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Dorothy L Sayers, “To view the whole world mirthfully”.

This playful and life loving poem is one of the reasons I like Dorothy Sayers. Hard headed common sense, intellectual curiosity, love of language and story and formidable Christian intelligence makes her one of those people it would have been fun to meet, even if you were a fool – whom, according to this poem, she would nevertheless have suffered gladly. The poem is about friendship, love, laughter – and the foolish wisdom that brings a sense of perspective to life. Not a bad late night prayer – compline in verse.

Lord if this night my journey end,
I thank Thee first for many a friend,
The sturdy and unquestioned piers
That run beneath my bridge of years.

And next, for all the love I gave,
To things and men this side the grave,
Wisely or not, since I can prove
There always is much good in love.

Next, for the power thou gavest me
To view the whole world mirthfully,
For laughter, paraclete of pain,
Like April suns across the rain.

Also that, being not too wise
To do things foolish in men's eyes,
I gained experience by this,
And saw life somewhat as it is.

Dorothy L Sayers, Op 1, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1916)

16 February 2009
Stony the road we trod….remembering James Weldon Johnson

The portrait is of the black activist, poet, diplomat, educator and musician, James Weldon Johnson. (d. 1938). Not so well known as MLK and other civil rights campaigners but I came across references to him recently and went chasing. In all the euphoria surrounding Obama, such great men as Johnson are too easily and conveniently forgotten.

Amongst the most interesting things I found out:

Johnson qualified for the bar but found the law boring, not least because it functioned within the way things are…and he wanted to be a catalyst for change.

He composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' a song that eventually became a national anthem for American Blacks, and with his brother composed music and lyrics for many Broadway shows.

He was a leading influence in the Harlem Renaissance, a resurgence of black cultural and artistic activity in the 1920's, and a vocal supporter of black artists struggling against white prejudice in the publishing houses.

He lived to see the first all African American orchestra formed, a symbol of collective creative energy, disciplined harmony and human co-operation that transcended socially contrived discrimination.

And not least, Johnson was a poet, whose poetry was unashamedly political because he knew the power of words to frame a different reality, and shape political vision. MLK used one of his poems in the great landmark speech 'Where do we go from here?' in 1968, 30 years after Johnson's death in a rail accident.

Men like Johnson created the context, set out the paramenters, exposed the issues, modelled the tactics, that would later coalesce and radicalise into a full civil rights movement.

The words MLK quoted are from "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days

When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place

For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way

That with tears hath been watered.

We have come treading our paths

Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the bright gleam

Of our bright star is cast.

15 February 2009
Finally Comes the Poet 2. Through (most of) the Year with Walter Brueggemann

There are theologians whose thought we try to understand; and then there are theologians who shape the way we understand.

Put another way, there are those theologians whose way of thinking about God is attractively coherent, intellectually and spiritually satisfying in a demanding way, whose vision of God and the world deserves our serious attention.

But then there are those other (but few) theologians, whose vision of God and the world is lived in such a way that they draw a deeper response of personal engagement, they demand our attention. In that sense their theology becomes transformative for us, working our deeper soil to a more fertile tilth, out of which the fruit of our own theology begins to grow and bear the fruit of the Spirit of Christ in performative and transformative Gospel practices.

Theology at its best is communal, shared conversation about God, a communion of the saints through shared insight. Theological discussion is a fellowship of minds and hearts, like informal prayer when we talk about God in God's presence, but without the rudeness of ignoring that Presence. In my current ministry which is theological education and pastoral formation, I try very hard to avoid those ways of doing theology that attract the pejorative and reductionist use of 'academic' – as if talk of God could be detached from the life we live, abstract rather than livingly engaged, an inner discipline of thought without the outer performance of faith.

If my own theological reflection has been kept rooted in Christian practice, prayer, and personal conviction, I think it's because of time spent in conversation and discussion with those theologians who work my deeper soil, who have shaped the way I think of God, and whose lived theology has impinged in transformative ways on my own attempts to follow more faithfully after Christ. It's one of the responsible joys of life to share those fruits with others in a process of theological networking through pastoral friendships, personal encounter, widening circles of conversation beyond the church.

