Living Wittily

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  • What kind of God is the Christian God?

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    What kind of God is the Christian God? The early apologist who wrote the Epistle to Diognetus was utterly convinced of the decisive nature of Christ for any understanding of God that claims to be Christian:

    "Why did God send the Son? To rule as a tyrant, to inspire terror and astonishment? No, he did not. No, he sent him in gentleness and mildness. To be sure, as a king sending his royal son, he sent him as God. But he sent him as to men, as saving and persuading them, and not as exercising force. For force is no attribute of God.

    On this passage the Arthur McGill in his book Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, gives this comment, one of the countless fugitive affirmations of kenosis as the self-giving love that is the disposition of God:

    "Force is no attribute of God". – that is the basic principle for Trinitarian theologians. God's divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding. Far from staying above the world he sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing  he invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from men and women in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to them for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because whithin himself he is a life of self-giving.

    (The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens – the random design of a cottage border seems to fit with a piece on the generously extravagant, self giving love of the God who does abundance!)

     

     

  • Haiku and the beauty of the stones

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    Amongst my favourite pastimes is walking on the cobbled beaches on the east coast of Scotland. I spent some time recently admiring, contemplating, enjoying, looking at, considering, wondering, imagining, as I looked at the cobbled beach in sunlight. The colours and textures, the thrown togetherness that looks like creative arrangement, the smooth roundedness surprisingly soft and warm, the hard durability of elemental substances of quiet understated beauty, the random oddity of millions of stones tumbled trillions of times and now available for exhibition to an audience of one, with a camera.

    The following Haiku hint at the marvel that is a cobbled beach, with oblique glances in the direction of that relatedness that enriches our humanity – relatedness enriched and stimulated by similarity and difference, tone and shape, angle of repose and interconnectedness so that the whole is greater than the parts, nearness and distance and space, and the provisionality that is essential to avoid sterile sameness.

    Stones in Sunlight.  

     

    Remorseless friction,

    waves lapidary tumbling,

    the beauty of grey.

     

    Cobbled together,

    aeons of geology,

    placed by time and tide.

     

    Tones in harmony,

    well rounded community

    of shaped difference.

     

    Pebbles of friendship,

    in easy togetherness,

    colour and contrast.

    (copyright. Jim Gordon, 2011)

     

     

  • 9/11 – when memory gives way to prayers for peace, and a theology of peace is a missional imperative

    WHAT KIND OF GOD?

    The toy plane comes out of the blue

    and zaps the tower as it would do

    in comic or cartoon, but this is true.

     

    A hundred storeys up, stick people

    wave little banners of forlorn humanity,

    already fatally diminished

    to their gawping fellow-kind

    before the crumbling hell engulfs them.

     

    It's said the terrorists' god

    unfazed by death of innocents

    will take his fanatics to unending bliss.

    What kind of god is this?

    Lesley Duncan, poem first published in The Herald, September 13, 2001

    I remember exactly where I was when the news came on the TV after the first plane – I watched the second plane.

    The world changed that day.

    For those of religious faith, religiously justified violence, distorted and destructive devoutness, was from that day seen as blasphemy writ large;

    for those of no religious faith, the events of that morning was a powerful persuasive that the idea of God is dangerous, inhuman, and when fuelled with hatred combusts in an evil worse than any secular ideology.

    Today analysis and comment on 9/11 seems unnecessarily presumptuous – better to remember, and to learn, and to pray. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself…." What kind of God is this?

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the love of life, and the courage of faith

    DSC00228 "If there is one result, one lesson to be learned from history, I would say that it is…the love of life as it really is."

    What makes that affirmation remarkable, and full of spiritual adventure, is that Bonhoeffer wrote it while in Tegel prison, and it is put into the voice of a character in one of the fiction pieces he wrote there.

    I guess "the love of life as it really is" is what Bonhoeffer means when he says "God is in our life and beyond it", a prevasive presence, a suffusing grace, giver of a transformative vision of the world and our life in it as God loved.

    A good thought for a grey, mizzly, drizzly, cold Saturday in mid-September while wondering where on earth summer was, or went.

    PS  The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens and is one of the best results so far of the now not so new camera.

    Secondly, I noticed the miss print "prevasive" – decided to leave it and let it mean what it sounds loike – that God is there before we are! 

  • Karl Rahner – the simple prayer of a complex theologian

    O God

    you must make your own human word,

    for that's the only kind I can comprehend.

    Don't tell me everything that you are.

    Dont tell me of your infinity.

    Just say that you love me,

    just tell me of your goodness to me.

    But don't say this in your divine langauge,

    in which your love also means

    your inexorable justice and your crushing power.

    Say it rather on MY language,

    so I won't have to be afraid

    that the word 'love' hides some significance

    other than your goodness and your gentle mercy.

    Karl Rahner, Encounter with Silence.

    And they say rahner is a complex, difficult to read theologian who uses obscure or sophisticated philosophical categories. maybe so. But this is the prayer of someone who knows the limits of language, the constraints on concepts, and the deficiencies of discourse when it comes to describing God, let alone addressing God – and when it comes to God addressing us, all language breaks down and we are presented with Personal Presence, the Word made flesh, God who has spooken in his Son.

  • A Litlle Prayer for Samson and Delilah

    Yesterday we were at the Westhill monthly book sale. It is held under the canopy of the shopping centre and there are loadsabooks! The money goes to support a local charity and the variety of books is astonishing, but there are also several genres heavily represented. One of the book sorters, displaying them in supermarket fruit boxes made no concessions to equality and diversity – there were "mens' book" and their were "womens' books". I asked him what defines a man's book – seems that's violence, thriller, military, and other accounts of mayhem. A woman's book is romance, nice story, life story of celebrities and other soft options.

