Living Wittily

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  • Mary Oliver, Staff Retreat and learning to pay attention to our lives.

    Been away from here for a few days.But been doing other things that brought me into good company, lovely countryside and conveyor belts of rain! Been at Grasmere with the good folks of Northern Baptist Learning Community sharing their staff retreat and helping provide guidance and stimulus towards renewal and refreshment after a long demanding year. So we had some of Mary Oliver's poems, an eclectic choice of music that reflects my own enthusiasms, a number of pictures and images which express beauty and the joy or sadness that intermingles with our lived experience. And I shared a few soliloquies inspired by several biblical encounters with Jesus – never been sure if they were worth doing more with, but the consensus seems to be a yes. So we'll see.

    41CU6Z6Ij7L._SL500_AA300_ What became evident though is that on a retreat occasion, a poet like Mary Oliver has the ability to open new doors of perception, encouraging a more attentive, less cursory viewing of the world – to gaze rather than glimpse, to notice rather than merely register, to greet whatever and whoever we meet, with "Hello", rather than to act ignorantly, that is in a way that shows we do not really know or want to know those other presences that would grace our lives if we gave them the time of day, and a little space.

    Throughout her recent work there are a number of light-hearted but not insignificant poems about her dog Percy. Here's one that I find irresistible because it is about a dog and books, or in any case about a dog impatient with stupid humans who bury their face in paper instead of looking at the beauty, the fun and the excitement of a colourful world laden with smell and sound.

    Percy and Books (eight)

    Percy doesn't like it when I read a book.

    He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

    He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

    The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

    The tide is out and the neighbour's dogs are playing.

    But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

    The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

    that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

     

    Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

    Let's go.

    With summer here, an academic year formally completed tomorrow, I'm with Percy. Let's go! Need a holiday and it will come in a few weeks. Meantime in order to enjoy it, I'm going to try to decelerate gently, a foot movement that doesn't come naturally to me. To help me I'll slowly work through several thin books of Mary Oliver's poems, and learn again how to pay attention, to say hello, and give time of day to whoever asks it, or even whoever doesn't.

  • Poetry, the hidden treasure of the heart, and being made to feel differently

    Amongst the subsidiary blessings of being a staff member at the Scottish Baptist College, is a generous books allowance to underpin our personal research and help us keep abreast of new work in the subject areas we teach. Of course there are those who call such blessings a perk – but that's cos they don't have the high vocational commitment of the bibliphiole for whom a book is synonymous with blessing, and reading an activity that Philp Toynbee called "the royal way to God".

    This week the book allowance for the next academic year becomes available. And I don't have what I often have, a long list of waiting to be bought goodies – perks – ehhh – blessings. Which said, there are a few essentials that are food for the soul, the heart and the spirit – before we ever get to the mind.

    51gbTlRCfvL._SL500_AA300_ Mary Oliver is a poet entirely comfortable swimming in the emotional depths, yet possessed of an uncomfortable and discomforting instinct for bringing our own more hidden emotions to the surface; not to embarrass or frighten, but to reconcile us to the richly textured, gloriously ambiguous world of our own deep feelings. And she does this in ways so deceptively simple that only because I know her ways with words, am I expecting to feel differently by the time I reach the end of one of her poems. But how I then feel, is still a surprise, because the reading of the poem becomes a medium of self-discovery, the poem itself a field in which, ploughing, I discover hidden treasure. Then again my own reading self is also the field in which the treasure is hidden – there but undiscovered, till her ploughshare turns the soil and there I am, laughing, or crying, daring or caring, restored or reconciled, interested or integrated, convinced or content, – the alternatives are endless, but the point is, I seldom read one of her poems without thinking and feeling differently about life, the world, me, those I love, problems I have or that have me, hopes fiercely cherished or disappointments that weigh heavy.

