Category: Uncategorised

Not good enough!
One gold medal from an entire Olympic event.
Nearly £6 million pounds invested.
And all we have to show for it is one gold medal.
What about value for money, eh?
Why are we floating around on a sea of mediocrity, eh?
How come when our athletes do their best it looks ordinary? Tell me that? How come?

The above rant isn't mine. I changed the font colour not to indicate red for anger but to disown the comments. Young people from a temperate climate country, that at a national level invests minimally in winter sports, are subjected to this kind of uninformed criticism by punters, politicians, commentators, news reporters and everyone else who has an opinion but little talent. And our own TV news networks lead the way. And I listen to them spouting forth indignation, and wonder if any of them has ever been good enough to get down a hill on a wee plastic sledge without falling off.

So here's what I think. Amy Williams won a gold. Rightly we celebrate that as a great personal and sporting achievement. Our other athletes didn't win, some didn't perform as well as we know they can. It happens. Did they not try? Were they complacent? Did they give the training regime a body swerve? Was it their fault and should we blame them for not being better than their best?

Och for goodness sake. Why don't we celebrate effort as well as excellence? Why is encouragement of those who pour huge chunks of their lives into their sport such a hard thing to say but such an important thing to hear?

This ritual humiliation of those who don't bring home the medals,

this wingeing and whining about poor performances,

this constant narking at folk who happen to be two seconds slower than the medal winners at skiing down an alpine slope at speeds of up to 90 kilometres,

this head shaking dimissiveness of a bobsleigh team who in a split second lose control and risk life and limb as their machine hurtles around, over and past them.

Just stop it.

Anyway, if it's the money that's a problem then instead of the Government's minuscule £5.8 million, why not ask Wayne Rooney, Peter Lampard, and any three other top earners in the Premier league to double the amount by donating 3 month's wages over the next four years. Snowboarders and skiers, curlers and sledgers, don't get the celebrity status and money professional footballers do. Instead they show dedication, enthusiasm, discipline, live with disappointment, strugggle for funds and equipment and sponsorship, love their sport and do it for reasons other than money.

So don't give me it – and don't give them it. Instead, why not just thank them that they have represented their country well and with dignity.

Rant over – till the next time British media have a go at athletes whose skis the same reporters and commentators are not worthy to unloose!

Right, feel better now!  

Need a poem. Here's one.

A prose poem – but the distinction is about form, not substance.

This is a poem. Actually, this is a really good poem.

………………………..

What I have learned so far

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world? because, proper-

ly attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is sug-

gestion. Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Though buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of — indolence or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems. Volume Two, Page 57).

.

Came across the poem below while looking for something else. Didn't recognise the poet so went looking and found she has written a book with the first line as a title. 

Markova is a psychotherapist in Vermont, and is far better known there than here. She is a significant influence in the Random Acts of Kindness movement, which is enough for me to be interested. If you want to know more you her website is here.

The poem itself is a beautiful statement of determined vitality, a description of risk-taking in order to be frutiful, an attempt at transforming wistfulness into lived purpose. 

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Fully Alive – Dawna Markova

To serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds….

This post was written three years ago when I started blogging as Living Wittily. It's based on the motto at the head of the blog page, words of Sir Thomas More, from Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons.

I read it every now and then to check it is still mostly what I am about – and it is. I've posted it again as a blogging reiteration, a restatement of why the time and energy to do this blog seems worthwhile. This is now the 1001st post – a lot of words. I hope some of them have mattered and made a difference.

……………………………………………………

Almost every word of this phrase has significance for an obedient
following after Christ. At least for me. Unpacking this I use the inclusive
'we' – others may not think or feel this way, which is fine. I would be
interested though to hear from you what you think it might mean "to serve God wittily in the tangle of
our minds".

To serve
implies obedience, but as willing grateful surrender, an inner attitude of
consistent readiness, from which each action and activity derives its value as
an act of devotion following after Christ.

