Living Wittily

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  • Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncracies (5) Bernard Lonergan and Faith Maps

    DSCN1295[1]Last Christmas I was given a book by a friend who knows me well enough to make good choices about books. Faith Maps by Michael Paul Gallagher is about ten religious explorers from within the Catholic tradition. I read it slowly earlier this year and have revisited one or two chapters again during Advent. The chapter on Bernard Lonergan opens up a remarkable mind, and hints at the intellectual precipices Lonergan scaled in pursuit of a way of knowing that did not invalidate religious truth. He insisted honest enquiry must pay due attention to the actual experience of human knowing, deliberate attentiveness to what goes on inside us when we pay attention, seeking the insight that comes from looking critically inside, pursuing the discovery of oneself in oneself so that the authentic self can be exposed to the truth encountered in God.

    51Heb8YIxVL__SL500_AA300_But it is the end of the chapter that glows with Advent hopefulness, as Gallagher puts into Lonergan's mouth an interpretation of the Magnificat that is the distilled essence of Lonergan's view that passionate love for God, born of God's love for the world, is what gives life its meaning, purpose and worth:

    As we look back on our lives we see that "in the whole outward and upward movement of our heart, God was active. But when we come to recognise this, and to speak to the Artist of our love in prayer, a new situation comes to birth. 'This complete being in love is the reason of the heart that reason does  not know.' It is the eye of faith that sees everything differently, life and death, joy and tragedy, the struggles of history; all is now the theatre of God's call and companionship.

    Here the Magnificat becomes magnificently true. God has done great things, meeting our deepest hungers. All is God's doing. We walk in the flow of divine creativity, even when we think it is all our own doing. God's promise is received and fulfilled in the slowness of our daily learning. At the peak of our freedom the music changes; it is no longer our effort that counts but our yes of recognition, of gratitude, and of an authenticity that is not ours. Yes, faith, born from love and giving birth to love, is the God intended crown of our long journey towards a fullness here and hereafter."

    (Pages 76-77) 

  • Why was he doing that?

    Driving to work this morning it  was dark, overnight gales persisting, heavy rain slanting down as if some demented supra-gardener was waving a watering can in time to Carmina Burana. In the dimly lit street I saw a car door open and close. I came closer and saw water spray bouncing off the car. At 7.05 am, in a howling gale and torrential rain, in near total darkness, someone was washing their car with a pressure hose. As I passed there he was, leaning against the gale, assiduously washing a car that was being rained on in a gale.

    Only one question occurs – Why?

    But the puzzles of the day kept coming. The floor director of the Silverburn shopping centre was being asked about the plight of the retail sector, and the mega-malls as customers seem less reluctant to throw money away. Amongst the comments he made was that families were not spending enough dwell time in the centre. Now "dwell time", suggests a place to stay, a settling down, maybe even home. The idea that a retail temple is a place to spend dwell time just about says what it is that makes contemporary life such a kaleidoscope of impermanence.

    I've no answers to the man with the pressure hose, or the customers who need to spend dwell time in Silverburn Centre. Just the perplexity of one who tries to live wittily in the tangle of my mind – and make some sense of this odd, loveable world.

  • The Water that is Christ – and the Flowering of the Desert

     I found this remarkable exposition of a Psalm verse by Ambrose of Milan on a blog I now frequent regularly. Each day a substantial passage from the Church Fathers and Mothers is offered for meditation, often adhering to the liturgical and Saints' calendars. Will be giving Living Wittily a refresh during Christmas  and I'll give this and several other links worth dropping into for a horizon widening, or heart enlarging, or mind stretching exercise.

    DSC00219Meantime allow the strangeness and gentleness of a pre-industrial, pre-technological worldview to create images far removed from retail parks and shopping malls, forest stripping and greenhouse emissions, celebrity overload and unreal reality shows, credit crunches and Eurozones. Not that these don't matter – they matter so much that to live in the reality of them, and try to change them, the human heart needs resources deeper than human ambitions and capacities, and needs a centre that is more durable than the self-interested pursuit of personal and national interests. The passage deals with such strange things as sermons – but just for once, assume that each follower of Jesus who opens their mouth, has the opportunity to offer words that refresh, nourish, irrigate, and so are life-enabling, life enhancing and life-sharing. Isaiah 35 isn't seen as an Advent text – but the image of streams in the desert, alongside the promise in John 4 that the woman of Samaria would discover wells of water bubbling to eternal life are enough for me to make the connection.

