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  • Beauty is a Beautiful Idea: Theological Aesthetics and the Beauty of Holiness

    DSC01519Beauty is a beautiful idea. For a while now I've been fascinated by the possibilities of beauty not only as a theological idea, or the focus and possibility of a theology of beauty, but as one of the dimensions of human experience which has congruence with how and why we do theology at all. The statement "God is beautiful" sounds either naively pretentious, eye-rollingly banal, or hopelessly vague, when used of the God whose light is a dazzling darkness, whose love shatters all human preconceptions and whose holiness is robed in infinite mercy so that those who come near to worship survive exposure to that Being which calls all other beings into existence, and sustains them by a grace unspeakable and full of glory.

    The last few decades the discipline of theological aesthetics has been growing as an increasingly fruitful theological style. The towering work of Von Balthasar's The Glory of the Lord is not so much a benchmark as a landmark. It will always be in the landscape background of the discipline, but that landscape is changing and new features are becoming familiar and established.

    My own interest in theological aesthetics arises from asking myself what goes on inwardly in the process of artistic activity. Writing Haiku, working away at a poem or doing tapestry are some of the activities I get up to that aim at aesthetic satisfaction in the results. In particular stitching colour and texture into shapes and ideas that bear the weight of significance, has produced images that are themselves objects of beauty. What is it in that which is beautiful which creates a current of awareness so powerful that it demands attention, compels stillness, and draws from us the sigh of surrender to the moment?

    DSC01186 (1)Allegri's Miserere, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Hopkins' Pied Beauty, Sand Stoddart's statue of Coila, (above) a perfect rosebud and even a well composed photograph of the same flower, a kestrel hovering, the face of a friend, a cat demanding attention!, those rare near perfect moments of aloneness looking at sea, sunset, garden or, often for me, sunlight through trees: all offer moments of beauty. Which is an odd way of putting it – is a moment of beauty a description of the time, or of the impact of the object of attention during that time. I suspect the question is one of those failures of imagination when analytic questions are a category mistake. 

    Theological aesthetics takes experiences like that and asks the God kind of questions. Creativity, is that the creature demonstrating she is indeed made in the image of the Creator? Why does beauty seem congruent with God, and not ugliness? Or is it possible that there is also a beauty in ugliness,that the category ugliness requires careful scrutiny to subvert the certainties of our own blinkers? What is lost in human spirituality when people are deprived of beauty and the time to sunbathe in the light of the beautiful that boosts health of soul and body? Can aesthetic experience help us to apprehend something of the nature of God that language cannot reach, or express, or even comprehend?

    Emerson wrote 'Beauty is God's handwriting, a wayside sacrament', the kind of vague feel good definition that still has enough truth to make it worth quoting. Perhaps God's handwriting is in a language, and script so unfamiliar to us we require to relearn the alphabet, take patience to decipher, and be humble enough to know that our grammar and vocabulary will never extend to an acquired fluency in translation. Beauty is often most intensely felt in glimpses, brief intimations, those moments of encounter when we recognise that our capacity to receive and take in and appreciate, will always be so limited by our finitude that we, if we are both wise and humble enough will settle for the mystery, joy and longing, the promise of unfulfillment, that are essential elements of beauty.

    David Bentley Hart's book, The Beauty of the Infinite is a difficult book, and a brilliant one, the one because the other. But his affirmation of beauty as a key category for an adequate Christian theology, in this book and his recent tour de force against new atheism, The Being of God. Being, Consciousness, Bliss gives reassurance to those crucial aspects of human knowing which affirm mystery, intellectual finitude, and the importance of aesthetic judgement when our eyes look towards the invisible, and discern in what is seen, and what is not yet visible however hard we stare, the beauty of holiness.

    Now and again I nuse this blog to think out loud – or at least think through a keyboard. Apologies if this all seems a bit 'Well, yes Jim, but so what……?'

     

  • Can Compassion be Taught? Is it a Skill or an Emotion?

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    As a hen gathers her chicks…….

    Took this photo end of June last year at Loch Rannoch. This red legged partridge had sixteen (16!) chicks in tow. About six of them are in this photo, camouflaged.

    One of them tumbled off the path and I went to lift it back with the rest, it squeaked in protest and mother partridge legged it straight towards me headlights flashing as I became a victim of partridge road rage.

