Blog

A walk up the hills around Banchory yesterday and on the path the contrast between potential and fulfilment.

The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.

How come we are so taken in by the absurdities of our age?  Are we too gullible to notice when we are being had by the adverts? Are we so self obsessed we are deaf to the voices from elsewhere saying we are not the whirring centre of the universe? How has the human gift of longing, journeying and exploring, in short the essential forward pull of the quest, become a seeking after that which is illusion and delusion, leaving us searching frantically for some kind of grail if only we knew what, and where, and when, and with no sense that what we seek is something that transcends our oh so limited horizons.

Ecclesiastes observed, with some irony after looking at the vanities and futilities of human pretentiousness, "You have put eternity in human hearts". Yes, God, you have. But that sense of eternity has been so eroded by mass produced experiential trivia, so corroded by the appetite to possess everything and experience whatever and dominate whoever, that what is left is a distorted vision, and instead of an upward longing for God, there is a downward longing for a dream reality. So we are gobsmacked by banality disguised as significance, tempted into ethical illiteracy trying to persuade us that cash value is confused with worthiness, and mistakenly believing street credibility is more important, more personally defining, than authentic human experience – joy and suffering, achioevement and failure, acceptance and rejection and self-awareness and self-questioning. By the way the important word in these pairings is the conjunction 'and', because we reach our richest potential as human beings, when we recognise and acknowledge and learn from the whole spectrum of experience, the positive and negastive. Ours is an age of denial, which avoids, minimises, talks down, intentionally overlooks and understates, those experiences and realities which interfere with the dream reality we have created.

All of this non-sense, absurdity, Foley cleverly and I think persuasively exposes. Such attitudes are the sources of our capacity to live absurdly. The second major section of the book explores a number of cultural strategies that help pull the wool over our eyes; or perhaps more accurately cultural obfuscators which grow like cataracts over those ways of seeing which we might want to call, a conscience ethically informed, knowledge distilled to wisdom, critical discernment, and honest, brave, open-eyed knowledghe of ourselves. The first of these rang so many alarm bells it deserves a post on its own – the next post. For now here is how the chapter starts, and you;ll see why as a recently retired academic teacher, it made me smile, wince and sigh all at once.

"A student fails to submit a project on time and then misses an appointment with his supervisor to discuss the problem. The university sends the student a letter informing him that he has been given a mark of zero for the project. Now the student not only comes to the supervisor but barges into his office without an appointment.

This project must be accepted late, he demands

Why is that?

Because I'm suffering from TCD

Which is?

Time Constraint Disorder – a chemical imbalance in the brain that means i can't meet deadlines or turn up on time for appointments.

Foley goes on, "I invented TCD as a joke….and the  discovered that a Professor Joseph Ferrani of DePaul University genuinely wants procrastination recognised as a clinical disorder and included in the standard reference work for mewntal health professionals, the Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)."

The chapter is called 'The Undermining of Responsibility" in which Foley examines the refusal of responsibility, the sense of entitlement and deserving, and the various slippages of social and personal accountability that lead to non-responsibility for the way we act, speak and live our lives.

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…."

He'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.

One 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!)

Michael 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.

I'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.

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.

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!!

I 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.