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As mentioned earlier the symposium on Autism and Religion will be taking place in Aberdeen mid December. The first draft of my paper has been sent out with the others so a lot of reading over the next week or two. Then two days of inter-disciplinary critique, insight, encouragement and collaborative discussion from a number of perspectives. It’s clear from the comments section in this blog, and several personal emails, that there are a number of churches where there is a felt need to understand how people with autism can be welcomed and supported within churches which are by definition places of communal and relational activity.

As I have been reading and thinking about a Christian understanding of humanity and personal identity, the expereince of the person with autism, and the Christian church as the community of Jesus, I’ve become even more persuaded that the word ‘community’ can become dangerously unexamined as an assumption of what God calls us to be. That’s why I call the church the ‘community of Jesus’, using the possessive case (it belongs to Jesus, indeed is the Body of Christ), and therefore also the community that seeks to embody the living presence and lived teaching of Jesus, incarnate, crucified, risen and exalted, and present as promised by the Spirit, at the gatherings in his name.

What defines the community of Jesus is not the ideal of community, or the working out of community, or the consolidation and promotion of a particular kind of community. What defines the community of Jesus is the presence, the living, active, guiding, enabling presence of Jesus. If community is the goal of Christian togetherness, the person with autism is likely to be marginalised, or socialised into certain activities and practices which express the communal life of the people of God rather than their own inner life. Such shared activities and practices are good, essential, in crucial ways definitive for the Church – but not everyone can participate in such a self-conscious, relationally interactive, communally fulfilling way. It is at this point I wonder if we are required, as the community of Jesus,and thus by the imperatives of Christ-like love and welcome, to ask whether there are other ways for the person with autism to be enabled to express who they are, ways that both accommodate their impairments and yet seek to discover with them, with imaginative, compassionate and resourceful welcome, how to encourage them to express who they are in relation to God. In the community of Jesus, such hospitality will inevitably be kenotic, self-emptying, surrendering the rights of the community for the sake of the one who is to be welcomed as Christ.

And therein lies the radical trajectory of my current thinking about community, self-fulfilment, and spirituality. The person with autism, by their incapacity to participate in the full range of communal interactive and relational practices, highlights one of the dangers of making ‘community’ an unexamined assumption of church life. When ‘community’ becomes an end in itself, it needs the disruptive corrective of the radically inclusive Kingdom of God. Church communities at best are a means to that great End, and Ending, when God will be all in all.

However, I’m still thinking…..pondering…..reflecting…..and I hope, learning.

I spent Saturday helping set up tropical fish tanks. Tropical fish aren’t my hobby, but they are my son’s passion – in particular the multi-coloured Betta Splendens, better known as Siamese Fighting Fish. Over the years Andrew has become an expert on these diminutive piscine gladiators.

A number of beautiful specimens arrived from the recognised quality source in Thailand and needed proper housing. Such housing must be segregated because fighting is instinctive, instant, territorial – the males of these fish are so antisocial with other males that zero tolerance is written into their genetic code with indelible felt tip pen – or whatever the scientific equivalent to the felt tip pen might be in genetic code writing!

So I now know how to build a condominium for celebrity fish

Here’s a couple of samples courtesy of Atisonbetta, the supplier

1997 J R Watson, The English Hymn.

Another of those sumptuous Oxford hardbacks that cost more than my first car. This is the definitive literary history of the hymn, written elegantly and with both authority and lightness. One of my side interests is Evangelical hymnody and the role of hymns in the formation and re-formation of evangelical theology and culture. Watts and Wesley broke moulds as they expressed evangelical experience in lyrical poetry set to music; Newton and Cowper’s Olney Hymns set profound and personal experiences alongside ordinary piety in the Olney Hymn Book; Sankey showed the evangelistic possibilities of spiritual sentiment set to music, and Frances Ridley Havergal was the lyricist of Keswick consecrational praise….and so on.

1998 Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes.

