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John Sargeant is one of those lucky people whose career has taken off since his retirement. Not that he had a bad career. He was one of the best BBC political correspondents, lucky enough to be right there in Paris when Margaret Thatcher suffered her own personal coup d'etat. And then more recently as guest and host on Have I Got News for You, his roving reporter role on The One Show, the comedy debunking of Strictly Come Dancing and a number of other enjoyable ways he grins his way on to our TV's.

So I enjoyed his review of the papers on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday for the following reasons:
Like the big human being he is, he took on all the detractors and self-righteous head shakers whose current target is Jade Goody. In her struggle with what is now a terminal condition she is telling and selling her story to make money to try to ensure she can make provision for her children. Those who prefer grudges and sniping, and diminishing further a vulnerable person created by the celebrity scandal culture and just as cruelly to be disposed of, were themselves shown to be diminished and hypocritical, preferring to take cheap shots rather than compassionate notice of a young woman making a hard, hard journey.

Both on the Andrew Marr show and on Any Questions on Saturday, Sargeant was quite unequivocal about the sacking of Carol Thatcher for her racist comment. Without rancour, but also without sympathy, he pointed out the importance of genuine apology, that acknowledgement, mea culpa, that says to others "Forgive me I got it wrong". Of course (and Sargeant didn't go here), there's also the insincere apology which Jeremy Clarkson mouthed immediately to avoid losing his job. His later comments show how utterly contrived and self-serving such emotionally redundant verbiage is. But it kept his job. An outcome I personally regret – unfortunately I don't know of a reliable test to confirm the integrity of Clarkson's apology, or that exposes the underlying arrogance that assumes others share his appetite for such nastiness. On any reliable integrity test, Clarkson would be gone.

Back to Sargeant, and one of the best examples of post-modern perplexity I've heard on TV. Sargeant has just done a minor bit part for the TV series Casualty. Regretting that he wasn't given a part in which he could die on Casualty (clearly an ambition equal in longing to his dancing aspirations), instead he is playing a reporter admitted to hospital with chest pains; indeed he is playing himself. His observation, on which we could do with an entire seminar on the liquid nature of identity in the capricious fluidity of our entertainment and celebrity culture, was the following: "I was paid more for pretending to be the real me, than I ever was for being me".
Go consider.

Or,

"Discuss with reference to our current confusion about reality, value and who we, or others, think we might be.

Today I
will be conducting the funeral service for my aunt, the last member of my
mothers family of four sisters and three brothers. Included in the service will
be a prayer written into a book of prayers that she used, well thumbed
and occasionally marked. It is a precis of a life well
lived.

The prayer is by
Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest musicians, and I think one of the great
human beings of the 20th Century. I remember reading his autobiography Unfinished Journey, years ago, while lying in a caravan, near St
Abb's Head, in a week of gales with horizontal rain, a fractious toddler (not
telling you what one), and a cupboard full of "spoil me I'm on
holiday" food. Yehudi Menuhin's story of how he grew from child prodigy to
one of the most accomplished and respected musicians of at least two generations,
is told in a way that was neither self-promoting nor self-centred. Instead he
wrote movingly of the musician's demeanour of humility before the music, the
importance of those teachers and companions who encouraged and drew out the
best, a sense not so much of his own greatness as a talent, but of his
obligation to fulfil his gifts in the service of human compassion and joy. And
through it all a deep and growing sense of gratitude, of indebtedness to life for its
opportunities, its blessings and late in life its still unexhausted possibilities.

 
So the prayer we will
say today, as the last will and testament of my aunt, is as much a blessing
offered at the end of life, from one human being to the wider human family, as
a religious devotion offered to God. But the truth is, gratitude is its own
prayer, its own form of address to Whoever is believed to be the author of such
blessing. In fact my aunt was the author of considerable blessing herself. From
as early as I can remember, until the year I was married, at birthday and
Christmas I received a card with money that was to be used for whatever I
wanted. So in the late fifties it was a ten bob note (10/-) that was inserted. Just to explain
relative values; the purchasing power of 10 shillings in 1958 was equivalent to
£22.50 today; put another way, it would have taken my dad 3 hours work to earn
10 shillings. Such long term and uninterrupted generosity comes from
the kind of person for whom this prayer was significant as her final word on
her own life, a word of contentment tinged with regret, but suffused with a
luminous gratitude. 

May those who survive me not mourn but continue to be as
helpful, kind and wise to others as they were to me. Although I would love to
enjoy for many years the fruits of my lucky and rich life, with my family and
friends, my many projects, and this whole world of diverse cultures and peoples
– I have already received such blessings as would satisfy a thousand lives.

