Living Wittily

Blog

  • Quality Enhanced Discipleship?

    Logo_web Like some football games, (one of which I am about to watch!) this was a day of two halves. I spent the entire working day formulating learning outcomes in preparation for the revalidation of our whole suite of awards and modules. After a while the mind begins to get the hang of this. What starts as an exercise in semantic arrangements to satisfy academic administrative procedures, becomes a process of defining as precisely and fairly as possible what our teaching, and the student’s learning should be able to achieve in a collaborative educational commitment.

    And at that point I sense the vocational importance of doing it right – which maybe panders to the perfectionist in me. But ‘Do everything in the name of the Lord’ is one of Paul’s no exceptions statements, and I’m always suspicious when those Christ honouring demands are softened. So yes – here’s an opportunity to offer good work as an act of spiritual faithfulness. Dag Hammarskjold warned us, ‘in our era the road to holiness necesssarily passes through the world of action’.

    It’s tiring though – and there’s only so much of this you can do well before you mutter, with a different kind of semantic precision, ‘ma heid’s nippin’! So I came home and before dinner went for a run – that’s when you realise how stiff and tight the body becomes stuck in front of a computer, staring into  electronic white spaces you are trying to populate with keyboard generated symbols that might eventually win whatever prize is offered for the most original, creative, imaginatively conceived Quality Enhancement Documents!

    025941_1193468e It’s surprising how stiff your legs get after a long stint plonking a keyboard. So I toddled up the park, and took it out on the hill. The hill is the longish steep incline in Barshaw Park (pictured) which I’m trying to run up at a respectable pace as part of my ‘personal development plan’. It must be suppressed anger / frustration / euphoria, or a form of middle aged denial, but I did a personal best, set a new ‘benchmark’, ‘gave evidence of progression’, ‘demonstrated a capacity for  self-motivation and personal development’. See! The terminology of Quality Enhancement has multiple life applications.

    I wonder what would happen if we sat down and prepared a Programme Specification for Following After Christ. What the learning outcomes would look like, what would be included in the curriculum as relevant and important, what the learning and teaching methods would be, the criteria to be used in assessing progress and performance, the regulations about attendance, participation and commitment to the work of the class…..

    Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon me and learn of me…..

    More interesting still – the admission requirements would be surprisingly open – you’d just have to want to be there, and to learn from Jesus!

  • Listening, a strategic act of patience

    444118_open_bible_2  Mostly when we talk about the church we use qualifiers, missional church for example. Rowan Williams in the lecture I noted in yesterday’s blog, suggests an altogether different qualifier. In relation to the Bible and the breaking of bread he understands the church as a listening community. And perhaps listening is a spiritual discipline the evangelical church needs to rediscover, and even as C S Lewis long ago suggested, perhaps we need to repent of our talkativeness.

    Listen – to the Word read and proclaimed

    Listen to the invitation, this bread, my body broken for you…take and eat.

    Williams brings Bible and eucharist together as means of grace, as sources of nourishment and spiritual vitality, as representing the summons and succour of God.

    The Church’s public use of the Bible represents the Church as defined in some important way by listening: the community when it comes together doesn’t only break bread and reflect together and intercede, it silences itself to hear something.  It represents itself in that moment as a community existing in response to a word of summons or invitation, to an act of communication that requires to be heard and answered.

    Listening to the Bible, listening to the summons of Jesus to His table, is not a passive activity, it is an active alertness to that voice which addresses us. Listening is not a low energy alternative to action it is the necessary prelude to knowing what is required of us, what to do, how to act. Listening is therefore a strategic form of patience, a way of waiting to hear the One who speaks, in their time…and having heard what is required is response. In hearing and responding life is transformed, we are in more sense than one converted, turned again to the ways of Christ.

  • Theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture

    Ben Myers at Faith and Theology (see my Favourite Blog sidebar for the link to Ben’s blog) has a link to a lecture by Archbishop Rowan Williams on The Bible: Reading and Hearing.

    Archbishopmedium Ever since I read Rowan Williams prophetic and perceptive Lent Book, The Truce of God, around 1985 I think, I have read whatever he has written with care and a willingness to listen to this deeply spiritual and intelligent Christian thinker. Yes, I think Rowan Williams is first and foremost a thinker, of the kind the Christian church needs and should cherish, and should listen to with care and humility. That he was made Archbishop is in my view a mixed blessing – the politics and institutional tip-toeing required of his high church office may not be one of his strengths, though he’s no political lightweight either. But there is a generosity of mind, an imaginative and humane intellect, a spirit richly endowed with learning and experience, that make him one of the most important theologians the Church of England has produced in a century or two. He is deeply read in the fathers of the Church, sympathetic to the diversity of Christian spirituality, global in his sense of the scope and significance of the Gospel, and a persuasive if at times undogmatic apologist for the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ.

