Living Wittily

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  • Channel 4, Non Justifications and the Emperor’s New Clothes

    Holbein18 ‘Living wittily in the tangle of our minds’ sometimes means thinking in an uncomplicated way about important events and human happenstance. I think a mother of two boys, killed in a car crash abroad, is an important event, and the most tragically life changing event so far in the life of her two sons. I am uncomplicated enough in my thinking, and in my not always successful attempts to be a compassionate and wise human being, to respect the grief, the privacy and the loss of all involved.

    Why should that change when the person killed was Diana Princess of Wales? Channel Four intends to screen previously unseen photographs of the interior of the car, of Diana receiving oxygen in the immediate aftermath, and to broadcast previously inaccessible testimony from photographers. This is wrong, cynical, voyeuristic and deeply exploitative. Which is bad enough. But my uncomplicated take on these things isn’t to be taken as stupidity. Does Channel Four think that the following is in any sense a professional or moral justification, or that it comes anywhere near socially responsible Huh?

    "there is a genuine public interest in the events that followed the crash…."(Sorry, but where is the distinction between public interest and ghoulsih voyeurism? And if by public interest, is meant the more ethically important issue of serving the public good, what good is it going to do me to see a dying mother struggling for life – or to see the mangled mess inside the car where a human being was fatally injured? PUBLIC INTEREST???).

    "We don’t think the pictures are intrusive, and we have thought very carefully about the sensitivities of the families involved" (Sorry, but what other car crash victims would also be fair game for widespread broadcast on our TV screens? And thinking very carefully does not necessarily imply that you have concluded very sensitively, wisely, responsibly or even humanely!!!)

    "Appropriate action has been taken to avoid any unwarranted intrusion in the privacy of the family."(Appropriate action – like what? And what is warranted intrusion, and who decides? A company already compelled to apologise for its mishandling of racist material expects me to believe it actually cares more about avoiding unwarranted intrusion, than it does about the human tragedy that lies at the centre of this whole tangled mess)

    So – the above quotes are Channel Four’s "justification". How does one respond to such a litany of inanities? How do we stop semantic gymnasts from offering – non-justifications as if they were convincing, reasoned and cogent points which any sensible, mature adult can swallow with their cornflakes? Maybe by adopting the uncomplicated response of the young boy, whose perception was clear, and who was innocently unaffected by spin and illusion, and who pointed out bluntly that the Emperor had no clothes on. Channel Four’s contrived "justification" is the identical scenario – naked hypocrisy patronising the crowd by parading its see through gear!

  • Picasso, Pentecost and Haiku

    Picasso’s simple line-drawing, with the biblical allusion of the dove and the olive leaf, I find profoundly moving, and poignant, in a world where violence is often the preferred method of communication. This Pentecost, may the Spirit of peaceful communication enable us to find olive leaves to offer one another.

    Picasso, Pentecost and Haiku

    Invading Spirit,

    Gatecrash our solemnity

    With holy fervour.

    .

    The Church that’s drinking

    Intoxicating Spirit

    Never lost for words.

    .

    Rushing mighty wind,

    Hurricane force holiness,

    Mission impelled church.

    .

    Searing tongues of flame

    "Inextinguishable blaze",

    Purify our hearts.

    .

    Speak in other tongues,

    Of love, of peace, of pardon,

    People reconciled.

    .

    Tower of Babel,

    Communication breakdown,

    New hermeneutic.

    .

    Pentecostal gift,

    As given, Giving, Giver,

    "The Go-Between God".

    Jim Gordon, Pentecost, 2007

  • Music is feeling, then, not sound

    Laurastearoom When stopped for speeding Oscar Levant, the American pianist and composer explained, "You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony and go slow!"

    When it was premiered, the critics panned Beethoven’s Seventh, one review accusing Beethoven of being as drunk as the music itself when he composed it. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve listened to it – and it never lets me down – it always lifts. Wallace Stevens’ poem about wistful piano playing says something about the spirituality of music:

    Just as my fingers on these keys

    make music; so the selfsame sounds

    On my spirit make music, too.

    Music is feeling, then, not sound.

