Margaret sent me the following link here which proves beyond all possible doubting, that human beings are beautiful – and that God made all of us for beauty, and goodness and glory.
‘Life in a human being is the glory of God; the life of a human being is the vision of God.’ (Ireneaus)
Thanks Margaret – to watch this clip is a rehumanising act of admiration for all this human beauty set to music, such passionately hopeful music.
A boy holding an orange in his hands
Has crossed the border in uncertainty.
He sands there, stares with marble eyes at scenes
Too desolate for him to comprehend.
Now, in this globe he’s clutching something safe,
A round assurance and a promised joy
No one shall take away. He cannot smile.
Behind him are the stones of babyhood.
Soon he will find a hand, perhaps, to hold
Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.
Lotte Kramer (1923)
It’s the word ‘perhaps’, that gives this poem its poignant pull; and how it is placed between ‘hand’ and ‘hold’, then framed in commas – the punctuation device that insists you, the reader, pause. Perhaps = uncertainty…. who knows what life will bring this boy – but perhaps, just perhaps, he has not lost the human power to imagine the better when faced with the worst.
…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,
Or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’
Few gestures rehumanise difficult moments more powerfully than the hold, the touch, even the reaching out, of a hand. Those moments in the gospels when Jesus at the bedside of the dying child ‘took her by the hand’, or when against all advice and "good practice" he practiced goodness, reached out to the leper and ‘touched him’; and when Peter started sinking in the maelstrom of a Galilean storm Jesus ‘reached out his hand and took hold of him’. Moments of precise, intentional, kindness and comfort.
One way of rehumanising our culture would be for us to find ways of being to those who need it, "….a kind hand, perhaps, to hold….". And for the community of Jesus’ followers the challenge is to demonstrate to a culture confused about how we can touch each other in non-threatening, non-exploitative ways, how to perform acts and gestures of spontaneous and embodied kindness and comfort.
…‘a hand, perhaps, to hold,
or a kind face, some comfort for a while.’
In conversation with Stuart (word at the barricades) on my current rehumanising campaign, we picked up on a number of what are called human interest stories on the news yesterday. TV News is usually dominated by the macro concerns of the 21st Century human community. ICT and economic transactions are globalised, products and cultures increasingly standardised, the language of diplomacy and policy militarised, and the economic, social, ecological and political consequences analysed!
So it becomes important to rehumanise the News, to tell and consider those stories that focus on the struggles and achievements, the joy and courage, the sadness and the dignity of ordinary people and their all too human, and therefore significant, stories.
The other morning a man spoke about early diagnosis of his Alzheimers condition and the drugs he is now taking. He tells of the joy of retaining his sense of self, the daily awareness of his grandchildren, the softening of his underlying anxiety about losing his hold on the deepest relationships in his life. But many of these drugs are expensive -and so not universally available – so what price on enabling a person to retain their identity, to maintain their friendships, and to be a giver as well as a receiver of love?
Altogether different, the story of an 8 year old boy whose weight of 14 stone is now of serious concern for those who have a duty of care. The papers were interested in the possibility of social work taking him into care – but the local hospital suggested a close tie-in with their eating disorder clinic. Whatever the rights and wrongs of how an 8 year old becomes three times the expected weight for a child of his age, there is no denying there are now huge ethical questions around food as a substance we increasingly abuse. Just what is it we are feeding, and how do we name, those hungers that come disguised as inner emptiness? How do we avoid uncritical acceptance of a culture where human beings eat themselves to death? In Elizabethan plain English, the words of another era are scarily and culturally precise – ‘whose God is the belly, whose end is destruction’. Both a warning and a description of a society where ‘enough’ is never enough, and more is always better.
And Josie Grove, the brave young woman who decided not to live at all costs, and who wanted whatever of life was left not to be diminished in its quality by chemotherapy. She didn’t blame her illness, leukaemia, for her distress; it was the treatment and its effects that she couldn’t suffer any longer. Surrounded by her family she gradually relinquished her hold on life – and again I’d never presume to say what anyone else should or shouldn’t have done. I simply admire the dignity and spirit of a young woman whose humanity was radiant with a gentle defiance of all that would diminish the human value of the time she had left.
Three human stories. And from my book of Poems for Refugees:
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above-
…
Know that you aren’t alone
The whole world shares your fears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
Vikram Seth (1952-)
Incidentally, Vikram Seth’s Equal Music is one of the most beautifully written novels I’ve ever read (and I’ve read it three times). He understands the full range of emotions that provide the scales and structures, the points and counterpoints, of that music which is the human song. Music too is a rehumanising activity.
Today’s post is at hopeful imagination, on Isaiah, Haiku and Son of Star Wars.
But I can’t resist the prose poem by R S Thomas.