    In this lecture he states his aim early on:

    my aim is a very modest one, to examine the practice of reading the Bible so as to tease out some of what it tells us about the nature of Christian identity itself.  Because some of our present difficulties are, at the very least, compounded by the collision of theologically inept or rootless accounts of Scripture, and it seems imperative to work at a genuine theology of the Bible as the sacred literature of the Church.

    A genuine theology of the Bible – absolutely. A placing of the Bible within a clear understanding of God definitively revealed in Jesus Christ, the church receiving the Bible as God’s gift to be read, heard, preached, performed – as the script of the Christian community. Yes; but the script of the Gospel drama interpreted and performed as an expression of our relationship, not to theological ideas, but to a Person, Jesus.

    I’m going to ponder Rowan Williams lecture some more – and then blog on it. Like the Archbishop, I think the way we approach the Bible, the way we interpret it and live it, and the way it interprets us and calls how we live into question, decisively forms our christian identity – for good or ill.

  • Learned Optimism

    Optimism isn’t the same as hoping for the best but not sure if it will happen. It isn’t a kind of philosophical crossing of the fingers behind our backs either. That kind of uncritical optimism mean we’re simply not being realistic. The relationship between optimism and realism is very interesting for people who take Jesus seriously enough to trust Him. For people of faith, is their trust in Jesus optimism or realism?

    An important insight comes from an unusual book entitled Learned Optimism. It sounds complicated, but stay with me:

    Apx1975_01 One of the creative techniques in John’s gospel is that the writer sets you up, to hit you with truth. His gospel is about learned optimism. Repeatedly he argues, if you believe in Jesus you can combine being realistic with feeling optimistic, because He will create ways to improve the realistic situation as we understands it.

    For John the gospel writer, optimism is not only a matter of temperament. It is a worldview, a considered view of how the world is. In John’s Gospel, to believe in Jesus is to develop a radically different worldview.  Jesus, says John, is God’s radical intervention who redefines all other reality.

    “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh…..in Him was life and the life was the light of all humanity…the Son came that you might have life….if the Son shall set you free you shall be free indeed”. Reality is reconfigured, the way the world looks changes forever, when Jesus’ presence, purpose and power are presupposed.

    So, John says – Jesus is the life-giver, the light bringer, the liberator. For example in chapter 11, Jesus’ friend Lazarus is dead, buried, locked in the grave, decomposing in the darkness, confined by embalming bandages; that, says John, is the reality. And John says to us his readers, "faith is learned optimism, faith is feeling optimistic about God improving reality – your considered view of how the world is, is about to be reconfigured".

    .

    John says, ‘Watch Jesus and learn’.

    ‘Take away the stone’, says the Life-giver

    ‘Lazarus come out’, says the Light bringer

    ‘unbind the grave clothes’ says the Liberator. 

    And Lazarus walked out, into the light, back into life  and out into the freedom Jesus both commanded and gifted.

    .

    “Learned optimism” – it’s the worldview of those who have seen Jesus at work, and who believe that he still works; that the light shines in the darkness of every death -confirming, life-threatening grave. But says John, the darkness can never get the better of him. And that says John, is the learned optimism of resurrection faith.

    Water_lilies I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.

    “I have always prided myself on being realistic, and still value that quality. What I learned is that being realistic should be combined with feeling optimistic about creating ways to improve the realistic situation as I understand it.”

  • When old age is a celebration of life!

    This story ( and the photo) are about the importance of purposeful work for human beings. For the full story see BBC news here

    _42815935_dorsetgardener_203 A 104-year-old gardener is to retire after working on the land for 93 years.

    But Jim Webber, of Stoke Abbott, Dorset, is to continue managing his own plot, growing vegetables for his own table and to sell any surplus to supplement his pension.The widower said that arthritis in his knees had made it difficult for him to work for other people.

    He told the BBC: "I would do about 10 minutes and have to sit down, I couldn’t carry on. That wasn’t fair for the people I was working for."

    The story reminds me of one of my favourite one line prayers. It was written as Vera Brittain’s epitaph:

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

    And the 80 year old John Wesley, ‘Lord, let me not live to be useless.’ Now was that Wesley the Arminian, praying a prayer to be kept faithful and persevere in the  Calvinistic work ethic?

  • When OTT is OK

    2758184200034295584pcnpni_th_2 So many buildings around Paisley are grey, brown or some other tone that blends into a chronic urban sameness. But for two or three weeks in April, azaleas, rhododendrons and cherry trees defy the drabness, and wreck all this tonal monotony with outbreaks of vivid variety. In our own street a bright purple-blue azalea, half a dozen pink and several white cherry trees, and intermittent rhododendrons draw attention to themselves like fluorescent adolescents. The azalea was already in full bloom by Easter, but by now, all over Paisley and along the Glasgow Road, cherry trees are dripping with colour.

