Living Wittily

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  • Contemplation as Necessary Time Wasting For Followers of Jesus

    The contrast between the contemplative and the active as styles of christian discipleship has an ancient and more or less homoured history in Christian thought and practice. The classic domestic scene where Martha works her pan out in the kitchen and Mary sits at Jesus feet engrossed in whatever Jesus is saying gives a foundational image to the contrast. Vermeer, in what I think is one of his too easily underrated paintings has a quite different take on the discipleship of the kitchen as opposed to the discipleship of the footstool. That loaf of bread is central to the picture and its eucharistic significance unmistakable. Somebody has to nourish, do the needful. I know, Jesus says one thing is needful, and he doesn't mean baking the loaf. His put down of Martha by saying Mary has chosen the better part shouldn't be too quickly seized on though. 

    We live in an age of time poverty, time management and time miserliness. By which I mean there isn't a lot of space and time in contemporary existence for folk to "choose the better part and do the one thing needful". Mainly because we have evolved a culture of endless energy expenditure, and we have bought into it with eyes wide open. We have reconfigured our life priorities so that the things that are needful are productivity, efficiency, time-saving, multi-tasking and in which we admire speed, profit, status and whatever else our bondage to the market might earn. Contemplation is time wasting to the consumer mentality; contentment deprives the market of its power; silence and solitude are just so difficult to achieve in the noise and crowdedness of contemporary life. 

    I was thinking about all this again while reading Divine Discontent, one the newest studies of the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton. The chapter on Merton the contemplative doesn't say much that is new, nor does it need to do so. Merton knew perfectly well the dangers of contemplation as escapism from life and its problems, ours or other people's. His answer needs to be heard by the contemporary church, and by each Christian community. Silence, solitude and contemplation are the dispositions which make it possible for God to be heard above the noise of our wanting. Contemplation creates space in thought and feeling for those concerns that lie light years beyond our own security, satisfaction and self interests – the concerns of God for a loved but broken world.

    The contemplative is the one whose time of reflection and listening equips the mind and conscience to respond with integrity, immediacy and ethical urgency to issues such as those raised by the recent CIA report on torture as a State sponsored weapon. To be quiet is not the same as quiescence; to be inactive is not passivity; to contemplate is not to withdraw from the world, it is to immerse the mind and soul in the hurt and brokenness and wounds of the world. To love the world as God does, and to see it through the eyes of the Crucified God

    In the same way, to be active in caring, faithful in protesting, outspoken on behalf of the poor, vulnerable and unjustly treated, need not mean we live only out of our own inner resources of conscience, emotion and thoughtful anger. That loaf in Vermeer's painting is unbroken, but no one looking at the painting can miss its significance about the bread of life, the broken bread given for the world. We are nourished in the Eucharist, sustained in those times deliberately taken to open ourselves to the presence of God, to listen more carefully to the Words of the living Lord Jesus, to receive as the very essence of our living, the renewing nourishment of the Holy Spirit.  In the contemplative receptivity of Mary, and the active giving of Martha, there is a necessary balance. We only give what we have first received; and only as we give to others, do we truly receive what God has first given to us. Grace is never a private possession; it is always a shared gift. In a hungry world, the same goes for bread. Vermeer knew that.

  • Lost in Next!

    NextWent into the Next Department Store in Aberdeen.

    It is an amazing maze of clothes rails.

    Many of them deeper in the shop are above my head height – my eye level is around 5 foot.

    Yes it is, you doubters. My height is 5'3"max

    What we wanted to buy was at the back of the store by a meandering path, through Narnia type rails of clothes.

    I got separated from Sheila and decided to make my way to the door and wait for her to emerge.

    Manda Quick, next time you're looking for a Prayer Labyrinth try the Next shop in the Bon Accord Centre.

    I wandered lonely as a cloud and found myself amongst kettles, lingerie and stands of what Nanci Griffiths in her song about Woolworths would call 'unnecessary plastic objects.

    No phone signal so no point trying to phone Sheila to tell her I might be gone for some time,

    No need to panic Jim. You came in, you'll get out.

    A small elderly woman examining house coats and slippers, and clearly gifted in the empathy department, noticing my confused bemused unamused search for an exit said, "Aye, you need a periscope in here."