    Josephkarlstieler_1820 Today, driving back from Laura’s Teashop at Carmunnock, Classic FM played the whole of that last movement. To my knowledge I didn’t speed – but music like that is to me what a double espresso is to some of my pals!! There is a dynamic payload of energy in it that makes Oscar Levant’s mitigation plea perfectly plausible. How a deaf composer was able to celebrate and synchronise sound into such joyful, aggressive, in your face vitality I’ve no idea. Part of the miracle that is Beethoven at his best, I suppose. But for me, Beethoven clinches Wallace Stevens’ argument – when music touches deep in our spirits, "music is feeling, then, not sound."

    And maybe Beethoven was remembering the critics when he said:

    Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

  • Jonathan Edwards – who he?

    Jonathanedwards The name Jonathan Edwards used to be famous and recognisable; he’s the New England late puritan revivalist pastor, now widely recognised as the greatest American theologian, and one of the most intellectually gifted philosophers in American history. It’s a pity most people who’ve heard of him tend to know him best, if at all, because of his famous sermon, ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’. Edwards’ theological writings can never be reduced to such caricature – his theological works are a huge mother lode of Australian (well, New England) gold nuggets. I can still remember reading his sermons on Charity and its Fruits, coming to the last sermon, ‘Heaven is a world of love’. I know of nothing, nothing, that gathers together such rhetorical and spiritual power in his descriptions of the love of God and the overwhelming mercy that suffuses the whole of reality.

    Ggweltklasse_zurich Nowadays the name Jonathan Edwards isn’t as straightforward. Someone by the same name is a retired world-class, olympic gold-medal winning triple jumper, who until recently presented Songs of Praise. Put Jonathan Edwards into an Amazon search and you get a mixture of athletic autobiography and puritan theology, motivational self-help and no nonsense mercy and judgement.

    Joned23123 And then the past couple of days I was down in Manchester meeting with British Baptist leaders and spent time with Jonathan Edwards (a third one) – Jonathan is General Secretary of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, a highly experienced pastor and a fine reflective church leader.

    41bv41ze32l__aa240_ The puritan, the athlete, the Baptist…..’ The name Jonathan Edwards is to the fore for me again cos I’ve just started the Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Edwards, along with other recent studies of his life and thought. The essays here cover the full range of Edwardsian studies – an essay a day means it’ll take a fortnight to read. As you can see, the book cover does him no favours – probably seemed like a good idea to the graphic artist to use a modern ‘wooden stylised bust’ – doesn’t work as a book cover – just makes him look miserable, scary and…well….wooden!

    I haven’t forgotted my promise to do a couple of posts on Edwards and Moltmann on the Trinity – after Pentecost I’ll get round to it.

    First – on Sunday I’ll post some Pentecostal Haiku!

  • A Pentecostal Worldview

    It is through the agency and power of the same Holy Spirit speaking in us and through us that the Word of God can be and continues to be communicated, as living dynamic Reality to humankind in the proclamation and the teaching of the Church. This holds good in the most difficult circumstances, for it is the coming of the Kingdom of God in Christ and the Lordship of the Holy Spirit on earth that are at stake in the mission of the Church. Just as when Jesus cast out demons by the Spirit (or finger) of God, the Kingdom of God or his sovereign Presence and Power came among people, so when the church proclaims  the victory of Christ over all the forces of evil and darkness, it is God himself  in the Sovereign Presence and Power of his Spirit who is at work bringing redemption and freedom to captive humanity.  (Torrance, Christian Doctrine of God, page 63)

    Aye, but do we believe all that? Does Pentecost decisively shape my worldview? Not if I’m simply flattened by the avalanche of gloom and manufactured anxiety that passes for ‘ the news’. Pentecost is the day when the Church believes in miracles again, when all that darkens and diminishes life is swept up into purposes much bigger than sin, and more determined than any number of demons. Whatever else, Pentecost announces Who rules, OK??

  • McJob and the Oxford English Dictionary

    So. Mcdonalds want to rewrite the English language by erasing the word McJob from that responsible guardian of verbal verities, the Oxford English Dictionary. Here’s the story from Lawdit, the intellectual property solicitors.

    Arch The

    UK

    arm of McDonald’s is planning a campaign to have the dictionary definition of a McJob changed. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is: "An unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector."  Lorraine Homer from McDonald’s, however, said the firm felt the definition was "out of date and inaccurate".

