Living Wittily

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  • George Herbert and the Orchestration of Scripture

    Not sure what poem Mike refers to that was cruciform. (See Mike's comment on previous post). One of David Adams' prayers is cross shaped, but it's pushing it to call it poetry, I think.

    200px-George_Herbert When it comes to shape poems, the few examples in George Herbert's The Temple are skilled artifices of poetic playfulness. The shape of the poem images its content. In the poem below, the four capitalised words distil the essentials into spiritual concentrate: –

    ALTAR -> HEART-> SACRIFICE-> ALTAR.

    One of the very best books on Herbert's poetry by Chana Bloch is called Spelling the Word, in which Bloch demonstrates Herbert's virtuosity with biblical text. The instructions for the tabernacle and the altar in the Pentateuch, the worship on the altar of the heart that is Jeremiah's new covenant, and the spiritual worship that is the living sacrifice in Romans 12 are only three of many texts which provide layers of meaning and suggestion throughout this poem. The poems are first written as records of Herbert's personal devotion, their essence drawn from his own scripture-informed contemplative conversations with God. Of course, unlike today, Herbert was able in his time to assume biblical literacy in those readers who came after him. But for those who still hear the scriptural symphonies through the Word orchestrated, this poem remains disconcertingly clever and to the point, and the product of a devotional genius. 

    The Altar



    A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
    Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
    Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
    No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
    A HEART alone
    Is such a stone,
    As nothing but
    Thy pow'r doth cut.
    Wherefore each part
    Of my hard heart
    Meets in this frame,
    To praise thy Name:
    That if I chance to hold my peace,
    These stones to praise thee may not cease.
    O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
    And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

  • Arithmetic-free generosity as the default monetary policy of the Christian community!

    A conversation the other day about churches, Christians, money – and the relations between the three of them. Well actually, since we were talking of those who confess Christ, and who seek to embody the life of Christ in their living, and through the witness of Christian community, the relation of all three to Christ. The particular issue was the way Christians often want to do things, or have things, on the cheap.

    Breadwine Now for communities of people who believe that grace is undeserved favour, and who 'have no problem' with Paul's theological extravagances in Ephesians 1, all of this puzzles me. For example – "God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing…according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us..and the riches of His glorious inheritance  among the saints…". And so on, using words like lavished, immeasurable, incalculable and climaxing in the great Evangelical cry,  "For by grace you have been saved…."

    So how does it come about that followers of Christ, themselves receivers of the most extravagant, reckless, arithmetic-free generosity, can often sound as if the spending and giving of money, the cost of celebration, the creation of beauty and the investment in human wholeness, joy and friendship, should all be subject to budget considerations, financial reality checks and the communal and personal self-interest that considers money more valuable than giving?

    Sbanner_left I'm not arguing for financial irresponsibility – but for instinctive generosity, for a recovery of the Christian default response of giving rather than saving, of sharing rather than keeping. I wonder where in the care of our churches, in the support of our ministries, in the setting of priorities for spending, in our love for God's world and the people in it, in the key decisions we all make about what to do with what we've been given, I'm wondering – where is the place of extravagance, generosity, that lavish uncalculating, joy-discovering , grace-driven, Christ-inspired gift of giving. When did Christian stewardship move from generous costly gift to prudent wise planning? Where in all our budgetary balancing, do phrases like those used by Paul feature as primary levers for the kingdom – "abundant joy and extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity…" and this rooted in the key evangelical principle "He was rich yet for our sakes became poor that we through His poverty might become rich".

    Anyway. My own heart has its own constraints, its own inner resistances. As a follower of Jesus maybe I need less stewardship and more generosity, less responsibility and more responsiveness, less prudential giving and more prioritised generosity, not saving but giving. What would happen in our lives, communities, neighbourhoods if as followers of Jesus, words like lavish, extravagant, generous, graceful, were amongst the first to be used of how as Christians we live our lives, and bear witness to the One "from whose fullness we all have recieved, grace after grace after grace …" (John 1.16)

    Here are some wise words from an unjustly obscure saint:

    There are two ways
       of bringing into communion
       the diversity of particular gifts:
          the love of sharing
          and the sharing of love.
    Thus the particular gift becomes common
       to him who has it
       and to him who has it not:
          he who has it
             communicates it by sharing,
          he who has it not
             participates by communion.