    Sure do!

    Racks of clothes, piped music, ceilings glaring from wall to wall with shadowless lights, crowds of self-absorbed strangers on their mission to consume:

    The opening lines of Dante's Purgatory suddenly find a context in my life!

    Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
    In dark woods, the right road lost.

    Tomorrow I preach on hope, using the text "The people who walk in darkness, have seen a great light."

    Not a bad piece of sermon preparation, lost in a shop! Unable to see which direction to go!! No, not dark woods, over-illumined shops. So many lights that look the same so that instead of clarifying they confuse with their featureless anonymity, their brilliant sameness, their shadowless display.

    Yes. Don't be daft. Of course I got home. Close thing though……………….    

  • Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck and the Importance of Literature

    Angelou“When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young.”

    Maya Angelou was one of the wise people. Wisdom is an endangered species in the information age. Information, knowledge transfer, unlimited cyber- data accessibility. It has never been easier, or harder, to learn stuff. Easier in the sense of information finding and retrieval; harder in the sense of understanding, assimilating, applying and allowing what is learned to become transformative of who we are. 

    Angelou is right. Reading of literature allows us to enter stories not our own, and find ourselves there. A novel is not only a story, it is a world into which we enter, with people we encounter, conversations we overhear and circumstances we experience in the imagination, rehearsing the questions, experimenting with answers, and like pilots in a flight simulator, practice the moves and manoeuvres that might some day save our lives.

    Can that same process take place watching a film? Reading an average novel takes 8 hours assuming 40 pages an hour or a 300 page story.  Even a long film is over in 150 minutes. Going by my own experience, and with no claims it has to be so for anyone else, I've found some films to be just as transformative as reading a novel. That said, the experiences are not comparable at the points that matter most. Written stories depend on words being chosen and crafted; context being created and made credible, at least within the imaginative world of writer and reader. But I wonder if novels depend rather more on description and imaginative sympathy in the reader, to enable characters to form and grow and become living agents in the story.

    Yes there''s the film script, and the good direction that enables characters in a film to emerge into their identity and seek to win the assent or resistance of the viewer, just as in the novel. But the written story has the great advantage of slowed down reading, re-reading, pausing between chapters for seconds, minutes, hours, even days, during which time the story slowly seeps into the mind and emotional biosphere of the reader.On the other hand, in less than two hours a film can so impress itself on the mind and memory, the conscience and emotions, that seeing it the first time is a memorable and world-view altering experience. I think of Schindler's List, The Mission, Patch Adams, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Kite Runner, The Shawshank Redemption, The Reader, as films chosen at random which at the very least demanded, or at least encouraged, some reconsideration of how I viewed the world, myself or other people.

    AtticusI suppose the adaptation of a book for the screen is a good way of understanding some of the differences and similarities of these two experiences of story – story read, and story viewed. Reading Pride and Prejudice is an education in manners, motives and mischief, conducted by an  author whose scalpel is precise and whose skill exquisite in opening up the inner machinations of social control and personal exchange; watching the BBC adaptation is an altogether different experience, but done faithfully to the original, it can achieve much the same effect. I recently watched Gregory Peck as the lawyer in To Kill A Mocking Bird; would I have needed to read the book to feel the ethical earthquake rumbling through that whole film? 

    In a world now incurably visual, even digital in its story-telling, the written word, literature remains an essential humanising and transformative medium. Having just read Lila by Marilynne Robinson, I am persuaded all over again, the written story remains a means of grace. But then, having watched To Kill a Mocking Bird in all its black and white and grey portrayals of human moral behaviour, I'm equally convinced that film has the same capacity to shake our assumptions and shatter our complacencies.  

  • When God Almighty Came to Be One of Us.

    This is one of my favourite carols. Written in the late 1960's by Micahel Hewlett, a C of E Vicar wanting to update the context within which God comes amongst us. It goes to the folk tune The Keel Row, and the good vicar was delighted to hear of a carol service in India which finished using his carol as the children danced down ther aisle and out of the church.

    When God Almighty came to be one of us,

    Masking the glory of his golden train,

    Millions of plain things kindled by accident

    And they will never be the same again.

