Living Wittily

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  • The Road Home – immigration, identity and the gift of welcome

    Road_home
    One of the less obvious ways of sensing what is going on around us is to ask what kinds of stories people are telling, and what kinds of novels people are writing. Cultural shifts can be gradual and unnoticed, like tectonic plates moving without collision; or they can be sudden and disruptive if the plates collide or suddenly shift. Rose Tremain's novel, The Road Home, won the the recent awards for the Orange Prize. It's a story about Lev, an Eastern European migrant worker who comes to Britain, his struggle to survive as a stranger and foreigner in a world now harshly defined by economic inequities, and the consequent draining of hope and energy from those who didn't start off with undeserved advantages.

    One of the judges in the Orange panel made a comment that might indicate one of those tectonic cultural changes – and whether it is gradual and unnoticed, or latently destabilising remains uncertain, and may depend upon our capacity as a country to welcome the stranger. Referring to the 120 submissions for the prize he observed that the key themes were, "immigration and identity and, alongside that, loss and bereavement.
    And these themes are connected. In an age of globalisation and
    migration these are the questions that we grapple with." What Tremain has done is provide a compassionate and humane window into the experience of those who come from one country to another to work for a living, and to work for a better life for them and their families. It isn't so much homelessness as economically impelled exile; and that exile involves cultural displacement, emotional loneliness, relational deprivation from those friendships and family ties that sustain and replenish identity. Involuntary economic exile can drain away hopefulness, and leave no sense of life's purpose beyond the desperate search for survival and the small freedoms that some money might bring to those entrapped in a relentlessly uncompromising global market.

    Tremain's book is an essential corrective, a gently prophetic invitation to readers to respond with human sympathy and understanding to those who have to leave home in order to earn what is needed to live – both for themeselves and for those they themselves love, and leave at home. Tabloid harangues about cheap labour, job stealing, Britishness and a whole lot of other strident resentful excuses for exclusion are at best annoyingly selfish, at worst uninformed rants about the virtues of hating. A novelist who writes imaginatively and tellingly into the experience of those who come as strangers to our country, is one whose role as instructor in social ethics and humane citizenship, gives us a cultural gift that deserves its own kind of prize. Voices like hers, and demonstrations of bridge-building through narrative shaped by imaginative empathy, give hope for those of us listening for signs of our own culture's capacity for hospitality, welcome, friendship, and some signs that we are coming to recognise it is in our own interests as human beings to 'look humanely forth in human life'.

  • Jonah 2: Grudging Obedience to a Generous God

    St.JonahJonah cannot find it in his heart to give Nineveh even a million to one chance. So because he believes in God, and because of
    what he believes about the abounding love and mercy of God, he runs away.

    Obedience is more than doing what God
    asks – it is being at peace with who God is. God is scandalously generous but
    we can be scandalously grudging. God doesn’t do fair, he does mercy. For ourselves,
    we are glad God doesn’t give us what we deserve, but sometimes it’s hard not to
    wish other people got what they deserve. In Jonah, God is the sender of well aimed storms, and fish the
    size of submarines; the God of nations and empires, the God of cities and their
    urban problems, of withered gourds and herds of cattle – and He is essentially and intentionally merciful and
    compassionate to his creation. So how dare any of us reduce God to informal conversation
    partner, or confine God to our own ideas of what a Christian God should be, as
    if God’s own reality might seem a bit theologically unsound to us! When God calls us to live up to who
    God is in Christ – our first thought confronted with such scandalous truth may well be flight – but the second will be
    worship – of the God who is above and beyond all our limited hopes for this
    world.

    There is in Jewish writing and spirituality a wonderful
    confidence in laughter as conduit of learning. If you get the joke, you get the insight,
    you understand, you get it.  This whole
    book is about Jonah having to be pushed and shoved towards Nineveh, and then
    pushed and shoved towards the truth of who God is, and when he says he’d rather
    die than see Nineveh live he has finally to face the ultimate test of obedience
    – will he allow God to be God? Slow to anger and abounding in love.

