Living Wittily

Blog

  • Unapologetic – On Reading An Unusual Advent Book


    42rockMy friend Geoff Colmer has been recommending with much enthusiasm the book Unapologetic by Francis Spufford. The sub title is Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. I got it recently and have been reading it with much laughter, much thought, and am so glad that someone has written an intelligent riposte to the lazy thinking and arrogant opinion-pushing of those who dismiss the whole religious thing. And emotional sense matters, just as much as common sense and intellectual sense.

    I found one long passage one of the most original reflections on the nature of guilt, the preciousness of human life and the nature of forgiveness and grace. The honest understanding of the late in life request for the presence of a friend by Field-Marshal Montgomery is a superb piece of pastoral journalism and moral realism. Knowing he would die soon he said 'I've got to go and meet God and explain  all those men I killed in Alamein.' There follows a wide ranging meditation on the importance of taking our moral failures seriously, and recognising the human capacity to mess up life and wound those around us. It is all but impossible to quote or summarise this sustained piece of theologically astute psychology, though the book is crammed with one liners, phrases and paragraphs of cleverness distilled to wisdom.

    There's something salutary and earthing about reading such a book during Advent. Christmas and nativity stories and the birth narratives in the Gospels are easy targets for those who want to debunk the Christian way of seeing and being in the world. But the significance of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and the intersection of human history and divine purpose which underlies the birth of Jesus and the Word made flesh is about more than over-clever dismissals of religious traditions as mere legend or myth.  Because 'his name will be called Emmanuel, God with us.' And 'you shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.' So there is indeed an issue for Field Marshall Montgomery and the lives lost in war and in all the brokenness of the world, and the need to face God. Except that in the Incarnation, God came to face us, with our own propensity to mess things up, and God's propensity to redeem.

    The picture is of Da Vinci's drawing of a woman and child – one of my favourite images of Christmas understood with theological imagination.

  • The Existence of God: The Argument from Snow!

    DSCN1295[1]

    The First Snow

    The snow
    began here
    this morning and all day
    continued, its white
    rhetoric everywhere
    calling us back to why, how,
    whence such beauty and what
    the meaning; such
    an oracular fever! flowing
    past windows, an energy it seemed
    would never ebb, never settle
    less than lovely! and only now,
    deep into night,
    it has finally ended.
    The silence
    is immense,
    and the heavens still hold
    a million candles; nowhere
    the familiar things:
    stars, the moon,
    the darkness we expect
    and nightly turn from. Trees
    glitter like castles
    of ribbons, the broad fileds
    smolder with light, a passing
    creekbed lies
    heaped with shining hills;
    and though the questions
    that have assailed us all day
    remain – not a single
    answer has been found –
    walking out now
    into the silence and the light
    under the trees,
    and through the fields,
    feels like one.

    Mary Oliver

  • Reconciliation: God’s Eternal Intent…

     

    I continue to work a small tapestry of the Hebrew word for 'shalom'.

     

    There is no intended or discernible pattern, no fixed image of what the finished work will look like. It is being worked slowly, in those odd brief spaces of time when the notion to stitch and the opportunity to do so coincide. The colours are being mixed, strand by strand, sometimes three or even four shades woven into one six strand thread – they reflect the mood I am in at the time, but they also weave into a pattern of hope. The colours are greens, yellows, blues, browns, but they are mixed, juxtaposed, blended, sometimes random, so that the overall work is open-ended; and yet.

    I hear the Israeli ambassador to the EU defending 3000 more houses in a settlement on the West Bank; and I stitch some more of this beautiful Hebrew word, and its background in the mercy of God. Palestinian outrage, rockets and political maneouvering raises the anger and fear stakes further, and I stitch a few more quiet points of hopefulness. In Belfast the flying of the Union jack creates riots and police officers are injured, I want to stitch.

    I guess for me this tapestry has become a metaphor for mercy, a symbol of shalom, a pitch for peace, a protest, a prayer, a promise, or at least a reminder of those great promises in Isaiah, Micah, Amos, the Gospels and Revelation.

    about lions and lambs in close but safe proximity

    about spears into pruning hooks and rockets into trade agreements

    about justice flowing down like rivers, and doing right by each other as natural and reliable as water runs to the sea

    about loving enemies and embracing the other so that the other becomes brother

    about leaves of the trees for the healing of the nations, and people from every tongue, tribe and nation praising the God who is all in all

    about the New Jerusalem, over which the three great monotheistic faiths no longer need to battle and do murder, because there is space and welcome for all in a new creation and in the reconciliation of all things.