    Sing all you midwives, dance all the carpenters,

    Sing all the publicans and shepherds too,

    God in his mercy uses the commonplace,

    God on his birthday had a need of you.

     

    Splendour of Rome and local authority,

    Working on policy with furrowed head,

    Joined to locate Messiah’s nativity,

    Just wehre the prophets had already said.

    Sing all you tax-men, dance the commissioners,

    Sing civil servants and police men too,

    God in his purposes uses the governments

    God on his birthday had a need of you.

     

    Wise men they called them, earnest astrologers,

    Watching for meaning in the moving stars,

    Science or fantasy, learned or laughable,

    Theirs was a vision that was brought to pass.

    Sing all you wise men, dance all the scientists,

    Whether your theories are false or true,

    God uses knowledge, God uses ignorance,

    God on his birthday had a need of you.

     

    Sing all creation, made for his purposes,

    Called by his providence to live and move:

    None is unwanted, none insignificant,

    Love needs a universe of folk to love.

    Close friends and strangers, ethnic minorities,

    Old folk and young folk and families too,

    God on his birthday, and to eternity,

    God took upon himself the need of you.

  • Biography as Theology, and As Studied Humanism

    Biography well written is like a window on another person's world, filtering borrowed light into our own. Human experience has so much, and so little in common. Yes we all eat and drink, laugh and cry, make love and make trouble, grieve and celebrate, are children and maybe parents, grow our hopes and see some of them flower or watch others wither, work hard for what we get and sometimes get what we never deserved or worked for. So much in common – and so little. Because who we are and what happens to us, the givens and circumstances over which we have no control, the choices that come to us and the choices we make, the contingencies and shocks and surprises that together give content to our story – these have infinite variety, endless possibility, and their contingency and happenstance are what make each life unique, each story different, every biography a novel in the making.

    WaddellI'm re-reading one or two biographies, which means I want to re-visit one or two favourite human beings, mainly people whose life stories, in all their specific and unrepeatable contingency, illumine the rooms of my own life. The biography of Helen Waddell by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine nun, is a masterpiece of the biographer's art. This is quite simply one of the best written biographies I've read. The writing is both precise and elegant, the story is both critical and appreciative. The understanding and insight into the mind and motives, the emotional climate and intellectual brilliance of Waddell's inner life, give the portrait the detailed finesse of a Vermeer, observing and representing the realities of one person's daily life and inner struggles.

    What is it that makes the translator of Medieval Latin Lyrics, the writer of the unlikely best-seller The Wandering Scholars, and the student of The Deset Fathers such a fascinating human being? This scholar poet was born in Tokyo to missionary parents, she revered Latin from age 9, was familiar with Greek poetry and visited Shinto Temples, a brilliant Graduate of Queen's Belfast, for 44 years friend of the English Literature doyen George Sainstbury, crammed lecture halls in Oxford, was close friends with Stanley Baldwin and received by Queen Mary. Later in life she became entangled in domestic cares, the demands of life during the Second World War, eventually overtaken by dementia, probably now diagnosed as Alzheimer's Disease. It is a life lived gloriously, and at times mundanely; a life of profound faith made joyful by a spirit of generosity and expansiveness; her mind endlessly curious, tenacious in pursuit of the beautiful the good and the true; soaked in history and the love of all things medieval. A scholar's life, but also the life of a deeply compassionate, imaginative, practical minded, occasionally eccentric, unfailingly interesting person. 

    I've read the book twice, and about to read it again. John Bunyan she disliked; Augustine she enjoyed. "Thou didst touch me, and I burned for thy peace..Too late have I loved thee. Beauty so old, and yet so new."  Is there anything in Bunyan equal  to that one sentence, she asked. Then after reading Pilgrim's Progress, she quotes Mr Standfast, "I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, There I have coveted to set my foot". On reading that, Waddell conceded, " And I take back everything!. Reading this biography brings you into the company of two remarkably sharp intellects and just as remarkably capacious souls. Corrigan on Waddell, a coalescence of brilliance.  

  • Advent Comes Nine Months After the Annunciation for Obvious Reasons!

    Annunciation

    The Annunciation comes in the Church Calendar months before Christmas – for obvious and natural reasons. But Advent is a time when it's important to look back in order to look forward; Christmas day is the fulfilment of the Annunciation, itself the fulfilment of long ago promises, made in the heart of God so long ago we call it Eternity.

