Living Wittily

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  • Looking for Meaning in an Age of Absurdity (II)

    Mike Foley is good with words, and questions. "Who in the Western world has not been deranged by a toxic cocktail of dissatisfaction, restlessness, desire and resentment? Who has not yearned to be younger, richer, more talented, more respected, more celebrated…who has not felt entitled to more, and aggrieved when more was not forthcoming…."

    DSC02125He's even better when he tackles the slippery tonic word happiness. Academic study defines it as Subjective Well-Being (SWB, not joking); recent popular books call it Wellness.  Foley points out the major growth in the literary genre of tragic lives and misery memoirs and notes that childhood happiness memoirs don't sell. Then he suggests a new academic discipline – Happiness Studies, which could be given intellectual heft by calling it Eudaimonics, from the Greek!

    But what Foley is arguing for is not subjective well being, nor mere vague wellness. "The greatest gift of happiness may not be the feeling itself as much as the accompanying thrill of possibility. Suddenly the world is re-enchanted and the self born anew. Everything ids richer, stranger and more interesting. The eyes see more clearly, the mind thinks more keenly, the heart feels mpore strongly – and all three unite in enthusiasm, delight and zest." These three last words will recur throughout the book. They are not so much feelings as dispositions; not reactions to the world but responses to the world as it is. But in a culture of perpetual wanting, pervasive advertising, inordinate consuming, and obsession with novelty, status and image, these three human dispositions are degraded by exposure to their counterfeits.

    DSC02146One of the interesting areas for reflection while reading this book is the way Foley pinpoints the cultural forces which shape our spirituality by frustrating and eliminating the conditions through which we can become aware of our inner selves and the call of transcendence. "What we need is detachment, concentration, autonomy and privacy, but what the world insists upon is immersion, distraction, collaboration and company". The three disciplines of solitude, stillness and silence are near impossible to achieve. Why? Because of the new religion he calls Commotionism – which demands faithful obedience to the imperatives of constant company, movement and noise. The result is an inner exhaustion, often undiagnosed, and for which the remedies of stillness, solitude and rest are noisily drowned out by the perpetual motion of a culture in flux.

    We are drowning in noise, and fear silence; speed, movement, multi-tasking, and the worship of instant, make us impatient with our own body, spirit and mind which aches for breath, space and time to be. If once the world was too much with us, now the world is too much within us, around us; and its ruinous interruptions destroy our peace, like a mobile ring-tune, its tinny, strident command for attention demolishes just that moment as the concerto pianist's fingers hover over the keys, waiting in the silence to play the resolving notes that gather together the fugitive emotions of an audience entranced by music which will take them beyond themselves and this world. Few things bring us down to earth more brutally than someone else's mobile going off at such moments of peak significance. But such crashing disappointments are the stuff of lives lived to the ring-tune rather than the soloist and orchestra.

    (The two photos are of Bennachie in a late August sunset, and Inverbervie beach – two places where silence, stillness and solitude can be enjoyed with enthusiasm, delight and zest!)

  • Looking for Meaning in an Age of Absurdity (I)

    FoleyMichael Foley's book The Age of Absurdity is a sharp, ironic but very perceptive analysis of what is wrong with our distracted and overstimulated culture, obsessed with novelty and transience. What Harry Emerson Fosdick called 'rich in things and poor in soul'. Never have so many wanted so much so badly – I love the front cover of this book – it could be a study on ecology, sociology, anthropology, technology, theology – in fact it's a study of absurdity.

    Foley eyes the whims and obsessions of a consumer culture with what can only be called expert irony. Many of his comments are simply unanswerably self evident except they weren't so evident till he pointed them out. Even some of his chapter headings are fun, in an ironic way. The Ad and the Id; The Old Self and the New Science; The Righteousness of Entitlement and the Glamour of Potential. Early on he lists with an envious glance at Buddhist wisdom, so absent in Western consumerism, the Four Ignoble Truths

    1. We can't sit still
    2. We can't shut up
    3. We can't escape self obsession
    4. We can't stop wanting things

    Four telling sermons could be preached on each of these as symptoms of a culture which far from being godless is god-ridden. If everyone is free to choose their own Gods, and want their own version of salvation, and to construct and be whoever they want to be at any particular time in their lives, and ignore any inner sense of obligation to that which is higher, more durable, more significant than the self, if 'whatever' is the mantra that underpins the weight of life's longings and those deep potential's of each human spirit, then we are in trouble. And Foley traces that trouble to its sources, and exposes the strategies that persuade us to buy into (important wee metaphor that) – to buy into someone else's vision of who I am, what my life is about, to let someone else subliminally shape my choices, influence my preferences and turn me into a money-spender and things getter.

