Living Wittily

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  • What we owe the old is reverence 3 De-marginalising our old people

    To reduce all aspects of life to a valuation indexed to usefulness, profitability, functionality, is to fall into the utilitarian nightmare. Such valuations see everything as a means to an end; now most things are, in fact, a means to an end; but a human being can never be reduced to such valuations based on usefulness, functionality, the status of means to other people’s ends, or an organisation’s ends, or a State’s ends. What sets a human being apart in moral and theological terms is that a human being is an end in herself, or himself. Yet at the same time the first question of the catechism immediately provides an important qualifying perspective. A human being not only is an end in herself, but has a chief end – to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

    It is because we are given our essential value, our enduring identity, our unique calling as gifts bestowed by God that we can never be ultimately reduced to mere means. We are created as those whose end is to love, serve and worship God. Heschel’s theology of human existence, draws nourishment from a root system plunged deep into the Hebrew Bible, which is why he is so resistant to any view of the old person as burden on society, or as one whose provision should in any sense depend on ongoing usefulness and economic contribution to society. Here is a word whose prophetic note reverberates through four decades with compelling relevance:

    There are alleys in the soul where man walks alone, ways that do not lead to society, a world of privacy that shrinks from the public eye. Life comprises not only arable, productive land, but also mountains of dreams, an underground of sorrow, towers of yearning, which can hardly be utilised to the last for the good  of society, unless man be converted into a machine in which every screw must serve a function or be removed.

    Ci_jet_header All of which leaves me wondering about the level of provision made for the elderly in our own society; the refusal to benchmark the Old Age Pension to a reasonable subsistence level and then index it; the recognised epidemic of loneliness amongst the oldest members of the population; the relatively small amount of money invested in research into some of the ailments of human ageing; the impatience of motorists at traffic lights which are already set with the green man at such a short time frame that it takes levels of agility to get across in time that some of the motorists would themselves struggle to beat; the sheer complexity of applications for benefit, rebate, relief from all kinds of costs – not least Council Tax; the bewilderment and sense of being left behind by rapid technological changes that in any case presuppose significant funds to access them – broadband, mobile phones, digital TV. And just to avoid stereotyping, I know a nonogenarian who recently took delivery of the new laptop so that it could download quicker!

    No society can do everything; and the Scottish Government intends well towards our older people, even if local government expressions of policy and commitment to fulfilling free care vary wildly. But I still think that within the Church that is the Body of Christ, there is a need for outspoken alertness on behalf of those older members of our community and society, who remain valuable, wanted, needed – not for what they do or did, but for who they uniquely, preciously, and at times expensively, are.

    There are few more important ways of wasting time, than visiting old people – I use the word deliberately, in the way Dr Sheila Cassidy uses it – to waste time with people is to give them non-productive time in order to give your self, to gift them presence as a sign of their worth. I know about strategic planning, dynamic leadership, anointed preaching, every person ministry, purpose driven this and that. But I have a feeling Jesus would have found time to spend, waste, give, and in so doing would de-marginalise one of the pushed to the fringe groups of our cost/benefit analysis culture. In fact I rather like the term – de-marginalise.

  • Let justice roll and righteousness flow: “Was there nothing to fight for?”

    For years now I’ve been a contributor to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, one of the few papers I know that has a God slot – a Saturday Ssermon, no less. Here’s the one the good people of Aberdeen will be reading today.

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    “There’s an epidemic of apathy, and I don’t care.”

    “When people complain about a culture becoming complacent, I shrug my shoulders.”

    These aren’t humorous remarks, they’re more like the resigned cynicism of a society so unsure of its future it’s hard to know what to care for. They’re the language used by paid up members of NMP – Not My Problem.

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    41h5kteerzl__aa240_ In Alan Paton’s novel of South Africa, Ah ! But your Land is Beautiful, there is a conversation between a white school headmaster, and Emmanuel Nene, a local leader of the black community. Following the ban on white and black children playing cricket together the headmaster resigned his job, because he said, “ I think it is time to go out and fight everything that separates people from one another”. Both of them, white and black together, accept they will be wounded and hurt, that such passionate caring for what happens in their society will be dangerous. Their conversation ends like this:

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    “Yes, and I’m going to get wounded, too. Not only by the government, but also by my own people as well.”
    “Aren’t you worried about the wounds, Mr. Nene?”
    “I don’t worry about the wounds. When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn’t face that question.”

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    It’s hard to see how, by acting faithfully and living obediently to the words of Jesus, we can avoid those moments when we have to fight. They’re fair questions – where are your wounds? Was there nothing to fight for? Fair and just questions, because justice and righteousness are core values of a Christian worldview. And there’s plenty to fight for, and against.

