Living Wittily

Blog

  • Dixie Chicks, freedom of speech, and an ethic of defiance

    Mary Chapin Carpenter’s most recent CD, The Calling, is one of the CD’s I’m listening to while doing the exercise bike thing. Sorry – but I’m a fair weather runner. Never been the slightest bit interested in padding through puddles, exhibiting pink legs turning blotchy red in the cold, and pretending that at my age I’m a serious contender for anything athletically ambitious. Just want to keep fit, burn stress, and enjoy the occasional guilt free chunk of chocolate!

    129_jpg Anyway, this CD is one of the better reflective collections to come out of the more progressive strains of country music I’ve listened to. Her tribute to the Dixie Chicks, ‘On with the song’, is a scathing comment on power hungry administrations, ridicule of those dehumanising dismissals of people who are ‘other’, and dripping scorn on those who use power to silence dissent and pretend that has something to do with the very democracy they go to war to defend.

    This song throbs with the kind of anger that simply refuses to grant the power brokers the last word. There’s high moral value in some forms of defiance, especially when they are a refusal to risk collaboration by silence, by resignation or by fear.

    This isn’t for the ones who blindly follow
    Jingoistic bumper stickers telling you
    To love it or leave it, and you’d better love Jesus
    And get out of the way of the red, white and blue

    This isn’t for the ones who buy their six packs
    At the 7-Eleven where the clerk makes change
    Whose accent makes clear he sure ain’t from here
    They call him a camel jockey instead of his name

    Chorus:
    No this is for the ones who stand their ground
    When the lines in the sand get deeper
    When the whole world seems to be upside down
    And the shots being taken get cheaper

    This isn’t for the ones who would gladly swallow
    Everything their leader would have them know
    Bowing and kissing, while the truth goes missing
    Bring it on he crows, putting on his big show

    This isn’t for the man who can’t count the bodies
    Can’t comfort the families, can’t say when he’s wrong
    Claiming I’m the decider, like some sort of messiah
    While another day passes and a hundred souls gone

    Chorus

    This is for the ones that I see above me
    Three little stars in a great big sky
    Light for the world and hope for the weary
    They try

    This isn’t for the ones with their radio signal
    Calling for bonfires and boycotts they rave
    Exhorting their listeners to spit on the sinners
    While counting the bucks of advertising they’ll save

    This isn’t for you and you know who you are
    So do what you want ‘cuz I know that you can
    But I’ve got to be true to myself and to you
    So on with the song, I don’t give a damn

    There’s now a book, When Art and Celebrity Collide. Telling the Dixie Chicks to Shut up and Sing, which examines the dominant male patriot mentality which seeks to silence artistic conscience and coerce them into compliance by seeking to ruin them economically. Chapin Carpenter’s song of support for  the ‘three little stars in a great big sky’, who dared to publicly disagree with Presidential policy, is itself an important negation of political bullying in the name of freedom.

    I don’t pretend to know the best ways to tackle some of the threats to global peace we all now face – but I am sure that security isn’t secured by silencing conscience and rubbishing truth.

    A couple of other tracks on this album are worth some further thought – I’ll maybe get to them in some later post.

  • The reward of tireless searching

    Here are some words from Elizabeth Johnson’s new book, Quest for the Living God. Mapping frontiers in the Theology of God, (New York: Continuum, 2007).

    The profound incomprehensibility of God coupled with the hunger of the human heart in changing historical cultures actually requires that there be an ongoing history of the quest for the living God that can never be concluded. Historically new attempts at articulation are to be expected and even welcomed. An era without such frontiers begins to turn dry, dusty and static.

    Christianity today is living through a vibrant new chapter of this quest. People are discovering God again not in the sense of deducing abstract notions but in the sense of encountering divine presence and absence in their everyday experience of struggle and hope, both ordinary and extraordinary. New ideas about God have emerged for example from the effort to wrestle with the darkness of the Holocaust; from the struggle of poor and persecuted people for social justice; from women’s striving  for equal human dignity; from Christianity’s  encounter with goodness and truth in the world’s religious traditions; and from the efforts of biophilic people to protect, restore and nurture the ecological life of planet earth. No era is without divine presence, but this blossoming of insight appears to be a strong grace for our time. (p.13-14)

    41cnryuvrml__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 A couple of things strike me about Johnson’s view of things. First, she takes seriously the importance of seeking as itself a form of love for God, and a recognition that the living God remains a profound mystery of love eternal who goes on seeking the response of creation. Second, she sees such theological developments as post Holocaust Theology, feminist theology, liberation theology and many other contextual and historically  specific developments in Christian theology as offering important insights from the theological and spiritual experience of those who have had to live with life circumstances very different from my own. From such articulations of the presence and absence of God I have a lot to learn about God, about human life, and about my own limited capacity for God as only one, male, middle-aged, Western, un-poor, white human being, whose own experience of God is equally valid, but mustn’t be made the norm by which to judge the truth of God in Christ that others have come to discover in their very different lives.

