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  • Wild Geese and the Homing Instinct for God

    This poem is posted because I like it.

    It may be Mary Oliver's most anthologised poem. That's another reason for posting it. If so many editors choose it, it must say something important.

    Living in Westhill, geese fly over and around us every year, long skeins of them. It's the season after Pentecost, and the wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the wild freedom of the Holy Spirit, the creative, urgent movement of life and the homing instinct for God. Another reason to post it.

    Whatever else Paul meant by his insistence that Christian existence is to live in the Spirit, he meant to the wild freedom and the homing instinct that makes us long for God.

    It wasn't written as a Pentecost poem – but I read it and wish I had wings.

    Wild Geese

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in  the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
    over and over announcing your place
    In the family of things.                             

  • Romans 1.12 and Teachers as Learners and Learners as Teachers

    Handley-mouleBishop Handley Carr Glynn Moule was one of the most effective expositors of the early Keswick holiness teaching. He grounded the Keswick experience of sanctification as an experience of full surrender to Jesus as Lord in careful exegesis of the New Testament, enriched and guided by a moderate Calvinism, and after his own experience of a new grace and power, that theology became an articulation of his own spiritual experience. 

    You can trace the transition by reading his earlier commentary on Romans in the Cambridge Bible, (1879) and comparing it with his later commentary in the Expositor's Bible (1894). I remember reading these two commentaries in parallel when I was writing about the courteous but principled disagreement between two fine Anglican Bishops, Ryle and Moule. For Ryle the idea of a final or continuing victory over sin and inner spiritual conflict was contrary to the clear teaching of the Bible and the universal experience of Christian struggle against sin as a lifetime of conflict, frustration of intention, and struggle towards holiness. For Moule, whose earlier commentary affirmed that same experience of inner contradiction, he had moved to an experience which, after his full surrender to Christ, affirmed the victory that only Christ can give to the soul which is surrendered fully to the indwelling Lord, crucified and risen, whose life is now lived through the experience of the regenerate soul by the power of the Spirit.

    These were the days when Anglican Bishops argued with passion on Pauline theology, christian existence and the crucial distinctions in Christian experience that made all the difference to how we understand the Gospel. And did so with Bible in hand and with the orchestra of theological tradition and biblical exegesis in full symphonic performance.

    All of which brings me in a roundabout way to Moule's earlier wee commentary on Romans. It's 270 pages, six and a half by four and a half inches, and fits nicely into an anorak pocket! Does anyone wear anoraks now? OK, a jacket pocket. Reading through it again as my daily devotions I came across the Bishop's quaint comment on Romans 1.12. This is where Paul, in full rhetorical and diplomatic flow says,

    "For I long to see you that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end you may be established; that is that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me."

    Here is Moule, his language that of a Victorian church statesman:

    "The tact of the apostle is only an exquisite combination of sympathy and judgement; he speaks the true word, in the right place, and from the heart. It would be shallow criticism indeed which would see here only an ingenious religious compliment. To the sincere Christian teacher nothing is  more real than the reflex aid he [or she] receives among Christian learners." page 55 

    Now that last sentence should be written on the door of every theological college classroom! The best teachers are learners and good learners are brilliant teachers.

    Moule's stately Victorian language lends gravitas to one of the key pedagogic dispositions of the teacher – lifelong teachability. I haven't checked, but I'm not sure I'd expect to find Moule's application of Paul's rhetoric in some of the contemporary Romans heavyweights, but I'm repared to be corrected by those willing to go look. For now, I'm grateful to God for 'the reflex aid I've recieved among Christian learners.'

  • Trinity, Tapestry and God’s Irreducible Ineffability

    DSC01947

    A couple of years ago I had a first go at trying to express theology in tapestry. I'd been reading several books on Trinitarian theology and wondered if some of the mystery and meaning of God's Triune life of love can be expressed in colour, shape and symbol. The result was this panel, now framed and hanging in our hall.

