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Triptych: The world according to Paisley on a Friday afternoon

Walking home from University after picking up some mail and parcels. Three fragments of conversation provided, if not food for thought, then at least a glimpse into alternative worldviews; on reflection, a triptych that shows the laughable and the likeable, the acceptable and the less acceptable sides of life in a town which has the kinds of problems that have no easy answers.
The world according to Paisley……

1. Two women are having a shouted conversation across the High Street. One of them has a birthday and is lamenting her fading looks. A car slows down and stops for the traffic light, cutting off vision and speech. Provokes the non-birthday wumman who shouts "Heh pal! Can ye move yur caur. We're hivin a conversation here!"
Sensible driver didn't make eye contact……

2. Three lassies taking up the pavement three abreast, all multi-tasking – talking, chewing gum, and texting. As they passed (or at least as I stood aside to let them pass, cos they weren't for breaking formation – you could just tell), I heard the intriguing story fragment, delivered with automatic pistol speed and threat, "Aye but ma mither says she'll batter his mither if he disnae."
If he disnae what, I wondered. And how do they do that – walk, talk, chew and text in a display of skilful synchronised nonchalance?

3. Nearly home when a young guy, I guess third or fourth year from the Grammar, comes up smiles pleasantly and asks, 'Would you mind going intae that shop and getting me fags?" Had to decline, gently and courteously, and he said, "Aye nae worries, Need tae chuck it onyway".
Wish he'd asked me to do something I could have done – nice big lad just trying to work out his problems like the rest of us.

3 October 2008
Mixed metaphors as unwitting truth.

Mixed metaphors can be a very effective rhetorical device – even if it's unintentional. So when a leading Financial Strategist with one of the mega-banks that is floundering in debt of its own making, drops such a mixed metaphor with a clang measurable only on the higher decibel range, and does so on the Breakfast News on the BBC, it tends to waken me up. Asked why the failure of Banks to lend to each other was such a damaging issue she said, and I quote:

"Inter-bank lending is the grist that oils the wheels of the economy".

The phrase "grist to the mill" was first used in the English translation of Calvin's Sermons on Deuteronomie, 1583. It means "everything can be used to move toward a profit or conclusion". Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but grist doesn't oil wheels, it gets ground up by wheels, big round stone ones. And inter-bank lending, and the pass the parcel approach to trading in debt,wrapped up in words like 'securities', it is now very clear, doesn't lead to profit or good conclusions, but to the credibility and security of Banks being ground down by the very system they created. The wheels of the economy are not being oiled, their bearings are being burnt out by grist! Or so it seems to this amateur observer of this new mystery religion with dangerous junior deities called Sub Prime, Credit Crunch and Market Meltdown.

One way or another, we're going to have to face up to a world in which we can no longer afford to worship Money and its pantheon of sub-deities. It's the God who has failed – again! The old Scottish version of the Lord's Prayer, "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" could make a comeback in a postmodern world which has tended to assume that the globalised market is here to stay. It's an interesting question, the relationship between the origins and development of postmodern culture and the economic and technological assumptions that nourish that culture.

2 October 2008
The Elusive Mr Wesley

Amongst the fascinating questions surrounding John Wesley is the difficulty of honouring a remarkable Christian without devaluing him by well-meaning but unnecessary hagiography. His faults, like his virtues, were reassuringly human with the usual complications of his own mixed motives, the distortions of other people's partisan opinions and prejudices imposed on an already complex personality, and the flow of a narrative that has to weigh the changing continuities of an unusually long, energetic and mutli-faceted life.

Wesley's Journal is a case in point. Is it accurate reporting of facts or revival propaganda? Is it a field-preacher's travelogue or a vindication of his divine calling? Does it present the real Wesley, or construct a presented Wesley? Should the reader hear Wesley's voice, and if so which voice – the personal voice of religious devotion, the formal voice of a religious leader, the informative voice of an organisational strategist, the combative voice of an innovator under pressure, the self-justifying voice of a controverisal figure? Well, all of them, and at different times in his life these varying voices were more or less dominant. Compared to many religious journals, Wesley's Journal is less an account of inner spiritual states, and more a record of evangelical activism expressed in one long continuous narrative, written like (and often reading like) an audit trail of activity, achievement and strategic planning intended ultimately as a statement of life purpose pursued with persistent faithfulness and relentless attention to detail. The 7 Volumes of the Bicentennial Edition of The Journal and Diaries of John Wesley, are a marvel of scholarly detail, providing in the critical notes the kind of information needed to understand Wesley in the context of his own life experience, against the background of his times, and providing persepctives and correctives that do justice to his position as leader of a movement that changed the religious landscape of Christian Britain, America and beyond.