    (Baldwin of Ford, quoted in Esther De Waal, Seeking God, page 125)

  • Reduced price ethics!

    Smile3t

    Just got a customer care promotion email from a bookstore I regularly patronise – in the positive sense of the word, not the talk down sense!

    Here's the offer

    Save 40% on Ethics

    I'm intrigued by the idea that ethics can be made cheaper, that you can have reduced cost ethics, or that it would be an ethically praiseworthy thing to do to save money on your ethics.

    Aye, I know. The bookseller didn't mean it the way I'm taking it, and was only trying to find a strap line that would get attention. And obviously succeeded cos here I am, paying attention! But ethics aren't to be had cheap – acts have consequences. Just think of that first choice, that primal moral dilemma, about whether or not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! And where did that happen? Yes, in the garden of Eden!

    The email came from Eden.co.uk

    Nae kiddin!  :))  Go look here.

  • Ministry as biography

    L_transfiguration Just preached at two services over in the East Neuk 
    of Fife. Despite     warm comments, and genuine 
    appreciation,there is still, and always, the     sense 
    that words cannot "stretch to the measure of 
    eternal things". The     last phrase is P T Forsyth's. 
    Sometimes I think that other brilliant,     infuriating 
    genius, the one from Denmark, should be heeded 
    more:

    "Order the parsons to be silent on Sundays. What is there left? The essential things remain: their lives, the daily life with which the parsons preach. Would you then get the impression by watching them that it was Christianity they were preaching?"
    Soren Kierkegaard, Journals,     Ed. Alexandre Dru (New YOrk: OUP, 1938), p. 402.

    Biography as theology - and as ministry.

  • Texts Under Negotiation: Brueggemann and Exegetical Confidence

    Have you not known? Have you not heard?
    The Lord is the everlasting God,
         the Creator of the ends of the earth.
    He does not faint or grow weary;
         his understanding is unsearchable.
    he gives power to the faint,
         and strengthens the powerless. (Isaiah 40 28-29)

    51Zb6piNjqL._SL500_AA240_ I've read various commentaries on this passage, and learned much. Westermann, Childs, Seitz, Goldingay, and Brueggemann's own commentary. But just to prove that the best comment on Scripture text isn't always found in commentaries, here's Brueggemann in his book with the disconcerting title Text under Negotiation. The Bible and Postmodern Imagination. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) It is replete with theological insight expressed in pastorally alert terms, and earthed in text, church and world. My copy is split, and the loose pages make it more like a loose-leaf folder – but I don't want to buy another because this one is annotated. But it's still in print and it remains a significant and persuasive example of exegetical confidence in the capacities of biblical text to help us reconceive our world in the light of the Gospel. So here's his comment on that famous Isaiah 40 text, found on pages 35-6.

    Creation not only works for the powerful, the mighty, and the knowledgeable. It works as well for the faint, the powerless, the hopeless and the worthless. It works by giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater. It works so that strength is renewed. It is creation that precludes wearniness and faintness, and invites walking, running and flying.

    Evangelical concern may derivatively raise the issue of our terrible disorderedness that issues in unseemly anxiety and in inescapable fatigue. It is a good question to raise in a local parish; Why so driven, so insatiable, so restless? The answer, in this doxological tradition, is that our lives are driven because we are seriously at variance from God's gracious food-giving program.

    And where there is a variance and a refusal to trust:
    youth are faint and weary,
         the young are exhausted,
         and there is little liberated flying or exhilarated running. (Isaiah 40.30)

  • Violence against women, and why Christians don’t throw stones…..

    I've tried to avoid making this blog a place where I just bang on about the things I want to complain about. That way when something does seem important enough to protest, dispute, or confront, it doesn't get lost in the constant drip, drip of low grade disgruntlement.