    Good memories from that holiday – including photos at the top of Scheihallion, the oldest yew tree in Europe, sunset over the Loch, and this family of feathered hill walkers.

    I've been writing a long paper on affective learning outcomes, and part of the research included reading up on the recent concern about the supposed lack of compassion in the nursing profession, reviewing the various responses, and thinking through the question 'Can compassion be taught?' Even if it can, is it possible to demonstrate development in compassion, if so what is the evidence and how do you assess an inner disposition? Through actions characterised by compassion? But shouldn't these actions be motivated by and carried out in an attitude that is spontaneous, authentic and an expression of the inner nature of the person? If it's a learned response, doesn't compassion need a prior foothold in a persons nature and personality that is emotionally consistent and authentic? Aren't some of the most admirable human qualities innate, instinctive, unself-conscious, rather than learned skills? 

    One NHS Trust is developing an assessment tool for compassion, with specific criteria and measurable levels of evidenc. This is a complex issue which goes to the heart of what it means to use words like profession, vocation, career and calling. I for one have no doubt that compassion can be taught, or at least compassionate responsivess can be illustrated and commended, attitudes of indifference can be challenged by displaying their consequences, and a bystander mentality can be transformed into one of risk, engagement and kindness. Otherwise why would Jesus have said, 'Go and do likewise', to that unfortunate lawyer who asked the wrong question at the right time.

     

     

  • A Typo, A Needed Corrective, and a Sabbath Poem

    Wrote an email to a friend this morning.

    Said I was going to a church down the coast to edify the saints.

    The predictive text didn't recognise edify and offered an alternative.

    This meant I had the slightly more difficult task of going to deify the saints!

    …

    On days when my perfectionist tendencies play up, Thomas Merton brings me down the necessary peg or two:

    "It is true that we make many mistakes. But the biggest of them all is to be surprised at them: as if we had some hope of never making any…above all we must learn our own weakness in order to awaken to a new order of action and being – and experience God himself accomplishing in us the things we find impossible.

    …

    And since it's Sunday, and I've been reading Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems, here's one which I think is a beautiful meditiation on those nameless longings that remind us we are made for heaven, and for God, and for life in all its fullness.

    From Leavings, XII

    Learn by little the desire for all things

    which perhaps is not desire at all

    but undying love which perhaps

    is not love at all but gratitude

    for the being of all things which 

    perhaps is not gratitude at all

    but the maker’s joy in what is made, 

    the joy in which we come to rest.”

    This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems, Wendell Berry (Berkley: Counterpoint Press, 2013) 312

  • Good News for Modern Man – or Good News for Post-Modern Persons?

    I recently spent a while reading the Good News Bible. It isn't a translation I often use, to be honest I think it lacks a couple of dimensions that are important to me in the Bible I read. Now this is going to sound at best pedantic, and at worst pompous, but it matters to me that the Bible I read retains a sense of mystery, that the words are precisely not the simplest most familiar words in our language. It matters that the literary skill and spiritual subtlety and intellectual dynamism of the texts are not drained off in the interests of in your face this is what it means. The Bible has depth as well as breadth, mystery as well as meaning, requires rich texture rather than thin fabric. This collection of literary texts ranges from poetry to story, prayers to curses, lament to love song, parable to philosophy, from gospel to history, biography to theology. It is the Word of God for goodness sake.

    Now all that said. I remember the sheer joy as a new Christian when I bought my first Good News for Modern Man New Testament at a Christian Endeavour Convention. Come on, if that doesn't place me in the rocking 60's what does!! I read it through like a novel, it helped make sense of some passages that puzzled me in my recently bought black leather, zip fastening Authorized Version. For a while I read them in tandem, and liked some bits of one and preferred some bits of the other.

    Eventually through the kindness of a Faith Mission pilgrim called Margaret, I was given a wide margin RSV the size of a paving stone! That became my desk Bible and I still love it, use it, but decline to lug it into the pulpit the way I used to. However by the 1970's the NIV was becoming the translation of choice for evangelicals. I have often been troubled by the idea of a translation suitable for evangelicals, or catholics, or any other denominated tradition – a translation stands or falls on its accuracy and faithfulness to the text, not on whether translational decisions coincide with preconceived ideas of what a text means.

