Living Wittily

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  • Cruciform scarlet!

    Dscn0074_2 The photo shows our now annual post-Christmas flower-fest.

    Each year ( as the non-surprise part of Christmas) Sheila is given an amarylis bulb which starts life as a big brown lump sticking out of a pot packed with compost. Once it starts to sprout it does the botanical equivalent of Formula 1 speeds, produces impressive buds and blooms in a spectacular display of in your face colour that demands attention from the other side of the room.

    Dscn0073_3 Native to South America, produced now commerically in Holland, they are in our shops from early December.

    The sight of such a larger than life exotic scarlet flower in our living room in the West of Scotland, early February (when do the clocks change?), is a visual tonic.

    Some people try to time them so they open (which they can do almost overnight) during the Easter week-end – you can see why.

    Amarylis Haiku

    Cruciform scarlet!

    Easter annunciation!

    Trumpet concerto!

  • brave gestures of remembering

    The dedication of a child is one of the unambiguously positive statements the church makes about children. As a minister few services give me more pleasure and reason for spiritual affirmation than holding a baby who represents the love of the parents embodied in a life, and now offered in gratitude and hopefulness, while a congregation sings the Aaronic blessing, the Lord bless thee and keep thee.

    This weekend has been one of the saddest of my life. A young man who was killed in a tragic accident while doing his job, two days ago, was one such child, the focus of a church’s prayers and his parents gratitude, over 20 years ago. He was growing into all they had hoped – not perfect, and all the better for that. And he had such exciting plans for the next stage of his life training as a teacher. He would have been a brilliant acquisition for the teaching profession.

    15_30_23_web His entire family are desolate – and for now, no words describe, explain or anaesthetise their anguish. Ministry begins in the silence of shared grief. Pastoral support becomes the unspoken agreement that some questions are unanswerable but have to be asked. Now and again it’s important to encourage brave gestures of remembering, holding on to the reality and permanent importance of their now absent son, brother, grandson and nephew.

    Somehow, the unbearable must be borne, and in the strength of the One who was also asked, "My God, why have you forsaken me"?

    And we all know the Easter outcome of that.

    But right now feels like Easter Saturday.

  • Hauerwas 9:the power they pretend to possess

    P_hauerwas0014_2 Matthew’s story about Herod, John the Baptist and Herodias is the only story in this gospel which does not involve Jesus. And Hauerwas is alert to the political realities of power in his reading of a petty tyrant’s cruelties and insecurities. The connection between political power and popular approval is dangerous – for tyrant and oppressed.

    "Matthew has described the insecurity of those in power who depend on the presumption of those around them; that is, they must act in a manner that assures those they rule as well as themselves that they possess the power they pretend to possess. The powerful lack the power to be powerful, which means that they live lives of destructive desperation. That desperation, moreover, often results in others paying the price of their insecurity". (page 138).

    Intended or not (and knowing Hauerwas, I think it is) that is an incisive comment on the recent history of Britain and America, our leadership and their policies. Leaders trying to "assure those they rule that they possess the power they pretend to possess".

    The next story, the feeding of the crowds, has the same political critique. Jesus feeds the hungry out of compassion, and because they are hungry. Herod feeds those who are not hungry as a way of showing his power and buying their favour. Jesus’ feeding of the hungry is an alternative politics to that of envy, greed and purchased popularity. How exactly the story fits the current news, eh?

    "Those who would be Jesus’ disciples need to learn how to feed the hungry in a manner that charity does not become a way to gain power over those who are fed. There is a violent and nonviolent way to feed the hungry". (Page 139)

    It is interesting, and spiritually astringent, to read a commentary on the gospel which is so outspokenly frank in its commentary on the kind of world Jesus calls us to confront, subvert, love and feed…. a world of Herodian banquets and hungry crowds.

