Living Wittily

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  • The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church

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    The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist

    Mary Oliver

     

    Something has happened

    To the bread

    And the wine.

    They have been blessed.

    What now?

    The body leans forward

    To receive the gift

    From the priest’s hand,

    Then the chalice.

    They are something else now

    From what they were

    Before this began.

    I want

    To see Jesus,

    Maybe in the clouds

    Or on the shore,

    Just walking,

    Beautiful man

    And clearly

    Someone else

    Besides.

    On the hard days

    I ask myself

    If I ever will.

    Also there are times

    My body whispers to me

                                                          That I have.

    Commenting on her poem Oliver wrote words of wisdom for theologians.

    "Centuries ago theologians claimed they had parsed with precision how God acted on the bread and wine during the celebration of the Eucharist.

    This wasn't helpful.

    Their lust for certitude bruised a mystery which was best left alone. It eventually birthed theological wars about the nature of a meal that was ironically intended to mend, not tear apart.

    I don't need to know what happens to the bread and wine to experience the oceanic love of God that I feel when I receive it, anymore than a newborn needs to know the mother's name and address to see and feel the adoration in her gaze."

    To which I wish all God's people might say, "Amen".



  • The Victorian Church, Owen Chadwick. With Thanks for Writing Readable Church History


    41v7IB4USJL._The historian Owen Chadwick is one of those scholars who give church history a good name. I'm currently reading the two volume The Victorian Church, which I have as two breize block hardbacks. I've dipped in and consulted them often enough, but never till now read through the thousand or so pages. Unsurprisingly Chadwick writes with authority and the required skill of instinct for the significant in constructing an account of an age transformed by revolutions in thought, heightened religious sensitivities in tension with growing secular and dissenting voices, constantly moving political alignments, and the expansion of British power and influence by means of Empire.

    But add to that narrative verve, ironic but always gentle humour, the skill of a master craftsman in words to draw pen portraits of the dramatis personaeof Victorian culture which match the equally miraculous accuracy of those near photographic miniatures of the 17th and 18th centuries. Chadwick makes history a pleasure to read  through; he makes ideas matter; and he brings personality and character alive so that you make up your own mind whether you agree or disagree, like or dislike, the key players. 

    I found his account of John Henry Newman satisfyingly honest, respectful and non-hagiographic. The narrative of the Oxford Movement is one I wish I'd come across when I was studying this High Anglican movement for a return to Catholic liturgy and ritual as a rather inexperienced young Baptist wondering what all the fuss was about because in my then less than humble opinion, both sides were wrong!!

    When I've finished both volumes I'll extract two or three of the best pen portraits and succinct one liners. ! 

  • Theology as an Act of Hospitality A New Theological Project

    It was 1973 when I first read Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret, while writing an essay on the Christian and Islamic conception of God. To say it was mind opening is understatement. Reading it represented a loss of innocence for a young Scottish Baptist evengelical, ignorant of the sophisticated theology and cultural depth of Islam, and guilty of narrow-minded caricature. For two years I had been reading Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, and was now in a second year reading Principles of Religion, a cutting edge course early in that decade of the 70's when growing cultural diversity in Glasgow was forcing the recognition that Christianity was no longer the only game in town. It was during that course that I first encountered the notion of inter-faith dialogue. And by being compelled to write an essay comparing two historic, related but highly differentiated monotheistic faiths, I found myself engaged in my own head experiencing a radical makeover of ideas, and persuaded in my soul where convictions strike deep roots, of the significance of dialogue in Christian relations with people of other faiths.


    ChildrenI discovered that dialogue need not be compromise, concession, or tame conversation in search of the lowest common denominator. Rather dialogue is conversation in which listening is as important as speaking, it concerns beliefs held with integrity and deep conviction, it requires respect, humility, and willingness to learn as well as teach; it is founded on the assumption of friendship and shared commitment in the search for truth, and as its beating heart, it recognises without demur the Other's right to hold to and practice their faith with the same freedom as I enjoy, and with an agreed covenant of faithfulness in our witness to, and practice of, our own faith.

