Living Wittily

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  • The Simon and Garfunkel Story. A Journey Back into My Teens!

    Tonight it's The Simon and Garfunkel Story, at the Music Hall in Aberdeen. These are the two demi-Gods of my own teenage years, I thought then as now they have a sound and a voice that ranges from playful to poignant, from mischief to wistfulness, from passionate political protest to love fulfilled or requited. And as a young man I sensed there was a seriousness in their take on life, a humanity and compassion in many of their lyrics, anger and resistance to those forces and social realities that dehumanise, from civil rights to Vietnam, from urban poverty to human exploitation. That may all sound idealistic, and much of it is, but listening to them nearly 50 years after Sound of Silence was released, their own peculiar sound still re-awakens memories of my own emerging view of a world where JFK, MLK, Vietnam, CND and other issues and causes were worked out in my own developing sense of who I was and who I wanted to be, and what I thought of the world. 

    Years later, hearing an actor reading Robert Frost's poem, Acquainted with the Night, I sensed the emotional and imaginative connections with the lyrics of The Sound of Silence. So tonight is a tribute show – but for me it has longer roots in my memory. It's an interesting question how formative repeated listening to resonant lyrics borne on music that is emotionally potent can be on moral taste, pers0nal values, life choices and our ability to think for ourselves. Of course we grow away from music of such powerful immediacy, but not before it has touched us into a different awareness of who we are and what matters to us. 

    There were plenty other groups and artists pouring out music in that decade of my growing up that was the 1960's, when nearly all the classic Simon and Garfunkel songs were produced. They have made a life habit of falling out, re-uniting then splitting again. Paul Simon particularly has pursued a solo career of considerable substance. But the songs in the musical tonight are the iconic ones, given context in narrative and dialogue between the songs. I'm expecting to be a wee bit nostalgic – and grateful for the giftedness of such music into our lives. The Sound of Silence, I am a Rock, Bookends, Homeward Bound, Cecilia, The Boxer, Bridge Over Troubled Water – take your pick, they are masterpieces in my canon of classic folk rock!

    For those who want poetry here are two brilliant evocations of urban life, its anxieties, loneliness and understated menace to the humanity of those who live in cities where the drivers are not self-evidently beneficial to those who live there.

    Acquainted With the Night (Robert Frost)

    I have been one acquainted with the night.
    I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
    I have outwalked the furthest city light.

    I have looked down the saddest city lane.
    I have passed by the watchman on his beat
    And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

    I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
    When far away an interrupted cry
    Came over houses from another street,

    But not to call me back or say good-bye;
    And further still at an unearthly height,
    A luminary clock against the sky

    Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
    I have been one acquainted with the night.

     

    The Sound of Silence (Paul Simon)

    Hello darkness, my old friend
    I've come to talk with you again
    Because a vision softly creeping
    Left its seeds while I was sleeping
    And the vision that was planted
    In my brain still remains
    Within the sound of silence

    In restless dreams I walked alone
    Narrow streets of cobblestone
    'Neath the halo of a street lamp
    I turned my collar to the cold and damp
    When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of
    A neon light that split the night
    And touched the sound of silence

    And in the naked light I saw
    Ten thousand people, maybe more
    People talking without speaking
    People hearing without listening
    People writing songs that voices never share and no one dared
    Disturb the sound of silence

    Fools said I, you do not know
    Silence like a cancer grows
    Hear my words that I might teach you
    Take my arms that I might reach you
    But my words like silent raindrops fell
    And echoed in the wells of silence

    And the people bowed and prayed
    To the neon God they made
    And the sign flashed out its warning
    In the words that it was forming
    And the signs said, 'The words of the prophets
    Are written on the subway walls and tenement halls'
    And whispered in the sounds of silence.

  • Caring for the Words and the Text of the New Testament.

    We all have our idiosyncracies. From food preferences to the clothes we wear, from the TV programmes that do it for us, to those that we have never watched  – and could conceive of no circumstances that might persuade us ever to watch them. Idiosyncracies make our world an interesting, colourful diverse and exciting place to be. It's those infinitely variable human differences that make us who we are, those personal interests and odd enthusiasms, that story that is only and can only be ours, and that only we can tell, the characteristics and quirks that give us our individiuality, uniqueness and definition as the specific, different person we are.

