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Rowan Williams is too often dismissed as an otherworldly academic, or an amateurish ecclesiastical politician , or an intellectual mystical theologian. I guess he comes over as each of these on occasion. But they are caricatures – there is substance, spiritual, moral and intellectual in this man. And I can well understand the Government of any day trying to maintain those caricatures, because time and again Rowan Williams has spoken truth to power. And he understands power.

So his comments on the big society idea promoted by David Cameron are likely to annoy and irritate, Good. That's what prophets do – they point out the Emperor's nakedness, and describe expedient moralising as 'aspirational waffle'. And then he goes on –

"And if the big society is anything better than a slogan looking increasingly threadbare as we look at our society reeling under the impact of public spending cuts, then discussion on this subject has got to take on board some of those issues about what it is to be a citizen and where it is that we most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity."

The same day it's leaked that the Prime Minister is consdiering axing housing benefit for under 25's as a further corrective of what he and his Government call the welfare culture. Just how is that fixed by destabilising the provision for young people who are already at the hard end of the employment  and opportunity spectrum of our economy. It isn't the Archbishop who lives on a different planet, or who is out of touchwith the realities of modern life.

In terms of where we 'most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity', I'd be more hopeful of the future if the Government supported and resourced such places, as schools, college and universities to do precisely that. Education for employability is one element of human formation – but only one, and the shaping of character, instilling of virtue, opening of minds in generous critical engagement, creating and sustaining self-confidence alongside respect for others, encouraging the celebration of difference and the importance of welcome. Where does all that happen, and whose responsibility, if not the Government's, to create a context where such human fruitfulness flourishes?

 

Last week I posted some thoughts on Miroslav Volf's work on reconciliation, peacemaking and questions of human identity and otherness. I omitted to give the quotation from Volf, incorporating his encounter with Jurgen Moltmann. Here it is.

" After I finished my lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: "But can you embrace a cetnik" It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called cetnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik – the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. "No, I cannot – but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to".

That is one of the most courageous and honest theologically anguished exchanges I know in theological literature. Moltmann's own theology has been hammered out for decades, using the raw material of his own experiences in war and imprisonment, supplemented by deep reflection on the nature of hope, the meaning of the cross and the mystery of the Triune God. Volf's theology is equally born of profound suffering, experienced and witnessed, and passed through the lens of Christian theology and discipleship. For both men, what is believed has to be able to be lived, faith issues in action congruent with what is believed, convictions about God have decisive purchase on human behaviour, relationships and community.

It is one of the great ironies of Christian history and contemporary Christian existence that a faith tradition which proclaims a Gospel of reconciliation, is embodied in communities and alternative traditions characterised by grievance, suspicion, unhealed fractures and unresolved differences. It is difficult to maintain credibility when the forgiven resist the call to forgive, and when the reconciled build walls of self justification, and construct a rationale for defining identity over and against "the other". Yet it was ever thus, and it may be that the Gospel of Reconciliation entrusted to the church, and the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to those who seek to follow faithfully after Christ, together provide for all Christians an obvious mission imperative in a fractured world, divided by mutually hostile ideologies; a world in which peacemaking, community building, forgiveness and active compassion are to be given embodied presence through the witness of communities of reconciliation, from which attitudes and actions of willed vulnerability and hopeful courage flow outwards offering a radical alternative utterly earthed in the truth of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

All of which is idealistic – as most far reaching visions of human flourishing tend to be in their origins. The issue is whether these ideals find embodiment, commitment and the willed practices of a community resourced by the grace, mercy and peace of God who, like these his children, hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

 

Miroslav Volf is a theologian whose work has built into an impressive corpus of reflection on the nature of the church and its mission. He has consitently explored the relation between Trinitarian theology and the life of the Church, and the theology and practices of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace and graced living with which the followers of Jesus Christ are called to address the disturbingly compelling realities of human conflict, historic hatreds and the resort to violence.

Reflecting on the nature of forgiveness and reconciliation, and the consequent practices of peacemaking, conciliation and openness to the other, Volf offers at times a profound and demanding challenge to the contemporary Christian and the contemporary Church, whatever the Christian tradition. His  Exclusion and Embrace is a seminal work whose relevance and argument go beyond any narrow theological concerns. It grew out of his experience of violence fuelled by historic hatred, depersonalising mythology and these expressed in barbaric behavious in the Balkans in the 1990's.

