Living Wittily

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  • Pre-emptive confession?

    Off to Aberdeen where I’m preaching on Sunday. Catching up with a number of friends, out for an evening meal with some of them tonight, and then making and taking time to worship together at Crown Terrace Baptist Church tomorrow. Amongst the other friends I’ll catch up with, will be Chris, who owns Old Aberdeen Bookshop.Whenever possible I try to encourage my friends by supporting them in whatever they do that matters to them in life. I don’t often leave Chris’s shop without buying – it’s what Dr Johnson used to call the wise habit of ‘keeping your friendships in good repair’. One way or t’other, a few inches of my shelfspace is about to fill – this is by way of pre-emptive confession.

    And yet – Chris is a friend, and I want to support his business, so that’s all right then. Aye, but what about motivation – is buying books from him further unnecessary self-indulgence, masked by alleged goodwill? So good consequences for the other person, don’t rule out convenient excuse for me. Isn’t life complicated if you think about things too much – maybe that’s why the wise spiritual guides of the past warned against scruples. Evangelical Christians are not immune to this spiritual obsessive compulsive disorder. It takes the form of self-centred wallowing around in our own souls, supposedly concerned about sin when all the time we are self importantly putting our little selfish moral sensitivities at the centre of God’s attention as if God had nothing better to do than monitor our personal guilt thresholds.

    In which case I’m going to just enjoy burrowing for an hour and happily and innocently buy some good books, from a good shop, at a good price, for a really good guy?

    Or is that me rationalising – is that ethical spin doctoring –

    aye probably, but there’s worse things than buying yet more books. One elderly lady we came to love in Aberdeen used to say dismissively to people going on…and on… with their moans and complaints, ‘Aye well – worse things happened at Culloden’.

  • Evangelism as benevolent barrage?

    Aehrenleserinnen_hi John Stackhouse is one of the most stimulating and clear-thinking theologians writing on mission, culture and evangelical theology. His recent article in Books and Culture says important things about gospel faithfulness, cultural relevance, legitimate and effective innovation, and intellectual and theological humility. He is reflecting on what needs to be learned, and unlearned, by a church seeking to embody the call of Christ responsibly and with gospel integrity. The whole article can be read here.

    I’ve quoted the last couple of paragraphs because (for me) they confirm my own underlying uneasiness at the increasing dependence on programme, technique,and ‘resourced mission’ where the resources seem increasingly dependent on human agency. Evangelistic fervour channelled into pragmatically driven activity and missional aspirations which sound more dependent on human energy than the divine work of the Holy Spirit invading and converting, calling and transforming, can easily replace that humble recognition that when allis said and done( by us), there is more to be said and done (by God). This is not to minimise the church’s missional imperative – it is to remind ourselves that it is God’s mission, in which we are invited to share – and the resources are God’s too, which we are invited to offer.

    We have to unlearn, however, our tendency to rely on technical skill and relentless pressure, as if we can manufacture conversions by dint of expertise and enthusiasm. We especially have to discard the dangerous dictum, "Pray as if it all depended upon God, and work as if it all depended on you." That is simply nonsense—or, much worse, a recipe for arrogance, burnout, frustration, and finally hatred of both missions and the neighbors we are supposed to love when they do not yield to our benevolent barrage.

    Conversion is the hardest work in the world, since fundamentally it means to change someone’s loves. (Have you ever tried to change your child’s values? Have you ever tried to change your own?) Such change is literally a miracle of transformation each time, and thus the special province of the Holy Spirit. Yes, let us marshal all the tools and skills and energy we can, but let us use them not anxiously nor proudly, but in the humble confidence that comes from doing God’s work in league with God’s Spirit, under his direction and in his own good time, in his truly global mission.

  • Prayer through sound, but without words

    Paisley1 Last night went to a music concert in Paisley Abbey. The music was unfamiliar, but the New Cologne Chamber Orchestra played to a good crowd, in a building brightened by evening sunlight, and it was a good place to be at the end of a busy burst of work in between holidays. I was able to listen without much visual distraction because we couldn’t see the performers! A level church nave, a seat well back, and some big people in front of me, ensured this was a primarily auditory experience. And the pew seats were clearly designed to prevent sleeping through anything going on at the front!

    Explore6 The flute concerto was the highlight. I’ve always found the flute a wistful, playful, gentle sound, which can express all kinds of yearning, joy, loss and love. Looking down to the magnificent stained glass window, brightened by a sunset, and hearing the sound of flute accompanied by strings – it was prayer through sound, without words. Not unlike my description earlier, prayer as ‘a wistful, playful, gentle sound, which can express all kinds of yearning, joy, loss and love.’