    Some of it is obvious in its references and inner nudges; however overall it plays with ideas without trying to resolve them through overloaded significance. It neither seeks to explain or depict, how could words or images or sounds do that. But it does allow the play of ideas, and an expression through art however limited the mind of the artist, of the desire of intellect and heart to understand and respond as adequately as created finitude can to the One who bewilders by beauty, graces with goodness and touches the heart of all creation with truth.

    "God's cognitive availability through divine revelation allows us, Irenaeus believed, to predicate descriptions of God that are true as far as we can make them, while God's irreducible ineffability nonetheless renders even our best predications profoundly inadequate" George Hunsinger, 'Postliberal Theology' in Camridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Vanhoozer, p.47

    The tapestry is called Perichoresis. It is true as far as I can make it…and profoundly inadequate. Like all theology.

     

  • Trinity in Haiku for Trinity Sunday – The Joy of 17 Syllable Theology

    Triune God

    Holy Trinity!

    Grace-filled life in fellowship,

    Love in triplicate!

     

    Father

    Living Creator,

    Creative adventurer,

    Father of mercies.

     

    Son

    Reconciling Son,

    Redeeming Ambassador,

    Love as surrender.

     

    Spirit

    Comforting Spirit,

    Articulate Paraclete,

    Truthful Advocate.

     

    God is Love

    Perichoresis!

    Cappadocian genius!

    Love co-inhering!

      

    Written as an exercise in theology pared down to the essentials of language, within the discipline of form, but with appropriate playfulness.

  • Moltmann and Hope: “Love looks to the as yet unrealised possibilities of the other…”

     

    I am all for passion in theology. What is impressive about Moltmann is his awareness that his early theology was partial, tendentious, passionate and committed. To break through the learned complacency of a generation more interested in the anxieties of the present and ways of escaping them, than in genuine risk-taking hopefulness for a more just and peaceful future, Moltmann wote a book concerned with looking at life through the lens of hope, rather than fixing eyes only on the present. More than twenty years ago, as a man in his middle sixties Moltmann wrote in this preface, "The older and more self-critical one becomes, the more one values the ruthless radicalism of one's youth."

    These are brave and wise words, indicating a theologian who acknowledges the limits of his vision, and the missed turnings in his journeys, but who does not apologise because all theologies are partial – what is important is the passion for truth, the openness to the new, and the expectations of a Christian standpoint that is future oriented towards the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit and in the eschaton when God will be all in all. And that hope far from being mere vision, is itself the source of energy, sacrifice and commitment to the Kingdom of the Crucified and Risen and Coming One, as we too seek to incarnate the love of God in Christ, in the embodied practices of those who, as peacemakers and ministers of reconciliation, are called to be and dare allow themelves to be called, the children of God.

    No wonder Moltmann finished his preface with words of prophetic assurance: " 'Do not despise the dreams of your youth' says someone in one of Schiller's plays. And as I write the words I am again heart and soul in the visions of Theology of Hope, 25 years ago."

    The book finishes wih these words, from a book which remains one of the great contributions Moltmann has made to Christian theology over the past 50 or more years:

     "As a result of this hope in God's future, this present world becomes free in believing eyes from all attempts at self-redemption or self-production through labour, and it becomes open for loving, ministering self-expenditure in the interests of a humanizing of conditions and in the interests of a the realization of justice in light of the coming justice of God. This means, however, that the hope of resurrection must bring about a new understanding of the world."

    As regular readers will note – I'm back, new computer, and Microsoft 8.1, the mysteries and frustrations of which make it all the more imperative to have a theology of hope!!!

     

  • Liturgy for the Demise of a Laptop?

    Regular readers will have noticed a slowing of posts – this isn't blog fatigue. My laptop has terminal symptoms and I'm in the process of replacing it. So blogging opportunities are a bit limited.

