Living Wittily

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  • Preaching, Theological Education and Honesty of Language

    "Our task is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of unadulterated truth

    but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language

    that will permit communication between people on all social levels,

    instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues

    which isolate people in their specialities."  Thomas Merton, Literary Essays, P. 272.

    FluteWhatever else our celebrity intoxicated, sound – byte obsessed, advertising dependent, txt diminished language could do with, it could do with laborious reshaping towards accuracy and honesty. Perhaps one aspect of Christian witness would be to live for a day or two in the light of Jesus' warning that every word we speak will have to be accounted for. And the criteria will not be what our language sells, but what it heals; not what it subverts, but what it builds; not how clever but how wise, and not how manipulative but how restorative.

    And that's as true of our preaching and teaching theology, as it is of any other sphere, from markets to banks, from Parliament to Church, from family to friends. A recession of truthfulness in speech is just as damaging to the fabric of society as an economic downward spiral.

  • The Advent of Smudge

    DSC00610New resident has moved in to our home. As from today goes by the name of Smudge.

     We've had a cat in the home all our lives other than the past two years since Gizmo went to the Celestial Catnip Mountains two and a bit years ago. The advent of Smudge restores the domestic balance and provides an endless source of fun on tap, affection on demand, conversation with and about Herself, curiosity and laughter, ongoing expense, years ahead of inconvenience, and all worth it, totally worth it.

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    One of the worst mentors for living kenotically is the cat, imperiously indifferent, manipulatively affectionate, instinctively self-interested, morally impervious, purringly contented most times, and furry fury now and again. Such a good balance to help us avoid that anaemic kind of Christian disposition that Thomas Merton called "chronic niceness".

  • A Harbinger of Hope in a World of Knowledgeable Cynics

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    Not often that North East Scotland reminds you of Isaiah the prophet. But this photo, due only to the coincident thought flashes in my own imagination, reminds me of Isaiah 35, one of the most remarkable poems in the Hebrew Bible.

    1 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

    the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

    like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,

    and rejoice with joy and singing.

    The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,

    the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.

    They shall see the glory of the LORD,

    the majesty of our God. 

    Strengthen the weak hands,

    and make firm the feeble knees. 

    Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

    "Be strong, fear not!

    Behold, your God will come with vengeance,

    with the recompense of God.

    He will come and save you." 

    Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

    and the ears of the deaf unstopped; 

    then shall the lame man leap like a hart,

    and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.

    For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

    and streams in the desert; 

    the burning sand shall become a pool,

    and the thirsty ground springs of water;

    the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,

    the grass shall become reeds and rushes. 

    And a highway shall be there,

    and it shall be called the Holy Way;

    the unclean shall not pass over it,

    and fools shall not err therein. 

    No lion shall be there,

    nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

    they shall not be found there,

    but the redeemed shall walk there. 

    And the ransomed of the LORD shall return,

    and come to Zion with singing;

    everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;

    they shall obtain joy and gladness,

    and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

    Isaiah was a harbinger of hope, a good news correspondent in a world wearied by waste, a visionary who could imagine an alternative reality and make it sound realisable. He is the patron saint of indomitable faith, not fideistic naivete, but someone who spoke out of a living core of obstinate belief that God is faithful, come hell or high water. Deserts blossom, streams flow out of rock and sand, safety is not a mirage, and joy doesn't have to be sought in artificial stimulant or chronic mental distraction, nor emotional satiety, but in the deep, deep knowledge of a love beyond grasping, holding and being held by that inexplicable hold God has on us that provides subterranean permanence beneath our doubts.

    In other words, God is the renewer of deserts, the restorer of hope, the giver of joy, the eye-opener extraordinaire, the sound that penetrates the dullest deafness and speaks new truth. For jaded 21st Century Christians Isaiah is the fifth Gospel, the good news for a world whose ecology is being devastated, for a world of jagged fractures and frantically maintained walls, for souls parched with too much flux and hype, starved of silence, cheated of joy for the sake of pleasure, and deprived of peace.

