Living Wittily

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  • Carrie Newcomer – poet of the mystery of the ordinary

    Geographyoflight Ever since I read a review in Sojourners years ago, I've listened to the music of Carrie Newcomer.  She is one of my favourite singer songwriters,(Mary Chapin Carpenter being another) strongly connected with the Quakers, outspoken on issues of justice and peace, a poet of human relationships of love, loss, forgiveness and joy, and a singer whose voice ranges from conversational confidence to a clarion call to community and convictions essential to human flourishing.

    She writes and sings out of a life committed to Christian principles and practices, but the spiritual is an undercurrent, a powerful but gentle pulling of the listener to consider and ponder, wonder and care for what goes on around us.

    I've just ordered her Geography of Light album, another collection of songs that gently and at times peruasively, and occasionally assertively, invite or demand that the listener pays attention. Attentiveness to people, to our inner world, to the situations of others, to those ordinary experiences that hint at the extraordinary, and to the mundane which can contain mystery – Newcomer balances the poetry and the music, and the result is a style that is somewhere between folk and progressive country, but always the sense that wisdom, insight and compassionate observance of human longings and behaviour inform her thought and suffuse her music.

    Her membership of the Quakers is for her a natural commitment, a spiritual context within which she is at peace and an ethos of gentle enquiry that resonates with her own reflective appreciation of human living, longing and loving – the emphases on peace, silence, pondering deeply, community building, and shared wisdom are not so much themes in her songs as presuppositions and assumptions of her poetry and her worldview.

    There is some irony in her being voted one of the ten most influential musicians working in the States just now, and her not being as widely known as that would suggest. So this is an unabashed plug for her music, and her voice as a call to pay attention to the life we are living, and to be attentive to those who share that life.

  • Vulnerable People in Our Communities – the Scandal of Abuse and the Cost of Caring

    I've waited a few days for the impact of the Panorama programme to be tempered from legitimate and understandable outrage, to a recognition that there is something deeply wrong and dangerously present in our society. The evidence of vulnerable people being abused, tortured and humiliated was sickening, and the systemic nature of this inhuman treatment in one ironically named care home, should rightly outrage – actually for me it went beyond mere anger. But more worrying and more urgent is the too easily trotted out reassurance that this is an isolated incident, that this is so unspeakably apalling that it is inconceivable it is a pervasive practice rather than a one off aberration.

    Now without assuming abuse of vulnerable people in care is common, and certainly assuming that the majority of those involved in the care of others are indeed carers, compassionate and professional, protective and supportive in  their relationships,there is still reason to pause, and think. The images on the Panorama programme are of such graphic inhumanity that the deeper question to ask is about the way our money conscious, value seeking, service cutting, economic efficiency indexed culture recovers a more humanly centred approach to our communal life. Jose Comblin the Catholic priest who has written so much on justice, the oppressed and the vulnerable, once said a cultre and society was to be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable people. It isn't an original thought – it is however, a fundamental one for a civilised society that claims to pursue human flourishing.

    There is a corrosive functionalism operating, and a dehumanising process of calculation at work, when the bottom line, the barcode, the budget and the deficit, are the primary drivers in choosing priorities for how we spend our money. Money wouldn't stop what happened in that care home. But monitoring and control agencies are strapped for cash; private care homes are businesses that need to survive and exist for profit; and therefore quality and number of staff is influenced not by the needs of those cared for but by the business considerations of a private company or owner; and that is one of the levers that often works against the best interests of those vulnerable people for whom we are responsible.

    What I found so distressing was the pleasure, the perverse and degrading spectacle of power and strength being used to hurt rather than comfort, to humiliate rather than affirm, to be cruel rather than merciful, and to laugh at weakness rather than embrace and support – in short to despise instead of love, and to wound instead of defend. You have to be so culpably lacking in that common bond of humanity that sees the dignity and worth of each person to inflict such misery. So beyond budgets and money, bottom lines and profits, there is another issue for me, and it is theological. What has our society replaced the imago dei with? If you remove the belief that each person is made in the image of God, has an inherent dignity and worth, that each human being is a reflection of the creative love and imaginative purposefulness of the Creator, what do we put in its place. All kinds of substitutes – human rights, equality and justice before law, legislation about the sanctity of life, the belief in each person's right to choose and decide for themselves – always of course assuming that when some people are less able to use such personal autonomy our society puts in place advocates, befrienders, carers and provisions to maximise their freedom and affirm their dignity and worth.