It is a hard book to read – rigorous and determined theological reflection on the darkest and hardest human experiences, arguing towards a conclusion that those who follow Jesus ought to be able to forgive. But recognising that the human reality, emotionally, spiritually and therefore practically, is all but impossible for those who have witnessed such brutality or been the victims of such violence. This paradox, of categorical imperative and human incapacity lie at the heart of the dilemma – how can Christians love their enemies in obedience to Jesus' command when the person they are to embrace and welcome is guilty of atrocity against them or their family? What are the resources of the Gospel of reconciliation that would make such a miracle of embrace possible? Volf's book grew out of precisely that question, asked at a seminar where Volf was teaching and Jurgen Moltmann was present, and asked the question. Volf's account of it is better told by himself:

 

This poem by e e cummings is just the thing for weather like this! And it's a  sonnet, one of my favourite forms of poetry. Hard to read this and scowl, or frown, or moan – and notice where the higher case is used – not the first person singular, but the second person transcendent! Love it.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

The following is the list of the top ten hot social network trends for this morning. Just curious at the descending priority list of people's interests and concerns. The Greek Crisis is in the relegation spot as the one least commented on.

Now I don't want to become all preachy, doomsday and grumpy, but is there a fascination with the emphemeral and transient here, and an avoidance of the stuff that concerns rather more than the fortunes and failings of footballers, who aren't likely to need payday loans?

 However, given a recent immersion in the world of Qoheleth for my own good, astringent and uncomfortable as his observations are, I'm not surprised he is described by one scholar as the gentle cynic.

And on that note, I hesitate only slightly to suggest that enigmatic phrase "Vanity! Vanity! All is Vanity!" could stand as a cautionary comment on the fast turning temporal and semantic kaleidoscope that is social networking in an increasingly techno-relating society. The same Qoheleth raises the stakes when he says "God has put eternity in human hearts", and "God is in heaven so let your words be few." Whatever else we might do to acknowledge or ignore the reality of the transcendent God, to cherish our humanity, face our mortality and make peace with our finitude, it seems we are way past any possibility of letting our words be few..myself and this blog included!

I leave you with the list of captured concerns in Current Trending for 11.31 this morning….. and ask which of them have universal, eternal or even life affirming significance?

1. Didier Drogba
2. Robin Gibb
3. Fernando Torres
4. Part Time Jobs
5. Fibre Optic Broadband
6. Euromillions
7. West Ham
8. Payday loans
9. Robert0 Di Matteo
10. Greek Crisis

 

 

Sometimes when I intend to pray I don't so much pray as dutifully get the job done, like drying dishes or washing the car.

Other times life is overloaded with stuff to do and prayer becomes one of those things I do while doing other things, prayer as multi-tasking and God given a percentage of my attention.

Or under pressure send God a text, U R my 4tress[ ]

Then feeling guilty because I don't pray properly (what would a proper prayer sound like) I come across a poem like this and realise again, prayer isn't calibrated on my pious thoughts and wayward intentionality. Prayer is paying attention, in those moments when God is present, and I notice.

Spectrum

A little window, eastward, low, obscure,

A flask of water on the vestry press,

A ray of sunshine through a fretted door,

And myself kneeling in live quietness:

 

Heaven's brightness was then gathered in the glass,

Marshalled and analysed, as one by one

In terms of fire I saw the colours pass,

Each in its proper beauty, while the sun

 

Made his dear daughter Light sing her own praise.

(As Wisdom may, who is a mode of light),

Counting her seven great jewels: then those rays

Remerged in the whole diamond, total sight.

 

The globe revolved subservient: that just star

Whirled in his place; water and glass obeyed

The laws appointed; with them, yet how far

From their perfection, I still knelt and prayed.

(Ruth Pitter, Collected Poems, page 370)

The window is the Daily Bread window in Durham Cathedral, gifted by the staff of Marks and Spencers in Durham. Those who have been in my College study will recognise it. I did a stranded cotton tapestry of this years ago, and the vivid, vibrant, vital colours are themselves a form of praise. The poem is one of my favourites from Ruth Pitter.