    So if I say I am fascinated by the history of New Testament research, I am referring to one of my idiosyncracies. An enthusiasm limited in its clientele, a minority interest group even in the rarefied world of New Testament scholarship, but for me one of the most exciting areas of study I've lived in for decades. It goes back to one book; The History of the Interpretation of the New Testament, by Stepehn Neil. I spent a summer holiday in 1984 reading that book from cover to cover along with Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October and the biography of Temple Gairdner of Cairo. Who he? That will be another post.

    CodexStephen Neil's book reads like a novel, a biography and a history all in one. It was updated in a Second Edition by N T Wright, and now covers the history of New Testament scholarship up to 1986. Recently a mammoth 3 volume History of New Testament Research from the 18th to the end of the 20th Century was completed by William Baird, and I've just started to read it. Baird is yet another example of scholars who go to heroic lengths in their quest for understanding of the text, and the history, interpretation, reception and influence of the New Testament over 2000 years of reflection, study, understanding and misunderstanding. These volumes trace the fascinating mixture of literary detective work, historical synthesis, biography, textual analysis, academic politics, and colliding theological presuppositions, philosophical assumptions and scientific theorising of around 300 years of intense study. All to make sense of 28 documents the length of a medium sized paperback, written around 2000 years ago by a variety of people and communities of no great moment then, but of vast significance for subsequent human history.

    SinaiIf you want to know what's so fascinating about this stuff let me recommend Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Martin Soskice as a good place to start. It tells of two sisters from Kilbarchan ( In Victorian times a wee Scottish village with weaving mills) who had ambitions to learn and travel. They visited Mount Sinai monastery, discovered ancient New Testament manuscripts and codices, learned several Oriental languages in order to translate them, and contributed significantly to the science of textual criticism and the search for the earliest witnesses to the biblical text.In doing all this they had to take on the male bastions of academia who had little patience and less respect for the accomplishments of these women.

    How scholars establish the reliability of the text of the New testament is a mixture of tedium and inspiration, it requires disciplined sifting of textual minutiae and instinctive genius for language, demands a scrupulous weighing evidence and imaginative but historically plausible reconstructing of context and provenance. During this period of Lent when I'm thinking about words, how they are used, the search for a responsible stewardship of words, and why we should care for words like conservators and curators of meaning. I reflect on the countless scholars, the millions of hours of study, the adventures and the heartache, the passion of the quest and the disciplines of intellectual integrity and humility before a text that no scholar can own, possess or control. And I'm grateful for such holy industry. At least in this sense, of careful attention to words that are life changing, Lent is a time to re-read the New Testament, wth a care for what it says.

     

  • Words as Couriers of Hope

    DSC02171Another way of thinking about the words I speak during Lent and beyond, would be to find ways of speaking that give sound and presence to the cardinal virtues – Hope, Love, Faith.

    When I speak is hope enhanced, love confirmed, faith sustained?

    So what about hope? Do my words encourage hearts and lift up heads and strengthen feeble knees?

    Or, by something I say, casually or thoughtfully, is love kept faithful, set free and made more real?

    And faith? Do words and sentences, comments and conversations, greetings and silent gestures, invite faith, instil trust, affirm worth?

    But let's begin with hope. If ever the Christian witness needed to repristinate a word that has become obscured and vague; if ever a word was slipping towards the margins of our living like an almost lost memory; if ever a word was under siege from its opposites, pressured to the edges of personal experience and political priority, that word is hope.

    No that isn't a counsel of despair, nor a surrender to the dark side. It is a recalling of Christian obedience to a faith where the deep seeds of hope are embedded in Calvary, that deep red soil where they propagate and rise in the flowers and fruits of Resurrection.  Resurrection hopefulness is our most powerful, sustainable energy source; and if so it should be evident in the way we look at the world and talk about it. The blazing radiance of resurrection should illuminate our words. So as a Lenten corrective to much that we feel and think and therefore say, here are two helpful voices:

    May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. (Romans 15.13)

    Try memorising that, and saying it before you open the office door of a colleague and waste their day, or when sitting in the hardly moving traffic queue fuming at all this precious time in your life that is so frustratingly unproductive, or when life comes tumbling or rumbling towards us with the promise of yet more hassle. 

