities so that the things that are needful are productivity, efficiency, time-saving, multi-tasking and in which we admire speed, profit, status and whatever else our bondage to the market might earn. Contemplation is time wasting to the consumer mentality; contentment deprives the market of its power; silence and solitude are just so difficult to achieve in the noise and crowdedness of contemporary life. 

I was thinking about all this again while reading Divine Discontent, one the newest studies of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. The chapter on Merton the contemplative doesn't say much that is new, nor does it need to do so. Merton knew perfectly well the dangers of contemplation as escapism from life and its problems, ours or other people's. His answer needs to be heard by the contemporary church, and by each Christian community. Silence, solitude and contemplation are the dispositions which make it possible for God to be heard above the noise of our wanting. Contemplation creates space in thought and feeling for those concerns that lie light years beyond our own security, satisfaction and self interests – the concerns of God for a loved but broken world.

The contemplative is the one whose time of reflection and listening equips the mind and conscience to respond with integrity, immediacy and ethical urgency to issues such as those raised by the recent CIA report on torture as a State sponsored weapon. To be quiet is not the same as quiescence; to be inactive is not passivity; to contemplate is not to withdraw from the world, it is to immerse the mind and soul in the hurt and brokenness and wounds of the world. To love the world as God does, and to see it through the eyes of the Crucified God

In the same way, to be active in caring, faithful in protesting, outspoken on behalf of the poor, vulnerable and unjustly treated, need not mean we live only out of our own inner resources of conscience, emotion and thoughtful anger. That loaf in Vermeer's painting is unbroken, but no one looking at the painting can miss its significance about the bread of life, the broken bread given for the world. We are nourished in the Eucharist, sustained in those times deliberately taken to open ourselves to the presence of God, to listen more carefully to the Words of the living Lord Jesus, to receive as the very essence of our living, the renewing nourishment of the Holy Spirit.  In the contemplative receptivity of Mary, and the active giving of Martha, there is a necessary balance. We only give what we have first received; and only as we give to others, do we truly receive what God has first given to us. Grace is never a private possession; it is always a shared gift. In a hungry world, the same goes for bread. Vermeer knew that.

This is one of my favourite carols. Written in the late 1960's by Micahel Hewlett, a C of E Vicar wanting to update the context within which God comes amongst us. It goes to the folk tune The Keel Row, and the good vicar was delighted to hear of a carol service in India which finished using his carol as the children danced down ther aisle and out of the church.

When God Almighty came to be one of us,

Masking the glory of his golden train,

Millions of plain things kindled by accident

And they will never be the same again.

Sing all you midwives, dance all the carpenters,

Sing all the publicans and shepherds too,

God in his mercy uses the commonplace,

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Splendour of Rome and local authority,

Working on policy with furrowed head,

Joined to locate Messiah’s nativity,

Just wehre the prophets had already said.

Sing all you tax-men, dance the commissioners,

Sing civil servants and police men too,

God in his purposes uses the governments

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Wise men they called them, earnest astrologers,

Watching for meaning in the moving stars,

Science or fantasy, learned or laughable,

Theirs was a vision that was brought to pass.

Sing all you wise men, dance all the scientists,

Whether your theories are false or true,

God uses knowledge, God uses ignorance,

God on his birthday had a need of you.

 

Sing all creation, made for his purposes,

Called by his providence to live and move:

None is unwanted, none insignificant,

Love needs a universe of folk to love.

Close friends and strangers, ethnic minorities,

Old folk and young folk and families too,

God on his birthday, and to eternity,

God took upon himself the need of you.

Biography well written is like a window on another person's world, filtering borrowed light into our own. Human experience has so much, and so little in common. Yes we all eat and drink, laugh and cry, make love and make trouble, grieve and celebrate, are children and maybe parents, grow our hopes and see some of them flower or watch others wither, work hard for what we get and sometimes get what we never deserved or worked for. So much in common – and so little. Because who we are and what happens to us, the givens and circumstances over which we have no control, the choices that come to us and the choices we make, the contingencies and shocks and surprises that together give content to our story – these have infinite variety, endless possibility, and their contingency and happenstance are what make each life unique, each story different, every biography a novel in the making.