The title is enough to commend this book. It is movingly written as a theology of the desert and the mountain and the wild places, where the only solace is the trust that God is not absent. Intermingled with Lane’s reflections on accompanying his mother through terminal illness, this theologian of desert spirituality writes a powerful and at times rather scary account of the love of God that is not always, even often, cushioning presence. God’s presence, loving yet at times severe in its mercy, can be aching absence or challenging call to follow into that place where, stripped of all the other things we humans cling to, we finally sense the presence and solace of God. I can’t describe this book easily – it was disturbing and refreshing. Bought in a huge bookshop in Hanover, New Hampshire while visiting my good friends Bob and Becky – Becky sometimes visits here, so leave a comment and say we behaved while we were there Becky!

1999 Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles (International Critical Commentary)

This book was self recommending, and on the Pastoral Epistles was an obvious choice for an ordination anniversary. Alongside Phil Towner’s Commentary in the New International Commentary on the NT Series, also on Timothy and Titus, I’m not sure much more has to be said (in English) beyond these two benchmarks. By the Way, Towner’s was the volume I bought in 2006 for an ordination present to myself!

2000 Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Theology

I can be quite smug about the fact that I was reading Brueggemann avidly long before he became the celebrated, opinionated, brilliant scholar-writer he now is. This is the culmination of a lifetime’s provocative, imaginative, bold and creative encounter with the Old Testament text, which he applies with razor sharp intelligence to the political structures, the social oppressions, the moral scandals of the ancient – and the modern – world. American Republicans are not amongst his most devoted admirers! His book of prayers and meditations, Inscribing the Text, is one of the best indicators of the spirituality, personal, liturgical, political and theological – of this Lutheran magister of Old Testament interpretation. I’ve got a shelf full of this man’s writing – and I doubt if there are three consecutive pages anywhere that don’t make you grab your Bible and see for yourself if you agree with him – and whether or not you do, how many other writers make you grab your Bible so fast, huh?

I met a friend yesterday who is doing research into Alzheimer’s and the nature of the person. We had an intriguing and all too brief discussion about the theological and psychological interface in exploring the nature of religious experience in those whose capacity to know, and remember, and relate self-consciously to others, have been impaired. In the finest book I know on Alzheimer’s and pastoral theology, David Keck (son of Leander Keck, the NT scholar), talks from the experience of his own mother’s struggle with the illness. The title itself describes the outcome – Forgetting Whose We Are. The issue isn’t only that the person forgets who they are; it is that they forget whose they are, that they belong to God. That is a spiritual bereavement that requires wise, compassionate and theologically responsible caring.

For reasons personal and pastoral I have long been interested in the human and theological issues surrounding those various conditions that seem to affect a person’s ability to express and experience who they are. This arises largely from pastoral experience of conditions which seem to impair a person’s spiritual responsiveness and awareness of the meaning and presence of others, and of themselves. Does religious experience require  self consciousness, an awareness of what is happening to us? Are spiritual and social experiences of others, and of others in relation to ourselves, and yes of the Other in relation to ourselves, an essential component or dimension of what it means to be a person?

Pastoral experiences over the years have led to deep and as yet unresolved questions about the connections between the love of God, the nature of personality and the value of the person, and the meaning of the image of God. Also, the difference, both practically and theologically, between someone being a person and their being valued, treated and cherished as a human being. Is the word ‘person’ a theological word at all? Or do we need to recover confidence in more theologically hospitable words such as human, created, image of God, in order to instill in the word ‘person’ the moral and spiritual values that mean we cherish and celebrate human beings in all our glory and brokenness?

And what about the nature of God as Triune love, and the essential belonging and identity that exists in such a communion of love? I have a deep theological feeling (verging on conviction), that a Trinitarian theology of love in relation, holds important clues as to how we love, value, cherish, care for and protect, those whose condition affects their capacity for affective and relational responsiveness rooted in self-consciousness.