Once you've spent a day in Glen Dye, Gerard Kelly's poem is even more impressive as a this worldly spirituality that brings heaven and earth, God and creation, our humanity and the Divine, ecology and theology, nature and praise, into that creative relationship that affirms as good all that God has made. Celebrating the beauty of the earth is just as important as lamenting its brokenness and ours, and an equally valid form of praise as any anticipation of being less than we were made to be – which is human beings who image the life of the Triune God, and whose humanity is taken up by Jesus Christ in the renewal and reconciliation of created existence, and human experience.

  

the very thought

I love the very thought of Heaven:
Where angels sing
In perfect, perpetual choir practice.
Where Father, Son and Spirit rule
Unchallenged
And are honoured in full measure.
I love the very thought of Heaven:
But I was not made
To live there.

I was not made
To walk on clouds,
And bask eternally
In immaterial splendour.
I was made for this green planet:
This tight ball
Of aching beauty,
Alive with the unending possibilities
Of his creative power.
I was made for the sunshine
That blazes through the veins of a leaf
And glints on the tiny, perfect back
Of a ladybird crossing my arm.
I was made to be human
In this most human of places.
I was made for earth:
The earth is my home.
That’s why I’m glad that God,
More than anyone,
Is a friend of the earth:
Prepared as he was to die
For its release.
And that’s why I’m glad
That the magnificent, jewelled foundations
Of the mighty pearly gates
Will be anchored
Deeply and forever
In the soil of earth.

by gerard kelly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamic and erratic,

spontaneous and radical,

audacious and immature,

committed if not altogether coherent,

ecumenically open and often experimental,

visible here and there,

now and then,

but unsettled institutionally.

Almost monastic in nature

but most of all….

enacting a fearful hope

for human life in society.

William Stringfellow, Quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer, page 634

Three things came together today and turned ordinary time into time when the ordinary and everyday, the routine and the easily missed, become for us extended moments of moment, not momentous, but not trivial either.

Sitting in  church looking at a prayer, beautifully rendered in cross stitch, a prayer I use often in worship, and which someone noted down some years ago, and worked in threads, framed it, and gifted it to the church. Now it hangs just to the left of where I sit. It's a prayer about accepting each day as God's gift, to be cherished for the freedom and possibility that every minute brings to us.

On the way to church listening to Classic FM, the second movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto. The gentle melody exudes inner yearning, as if musical notes, carefully composed and skillfully played contain a more adequate grammar of longing, a logic of the heart's desire, a capacity for expression that doesn't need to answer all the deep questions of our existence, but merely to remind us that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yearning is prayer, 'the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.'

 Then there were the chocolate gingers! My interest in spirituality and mystical theology has never attained that high level of ascetic practices that would call in question the delight, the God given pleasure, and the necessity for my inner happiness, of the combined taste of dark chocolate and stem ginger! I'm struggling to give a spiritual or intellectual twist to this which is just as well. Few things waste good food more than rationalising the joy of taste. I suppose I could quote "O taste and see that the Lord is good"; or compare the rich spiced sweetness of chocolate gingers to the Psalmist's equivalent comment on the Word of God, "sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb".

No, on this holiday Sunday blessings can be counted. A prayer that receives each day as gift and offers it in worship; music that pulls our hopes and trust upwards in a longing only God can fulfil; sweets, the intensity of taste, spice and sweetness, the pleasure to mind and body that makes us so aware of our physical reality. Each of them a sacrament, a means of recognising in that moment, the presence of grace and the gift that is God and the God who comes as gift. 

 

Just finished the class on the rediscovery of the Triune God. The discussion on Mission and Trinity was an exciting collaborative hour which eventually produced the theological goods that only come from a class engaged, informed, excited and willing to make space in their minds for new and dynamic thought.

Some of that discussion will continue to niggle away at our theological assumptions and the limitations to our practices and convictions that unexamined assumptions often impose. I have an idea. This is not news, it happens now and again. But the theological goods captured on the whiteboard and preserved on Ipads and emails will make an interesting project for this class to take forward. Except it's the final year class. That's ok – they aren't going to stop thinking, they're going to think deeper, longer and more adventurously out of what they have worked so hard to learn during their journey with us. It would be interesting to see where yesterday's thinking might lead if they continued the discussion on an online blog and developed it into a way of bringing Trinitarian theology, missiology and a Baptist ecclesiology together. Not right away of course – but we may decide on a collaborative project aimed at pushing our own thinking as far as it will go….and then some more…