    The antidote to which might be this poem by Denise Levertov, who knows the resurrection power of words, kindly spoken, courageously proclaimed, firmly stated, angrily shouted, gently whispered, hilariously shared, and as couriers of hope.

    New Year Poem. 1981

    I have a small grain of hope—
    one small crystal that gleams
    clear colors out of transparency.

    I need more.

    I break off a fragment
    to send you.

    Please take
    this grain of a grain of hope
    so that mine won’t shrink.

    Please share your fragment
    so that yours will grow.

    Only so, by division,
    will hope increase,

    like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
    unless you distribute
    the clustered roots, unlikely source—
    clumsy and earth-covered—
    of grace.

    –Denise Levertov

    Last summer, one of our roses (photo above) produced this Trinitarian reminder. For this and the next two posts it will be a reminder of the three cardonal virtues of Faith and Hope and Love.

     

  • Beware of Deedless Words

    So, Lent is about not speaking empty words. The NIV translates Jesus saying in Matthew 12.36: "But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken." NRSV says "careless": KJV "idle". An old 17th Century commentary paraphrases, "frothy language".

    Now this becomes interesting. Matthew uses a Greek word meaning "unemployed, lazy" if it's used of a person. But it means "unproductive" when used of something like a word. Words should lead to deeds. Words that do nothing and go nowhere are unproductive, fruitless, make no difference to the way things are. In that sense are empty of purpose, devoid of practical meaning. Ulrich Luz, the premier contemporary commentator on Matthew (his 3 volume commentary is a prized personal possession over which I inordinately gloat!) connects this hard saying of Jesus to the way the Church speaks and acts: "On the day of judgment human wordas are asked whether they have produced deeds, and in Matthew that means essentially whether they have produced love." (Luz, Matthew, Hermeneia, Vol. 2. p.211) In other words Jesus is warning against talking the talk but not walking the walk.

    In a wonderful book, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, G B Caird expands on this idea that words accomplish things. He writes, "The point is not thoughtless words, such as a carefree joke, but deedless ones…the broken promise, the unpaid vow, words which said "I go sir" and never went (Matt 21.29)"

    Between them, Luz and Caird guide my Lenten search for responsible stewardship of my words and speech.

    How many of my words are deedless?

    Can my words, let alone my word, be trusted?

    What compels me to speak out and act out of what I say?

    What words will best stand the scrutiny of the Judgement if not those uttered against injustice, if not words of performative kindness?

    PatonThose questions remind me of a conversation in one of Alan Paton's short stories, in Ah! But Your Land is Beautiful. A conversation takes place between a white man and his black friend about the dangers of protesting against the system of apartheid and its inhumanity to those crushed by state sanctioned segregation and discrimination. I think Paton captures exactly what Jesus words mean if we are going to walk the walk as well as talk the talk:

    “When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn’t face that question."

    Well I did say that a Lenten examination of how I use words might be harder than giving up coffee or chocolate.

  • Giving Up Empty Words for Lent

    It's Ash Wednesday. Once again the annual give-upfest comes around. Need to eat less. Do more exercise. Reduce caffeine. Refuse chocolate. Prohibit clicking the Amazon shopping basket. Stop cheating in speed limits. Walk more and drive less. Keep tabs on food waste. Keep tabs on my own waist. Detox from the Internet.  I've just written a Lenten Decalogue. Ten new commandments to make life, me, the world, a little more this, a little less that.

    Raphael52I'm not going to try to keep any of them. Each one is valid, valuable and salutary. These I should be doing whether it's Lent or not. The fact I can so easily compile such a personally relevant checklist of virtues or their absence is evidence enough of my need for improvement.

    And yet. Somehow this year I feel less interested in pulling out a few weeds, and more interested in replenishing the soil. Not so much interested in dealing with this or that bad habit, more challenged by the issue of the kind of person whose habits they are.