  • Haiku: patient verbal renunciation

    Recently I have begun to write Haiku, a form of Japanese poetry. I have a passion for words – their meanings and sounds, the capacity of words to convey human thought, express human emotion, announce personal intention. In the beginning was the Word – a creative purposeful power that calls into being, that names what is created because it is personal and relational, that creates the reality of goodness by pronouncing what is made – good.

    Haiku is a disciplined shaping of words to express truth with purity and singleness of thought. In its classical form it has three lines of 5 then 7, then 5 syllables. Not much scope for polysyllabic sesquipidalian show-offs then! But a well conceived and constructed Haiku verse can contain depth of emotion, clarity of insight, intensity of thought – so I find it an interesting way of trying to contain – not in the sense of constrain, but in the sense of hold, the meaning of biblical text.

    Doj_roberts_01 A recent example of this for me was Advent, when I spent some time exploring the book of Lamentations in the company of two women commentators – their books are on the sidebar. It seemed important to hear the voices of those acquainted with grief, and with God, in a time when we too hear the lamentations of dispossessed, violated people. I offer only three of what for me became an exercise in reverent articulation, patient verbal renunciation, choosing and arranging in the minimum of words a heart cry for a world gone wrong. I make no claims for them other than that they seek to express the theological concentrate of a potent text.

    Haiku Lamentations

    Zion dismantled.

    Military masterpiece,

    City walls unbuilt.

    ………………………….

    Splintered gates, unhinged.

    Doorways, empty sockets stare;

    Shadows of despair.

    …………………………….

    Sorrow is constrained.

    Grief controlled in bitter verse.

    God, perhaps, has gone.

  • haute cuisine = hot food

    Having just had a routine cholesterol check I thought I’d pen a panegyric in praise of porridge. Forget tasteless glutinous gunge – people queue for this stuff at Mash (haute cuisine establishment!) in London!

    The medical benefits are universally recognised. Here’s a quote:

    "Soluble fibre which is found in fruit, vegetables, peas, beans and of course, oats, helps reduce blood cholesterol. It’s a complex process but, put simply, think of rolled oats as tiny sponges in your body that soak up cholesterol".

    Well it must be good if Nelson Mandela, Bill Gates, Jane Fonda and Tim Henman (oh, and Wallace and Gromit) are celebrity consumers.

    Englishteastore_1935_18263349 Roald Amundsen even took it to the South Pole – I wonder if Scott did – would be a good advert for Scott’s Porridge Oats.(Picture on left illustrates the export version – American spelling! Picture also shows shot putt being thrown over cliff?!)

    Anyway – Sheila and I have porridge at least a couple of times a week. Apart from all the above pluses, it’s supposed to release seritonin, which helps you feel less depressed by the long dark, wet, windy, dreich West of Scotland winters. But making porridge has a down side – Who cleans the pot afterwards? Because when a porridge pot cools it develops a thick gelatinous coating which, when it comes to washing the pot…….yeuk!

    Scouring out the porridge pot,
    Round and round and round.

    Out with all the scraith and scoopery,
    Lift the eely ooly droopery,
    Chase the glubbery slubbery gloopery ,
    Round and round and round.

    Out with all the doleful dithery,
    Ladle out the slimey slithery,
    Hunt and catch the hithery thithery ,
    Round and round and round.

    Out with all the ubbly gubbly,
    On the stove it burns so bubbly,
    Use a spoon and use it doubly,
    Round and round and round.

    For a fact sheet on the dietary benefits of porridge, Scotland’s contribution to health food, see http://www.flahavans.com/home/facts.htm

  • Hauerwas 8: It’s that simple

    Hauerwas_2 " The parable of the sower is not often considered by those concerned with the loss of the church’s status and membership in Europe and America, but it is hard to imagine a text more relevant to the situation of churches in the West. Why we are dying seems very simple. It is hard to be a disciple and be rich. Surely, we may think, it cannot be that simple, but Jesus certainly seems to think that it is that simple. The lure of wealth and the cares of the world produced by wealth quite simply darken and choke our imaginations. As a result, the church falls prey to the deepest enemy of the gospel – sentimentality. The gospel becomes a formula for "giving our lives meaning" without judgment. (Page 129)

    Hauerwas is aksing disconcerting questions in his reading of chapter 13. Does Western culture have soil deep enough to grow deep roots? Is the church in the West so identified with the choking entanglements of consumer capitalism and its promised good life that it will inevitably strangle itself?

