Living Wittily

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  • Sacrifice of praise 3 That I did always love

    Emily Dickinson was an enigmatic genius. Her poetry presents condensed thought, ideas triggered by allusive but precisely chosen and positioned words, often indicating the direction rather than the content of thought.

    "Her poetry is ‘romantic’, that is derived from observations and meditations on phenomena of ‘nature’, but it is also metaphysical, making use of unusual and extended metaphors."

    200pxblackwhite_photograph_of_emily Quite – but such comments hide as much as they say. Reading Dickinson’s poems can be like encountering the astringent wisdom of the Desert Fathers, or the contemplative challenge of Zen teaching, but in the diamond-cut terminology of a 19th Century New England woman, who knew a bit about desert, solitude and the essential if elusive wisdom that resides in words and silence, when each is rightly used.

    Metres of shelf space and gigabytes of word documents are devoted to secondary studies of commentary, criticism, context and much else about Dickinson. More important is the work of reading her – and allowing her poetry to do its own work. That work is best described by the word ‘deep’, used in a currently fashionable sense of "deep listening", "deep feeling", "deep understanding".

    That I Did Always Love (No. 549)

    That I did always love

    I bring thee Proof

    That till I loved

    I never lived—Enough—

    .

    That I shall love alway—

    I argue thee

    That love is life—

    And life hath Immortality—

    .

    This—dost thou doubt—Sweet—

    Then have I

    Nothing to show

    But Calvary—

  • Sacrifice of praise 2. Stand still and see

    Holy Week is a good time to honour martyrs, those who bear witness to their faith by sacrificial living or by surendering life itself. Elisabeth Alden Scott Stam was raised by missionary parents in China in the early 20th Century. After missionary training at Moddy Bible Institute she married and returned to China. They had a daughter in 1934 and six months later, during the Chinese Civil war, she and her husband were executed by Chinese Communist soldiers. In the looted wreckage of their home, written on scraps of paper used to wrap around chinaware, a number of her poems were later found. They had been preserved by their faithful cook, disguised as mere wrappings.

    The story of the deaths of John and Betty Stam is almost forgotten. The book The Triumph of John and Betty Stam written by Mrs Howard Taylor is now available here and there on Amazon, but like many classics of Christian faithful Christrian witness is now an almost forgotten genre. Some forms of post-modern and post-colonial theology have taught us to recognise the failings and consequences of the role of Christian missionary activity in Western imperial politics. Fair enough, and there is plenty to require a long repentance

    But when all due consideration is given to this, it doesn’t in my view eclipse the significance of faithful Christian witness, the combination of compassion and courage shown by countless followers of Jesus who discovered in their own experience the cost  of sacrifice in their own personal passion story. So I honour this woman and her husband, who the morning she and her husband were beheaded, managed to hide her baby Helen in a rug, later smuggled to her grandparents; this woman who whatever the murky implications of national politics simply wanted to share her faith by the practice of kindness; this woman whose passion for God led to the personal passion of martyrdom. Accounts of their death seem embarrassed by terminology – ‘put to death’, ‘murdered’, ‘executed’ – each with its own connotations of the motives of those who killed them. More important was the motive that took them there in the first place – passion for God, the call to bear witness to the love of God in Jesus, a love for a people amongst whom they chose to live.

    Here is one of the poems, used to wrap china – I note the irony of the image – china wrapped in the poetry of Christian devotion, China wrapped in the witness of devoted Christian living.

    "Stand Still and See"

    Exodus 14.13.

         "I’m standing Lord.

    There is a mist that blinds my sight.

    Steep jagged rocks, front, left, and right.

    Lower, dim, gigantic, in the night.

         Where is the way?

    .

         "I’m standing, Lord.

    The black rock hems me in behind.

    Above my head a moaning wind

    Chills and oppresses heart and mind.

         I am afraid!

    .

         "I’m standing, Lord.

    The rock is hard beneath  my feet.

    I nearly slipped, Lord, on the sleet.

    So weary, Lord, and where a seat?

         Still must I stand?

    .

    He answered me, and on his face

    A look inefffable of grace,

    Of perfect understanding love,

    Which all my murmuring did remove.

    .

         "I’m standing, Lord.

