Living Wittily

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  • Intercession as Unselfish Prayer

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    The prayer of intercession below was written for our shared worship this morning where I'll be preaching down the coast a bit. (The photo was taken on a sunny day on Inverbervie beach). I guess one of the besetting sins we find it difficult to identify and name is the sin of praying more to our own advantage than to the world's. So it seems to me.In one sense a sin of omission, not praying for others. In another sense a sin of commission, as the self elbows out the needs of a whole world.

    Intercession is a de-selfing of prayer, a silencing of our own pushy at times noisy agendas. Compassion is something we feel that only grows towards fruitfulness when it acts. Intercessory prayer is enacted compassion, as important as, and never a substitute for, costly giving, the inconvenience of putting others first, imaginative action that makes a difference and gives love embodied presence.

    Put simply, prayer is something we do because we believe in the compassionate mercy and self-giving love that lies at the heart of all reality as the Triune God of Eternal Grace. To not intercede for others, to pray mostly for ourselves, our church our personal spiritual lives, is a failure of compassion; more it is a failure of faith. As if I didn't believe praying for others would make any difference to their lives. Anyway out of such thoughts, comes this prayer. The responses by the congregation are sung, using the familiar praise song.

     

    Creator God, Who gives us life,

    who gives life to the world,

    who loves and cares for all people,

    forgive those narrow windows we look through

    seeing only our own life,

    anxious only for our own needs.

    Forgive us our self centred perspectives

    our prayers first of all for our own blessing.

    Forgive our limited horizons,

    thinking first of our
    selves, our church, our plans,

    at times blind to the beauty and brokenness of your world,

    until catastrophe opens our eyes

    and make us see a suffering world as you see it,

    with determined compassion and redemptive purposes.

     

    Be still and know, that I am God  
    (x3)

     

    Lord widen our windows so see beyond ourselves.

    You teach us to look at the world through the eyes of your
    love.

    Your Spirit pushes back our horizons and opens our
    hearts 

    to include those far from us, and
    different from us,

    yet all are yours.

    Teach us what love is,

    the self-giving that we believe lies at the heart of all
    reality,

    because you revealed it in Jesus Christ, crucified and
    risen. 

     

    So as we pray for our broken world;

    its wars and conflicts;

    the hatreds and the enmities;

    all injustices and poverty;

    the greed and the waste;

    the lost hopes and the growing despairs;

    mega-problems that threaten to overwhelm,

    disasters that all our technology and resources can’t
    fix.

    As we pray then, for our broken world,

    Where people face famine and disease,

    loss of home and the
    crushing of freedom,

    the fear of war and co nsequences of conflict,

    we lift this world you love before you,

    the God of all grace
    and love,

    and ask the blessing of your peace

    and the healing of your
    mercy,

    through Christ who is our mercy and peace,

    in the power of the Holy Spirit of life,

    Amen

    In Thee O Lord, I put my trust (x3)

     

    In Thee O Lord, do I put my trust (x3)

  • Satelite images of the Alps, and the God Who Raises Mountains.

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    When it comes to satellite images of the surface of the earth they are endlessly fascinating and beautiful. Rocky mountains covered in snow, the merging of shade and colour, mostly gray, black, silver and white, a geological kaleidoscope that reflects light and captures shadow. I still remember flying over the alps at about 35,000 feet on our way to Austria, the first time I'd looked down on mountains from  that height, and wondering wide-eyed like a child hungry for experience and explanation.

    No wonder mountains play such a role in the Biblical images of majesty, power and permanence. In the Bible either God raises mountains, shakes them, throws them into the sea, speaks from them or dwells on them. Around Zion the mountains symbolise the protection of God.