    2720465440029210395nhhlbk_th I suppose it’s the fragile transience, and the finely veined delicacy, and the sheer superabundance of petals, that give that sense of urgent beauty – show-off now, cos it’s a long time till next year, and you never know the weather in the West of Scotland – four seasons in 10 minutes. Either way, Cherry blossom (NOT shoe polish) is one of my personal religious symbols – and if you ask me what it means I’ll go all postmodern on you and say – it means whatever I feel, and what I feel has nothing to do with meaning and everything to do with joy and hope! Hopeful joy and joyful hope. I’m off for a run, in the sun, along a road where there is a whole extended family of cherry trees having a riot. That’s where I’ll have my first breather.

    Isaiah knew a thing or two about hope – "the desert shall blossom", he said, and in a number of urban desert corners around the town, the cherry trees are doing their bit for hope!

  • Novel writing as vocation: Chaim Potok

    When Chaim Potok, the well-known Jewish novelist, decided to become a writer, his mother had a different idea. “Chaim,” she said, “don’t be a writer. Be a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”

    Chaim said, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.”

    Periodically his mother tried to change his mind. “Chaim, listen to your mother. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying and you’ll make a lot of money.”

    But he always replied, “No, Mama, I want to be a writer.” Eventually she lost her temper. “Chaim, you’re wasting your time. Become a brain surgeon. You’ll keep a lot of people from dying.”

    Chaim shouted back, “I don’t want to keep people from dying; I want to show them how to live.”

    Daily_stanford Potok is one of the novelists I re-read – I’ve read several of his stories three times! He writes as a used-to-be insider on New York Hasidic communities in the mid-twentieth century. Talking with a good friend yesterday about what we were reading, she had bought The Chosen, on my recommendation. Hope she isn’t disappointed – one person’s enthusiasm can be another person’s tedium. Potok can be intense, and the world he evokes is the world of fading modernity, where human beings are still trying to figure out their place in this vast universe.

    0140030948_01__sclzzzzzzz_v45545076 But for me, Potok has captured the powerful, ambivalent and even dangerous tensions created by religious commitment and the contemporary world. But he has also articulated those deep religious longings that are tied to community, tradition, difference and identity, and which arise out of that deep place in us where we feel the desperate desire to live our lives towards hope and fulfiment. You want to read something a little different – here’s a novelist who chose storytelling as a way of showing us how to live.

  • Christ have Mercy

    _42035844_scream_body Edvard Munch, at the time he completed his masterpiece ‘The Scream’, said he had tried to express the scream that echoes throughout creation. And the picture with its lines distorted around a distorted human face, conveys a disturbing and disorientating sense of unspeakable anguish. And the hands that frame the face are covering the ears, perhaps trying to shut out the noise of the scream, but unable to silence the inward scream that is the response to unimaginable pain. Yesterday, in the aftermath of the massacre of young students at Virginia Tech, someone said 2007 can already be called the year of the scream.

    A blog isn’t the place for plausible explanations (none come to mind), nor the place to pinpoint blame (the killer, the gun culture, the video-game aneasthetising of violence); I want to scream. I want to protest at the waste, the tragedy, the cruelty of what has happened to so many young lives, and the devastation unleashed out of the blue on so many families and communities. I want to scream at whatever it is that drives one human being to kill so many with automatic efficiency and bypass any of the usual human restraints of conscience, compassion, satiated appetite for violence. And inside, like the rest of us, I’m sick. A University is a place of learning, of developing potential, of human activity focused on self-development towards usefulness as a human being, a place where people come to be changed by learning and knowing.

    300pxchrist_of_saint_john_of_the_cr Lord have mercy

    Christ have mercy

    Lord have mercy

  • Watch where you put your feet

    Haworth_013 In one of the older Bible translations Paul encourages the Ephesian Christians to ‘walk circumspectly’, which might at a push also mean ‘live wittily’.(Eph 5.16-17) Both renderings are demonstrated in this photo of me on an ancient set of monastery stepping stones, while on holiday down at Haworth (Bronte country). I’ve decided that I look sufficiently careful where I put my feet (well some of the stones were shooglie -Scots word for ‘tottery, insecure’), that I’ll leave the photo on the profile for a while, to illustrate walking circumspectly, living wittily.

    47507392__p5293192_c1_800 Ancient ruined monasteries are significant places for me – the care with which the sites were chosen, the craft and skill and hard labour of building such sacred space, their pivotal place in the local economy of previous centuries, but also the sense that these were places of prayer set to the rhythms of the day, and places of purposeful work and study, of industry and liturgy.

