Living Wittily

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  • Enjoying the diversity of difference and resisting the absurdity of division


    Images Following the previous post on Baptist identity and my preferred disposition of persuasive humility, Chris asked a fundamental question with which I have great sympathy. From what I know of Chris (only from her blog, we haven't met yet, though I hope we can do that one of these days), she is an ecumenical enthusiast, and impatient of the barriers that seem to get in the way of Christian unity and a mutual recognition of each other as fellow travelers on the road with Christ. She always writes (here) with a generosity of mind to others, but also with sharp and critical awareness – so as a retired teacher herself, she knows when someone is writing, thinking or speaking tosh!

    So when Chris asks her question she does so as one whose complaint I share. There are too many artificial barriers; more than enough personally invested agendas; a surplus of piously defended principles that have little purchase in the contemporary world; too many long memories of bitter divisions, and toxic after-lives of forgotten disputes; too much proud defensiveness about one's own precious if growingly obsolete traditions. And so on. And just to say, my reply presupposes my complete agreement about the unacceptable face of anti-ecumenism.

    Here is the comment and question Chris
    offers, followed by my reply    :

    Chris:   When I
    read this, and the post that precedes it, and in fact great chunks of
    your blog, it keeps hitting me that it's absurd that you call yourself a
    Baptist and I call myself an Episcopalian. There is far too much we
    share – and I'm going beyond the basic tenets of faith here – for us to
    be described as different. "Our sad divisions" are just that – and in
    this time they are also absurd. Aren't they?

    Jim:   Hello
    again Chris. I'd like to respond to your questions more fully in a post
    but I'll at least hint at what a response might be. Ecumenical is for me
    a good word, a generous word, a hospitable word. Diversity likewise
    reflects something of the fecundity and variegation of created life,
    human culture and faith expression. Neither term necessitates that
    difference become sad division. But both safeguard the freedom, identity
    and integrity of the many Christian traditions that make up the Church,
    the Body of Christ. Baptist, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian
    and a wheen more are for me the names by which we recognise each other,
    not slogans by which we disenfranchise, diminish or oppose each other.
    My being a Baptist can never justify me breaking fellowship with other
    Christians – indeed as you suggest, it says as much about what is shared
    between us. But it does allow for my own faith story to be heard,
    coming as it does within a different tradition; and it requires of me to
    hear your faith story, and value and learn from it. Absurd – division
    is always absurd in a faith based on the Gospel of reconciliation. But
    diversity is not absurd, it is the context within which conciliation,
    peacemaking, fellowship and mutual recognition are worked out. Or so it
    seems to this Baptist, seeking to witness with persuasive humility to
    another valid way of being the Church.

    Chris: I'll be fascinated in a further exploration of this – though if this is a
    hint it's a generous one! I knew when I posted the comment that I
    wouldn't want to lose the lovely things that I associate with my church –
    which were vital components of my conversion, actually – and of course
    if you call it "diversity" you cast our differences in a much more
    benign light. Maybe I'm affected by the book I'm reading about the
    dissolution of the monasteries – such cruelty in the name of religion!
    I'll await further developments …


    Galle 001 When Chris says there is far too much we share for us to be described as different, my whole self, (mind, heart and affections), affirms the truth of what she says. A thoughtful, outspoken, Episcopalian, hillwalking chorister peacemaker, who has spent a lifetime teaching, and a thoughtful, outspoken, Baptist preacher, teacher, academic and tapestry worker, for all the other differences, do indeed have a deep and durable affinity. And it's this. To be in Christ, to be incorporated into the Body of Christ which is the Church, in all its variegated glory, Baptist and Episcopalian and all the rest of them / us! That is the fundamental truth that renders other differences relative, but not irrelevant. I think it does matter that we remain true to those stories and traditions that have shaped us. But part of that being true to our own tradition is, I passionately believe, to value difference not as division but as diversity, not as threat but as opportunity, not as opposition but as co-operation, and not as obstacle but as tepping stone to deeper, richer understanding of a Gospel far too gloriously complex and far too redolent of new possibility, for any one tradition to constrain let alone contain it.

    All that said. I still lean heavily towards Chris's sense that difference made excuse for division is sad, and absurd, in a church for which Christ himself prayed, that we may be one even as Christ and the father and Spirit are one.

