Living Wittily

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  • The use of the adverb Trinitarianly

    William-blake-sketch-of-the-trinity-21Was teaching the doctrine of the Trinity yesterday, and we had an interesting session on Trinity and Community. Starting from love that is purposeful, outgoing and creative and which is self giving and combines both trust and risk, we moved back and forward between the inner relations of the Triune God to the outward expression of that life in the economy of creation, redemption and consummation.

    It would be misleading and unnecessary to say we all understood what we were talking about! But a lot of learning took place in exploring the realities of human relationships as we work out in our personal lives, the lives of the communities we inhabit, and the life of the world which is a community of communities living with tensions at times creative and at times destructive. Ecclesiology, missiology, spirituality, worship, pastoral care and compassion, ethics and justice, are significant areas of Christian existence and reflection which are profoundly influenced by the way we think of God. And for Christian theology that means thinking of God Trinitarianly. I know, it's not the most elegant of words, but it is a modifying adverb that should be used frequently in our thinking about those key areas of Christian reflection and practice. It's pushing it to talk of a Trinitarian lifestyle, or living Trinitarianly – but to see ourselves as drawn into the life of God, and immersed in the Love that is purposeful, creative, outgoing trusting and risk-taking, and to ask what that might look like in practice, would be to at least make a start on living Trinitarianly.

  • Scunnered and other Scottish Philosophical Concepts

    Des Dillon's wee book, Scunnered. Slices of Scottish Life in seventeen gallus syllables, (Luath Press), is a tonic. Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, somtimes amusingly angry; considering in haiku such philosophical concepts as midges and neds, the Gulf War, wind turbines, psychology, consumerism and much else, trivial yet serious, wistful but laser sharp.

    ATTENTION SEEKERS.

    Self assertion is

    the very heart and core of

    all conversation.

     

    THE NECESSARY BLINKERS

    Life – a series of

    disappointments glued brightly

    together by hope.

     

    HA HA LLELUJAH

    Cosmic but comic

    angels fly because they take

    being holy lightly.

    ………………….

    More of this tomorrow!

  • Five a side football, buttered toast and old poetry

    DSC00435
    Last night was one of those strange juxtapositions of experience the oddity of which isn't obvious till you think backwards.

    9.00 to 10.00 was five a side football, requiring someone my age to have a sufficient sense of recklessness, to resurrect whatever skills I ever had, and balance these with a sensible consideration of what is still possible. Got flattened near the start and was playing catch up with my dignity for the rest of the game!

    10-10.20 drove back listening to the CD of the month for me – Renaissance, Harry Christoper and the Sixteen, and listened yet again to Allegri's Miserere and felt that was Vespers and Compline sorted for the night.

    10.20 to 11.00 a cooling shower, tea and buttered toast, and some time browsing in Karl Barth IV.3.2 chasing a paragraph I'd read earlier but hadn't marked and wanted to post on this blog – still haven't found it.

    11.00 till 11.25 reading poetry while having a bottle of water and came across a poem by Robert Herrick that I'd all but forgotten but which used to be a favourite – an entire blog post could be dedicated to what that means 'used to be a favourite. Anyway here's the poem I read just before lights out – the quaint olde worlde spelling and erratic punctuation is found in a late Victorian anthology of devotional poems, bound in green leather which I picked up for 80p years ago.

    GOD'S MERCY

    Gods boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,

    Like to the ever wealthy ocean:

    Which though it sends out thousand streams, 'tis n'ere

    Known, or els seen to be the emptier:

    And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more

    Full, and filed full, then when full-fild before.

    Does anyone still read Robert Herrick?

    The photo is of the North Sea from Aberdeen front – not quite the ever wealthy ocean of God's mercy, – too cold for that!

  • Believing Three Ways in One God, Nicholas Lash

    DSC00220Believing Three Ways in One God, Nicholas Lash. (SCM, 1992)

    I love this book, published 20 years ago and read three times, and returned to often as one of those thin books, but 'thickly textured' and richly nourishing.

    It is popular theology without being populist, theologically fresh without being merely different, provocative in the positive sense of making you think differently about familiar things.

     

    God's utterance lovingly gives life,

    all unfading freshness:

    gives only life,

    and peace, and love,

    and beauty, harmony and joy.

    And the life God gives is nothing other,

    nothing less,

    than God's own self.

    Life is God, given.

    Page 104

  • Just a wee thought…..

    Now here's an interesting observation:

    It is a humorous paradox that in a faith that speaks about the "journey" of following Jesus, Christians claim to have total and absolute truth from the beginning, while scientists, who are supposed largely atheists and agnostics, are quite willing to work for decades knowing that their theories and hypostheses are merely provisional."

    (The Naked Now, Richard Rohr, p.85)

     

  • Elizabeth Jennings Week (III) Michaelangelo’s First Pieta.