It points to the necessary humility and respectfulness of others that,
for those who claim a call to ministry,
are presuppositions of vocational integrity.
‘The holiness of the heart’s affections’. Never
tamper with them. In an age of science everything
is analysable but a tear. Everywhere he went,
despite his round collar and his licence, he was
there to learn rather than teach love. In the sim
plest of homes there were those who with little
schooling and less college had come out top in that
sweet examination.
An entire pastoral curriculum in around 50 words!
I’ve had a long standing relationship with Oxfam shops. Long before the word recycle began to exert some leverage on our throwaway habits, Oxfam was working hard at being honest broker, the middle man (sic) in transactions where they got stuff for nothing and sold it on for bargain prices. Books by the dozen, the occasional shirt (one suitably sombre tie needed while on holiday to attend a family funeral), a superb ratchet nut cracker more like a shifting spanner and a real mauler with almond shells, along with fair trade honey and coffee.
Bought another book the other day in the more upmarket branch in Hillhead, Byres Road! Poems for Refugees, originally published to raise money for the children of Afghanistan. I’ve enlarged the cover so you can see the sad beauty of this vulnerable, precious little human being. Her home – who knows? Her parents – maybe there, maybe dead. Her future – again, who knows. I took the book because of the picture – and also because of the poems – and mostly because something deep in my heart and spirit is simply not prepared to accept that this is the way it has to be for this child.
I used a rare word yesterday – I’d like to see it enter the common stock of everyday words. I haven’t looked it up in a dictionary, I’ve decided to define i for myself – to take it to mean what I think it means and should mean in the vocabulary of the 21st C!
Rehumanise (def): to restore human dignity to the dehumanised; to reinclude (another new word?) a person in the human community; to remove causes of dehumanisation.
Recently I’ve started to notice social situations, unhealthy relationships, institutional practices, political decisions, management styles, military protocols and commercial behaviour which undermine, deny, diminish, ignore, people’s humanity. This poetry book is essentially a protest on behalf of rehumanising practices. Its sections include
On Exile and the Refugee
On War
On Diversity
On Love and Loss
Consider for a second or two who you are, what you are – what matters to you –what you want from life –those you love and whose disappearance would deprive your life of an essential joy –
Think humanely, imagine and celebrate what it means for you to be a woman, a man, a child – and then look again at the book cover, at the bewildered uncertainty of this child, this small refugee human being, caught up in war, suffering God alone knows what love, and loss, and loss of love. Different from us but deeply, essentially, humanly, the same. And remember the rehumanising words of Jesus,’Let the children come to me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’. So how come countries which claim any moral continuity with Jesus can impose political and economic sanctions which inevitably lead to large scale suffering for children?
Aye – I know there are political realities, that the world is complex, and a dangerous world becomes positively perilous when spiritual and theological reasons are given as to why such policies are wrong. But I can’t get the thought out of my head, that Jesus is on the side of this child, these children. And that the Word who became flesh, cherishes and comforts the vulnerable beauty that is a human being, made in the image of God.
Stanley Hauerwas doesn’t need his popularity ratings boosted – two reasons – one his stature as pastoral theologian, ethical thinker and ecclesial critic is already assured – two, the popularity of his views is the last thing that bothers him. I’m pleased however that a number of folk have emailed me to say they’ve bought his Matthew commentary on the strength of what I’ve quoted and commented on here. Good. But I’ll give it (and Hauerwas) a rest now. Meantime, here’s the Matthean Hauerwas illustrated by Picasso!
Christian discipleship requires confrontation because the peace that Jesus has established is not simply the absence of violence. The peace of Christ is nonviolent precisely because it is based on truth and truth telling. Just as love without truth cannot help but be accursed, so peace between the brothers and sisters of Jesus must be without illusion.
Yet we must confess that truth is about the last thing most of us want to know about ourselves. We may say that the truth saves, but in fact we know that any truth, particularly the truth that is Jesus, is as disturbing as it is fulfilling. That is why Jesus insists that those who follow him cannot let sins go unchallenged. If we fail to challenge one another in our sins, we in fact abandon one another to our sin. we show how little we love our brother and sister by our refusal to engage in the hard work of reconciliation.
……pastoral theologian, ethical thinker and ecclesial critic…..all three in one short extract. Superb!
Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks. Military hardware recycled as agricultural implements, personal weapons reshaped into horticultural tools. The African-American spiritual, ‘Aint gonna study war no more’, protests the use of human ingenuity and creativity in the art of war, as if there were such a thing as an aesthetic of killing. Instead to lay down the burden, down by the riverside, and cultivate, nurture, harvest and then feed, nourish, share – to rehumanise (new word?).