Amen, and Amen

In the absence of Exit Interviews, an important source of insight for organisations and movements haemorraging recruits and support, David Hempton has done what's the next best thing. Evangelical Disenchantment is a phenomenon that goes back to the early generations of the movement and has remained a significant outcome for many who put their hands to the plough and looked back – or looked elsewhere. What makes this book so interesting and challenging for contemporary evangelical self-understanding is the account it gives of faith found and lost, of the weaknesses and strengths of Evangelicalism viewed through the lenses of human personality in cultural context.

George Eliot combined intellectual power, moral imagination, philosophical rigour and psychological insight, making her a formidable opponent with previous insider knowledge.  Francis W Newman was the brother of John Henry Newman. His experience as a missionary in Baghdad, his encounter with the Muslim world, his disillusion with millenial theology that looked to the Christianisation of the globe, the anti-intellectualism of fellow evangelicals, pushed him towards a position much more open to modern advances in knowledge. He came to see Evangelicalism as pathologically scared of the mind, holding to an infallible Bible often at the cost of authentic spirituality, trusting in Christian evidences, naively unquestioning of core dogma, and unchristianly hostile to those like himself who could no longer sign up to a faith demanding detailed doctrinal rectitude.

Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the great anti-slavery patriarchs of the 1830's and a convert of Finney's revival activities. He broke with Finney over whether priority should be given to revivalist conversionism or reformist zeal in transforming the social and moral life of the nation.

Three women activists, Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Frances Willard are treated in one chapter.

Why?

Hempton acknowledges that such women are an essential though largely missing part of a more truthful, alternative, and as yet unwritten history, a required corrective to the distortions of male-focused narrative. But from the writings and accounts these three women Hempton builds a composite picture of the crucial connection and eventual conflict between their feminist principles and the biblically underwritten constraints imposed on them by church sponsored theology and politically legitimated male empowerment in society. My next post will review this chapter along with the last chapter on James Baldwin, sub-titled Evangelicalism and race. 

The chapter on Van Gogh on secularisation (the focus of the previous post on January 31) is followed by a careful and balanced exploration of Father and Son, one of English Literature's classic accounts of Victorian childhood. By the time Edmund Gosse wrote Father and Son, he was established as a literary critic and writer of independent mind. Brought up in a narrow Plymouth Brethren home, Gosse and his later autobiography provide a fascinating, at times embarrassing account of Evangelicalism and childhood. I remember the first time I read Father and Son. And coming to the end of it where the last line says so much about the impact of powerful religious convictions, conveyed through parental approval or disapproval, and reinforced within a small religiously intense community where conversion and baptism as a believer by immersion were paradigmatic and required experience. The book ends by insisting on "a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself." And in that culminating observation lies an entire critique of what Gosse himself saw as a well meaning but personally damaging process of indoctrination.

Hempton is even-handed in these studies. Disenchanted critics are listened to, their grievances heard, and the validity of much of their complaints acknowledged. Their own oddities of temperament, gift for shooting themselves in the foot, attempts to have their evangelical cake and eat it, these are also noted and fitted to what is an overall balanced exploration of a movement and its dissidents. The concluding chapter helpfully gathers the main causes of intellectual and spiritual disenchantment and personal disaffiliation. Some reflection on these will be the final post on this fascinating education of a book.

At times R S Thomas reads as much like a Zen master, as a Welsh Anglican priest. His resistance to certainty, and reluctance to make dogmatic faith claims, betray a mind restlessly, at times angrily, interrogative. He came to a faith intuitively hesitant in his recognition of a Reality detected if at all, by hints, half-heard intimations and those unattended moments when truth invites attention. Distilled into this brief poem, are serious playfulness, unsentimental wistfulness, resilient hopefulness, and a capacity to make the uncertainty of 'maybe' sound like a promise, but not to be taken for granted. Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well", transposed to the minor less confident key of "Maybe…, after all…, all shall be well".

One of the longest Benedictions I've ever heard. A complex text of human experience, personal story, national history, biblical faith and political hope. A day when the world was watching and listening, Rev Joseph Lowery a veteran civil rights campaigner, offered prayer on the high balcony of Capitol Hill, America's public architecture of power, partially reconstructed in the 1850's using slave labour. It was a day when inner attitudes went through tectonic shifts. And as I listened to this long Benediction, part confession, part eulogy, part prophetic oracle, and all transparently and unembarrassedly prayed, as a citizen of the world and a human being, I sensed again the importance of hope as a moral stance. And I cried and laughed for sheer pleasure that a prayer could say so much – not only the words, but the human life of the one who spoke it, and the multi-millions of lives on whose behalf he prayed.

There's already been criticism of the comment about "white will embrace what is right". And I think I understand the sensitivities of those hurt by this singling out of one human colour for moral censure – especially the thousands of white civil rights campaigners who walked alongside Rev Lowery and others down through the decades. That's why I think it has to be read and heard as a complex text; the long and bitter experience of the man who prayed, the history of a nation, and the miracle of hoped for and long in coming change, is reflected in a prayer personal, political, prophetic, and reflecting the very tensions that made the day fraught with possibility.  