    On a more discordant note – the connection between flutes and drums, in military music, and in the West of Scotland and Northern Ireland, I find offensive. Whether the band is Irish Republican or Orange Lodge, I find the whole performance of marching music commemorating religious conflict inimical to a gospel of peace and reconciliation. One of the most effective exposures of the brutality and hatred that underlies flute and drum music as an expression of religious hatred is in Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, Grace Notes. There is a scene well into the novel where the philabeg drums feature as the destructive, rhythmic symbol of the violence they both foment and portray. The flute is capable of such beautiful, creative, life affirming sound, made by the shaped and directed breath of the performing musician – but so likewise the flute can be made to serve the violent, commemorative sounds of ancient hatreds kept alive by musicians performing for quite other reasons. As an expression of religious conviction – on whichever side plays them – they are a shame and an embarrassment.

    Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God – the flute music I heard last night, in the setting of a place of worship, with the sun streaming through stained glass, in a pre-reformation building, was a gentle defiance of all that would pull our human lives into discordant conflict.

  • Three perspectives on gratitude when growing older

    While clearing out a pile of stuff, I found these three observations I’d typed on a sheet of paper don’t know when –

    Lord grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference

    .

    The elderly gentleman said, ‘I have had bypass surgery, am largely deaf, and have both prostate issues and old age diabetes, and take about 40 different medicines that give me dizzy spells, but thank God, I still have my driver’s licence.

    .

    ‘Who then is God, that we must speak of Him? God is he whom we must thank. To be more precise: God is he whom we cannot thank enough. (Eberhard Jungel)

  • My true name

    41c3cvt5xnl__aa240_  There is a passionate integrity in the lyrics of this album. Carrie Newcomer’s writing is human, humane and humanising – passionate love, reverence for the mystery of human joy and longing, controlled but targeted questioning of the way things are, unembarrassed use of words like tenderness, try to be kind, no shame in asking for help, the importance of our true name, and as she admits – love is too hard to figure. I’ve found myself listening to the lyrics and sensing in myself an answering inquisitiveness about what matters – the relaxed almost conversational singing, the gently interrogative mood of several of these songs, the affirmation of life’s limitations and the need to accept that mistakes, regrets and loss are balanced by possibility of joy, undeserved gift of love and an experienced eye for what is hopeful and worth striving for. I’ve chosen a song as an example of what makes her lyrics(and her performance of them), human, humane and humanising – it’s about our struggle to know and love who we are, and how that’s connected to who loves us.

    My true name

    Let me call you darlin’, maybe call you sweetheart
    Don’t you hate it when they call you Louise
    But isn’t it scary, when they want to call you Mary
    A whore, or a saint, or a tease.
    But you came here in summer, you’d been living in Manhattan
    You caught me wide eyed and half sane
    But you saw to my center past every imposter
    And you whispered My True Name

    _
    I have been Betty, Eleanor and Rosie
    I’ve been the shamed Magdaline
    And if the truth be known I’ve attempted Saint Joan
    Donna, and Sarah, and Jane
    For we all have our heros and we all have tormentors
    and we’ll play them again and again
    But you saw to my center, past every imposter
    And you whispered My True Name
    _

    And if you see me standing on the banks of Lake Griffy
    Throwing white bits of paper to the wind
    I’m just throwing the shards, of all my calling cards
    And I’m speaking My True Name
    I’m just throwing the shards, of all my calling cards
    And I’m whispering My True Name.

    Identity depends on being recognised, on the perception of others as well as that inner awareness of who we are and who speaks our name. I have little difficulty theologising this song – but only after I’ve heard its human longing for recognition from the other, ….and from the Other.

  • Have you ever…..?

    2358179450037305645yzihkm_th At this time of year, for an hour in the early morning, the sun streams into my study onto the computer screen. Why pull the blind, or move the screen – instead I move myself into the window chair, and sit reading in the sunlight. It reminds me of this beautiful poem by a favourite poet, whose love of the world, and whose attentiveness to its nature as gift, reminds me of the liturgical ecology of the ancient Psalmists.

    The Sun

    Have you ever seen

    anything

    in your life

    more wonderful

    _

    than the way the sun,

    every evening,

    relaxed and easy,

    floats towards the horizon

    _

    and into the cloud or the hills,

    or the rumpled sea,

    and is gone—

    and how it slides again

    _

    out of the blackness,

    every morning,

    on the other side of the world,

    like a red flower

    _

    streaming upward on its heavenly oils,

    say, on a morning in early summer,

    at its perfect imperial distance—

    and have you ever felt for anything

    _

    such wild love—

    do you think there is anywhere, in any language,

    a word billowing enough

    for the pleasure

    _

    that fills you

    as the sun

    reaches out,

    as it warms you

    _

    as you stand there

    empty-handed—

    or have you too

    turned from the world—

    _

    or have you too

    gone crazy

    for power,

    for things?

    Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1, pages 50-51.

  • Blog makeover

    Decided the design of the blog was tired and needing a makeover. I like the space and the clearer, larger font, the colours, and the butterfly heading out the top corner for freedom. I’ts called Art Nouveau Red – I think it’s the smartest I’ve had so far. I had a wee problem getting the blog to accept the changes, emailed Typepad help at 6.45 and had an answer an hour later – and the answer solved the problem.

  • Letters mingle souls, for thus friends absent speak

    Books02619x685 I spent a wee while this morning, reading in the small chunky maroon buckram volume of The Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, my copy published in a fourth edition, 1884. It’s one of a small collection of ‘devotional books’ I turn to regularly. The inverted commas around devotional is a hat tip to C S Lewis who disliked the marshmallow niceness of devotional writing, and preferred hard books you had to read with a pipe gripped in your teeth. Apart from the pipe, I’m with CSL – his essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’ is anthologised all over the place; written sixty years ago, it’s still a wise dissuasive from our ‘chronological snobbery’, by which we think the latest, newest, shiniest, easiest is best. The old has lasted till now – the newest still has to be tested – that’s CSL the pragmatist!

    Thomas Erskine was one of those Scottish Christian leaders during the first half of the 19th Century, who fell under the criticism and at times manipulative severity of those who saw themselves as defenders and upholders of Westminster orthodox Calvinism. Thomas Erskine, John Macleod Campbell of Rhu, near Helensburgh, and James Morison of Kilmarnock who formed the Evangelical Union of the Congregational Church, were three Scottish theologians who taught that Christ died for all, and not for the elect alone; they challenged particular atonement and proclaimed a universal and free Gospel, to be offfered to all, that all might hear the good news of Christ and respond in repentance and faith. 

    Morison and Campbell were tried before their church courts and deposed – though before the end of the 19th Century their theology of God’s universal love, Christ dying for all, and of the evangelistic imperative of a free gospel offered to all, had become the dominant position. P T Forsyth (Jason will concur!), described Macleod Campbell’s book, The Nature of the Atonement, as ‘a great, fine, holy book’. His endorsement is for some of us as near an imprimatur as Forsyth himself would allow!

    .

    Ptf_letter_2 Now that I think of it, a number of books of letters are important in my own understanding of what it means to follow after Christ – The Selected Letters of Baron Von Hugel, the Letters of Samuel Rutherford, the five volumes of Letters of Thomas Merton, The Spiritual Letters of Fenelon, The two volumes of Letters of Principal James Denney, Collected Letters of Evelyn Underhill, Cardiphonia of John Newton, the Letters of John Wesley (much more interesting than his Journal), William Cowper (one of the best letter writers in the language). (A Roman Catholic intellectual, a Scottish Covenanter, a trappist monk, a French Catholic spiritual director, one of Scotland’s finest biblical theologians, an Anglican laywoman, an ex slaver turned Evangelical leader, the founder of Methodism, and England’s finest rural poet) – quite an impressively varied crowd – and what brings them together in my story, is their careful correspondence, their taking time to ‘connect’ by snail mail, and someone taking time to gather, edit and publish them.

    If Baron Von Hugel had lived today, would we have his posthumous Selected E-mails, Blogposts and Text Messages of BFVH’@Typepad.com?? – instead of some of the wisest, most convoluted, but most spiritually patient guidance anywhere. Not only history, but biography and sheer human artefacts, and spiritual theology as lived and written, seem threatened by the transience, occasionality and excess of electronic communication.

    For example the above scanned letter is from P T Forsyth about a letter in his coat pocket he’d forgotten to post!

    Off to get ready for church………………………….

  • live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out…

    51p7bfhdxkl__aa240_ I’m reading two books on the Bible. One by Brian Brock on Singing the Ethos of God, is really hard work. Parts of it are a dense and detailed exposition of Augustine and Luther on the Psalms. The whole book is an attempt to find a way of using the Bible in Christian Ethics without ‘using’ the Bible as support for ethical positions arrived at independently of the will and nature of the God encountered in the Bible. To live within the ethos of God, for the presence of God to be the environment we breathe, the affective centre of our lives, the emotional and spiritual expression of doxology and gratitude, is very different from a utilitarian handling of Scripture as a collection of principles, values, virtues or any other set of abstract extrapolations to be taken off the shelf as need requires. Brock is arguing for a much more interactive, dynamic and theologically responsive and responsible use of the Bible. So his book is important, carefully argued, at times lucidly persuasive – but overall I’ve found it hard to follow, and wonder if that’s because it’s too long – some of the exposition of Augustine’s exposition of the Psalms makes its point – but takes too long to do it.