Richard Heitzenrater is one of the remarkable Wesleyan scholars whose work underlies the editing of the Bicentennial Edition of Wesley's Works. He was one of the supervising Editors for the Journal, and the author of one of the best resources in trying to understand John Wesley, his aptly named book, The Elusive Mr Wesley. For years now I've been a student of Wesleyan theology and spirituality – (and, as a matter of balance, a student of Jonathan Edwards 's thought and spirituality). What intrigues me about Wesley is precisely the word Heitzenrater used, "elusive". There is something comfortingly frustrating about a Christian leader who fits no neat categories, who inspires loyalty and opposition, who claimed lifelong allegiance to his Church, but shaped a dissenting movement, whose written sermons read like treatises and whose preaching while not electrifying like Whitefield's nevertheless carried a potently persuasive voice.

So wherever I go in my travels, I'm looking for Wesley's footprints. And I found a huge one at Gwennap Pit. Methodism made a deep and lasting impact on Cornwall, in the villages, amongst the tin mining communities,and in the main towns. usually liability to subsidence makes a piece of real estate a dodgy deal – but this piece of sunken ground, probably caused by settling over underground mine workings, provided what Wesley later called his amphitheatre. You can read about it here. (http://www.methodistrecorder.co.uk/cornwall.htm)

For myself, I was happy to be in a place so steeped in early Evangelical experience. It's far too easy to dismiss the importance of place, as if there was no such thing as sacred geography. What makes a place like Gwennap Pit special is the story of what happened there, its significance in the story of thousands of hearers, many of whom heard the Gospel, met God, wrestled with their own angels. Indeed that story of Jacob at Peniel, told in one of Charles Wesley's greatest hymns, is a story about an encounter with God that made the place special. Sacred geography, remembered place, where the ground is holy because God was found there, and found to be worth finding.

A couple of extracts from John Wesley's Journal show how Wesley, ever the pragmatist, saw both the practical use, and the sacred purpose, of a hole in the ground!

Sun. Sep 11, 1768 "At five I took my old stand at Gwennap, in the amphitheatre. I suppose no human voice could have commanded such an audience on plain ground; but the ground rising all round gave me such an advantage that I believe all could hear distinctly."

Sun Sep 3 1775 "At five in the evening I preached in the amphitheatre at Gwennap. I think this is the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen on this side of heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices, when they are all harmoniously joined together singing praises to God and the lamb".

Wish I'd been there, then!

2 October 2008
In the footsteps of John Wesley

Visited here yesterday – will say why later.

30 September 2008
Living Wittily is on holiday

Off to do a Wesley pilgrimage down south – tell you about it later. If Sabbatical has a verb, I'm Sabbaticalling.

23 September 2008
Libraries as Storehouses of History

Two or three weeks ago I reminisced about libraries I have loved! Recent visits to various places sparked a further chain of memories. I still remember an April evening
sitting in the Carluke library (near 40 years ago!) reading an outline of
European History to get a handle on the Benevolent Despots. The sunset
streaming through the glass sided windows, the place virtually to myself, as an
18 year old about to sit Higher History having studied at night class, there
seemed nothing more important than sorting out the policies of Maria Theresa,
Catherine the Great of Russia, and the other guy from Prussia. (The photo is from the current Carluke Library website!)

By the time I got the Highers, and
was offered a place in the Glasgow MA course, books had simply become an
essential fact of my life, and one of its indispensable nutrients. But of
course there are books, and then there are books. The first book I bought at
University was for the Moral Philosophy class – it was Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, a masterpiece of political realism
that anticipated the excesses of contemporary democratic decay such as cynicism
and truth-bending, power mongering and self-serving, and suggesting legal and
contractual restraints to channel and constrain political power. Actually, not
all that far from the allegorical connections to be discerned in Watership Down, the odd Western, and the
rise and decline of the Benevolent Despots!

During my time at Glasgow in the 1970’s, theology and philosophy were
on Floor 6 of the University Library. I still remember that first encounter
with hundreds of metres of books, set out in shelves, under subjects, every
volume findable if you could use the new technology of microfiche and translate
Dewey System into the kind of mapping code that took you to the very volume. Here
were more books than all the other libraries I’d known, all put together. I spent a whole evening handling,
browsing and reading bits of the multi-volume Encyclopaedia of Philosophy; reference books have always drawn me
like iron filings to a magnet. The idea of an encyclopaedia, a repository of
authoritative knowledge, isn’t very popular now, in the post-modern climate of
suspicion about overarching frameworks of knowledge. Did anyone else love and
wade through the Children’s Encyclopaedia of Arthur Mee?

