"Christ came mainly for this reason: that we might learn how much God loves us, and might learn this to the end that we might begin to glow with love of him by whom we were first loved, and so might love our neighbour at the bidding and after the example of him who made himself our neighbour by loving us."
Augustine, quoted in L Gregory Jones, 'Baptism', in J J Buckley, D Yeago, Knowing the Tirune God. The Work of the Spirit in the Practices of the Church, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 168
Sunday last I was preaching on Isaiah 9. The great poet prophet scatters lights around his writing like a Van Gogh starry night. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…." But what makes the brilliance of Isaianic light and hope so startling is the setting, against the darkness, gloom and menace of the night. Van Gogh's masterpiece works because of the same contrast, golden swirling balls of light against cobalt blue framed in black.
The picture Isaiah paints reminds me of that painting, and of one of my favourite poems, Robert Frost's "Acquainted with the Night".
I read it at the start of the sermon, and sensed once again the wistful resignation, the knowing that can only come from loneliness, uncertainty and the chronic longing for home. As a poem of exile, inner, urban, spiritual or emotional, it describes the half remembered pain, the yearning for solace, the listening of the heart for the sounds of other human presence, that we each might find we also were 'unwilling to explain'.
Anyway, it's too good a poem to not cite, and too important in my own stellar constellation of best loved poems to not find a place on this blog.
Acquainted
with the Night
by: Robert Frost
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Some theological writers are as hard to understand as other creative artists, and what they write is to be appreciated in a similar way to other works of art. Indeed we might be doing a disservice to them and ourselves if our primary purpose in reading them is to "understand" what they write, or understand them through what they write. I'm thinking of those times when reading something, I become aware of its power, its capacity to affect me, that something or other that alerts in me the crucial appreciative quality in the theological reader, and not to be easily dismissed, of being mystified. At one level I do understand what is written, but at a higher (or deeper?) level there is something elusively present in the writing that seems more important than my own cognitive grasp, that evades intellectual control, that gives what is written an authority over my conscience and will and affections. That makes me say Yes, more from intuition and instinct than crtical analysis
Augustine was good at this kind of thing. In Book 1 of the Confessions he tries to tease out by talking out, the relation between his own existence and the Eternal Being of God. He compares his own sense of being time-bound, time limited, dependent on Divine will that he exists at all.
"Because your years do not fail, your years are one Today. How many of our days and days of our fathers have passed during your Today, and have derived from it the measure and condition of their existence? And others too will pass away and from the same source derive the condition of their existence. 'But you are the same', and all tomorrow and hereafter, and indeed all yesterday and further back, you will make a Today, you have made a Today.
If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say 'What is this?' (Exod. 16:15). So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable"
Confessions (Trans. Henry Chadwick) (Oxford:OUP, 1991), page 8.
This line of thought, (about what some theological writing does to us rather than what we do with it), was triggered by reading a brief passage of Kierkegaard the other day. It bothered me in a positive kind of way. It made sense at a deeper level than seeming straightforwardly reasonable. It isn't the kind of passage with which you agree or disagree; as well try to agree or disagree with a sunset. It is precisely a passage that mystifies, unsettles the conscience, evokes an immediate and appreciative Yes, while also saying "What is this?." Yet though inwardly I assent, not without misgivings that, if Kierkegaard is right, then much else I swallow uncritically about how to live my life in the world is wrong.
The passage itself? Tell you tomorrow 🙂
There are times I miss being a pastor within a local Christian community. There are plenty of obvious reasons for this. Less obvious, until it happens, is the inner urge to gather together with the community of faith, as one called to encourage and enable this particular community to work out its own theology, with fear and trembling, in the face of disaster. In my years as a pastor I found myself at different times on a Sunday Morning leading worship in the aftermath of Tiannemann Square, 9/11, the Omagh bombing, Piper Alpha, Dunblane, Lockerbie, and in subsequent days sharing the prayers, conversations, questions and grief of a community reaching out in heart to love a broken world.
The task of the pastor and community theologian, when disaster overwhelms some in our world, is to recognise the faith questions and the faith resources within the Christian community. Then gathering our wisdom and bewilderment, holding onto both our faith and uncertainty, mouthing our hope and defying the despair, we pray. Determined to try, together, to respond in a way that willingly absorbs the suffering and human anguish of others, we bring it all into our worship, our prayers, our supplication to the God who in Christ entered the deepest darknesses of a fractured creation.