    That's quite a theological load for a tapestry; but it is also the theological implicate of praying that looks to a different future because God is the God of the future whose loving purpose, just mercy, and reconciling heart, intersects with the reality of our present, but does so with Eternal intent. Whatever else advent and incarnation mean, they open up those wide doors for the King of glory.

  • A Jewish Golden Wedding 75 years ago.

    DSC01093 (1)

    I was in a charity shop and found this brass plaque. The inscription shows the initials of two people the dates 1887 – 1937. The relief in the centre is of Jacob and Rachel at the well. The surrounding reliefs are the story of Jacob's journey, his wooing Rachel and working for Laban. The two names are inscribed in Hebrew on the top left and right of the reliefs. My guess is this is a Golden wedding plaque, made in 1937, and featuring one of the greatest love stories in the Hebrew Bible.

    DSC01097

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    The quality of the central relief captures the moment of encounter, a beautiful portrayal of accidental providence, those unlooked for meetings when God is at work in the ordinariness of everyday. Except with Jacob, very little is ordinary. Below is one of the scenes from the outer reliefs. I love this plate – it will hang in my study, a piece of brazen exegesis 🙂


    DSC01095

  • Scots Pine, Kings College, Blue Sky and a Good Day

    Today was a busy day with several appointments to see people, do stuff and have stuff done to me. Coming out of the doctor's surgery facing me was a ridiculously blue sky and two trees that looked made for such an azure background. And not 50 metres from Tesco's car park!

    DSC01089

     

    My day also took me down to the University and King's College. On a frosty sunny morning it's difficult to believe that this is a modern University campus, so I sat in the quad for some minutes, chilled but cheerful, and watched the world amble past slowly. I love the old crown on the chapel, and in the sunlight it looked its best. Then a cappucino to go, a walk up the high Street, and an impulse buy of three books for the price of two. Work done, folk met, several important conversations, and then tonight five a side football, that spiritual stress buster in which there is an entire absence of the fruit of the Spirit!.


    DSC01090

  • Greeting Death by Celebrating Life

    Last week I took the funeral service for my brother-in-law, Sheila's brother. We all have our ways of coming to terms with loss. I had been best man at Ian's wedding 40 years ago, which added to the poignancy, and the fittingness of conducting the funeral of a good, gentle, man.

    Inevitably when death comes close we are wise to think about that word inevitable. And to prepare for what must surely come nearer as day passes day. That isn't a morbid, unnatural negative thought – it's simply the truth that needs to be faced so that life can be enjoyed for what it is, precious unrepeatable gift. A human life is a succession of giftedness, each day a miracle of consciousness that we are, and wonder that we are at all. And as a Christian that miraculous wonder borrows the rhetorical prayer of the Psalm writer, "What is a human being that you care for us, mere mortals that you the Eternal pay attention to us?"
    Mary Oliver is one of my canonical poets. Her reflection on how to greet death, is an exuberant celebration of how we greet life. I love this poem.
    DSC01079

    When Death Comes
     
    When death comes
    like the
    hungry bear in autumn
    when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
    his purse
     
    to buy me, and snaps his
    purse shut;
    when death comes
    like the measle-pox;
     
    when death comes
    like an
    iceberg between the shoulder blades,
     
    I want to step through the
    door full of curiosity, wondering;
    what is it going to be like, that cottage
    of darkness?
     
    And therefore I look upon
    everything
    as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
    and I look upon time as no
    more than an idea,
    and I consider eternity as another
    possibility,
     
    and I think of each life as
    a flower, as common
    as a field daisy, and as singular,
     
    and each name a comfortable
    music in the mouth
    tending as all music does, toward silence,
     
    and each body a lion of
    courage, and something
    precious to the earth.
     
    When it's over, I want to
    say: all my life
    I was a bride married to amazement.
    I was a bridegroom,
    taking the world into my arms.
     