    And maybe, like Jonah, we so want
    to have a comfortable, predictable and theologically safe God. C S Lewis unforgettably said of Aslan, 'He is not not safe, but he is good'. In Jonah God's goodness is the counterpoint to the
    spirit of exclusion, the grudging heart, the narrow-minded faith. So all of us Jonah's can stop thinking of God as our divine resource centre, a kind of holy
    transcendent megastore of blessings accessible only to a privileged clientele. God
    does not belong to us – we belong to God. And theology is not so much our thinking about
    God, but a perilous, precarious way of coming to know something of what God
    thinks of us, and this our problematic world filled to overflowing with those we call 'other'.  What is revealed in Jonah, and comes to its apotheosis in Christ, is that God's worldview rests on a nature that is  … slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

  • Jonah, Nineveh and an unfair God in an unfair world

     Preaching today on a text that was the first in a series of five on Jonah. Others will do the later ones – my passage was Jonah 1.1-3. Now Jonah is one of the most purposely subversive theological documents in the entire Bible – it is also one of the most artfully crafted protest stories, couched in narrative laced with irony, and delivering one of the most persuasive correctives in all of literature. So not easy to preach meaningfully on the first three verses – the opening scene of a film is hard, even misleading, to interpret without the following plot. Still. I did enjoy rereading and reconsidering this story for our time.  In fact that's the line my sermon took – today's Jonah's and today's Nineveh.  Here's the first part of my thinking:

    You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life
    experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And
    you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a
    painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah
    hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a
    brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant,
    conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today is hard to imagine –
    but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose
    suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to
    the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of
    terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we
    call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism
    and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in the destructive blue light of violence.

     Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves;
    those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think
    that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city
    would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell

    Nineveh


    they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap
    you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the
    enemy. So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on
    the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an
    eloquent herald of doom?

    Chapter 1 Verse 3 only makes sense when you come to ch. 4 verse 2. Jonah isn’t
    disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God –
    he believes too much, he knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a
    liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to
    do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that

    Nineveh


    will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God
    won’t be merciful – it's      an absolute
    certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

    And that isn’t
    fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger –
    That would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and
    tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows
    there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord", – it's the effectual fervent prayer of a righteously indignant man. Jonah won’t take that
    million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will,
    learn a new theology of God – he will learn how to apply that theology to the
    deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn
    about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater
    than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll
    learn – but as this story begins it touches on some of the most important
    things we will ever need to know about ourselves, about God, about those
    different others who share this planet with us

    Of which more later.


  • In praise of thin books

    Well . Been away to Manchester on a staff retreat which was a mixture of important discussions we needed time and space for, meeting with colleagues at Northern Baptist College, (including a shared meal at one of the local restaurants on Curry Mile), and time for shared conversation and friendship. In the intervening couple of days some of you have upheld the virtues of the thin book. Thansk for all the suggestions, and maybe worth offerinf some responses.

    Trevor, since the Bible is a book of books you could probably choose any one of them as a thin book. Printed as a Penguin paberback I doubt if matthew's Gospel or isaiah would go much beyond 60 pages. So it isn't that the Bible doesn't count as a thin book – it counts as 66 of them.

    Kate – not sure where I said suggested thin books need to be theological – so in case I gave that impression, it wasn't intended. Amongst the non theological nominations for my thin book shelf would be Saint Exupery's Little Prince, Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, and Dag Hammarskjold's Markings (which if it is theological, isn't defined by its theology).

    Gavin – Dissident Discipleship has 245 pages, which makes it a rather thick, thin book. But Augsburger's earlier books are nearly all within the 160 page limit. But thanks for pointing out a book that doesn't reduce discipleship to a ten quick steps programme, but affirms discipleship as a following after Jesus which is characterised by life practices which bear witness to who Jesus is.