    But underlying all such provisions there has to be in those responsible for the care of the vulnerable person such atttiudes as compassion, respect and recognition of worth; there have to be values and virtues that affirm the humanity of the carer as well as the cared for; there has to be a way of looking at people that sees and understands the incalculable treasure that each human being is. Is that idealistic? Probably. Unrealistic? I hope not. Because what those images of inhumane abuse William-blake-sketch-of-the-trinity-21 showed is what happens when a person's dignity and worth as a human being is discounted, and the consequences of such callousness is a dehumanising of the person, and a further raid on the social capital that keeps us safe, respectful and compassionately interested in the wellbeing of others. So even if our secular values  don't have the underpinning of the concept of imago dei, that each person has an intrinsic and inviolable value as a being made in the image of God, there is a need for those who are trained in the care services to be educated in the valuing, respecting and understanding of those people for whom they will care, for whom they will be responsible, and to whom they will be responsive, as one human being to another.

    And yes. What happened was criminal. The consequences should be within the justice system. But the exposure of this atrocious practice, which went on over time, should alert us to the likeliehood that other people are equally at risk; and should encourage us to ask deep questions about what it means to form and shape the atttitudes of those entrusted with the care and protection, support and befriending of those amongst us who need much from us, and who give much to us.

  • The pattern of our days

    300px-Vincent_Willem_van_Gogh_127 Accept surprises

    that upset your plans,

    shatter your dreams,

    give a completely

    different turn

    to your day

    and — who knows?–

    to your life.

    It is not chance.

    leave the Father free

    himself to weave

    the pattern of your days.

    Dom helder Camara, A Thousand Reasons for Living.

  • Friendship, book shops and “the heart in pilgrimage”

     Sometimes, not always, I write in a book where I bought it, when and why.  I had reason to go looking for George Herbert the other day and opened "This Booke of Starres" Learning to Read George Herbert, by James Boyd White. Inside I had written – "Oxford August 1995, while on a bookshop tour with Ken Roxburgh" That was a wonderful three days away which took in York, Oxford, Cambridge and Durham and the various bookshops therein.

    We had an appalling and hilarious B&B expereince which included a room with broken window sashes, a landlord with open shirt, sweaty chest and non-designer stubble, and a railway line that serviced the main Oxford sorting office and mail trains through the night, during a heatwave in August – oh and the sweaty landlord was also the cook for breakfast!

    But I still have several books bought in different places, Ebeling on Luther, Boyd White on Herbert, Keeble on Richard Baxter and a hardback copy of John V Taylor's exquisite The Go Between God. The friendship we have shared for a long number of years transcends but could not exclude our shared passion for books, reading, theology and the joy of the chase. Only, the on line availability of most things has reduced the urgency, the sweaty palms, the raised metabolism, the nervous searching of the eyes along rows of books for that one, just that one, which you've looked for for ages and at a price that leads you to faith in  miracles.

    So I'm glad I have books like this – and a one sentence memo to myself to good companionship, literary hunting parties and long pilgrimages to those holy places where books live.

    2222240312_e56af494c5 The book itself is one of the best studies of Herbert's poetry of which I have a shelf full. Boyd White has a particular interest in literature and its relation to law, and especially how poetry expresses and expounds human experience of language, self and community, and how language is fluid, shaping the community which shapes it, and how the speaking self is also the listening self, the influencing self also the influenced self. Just the qualifications in complexity needed to appreciate the filigree of self-referential connections which adorn and decorate Herbert's poetry. It is part of Herbert's genius that such metaphysical elaboration nevertheless articulates the deepest and most intense spiritual longings, and in verse where the sense of the transcendent God is suffused with a sense of the self as broken, yearning and hungering for wholeness. Boyd White's book is a wonderful interpretation of Herbert, and a treasured book, for which I am grateful, because of where I bought it, because of the company I kept, and for the sheer brilliance of the writing itself.

    Thou hast given so much to me,

    give one thing more, a grateful heart

    …Not grateful when it pleaseth me:

    As if thy blessings had spare days:

    But such a heart, whose pulse may be

                                      Thy praise.

  • When being bold is hard to be, and being scared is ok

    You know how now and again, at church, you find yourself invited to sing something you don't want to sing.

    It isn't just to be awkward. And it isn't because you don't want to sing something you don't much care for, or it's a duff tune or one that is unsingable. It's more fundamental than that.

