Living Wittily

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  • Longing for the Infinite…you have put eternity in human hearts, O God.

    In the beginning was the Word….all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made…

    When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands….what are human beings that you care for them, mortal people that you keep them in mind?

    Horsehead Nebula

    The new images from the Herschel telescope mirror, 3.5 metres in diameter.

    This image reminded me of the work of the late Rebecca Elson. I wrote about her in an earlier post here. I quoted the following poem, written by Elson, a brilliant astro-physicist, a deeply thoughtful human being, and one who, suffering a terminal cancer, explored her own mortality with courage, honesty and a deep longing for more.


    Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)

    For this we go out dark nights, searching
    For the dimmest stars,
    For signs of unseen things:

    To weigh us down.
    To stop the universe
    From rushing on and on:

    Into its own beyond
    Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
    Its last star going out.

    Whatever they turn out to be,
    Let there be swarms of them,
    Enough for immortality,
    Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

    Let there be enough to bring it back
    From its own edges,
    To bring us all so close we ignite
    The bright spark of resurrection.

    I find few things more moving than those moments when human beings, and perhaps most of all pure scientists, who recognise mortality as both the given limits of life, and yet hold to a deeper trust that there is that which enables such limits to be transcended by a power and creativity beyond our ken….

    And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.

  • Give peace a chance – the mission of the Body of Christ, the Church.

    Fresco Painted by Bo Beskow of Sweden for the UN Meditation Room that opened in the winter of 1957. The space is dedicated to silence, where people can withdraw into themselves, regardless of their faith, creed or religion. It was planned by Dag Hammarskjöld (UN Secretary-General 1953-61), who personally supervised its creation; he believed that the UN “should have one room dedicated to silence in the outward sense and stillness in the inner sense.”

    Fresco painted by the Swedish artist, Bo Beskow, illuminated within the Quiet Room at UN Headquarters, New York. 

    "This is a room devoted to peace

    and those who are giving  their

    lives for peace. It is a room of quiet

    where only thoughts should speak."

    (Dag Hammarskjold)

    Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.

    Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

    So far as it depends on you, live at peace with all people.

    Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of
    us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To
    build a world of justice, we must be just. (Dag Hammarskjold)

    When was the theme of peace,

            in its length and breadth,

                      and height and depth,

                              last on the agenda of your local church meeting

                                      as an essential missional question for followers of Jesus?



  • Dag Hammarskjold – the United Nations and the Road to Holiness.

    Product Details
    In conversation with Jason the Forsythian when we met in Scotland he was guilty of shameless name-dropping:) He had been in the company of Archbishop Rowan Williams no less, a Christian thinker whose writing is often complex enough to both frustrate and satisfy; frustrating because you know he is saying something important and profound, satisfying because he never short changes the reader by dumbing down, cutting corners, or pretending all the jig saw pieces are even there. His return to academia will I hope mean he will begin to draw together much of his thought into a substantial vision of God enriched from important influences of Eastern and Western theology. 

    But anyway, Williams mentioned to Jason the new biography of Dag Hammarskjold, and commended it warmly. His blurb is on the dust jacket:

    "And admirably judicious and comprehensive – and long overdue – study of one of the most remarkable figures of the twentieth century, whose presence remains both spiritually and politically significant for an age of violently confused international relations."

    Another former Archbishop, this time K G Hammar of the Church of Sweden, also commends the volume:

    "A great book about a great man who must not be forgotten in a time which more than ever needs to see the footprints of Dag Hammarskjold – the combination of wholehearted engagement in the world and familiarity with the spiritual journey inwards."

    My own debt to Hammarskjold goes back to the first reading of Markings, and how many people have to say that. It is a quite extraordinary book, a reservoir of wisdom, deep, fresh, reflecting shimmering sunshine, some blue sky but also clouds and the shadow of mountains. Maybe it would be better described as a Scottish loch then. But the maxims and reflections, the prayers and the psalms, the confessions and thanksgivings, the self critique and the compassionate outwardness, and through it all the sense of the reality of a power that is transcendent, suffusing life with mercy and hopefulness, – through it all, the sense of God.

    I've often wondered what a book club would make of it, filled as it is with the heart and the mind of a great human being, part of whose greatness was his own sense of mortality, fallibility and the urgency of what we do with the gift of our life. One of his best known maxims remains true as a reminder to the Church of what its life is about, what its mission is to be:

    "In our era, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action."

    Yes, and yes again. Lipsey's aim in this biography is to explore the importance of Hammarskjold's inner life as the engine and energy of his outward activities as an humanitarian, diplomat and man of faith caught up in the world of politics, power and international tensions. That small book of markings, found on his bedside table after his death, remains a classic of spiritual honesty, moral striving and the felt tension between disciplined duty and enabling grace from beyond ourselves. 