    Since Thou hast spoken, Lord, I see

    Thou hast beset; these rocks are Thee;

    And since thy love encloses me,

         I stand and sing!"

    The epitaph on her gravestone reads, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain". When we’ve learned what we must learn from the mistakes and wrongs of history, It’s no part of post-colonial hermeneutics to minimise the sacrifice and integrity of such remarkable witnesses, who in following after Jesus, entered their own Passion story.

  • Sacrifice of praise 1. Yet Listen Now

    During Holy Week I’ll post a poem and some brief thoughts and reflections. Doing this gives focus to my own devotional response to this Holy Season, and I hope offers food for thought and thought for prayer, to those who visit here. 

    180pxamy_carmichael One of the underrated figures in Evangelical spirituality is Amy Carmichael of Dohnavur. Long before Mother Teresa, Amy Carmichael was developing fellowships and communities of compassion for the disinherited, the vulnerable, and especially the children of South India. Her poetry is  unabashedly devotional, but it is devotion unspoilt by superficial emotionalism, or cheaply purchased sentiment. Carmichael’s spirituality drew on powerful undercurrents of Keswick holiness teaching, channelled through a determined and passionate personality, worked out in the pragmatic hard-headed labour of making homes for the homeless and feeding the hungry; all this then expressed in some of the most effective poetry in the last hundred years of Evangelical writing.

    Olive_13_2 Her vision penetrated to those inner recesses of theological reflection where the eternal and mysterious purposes of God, though still unexplained, are yet contemplated and if not understood, then at least appropriated as foundational trust. "Yet Listen Now", is one of those poems that makes Easter more than a focal liturgical annual event, but a way of looking at the world day after day. Olive trees (favourite subject of Van Gogh), are called as witnesses of the redemption and healing of that human brokenness and fractured creation which is experienced in the reality and mystery of suffering.

    Yet Listen Now

    Yet listen now,

    Oh, listen with the wondering olive trees,

    And the white moon that looked between the leaves,

    And gentle earth that shuddered as she felt

    Great drops of blood. All torturing questions find

    Answer beneath those old grey olive trees.

    There, only there, we can take heart to hope

    For all lost lambs – Aye, even for ravening wolves.

    Oh, there are things done in the world today

    Would root up faith, but for Gethsemane,

    For Calvary interprets human life;

    No path of pain but there we meet our Lord;

    And all the strain, the terror and the strife

    Die down like waves before his peaceful word,

    And nowhere but beside the awful Cross,

    And where the olives grow along the hill,

    Can we accept the unexplained, the loss,

    The crushing agony – and hold us still.

  • “And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long…”

    Qtz2009 I’m sitting transfixed in my study listening to Christian Forshaw’s utterly heartbreaking rendering of Come Down O Love Divine.  I wrote about this CD, "Sanctuary", some months ago, enthusing about this beautifully conceived and performed album.

    One of the recurring, indeed pervasive and persuasive notes in Elizabeth Johnson’s account of contemporary Christian thinking about God is that of a Love that is at once mystery and gift, transcendent and intimate, sovereign and self-giving. Forshaw’s rendering of this late middle ages hymn, Come Down O Love Divine, accompanying Aimee Green’s voice which is pure with devotional intensity and intent, simply raises my heart into another degree of spiritual awareness. The combination of human voice as embodied longing, and of the saxophone through which musical improvisation gives breath to unassuaged yearning, communicate degrees of spiritual desire that are breathtaking. And I mean breathtaking – the word is used with specific intent – the saxophone played by the controlled expulsion of breath, and the soul’s longing similar to overworked lungs inhaling oxygen, combine in spiritual aspiration and a final devotional surrender to the grace that transforms moral personality, transfigures character and transmutes human longing into fellowship with the Love Divine.

    And so the yearning strong

    with which the soul will long,

    shall far surpass the power of human telling;

    for none can guess its grace,

    till we become the place

    wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.

  • Liberation, structural sin and human flourishing

    911_ejohnson_2 Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s chapter on Liberation Theology has a number of fine passages, and disturbing asides. On page 72 she quotes the Puebla Document and its use of the image of the human face, the faces of the poor, as a way of demonstrating what is at stake in political theology. Vagrant children, sexually exploited minors, marginalised indigenous peoples, ill-paid labourers, women trafficked and enslaved, old people cast off as unproductive….and the list goes on, of human beings whose faces tell a story, and it is a story of those who hunger for liberation.

