Living Wittily

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  • Vermeer and the artist as amateur exegete

    531px-Jan_Vermeer_van_Delft_004 This painting by Vermeer is a masterpiece of exegetical imagination. It seems to me impossible to tell where Vermeer's sympathies lie. Traditional interpretations of Christ in the home of Martha and Mary take at face value Jesus' words in praise of Mary and the quite gentle but dismissive words to Martha.

    Mary sits attentively at Jesus' feet, listening and learning; Martha is harassed and hassled trying to fulfil the obligations of hospitality and the duties of kindness. The story is often used to illustrate the superiority of the contemplative over the activist, as if devotion to Jesus all comes down to attentive passivity (prayer) rather than distracted activity (service). What is at the centre of Vermeer's painting is a loaf, bread, the substance that nourishes and sustains. And bread isn't made in five minutes – it takes work, energy, time, and the patience to let the yeast work, the oven bake and the loaf to be ready. 

    Jesus is pointing at Mary and talking to Martha – who looks not a little miffed that her efforts are so quickly and lightly demoted as distraction, compared to her sister's unhelpful passivity. And for me, that loaf is Vermeer's comment. Not Martha or Mary, not contemplative or active, but the one loaf that signifies the heart and energy of Christian devotion – both prayer and service, what Merton would call contemplative action, and what Dag Hammarskjold  meant when he said of the modern Christian (as true for postmodern ones!), "The road to holiness lies through the world of action".

    This is the only extant biblical picture Vermeer painted – but it has a depth and warmth to it that is lacking in some less accommodating interpretations of Mary's piety and Martha's too easy dismissal. Apart from anything else, Jesus is so relaxed – that hand over the arm of the chair and the other open, palm upwards and pointing to Mary doesn't convey tension and criticism, but a conciliatory persuasion. I doubt Jesus ever dismissed the importance of bread, – sure he refused to magic bread out of stones, but he also enshrined daily bread at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and the breaking and sharing of bread was to become the way he was remembered, celebrated, and yes, served.

    I love this painting, not only for its beauty, but for its exegetical fairness to Martha, its softening of the tradition as to Jesus demeanour and tone to Martha, for that loaf, forever the gift of our Lord to a church often too quick to judge, too ready to criticise, and always tempted to overplay its pieties at the cost of its service to others – that loaf is decisive for Christian devotion and discipleship. Did Vermeer mean all that? Almost certainly not. But that's the joy and fascination of gazing for a while at a picture, and allowing it to question and unsettle unexamined assumptions. Vermeer was no biblical scholar – but sometimes the amateur exegete, using the tools of an altogether different discipline, provides the human texture that prevents the exegetical tradition being monopolised by the professional guild.

  • Hill walking, red kites and a sunny, windy day in the North East.

    Brimond Yesterday amongst other things we went a walk up Brimond Hill. Nothing ambitious, just a 2 mile walk, half of it uphill, and half of it down! But it was bright sunshine, seriously windy, and at the top a sound recordist for the BBC would have had exactly the sounds needed for a documentary or film that needed the wail and whine and muted roar of the wind. The telephone masts with their enormous drum disks provided a weird wind instrument that varied the note and tone depending on the direction and force of the wind.

    Standing at the top you can see a 360 degree view that starts with Aberdeen, the North Sea, the white early warning globes, Inverurie in the distance, Benachie, hills all the way down to Clach na Ben looking like a distant pimple, and so down to the mearns, and then the dip towards the sea again, and Stonehaven beneath the horizon 15 miles sse. A while ago some ill meaning person removed the brass viewpoint information disc which means you have to guess the names of the far mountains unless you are an expert. The photo can be found here which gives a good route guide for mountain bikers.

