Living Wittily

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  • Paying Attention to those Moments of Moment….

    Menuhin6Three things came together today and turned ordinary time into time when the ordinary and everyday, the routine and the easily missed, become for us extended moments of moment, not momentous, but not trivial either.

    Sitting in  church looking at a prayer, beautifully rendered in cross stitch, a prayer I use often in worship, and which someone noted down some years ago, and worked in threads, framed it, and gifted it to the church. Now it hangs just to the left of where I sit. It's a prayer about accepting each day as God's gift, to be cherished for the freedom and possibility that every minute brings to us.

    On the way to church listening to Classic FM, the second movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto. The gentle melody exudes inner yearning, as if musical notes, carefully composed and skillfully played contain a more adequate grammar of longing, a logic of the heart's desire, a capacity for expression that doesn't need to answer all the deep questions of our existence, but merely to remind us that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yearning is prayer, 'the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.'

     Then there were the chocolate gingers! My interest in spirituality and mystical theology has never attained that high level of ascetic practices that would call in question the delight, the God given pleasure, and the necessity for my inner happiness, of the combined taste of dark chocolate and stem ginger! I'm struggling to give a spiritual or intellectual twist to this which is just as well. Few things waste good food more than rationalising the joy of taste. I suppose I could quote "O taste and see that the Lord is good"; or compare the rich spiced sweetness of chocolate gingers to the Psalmist's equivalent comment on the Word of God, "sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb".

    No, on this holiday Sunday blessings can be counted. A prayer that receives each day as gift and offers it in worship; music that pulls our hopes and trust upwards in a longing only God can fulfil; sweets, the intensity of taste, spice and sweetness, the pleasure to mind and body that makes us so aware of our physical reality. Each of them a sacrament, a means of recognising in that moment, the presence of grace and the gift that is God and the God who comes as gift. 

     

  • The Excitement of Trinitarian Theology – Honest, no kidding!

    RublevJust finished the class on the rediscovery of the Triune God. The discussion on Mission and Trinity was an exciting collaborative hour which eventually produced the theological goods that only come from a class engaged, informed, excited and willing to make space in their minds for new and dynamic thought.

    Some of that discussion will continue to niggle away at our theological assumptions and the limitations to our practices and convictions that unexamined assumptions often impose. I have an idea. This is not news, it happens now and again. But the theological goods captured on the whiteboard and preserved on Ipads and emails will make an interesting project for this class to take forward. Except it's the final year class. That's ok – they aren't going to stop thinking, they're going to think deeper, longer and more adventurously out of what they have worked so hard to learn during their journey with us. It would be interesting to see where yesterday's thinking might lead if they continued the discussion on an online blog and developed it into a way of bringing Trinitarian theology, missiology and a Baptist ecclesiology together. Not right away of course – but we may decide on a collaborative project aimed at pushing our own thinking as far as it will go….and then some more…

  • Inversnaid – place of beauty, and inspired poetry

    Waterfall_InversnaidTalking to a friend tonight who spent the day at Inversnaid. No excuse needed for posting Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, but the reminder was enough. Few poets have written of a loved part of Scotland with more precise and sympathetic insight into the inscape of a captured corner of Scottish scenery. Hopkins, along with Clare, Dickinson and R S Thomas, open eyes and ears to the beauty of living things. Hopkins' prayer for the wilderness, those undisrupted places of displayed wildness, comes as a lament for countryside too easily consumed by human acquisitiveness.

    INVERSNAID

    THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
    His rollrock highroad roaring down,
    In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
    Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
     
    A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth         5
    Turns and twindles over the broth
    Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
    It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
     
    Degged with dew, dappled with dew
    Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,         10
    Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
    And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
     
    What would the world be, once bereft
    Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
    O let them be left, wildness and wet;         15
    Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

  • Khalid Dale and the Death of the Righteous

    S-KHALIL-DALE-largeThe righteous of the world aren't those who claim to be righteous, but those who do righteousness. That religiously motivated followers of God believe they act righteously, and in the name of their God, by murdering another human being is one of the tragic ironies of religion contaminated by the toxins of hate, greed, cruelty and self-validated violence.

