"We preachers are summoned to get up and utter a sub-version of reality, an alternative vision of reality, that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid…This sub-version intends to empower a community of sub-versives who are determined to practice their lives according to a different way of imagining".
Walter Brueggemann, quoted in Disruptive Grace, page 8.
Yesterday the big furore over the Sky Sports sacking of Andy Gray, and the resignation of Richard Keys, filled the back pages of the papers. Apart from the unpleasant suggestiveness of some comments off screen, which were then broadcast, there seems to me to be more than adequate grounds for sacking them both on the grounds of sheer gender prejudice. And alleviation or mitigation on the excuse that this was merely dressing room banter is beside the point and both ethically and culturally puerile.
But also yesterday, a research project Vrije University shows that some decisions are impossible for the human eye to call. It requires the assistant referee to be looking at two different places at exactly the same time. So a good assistant referee is likely to get 90% of the decisions right and 10% wrong. Male or female. And also, the female assistant referee in question did indeed get the crucial decision right, demonstrated conclusively by technology which she didn't have available to her.
Now would the ex Sky pundits say that men would get the 90% right but women less than that? Or are men so omnisciently endowed and so intellectually quicksilver that they could improve on the 90%? And if men are so technically and physiologically gifted of eye and brain, particularly brain, why would male pundits fall for such a spurious and prejudiced viewpoint in the first place. Don't they SEE their own prejudice? Or are they unable to interpret the rules of the game we call human life, community and respect for others?
The photo is of the assistant referee whose skill, athleticism and knowledge of the gaem, got her in the right place, at the right time and making the right judgement.
The drive to Aberdeen from Glasgow was a journey of two halves, or a journey of two worlds. Glasgow to Dunblane was frozen fog, a thick grey blanket of low visibility .
Beyond Dunblane the sky cleared and just about Gleneagles the full moon appeared above the hill line. Pale orange, a luminous disk suspended like a chinese lantern over Perhshire hills, creating the impossible illusion of glowing warmth on a frosty night.
Then passing Forfar the same moon reflected on the loch that is home to hundreds of waterfowl, as if an artist with a coarse hair brush had painted the surface the colour of the moon with one stroke – and decided to leave it at that.
By the time I got to Laurenckirk the magical moments were beginning to come with alarming and delight filling frequency. The moon still low over the Mearns, I looked at the new windfarm and at just the right moment the gigantic three blades were framed against the now bright cream moon. And for a brief epiphany it was the CND sign captured by heaven and earth, the moon and the mill co-operating in the sign of peace.
Finally, crossing the River Dee at Maryculter, the entire river seemed to be illumined by a thousand ripples of pale cream light, and against the background of silhouetted Scotch Pines through which the moonlight streamed with carefully controlled extravagance.
There's an enchantment that I guess is embedded in our spirits when we see such beauty, and we feel and know deep down the reverberations of our own createdness, the answering upreach of our own longing. A journey like that can change an entire perspective on life, or at least remind us that to enjoy and grow through the life we have, a first necessity is open eyed wonder at the gratuitous loveliness of the world. Tonight I gazed at the varied canvases of a night sky, painted from the palette of the One in whom is truth, beauty and goodness.
Heading towards New Year I've been thinking about the church.
Where in all the cultural flux of the times?
where in the midst of spiritual pessimism not unrelated to economic gloom?
where in the massed choir of competing voices that is our digital cyber inhabited environment; where in our confusion, anxiety and driven existence?
where, is there a place to stand, or to sit, and regain a sense of perspectve?
Where is there a centre that will hold against the centrifugal and centripetal forces of a world complex and dangerous, self-destructively greedy and unable to curb the human appetite to possess, have power over, and assert the will to life and power over against the imperative to be on the side of life itself?
Where is the place where the church's life is renewed, it's purpose reconstituted, its raison d'etre reaffirmed and its mission reconfigured.
The table, is where.
Gathered in Jesus' name, around the sacred table, sharing blessed bread and wine, hearing again the Gospel promise, giving again our deepest love, owning again our deepest longings, and realising that our loves and longings derive their importance from that which is prior to them – the love of God in Christ made known in the Spirit.