    Wild-Red-Kites-at-Gigrin--001 And on the way up we saw the red Kites patrolling over the fields and trees. Several pairs were recently released near where we live. Their delta tails and pointed wings make them unmistakable – they have only recently been reintroduced to Scotland and most recently Aberdeenshire. Reading about them later, it's obvious what caused their decline and near extinction. In the late Victorian age, and into the 20th Century when grouse shooting was the pastime of the rich and the absentee landlords, 267 of these birds were shot as vermin on one huge estate in several days. I've always been slightly puzzled and more than slightly annoyed at the idea you shoot the birds that feed on the birds you really want to shoot! Such arbitrary values reflect a ruthless kind of stewardship.

    There's an environmental brain teaser – how to balance the interests of the leisure seeking human being, with the survival needs of the varied species that share our land. Watching the red kites entirely at home in the gusts and fickleness of a strong North East wind, I was glad to see them be what they are. I might have thought different if I'd been a grouse – but then I'd likely have more chance being chased by the occasional kite for food, than when I'm forced to fly towards 20 shotguns held by people hiding behind screens, and calling it sport!

    The photo is from The Guardian, ironically accompanying an article about the systemativ poisoning of red kites, this time in the Scottish Borders. .

  • Kindle, George Eliot and the Slow Absorption of a Story

    Just had a few days at a friends house down in the East Neuk of Fife. Cold and wet, windy and grey, but it was a good rest and I'm home less fatigued than when I left! I took the Kindle with me just to try it out for convenience and flexibility.  I'm slowly making my way through Middlemarch, and one of the great bonuses of Kindle is the way it helps redeem those 5 and 10 minute hiatuses (what's the plural of hiatus by the way?) Waiting for the pizza to heat (12 minutes),  or the 9.00 news to come on (5 – 10 minutes usually, or sitting in the car waiting for Sheila (1 – umpteen minutes), and especially those quarter hours that are just about the maximum period of consciousness between sliding beneath the duvet and the onset of eyelid fatigue swiftly followed by irresistible soporific longings.

    Geliotprettified The point is – I'm reading George Eliot several times a day in byte sized chunks and enjoying the leisurely meandering more than that determined enjoyment with which I usually tackle a big novel. It's a different kind of read, but just as enjoyable, and maybe the slow literary drip is as effective a way of living in a story as the conscientious page turning that may get the book finished quicker and the story absorbed more effectively – but it may be that rather than us absorbing the story, a slower reading allows the story to absorb us, and draw us in. Anyway, that's my experience so far – and as a stunningly obvious commonplace observation for Eliot fans – she is a wonderfully wise, lucidly sharp, comprehendingly compassionate and critical narrator who knows the depths of, and points with unerring skill to, the machinations and motivations of human behaviour. Her novels are post-graduate courses in moral psychology and moral philosophy – impossible to read and not see ourselves in a different, sometimes better, sometimes more critical, light.

    I know there are lots of ways to use Kindle – people now use them as the sermon notepad, lecture notes, PDF readers – I'll probably get round to some of these. But it's as a way of filling the unforgiving minute by spending it in the company of an omniscient narrator that Kindle has so far "done it for me". That cliche would have survived a nanosecond within range of Eliot's editorial pen!

     

  • Emmaus and the journey towards a new wholeness.

    William_Morris_Troutbeck_Jesus_at_EmmausThe walk to Emmaus is one of the high points of gospel narrative. The journey, the lonely road, two bewildered travellers, the unlooked for stranger who becomes a companion, the change of conversation, and the way the journey passes quickly in such company. Each of these are features of the skilled storyteller, and each of them exactly what I guess are universally recognised clues for what we all need when walking the road of uncertainty ourselves – company, conversation and companionship that stays with us.

    The Emmaus walk and the Emmaus Supper have provided artists with some of the most emotionally charged narrative and some of the most poignantly imaginative encounters in the entire Christian tradition. For those who are honestly facing the realities that call previous certainties in question, or who have reached those unknown places of uncertainty and significant life change, Emmaus is a pivotal story. "He took bread and blessed and broke it….And their eyes were opened…and he vanished from their sight".