    I haven’t lived under a military dictatorship, or in a country near bankrupt by corrupt centralised power – liberation theologians have. I am white, so have to listen humbly to the insights and affirmations of African and Asian theologies. As a male I need women to explore and express and explain their experience of God, and to listen to the hurt caused by an entire tradition that finds biblical warrant for marginalising female experience, excluding women from places where decisions are made and influence nurtured. Nor can I as a person whose own religious convictions make me who I am, ignore the presence in my neighbourhood, our country and our world, of others whose religious commitments are as genuinely held, felt, believed and practised, and with whom I have to live on this planet. Speaking of the planet, I am also one of those responsible for the sickness of our planet, the depletion of those important processes and resources that make this planet livable for human beings and for the rest of God’s creation.

    So rather than hide behind my own certainties and limited insights, I have to grow up, and be mature enough in Christ to listen to all those other voices who are also singing God’s praise, praying out of the hurts and joys of their very different lives, and calling in question some of my own cherished certainties with truths that I can’t simply dismiss – lest in doing so I dismiss the presence, and the seeking voice, of the living God. Being aware of the pluralist nature of Christian theology does not make me a pluralist – but it should make me a humble listener and a more humble talker when it comes to our experience of God.

    Johnson’s previous theological writing is provocative, and I have serious reservations about some of her proposals. But her voice is an important corrective, and a much more generous response to the diversity and vitality of global Christian thought, than those voices which want all God’s children not only to sing from the same hymn sheet, but to read from the same theology books!

  • Sport, cheating and the problem of forgiveness

    I’ve been bothered for some time about the return of Dwain Chambers to the arena of International Athletics following a two year ban for taking performance enhancing drugs. This wasn’t a contested allegation, but a confirmed offence that has many consequences.

    1. First it gave him an adavantage over other athletes in what is supposed to be a test of human ability, albeit natural ability trained, honed, tuned like an F1 car.
    2. Second, by cheating others, the essential substructure of all fair competition was compromised, robbing others of prizes that they rightfully won, but which were awarded to the person who finished before them by knowingly enhancing his natural capacity.
    3. Third, a sporting event that is supposed to celebrate the skill, endurance, strength, speed and instinctive response, and which in the 100 metres event counts speeds in digital fractions of a second, is tarnished to the point where every broken record or championship win is also tarnished till the winner is demonstrated as ‘clean’.
    4. Fourth, drug testing of athletes uses advanced technology to detect offences, which means the deterrent is the fear and consequence of being found out. But if a drug is developed that is not detectable, how can any performance ever be completely clear of that corrosive skepticism which suspects all incredible performances of being tjust that, not believable.

    Dwain_chambers_admits_he_a168047012 And so on. Yet Dwain Chambers has taken his punishment, a two year ban. He now wants to make a comeback and prove what he can do as a ‘clean’ athlete. The controversy is all about whether or not he should ever run again at a professional and international level. He is still excluded from the possibility of going to the Olympics because the British Olypmic Committee still upholds the lifetime ban on athletes convicted of doping. Now that does seem unfair, given that plenty of other athletes with doping offences on their record have served a similar penalty to Chambers, and will be allowed to go. Further, he is off the invitation list for the events that make up every top athletes circuit of competitions. He has stated his remorse and openly acknowledged the wrong of what he did several times in interview, and again last night following his silver medal at the World Championships.

    So here’s what makes me uneasy. I can argue for both sides in this debate. I do think that something is fundamentally ruined when an athlete cheats; a combination of personal integrity, trusted reputation, an ethic of fairness not far removed from justice, an ethos of assumed mutual admiration amongst peer competitors. To tear that nexus of values apart seems to me to do something to oneself in relation to others, that irrevocably ruins the possibility of recovering previous trust and transparency.