    The two images above are not satellite pictures, and are only distantly related to the Alps, mainly by geological affinity, though that too is a guess. They are close-ups of a 13 centimetre across stone I found on the beach yesterday. Heavy, rough, sparkling, slightly oxidised, and in its way a thing of beauty quite beyond the polished varieties of smooth shiny gee gaws! It is neither objet d'art, nor artefact, it has no therapeutic qualities I know of, its history is millions if not billions of years in the making, how it came to be on the Aberdeen beach and why I noticed it and paid attention – sheer serendipity, random coincidence, juxtaposition of unplanned circumstance. Yes, all of these, maybe.

    And then I remember that small gem of a book, Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

    "The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy or too impatient. One should lie open, empty, choiceless as a beach – waiting for a gift from the sea."

    And that's all this flat sliver of silver laced stone is, a gift from the sea.


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  • Unfearingness – A word of semantic clumsiness but real liturgical class!

    In the Celtic Prayer book of the Northumbrian Community, there is an odd couplet from the Hebridean Altars:

    Though we prospered little,

    yet we were rich in faith and unfearingness

    Sometimes the clumsiness of a word gives it a jarring aptitude. Fear is a destabilising word, and an undermining experience. Fearingness is that fear made chronic, a state of apprehensive mind, a continuing anxiety suspicious of reassurance. Unfearingness is the opposite of each of these. Not chronic fear but inner constancy of peace; not an apprehensive mind but one comprehending something of the unchanging love of God in Christ; not suspicious anxiety but confidence born of trust and persuaded that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

    Unfearingness is what Jesus tried to make the disciples experience when he said to them "Fear not for I have overcome the world". Unfearingness is what isaiah described when he said "When you walk through fire the flames will not harm you, and through the waters the waves shall not overwhelm you." Unfearingness is precisely what is described in Psalm 23, lying down by still waters, led in a pth of righteousness, and goodness and mercy dogging our footsteps every blessed mile we trek.


    RevisedUnfearingness is to listen to the wisdom of those ancient travellers who were pilgrims to Jerusalem, and who wrote their poems and prayers to the God who, they hoped and trusted, would keep them safe. "The sun shall not smite you by day, nor the moon by night…" The photo was taken on a February evening, frosty, silent and I have to confess not the slightest bit menacing. But then I wasn't trekking hundreds of miles across desert and bandit country, and doing so, not for trade and profit, but to go and worship the God by whose mercy I lived, and in whose covenant love I trusted come hell or high water. What I like about the Psalms is their honesty and unashamed admissions of fear, anger, depression, anxiety – the whole gamut of fearingness – but still, like needles drawn to the magnetic north, they turn to the Lord, in hope and trust, and pray for unfearingness.

    This is a word I want to think about for a while – linguistically clumsy, but spiritually and theologically a word bespoke for the heart.

     

  • The Silent Presence of God and Spiritual Complacency

    Thomas Merton remains one of my spiritual mentors: time and again I hear a voice of compassionate rebuke, patient understanding and in a tone of self deprecating modesty. Often enough for me it is a needed corrective, a recovery of perspective which a too driven Baptist needs to consider on the advice of a Cistercian who died nearly 50 years ago.

     

    "If our life is poured out in useless words,

         we will never hear anything,

              will never become anything,

                  and in the end,

                      because have said everything before we had anything to say,

                              we will be left speechless."

     

    "The world our words have attempted to classify, to control,

    and even to despise because they could not contain it, comes close to us,

    for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

     

    When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us,

    our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words about it

    from the silence which is the mother of Truth."

     


    DSC01199 (2)These words are from Thoughts in Solitude, an early intense series of meditations Merton later felt were overstated, idealistic and betraying his early over earnestness. But actually some of the most important spiritual writings are forged in the heat of enthusiasm, and what they lose in moderation and maturity and consistency, they gain by reflecting real and immediate experience that challenges our spiritual status quo, which too often has settled into unsurprised complacency, emotional comfort and a self-serving pursuit of spiritual bargains. Bargains are by definition something worthwhile which we get on the cheap. Spiritual growth and maturity cannot be had on the cheap. Merton was far too self-knowing not to recognise the short cut, the body swerve, the consumer mindset, the natural evasiveness about the demands of God that were a trait in himself. And in pointing out such inner bias he helps us recognise them in ourselves, and then to see more clearly, speak more humbly, and learn again the silence of the heart.