Several theologians whose writing has worked itself deeply into my way of thinking have remained frequent and sometimes awkward conversation partners. I trust them. Not because they are always right, or above criticism themselves. But because they provide reference points for my own journey, correctives to my perspective, retardants to my prejudices – and because in them I see and hear the voice of the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. (By the way there are other kinds of theologian, who might not use or own the term, but who paint, compose music, write poetry and story, embody loving practices that humanise – and in their gift they live their faith and deepen ours. But that's another story worth the telling.)

Over the next while I'd like to work out what it is about those Christian theologians I've unwittingly turned into my own canon of Christians to attend to, and why it is they do it for me. Some told their truth, made their mark, and I moved on the better for meeting them. Others have stayed around, their voices still amongst those I listen to most carefully. And then there are new voices saying things that not everyone wants to hear, too easily drowned out by the din of hyper-marketed voices hawking Christian consumer religion. But which of these new voices now to attend to, and how to decide, and what they are saying that needs to be heard, spoken and lived, here, now?

God's voice is of the heart.

I do not therefore say,

all voices of the heart are God's,

and to discern His voice amidst the voices

is that hard task to which we each are born.

One of those long time conversation partners, a voice I've found it important and demanding to attend to, is Walter Brueggemann. I've already posted on him, (on Jan 25), touching on one of his major contributions – giving the Gospel back to the preacher and the preacher back to the Gospel. In the wiriting of Brueggemann, the Gospel comes to us, individually and as the community of Christ, as both cultural critique and invasive grace. Every Friday for the rest of this this year I'll come back to him here – a kind of Through (most of) the Year with Walter Brueggemann!

13 February 2009
The picnic, the dance and the abiding tree.

I never did Higher English at secondary school. I did it at night school in a year that introduced me to three Shakespeare plays, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and Othello; George Orwell's Essays; D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers; Wilfred Owen's War Poems; and several poems by W H Auden. What I made of Auden's poems I have only the haziest notion, except I knew what I was reading was important, in that way that when you are young you just know.

Since then I've slowly read more of his poems, gleaned from anthologies, quoted in odd places from Four Weddings and a Funeral to the current Archbishop of Canterbury, who is one of Auden's best critics and most thoughtful admirers. In his review of Volume 3 of Auden's Collected Prose, the essayist Alan Jacobs considers Auden's Horae Canonicae the high point of Auden's statements on his Christian beliefs. As a mature account of what is at the heart of his Christian faith, this sequence of poems, Horae Canonicae, demonstrates the fusion of poetic art and religious experience as feeling, thought and conviction.

In my haphazard, accidental and occasional encounters with Auden's poetry I hadn't come across this cycle as a complete sequence. So I went looking for it. By which I mean, forgive me, I Googled it. And struck spiritual gold, or oil, or whatever the equivalent metaphor is for important because valuable spiritual discovery.

A couple of years ago this cycle of poems featured on Radio 3 on Good Friday, introduced by Rowan Williams and read by the actor Tom Durham. The other night I spent an hour or two listening to the poems and the introductions by Williams, and what started as anticipated enjoyment quickly became unexpected encounter.

The combination of sympathetic and spiritually attuned commentary by Rowan Williams, clear and unaffected reading of Auden's poems by Durham, the evocative beauty and religious inquisitiveness of the poems themselves, and this in the context of a Good Friday meditation, made listening a complex process of prayer, aesthetic enjoyment, intellectual pleasure, and inward surrender to events and realities at once ineluctably tragic yet inexplicably redemptive.

Reading these poems again, you become aware of Auden's patient discontent, his by now chronic longing to understand "what happened between noon and three…", on that pivotal day when the business of Empire required yet another crucifixion. This time with hidden but eternal consequence. The poem 'Compline' ends with profound eschatological hopefulness, more than a hint of eucharistic thankfulness, and a celebration of the mutual indwelling and shared participation that is the eternal movement of Love in the celebration of a redeemed creation.

