Living Wittily

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  • “Give us this day our daily bread”,….but what about Hell – icopter Gunships….

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    I am  preaching at a favourite place this Sunday, on The Lord will provide.

    One of the fascinating debates surrounds the meaning of the word translated in the Lord's Prayer as "daily".

    Give us today bread sufficient  for today

    or

    Give us today bread sufficient to give us strength to work tomorrow for our daily bread.

    In the middle of the Lord's prayer there is this crusty plain loaf, and for me that is the essence of the Lord will provide.

    The hallowing of the Name, the coming of the Kingdom, forgiveness and deliverance, and at the centre – daily bread.

    So what do I pray for when Syrian helicopter gunships turn their lethal weapons on safe zones and bread lines?

    What do I mean when I say the Lord will provide, when news images show hungry people queuing for daily bread being used as target practice by a regime gone rabid?

    I deeply believe and trust in the Lord who provides.

    But I deeply believe in the Lord of justice, righteousness and mercy – and I see none of that in Syria, and countless other places.

    But I believe – and because I believe I hope – but there are times when human behaviour makes me despair.

    Kyrie eleison

     

  • A Theological Reflection on Three Mornings of Problematic Commuting!

    Hs-1995-44-a-webOn the way to College each morning this week I've been delayed.

    Monday it was the lolipop man stopping the traffic with a high waving lolipop, stopping the traffic for one adult to cross the road and no children in sight. That got a few irate horn blasts for lolipop abuse.

    Tuesday I was a witness to a motor cyclist who came off his bike because a dog on an extension  lead (not the electrical kind) had run across the road and created a tripwire. The biker wasn't too badly hurt but was rightly mad – I've no idea what the insurance issues will be.

    Wednesday it was the huge articulated European transport Lorry which stopped within inches of the Nitshill Bridge and blocked the traffic both ways. No way to reverse because backed in by the Traffic queue – no way forward because, well because of the bridge.

    Not the best start to the working day – not talking about me, but the lolipop man who thought he was being helpful, the motorcyclist who probably has no comeback for the damage, and the lorry driver who stopped on time but had nowhere to go, and surrounded by impatient to hostile commuters!

    Hard to go in after such encounters of commuting life and sit down with a cup of tea and pick up where I left off in my reading of the more abstract realities of contested ecclesiologies, patristic Trinitarianism and contemporary approaches to mission for faith communities on the cusp of a culture fuelled by disruptive innovation and recessional panic!

    But such is the life of a theologian – and seriously, the social and civic attitudes that underlie anger at a car having to stop for a walking human being does indeed provide food for theological critique of the values we live by;

    and the questions raised by the unforeseen accident, the injury to others we intend or don't intend, and how to resolve situations that have gone wrong between people, there is an entire theological and ethical agenda for the church;

    and to ask ourselves what resources we have to deal with those situations where we are stuck at a low bridge with no easy way forward or back, and all around us people just wanting to get on with their own lives.

    I guess that embarrassed lorry driver mirrors the experience of so many folk trying to work out how to make their lives work and be able to move forward from the mistake they have made.

    And I'm pondering the parable of the church as articulated lorry, confronted by a low bridge, trapped by the traffic, nowhere obvious to go, the driver frantically directing traffic around a vehicle made for movement but stuck by its own shape and wrong turnings…….

    The image of the Eagle Nebulae always reminds me of the context within which all the strangeness of the ordinary is held, 'In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us'. And whatever the future of the church, that truth is the intellectual, spiritual and and moral directive for how the Church as the Body of Christ is to live in the creative energy of resurrection, and with trust in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world into the life of the Triune God.

     

  • Anne Frank, – The Prophetic Voice of a Teenage Diary

    200px-Anne_FrankWhile in Amsterdam for those few days on my Van Gogh pilgrimage, I also visited the Anne Frank House. I had tried to book online before leaving to avoid the long queue, but it was booked a week in advance. However long queue or no long queue, I had already decided such a visit was a must.

    So we arrived not long after opening at 9.00, and the queue was already long and slow moving. Now I'm not the most patient or contented queuer, but there are times when inconvenience, delay and anticipation are more significant than cramming every unforgiving minute with value for money tourism. We got talking to the couple behind us who had just flown over from Bitmingham, and who were also making a pilgrimage to this place of  humane and humanising memory of a young girl whose honest goodness and innocent intelligence defied and triumphed over the inhuman bureaucracy of the genocidal imagination.