    Yet I also think that as Chambers himself pleaded, nobody’s whole life should be blighted by one mistake if they take their punishment, admit they were wrong, and undertake to reform. In fact what Chambers was asking for was forgiveness. I am a passionate believer in second chances, in the forgiveness that allows a person to start again, in the gift of a new beginning that gives a person back their self-respect. As a Christian I hear his plea for forgiveness as one I cannot possibly refuse.

    But what has my attitude to Dwain Chambers to do with any of this. Who should do the forgiving? The Olympic Committee? The athletes he cheated? His international team members whose own achievements were irrevocably spoiled? And what would forgiveness mean in practice? Does a refusal to allow him to race again mean he isn’t forgiven? Must forgiveness mean that a person is treated as if what they had previously done had never happened?

    Or is forgiveness more about not allowing our view of Chambers to be defined by his offence, and of valuing the human being he is? Are there offences in certain areas of life, that no matter how much the person who committed them now regrets it, make it impossible to turn the clock back and trust them again in the same situation? What would be a redemptive response to the mess this young man made of his life? But who of all those affected by his actions has the right, the power, to act and respond redemptively?

    I confess to being in a dilemma about this – what do others think?

  • Driving, praying and laughing

    Driving along Glasgow Road, doing exactly 30 mph, a red Clio came up behind, and the body language of the car, never mind the driver, was impatient, aggressive, that kind of worldview where any other driver on the road is an inconvenience, a nuisance, a hindrance. So out the car shot to overtake me, and I prayed for the driver, not the charitable bless her anyway Lord, kind of prayer. I prayed that as she overtook and went round the corner at well over 40 mph she would encounter the mobile Speed camera van and I would then smile in self righteous satisfaction without a twinge of guilt. But no! As she cut in front of me I could see there was no divine, or police retribution.

    Home_noddog But then. Just along the road were the roadworks, and the closed lanes, restricted access, and the temporary traffic lights with their long phased sequence. So I drew up behind the driver, and watched in amusement as she, (yes afraid this time it was a she), remonstrated at the traffic light, shook her head, looked at her watch, clearly enjoyed having a rant with herself as audience in the front row. But as I watched these histrionics and the head still bobbing up and down as the rant showed no sign of concluding, I noticed the Churchill Insurance dog, sitting on the back shelf of her car. And its head was moving slowly from side to side, in what I decided to believe was slow head-shaking disapproval, acute canine embarrassment at the irrational impatience and pointless annoyance of human beings behind a wheel. The spectacle of one vigorously tossing head asserting to the world how in the right she was, and one slowly indicating that the world took a different view.

    So I prayed again. That this angry-in-a-hurry driver would arrive where she was going safely, and without screwing up someone else’s life by causing an accident. Made me wonder if there might be a case for an anger breathalyser – to catch those who drive like the unconverted Saul of Tarsus, breathing our fire and slaughter against anyone who gets in their way.

  • Lectures and Questions on Charles Wesley

    20816 Just back from Cardiff where, as Jane Austen’s Emma would say, in an attempt at modesty but without trying too hard,  ‘People tell me I acquitted myself quite well’! We had a great afternoon singing, contextualising, analysing, criticising (in the literary sense), and admiring one of the greatest repositories of Christian spiritual experience ever composed, A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists. (Available from Amazon for around £30 – you can hardly get a hefty theological paperback for that now – and this is a critically annotated work of undisputed spiritual genius)!

    Following each lecture we had some discussion and several questions I found intriguing and to be thought about further.

    Doesn’t Isaac Watts, an Old Dissenter, have an equal claim on our admiration, and isn’t he the real originator of the hymn that articulates and perpetuates the spiritual theology and experience of Evangelicalism? HMMMMMMM?   That sparked a debate about the Evangelical movement, its origins, earliest representatives, and the relative importance and positions of Watts and Wesley in relation to Evangelical hymnody.

    In the current post-Christendom, postmodern situation of a sidelined and increasingly marginalised church, should the old hymns of the tradition be preserved as they are, or updated, or dispensed with as no longer serviceable artefacts of a previous generation’s spirituality? With their out of date and frankly meaningless discourse to most folk outside, and increasingly inside, the church what now is the apologetic and evangelistic value of traditional hymns? HMMMMMMMM?  This got us talking about the place of traditional and classic expressions of faith, over and against the need for language and theology which ‘connects’ and ‘communicates’. After all, how many now use the King James Version when more contemporary translations are available?