    Which brings me to Jesus, believe it or not – but I'd prefer that you did believe it. Matthew 12.35-37 tends not to be amongst the more comforting words Jesus ever spoke.  My guess is we interpret them as hyperbole, a good natured warning phrased strongly for rhetorical effect. That is a category mistake. These words are spoken with an exacting exactness – Jesus means what he says. Seriously, Jesus is being serious.

    35 A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him. 36 But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken. 37 For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.

    So as I mentioned in a previous post on the Epistle of James, this Lent I am giving up words. Well at least giving up, so far as prayerulness and carefulness allow, empty words. Earlier today Professor Dana Greene left a comment here on Living Wittily. It relates to a post I did on Elizabeth Jennings and one of her poems. To show what words are and achieve in human relations when they are not empty, and to give an idea of a stewardship of words, here is one of a good number of poems in which she considers language, words and the therapeutic effect of good words spoken:

    Hours and Words

    There is a sense of sunlight where

    warm messages and eager words

    Are sent across the turning air,

    Matins, Little Hours and Lauds,

     

    When people talk and hope to teach

    A happiness that they have found.

    Here prayer finds a soil that is rich

    and sets a singing underground.

     

    Let there be silence that is full

    of blossoming hints. When it is dark

    Men's minds can link and their words fill

    A saving boat that is God's ark.

     

    O language is a precious thing

    And ministers deep needs. It will

    soothe the mind and softly sing

    and echo forth when we are still.

     

    As a Lenten discipline, what might it look like to cultivate a stewardship of words, develop a discipline of language, practice a care for speech as therapeutic. And perhaps above all, a recovery of the eloquence of silence, out of which comes our deepest thoughts and those words that have a lasting worth and legacy in the enriched lives of others.

    The painting  by Raphael, Paul Preaching at the Areopagus, has its own message about the importance of the words we speak out of fullness of heart and the empty words we do better to refrain from speaking. Remembering we speak in the presence of the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

  • Wednesday Nights are Wolf Hall.

    Wolf hall 2The title of this blog is Living Wittily. The phrase comes from Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons. The play is based on the life of Thomas More and explores the moral, psychological and theological morass created by Henry VIII and his ruthless determination to produce a male heir with or without Catherine of Aragon. Of course, it was going to have to be without her, which set Henry on a collision course with the Pope, the Catholic Church, and any close to him whose conscience prohibited approval of the King's dynastic goals.

    Disapproval of the policies of a Tudor King may well be dictated by conscience but it was equally an act of political suicide and invited martyrdom. This was brilliantly captured in the most recent episode of Wolf Hall, in which the King's ruthlessness, Thomas Cromwell's manipulative cleverness, and Thomas More's adamantine refusal to violate his conscience. were composed into a concerto movement of tragic slowness, tortuous windings, and an outcome made certain in its fatal climax. The psychological subtleties and virtuoso ethical performances of More were never going to save him in a drama about power in need of substance, about evolving national identity, debts of remembered grievance being called in, and the beginnings of Parliamentary muscle flexing towards a more democratic distribution of power, at least amongst the nobility and between Parliament and King.

    Anton-Lesser-Thomas-More-012The portrayal of More's moral dilemma and spiritual crisis, was a brilliant narrative of a frightened man whose fear of death was only tolerable because the alternative would be the fear of an enraged God should he go against conscience. In Bolt's brilliant paraphrase of human tragedy and moral perplexity, More claimed he sought to serve God in the tangle of his mind. Equally brilliant, was Cromwell's deconstruction of More's own self-image as one who never sought another human being's harm. Although not made more prominent than it needed to be, the use of the rack, burning at the stake, and the whole hellish machinery of religious violence against those who believe differently, is a telling reminder in our own day of the cruelties and violations unleashed when an ideology with the status of a religion secures its dominance by a process of elimination. I welcomed the reference to the deceits behind Tyndale's capture, More's gloating piety, and Cromwell's much less religious distaste for religious persecution as justifiable on theological grounds.In this production More is saint and sinner, with the weight on the saint oblivious of his own deep and cruel sins against others.