The poet Daniel Berrigan, one time friend of Thomas Merton, grew up in a farming family. I learned that by reading his meditations on Isaiah 2 in his book Isaiah. Spirit of Courage. Gift of Tears. Most of the chapter he works away at thinking through what it means to beat swords into ploughshares. And he makes it personal by recalling his own childhood experiences of ploughing with his father. Several sentences triggered deja vu in my own memory and experience – I was also brought up in a farm labourer’s family. My father was a dairyman and ploughman – the picture shows him ploughing in the early 1950’s – with my mother,(I’m sitting on her knee!) and my brother (standing at the edge of the field)watching the world, and the horse, go by. So when Berrigan describes the tranformation of soil through ploughing the images resonate deep in my memory of childhood, my love for my father, and make me long for a more innocent time – except by the 1950’s, the last decade of horse drawn ploughs, nuclear weapons were the holy grail of post-war governments desperate to possess the ultimate deterrent. Here is Berrigan complete with American spelling:
Each spring I stumbled along after the plow as my father turned the earth, one furrow upon another. A sense of new life, damp, permeating, haunted with presences, arose in the mild air, so welcome after a killing north-country winter. I imagined that giants of the earth were turning over in sleep just before awakening. Or I thought of the furrows as great coils of rope, weaving, binding all things in one; earth and season, furrow and family, the horse plodding along, the planting, the harvest to follow, my father and me. It was all one. The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world.
I love that last sentence: The blade of the plow wove the garment of the world. Swords into ploughshares. Work that ‘rehumanises’.
Stuart has a characteristic word at the barricades, on the prophetic relevance of that short text for today (and I mean today, Saturday the 24 of February, the date for anti-war protests). See here. I’m blogging at hopeful imagination next Wednesday (Feb 28), on precisely this text, Isaiah 2.2-5. I’ll post the photo of my father there too; such human, humane labour, weaves the garment of the world…., and whatever else dad was, he was a man of the soil.
On Wednesday, 21 Feb, my birthday, I spent the day doing several things I enjoy. Early morning I was on my way to Glasgow University Library chasing material on George Macleod of Iona for the paper I am doing on him in March. Needed a quality coffee to start the day and went into the Hunterian Museum which has a small, light, corner cafe where I enjoyed a latte with Almond syrup, and a chapter of my new book.
When I asked for the Almond syrup the woman serving me asked if I’d seen Masterchef Goes Large, the night before.
‘Aye’, I said.
‘Whit aboot that eejit that put ground almonds instead of parmesan in the pesto?’, she asked me, obviously still astonished at such ignorance of elementary cuisine know-how.
‘And the pillock served it, tae’, she added.
I know what she meant – meatballs served with a sweet almond sauce????? If you make a mistake, you acknowledge it and start again; if you are in a hole stop digging; two wrongs don’t make a right. Did leave me wondering though….marzipan flavoured meatballs!
Then, still sipping and reading, I overheard fragments of a conversation – but before I recount a couple of snippets, you need to know I was reading The Cross Shattered Christ by Hauerwas, a gift for Lent. As usual, Hauerwas was on about peace, the cost of peacemaking, and the dangers of pious sentimentality leaching the tragic mystery from that pivotal moment in the life of God – the death of the Son. And in the light of such tragic mysterious triumph, the determined opposition of Christian hearts to all that makes for unjust death and dehumanising cruelty, morally reinforced by an abiding suspicion of politically motivated violence.
Now the fugitive pieces of conversation rendered into phonetic Scots – the meaning still more or less transparent………
‘Ah didnae want tae hiv a row wi’ her. A didnae mean tae fa’ oot wi’ her. She juist went ballistic.’
‘Ah’m that busy ah’m gonnae be aff the planet next week – ah cannae look efter her.’
‘See whit ah huv tae pit up wi’? God love her – ah love her tae bits so ah dae.’
A mother, complaining to her friend, about her teenage daughter’s perplexingly challenging behaviour, in the language of the heart.
What’s the connection between me reading about the cross and peacemaking, thinking about George Macleod, sipping an almond latte, and hearing these snippets of genuine humanity and the costly tensions and tanglements of human love.
It’s the word ballistic – used to describe a family row, a euphemism for other euphemisms like ‘losing it’, ‘chucking a wobbler’, ‘doing your nut’. Ballistic – it means a projectile travelling by its own momentum when the engine is switched off. So when I hear the word I think of other semantic connections – Intercontinental ballistic missiles – silent unwinged harbingers of mass death, the terror of our enemies, our peace founded on the ultimate blackmail play of the ‘other’s’ threatened destruction.
Connections?
The cross and its intercontinental embrace.
Peace as the goal of God.
Lord George Macleod, passionate Christian pacifist, kirk minister, and CND’s most eloquent orator.
The love of a mother and the love of God.