    But to brutally behead a Red Cross worker, qualified as a nurse, and working in the killers' own country to bring help and healing to the people, and under the auspices and for the medical and humanitarian ends of an organisation committed to humane and humanising behaviour – there are those who would say such blind hatred and religiously inspired cruelty is beyond words. But it is not beyond words, and must not be allowed to be.

    Khalid Dale was a human being, whose humanitarian values and humane compassion, led him to a place of opportunity to help others, and knowingly putting himself in a place of personsal risk. But his presence as a Red Cross Worker, and the universal recognition of Red Cross neutrality and goodwill, should have been sufficient to guarantee his safety and dissuade opportunist or ideological kidnapping. It didn't, which is one of those events that corrodes the foundation pillars that enable the Red Cross to sustain and protect that most fragile but essential attributes of a human being – a humane humanity. That is not a tautology – it is an intensive adjective. Few things diminish the value of human life more rapidly and fatally than war, conflict, hatred, grievance, or any of these combined with religious or political ideology which eclipses all other moral concerns and itself becomes an idol.

    We can guess at the motives of those who killed Khalid Dale – but it would illumine little. Some enactments of evil are beyond such explanatory analysis. They are best understood by the act and its consequences. Whole communities will suffer as a direct result of Khalid Dale's murder. People whose lives would have been saved by his experience and influence, his commitment and expertise; people struggling to survive and whose humanity is further diminished by the killing of a trusted and resourceful Red Cross Commission reprersentative. But above all that, a good man was killed by those who show little evidence of that humanity which Khalid Dale cherished, revered and died for in the name of his God – who, whatever the theological complexities, it is hard to believe is the same God as that owned so violently by his killers.

    This was not an action beyond words – it was an action beyond understsanding, but not, and never, beyond condemnation. Such acts gave the original impetus to the magnificent work of the Red Cross, and they will not discourage that deeper and more resilient human motive of love, compassion and humanity. To believe otherwise is to give in to the darkness – and I for one believe "the Light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it". Khalid Dale converted to Islam, and therefore he, and not his killers, is the benchmark of that great monotheistic faith and its ethical imperatives.

  • The Day Thou Gavest Lord Ended Very Well!

    Last night I didn't die and go to heaven. I went to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and found a piece of it there. The performance of Monteverdi's Vespers by the Dunedin Consort was a very rare experience, and one that would be hard to repeat in just that way and just that place at just that time.

    It started at 8, at which time the setting sun was blazing through the gallery windows, illuminating the organ pipes and chandeliers. And as the music progressed the light mellowed, blended with shadow and bathed the interior in breathtaking benediction. To sit there and listen to a performance that was professional in the sense of a performance that is careful and cared for by the artistes, and to do so in the magnificent Kelvingrove Main Hall illuminated by sunset, and Sunriselistening to music intended for high spaces, exacting acoustics, and for end of day, was more than memorable.

    It was an experience absorbed into those fibres of our being that are not for mere remembering, but for taking away beauty, peacefulness, gratitude and wonder, as part of who we now are. It wasn't just the music; it was more than the glorious building; it was more than the passionate professionalism of the performers; it was even something other than the setting sun and encroaching peace of night. It was all of these, which taken together, allows the Spirit of God to insinuate into our deepest selves that longing and yearning that is love for all that is, for all that we are or can be, and for the Divine Love rarely more powerfully voiced than in the harmonies, aural and visual, of certain rare experiences in our lives. What someone called the unattended moment, a glimpse of glory, and for me, an evening when inner concerns of every human heart, are transcended for a while, by an encounter with that love 'that moves the sun and other stars.'

    Other can write a review – I am simply content to acknowledge a debt.

     

  • The joy of new words

    Just learned a new word – "inconcinnity" – which apprently means 'lacking congruity or harmony; the quality of unsuitability'.