    Which doesn't mean Thomas Cromwell was himself above coercion of conscience and the use of force to suppress dissent; More's hounding to execution is part of the evidence against him. 

    Anne_boleyn_1_wolf_hallAnother enjoyable and important strand in the production is the role of women in the making and breaking of power in a cultural context so structurally masculine. While serial Queens were to be taken and discarded if they failed Henry's obsession with succession, Catherine, and Anne Boleyn, are not portrayed as the wilting, timid, or unintelligent consorts in other productions. They are strong; they understand power; they form alliances and plot against dangers; their fears are real, but so is their courage and integrity. They are an important alternative narrative to the insecure King desperate to establish a dynasty, and the power hungry nobility and advisers whose loyalties are ambiguous, and whose own security has to be bought at the expense of others. 

    A TV adaptation will always struggle to persuade those who are fans of the original book, but this one comes as close to the real thing as may be possible. The occasional historical anachronism is easily ignored in a production that varies in pace but is overall a leisurely unfolding, increasing in tension and crisis, and which therefore allows the chief characters to be developed and established in all their emotional complexity and political ambiguity in the mind of the viewer.

    Wolf-HallThomas Cromwell is I think convincing, chilling, hard to read, but a man with a long memory for grievance and a passively violent way of settling things his way and in his own interests. Not sure what it says about me but so far I like him! His portrait being painted in this week's episode (by Holbein?) placed him in the classic partial side profile of Renaissance portraiture, and showed that same strong, unreadable face, unflinching in gaze, and coming alive only when he speaks in an understated, considered forcefulness of someone who always, but always, thinks before he speaks.

    I can understand why Hilary Mantel is very happy with the adaptation. It will bear repeat broadcasting later.

  • From Facebook to Youtube to a Theologian, Poet and Philosopher.

    HartThe Australian poet, theologian and philosopher Kevin J Hart gives an intriguing interview here What is so helpful in this extract from a fuller conversation is Hart's indebtedness to an algebra lesson for his conversion. The Damascus road experience came to him while looking at a blackboard with a simple equation, and his realisation as he looked around the class that he was now seeing the world differently. At this stage there was no theological content, more a sense of the mystery and longing and beauty of life distilled into the elegant rightness of an equation. Later his discovery of a Southern Baptist congregatrion (in Australia), opened him to new and deeper longings for a God both transcendent and immediate, whose love beyond words was nevertheless sung out with passionate intensity in hymns utterly inadequate to their theme, and in their lack of metaphysical reach, all the more poignant and valid.

    When later at age 21 he converted to Catholicism, he became interested in the mystical streams of Catholic theology, and in the tension between kataphatic and apophatic theology,the classic distinction between positive theology as a revelation and way of knowing, and negative theology as a more reticent admission of unknowing. Hart is an important voice because what he says is refracted through a mind at ease with mathematical abstraction, careful in theological humility, precise in philosophical reflection, imaginative in poetic discourse, and each of these articulated within his Catholic faith in which the sacraments function as reminder and confirmation of the God in whose mysterious conjoining love Creation, human being, and life itself subsists.

    Hearing Hart's testimony is a reminder of the need for some apophatic reticence in  all of us if we are ever tempted to make our own experience the paradigm, our own theology the norm, our own take on the world a claim we know 'the way it is'. Truth is not univocal, as if 'it means one thing and that's what I think it means'. Nor is truth equivocal, as if 'it means what each person thinks it means'. Mathematics, poetry, evangelical hymnody, mystical theology, Continental philosophy are any one of them slightly off the beaten path of the ordinary; as an intersection of disciplines, intellectual, theological and ethical, they provide for Hart a multi-vocal exploration of this vast mystery, this terrifyingly beautiful conundrum that is our human existence in relation to the God in whom we live and move and have our being.

    I came across this interview clip by entire accident, follwing several links from facebook to youtube. By such random purposefulness life is enriched. 

  • Listening to Your Life Knowing God Listens Too.

    These past few days I've been thinking. I do quite a lot of that. Live inside my own head, reflect on this and that, consider, ponder, worry, praise. Rehearse memories, imagine conversations, read, pray, give thanks, complain. Feel guilty or contented, uplifted or sad, impressed by beauty or depressed by brokenness; these and other emotional and intellectual puzzles are the colours and sounds of that world known only to me, and God. And in the most important sense, thankfully, known better to God than to me.