    RublevMerton encourages a pursuit of spiritual maturity that is less self-conscious and more focused outwardly on the reality of God, the activity of the Holy Spirit and the living presence of the Risen Christ. Waiting in silence, hoping in the quietness, trusting in the peacefulness, of the Triune God. Activist spirituality is by definition impatient, pragmatic, results tested and evidence based. Integrated silence, contemplative prayer, welcoming the presence of God, and being welcomed by God, seated in hospitality at the table with the Triune God, has no empirical evidence we can point to or demonstrate. Nor should it. God is to be loved for God's self, and whatever else intentional inner and outer silence is, it is an act of love, to pay attention, to adore, to worship. 

  • Shalom – A Tapestry of Psalms. Psalm 8

    Psalm 8

    In this Psalm Shalom is founded on the majesty and artistry of the Creator. This panel of the tapestry contrasts the vast intricacy of the universe and the small human habitation at the waterside, its light reflected on the water. See the earlier post on the Defeat of Dogma by Understatement for the theological and polemical importance of stars in the Hebrew Bible.

    Each of the panel of the tapestry is 9cm by 7cm. What you are seeing is a close-up. The canvas us 24 to the inch guage, and the cotton is six stranded cotton, with the colouts mixed in various combinations of strands – which means endless possibilities of colour and tone.

    Psalm 8

    1 Lord, our Lord,
        how majestic is your name in all the earth!

    You have set your glory
        in the heavens.
    2 Through the praise of children and infants
        you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
        to silence the foe and the avenger.
    3 When I consider your heavens,
        the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars,
        which you have set in place,
    4 what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
        human beings that you care for them?[c]

    5 You have made them[d] a little lower than the angels[e]
        and crowned them[f] with glory and honor.
    6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
        you put everything under their[g] feet:
    7 all flocks and herds,
        and the animals of the wild,
    8 the birds in the sky,
        and the fish in the sea,
        all that swim the paths of the seas.

    9 Lord, our Lord,
        how majestic is your name in all the earth!


  • Kells2I remember in 1977, reading W D Davies The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, a comprehensive examination of the background of that radical Kingdom of God manifesto.

    A few years later F F Bruce published the fruit of a lifetime's study and immersion in the life and thought of Paul, his theological mentor whom he called 'Apostle of the Free Spirit'. A year or two later E P Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism forced a fundamental rethink of Pauline studies.

    In the mid 1980's Bishop John Robinson, of Honest to God fame, completed the draft of his Bampton Lectures which was published posthumously as The Priority of John. Seldom have I read a more theologically sensitive exposition of the passion of Jesus, even if the underlying thesis was brilliantly argued but with few lasting converts.

    Early 90's and John Ashton's major study Understanding the Fourth Gospel, (which cost £65 and was paid for by books tokens!) opened another vista on the theological masterpiece attributed to John.

    Then I ploughed through N T Wright's The Origins of the People of God, volume 1, published in 1992. It was, and is, a hard read, but it too changed the way I read the New Testament, more fully aware of worldview and cultural norms and codes and social context.

    Jesus and the Victory of God moved the discussion to a further level, and once again a massive book compelled new thinking, rewarded careful reading, and takes its place as a milestone in my personal study of the New Testament.

    Sometimes commentaries have the same ground-breaking and ground-shifting effects. Ulrich Luz's three volumes on Matthew in the Hermeneia series are such. Beautifully produced, replete with learning long and slowly distilled, ranging across hermeneutical disciplines, developing a particular study of 'effective history', that is the effect of the text on readers throughout history – (different from reception history). They are a joy to use.

