Before an Icon
Before an Icon
The unbeliever is challenged
The intellectual is lost for words
The theologian feels small
The artist's heart is filled with joy
The contemplative finds fresh inspiration
Those who thought they were strong are disarmed
The child throws wide its arms, and smiles.
Anon.
Oh my goodness! If as Brutus claims,
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune",
then there is also
"a click in the affairs of men
which taken at the Amazon checkout leads on to spending a fortune!"
Which I now confess freely if a tad expensively, I have done. For a year or so I've flirted with the idea of buying the definitive set of books on Scottish Birds. The recent post about the yellowhammer's egg is just one incident in a lifetime interest in Scottish ornithology. No big deal, never made it a hobby, just always interested, always looking, gathering information, finding out about this one and that. But I was brought up listening early morning to skylarks, walking home at dusk listening to the hunted cry of the curlew, dodging the dive-bombing of hundreds of peewits (lapwings), knowing the difference between a wren and a goldcrest, fascinated by the flight of the pied wagtail, mesmerised by flocks of starlings doing their choreographic miracles before roosting in the haysheds, astonished at the kestrel defying gravity by simply facing the wind and angling its wings, excited by the wirring of a sinpes wings as it banked towards the ground, scared witless by the big owl that flew out of the farm barn one evening we were playing in the loft, and so well able to identify by call or appearance most of the birds that inhabit our wee country.
The books are a work of art. Forget coffee table books – these are dining table books. You need space on table or floor to open them. The illustrations are nearly all photographs by Scottish Ornithologists, the text is written in flowing narrative, the information is comprehensive, authoritative and up to date. But most of all they are simply sumptuous repositories of science, wisdom, testimony and required data to understand, appreciate, care about and care for some or the most beautiful creatures in our country. Since my childhood a large number of species have been decimated by the way we've lived and sprawled across the land. But there are still encounters that evoke wonder, moments of sheer magic, unlooked for surprises all over the place.
This blog has always been a place where great books are appreciated. And while much of the best reading of my life has been theology, there's always been for me the needed balance of books that broaden out into the wider avanues of our experience. Biography, history, good fiction, poetry – and natural history. These two large volumes will simply become part of our living room furniture – because expensive as they are – they could have cost 3 times as much and they'd still be a bargain – but they are to be looked at, loved, studied, browsed, handled, shaped by constant handling so that they don't stay nearly new books but begin to show signs of being used, referred to, plundered and gazed at.
Roses
You love the roses – so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!
George Eliot
The greatest novelist in the English language – maybe. Not the greatest poet – in one textbook called a minor poet. But when she got it right she could capture in a poem those same human longings and dreams, frustrations and hopes, that add such texture to her novels.
I quote this poem for no other reason than I like roses, I like the poem, and clearly, George Eliot liked roses as well! Oh, and there are still roses in our back garden despite the snow that fell earlier this week.
Inspired a Haiku:
White capped red rose bud,
snowflakes on fragile petals,
summer meets winter.
Since College days when I patiently and conscientiously worked through C K Barrett's commentary on the Gospel of John I have loved this New Testament text. And alongside those evenings slowly turning the pages and making notes I still have in neat handwritten, pre-computer script, we were walked through the text by our New Testament teacher, R E O White. It was an immersion in text that taught me to swim, and not to be too afraid of deep water. In the years since I've slowly worked through numerous commentaries and monographs and tried to stay current with Johannine scholarship. Some big names are familiar companions – Barrett, Brown, Schnackenburg, Morris, Carson, Beasley-Murray ( a scandalously restricted volume in the Word series given the three volume sprawlers on Luke and Revelation) – more recently Moloney, Lincoln, and monographs by Ashton, Koester, Robinson, Bauckham et al.
And then there are those books which use John for spiritual formation, from Jean Vanier, to William Countryman to Francis Moloney. I have to say I'm less enamoured of such attempts to feed the Gospel of John through a Christian spirituality grid. Lesslie Newbiggin's The Light Has Come is a different category altogether. A theological gem.
But the reason for all this Johannine enthusiasm is the imminent arrival of John Ramsey Michael's commentary on John. I met him once when i was teaching in Hanover, New Hampshire. He is a wise, shrewd and deeply learned man, whose scholarship range is wide and deep. I was teaching on Julian of Norwich, George Herbert and Charles Wesley – he was teaching on John Bunyan. His literary sensitivity, theological resourcefulness and open minded interest levels made him a source of much fun and much learning. His commentary is already being described as readable, progressing Johannine scholarship, and a gift to the preaching of the church. Not surprised. And it will be the commentary I'll saunter through for the next few months – if it arrives by Advent it'll be fun reading him on the greatest advent hymn of them all – "In the beginning was the Word…..and the Word became flesh…" So swimming at the deep end, standing at the edge of the reservoir, not being afraid of deep water – my theological hero James Denney had his own take on the deep water metaphor – about Jesus and his passion he urged that we hear 'the plunge of lead into fathomless waters'. That's what happens when I dive into the text of John's Gospel.