    When Ambrose says the words of Jesus are like clouds of refreshment, torrential rivers of joy, deep wells of life-giving, he is exulting in the Word made flesh, that comes to live amongst us, and in whose words are eternal life.

    ………………………………………………

    Drink, then, from Christ, so that your voice may also be heard.

    Store up in your mind the water that is Christ, the water that praises the Lord.

    Store up water from many sources, the water that rains down from the clouds of prophecy.

    Whoever gathers water from the mountains and leads it to himself or draws it from springs, is himself a source of dew like the clouds.

    Fill your soul, then, with this water, so that your land may not be dry, but watered by your own springs.

    He who reads much and understands much, receives his fill. He who is full, refreshes others.

    So Scripture says: If the clouds are full, they will pour rain upon the earth.

    Therefore, let your words be rivers, clean and limpid, so that in your exhortations you may charm the ears of your people. And by the grace of your words win them over to follow your leadership.

    Let your sermons be full of understanding. Solomon says: The weapons of the understanding are the lips of the wise; and in another place he says: Let your lips be bound with wisdom. That is, let the meaning of your words shine forth, let understanding blaze out.

    See that your addresses and expositions do not need to invoke the authority of others, but let your words be their own defence.

    Let no word escape your lips in vain or be uttered without depth of meaning.

    Ambrose of Milan (c. 337-397): Letter 2, 1-2. 4-5.7:  from Office of Readings for the Memoria of St Ambrose, December 7th, @ Crossroads Initiative.

  • Humour, Humanity and the Incarnation

    Dont-let-the-worldFunny how unrelated things come together sometimes.  A TV personality caused outrage by suggesting strikers should be shot.

    Explanations about being satirical with a sharp edge, or words taken out of context, or apology that people were offended, didn’t redeem the situation.

    They simply betrayed the dangerous deficits of compassion, understanding and ethical responsibility that can lurk in what is intended to make people laugh.

     

    Then I had a discussion with some students about laughter. A sense of humour is an essential attribute if we want to learn, understand, enjoy and come to love human beings. Humour and humanity come from the same word family.  What we laugh at says something unmistakable about what we live for and how we look at the world. Laughter with people creates deep bonds of togetherness, head nodding, hand-clapping, shoulder-shaking mirth, and joy in the oddity of things. Laughing at people is divisive, and tries to diminish the one laughed at.

     Fra-angelico-the-annunciationThe contrast of inhumane non-jokes about other human beings called strikers, and one of the nicest compliments I ever read couldn’t be greater: “he looked humanely forth on human life”. The greatest humorists manage to bring humour and humanity together. Then our laughter brings us close to tears, because we see ourselves, our ridiculous, wonderful , mistake-making selves, in their work.

    Advent is the time we celebrate the birth and humanity of Jesus, ‘when God almighty, came to be one of us’. Christmas joy is because Jesus shows us the God who does not mock our humanity, but takes it and restores it, and redeems our own humanity in that great original act of generous love. Emmanuel. God with us.

    The two images are carefully chosen – the one smiley amongst the blue down in the mouths – and the Annunciation (Botticelli) of what would become good tidings of great joy, to all peoples. The juxtaposition of humour, humanity and the redeeming touch of God.

  • Living Wittily, Social Communication, and the Modest Aim of Creating Conversation

    DSC00128Sometime today Living Wittily will have received 200,000 hits, which is no great milestone for a blog, even though the blogger eschews Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social communication. Interesting use of both social and communication when they become married without a conjunction. Social communication should be a tautology, if it's communication between human beings then it's social; if it's social then it involves inter-communication of those who can express themselves in terms that each understand. I suppose the question is, are all forms of communication social? And if they are, how to we differentiate between conversations face to face, conversations on phone, Facebook, Twitter with known friends, and conversations with that world out there with whoever reads something and responds to it. Which raises further the question when does an exchange of information, opinion, comment, gossip become a conversation rather than an impersonal exchange of floating data, random thoughts, serendipitous exchanges, and uncontextualised trivia?

