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Christ the Wisdom of God, and the repository of all the treasures of wisdom

When it comes to browsing in the Bible, after the Gospels I most often find myself in that supermarket trolley of good advice and wise counsel, the book of Proverbs. One of the words I enjoy saying, and reading, and hearing, is "wisdom". Just pronouncing it somehow conveys a reassuring sense of the world being made OK, of good decisions, of careful considerate behaviour, of something as good, beautiful and true as the knowing smile of a good friend.

Information informs and knowledge enables understanding. but then, when understanding and human experience flow together, the resulting confluence is wisdom, that deep way of knowing and being known that forms character, transforms lifestyle, and conforms us to the image of Christ. Paul knew about Christ and wisdom; he hoped the Christians of Laodicea would receive "all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."

My own take on wisdom is profoundly Christological. The Word God utters, the knowledge of the Holy, the incarnate truth that is human life articulated in its surrender to God, the experience of the Creator accommodating to the creature, and thus understanding from within the truth of our humanity and limitation, this is the "loving wisdom of our God." And if indeed it is so that Christ is the wisdom of God, the source and repository of divine understanding and the finally uttered truth of who God is, then all wisdom is tested by Christ, and no wisdom is alien to Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom."

So whether I am reading the book of Proverbs, or Pirke Avot that marvel of compression embedded in the Mishnah, or some of the great wisdom statements of other faith traditions, I recognise a certain ethical tone, a spiritual accent, an echo, perhaps slightly distorted, that is deeply resonant of the Wisdom of God. Wisdom is not disqualified from our consideration because it is uttered by another faith tradition whose dogmatic framework and doctrinal constructions are incompatible with Christian theology. "All the treasures of wisdom are hidden in Christ", the eternal Word subsumes the wisdom of the ages, and so in that incarnate life, crucified and risen, the wisdom of this world is converted into the currency of a quite other way of thinking, acting and being.

So when I come across words like the following, from the ancient Chinese wisdom tradition of LaoTzu, I listen respectfully. And if I do, I am attentive to that which resonates with the uttered words of Jesus, who lived a life which was the uttered Word of God:

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife

and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security

and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval

and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.

Or as Jesus said, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his justice, and all those other things will find their proper place."

24 February 2010
Pastoral theology as honouring care-givers

Renita Weems again – this time on a society that has its values upside down.

"We are bereft because we lack traditions that elevate caring for children, the aged, and the informed to meaningful venues for encountering spiritual wisdom. Our society views caring as an impediment that squanders our potential and ties us down. It demeans mothering, underpays day-care workers and teachers, and penalises adults who take time off to care for aging parents….A society that spurns the work of caregiving cuts itself off from learning about life itself. Relegating all the caregiving that faces us to spouses, nannies, housekeepers, maids, live-in nurses and paid personnel threatens to make us overestimate our strengths and can blind us to our own vulnerabilities. We miss the work that can help to civilise us."

Question: What would change in the way the Church functions, and in the way the world sees the Church if, as the Body of Christ, it gave priority to caregiving in a reversal of the priorities of our culture?

23 February 2010
A year older than I was

Happy Birthday to me!

Someone asked if it was a big Birthday.

Big enough I said.

Next year is really big 🙂

No big extravangances this year – just bought a house!

Having favourite and not healthy food with a couple of friends

(Pizza party, Gu chocolate cake, plus some etceteras!)

Pizza home made, half an acre in size, varied toppings,

you get to build your own section before it goes in the oven.

Just put new batteries in the exercise bike to make sure the electronics give the accurate information during the long calorie burns that will be required over the next week.

Don't care – Home made Pizza is one of the blessings by which we have a proleptic anticipation of heavenly wellbeing and an eternal smile on the face…….