    For the second day in a row, though, I'm both angry and feeling personally implicated by what is happening in our society. Yesterday figures for violence against women in Renfrewshire were released. Nearly 2,000 reports of violence against women were lodged last year. A specialist police task force has been set up to deal with domestic abuse in our surrounding area; you can read more about it here in the local paper. In my summer job as a student a while of years ago, I worked as an assistant social worker in Easterhouse, Glasgow. One of the first families I became involved with lived in fear of a violent partner. The consequences of this sometimes hidden and sometimes not so hidden violence were catastrophic, and the human cost in misery, fear and injury retain a long afterlife.

    Then on the news this week,  video evidence of a police officer wearing reinforced gloves and body armour backhanding a woman protester on the face, before drawing a baton and lashing out at her legs. We are told that the context, the duress of the officers, the need for independent investigation mean that such actions if described as violence or assault are to be preceded by the word "alleged". That on our streets there are again images of crowd violence, and bloodied faces, police and public, needs little corroboration – bloodied faces and broken limbs are not alleged, they are real.

    But in my mind a link was inevitably made. A specialist task force to tackle violence against women – and a woman protester the subject of violence from a specialist police officer. It's part of the bewildering fragmentation of our world into news clips, broadcast images, compromised  integrity and ethical erosion – but it signals a society where a deep malaise is settling over our capacity to recognise when the essentials of community life and life-enhancing human values are being threatened.

    Magdalene And the church? What does the church, say and do? That story that floated around in the memory of the early church, but which one way or another had to be included in the Gospels, of Jesus standing with a stone in his hand daring the men to throw it. It remains for me a definitive story about where Jesus chose to stand – somewhere between the stone thrower and the victim. Jesus understood violence – its sources in our fears and prejudices, the ways it feeds on our reductionist views of others who are different, the corrosive effects of violence on both perpetrator and victim so that unless someone absorbs its energy the vicious circle becomes cyclic, chronic, and if unchallenged, legitimated.

    Rockstonepebble The church of Jesus, then, is surely the very place where we understand the significance of violence, recoil at the gratuitously slapped face, resist the use of power to abuse the person. And understanding it, we  name it for what it is. To follow Jesus is to stand between violence and the intended victim; it is to call violence to account; it is to remember that Jesus who urged the turning of the other cheek rather than retaliation, was himself slapped about by gauntlet armoured hands. But that stone, hefted in his hand and offered to men bent on violence, is one of the church's key symbols of justice and compassion. Maybe alongside our other sacramental objects, bread, the chalice, the baptistry, the basin and the towel, we also need to find a large, hefty, bone-breaking flesh-bruising stone – and lay it on the table alongside these other objects of service and vulnerable compassion; that stone, itself a sacramental reminder of our call to patient unyielding protest and spiritual resistance of those actions aimed to diminish humanity, wound the body and subdue the conscience and spirit by violence. And beside them the reminder, stones are not for throwing, they are for not throwing

  • It’s what comes out of a man that defiles – emails and politics.

    Prime-Minister-Gordon-Bro-001 Not what goes into a person that defiles, but what comes out of him. The observation was made by Jesus. And it applies to words as much as actions. Words are the codes we use to communicate thought and feeling, to express our inner world to the outer world that hears, sees and knows. Acts of Parliament and poems, novels and tax legislation, commercial straplines and sermons, UN resolutions and Argos catalogues, road signs and nutirition information on my box of walnut whips bought at M&S as an Easter treat – they all use words and communicate something deemed essential. But however words are used, they are open to moral scrutiny and ethical judgement. That holds whether they are any of the above, or are used in emails or conversations, texts or phone calls. And that holds especially amongst those who presume to exercise power in the name of the people who elect and hold accountable those who govern our country.

    That Gordon Brown has not apologised for the now notorious email exchanges amongst his Downing St staff is an interesting example of how seriously politicians take words – when it suits them. A letter expressing 'profound regret' is not an apology. To say 'I am sorry' would be to acknowledge some personal responsibility, and hand significant adavantage to one's political opponents. And the debate about whether such an apology would be justified will go on.