    I've often enough said that the poets are the ones who take us to the heart of things, and to the heart of our own hearts. Mary Oliver's best poetry performs such cardiac surgery using words as both scalpel and needle, skillfully healing and repairing that centre of our being which gives our lives rhythm, oxygen and the vital energy for life. And in the process, she brings to the light of our days, treasures we did not know we had, treasure we did not know we were. Tomorrow I'll post one such poem – read earlier in the week, in the middle of a jaded afternoon to each of our staff members, read and heard by each as a benediction framed in loveliness, and welcomed as a gentle corrective for lives perhaps too prone to self-important anxiety about getting the job done. Whatever is true of my colleagues, Mea culpa! 

  • The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

    021  Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world. 

    Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

    the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us…for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God… 

    The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

    My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does – persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.

  • That’s it! Clear and Simple!

    I've always liked William Sloane Coffin's maxim (slipped into a comment on the Faith and Theology blog recently) as the description of good writing, a good conversation, and maybe even good preaching:

    "Think thoughts that are as clear as possible, but no clearer; say things as simply as possible, but no simpler."

  • Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison – the distilled essence of spiritual search.


    41K8KK+g8gL._SL500_AA300_ No need to enthuse, explain or review this classic of Christian faith as lived in the mid 20th Century. This is engaged theology, hammered out in the context of imprisonment and paradoxically composed out of a mind and soul insistent on freedom under the God  revealed in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Consequently, the academic and scholarly study of Bonhoeffer and its application to the ongoing experience of the Church into the 21st Century, continues to interrogate lesser theologies. Bonhoeffer's thought disturbs settled minds, contradicts received arguments, subverts easy or even hard won assumptions, and simply will not fit comfortably into categories of intellectual control.

    Phrases like "world come of age" "religionless Christianity", "the church for others", "worldly transcendence", "who Jesus Christ actually is for us today", act like theological detonators setting off chain reactions of thought and energy that lead to surprising and often disconcerting reconfigurations of theological reflection. As De Gruchy says, these papers contain "theological explorations in a new key…". The new Fortress Edition, volume 8, is complete with Introduction and Afterword, Bibliography and Notes, and provides over 500 pages of Bonhoeffers letters and papers. It is a miracle of production, from the first lonely but determined writing out of a mind soaked in Scripture and prayed theology, to the process of smuggling and accumulating and later editing and publishing after Bonhoeffer's death, till now 60 years later, we have this definitive translation, edition and presentation of the distilled essence of a martyr theology, a theology of witness.


    Stations_11_lcm_cat_p This will be a slow, reverential, and I don't doubt deeply affecting re-reading of one of those treasures of the church, the lasting impact of which we will only finally know when all the broken world is gathered again to the wholeness and hopefulness that Bonhoeffer himself did not live to see, but lived, and died, to point towards. One of the most important parts of the volume is the new translation of the prison poems. These are distilled essence of spiritual search, the legacy of Bonhoeffer's own wrestling in the night at the brook Jabbok. Reading them you can sense, even glimpse the lone figure of Bonhoeffer limping towards the sunrise. Some of these poems should only be read, perhaps, when we have learned the meaning of our own tears, accepted the cost of our own faithfulness in following after Christ, recognised in the deep places of the heart where trust is born, the quiet voice of the God who knows us, and enables us to say, "Whoever I am, thou knowest me: O God, I am thine!"

  • Rest in Peace, Olive Morgan – one of God’s peacemakers.


    Olive_in_church

    Been out of touch with other bloggers on my sideabr for a wee while. Which is probably why I have only just learned of the death of Olive Morgan from Rishard hall's Connexions. Olive blogged at Octomusings where she wrote with wit and wisdom about living Christianly in a complex world. Olive was 88 when she died, a committed Methodist, a peace campaigner and much else. There aren't many octogenarians out there blogging and arguing for a world more peaceful, more compassionate, less dangerous. Her last post was on "Ban the Bomblet", her approval of the Bill which bans the use of and the storage of cluster munitions. Her sharp enagagement with the world is a powerful argument against the unspoken but pervasive assumption in too many Christian circles, that the future of the church rests almost exclusively with the young people. The future rests with those who live faithfully in the present, look hopefully to the future, and learn wisely from the past. 