    What Liberation Theology seeks to articulate is the outraged cry that rises to heaven, as it did when the Israelites were in bondage in Egypt. The liberation theologian believes in a God for whom bondage is a scandal, oppression a contradiction of God’s intention for humanity, and poverty that leaches life of joy, meaning and fruitfulness a condition at odds with the benevolence and generosity of the Creator.

    Johnson’s critique of money as a divinised source of oppression, a universally sought after means to power, faces head on the capacity of finance to dominate and enslave, to dehumanise and oppress. So in common with liberation theologians she wants the focus of the Gospel to be fixed, not on the nonbeliever struggling for faith, but on the nonperson struggling for life. Life, liberation, fruitfulness, human fulfilment:

    "Liberation is the signature deed of the saving action of God in history. To liberate is to give life, life in its totality. Consequently it becomes clear that God does not want humankind to suffer degradation. Far from happening according to divine decree, the sufferings of the poor, oppressed and marginal  people are contrary to divine intent. The dehumanising and death-dealing structures that create and maintain such degradation are instances of social sin. they transgress against the God of life….. (p. 79)

    Speaking of the Americas, but incorporating in the same argument the impact of unrestrained economic globalisation she reflects:

    Starting with the conquistadores and continuing for five centuries through successive ruling systems up to multinational corporations today, greed has divinised money and its trappings, that is, turned them into an absolute. Core transgressions against the first commandment have set up a belief system so compelling that it might be called money-theism, in contrast to monotheism. (p.80)

    Bishop Irenaeus gifted to the church a four word motto I think I’d like to get put on a T-shirt in both Latin and translation:

    Gloria Dei,

    vivens humanitas –

    "The glory of God is the human being fully alive"

    Liberation theology has taught us to give important weight to freedom from oppression and establishing justice for the poor and dispossessed as definitive of the Kingdom of God and of the God whose Kingdom will come. as Holy Week approaches, and we begin to have a sense of our own individual unworthiness, it may be that God’s greater requirement of us is to look on a money-theistic world, and repent of our idolatry. Structural sin is much harder to confess, and to turn from.

  • Grasped by the mystery of who God is

    Lectio Divina is a way to God, which when persevered in, becomes a determined pilgrimage from where we are to wherever God’s invitation takes us. Spiritual reading, which I think is very different from other reading (whether academic or devotional) has given me my richest moments of encounter with God. My own spirituality is inextricably linked to words as sacrament; words undoubtedly convey spiritual truth freighted with meaning  that touches me in the depths of who I am.  The Jewish reverence for Torah, is demonstrated by the importance of writing the scroll by hand, each word then has to be thought about, meticulously constructed, meditated upon as it is written with a calligrapher’s care for beauty, precision and accuracy.  A spiritual reading journal which I write now and then, also acts as an important vehicle for careful, considered respect for  words. In such a journal what is most important is not quantity and regularity of entry – but thoughtfulness, attentiveness, so that what is written is only that which communicates the sense of truth and presence, that intimates the reality of God.

    41cnryuvrml__bo2204203200_pisitbdp5 Reading Elizabeth Johnson’s reflections on the importance of being able to ask questions, as a defining characteristic of being human, opened up for me yet again, the essential mystery of the God whose incomprehensibility both evokes ultimate questions and eludes final answers.  She mentions that the first words of Karl Rahner’s doctoral thesis are, "One asks". One important way we as human beings relate to God is, “A person asks a question”. After that, the limitless horizon of knowledge, including sacred knowledge, opens up. The true theologian prays, so that when we pray a true prayer we are being theologians. One way or another, God is the epistemological presupposition of our lives – the starting place and ending point of wisdom. "One asks" – and question becomes prayer.

    .

    “The concept of God is not a grasp of God by which a person masters the mystery; but it is the means by which one lets oneself be grasped by the mystery which is present yet ever distant.”

    .

    Words like these act as brakes on that intellectual hubris that deludes us into thinking that God is there to be known. Humility encouraging  receptiveness, patient longing as the passive activity of desire, curiosity as an outward looking trustfulness seeking answers to inner questioning – but these grasped by the mystery which draws us out of ourselves, towards the mystery of who God is.

  • 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.