    Is there a Laptop Funeral Liturgy out there? All you imaginative, contextual and practical theologians – are there appropriate words and prayers for a dying computer – loss of memory (RAM), terminal slowness (AGE), loss of communication (wi-fi and cable!), the detectable disintegration of the life force (processor / Hard Drive). And words of thanksgiving for a friend who has put up with my thinking and writing, surfing and downloading, key-board hammering and frantic mouse movements for years. It wouldn't be true to say nobody had a bad word to say about my computer – I often did! Nor that it never did anyone any harm – it lost a lot of my stuff!

    But it has been a long time companion; there are many things I couldn't have done without it. It has kept me in touch with hundreds of people, dozens of colleagues and many a friend. It shares my enthusiasm for photographs and has happily stored years of digital images which are part of the story of my life. It has travelled 17000 miles a year with me for the past 4 years, and apart fro  cracked casing is still in one piece.

    So a prayer of thanksgiving for a Laptop to celebrate how a wee machine can be such an important part of life. OK – that has gone as far as it can go. It's a flipping computer not a person; technology not human; disposable, replaceable and obsolete – unlike human beings.

    Next week or so I'll post when I can.

  • Pentecost – “Cartwheels across the sun”.

     

    One of my favourite Pentecost poems.The freedom and wildness of the Spirit is divine subversion unimpressed with every attempt to pin down Pentecost to a date in the liturgy, or anything else contrived for our own convenience.

    PENTECOST

    I share and share and share again

    sometimes with a new language

    which, if you are so open

    will take you behind the sky

    and award you cartwheels across the sun

    I give and give and give again

    not restricted by the church calendar

    or concocted ritual

    I have no need of anniversaries

    for I have always been

    I speak and speak and speak again

    with the sting of purity

    causing joyous earthquakes in the mourning soul of man

    I am and am and am again.

    Stewart Henderson.

  • Simone Weil: Sometimes Holiness is Weird Before It Is Wonderful.

    Simone Weil is hard to understand. That’s a reason for reading her. Simone Weil was weird and one of those people who give saints a bad name. But what do we expect of people whose sanctity offends our most cherished presuppositions? Holiness isn't temperamentally tidy or comfortably predictable, and often is not remotely familiar. Her biographer describes Simone Weil as ‘unclassifiable’, someone who believed that ‘to be always relevant you have to say things that are eternal’.

    Her lived anguish over the agonies of the world, (she died in 1943) the spiritual importance she placed on uncompromising self-immolation, the coalescence in her of supreme individualism and determined asceticism, made her , well, weird. But such characteristics generated in her laser lights of insight into the meaning of love – the love of God both terrible and tender; the call on human personality to learn to dwell in deepest Hades and highest Heaven and find God in love is indeed there, or not; and love for others, neighbour and enemy, and both with their humanity claiming forgiveness, atonement, compassion and service.

    I’ve just been reading Nancey Murphy’s essay again, ‘Agape and Nonviolence’,[i] and she explores some of Weil’s thought on this. Here are a couple of extracts from Weil, via Nancey Murphy:

    “To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death…To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance.  We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.”  Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1992) 6.

    That isn’t the stuff you come across in any ‘how to’ book I know. It isn’t the stuff that feeds our hunger for ways to increase our self-esteem. The opposite. The aim of nonviolence is to ensure we do not diminish the other person. I guess what she is saying is that a Christian doesn’t try to make someone ‘pay’ for what they have done to us. I told you she was weird, and hard to understand.

    But sometimes her uncompromising, unreasonable so called wisdom reminds me of someone who understood the foolishness of the cross.


    [i] Visions of Agape, Craig Boyd (ed.) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 68-9.

  • Blinking Blinkered Hermeneutics – OR – Seeing in the Text What We Want to See, and Turning a Blind Eye to What We Need to See

    I love biblical commentaries. I don't mean only that I like, value, use, buy, read, browse, collect commentaries. I mean all of these and added into it a glad amazement at the inexhaustibility of the biblical texts. A definition of a good commentary is hard to formulate – so much depends on the kind of reader and the kind of commentary. So, is Gary Smith's commentary a good one?