    The Manse Cat is a veritable thin book enthusiast, and it was good to have amongst others, The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I once witnessed this wee book lift the spirit and strengthen the hopefulness of a wonderful Christian lady at the time pushing 80. I still have a letter from her in which she quotes Brother Lawrence and Evelyn Underhill with the surprised gratitude of someone who had just had their medication changed and it was doing wonders. And Nuttall's slim biography of Richard Baxter is like all that Nuttal wrote – discretely erudite, written in restrained and elegant prose, and quietly taking its place alongside weightier works as the one that portrats baxter with affection and authority.

    The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass gave me indigestion after a Christmas dinner years ago, when I read the entry on the bearded man shouting in church with the riposte, 'he shaved others, himself he could not shave'.

    Bonhoeffer's Life Together is as Graeme says, one of those books which is thin only in the sense of its pagination. I've found that it's a book people either love or hate – its demanding, uncompromising, exposure of spiritual psychology and human dynamics as they are worked out in a close-knit, intensely focused community seldom make for comfortable reading. Yet like many others I've read it several times – each time wincing at the accuracy of his observations, at times resentful of such astringent exhortation, and having to own the painful truth that few church fellowships would be prepared to take this thin book as a year's experiment to test the too easy assumption that if all the world were Christians all problems would be solved!

    John Colwell's The Rhythm of Doctrine is both a very good brief systematic theology based on the Church Year, and, I hope, an outline of what could become an original and valuable series of larger books expanding on the theological approach John has opened up – and I hope he does them! Few books claiming to be systematic theologies manage to be both brief and sufficiently rigorous – along with this one, Nicholas Lash, Believing Three ways in One God and Kathryn Tanner's Jesus Humanity and the Trinity, being amongst the more obvious. 

    Bible-31
    Right. I'm off to read one of the thinnest books in the Bible. I'm preaching on Jonah tomorrow. I know the story well, and the way it destabilises safe theologies and possessive spiritualities. In less than four modest chapters this story turns worlds upside down, changes worldviews, forces a revision of how its readers think of God, and ends with one of the most wonderfully funny lines in the whole Bible. In fact, going back to Trevor, and his search for a thin Bible, raises the question of thin books in the Bible. Ruth is a masterpiece in the same tradition of revising theologies built on unexamined assumptions about God. Lamentations expresses the darkness of the darkest hours – or decades, yet with an adamantine determination not to let God go. Philemon isn't a book – it's a letter, but I have a commentary on its 24 verses that is 550 pages long – and the incongruity of such a hefty commentary for such a brief occasional letter, is only felt if we haven't recognised the mustard seeds of Kingdom revolution implied in all the courtesies and gentle nudges woven throughout. A thin book, thick with possibility, eh?

  • The definition of a good book – from a wise, learned man

    One of the hardest working students in my time at College, had come later in life after working amongst other things in merchant shipping. His enthusiasm was for ministry, his vocation to serve Christ in the church, and if that meant doing academic work, and developing different intellectual muscles so be it. I happen to believe that intellectual ability, intelligence, learning isn't only about academically tested standards and intellectual testing.  Life is a highly efficient educator, work of whatever kind – manual, mental, skilled craft, administrative – they all require the learning of new skills and developing established skills, interpreting situations before or while applying knowledge, negotiating a way between the demands of work and people and our own resources of ability time and energy. To successfully do that year on year makes for a degree of learning every bit as impressive as any Degree obtained from learning.

    So when such a student as mentioned above comes to College, they don't come to start learning – they come to begin learning differently, and they do so with considerable wisdom, knowledge and know how already in the bank. So when it came to meeting with our denominational Board of Ministry, our student was asked if he had enjoyed the academic work. His answer 'No'. 'But it's been good for me'.
    When then asked for one particular thing he had learned that was important he replied,'The definition of a good book'.
    Pressed further what that might be, his reply lives on because of the laughter the truthfulness of his reply generated: The definition of a good book? Here's the reply, delivered in a broad West of Scotland accent and with considerable conviction: 'A thin one'.

