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Living Wittily is four years old

It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line. Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.

8 January 2011
Vat increases and the unedifying spectacle of ethical deflation

I am not an accountant.

I am not an economist.

I am not a professional poltician.

The world of national, international and institutional finance is as complex to my mind, and as inaccessible, as an esoteric gnostic myth, written on a much used palimpsest, in an ancient language barely visible let alone legible, to my untutored eyes.

But my uninformed gut feeling is that the impact of an across the board rise in VAT will make life so much harder for lower income people and families.

And my moral instinct is therefore that such a tax adjustment is demonstrably unjust, ruthlessly ideological, lacking in moral commonsense, devoid of political imagination and socially irresponsible.

It isn't the big consumer goods – but the increased cost of fuel, domestic energy, clothes, basic foods, the necessities, that will erode the security of poorer people.

Yet Tuesday morning we were afflicted by the sanctimonious tones of the Chancellor, Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister that this is a tough call, but one that treats everyone the same. When will it dawn on them that to treat everyone the same is unfair, because not everyone is the same – else why a welfare policy at all!?

My elderly friend getting by on her pension will now pay an even greater proportion of her income to the Government, and do so from a margin of financial security with few footholds left.

The refusal to increase income tax we were told is based on the judgement that this would indeed hit the lower paid – well, how about increasing the threshold, or bringing back the 10p band compensated for by extra income tax further up the feeding chain – I use the slang deliberately, because this increase could well come down to choices about food for some people.

As I said – it's all very complex and ordinary folk like me should keep their noses out of such specialist, complicated, technical financiology (new word?) – but noses are not only for sticking in, they are for smelling, and I don't like the smell of a policy that is indiscriminate, declared irreversible, and reeks of social carelessness – by which I mean demonstrates an absence of care.

But I'm no politician or economist. Just a human being insisting that humanity is also an important criterion in socio-economic policy – and this tax adjustment seems to lack that entire dimension.

The photo above betrays the ethical dilemmas facing the LIb Dems – and the runaway ethical deflation reducing their currency and credibility, as promise and principle dissolve into compromise. But once again, that expedient compromise, as with the pledge on student fees, is one which will impact most on those with least.

Or am I wrong?

Haven't done a fibonacci for a while. A poem in which the syllable count of each line is the sum of the two previous lines – it goes thus 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 and if you feel silly, 55!

DRAT THE VAT! (A FIBONACCI SPAT).

VAT!

DRAT!

Increase!

"Tough but fair."

"In this together."

Chancellor Osborne's perspective.

Single parents, pensioners, unemployed, low earners;

all rightly sceptical about the Chancellor's perspective on what's fair or unfair.

They ask, "Is it fair, a millionaire Chancellor, who has a Two/One in Modern History, from Oxford, should confuse fairness with justice?

5 January 2011
Sin matters but God matters more!

Sometimes sin appears when you're not looking for it. Yesterday was a semi-holiday, by which I mean I was still off work, but spent some of the time reading God Matters, Herbert McCabe. When he died in 2001, the Church lost one of its sharpest minds and most gifted homileticians. It's dated now, but his critical review of The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977 (chapters 5 and 6 here) is a model of precise dissection worthy of Silent Witness! McCabe several times alludes to what he sees as a cardinal sin in theology, "intellectual muddle". His review provoked some of the "Myth's" contributors into an exchange they didn't win!

However, back to sin. In this volume there is a long sermon for Easter, divided into three shorter chapters. In the first of these, on Maundy Thursday and the Eucharist, in several lucid sentences, McCabe sheds light on the dark shadowy mystery we call sin.

"Sin is the disunity of people, their deep disunity. Sin too, is a mystery; it is not to be identified with what we see on the surface. I do not mean by this that sin is some hidden 'spiritual' reality quite distinct from the physical facts of cruelty and greed; I mean it is the depth within our quarrels and disunity and dislikes. Sin is the seriousness within human injustice, where it becomes a matter of what God we serve…. Sin is the mysterious depth within the alienation and isolation of people from each other. Sin is not to be identified with the more obvious signs of human separation, any more than real unity in love can be identified with superficial friendliness and cheerfulness."

Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Continuum, 2010) pp. 79-80.

The Eucharist, the table and what happens at it, is the context within which McCabe explores sin and love, human failure and divine response, the cosmic tragedy of evil redeemed by love on a scale capable of renewing and restoring creation to truth, beauty and goodness, a reconciliation of all reality on a Colossian scale. And the Eucharist is consequently the place where divine sacrifice is acknowledged and thanksgiving offered, the place where the Word of God made flesh and matter communicates itself to the gathered people and through them to the created and human world, so that the table is the one place where more than anywhere else on earth, the love and wisdom of God are celebrated, appropriated, shared and communicated to a God-loved world.

The Eucharist, where bread and wine are offered and received, becomes therefore the place where sin is best understood and named as the alienating, isolating, life-denying contradiction of God's creative love; and therefore the place where sin meets its antithesis and its antidote. The table, and the celebrated Eucharist, is where as nowhere else, the Gospel is proclaimed and enacted, and points to what a very different theologian, James Denney, called "the last reality of the universe, Eternal love bearing sin", and so reconciling all things to God in Christ, making peace by the blood of the cross.

It takes theology of that seriousness to instill in our practices and observance of the Lord's Supper, a corresponding seriousness…and joyfulness.

4 January 2011
The table where love bids us welcome – and as guests we sit, and eat.

"At the table as nowhere else, we are the Lord's, not ours. We are not ours and he is not ours. We need not worry there about our destiny. We do not have to justify our existence there. I don't know about you but I find that freedom and gift nowhere else completely. Probably we have not been enough amazed at that incredible gift God has granted us in the mystery of the table. There we need only yield our lives over to God. That is all! As such, the table stands in contrast to, if not in protest against, all the ways we have to make it the rest of the time. Now I want you not to miss the polemical point I am suggesting by starting our discussion of shalom at the table. I have the impression that most of us, and perhaps we cannot do otherwise, want to talk about shalom as task, or as discipleship, or (perish the thought) as "works", as more we have to do. And if we start there, we not only betray the mystery of the table, but also we doom our shaloming to failure, either in pride or despair, before we ever begin.

But it does begin at the table, it always does. And the promise to us is that the church that lets the historic mystery fashion its life can hear the word and be empowered to live in and toward the new age of shalom."

Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision, page 143-4.

Now, if you've a mind to, read the Brueggemann extracts from the last three posts one after the other, and feel the cumulative passion, harnessed to biblical conviction, and made the more persuasive by the pastoral plausibility of the implausible mystery he is urging the church to cherish and live within.

I guess Brueggemann publishes too much, and that there is repetition and quality variation in the volumes that occupy at least a metre of bookshelf space in my studies (yes, one at home and one at College – a situation that has its own logistic challenges). But this early book on Shalom is still amongst the most pastorally engaged, and 30 years on speaks in its revised form with a voice that has learned much from the Hebrew prophetic literature he has spent a lifetime teaching. This book is for those who believe Christian existence is about being a witnessing community, embodying and practising our convictions in the lived realities of the Gospel, our lives both surrendered gift and flawed amateur performance of the way of Jesus. Here Brueggemann has the wisdom to underplay our urges towards controlled and managed discipleship, and to dare challenge our less than subtle belief in, dependence upon, our self-generated "works" based approach to church life. And nowhere more than in these several pages on the mystery of the table, where he restores the essential connection between the life of shalom and our recognition of our status – humble guests at the table where Love bids us welcome and bids us sit and eat.

3 January 2011
At the Table is where we encounter the Real.

"At the table as nowhere else we are made aware that true life is in mystery and not in management. At the table there is now worry about members or budget, but only the reminder of meaning given that we don't have to explain or manufacture. It is overpowering, when we reflect on it, that all the key verbs in that drama have him as subject and not us. We are the subject of no important active verbs at the table. He took, and he blessed and he broke and he gave to us again. It is his table; we are welcome guests and we don't fix the menu or pay the bill."

Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision, page 143

It's such concise theological guidance that makes this book one of the very best things Brueggemann has written – and it's amongst his first publications. His words come as such an effective antidote to the veiled selfishness that passes for our ecclesial activism, programmatic evangelism and missional (miss)-management. I wonder when evangelical activists will recover the real drama of God's mission, really and truly embodied and proclaimed in the broken bread and poured wine shared around a table that is not ours? In a digitally experienced and ICT expert culture, the simple enactment of breaking bread and passing a shared cup becomes a proclaimed Gospel, a gift of grace so framed in mystery and profundity it is scandalously enigmatic to minds used to more sophisticated encounters with virtual reality and impatient with the gift and demand of a Real Presence.

2 January 2011
We shall understand shalom at the table….

At the table we eat and drink to another reality and toward another order. And if we are to understand shalom at all,…we shall understand it at the table. It is at the table as nowhere else that we get our minds off ourselves long enough to think of His promises and His tasks. Most of the time the church is busy worrying about wellbeing, survival, reputation, success. At the table we occasionally get these temptation in perspective and see that they do not really matter./ No doubt it is not possible for us as the church, any more than any other commmunity, to live always with that demanding reassuring awareness. But what a marvel and a gift! We have given to us, and can value that moment of truth when we come face to face with realities that let us get free of our immobilising self-preoccupation.

Walter Brueggemann, Living Toward a Vision (United Church Press, 1982), 143.

1 January 2011
Where in the world? The table, is where.

Heading towards New Year I've been thinking about the church.

Where in all the cultural flux of the times?

where in the midst of spiritual pessimism not unrelated to economic gloom?

where in the massed choir of competing voices that is our digital cyber inhabited environment; where in our confusion, anxiety and driven existence?

where, is there a place to stand, or to sit, and regain a sense of perspectve?

Where is there a centre that will hold against the centrifugal and centripetal forces of a world complex and dangerous, self-destructively greedy and unable to curb the human appetite to possess, have power over, and assert the will to life and power over against the imperative to be on the side of life itself?

Where is the place where the church's life is renewed, it's purpose reconstituted, its raison d'etre reaffirmed and its mission reconfigured.

The table, is where.

Gathered in Jesus' name, around the sacred table, sharing blessed bread and wine, hearing again the Gospel promise, giving again our deepest love, owning again our deepest longings, and realising that our loves and longings derive their importance from that which is prior to them – the love of God in Christ made known in the Spirit.

To the question where, the answer of the Christian heart will be – there, at the table.

How that works out in the theology and practice of each Christian community has been told with succint pointedness by Walter Brueggemann. The next few days I'll post Brueggemann's take on the central importanc eof the Gospel table, the place where shalom is proclaimed and from which it is to be lived.

30 December 2010
Salley Vickers, Pastoral Care and the Complexity of Human Love

I have a very good friend who has an all but uncritical enthusiasm for Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, the first of her books I read. Another friend, Geoff Colmer, has been at me to read Vickers' The Other Side of You. I'm getting there Geoff! But I recently picked up a couple of other novels by Vickers in the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an establishment I have no hesitation in advertising here. (Organised, discerning, reasonable prices, a proprietor who leaves you to browse without ignoring you – The Old Aberdeen Book Shop 140 Spital ABERDEEN Aberdeenshire AB24 3JU tel: 01224 658355 map.).

So having read Mr Golightly's Holiday, a strange novel, somewhere between modern novel, and timeless fable with religious overtones and metaphysical undertones, I've just finished Instances of the Number 3.

I'm beginning to notice recurring themes, recognise the wise interpretive voice of the author, and becoming familiar with the narrative contexts Vickers creates as she examines and explores the topography of human relationships. Mostly her novels are about love of one kind or another – its failures and triumphs, its capacity to mortally wound and miraculously heal, its puzzling complexity and frightening simplicity, its power to extend forgiveness to the heartbroken or to withhold absolution and peace from those who make life choices that deny love's sovereign demands.

But love is neither to be domesticated to human whims, nor limited by the all too human urgency of selfish desire which is indeed love's negation. Vickers is a Jungian psychoanalyst; she is also an accomplished literary scholar; in addition she is a consummate observer of human motivation, behaviour and character; which makes her a consummate novelist. So metaphysics, religious experience, supernatural phenomena, the world of high art and serious literature, become in Vickers novels important perspective giving lenses into human aspiration as it grows or diminishes in the life and circumstances of the characters she creates. And she creates characters who are immensely persuasive, attractive, instructive – the outcome of the story matters because the destiny of the characters matters to the reader.