  • Why we are not a waste of time and space

    I like this. Not the final knockdown argument that demolishes Dawkins et al. Too subtle for such intellectual dogmatism. And why demolish straw anyway?

    No. This is affirmation, hopefulness, trustful optimism that this glorious, beautiful, perplexingly addictive world around us, is more than the collisions of infinite variations of chance. I like the thought that beautiful music skillfully played is a crucial clue to why life matters, and matters to more than ourselves. 

    For today let's pause

    At my first groping after the First Cause,

    Which led me to acknowledge (groping still)

    That if what once was called primeval slime

    (in current jargon pre-biotic soup)

    Evolved in course of eons to a group

    Playing Beethoven, it needed more than time

    And chance, it needed a creative will

    To foster that emergence, and express

    Amoeba as A Minor. 

    Martyn Skinner, Old Rectory, (Michael Russell Publishing), 1984, Quoted in This Sunrise of Wonder, Michael Mayne, (London: DLT, 2008), p. 110

  • End of session marking, Mozart, Country Western and Simon and Garfunkel

    The absence from here is entirely due to a conveyor belt of marking, collating and responding in feedback to student essays and other assignments. All now safely negotiated and only the final confirmations within the Quality Assurance processes now required.

    At this point some unhilarious alleged friends or acquaintances suggest we are now finished for the summer. Once they recover from the instant shock-wave of unspoken but eye-glinting caution to not go there, I explain that the summer is not less busy, just differently busy. Any further attempts at having a go at the alleged easiness of life in the College are not treated with such commendable if barely controlled verbal restraint.

    So what happens next. Next year's timetable to be fitted as best can be around the various needs and availabilities of around 40 students doing some of the 50 or so modules. Arranging teaching of modules, accommodation and equipment needs. Aligning College practice and documentation with UWS policies and good practice. Refreshing the Website with next year's information. Research stuff to be progressed and moved towards delivery / publishing. Entire curriculum rebuilding in preparation for revalidation and Subject Health Review. Reconfiguring all our working remits to align our activities with the College Development Plan for the next 5 years, which presupposes extensive personal and institutional development. Oh, and given that we don't take holidays during Semester time which is 30 weeks of the year, there is the not small matter of trying to fit holidays into our lives. These are some of the reasons for the "eye-glinting caution" that greets frivolous comment about life in theological education 🙂


    51g+0BMZrLL._SL500_AA280_ Last night I travelled home to the accompaniment of Mozart. The Exsultate Jubilate is one of the most sublime pieces I know – yes, my repertoire is limited, but music which has the line (translated) "the skies sing psalms with me", played as I drive alongside a low sun and distant hills. Well – it beats any praise song I can think of, and a lot of them I don't want to think of much. One of the interesting reflections on regular long trips in the car, and listening to some music more than once, is the capacity of music to change my inner climate. I can be quite buoyant till I hear, for example, the slow movement of Mozart's Concerto for Flute and Harp, and I move to a wistful longing that fills the mind and heart like a prayer – not asking for anything, just longing for God knows what. That phrase, "longing for God knows what", isn't a careless irreverence, it's a careful reverent recognition that we are beings whose affinities are with that in life which touches us with wonder, gratitude, possibility, hopefulness and goodness.



    21AH66NJRNL._SL500_AA300_      Likewise I can put on Mary Chapin Carpenter singing her song about John Doe, which tells the story of a child with special needs, told through the mouth and eyes of that same child now as an old man, remembering how he was pitied, institutionalised and treated as less than the full human being he is. And I then know why I am so passionate about affirming and embracing the full humanity of each person, and why I so agree with Jean Vanier that every human being has needs, and is special. The same CD has her song Stones in the Road, and Jubilee – and they remind me why being angry with systems, powers and people whose wealth and power-games presuppose the poverty and exploitation of others, is not only allowed, but obligatory. Or I put on Simon and Garfunkel's live concert and simply explore the infinite range of human expereince and emotion in songs that are still for me definitive of modern popular music that touches the heart because it celebrates life.