    Still, for years I've read and preached from the NIV, though mostly now I use the NRSV for a whole lot of reasons. I do wonder how many now use the Good News Bible. I wonder too, if the desire to be contemporary, to reduce the Bible to the language of 'modern man' is a self defeating exercise because the language of the 60's is 50 years ago now. And I shudder at what a translation called the Good News for Post-Modern Persons might read like….

    2-Bible-illustrator-Annie-Vallotton-©-American-Bible-SocietyI was reading the Good News Bible because I miss the pictures. Those line drawings by the Swiss artist Annie Vallotton are amongst the most evocative, suggestive, funny, moving and subtle delineations of biblical text of any I know. I wouldn't be without them; sometimes they are the best exegetical comments I can find.

    I was reading Malachi, and the dancing figure illustrating the sun rising as God's blessing on a world promised a different future, is just the right fit of mood, hilarity and faith. Go find a Good News Bible and look at it – then flick through and have a look again at the work of this brilliant felt tip pen exegete.

    The picture is of Vallotton on tour in the United States in 1966. She died on December 28, 2013 at the age of 98. I hope she was often told that her drawing s have been a means of grace, and windows into sacred text.

  • Elizabeth Jennings, Friendship

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    This is a favourite poem. Jennings often found words for those experiences and gifts in human life that make us feel most fully alive. Was she an easy person to befriend? Did she live what she wrote here? Was she celebrating the reality, or wishing it were so? 

    The psychology of friendship is subtle, complex, fluid, a combination of affections ranging from love and commitment to laughter and trust. Friendship means going with the other into the deep places of loss and joyfulness, is given stability by faithfulness and kept durable by the mutual exchange of presence, words and the gift of the other. Few gifts are more wrapped in mystery than two human beings who understand each other enough to appreciate the wonder of such a thing being possible. There is something of grace, of undeserved blessing in the kind of friendship Jennings describes.   

     

     

    Friendship, Elizabeth Jennings.

    Such love I cannot analyse;
    It does not rest in lips or eyes,
    Neither in kisses nor caress.
    Partly, I know, it’s gentleness

    And understanding in one word
    Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
    By trust and by respect and awe.
    These are the words I’m feeling for.

    Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
    The giving comes, the taking ends
    There is no measure for such things.
    For this all Nature slows and sings.

  • The Joy of Browsing Your Marginalia

    Marked in the margin of Kathleen Norris reader's digest on Benedictine spirituality, Amazing Grace, about 15 years ago, and now revisited on a whim:

    Every atom in our bodies was once inside a star…..

    It was a presence not a faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush. And what happened there was a revelation, not a seminar.

    A praising of God is what laughter is, because it lets a human being be human.

    The response to poetry is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

    Perhaps the greatest blessing that religious inheritance can bestow is an open mind, one that can listen without judging.

     

  • Reading and Feeding from the Book of God

    I remember reading F W Dillistone's biography of the NT scholar C H Dodd, one of the luminaries of British biblical scholarship in the mid 20th Century. It is an affectionate if not uncritical account of a scholar gentleman who brought textual precision, historical alertness and intellectual faithfulness to his teaching and writing. His commentary on John's episteles is still a delight to read – yes, that's right, it is one of those commentaries that can be read as a running commentary on the text.

    Dodd chaired the translation committee for the New English Bible in the 50's and 60's, and was known to begin each session with a prayer which included these words, which should be the prayer of each Christian scholar wrestling with the richly layered textures of Scripture:

    "Give us keenness of understanding, subtlety of interpretation, and grace of expression."

    That's not a bad one liner to be said each time we open our Bibles and ask, "What do these words mean, and how should I then live?"

    DSC01550It so happens after reading the article on C H Dodd ( in The Dictionary of Major Bible Interpreters – a treasure house of solid information, biographical interest and in house gossip) – anyway, after reading it, I was raking around in another book – this time on  Benedictine Spirituality and Lectio Divina, and I came across Cranmer's Collect about reading the Bible –

    Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ.

    So the Congregationalist Dodd and the Anglican Cranmer remind us that when we life a Bible and read it, we are holding living words, to be read with mind and heart alive and alert, attentive and responsive, requiring obedience as well as illumination.