    I asked him then why the majority of readers of crime fiction are women, and some of the best crime authors likewise, women – including some of the darker forms of the genre. At which point I realised I was pushing too hard at his useful rule of thumb cataloguing technique by stereotype. I moved on.

    Anyway, I bought two books having returned five and a CD for resale. (Net loss to our house of three books!) One of them is a book of poetry where I found this poem which is a brilliant example of biblical exposition that is imaginative, michievous, humorous and serious. There are a number of ways you can treat the story of Samson and Delilah. The weak strong man, the naive Judge who couldn't judge character, his own or Delilah's, the arrogance of strength and power. Then there's the Hollywood treatment of Victor Mature and Angela Lansbury as Delilah!

    But this poem is quite different and I'm now wondering if the insight given could ever be preachable by a bald man!

    Gerrit-van-Honthorst-XX-Samson-and-Delilah-1615-XX-Cleveland-Museum-of-Art-Cleveland 

    Little Prayer for Samson and Delilah

    When all virtue

    like Samson's Rastafarian locks

    lie strewn about us,

    have mercy Lord,

    on those who sleep in weakness,

    and those who have shorn us of strength.

     

    Like the growing stubble on Samson's head

    let us be renewed to undertake

    the phenomenal as a matter of course

    when we awaken

    from the lap of philistine ease.

    (Diana Karay Tripp, 20th C, Lione Christian Poetry Collection, Mary Batchelor (ed), p.46.

    The painting is by Gerritt Van Honthorst.

  • The Snow Leopard – the most magnificent of the great cats

    Cubs1 I don't think you can have too many enthusiasms. Curiosity, wonder, pleasure, admiration, intellectual and emotional satisfaction, aesthetic insight, the joy of looking, gazing, seeing, taking in, revelling in – there is probably a thesaurus of descriptors for that human responsiveness to that which is beyond ourselves, and draws us towards it to be touched, enriched, made to pay attention, and somewhere out of our depths comes gratitude and the awareness that what we are encountering is blessing.

    That's how I feel about the snow leopard. When Peter Matthiessen's book was published 30 something years ago, about his journey to Nepal to try to see the snow leopard in the wilds, I read it and discovered a world of which I knew nothing. It's the story of his journey towards a healing of the heart after the loss of his wife – the seeking of the snow leopard almost a parallel search for the one he had lost. It is in my own canon of books, a great book.

    So the other day when aol posted this picture of snow leopard cubs, I was taken back to the summer I read Matthiessen's book for the first time. And the picture shows why that first paragraph of this post is struggling to define and articulate adequately, the wild beauty that inhabits this world of ours.

  • Praying to Paul for the blessings he describes!

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     Lead us, great teacher Paul, in wisdom's ways,

    And lift our hearts with thine to heaven's high throne,

    Till faith beholds the clear meridian blaze,

    And, sun-like, in the soul reigns charity alone.

     

    Elpis, wife of Boethius (480-524)

    Paul has come in for his share of criticism and even calumny in some circles of NT study – his views on a number of issues challenged, contested, the target for a dismissive reductionism. But there is great wisdom, and remarkable  intellectual vision in his writings. I've just finished yet another slow reading of Ephesians, and there are passages there that are amongst the highest points in all Christian literature.

    So the prayer of Elpis to St Paul – let's not get into the theological soundness or spiritual efficacy of praying to one of the saints, even if it is Paul. I'd rather just echo the prayer and discover that the blessing of God isn't so hemmed round by theological proprieties as we might think. The direction of the heart Godward seems more important.

  • Carefully Considered and Patiently Crafted Prayers – The Gift of Reverence

    O thou who art the light of the minds that know thee,

    the life of the souls that love thee,

    and the strength of the wills that serve thee;

    help us to know thee that we may truly love thee,

    and so to love thee that we may fully serve thee,

    whom to serve is perfect freedom.

    Amen    (Augustine of Hippo)

    …………………

    DSC00199 There are few more decisive arguments on behalf of careful, considered and beautifully crafted prayers than a prayer like this.

    When all the valid arguments and reasons for extempore, unrehearsed, informal and immediate prayer are accepted, there is still an absolute necessity, when addressing God, to take care with the beauty of our language.

    It reflects the care we take with the shaping of our thoughts and the sharing of our hearts.

    And it reflects that essential courtesy that acknowledges the importance of the other by preparation, attention, attentiveness and the offering of that which has taken us some time and trouble.

     

     

    The picture is of the rose I bought for Sheila last year – it too is a carefully crafted celebration of beauty, compliments of the Creator!

  • The day thou gavest Lord, has ended – Sunset Hymn

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    The day thou gavest, Lord, has ended;
    the darkness falls at thy behest;
    to thee our morning hymns ascended;
    thy praise shall sanctify our rest.

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    2. We thank thee that thy church, unsleeping
    while earth rolls onward into light,
    through all the world her watch is keeping,
    and rests not now by day or night.

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    3. As o'er each continent and island
    the dawn leads on another day,
    the voice of prayer is never silent,
    nor die the strains of praise away.

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    4. So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never,
    like earth's proud empires, pass away.
    Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
    till all thy creatures own thy sway.

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    The North east of Scotland has some of the most spectacular sunsets in Scotland. I know about the West coast, from Machrahanish to Ullapool, and I've watched sunsets there too. These pictures were taken last night, one of the most spectacular sunsets we've seen up here for years. Impossible not to link them with this evocative Victorian evening hymn. By the way, Lesley Garrett sings this hymn on her album Amazing Grace, and it is one of the most resoundingly over the top and enjoyable versions I've ever heard!