    Then once we got in, after an hour's waiting, we made our slow way through the house, with the sound of the Kerk bells from nearby, the same bells she heard sounding when in hiding. And the slowness of those in front of us allowed time to see, to think, to pay attention, and so to imagine. One of the greatest moral challenges of our age is the safeguarding of the moral imagination, the developed capacity to anticipate, and have symathy with, and realise in thought and vision the cost and consequences of the intractably human lust for power, power over others, exerted for ends other than humane. 

    Anne Frank's Diary is one of the most astonishing achievements of World War II. Not just the transparent goodness and hopefulness of the entries; and more than the faithful recording of the experience of what it is like to be afraid, and hated by the powerful and ruthless; and more too than the exposing of political malignity observed and critiqued by a young woman wo was naive, but wise, and whose own future would be foreclosed by the lethal consistency of the racist mindset. The Diary is first hand evidence of human resilience, of spiritual awareness, of life loved as gift and mystery, and of that instinctive will to live and to live well, that occasionally illuminates the historical landscape, and gives us all hope and a much needed reminder of the glory of a human life whose music cannot be silenced.

    Then near the end of the exhibit, time to look at the faces of those who hid in the hiding place, blqck and white photographs, and behind the face of Anne Frank, another queue, at the arrival station of Auschwitz, and then images of the Shoah and the Camp liberations. I was overwhelmed by then, having just stood in a slow moving queue to enter this house, and to pay respects to this story of one girl amongst 6 million of her people, and one girl amongst countless more people across continents, whose deaths are the fearful mathematics of state generated hatred linked to military ambition. 

    It is one of the sanitising statistics worth pondering, that all day every day, this house is open, and the queues are constant. And if everyone who comes to this place comes respectful and goes away subdued by a wondering sadness but a renewed commitment to the nourishing of humane values, then there is hope for us. The Hebrew Bible has the prophetic observation, "a child shall lead them". And so she did, and does.

  • What happens when you put seashells on a sheet of paper.

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    (c) James M Gordon, 2012. Please ask if you want to use.

  • Tapestry: Using Colour, Shape and Design as a Form of Exegesis

    PL002849Working on the design for a new tapestry. I think Greek script in the New Testament is a beautiful form of writing. Several NT Greek words have profound resonance in Christian thought and experience. I am exploring ways of using colour and shape to give visual texture to those resonances, while at the same time wondering if colour and shape have any contribution to an exegesis of key words in theology and spirituality. 

    So I spent a while drafting a design, choosing colours and now just seeing what builds. But while stitching each letter, and therefore looking closely at these words, slowly giving shape, choosing colour, co-ordinating action of fingers and vision, I am wondering what the contemplative patience of such work contributes to a deeper appropriation of a text.

    Whether such a visual medium contributes to the meaning of the text would require a much more technical discussion of hermeneutics, theological asthetics, liturgical symbolism and iconography. I've no such ambitions. Working tapestry is a form of meditative activity, which may at times draw the heart into contemplative attentiveness, the controlled freedom that comes from serious engagement with and receptiveness before the text. That said, there's something different about designing a tapestry around the form of a script, the shape of letters and words, and allowing that treatment to be shaped by theological presuppositions about the meaning of the words. What would be interesting is whether anything new emerges from a several week process of concentrated creative work focused on the form of the letters and words.

    So we'll see what comes of it. For those interested I work in stranded cotton, blending the colours like paint on a pallette, and use a minimum of 22 points to the inch canvas.

  • The Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love 2

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    The fruit of the Spirit is love

     

    Joy is love’s consciousness

     

    Peace is love’s confidence

     

    Long–temperedness is love’s habit

     

    Kindness is love’s activity

     

    Goodness is love’s quality

     

    Faithfulness is love’s quantity

     

    Meekness is love’s tone

     

    Temperance is love’s victory

     

    The fruit of the Spirit is love.

    The words were originally part of a sermon by G Campbell Morgan, preached at Westminster Chapel in the 1930's. Campbell Morgan was one of the most attractive classic evangelical biblical expositors. His sermons on 1 Corinthians 13 are spiritual reading that is both soul searching and psychologically astute. Not often is such literacy, rhetoric and spirituality fused into biblical reflection and made accessible through a demonstrably holy personality.

    His commentary on Hosea is still one of the few that explores the full range of emotions in God that makes Hosea 11 amongst the most theologically subversive chapters for those who want a God predictably sovereign or indulgently loving – Holy Love is agony, but agony that persists in mercy.