    I've thought often about that answer – and the wisdom and honesty of a man for whom reading isn't the be all and end all of learning. I never thought it was – I've worked in a brickwork setting bricks, ploughed fields with tractor and multi-blade plough, done the best part of an apprenticepship as an electrical engineer, shared in the management of a small market garden. And I've known many learned people whose learning didn't come from hours spent reading, and for whom reading was a necessary precondition only for learning what they needed to know, in order to know how to do what they wanted to do. The connection between knowing and doing was central to who they were, how they lived their lives, and just as important, was a key component of the accumulated wisdom and learning that comes from a life well lived

    41JMJN6WVQL._SL160_AA115_
    A good book is a thin one. It doesn't try to intimidate you with its learned bulk; it won't take chunks of your life to plough through assiduously assembled arguments, nor spend zillions of words telling you what is interesting to the writer rather than what is important for you the reader; it will get to the point, say the essentials with minimum fuss, and because it is a thin book, will say it well in order to make the most persuasive case in the space available. And if you are lucky and blessed, it will change how you think, how you look at life, and make you thankful for thin books.  Preaching for 50 minutes takes less time to prepare than preaching for 10 minutes. Somewhere in 50 minutes there will be things worth hearing, but what a lot of other stuff you have to live through to get there. But in ten minutes, to say what is worth saying, and worth others hearing, is a bigger ask. And if it is pulled off, it saves folk a lot of time and tedium.

    Likewise books. Now I've read my share of thick books – big, bulky brieze blocks of Barthian dimensions. But I've also read thin ones – under 200, even under 150 pages, and could argue that what I learned from them could never have been as persuasively, effectively, life changingly accessed in a book two, three or even four times the size. So I'm going to do a series of posts soon in praise of thinner books, as a tribute to a man who once told us something wise about learning, and showed us he had used his time well in College. A definition of a good book – a thin one.

    I'm hoping to have a few guest posts from those of you who wish to write a piece in praise of a thin book – no more than 160 pages – the odd choice of maximum pages is because one of the books I want to write about is 156 pages. Post a comment with your suggestion if you have an offer, and meantime I'm asking one or two to think about doing one.

  • Blogging milestones.

    DSCN0068
    Statistics aren't always misleading. Sometimes they simply state facts.
    So.
    I've been blogging now for exactly 500 days.
    During that time I have written 479 posts.
    Goodness knows how many words.
    Reckon that makes me a blogging addict, or an incurable writer,
    or a conscientious contributor,
    or a vocationally driven literary exhibitionist whose love of words is now confirmed as a lifelong dependency,or someone who needs to get out more (true), but not wearing that hat (oh go on, says Margaret).

    I've enjoyed being part of that invisible community of folk who drop past, sometimes comment, or email. So long as interesting things happen in the world, as long as theological study remains both intellectual fun and context for prayer, as long as there's stuff to laugh, weep, shout about or celebrate, I'm likely to find time to blog.

  • The unholy trinity of ‘Money, Football Dominance, and the Cosmic Scale Ego’.

    Don't know how many regulars to this blog have any interest in football. But I think most probably have considerable interest in issues of justice, human flourishing, use and abuse of power, and the dangers of globalised capitalism and consumerism when they are made the absolute standard by which human activity is judged. So from a weekend of action and news – some reflections.

    Queen of the South, a wee team from Dumfries, played in the Scottish Cup Final against one of the two the wealthiest clubs in Scotland. The final score of 3-2 to Rangers points to a close game, and the sheer romance of a rural town virtually emptied as 17,000+ went to support the local team. David and Goliath it wasn't – cos the big guy won this time. What was recognisable was the sport, the human experience of competing, trying, and knowing that though there can only be one winning team – played the right way for the right reasons, everyone comes away with more than they took.