    I love this book – to use an older phrase, "it speaks to our condition". What would it be like if, after the usual litany of what we now call the news, someone was brave enough to say "And finally, the wilderness will be glad, a highway for the righteous, streams in the desert, and everlasting joy shall be upon our heads". I know – daft, naive, – but Isaianic naivete is preferable to what we call political sophistication and realpolitik.

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  • Refusing to confer ultimacy on evil

    Funny how sometimes several scattered moments of cognition can be drawn together by one of those rare migrating coincidences of thought, when against all odds, we are made attentive to something precious and important to capture,which otherwise would disappear in the fast flowing stream of consciousness which passes for thought in an overstimulated world.

    RembyIt started when I read a novel last week by David Silva, The Rembrandt Affair. It's the story of a lost Rembrandt masterpiece, an SS Officer who combined an obscene courtesy to those he robbed with indifference to the plight of those same Jewish victims, a Jewish painting restorer who works for Israeli intelligence, and a little girl who, like Anne Frank was hidden by neighbours. A key moment in the story is when against all warnings, she crept out into the snow one moonlit night to play and dance. She was seen by the neighbours, reported, and the family were transported, except her, whose freedom was bought with the painting. Like so much of the literature of the Holocaust, there is the tragic irony of guilt clinging to the soul of the victims, who have done nothing wrong – other than exist.


    HancockThen I listened to Sheila Hancock's audio version of her autobiography Just Me. One chapter describes her visit to Hungary, and her discovery of the 600,000 Jewish people who were there before the War, and the tiny remnant who survived. Her sorrow and anger, her utter bewilderment at such organised human cruelty, combined with her rage that this could happen while she was betwen the ages of 8 and 13, in her lifetime, is one of the most telling pieces of soliloquy she has ever uttered, including Shakespeare.

    I then watched the programme on Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, a pre-olympic docu-drama that filled out the stories of these two remarkable human beings. Both of their later lives overshadowed by war, and the cost and consequences of ideologies that reduce human beings as means to ends, rather than privilege every human being as ends in themselves.

    By now, inside a few days, one of the 20th Century's most systematic forms of madness had insinuated itself back into that conscious reflective place in the mind, where prayer, ethical judgement, moral energy, critical thought and human wondering mix together in the search for meaning. As if the discovery of meaning could lessen the evil, reduce the guilt, redeem the suffering, restore hope or render the Shoah as something less than the mystery of iniquity it is. Because at the same time it arose in an historical nexus of events imagined, initiated and implemented by human beings, morally accountable, made in the image of God, and utterly capable of denying to others the humanity they claimed for themselves, thereby raising by their actions, in the tragic irony that accompanies moral suicide, a more potent question mark over their own humanity.

    2.5-8_CRIPPLED_WOMAN_Torah_scrollsAnd then I came across this – and I realised again the spiritual genius of God's people, the miracle of human hopefulness and goodness, the capacity of that of God in us to look Hell in the face and refuse it ultimacy.

    O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us.

    Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to the suffering; our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this.

    And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.  (Prayer of a condemned Jew in Belson)

    I'm glad I was in my study on my own when I read this, and I am glad for two reasons. First, because together with the clues and intimations above, I was ready to hear words that in their truth and hope and love, slice through the dark tangle of hate and anger, sorrow and shame, despair and distress that grips the heart when we are confronted by intolerable but unalterable truth. Secondly because I cried, confronted by the distilled essence of goodness and mercy.

  • Unashamed nostalgia

    The-sixtiesJust flicked  and found the Yesterday channel and was transported to 1965 when I was young, not too innocent and loved the music!

     

    The Seekers, Carnival is Over, (EVeryone was in love with Judy Durham) Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, Dave Dee, Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch, Hold Tight, (to which I used to dance with unbelievable energy) The Byrds, All I Really Want To Do, (I used to wear the tall white polo necks too!)

    I remember watching each of those performances on TOTP without realising we were on the cusp of a cultural revolution. There are chords and bars of those songs that simply erase 47 years and make the record play again 🙂 Mhmm.