    There have been many significant formative moments in my life as a minister and theologian. There's little point in grading them in degrees of significance; indeed the importance we attribute to events, circumstances, encounters, experiences, thoughts, memories, conversations, books, are likely to depend on which stage of the journey we look back from. But I do know, that from the time I wrote that essay and read Cragg's great book, I moved from Christian mission as declaratory theological monologue to Christian witness as Holy Spirit enabled hospitable dialogue. If I haven't always lived up to that key principle of Christian witness in a pluralist world, then that is my own failure to live out of what remains a central Christian conviction: namely, bearing witness to Jesus requires us to relinquish the places of theological, intellectual and cultural power, and to sit down next to those who share our world and our lives. In that disposition of recognition and accompaniment as a faithful follower of Jesus, I am free to bear witness in a conversation which is a sharing and searching for the truth that sets free. And to do so as one who seeks to live under the rule of Christ, in the power of the Spirit, and in the love of God.


    868534_w185All of which brings me to a book I've been asked to review for the Regent's Reviews online Journal. Christ and Reconciliation. A Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World, Veli-Matti Karkkainen (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013). This is one of the most promising theological projects to come along for some time. It is one desperately needed by a Western-Northern Post Most Things Christianity in danger of recycling its own in-house theological discourse and history, talking its own talk to an increasingly disinterested culture, and in a linguistic currency increasingly distorted and devalued by the absence of defining voices from other cultures and contexts of globalChristianity.

    Karkkainen has for years been writing theology from global and contextual perspectives. He is unafraid of the clumsy, even ugly term "glocal", because it's very awkwardness highlights the need to recognise the complex interaction of local and global perspectives which now impimge on Christian theologies. Here is a brief paragraph which makes a very obvious connection between my earlier encounter with Bishop Kenneth Cragg's plea for dialogue, and this major new theological project.

    "Theology, robustly inclusivistic in its orientation, welcoming testimonies, insights, and interpretations from different traditions and contexts, can also be a truly dialogical enterprise. It honors the otherness of the other. It also makes space for an honest, genuine, authentic sharing of one's convictions. In pursuing the question of truth as revealed in the triune God, constructive theology also seeks to persuade and convince with the power of dialogical, humable and respectful argumentation. Theology then becomes an act of hospitality, giving and receiving gifts." (page 29)


  • A Wee Bit from A Prayer of George Macleod

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    God the Creator

    Thou hast changed us.

    Christ the Redeemer,

    Thou hast changed us.

    Holy Spirit the Binder,

    Thou dost keep us changed:

    Even as our lives are bound together in Thee.

    George F MacLeod, from The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory.

    As one trying hard to accomodate my books in a modest house, I have come to love slim books more than ever. Macleod's wee book of prayers is half a centimetre thick, and one of the gems of Scottish spirituality. I wouldn't part with it. He laboured over his prayers more than his sermons. There are prayers sketched on envelopes, on the back of utility bills, and even an occasional scrap of cereal packet – saved for the nation in the National Archives where his papers are held. They are holy fragments of a man's life, and even if Presbyterians don't do relics, and even less so us Baptists, these prayers, addresses, sermons and miscellaneous notes are amongst the treasures of the Kirk. I spent a couple of half days in Edin burgh going through them, and imagining this pipe clenching cleric hammering them out on a typewriter, or outlining them with a blunt pencil (making them a challenge to decipher), and sensing the spiritual passion of a man who made the vision of Iona more than a pipe dream.

    The book is still in print from Wild Goose, and available on Amazon.

  • And we complain at the cost of theological education – and sometimes at the inconvenience caused by some years of ministry formation.

