Living Wittily

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  • Fragments of an overheard argument

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    About to reverse the car in Braehead car park, but two people from the car next to ours were standing behind exchanging views in a frank and robust manner. I waited patiently as is my wont, but though both were animated and moving back and forward, they didn't move away from behind the car – which made it difficult to reverse.

    Eventually as I moved the car slowly and almost but not quite imperceptibly backwards (had it been imperceptibly they wouldn't have noticed, would they?), they eventually noticed my desire to leave the vicinitypreceded by the necessary reversing manoeuvre. My window was down and I could hear there was some disagreement about whether their car was locked. He tried the doors – they were locked. She tried the boot – it too was locked.  But who locked it – and when? Huh?

    At which point the wife of the driver delivered the almost unanswerable put-down:
    "Well, ah didnae see it!"

    Followed by the answer which I suspect came from long practice:
    "Ah well! It couldnae have happened then, eh?"

    Two thoughts occur as a comment on this mini-episode of soap opera – one human and humorous (same semantic ancestors) – the other a wee bit more, well, metaphysical.

     The husband's reply made me wonder if he was thinking of the variation on the old epistemological question – If a man expresses an opinion in a forest, and there is no woman to contradict him, is he still wrong?
    OR     to balance the gender roles and avoid stereotypes – If a woman expresses an opinion in a forest, and there is no man to contradict her, is she still wrong?

    Whoever was right or wrong, they were still going at it – 20 feet apart, when we were leaving the car-park.

    The more serious and intriguing question arises from how we know what we know – and how we can establish who is right or wrong if two people have different perceptions of things. If 'ah didnae see it' – could it have happened?

    Possibly, but how would I know? Well, if you told me and I trusted your word. Uh Huh – but what if it's an argument and it matters to both protagonists who wins said argument? Well then it depends on whether my desire to hear the truth is more important to me than loudly proving you wrong.

    There's something important lurking in this line of thought that might help to deal with those breakdowns in communication, which become breakdown in trust, and then breakdown in relationship, which slides into those irretrievable breakdowns that inflict the kinds of hurt that can't be easily sorted. Why is it, that on certain occasions not easily predicted, it becomes so important to be right, and for the other to be so demonstrably wrong they have to admit it? And such due deference feeding the ego of the one who wins a low grade argument by losing something more valuable! Such episodes tend to have a lengthy and potentially toxic half life.
    Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

  • Under the Rule of Christ – Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality

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    I've changed the image on the side panel. Had enough of my own face for a while. Not that I've gone off it or anything – just think there are other interesting things in the world.

    Amongst those other interesting things is the art work of He Qi. I've known of his work for a while, but recently I've been looking for and looking at images of Jesus that come from cultures other than my own Western, Northern, white, Eurocentric context.

    The picture here of Christ calming the storm, Peace Be Still is a magnificent portrayal of power that is cross shaped, faithful mercy that is dove-shaped, recalling Noah and the rainbow – the colours of the disciples clothes are a fragmented rainbow. I'm on the hunt for a good quality print of this from heqigallery.com. Go look at the site and enjoy the vivid, colour intoxicating images of this remarkable artist. I find this picture as spiritually enriching and textually provocative as any amount of exegesis that lacks imagination. Exegesis that has imagination, will tend to look for and appreciate the ways the biblical text has been interpreted in media other than words, and in disciplines other than biblical criticism and exegesis. This image will feature along with many others from various traditions in the course I'm teaching enxt year on Jesus Through the Centuries and Cultures.

    The book Under the Rule of Christ is due out this month from Smyth and Helwys. Edited by Paul Fiddes it contains seven essays written by Principals of the Baptist Colleges in Britain, exploring various dimensions of Baptist Spirituality. My own essay is on Baptists living under the rule of the Word – Christ and Scripture.

  • Because God is love – Eberhard Jungel, tough theology and poetry.