The text has been released by the Federal News Service, and I was glad to read it again – but it's nothing without the quiet defiant hopefulness of the Rev Lowery's gruff, at times breaking, but affirmative voice. So you can also see and hear it over at You Tube.

……………………..

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has
brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us
into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet
stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts,
drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy
hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our
native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this
day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack
Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his
administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the
national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know
you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation,
but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though
pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you're able and you're willing to work
through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness,
heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the
least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president,
to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to
achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed
— the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind
of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a
spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president
by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to
turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to
make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion,
not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit
of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power
back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our
mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get
weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone,
with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors,
when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and
fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like
waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest,
and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that
day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick
around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) —
when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white
will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen —

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: — and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)

My thanks to Andy and Derek (see comments on previous post), for looking at Google books and for their efforts to find that which was lost and redeem my literary lapses.

My pal Bob from New Hampshire tells me the Von Balthasar reference I'm looking for is in Grain of Wheat. Now this collection of Von Balthasar's aphorisms isn't on Google books as a preview volume, and I don't have a copy. So does anyone have access to a copy and is my elusive reference to be found there? I'm beginning to feel like the woman with the lost coin, unable to settle to those other responsibilities of life till I find the one that was lost. So I'm sweeping the house – figuratively speaking.

Here it is again – you can see why I want to place it – this is Von Balthasar at his most quotable. I don't know a better definition of that ecumenism of the heart that grows out of the love of God in Christ.

"Only in Christ are all
things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings
and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each."

Saturday was a full day. Up at 5 a.m. to deliver Andrew to Glasgow airport bound for the furthest extremities of England to carry on the fish management studies. Which meant back in the house at 6.00 a.m, bright eyed, feeling skeich, ("in high spirits, animated, daft", according to the Scots Dictionary!), and wondering what to do with a day that the weather woman said would be bright, cold and clear.

By the time it was daylight we were in the car and heading north west. The sunrise in the rear view mirror was a glowing orange advert for the new day, a dazzling copper gold diffused by low mist – the kind of effect Turner strove for but only now and then came close – which is saying a great deal. By the time we were crossing Erskine bridge the sunrise was a far too beautiful distraction from driving, so I only glimpsed it. Decided to go via Helensburgh, then Rhu (a favourite place forever associated in my mind with John Macleod Campbell, one of Scotlands greatest theologians).

Then up the loch. Gareloch's beauty is now permanently disfigured by miles of metallic link fence topped by razor wire, boasting our capacity to look after our weapons of mass destruction, and keep them safe – just in case we need to use them! The incongruity of such natural age-old beauty as those Scottish hillsides and glens, co-existing with state of the art weapons techonology, concealed and incalculably lethal, is a parable of our lostness; an admission that pushed far enough, our fears might prove more decisive than our hopefulness. For surely the decision to use nuclear weapons could only betray the distorted preference of those who would risk no future for any of us, rather than the future they don't want – a form of moral and political nihilism. Of course I know there are complex arguments justifying all this. But they aren't where I've chosen to stand – and they don't make me less outraged by what all that razor wire is for.  

But with that ugliness behind us, parts of the drive to Arrochar were sublime – the beauty of hills carpeted in shades of brown, green and those colours on Scottish hills that seem only to come alive in a bright winter sun, and all of this reflected on the mirror surface of the loch – disturbed at one point only by a seal breaking the surface to breathe, eat, bother the seagulls, or just admire the view. Inveraray as always was set against that kind of background that looks like a shortbread tin cliche – but which on a morning like this is the real thing. Brambles was open for business by 10.30 and we had near perfect coffee and the just out the oven rock bun, while I read the Herald Supplements. How hard does life get? 

So on slowly to Crianlarich, Ben More (Photo not mine – a freebie), and then the packed lunch simply looking while we ate. The drive back down was pleasant enough but by then the sun was going down, we were on the shadow side of the hills, and everybody else by this time was up and about and in a bigger hurry than me. So home by 3'ish.

Decided in the absence of a long walk I'd do the exercise bike for a while listening to my new CD of Beethoven's 7th Symphony.
I defy anyone to cycle slowly during the last two movements of this raucous celebration of dancing sound and orchestral frenzy. By the finale I was approaching knackered – but what a madly generous piece of music. No wonder some of the critics suggested Beethoven had had too much to drink when he composed the final movement. The argument between the brass and the strings is one of my favourite musical shouting matches.

The rest of the evening was good food, a read at the book, preceded by a long hot soak. All of which is a way of saying that the Sabbatical is now all but done. Back to College on Monday and ready to try to remember what it is I do there……!?