    For students of Bonhoeffer yet another milestone is about to be passed. The English translation of volume 14 of Bonhoeffer's works is due to be released by the end of October. Between 1935 and 1937 Bonhoeffer was engaged in theological education and pastoral formation at the underground seminary in Finkenwalde. The slim book, Life Together, is as near a Rule for that Christian Community as he ever came to write. It is a passionate exposition of the disciplina arcana of a Christian pastoral spirituality resilient enough to resist the Nazification of German culture and the widespread collaborative capitulation of vast swathes of the German Church.

    This new volume gathers together for the first time Bible studies, sermons, lectures on pastoral theology and preaching, a huge collection of writing from the rapidly maturing Bonhoeffer who wrote at this time Life Together and Discipleship. At over 1250 pages I did wonder if it might come in two volumes – so I asked the good folk at Fortress – but no, it will be one very thick and heavy book. Cumbersome, but only in the sense that gold bricks are. I'm finishing off the other stuff I'm reading just now so that when this book is unloaded onto my desk there will be room for it, and time to join the seminary classes out of which came some of the most courageous pastors, many of whom would not survive the war.

  • A Week of Poems that “do it”, Whatever “It” Might Be – Sunday

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    Every Riven Thing

    God goes, belonging to every riven thing He's made
    Sing his being simply by being
    The thing it is:
    Stone and tree and sky,
    Man who sees and sings and wonders why

    God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He's made,
    Means a storm of peace.
    Think of the atoms inside the stone.
    Think of the man who sits alone
    Trying to will himself into the stillness where

    God goes belonging. To every riven thing He's made
    There is given one shade
    Shaped exactly to the thing itself:
    Under the tree a darker tree;
    Under the man the only man to see

    God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
    The things that bring Him near,
    Made the mind that makes Him go.
    A part of what man knows,
    Apart from what man knows,

    God goes belonging to every riven thing He's made.

    Christian Wiman

    I've been reading Wiman for a few years now. This is a poem that needs little comment other than to hear the author read it here.

    This comes from an astonishing interview with Wiman recalling his life growing up in Texas. If you want to hear the full interview with Krista Tippett it's over here.

    As a taster of how this remarkable man's mind works, here's just one quote:

    I am convinced that the same God that might call me to sing of God at
    one time might call me at another to sing of godlessness. Sometimes when
    I think of all of this energy that's going on, all of these different
    people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I
    think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order
    that faith can take new forms.

    …………………………………………….

    The photo above was taken on Inverbervie beach – those smooth, sea shaped stones are amongst my favourite things in Scotland. I can happily meander along that rocky beach taking pleasure in the coulours, shapes, arrangement and sound of those stones being pushed and pulled by the waves. The phot below is of another of God's creatures who likes the same beach.


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  • A Week of Poems that “do it”, Whatever “It” Might Be – Saturday

    Rose tinted
    twilight;

    alert
    serenity, poised

    with effortless grace.

    Jim Gordon

    Yes haiku is poetry, and at least once this week I though I might be permitted a wee bit self indulgence and share one of my own Haiku!
    The photo was taken at Loch Skene this Spring during a long slow sunset. This time it isn't really the poem that "does it", its the combination of the poem and the picture, the memory of such a beautiful moment and its capture in words that in turn recall the memory.

    What is it about beauty that brings a lump to our throats and makes it hard to swallow? Then there's the deeper sense, that the power of beauty to apprehend us floods us with an inner joy and outer clarity so that we see, we pay attention and we glimpse that which is beyond us. There are few moments in our lives in which we more closely encounter truth, than those moments of clarity when unexpected beauty illumines our world, and our painful longings for goodness are strengthened from ideal into resolve. Such transforming moments of encounter with beauty, goodness and truth are what Aquinas understood as contemplative theololgy, when the three transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth are integrated by love, experienced and expressed as a transformative trinity of human responsiveness to the Eternal Love that occasionally irupts and bathes all creation with radiant glory.

  • A Week of Poems That Do “It”, Whatever “It” Might Be – Friday

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    EVENING, Emily Dickinson

    She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
    And leaves the shreds behind;
    Oh, housewife in the evening west,
    Come back, and dust the pond!

