Living Wittily

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  • 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.

    DSC01649 (1)

    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

  • The Glimpses and Whispers of the Creator Redeemer

    DSC01041Yesterday, how pleased and blessed was I……

    In one corrdor at University I met three friends coming the other way, one after another, all hurrying, all going to the same meeting,all tight for time, and all stopped to say hello.

    The day before left my glasses on someone else's table and went to retrieve them, and had a surprise catch up with someone I didn't expect to see whose company is always a benediction on the day.

    In class we were thinking about monastic spirituality, and about the dispoitions of simplicity, stability, listening and hospitality – and we wondered what Baptist church meetings might be like if these were the four dispositions that governed words, thought and behaviour?

    On the way home near Auchterarder, a lapwing doing "summersaults" in early spring. Few birds can do aerial acrobatics with such consummate ease and the sunlight catching the black, white and green shimmer of the plumage…praise in motion.

    At the Mearns around Laurencekirk, a sunset in my rearview mirror that was so distractingly beautiful I stopped at the lay-by and watched. The brilliant orange filtering through early evening haze, the hill line awash with warm Turneresque tones, and the blades of the windfarm no longer geometric gray but a golden mobile contradicting the fading of daylight.

    All of which lifted the heart and reminded me of this hymn I haven't sung for a hundred years – but would like to!

    1. How pleased and blessed was I,
    To hear the people cry,
    “Come let us seek our God today!”
    Yes with a cheerful zeal,
    We'll haste to Zion's hill,
    And there our vows and honors pay.

    2. Zion, thrice happy place,
    Adorned with wondrous grace,
    And walls of strength embrace thee round!
    In thee our tribes appear,
    To pray, and praise, and hear
    The sacred gospel's joyful sound.

    3. There David's greater Son
    Has fixed his royal throne;
    He sits for grace and judgement there:
    He bids the saint be glad,
    He makes the sinner sad,
    And humble souls rejoice with fear.

    4. May peace attend thy gate,
    And joy within thee wait,
    To bless the soul of ev'ry guest:
    The man that seeks thy peace,
    And wishes thine increase,
    A thousand blessings on him rest!

    5. My tongue repeats her vows,
    “Peace to this sacred house!
    For here my friends and kindred dwell:”
    And since my glorious God
    Makes thee his blest abode,
    My soul shall ever love thee well.

     

    I guess the verses are too packed with University Challenge busting allusions to the Bible, and there are too many metaphors that are familiar only to those who once sang hymns like these, and the tune doesn't need all the accoutrements of the now essential praise team, for it to be popular, or even accessible. But that first line, "How pleased and blest was I", the first three lines of verse 4, and the lovely couplet, "Peace to this sacred house! For here my friends and kindred dwell." These are the sentiments of those soaked in Psalm 122, whose prayers are a passionate plagiarism of the psalm-prayers of Israel, and for whom attentiveness to the world around is itself alertness for the glimpses and whispers of the Creator Redeemer. 

  • Books worth buying twice: Talking with Denise Levertov

    41LY+sQNaRL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX342_SY445_CR,0,0,342,445_SH20_OU02_Over the years I've lost a book and asked myself if it was important enough to buy it again. I had a hardback first edition of Chaim Potok, The Gift of Asher Lev, and when I went to look for it I couldn't find it. Did it get handed into a charity shop? Did someone borrow it and I've forgotten (check your bookshelves readers whom I know, please 🙂 But it doesn't matter – I was in a charity shop in Crieff and found a mint paperback copy for £1.99 and I'm almost finished reading it again. What a writer Potok was!

    However I remember more vividly coming off a train on the way back from somewhere and just as I surrendered my ticket to the exit barrier I remembered I'd left my book on the table. It was Conversations with Denise Levertov, and I had just finished reading it and had annotated it to find the good bits more easily. I resisted buying it again, for a few years, but today it arrived from Amazon because I want to hear her voice at the different stages of her life. It is a voice that talks in compassion and anger, but each in proper proportion; it is a voice that speaks of what is seen and heard, but only after what is seen is taken in, and what is heard is listened to for its truth; hers is a voice that articulates conscience while understanding the entanglements, ambiguities and ethical quandaries that grow across whatever paths we walk.

    "Belief is believing there is a God; faith is believing that God believes in you". That's just one of her one liners. This was a poet who wrote poems on subjects for which there were no words, yet she was determined to give word to the wordless horror of rape as a military weapon, napalm as apocalypse reduced to local conflagration, and torture as an acceptable means to the end of national interest.

    Denise Levertov's essays A Poet in the World is in effect a confession of faith in the poet's vocation, For her, political issues are so embedded in human flourishing and suffering that they require articulation in words and thoughts, that are not beholden to expediency, pragmatism and the calculus that guages how much human suffering is justified in the pursuit of "freedom", "democracy", and yes, power. 

     

  • Two Observations on the Wesleys.

    `The veteran Methodist scholar Geoffrey Wainwright in a superb essay on Wesleyan hymnody and Chalcedon reminisced:

    "When Paul Tillich was still a figure in  twentieth-century theology I liked to say to students that Charles Wesley had captured first Tillich and then Chalcedon in just two lines: 

    “Being’s source begins to be,

    And God himself is born.” 

    ………………..