    The photo was taken on a walk beside a burn – (from Scots Gaelic for a watercourse that feeds larger rivers). 

  • Political Argy-Bargying versus the Determination to Make Music

    Dont-let-the-worldWhile listening to the replay of yesterday's Today programme in which Minister for Policing, Nick Herbert, was accused by Evan Davis of "talking boring waffle" and evading direct questions, I noticed this, and my heart was glad.

    In the torrent of words and cliches, interrupted by the sporadic gunfire of a not to be denied radio presenter, I multi-tasked – and listened to the political bickering while reading this story. The Radio 4 exchange was a cacophonoy of disagreement and non resolution; the story was music to my ears, and set me up for the day. The human voice, and the gift of language, the capacity to communicate and to say outwardly the truth that is in us, is one of the defining characteristics of being human, and humane. Used as an assertion of power, an evasion of truth, as rhetoric to construct illusion and unreality, as an instrument of conflict and a defining of the other as over and against, that same voice obscures that which is humane and enriches humanity. One of the necessary counterpoints is music, the skill and sensitivity, the creative urge and iron discipline, the givinbg of the self to the music so the music can be given. That's why my heart is glad – that a young man has found his own way of making music, against the odds, and with no deficit of excellence. 

  • Amsterdam, Van Gogh and the Things that Lie close to the Heart.

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    We have just spent a few days in Amsterdam doing some of the things I've wanted to do for years. So I spent a long time in the Van Gogh Museum, looking at some of his most famous work. It's a busy place. Even if you book online and miss the long entrance queue, there are still long queues, guided tours, people with audio guides enwrapt in the context and detail, and most folk jostling for a good view of the celebrity paintings. It would have been easy to become grumpy at the sheer struggle to look, see, gaze, admire, appreciate these masterpieces. And I often find those in front of me are bigger than I am which means a total eclipse of the painting if it's one of those really big tourists.And I haven't developed that brass knecked assertiveness that proceeds through an art gallery oblivious of courtesy, – an art gallery seems an inappropriate place to text out the survival of the fittest. 

    But standing amongst such riches of aching beauty, soul piercing eagerness to articulate deepest pain and deepest joy, and the anguish of someone who was unheard, misunderstood, and at times ridiculed by those who thought his art was merely madness, the least of my concerns was the bustling art lovers. Enough to be amongst those who have found there way here, to stand in front of this man's soul shaped and passionately coloured art, and to feel the depths of my own humanity, my own needs, and yes my own anxieties and joys. Some of these paintings expose our most cherished hopes, and our most self-diminishing fears, while also drawing us to see in the angst and exuberance of the artist, the two poles of human longing.

    All that said, how can you look at the painting of his bedroom and not feel a deep love for the man who saw like that, and thought to paint a place so constrained and ordinary, with such extraordinary freedom and emotional investment. The story of Van Gogh and his brother Theo is one of remarkable courage, vision, tragic struggle against illness, faithful friendship between brothers, grabbing life with both hands yet unable to hold firmly to all that is life affirming and humanly fulfilling.

    DSC00930Some have tried to write about the spirituality of Van Gogh, or have used his paintings as devotional sounding boards. I don't doubt there are profound symbols and hints obvious and obscure in his work that encourages spiritual reflection. Indeed several of the overtly religious paintings do their own kind of aesthetic homiletic. But sometimes the message isn't in the painting; the painting reaches beyond articulated understanding and wounds us where comprehension is unnecessary, and recognition of who we are and why we are is sensed in that place deeper than reason and more permanent than passion. 

     

     I took a photo and removed the picture frame – better than some of the prints on sale, but the power is in the original.

  • Isaianic Imagination – Dorothy Day and Peaceful Nay-Saying

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    Isaianic Haiku

    Walk the ways of God –
    the politics of shalom
    make peace the new norm.
    …………………………………………..


    Swords into ploughshares –
    weapons for food production,
    not mass destruction.
    ………………………………

    Double negative,
    "We won't study war no more".
    Future positive!

  • The Hermeneutics and the Imperative of Love 1

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    We do not live for ourselves alone

    and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact

    that we begin to love ourselves properly,

    and thus also love others.

    What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?

    I mean, first of all,

    desiring to live,

    accepting life as a very great gift

    and a very great good,

    not because of what it gives us,

    but because of what it enables us to give to others.

    Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.

    Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.

    Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.

    If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!

    More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces! 

    However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.

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