    For truthfulness, and against the pervasive dishonesty of much in public life;

    for friendship, and against bullying that only thrives where it isn’t confronted;

    for open trust, and against the creeping backstabbing nastiness that invades office space;

    for commonsense, and against irresponsible front door promotions of buy one get one free multi-packs of booze in supermarkets;

    for human dignity and diversity, and against racism, latent and blatant; against, well against whatever diminishes and devalues human beings and human life. ‘Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever rolling stream’ – not mere aspiration, but worldview, lifestyle, prayer that leads to practice.

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    It’s Lent. Maybe complacency would be harder to give up than chocolate, wine, TV. It might be worth deciding what to fight for….and against. If we can be bothered!

  • Scottish Baptist College Blog

    The Scottish Baptist College now has its own blog, set up by Stuart and a place where we will post news, articles, reviews and open up discussion on areas of theology and ministry, both in a Baptist context and with openness to wider views and experience. We will also do book reviews in areas in which we teach, or have an interest, and for those who engage in a preaching ministry some suggested reading, shared experience, ideas.

    The link is on my sidebar amongst the Blogs I Regularly Read. I posted there yesterday and you can find it here. The post asks whether we are entirely right to say the raison d’etre of the Church is mission. One witness who sees the Church’s role from a different perpsective is P T Forsyth who prefers the word mediatorial to missional.

  • What we owe the old is reverence 2

    _42815935_dorsetgardener_203 Gerontology is the scientific study of ageing. Growing old is the existential reality of ageing in people’s experience. Heschel’s remarkable essay, ‘Growing in Wisdom’ is remarkably prescient, given its date in 1964, and that this plea for a theology of ageing first appeared in a publication Geriatric Institutional Management. Even in the 60’s he recognised the dangers of celebrating youth at the expense of age. ‘Youth is our God and to be young is divine….The cult of youth is idolatry.’ Sounds like overstated rhetoric, but Heschel had already identified the impatience a consumer society with the less productive, less economically powerful. For many older people old age comes to be seen as defeat, a chronic form of capital punishment, because life, excitement, vitality, productivity now seems to be consigned to memory. The compassion and passion Heschel had for human beings, especially vulnerable human beings, gives his words an essential moral authority.

    By what standards do we measure culture? It is customary to evaluate a nation by the magnitude of its scientific contributions or the quality of its artictic achievements. However, the true standard by which to guage a culture is the extent to which reverence, compassion, justice, are to be found in the daily lives of a whole people, not only in the acts of isolated individuals. Culture is a style of living compatible with the grandeur of being human.

    The emphasis is his, and the statement is a searching performance indicator for our own culture, now, here. On free care for the elderly, Heschel asks, ‘Is there anything as holy, as urgent, as noble, as the effort of the whole nation to provide medical care for the old?’ His choice of words is odd, for a consumer society. Not a hint about affordability, budget constraints, waiting lists; instead care for the old as holy purpose, comfort of the old as humanly urgent, support for the old as noble task.

    037004 ‘The aged may be described as a person who does not dream anymore…’ This for Heschel is a spiritual matter. To grow old should not mean the loss of dreams, but opening up of the self to whatever future awaits as goodness and mercy surely follow us, all the days of our lives. For that reason heschel insists that the spirituality of ageing is less important than the spirituality of the aged. With poignant impatience he observed, ‘to be retired does not mean to be retarded’. he identified three spiritual ills of old age that need to be addressed: i) The sense of being useless; ii) the sense of inner emptiness and boredom; iii) loneliness and the fear of time.

    The essay title, ‘To grow in wisdom’, explains the profoundly biblical substratum of this way of thinking. To study, to grow, to toil and to mature, to work and worship, to live life in its fullness, both celebration and sorrow, achievment and failure, and to do so nourished by prayer and honoured in our humanity, that is something of the rich meaning of shalom. And for old people, that shalom will require a culture which honours the grandeur of being human.

  • Receptive or interceptive listening?

    Web Discussion the other day about reflection as a form of listening. Is listening a gift, a skill, an art, a discipline, or a combination of some or all of these? What would reflective listening feel like? A very good friend, of an older school of Evangelical formation, good naturedly pulled my leg about overuse of the word reflect. he felt that too much time reflecting, got in the way of doing. I know what he meant, and as one of the most skilled workers of wood I know, trained as a ship’s carpenter, he knew about the importance of doing, of practical, manual making a difference. Till I pointed out that the good carpenter (and he is one of the best I’ve watched) is a reflective practitioner, thoughtfully working with tools and material to create a solid object that witnesses to his skill and thought. So, I’m yet to be convinced we would ever be in danger of reflecting too much. More likely we have educated ourselves out of reflection as slowed down thought, considered opinion, informed judgement, balancing considerations with evidence. And maybe it isn’t we have educated ourselves out of reflective listening, as that we never really learned it.