  • Keep playing Vivaldi – Winter gives way to Spring, Eventually

    DSC01253

    On the road up the Cairn o' Mount this intrepid tree seemed to be hanging on for dear life. Its angle of repose has been shaped by years of windswept exposure, and roots more likely spread outwards than plunging deeply. No other trees are near it. How it got there, how it stays there, part of the accidental landscaping of a Scottish high level moor. I'm going to try for another photo of it in the summer – that might be some time away yet! I love trees.

    Curved resilience

    leaning away from wind chill;

    but after snow, Spring.

  • The Boston Marathon and an Alternative to the Futility of Violence

    I haven't been in many American cities, but I have been in Boston three times. My good friends Bob and Becky live in New England, and as their guests we have enjoyed the hospitality, warm love for all things Scottish, and the intellectual and cultural experiences of New England people. And from a blugerass concert to Shaker heritage, to Boston and its important place in the history of Baptist thought and practice, even visiting the Quaker assembly which Elton trueblood attended.

    I guess not many now know the name Elton Trueblood. Philosopher and cultural critic, radical Christian practitioner and intellectually generous follower of Jesus, a man whose wisdom and deep love for God illumines much of what he wrote, lived and said. His sermons The Yoke of Christ, his numerous books on Christian engagement with society in the 1950's and 60's, and his reputation as a thinker deeply plunged in the contemplative foundations of Christian theology and prayer, made that brief glimpse of the place where this man lived out his later life a kind of low key pilgrimage. I owe much to Trueblood's thought.

    His book Alternative to Futility was born in class discussions about war and peace, violence and dialogue, conflict and reconciliation. In the 50's the Cold War was fuelled by runaway fear and suspicion, and the futility of a world divided along lines of terror, hostility and the idolatry of explosive power. The idolatry of explosive power from bullets to missiles, smart bombs to IED's, and yes nuclear weapons and drone delivered death, is now an established and largely unchallenged recourse to the explosion of energy for the damage of other human beings.

    And I guess my overwhelming response to the explosions at the Boston marathan, immediate and so far largely unreflective as it is, is one of deep sadness at the futility of such acts of violence and hatred of other human beings. The death of an 8 year old boy, there to celebrate his father's finishing the race is, well futile. The reduction of human life to fuel for publicity of any cause or none fulfils no meaningful purpose I can discern. Trueblood's thesis still requires adequate refutation – whatever the motives for the use of explosive power to the damage of another human being, it will always be invalidated in any hieracrchy of values that sees human hurt and human killing as a means to an immensely lesser end. I realise more can be said. And on reflection I may wish I'd said more, or less. But the sense of sadness, and the refusal to give in to the temptations of despair and cynicism that grow out of a sense of futility, will not make me want to be less hopeful, more committed to an alternative view of the world, more thoughtful in my prayers for a world like ours.

    One of the great visions of the Hebrew Bible is children making the noise of play and excitement in city streets. Whatever else the death of that young boy means, it is a reminder of what I hope for in human fulfilment, and what I pray against in the actions and thinking of those who settle for futility.

    Kyrie Eleison

    Christe Eleison

    Kyrie Elieson

  • Not a poem but a footnote

    uganda - tribes and culture

    "The Human Other"

    We must, in short,

    descend into detail,

    past the misleading tags,

    past the metaphysical types,

    past the empty similarities

    to grasp firmly the essential character

    of not only the various cultures

    but the various sorts of individuals

    within each culture,

    if we wish

    to encounter humanity

    face to face."

    I came across this as footnote 210 on page 139, in Graham Buxton's excellent Creation, The Trinity and Pastoral Ministry. Imaging the Perichoretic God. The quote is from Clifford Geertz the sociologist, in his book The Interpretation of Cultures. Typed like that it reads more as a poem than a footnote.

    The photo can be found here on a site that is a marvellous celebration of culture, difference and otherness and the diverse richness of the varied beauty of the human face and the human family. The expression "face to face", happily a non-jargon description of cultural encounter, has so much potential for understanding, compassion, celebration and the shared enjoyment of God's creation.

  • Margaret Thatcher, St Francis of Assisi, Money and Social Security.

    My family going back several generations were Lanarkshire miners. By the time Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister most of the deep mines in Scotland were either closed or closing. My children were born into a country in which we struggled with the three day week, power cuts, the oil crisis with prices going beyond what any of us thought would ever be affordable again, inflational spirals, and then the Winter of Discontent. That so apt Shakespearean phrase was filled with all the constrained but difficult to contain energy of resentment, an anger charged lightning that had to find a point of discharge.