    And Chris's second comment about cruelty and brutality in the name of religion is a reminder to ecumenically generous people that the forces let loose by religion, politics and power, are never neutral, and often malign. In that sense the irony of a divided Christianity is itself an impetus to a recovery of a lived Gospel of reconciliation, peace-making, just relations and forgiveness. I am so tired of offensive behaviour, sullen doctrinal judgmentalism, partisan Christianity, rationalised dislike or worse of those who differ in their experience of God in Christ. And yes, when such over-againstness is given the twin engines of religion and political interest, as in Tudor England, then the Gospel of peace becomes an instrument of power, and the Prince of Peace is betrayed for the one Machiavelli called The Prince.

    Because whatever else I stand for as a Baptist, I stand in the tradition of the persecuted, not the persecutor, and a tradition that rejects the coalition of church and state, and of political will with the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. So I'm no ecumenical idealist unaware of the realities of division, divisiveness and a divided church; but I am one who believes Jesus' prayer was not a waste of words or time – "that they may be one." And where there is celebrated diversity, and humbly persuasive wearing of the amazing technicolour dream-coat of the Church (I know, exegetical daftness but it's just a bit of fun!), then at least we can argue we are trying to walk together after Christ, and glad of the company of each other.

    Chris, we must meet for that coffee.

    ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

    On another note: A brief report of the recent Baptist Union Council, along with downloads of two of the papers, can be found at the Scottish Baptist College Blog here

  • Being baptist – an exercise in persuasive humility

    I am a Baptist, which doesn't make me any better than any other Christian seeking to live faithfully for Christ within their own tradition. Nor does it guarantee that my theology is any more securely right or doctrinally orthodox than other Christian expressions of faith. And my spirituality, though grown in Baptist soil, is in fact a veritable cottage garden of colours and varieties planted from my own tradition and transplanted from others, and a mixture of overgrown abundance and well controlled tidiness. Nor does being a Baptist commit me to rubbishing, or challenging or choosing to be ignorant of other Christian traditions, expressions and ways of being the Church of Jesus Christ.


    Palmcross No, being a Baptist is an exercise in persuasive humility, acknowledging our limitations but also commending the peculiar perspectives we bring to Christian life and practice. Being a Baptist compels me to ask questions about the relations of church and state; to uphold religious liberty for all; to affirm the nature of faith as a personal response to Jesus that isn't only about what I believe, but has transformative power over character and patterns of behaviour; it compels also an embracing of life-shaping Gospel values such as peacemaking, reconciliation, community building and compassionate service.

    Baptist identity is moving to the centre of our denominational thinking. That's why I am writing the disclaimers above. There is all the difference in the world between a denomination so insecure that it bangs on about its own rightness; and a denomination that values who it is and was called to be under Christ, and doesn't have to undervalue other traditions to do so. Where all this will take us I don't know. For myself, I long for a rediscovery of Christian existence shaped by the core Baptist affirmation that "The Lord Jesus Christ our God and Saviour is the sole and absolute Authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures". When the Sermon on the Mount has the same purchase on our thinking and living as Paul's Romans; when the parables are as life-shaping as the epistles; when the example and teaching, the life and death and resurrection of Jesus are seen as the treasured truths of a faith that lives only by that name, Jesus Christ. If that is secured, most other things are too.

  • Baptist identity – is it what we take ownership of, or what we give ourselves to?

    The past couple of days I have been with the Baptist Union Council sharing in a residential conference, and trying to practice what we say we believe about a Baptist way of being the church. Communal discernment is all very fine in theory, can be strongly defended biblically, can be shown to be good practice in a community impatient with hierarchy but staying this side of anarchy. But it's hard. And what makes it hard is the ingrained bias of our default habits of thought.

    For example, Scottish Baptists are just not comfortable with silence, as if it suggests no one has anything worthwhile to say. Well, actually that might indeed be what it suggests, and in that case silence is the more creative option. Then there's the question of agendas, time constraint and the safety felt in a followed programme, so that departing from what was planned seems radical and risky- what might be radical and risky is to abandon any programme that imposes control, and trust the Holy Spirit to push, persuade, pull and prepare us to see what at present we can't see, to hear what we are too busy to listen to, to think what we previously thought unthinkable, to feel more deeply than we have for years, to reach out to each other in the fellowship of the One who washes feet, breaks bread, shares wine, and walks beside us on the way.



    403px-Thorvaldsen_Christus      My own contribution, for what it is worth, and it is worth something I think, was to ask that we choose our vocabulary more carefully. No one was swearing! But some words we use seem to suggest mechanism rather than organism. For example to say we should have a sense of ownership, requires of us a more self-centred and self conscious taking to ourselves of something, denomination, church whatever. I prefer the word belonging, in which the driver is not what I own, but what I give myself to. And indeed the most important form of ownership of Baptist identity isn't to own the principles and practices, but to give ourselves to them. To present our bodies as living sacrifices to Christ, living out his teaching, expressing his risen life within and amongst us, embodying his presence in a world hungry for bread, desolate of light, and where for all our claims to grown up cultural maturity, the church encounters a world frightened of its own shadow side.