    Now when it comes to theology, theologising, and theologians, I am entirely persuaded that theological reflection is an important form of listening, reflective listening. And in that conversation we identified two ways of listening that we all practice, and we aren’t often aware of the difference it can make to a conversation, a relationship, an outcome, which one we use. There is receptive listening  and there is interceptive listening. Receptive listening is when our attitude is open, our presuppositions and prejudices silenced, our attention is given, and the other is the guide to where the conversation is going. Interceptive listening is when the word clothed thoughts of the Other are intercepted by our own thoughts impatiently waiting to be clothed in words as soon as we get a word in edgeways. The first, receptive listening is interested in what the other thinks, how they think, why what they think is important, and so their words are gifts that make possible communication and understanding. Whereas interceptive listening is a defensive stance, anticipating the earliest moment available for regaining cotrol of the conversation.

    Trinity The good theologian is a receptive listener – whether to the human voice in discussion, argument, testimony – or to the voice of a text which informs, persuades, challenges, contradicts, affirms, – or to the choral voice of the Christian tradition, recognising the harmonies and movements, the points and counterpoints, and responding to the textured sound of theological music as it is composed, practised and performed. I suppose what I am asking you to be receptive to, is the idea that a receptive mind and heart is one skilled in the art of reflective listening; openness of spirit to what is new and different, humility before the careful thought of others, docility that is the attitude of the teachable ( and reachable) soul, hospitable to the truth that will always be more than we can safely contain. A lot of theological writing, quite a lot of contemporary preaching, and maybe even too much of our usual ways of conversing, lean more towards an interceptive form of listening, when our own presupposed rightness is more important than the off chance that the Other may have something life-enhancing or life-saving to say to us.

    Amongst the habits I’ve grown into over the years is reflective reading – a long, slow, meandering walk with someone whose voice, at least during those pre-arranged appointments, is always to be considered more important than mine. It may be that reflective, receptive listening describes those times when we let others get their words in edgeways. One further thought from that discussion – talking of theology and imagination, we moved to the word speculation. Why does speculative theology get such a bad press? As if God’s immensity, mystery and overwhelming mercy were in some sense threatened by our thinking! A far greater threat to the vast mysterious truth of who God is, is that guarded timidity that wants our talk of God to stay within already confirmed parameters, a process of interceptive listening that is in danger of making what we already think, know, or think we know, a final position to be defended.

    Theological reflection can only take place if there is a willed vulnerability, a determined openness, a receptive attentiveness, to voices other than our own.

  • What we owe the old is reverence 1

    Hain defends job for mother 80.

    That’s the headline at the end of a week when polls suggest MP’s are unpopular, are in the relegation zone of the public trust league, when an MP has been suspended for employing his two sons for £45,000 worth of work for which there is no paper trail, and Mr Hain himself just over a week into a police investigation about undeclared donations. In the light of very dodgy forms of nepotism (promoting or rewarding on the basis of family connection rather than talent, entitlement or right) what offends me about the headline is the number 80.

    Of what relevance is the age of a secretary who still does efficiently the job she began in 1991, and possibly better than younger alternatives when it comes to life experience, literacy, discretion and overall reliability? An octogenarian does a good, honest job, all above board, and is sucked into a row about dodgy deals involving MP expenses, and family connections.

    037004 Apart from the murky machinations of MP’s financial choices, it’s also been a week of widespread debate about massive shortfalls in future funding for care of the elderly. As each year passes our impartiality is undermined by the realisation that one day we’ll be old too. Given that we need a radical overhaul of policy, and a realignment of public and Government attitudes, and a recovery of the moral values that underpin a humane society, I am also in search of a theology of ageing. Such a theology grows out of the kinds of values that expose the above headline for what it is – a piece of engrained prejudice based on a narrow, utilitarian view of human capacity. And it disguises itself as a morally defensible enquiry about whether or not an elderly woman should be employed by her son and paid by taxpayer’s money.

    At different stages of the church’s history specific doctrines have played a major role in overall theological restatement. Christological and trinitarian controversies dominated the first few centuries; at other times ecclesiology, the doctrine of justification and / or the doctrine of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit and again in the last couple of decades further review and reflection on the nature of the Triune God. But in an age of genetic technology, ecological crisis, globalised consumerism and religious transmutation from radicalism through extremism, it may be that the Christian understanding of the human will become a crucial counter narrative.