  • The Poet reveres the word, the mind and the heart

    Sargent_-_Alice_MeynellEvery now and then I come across a poem by Alice Meynell, and decide to go look for her and find out more about her. Till now, I haven't. But already it's obvious she was someone whose life experience was rich and enriching, whose contribution to her times like that of many women was overlooked by virtue of her being a woman. Late Victorian patriarchy and anti Catholic bias led to her being shunned for Poet Laureate; her contribution to the Suffragist movement is all but ignored, and at times misleadingly omitted from the narrative. She was one of a growing number of literary Catholics whose poetry and essays explored those realities of faith and questioning, from the standpoint of a Catholic heart and mind seeking to be faithful, yet doing so with intellectual integrity and emotional honesty.

    I want to know more about her, and I want to read her best poems. Because again and again I've found that the poet who reveres the word as the currency of human thought and feeling, has a charsimatic quality of language that makes mystery communicable; not as lucid clarity and definition, but as articulated longing, as holy imagination, as intellectual and spiritual humility in the presence of the sacred.

    Here is one of Meynell's poems which I know well, and need to know better, because it points to a way of seeing people, and seeing Christ in and through others.

     

    "The Unknown God”

    One of the crowd went up,

    And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,

    Received the Lord, returned in peace,

    and prayed Close to my side. Then in my heart I said:

     

    ‘O Christ, in this man’s life

    This stranger who is Thine in all his strife,

    All his felicity, his good and ill,

    In the assaulted stronghold of his will,

     

    ‘I do confess Thee here,

    Alive within this life; I know Thee near

    Within this lonely conscience, closed away,

    Within this brother’s solitary day.

     

    ‘Christ in his unknown heart,

    His intellect unknown – this love, this art,

    This battle and this peace, this destiny

    That I shall never know, look upon me!

     

    ‘Christ in his numbered breath,

    Christ in his beating heart and in his death,

    Christ in his mystery! From that secret place

    And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!’

  • Catherine Lacugna and a Trinitarian Approach to Preaching and Pastoral Practice

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    Amongst the books on the Trinity written over the past 40 years, God For Us by Catherine Lacugna is one of the most creative and fresh.

     

     

    The last paragraph is a fine summary of why Christian theology is Trinitarian, what is at stake and why in our preaching and pastoral practice the reality of the Triune God is allowed to inform, inspire and underwrite with the grace of God, the life and spirituality of the Christian community. I've rendered it as a prose poem, which is how it reads anyway:

     

    The doctrine of the Trinity succeeds

    when it illumines God's nearness to us

    in Christ and the Spirit.

    But it fails if the divine persons are imprisoned in an intradivine realm,

    or if the doctrine of the Trinity is relegated

    to a purely formal place in speculative theology.

    In the end God can only seem farther away than ever.

    Preaching and pastoral practice will have to fight a constant battle

    to convince us,

    to provide assurances,

    to make the case

    that God is indeed present amongst us,

    does inded care for us,

    will indeed hear our prayer,

    and will be lovingly disposed to respond.

    If, on the other hand,

    we affirm that the very nature of God

    is to seek out the deepest possible communion and friendship

    with every last creature,

    and if through the doctrine of the Trinity

    we do our best to articulate the mystery of God for us,

    then preaching and pastoral practice

    will fit naturally with the particulars of the Christian life.

    Ecclesial life,

    sacramental life, 

    ethical life,

    and sexual life

    will be seen clearly as forms of trinitarian life:

    living God's life with one another.

    Page 411

     

  • Adidas – The trainers that scored an own goal!

    The post last week on those shackle trainers touted but then withdrawn by Adidas, can now be supplemented by a further very interesting perspective. A friend drew attention to the take of the Guradian correspondent on this consumerist own goal. And his perspective is perhaps the more subversive, powerful and telling. Go to the link below and read for yourself.

    What the piece does is identify and expose the hubris and accompanying moral blindness of brand driven companies, so assured of their captive market that they miss the internal critique of one of their flagship designers. Was the designer genuinely making a sociao0ethical statement, or is this a clever piece of social hermeneutics?

    So here again is the image of these trainers which purportedly carry the message no O-ADIDAS-SHACKLE-SNEAKERS-570matter how hard you kick the ball they won't come off. Except the same trainers carry now the more powerful image of a company scoring an own goal in late extra time!