And so today, with the anguish and danger facing the people of Haiti, I so wish I was again in that role of sharing the life of a known community as its pastor, learning again the necessary humility of the pastor who truly believes that theology and doxology, reflection and worship, plaintive prayer and patient praise, that these are the Church's work of witness in our world, and that they come not from her or him as pastor, but from the community itself. No hard edged doctrine of providence like so much theological shoulder shrugging; no Bible quotations to silence impolite questions; not a word justifying our faith, because God's response is never self-defensive. Instead tears for the dead and the broken; prayers for those who dig with their hands and with kitchen utensils; inner recoil from the hard fact that the logistics in Haiti just now are near impossible; guilt at our own impotence and gratitude for every gesture of help and humanity. ( The photo of the wee toddler's smile of recognition as he is handed to his mother is for me a powerful image of the reaching out hands of God).
How do you pray in all this? The question isn't so much where is God as where are we and where is help for our world, and what will help anyway? Money will. So we give it, then double it. Long term compassion will, because money and relief aid will be needed for years. Questions will – especially those about the unfair distribution of wealth across our world, and why it is that poor people, in a high risk area, whose homes are cheaply built and collapse easily, and who have no state sponsored medical service, are utterly vulnerable. And yes prayer will, especially prayer as Barth urged, the lifting up of holy hands against the status quo.
Last night, and today and coming days, I will light a candle and pray for the people of Haiti. And that small flame, the candle self-consumed in the giving of light, will signifiy our calling to lighten the darkness, to radiate the life and light of Christ – by the strategic generosity of giving money – by long term commitment to go on giving into the future – by not settling for the rules of the global money-grubbing and resource-grabbing game – by praying against all that diminishes and crushes human hearts and bodies, and by doing so in the name of the One whose own body was crushed, and through whom life and hope and the love of the Eternal reaches the darkest recesses of our God-loved world.
Not everyone in academia thinks academic achievement is an unqualified good. Rick Gekoski (on page 167) manages to be both self-deprecating and maintain enough self esteem to not write himself off. But this is as salutary a paragraph as any I've come across that honestly looks at the cost and consequence of academic competitiveness in the University.
"I am told that one should feel proud of oneself and one's achievements, but I frequently value the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Pride resulting from, say, academic acheivement, is a kind of false pride based on false goals. Does high academic achievement make one happy, or good? Does it fill you with laughter and goodwill towards man? [sic] Look around the universities and despair. No. I rather prefer moderate, vigilant self-esteem, scepticism directed inwards, self-doubt: those qualities of mind that lead to humility, and to that irony which wryly registers the differences between the apparent and the real. And ironically enough, I still feel proud od my academic achievements, when I'm not mildly ashamed of them".
There are some modern theologians I now couldn't not read. Sometimes a double negative is the best way to be emphatic, making a point by grammatical clumsiness. Double negatives act like speed-bumps on the rat run of our hasty assumptions.
So just to
slow you down
enough
to hear
the point I'm making,…..
There are some theologians you read and that's it, you've done it and you can move on. But there are others who aren't so easily assimilated, and who refuse to be reduced to the status of transient interest now dispensable.
For different people, the names would be different. I know readers of this blog have their own need-to-read authors. For myself I couldn't not read Moltman, Bonhoeffer, T F Torrance, Yoder, Newbigin, Brueggemann, Hauerwas, Rowan Williams.
From earlier centuries there are others I return to, and some of them I couldn't not read either (Julian of Norwich for one, the very different P T Forsyth for another). But for now I've been reflecting on why these particular modern theologians have so fully entered my theological bloodstream that they are now essential to my spiritual and intellectual health. It isn't that I agree with all that any one of them says. And not as if they are all from the same theological stable. Some of them are quite hard to read, several of them write far too much, and I haven't read all that any one of them has written.
But they are,
every one of them,
Christian theologians who have required of me
a new depth of response,
demanded a full measure of intellectual integrity,
and instilled a spiritual seriousness
that understands the necessary connections
between good theology,
Christ-like practice,
and the habit of doxology.
This coming year I intend to pick one book from each of these, and read them again. With one or two it might be one I haven't read before. But Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Newbigin's The Open Secret,
and The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, (I see these two as essentially together), Yoder's Politics of Jesus, and Volf's Exclusion and Embrace, are all but self selecting. It's a sign of age I'm told – to re-read instead of reading what's new. To be honest though, even the five books cited above are hard to beat as worthwhile theological writing that is inherently if at times uncomfortably transformative for those who engage with them.