    I'm not sure where Scottish Baptists will be in a decade. But wherever it is, I would want us to be Christian in our vocabulary. So, why is it we have bought into the word "risk", as if risk was good for its own sake. My own understanding of Christian discipleship is that to follow Jesus is a decision high in risk, offset by trust. Do I trust this One who says, Come and follow me, take up your cross and come…. Radical is a word so overused now it refers mainly to things that might be thought or done slightly differently. I see it as a disruptive word, referring to definite discontinuity with status quo, a word itself redolent with risk, inviting to ways that are different, daring a new way of thinking that is only ever confirmed when practised.

    If baptists are radical believers, and if we are people who give ourselves to what we believe, then maybe we need to find radical, risky, costly, personally disruptive ways of being together, thinking and praying together, walking with Jesus together. 

    The statue is the magnificent Thorvaldsen's "Christus", in Copenhagen. The artist's intention was that " you only see his face when you kneel at his feet". Maybe that is where communal discernment begins…..

  • Vivaldi’s Gloria and sabbath moments of the soul

    New patterns of life are bringing new ways of keeping inner experience nourished, and even enriched. I mentioned travelling in the car as my new place to listen to baroque and early music. Some of the music is an acquired taste I might never acquire. But then I remember I didn't like Yoghurt, loathed olives, didn't fancy smoked salmon, and would have thought stilton cheese was a good cheese gone bad. Now they are each of them staple food, and looked forward to treats. Music has been a bit like that for me too. I now listen with great pleasure to music I first thought boring because it didn't taste familiar on a very limited sound palate.

    419R7W83YBL._SL500_AA300_ Now I'm writing this in College at 7.37 a.m. Listening to Vivaldi's Gloria. The fire alarm test has just gone for twenty seconds and shattered the intricate architecture of sound I was exploring. Sound – whether the fire alarm or chamber orchestra, is dependent on context. If a fire has broken out somewhere I want to be scared out of my seat, and a chamber orchestra can't do that; and if my soul needs the balm of music that opens up visions of glory and vistas of sound then I can do without the stress accelerator pedal being floored by a pitched for panic screaming fire alarm.

    But back to new practices of inner sustaining. In the College and in my study (not an office -  too many books contradict that – the ratio of filing cabinets to bookcases is for me the defining geography – and it's 1 to 5), I have started having half an hour of music, reading and thinking about the day with a sense that life is for joy, peace and purpose, as well as for concentration, work and obligation. I suppose such a half hour is a subversion of any work ethic that needs to have a measurable end product. Not sure how you can ever measure the impact on heart, life, mind, relationships, and overall view of the world and our place in it, that a great piece of music or fine writing can have. So I allow the music time, space, movement in and through those places of  mind and heart that will soon be filled with other stuff. The other stuff is legitimate enough, in fact that's too grudging – not just legitimate but necessary stuff, obligations rightly placed, expectations fairly faced, work requiring to be done well, a vocation to fulfil. But before then – sabbath moment s for the soul. And anyway – you never know when the fire alarm will shatter the conversation between flute, oboe, strings and human voices.

  • The tree of Calvary and the ecology of the heart

    O Tree of Calvary

    send thy roots deep down

    into my heart.

    Gather together the soil of my heart,

    the sands of my fickleness,

    the stones of my stubbornness,

    the mud of my desires, bind them together

    O Tree of Calvary,

    interlace them with thy strong roots,

    entwine them with the network

    of thy love.

    Chandran Devanesen.

    12899a559cb69bc6 At present I'm busy repairing, retrieving, restoring, reconstructing, gardens, our own and someone else's. This prayer means every tree stump removed, every square metre turned over to improve tilth, every shrub and tree pruned back to shape and fruitfulness, every weed and stone removed, becomes an inner aspiration for a renewed ecology of the spirit. No idea who the author was, but it's a prayer I've used before, and it comes and goes with the seasons of the heart.

  • When contemplative prayer doesn’t work – and hard words do.

    In the Celtic Daily Prayer of the Northumbrian Community there's a lot of liturgical material you don't easily find elsewhere. And sometimes it gets in the way of meditative or contemplative praying. Some sentences are just too provocative. Like this one:

    "Many whom God  has, the church does not have; and many whom the church has, God does not have."

