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Attempted murder in a classroom – time to pray for our schools

Today I am making time to pray for Jack Waterhouse a fourteen year old pupil. And for Peter Harvey the teacher now charged with his attempted murder. And for their respective families. Whatever explanation emerges from police enquiries about what happened in that classroom, the reality of a boy seriously head injured and a teacher remanded in cusody for attempted murder, gives cause for very serious thought.

Fourteen year old pupils are legally children; teachers have a duty of care; inside a school classroom is in theory, and ought to be in practice one of the safest social environments for children and young adults. Violence by a teacher against a pupil should be unthinkable, an option so guarded round by management processes, professional ethics and prudence, human and institutional support resources, internalised and restraining social values, and high ideals of educational vocation, that long before violence erupts there are enough fail-safe and prevention systems in place. But obviously not.

Whatever the provocation (and we are yet to hear what that might have been), but whatever the provocation, such a violent assault on a pupil and at least two others is unacceptable, and absolutely requires the intervention of the law. What charges Peter Harvey eventually faces, any sentence he receives if found guilty, and how far his act of violence will affect Jack Waterhouse, his family and the class that witnessed what happended – who knows? But it is such questions that must now inform our prayers, for healing of people indelibly wounded by this tragic happening, for justice to be seen as more than due process of law but to include the making right of whatever it was that went so badly wrong, for pupils and parents, teacher and school staff, and local community to learn from what happened, and then to allow those lessons to be the basis of real changes more widely and deeply in school culture and political goals.

Parents say the teacher snapped. Previous pupils turned up at court with letters of support and character endorsements. Earlier reports suggested the teacher had previous underlying health issues. Maybe so. Such fragments need context in a more thoroughly investigated and more carefully told story. What happened was shocking, because it shouldn't have happened – ever. But such acts have a context, each person caught up in it lives in a community, that living community has its peculiar history, values, relationships and tensions – and so the task of interpreting what happened will require more than forensic expertise.

Like fragments of text, the evidence gathered requires a disciplined hermeneutic of human behaiviour, intellectual integrity and moral imagination, and a willingness to ask the kind of questions that interrogate not only victim, perpetrator and witnesses. There are questions for the school, for the education authority, for Government – about support for staff, about resources and budgets, about teacher's experience of fear and intimidation, about pressures on schools, staff and pupils to perform to externally imposed standards, about a culture of failure and success too closely tied to statistics, performance indicators and funding issues.

Because what happened in that pressure-cooker classroom is not likely to be a one-off meteorite in the back garden,but a particularly tragic example of human beings placed under intolerable strain. Eventually the courts will decide who is "to blame". Perhaps only a more public enquiry can answer the deeper question, "Why did this happen?"

And in the meantime, two people's lives are broken, others are traumatised, a community is angry, bewildered and demanding answers. So today would be a good day for Churches to pray for our schools, their pupils and teachers, and for that great human achievement that modern educational approaches don't use much in their documentation – wisdom.

12 July 2009
Kierkegaard on thought turning toward God

Father in heaven!
Our thought is turned toward Thee; again it seeks Thee at this hour, not with the unsteady step of a lost traveller but with the sure flight of a bird homeward bound.

Grant then that our confidence in Thee be not a fugitive thought, a momentary leap, a mistaken appeasement of the heart and flesh.

Grant that our aspirations toward Thy Kingdom, our hopes for Thy glory, be not unproductive birth pangs or waterless clouds, but that from the fulness of our heart they will rise toward Thee, and that being heard they will quench our thirst like the refreshing dew and satisfy us forever like Thy heavenly manna.

P. D. LeFevre,(Ed.), Prayers of Kierkegaard, page 55

11 July 2009
Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry

Didn't say in yesterday's post – Buechner is an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a perceptive humane novelist and essayist. So quite a lot of his published work is sermons. In an age when publishers are no longer interested in the obsolete genre of the printed sermon, Buechner defies the odds. His sermons read like wisdom literature – at times gently sceptical like Ecclesiastes, or spiritual experience is shaped and Psalmed into praise, or reflected experience is distilled in Proverbs about the fear of the Lord and what makes for the good life, or again, human love is celebrated in unabashed enjoyment as in the Song of Songs. But all of them immersed in the Gospel, and opening up to those with enough faith to know they are desperate, the realities of mercy and judgement and love and forgiveness, the promise of new possibility through the call to enter the Kingdom, and a way of life shaped by cross-bearing and party going celebration.

Here's an example – an extract from a Church anniversary sermon, called "The Clown in the Belfry." :

In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. "When the steeple was added," Howard Mudgett writes in his history, "one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward Heaven."

That's the one and only thing I've been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole world on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.