    I'll do a couple of other posts on this book – he has important things to say to the Church (which isn't even on his horizon) if we are prepared to overhear someone whose analysis of the culture within which we are placed to follow Jesus and share the Gospel is way ahead of some of our own efforts within the Christian Church.

  • What You Can Tell By Looking at a Book Cover

    NicntI've been browsing, reading and at times reading carefully Dick France's commentary on Matthew – the big one. His smaller Tyndale commentary is a good reliable guide to Matthew, but this volume, along with his commentary on the greek text of Mark represents the culmination of a lifetime study of the Gospels.

    This series of commentaries has very few duff volumes, and several of them are just about all I personally need and want in a commentary. This volume is well over 1100 pages, it needs a desk for reading it and it has one of the inevitable drawbacks of thick books – it doesn't lie open on the desk until you're 100 pages in! Those who use big books will know the experience.

    The cover for this series is a work of art – literally, Botticceli's Annunciation, but also the deep and warm colour and sharp detail. Someone thought carefully about this cover but I haven't come across a publisher's explanation. As an image of hermeneutic encounter it's brilliant – the Virgin reading, distracted, drawing back but in the pose of reaching out, the hands ambiguous reaching out or fending off, Gabriel's eyes open and her eyes closed in prayer, or fear, and in the space between the two hands with fingers of blessing and open vulnerability, the place of choice, decision, response. 

    The cover picture honours Mary, the bearer of the Word, the mother of our Lord. On her own word, yes or no, depends more than she can ever know or imagine. The Gospel, literally, depends upon her Yes. The cover captures that moment when the destiny of creation, the plans of redeeming love, the kenosis of the Son, turns on the obedience of Mary. It is a moment of astonishing hermeneutic significance. Because Mary doesn't have to understand the mystery; she is called to assent to the Divine Annunciation, to trust the Lord and magnify the Lord with her soul; she has no guarantees other than her faith in the grace of God who has looked favourably on this young woman; her Yes changes her life forever, and changes the world too.

    No wonder the Magnificat kick starts such powerful generators of political change and future hope. Here's her hymn in old English

    My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
    For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.
    For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.
    For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name.
    And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations.
    He hath shewed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
    He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
    He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
    He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel : as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever.

     

  • Ecumenical Hopes for a Church Bald of Ideas in the 1960’s

    Reading a hefty volume of the Oxford History of the Christian Church, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales. The Christian Church 1900-2000.

    One of the embarrassments and perplexities of being an ecumenically minded Baptist is the anomaly of a fragmented church mandated with a message of reconciliation to the world!

    So I was amused and heartened by Colin Morris, quoted in this book in a discussion of 1964 ecumenical delegates who dared suggest a union of churches by 1980!

    Morris thought the churches were demonstrating how implausible was their offer of a gospel of reconciliation.

    "Their pitch rang as hollow as that of a bald man selling hair restorer".

    Nae political correctness in his pulpit in 1964 then. His ater career was in the higher levels of BBC management, especially religious broadcasting. Wonder how he'd survive there today.

    Oh, and this has just arrived so some decent music later.

  • New Beginnings in Montrose and the Logistics of Trying to Talk with Your Mouth Full.

    Yesterday I was inducted to be minister of Montrose Baptist Church. The formal Induction service was led by my friend and brother in law, Rev Jim Simpson; another near lifelong friend Rev Douglas Hutcheon preached from Ephesians 3.7-16. The Church Secretary, Ken Sinclair, and I, shared the story of how a first invitation to an ecumenical service at Montrose 2 years ago grew into a friendship with the church that now becomes a partnership in living and being the Gospel of Jesus. As always these are days of lasting significance, when words said and promises made, prayers spoken and hymns sung, gather into the one act of worship and commitment that affirms those decisions, taken on trust and offered to each other as a covenant to which we are each called to be faithful before God.

    This was followed by a remarkable banquet of coffee and cake – I've never become anything more than a fumbling amateur at holding a plate with a deep slice of Victoria cream sponge, a mug of coffee, and talking. It takes two hands to hold the sponge while you try to get your mouth delicately and discreetly into position – what then about the mug. And as for continuing a conversation in a socially acceptable manner?

    So I did what any sensible sponge connoisseur would do – put down the mug, and gave full attention to the cream cake. I know. Any half respectable pastor would forego the cake and listen attentively to the other person; would see that the physical needs of the stomach are no match for the vocational obligations to listen….but it was a magnificent sponge! Someone took the photo of the tables as they were being set, and there at the front is that GBBO quality sponge.

    Notice the text on the wall which I feel might be a plausible excuse for eating the sponge despite the conversation – "May the God of hope fill you……" With just a wee bit hermeneutical imagination, that could be interpreted as a prayer of wishful thinking! Or hermeneutics as wishful thinking!!