    When it's over, I don't want
    to wonder
    if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
    I
    don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
    or full of
    argument.
     
    I don't want to end up
    simply having visited this world.
     
    ~ Mary Oliver ~

  • Living the Justice of the Triune God

    A candidate for Baptist ministry was asked if he had enjoyed his time at College.

    "No" he said, "But I learned stuff."

    "Can you give an example of something important you learned", he was asked – the usual open question on the hunt for evidence.

    "The definition of a good book", the wary reply.

    "And what is that", the obvious follow up.

    "A thin yin", the reply in unadulterated colloquial Scots!

    And faur frae bein' wrang, he wis dead right!


    TrinityI'm reading a thin book – Living the Justice of the Triune God, D Power and M Downey, Collegeville, Liturgical Press, 2012. It is a good book, by any definition.

    "The book offers a fresh vision of the justice of the Triune God to a world anguished by deprivation, division, ecological degradation and the loss of a sense of purpose and direction. Their praxis theology of the life-giving Word and love of God made tangibble  in the particularities of cosmic and human history speaks to the crises and sufferings of our time."

    And so it does.

  • The Early Church Fathers and the Cure and Care of Souls


    Fra-angelico-the-annunciationI recently had to write something on the pastoral theology and practices of the Early Church Fathers. Much of what they thought, wrote, did and understood now seems strange, from another world, unenlightened in the view of post enlightenment minds! And yet.

    The pastoral heart is evident in
    many of the Church Fathers. The inevitable tensions between compassion and discipline, the intellectual and spiritual wrestling over the relationship between the life of grace, the struggle with sin, the holiness and mystery of the Triune God, and the nature of prayer, worship and Christian living as the proper response to the love of God in Christ.Their primary goal and foundational value was
    growth in the love of God, towards the perfect love of God and all inclusive love of neighbour.

    The route to this love was a
    long training, an instilling of spiritual disciplines to train the personality
    in the fruits of the spirit, to educate the soul in self-critical ethical
    scrutiny, to co-operate with God in the restoring of the image of God, which
    though marred remains the defining truth of every human being. To be made in
    God’s image is to be able to know God choose the good and learn to love – it is
    to have the capax dei, to train the passions by spiritual discipline in
    order to love God with that balance of mind, heart strength and will.

    Reading some of the Fathers today is an exercise in strangeness, but sometimes that's what a church which is now overfamiliar with God needs; and a church confident of the can do approach to theology can be reminded that living for God isn't about our can do, but about God's enabling grace; and a humbling corrective to theological and pastoral practitioners, that in the end we are all unprofitable servants, and what we seek to practice is a life rooted and grounded in the eternal love of the Triune God, seeking to know and make known the love that is beyond knowledge.

    So we ignore the Fathers to our
    loss. In the history of the cure of souls they had their own spiritual
    psychology, their unique sense of the sacred, a profound sensitivity about sin
    but matched by a diamond edged view of grace sufficient to cut and shape
    character towards Christlikeness.

  • Haiku, the Sea, and Grace Sufficient

    DSC01082

    You know the bit in Psalm 23 where the Psalmist finds peace beside the still waters and the green pastures? Sometimes that works for me too. But more often when I need a place of solace, silence and solitude, I find it on the edge of the sea.

    This has been a week of sadness following a family bereavement. By the end of the funeral yesterday and then the journey home I was tired and inwardly out of sorts. No surprise there.

    But this morning I knew what I wanted to do. Sheila and I went down to the front, bought a capuccino to go, and walked awhile. Then I stopped, Sheila walked on and i sat awhile listening to the rhythm of the waves, watching the play of sunlight on water, sand and stone. Few things for me, reconfigure the mind and restore the rhythms of the heart more gently than the sounds and sights of this ancient toing and froing of the sea. I almost never come away from the beach without a stone – shaped and smoothed by the faithful monotony of wave, after wave, after wave – patiently, persistently and playfully rolling rocks against each other, the lapidary friction defining the grain and structure of each stone. 