    Hull City played Bristol City for the final place in the Premier League. The winning team would find its finances boosted by around £60 million. So Dean Windass, 39 year old striker with the build of a slightly out of condition rugby player, hit one of the best timed volleys of his career, and netted the club £60 million. No pressure then. With that kind of money, how many of the current squad who worked to get the team into the Premiership, will be there after the start of next season, when that kind of money is around to buy some security and success. How far should money count in a sport, in the life of a sports player?

    Which brings us to Chelsea, whose owner is one of the richest men in the world, who spends millions the way the rest of us spend 10p pieces, and who has injected hundreds of millions into the Club. That explains the quite astonishing arrogance of their Chairman Bruce Buck speaking after Chelsea sacked Avram Grant:

    We have had a great season," said Buck. "In the
    four competitions we were in, we were runners up in three of them. But
    we have very high expectations at Chelsea and a couple of second place
    finishes is just not good enough for us."

    He added: "Although we never would have thought
    in September when Jose Mourinho left that we would be able to make it
    into a Champions League Final – as we did, and that is fantastic –
    Chelsea is here to win trophies so, although it was an excellent
    season, we are still disappointed."

    1424417666-soccer-barclays-premier-league-chelsea-v-tottenham-hotspur-stamford-bridge
    Now I'm not naive enough to think that a huge, lucrative, ego factory like top flight professional football should by some miracle show the slightest display of such human virtues as altruism, due deference to the excellence of others, fairness, or even at a push evidence of actually enjoying the game itself. But there are levels of irrational expectations behind that statement that border on religious fundamentalism rooted in worship of a God named ' Money, Dominance and the Corporate Cosmic Ego'. (Buck is pointing to said deity in this photograph – note the open mouthed worshipper on the left). The ruthless disposal of a failed manager, after 8 months having inherited a club in crisis, and on a definition that counts three runner's up places in four competitions (one of which was lost by the captain of the team slipping as he took a penalty that would otherwise have one the biggest of them all) as not good enough, is an act that betrays a truly scary worldview. Some of the most ruthless military leaders in human history would struggle to compete with such expectations after 8 months in charge. Alexander the Great took a bit longer……

    Ufn.buck
    All of which means what? Football is a major global industry, increasingly used as a shop window for the world's most powerful global capitalist interests, and now the sport itself has become the means and not the end. Left me wondering if my deep moral repulsion at such power seeking and financial muscle flexing in sport is only one of scale. The two Scottish teams in the final need money, and money and status are at the centre of professional sporting motivation, so they play the same game. But equally I'm quite sure players on £200,000 a week!!! is a moral issue of another order. And the sacking of a manager in such cirucmstances as Avram Grant, explained with the liturgical solemnity of a High Priest spokesman of ' Money, Dominance and the Corporate Cosmic Ego', demonstrates with brutal clarity, that when money speaks, some people hear it as the word of god (small captials intentional). They also live under the quite irrational belief in the divine right to win.

    Much to ponder as a once football player, a lifelong football fan, and a follower of a different God, who speaks a different discourse, whose goals are very different, whose criteria for excellence are not centred on universal domination, and whose view of human beings is, apparently, not as ruthlessly exacting as those held by Bruce Buck. But then the God I refer to never finishes in penultimate place – indeed hear the Word of God, (capitals intentional this time): – the last shall be first and the first shall be last – no place then for the penultimate or the ultimate then. Winning isn't everything, thank goodness.

  • Theological education, writing, and an ethic of words.

    Who_photo_stephanie
    Here is Stephanie Paulsell on 'Writing as a Spiritual Discipline', one of a number of very fine essays in The Scope of Our Art. The Vocation of the Theological Teacher L. Gregory Jones & Stephanie Paulsell (Eds.), (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 17-31.