    The fast food chain is planning a public petition to try to get the definition changed. The word McJob was first used in the

    US

    in the 1980s and was popularised by Douglas Coupland’s 1991 book Generation X. It first appeared in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary in March 2001. McDonald’s tried to improve the image of its employment opportunities last year with the slogan: "McProspects – over half of our executive team started in our restaurants. Not bad for a McJob."

    Now I think it’s laudable (a couple of letter changes make the word laughable) that McDonald’s are now concerned about fairness, keen for everyone to use accurate descriptive terminology, and aspire to be supportive enablers of their employees’ prospects. And I do think if a company has genuinely turned around, and is now espousing and promoting fair trade, fair labour practices reflected in liveable wages as a global and not only locally expedient policy, and works credibly towards not only image change but to evidence a change of ethical substance, then that’s to be commended and rewarded.

    However – rather than remove the pejorative McJob, Mcdonalds could inspire new words like McFairpay, McFairtrade, McHealthy, McOrganic. If they carry on appealing to the courts, and using their commercial weight, they might generate the even less welcome neologism, McLitigation.

  • Courageous intervention

    I was once told by one of the congregation, after preaching on a particularly astringent passage from the Gospels where Jesus was berating the religious status quo, that I needed to preach like that more often. When I asked ‘Preach like what’?, I was told ‘Give us a hard kick up the backside’.

    I have to confess I was a bit surprised – I suppose it hadn’t fully registered that

    a) preaching might have had that kind of aim expressed in such unevangelical terminology

    b) there are those who expect to come to church and be the regular recipients of that kind of ‘team talk’!

    But at the same time I recognise the truth of Thomas Merton’s comment that the church suffers from ‘chronic niceness’, a capacity to be accommodating and non-confrontational, and that in so doing the church is being unfaithful, avoiding the pain and rejection of being both critic of the status quo and exemplar of another way.

    51x45jbq92l__aa240_ Which brings me to a passage from my A year with Dietrich Bonhoeffer daily readings book. Some of Bonhoeffer’s writing is an unmistakable example of ‘a hard kick up the backside’ for the Church. The words below were written at a time when the church’s silent acquiescence let evil go unchallenged.

    Bonhoeffer The church confesses itself guilty of violating all the Ten Commandments. It confesses thereby its apostasy from Christ. It has not so borne witness to the truth of God in a way that leads all inquiry and science to recognise its origin in this truth. It has not so proclaimed the righteousness of God that all human justice must see there its own source and essence. It has not been able to make the loving care of God so credible that all human economic activity would be guided by it in its task. By falling silent the church became guilty from the loss of responsible action in society, courageous intervention, and the readiness to suffer for what is acknowledged as right. It is guilty of the government’s falling away from Christ. (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 140-1)

  • Still Reading Torrance

    41pmc6kwr3l Someone defined a good book as one that should be sucked slowly, like a lozenge. Now ‘lozenge’, ever since I was a wee boy and had to suck cough lozenges on account of chronic bronchitis, brought on it seems by secondary smoking, has always seemed to me to be a grown up word for a sweetie, that while tasting a bit different, would definitely do you good. 

    Tom Torrance’s The Christian Doctrine of God is a lozenge of a book. I am reading it slowly because it’s a grown up book that is doing me good. Here’s one of my latest lozenge paragraphs – to be taken slowly and allowed to do good.

    …our belief in the Deity of Christ rest,…upon the whole manifestation of ‘the Christ event’ as soteriologically proclaimed and interpreted in the gospels and epistles. We rely upon the whole coherent evangelical structure of historical divine revelation given in the New Testament scriptures. It is when we indwell it, meditate upon it, tune into it, penetrate inside it and absorb it in ourselves, and find the very foundations of our life and thought changing under the creative and saving impact of Christ, and are saved by Christ and personally reconciled to God in Christ that we believe in him as Lord and God. This does not come about, however, without renouncing ourselves in a repentant rethinking of all that we are and claim to know, that is, without our being crucified with Christ in heart and mind and raised to new life in him. (page 53)

  • To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak

    Music is a powerful, persuasive, subversive force in human culture, having a capacity ‘to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.’ Decided recently to have a summer of rediscovered favourite music and newly discovered shouldn’t have missed it first time music. So I’ve added a sidebar called Music Redivivus – the albums there list the music I’m now making time to listen to. My usual stuff includes Baroque, Beethoven, assorted Country – mainly female vocalists, Joan Baez and bits and pieces of other stuff. So I’ve asked several folk to give me the name of a CD they think would help me recover from my self imposed philistinism and restore a sense of cultural connectedness!! Over the next couple of months I’ll occasionally update on my progress on a musical refresher course, curriculum dictated by other people’s tastes.