In those first few weeks at
University I took down off the shelves books whose titles I had no way of
interpreting since I hadn’t yet encountered the currency of philosophical
discourse – metaphysics, epistemology, the categorical imperative, empiricism,
theodicy, utilitarianism, – or names like Immanuel Kant, Benedict Spinoza, Duns
Scotus, G W F Hegel. I was both ecstatic and terrified – so many books, most of
them crammed with words I hadn’t ever had need of before. Like everybody else
today, I surf the internet – but the battery hen approach to knowledge much of
the internet represents has never replaced for me its organic free range
alternative – the serendipity and random purposefulness of browsing in a
library with more books than you can ever read, but with enough time to touch,
handle and peruse, and perchance read.

Since then I’ve gradually built my
own library, housing on its shelves books that are now important clues to my
story and character. As a self-confessed, unembarrassed bibliophile, I’ve no
difficulty admitting my entire grown up life (and much of my childhood) has
presupposed a book budget – by which I mean money to purchase, time to read,
space to shelve and freedom to choose. From those childhood days when my
sainted Aunt Edith sent a ten bob note (10/- or 50p in today’s money) for
birthday with clear instructions to do what I liked with it – which meant books
– to now, books have simply been an existential presupposition, an assumed
necessity for human flourishing, that without which I could live, but not
without near fatal diminishment of soul.

Amongst those I have to thank for
endless and now uncountable hours of joy, work, learning, questioning and at
times finding, are those librarians of school, university and public libraries, whose
choices and suggestions opened up entire worlds of knowing and wanting to know.

22 September 2008
Money…moths, rust, thieves….and toxic debt.

I suppose it's hard for a market driven culture hyper-sentistive to the health and long term prospects of wealth creation, wealth retention and thus wealth possession, to come to terms with the reality that no one is immune to the transience of wealth, the permutations of market forces and the capricious fears and greeds of investors.So earlier this week, when financial landmarks were flattened, centuries old institutions liquidated overnight, and vast electronic share monitors were glowing red across the board in all the major global share indices, the cause was identified and named by the US spokesman, responsible for announcing the remedy.

The cause, we are told, was toxic debt.

Now I know what he means, I think. Debt that has become a poison in the system, liabilities that have no matching assets, commitments so overstretched they could never be met, and this not with the odd maverick money-grabbing risktaker, but as a pervasive practice that has become systemic. Toxic debt is a phrase that sounds like an unfortunate set of circumstantial events no one could have predicted, something that has happened to otherwise repsonsible people. But that isn't the truth,is it? Does unregulated greed, irresponsible decision-making, blind faith in money's power to create wealth regardless of human caprice – are these irrelevant?

Here's an odd, scary, perplexing and morally outrageous story. Warren Buffett, the richest man in the world, has seen his personal wealth tumble from $50 billion to $12 billion in the past six months. A personal loss of $38 billion – or around £20 billion.How can someone lose $38 billion and still have more money than it cost to buy HBOS? So is there something called toxic wealth?

You could be forgiven, in the context of the frantic, fevered, frenetic money markets of our globalised greed, for thinking that the Sermon on the Mount has little to say. "Consider the lilies" seems a tad inadequate as advice to a culture busy manufacturing and breathing its own life-diminishing, and life-threatening toxins. But I still want to place alongside the nonsense, (I mean "non-sense" as irrational foolishness), of making money into a golden calf, the words of the clearest thinking and most forward looking wealth analyst ever to comment on the human lust for accumulation –

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven……"

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these…"

"You cannot serve God and wealth".

Unless of course you make wealth into your God – which brings its own judgement, of toxic debt and toxic wealth.

21 September 2008
Eternal Light, Requiem by Howard Goodall

Just been listening to Classic FM and the preview of this Requiem by Howard Goodall. I've ordered it from Amazon on the basis of that one track. Why? Two immediate reasons. First I liked it. Second, I was intrigued by the composer's description of what he was seeking to do. Here's an extract.

The writing of a Requiem is a special challenge for any composer. The
great Requiems of the past by composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Fauré
and Duruflé interpret the sacred Requiem text literally, and represent
a prayer for the salvation of the departed soul(s). Howard Goodall's
Requiem, by contrast, is intended to provide solace to the grieving.
The composer said, "For me, a modern Requiem is one that acknowledges
the terrible, unbearable loss and emptiness that accompanies the death
of loved ones, a loss that is not easily ameliorated with platitudes
about the joy awaiting us in the afterlife. … Musical expression can
I hope provide some outlet, some reflection, some transportation, even
some comfort….This was to be a Requiem for the living, a Requiem
focussing on interrupted lives."

Once I've listened to it I'll let you know whether impulse buying is to be recommended as a way of discovering what new music you like by listening randomly to Classic FM!