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     This morning I was re-reading some passages in Eberhard Jungel, God as the Mystery of the World.
    (page 223)  Jungel's volume is  widely recognised as difficult to read, brilliantly
    argued, and a serious challenge to all attempts in modernity to reduce transcendence to philosophical
    irrelevance. Below I've copied it out exactly as in the book, but put it into verse form, with only a
    couple of parentheses omitted – the italics are in the original. Rearranged like this does it
    read as theology or poetry, or a prose poem? The question is an open one – I'm genuinely
    intrigued by how it looks and reads when the long teutonic syntax is
    broken down into rhythm and different form. I also wish I could read German to hear how it sounds as Jungel wrote it. Just a wee thought
    experiment – what do you think – could it pass as a poem?

    Because God is love….we are!

    God is creator out of love
    and thus creator out of nothing.
    This creative act of God is, however,
    nothing else than God's being,
    which as such is creative being.
    In that God relates himself creatively to nothingness,
    he is the one who distinguishes himself from nothingness,
    he is the opponent of nothingness.

    God's being, as overflowing and creative being,
    is the eternal reduction of nothingness…
    Creation from nothingness
    is a struggle against nothingness
    which carries out this reduction positively.
    As such it is the realization of the divine being.

    In the work of creation,
    God's being not only acts as love
    but confirms itself to be love.
    Therefore that God is love
    is the reason that anything exists at all,
    rather than nothingness.
    Because God is love,
    we are.

  • I heard the voice of Jesus say……..

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    Ever since I read the remarkable book Dakota. A Spiritual Biography, I've had a lot of time for Kathleen Norris. I spent a lazy couple of days in the sunshine reading The Cloister Walk, beside the barn in Lyme New Hampshire. One of her later books, Amazing Grace, a kind of spiritual lexicon in the form of brief essays accompanied me through a chunk of Lent several years ago. She is a poet whose roots are in South Dakota, and whose more porpular writing today tends to be on spirituality. But given the level of dilution the term 'spirituality' has undergone, more needs to be said about Norris's writing. Indeed it might be truer to say that Norris has made writing itself a process of contemplative and communicative spirituality. I came across her name by accident today when reading an essay by Denise Levertov, another poet in my personal canon. One of Norris's poems features in the lecture, and I was so intrigued and moved by its simplicity of content and form. She simply 'collages essential words and phrases from what Jesus is recorded to have said'. She  has made a poem out of the ipsissima vox* of Jesus, the essential recognisable voice that speaks in the unmistakable cadences of the Kingdom.

    Imperatives

    Look at the birds
    Consider the lillies
    Drink ye all of it

    Ask
    Seek
    Knock
    Enter by the narrow gate

    Do not be anxious
    Judge not; do not give dogs what is holy

    Go: be it done for you
    Do not be afraid
    Maiden, arise
    Young man, I say, arise

    Stretch out your hand
    Stand up, be still
    Rise, let us be going. . .

    Love.
    Forgive.
    Remember me.

    Kathleen Norris.

    Few poems I've read have the to-the -pointness of this one – I could pray this for weeks, and hear that imperative Voice spring cleaning my motives and adjusting (yet again) my life values.

    ………………………………………………………………………………

    * ipsissima vox was a phrase used by Joachim Jeremias in his Theology of the New Testament volume 1. Sadly he didn't live to complete his project. Dated now, but this volume is still in my view one of the finest expositions of the teaching of Jesus, and one that takes with utter seriousness the inbreaking and transformative power of the Kingdom. This year I am aiming to reread several biblical books that changed the way I read the NT – this is one of them.

  • A Responsibility to Awe – Rebecca Elson

    Rebecca_elson Rebecca Elson died in 1999, at the age of 39. She was an astronomer, physicist and poet. I came across her name and her work in Robert Crawford,(ed.), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science (Oxford: OUP, 2006), a volume of essays and poems with responses from scientists. The book sets up a conversation between two apparently very different disciplines and discourses – with surprising and fruitful results. Elson's research was into dark matter, and the relationship between the quantity of dark matter, the amount of gravity it represents and therefore the rate and nature of the universe's expansion. Here is one of her poems, characterised by a remarkably reflective hopefulness, and a willingness to handle the biggest questions in two interrelated forms of human discourse and knowledge.

    Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)

    For this we go out dark nights, searching
    For the dimmest stars,
    For signs of unseen things:

    To weigh us down.
    To stop the universe
    From rushing on and on
    Into its own beyond
    Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
    Its last star going out.