    And now. News of another gold strike in New Testament studies! SPCK have announced N T Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Three volumes including the long awaited monograph on Pauline theology, a second volume on Paul's recent interpreters, and a third collecting Wright's most significant and seminal essays over 30 years. You can check this out for yourselves here. Me? I'm saving up!

    http://www.logos.com/product/29160/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god?utm_source=prepublication&utm_medium=email&utm_content=4343421&utm_campaign=prepub

  • The Defeat of Dogma by Understatement – and the Fruitful Companionship of Dictionaries

    Amongst other things this blog is a celebration of the book, a conservation area for those who, without despising Kindle, still require as a life necessity, the proximity and availability of books. I await the advent of an e-reader that is as flexible, quick and easy to flick through and back and forth, as a solid reference book. Because some of the most important books are for reference.Thumbing through a reference book is education by serendipity, and the best reference books send you chasing in all directions, to articles and topics you hadn't realised were connected to your first enquiry. A good article in a quality reference book will have cross references to other articles and treatments of similar or related material. Now I guess hyper links and other devices allow a similar cognitive tour on an e-reader but I'm now so incurably attached to those large repositories of print and picture that I'll persist with the dictionary, encyclopedia, companion, handbook, and lexicon in book form.

    One such dictionary I use often and am seldom disappointed. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, published in 1998 by IVP is according to its impressive sub-title "An encyclopedic exploration of the images, symbols, motifs, metaphors, figures of speech and literary patterns of the Bible." While working away at the Shalom tapestry I've consulted it on shepherds and sheep, moon and stars, mountains and rivers, trees and fruit, water and sunshine, cups that run over and my going out and coming in! The literary texture of Scripture is rich and dense, colourful and subversive, the range of its imagery drawing from many cultures, several languages, and centuries of history. The column and a half on stars is an eye opener to those who read biblical, texts with minds as dulled in vision as our eyes as we stand in a brightly lit street and see through a glass obscurely, missing the sheer magnificence and cosmic artistry of a night sky that should rightly reduce our utilitarian view of the world to a humbler respect for that whose vastness renders our self-importance of no intrinsic significance.


    Hs-1995-44-a-webBecause that's what Psalm 8 is saying. Human beings are made a little lower than the angels, because the Lord God made it so, not because we made ourselves so. Street lights are themselves metaphors for illuminated blindness, artificial light that obscures the billions of divinely appointed lights for the universe. Fanciful? Come on, stop being a literalist – the great Psalm poet wrote, "God determines the number of the stars; he gives to each of them their name"(147.4). In a world awash with astrological predictions, stellar worship and fear of the astral forces that fix human destiny, the psalmist upsets the game board and announces that the God of Israel, far from being subject to the whims and fates of the stars, is the one by whom they exist, the one whom they serve, and the one who gives each star its name – naming being a fundamental act of ownership. And yes, in the creation narrative of Genesis 1, as a fatal deflation of Babylonian arrogance and astrological controls, the writer says in a devastating parenthesis at the end of the story of the creation of earth and heaven, "he made the stars also". I don't know anywhere in all literature a more comprehensive defeat of dogma by understatement. 

    All of this from a dictionary. Love them!

  • Karl Barth and the Cure for Desultoriness of Spirit

    Earlier today I was desultorying. There's much to be thought about just now, life taking new turnings, decisions that involve both risk and trust, and I was looking around for a conversation partner, someone to take me out of self-pre-occupation for a while. In the corner is a tall narrow bookcase which houses Barth's Church Dogmatics, and sundry other Barthian writing, along with a number of the key monographs on Barth's theology from McCormack to Hunsinger, and Busch to Webster. I took down the Romans commentary – that angry, passionate, turbo-charged bulldozer of a book that didn't only disturb the scholars in their playground, but proceeded to demolish their school.