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  • Ambushed by a CD – and Made to Think About Israel, Gaza and Land Ideology.

    Cd welshI like this CD. No accounting for taste.

    It has several songs that sound different in male voice chorus – not always better, but different.

    Tonight this CD ambushed me.

    I was working away innocently listening to background music as I wrote a prayer of intercession.

    Then they sang the theme from the film "Exodus".

    Those first words – "This land is mine, God gave this land to me…"

    It's a song of passion, religious fervour, political hope and even generosity.

    And I couldn't listen to it.

    The ideology of land, underpinned by religious claims, against the tragedy that is Israel, Gaza and the West Bank drain this song of the very humanity of which it sings. 

    So what do you do with a CD that has a song which celebrates the claim to land, when the way of defending it has become indefensible?

    Seems a pitifully small gesture to skip the track – but that's what I did.

    Sometimes our inner discomforts, and our outward actions however trivial, are nevertheless the raw material of larger moral choices and more hopeful moral visions.

     

  • Dreams, books, are each a world…..

    Been reading and writing an essay review on the first two volumes of Veli-Matti Karkkainen's Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. This is a major theological project by one of the leading Ecumenical theologians writing in the West today. He trained as an Ecumenical theologian, has taught on three continents and has a passionate interest in bringing the Christian faith into constructive conversation with the other living faiths (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism); but he wants to do so by being critically and appreciatively faithful to the range and depth of the Christian tradition.

    Not everyone who reads this blog will want to invest the time and energy reading these volumes as they become available. But you can get a good sense of what he is about, and the kind of thinker he is by watching an interview he gave at the launch of the first volume, Christ and Reconciliation. You can find the interview here.

    ……………………..

    Yesterday I spent some time looking through a bookcase of books that used to belong to a friend. I had the pick of them, but the real interest was simply handling books that had been shapers of thought, inspirations for life, companions of comfort. Over 7 or more decades, books that have been bought, ead and reread. Some of them now taped together; others with what the booksellers call foxing, spine split, some highlighting or underlining. The whole lot together wouldn't make much money. But then riches afren;t just about money.

    Some of the enduring values and gifts evade the commerical tyrranny of the barcode. I only took four. A lot of them I haven't read and won't. Some of them meant more to my friend than to me – it's like that with books and friendship. I don;t have to like what he liked, nor pretend it does for me what it clearly accomplished in his own inner life. There were two or three though that brought memories of ding dong discussions over a lunch table with a crusty loaf, a pot of soup, and a bowl of fruit. Two of the ones I brought away I'll give to someone else.

    The two I'll keep are because they say much for my friend's theology, faith and way of thinking and living. One is a biography of Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, whose theology was generous, passionately questioning of God in the face of suffering, and utterly grounded in Calvary and the Cross as the place where earthly suffering and Divine mercy comingled in the sacrifice of Christ. The other is The Path to Perfection, W E Sangster's volume on John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. I've read it before, it's now a book of past generations, eclipsed by so much high standard contemporary Wesleyan scholarship which shows no signs of abating. But Sangster was a saintly man, a deep lover of Jesus, and so was my friend. "Love is the key to holiness" says Sangster – and my frienc's life underlined that sentence. 

    ……………………………………

    And then there was this wee red booklet I picked up for £1 at Drum Castle Garden, in the wee shed where used books are there with an honesty box.

    Scan_20140828

    I merely mention this. I'll write another post later on the fascinating hopes and optimism of a conference 60 years ago. They say times have changed – but reading this, the aspirations and proposals remain vaslid, and largely unfulfilled. More on this later. 
     

  • The Best Theology of Prayer in English Poetry


    DSC02379
    One of the not so subtle temptations of a blog is thinking it always has to be the blogger's voice, saying something new, or interesting, or the blogger opinionating to enlighten the world, or getting whatever happens to be bugging at the time off the chest and into a post. I don't always succeed in resisting these sins.Pity, there are other voices that have more important things to say, and which say them with words that linger in the memory and educate the heart as well as the mind. Like George Herbert, in a sonnet that is in my top ten best poems in the English language – of those I've read that is, which admittedly is a tiny fraction of the whole. But…….
     Prayer (1)

    PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
            Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
            The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
    The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

    Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
            Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
            The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
    A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

    Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
            Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
            Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
    The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

            Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
            The land of spices, something understood.

  • “This love encompasses the whole world of creatures….”

    DSC02384

    On the whole path from the beginning of creation

    by way of reconciliation to the eschatological future of salvation,

    the march of the divine economy of salvation

    is an expression of the incursion of the eternal future of God

    to the salvation of creatures

    and thus a manifestation of the divine love.

     

    Here is the eternal basis of God's coming forth

    from he immanence of the divine life as the economic Trinity

    and of the incorporation of creatures, mediated thereby,

    into the unity of the trinitarian life.