    Easy to miss that. The moment of recognition lasts just long enough to surprise, remind, reassure, and to release vision and energy enough for a lifetime. Open-eyed recognition, and he vanished. Like those first disciples, the reader today wishes he had stayed longer, we long for more permanence. Yet. Whatever else faith is, it cannot be chronic certainty. The constituents of faith are wonder and surprise, risk and trust, voluntary vulnerability, and contentment with hints of truth and glimpses of glory. That walk to Emmaus could have left the disciples where they were – bewildered, resentful, and in terms of life purpose at a loose end.  "and a stranger drew near…and they didn't recognise him…". But he walked with them just the same, won confidence enough to not only speak, but be listened to, and on being asked to stay longer, like a good guest, he welcomed their welcome, and shared their meal.

    For all kinds of reasons Luke's Emmaus narrative of that troubled journey and its resolution, touches into those deep places of our human experience, those parts of our journey that are also troubled, from which we don't emerge unscathed or unchanged. But in the breaking of bread, the Guest becomes the Host, our eyes see, and our souls are fed – and life is nourished again towards wholeness.

    in trying to get hold of things mysterious
    we try to invent something definite
    and mystery can never be defined
    or must always be redefined
    or better yet
    come at newly and indirectly
    through stories and things around us
    thru parables and food

    The window was designed by William Morris. The verse is quoted in an early book by Sallie McFague, Speaking in Parables, Fortress, 1975, p.114.

     

  • Good fences make good neighbours.

    Piled Today I'm in the fence-building business. Both sides of our gardens have woven slat fences that are greened with moss, broken and brittle and with posts that are shoogly (scottish word for unstable!) So we do the first one today, my neighbour and I, two amateurs who know how to dig holes, mix postcrete, use a spirit level, and both want a shot of the paint sprayer! As to whether the fence will be the epitome of fenceness – we'll see. But the negotiation and agreement and shared labour needed to build it is one of those episodes when social fabric is repaired and a few strands of neighbourliness woven in. Reminded me of some words from Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall:

    Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

    That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

    and spills the upper boulders in the sun,

    And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

    ……

    Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

    What I was walling in or walling out,

    And to whom I was like to give offence.

    Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

    that wants it down.

    …..

    Good fences make good neighbours.

    Robert Frost.

    Frost had such a clear mind about what makes for good and satisfying social relationships. Irrascible, confrontational, unforgiving and at times downright cussed he might be – but he knew how to put into words the way things should and could be, when human beings make good choices (the Road Less Travelled) or cement neighbourliness with postrete (Mending Wall) – as in this case, fallen boulders replaced in the interlocking balance of angle and weight that is the genius of the early New England drystone wall (and the Scottish drystane dyke). 

  • Questions as the oxygen of faith?

    Central All who genuinely seek to learn,

    whether atheist or believer,

    scientist or mystic,

    are united in having not a faith,

    but faith itself.

    Its token is reverence,

    its habit to respect the eloquence of silence.

    For God's hand may be a human hand,

    if you reach out in lovingkindness,

    and God's voice may be your voice,

    if you but speak the truth."

    (Paul Ferris, The Whole Shebang).

     

    "Every question asked in reverence

    is the start of a journey towards God.

    When faith suppresses questions,

    it dies.

    When it accepts superficial answers,

    it begins to wither.

    Faith is not opposed to doubt.

    What it is opposed to

    is the shallow certainty that what we understand

    is all there is."

    (Jonathan Sacks, Celebrating Life).

  • Thomas Merton and the Emmaus moment of invitation and recognition

    20051018_caravaggio_emmaus There are some writers who become companions on your road. It didn't start out that way. Just that one day you picked up the book and in reading it you heard a voice that you liked, recognised tone and demeanour that was friendly, felt the kind of ease and trust that only comes when you know, you just know, here is someone who would be good company. And once you've walked the length of that book, there is a kind of Emmaus moment, a reluctance to let this companionship on this journey end. Because your heart burned within, the conversation brought healing, understanding, possibility of newness, opened up a different future, and the friend we met on the way is one we now want to spend more time with. And we have the feeling we didn't meet him – he met us, he drew near, at just that time and in just that place.