21 February 2010
Baptists, religious freedom, and catholicity of spirit

After our emergence in the 17th Century, Baptist communities in the British Isles existed in peace only after religious toleration became an accepted cultural attitude with legal and religious validity. For that reason liberty of conscience in matters relating to God has remained a core Baptist principle. Baptists were born in an age of zealous persecution, and like other dissenters suffered from religious intolerance. The Baptist conscience is therefore genetically predisposed to resist religious oppression, to refrain from judging the faith of others in ways that are obstructive or repressive.

(The first Baptist
meeting house at Goodshaw was started in 1685, probably at the house
of Henry Butterworth or in his blacksmith shop.)

More positively, Baptists who affirm liberty of conscience before God, gladly recognise and respect the work of God in the lives of others, even when their experience is different. "Baptist Catholicity" is a phrase being used increasingly to describe that way of being Baptist that traces our rootedness back into our own tradition, but then back further into the deeper loam of the Christian tradition in its rich diversity. A dissenting ecclesiology need not mean sectarian isolation, and a Baptist commitment to Christ-centred discipleship gives no mandate to disenfranchise other Christian traditions.

I was nudged, if not shoved, to think about all this late last night when I was reading Evelyn Underhill's book on worship. Written in 1936, against the darkening skies over Europe, by a middle-aged, middle class, genteel Anglican steeped in mystical theology, and conductor of refined devotional retreats in rural Pleshey, the book is one of the few credible attempts to describe what worship is from the perspective of one who understands transcendence, adoration, and the response of human finitude to the Eternal.

I don't know how many readers of this blog have ever read Evelyn Underhill. Not everyone is patient now with a style that can seem rarefied and lacking practical usefulness. What I like about her is that much of her writing does indeed lack practical usefulness! Instead she explores why the human heart must worship, and finds the answer in the nature of God, the attraction of Love Eternal, the innate response of human longing to the Word Incarnate.

So when I read Underhill's paragraph (cited below), I thought of why I am a Baptist, and why as a Baptist I am passionately outspoken about our traditional commitment to religious tolerance. And why in faithfulness to Christ and to the Church which is the Body of Christ, I am respectful and receptive to the truth of Christ as we encounter Him in the experience and faith of other Christians. Such Christ-centred openness to other Christians requires theological humility, a sense of our own need of the other, and a spiritual obedience to the apostolic logic of welcoming one another as God in Christ has welcomed us.

"Some of the friends and fellow students who have read these chapters have been inclined to blame me for giving too sympathetic and uncritical an account of types of worship which are not their own. It has been pointed out to me that I have failed to denounce the shortcomings of Judaism with Christian thoroughness, that I have almost unnoticed primitive and superstitious elements which survive in Catholic and Orthodox worship, that I have not emphasized as I should the liturgic and sacramental shortcomings of the Protestant sects.

But my wish has been to show all these chapels of various types in the one Cathedral of the Spirit; and dwell on the particular structure of each, the love which has gone to their adornment, the shelter they can offer to many different kinds of adoring souls, not on the shabby hassocks, the crude pictures, or the paper flowers.

Each great form of Christian cultus is here regarded…as a "contemplation to procure the love of God"; for its object is to lead human souls, by different ways, to that act of pure adoration which is the consummation of worship".

Evelyn Underhill, Worship (London:Nisbet, 1936), pages xi-xii.

20 February 2010
Words, silence, prayer and the first person singular

Those who know me know I talk a lot. And I write a lot. I hope too, I listen a lot. I suppose I live by words.

Nearly one in five of the words above is the first person singular – which is its own comment on what happens if we are addicted to words, and uncritically permissive of our own voice.

That said, I'm also someone who needs silence and solitude, not lots of it, not stretches of it. But enough to think, to pray, to wait, to listen. Thomas Merton taught me years ago to pay more attention to the inner life when he said words are the noises that interrupt our silence.

And then there's the wise wistfulness of the woman who said, "Sometimes I think that just not thinking of oneself is a form of prayer".

Well Amen to that.

Renita Weems, whose book I quoted from yesterday says much the same thing:

"As with most great communicators, God knows that the point of silence and the pause between sentences is not to give the audience the chance to fill the silence with empty babbling but to help create more depth to the conversation."