To serve wittily
means an end to naivete, a call to attentiveness and alert observation of the
world in which we live and move, and within which we are called to serve. So
having  our wits about us will mean, (and this only for starters – feel
free to add to this unpacking process)

1. Not being rendered myopic by cultural
   assumptions, but rather
   see the world through the lens of the Gospel – not war but peacemaking;
   not greed but generosity; not lies but truthfulness; not power over others
   but power serving others.
2. Not being pushed around by consumer
   pressures but rather
   being intentionally shaped and transformed by Jesus. And what are the
   economics of the Kingdom; what is it that profits a human being?
3. Not being morally
   domesticated by ethical and cultural accommodations, but rather seeking to live
   in the radical freedom of the Kingdom of God where the only rule is God’s rule. The
   culture of hard realism challenged by visionary compassion; the idolatry
   of the bottom line questioned by gestures of sacrificial extravagance; the
   semantic cosmetics of political correctness superceded by communities of
   Jesus embodying radically inclusive love.
4. Not being embarrassed by the evidence of
   Christendom in decline, but rather
   seeking and embodying a lifestyle more faithfully rooted in the teaching
   of Jesus.

The tangle of our minds –
tidiness and system, an imposed order on life, what P T Forsyth called the lust
for lucidity – none of these answer to the sheer messiness and inconvenience of
the world, our culture and our times. There is that in the Gospel which resists
being combed into shape, style and fashion. ( I use the metaphor as one who no
longer has much use for a comb!) My own experience has been that Christian
theology, ethics and practice have to relate to a world constitutionally ambiguous,
unpredictable, inconsistent – and each human life is entangled in the
consequent joy and suffering that is a human life together.

And it is the tangle of our minds;
speaking here only for myself, my deepest theological convictions, and even my
most passionate spiritual experiences, are often rooted in the life of the
mind. Thought, reflection, consideration, contemplation, reason, understanding,
prayer – however deeply I feel the truth of things, they become most real and I
own them as life convictions mostly as they are received and welcomed as ideas
rooted in experience and expressed in the life God gives me to lead. Loving God
with my mind is an essential not an optional devotional attitude and aptitude
in my own spirituality – and for better or worse.

  So as a motto, ‘to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds’,
provides a number of perspectives on my personal discipleship. However, in case
I get too serious about this, serving God wittily could also mean humorously,
good humouredly, and with hilarity. Fun and laughter being an essential
presupposition of healthily, gladly, en-joy-ably, serving God.
That sets me thinking about the spiritual discipline of fun – is there a
discipline of
fun, an obligation under God to be a gladness maker?!

Was speaking with a close friend the other night and quoted the text about the threefold cord that is not easily broken. The faithful strengthening that comes from woven companionship has been important in this and many friendships.

Decided
to play around with this maxim from Ecclesiastes, that good natured Jew who was
gently sceptical about life, God and the elusiveness of happiness:  “a three stranded cord is not easily broken.”
(4.12).

Tried a little Midrash on this, exploring the multiple choice interpretations, not
to choose the right one but to see the rich possibilities in each.  The complete verse says, “If one person can
overpower another who is alone, two can resist his opponent. A three stranded cord
is not easily broken.”

The Jewish
setting and background is that of a journey. The danger of being on the road
alone. Vulnerability and risk are lessened when there are those who stand with
you, one on each side. That’s what friendship is. Those who stand on either
side of you, between you and those who mean harm or hurt.

Or from
another angle, this time Christian, the threefold strand could be the
companionship of the Triune love that is God. In the old Irish prayer, “I bind
unto myself today, the strong name of the Trinity.” The grace of Christ, the
love of God, the fellowship of the Spirit.

Then
again, from an ethical perspective “these three abide, faith, hope and love,
but the greatest of these is love.” Yet they belong together in a threefold strand.
Love without faith and hope lacks trust and promise. But where there is trust,
and forward looking promise, then love lives again and abides.

Whichever
way we take it, the three stranded cord of human friendship, of God’s enfolding
love, of the cardinal virtues, provides support and strength that is beyond any
one of us, but belongs to us together. Indeed human friendship, entwined with
divine love, and kept faithful by the three virtues, is just about the most
secure place any of us can be.

The whole history of Christianity,

and the history of the world,

would have followed a different course

if it had not been that again and
again

the theology of the cross

became a theology of glory,

and that the
church of the cross

became a church of glory.

—Theologian Emil Brunner, The Mediator, 1927

The cross is “the signature of the one who is risen.”

—Biblical theologian Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul, 1969

Both quotations used as epigraphs in an article by Michael Gorman in Catalyst, see here http://www.catalystresources.org/issues/313gorman.html

I like it when two entirely different people, write in two very different styles, on a similar theme, and from two historically and culturally alien perspectives, enrich our theological understanding, and restore faith in the continuity and congruence of the Christian tradition.