To the question where, the answer of the Christian heart will be – there, at the table.
How that works out in the theology and practice of each Christian community has been told with succint pointedness by Walter Brueggemann. The next few days I'll post Brueggemann's take on the central importanc eof the Gospel table, the place where shalom is proclaimed and from which it is to be lived.
I have a very good friend who has an all but uncritical enthusiasm for Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, the first of her books I read. Another friend, Geoff Colmer, has been at me to read Vickers' The Other Side of You. I'm getting there Geoff! But I recently picked up a couple of other novels by Vickers in the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an establishment I have no hesitation in advertising here. (Organised, discerning, reasonable prices, a proprietor who leaves you to browse without ignoring you – The Old Aberdeen Book Shop 140 Spital ABERDEEN Aberdeenshire AB24 3JU tel: 01224 658355 map.).
So having read Mr Golightly's Holiday, a strange novel, somewhere between modern novel, and timeless fable with religious overtones and metaphysical undertones, I've just finished Instances of the Number 3.
I'm beginning to notice recurring themes, recognise the wise interpretive voice of the author, and becoming familiar with the narrative contexts Vickers creates as she examines and explores the topography of human relationships. Mostly her novels are about love of one kind or another – its failures and triumphs, its capacity to mortally wound and miraculously heal, its puzzling complexity and frightening simplicity, its power to extend forgiveness to the heartbroken or to withhold absolution and peace from those who make life choices that deny love's sovereign demands.
But love is neither to be domesticated to human whims, nor limited by the all too human urgency of selfish desire which is indeed love's negation. Vickers is a Jungian psychoanalyst; she is also an accomplished literary scholar; in addition she is a consummate observer of human motivation, behaviour and character; which makes her a consummate novelist. So metaphysics, religious experience, supernatural phenomena, the world of high art and serious literature, become in Vickers novels important perspective giving lenses into human aspiration as it grows or diminishes in the life and circumstances of the characters she creates. And she creates characters who are immensely persuasive, attractive, instructive – the outcome of the story matters because the destiny of the characters matters to the reader.
Instances of the Number 3 is a novel that requires of the reader certain things. First a more than curious interest in what it is we are all looking for, hoping for, longing for, suffering from in those relationships that matter most to us – love. Second, a willingness to read slowly, and read much of the novel more than once in the first reading, in order to apprehend, and comprehend, the comments of the authorial voice, less didactic than George Eliot, but often as ethically perceptive and psychologically enlightening. Third, a patience with a writer who assumes her readers know enough about art and literature to grasp the more important allusions in chapters and passages of pivotal significance. But fourthly, a willingness to learn the art of sympathy and hopefulness, because Vickers' characters are on the whole likeable, flawed, people caught in the snares of circumstance, or constrained by previous life choices, so now longing for new purpose, direction and meaning, and all of this within the sphere of human relationships.
I've said it here before – there are entire mornings in pastoral theology seminars when students would learn so much about themselves by reading novels. How the human heart works, about the constraints and disappointments, the quiet patient sacrifices that love both requires and bestows, and about how there are experiences and situations in all of our lives that are not resolved by changing them, but by recognising that their givenness and intractable nature, and how we respond to them, is what makes us. And no, this isn't a review of a Salley Vickers novel. It's more and less than that. It is a push and a plea to those who dare claim the work of the cure of souls is their vocation. To take time to read those writers who sharpen our insight, ignite our imagination, stimulate emotional sympathy, teach us to interpret a life story – our own and that of others, and do so by drawing us into and involving us in their stories, where so much of our own experience is rehearsed, or questioned, or touched with the coal from the altar so that we understand ourselves more compassionately, see ourselves more honestly, and so speak of ourselves more modestly, and mercifully.
As one reviewer said there is an "essential optimism" in Vickers' writing. And there are sentences in her novels that are amongst the wisest counsel I have ever received from the pen of someone who has never met me, but who has, it would seem, been reading my private journal and plagiarising my experience.
(The photograph above is included just because it is a great photograph of avid readers! It came from here and I gladly acknowledge its use.)
Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.
Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.
In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?
One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.
Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold – the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.
That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.
Every detective story is a proof of God's existence.