    Whatever they turn out to be,
    Let there be swarms of them,
    Enough for immortality,
    Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

    Let there be enough to bring it back
    From its own edges,
    To bring us all so close we ignite
    The bright spark of resurrection.

    188218main_188092main_D-Protoplanetary-082907-full_516-387 The essay in which this was quoted, 'Astronomy and Poetry', was written by Jocelyn Bell Purnell who discovered pulsars in 1967. It is the best in the book, at least the one I enjoyed most. But all the essays are attempts to share in a process of mutual appreciation, 'the mystery and challenge of science and the sense of music and ideas in poetry'. My current interest in theology and poetry is taking me into unfamiliar terrain, pushing me out of that comfort zone we call our subject field! The poems of Rebecca Elson represent one of the rewards of taking that risk. Her poetry and extracts from her notebooks are published by Carcanet, A Responsibility to Awe.Could just as easily be the title of a book on worship, don't you think?

  • Is this the most useless use of energy

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    You know these spiral shaped mobiles that are meant to blow in the wind? Like a Chinese lantern, but made of thin polished metal – they're called wind spinners, cos they spin in the wind, ken? They require a wee breeze to make them move – mobiles, you know? And for those who like the sight of light reflected from a spinning metal spiral, one of them hooked to a bracket in the garden will double as a deterrent for most birds – except magpies, pigeons and jackdaws which are the ones most people want to deter.

    Well I was in a garden centre today, having a coffee with Graeme, and they had a stand with over a dozen of said mobiles (no not the phones, the spiral things). The stand was about 12 feet from the open air, in a sheltered spot, but the spirals were turning. Explanation. A fan – I kid you not, a fan, was hooked to the top of the stand, pointing down, to make the mobiles turn. Green question – why not move the blessed stand 12 feet and switch off the fan. The breeze – there's always a breeze – would turn the mobiles, and the fan wouldn't contribute to the problems the planet already faces. Mentioned it to an assistant, who shrugged his shoulders with disarming nonchalance, concluded I was more a nuisance than a threat, and sauntered off to see if he could help some more amenable customer.

    A fan! An artificial breeze – in Scotland?! To move a mobile??! There are other big fans all over this country whose justification for being a blot in the landscape is that they produce power – to run fans in Garden centres for the most useless purpose I've yet discovered for a fan.

    Rant over! But I ask you – a fan……to blow ornaments…..outside…..in Scotland….Hmmmmmmmmm!

  • Carol Ann Duffy – Text, message and text messaging.

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    I’m not good at texting. It’s one of the aspects of my personal development that needs additional support and encouragement. If I ask why I’m so slow at becoming a skilled texter, allowing for laziness, technophobia, latent luddite syndrome – I become aware of an unexplained but persistent ambivalence I feel bout text-message communication. It’s something to do with the medium, the hardware and the software, my feeling that the actual process gets in the way of the human spontaneity that makes communication personal; or maybe it’s the way texting mangles language to make the text message carry the maximum message with the minimum words or even letters.

    The poem below is a playfully serious piece of contemplation on the benefits and limitations of texting. It is one of the responsibilities of the poet to articulate the human and social consequences of cultural change, perhaps especially as they impinge on our uses and abuse of language – to gently warn us when we are being seduced into thinking that something that is good and useful has no down side. The poet is in love – and in the absence of the beloved the main source of relational sustenance is texting. At several key points in this poem, Duffy drops broad hints about the inadequacy of texting as a way of keeping love alive. And the last line pinpoints one of my own hesitations. It is precisely this ability of the poet to see and feel the impact of culturally celebrated technological arefacts on our humanity, and on language, one of the main arteries of cultural expression and human exchange. Which is why I think theology and poetry (theologians and poets) need to talk more to each other.
       
             Text
    I tend the mobile now
    like  an injured bird

    We text, text, text
    our significant words.

    I re-read your first,
    your second, your third,

    look for your small xx,
    feeling absurd.

    The codes we send
    arrive with a broken chord.

    I try to picture your hands,
    their image is blurred.

    Nothing my thumbs press
    will ever be heard.

    Carol Ann Duffy, from Rapture (London: Picador, 2005), page 2.