    Pieta4

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Michaelangelo's First Pieta

    Carve a compassion. Older than you are

    He lies upon your lap. What can you do

    But hold him with a trust you also fear.

            Thus Micahelangelo

     

    Saw what a girl may do for gods. O we

    Have mercy on this man a woman holds,

    God in the grip of our humanity.

             All this the sculptor moulds.

     

    But more. It is a prayer that he is saying

    Wordless, except that written on her breast

    He writes his name. This girl he is displaying

             Has also brought him rest.

    (New Collected Poems, 124)

     

    Poem and sculpture,

    word and image,

    chiselled form and crafted articulation,

    one representation seeking to interpret the other,

    one medium mediating the ungrasped essence of the other,

    compassion hand carved and hand written,

    because passionately felt and expertly expressed.

  • Keeping the Faith without Rubbishing Every other Faith

    Now and again we are treated to political statements that are genuinely constructive, considered and thoughtful, socially invigorating, morally courageous and a true reflection of what we should expect of those who represent us.

    Warsi_2137949bBaroness Warsi will later this week address the Pope in an address that affirms the importance in Europe of religious traditions, heritage and beliefs as essentials of cultural stability and integrity. Her argument is that firmly held convictions and intentional dialogue towards mutual understanding are more important than any falsely justified or mistakenly fumbled attempts to repress or marginalise faith traditions and their legitimate public expression.

    Given the nonsense of last week's judgement about the legality of prayers before local government sessions, and the strident intolerance of secular humanists and populist atheists, it's time we had outspoken advocacy of religious freedom and liberty of conscience, not to mention mere toleration. The irony is the intolerant attack on religion per se by those who appeal to religious intolerance as a fundamental reason, on the basis of reason, to outlaw or ridicule or damn all religion.

    My own Christian life has been spent within a small radically evangelical community which, sometimes to its embarrassment is reminded that religious toleration is in its DNA. Yes, Baptists emerged from religious persecution with a passionate commitment to liberty of conscience before God and freedom of worship and religious expression as that which the state has no right to promote for its own ends, or suppress in the interests of its own power.  And since I graduated in Moral Philosophy and Principles of Religion, followed by a theological formation for ministry, I have held just as passionately to those early Baptist instincts about freedom of conscience, religious toleration and humble respect for those whose faith tradition is different from mine, but whose integrity and identity I am called in Christ to respect, and whose person I am called to love.

    210So dialogue between faiths is not for me a concession to compromise, but a commitment to communication and understanding rooted in theological realities such as imago dei, the communicative nature of God, the work of the Holy Spirit in human expereince and culture, and the call of Christ to love our neighbour as ourselves. Likewise, Ecumenical openness is not a sign of woolly thinking and fluffy goodwill, but a serious theological, ethical and pastoral challenge to recognise and respond in the Spirit of Christ to those whose experience of God in Christ, and whose living expression of their faith is different from mine, and if we are both honest and humble, is often richer than what I have known. And in a polarised world where hostility and suspicion are often the default dispositions of opposing religious traditions and cultures, I welcome every encouragement to people of faith, whatever faith, to begin by recognising the humanity of the other, and then to respect the religious commitments and traditions of the other, and then to respond in friendship and sincere interest in this other person, tradition, culture, with whom I share this planet, and this time in human history.

    Is that too much to ask, of those who follow the one who is the Lamb slain, and before whose throne peoples of all tribes, nations, peoples and cultures will gather in the act of praise and worship? One of the missional essentials of today is a recovered sense of generosity that can only come from a faith tradition that stops being timid, protectionist and negative. Instead, with the courage of our convictions, and the exemplary generosity of God in Christ as our inspiration, and trusting the promised Counsellor who leads us into all truth, let us sit and think, and talk, and pray, and learn, and so come to understand, our neighbours, the strangers in our midst, and to greet and welcome others as God in Christ has welcomed us.

    Some of what sparked these reflections can be read in the linked article below

    http://uk.news.yahoo.com/stand-faith-says-peer-warsi-064447947.html

  • Elizabeth Jennings Week (II) Clarity and Calvary

    Tokenz-dealwd023Elizabeth Jennings' poetry is replete with religious themes, experiences, aspirations, questions and speculations. Profoundly Christian yet alert to the ambiguities of human experience, immersed in the Catholic tradition but without unqualified surrender to dogmatic formulations, learned in incarnational theology and the astonishingly aware of the connectedness in Christian thought between the suffering of human beings and the passion of God.

    Advent and Easter, year on year, provoked her to poetry, attempting again the impossible puzzle of arranging words so that eternal truth is sufficiently framed in language to embrace and communicate the realities to which language refers. Yet words we have, and limited though they are, words represent one of the great gifts of human exchange, and Babel nothwithstanding communication is a bedrock of culture, civilisation and human community.