    It would help my self esteem if any of the readers of this blog were also able to acknowledge their semantic deficit in relation to this word! I thought it was a typo at first 🙁

     

     

  • Ultimate Grace for Our Ultimate Concerns

    DSC00331John Donne is one of the greatest English prose writers. He was also one of the most accomplished and metaphysical of Seventeenth Century poets. His sermons and poems are richly embroidered with imagery and allusions, classical and biblical, theological and philosophical, many of them obscure and at best enigmatic to those less familiar with Donne's cultural and intellectual worlds. He treated the big themes of human existence and the overwhelming questions posed to the guilty conscience by a God whose love and justice he saw as absolute, and therefore absolutely decisive for the destiny of each individual soul, including and especially his own.

    Anguish and ecstasy, fear and joy, guilt and forgiveness, desolation and consolation; such are the poles of human experience between which Donne composed his sermons and poems. And when allowances are made for the rhetoric and discourse of Seventeenth Century divinity, many of the poems still speak with universal relevance to those deep inner turmoils of conscience and those serial disappointments that can so dishearten us when we would be better than we know we are.

    First_046The tortured uncertainties of Romans 7 describe Donne's oscillation between regretted sin and longed for holiness. "For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do….O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"

    Few poets have faced death with such honest human terror balanced by a faith "troubled on every side but not distressed…perplexed but not in despair,…cast down but not destroyed…" And he often finished his most searching poems with recovered assurance resonant with Paul's great sigh of relief – "I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord…."

    Here is one of my favourite Donne poems – for those not familiar with it remember Donne's name was pronounced "Dun" – and so the wordplay becomes a playful dialogue with God in a prayer about Donne's ultimate concerns.

     

    HYMN TO GOD THE FATHER.
    by John Donne

    I.
    WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
        Which was my sin, though it were done before?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
        And do run still, though still I do deplore?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    II.
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
        Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
    Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
        A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
            When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                        For I have more.

    III.
    I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
        My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
    But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
        Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
            And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                        I fear no more.

  • Charity Book Shops, Machiavellian Tactics, and the Mess We Are IN!

    MchoThe other day I was in a charity shop having a good natured exchange with one of the staff who was trying to get me to buy books. You'd think that would be easy. Getting me to buy books is like encouraging me to eat chocolate. But it was gardening books she wanted me to buy, and I'd asked about art books, then it was celeb biographies when I asked about poetry. Eventually I found something, having decided she had tried so hard it would be discouraging for her if I walked out without buying anything!

    A pocket sized mordern edition, mint condition, of Machiavelli's, The Prince! Now this isn't a book about spirituality I know - though that week I was preparing a sermon on Jacob the self-interested cynical manipulator, and there seemed something appropriate, if not meant! No this is a book about bare-faced cynicism in the application of tactics of power, political survival, and developing skills of manipulation and getting your own way. It combines wisdom and ruthlessness, calculated risk with playing the percentage shots, distilled study of power, how it is gained and lost, while at the same time forming the inner habits, even an instinct, for personal advantage. Actually if you wanted a description of Jacob before Jabbok that just about does it!

    The book is an education in self-interest, cynical exploitation of those least able to resist, acting ruthlessly against those who might resist in order to preserve a personal power base, anticipating an opponent's next moves and subverting them, using power to make the powerful stronger, and generally excluding or eliminating anything that might hinder the exercise and retention of power, including considerations of compassion, justice, and overriding moral imperatives. I'm thinking that much of that mentality is abroad in the political and economic attitudes of recession haunted Governments.

    The word Machiavellian, which sums up all this ruthless, cyncial power hunting, is a bit unfair on Machiavelli. He was a Renaissance humanist. His book was written as a Power for Dummies,intended to win the favour of Renaissance Princes seeking to cling to power in the dangerous courts and corridors of 15th Century Italian Courts. But, as I say, it does raise for me the question of how far the word Machiavellian applies to the approaches and policies of the current Governement. 