"There is nothing new in a set of Government policies that looks to encourage individuals and voluntary groups to be enabled, to be engaged within our community, to care for one another.
"The Church of England knows all about volunteering. More people do unpaid work for church groups than any other organisation. Churchgoers contribute 23.2 million hours' voluntary service each month in their local communities.
"The Church of England alone provides activities outside church worship in the local community for over half a million children and young people aged under 16 years, and 38,000 young people aged 16 to 25 years. Over 136,000 volunteers run activity groups for young people which are sponsored by the Church of England."
The Church understands the importance of volunteering, but we must not forget that the state "has responsibilities too", he said.
"There is a reason we pay our taxes. Whilst it is easy to pretend that much of our hard-earned cash goes to fund expense-fiddling MPs, disreputable casino-style banks or mad politically correct quangos for do-gooders – actually we should expect the state to run and fund strong public services, with our money.
"How to raise that money is another question. I am not an economist, and I am not a politician, but to cut investment to vital public services, and to withdraw investment from communities, is madness.
"You do not escape an economic downturn by cutting investment and by squashing aspirations."
(Part of Archbishop John Sentamu's response to the Spending Review – more of it here)
I have been rightly chastised by a good friend more than once, over many years, for daring to suggest that she read Kingsway paperbacks! Not that I or she has anything against publisher, pbk format or the popular theology usually packaged in said books! But she reads serious theology, and so now if either of us want to wind the other up about our intellectual exploits or lack thereof, the most effective term of affectionate ridicule usually includes the Kingsway pbk!
So! Just to avoid such a literary insult flying in this direction any time soon, I wish to announce the purchase of some serious theology. David Kelsey's two volume magnum opus, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox0 2010) [1496 pages!] is the culmination of a lifetime's wisdom, reflection, theological exploration and Christian thinking. A systematics from the perspective of Christian Anthropology is so overdue I suppose some of us wondered if it might ever appear – assuming any of us thought it a valid or viable theological proposal in the first place. But because the nature of the human being, and the relation of humanity to God, and the meaning of humanity created in the image of God, are deep questions that go to the vital centre of human thought, experience and existence, such a theology is now an essential and humanising task. Christian theology now, at this stage in human history, has critically important things to say about human existence, the human future and the future of the world.
A faith tradition that expresses an understanding of God as a Triune communion of self-giving creative love, and tells the story of that love as bringing all else into existence, and becoming incarnate in human form to enter the created and finite order of time and sin and death, and triumphs not through power but through redemptive passionate love, is a faith tradition which must inevitably hold, not only an exalted and holy view of God, but a high and sacred view of human dignity, worth and personality. In other words, a systematics that begins with the question "What are human beings that you care for them?", is one that will approach familiar questions from an unfamiliar angle, will take seriously the relationality of God and the human creature, and will bring the Love of God to bear upon the purpose of human existence within the entirety of the divine purpose for the created order. In a world hell bent on its own exhaustion, such a theological corrective is now a necessary and urgent note in the message of a Gospel whose ultimate purpose is the renewal of a creation which, more than he could ever have known, Paul describes as groaning, awaiting its redemption.
These two big books when they come will be the ever presents on my desk for the winter. To be read deeply and slowly, not uncritically but with a sense that now and again, we are gifted the chance to handle, admire, even to own, someone else's richly textured theological fabric, woven on a long practised loom by a weaver who knows the colours and patterns of theological reflection, faithful to Scripture, and lovingly modelled on a conception of God that is Trinitarian.
Kelsey, along with Frei and Lindbeck, are of course postliberal theologians of "the Yale School". I know that. And I recognise the challenge his theological approach represents to other theological schools and styles, including my own. But one of the golden rules of theological hospitality is the refusal to allow someone's label and reputation to dictate how we receive them. So I look forward to what good hospitality should also and always enable – shared conversation, intellectual friendship, and sufficient courtesy to listen at least twice as much as we speak. Now and again I'll report on the conversation.
My early years were spent in rural Ayrshire. My father was a dairyman and I lived my entire childhood at least three miles from the nearest shop and school. Oh, and we didn't have a car till I was at secondary school. Amongst the compensations throughout my life have been a love of the coutnryside, a lifelong passion for Scottish wildlife – flora and fauna, and a number of memories maybe not many folk my age will now have.