    You are being asked to sing what isn't true in your experience. The last place to pretend is in a service of worship. And amongst the most corrosive forms of pretence is emotional insincerity, which isn't far from spiritual self-deceit.

    Jesus japan You see, the Catch-22 of congregational singing is that while you want to share the faith of the community, sometimes you can't without being untrue to yourself. Because how that faith is expressed, and what it is declaring to be everyone's experience right now, may not be at all congruent with where your own heart is, what is so in your life, and may wrongly presuppose that it is well with every soul gathered in this place, with these people, for worship, now.

    Some time ago ( and it is a while ago) I was standing alongside someone in her own church, who was going through the most horrendous experience of their life. The details don't matter – what matters is that this person was inwardly broken, clinging to whatever faith might have enough buoyancy to stop her from drowning. And she was afraid, scared of the future, her inward defences dismantled by what had happened. And we stood to sing

    Be bold, be strong, for the Lord your God is with you!

    Be bold, be strong for the Lord your God is with you!

    I am not afraid. I am not dismayed

    For I'm walking in faith and victory

    Come on and walk in faith and victory

    For the Lord, your God is with you.

    Now I know it's biblical, it's the spirituality of Joshua, its the confidence of the conqueror and a declaration of assurance. But there is also the spirituality of the Psalmist in lament mode, and of Isaiah who understood broken hearts and bewildered spirits and people's deep fears for the future. And allowing for that, I wonder if we could just occasionally take time to sing, to each other, same tune, much less strident:

    Though scared, though weak,  Still the Lord your God is with you;

    Though scared, though weak,  Still the Lord your God is with you;

    Yes you are afraid, Yes you are dismayed,

    Because you're walking in deep uncertainty,

    We know you're walking in deep uncertainty,

    But the Lord your God is with you.

    This is a plea for emotional honesty, and emotional inclusion, so that we recognise in each gathered community, the experiences of joy and sorrow, laughter and lament, of confident faith and struggling faith, healed hearts and breaking hearts. I too like a good sing when my spirit is singing – but I need different words when I'm inwardly crying. Worship is honest when the declarative mood is sometimes muted by the interrogative mood, and worship that arises from the real experience of the life I live is more likely to have integrity. And whether I am going forth weeping or rejoicing in the homecoming, it is one of the great gifts of the worshipping community that the content of our services enables us to laugh with those who laugh – and weep with those who weep.

    I offer this not as a rant, or a hobby horse – I think these are trivial forms of complaint. I'm more interested in making an observation of pastoral consequence, and spiritual sensitivity, and human solidarity, all of which are inherent in the practices of Christian fellowship.

    The etching above comes from my personal canon of artistic exegesis – I guess at some time in our lives we are the one clinging to the mast, or holding on to Jesus for dear life!


     

     

     

     

  • Learned Optimism and the Gospel of John

    18051848 Optimism is not the same as hoping for the best but not sure if it will happen. It isn’t a kind of philosophical crossing of the fingers behind our backs either. That kind of uncritical optimism mean we’re simply not being realistic. The relationship between optimism and realism is very interesting for people who take Jesus seriously enough to trust Him. For people of faith, is their trust optimism or realism?

    An important insight comes from an unusual book entitled Learned Optimism. It sounds complicated, but stay with me:

     “I have always prided myself on being realistic, and still value that quality. What I learned is that being realistic should be combined with feeling optimistic about creating ways to improve the realistic situation as I understand it.”

    It is one of the subtle and creative techniques in John’s gospel that he sets you up, to hit you with truth, an ambush of the intellect. His gospel is about learned optimism. Repeatedly he says, if you believe in Jesus you can combine being realistic with feeling optimistic, because He will create ways to improve the realistic situation as He understands it.

    For John the Evangelist (nickname for Good News Disseminator!) optimism is not only a matter of temperament. It is a worldview, a considered view of how the world is. In John’s Gospel, to believe in Jesus is to have a radically different worldview.  Jesus, says John, is God’s radical intervention who redefines all other reality. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh…..in Him was life and the life was the light of all humanity…the Son came that you might have life….if the Son shall set you free you shall be free indeed”.  Reality is reconfigured, the way the world looks changes forever, when Jesus’ presence, purpose and power are presupposed.

    Jean9site So, says John – Jesus is the life-giver, the light bringer, the liberator. And in chapter 11, Jesus’ friend Lazarus is dead, buried, locked in the grave, decomposing in the darkness, confined by embalming bandages; that, says John, is the reality. And John says to you, the reader, faith is learned optimism, faith is feeling optimistic about God improving reality, your considered view of how the world is, is about to be reconfigured.