If the Lord is indeed our Shepherd, then everything goes topsy turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last becomes first and the weak becomes strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end, as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.

Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 115-16.

That's why I read Buechner.

The photo above is of the Congregational Church in Henniker, New Hampshire where my friend Becky (pictured here) is minister. So far as I know she hasn't stood on her head in the belfry yet. Buechner lives in Vermont, just a wee bit up the road!

10 July 2009
Frederick Buechner on theology

"Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study humanity and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise."
(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC. (New York: harper, 1973), page 91.

Ever since Kate introduced me years ago to Frederick Buechner, he has amused and informed me, sometimes reverencing the holy, other times debunking anything even sniffing of spiritual artificiality. He can write like a country western crooner with a gift for folksy theological reflection, but more often as a serious novelist for whom God is the essential character in an as yet unresolved plot, but whose love and mercy drive the story towards completion. He is the best kind of holiday reading – because reading him is like giving your spirit a holiday.

9 July 2009
Coffee and the complicated complexities of colour coded milk

In Garden Centre Tearoom.

Ask for a latte.

Then, hoping for a skinny latte I ask if they can do one with semi-skimmed milk.

Answer from smiling but bemused sales executive : "We've only got green milk or blue milk."

Now you need to be quick, domesticated and sure of your retail facts but I got it right away and first time.

"Green", I said.

Not the blue – which is full cream.

Not the red which they didn't have – which is skimmed.

But the green – semi skimmed.

Sales executive and customer happy.

Green or blue milk. Sectarianism. Sneaks in everywhere so it does!

9 July 2009
Joachim Jeremias and the Central Message of the New Testament

Well I'm on holiday. That's when you get doing what you like. I like second-hand bookshops. So that's what we did, Graeme and I. James Dickson's out at Kilsyth, via Caulders Garden Centre with tea room. Only bought three books – two of them recently published but well reduced. One of them a wee gem from another era. A hardback first edition of Joachim Jeremias, The Central Message of the New Testament, published by SCM in 1965. What was a surprise about the book was the reverse of the dust cover. Unlike the bad and often annoying habit of contemporary publishers, who put the mutually congratulatory blurb of sympathetic peers on the back, this one has something much more interesting. A map. The SCM Map of Theology 1965, showing the university whereabouts of some of SCM's main European continental authors. Fascinating and a who's who of mid-20th century and mainly German and Swiss Protestant biblical scholars. It both dates me and pleases me that I've read something by most of them, and lots of stuff by some of them.

Joachim Jeremias himself I have admired and enjoyed reading ever since working through Volume 1 of his New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus. He never finished the second volume – and some of his main contentions are now questioned or superceded. But there is a seriousness of purpose and a reverence for the words of Jesus in Jeremias that helped to reassure a young Scottish Baptist student who had discovered that reading German biblical criticism can be like a debut attempt at white water rafting not knowing how to hold the paddle. So I bought this book in appreciation of a good man and a careful scholar. His other books, The Parables of Jesus, The Eucharistic Teaching of Jesus and Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, show the same careful learning tracing its way through ancient cultures and texts.

The last lines of Jeremias in The Central Message of the New Testament, on the Johannine Prologue (John 1.1-18), are a good example of his style and his way of doing New Testament theology from the standpoint of a faith both critical and confident:

It is in a world which knew of God's silence as a token of his inexpressible majesty that the message of the Christian church rings out: God is no longer silent – he speaks… [and] God has not always remained hidden. There is one point at which God took off the mask; once he spoke distinctly and clearly. This happened in Jesus of Nazareth; this happened above all on the cross…God is no longer silent. God has spoken. Jesus of Nazareth is the Word – he is the Word with which God has broken his silence. Page 90

8 July 2009
Hans urs Von Balthasar – why “Love Alone is Credible”.

One of Von Balthasar's greatest books is his early monograph on The Theology of Karl Barth. That these two theological opponents were also deeply respectful allies in their search for an articulation of Christian faith more adequate to the mystery and majesty of divine grace, means that to read either or both of them, is to discover theology that is deeply satisfying, if occasionally frustrating, and often congenial if now and then contentious.

Don't laugh. The other night I was reading (in the bath!) Balthasar's small paperback Love Alone is Credible, and so liked the following passage I think it deserves its place as our thought for the day:

The decisive thing is that the sinner has heard of a love that could be, and really is, there for him; he is not the one who has to bring himself into line with God; God has always already seen in him, the loveless sinner, a beloved child and has looked upon him and conferred dignity upon him in the light of this love.

no one can resolve this mystery into dry concepts and explain how it is that God no longer sees my guilt in me, but only in his beloved Son, who bears it for me; or how God sees this guilt transformed through the suffering of love and loves me because I am the one for whom his Son has suffered in love. But the way God, the lover, sees us is in fact the way we are in reality – for God, this is the absolute and irrevocable truth. This is why there can be no talk of "merely forensic" justification; the theory is valid only in the sense that, through God's creative and transformative love, we become what he takes us to be in the light of Christ.'
Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 103-4.