    I suppose what I find most depressing / disturbing / infuriating – is that highly paid public officials in Downing Street – in the PM's office – can even conceive of, imagine, give mental energy and intellectual living space, to emails so shocking in their content, so scurrilous in their intent, so obviously fabricated and with malice aforethought, that they haven't even been published.

    Which brings me back to words, and those words of Jesus, that what comes out of a man is what defiles – words included, emails included. That a mind capable of such culpable ethical deficit should be a close and long term advisor to the Prime Minister is a national embarrassment. Whether or not Gordon Brown apologises or merely expresses regret, such a toxic inner world as displayed in such email exchanges is, to use the older biblical term, defiling. For all of us. I don't mean to sound self-righteous – I confess I feel self-unrighteous, tainted, compromised, embarrassed. And someone needs to apologise.

  • Walter Brueggeman: For the Bible tells me,…..not so!

    715 Do we tell the Bible what it is, or does it tell us who we are? 

    Do we tell the Bible what it's for, or does it tell us what we are for?

    Is the text of Scripture ours to interpret, or is Scripture God's way of enabling us to interpret ourselves, our world and God's ways in the light of Christ?

    Here's Brueggemann in full flow:


    "My theme is the practice of imagination entrusted to us in the church, a capability of otherwise so deep in our call, so urgent in our context, so dangerous in our practice.

    This practice of imagination is textual. It arises from the intense and sustained study of this inexhaustible text that we take to be Holy Scripture. We notice regularly that this text comprises for us and offers to us what is not otherwise known. This text-driven, text-compelled imagination keeps us under the discipline of close study, for it is not free-lance fantasy. The matter of the text is urgent, precisely because a "modernist" church – liberal and conservative – has largely given up on the text as our gospel script of otherwise".
                          Walter Brueggemann, Testimony to Otherwise. The Witness of Elijah and Elisha (St Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), page 40.


    Forget about Bible reading and "the quiet time"; Bible reading is the disquiet time. And don't read Scripture text to fuel devotional feelings, but to ignite imaginative faith in the God who dares us to think and act otherwise. Scripture text is not intended to confirm for us our spiritual and theological status quo, but to call us and our communities of faith into question, to unsettle our settled convictions because God is always urging us beyond what we already know and have learned to live with.

    "In truth, if one examines the great hymns and prayers or the sacramental cadences of the church, it is abundantly clear that the characteristic rhetoric of the church, when it speaks its own 'mother tongue' is in images and metaphors and narratives and songs and oracles that make almost no concession to dominant definitions of the possible". (page 41) 

    And in all our talk about vision and strategy, emergent church, transformative practices, alternative community, this text becomes a sifting interrogative voice, that compels our attention, requires our responsive listening and subverts those "dominant definitions of the possible" that limit the range and reach of the Gospel. Amongst the most important contributions Brueggemann has made to the Christian community is this call to so live in the text of Scripture that we bear witness and give testimony to a Gospel that makes the world otherwise. How does the church embody a life that is so "otherwise" it is good news for the world? The question would be an interesting evaluative criterion for church programmes, Christian community lifestyle and individual Christians' daily discipleship.   

  • “Meanwhile……” Mary Oliver, Wild Geese and regaining perspective

    800px-Graylag_geese_(Anser_anser)_in_flight_1700 Early yesterday morning, as we went for a walk in the park, we overheard the shouted conversation between several skeins of geese heading north. There's something irresistible about that gaggled running commentary between around a hundred geese as they pass the time of day during a journey of several thousand miles. For me they speak of Spring, of life on the move, of rhythms easily lost in a life too constrained by demands, expectations and stuff that is more urgent than important.

    Geese have always given me a sense of perspective – ever since I saw, year on year, hundreds and hundreds of them stopping off on the fields around the farms in Ayrshire where I was brought up. The way they hold their head absolutely steady as their whole body pulsates with energy. The unerring instinct for the right direction. The rota system of leadership at the point of the chevron. And the sound of their honking, the excited noise of those who know they're going home, wherever that is.