20 September 2008
George Herbert: Secretary of Praise

Amongst my treasured literary possessions are several carefully sought out, frequently handled, and regularly read editions of The Temple, George Herbert's matchless contribution to Anglican Spirituality. For my 40th birthday I was given a leather bound early Victorian copy by my friend Kate. It was given as a prize for Arithmetic, to Master W L Riddell, in 1864, while a pupil at Mr Crerar's School,13 Forth Street, Edinburgh. It was published by the Edinburgh firm of James NicholI, around the time they started issuing those famous sets of the works of Standard Puritan Divines such as Thomas Goodwin and Richard Sibbes. The book has copper engraved borders within which each poem is placed like a framed word picture – which much of Herberts verses are. In bookseller's parlance, the condition is "used, no marking, previous owner's bookplate (the prize label), finely bound in tooled and gilt leather with signs of some use." Perfect – and it couldn't be in safer, more appreciative hands!

Nearer my 50th Birthday I uncovered another Victorian edition, maroon cloth, elaborate gilt celtic tooling, and used enough in the past 150 years to make me feel that reading it is an act of recognition, that someone else, numerous someone elses, have enjoyed the look and feel, the smell and heft, as well as the contents of a favourite book. This edition has copper engraved prints(an example here) as well as page borders, good illustrations of how the Victorians imagined seventeenth century English life, and now enjoyed by a 21st century bibliophile. One example of Victorian devotional book illustrative art shows the choir singing 'Let all the world, in every corner sing, My God, and King'. I've never visited Bemerton where Herbert was country parson, but later this year, as part of several sabbatical pilgrimages, I'm going looking for Herbert's church of St Andrew's, Bemerton. and Leighton Bromwold. Salisbury Cathedral which I've never seen is nearby and will be enjoyed as an enduring expression of devotion to God through archtecture on the grand scale. But the little church Herbert restored bears witness to a different scale and quality of devotion – in my imagination I see Herbert being as careful about the details and care for restrained beauty of expression in the restoration of God's house as he was about the selection and arrangements of words and images in The Temple.

I remember on a warm June evening, singing that Herbert psalm, 'Let all the world, in every corner sing', in the magnificent setting of Coats Memorial Church, with the choir (who didn't look anything like in the picture above) and a small gathered congregation. I've never forgotten the coincidence of mellow late evening sunlight, the soft authority of the great organ, the harmony of choir and congregation, and the aesthetic beauty of a building that is itself an historical accident. It was built in 1894, when the finest material and the most skilful craftsmen were affordable, when Victorian confidence was still high enough to build without thought to cost, and before the turn of the century move away from large scale gothic towards more functional, modest places of worship. But that night, the glow of late sun-soaked oak, the clear handmade glass, the sanctified spaciousness outwards and upwards from the chancel, allowing light to be shaped and toned by warm sandstone and carved wood, all of which was part of the architect's intention – it all makes for a memory still sharp with the sense of smell, touch and sound. Reading George Herbert's hymn still has the effect of collapsing time into vivid memory of sight and sound.

19 September 2008
Chestnuts, hazelnuts and brown theology.

Aesculus hippocastanum, the horse chestnut season is here again. I remember as a wee boy in Ayrshire going looking for chestnuts, with all the excitement and anticipation of a child looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or the half crown lying neglected on the pavement would do. I've always felt when, under autumn trees I've picked up a newly dropped chestnut, that I've found something absolutely worth having. Every year I pocket a few; but they don't keep well. Their real beauty is in their newness, and in their promise of renewal – after all a chestnut is a seed. The colour something between red and brown but with contours that make the surface look like a polished spherical ordinance survey map traced on the grain of burnished wood; the shell smooth, glowing warm though cold to the touch; and the play of light on the naturally varnished shell, like a brown gem not so much reflecting the sun as absorbing it, and bearing witness to promised life.

And yes, I know it was a hazelnut that did it for Julian of Norwich, but every year chestnuts do it for me. So with apologies to Lady Julian:

And in this he shewed a little thing, the size of a chestnut,
lying in the palm of my hand, and it seemed to me round as a
ball. I looked thereon with the eye of my understanding and thought,
"What may this be?" And it was answered generally thus: "It is all
that is made." I marvelled how it might last, for me thought it might
suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so all things have being by the love of God.

As soon as it's light I'm off for my slow trot around the park – to gather a few sacraments of created smallness which witness to the being all things hath by the love of God. As I hold them and gaze on them, I will be engaging in brown theology – seeing in their burnished glow, the prodigal promise of life instilled in a world that was only ever intended as gift to be enjoyed. 'All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made…'.

Such sacraments of created smallness rebuke the destructiveness and waste of our way of living by their sheer incongruence. Give it time and that 1 inch nut becomes the 70 foot tree; for so all things have their being by the love of God.

18 September 2008