….facts
are facts,

(And I shall know
exactly what happened

Today between noon and three)

That we, too, may
come to the picnic

With nothing to
hide, join the dance

As it moves in
perichoresis,

Turns about the
abiding tree.

…………………….

Williams' commentary and Tom Durham's readings can be found here.

12 February 2009
The salt of the earth!

Monday afternoon went out the front of the University on to the High Street. The local authority local heroes were busy with shovels hurling rock salt on the pavements off the back of a big yellow lorry – five of them for a pavement. Health and safety by the shovelsfull.

Along comes a ned with his nedette on his arm, both wearing the shell suit uniform, pristine white trainers and baseball hats.

She shouts, "Heh gonnae geez a job?"

Foreman with eyecatching luminous jacket, hard hat and big shovel shouts, "Naw you couldnae dae this hen."

Nedette replies with lethal hair trigger wit, while rapidly chewing the gum, "Aye ah could. Ah used tae work in a chip shop."

At which point I have a vision of fish and chips, shovels of salt, and a possible clue to the West of Scotland epidemic of heart problems and sodium induced high blood pressure!

11 February 2009
The tests of compassion, integrity and identity

John Sargeant is one of those lucky people whose career has taken off since his retirement. Not that he had a bad career. He was one of the best BBC political correspondents, lucky enough to be right there in Paris when Margaret Thatcher suffered her own personal coup d'etat. And then more recently as guest and host on Have I Got News for You, his roving reporter role on The One Show, the comedy debunking of Strictly Come Dancing and a number of other enjoyable ways he grins his way on to our TV's.

So I enjoyed his review of the papers on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday for the following reasons:
Like the big human being he is, he took on all the detractors and self-righteous head shakers whose current target is Jade Goody. In her struggle with what is now a terminal condition she is telling and selling her story to make money to try to ensure she can make provision for her children. Those who prefer grudges and sniping, and diminishing further a vulnerable person created by the celebrity scandal culture and just as cruelly to be disposed of, were themselves shown to be diminished and hypocritical, preferring to take cheap shots rather than compassionate notice of a young woman making a hard, hard journey.

Both on the Andrew Marr show and on Any Questions on Saturday, Sargeant was quite unequivocal about the sacking of Carol Thatcher for her racist comment. Without rancour, but also without sympathy, he pointed out the importance of genuine apology, that acknowledgement, mea culpa, that says to others "Forgive me I got it wrong". Of course (and Sargeant didn't go here), there's also the insincere apology which Jeremy Clarkson mouthed immediately to avoid losing his job. His later comments show how utterly contrived and self-serving such emotionally redundant verbiage is. But it kept his job. An outcome I personally regret – unfortunately I don't know of a reliable test to confirm the integrity of Clarkson's apology, or that exposes the underlying arrogance that assumes others share his appetite for such nastiness. On any reliable integrity test, Clarkson would be gone.

Back to Sargeant, and one of the best examples of post-modern perplexity I've heard on TV. Sargeant has just done a minor bit part for the TV series Casualty. Regretting that he wasn't given a part in which he could die on Casualty (clearly an ambition equal in longing to his dancing aspirations), instead he is playing a reporter admitted to hospital with chest pains; indeed he is playing himself. His observation, on which we could do with an entire seminar on the liquid nature of identity in the capricious fluidity of our entertainment and celebrity culture, was the following: "I was paid more for pretending to be the real me, than I ever was for being me".
Go consider.

Or,

"Discuss with reference to our current confusion about reality, value and who we, or others, think we might be.

10 February 2009
Prayer, the preacher and wrestling with God

Now and again, it takes P T Forsyth to reset the preacher's heart to the default setting of grateful wonder at the mystery of the Gospel and the privilege of proclaiming it.

The secret of spiritual realism is personal judgment, personal pardon, and personal prayer – prayer as conflict and wrestling with God, not simply sunning one's self in God. There is no reality without wrestling, as without shedding of blood there is no remission…For the preacher it is only serious searching prayer, not prayer as sweet and seemly devotion at the day's dawn or close, but prayer as an ingredient of the day's work, pastoral and theological prayer, priest's prayer – it is only such prayer that can save the preacher from histrionics and sentiment, flat fluency and that familiarity with things holy which is the very Satan to so many forward apostles….. (Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, 108ff).