    It matters what words we choose, what voice we speak in, what tone we take. It matters both for the quality of our own thought, and for the quality of our invitation to our readers. The intellectual and aesthetic choices we make when we write are also moral, spiritual choices that can hold open a door for another to enter, or pull that door shut; that can sharpen our thinking or allow it to recline on a comfortable bed of jargon; that can form us in generosity and humility or in condescension and disdain. (page 24)

    One of the courses I teach involves introducing students to writing as a moral and spiritual practice of slowed down thinking, that is intellectually generous and curious, while also providng a framework for trying out ideas, developing mental agility, and learning to love and value words. To preach, to lead others in prayer, to speak into situations of human experience where what is said can be transformative, creative, supportive, redemptive, communicative of love or hope or peace; and also to know when words won't work and wordless presence is the gift we must offer – these require facility with words, but also a practised ethic of choosing our words with care – care for those who will read them, hear them, be touched and affected by them.

    Writing this blog is one way of practising the moral and spiritual choices that are part of the vocation of those whose calling involves the use of so many words – may the words of my mouth, pen, keyboard, and the meditations of my heart, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord.

  • marking, grading and handling other’s work with care.

    That time of the year when all the work has to be marked, graded, collated, data accurately recorded, scripts sent to Externals, paperwork generated for a years coursework. Important to remember that these exam scripts and projects, Journals and essays, represent hours and hours of work, hard pushed effort to meet looming deadlines, so no shortage of anxiety and hopefulness. Such work and costly labour, so much read and written, revised and submitted -  All of which prompts the following Haiku (Typepad's new software does daft things with indents, font size and stuff – I'll practice)

    Advice for Anxious Students
    Marking and grading-
    wood or straw, gold or silver?
    Do good works- and hope.

    Ideal Essays 1
    Write a good essay-
    well wrought words capture ideas
    in structured syntax.

    Ideal Essays 2
    Clear intro, conclude,
    make sense in the middle, plus
    Bibliography

    Motto for Markers
    Judge coursework with care –

    assume honest long labour,

    and assess intent.

    Beatitude for Students
    Blessed are those who
    read the question carefully
    and answer it well.

    Beatitude for Markers
    Blessed are those who
    make allowance for effort –
    but not for short change.

  • Birmingham, Women Ministers and the liberty of Christ

    Just been to Birmingham for a meeting with the Fellowship of British Baptists which met at the International Mission College of BMS World Mission. Baptist leaders from BUGB and Welsh and Scottish Unions meet each year to share ideas, stories and discuss together important aspects of strategy and development within our felloship of churches. It isn't an easy time to be a mainline denomination and there are fairly constant and demanding pressures of finance, cultural change, expectations both valid and unrealistic, and throughout it all a sense of urgency about how best to bear witness faithfully in our following after Christ.

    Our visit coincided with Women in Ministry Day and I caught up very briefly with several friends including Carol, Ruth, Clare and Catriona – I met them in that order and had far too little time to talk about their ministries and how life was in the churches where they serve. But it did my heart no end of good to be amongst so many gifted and significant people whose ministries are expressed in creative faithfulness. I hope their time together was a time of mutual encouragement, shared expereince, renewed faith, replenished enthusiasm, and anything else that could in the generosity of God be given for their blessing and for the church's edicfication. The experience of women serving within a still male dominated leadership in our churches remains a pressing issue of justice, stewardship and fellowship, requiring biblical, theological and pastoral debate about the nature of the Gospel, the witness of a Gospel people, and the meaning of the liberty we have in Christ, and the liberty of Christ – to call to ministry those whom he calls. I've heard arguments for and against women in ministry – even to the point of stating what Christ can and cannot do as if the call of Christ has to answer to our theological scruples. At that point the issue becomes one of humility and obedience as key inner principles in any such responses, discussions and conclusions.

    Then tonight watched the Champion's League Final – which Manchester United won. There are levels of emotional expenditure in football that come as close as anything else I've witnessed to relgious fervour – whether desolation or elation. I'm doing a paper later this summer on sport in general, and football in particular, as forms of secular spirituality. Tonight's game had some of the key elements of religiously generated expereince – prayer and cursing, praise and blame, fellowship and isolation, liturgical chants, and a sense of the absolute significance, even the cosmic implications of, THE RESULT. More on this later – time for bed.