    The photo is of a battered old pulpit Bible, lying in a pew in a rural country church in Aberdeenshire. Looks as if someone took Cranmer literally and chewed it up! It bears witness to the nature of words, whether printed, spoken, read or preached. And maybe, just maybe, all the cultural dismissiveness, complacency and non-awareness of the Christian rootedness and biblical echoes in the flux and confusion of contemporary philosophies of life, would be counter-balanced by Christians being faithful in their reading and feeding from the book of God.

  • Alzheimer’s, Christmas Cards and the Yoke of Christ

    Over at the blog Faith and Theology, Kim Fabricius has his now regular doodlings on life, faith and disbelief at what Christians get up to, think, and how we sometimes behave in ways that bring Jesus into disrepute!

    Amongst his later comments I found the following poignant, pointed comment about what matters, who matters and why.

    Want to pare your Christmas card list? Ask yourself: if I am afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, who will come to visit me, sit with me, stay with me, speak my name, talk about the old days, and, above all, tell me how wonderful it is to see me?

    In one of those strangely compelling connections of thought we sometimes have, I remembered Jesus words about who to ask for dinner. Not those who can reciprocate, not those who will even appreciate, but those who can't pay back, those who may not even notice your kindness they are so hungry. Or those who no longer recognise you, have no way of remembering your kindness from one minute to the next, and therefore for whom friendship as the collected memories of love, companionships and shared life, now has to be lived in the present moment. So ask those who will never know it was even you – better still, visit those who don't even know who you are and why you are there. And perhaps, then our kindness, compassion and mercy is the beginning of that habitus of friendship that is something of what it means to accept Jesus' own invitation to "take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am gentle and lowly of heart, and my burden is light, and you will find rest for your soul" – [and perhaps, through you, so will others]

    And maybe going back to the Christmas card list, I want to make sure there are the names of those who will not send me one, may not even know any longer who I am or what a Christmas card stands for. But I do, and somewhere in that mystery we call love, such otherwise pointless gestures taken on the significance of sacrament. And that sacrament becomes the more redemptive of friendship if it is embodied because I take the card rather than post it.

     

  • Prayer, the Ordinary, and Seeing the World from God’s Point of View

    In a desultory hour this afternoon I went looking for my old friend, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I'd been working on the Christology tapestry, which is very close work and I needed a rest from peering and precision, staring and stitches, colours and choices. The Heschel anthology, I Asked For Wonder is a one-stop dispensary of spiritual wisdom and food for thought.

    Worship is a way of seeing the world

    in the light of God.

    We do not step out of the world when we pray;

    we merely see the world in a different setting.

    The self is not the hub,

    but the spoke of the revolving wheel.

    In prayer we shift the centre of living

    from self-consciousness to self surrender.

    God is the centre toward which all forces tend.

    He is the source, and we are the flowing of His force,

    the ebb and flow of His tides.

    Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest,

    and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy.

    …….

    See what I mean – spiritual wisdom and food for thought. A re-orientation of priorities; a reconfiguration of thought; a necessary change of perspective; a letting go in order to be free; an expansion of the heart by photosynthesis in the light of Divine Presence.

    Few writers I know combine the enjoyment of God with such reverence, or see so sharply and persistently the reality of God underlying the ordinary. To use Tillich's phrase, which Heschel would have accepted with some qualification, prayer is to live in constant attentiveness to the One who is the Ground of our being, and whose love and mercy are cause for wonder, thankfulness and worship.

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    The photo was taken at St Cyrus. In an odd juxtaposition of Blake and Heschel, it nicely illustrates the Heschel's way of viewing the world.

    To see a world in a grain of sand,
    And a heaven in a wild flower,
    Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
    And eternity in an hour.

  • Prayer for Needleworkers!

    DSC01286 (1)I like this prayer. Probably because I spend considerable spare time with stranded cotton and canvas, weaving and inweaving. Also because only when you discover the infinite options of mixing a couple of dozen six-stranded threads do you realise that diversity of shade and tone and colour make for richness of texture, surprising juxtapositions, clashes, harmonies and always the valuing of what is original, different and fun. Likewise with people, relationships and the life we are given to live.

    Go-between God:

    inweave the fabric of our common life,

    that the many coloured beauty of your love

    may find expression in all our exchanges.

    Jennifer Wild

    The Shalom Tapestry was completed Autumn 2013, and was worked over six months. Each panel portrays a Psalm – the inweaving of colour was a form of contemplative prayer, slowed down musing on the meaning of the texts