    And maybe, just maybe, minds overtaxed and overtired learn again the significance of slowness; hearts carrying excess baggage lighten up in the sunlightl; and that fragile reality we call the self recovers equlibrium and the soul is restored. I often find that the presence of God becomes more tangible, or discernible, in those places where you can lose yourself – by which I mean, for a short time let go of that self-preoccupation that silences other voices and obscures the reality of the God who, as Nicholas Lash says, 'does not shout'.

    Haiku, The Sea, and Grace Sufficient.

    PRAYER

    Not our neat rhythmic prose

    but sunlight on sand and stone

    speaks our heart's true need.

     

    HOLINESS

    The gentle rumble

    of stone on stone; the sea's gift

    of polished granite.

     

    HEALING

    The liquid mercy

    of waves, the sand's kind friction,

    grace that heals, and saves.

    (C) Jim Gordon

    I took the photo while finishing a wonderful capuccino to go from The Pavilion Cafe.

  • When the Aim is an Ethos and a Discipline: Further Thoughts on the Order of Baptist Ministry.


    DSC01061While at the Second Convocation of the Order of Baptist Ministry we spent some good time reflecting on the aim of the Order. I had come to the Convocation because the intimation and invitation
    seemed a good way of creating space to gather my thoughts and allow the
    sediment of a too full life to settle a little. Too much sediment and water becomes
    worryingly opaque.

    What follows is a personal reflection shared with the others, and providing a basis for further reflection. During the discussion of the aim of the order the sediment settled enough for me to see that such an Order
    would provide and important alternative to other understandings of ministry
    prevalent within our own communities of faith. That is, the Order would  provide an alternative living out of Baptist
    Ministry that, with intentional seriousness of purpose, seeks to pay close
    attention to both words, Baptist and Ministry, thereby offering a framework of
    relationships which will enable, encourage and enhance ministry in a self-consciously
    Baptist way.

    Not that
    Baptist is the only way, or even the best way. But if we take our identity
    under God seriously, then we are called to be Baptist in those essential
    convictions and practices which are inhabited, and lived out, in the gift and
    calling of our varied but shared ministries within Baptist communities.

    This means
    that the Aim of the Order would be neither critical of other expressions of ministry,
    nor satisfied with our own ways of living out our vocations. Ministry is too
    rich, varied and expressive of the diversity of the Body of Christ to be
    captured or constrained by any particular model or embodiment. Baptist however
    is a term we consciously own, as the talent entrusted by the Lord to our
    particular communities of faith. While the name Baptist is rightly contested,
    and understood in Baptist communities in different ways, the Order seeks to
    give lived expression to the theology, practices and spirituality that are
    quarried from the rich seams of our own historic and theological peculiarities.

    By being
    faithful to our own Baptist particularity we remain alert and obedient to God
    who called us to follow and serve Christ in ministry. We do this precisely by
    seeking to sustain authentic Baptist ministry as a gift to the whole Church of
    Christ. Calling is always a gift, and the Aim of the Order, it was felt, ought to articulate
    the specific peculiarity of what we believe is God’s gift to us. Therefore we
    commit ourselves to walk together under the rule of Christ, faithfully
    following after the Great Shepherd of the sheep, as Baptist Christians
    encouraging and accompanying each other in fulfilling the vision of service we
    believe is entrusted to us.


    DSC01059Nevertheless,
    and that word is a decisive caution and qualifier – nevertheless we recognise
    humbly and gratefully the richness and necessity of other forms of ministry,
    which have their own validity, and which are God’s varied gifts to the Church as
    the Body of Christ. As Baptist we gladly acknowledge our
    dependence on the insights and resources of the Church Catholic, and seek to
    sustain and enrich Baptist ministry by appropriating the gifts and spiritual
    resources of the wider ecumenical consensus of faith in the Triune God. The Order aims to explore and enrich Baptist pastoral spirituality by conscious indebtedness to the rich catholicity of Christian thought and experience: building upon disciplines of prayer in the Daily Office, developing and sustaining a pastoral disposition that is both attentive and contemplative, and pursuing in prayer and study, a humble receptiveness to the knowledge and wisdom of the Triune God.    

    The Order
    aims to give faithful expression to a vision of Baptist ministry and therefore
    the aim could be stated:  To embody, encourage and enable ministry
    that is intentionally Baptist, vocationally pastoral, and spiritually faithful,
    under the rule of Christ.