    John Wesley has rightly been described as a reasonable enthusiast. But his sermons are too often dismissed as rational argument over-endowed with logic and theological precision, lacking the vitality and imagination necessary to sustain interest and persuade the spirit. How about this then, as a pargrapah that, for spiritual experience described and communicated, stands alongside the effusive Francis De Sales, the intense Teresa of Avila, the passionately alight Augustine, and the enigmatic author of the Cloud of Unknowing, as an account of authentic experience of God, given classic expression in words. 

    From what has been said, we may learn…what the life of God in the soul of a believer is; wherein it properly consists; and what is immediately and necessarily implied therein. It immediately and necessarily implies the continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit; God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and a re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be a holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus.

  • Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar. The Power of Story.

    516rW-VRs6L._This is not review; it's more a meditation on the power of story in our lives. For a while I've found it hard to read a novel. It wasn't a deliberate evasion of fiction which I've always enjoyed, and just as importantly, learned from. Story is the way we think through our lives, encounter other possible selves, explore from both distance and nearness, the experience of others, and ask ourselves questions where it overlaps with our own, or diverges into territory we have never explored.

    Anatomy of a Disappearance, by Hisham Matar, is a strange novel. I’m not sure what  is to be assimilated as ‘lesson’ or ‘wisdom’; other than the recognition of complexity not only in our relationships with people, but in the mystery and experience of the people to whom we relate; and the puzzle all but insoluble, of our own selves, as that same complexity multiplied by our intermingled relatedness to all those others in our lives, for good or ill.

    What is love? Does it change its forms as we grow and mature? Or is it us who change? How many kinds of human relationship are there in which we can still with confidence use the term ‘love’ as descriptor? Does love cause jealousy, or does the birth of jealousy kill love at source? As this story unfolded and the boy becomes a man, his mother dies, his father remarries the woman he wants for himself, then is discovered to have married her to secure her presence for his son, while he secretly loves and lives with the person he really wants to be with, but in the process his father then disappears as a kidnapped political dissident.

    Emotional nuance, the dread and dream of desire, the embodiedness of love and yet the inadequacy of mere embodiedness to fully express it; the tension of father and son in this story; the ambivalence of stepmother and child growing into a man and the awakening of desire – all of these are beautifully portrayed in a story that describes the limitations which circumstance inevitably imposes on human love and experience, with resultant sadness, and inevitable if reluctant resignation, but which nevertheless, in the alchemy of human relatedness, enrich and change the protagonists.

    And I guess in every human heart there is the intersection of these same fallibilities and possibilities. We love as we can. Occasionally we reach degrees of intimacy that truly satisfy, more often there is the restless attempt to understand, the yearing to build bridges, to reach out, but all the times the frustration of circumstance without and hesitations of confidence and trust within. I do wonder if Christian theology has often enough made allowances for the mismatch between love at its best and the human heart as it is; if our theology of love is adequate to the essential complexity of created being. And I wonder too if or when we might ever clearly understand and pay attention to the frightening precipice on which we all stand as we survey the world of people around us, with all of whom we share this mysterious potentiality that is our life from God, love as divine and human gift, divine grace and human longing, essential vocation and terrifying treasure which must not be wasted.

    Psalm 51 with its profound anguish of guilt, shame and yet irrationally persistent hope of redemption, and 139 with its God hauntedness and its mixture of complaint and comfort in the omnipresence and omnisicience of God, are written from such a knowing heart. A heart familier with the confused complexity and inherent dignity in this bundle of longings and anxieties we call our humanity, and which nevertheless trust that God's mercy, grace and love can draw purpose and wsorth out of such a fankled existence.

    This novel, with its tale of a son, a mother, a stepmother, a father, and the impact they have on each other at different stages of life, is a potent example of how story enables us to look with compassion on humanity, ours and others; and to be more patient and unjudging of human love in all its fallibility and mistakenness, because it is love in its mysterious reality that sounds the echo in our hearts that we are made in the image of God, and thus allows us to hear the footsteps of God in our lives. 

  • Renewing the Heart in Old Churches.

    Just back from 4 days of a self-indulgent holiday break at Crieff Hydro, and feeling that life is good and God is to be thanked. Smudge was delighted to see us – she was at the feline equivalent of the Hydro, but happy to be back stomping around her own place.

    Amongst the things to do in the rain – visit old churches. Fowlis Wester is as old as they come in Scotland. A church has been here since the 13th Century and this is one of my favourite quiet places, first discovered in 1972. Time has passed the village by, it used to be a thriving trade centre into the 19th century, and it's now hidden from the main road unless you go looking for it.

    DSC01839The leper squint is one of those generous concessions of a bygone age to those who were  otherwise excluded. From this window, and this distance it was still possible for people with leprosy to see the Eucharist being performed, to hear the words, and thus to feel some kind of connectedness in a society where fear, ostracism and a primitive health and safety policy imposed a non-negotiable exclusion. I don't know how many other Scottish churches have a leper squint, this is the only one I've seen, sat beside and wondered about thos all but lost souls for whom this was a window into heaven and the hope that somewhere there was a love that would ransom, heal, restore and forgive.

    DSC01849 (1)Leaving the church the sun came out and a glance across the graveyard the snowdrops were astonishingly white against the greys and greens of granite, grass, moss, lichen, the juxtaposition of mortality and eternity, life's promise contradicting death's certainty.

    Good places old churches, and old graveyards where the saints of yesterday rest in peace, while encouraging people like me to, as Jesus says, '"work while there is still daylight"!

    Spring is here :))