    That's as near as I can describe my first encounter with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, seeker of solitude, peace activist, inveterate journal and letter writer, and mercifully fallible human being. Few of his books are sustained argument, constructive theology, or innovative spirituality. Most of his writing is informal, occasional, meditative. The best of it reads as distilled thought, not concentrate that is dense, but a cultivated lucidity, with sentences that have extracted from long thought and experience an uncluttered clarity, and confident humility. He is someone who has shared several decades of my inward journey, a writer to whom I've looked at crisis or pivotal moments, and been glad of his company, his conversation, his opening up of a truth I needed to hear. I'm reading him again.

    Here is one of his long sentences, formatted as a prose poem, a constructive piece of spiritual theology that says so much about what is so about the life we each have to live.

    Therefore each particular being,

    in its individuality,

    its concrete nature and entity,

    with all it own characteristics

    and its private qualities

    and its own inviolable identity,

    gives glory to God

    by being precisely what He wants it to be

    here and now

    in the circumstances ordained for it

    by His Love and His infinite Art.

    (New Seeds of Contemplation,  Shambala Library ed. page 32)

    Love and infinite Art – to see our self as the cherished product of such purposeful creativity is as near to coming to terms with God, our life and ourselves as we can properly expect. I guess it would take love and infinite art to make something worthwhile out of the bundle of contradictions and cluster of insoluble enigmas that is the human being in all the glory and mystery of human living. When those reverberating questions of meaning and purpose and what makes for our happiness shake the foundations of our self, Merton quietly mentions the ultimate fundaments of human fulfilment – "His Love and infinite Art".

    That's the kind of key that unlocks chains and doors. The life I live is sometimes glad and sometimes sad, at times exciting and at times exhausting, determined by my good choices and bad mistakes, touched by love and wounded by hurt, but nevertheless my life, the only one I have. Faith in God is the recognition that in that limited and constrained existence, His Love and infinite Art are what confer worth, affirm identity, and make possible the living of a life that is good, generous, joyful and ever  capable of newness and surprise.

     

  • If you have time, inclination and no other priorities you might do worse than Behold the Lamb of God!

    Yoder book Most of the slim paperback re-issues of John Howard Yoder's work have the symbol of the victorious Lamb slain displayed on the front cover. It is a powerful image going back to the early church, but re-appropriated within traditions which emphasise peace, peacemaking and non violence. The Book of Revelation has in the midst of the throne, not the emperor, and not the image of power, might and force, but the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. I guess that image is just too subversive, too threatening to power, too ludicrous as a political vision, and just too impractical as a religious option, for it to have had widespread adoption as a central motif of Christian theology, spirituality, ethics or political practice. 

    My latest tapestry, which is being worked for a friend who stands within that tradition, is an attempt to work this image using purple, gold and red, and framed in a broad goebelin stitch border incorporating these colours representing sacrifice, love and majesty – thereby subverting the majesty of power by using its primary symbolic colours of power and spectacle to convey an entirely different kind of power, strength and purpose.

    Caravaggio sheep "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." I still remember those days at college working through C K Barrett's commentary on John, and fumbling my way through the Greek lexicon, comparing the uses John the Evangelist made of that great invitation and command to see, "Behold…." – it's a good word, a take your time word, a get ready to see something new word, a would you stop twittering and tweeting and start looking at life with eyes open and mouth shut long enough to hear and see life changing truth. "Behold!".

    One of the by products of freehand tapestry is a process that combines contemplative patience with creative practice. Bringing a symbol into being as a manufactured (ironically the word means made by hand!) artifact is itself a form of beholding, a way of not only seeing but of expressing vision, a slow intentional absorption of the varied meanings and memories of a symbol that resides deep in the mind and heart of the Church.

