Blog

Libraries as Supermarkets for the Imagination

Thinking about my earlier life
recently – triggered by reading someone else's memoirs – I realised that I could
remember the great freedom of mind and expansiveness of spirit that mobile,
local and public libraries brought into an otherwise routine and limited life. Routine
and limited for various obvious reasons – we lived in the country at a time
when working folk couldn’t afford cars, TV was OK but not the pervasive and
persuasive time waster it is now, being in the country there weren’t many
options for after school activity. Well, anyway, I’ve always been a reader –
from Corn Flake packets to Reader’s Digest, newspapers, and at every stage and phase of life, books.

From primary 5 ( I was 9 or 10) I
remember the large leather suitcase with LIBRARY stamped on it, which was
brought round the classes on a trolley each Friday afternoon for us to choose a
book and return the one borrowed last week. That's where I first read Kidnapped,
The Invisible Man and Children of the New Forest. Then there was the local
library at East
Kilbride
in the
early 60's when it was a new new town, and the library a new glass sided shiny
building. That's where I developed a never lost interest in biography, stories
that were real because the people were real, and in stories about animals, and
in which animals are the narrators – so Watership
Downdidn’t require the mental re-adjustment others felt they had to make.

Then there were the Carluke and Lanark Public Libraries, which supported my reprehensible
Western phase. I must have read dozens of not very politically correct
stories of stereo-typed goodies and baddies – that was before I graduated to
Alistair Maclean and Desmond Bagley adventures, Evelyn Anthony espionage, a
long phase of Douglas Reeman (naval war), Hammond Innes and even a few of Neville
Shute.

But in those libraries I also began
to read history, which along with biography I think accounts for my lifelong
interest in the history of ideas and the people who have them! My current love
for history, who we were before we became who we are, came into being against the best efforts of the gentlest most
boring teacher I ever had to immunise all pupils against ever catching any long term infection or enthusaism for history. Her nickname was Texas, on account of her slow drawl, in which she
enunciated word for word and with sing-song, lilting pathos, her handwritten
notes from a blue jotter, concerning the various demeanours and misdemeanours
of the key players in the Scottish Reformation and the various fates they met.
At 13 years old, I couldn’t have cared less about the young, innocently foolish,
(or even culpably stupid) Mary Queen of Scots, though I was a bit more
sympathetic to the verbally violent theological hard man John Knox.

It took me several years, a conversion
experience and a life-changing call to ministry to get me inside a history book again with
serious intent. Having left school with nil points as far as qualifications
were concerned, and sure God was calling me to be a minister I had to get some
Highers. One of them was History, another English and a third French. The first two have remained lifelong enthusiasms. French I can still read well enough but have all but lost spoken French. More later………

19 August 2008
When email is easier than conversation

From AOL News on the work practices of desk workers:

A survey of over 1,200 office staff found that
most admitted that better communications made them lazy because it was
easier to email someone than meet face to face.

The study, by employment law firm Peninsula,
showed that seven out of 10 workers described themselves as unfit
because they sat at their desks all day.

Managing director Peter Done said: "Modern
technology has made people lazy. It has even got to the point where
employees prefer to send each other emails to someone sitting in the
same room, just so they don't have to engage in a spoken conversation."

"This over reliance on technology is taking away the social side of people's jobs and leaving workers too lazy to bother with exercise."

I had a conversation the other day about a moratorium on the word "community" unless it is used with some sense of what is meant by it. So. Amongst the things I mean by it are two principles implied in the titles of two books. These six words describe a basic philosophy I've long subscribed to and tried to live – "respect for persons," and "persons in relation". If community is the working out of human relationships then the interchange of human beings is integral, essential and defining, and that interchange presupposes respect and relationship between persons.

So it matters that I see a face, hear a voice, be present to and with the other person, share at least in the broad outlines of a life story, care and be interested in who someone is and what other than work goes on in their lives. The email exchange is a highly efficient and useful tool for some purposes; sure, a conversation can be tiring, less informationally focused and time consuming. But a conversation isn't a tool – it isn't only a means of communication – it is an opportunity for human relationships to be kept open, for understanding to have a chance, for coming to know those with whom we work, however tangentially. Conversation maintains those bridges that enable us to travel freely into each other's world, at least far enough to know and understand those who live there.

The workplace community is sometimes called a "team", and "team-building" has become an important priority in a shared workplace – it's hard to see how emails do it better than conversation. Respect for persons, and persons in relation, are phrases which provide a minimal sub-structure for workplace practice. As a Christian, I follow One whose way of encountering people was the expression of the love of God. The conversations of Jesus are told with great delicacy and sharp observation by the Evangelists. And while I find the 'What would Jesus Do' question is often clarifying, it can be frustrating when the situation is anachronistic. Would Jesus send an email or go speak to the person along the corridor? Would the Word who became flesh, reduce the Word to texting? I've a feeling Jesus would have preferred human faces to digital screens, and an embodied voice instead of electronic cyphers.