    DSC00447Barth is one of a few theologians who provide (for me at any rate) a theological and spiritual antidote to the debilitating condition of desultorying. Loss of impetus, boredom with transcendence, spiritual attention deficit, emotional reductionism, theological complacency, – there are plenty of phrases and they describe some forms of desultorying. Nearer where I am just now is something different – experience overload, much happening at once and the need to have time, space and energy to work through what it means, how it feels, and how best live with and through life as it is. In her wonderful Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton wrote something I adopted as a spiritual principle. She spoke of the depletion that comes from 'unassimilated  experience' – she meant those times when life is too stridently demanding, expectations of ourselves are unrealistic, too much happens before previous experience is reflected upon, learned from, made peace with.

    One way of interrupting the flow of information, experience and circumstance is to change the subject away from  yourself to that which is beyond, more than, extrinsic to, our own inner world with its worries, problem solving, calculation and self- centred attention. Open a volume of Barth, and I find myself interrupted! Romans 8 belongs in the Alpine range of Paul's theology, and Barth on Romans 8 in his commentary provides a stunning viewpoint to take in the vast vista and far away horizons of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Is it an exegesis of Romans 8? Absolutely not, more like a conductor inspiring an entire orchestra to improvise with passionate responsiveness to the composer's musical vision, and therefore to treat the script with such massive respect that it is not slavishly followed but teleologically fulfilled. The result is an artistic triumph, a virtuoso performance that is unique and arises out of the specific coincidence of musicians, conductor, musical score and historical moment.

    Barth's Romans is like that. I spent a while reading him on Romans 8.28, that massive granite rock of a verse that you either stand on because it will never move, or that falls and flattens you if you try to duck beneath it! Here is what I read, the cure for today's desultoriness:

    The Love of God stands where there is disclosed,…the pre-eminent affirmation – Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. Blessed discovery! God stands in light inaccessible. Blessed discovery! All flesh is grass and all the glory of men is as the flower of the field. When in Spirit and in Truth, one of these discoveries is made, the other is involved in it, for both are in fact operations of the One God, whose universal majesty is the 'Yes' in the 'No'. The Love of God dares to see everywhere on this side and on that side, not a 'Here' and a 'There', but wholly and altogether beyond all tension and duality, the revelation of the one Truth, proclaiming that the free and righteous, blessed and living God, knows us, prisoners and sinners and condemned and dead, to be His own. And so in our apprehension which is not-knowing,  and in our not-knowing which is our apprehension, there is shown forth the final and primal unity of visibility and invisibility,  of earth and heaven,  of man and God…Thus God rewards those who love Him. 

    Flannery O'connor loved Barth because he 'threw the furniture around'. He did, and he does. But here is an even earthier description that comes from one of those comments at the door after preaching, made by a farmer in the North East, that he was "glad to get a good kick up the backside". Not sure that was the aim of the sermon, but for him it did seem to be the outcome. And his phrase aptly describes Barth's theological impact on a desultory spirit!

    The photo is across the Mearns at early sunrise into a liquid sky.

  • Prayer for Wider Horizons and an Enlarged Heart

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    Prayer of Response

    We
    confess to you our Father, our small-mindedness and limited appreciation of
    your greatness and almighty power.

    We
    confess that we scarcely consider your mighty movements at the beginning of
    time, creating the heavens and the earth. 

    Forgive us and enlarge our
    understanding.

    We
    confess that the life and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ do
    not infuse our thinking as they should: we are so hemmed in by transitory
    interests and temporal pursuits that we lose sight of the essential and eternal.

    Forgive us, and deepen our
    love,

    We
    confess that we do not value and often do not welcome the gift of your Holy
    Spirit to liberate our tongues to praise you and our lives to serve you. 

    Forgive us, Creating and Redeeming God, and open our hearts,

    Through the love of our Lord
    Jesus

    And by the power of
    the Holy Spirit,

    Amen

  • A Photo, a Haiku and Paying Attention as an Act of Gratitude

    PAYING
    ATTENTION

    Sunshine
    illumines

    a
    million raindrops; turning

    life’s
    kaleidoscope.