A Seventeenth Century rural parson poet, and a Twentieth Century Swiss Reformed dogmatician, writing on what it is that goes on in the heart of the unworthy guest, just before sitting at the Lord's Table.

"The conversion which the Word of grace ascribes to him consists in the exercise of the freedom which he does not need to assume or give to himself because this is not necessary, since it has been already given in what God has long since done for the world and for his own salutary humbling and therefore for his peace and for that of the whole world.

The Word of grace simply tells him that the table is spread for him and for all, but that a few places – his own included -  are still vacant, and would he be so good as to sit down and fall to, instead of standing about and cleverly or foolishly prattling.  Everything else will then be discovered, or is really discovered already. 

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics,The Doctrine of Reconciliation, IV.3.1, page 247.

*************************

Love (3)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin. 

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack'd anything. 

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he. 

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on thee. 

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I? 

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve. 

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? 

My dear, then I will serve. 

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.

George Herbert, The Temple.

 

 

 

 

There are times I miss being a pastor within a local Christian community. There are plenty of obvious reasons for this. Less obvious, until it happens, is the inner urge to gather together with the community of faith, as one called to encourage and enable this particular community to work out its own theology, with fear and trembling, in the face of disaster. In my years as a pastor I found myself at different times on a Sunday Morning leading worship in the aftermath of Tiannemann Square, 9/11, the Omagh bombing, Piper Alpha, Dunblane, Lockerbie, and in subsequent days sharing the prayers, conversations, questions and grief of a community reaching out in heart to love a broken world.

The task of the pastor and community theologian, when disaster overwhelms some in our world, is to recognise the faith questions and the faith resources within the Christian community. Then gathering our wisdom and bewilderment, holding onto both our faith and uncertainty, mouthing our hope and defying the despair, we pray. Determined to try, together, to respond in a way that willingly absorbs the suffering and human anguish of others, we bring it all into our worship, our prayers, our supplication to the God who in Christ entered the deepest darknesses of a fractured creation.

And so today, with the anguish and danger facing the people of Haiti, I so wish I was again in that role of sharing the life of a known community as its pastor, learning again the necessary humility of the pastor who truly believes that theology and doxology, reflection and worship, plaintive prayer and patient praise, that these are the Church's work of witness in our world, and that they come not from her or him as pastor, but from the community itself. No hard edged doctrine of providence like so much theological shoulder shrugging; no Bible quotations to silence impolite questions; not a word justifying our faith, because God's response is never self-defensive. Instead tears for the dead and the broken; prayers for those who dig with their hands and with kitchen utensils; inner recoil from the hard fact that the logistics in Haiti just now are near impossible; guilt at our own impotence and gratitude for every gesture of help and humanity. ( The photo of the wee toddler's smile of recognition as he is handed to his mother is for me a powerful image of the reaching out hands of God).

How do you pray in all this? The question isn't so much where is God as where are we and where is help for our world, and what will help anyway? Money will. So we give it, then double it. Long term compassion will, because money and relief aid will be needed for years. Questions will – especially those about the unfair distribution of wealth across our world, and why it is that poor people, in a high risk area, whose homes are cheaply built and collapse easily, and who have no state sponsored medical service, are utterly vulnerable. And yes prayer will, especially prayer as Barth urged, the lifting up of holy hands against the status quo.

 Last night, and today and coming days, I will light a candle and pray for the people of Haiti. And that small flame, the candle self-consumed in the giving of light, will signifiy our calling to lighten the darkness, to radiate the life and light of Christ – by the strategic generosity of giving money – by long term commitment to go on giving into the future – by not settling for the rules of the global money-grubbing and resource-grabbing game – by praying against all that diminishes and crushes human hearts and bodies, and by doing so in the name of the One whose own body was crushed, and through whom life and hope and the love of the Eternal reaches the darkest recesses of our God-loved world.

Antidote to cynicism. 

Making the world a better place, and making us feel better about it.

Compassion as the guarantee of honesty.

Which one proved to be the neighbour, huh?.

Click on this link and smile knowingly, then go and do likewise.

Found this prayer over at Michael Gorman's blog and thought it worth circulating.

I think some of the readers of this blog are likely to appreciate its spirituality of perceptive self-critique, and love's instinctive but demanding integrity that seems utterly congruent with the call of Jesus.

I'm compiling a sheet of seven prayers which I'll use one each week-day for a while. This is one from a Franciscan community is one of them.

May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half
truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within
your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and
exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and
peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to
comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you
can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others
claim cannot be done.