    Well according to one Amazon reviewer called Shandy, mostly yes but with a serious caveat. I leave you to read the whole review and tell me what you think of the caveat.

    Another excellent commentary from the NIV application series. Good exposition of what the prophecies meant to those who first heard them in Bible times. Original ideas for how the messages of the ancient prophets help us in our lives today.
    Gary Smith presents some challenges to the Bible believer, such as his powerful argument of the importance of the "Lament" in the life of the Christian.
    My only criticism of the book would be that Smith urges Christians to become political activists on behalf of the poor and oppressed. This seems to go against Christ's example of refusing to become involved politically (e.g. refusing to be made king, or become involved in protests against heavy taxes) as his mission was first and foremost to preach the good news about God's coming kingdom on earth, where oppression will be destroyed once and for all.
    With our world being ravaged by earhquakes, tsunamis, wars, famines and terrorism, Micah's prediction of a righteous king from Bethlehem – Jesus Christ – ruling over a worldwide kingdom of peace is as relevant now as it ever was.

    This was accessed here

    Dear Readers, on the strength of Shandy's caveat, I will buy Smith's commentary and soak up every instance of being urged to become politcally activist in the pursuit of justice and righteousness and mercy.

    Incidentally what on earth did Micah mean by "He has told you O people what is good; and what does the Lord require of you? But to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." How do you act justly in an unjust society? How do you love mercy in a politcally ruthless society?By amongst other things, being politcially activist, that is, acting in ways that arte for the common good, and out of a commitment to Jesus, who was crucified for reasons of political expediency and religious convenience.

  • Eucharistic Grace is Always Surrounding Us…….

    BreadI've spent a while filleting back issues of The Tablet, passed on to me by my friend Derek. The Tablet is one of the main Journals of contemporary Catholicism in which news, opinion, cultural comment, theological and ethical issues and much more are explored from a faithful but critical Catholic persepctive. One of the regulars is Father Daniel O'Leary whose columns contain some of the best spiritual writing around on the graced gift that is life in a God-loved world. In the 24th August 2013 issue (I told you they were back issues!!!), he wrote about the Eucharist as the feast of the love of God.

    Quoting St Symeon the New Theologian he then moved on to celebrate the Eucharist as a deeply transformative re-reception of the embodied grace of God in the sacrament of bread and wine. At the miracle of communion:

    …. everything that is hurt, everything

    that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

    maimed, ugly, irreparably

    damaged, is in him transformed

    and recognised as whole, as lovely,

    and radiant in his light

    he awakens as the beloved

    in every last part of our body.

    O'Leary goes on: "These infinitely intimate experiences of our sacred senses …purify and confirm our graced potential, for recognising God's bread in every bread, God's incarnate body in  every human body, God's own need in every need. And we do not just receive the holy bread….we become it.

    In becoming it we are gifted with our true identity. Reputations, titles, possessions, power and prestige do not determine our identity. They die when we die. Who we are before ourselves and our God is who forever we are. And we become the blessed bread and wine not just for ourselves, as Pope Francis preached recently, we become it to light the way for others.

    That is one of the most penetrating and generous expositions of the Eucharist I've read in a long while. Leaving aside the theological pragmatism many others indulge in trying to reduce the miracle to the spiritual technology of God's workings, what Daniel O'Leary offers here is a glad receiving, and faithful living into our true identity as the Body of Christ, a regular recovery and rediscovery of our graced potential, a thankful taking of the bread for which we hunger and thirst, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice and and for peace in a reconciled world. 

    Father O'Leary goes on:

    It is in the ordinariness, accessibility and blessing of bread that this ravishing love incarnate is experienced and celebrated. And it is the sacramentality of the celebration that reveals a most comforting truth; in all our daily efforts to be human and loving, eucharistic grace is always surrounding us, enfolding us, empowering and consecrating us.

    Like R S Thomas at the end of his poem, 'The Moor', I read this and then

    I walked on

    Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

    And broke on me generously as bread.