    DSC02639So how much of all of that inner noise and silence, searching and finding, that continuous flowing of thought and feeling that is the life I inhabit, how much of all this muchness of me is prayer. Do I pray or does God pray in me? Is prayer my seeking God or God seeking me? Is prayer indeed "the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed"? As an introvert I hope so, because there is a lot of living goes on inside our own heads, and inside our own hearts, and much of it a shared secret between us and God. Interestingly I find that more reassuring than worrying.

    "O Lord, you have searched me and know me….you perceive my thoughts from afar…you are familiar with all my ways…before a word is on my lips you know it completely, O Lord." All this inner noise, like an orchestra tuning up and never quite ready for the concerto at which I am to be the guest soloist, God hears it, knows and understands the pre-performance anxiety. The closed circuit of action and reaction to all that happens in my life, that turns the affective and emotional kaleidoscope of my inner life into ever changing patterns I can't predict, God sees, and knows and understands the passion and the hope, the longing and the shadows, the joy of love found and the fear of love lost. 

    All this is a reminder to myself of something too often overlooked and under-appreciated. A human being is a stupendous mystery of unique and eternal worth to God, created and known and enfolded in the creative love that calls us into the freedom and glory that is a human life.

    For you created my inmost being;
        you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
    14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
        your works are wonderful,
        I know that full well.
    15 My frame was not hidden from you
        when I was made in the secret place,
        when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
    16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
        all the days ordained for me were written in your book
        before one of them came to be.

    IMG_0127There are of course deep and perplexing questions posed by such theological optimism about my life and metaphysical confidence about the way the universe works. I neither ignore them as irrelevant nor answer them with answers by definition partial, limited and speculative. Like everyone else I have to live with them. As a Christian I have no calling to understate the reality of evil, give intelligible answers to the tragedy of suffering, explain with what could only be uninformed impertinence the mystery of life's injustices cruelties and waste. No, as a Christian, facing the full realities of human existence and being a participant in this essential part of the human story that is my life, I think, pray and act out my life in the long shadow of a cross illumined by the blaze of resurrection.

    Donald Mackinnon, was a courageous, intrepid explorer of the metaphysical landscape of 20th Century philosophical theology. He was a giant of a man, with steel wool eyebrows, a a love for his Harris Tweed jacket, and a voice that compelled attention, as with the huge hands and the body language of an Olympic wrestler he grappled and swayed to get a better hold on ideas both massive and elusive, but whose truth if it can be held and stated, are words of life. In one of his last publications he wrote movingly of the witness of the Christian church in a world full of just such tragedies and perplexities as our own.

     “The Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps.”

    Out of such ultimate love, we live and move and have our being.

    (Both photos were taken early morning – one at the beach in Aberdeen, the other looking across the Mearns from the Bervie Road.) 

  • The Letter of James 2. Words of Advice for Confused Strugglers

    I'm still reading, marking and learning in the Epistle of James, and taking time to inwardly digest a text that is nourishing and therefore not fast food. James is writing "in the name of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion". So in the very first verse he uses a word that tells us who we are as followers of Jesus, whether we live now or 2000 years ago – we are exiles, dispersed people, a scattered community.

    Postmodernism_for_beginnersI've long felt that the biblical story of Exile has important parallels for Christians trying to live in our 21st Century culture where faith commitments and religious privilege are no longer the assumed context for our daily living. Christian values, practices and moral patterns are now minority interests, one option in a plethora of other chosen lifestyles, value systems and relational commitments, which have equal validity and powerful promotional claims in a post-Christian, media soaked, inter-connected society.