19 February 2010
Prayer as the risk we take in being honest with God

This poem about God, prayer, and us, was written by Renita Weems in 1980, when as a young woman she needed to find a way of relating to God that was her own. Not inherited reverence, not borrowed piety, not well rehearsed habits, not words worn with familiarity – but the determination to be a young black woman whose voice has its own integrity, and whose sense of God resists the reductive pressures of conformity to 'the done thing'. It is reproduced in her autobiography, Listening For God. A MInister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Professor Weems is a biblical scholar, an ordained African Methodist minister, an outspoken critic of systems and social attitudes of discrimination and exclusion, and a woman whose spirituality combines hunger for righteousness, impatience with injustice, and a relationship with God in which love and trust enable prayer to be a robust debate about the things that matter. Her blog is over here.

I usedta bow,

now I stand

before God's throne.

I usedta close my eyes,

now I stare

straight ahead

I usedta do what was expected,

nor I do what I want

to make this faith

faithful to me.

I usedta be afraid of God

now I take chances

and wait

and wait

tapping my feet,

listening for God.

(Listening for God, page 35)

18 February 2010
“And all manner of thing shall be well” – the applause of God’s creation

Just received from Amazon the beautifully produced translation of Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love. The type font, the page layout, the paper quality, and the overall production makes it a treat to read and handle. The translation by Julia Holloway is somewhere between medieval and modern in the range of vocabulary and sentence structure. It reads smoothly, and with a care for the cadences and stylistic oddities of one of the finest writers in early vernacular English. It's a sign of high quality translation when a text you know well, reads with freshness and an absence of deliberate novelty, the translator content to let the voice of the text be heard without literary amplification and sound effects. I've read the Penguin translation by Clifton Wolters, and the Paulist Press one by James Walsh, and they still have their place for Julian enthusiasts – the Walsh one remains the definitive modern version.

But this lovely edition (now in protective plastic cover courtesy of a friendly member of UWS library staff) will accompany me through Lent – because Julian is my chosen read this year. Time to enjoy a classic statement of theology that is both radical and orthodox, that was the fruit of twenty years of contemplative prayer, and that speaks with profound relevance to a world that needs as never before, to hear the love of God redemptively defying all that makes for diminishment, futility and waste:

"And thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably, "I may make all things well, I can make all things well, and I will make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and you shall see your self that all manner of thing shall be well."

Julian, more than any other theologian except Traherne, celebrates the wise, good love of God by seeing beyond the immediate and transient to a time when all of creation will applaud the Creator.

For now, I decided to write a Fibonacci in honour of Julian the theologian of the love of God.

Fibonacci on Julian Of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Look!

Love!

Behold!

Crucified!

Divine Love Revealed!

All manner of thing shall be well.

I saw a little thing the size of a hazelnut!

It represents all that is made, and it exists and ever shall, because God loves it!

Would you know your Lord's meaning in this? Know it well, Love was his meaning. Hold yourself therein, and you shall understand and know more of the same.

…………………………

17 February 2010
Exalted theology for humanity diminished by routine consumer liturgies

Now here's one way of starting a new day. Forget the to do lists, the diary commitments, the ordinary routines that kick in as soon as eyes are open and brain in gear. Instead think of your life as that of a human being glorified by the life of God in Christ, caught up into the eternal beauty and purpose of that Goodness without remainder that is God, generously and creatively radiating light and life in the outward movements of renewing Love.

Just for some minutes, ignore the background hum of a culture that says you are what you do, and you are what you earn, and you are what you consume, and you are whatever the culture gives you permission to be. Instead read a chapter of Kathryn Tanner's new book, Christ the Key.

Oh, I know. It isn't exactly the first alternative thought that enters the mind at 5.50 a.m. But it is what I did, as I browsed this new book, started reading, kept going, and began thinking the kind of thoughts I've just written. This is serious theology in the service of Christians longing for an alternative vision of God that starts and ends with God revealed in Christ, rather than being reduced to the needs-meeting God so celebrated by Christian consumers. The life God intends and offers for a world of creatures, including humans like ourselves, is not only imaged in Jesus, but is divine gift conferred by the power of the Spirit, opening the human being to the life of God, through the Word made flesh, crucified and risen.