I remember discovering a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge and being utterly and almost tearfully delighted at the delicacy of shape and colour. To my young eyes this is what a jewel looked like – fragile beauty, grey mauve at the top, tapering to white at the point and traced with several dark elongated commas and question marks as if someone more clever than Faberge had randomly painted a one off egg for the life-remembered pleasure of an 8 year old boy in wellingtons jeans and almsot certainly a big wooly jersey!
So when I come across this poem by Mary Oliver I know exactly what she feels.
With Thanks to the Field Sparrow, Whose Voice is So Delicate and Humble
I do not live happily or comfortably
with the cleverness of our times.
The talk is all about computers,
the news is all about bombs and blood.
This morning, in the fresh field,
I came upon a hidden nest.
It held four warm, speckled eggs.
I touched them.
Then went away softly,
having felt something more wonderful
than all the lectricty of New York City.
………………………
Maybe somewhere in such memory there is for me the explanation of why I have always felt a deep resonant joy that Jesus saw connections between the birds of the field and air, and the creative care of God. Was that egg still beautiful if no one had ever seen it? You decide. Some day I may attempt the impossible and try to capture on tapestry that jewel of a moment, that awakening of childhood wonder at the random beauty of life's promise, a yellowhammer's egg, laid in a woven cup lined with moss, sheep wool, and feather.
As the Church seeks to adopt a more humble, receptive, listening and thus persuasive stance over and against the surrounding world, there are a number of strategies suggested by those Halik engages in conversation throughout his book. Here are just three from Paul, Von Balthasar and Thomas Merton:
The way of paradox – "great things are revealed in small things; God's wisdom is revealed in human foolishness; God's strength is revealed in human weakness"
The way of humility – the struggle against "that will to power disguised in the mantle of religion that drives one to assert one's own greatness instead of acknowledging that God alone is great…against every ascetical practice which aims not at God but at one;s own perfection, and which is nothing more than spiritual beauty treatment."
The way of Christlike living "What we are asked to do today is not so much to speak about Christ as to let him live in us so that people may find him by feeling how he lives in us".
Paul's point is that God is not limited by our limitations, or boosted by our resourcefulness. Von Balthasar's point is different – the stance of power, of certitude and of self-righteousness negates a Gospel earthed in the humility of God in Christ. And Merton was quite capable of speaking for Christ, as we all are – but the primary speech of Christian existence is the life lived, the evidenced vitality of the living risen Lord in the life of individual and community.
.d b
The Renaissance of interest in Kierkegaard in recent decades is not without significance for Halik. The move in the 19th century from "study of God" (philosophical theology) to "an hermeneutic of the existential experience of faith" leads Halik to suggest that faith is the most radical existential expereince. And that theological tradition may have even more to say to our culture now than it did even in the existentialist high points of the mid 20th century.
"Out of all theological disciplines, that theological current is probably closest to spiritual theology; after all, spirituality is without doubt the dimension of Christian faith most relevant to the spiritual climate of present-day Western society. However if the theological impulses I have indicated are embodied in a lived faith and spirituality, then this liberation spirituality or exodus spirituality should not lead to shirking our responsibility for the society in which we have been placed. On the contrary, one of its essential tasks is sensitivity to the signs of the times in the cultural and political climate of today's world. "Solidarity with seekers" implies sharing in their seeking and questioning."
Here again Halik is arguing for a Church that vulnerably and willingly moves away from assertion and proclamation of claimed truth, to the much more humble position of listening, seeking and offering of truth from the experience of lived faith. To live responsibly in our culture, alert to the signs of the times, listening to the heartbeat and longings articulated by those who share our times and places, seeking a life more humane in which peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy are lived out precisely as principles of a Gospel of peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy. It isn't that the church should not be confident in the Gospel, but that it should stop being so self-confident that in its words and concepts, by its institutions and worship, in its history and traditions, through its theological articulations and apologetic arguments, it in any definitive sense HAS the Gospel as possession, has the truth in its finality, knows all there is to know, understands the incomprehensible, or conveniently flat packs the Infinite. The Church itself receives within its limited finitude only what it is given of the infinite riches of God in Christ, and so the Gospel is bigger than the church's idea of it, as Christ is greater than any formulation or conception purposed to contain Him.
A church confident in the Gospel is by definition one that should be the last to be guilty of self-confidence, and the first to confidently sit alongside the seekers of our age and culture and converse, explore, share and commend, review and revise, persuade and be persuaded as true, a way of life that in its embodied integrity gives credibility to those humble words we feel are capable of telling the truth, of bearing witness, to the reality of God as we have discovered that Loving Reality in Jesus.