    41tsk5p1hwl__aa240_ By contrast Eugene Peterson’s Eat this Book, is an uncomplicated appeal for christians to stop playing around with the Bible and eat it – let its words be embodied in blood cells, nerve endings, joints and sinew, muscle and bone. Peterson targets the self sovereignty of contemporary Evangelical Bible readers, who use the Bible for their own spiritual projects, their personal doctrinal choices, to win arguments, settle ethical controversies. This is vintage Peterson as encountered in some of his earliest (and best) work.

    One quotation from each of these authors shows why I’ll persevere with reading both.

    …for love to be rightly directed we need "God with us". Humans are in need of consolation, not because they have difficult experiences, but because they have lost God and thus no longer know how to love aright. Doxology is the point where the lost meet God…because doxology cries for and dares to enter God’s presence. The Psalms are God’s way of opening doxology to us, and thus they play a crucial role in Christian ethics: they are God’s offer of himself to us, and the promise and the form for our renewal. The new humanity has been renewed in order that they may be entirely given over to good works. (Brock, page 167.)

                                                             …

    We are in the odd and embarrassing position of being a church in which many among us believe ardently in the authority of the Bible but, instead of submitting to it, use it, apply it, take charge of it endlessly, using our own experience as the authority for how and where and when we will use it. One of the most urgent tasks facing the christian community today is to counter this self-sovereignty by reasserting what it means to live these Holy Scriptures from the inside out, instead of using them for our sincere and devout but still self-sovereign purposes.(Peterson, page 59).

    Andy (Goodliff) promised to blog on Brock later – I’ll be interested to see if my making heavy weather of chunks of it were due to my reading most of it while on holiday, or a sign of intellectual atrophy, or just the cost of trying to understand someone who is trying to say something significantly new. Either way reading the two books together makes for an interesting trialogue.

  • The Spiritual discipline of other people…..

    Tartan_shirts_ Multipurpose trip to Edinburgh yesterday – research for a couple of things I’m working on was the primary draw. I wanted to check up on the Special Collections holdings at New College – they hold the papers of one of my other spiritual heroes, Alexander Whyte. Of all the Scottish preachers I’d like to have heard, he is in the Scottish Premier League, and in the top six!

    Two encounters with folk I’ve never met and probably won’t again. Since I was going to retrieve my car loaned to Aileen during our holiday, I only needed a one way fare. Spoke to the Ticket Man Behind the Glass and asked,

    ‘What’s the difference between a cheap day return and a single one way?’

    ‘Wan brings ye back, and wan disnae’, he said, smiling disarmingly but with the sub-text ‘Ya pillock’.

    The difference in price was 10p – but it seems the 10p part of the Journey wasn’t transferable to the outward leg. decided not to ask him to confirm this!

    .

    Later, in the National Museum cafe, having ordered my Mozarella, cherry tomato, fresh basil leaves and pesto Ciabata (how Scottish is that??), I was reading, minding my own business. When my Ciabata arrived, and I was poised with knife and fork ready to begin the delicate operation of not eating it like a sandwich, a polite voice from the next table asked,

    ‘Excuse me, but what is that you have ordered’.

    A senior citizen with a non-spray on tan, serious bling attachments to both wrists and her neck, smiled at me over her must have cost a packet tinted specs. So knife and fork poised I described the contents of my anticipated lunch and showed her on the menu where it was.

    ‘And is it nice’, she asked, before I’d even tasted it.

    So I cut off a chunk, chewed it thoughtfully (and it was really good), nodded affirmatively, at which point she said to her friend, ‘No. I think we’ll just have the soup’. Was it the way I ate? Or did Scotch broth appeal more than eating Italian? Or was she an undercover quality control visitor satisfied that the punter was satisfied?

    Dinna ken. But what I did discover is you can’t eat a Ciabata with a knife and fork and read a novel that snaps shut if you try to lay it flat on the table. So do I pick up the Ciabata and eat with one hand holding the book with the other? Or do I concentrate on enjoying the taste and nourishment of the meal – as well as eat in a more civilised, good mannered way? Happy to have advice on such nutritional multi-tasking, feeding body, mind and emotion (it was an Anne Tyler novel).