Now to send an email suggesting a meeting to talk over the matter…..? That uses the tool but doesn't reduce the person we contact to mere recipient of the information WE want to pass on. It sets up a meeting – of persons, faces and minds.

18 August 2008
Disappointing Excellence

We are having the best GB Olympic performance ever. The tally of medals is 11 gold and a couple of handfuls of silver and bronze. And yet time and again in the commentating and interviews the word disappointed and disappointing have been used. Either an athlete didn't make it to the final, or they did but didn't get a medal, or they got the medal but not the gold, ONLY a silver. Now I can understand some athletes being disappointed – it's natural and human to be disappointed when our highest hopes and expectations collide with the reality of personal limitations and other competitor's abilities. What I find it hard to tolerate is commentators and pundits using such a word for people who have worked so hard, whose dedication and personal investment in their event is huge.

I'm not disappointed in any of our competitors all of whom will have done their best, whether or not they feel they did themselves justice. Many of them have recorded personal bests and lifetime bests – for goodness sake what more can be asked. I can feel for and with the women's fours rowing team having a third silver in three consecutive Olympics, and their disappointment is very understandbale. But I hope none of us couch spectators have the small-mindedness to be so disappointed their silver wasn't gold that we underestimate the achievement behind that silver – likewise the men's eights.

Excellence is about a person performing to their potential – that may be good enough to win, but if it isn't it's good enough. Disappointing excellence is one of the sillier oxymorons.

OK. Got that clear. I'm looking forward to the rest of the games and am sure I won't be disappointed. If I keep using my exercise bike will I get thighs like Chris Hoy? Probably not, in which case I'll be….disappointed!

17 August 2008
God as the Mystery of the World, and the long climb to theology

When I go to Glasgow University
Library I usually ignore the lifts and take the stairs. Theology is on floor
10. I think of it as a sancta scala, a stairway to wholeness if not holiness,
at one and the same time aerobic exercise and a defiance of that creeping
laziness that thinks saved time and energy is a greater virtue than healthy
slowness. Those who know me know I need to learn healthy slowness!

I joined the University of Glasgow Library in 1974 when I graduated, paying £50 for a
lifetime membership. That is one of the greatest gifts and biggest bargains in
my life. Mum and Dad paid half of it, and I paid half with a prize what I
winned by having wrote the goodest essay (but not for good grammar!). Over the
years I've borrowed, browsed and buried myself among the stacks. Amongst the
various places I go to feel nearer to God, or at least to put myself within
range of God's presence and voice, is the familiar library, a place of learning, quiet and inner humbling.

The University of Glasgow, New
College Edinburgh, University of Aberdeen, St Deiniol's in Hawarden, are all
places where I've spent hours, days, in one or two cases weeks, in the company
of a great cloud of witnesses. But Glasgow's theology floor is the highest and hardest
to get to by stairs. There’s something symbolic about the hard climb and the
sense of exertion and effort before walking into Floor 10 with its hundreds of
feet of shelved theology and philosophy. Reading Eberhard Jungel’s The Mystery of God in the World is the
intellectual equivalent of climbing to Floor 10 to do your theology! Exertion and
effort are required but you hope it’ll be worth it. This is a book that has
dared me to read it – and having dared, my instinct for recognising a hard book
is again confirmed.

Now time was when I would finish
any book I started. A matter of pride and conscientious resistance to
cherry-picking, body swerving, free-wheeling – in other words I was refusing to
take the lift, preferring to persevere with the stairs. But more recently,
whether because of experience, wisdom or the sense that life isn’t forever and
there’s too much to read that’s good, I’ve become more impatient with those
books that don’t quite do it any more. A book like Jungel’s Mystery of God could easily be dismissed
as unnecessarily hard going, and defensible reasons given for laying it aside.
But I’m thinking of it in terms of Floor 10. The hard work of taking the stairs
eventually brings you to the place where theology and philosophy are given
their place, and where learning can begin. And the by product of the long
climb, if it’s done regularly, is an improved cardiovascular system, or in
reading terms, theological fitness and stamina.