    ACF1AAC Mary Oliver, (the photo must have been taken during the stereoscopic windscreen years for glasses), as so often, pulls threads of meaning from such natural happenstance and weaves them into images of how we'd like our lives to be. She makes you think about it: despite all our self-absorbed preoccupations, the world goes on. Three times in this poem, like a reprimand for our self-centred worldview, the word "meanwhile". The sentiment not unlike Jesus advice to look at the birds of the air – he probably didn't mean geese, but the point is the same. And whatever else geese do – they do make me look up and out, instead of down and in. They remind me that however important my own life seems at any given moment….meanwhile….the world goes on.

    Wild Geese
    by Mary Oliver

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
    over and over announcing your place
    in the family of things.

  • Resurrection Fibonacci (I) and “Easter Wings”.

    Resurrection Fibonacci (I)

    Christ?
    Yes!
    Risen?
    Disbelieve!
    Disbelieve for joy!
    Incredulity learns to laugh,
    unembarrassed by the scandal of resurrection.
    "And on the third day." His promise no exaggeration. Empty graveclothes, empty tomb.
    Galilee. Peter. Upper Room. Thomas. Garden. Magdalene. Emmaus. Cleopas. Places transfigured, people transformed. Risen indeed! 

    Resurr41 Luke 24.41 should always be read in the RSV or AV. "The disciples disbelieved for joy". When that which is singular, unprecedented, inconceivable, incredible, unimaginable, occurs, the normal response is disbelief. When that occurence forces the realisation, even the minute possibility, that our worst fears and worst nightmare can no longer happen, then that disbelief is energised by joy. To disbelieve for joy isn't scepticism, it is wonder giving birth to possibility, because the impossible has just been contradicted.

    To disbelieve for joy is to struggle with mixed emotions, at one and the same time to dare to hope and hope to God we are not wrong, deluded, mistaken, duped by our own desire that it be so. Joseph Fitzmyer is my first resort on Lukan exegesis; his translation of the key phrase in 24.41 is 'because they were still incredulous, overjoyed yet wondering…". Resurrection does that . It doesn't take much imagination, (though maybe even the little it takes is too much for some of us) to think our way into the minds and hearts of disoriented disciples, traumatised, grieving and scared. Yes incredulous. And yes overjoyed, overcome with that hilarity that is somewhere between joy and hysteria. Later they would begin to understand, incredulity would give way to faith, joy would become something akin to assurance, worship would become urgent in a world now changed forever, and their witness to that world an affirmation of Christ crucified and risen. And the news so good that countless others who encounter Jesus will disbelieve for joy, that God is like this Jesus, reaching out in love and mercy, meeting them where they, and we, are.

    Christ is risen!

    He is risen indeed!

    The statue is by Frederick Hart, and is called "Christ Rising". The image expresses the anguish of Christ's sacrifice and the power of resurrection. One of Hart's descriptions of his own art shows why this statue is such a powerful statement: "Art must touch our lives, our fears and cares – evoke our dreams and give hope to the darkness."

    Christ is risen!

    He is risen indeed!

    ……………………………….

    And because I can't print it the way George Herbert intended, here is a scanned image of Easter Wings, a poem I think is hauntingly beautiful – the words and the form. I've included the words below for easier reading – but the typesetting on the scan was Herbert's original intention.

    EasterWings 

    Easter-wings

    Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
    Though foolishly he lost the same,
    Decaying more and more,
    Till he became
    Most poore:
    With thee
    O let me rise
    As larks, harmoniously,
    And sing this day thy victories:
    Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

    My tender age in sorrow did beginne:
    And still with sicknesses and shame
    Thou didst so punish sinne,
    That I became
    Most thinne.
    With thee
    Let me combine
    And feel this day thy victorie:
    For, if I imp my wing on thine,
    Affliction shall advance the flight in me.