    Going back to Charles Wesley, what drove a man to produce such an enormous output of versification? Around 9,000 hymns with a huge output in four years that ran into several thousand – 3 or 4 a day! HMMMMMMMM? This raised the question of heightened awareness, inspiration, poetic gift and technical skill, pastoral strategy and catechetical intentions and much else. And perhaps the recognition that creative overdrive and spiritual experience and individual psychological drives are not always to be interpreted as if they cancelled each other out. We are, as was commented, fearfully and wonderfully made.

    These and much else made for good talk, good laughter and good learning, both me and those who came to share the day.

  • Evangelicalism’s continuity with its own past

    C_wesley2 Blogging is intermittent at present. Don’t blog when I’m away from home. Next few days I’m in Cardiff on a dual purpose visit. I’m doing a couple of lectures on the hymns of Charles Wesley, and meeting up with the other UK Baptist Principals – amongst other things to harden up arrangements for the Baptists Doing Theology in Context conference later this year at Luther King House, Manchester.

    I’ve posted on the Scottish Baptist College blog the details of the lectures – recent blog posts here on Charles Wesley have been sparked by immersing myself again in Weselyan hymns and biography. The Wesleyan hunger for holiness drove Charles and John to a lifelong programme of original research, analysing and exploring the origins and nature of personal Christian experience. Their search for a theology of experience which encompassed redemption and sanctification and took with radical seriousness the power of divine love to renew the image of God in human personality, inspired some of Charles most remarkable hymns. And woven through them a rich combination of Christian theological traditions from Augustine’s Homilies on 1 John and his Confessions, to Eastern Fathers such as the Cappadocians; from Ephrem the Syrian to the Anglican poet George Herbert, from Luther to a whole clutch of Puritans; from Henry Scougal of Aberdeen whose Life of God in the Soul of Man had an influence out of all proportion to its size on the theology and spirituality of the Wesleys and Whitefield, and on to the non-conformist expositor Matthew Henry, whose brilliant one-liners at times are the inspiration for entire hymns. And on…..and on.

    Scottishhighlands02cr To study Wesley’s hymns is to encounter theology that is passionately felt and told; it is also to discover just how varied and suggestive, how profound and creative Christian theology can be, when powerful streams meet, and earlier tradition encounters contemporary experience in a new confluence. For myself, the devout eclecticism and reasonable enthusiasm of John Wesley’s theology, and the poetic virtuosity Charles Wesley displayed in setting Evangelical faith to music and rhythm, demonstrates how a classic stream of Christian tradition such as Evangelical Spirituality, incurs debts it must never disown. Whatever else contemporary Evangelicalism loses, and it is in process of losing much, it must not lose its sense of indebtedness to and dependence upon, the insights and energy, the spiritual resources and theological correctives, of a Christian tradition much older, wider and deeper than any single movement. Of course it’s hard now to define Evangelicalism as a movement – qualifiers such as conservative and progressive, variations of species that are encountered in different cultural contexts, claims and counter-claims to represent ‘historic Evangelicalism’ and thus exclude others as non-representative, and a plethora of agenda driven marketable Evangelical makeovers, suggest a serious dissolution of distinctives. Anyway, Evangelicalism never was a unified, overarching, co-ordinated movement, but rather an expression of Christian faith shaped by a cluster of convictions variously interpreted, and yet which were common to people of many Christian traditions.

    Which is why it is important that discussions of contemporary Evangelicalism should not be divorced from the historical origins in the Evangelical revival of the 18th Century; nor should the classic expressions of Evangelicalism be isolated from that continuous flow of Christian tradition, as if Evangelicalism somehow superseded all other traditions in theological truth claims, missional urgency, spiritual vitality. Any particular tradition that cuts itself off from the mainstream, becomes an oxbow lake, and is in danger of simply drying up as the rest of the river flows on.

    One of the reasons I study the hymns of Charles Wesley and the sermons of John Wesley, and much else in the Evangelical Spiritual tradition is because I refuse to allow contemporary a-historical fashions to dictate what Evangelicalism is or isn’t. And often restatements and redefinitions make little meaningful reference to our own tradition, never mind Evangelicalism’s own dependence on those many streams that originate up in the foothills of the Christian tradition, and which in their flow towards the sea feed and sustain each other like tributaries. Traditions must change, adapt, remain responsive to contextual flux, but there is also something given to a tradition which later generations cannot simply decide to dispense with in the struggle for survival we call relevance.