     John says, ‘Watch Jesus and learn’.  ‘Take away the stone’, says the Life-giver; ‘Lazarus come out’,  says the Light bringer;  ‘unbind the grave clothes’ says the Liberator.  And Lazarus walked out, into the light, back into life  and out into the freedom Jesus both commanded and gifted.

    “Learned optimism”, it’s the worldview of those who have seen Jesus at work, and who believe that he still works; that the light shines in the darkness of every death confirming, life threatening grave. But says John, the darkness can never get the better of Him, cannot comprehend Him, never but never has the last word. And that says John, is the learned optimism of resurrection faith.

     I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.

    ……………………

    The second picture is by Corrinne Vonaesch and can be seen along with a series of illustrations of John's Gospel over here. They are a form of exegesis in their own right, – simple and complex, the language of colour expounding both text and story.

  • Why the Daily Mail should be read – with critical scrutiny and moral vigilance

    Images It all depends on the words you use. And the words you use betrays your attitude. And attitudes expose ethical convictions, our view of what's right or wrong. And of course there are always different perspectives, contested worldviews, and varied ways of thinking about the other human beings who inhabit our planet.

    So yesterday the daily Mail once more showed it ethical (sic) convictions, betrayed its attitudes and used words intended to persuade us to think like its editor and writers. Not a chance.

    The headline was UK DOLES OUT MORE AID THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

    The problem is with the word "dole". Used in Daily Mail discourse it means handout, soft indulgent and spineless philanthropy ( a word that means love of human beings).

    Smile3t Now what difference would it make to the moral meaning and ethical purpose of the fact that Britain gives more to aid for development than any other country, if we said the same thing but changed the wording to reflect a different attitude and an alternative set of ethical convictions.

    Suppose the headline had read UK IS MORE GENEROUS TO OVERSEAS DEVELOPMENT THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY.

    That's more like it – and nearer the truth.

  • Divine Humanity – in defence of Kenosis

    Kenotic A while since I wrote a post in the category Confessions of a Bibliophile. And this is a seriously embarrassing confession. David Brown's book on kenotic Christology has just been published. The price is outrageous, and email correspondence with SCM merely confirms that as an academic book with a limited market it has to be fixed at a viable price. no apology, no compromise, no sympathy. So. No guessing games. The paperback copy of 273 pages cost £50. That's 5.5p per page.

    If you are regularly around this blog you'll know my interest in Trinitarian kenosis and kenotic Christology. To buy this book you need a kenotic wallet, self-emptying! I'm not sure what response to make when a publisher produces a book that has this kind of price tag. I understand the need to be competitive. I recognise that academic books have a smaller circulation and thus a narrower margin for profit. I also acknowledge the quality and importance of good academic theology being published and flowing out into wider peer discussion. But the price has got to be affordable, the book accessible, and have some sense of value for money – I don't mean cheap, I mean fair.

    So my wallet has self emptied, and I've already used a large gulp of the book allowance. That said – this is an important book, an elegantly written and openly positive defence of kenotic Christology. Nearly half way through it and have enjoyed the careful clearing of the ground through context, historical theology and constructive proposals. What is most impressive is that in defending Kenosis as a viable theological category in Christology and Trinitarian theology, Brown doesn't overstate the case or overlook the theological difficulties with kenotic theology – but neither does he gloss over the theological difficulties and serious questions raised by the Nicean and Chalcedonian definitions. The orthodox position is not itself so rooted in biblical categories and exegetical foundations that it avoids serious questions of adequacy and sufficiency as a Christological definition persuasive to contemporary minds.

    One of Brown's major contentions is that a kenotic trajectory is not dependent on the classic text of Philippians 2.5-11. The Synoptic Gospels in narrative drive and plot portray Jesus in terms that are not incongruent with a kenotic motif. Once I've read it all, and thought some more, I'll post again.

    Another research interest is the hymns of Charles Wesley, whom brown quotes – and here the kenotic imagery is made to bear the full Christological weight:

    Emptied of His majesty,

    Of His dazzling glories shorn,

    Being's source begins to be

    And God Himself is born!

    Theological adventurousness is not inimical to Evangelical orthodoxy, it seems.

  • Theological Education is more than the Diploma or Degree.