Which other theologians, writing today, meet the benchmarks of that italics sentence above?
Antidote to cynicism.
Making the world a better place, and making us feel better about it.
Compassion as the guarantee of honesty.
Which one proved to be the neighbour, huh?.
Click on this link and smile knowingly, then go and do likewise.
Found this prayer over at Michael Gorman's blog and thought it worth circulating.
I think some of the readers of this blog are likely to appreciate its spirituality of perceptive self-critique, and love's instinctive but demanding integrity that seems utterly congruent with the call of Jesus.
I'm compiling a sheet of seven prayers which I'll use one each week-day for a while. This is one from a Franciscan community is one of them.
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half
truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within
your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and
exploitation of people, so that you may work for justice, freedom and
peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain,
rejection, starvation and war, so that you may reach out your hand to
comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you
can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others
claim cannot be done.
Wasn't going to complain. But
28 December to 30 December blocked main drain. Details censored in consideration of those with delicate imaginations.
30 December no water – main supply fractured and three postcode areas affected. Bought 30 litres of water to divide amongst the neighbours – water back on before it could be distributed.
4 January took our 17 year old cat to the vet – had to come home without him, and he is now, it warms my heart to believe, purring in eternity.
Sunday January 9, at 2.13 pm ( I noted the time) the cold water supply burst in the cavity between the garage and the kitchen.
Three hours later, fingers numb and feeling as big as cucumbers, arm scraped after lying on the road on the ice, trying to locate the cold water supply turn-off valve while my cheek was pressed into the slushy tarmac, I managed to attach a hose to the gushing pipe and persuade the water to run harmlessly into the main drain, which was now mercifully unblocked.
Monday Jan 10, still unable to locate the turn-off valve in the house, accompanied by a plumber whose patience was biblical in its perdurance, and after us trying again to get the street valve to turn-off while avoiding multiple hernia injuries, we finally attached two pressure seals to the ends of the fractured joints, the only down side being the icy plentiful spray that ( I use the word for once in its more accurate and untheological sense) inerrantly found that part of our necks and the inside of the sleeves at the wrists, so that channels of icy water flowed up to the oxter and encountered channels of icy water flowing down the front of our shirts.
There are valuable and profound and meaningful and transformative spiritual lessons to be learned from all this, but I can't be bothered.
Those familiar with the Scots language will know what I mean when I say I am scunnered. Those unfamiliar with the word – ask me on a better day. 🙂
Just listened again to a Johnny Cash album, the definitive collection. Some of these songs are masterpieces of their genre; and one or two of them transcend genre in their significance and power. I remember the first time I heard the album Man in Black. Along with The San Quentin and Folsom Prison Concerts, and Bitter Tears (a stunning apologia and lament for the way of life of the native American peoples), these albums confirmed Johnny Cash as one of the artists whose music is for me indispensable. I know the often noted weaknesses – sentimentalism, sensationalism, banal lines, thematic repetition, and sheer deluge of recordings some of them little more than ordinary. But Johnny Cash is one of the truly great artists whose greatness grew out of the deeply turned tilth of personal failure, emotional suffering and his own acknowledged brokenness. Few Country singers give voice to the highs and lows of human experience with such searing honesty, and with that knowing tone of voice that articulates lostness, longing, love, laughter and lament.
The title song, Man in Black, became Cash's theme song, and black his chosen fashion statement. Bernard Levin, in his book A Walk Up Fifth Avenue, tells of going into the top tailor's store and being measured for a suit that cost a year's salary. The justification?
"Clothes aren't only for wearing Mr Levin. When you wear this suit you are making a statement."
Cash knew that – "there's a reason for the things that I have on", he . Man in Black is one of those pieces that takes its place in the premier league of protest songs, the songs of the discontented, the poetry of the dissenter, the lyrics of those fed up with the status quo, the music that combines compassion and outrage, ballads that tell a human story to elicit human understanding and responsiveness.
The poignancy and dignity of his last few years when suffering from Parkinson's disease pushed Johnny Cash deeper into his search for inner and outer peace, for healing mercy and a way of leaving life that would finally satisfy his yearning for a life that had been worth living. His courage in performing till his hands wouldn't do what was needed on his instruments, that unique gargling-with-gravel voice weakened but still able to orchestrate the pathos and passion of human emotion with the range and intensity of a full orchestra. And the closing scene of Hurt, when he closes and caresses the piano lid – these are unforgettable moments of great art, and human tragedy transcended by brave dignity.
.