9 February 2009
A land flowing with porridge and cream.

Just been out walking in the fresh air – that would be the -5 degrees fresh air. Decided that today was a porridge day. Somewhere from the dim recesses of childhood memory, the advert jingle is still on my inner memory stick, "Scott's porridge beats the cold". At my aunt's funeral earlier in the week catching up with cousins we were remembering our days on the farms in Ayrshire when my dad was the dairyman. And most mornings we had cream from the milk left overnight which kind of neutralises the cholesterol lowering properties of the porridge – but there's nothing like it. A couple of years ago I posted a panegyric on porridge as health food. You can read it on the Feb 1, 2007 post over here.

Don't usually repeat posts – but that one just seems to say something essentially sensible – and daft. I like the poem too much to only ever post it once! And the Scott's Porridge packet is so cliched it should be run past the trade description and advertising standards – I've never seen someone in a white vest, wearing a kilt, in shot putt throwing stance, on the edge of a cliff, looking down on a Scottish Loch, with the sun shining! It isn't our porridge of choice anyway. The big chunky jumbo rolled oats ("gently milled to retain the nutty flavour" – aye right!), from Sainsbury's are the ones that do it for me. Whatever – I've just had some and only the good people at the church were I'm preaching soon will know if it did me any good.

8 February 2009
Evangelical disenchantment and disenchanted evangelicals.

One school of thought suggests that conversion and subsequent religious activity under the Methodist and Finneyan revivals helped empower women in such areas as public speaking, fundraising, and organisational leadership. Hempton is sceptical. The claim that "evangelical religion through its disruptive piety opened a small but expandable crack in the wall of male power and control", is a tidy theory with too many untidy loose ends.

More liberal groups like the Quakers, Universalists and Unitarians produced many of the women leaders in various abolitionist and emancipationist movements. Hempton points out that relatively few American feminist leaders came from the Evangelical stable, and most of those who did, eventually distanced themselves from it. Early conversion experience, and revivalist affiliations, for some of these women raised as many questions as they answered. Two key areas of intellectual discontent quickly emerged; biblical hermeneutics and evangelical dogma. By 1836 Sarah Grimke was arguing forcefully that any plain reading of the Bible will convince any reasonable mind informed by Christian conviction, that slavery was an abomination to the God who is 'in a peculiar manner the God of the poor and the needy, the despised and the oppressed.'

The open letter Sarah wrote was overtly critical of clergy who condoned slavery either by exegetical underpinning or by expedient silence. This and further letters begin to show a loss of confidence in the Bible as the primary arsenal of male power, and consequently her loss of confidence in any mainline denomination, for none upheld " the Scripture doctrine of the perfect equality of man and woman, which is the fundamental principle of my argument in favour of the ministry of women". (page97) The result of such a theological position was alienation from groups that upheld traditional biblical views – prominent amongst them those sponsored by Evangelicalism. In the minds of feminist activists still prepared to found their views on the Bible, abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women were key areas requiring political activism, the social persuasion of protest and debate, and a much more rigorously critical biblical hermeneutic.

"Love to God manifested by love to his creatures." That was a fundamental and sufficient theology for Sarah Grimke. It wasn't long before opposition to oppression fused with concentration on love as theologically definitive, raised serious questions over key evangelical doctrines founded on penal substitution, human sinfulness and hell. In reaction to such theology, leading Christian feminists adopted an increasingly rationalist and universalist position. Elisabeth Cady Stanton was the philosopher and intellectual engine of much mid- 19th century American feminism. Weighed down by the whole panoply of evangelical dogma, "these gloomy superstitions", these "fears of the unknown and unknowable", she found her way to light and truth by "rational ideas based on scientific facts".