    The dignity and value of each human person, the God-givenness of existence and identity, the common humanity of all and yet the scandal of particularity witnessed to in the incarnation of Jesus, makes a Christian anthropology an important line in the sand when we talk about how we treat the elderly, protect the vulnerable, cherish human life, resist dehumanising politics and protest against the bar-coding approach to the cost of caring for and nurturing human life throughout the life cycle. Practical issues of funding and resources may become acute; economic choices will have to be made, and that may not be to our economic advantage in the global market; and human welfare is sustained by finite resources just as our economies and communities are.

    But what a Christian anthropology seeks to provide is a nexus of values that secures a reverence for human life, a respect for all who share this planet, and a working assumption for Christians that every human being is one for whom Christ died, who bears the image of God however dishonoured, and who lives in the tragic ambiguity of a fallen world. But a world invaded by the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ. Jesus the Jew was immersed in the spiritual wisdom of the Torah, the instruction of God that shaped and gave texture to the shared life of Jewish communities.

    517ey9ddwel__aa240_ Which brings me to my favourite rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote a quite remarkable celebration of age, wisdom and humanity. After fifty years, his essay carries the moral rebuke of a prophet who knew the importance of an anthropology rooted in the values of the Hebrew Bible. Here are the first two paragraphs:

    I see the sick and the despised, the defeated and the bitter, the rejected and the lonely. I see them clustered together and alone, clinging to a hope for somebody’s affection that does not come to pass. I hear them pray for the release that comes with death. I see them deprived and forgotten, masters yesterday, outcasts today.

    What we owe the old is reverence, but all they ask for is consideration, attention, not to be discarded and forgotten. What they deserve is preference, yet we do not even grant them equality. One father finds it possible to sustain a dozen children, yet a dozen children find it impossible to sustain one father.

    I’ll come back to this essay. In its indictment of a culture impatient of the elderly, resentful and grudging of the resources that will be needed to care for the old, it offers an altogether different vision – in which octogenarians go on doing a good job without their age being held against them.

  • Prayer distilled to the essentials

    ‘Lord, let me not live to be useless’.

    This one line prayer explains something of the devotional intensity and driven pragmatism of John Wesley.

    ‘Lord give me life till my work is done, and work till my life is done’.

    The epitaph of Vera Brittain, expressing that longing so characteristically human for our lives to have meaning and value.

    ‘For all that is past, thanks – for all that is to come, Yes!’

    Dag Hammarskold’s formula for spiritually respopnsible and responsive living.

    And then this, which I found today, another one line prayer from Albert C Outler, Wesleyan scholar, Christian gentleman, and ecumenical enthusiast:

    ‘Keep us Lord from the love that deceives, and from the candour that wounds.’

    As a succinct statement of Christian hospitality to the views of others, that is hard to beat for its generosity tempered by integrity.

    Comments open for your favourite one line prayer.

  • Disorientation and a study in turmoil

    Walter Brueggemann explores the Psalms through the experience of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. The same approach can at present be applied to my study. The painter is half way through decorating it, and I’ve decanted books to various surfaces around the house, and sit here with abandoned bookcases, bare windows, painter’s sheets with a few years of paint drippings draped around the place, sets of steps standing at the door, the pictures removed – and a sense of inner disorientation to match the mess around me.

    Remember – this is the guy who likes his books in neat rows on the bookshelves, the same distance from the front of the shelf, arranged in a system so familiar I can tell my PA at College exactly where a book is – bookcase, shelf and roughly where. Same at home; except tonight my study suffers the first two of Brueggemann’s rubrics – orientation has given way to disorientation. It will be Saturday before the painter returns, and probably Sunday before there’s a hope of reorientation.

    No big deal to most folk I suppose. And I’ll survive. But moving 23 metres of shelved books is an exercise in dismantling the familiar which raises questions of attachment, comfort zones. Moving around the furniture reminded me of the elderly couple who first gave me somewhere to stay in Glasgow when I started University. Lily was one of the most unassuming, generous and open people I’ve ever met. Well into her sixties and seventies she went to the chapel next door to ‘the jigging’, while Bill stayed in the house and watched the telly. When I first met them and we agreed I’d be staying with them Bill warned me,

    ‘Son. When ye come in at night, put the light on before you get into bed. She’s aye shifting furniture, an’ yer bed might no be where ye left it’.