That phrase about God's love – that we are "always already seen" as God's beloved children, is an example of why I love reading Von Balthasar. The picture is by Blake, Christ Accepting the Office of Redeemer. As a comment on Von Balthasar's words, it has for me that utter intensity of willing surrender that makes God's love cause for adoration rather than analysis.

On a lighter note, my ecumenical credentials nevertheless remain intact – I also have a paperback copy of Barth's Evangelical Theology, which has also seen better days due to repeated re-readings in the same leisurely locus! I once had a remarkably fun conversation as a student with R E O White, then Principal of the Scottish Baptist College, and afterwards a lifelong friend. Asked if I'd read his notes on John's Gospel for class that morning, I had to be honest and confess that I had read them in the bath the night before! To which he replied – "Waste of time. I read Dickens in the bath, and have waterproof covers to do so!"

7 July 2009
Two sides of Glasgow – passion for social change and the virus of sectarianism

Been an interesting weekend. Yes I did watch the longest Wimbledon final ever, and admire both players, so was happy for Federer and sorry for Roddick, and would have felt the same if the result had been the other way round. And sat Sunday evening, from 7.30'ish p.m. to 8.30'ish p.m., in my garden, sipping tea and reading, on a warm balmy evening with no midges in sight. And this in the West of Scotland in July!

Saturday we went to the People's Palace on Glasgow Green and spent the morning revising my Scottish political history of the past couple of centuries. The banner carried by the Suffragette's in 1910; the manifesto signed by a dozen ILP activists in the 1930's; archive films of strikes, marches and protests that took place in Glasgow in the past century. These included footage of the early 1970's Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' work in, inspired by Jimmy Reid and for those of us who remember it, a still potent reminder of how organised labour can at times grow out of and express the deep social, moral and human concerns of ordinary folk, in the face of political indifference and economic decisions made with little thought to their social consequences. I am a Baptist, a paid up member of the dissenting tradition, an upholder of freedom of religious conscience and of the right to think differently from the prevailing establishment. Being Baptist also commits me to communal action and a valuing of community as a primary context for human development and spiritual formation.

Amongst the exhibits in the People's palace is the corner given over to Rangers and Celtic football clubs, the "Old Firm". To get to the Palace on Saturday morning we were held up at Glasgow Cross as the annual Orange Lodge Parade passed. Eight thousand marchers, 90 bands, and music that was martial, belligerent and religiously validated as militantly Protestant and anti Roman Catholic. The marching season, whether under the Union Flag or the Repaublican Tricolour, creates a problem for me as a Baptist. On the one hand I believe deeply in religious tolerance, the rights of people to express and support their religious convictions without intimidation. But it doesn't commit me to endorse activities which have only a tangential connection with religion, and which by their very nature are intimidatory – the words that accompany the tunes, whether the marchers are blue or green, and whether the words are sung audibly or not, are intentionally offensive, like playground taunt songs laced with menace. Sectarianism isn't a mere confrontation of religious differences; it is a social toxin distilled from bigotry, overblown historical myth, and a people blindness largely caused by the psychological need to find security by identifying a common enemy to demonise as 'the other'. And the hate virus infects both sides. (The photo is deliberately chosen for its light-hearted seriousness).

It is when such language and social attitudes surface that I am in a dilemma as a Baptist Christian. I find it impossible to make any connection between those banners, sashes and tunes with their vitriolic intent, and the Jesus encountered in the Gospels, the living Lord of the Church whose ministry is reconciliation. I wholly support the Scottish Government's initatives to tackle sectarianism, which is both a religious and social reality in the West of Scotland. And while I am committed to freedom of religious expression, I recognise that such a conviction cannot oblige me to legitimate or defend these annual hate-fests of blue and green marches through the streets of a City where in a proud history, others have marched and suffered to win those human rights, civic freedoms and social values that safeguard and undergird responsible citizenship. And where many still live in peaceful co-existence with neighbours whose differences are cause for interest and celebration and welcome, rather than suspicion and ridicule and segregation. For those interested, there's an earlier post on sectarianism over at this post.

An interesting weekend, with much to ponder, enjoy, and ponder again.

6 July 2009
God’s eternal purposive love versus secular apocalyptic scenarios – the Book of Revelation as required reading

'Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.'

'Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.'