  • Thou shalt not covet what thou cans’t ill afford!

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    Strange kind of day, satisfying in an unintentional way; it just happened. I’m on holiday but as always takes a few days to get out of thinking about work mode. So we had a walk at Lochwinnoch as far as the Castle Semple Collegiate Church. Sun blazing one minute, and then cool and cloudy the next, and for most of our walk we weren’t sure if the tee shirt without the rain jacket was a mistake. But the sun shone sufficiently long on the righteous. The Collegiate Church is just over 400 years old, and if you use the link below you can read about its history, and  connection with the battle of Flodden – one of the key dates for those still trying to understand why the Scottish temperament has a persistent note of melancholy. The loss of so many significant political and influential figures, and the sheer misery of the aftermath, makes Flodden as defining for Scottish identity as Bannockburn or Culloden. http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/lochwinnoch/castlesemplechurch/index.html

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    Spent the afternoon chasing stuff for my paper on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy. Loadsa stuff, but not always easily accessed – and much of it focused on her feminist credentials, and vaudeville style, rather than the specific aspects of her work I’m interested in. Browsing further afield I discovered Glasgow University Library has the new Cambridge Edition of the English Poems of George Herbert, edited and with a rich harvest of notes from Helen Wilcox. I’ve known about this book since it was announced, and looked at it often enough on the CUP website – but £85! Never mind the credit crunch – at that kind of cost it might need a mortgage. That said – the definitive edition of one of the finest poets in the language – with scholarly notes – and made to last. No paperback announced so won’t be around for a few years I suppose.  How much should anyone pay for a new book? At what point is cost unreasonably beyond perceived benefit? A meal for four at a modest restaurant would knock you back as much as £85 – and a book lasts longer…….

    Speaking of Herbert – I discovered Vikram Seth, the Indian novelist, bought Herbert’s house in 2003, and has recently written six poems as a tribute to Herbert. He includes in his piece, some lines of Herbert carved in stone on the north wall of the rectory:


    I    f thou chance for to find
    A new house to thy mind
    And built without thy cost
    Be good to the poor
    As God gives thee store
    And then my labour’s not lost.

    Wonder if those lines are in the Cambridge definitive edition?  Typical of Herbert – a default setting of holiness dressed as compassion!

    Late evening sun, so spent an hour in the garden reading some of Classics for Pleasure. (on the sidebar) Dirda’s enthusiasm for books I’ve never heard of, or vaguely remember some obscure reference to, and some that, yes, I do know and have even read – but whichever he reviews, he’s interesting because interested, a critic who knows what critical appreciation means in practice. I’ve decided what it is I like about Dirdan: it’s the pervasive affection he has for those whose writing  he has read and enjoyed. There isn’t a sarcastic or cutting sentence in the 200 pages I’ve read so far, but much praise tempered by honest recognition of genius and its limitations.


  • Catherine and Ben Mullany: Pax Christi.

    The litany of sadness and brokenness that seems woven throughout our 24/7 news-soaked daily lives occasionally still manages to shock. Sometimes the scale of the horrors visited on our planet, and the immediacy of camera, satellite and internet, create levels of information and graphic image that we simply have to filter them down to more emotionally manageable proportions. Compassion, moral revulsion, sympathy, anger, sadness, helplessness, hope, faith, all those feelings and passions that identify us as human, humane; if allowed full expression all the time would make despair and spiritual ennui inevitable.

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     Yet. There are times, usually when tragedy becomes personal, and touches the deepest places of our vulnerability and hopefulness, when we are, again, shocked and deeply, painfully aware of  our feelings. I’m not the only one whose sense of what is important in life, what is real, valuable, to be cherished and never taken for granted, is heightened by occasions of brutal waste, when nothing can explain such senseless loss. Catherine and Ben Mullany loved each other, were on honeymoon on a Paradise island, had life and joy ahead of them, and no doubt their share of – well no one can know. I heard the news that Ben had died with a distressingly ambiguous confusion of emotions: relieved for him, profoundly saddened at the death of two people in love, angry at the needless anguish of so many people, and wondering again, yet again, what it means to live our lives in such a random, risky, world where beauty of love and lethal violence can inhabit the same few square metres of a honeymoon bedroom.