    That is Karl Rahner, an often controversial Catholic theologian, parodying Augustine, who was also controversial but tends to be seen as a central pillar of orthodoxy. One of Rahner's more controversial ideas  was the notion of 'anonymous Christians', those who were unrecognised as Christian because they were outside the recognised spiritual terrories of the Christian churches. But their character, their inner impulses and instincts, were open to and responsive to the grace of God in Christ. Now however difficult this idea is, and it is fraught with theological contradiction and damaging tensions, Rahner is saying something important as a general observation on the Church's amnesia about some of Jesus' hardest words. "Not everyone who says Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom".
    Homeless-Streets-medium And what about that huge granite boulder of a parable in Matthew 25 where the presumed righteous, (in Matthew's gospel, the Church), have to ask in consternation, when did we see you naked, hungry, thirsty, in prison and do nothing about it? That parable is a road-block on spiritual complacency, a take-down for theological over-confidence, a puncturing of presumed moral and ecclesial superiority.

    We can all find good biblical and theological reasons to refute the claim "you can be a Christian without going to church". And we instinctively resist the idea that some people outside church life altogether are nearer to what it means to follow Jesus than some professing Christians who say "Lord, Lord." For myself, I am trying to stay alert, to see those whom God has, but the church does not have; I wouldn't presume to think too hard about whom the church has that God does not have. But I suspect there is a serious and troubling truth in Rahner's words that catches those warnings of Jesus to those who think they have Christian discipleship and their personal place in heaven sussed. And then there's that veiled promise of Jesus that there are those whom the church does not have, who are invited into the Kingdom because when Jesus was naked, hungry, thirsty, sick, in prison, they fed, cared for and visited him. And all of those, God does have.  Hmmmm.

  • Ross County are in Europe….


    75px-Rosscbadge Today is the biggest football day in the history of Ross County Football Club. The cup final at Hampden. There will probably be a few others there, but I've got my ticket and the important thing is I'll be there. The manager Derek Adams I've known since he was 8 years old; the Director of Football, Geroge Adams, a personal friend of years standing. The achievement of a former Highland league side in getting into Division 1 was huge – a cup final is a sign of another kind of arrival. And European football next year – I want tickets for Ross County v Barcelona.

    No idea how the game will go – the miracle is their being there. To win would be a sign of eschatological proportions that would herald a new era in possibility thinking. Either way, travelling with two friends in their car (I've done the journey already this week! :)), encountering long roadworks on a road that will funnel both sets of fans from the North, getting parked and into the stadium, surviving the Hampden pie, and then home before whatever time – going to be a long, big, tiring, fun day. Why not?

    Post Match Update

    Ross County 0 Dundee United 3

    Yes, I'm sad the fairytale came to an end Ross County. But they had over 20,000 supporters, the match was without incident or acrimony on the pitch and the fans were brilliant with each other. The Hampden pie didn't happen because the one thing that hasn't changed is the inability of a national football stadium to have caterers who can serve at something above slow motion. I stood in a queue for 12 minutes and it barely moved. However, given the other dietary experiments of the day, probably just as well. A long day – from 9.15 am till 9.45 pm – was it worth it? Yes – not for the football, but for the friendships.

  • Spem in Alium – music and the experience of recovered equilibrium

    As one who has spent most my life filling the unforgiving minute, there's the small question of how to fill 360 minutes of travel per week. I do it by car so the laptop isn't the answer. A combination of Radio Four and Classic FM helps, but at the times I'm travelling it tends to be news (Radio 4), and that becomes cyclic after half an hour; or you get weary of Classic FM's daft juxtapositions of Ave Verum followed immediately by silly advert jingles, or the Mozart Clarinet Concerto slow movement followed by a condensed milk voice dripping syrupy words about smooth classics!


    Tallis So. A strategy. I have long wanted to explore the treasures of Baroque music, and I have a friend who knows stuff about Renaissance and early sacred music. So each journey I listen to a CD, sometimes the same one twice. This week it was a new double CD of Thomas Tallis, whose work spans the 16th Century Tudor period. Most of this is new to me, one or two I have a vague recollection of hearing before, but no real previous engagement with this range of early choral music. My one complaint is there is no copy of the words, Latin or translation. Now in complex choral music sung in parts, knowing what is being sung seems to me to matter – certainly to those unfamiliar with the pieces. That said. The central piece is Spem in Alium, which to my embarrassment I only recently discovered through the afore-mentioned friend asking if I knew Thomas Tallis. The first hearing of it was magical, shared in the background of quiet conversation, and immediately marked it for me as a quite beautiful expression of hopefulness and longing, human voices lifting that longing heavenwards in sounds that are breathtakingly lovely.