    And true enough. Lily was an experimenter with space and furniture. She was a tireless exponent of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

    Bill painted the ships with red lead, and worked alongside Jimmy Reid. Lily served in the newsagent and grocers downstairs. She smoked like a chimney and always apologised for some of what she called her ‘bad adjectives’. They never referred to me as anything but ‘the boy’. They were at our wedding, and some years later, within a couple of years of each other, I took their funerals. And the two years I spent in the four up two room flat in Dumbarton Road made it possible for me to afford being at University. We had several arguments about what I should pay. Not how much, but how little – she was mortified, embarrassed, annoyed, when I paid the first week’s rent. In the end she agreed to take a fraction of what they could have asked. I look on their friendship as one of those gifts that teach us the connections between hospitality and humanity, and demonstrate the sacrament of unselfconscious generosity.

    But Bill was right. Several times in those two years, I put on the light before getting into bed – to make sure it’s where it was when I left it! May they rest in peace, whose home was a place of reoritnetation for a young man whose life was going through that disorientation that is an inevitable consequence of hearing Christ’s call, and following.

  • Children’s work a hundred years ago

    Been an unsatisfying but sanctifying day. Spent most of it doing lots of cosmetic fiddly stuff with a massive 250 page document getting it ready for printing. Whoever formatted the template built in various safeguards that kept making the blessed document ( I use the word beatitudinally) do all the wrong things. This incrementally increased the longsuffering aspect in my overall sanctification portfolio.

    Then I spent a while writing a brilliant post for this blog – vintage rant, ascerbic wit, politically subversive, carefully crafted with minimal semantic infelicities. Went to save it and the blessed Web page expired message came up. Again I use the word beatitudinally. This tragic loss to the literary archives tested the resilience of that other slow ripening fruit of the Spirit which is likely to become an area for ongoing self development in any spiritual audit I do, self control. Indeed it probably becomes one of the learning outcomes in my lifelong learning programme.

    So here I am. And I’ve scanned in a wee card I found in a second hand book. The date written in neat fountain pen on the back is March 18th 1903. As you can see it’s an invite to a children’s meeting in one of Glasgow’s biggest public halls. Changed days, eh? The speaker was the renowned R A Torrey, who knew a few things about sanctification. Wrote books on holiness, Bible study, prayer, the work of the Holy Spirit. The singer was Mr Alexander. Not sure if he was an Edwardian Stephen Fischbacher, but apparently the weans were going to be ministered to by a big name preacher and a soloist. Eat your heart out Lynn from ‘help I work with Children’ (By the way, where are you Lynn – haven’t had your wisdom / wit / wistfulness / for a wee while?

    Book_2 

  • Giving up rubbish

    Aehrenleserinnen_hi_2 Millet’s ‘The Gleaners’ has been reproduced on jigsaws and biscuit tins. It portrays a different age, culture, pace of life; and it shows our wasteful, extravagant ways when contrasted with people whose daily lives depended on ‘what was left’. The large stacks in the background, the loaded horse and cart, the bundles of harvested straw and grain, contrast with the fingerpicking, back-breaking thrift of the gleaners. I don’t want to wish myself back into an era when so many of our technologically derived life comforts and provisions were uninvented or unavailable.

    But a picture like this argues for a way of treating our world less as a machine that produces the goods, more like the place where we find what we need; what we need to live humanly and humanely, not what we need to live at the expense of life itself. Stewardship presupposes an accepted responsibility for looking after and using wisely, that which is entrusted, given and therefore not mine. It shoudln’t take an old story about a woman’s fight for survival to make us aware of the fragile hold we have of this delicately poised, gloriously gifted, and now humanly threatened place where we live.

    Millet’s picture, those three gleaners who know the value of grain, and the story of Ruth and the providential accidents of divine happenstance, are enough to reflect on for today. I write this as the dustbin lorry comes up the street to take away our rubbish by the big bucket load – even our rubbish bins are getting bigger. I feel a lenten theme emerging here – suppose we give up producing rubbish for Lent? And suppose we apply the gleaning principle as a way of cutting down what we waste, throw out, use up? So instead of asking how much holier my soul is at the end of Lent, suppose I ask how much emptier the bin is of rubbish? Instead of denying myself luxury, I’ll deny myself the luxury of producing rubbish.

    How?

    Need to think about that – maybe I need to find a modern equivalent of gleaning, not wasting, valuing grain….

    By the way, we have a wee cheap print of Millet’s masterpiece, in a wee cheap frame, which came from the home of one of the most generous, gentle and merciful people I’ve ever known. Married later in life, and a widow much too early, Ruth was her favourite book in the Hebrew Bible – which was only one of the things which she and I had in common, enriching a friendship founded on honest questioning about what God is about, turning lives upside down and yet, as Winnie believed, faithfully working all things together for good.