When everything is suffused with reasons, that's the presence of God. Everything ought to be (and is) luminous with reasons. – although these are often not so easy to figure out. After all, everything flows from one single intelligent Creator. If one may say so, God knew what He was doing.
Still we have to recognise: God hates to be too obvious about things. He writes pretty darn good mysteries into almost everything He does. Our fun lies in the detection. Who would be attracted to God if He didn't drop a hint, or plainly plant a clue? And then cover it up again? We have to work for it. Use our brains a little. Keep pursuing the hidden God. God is pursuing us, and wants us to be adults. Not wimps. But we keep running from him…
I fled him, down the nights and down the days,
I fled him, down the arches of the years;
I fled him, down the labyrithine ways
Of my own mind.
God has been pursuing us. He has been flirting with us. He has been giving us all the hints we will ever need. It is okay to stop and let Him catch us.
No One Sees God. The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers, Michael Novak, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 198-99.
This is popular philosophy, and no wonder it's popular. God the flirt! Life as a detective story! A hint dropping Deity! And if he may say so, "God knew what he was doing"
Quite so!
"And the Word became flesh and took up residence amongst us, and we gazed on His glory…"
The Absolute becomes relative. Absolutely! And that too is Advent.
(Blake's etching of the Trinity, above, is a beautiful contrast to our words – the embrace of love, the hovering comforter, the eternal communion of willing surrender and redeeming grace, the planted clue of divine unselfishness).
" To be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God…We myst keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian's in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was "all that is made". God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them"
C S Lewis, The Four Loves, ch. 6
Yes, and having loved such creatures into existence, God proves that they are not superfluous. Advent is the evidence.
A mid afternoon blizzard courtesy of Siberia and the North Sea!
Our patio table on Saturday….
And then on Sunday morning pictured from the warmth of the living room.
And then there's me, looking suitably satisfied but knowing that the next snowfall will mean a repeat exercise. Exercise being the operative word because this beats an exercise bike for fun, aerobics and general physical work.
Till the snow is finished, clearing it seems futile, but it's a way of trying to pretend we can deal with whatever the world throws at us. An exercise in futilityperhaps, human pride maybe, and male delusion certainly!
A human being has not only a body but also a face. A face cannot be grafted or interchanged. A face is a message, a face speaks, often unbeknown to the person. Is not the human face a living mixture of mystery and meaning? We are all able to see it, and are all able to describe it. Is it not a strange marvel that among so many hundreds of millions of faces, no two faces are alike? And that no face remains quite the same for more than an instant? The most exposed part of the body, it is the least describable, a synonym for an incarnation of uniqueness. Can we look at a face as if it were a commonplace?
A J Heschel, Who is Man? (Stanford University Press, 1965), pages 38-9.
Isn't it wonderful irony that Heschel had one of the most unforgettable physiognomies of his generation? The best pictures of him show that same ironic but compassionate gaze on a world at once foolish and divinely loved. Anyway, my favourite Jewish author has been away too long from this blog.
Here he is again, compassionate and not ironic but eirenic, and he mentions the face as that universal means of recognition, by which we acknowledge each others' humanity. You see why I love this man?
The Psalmist's great joy is in proclaiming : "Truth and mercy have met together" ( Ps. 85:11 ). Yet so frequently faith and the lack of mercy enter a union, out of which bigotry is bom, the presumption that my faith, my motivation, is pure and holy, while the faith of those who differ in creed - even those in my own community - is impure and unholy. How can we be cured of bigotry, presumption, and the foolishness of believing that we have been triumphant while we have all been defeated ?
Is it not clear that in spite of fundamental disagreements there is a convergence of some of our commitments, of some of our views, tasks we have in common, evils we must fight together, goals we share, a predicament afflicting us all ?
On what basis do we people of different religious commitments meet one another ?
First and foremost we meet as human beings who have so much in common : a heart, a face, a voice, the presence of a soul, fears, hope, the ability to trust, a capacity for compassion and understanding, the kinship of being human. My first task in every encounter is to comprehend the personhood of the human being I face, to sense the kinship of being human, solidarity of being.
From "No Religion is an Island". Read the whole lecture here