    Cross
    Over the years I have taken enough funerals to know that the bewildering loss of bereavement, the disorientation and chronic ache of what seems a forever inconsolable absence, are part of the inhernent cost of love, passionate, long-faithful, life-shaping and self-surrendering – love. But when death comes from an act of callous violence, unlooked for, undeserved, inexplicable – then a further layer of despair-inducing misery falls on those left to cope with the aftermath of such loss. I pray tonight for those who now have to care for two bereaved families – three weeks ago celebrating a wedding. I pray for those two families, and wonder how any words, gestures or decisions can make any of this better, easier, less hellish But it may be that with the gifts of faithful presence, wise restraint of well-meaning words too quickly said, and tears which share both the baffled silence and raging anger, God will bring the touch of divine mercy through human compassion. As often now, when words don’t work, I hold my holding cross and think with compassion in the presence of Christ crucified and risen, and believe that even in such God-forsaken anguish, these two families will find strength, the beginnings of comfort, and in time some healing.

    Lord have mercy
    Christ have mercy
    Lord have mercy

  • The amazing grace of biblical scholars!

    “Amazing”! Amazing how often the word is amazingly overused. Overstatement is one of the most insiduous and pervasive linguistic diseases afflicting contemporary discourse. It’s amazing we put up with it.  If most things are amazing, then jaw-dropping, eye-brow raising genuine astonishment becomes a redundant experience, and wonder is also out of a job.So when referring to human achievement, I try to use the word “amazing” to refer to those things which can be truly praised to the point of admitting I don’t know how they did it, but in humble admiration I stand, (I use the word advisedly), amazed!

    In which case I think Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on the Gospel of Mark, published in 1952 is an amazing work of biblical scholarship and human endeavour.

    Consider.

    It was in process during and beyond the Second War. Taylor was a family man and an active Methodist Churchman. Travel to libraries was limited, the scale of the commentary was towards being a comprehensive summary of previous scholarship with Taylor’s own independent judgement woven through. He was a practitioner of text, form, source and historical criticism, and by the time he wrote his commentary, a scholar immersed in study of NT christology and atonement, evident throughout his exegesis of the Markan passion story. And all this was done before PC’s allowed cut and paste, painless re-drafting, footnote and bibliographic software, file back-up – and before the internet gave access to the bibliosphere and that republic of information communication called cyberspace.

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     And there it stands. An amazing monument to meticulous, persistent, faithful, disciplined labour; described as a no-stone-left-unturned commentary. Part of the MacMillan series, those detailed examinations of text, syntax, Greco-Roman context, classical parallels, verbal studies – a thorough literary dissection aimed at all round textual explanation. The volume is a hefty repository of learning, set out in double columns of smallish print, few concessions to those untrained in the biblical languages, and here and there, in partial explanation of this labour of love, Taylor’s own faith appropriation of the text.

    I remember R E O White telling a story (whether apocryphal anecdote or true memory I never confirmed) of Vincent Taylor and ten tons of topsoil. Asked how he had managed to keep going at the commentary he recalled the delivery of ten tons of topsoil to his front drive at the manse. Over the summer he moved it round to the back of the house to rebuild the garden, shovel by shovel, barrowload by barrowload, till it was moved. The commentary was tackled in the same faithful incremental way.

    Study of Mark’s Gospel has moved beyond Taylor’s work, and the concerns of contemporary scholarship are very different. Numerous and various forms of NT criticism have come and gone, pushing study of Mark’s Gospel in excitingly different directions.  But few commentaries today are written out of a lifetime’s textual cultivation of one allotment in the large acreage of biblical studies. Shovel by shovel, sentence by sentence, over the years, Taylor worked the text of Mark with the thorough patience of the gardener who knows the time it takes to build a garden, work the tilth of the soil, sow seeds and wait for worthwhile growth and eventual  fruit. For that reason, now and again, I open Vincent Taylor’s Commentary on Mark, read him on some passage or other, and thank God for that unsung apostolic succession of  those who have given their lives to scholarly study of the biblical text. They are God’s carefully chosen gifts to us.