    That's another post perhaps – but Granny Tax I, the mooted Granny Tax 2, the pastry tax, the capping of charitable donations, the rhetoric but non-action against Tax avoidance by the wealthy, the comprehenesive and unsympathetic re-configuring of criteria for Benefits but little progress on reining in bonuses and extravagant salaries, the change to VAT criteria for churches.These are the mere headlines of an approach that seeks economic prosperity by risking being morally bankrupt. Alongside The Prince, I suggest a reading of the Prophet Amos, who had a few things to say about Machiavellian politics – I know, the anachronism is blatant. But the history of power as morally ambiguous and dependent on the moral character of those who exercise it, is a history that cannot be dismissed so easily. Whether it's the privileged rich selling the poor for the price of a pair of sandals in ancient Israel, or the privileged powerful of a Renaissance Court doing whatever is necessary to cling to power, or the social impact of the policies of a modern democratic Government hard-wired to an economics of global growth, the result is the same and the same two non Machiavellian questions remain. Compassion? Justice?

     So anyway, I asked how much? Which side of the shelf was it on, she asked. I showed her the gap and said 'There'. That OK she said. That's 50p – if it had been further along it would have been £1. Then in true Machiavellian fashion she said, But you could just pay the £1 – which I did!! Oh, and inside the front cover is a label that says Happy Birthday – now was the gift intended to cement a friendship, bribe a colleague, a veiled apology, an act of crawling……oh stop it! And get a life…

  • Reeds blowing in the Wind and the Word of God

    DSC00505I I know I'm not very tall, but this photo was taken standing up in high reeds and exuberant gorse.Whenever I'm standing with things growing all around me ( and sometimes above me) I often think of the Sermon on the Mount – about the grass of the field, the flowers, and the pretensions of all those Solomons who think they are eye stoppingly glorious!

    More seriously – yesterday I was chasing a number of biblical themes and passages and came across several suggestions that certain biblical texts are particularly fitted to where we are now, in our time, at this place in our history as a world in a mess. Suggestions included Qoheleth (the fatuity and vanity of so much contemporary culture), the Tower of Babel (the power of the Web and Social Network), Amos (inequity and injustice pushed to extremes of social situation). It made me wonder about how we each find a canon within the Canon, selected Scriptures that seem really to 'do it' for us! And one of the ways that might happen is when certain Scriptures seem to have a deep moral and human resonance with our contemporary history – personal  social, global. Those Scriptures may bring hope, warn of judgment, describe and analyse our fears and anxieties.  Which means that Christians who claim to be biblical in their thinking, ethics, world-view should perhaps stop insisting loudly on their own view of what the Bible says, means. And as an act of obedience to God listen for the still small voice of a text that bears witness to Christ, and like Him will always call in question our assumptions, challenge the closedness of our certainties, undermine and expose the toxic roots of our prejudices, open our eyes to the blind spots we can't see because our cultural lenses have visually impaired our insight.

    It will require a deeper more disruptive encounter with Christ the Word for us to hear, and then amplify his voice, which is the voice of self-giving love, reconciling judgment, renewing mercy, the Voice of the Crucified Risen Lord of Life.

  • Chichester, Chagall and Visual Exegesis

    470960_49c77260The Chagall window in Chichester Cathedral is on my must see list.

    It's a 20th Century Jewish pictorial exegesis of Psalm 150, created to enhance Christian worship.

    It's a startling and beautiful work in stained glass, one of my favourite things to look at. Baptist churches should have stained glass windows may be a minority view of one, but I struggle to see any valid objection to visual beauty as an aid to worship.

    It's an interpretation of written text in image, form and colour. Along with music, such art provides an exegesis that is neither more nor less important than written commentary or spoken exposition.

    It's a picture of exuberance. I don't mean it's an exuberant picture, but that it represents worship as praise, gratitude, wonder, noise, dancing, walking, climbing, arm-waving; it represents joy embodied and laughter in movement, the human spirit doing what it does best in response to the exuberance of God, the shared exuberance of Creator and creature, of imago dei answering to our Original.

    It's a psalm in glass, and in colour, and looking at it is intended to create in the heart the words it depicts – exuberant praise of God.