    The Evangelical tradition has moved on since Wesley’s day – but what is it that gives Evangelicalism continuity with its own past?

    What in the tradition is ‘given’, that without which Evangelicalism begins to lose its impetus and flow, its place in the mainstream, and puts it in danger of becoming an oxbow lake, cut off by the slow accumulation of silt?

    Questions. And not unimportant ones.

  • Charles Wesley and a call for apophatic praise songs

    Cwesley2 There are times when Charles Wesley is so precisely explicit in recounting Christian experience, so assured and confident of the realities and verities of evangelical theology as it arises from the confluence of evangelical experience and biblical doctrine, that it’s easy to forget the balancing reticence that prohibits assurance becoming presumption. The Love Divine that excels all other loves, and which is beyond all knowledge, is to be trusted fully and freely on its own terms, even though such faith has eternal consequence. And trusted not because it is fully understood, or underwritten by  intellectual guarantees, but because it floods the heart with joy, renews the spirit in love, and recreates the entire personality in the image of God, and God does all this by a love that operates outside the categories of any epistemology limited by human finitude.

    So when Charles coments, In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of love divine; and when he declares,”T’is mystery all! Let earth adore. Let angel minds enquire no more", he is declaring the mystery of Divine Love off limits to any form of calculus, logic or formula that by definition seeks to define, and thus control, and thus limit.

    46_11_65clouds_web But Charles is not only saying that the Divine Love is immeasurable – he is saying it is a mystery so deep that the only response is adoration, what is demanded is the capitulation of the heart in trustful, grateful love. The apophatic strain in Charles Wesley’s hymns is however less than total – for in the Gospel story of God in Christ, who emptied himself of all but love and was crucified for sinners, the divine love is indeed revealed, and in such terms as is sufficient for salvation. But in worship and adoration the Christian heart and mind recognises that the Divine Love has an infinite surplus, an inexhaustible fullness, an endless repertoire of creative, redemptive power, that renders praise all but speechless, and compels a reverent reticence in which words give way to adoring wonder.

    One of Charles’ lesser known hymns expresses an important truth deeply embedded in Christian mysticism. For example in The Cloud of Unknowing the writer describes the deepest relations of a person to God, not in terms of knowing, but in terms of loving: "Because he may well be loved, but not thought. By love he can be caught and held, but by thinking never".

    So in a hymn based on Job 11.7, "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?, Wesley teaches the importance of theological humility as a spiritual grace, and as a prerequisite to proper worship:

    Shall foolish, weak, short-sighted man

       Beyond archangels go,

    The great Almighty God explain,

       Or to perfection know?

    His attributes divinely soar

       Above the creatures’ sight,

    And prostrate seraphim adore

       The glorious Infinite.

    .

    Jehovah’s everlasting days

       They cannot numbered be,

    Incomprehensible the space

       Of thine immensity

    Thy wisdom’s depths by reason’s line

       In vain we strive to sound,

    Or stretch our labouring thought t’assign

       Omnipotence a bound.

    .

    The brightness of thy glories leaves

       Description far below;

    Nor man, nor angels’ heart conceives

       How deep thy mercies flow:

    Thy love is most unsearchable

       And dazzles all above;

    They gaze but cannot count or tell

       The treasures of thy love.

    Apophatic theology is an important restraint on that human impulse, particularly strong in accomplished theologians, to reduce God’s immensity to manageable theological proportions. What P T Forsyth calls our ‘lust for lucidity’. In Charles Wesley’s theology of praise and worship there is an important expression of apophatic thinking. At times worship for Wesley is a willingness to glory, not in what we know, but in what we cannot know; a celebration not of understood certainties but of incomprehensible mysteries; a contented acceptance not of doctrinal precision but of personally appropriated spiritual experience.

    Whirlpool Mystery is an essential element in Christian theology, a necessary safeguard that, like the angel at the garden of Eden, prevents us from ever presuming to go where we have no right to go. Amongst the priorities in contemporary worship songs and hymns, is a rediscovery of a proper reticence, a willingness to live with and within a mystery that baffles, bewilders and captivates. How about some apophatic praise songs then?

  • How unlucky can you get?

    This briefly reported AOL news item is a really good example of the short story. Hardly a wasted word, just enough information to set context, a sense for the reader of just desserts in tension with ‘how unlucky can you get’!

    And I love the hugely understated last half sentence, which leaves everything to the imagination!