    ThatcherThe debate surrounding whether Margaret Thatcher ruined the country or saved it was always going to rage after her death. Indeed, rage is perhaps a word that encapsulates the emotional and visceral responses generated by the policies of successive Thatcher Governments. Either the rage and outrage of those who opposed monetarism, privatisation, the forefronting of nuclear threat, the dismantling of heavy and manufacturing industries replaced with financial and service industries, or the rage of those who thought Union power, Nationalised industry, the threat of Russia and Communism, and other social or socialist policies were forcing the country into recession or social regression.

    No wonder feelings are once again raw with hatred or admiration, resentment or gratitude. It is interesting that those who speak most volubly and positively of the Thatcher legacy mostly do so from positions of power, wealth and social security – the phrase is deliberate. Note, Social Security is a positive idea, Benefit System is much less affirming and supportive of human need. I mention the point because amongst the most influential changes Margaret Thatcher brought to British politics was not only political divisiveness but a discourse and rhetoric that made a virtue of polarisation rather than negotiation, that edefaulted to compulsion over consensus, and that placed in the political lexicon the threefold No! No! No! as the term of choice when defending self-interest.


    Francis_and_birdsThe creation and validation of greed as a social virtue, the morally naive claim that creation of wealth is not wrong (The Sermon on the Mound) and that it is the use of wealth that raise the significant ethical questions, lacked, as all political ideologies do, an adequate doctrine of hamartiology. Hamartiology is the area of theology that deals with human sinfulness, fallibility, and the creative genius of the human mind to create and worship our own idols. In recent decades the phrase structural sin has come to refer to our ability to build into social structures of power and policy, those same self-interested drives that underlie greed, dishonesty, matter of fact bottom line thinking that delibedrately leaves out the human cost because that is a subjective skewing of what needs to be an objective assessment in order to get value for money, the cheapest price, the most for the least output, cost or effort.

    Successive Governments after Margaret Thatcher's fall in 1990, have built on that legacy, with a financial free for all that became financial freefall, and now an austerity programme justified by blaming others, and fuelled by that same resentment against those who benefit from our ( note, our – not the Government's) Social Security system and our ( note, OUR ) National Health Service.We still lack an Hamartiology adequate to our economic ambitions, mistakes and inhumanity.

    All that said – an elderly woman has died and certain humane customs ought rightly to follow. The scale and cost was always going to be problematic, if only because of security, settling of scores, and what she herself called 'the oxygen of publicity', even more important and immediate in a culture used to surveillance, digital technology and the uniquitous hand held camera options. I hope her funeral takes place with dignity, honesty, and the proper summing up of a human life, believing as I do a truer, sterner judgement, and a more generous mercy and justice than mine, will prevail and speak the final words.

    At the beginning of her Premiership, Margaret Thatcher quoted the prayer of St Francis of Assisi, including the words "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony". Perhaps instead of taking ideological sides, or insisting that her impact on our personal life story is the decisive factor in the debate about her achievements, the whole of that prayer, in its more familiar text, should be set against her political career, her life, and her legacy.

    Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

    Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

    where there is injury,pardon;

    where there is doubt, faith;

    where there is despair, hope;

    where there is darkness, light;

    and where there is sadness, joy.


    O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek

    to be consoled as to console;

    to be understood as to understand;

    to be loved as to love.

    For it is in giving that we receive;

    it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

    and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

    .

     

  • Picasso: Child Holding a Dove, and Our Longing for Peace

    Last week was the anniversary of Picasso, whose work is for me glorious, mysterious, wild, disturbing, perplexing, consoling, awakening, upsetting, – these and much more. Some of Picasso's work is beyond me, which mostly says more about my incapacity and knowledge limitation than it does about works that puzzle me. I have a framed print of Picasso's Dove of Peace, which remains an eloquent comment on human capacity for peace destruction, whether in Afghanistan or Syria, Iran or North Korea.

    The novel Guernica, by Dave Boling is romance and historical novel, based around the destruction of Guernica by the Luftwaffe during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso features in the novel, along with his massive raginbg response to the brutality of the attack on a civilian population. Near the end of the novel a high ranking German SS Officer who admired the painting met Picasso in the cafe and asked, "That painting. Did you do that?"

    Picasso's answer was as blistering as the painting – "No. You did that."

    Amongst Picasso's paintings Child Holding a Dove is one of my favourites. Is the child protecting the dove or holding it captive? Is the dove of peace safe in the hands of children? Is she holding it close, or in the act of lifting it to the freedom of flight? Is it a toy, like the ball in the foreground, or a precious creature whose gentleness is to be cherished and whose life is to be valued? All or none of these, it doesn't matter. The painting is a lovely image of much that makes human life itself the value that underlies our longings for peace, and the ambiguity and precariousness of our grasp of peace, and the risk that lies in our human choices, to posses it for ourselves, or leave it to fly freely amongst us all.