'You explain nothing , O Poet, but thanks to you all things become explicable.'

The above are several one liners on poets and poetry that I've noted from here and there. The first one is whimsical and hints at the capacity of poetry to juxtapose the unlikeliest things, so that incongruity and ambiguity undermine logic and linear thinking. The second reminds of the partiality of our sight, the transience of our perceptions and the possibilities of seeing the unexpected. The third defends the significance of mystery as that which awakens our deeply human longing for explanation, while recognsing that part of that same humanity is recognising the significance of the inexplicable. Poetry does all these things.

These thoughts link in my mind with a book I recently ordered, Seeing Things John's Way, by David DeSilva, (Westminster John Knox, 2009). It's an examination of the Apocalypse using rhetorical theory, and exploring what John does with words and images used to rhetorical effect in the service of theology. John's goal is to help his readers / hearers to see things in a new way, (or in the words above), opening and closing doors in order to give glimpses into an alternative reality, explaining nothing but enabling all things to become explicable. For Christians under the constraints of Empire, such rhetorical deconstruction of power, and reconstruction of divine purpose, would embolden faith by recharging the imagination with visions of the majesty of Christ, and the planned future for a Creation in which God will be all in all.

It's one of the great losses to Christian discipleship that the Book of Revelation has far too often been made to say and mean what it was never intended to say and mean. While on the other hand the author's artistry as a poet and his prescience as a prophet have seldom been given the attention they deserve as great gifts of vision and imagination capable of subverting even great empires, by appeal to the One who is greater and whose Kingdom is more durable. At times of cultural crisis, we need the poet prophets to deconstruct the rhetoric of empire by exposing it to the rhetoric of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world, who sits in the midst of the throne, and who thus redefines power and majesty in ways that have eternal and cosmic consequences.

I remember as a young and innocent (ignorant?) Christian reading through the Book of Revelation and being thrilled, scared, puzzled and hooked. Since then NT scholars like Austin Farrer, G B Caird, and Richard Bauckham have educated my responses. There's a lot in this new book that should be preached today (you can see the contents on the amazon.com site) – and I don't mean the allegedly safe first three chapters. In a world awash with secular apocalytic scenarios, projected and actual, the Book of Revelation represents a triumphant canoncial contradiction of all those who say it has to be that way. And it does so by calling in question all those counsels of despair that simply assume evil and power have an unbroken monopoly in human history.

I hope De Silva's book is taken seriously by preachers, and will make a substantial contribution to the kind of preaching on Revelation that is neither other-worldly, world-hating nor world-denying. Instead, using this massive visionary text, preachers will once again call in question secular apocalyptic scenarios, by pointing to a redeemed and renewed creation, imaged in some of the most theologically potent ideas which focus on Christ as Lord of all, the Lamb slain from the foundations of the world, and the permanent overwhelming of evil by that which finally negates it. In his Apocalyse, John speaks forth the renewal, redemption, reconciliation and eternal shalom of God's Creation, and the reign of a God whose nature, revealed in Jesus Christ, is eternal purposive love, expressed as communion and endlessly creative mercy.

5 July 2009
Modest makeover in progress…..

Decided I wanted a change of design on Living Wittily. A recent photo of me at a wedding reception replaces the previous relaxed-tourist-at-the-Eden-Project, pretending he's in the jungle. To forestall rude comments I am virtually teetotal (when asked during a recent health check how many units of alcohol I drank I estimated around 12 – a year! the safe limit is 21 a week!!) – so the smile is genuine pleasure in the company and the occasion!

By the way, I do sometimes look spectacularly bad in photos – I have several which if ever I begin to take myself too seriously I just might post. Possible titles include "The Wayward Pressure Hose"; "The College Hoodie"; "The Sweaty Cost of Fitness"; "The Ridiculous Hat"; "The Cardigan Clad Scholar". The clown in the above painting is not one of mine – or me.

Also making a few changes to links on the sidebar. I'm not all that interested in accumulating long lists of links however generally useful. There are those who do that really well and if you're looking for more comprehensive lists click on Jason Goroncy and Ben Myers – enough links there to span the widest interests.

Short "First Call" lists will replace the miscellaneous list of links to other Blogs, and will include Baptists, Biblical, Theology, and Poetry and Theology. Living Wittily will continue as a forum for exploring what it means to serve God wisely, creatively and obediently; to follow after Christ gratefully and faithfully; and to live in the power and grace of the Spirit. And to do so with a voice that looks humanely forth on human life in a world that is God loved, reconciled in Christ and still creatively touched by the Holy Spirit.

What I'm trying to do is still best understood by this early post, which explained (and still explains) the motto at the head of the Blog, and what I'm trying to be about.

4 July 2009