     

    The distinction and unity of the immanent and economic Trinity

    constitute the heartbeat of the divine love,

    and with a single such heartbeat

    this love encompasses the whole world of creatures.

     

    Over the years I've come to notice the last few sentences with which an author chooses to end a book. Especially a magnum opus. These are the last sentences of volume 3 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Systematic Theology. They have a liturgical rhythm to them once you allow for the translation from German, and arrrange them for slowed down reading. In which case I read these and can say, Amen. 

    The photo was taken in the walled garden at Drumoak Castle, and seems to hint at the love that encompasses the whole world of creatures!

  • Repentance Is the Only Way Back for Big Malky

    The problem with the controversy over Malky Mackay's texts to Iain Moody is that the main protagonists seem to speak a different language from the rest of us.If you haven't read the offending texts, I'm not copying them here – try the BBC website.

    I've read the texts carefully, allowing the words used to have their mainstream dictionary meaning, and they are, by any inguistic and reasonable standards,  racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Jewish. Mackay now, on a third attempt at an apology, admits they are "unacceptable and inappropriate" and that there is "no excuse".

    Malky-mackayHe insists he is not a racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Jewish. That leaves me linguistically confused. The texts are unacceptable and inappropriate, why? It isn't the grammar, the poor choice of vocabulary, the timing, the recipient, the fact that he was "under pressure" – it's what they say, and what that tells us about the mind that thinks in these gratuitously abusive terms in the first place, articulates them, and communicates them.

    Football managers at the highest level are under pressure all the time – it's the job, and the financial rewards are meant to purchase the experience, character and skills of someone who, under that pressure, behaves in a way that is – well, acceptable, appropriate and respectful. So pressure is no excuse – not even an explanation.

    Quoted on the BBC website, Mackay says, "I'm a leader of people and it shouldn't have happened. But I'm a human being and I made a mistake." Quite so.

    But the word mistake is a wee bit of an understatement, a piece of spinning rhetoric, an attempt to make serial offences sound like an oversight. Jesus said it's out of the heart the mouth speaks, and Luke 6.45 is a much more honest and realistic assessment of what happens before the thumb presses send.

    As a Christian I am appalled at Mackay's language, the mindset that lies behind and chooses the words, and the character of someone who can even think the thoughts requiring such crude, dangerous vocabulary.

    So what am I saying? That he should never serve as a manager again? That his claim it was a 'mistake' should be dismissed as self-serving minimising of damage? That his claim to have shown contrition is not enough? I'm frankly gob-smacked that a high profile football manager, who must know that in an age of digital footprints and carnivorous media interest, he is required to act in the character of his role – "a leader of people" – would be arrogant enough to send this stuff and think no more about it.

    Perhaps the best question big Malky could ask is "What do I need to do to put this right?" Those who are targeted by, and offended by his language, what would they ask of him, that would enable him again to hold his head up in any company, including theirs?

    The word redemption is a rich, old fashioned and essential community restoring word. It enables language to move from conflict to resolution, from prejudice to understanding, from acknowledged guilt to forgiveness, and from a broken past to a recovered future.

    If Malky Mackay has any sense, and can think his way forward with or without the aid of publicists and lawyers, he might come to realise what is needed is an intentional and determined decision to face the reality of what he said, and therefore who he is. That will mean repentance, a turnaround, an inner re-orientation, a combination of remorse and commitment to change. Then there would be at least the possibility he can recover a sense of personal integrity as a first step towards restored public credibility.

    He needs to hear from those he offended, to listen and understand. He needs equality and diversity training, which he is now quoted as saying he will seek. Good. He needs a refresher course in leadership and self awareness, exposure to the consequences of language and an understanding of the linear moral connection between the words we use and the heart and mind that chooses them to tell the world what we are thinking.

    If Mackay insists he is not racist, sexist, homophobic or anti-Jewish, then that now needs credible evidence to prove it. He can do that by showing willingness to learn and understand why these texts are morally repugnant, and why they were sent by him. In the fantasy world of football, there are times when what's needed is moral realism. Mackay is not being asked in a post match interview to justify his team's poor performance – he's being asked to do something infinitely more demanding – to identify the weakness of his own performance and train to put it right. I for one hope he will find a way that is redemptive for him, and brings good out of evil, and enables a talented man to work again at the highest level (by which I mean ethics as well as tactics) – but it will require far more than words.

    ……………………

    This post was drafted this morning for publishing later. But then came this. On Football Focus today Garth Crooks a Kick it Out Trustee said, "There has to be room for redemption. This is about education. We are keen for managers, players and coaches who fall from grace in this area to understand what is acceptable in a working environment."

    Amen to that, all of it, including his use of that wonderful word – redemption.