  In other words, a Trinitarian understanding of God as a communion of love, and a Christian anthropology that sees humanity as communal as well as individual, has to underlie much of our reflection on Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other conditions that impair many of the capacities that are often related to our understanding of the person and the human. And perhaps here, as much as anywhere, we can understand the Communion of Saints as that fellowship of supporting love within which, in prayer and loving care, we hold all those unable (so far as we can know), to fully know and respond to that Love which surely holds and cherishes them, and will restore to them who they are as children of God. I love the finger pointing saint (bottom right of the icon) and the figure held in the middle and surrounded by the communion of saints – it is an image of, in Julian of Norwich’s lovely phrase, being ‘enfolded in love’.

I’m meeting my friend again soon – and we’ll continue the discussion. Meanwhile, I think of several people I know who are now embarked on such difficult journeys – both those who suffer from Alzheimer’s, and those who love them, for who they have been, who they are, and who they will be. And I pray for them…Lord in your mercy……

Not sure what’s happened on my blog – I am seeing a blank space where my previous posts should be. Don’t know if this should happen or is easily fixed. Experienced bloggers out there who know typepad – is this a simple glitch or have I done something wrong?

Just returned late last night from our holiday at Lake Garda. A detailed itinerary of places visited, people met, photos of places you haven’t been and people you haven’t met, you don’t need. Nor do you want to know the Kafkaesque pantomime of trying to board a plane at Verona airport when there is only one departure lounge with space for 300 people, which is already filled with 500 people waiting for long-delayed flights (to Dublin and Heathrow), and in the meantime three otherflights with hundreds of other people are pushed through security to stand in a corridor for over an hour, with no information, no water, no air conditioning working, and outside temperatures of 35 degrees. And you don’t need to know the inner dialogues and imaginary conversations I was having with the airport security, the airport manager, Ingham’s, the Italian Government – it is hard to live wittily surrounded by anxious sweaty returning holidaymakers, squeezed tighter than sardines into a place where you can’t go back or forward, and listening to increasingly strident complaints answered by decreasingly interested airport staff with shoulder shrugs and firm instructions to stay where we are. No you don’t need to know any of this – but it helps to talk, the catharsis of a typepad and the sympathy of friends!

All of which said, good holiday, and now back to see what all needs to be done to rebuild life in the real world. The first thing to notice is the sheer misery of people down south coping with flooded homes and inundated communities. Makes a difficult couple of hours in an airport a trivial matter of inconvenience and post holiday debility syndrome, and resolved albeit in a festival of disorganisation and non-communication. Watching the late news of folk in danger from floodwater, and their homes under feet if not metres of water, my heart went out to them, and I will pray for them in church today.

Someone defined a good book as one that should be sucked slowly, like a lozenge. Now ‘lozenge’, ever since I was a wee boy and had to suck cough lozenges on account of chronic bronchitis, brought on it seems by secondary smoking, has always seemed to me to be a grown up word for a sweetie, that while tasting a bit different, would definitely do you good. 

Tom Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God is a lozenge of a book. I am reading it slowly because it’s a grown up book that is doing me good. Here’s one of my latest lozenge paragraphs – to be taken slowly and allowed to do good.

…our belief in the Deity of Christ rest,…upon the whole manifestation of ‘the Christ event’ as soteriologically proclaimed and interpreted in the gospels and epistles. We rely upon the whole coherent evangelical structure of historical divine revelation given in the New Testament scriptures. It is when we indwell it, meditate upon it, tune into it, penetrate inside it and absorb it in ourselves, and find the very foundations of our life and thought changing under the creative and saving impact of Christ, and are saved by Christ and personally reconciled to God in Christ that we believe in him as Lord and God. This does not come about, however, without renouncing ourselves in a repentant rethinking of all that we are and claim to know, that is, without our being crucified with Christ in heart and mind and raised to new life in him. (page 53)

A good conversation with Sean and Stuart the other day about why we blog, should we blog, is blogging addictive, why spend time blogging when you can do real writing, what are we avoiding / escaping from when we blog????

(By the way, the pictures on this post are some of the ones I have enjoyed using – they serve to reinforce the human, moral and spiritual dimensions of what I think makes blogging ‘worth it’ for me.)

Well, right up front, some of it must be vanity – the assumption someone other than me is sometimes interested in some of what I sometimes say. So a bit of self-indulgence – but it’s the other reasons that I hope are the main energy sources.