    Caravaggio_calling_of_peter_andrew_large So I listened to Spem in Alium several times on the way home yesterday – for this one I do know the words and they are included below. It did what great music should do – it lifted my heart, it reconfigured the world around, it restored my inner climate, it was an experience of recovered equilibrium. One of the most important discoveries in my own faith development is that prayer is a much more thickly textured experience than any one Christian tradition can contain or express. For me great art like the Rublev Icon, the Caravaggio of Jesus calling the disciples (pictured), glorious music like Ave Verum or Laudate Dominus, or poetry like Herbert and R S Thomas, as well as great liturgies and great cathedrals, mountains, sunsets, mountain avens, a hovering kestrel, the face of a friend – they are all ways of recognising the presence of God, and the touch of love through created things. And perhaps prayer only happens at those points of recognition, when something other than us, greater than us, less self-consciously anxious than us, takes hold of the heart and mind and renews feeling and thought. That was what happened on the way home yesterday. Some might call it music therapy – I call it God healing the heart through created things, including those few people who know us best, and those people of genius in whose work we hear, see, apprehend, encounter, A God who is hard to ignore.

    Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te

    Deus Israel

    qui irasceris

    et propitius eris

    et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis

    Domine Deus

    Creator coeli et terrae

    respice humilitatem nostram

    …………………………………….

    I have never put my hope in any other but in you,

    O God of Israel

    who can show both anger

    and graciousness,

    and who absolves all the sins of suffering man

    Lord God,

    Creator of Heaven and Earth

    be mindful of our lowliness

  • They maintain the fabric of the world – a celebration of ordinary good folk

    Dont-let-the-worldThere are important people in our world who don't get all the rewards of big salary, career prospects, noticed by the so called movers and shakers, often don't even get noticed. So today is noticing day. One of them is the woman who cleans our College. The great thing about the College being on the campus is the interaction with a whole slice of human life the churches seldom if ever get near, or go near, or it seems at times, want to. At one of the cafes, in the library, along the corridors, up the High Street and random places in between all these, there are folk just getting on with their lives, and in their work helping us all get on with ours.

    So our cleaning person ( we use gender neutral as the default discourse here 🙂 is here before me and I get in a wee tad early myself. We take time to chat and laugh and complain and grump, then she gets on with making the world cleaner and I get on with making the world…..well, making the world what?

    This cleaner isn't content with the hoover, the jay-cloth and the mop. She washes our mugs; she puts on the kettle; she makes sure there's milk in the fridge cos she knows theologians are a bit otherworldly, and though they may demythologise the land of milk and honey, they soon discover the benefits of a land (or at least a fridge) where at least there is non-mythological milk – provided by the grace and goodness of someone else.

    Ecclesiasticus has this wonderful litany of praise for workers – and at the end, when the ploughman and the blacksmith, the carpenter and the metalworker, the potter and the vine dresser, have all been commended for their part in the shaping and making of the world, there are the lovely lines: "All these maintain the fabric of the world, and their prayers are in the work of their hands." Quite so. And that clean mug every morning, the boiled kettle, the conversation that sets the world right, and the milk in  the fridge – tell me they aint sacraments…..

  • The Divine Love – Durable Faithfulness, not Transient Sentiment

    Yesterday I wrote about the durable, faithful Love of God. It would be way too easy to sentimentalise the love of God, unintentionally reduce it to indulgent complacency, describe it with fatal inaccuracy as if it were a celestial flavour of niceness, or mistake it for an anodyne affection lacking the pain of passionate longing. Some of the greatest theology ever written struggles and strains within the limits of meaning to say what the love of God is, or is not. It's an area where I don't want to be dogmatic, but often end up being so! Some of the greatest religious poetry has also explored the ranges of of far distant meaning, or ransacked all the available semantic domains, or has continuously conceived conceited concepts…. 

    (I know, just let my own wee conceit pass without comment:)

    So when I discover a few lines of prose or poetry that backs up my own dogmatic tendencies, or subverts my equally dogmatic certainties, I copy it, think about it, interrogate it, – even let it interrogate me. One such attempted definition has been in my commonplace book ever since I read it in a poetry anthology years ago. Over the years it has broken down into the diverse butv fertile compost out of which grows my theological life and thought. I share it not because it is the last word, but because it is at least the first word.

    Love ever gives, forgive, outlives,

    And ever stands with open hands.

    And while it lives, it gives.

    For this is love's prerogative:

    To give – and give – and give.

    John Oxenham