Instances of the Number 3 is a novel that requires of the reader certain things. First a more than curious interest in what it is we are all looking for, hoping for, longing for, suffering from in those relationships that matter most to us – love. Second, a willingness to read slowly, and read much of the novel more than once in the first reading, in order to apprehend, and comprehend, the comments of the authorial voice, less didactic than George Eliot, but often as ethically perceptive and psychologically enlightening. Third, a patience with a writer who assumes her readers know enough about art and literature to grasp the more important allusions in chapters and passages of pivotal significance. But fourthly, a willingness to learn the art of sympathy and hopefulness, because Vickers' characters are on the whole likeable, flawed, people caught in the snares of circumstance, or constrained by previous life choices, so now longing for new purpose, direction and meaning, and all of this within the sphere of human relationships.

I've said it here before – there are entire mornings in pastoral theology seminars when students would learn so much about themselves by reading novels. How the human heart works, about the constraints and disappointments, the quiet patient sacrifices that love both requires and bestows, and about how there are experiences and situations in all of our lives that are not resolved by changing them, but by recognising that their givenness and intractable nature, and how we respond to them, is what makes us. And no, this isn't a review of a Salley Vickers novel. It's more and less than that. It is a push and a plea to those who dare claim the work of the cure of souls is their vocation. To take time to read those writers who sharpen our insight, ignite our imagination, stimulate emotional sympathy, teach us to interpret a life story – our own and that of others, and do so by drawing us into and involving us in their stories, where so much of our own experience is rehearsed, or questioned, or touched with the coal from the altar so that we understand ourselves more compassionately, see ourselves more honestly, and so speak of ourselves more modestly, and mercifully.

As one reviewer said there is an "essential optimism" in Vickers' writing. And there are sentences in her novels that are amongst the wisest counsel I have ever received from the pen of someone who has never met me, but who has, it would seem, been reading my private journal and plagiarising my experience.

(The photograph above is included just because it is a great photograph of avid readers! It came from here and I gladly acknowledge its use.)

29 December 2010
The theological possibilities of a Pre-Raphaelite sketch

Burne Jones is famous for his Christmas angels. But this sketch of Mary and the infant Jesus has delicacy of touch and gentleness of line, and softness of tone.

Of course the subject matter has inspired great masterpieces from iconography to Renaissance masters, but I've often been moved more by the preliminary sketch, the idea in outline, which seems to be the more expressive for not being fixed and made permanent in a final work.

This is an idea being born, its incompleteness and preliminary status suggesting a living conception, a paradox of provisionality and finality, because it portrays its subject in definitive lines.

Is there a theological claim, or at least a theological clue, when the incarnation is portrayed in such ambiguity, the sketch that points to the masterpiece, but which stands in its own integrity even if the masterpiece is never attempted. The divine makes do with the human, the eternal inhabits time, spirit is embodied in flesh, and thus God comes to the world as the Creator to the creature, and inhabits the limitations of God's own art. Maybe so, or not. In any case, this is beautiful – and beauty itself points to God.

28 December 2010
The Cost of Being Joseph, and Loving Mary.

For years U A Fanthorpe wrote a Christmas poem for her friends.

These and other Christmas poems are now gathered in the Collected Poems.

A favourite is the one about Joseph – not because it's great poetry, it isn't – but it is imaginative psychology with just enough theology to hold it together.

And Poussin's painting shows him suitably worried and wondering what in Gabriel's name he's got himself into!

I am Joseph

I am Joseph, carpenter,

Of David’s kingly line,

I wanted an heir; discovered

My wife’s son wasn't mine.

I am an obstinate lover,

Loved Mary for better or worse,

Wouldn't stop loving when I found

Someone Else came first.

Mine was the likeness I hoped for

When the first-born man-child came.

But nothing of him was me. I couldn't

Even choose his name.

I am Joseph, who wanted

To teach my own boy how to live.

My lesson for my foster son:

Endure. Love. Give.

27 December 2010