Some of it is creativity – I love words, I enjoy writing, the ‘create a new post’ button gets pressed I see the empty whiteness and get thinking and tapping – not just for the sake of it, but because articulation and communication of thought is a significant defining activity of the human person – and of the Christian following after the One who was "the Word made flesh", the articulate communication of who God is.

Some of it is curiosity – wondering if others think as I do, care about what matters to me, laugh at the same things, but also it helps me learn if and how others see life differently and more interestingly than me. Communal reflection and conversation isn’t about me being re-assured by others reinforcing my view of the world – but a shared exploration of its ambiguity, frustration, loss, wonder, joy and whatever else happens. A creative communal curiosity about the best ways to share life on this planet might break a few vicious cirles.

Some of it is cathartic – when something gets to me, –  perceived injustice, culpable stupidity, inexcusable arrogance, unnecessary rudeness, blatant greed and needless waste, human hurt and humans causing hurt – that and much else – it helps to name it. So naming injustice, resisting cruelty, saying prayer, giving voice both to moral outrage and to moral admiration – now and again, here and there, this and that happens, and the odd piece of prophetic blogging names it and brings it into the light, so that we can see if its deeds are evil, or if it can be clearly seen that it is the work of God.

And some is celebration – living wittily is still an underlying worldview I try to live. Witty as in wise; witty as in funny; witty as in curious, cathartic, creative, celebratory engagement with the life God gives. Not that I manage anywhere near all of that ; or even some of it most of the time. But to enjoy life and people, to be the occasional gladness maker, to resist the suppressive forces of consumer self interest by generously living its opposite – to laugh, encourage, support, affirm, praise, appreciate, all those whose lives impinge on, and enrich, our own living – that’s a worldview compatible with the Kingdom!

Those who missed my induction to blogdom can read what I take living wittily  to mean here. Sean paid me the embarrassingly welcome comment of saying what he thought of that post – he obviously liked it! Living wittily means living attentively (to others), seeing (others) wisely, listening (to others) with critical care, acting supportively and curatively (for others), speaking constructively (to others), and gratefully receiving the grace that comes (from others).

I am posting today at hopeful imagination – about the importance of staying awake – politically, ethically, spiritually, theologicallly ….awake!

Finished the paper for the first meeting of the Centre for the Study of Scottish Christian Spirituality, this Saturday at the College (Block K University of Paisely – need to enter from Storie St past security). From 10 a.m. -1.00 p.m. we will explore the early days of the Iona Community when Anne Muir, the oral historian of the Community, will be our guest speaker. My own contribution is an exploration of George Macleod’s prayers – the title is taken from one of his recurring phrases;

‘When the whole thing becomes the whole blessed thing’.

Stuart will do something on Macleod’s radio broadcasts from Govan, dating the 1930’s. If you are free come along. If you want any other details email me from the email address on the sidebar of this blog.

My main post for today is at hopeful imagination. Took the chance to mention my current Lent Book, Raging With Compassion and connect it with a couple of really big questions? Couldn’t resist another wee post on the astringent wisdom of James Denney though! See earlier post here today!

Today’s main contribution to blogdom is at hopeful imagination 

  But last night’s reading included this Barthian broadside against any marginalising of preaching by the church.

"… the sermon as the exposition of Scripture, becomes fraught with meaning, when it is a preaching of the Word of God. It is simply a truism that there is nothing more important , more urgent, more helpful, more redemptive, and more salutary, there is nothing, from the viewpoint of heaven or earth, more relevant to the real situation than the speaking and the hearing of the Word of God in the originative and regulative power of its truth, in its all-eradicating and all-reconciling earnestness, in the light that it casts not only upon time and time’s confusions but also beyond, toward the brightness of eternity, revealing time and eternity through each other and in each other – the Word, the Logos, of the Living God. Let us ask ourselves – and as we do so think of Jesus Christ – whether the will of God does not drive us, and the plight of man….does not call us, toward this event?

Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (London: H&S, 1928), 123-4.