    I think it's when the communication is between people who even if they don't know each other, are looking for more than a forum to opinionate, and more than a network to barge into with self-expression intended to make that particular self noticed – and that as a process of self-identity construction. Such communication will only become conversation when it produces one of the most important strands in human relationships – continuity. It's the continuity of communication, the desire to turn comment into conversation, and offer personal opinion not as the put down answer but as the gift of further questioning in which each side enters a partnership of respectful speaking and listening.    

    I can think of a few reasons for keeping a blog and offering thought, and viewpoint and insight – and whatever wisdom we learn, to whoever will read it. For me it's quite simple. The offer of all the above to whoever is patient, interested and trustful enough to read and ponder, to offer their own wisdom and insight, to value their own experience as well as the experience of the writer. When that becomes an exchange, conversation begins. Most folk who comment on Living Wittily are people I know, or have come to know, and quite a few of you I've not met. Some email and these become private conversations, and often they have enriched and persuaded and edited my thinking and sharpened my view of the world.

    MoreSo in a life a wee bit busy just now I still try to keep Living Wittily going, offering a voice amongst the voices, and now and then offering my five loaves and two fishes into the mix and flux of this kaleidoscopic second decade of the third millennium, and hoping that readers might have some nourishment, and not expecting there are too many baskets full left over. Blog posts are like the water in a Scottish burn in spate – they swirl downstream and quickly disappear. But in the flow of words, the aim remains the same, and the motto from Robert Bolt's "Man for All Seasons" still expresses my own spiritual and intellectual disposition. There are few pursuits in life more fascinating, fulfilling, frustrating and fruitful than seeking to serve God in the tangle of our minds, and doing so as those who try to keep the first and greatest commandment – to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind and all our strength.

  • Advent – Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (4) The Gardener at Christmas.

    DSC00215For some years now I've enjoyed the poetry of U A Fanthorpe. Her collected poems range across human experience as seen by a perceptive, compassionately critical poet whose emotional intelligence and moral sensibility make hers a voice that 'looks humanely forth on human life.'  Reflecting on the NHS, or the loss of passion and humanities in the Universities, or identifying those who now inhabit 'the draughty corners of the abandoned Welfare State', she has little interest in acid and lament, but rather holds up human experience to a scrutiny that is looking for what is of value, what is the dignity, what the obligations we all have to each other, to enrich and nurture life, and resist what withers, diminishes and devalues.

    She always writes poetry for the Advent Season and most earlier collections include some of these – others are written for friends and family.

     

    The Gardener at Christmas

    He has done all that needs to be done.

     

    Rake, fork, spade, cleaned and oiled,

    Idle indoors; seeds, knotty with destiny, rattle

    Inside their paper jackets. The travelling birds

    Have left; predictable locals

    Mooch in the early dusk.

     

    He dreams of a future in apples,

    Of three white lilies in flower,

    Of a tree that could bear a man.

     

    He sits back and waits

    For it all to happen.

    U A Fanthorpe, Collected Poems 1978-2003 (Calstock: Peterloo, 2005) page 400

     

  • Advent – and the shadow of malice from offstage

    There is a part of my mind that doesn't want to say anything about Jeremy Clarkson.

    But there is a larger part (it's made up of conscience, intellect, emotional intelligence – 0h and moral coherence) that simply wants to dissociate my own capacity to think, feel and speak as a human being whose world has horizons wider than gearboxes, and whose values are about more than speed, power and self-centred indulgence growing like giant hogweed out of an overblown ego.

    His comment on The One Show about those involved in yesterday's strike are too crass, stupid, nasty and morally repulsive to repeat. If you didn't hear it, or the fallout, google his name.

    It's Advent – and one of the most perplexingly predictable episodes in the Christmas story is what those with power do to those who are powerless – it's called the slaughter of the innocents.

    Not that Mr Clarkson can compare with Herod and his methods of silencing dissent, holding on to power and eliminating opposition. But the instinct to identify, demonise and eliminate any threat to self interest is always the temptation of power – and thankfully Mr Clarkson has no executive power. Which is a good thing, a very good thing.

    Incidentally I've never watched Top Gear. I think it's presenter should be taken out and made to apologise in front of all the families ( many of whom will be his ex-viewers) he had the insolence and brutality to besmirch with words that are socially toxic and ethically inexcusable.

  • Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (3) Christian Forshaw

    ForshawTwo or three years ago I bought this CD, because a year earlier I heard Sanctuary and Christian Forshaw on the radio, performing Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. I was converted there and then. Since then I've listened to Forshaw's music whatever the time of year. His performances on the saxophone, and the accompnaying organ, soloists and ensemble create a sound that for me is unique in its range from intensity to serenity. The saxophone solos have the capacity to evoke profound feelings of joy, or longing, and sometimes that mystertious combination of both for their are few things touch our deepest longings more tenderly than joy remembered or joy anticipated.

    One of my ambitions is to hear Christian Forshaw at a live concert, most of which take place in England, and often at times I'm not free to postpone other responsibilities and just go! But it's on my must do list – along with several other events / experiences I want to attend or make possible. Maybe I need a  must do this year list – which would include coffee with an as yet unmet friend, a visit to the Amsterdam Art Galleries, and a Christian Forshaw Concert. Mhmm. These would do fine!

    Meanwhile, if you're tired of the run of the mill Christmas CD avalanche of average, go to Amazon, get this CD, and redeem advent by recovering or rediscovering that joyful longing that beats at the heart of our Faith, "The Word became flesh, and dwelt amonst us…"

     

  • Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncracies (2) Blowin in the Wind – does anyone remember this version?

    ButterflyMany years ago, in 1972, I was in Perth. I didn't have much money (I was getting married a month or two later) and I was in a long disappeared record shop. One of the songs that is now part of my inner canon was playing, but it was unlike any version I'd heard before. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Seekers, Judy Collins, they each had a trademark version.

    This was different – you love it or hate it. I loved it and bought the LP, most of the other songs are ordinary, mostly forgettable but the rendering of Blowin in the Wind was extraordinary, and unforgettable, whether yolu love it or hate it! The vinyl LP is long gone, and the track is now hard to find though I've tracked it down on an import version, You can hear it on Youtube at the link below.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_bo4KU1yc

    Please don't inundate the comments box with your negative reviews because they won't change my mind. There are few versions of this song I don't like, but when I want it to express an exuberant and passionate no to the daftness of a world which finds ever new and imaginative ways of making human life miserable, I go looking for this one, and in the privacy of the study, the car or wherever, add my yell of wistful protest and hopeful anger to one of the weirdest musical accompaniments to any 60's folk song. I love it!

    The butterfly photo? Just a reminder of the beauty that gratuitously adorns this planet, and the creatures who share our time and place on it.

  • Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (1)

    My favourite soprano singer is Jessye Norman. Ever since I heard her sing the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass (20 years ago), I've listened, learned and been renewed by that magnificent voice. That double CD is now scratched and looks its age.

    JessyeI've just bought her double CD, Christmastide for the Aberdeen – Paisley weekly jaunt. So instead of Abba, Mozart, John Denver, Thomas Tallis, Mary Chapin Carpenter,and various other voices I'll play several CD's I've now bought for Advent. The Jessye Norman one begins with O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Sung with slow, deliberate enunciation, like a prayer quietly passionate and long in the saying. It builds towards a crescendo of longing, orchestra and voices demanding to be heard, and above it all the clear confident cry, no longer quietly desperate but sure in its rejoicing, "Emmanuel will come to you, O Israel". 

    If it is to be faithful to its own mission and message, then this year the Church, more than any other institution, more than any other source of wisdom or authority, and more confidently than any marketing agency cleverly luring customers, – the Church should speak, live, embody, sing, pray, share, demonstrate, the truth by which it lives. "Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel." Whatever else our culture currently lacks, joy, hope and trust are in highly significant deficit.

    Fra-angelico-the-annunciationThe question haunts me – how does believing God comes to us in Jesus Christ make me act differently from my neighbours?

    If in Jesus the love and mercy of God have come, and if Christmas brings a message of peace on earth and goodwill amongst all peoples, then why in the name of Jesus do I buy into the gloom and anxiety of a global economy on the critical list?

    What listening to Jessye Norman's rendering of O Come, O Come Emmanuel does is question our culture's default position on what matters most. And it lifts my eyes beyond the Euro zone, to the economy of heaven, and the call to live with hopeful joy and trustful peace, not because that makes problems go away, but because it looks with clearer vision at the God who comes near.

    The painting is The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico. It is replete with biblical clues, it is a masterpiece of reverenced mystery. It is a painting of God at work invading and interrupting with urgency and demand – awaiting that "Yes" that allows the Word to become flesh.