    But first, a singer I am revisiting.41c3cvt5xnl__aa240_ Several years ago I discovered Carrie Newcomer. Her work was profiled in Sojourners, never a recommendation I’d ignore. I discovered a singer and writer whose major key is hopefulness, who combines faith with justice, and laughter with serious critique of all that makes laughter hard. She tells stories of the hopes and dreams, the struggles and courage of immigrants, single mothers, refugees and others whose place in the world is threatened and whose life chances are made fragile by ‘the way it is’. Her songs vibrate with a sense of life’s mystery, how frustration mixes with fulfilment, sadness with joyfulness, loss with new possibility. She is a wonderful apologist for music as a deeply formative shaper of moral response and a hopeful worldview. Here’s one of her songs from the CD My True Name.

    When one door closes another door opens wide
    It’s hard to believe all of the locked doors I’ve tried
    And you can’t pray for what you want or what you’d have instead
    You can only offer up your heart and ask that you be led

    Life’s gonna take you, where you never thought you’d go
    When you finally think you’ve got it down, It isn’t so
    There are windows and doors, you’re not finished with yet
    It’s not always getting what you want, but wanting what you get
    Chorus

    It’s not gettin’ easier, so I’m not going to pretend
    That I know this story from it’s beginning to it’s end
    Oh believe me when I tell you, believe me if you can

    If I could turn down the noise of my own will and choice
    I could hear the truth of my life in a clear voice
    I will bow down my head to the wisdom of my heart
    Cool my heels and hold on to the best parts

  • Muffins and Sandy the Poet; Pizza, IRN BRU and Wembley

    200424062001 Thursday morning went in to College hoping to find my glasses – the expensive ones. Asked at the Cybercafe – no luck. Over to the library and asked on floor three if any glasses had been handed in. Librarian misheard me, looked at me as if I was daft, and said,

    ‘We don’t lend glasses. Anyway, the only ones I’ve got are my own and they would look weird on you.’

    After explanations – she’s embarrassed and I still don’t have my glasses. Eventually I found them – on the floor of my study (I don’t have an office – I have a study, HMMPHH!) – under the chair, undamaged either by the wheels of the chair or the cleaner’s hoover the night before!

    A_hutchinson Friday morning did lots of phone / email / marking then went for a coffee with Graeme. Met Alexander Hutchison the Scottish poet – not to name-drop but Sandy has been a friend since my early days here at the University – he gave me one of his poems, signed, as a gift to mark my Doctorate. Well a long blether about illumination in the poetry of Theodore Roethke, the dialectic between immanence and transcendence, the inordinately long sentence (Sandy thinks the longest one extant!) that comes at the end of Michael Polyani’s 1951-2 Gifford lectures, Personal Knowledge, and our usual swipe at the suffocating algae of contemporary academic administration that reduces the oxygen and light of scholarship.By the way, did I mention the curling stone sized blueberry muffins that Graeme and I ate???

    Friday afternoon did another 10k run – still quite hard going but slowly improving. Not today though – end of Semester fatigue took the edge off. But the wind, a couple of light showers and quite a lot of sunshine provided a pleasant climate in which to risk expiring. Running past a bus stop in Crookston Road, obviously looking mildly distressed, young ned says, devoid of sensitivity,  ‘ Ach ye’ll be too auld onywye by 2012.’

    Obviously I no longer cut it as an Olympic prospect. But I did shift most of that mountainous muffin though!

    This afternoon is fitba’ and pizza – Andrew and I are hoping for a scoring draw, extra time and then a penalty shoot-out at the new Wembley which today doubles as the OK Corral between Mourinho and Ferguson. If one is the goodie and one is the baddie, which is Ike Clanton and which is Wyatt Eearp? 

    _39342935_irnbru203_3 Doesn’t matter we’re neutral observers of the beautiful game, skilled practitioners of sofa fitba, the high energy spectator sport sustained by Pizza and, in true Blythean spirit, – IRN BRU. Anyway the BIG game is tomorrow – Aberdeen need to beat Rangers to qualify for Europe – or Hearts need to lose at Kilmarnock – which makes me a two day fervent Killie fan.