     20051018_caravaggio_emmaus The last couple of weeks we have been completing the marking and grading of papers in preparation for the end of the session. Every time I do this I'm aware of the work and worry, the learning and writing, the thinking and re-thinking, that is part of that great humanising process we call education and to which our students commit themselves. Leaving all the usual quips aside, the truth is a theological paper is an attempt by one mind to grasp and understand, then to articulate and communicate, something they have come to know about God, their self or the world, and how to live and grow as the person they are. That's what is meant by learning that is informative, then formative and finally transformative.

    For that reason, a theological essay is a statement of what one person believes and tries to argue. Their can be little point in simply writing what they think the marker wants to see, if at the same time they don't affirm the validity of what they write. Authentic learning is where we risk writing, saying, speaking out, what we believe to be the case – how much more then when dealing with those things we say matter to us as ultimate, primary, perennial concerns of our lives, and expressions of our deepest commitments.

    So when I read an essay on the Triune relations of Father, Son and Spirit; or a Journal of personal discovery in ministry and responsiveness to others; or a review of a tough book that demands critical thought tempered by intellectual humility; or a sermon written out of a wrestling match with the text when like Jacob the preacher won't let the text go 'except you bless me'. That's when the academic discipline of marking is sanctified by the awareness that these assignments are about more than the grades – and to be sure the process of grading is rigorous, fair and open. But alongside the academic achievement, is a process of shaping and forming a mind, nourishing and nurturing a heart, encouraging the spirit to expansiveness, receptiveness and hospitality to new ideas and experiences.

    So when people ask how the marking is going, there are two answers. One is about the process of confirming the achievements in learning; the other is being alert to that deeper process of growth and change towards maturity of theological understanding, enrichment of spiritual life, and development of gifts and skills which become the source and resource of the Church's mission and ministry in the world. That's what makes theological education crucial – and that's what makes being a theological educator a crucial ministry in the life of the Church.

  • Bob Dylan – the latter day Ecclesiastes?

    Dylan One of the signs of age is when you see Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in concert in the 1960's and remember the excitement and passion of discovering they sang about things you cared about as a teenager. Last night on BBC4 I watched the first part of Arena: No Direction Home, a biography of Dylan's early years. The footage of him singing Blowing in the Wind, evoked more than nostalgia – a kind of pride that my generation used music as a medium of political protest, moral exhortation and ethcial censure of cynical power structures. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Peace movement and CND, the ruthless greed of corporate business, the unequal  lives of the powerless poor and the powerful rich – these were issues of critical importance for humanity, and they were being sung with rhetorical power, or iconoclastic sarcasm, or blunt poltical incorrectness long before politcally correct means what it now means.

    And Pete Seeger all but in tears remembering how it felt to know a singer as genuinely committed to political protest had taken up his torch, and Joan Baez reminiscing about the discovery of Dylan the soon to be phenomenon and prophet for his generation – these were significant moments of cultural history. Dylan is both perplexing and fascinating, complex and enigmatic, passionately humane and incapable of indifference, deeply religious but despising religiosity.

    170px-Paparazzo_Presents_Bob_Dylan_ What was evident in last night's programme is the power of a life story to shape and direct the way others live their lives. It's going too far to talk of Dylan having disciples – but there are millions who now span at least two generations, for whom Bob Dylan has articulated what we want to say about the world, our joys and fears and loves, to tell of the things that outrage us, to sing the causes that matter because they are about human flourishing – both what hinders and helps human beings live in peace and freedom. It takes a troubled soul who looks unflinchingly at trouble to interpret what troubles, or ought to trouble, each generation. In that sense, Dylan is a prophet – flawed, enigmatic, sometimes wrong, quite often right in the diagnosis of the self-inflicted wounds of our humanity.

    "Human beings are born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward…" "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, says the Preacher". "Let justice roll down like waters…." "Now abides faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these…." Job, The Preacher, the Prophet, the Apostle – in secular terms Dylan weaves those strands of human experience (the tragic, the skeptic, the ethical and the romantic), into a corpus of music that is profoundly spiritual, and which for 50 years has resonated with those who question the status quo, who are restless for change, and who are looking for an exegete of their own lives' experience. It's only a thought – but if the preacher of Ecclesiastes had been looking for a way to communicate with the Western World of the 1960's, he could have done worse than being a singer song-writer who composed Blowing in the Wind….

    As a coincidence of serendiptious proportions – the picture of the young Dylan above, which I saved to my picture file, is next to a photo of David Cameron used in an earleir post. Now there's a conversation I'd like to overhear – Dylan and Cameron, on the things that matter most!