    The journeys in the car are not time wasted when keeping comapny with such articulate humane travellers on that journey we are all sharing.

  • Diversity, diversification and the church’s uncertain future

    Last few days have been interesting as people have engaged in some conversation about diversity versus division, and the importance of distinctive traditions over and against the overall Christian tradition within which Christians stand. Over at Blethers Chris has been taking her own thoughts deeper into her own traditional territory, and with the usual commonsense caution about whether the church can now afford the luxury of diversification. There are dire predictions for the future of most denominations in Scotland, and past patterns of alignment may not survive the pressures of decline, marginalised influence, muted voice, unattractive ideas in a changed marketplace, and the sheer indifference of most Scottish people to the things Christians get all worked up about.

    Happy to keep this conversation going if there are other viewpoints to be heard. Meanwhile there is marking to be done so the blog gets pushed down the urgent list to somewhere near maybe and perhaps if there's time!

  • Elton Trueblood – in affectionate remembrance of a Quaker Philosopher

    My good friend Bob Maccini, who is a black-belt in karate Quaptist, who plays the coronet and the guitar with consummate skill, who has a doctorate in Johannine studies from Aberdeen, who with his wife Becky gave a home to three Russian children, who is an ordained Baptist pastor, a highly sought after copy editor of academic publishing, a cross country skier and a qualified football ( I mean football) referee – anyway, my friend Bob had his first pastorate in the Quaker meeting attended by Elton Trueblood.


    Elton_trueblood Now I'm not sure how many people now recognise the name of Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), that deeply wise and intelligent philosopher-Quaker. Phiosopher, chaplain to Stanford and Harvard Universities, ecumenical pioneer and in at the founding of the World Council of Churches, leading thinker in the post World War 2 Quaker renaissance across the United States. But he is another of those Christian thinkers whose writing shaped my early thinking, and whose wisdom still lightly guides the way I think a community of Christians should live, treat each other and look with compassionate understanding on the world of people. Three of his books, even in their titles, suggest why the theology and spirituality of Elton Trueblood merges with Baptist theology into that attractive kind of Christian Bob refers to as a Quaptist. The Company of the Committed is a clear argument for human community, centred on Christ, and expressed in costly service in which the cost is the least important thing. The Incendiary Fellowship portrays a community of Jesus' followers who burn with hopefulness, love and a trustful openness to life in the Spirit. The Yoke of Christ is a volume of sermons in which following Jesus is spelled out as learning through living, and living in such a way that Jesus' words are both harness and freedom, that our faith is both a calling and a chosen obedience, the grateful yes with which we embrace the invitation to follow after Christ.

    The books don't read so well now. They were so clearly attuned to their times from the 50's to the late 70's, that they have lost that counter-cultural edge because the culture they were countering is long past. And in its place a world infinitely more complex, less congenial to Christian thought or indeed any other over-arching view of the way the world is or should be, and thus a world in which human hopefulness has to survive in an ecology much more fragile, and in a cultural and moral ecology increasingly awash with newly developed toxins we are not sure how to control.

    I read a couple of the sermons from the Yoke of Christ a week or two ago – it's the one volume I still have. And the sermons still work at the level of the classic – Trueblood touched on things that are always important, and each generation should at least consider. And in his day, he wrote with diagnostic skill, identifying the malaise of modern culture. His book The Predicament of Modern Man was summarised for the Reader's Digest, received sacks of reader response mail, and he answered every one of them personally. But the cost of contextual popular writing is its effectiveness wanes as the context changes. Still, I'm glad my Quaptist friend reminded me of this fine, modest but spiritually impressive Quaker leader, who embodied the name of this blog and who lived wittily in the tangle of his mind. You can read a bit more about him here.