This kind of theology is not your usual thought for the day. More thought for the rest of your life. Here's a couple of paragraphs of what this kind of theology reads like – it isn't easy to read. The best theology isn't easy; it's task is not to indulge us, but to open us up to that which transforms us.

"The humanity of Jesus has that perfect attachment or orientation to the Word in virtue of his being one with the Word, nothing apart from it; and we gain the capability of something like that through our connection to him. By the power of the holy Spirit, the first person of the trinity sends the second person into the world so as to be incarnate in human flesh, one with the humanity of Jesus. That same power of the Spirit comes to us through the glorified humanity of Christ in order to attach us to him, make us one with him, in all the intensity of faith, hope and love.

In virtue of such close attachment to the divine image, humans would be the images of God, not just in leading borrowed lives, but by living off God, so to speak, by drawing their very life, that is, from the divine image to which they cling, in something like the way an unborn baby lives off the life of its mother, living in, with, and through her very life. Or – to use the more common biblical imagery perhaps – they would exist as images by being like branches living only off the alien sap on the vine to which they have been grafted. They would be images in the way otherwise empty mirrors enjoy brightness only by receiving from outside themselves the light of another."

(Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key, Cambridge: CUP, 2010), 14-15.

Now having read something like that, our to do lists, diary and daily routines are put in their proper place, and life recovers some kind of proportion, eh? Like mirrors of God in Christ, we enjoy brightness by receiving the light of another. Oh you Beauty!

16 February 2010
Winter to Spring, Royal Deeside and a Wedding

Been up the North East for the weekend. I was conducting a wedding on Sunday afternoon but we spent Saturday afternoon revisiting familiar places along Deeside and Donside. The countryside has been bruised and flattened by the long freeze and deep snow, but it still lifted the heart to look at dark green forest, mountains on the skyline, and on Saturday the kind of blue sky with a late winter sun which touches that deep place where longing waits to break and heal the heart. There's a beauty in the slow movement of winter to spring that combines elegy with hope, that reminds us how sensitive we are to being old, or young, and how much it matters that we have those days when horizons matter, because they compel vision outwards.

And during our weekend meanderings we saw an osprey carrying a large trout out of the Banchory trout fishing loch (the photo is from here); there were long skeins of geese honking their way north, chevrons of fellow travellers staying in position to make the journey easier for themselves and their neighbours; driving home on Sunday night a stoat still wearing its ermine coat decided to play chicken on the Aucterarder bypass – it lived to boast about it.

The wedding was – well what else? A Valentine Day wedding, two young people telling all the important people in their lives about their commitment to each other for the rest of their lives. They too had been touched in that deep place where longing waits to break and heal the heart. Sharing the day with a family I first met 26 years ago – to the day as it turns out. And the groom was the first of many child and family dedications I conducted in the ministry that started in Aberdeen in 1984. Much has happened since in their lives and mine, and the coming together in prayer, promise and praise was just one more of these miracles of pastoral friendship that make being a pastor more profitable than a banker's bonus! Would I exchange such days for a six figure sum? The question is ludicrous because the answer to me is obvious. Lest there be any doubt. No.

15 February 2010
Random poems, and a founder of Random Acts of Kindness

Came across the poem below while looking for something else. Didn't recognise the poet so went looking and found she has written a book with the first line as a title.

Markova is a psychotherapist in Vermont, and is far better known there than here. She is a significant influence in the Random Acts of Kindness movement, which is enough for me to be interested. If you want to know more you her website is here.

The poem itself is a beautiful statement of determined vitality, a description of risk-taking in order to be frutiful, an attempt at transforming wistfulness into lived purpose.

I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.

Fully Alive – Dawna Markova

14 February 2010