    You dropped a purple ravelling in,
    You dropped an amber thread;
    And now you've littered all the East
    With duds of emerald!

    And still she plies her spotted brooms,
    And still the aprons fly,
    Till brooms fade softly into stars –
    And then I come away.


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    I don't remember my first encounter with the strange beauty and enigmatic brevity of Emily Dickinson's poems. More than many others I've read, even favourite poems of hers read differently every time; they evade critical and even appreciative capture. If poems are capable of playing hard to get, then many of her poems do frustrate our desire to possess, our drive to understand, and refuse to pander to our insecurity pushing us to pin down meaning. What on earth does it 'mean' to say "Till brooms fade softly into stars" – and then you realise, that what it 'means' isnt the point. In six words she makes the transition from dusk to darkness, and the word 'softly' is hushed with reassuring gentleness. It isn't too speculative to say this poem is informed by witnessing hundreds of performances by "the housewife in the evening west".

    I am ridiculously fond of fudge with stem ginger, covered in dark chocolate. The collision of flavours and richness of each slice means you don't eat it like sweeties! A bar of this connoiseur's confection lasts me a month (it's quite a big bar though). Likewise Dickinson's poems – hers is a book on my desk and I seldom read more than one or two poems at a time. What a waste of taste, sensation and anticipation to sit down and devour them without lingering over the sheer joy of sampling each poem. Aye, chocolate covered ginger fudge, and Emily Dickinson's poems – you could do worse than enjoy both, together.

    The first photo was taken from my study window; the second from a layby near Sherrifmuir looking north west.

  • A Week of Poems That Do “It”, Whatever “It” Might Be – Thursday

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    Ode To Autumn

    1.
    Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
            Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
        Conspiring with him how to load and bless
            With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
        To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
            And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
              To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
            With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
        And still more, later flowers for the bees,
      Until they think warm days will never cease,
              For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

    2.
      Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
          Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
      Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
          Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
      Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
          Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
              Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
      And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
          Steady thy laden head across a brook;
          Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
              Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

    3.
      Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
          Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
      While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
          And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
      Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
          Among the river sallows, borne aloft
              Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
      And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
          Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
          The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
              And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                                                                                  John Keats
    The best time to read this is just after listening to Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Autumn movement from his Seasons suite, after which have at least three Victoria plums followed by oatcakes with Ayrshire cheese and pear chutney, then a large pancake with butter and bramble and crab apple jelly, at an open window listening to the migrating geese honking their way south. That's about as devotional as this post gets today! Autumn – love it.
    The photo at the top is of a straw swiss roll taken from the field a mile away. The small acer is years old and last winter gave it a hard time. It's still spectacular at this time of the year – for about 5 days.

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  • A Week of Poems That Do “It”, Whatever “It” Might Be – Wednesday

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    Favourite poems sometimes have complex pedigrees. The prayer of thanksgiving by Simon in The Wisdom 0f Sirach 50.22-24 was the inspiration for Martin Rinkart to write the German Hymn Nun Danket Alle Gott. This was translated by Catherine Winkworth as  Now Thank We All Our God, the version printed below. Incidentally that supposedly sweet tempered, gentle Anglican and spiritual director, Evelyn Underhill, was less than impressed with Winkworth's translations of the German Mystics, referring to her as 'wicked Winkworth'. But whatever her shortcomings as translator, she produced a rock solid hymn of praise and thanksgiving adequate to our deepest and simplest theology. Karl Barth was guilty of writing some of the deepest and simplest theology in the history of the Church, and the hymn below was one of his favourites, and its middle verse a personal prayer credo – one which I'm happy to sign up to myself.

    The photo was taken in August – Smudge is a crypto-Barthian in her spare time.

    Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,

    Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;

    Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way

    With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.


    O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,

    With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;

    And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;

    And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!


    All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;

    The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;

    The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;

    For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

    Martin Rinkart (1586-1649)