I'm re-reading one or two biographies, which means I want to re-visit one or two favourite human beings, mainly people whose life stories, in all their specific and unrepeatable contingency, illumine the rooms of my own life. The biography of Helen Waddell by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine nun, is a masterpiece of the biographer's art. This is quite simply one of the best written biographies I've read. The writing is both precise and elegant, the story is both critical and appreciative. The understanding and insight into the mind and motives, the emotional climate and intellectual brilliance of Waddell's inner life, give the portrait the detailed finesse of a Vermeer, observing and representing the realities of one person's daily life and inner struggles.

What is it that makes the translator of Medieval Latin Lyrics, the writer of the unlikely best-seller The Wandering Scholars, and the student of The Deset Fathers such a fascinating human being? This scholar poet was born in Tokyo to missionary parents, she revered Latin from age 9, was familiar with Greek poetry and visited Shinto Temples, a brilliant Graduate of Queen's Belfast, for 44 years friend of the English Literature doyen George Sainstbury, crammed lecture halls in Oxford, was close friends with Stanley Baldwin and received by Queen Mary. Later in life she became entangled in domestic cares, the demands of life during the Second World War, eventually overtaken by dementia, probably now diagnosed as Alzheimer's Disease. It is a life lived gloriously, and at times mundanely; a life of profound faith made joyful by a spirit of generosity and expansiveness; her mind endlessly curious, tenacious in pursuit of the beautiful the good and the true; soaked in history and the love of all things medieval. A scholar's life, but also the life of a deeply compassionate, imaginative, practical minded, occasionally eccentric, unfailingly interesting person. 

I've read the book twice, and about to read it again. John Bunyan she disliked; Augustine she enjoyed. "Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace..Too late have I loved thee. Beauty so old, and yet so new."  Is there anything in Bunyan equal  to that one sentence, she asked. Then after reading Pilgrim's Progress, she quotes Mr Standfast, "I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, There I have coveted to set my foot". On reading that, Waddell conceded, " And I take back everything!. Reading this biography brings you into the company of two remarkably sharp intellects and just as remarkably capacious souls. Corrigan on Waddell, a coalescence of brilliance.  

The Annunciation comes in the Church Calendar months before Christmas – for obvious and natural reasons. But Advent is a time when it's important to look back in order to look forward; Christmas day is the fulfilment of the Annunciation, itself the fulfilment of long ago promises, made in the heart of God so long ago we call it Eternity.

The word "mystery" is not fit for purpose, but what words would do any better at explaining the inexplicable, attempting to describe that which is categorically beyond the efficacy of all our meaning laden categories? So we are stuck with mystery, stuck in mystery, mysteriously stuck within the limits and constraints of our own thinking. Advent celebrates unthinkable possibilities now become familiar and realisable through the Yes of a young woman to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. Her response, "Be it so" is itself beyond the understanding of all but those whose hearts beat in synchronic obedience to the call of God.

The contemporary demand for relevance, for pratcical application, for reducing and splitting a text by force into manageable parts that can be 'embodied', 'lived', 'practiced', destroys the hidden inner structure of mysteries more suited to wonder, adoration and silent inner assent to what is beyond us. So I like Jane Kenyon's poem, The Bat, and smiling at its relevance way up here in the North East, and its reference to how, long ago, the Holy Spirit came dangerously near, and redirected history.

The Bat

I was reading about rationalism,
the kind of thing we do up north
in early winter, where the sun
leaves work for the day at 4:15

Maybe the world is intelligible
to the rational mind;
and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
for nothing…

Then I heard the wings overhead.

The cats and I chased the bat
in circles—living room, kitchen,
pantry, kitchen, living room…
At every turn it evaded us

like the identity of the third person
in the Trinity: the one
who spoke through the prophets,
the one who astounded Mary
by suddenly coming near.