I doubt if Halik would own all the weight I put on this – but I am largely persuaded for myself that such humble confidence, shared in the confidence of trust, would be a deep, and patient, and valid alternative form of witness to the One who once said to seekers who asked where he stayed, "Come and see". Confident in the Gospel of Jesus? Absolutely. Confident too, that the One for whom all things were made, who is the last word in wisdom and understanding, will lead those seekers in our own times, into that way that is truth and life. The role of the church may well be to create places of openness, moments of graced meeting and speaking, occasions of spiritual hospitality, encounters between those who seek and the One who is sought.
When I said I was reading this book slowly, I meant patiently, taking time to let a different voice say new things, or familiar things in new ways. I wasn't aware it would be read slowly, a page or two at a time, lying in hospital, with time to think between each reading, a miasmic doze, and the next couple of pages. Not sure anyone sucks lozenges nowadays – the word lozenge seems to refer now to a medically laced sweet from a bygone age. But as a sweet to be sucked rather than crunched, slowly ingested rather than consumed, enjoyed for lasting taste rather than eaten for short term satisfaction, the metaphor still works. This book is a lozenge type read.
The cliche graffiti story, "Jesus is the Answer" to which someone allegedly wrote below "What is the Question", may in the end be mere baseless anecdote at best; at worst, a preacher's invention. But Halik pushes the point and arrives at a different intellectual level. Quoting the philosopher Eric Voegelin, Halik asks whether the biggest problem for Christians today is not that they don't have the right answers, but that they've forgotten the questions to which they were the answers. Then Halik continues:
Answers without questions – without the question that originally provoked them, but also without the subsequent questions that are provoked by every answer – are like trees without roots. But how often are Christian truths presented to us like felled, lifeless trees in which birds can no longer find a nest?
There in a couple of sentences is the diagnosis of the church's contemporary malaise and missional confusion. We talk dialogue and practice assertion. We claim to present, embody, live by, know, the truth, but to put it in the words of that most unmetaphysical of movie characters, Jack Nicholson, "Son, you can't handle the truth!" Because the truth is bigger than our capacity; the truth is stranger than our conceptual field can contain; the truth is never our possession always our gift, and never entirely given. And whatever else I make of the Colossian Christ, the Johannine Logos, the Hebrews "God's last word" claim about Jesus Christ, whatever else I make of the NT claims to apostolic testimony to the truth, it never was that the church can simply take truth for granted. We don't possess it, it possesses us; we don't control it, truth compels and constrains us.
And while Halik can push too far his hesitations about just how much truth can be understood, held to, made the base convictions of life, he is absolutely right in his image of felled lifeless trees, truths nobody cares about any more; truths that don't shelter; truths that have lost the sap of life. And therefore truths cut off in the deforestation of a landscape that should include mystery, miracle, question, search, enquiry, discovery, newness, oldness, longing and finding, losing and recovering, sunlight and shadow, the colour and tone of life rather than the settled leafless skeletal greyness of what used to be a magnificent rain forest, a life-giving canopy under which human life is explored in the mystery and history of a God loved world.
And yes that is idyllic, and a bit overblown. But I do sense in our cultural landscape that deforestation of religious ideas is well underway, a land-stripping of those vast questions that have always fascinated and terrified, opened us up in mind and heart, to a universe at once alien and home. Which brings me back to the New Testament. Because I happen to believe its outrageous claim that in Jesus Christ the universe co-inheres, all things hold together. That in Jesus Christ, the Lamb Slain from the foundation of the world, the Word uttered by the Father, the Life that Lightens every human being, the heart of God is revealed. And the mind of God is glimpsed – not captured, not contained, not comprehended – but we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. And when it comes to beholding glory we can only glimpse - because to gaze would be blindness.
Here's Halik again
It takes the confrontation of questions and answers to return a real meaning and dynamic to our statements. Truth happens in the course of dialogue. There is always a temptation to allow our answers to bring to an end a process of searching, as if the topic of the conversation was a problem that has now been solved. But when a fresh question arrives, the unexhausted depths of mystery show through once more. let it be said over and over again; faith is not a question of problems but of mystery, so we must never abandon the path of seeking and asking.
I think Halik is, quite simply, right. And I wish the church was able to recover the intellectual humility to recognise that what is now needed is a reforestation of the cultural landscape, a church with a sense of the greatness of God's humility, a church unembarrassed by the vastness of the truth of who God is in Christ. And a church lost in wonder at a Love way beyond our mere intellectual constructs, but purposefully present and deeply entangled within those profound and mysterious depths of human brokenness and aspiration that define us as human beings, made in the image of God.