One or two of the blogs I visit have started exploring the fun of the Fib. Gave me the idea that it might be fun to have a Fib Fest of Bible Stories. Would help to keep your mind active and attentive to more serious things than the usual Christmas pastimes. If there are enough it would be fun to compile them into a Collection of Bible Fibs – to go alongside the Haiku Introduction to the NT. (If you missed this you can view it on the September 8 posting. )

Just to be clear, a Fib isn't an untruth! It's a poem of 20 syllables in which the number of
syllables in each line is the total of the two previous lines  – thus
1,1,2,3,5,8. You can of course continue upwards so that the next line is 13, then 21, after which it gets too silly I think. Fib poems are based on the Fibonacci mathematical sequence and you can find a fuller explanation here. 

The rules for this Fib Fest of Bible Stories are simple and three:

The Fib

1. can only have 7 lines, on the pattern explained above, the last being 13 syllables.
2. must encapsulate a story from the Bible.
3. leave your Fib in the Comments Page.
   

To illustrate I've chosen two of my favourite stories. Try to choose a story no one else has attempted so far, so that we can have a wide range of biblical stories. A later Fib Fest may focus on one story, from the multi-perspectives of the contributors. Cumulatively that would be communal exegesis!

Oh and have fun – much in the best Bible stories makes for laughter, food for thought – even prayer!

Sarah

Sarah

laughed!

Why not?

So would you!

Old age child-bearing,

even when announced by angels

with straight faces; a cruel joke, or God’s promise. Which?

…..

Jacob

Dark

night.

Jacob

fast awake,

conned into wrestling

for his life, then hirpling into

the breaking dawn, learning to lean on integrity.

 

Today I'm blogging at Hopeful Imagination on "steadfastness in a spasmodic era". I wonder if instead of urgent activism, there are times when the church's steadfast stance on Kingdom values requires us to live in a place of necessary tension – between trustful waiting and impatient longing for justice.

Anyway – you may want to go look.

And no – my lost book isn't yet found by Easyjet. I feel a parable coming on about the lost book – not sure if it ends with angels in heaven rejoicing or gnashing of teeth.

During these sabbatical months I've quietly pursued my interest in conversations that might be possible between theology and poetry. I am interested in how the different approaches of these two disciplines can be mutually enriching to matters of life, truth and meaning. As a theologian-pastor I've long felt it important to listen to voices that speak in a different tone, from other perspectives, about life, truth and meaning. I know such pastorally responsive listening includes philosophy, the sciences, ethical and social reflection, and cultural voices in music, film and other media. But it's the particular discipline of poetry that currently fascinates me; and by discipline I mean human creativity bent to artistic purpose for the common good.

Now I recognise that such a view of poetry could become reductionist and utilitarian, a form of theological imperialism that wants to lay tribute on whatever can be used to theological advantage, without thought of poetry's right to self-determination. At the same time though, there are undoubtedly poets whose work flows from inner depths of experience that resonate profoundly and sympathetically with theological concerns. When theology makes comprehensive truth claims the poet more modestly demurs, "instead of saying that's true, I could say, there's truth in that…" This altogether more tentative approach to the world and our experience,is rooted in responsible and responsive openness to what is seen, listened to and cared about. This makes the poet an important reference point for theological convictions, which without pastoral rootedness and lived actuality ossify into truth claims lacking that purchase on human embodiedness that alone gives them credibility.

What does the systematic theologian make of Seamus Heaney's claim that the poet "enters and explores and exceeds himself by entering and exploring and exceeding the language"? The Word became flesh and dwelt among us – that is, the truth of God, embodied in the Word made flesh, entered, explored and exceeded all the languages of human life. Theology therefore exists as a process of articulation happily and necessarily incapable of ultimate success – likewise poetry. Both poetry and theology are only possible on the understanding that articulation of our ultimate concerns is proximate, provisional – because the perfect poem is not so much the one that pins truth down in final form, but the that which enables truth to be transformative of how we see the world and how therefore we henceforth and now live in the world. Here's Heaney again talking of what he had hoped for one of his poetry collections:

The poet's role, and the gift of her poetry, is to enable the reader to journey towards a clearer view of their place in the world, because they see the world differently. That might equally serve as a vitalising vision of a genuine pastoral theology, in which words about God are carefully shaped and spoken, where journeys are undertaken together, and when in the miracle of life and truth, human transformation is earthed in that grace ad infinitum which was embodied in the Word made flesh, and which is given as the light of every person.

"…the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not"
Our language neither comprehends by intellectual control, nor encompasses by systematic constructions, nor extinguishes by exhaustive explanation. From the poet the Christian theologian could learn intellectual and spiritual attitudes more in keeping with the source and style of Christian theology in the Incarnation. Kneeling before mystery, waiting in contemplative trustfulness, giving voice to questions of justice, meaning and faithful living, pushing outwards the boundaries of faith and understanding – and always in language not fully up to the task, but within which all stories must be told.