    The word "mystery" is not fit for purpose, but what words would do any better at explaining the inexplicable, attempting to describe that which is categorically beyond the efficacy of all our meaning laden categories? So we are stuck with mystery, stuck in mystery, mysteriously stuck within the limits and constraints of our own thinking. Advent celebrates unthinkable possibilities now become familiar and realisable through the Yes of a young woman to the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. Her response, "Be it so" is itself beyond the understanding of all but those whose hearts beat in synchronic obedience to the call of God.

    The contemporary demand for relevance, for pratcical application, for reducing and splitting a text by force into manageable parts that can be 'embodied', 'lived', 'practiced', destroys the hidden inner structure of mysteries more suited to wonder, adoration and silent inner assent to what is beyond us. So I like Jane Kenyon's poem, The Bat, and smiling at its relevance way up here in the North East, and its reference to how, long ago, the Holy Spirit came dangerously near, and redirected history.

    The Bat

    I was reading about rationalism,
    the kind of thing we do up north
    in early winter, where the sun
    leaves work for the day at 4:15

    Maybe the world is intelligible
    to the rational mind;
    and maybe we light the lamps at dusk
    for nothing…

    Then I heard the wings overhead.

    The cats and I chased the bat
    in circles—living room, kitchen,
    pantry, kitchen, living room…
    At every turn it evaded us

    like the identity of the third person
    in the Trinity: the one
    who spoke through the prophets,
    the one who astounded Mary
    by suddenly coming near.

  • Advent Intercessions For Those Who When Christmas Comes, Don’t Get It.

    “We bring good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people."

    Advent God, who comes to us in love, peace and joy, We thank you

    • for love that nourishes and sustains our hearts,
    • for peace that enables us to live in friendship with others
    • for joy that illumines and inspires our lives.

     Yet

    • To be loved and not care for the unloved,
    • To live in peace and ignore the shattered lives of others
    • To celebrate our own enjoyment selfishly,

    Are sins against you, O Advent God, which deny the very message we preach.

    So in thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, We pray for those for whom joy seems far away and for others to enjoy.

    • For all whose loneliness is made worse by parties, laughter and other people’s joy:
    • For bereaved people still hurting from the death of someone they have loved
    • For wives, husbands and children, whose lives have been broken by family break-up, divorce and the dismantling of their hopes.
    • For older people now living on their own, 1 in 8 of whom will see nobody over Christmas

    Lord in their loneliness, may these your children know the presence of the Wonderful Counsellor, and comfort them through us. 

     ……….

    In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are hungry and homeless at the very time when everyone else will be eating their fill, enjoying the warm comfort of home.

    • Those men and women and young people whose lives simply collapsed and they fell through all the safety nets
    • Those for whom the big issue isn’t a magazine, but the hopelessness, loneliness and placelessness of not having a home
    • Those who have to stand in supermarket queues looking at others with stacked trolleys and finding it impossible not to envy
    • Those who won’t receive any Christmas cards because they have no address, no live relationships with their past

     Lord for those who feel empty and unwanted, be to them the Everlasting Father, and love them through us.

     ,,,,,,,,,,,,

    In thanking you for the joys that illumine our lives, we pray for all who are ill, or suffering, or anxious about their future

    • We pray your compassion on those who are in hospital, feeling isolated, dis-empowered, and often disorientated
    • We pray your strength for those who struggle day and daily with chronic illness, constant pain, and a sense of their own weakness
    • We pray your peace for those who care for their loved family or friend, and who often wonder how long they can keep up with the demands and needs of one they love
    • We pray your patience and respite for those who care for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other conditions that take away the sense of self, and descend into loneliness.

    Lord for those who are suffering and anxious, and for those needing strength to care for them, be to them the Almighty God whose love and joy and peace surround, uphold and will never let go,

    Through Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, Amen

    (I wrote this prayer for those who find Christmas an ordeal and yet another expreience of exclusion – we'll use it at our Advent Service of reflection in Montrose this Sunday – feel free to use. I've always thought it odd to put a copyright on prayers :))

  • He made the stars also: Advent in Five Words.