And that scary euphemism; when did the word ballistic enter the popular vocabulary of the West of Scotland as a description of self-propelled anger? I ask the question as a West of Scotland man, sitting at a keyboard, 20 miles from Faslane, hoping none of the people with power ever feel compelled to go ballistic on an international scale.
And I sit here affirming still, ‘Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand’;
and praying still, ‘O cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee, I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be’.
And, more whimsically, but just as seriously, I wonder if God looks down on this planet and says something like……..
‘See whit ah huv tae pit up wi’? God love her – ah love her tae bits so ah dae.’
Cross shattered Christ!
God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…………………..
March 24 will be an important date for us here at the College. For some time we have wanted a place (Stuart would say ‘space’) to explore the diversity and significance today of the Scottish Christian Spiritual traditions. This isn’t a wee parochial talk shop about what makes Scottish Christians special, unique, peculiar; ‘Here’s tae us, wha’s like us’, is hardly a spiritually modest toast! It’s more about trying to understand the context within which we are trying to follow Jesus faithfully as witnesses of His Kingdom. There is no claim that there is such a thing as A Scottish Christian Spiritual tradition anyway. There is a long, tangled, at times tragic, religious history that still deeply informs Scottish values and attitudes. Scottish spiritualities often emerged from controversy, a passionate againstness that found identity through conflict. Our heritage has powerful streams of Celtic, Catholic, Calvinist, and Kirk traditions that do not coalesce easily. To understand who we are, where we came from, what histories and memories shape our present and shove us into the future – this is a missional obligation.
So there are no intended pretensions about all this. The invitation is to gather people together in a spirit of exploration, to take an interest in how Christians in our own nation and culture, past and present, have believed they were being faithful to Christ; to learn from their insights and their mistakes, because we are part of the same continuing but changing church. And while there may be occasional reflective papers, each event will be an occasion for spiritual reflection, prayer and thinking about who we are, and asking in the light of that, who God is calling us to be, here, now.
Our first half day meeting (full details soon) has the overall theme ‘Persepctives on George Macleod and the Iona Community’. There was a spiritual courage that could be expressed both in belligerence and benediction in Lord George Macleod of Fuinary. His prayers are amongst the devotional treasures of Scotland. Here’s one of them
Almighty God…
Sun behind all suns,
Soul behind all souls…
Show to us in everything we touch
And in everyone we meet
The continued assurance of thy presence round us,
Lest ever we should think thee absent.
In all created things, thou art there.
In every friend we have
The sunshine of Thy presence is shown forth.
In every enemy that seems to cross our path,
Thou art there, within the cloud, to challenge us to love.
Show to us the glory in the grey.
Awake for us thy presence in the very storm
Till all our joys are seen as Thee
And all our trivial tasks emerge as priestly sacraments
Within the temple of thy love.
Today, Ash Wednesday, I have blogged at hopeful imagination. The site is set up by Andy Goodliff, and you should visit it during Lent if you want daily reflection and comment that encourages a different way of looking at the world, ourselves and what God is about around us. The title will be familiar to Brueggemann fans – the theological importance of both hope and imagination is that they are perspectives that refuse to take the way things are as the way things have to be. To pray is to lift up holy hands against the status quo – the thought is Karl Barth’s, and recalls us to prayer as an act of political significance.
Lent can easily reduce to a "pious grovelling around in our own souls" (R E O White, former Principal of the Scottish Baptist College in an unforgettably astringent lecture on pastoral prayer). There are few more selfish acts than prayers which are fixated on our own feelings, our own devotional aspirations, our sins, our desires, our view of what we want God to do here, there, then, now. Yes prayer is personal relationship – but the personal becomes selfish, and private, and exclusive – "oh that will be, glory for me" – if that relationship, like all Christ-like relationships, is not outward looking in self-giving love, generous compassion, hunger for justice for others. The picture above is of a child working on a construction site in Honduras. See the story and statistics on the UNICEF site here. Lifting up holy hands against the status quo….Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven……children….of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Self-concern is not one of the fruits of the spirit, and it might be an interesting experiment this Lent to monitor the frequent recurrence of the first person singulars in our prayers – I, me, we, us, mine, our. And to consider whether public prayers by those of us who lead worship reflect the wideness of God’s mercy, express hunger and thirst for righteousness, understood not primarily as personal justification, but as God’s call to the Church to embody a Kingdom that is justice, peace and joy. And it just might result in one of the most radical changes in our own spirituality when our understanding of the ‘ingrasping’ love of God,(the word is Charles Wesley’s!) opens our arms to embrace this broken beautiful world of ours, with a passion derived from Christ’s Passion, and with a self-forgetful commitment to the ways of Christ as the ways of life. That would be to pray with hopeful imagination!
Have a good Lent!