There is something deeply significant, which evangelicals today need to think through with some self-reflective and self-critical candour, that these women, protesting against social and institutional oppression, believed they could trace in evangelical dogma and in evangelical biblical interpretations, ideas on which such oppressive attitudes were uncritically founded. Though 20th Century South African Apartheid or Segregation in the American south may seem extreme cases, they do show that abuses of the biblical text to warrant oppression is too well documented in history to be seriously denied. Alongside that of course, goes the honourable record of people like Wesley, Newton, Wilberforce and a host of other evangelical abolitionists whose contribution was decisive and rooted in a securely biblical theology of humanity.

Another Christian feminist, Frances Willard, moved from evangelical Methodism, to collaborative evangelistic activity with D L Moody, and then disenchantment set in. Her interests were more in social reform, particularly temperance and women's suffrage, and her theology morphed into a faith more inclusively catholic, less biblicist and more speculative even at times dabbling in esoteric spirituality. But again what inexorably drew her away from more evangelical principles, what disenchanted her, was what she saw as the inherently patriarchal and hierarchical exclusiveness of evangelical male clergy. This was coupled with a perceived anti-intellectualism and cultural suspicion pervading and constraining evangelical thought and practice seeking to be "in the world but not of the world." Each of these women, in different degrees, saw such attitudes as both informing and distorting Evangelical hermeneutics, so that patriarchy and the suppression of women's leadership and ministry, were inextricably linked to biblical authority understood in male terms, implemented to male advantage, and based on an almost total monopoly of male biblical scholarship. A closed shop of biblical knowledge, (and indeed of formal advanced education), they believed, secured male dominated control of ecclesial power

The importance of such research into the individual experiences and personal stories of those who, over two centuries, chose to make an exit from the evangelical big story is self-recommending. But after reading it I'm left with a hard to shake off depression, an inner repentance at the incapacity of many expressions of evangelicalism, historic and contemporary, to respond creatively and live adaptively with difference, able to welcome and learn from valid questions.

Failure to focus on the Gospel as the commanding invitation to follow Jesus in radical love, to join with Jesus in liberating protest, to be ministers of reconciliation through costly peacemaking, to live with open armed welcome that transcends our constructed divisions whether of gender, doctrine or view of the Bible; and instead to indulge in an eager pursuit of self-defeating and corrosive arguments over doctrine, or hard edged definitions of the Gospel whose goal is to claim exclusive possession of truth, while also disenfranchising those who dare to differ. These are amongst the failures that led to evangelical disenchantment, and therefore disenchanted evangelicals making their exit left.

And yes, there is another side to this story – but that gets told in plenty of other books, from responsible history and theological reflection all the way through to unabashed propaganda. For now, evangelicals who read this book with requisite humility, will hear important voices of protest and insider critique, that requires attention and honest self-appraisal – and the criterion of that critique in my view must be the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the extent of our faithfulness in following after Jesus.

7 February 2009
Intelligence, torture and my personal safety.

If the rule of law and national security are both in the public interest, and they are in conflict, which one do we choose to uphold?

If it is against the law to torture, but that's the only way to extract intelligence about a security threat to our country, which choice should a government make?

If violating the human rights of one person is necessary to preserve the safety of the general public, should we therefore use violence to prevent violence, break the law to keep the peace, dehumanise an individual to protect the humanity of ourselves?

If such an individual is violated and tortured, should the perpetrators be answerable to the courts? And should all evidence be made available to the court, and the person be assured that before the law they have rights that cannot be denied because undue influence is brought to bear on the court, the Government or its intelligence agencies?

I've never been injured in a terrorist bomb. No one in my family has been killed or had their body shattered by bombs or bullets. So I might not be asking these questions if I had to live with consequences that lead to shattered lives. But I can't help feeling that something near fatal to democracy, something corrosive of human rights, something that threatens the everyday safety and security of us all, something that is morallly toxic is abroad, when allegations of torture, and due legal process, can be frustrated by the prior claims of 'intelligence' and 'terrorist threat.'

In the eyes of the Romans, and various other intelligence gathering agencies of religious and political groups, Jesus of Nazareth was a terrorist threat – who was tortured and crucified. I've never yet heard a positive spin on the verse 'It is expedient that one man should die for the people.' But I'm waiting.

See The Guardian Editorial, along with the links in the piece,

5 February 2009