    Revised

     

     December Moon, Through Winter Trees

    In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…God made two great lights – the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He made the stars also.

    In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…all things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made…The Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

    The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld His glory, full of grace and truth.

    I call it the ultimate parenthesis. "He made the stars also." The best theological put down in the Bible. Stuck in Babylon, with the gods of the Empire in your face, stamped on your money, sold in the markets, and made permanent in the power-speaking architecture of Temple and State, you'd think the Exiles would get the message: our Gods are bigger than your god. But no. Some clever Jewish priest writes and tells the story of creation, and describes the architecture of the heavens. The stars are not gods, they are the handiwork of the God of Israel. Babylon is a mere empire, but God is the maker and breaker of the nations. So, these stars that the Babylonians worship and fear; those zodiac signs that an entire civil service studies in order to predict events and control the future. They're no big deal. They are a side show, albeit the greatest side-show in the universe. "He made the stars also". It's that devastating diminutive, "also". The whole infrastructure of Babylonian religion collapses under the weight of that parenthesis.

    Advent is a time to look at the night sky, preferably just after reading Genesis 1 and John 1. And remembering that we live in our own Babylon of consumer capitalism, technological addiction, globalised trade, ecological vandalism, oppressive imagery, militarist problem-solving, and selling out to all the other gods of our own making. We may behave as if we are masters of the universe. But the masterpiece we are busy dismantling, defacing, despoiling and 'owning', belongs to the Creator God, who, by the way, "made the stars also". The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not – neither understands, nor defeats, the light of God. "He made the stars also". That is Advent in five words.

  • Advent and the Light on Our Faces

     

    Marianne Stokes, "Candlemas Day", 1901

    Advent I turn to my favourite poets. Even those poems I know by heart, shed light into the duller recesses of routine, and illumine the dark corners that threaten hope. Candlemas is the other side of Advent, but Levertov's poem, in three short sentences, contrasts the certitude of faith with the realities of cross, tomb and darkness.

    Candlemas

    With certitude
    Simeon opened
    ancient arms
    to infant light.
    Decades
    before the cross, the tomb
    and the new life,
    he knew
    new life.
    What depth
    of faith he drew on,
    turning illumined
    towards deep night.

    Denise Levertov

  • Advent is for a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

    Fra Angelico: The Naming of John the Baptist

    Fra Angelico, Naming of John the Baptist.

    Advent is when, in an impatient world, we wait patiently. The connection between waiting, patience and hope is strong, and if we can wait in patient hope then perhaps we are beginning to understand what it means to live by faith. Because to wait patiently and hopefully is an act of continuing trust.

    In an impatient world we've become used to speed of delivery, everything from fast food to same day online pick up points. Saving time, filling time, using time, we've slipped into a mindset that thinks we can control time. Slow it down, speed it up, adapt it to our own purposes. The default secular worldview ignores, perhaps deliberately obscures our ultimate helplessness to control time. Indeed, the pace of our lives these days, our determination to compress as much energy, achievement, possession, entertainment, work and doing into every hour and day and week and year, is making us impatient with, well, with waiting. No wonder hope is all but obsolete, and the long view of the forward looking spirit seems hardly relevant in a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

    Advent comes as a reminder to our time obsessed times, that time is passing. God is not the servant of our wants. The determined redemptive purposes of a love that is Eternal are not likely to be derailed by our impatience. "Time like an ever flowing stream , bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, like a dream dies at the opening day."

    So as Advent begins, even if we do live in a frantic culture which idolises now and worships time saving efficiency; wait patiently; hope trustfully; look attentively; live faithfully. Pray with urgent slowness. Speak with considered kindness. Let longing be as the word says, long. Wonder cannot be rushed. Mystery takes time to unfold.

    Year on year, each day of our lives, God comes with the slow deliberation of eternal purpose into the frantic filling of our days. If we can slow down, stop and wait long enough, the Advent of God brings life's renewing. The connection between our waiting, our patience and our hope is secured only by God's unbreakable promise. Advent is the time to offer once more the vulnerable but heart meant yes to that promise: "But to you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings." And no. For all our attempts at control and speed, we can't make the sun rise on demand. In God's time. That's what Advent is. Learning to live in God's time.

    Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

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