    Wish I could write a sermon as short and effective as this:

    An armed robber picked the wrong target when he raided an Australian bar where a biker gang was holding a meeting — and ended up hog-tied and in hospital.

    Police said the man and an accomplice, wearing bandanas and waving machetes, stormed into a club in a western Sydney suburb and ordered customers to lie on the ground as they tried to rob the till.

    The noise attracted the attention of up to 50 members of the Southern Cross Cruiser Club, who had just started a club meeting in another room and who then decided to intervene.

  • God is closer to sinners than to saints

    5134gwgjnhl__ss500_ The Desert Fathers and Mothers can at times be worryingly severe, annoyingly obtuse, and not infrequently clearer in their thinking than any 21st century clued up, theologically literate, culturally aware, postmodern follower of Jesus. Ironically, with their refusal to answer questions with closed answers, and their penchant for the two sentence story, and with their restless refusal to accommodate living for Christ to the urges of the prevailing culture, these representatives of extreme Christian discipleship help us survive the desert of consumer religion and consumerism as religion. And despite their no-nonsense approach, they could be movingly gentle in their understanding of who God is and what God is about in our lives. here’s a favourite story.

    "God", the elder said, "is closer to sinners than to saints."

    "But how can that be?", the eager disciple asked.

    And the elder explained. "God in heaven holds each person by a string. When we sin we cut the string. Then God ties it up again, making a knot – bringing the sinner a little closer. Again and again sins cut the string – and with each knot God keeps drawing the sinner closer and closer." (Page 29)

    The story is recounted in The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages, by Joan Chittister. If Chittister wrote a commentary on an Argos catalogue or the small print of a credit agreement, I’d almost be tempted to read it. She is a Benedictine sister whose writing on feminist spirituality, issues of social justice, and the complexity of living with and for others, is fresh, sensible and honest about how tough it is just to keep going as a Christian.

    For years I have returned periodically, to the Rule of Benedict, and the core values of Benedictine Spirituality – prayer, study, work, hospitality, community, stability, and an immensely impressive and humane balance between the life of the mind (study), of the heart (prayer and community), and of the body (physical work or exercise). The people who have helped me understand how a monastic rule which shaped western civilisation can still decisively shape the life of obedience to Christ today are Chittister, Esther de Waal, Kathleen Norris, Maria Boulding, Columba Stewart and Thomas Merton. I’m currently meandering in an orderly way through Chittister for the severalth time.

    I’m beginning to work at what might become a paper on Benedict and the Baptist. Might post it if it works…meantime here’s a brief comment from Chittister that is now written in my journal:

    Clearly, living life well is the nature of repentance. To begin to see life as life should be and to live it that way ourselves is to enable creation to go on creating us. (page 28)

  • Kite flying as a sacrament of the Spirit

    Various1 Some years ago on holiday at Poolewe, up the West coast of Scotland, near Ullapool, I was flying my kite. It wasn’t a fancy two string acrobatic stunt kite. It was an ordinary diamond shaped honest to goodness kite I’d had for years. And the sea breeze took it the full length of the string till it was a wee dot way up there. Then the string broke. And I took off along the beach in pursuit, trying to put my foot on the trailing string to recapture my kite. Twice I got my foot on it but the wind was too strong, and all I got was a sore foot. I gave up and the last my kite was seen it was heading out to sea………

    Some time ago I was given the gift of a kite. I’ve never flown it yet. One of the costs of being too absorbed in doing busy stuff, is you forget to play. And it is years now since I played with a kite. Why should that occur to me at around 6.00 a.m. on a dark February morning? Not because the wind is blowing a gale outside – it’s too strong to fly a kite in anyway. But because I came across this in David Runcorn’s book, something I didn’t know:

    Some Greek Orthodox communities mark the start of Lent as the first outdoor day of the year. Lent is the beginning of Spring. After the long death of winter, here is the first sign that new life is coming. We must go out to greet it. The community celebrates this day by climbing the nearest hill and flying kites on the fresh spring wind!

    Always more important than what we turn from is what we turn to. Here we meet the Spirit enticing, driving, inspiring us in the struggle to turn from sin and be caught up into the adventure of divine love. (Page 133)

    That new kite was a gift from people who know what’s good for me. And this weekend it’s going to become a sacrament of the Spirit, a way of yearning to be caught up into the adventure of divine love.

    I’ve posted a full review of David Runcorn’s book,  Spirituality Workshop on the Scottish Baptist College Blog.