Anyway, it’s only in the hard books
that you come across such observations as this. Speaking of human anxiety in
the face of life’s precariousness and human mortality:

Anxiety is not to be understood as a
deficit, but rather something positive as concern for that which exists. Man is
not less human when he perseveres in that anxiety than when he is definitely
removed from it. In a definitive way, however, man cannot remove himself from
this anxiety. Definitively he can only be
removed from it. And if man is definitively removed from his anxiety about
non-being, then God has been at work and is experienced as the one who always was at work, so that one can only
look after him and can only recognise the posteriora
dei (hinder parts of God, Ex 33.23). (Page 34)

In a passage like this, Jungel’s
own experience of anxiety and insecurity doing theology in the former Communist
East Germany, injects a charge of spiritual authenticity and faith tried in the
place where it carries its own cost. Anxiety being transmuted into concern and
caring for life, our own and others, is one of those counter-intuitive comments
that sheds an entirely different light on our own inner fears. Instead of feeling
guilty about being anxious, we cast all our anxieties on Him – but that needn’t
mean we will no longer feel anxious for others – for such anxiety may only be
the urgency and persistence of love. And a book about the theology of the Crucified One we
should expect to challenge every attempt to minimise the personal cost of loving others.

16 August 2008
The Big Issue is a big issue

Coming out of Glasgow Central Station a Big Issue vendor is singing her sales line about the new Big Issue. Not a bad voice, the lyrics not very memorable cos I can't remember them. Provoking a lot of good-natured smiles and occasional looks of perplexed sympathy, but the song is a sales pitch asking for money.

A hundred yards along Gordon Street, a woman is kneeling outside a shop, holding a polystyrene cup, eyes closed, in the disposition of meditation, asking without asking, for money.

Doorbell goes at 6.45pm and a man with glossy publicity brochures is asking about roofs, windows, conservatories and doors. This is a cold call which I try hard not to point out, while also making a brave attempt at hiding my annoyance at what is a commerical unasked for intrusion, asking for money.

An email comes from one of the good causes I once gave a donation to, with several anecdotes of people who have been helped, and several of people who can now only be helped if funds come in, so they're asking for money.

There are endless options for how we choose to use our money, and no shortage of those with various subtle and not so subtle ways of trying to influence those choices. The Big Issue is a couple of pounds, but there are lots of vendors; the polystyrene cup is only one of several to be seen on a saunter round the city centre, and I suppose any amount we give is welcome; the cold call seller parked his car outside our door as he worked the street, and it's significantly more upmarket than mine, and he wants me to spend hundreds or better thousands of pounds on the off chance I've been waiting for just him to suggest how we use the spare loot lying around; the charity generated email is one of a constant flow of conscience pricking, guilt triggering, appeals from worthy causes to which we would all always want to give.

I think money and how I use it is an uncomfortably accurate index of how seriously I try to live Jesus' words. Good intentions don't always lead to the best choices. Once you analyse whether you should give and why, are you not already rationalising a refusal? And isn't there something spiritually to the point in the comment that we regret most the good that we meant to do, and didn't? Of the four options it's no one else's business what I did or didn't give – but just to avoid misunderstandings, we declined the conservatory and assorted real estate upgrades!

15 August 2008
Pencil notes in the margin

For years I've had my own way of marking books I read. This is not vandalism or graffiti practice. It's a record of a conversation, minutes of a meeting of minds. And in many books I've read there is the index at the back – not the one the publisher or writer compiled – but the one I compiled. The more significant ones are linked to a key index.

Where there's an "S" in the margin, near it the underlined word indicates subject; an arrow ( > ) indicates something that needs more thinking about; a vertical line that stretches to a few lines is a pasage I'll read again – and again probably. A "T", along with a biblical reference links the page to whichever biblical text is written in the margin. A "?" means I've a question for the writer, but I always add question marks tentatively – always good to assume that the writer knows what they're talking about, and even if I remain unconvinced, I've thought about it.

Today reading in a couple of places, here are three pencil marked extracts. The first an important reminder of life balance. The middle one is self-explanatory and one of those unsettling examples of serendipity cos I only read this page this morning. The last an example of Balentine's astute realism and psychological honesty about what suffering can do to people's thoughts about God:

We have sought truth, and sometimes perhaps found it.
But have we had fun?
(Benjamin Jowett, amongst other things the great translator of Plato)

The books that matter are those we have wrestled with, like Jacob and the angel, those we have questioned and argued with and been persuaded by. The best way to create a proper agonsitic encounter with any text is to mark it up.
(An Open Book, Michael Dirda, Senior Editor, Washington Post Book World)

Job's call for God to remember the sad state of his life is not an appeal for God to be more present with him, for in his judgement divine presence equates with human misery. What he seeks instead is for God to be more absent.
(Sam Balentine, Job, page 134).

For the record, I use a pencil when taking minutes of a meeting with a book. Recently the reloadable BIC gives a sharp fine line – nothing if not fussy, me.

14 August 2008
Fragments of an overheard argument

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?

12 August 2008
Under the Rule of Christ – Dimensions of Baptist Spirituality

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.

11 August 2008
Because God is love – Eberhard Jungel, tough theology and poetry.

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.

10 August 2008
I heard the voice of Jesus say……..

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.

9 August 2008