    Abbeysept05d4211sar800 My favourite such place is Rievaulx in Yorkshire. Been there a number of times –

    1. in the aftermath of two days rain when the mist clung to the trees but the rain had stopped, and there was a stillness and a sense of countryside drenched but refreshed by the water that makes life and growth posiible

    2. on a sunny day when the tourist buses were like dodgems in the coach park, noisy children were making the kinds of noise that probably monastery walls were built to keep out, but there was a sense that the place itself was undismayed by the presence of folk, because that’s why it was put there in the first place

    3. and my first visit, when I’d done my homework, knew the plan of the building, and went to do the educational thing, identifying the nave, the transepts, scriptorium, refectory, herb garden, dormitory – and simply admired the sense of permanence that such durable buildings must have given to the community over the generations.

    Where there’s a monastery there is a river, where there are no bridges there are stepping stones – OK to walk across them on a summer day when the river is low, the stones are dry and I’m wearing New Balance trainers. Wouldn’t like to do it in February, across a risen river, stones wet, mossy and slimy, and the water freezing, and wearing leather open sandals or massive working clogs.

    Three thoughts –

    1. The thought that a community builds stepping stones across rivers is an interesting image of how a church serves its local community – the church helping people get from here to there, negotiating the difficulties with them
    2. the thought that whether you’re a monk or not, none of us walk on water, some stones are shooglie and any one of us could slip and fall in, a reminder of our dependence on each other for care and occasional rescue
    3. and the final thought – stepping stones get you there stage by stage -for the monks who put them there, stepping stones were a metaphor for walking towards God, using the means he had given, the stepping stones – scripture, community, prayer, bread and wine, praise, care for the poor and sick.

  • Emerging church and revivalism

    Energetic church – progressive church – emerging church. Whichever qualifying participle we use, we are likely to be theologically redefining the church in response to perceived or desired change. We are also using such words to describe the various ways the church expresses its life and evolves, even metamorphoses, within successive cultures.

    0830825827_01__sclzzzzzzz_aa240_ I’m reading about 19th century revivalism – and am intrigued by the parallels between then and now. Those who generated revivalist practice and theology, and those who criticised and resisted it in the 19th Century begin to sound like Maclaren and Carson arguing about who is being faithful to the Gospel / Scripture.The same polarisations about developments within / out of Evangelicalism that arose over revivalist practices bear some similarity to the current tensions created by ’emerging church’ as it encounters more conservative expressions of Evangelicalism.

    Interestingly Revivalism in the 18th and 19th centuries was seen as doctrinally suspect by many of the most influential Evangelicals, while other Evangelical leaders offered supportive Gamaliel arguments (if it’s of God it will prosper, if not it will not). Revivalists such as Finney and Moody were imaginative, innovative and provocative in their methods and approach to evangelism; and while their preaching aimed at radical and enduring conversion, they were also concerned about the subsequent church experience of converts.

    Moody_sm Their approach was unabashedly pragmatic, often theatrical in expression, the theology focused and clarified in a Gospel presented in ultimatum terms, accompanied in some of its expressions with emotional extremes climaxing in conversion, while others encouraged hearers towards a quieter controlled experience of conversion in which religious affections and elementary theological awareness combined. But I doubt if we have any idea how radical it was in the early 19th century to hold Christian worship services in theatres, to advertise them with flyers as if they were local gigs, with ink-drawings of the main celebrities, and for preachers to perform like religious sales personnel (I avoid the gender restrictive ‘salesmen’, cos some of the finest revival preachers were women! – until revivalist congregations and denominations aspired to social respectability after which women preachers all but disappeared). (See Wolffe, 128).

    Here is one religious journalist’s description, from 1836, of the energetic and progressive piety of American revivalist churches:

    If churches relapse into a low state, they are not satisfied long to continue so; but they begin to enquire into the cause of this declension and the means by which it may be remedied. They entertain confidence in the success of suitable means, and are often at once sagacious in the discovery and prompt in the application of them to the condition of particular congregations. Should plans be suggested which have for their object to waken professors from a state of slumber, and arouse the unconverted from their sleep of death, objections are not urged against them because they are new; they do not restrain zeal, lest it should produce innovation; and are more afraid of incurring the guilt of lukewarmness than of being charged with the extravagance of enthusiasm. (Wolffe, page81)

    Was this the 19th Century church accommodating to cultural change, on pragmatic missional grounds deliberately adjusting Christian experience and church expression to maximise connectedness with the changing life around it? Was revivalism as a movement, a 19th C equivalent to emerging church?

    And before assuming this is oversimplified comparison, and unhelpful anachronism, perhaps we should try to understand, using some historical imagination, just how radical – and transient – such accommodations have tended to be. That might help us see the importance, but only the relative importance, of contemporary accomodations – such as emerging church. And maybe instead of putting participles in front of church (doing words – which do tend to put human activity in the driving seat!) we should put the adjective after – as in church militant – church triumphant – church universal. I have a feeling it’s words that way round that best remind us the church isn’t ours, nor is its future in our hands – and that the church of Christ will always be bigger than our participles!!