    So when Jennings writes a poem called 'Clarify', 12 brief lines making three short stanzas, she manages to make it a prayer for two great yearnings from our deepest being – the longing for meaning and the struggle for freedom, but meaning that is purposeful, and freedom that is not destructive. Lucid brevity, knowing naivete, self- knowledge

    CLARIFY

    Clarify me, please,

    God of the galaxies,

    Make me a meteor,

    Or else a metaphor

     

    So lively that it grows

    Beyond its likeness and

    Stands on its own, a land

    That nobody can lose.

     

    God, give me liberty

    But not so much that I

    See you on Calvary,

    Nailed to the wood by me.

    (New Collected Poems, 161)

  • Elizabeth Jennings Week (I) Poetry and Friendship

    DSC00281Talking with a good friend after church about poetry – well, as you do, and why not? He was saying when he read poetry he often didn't understand what he read, but enjoyed reading poetry just the same. In our conversation I suggested perhaps sometimes poetry isn't meant to be understood, but rather, it helps us to understand – ourselves, the world, others, those perplexities and mysteries of the life we live. 

    In that remarkably evocative book, Mr God This is Anna, there's a definition of poetry that has always intrigued, and largely satisfied me: "Poetry is something made up of different bits that is different from all the bits." I too have come away from reading poetry with that strange intellectual and existential paradox – while I haven't understoood it, it would be quite wrong to say I was none the wiser. Because wisdom isn't only about knowing all the answers, or even knowing all the questions. Wisdom is to know the limits of the question and answer approach as the only way to understanding much that makes up our lives. Curiosity is its own justification; the inner search is not always the search for an answer. The quest for truth isn't so easily reduced to the limits of vocabulary. Poetry allows us to both think and feel, to search and only perhaps find, to question without being overanxious to fix, sort and nail down in words alone, those profound insights and experiences that like time and tide, climate and geology, give shape and character to our inner world.

    So it's important who we choose as companions on the road, whom we invite to be conversation partners, those voices that can be relied on not to let us off with shallow and superficial answers, or predictable and unsearching questions. Amongst the poets I have several such critical friends, and readers of this blog will guess most of them. R S Thomas; Emily Dickinson; George Herbert; Mary Oliver; Gerard Manley Hopkins: Robert Frost; Denise Levertov; Elizabeth Jennings; Carol Ann Duffy; Seamus Heaney. There are others of course, and in any case one of my favourite kinds of book is the poetry Anthology of which I have several which are now as familiar as any collected corpus.

    Elizabeth_jenningsBut this week I'm having an Elizabeth Jennings week on the blog. She is one from whose poetry I've learned amongst other things the importance of relationships in any spirituality that takes the divine and human intersections of our experience seriously. Here she is on friendship. And this one poem says why each special friendship is cause for celebration, gratitude and the glad recognition that such blessing is ours, undeserved gift, grace at its surprising best.

    FRIENDSHIP

    Such love I cannot analyse;
    It does not rest in lips or eyes,
    Neither in kisses nor caress.
    Partly, I know, it’s gentleness

    And understanding in one word
    Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
    By trust and by respect and awe.
    These are the words I’m feeling for.

    Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
    The giving comes, the taking ends
    There is no measure for such things.
    For this all Nature slows and sings.

     

  • Multum in Parvo (III) The priority of questions over answers

    Always we find ourselves at the divergence

    Of two paths travelling out.

    Otherwise, our questions

    Would already have been answered.

    ………………….

    Turning nightward in these domes

    Our shutters opening like secrets

    We set our silvered cups to catch

    The fine mist of light

    That settles from our chosen stars

    On the edge of the unanswerable

    Even here, our questions.

    ………………..

    Hs-2005-35-a-webThese are two samples of poetry written by a brilliant astrophysicist whose field of research was 'dark matter'. Rebecca Elson wrote as an agnostic whose religious scepticism was tempered by imagination, compassion and a visionary hopefulness for humanity and for a future worthy of the beauty and potential of a universe shot through with mystery.

    Reading her poetry and Journal entries is like encountering a 20th Century Qoheleth, questioning, enquiring, redolent of responsibility, capable of awe and wonder at the sheer intransigence of existence in the face of the human urge to mastery and comprehension.

    Reading her poetry is to have your too easily and carelessly held assumptions about faith and life interogated by someone who was an Isaac Newton scholar at Cambridge, and interpreter of the Hubble data, a Harvard researcher, and a poet whose precision with words had more to do with nuanced meaning than technical skill.

    Reading her poetry is like standing in a hot shower when someone turns on the tap downstairs and suddenly the water is freezing and there's no easy or quick escape from its jetted cold.