    (The painting is Caravaggio, John the Baptist Holding a Sheep).

  • Beethoven – music on the full spectrum from rage to adoration

    The other day a car came towards me with the head of one of the passengers sticking out of the side window. It was a large German Shepherd, Alsatian. Its ears were flattened, its eyes closed to slits, its lips blown back in a manic grin, and it illustrated perfectly the canine equivalent of getting the cobwebs blown out of the head!

    Just listened to Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I've listened to it more times than I could count. I love it. And when the slow second movement was played at the climax of the King's Speech I recognised it immediately – and noted the irony that a movement from this over the top exuberant symphony was played to accompany a speech to hearten a population now at war with Beethoven's Germany. That slow melancholic movement, with its slow struggle towards assertion was an inspired choice.

    But it's the finale that astonishes. The critic who on first hearing it accused Beethoven of being drunk as Bacchus was entirely wrong, except that the music is undoubtedly intoxicating, an 'unstoppable swirl of ebullience and energy". I can't listen to it and not move! The performance I have allows the brass to blare in triumphant abandon and I enjoy it best when volume is no problem to anyone.

    Beethoven Like Van Gogh, Beethoven walked through valleys of deep darkness, and yet produced some of the most exuberant, celebratory and inspiring music, and some of the most tender, subtle and lovely melodies from the Moonlight Sonata to the Peasants' Thanksgiving. Years ago I read a book on the nine symphonies and from then on have returned to be restored again. Because if anyone knew the valley of deep darkness as well as the still waters and green pastures, it was Beethoven. From a personality potent and vulnerable, with responses on the full spectrum from rage to adoration, and levels of creative genius that were all but self-destructive, comes such music. 

    I know us amateur music listeners can over-interpret and over-praise our enthusiasms, misinterpret and misunderstand for lack of technical expertise and passable erudition. But there is that in music which, transcending such limits, is creative and recreative, restorative and redemptive, offering healing of heart and mind and spirit and soul – whichever of these elusive terms describes where our deepest living comes from. During Lent I'm browsing – loved music, loved paintings and loved poetry. No choices made ahead – an indisciplined, desultory but not purposeless indulgence in what I know restores my soul and reminds me goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life. And if part of that mercy is laughter and joy and sheer life-affirming exultation, then listening to this 7th Symphony at dangerous levels of volume does it for me!

  • Mary Oliver who knows a thing or two about prayer

    Prayer

    May I never not be frisky,

    May I never not be risque.

     

    May my ashes, when you have them, friend,

    and give them to the ocean

     

    leap in the froth of the waves,

    still loving the moment,

     

    still ready, beyond all else,

    to dance for the world.

    Mary Oliver, Evidence, (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009), page 33

    Life is not easily negotiated just now for various reasons. Despite it all, and as a wish to be defiant in a self-preserving way, I pray prayers like this poem. I understand and accept that prayer can be an experience of calming, contemplative, creative and constructive thought. Other times it can be invigorating, ennervating and energising. Or again a serious piece of negotiation between me and God, when I argue and God listens (presumably), and occasionally answers even if I don't always quite pick up the still small voice easily submerged under waves of complaint, self-justification and genuine bewilderment. But this poem is about something else. It is about finding alternative ways to dance when life is like ashes. It's about the latent but faithfully present fun that can be found in life when frisky and risque are not pejoratives to be avoided but compliments to be enjoyed. It's a prayer that says the best way out of ourselves is to love the moment of freedom, to recognise the windows through which joy is glimpsed, to dance not for ourselves, but for the world, and find that the ocean, vast and capacious, has room and energy to buoy us, and turn movement to dance.

    Did Mary Oliver mean all that – probably no, and maybe yes. But that's what comes out of my keyboard when I read this poem. Frisky and risque indeed? Indeed! Leap in the froth of the waves – absolutely, where's the beach?