    So when James says his letter is for those who feel displaced, who live away from home, whose identity is constantly under pressure, whose cultural roots are planted in alien soil, then it just may be that his message takes on particular urgency and poignancy. A recent study of Global Diaspora might help us understand why it is that Christians struggle to survive in our society, and are tempted time and again to take the lines of least resistance, and to settle for being non-radical in our discipleship. Here are some of the realities pointed out in that study of what it means being an exile, being dispersed and away from where we are most at home. Each of them is energy sapping, vision reducing, hope impairing, and thus diminishing of life possibilities:

    • separation from homeland (alienation from an increasingly anit-Christian culture)
    • life on the move (living with rapid paced change)
    • erosion of identity as a people (Christian community)
    • living on the periphery when power is at the centre (end of Christendom)
    • loss of cultural roots ( the things that matter most to Christians matter least now)
    • refugee status (citizens of heaven locked into ways of life hostile to Christian values)

    Now the New Testament scholar Joel Green then points out that James himself identifies key features of dispersion and exile:

    Decision-making-processes1trials of every kind (1.2)

    testing of faith (1.3)

    humiliation (1.9)

    temptation (1.12)

    distress (1.27)

    conflicts and disputes (4.1)

    victims of hostile treatment (5.4,6)

    a life of wandering (5.19)

    However, James says something early on that is crucial for our survival as Christians amidst all this negative sounding talk – "Count it all joy when you face various tests…". Why? Because suffering trials and tests brings endurance and then maturity. Joy isn't happiness; it's much nearer confidence, a trusting attitude to life that isn't based on only good things happening to good people, and behind all that, James urges a recognition that God is a particular kind of God. James 1.16-18 "Every good gift, every perfect gift, comes from above. These gifts come down from the Father is the creator of the heavenly lights, in whose character there is no change at all. Or in an older translation, "in whom there is no shadow of turning."

    So exiles in a time and a place, a culture and a society, struggle to exist where following faithfully after Jesus is neither easy nor popular. But, says James, they are those who have a strange, durable joy, because the God who gifts us life and whose gifts sustain our life is faithful, constant, unchanging. No wonder these verses are embedded in hymns of the Church:

    "Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,

    There is no shadow of turning with thee;

    Thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not,

    As thou hast been thou forever wilt be."

  • Lenten Thoughts and a Lenten Prayer a Full Fortnight Before Lent…….

    Sometimes, following faithfully after Jesus no longer makes sense, our first love has become our last love, focus is blurred, purpose confused, DSC01895joy is muted.

    Sometimes, for all our pragmatism, insistence on faith as "practical" and truth as "applied", Jesus' demands sound like high ideals and begin to sound ludicrously impractical.

    Sometimes, we have to admit that our understanding of what it means to be a Christian gravitates downwards towards playing safe, staying predictable, being non-disruptive and we begin to believe following Jesus is easily accomodated within our otherwise busy multi-tasking lives.

    Sometimes, reading what Jesus says has the same minimal impact as humming our favourite music, with the lyrics and beat familiarly and smoothly pulsing through headphones into a mind preoccupied by other stuff.

    Sometimes, complacency becomes so comfortable, so unnoticeably normal, that we are in danger of losing our edge, closing our eyes, cruising to a fuel efficient slowness, at which point the only thing that might save us is, well, Jesus.

    Sometimes, what is needed is a new vision, a recovered love, a re-orientation of the heart.

    Sometimes, being a Christian means believing what is wildly implausible but true.

    Sometimes, Jesus asks something that is risky and disruptive and demands our whole self all over again.

    Sometimes, the soul is healed by unfamiliar music inviting us to move again in God's direction, along unfamiliar roads.

    And sometimes, it is the call of Christ coming with resurgent force that electrifies and defibrillates the spirit, and re-establishes the rhythms of our discipleship.

    So Lord,

    Once you called our name, and we followed; but sometime, somewhere along the way, the sound of your voice diminished beyond our hearing:

    Lord forgive our pragmatism and open our minds to the wildly impractical practices of your Kingdom of love and peace-making

    Lord replace our complacency with urgency, and replenish our hearts with a holy recklessness turned outwards in compassion and service

    Lord save us from the exhaustion of multi-tasking the ordinary, and give us energy for gestures of redemption and enthusiasm for the extraordinary

    Lord make us sick and tired of the familiar, the normal, the routine, and call us once again to take up again the cross, the cost, and the consequence of following after you.

    May your Kingdom come, here, now, in me, in your world, Amen