    Child holding an Ipad doesn't have the same aesthetic appeal. But maybe, just maybe, children whose imaginations and awareness are expanded by the best of our technology, will grow into mature people who resist the temptations of the worst of our technology. Let the dove fly.

  • “Let me just pray – and you can just listen”.


    DSC01082I first came across the name of Caryl Micklem as the writer of a slim volume of "Contemporary Prayers for Church Worship", published in the 1970's. The book is long gone, as is the contemporary world for which the prayers were written. But the collection included the kind of prayers that required eyes open to the world in compassion rather than eyes closed in inner reverie. Intercessions were specific, ways of addressing God less consxtrained by tradition.

    To lead a congregation in prayer is one of the most significant acts of service and humility before God and before the people. On this I am I guess, old fashioned. After all I still wear a tie both for the formality and for the joy of colour! But it is difficult to feel included when the person leading worship uses the first person singular – they are not leading us in prayer, but forcing us to overhear a private conversation. The unrehearsed, unconsidered outpouring of words and thoughts with blanks filled in with 'just' and 'Lord' and moving in and out of cliched devotion are not so much the outpourings of the heart, as what R E O White, my former College Principal once called, "pouring out the contents of your mental waste paper basket upon the heads of an unsuspecting congregation".

    Geroge Macleod, whose small book of prayers "The Whole Earth is Full of His Glory", is in  my view one of the most beautifully composed volumes around, spent as much time, and sometimes he confessed, more time, composing the prayers that would give voice to the spiritual longings, life hurts, celebrations and perplexities of a gathered community of believers, bowing their heads in worship. That kind of thoughtfulness is itself a pastoral discipline that requires the best of those who aspire to "lead" a congregation in  prayer or in worship.

    For such reasons, contemporary or not, I have always valued books of prayers, both those that can be used and acknowledged, and those that push us to think differently and with a larger horizon, those that stir imagination and open us up to the range of human experience so infinitely varied from our own – these are amongst the treasures of the church. And sometimes they are written as hymns, like the one below, also by Caryl Micklem. I can still say or sing this and feel that important things I might not have thought of, are now thought about in the presence of God who knows my heart, and my limits of thought and word!

    Give to me, Lord, a thankful heart


    And a discerning mind;


    Give, as I play the Christian’s part,


    The strength to finish what I start


    And act on what I find.

    When, in the rush of days, my will


    Is habit bound and slow,


    Help me to keep in vision, still,


    What love and power and peace can fill


    A life that trusts in you.

    By your divine and urgent claim,


    And by your human face,


    Kindle our sinking hearts to flame,


    And as you teach the world your name


    Let it become your place.

    Jesus, with all your church I long


    To see your kingdom come:


    Show me your way of righting wrong


    And turning sorrow into song


    Until you bring me home.

    The photo was taken on Aberdeen beach one day when I pondered as I wandered.

  • Jewish Spirituality, Christian Humility and the Wisdom that Repairs the World


    Amongst the Jewish writers whose wisdom and exeprience of God has touched and opened my heart to important truths are Abraham Joshua Heschel, Chaim Potok, Jonathan Sacks, Elie Wiesel, Joseph Kaplan, Susannah Heschel, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. And of course Isaiah, Jeremiah, Qoheleth, the Psalmists, the writers of Torah, and the other writers and communities behind the Hebrew Bible.

    This collection of contemporary Jewish Spirituality doesn't include those classic expressions of jewish faith and practice. What it does offer is a wide ranging selection of wisdom and reflection on such themes as God, community, prayer, meditation, mysticism, study, blessing, repairing the world and other characteristic emphases of a faith that is profoundly practical as well as profoundly reflective. Either browsing and dipping, or reading more intentionally in this book, you become aware that you are invited to read and think on the rich history of a people's rich experience and the changing contiuity of its story of the journey with God.

    Some of what is written here is lightweight, a kind of self-help with a religious underpinning. Some of it presupposes, as it should, an active practice of Jewish faith, ritual and liturgy. But much of it offers wisdom and guidance in what it means to make room in our lives for God, to pay attention to the world around us, and that radical goal of Jewish compassionate action, "to repair the world".

    As spiritual reading it is a good balance and corrective that reminds me as a Christian that my own faith and the faith of the Christian church, has deep roots in the soil of the Jewish people and an indebtedness and incorporation into their story which has become our story. And our story, not because the Church co-opts the elected preciousness of the people of God, or renders the Jewish story and faith superfluous. But because from the story of the Jewish people, came the One we call Messiah, and in the purposes of God, Jesus fulfils the great messianic promise that the Suffering and Sovereign Servant will be a light to the nations, and  the blessing of the world. And that to act justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with God is an imperative within the Christian faith as in the faith from which the Church was born.