     

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/19/adidas-trainers-slave-fashion

  • From aspirational waffle to hopeful imagination

    RowanRowan Williams is too often dismissed as an otherworldly academic, or an amateurish ecclesiastical politician , or an intellectual mystical theologian. I guess he comes over as each of these on occasion. But they are caricatures – there is substance, spiritual, moral and intellectual in this man. And I can well understand the Government of any day trying to maintain those caricatures, because time and again Rowan Williams has spoken truth to power. And he understands power.

    So his comments on the big society idea promoted by David Cameron are likely to annoy and irritate, Good. That's what prophets do – they point out the Emperor's nakedness, and describe expedient moralising as 'aspirational waffle'. And then he goes on –

    "And if the big society is anything better than a slogan looking increasingly threadbare as we look at our society reeling under the impact of public spending cuts, then discussion on this subject has got to take on board some of those issues about what it is to be a citizen and where it is that we most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity."

    The same day it's leaked that the Prime Minister is consdiering axing housing benefit for under 25's as a further corrective of what he and his Government call the welfare culture. Just how is that fixed by destabilising the provision for young people who are already at the hard end of the employment  and opportunity spectrum of our economy. It isn't the Archbishop who lives on a different planet, or who is out of touchwith the realities of modern life.

    In terms of where we 'most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity', I'd be more hopeful of the future if the Government supported and resourced such places, as schools, college and universities to do precisely that. Education for employability is one element of human formation – but only one, and the shaping of character, instilling of virtue, opening of minds in generous critical engagement, creating and sustaining self-confidence alongside respect for others, encouraging the celebration of difference and the importance of welcome. Where does all that happen, and whose responsibility, if not the Government's, to create a context where such human fruitfulness flourishes?

     

  • The Apostle Paul, the Leveson Enquiry and the Ethics of Communication

    Apostle_Paul_by_Rembrandt
    This morning I was reading Paul's Prison Epistles – Chrysostom describes Ephesians as "sublimely difficult", James Denney found in Colossians the Christ who is the "last reality of the universe", and Philippians, that masterpiece of pastoral diplomacy and theologically powered subversion of the spiritually overwrought ego!

    Ever since I bought G B Caird's wee commentary on the Prison Epistles and worked through them guided by that concisely elegant and pastorally alert volume (which cost me £2.25 in 1975), I've gone back to these letters when I need to get my horizons stretched, my mind lifted above the mundanely essential concerns of getting on with life, and my conceptuality refurbished with dimensions that are eternal, transcendent, and regenerative of faith, hope and love.

    The unsearchable riches of Christ in Ephesians, the mind that was in Christ Jesus in Philippians, the Christ who is the Head of all things and the Church in Colossians, and that crucified and risen Lord as the inspiration for the radical liberation of Philemon by Onesimus, – these are realities to place alongside the precarious Eurozone, the terror and brutality of Syria, the commercial hysteria of the Olympics which threaten the very integrity of Olympic ideals, the cynical dissolution of truth, human respect and social responsibility exposed serially in the circumstances giving rise to the Levenson enquiry.

    One example – how to close a newspaper in 2012 –

    "Finally, 

    whatsoever things are true,

    whatsoever things are honest,

    whatsoever things are just,

    whatsoever things are pure,

    whatsoever things are lovely,

     whatsoever things are of good report;

    if there be any virtue,

    and if there be any praise,

    think [report and write] on these things. (Philippians 4.8 – King James Bible)

    Make that the basis of news reporting and perhaps then phone hacking, bribery, nepotism, corruption of office, invasion of privacy, exploitation of the vulnerable and much else would be disqualified. The irony is, the verse was carved in stone outside BBC House by Lord Reith. A first century exhortation, scratched on papyrus and sent to a tiny religious community in a Greco-Roman city, describing healthy mindedness that sustains community, serves as an ethical benchmark for one of the most respected broadcasting institutions in the world. Not bad Paul, not bad at all…..

    What Paul could have achieved with an Ipad…..