    ‘Possessed by possession, we desire to act in the world, often on behalf of the poor, without having to lose our possessions…A church that is shrinking in membership may actually be a church in which the soil of the gospel is being prepared in which deeper roots are possible. (Page 130)

    This is Hauerwas commenting on the text by assertion – which he owns up to on the first page of the commentary anyway. But I am finding myself irked by his overstatements – until I ask, overstating what? Not the gospel – because the inevitable consequence of that gospel is that it calls in question the very things I hold on to tightest. And, yes, if Jesus is calling me, the church,us, to relinquish all the stuff that chokes, to risk being deepened by deprivation – that sounds like an overstatement, which means it is probably gospel truth.

  • emotional and spiritual interrogation

    Howard For about a month I’ve made my way through Eliot’s Four Quartets using Howard’s slim commentary, Dove Descending, as a guide. And Howard is a good guide – not too talkative, not prepared to explain ad nauseam as if you had no eyes of your own, but well informed, not pushing you along too quickly, and clearly in love with his subject.

    I have seldom read a poem more historically specific in its imagery, (the first half of the 20th century). And yet there is in its power and subtlety, unflinching realism about human experience of precious life and inevitable death, penetrating truthfulness about fear and hope, anxiety and aspiration, time and eternity, an unnerving contemporary feel. It isn’t easy poetry – apart from the intellectual artfulness, the technical construction, the precision of language and subversion of form – it is the emotional and spiritual interrogation that takes place when the four poems are read in 2007. These quintessentially modern poems, accurately and specifically, diagnose the symptoms and trace the complexities of the post-modern worldview as it impacts on human existence. And Eliot does so profoundly informed by Christian tradition.

    356996978_1772d0ce84 Time and timelessness, the centrality but elusiveness of human experience, the loss of the metaphysical structures of thought, the "chronological snobbishness" that thinks newest is truest and the accompanying suspicion of meta-narratives; these are some of Eliot’s themes. I know some of what he says doesn’t ‘work’, ‘connect’, with where we are today; what he’d have made of a world wired to the Web, welded to the mobile phone, dissolving into globalised standardisation – I’ve no idea. But if I want to even begin to examine life’s deepest foundations, his is one of the voices I would want to hear.  Why? Because he is honest about how hard Christian faith is, both to hold on to, and to relinquish – because we are caught in the love of the God who is caught in the love of the world.

  • Leadership and Community – which defines which?

    One of my favourite writers complained in one of her books that life was happening too fast, that experiences, conversations, people and thoughts require time to be assimilated. She viewed unassimilated experience as wasteful, an irresponsible squandering of life’s significant moments, a culpable extravagance that failed to learn from other people’s ideas.

    That’s how I feel after a working retreat (oxymoron?), when important conversations, shared times of prayer, intentional time away from the usual routines, were dedicated to giving us space and inclination to think, talk and plan, to dream, grumble and get whatever is in our hearts off our chests! There’s a couple of intriguing questions that I want to think about, (assimilate!!) – then in a day or two suggest some of my (probably tentative) conclusions, so that if you are interested you can offer your perspective, correctives, insight.

    03footwash_s What is the relationship between community and leadership?

    Is leadership individual or corporate? Is it a personal charisma or a community gift?

    If it is not an either/or, how can it be both personal and communal? 

    These kinds of questions are important because if we aim to identify potential leaders, develop gifts of leadership, grow certain kinds of leadership (visionary, enabling, strategic, prophetic etc), it seems to me one way or another they have to come from, emerge from, and find rootedness in the community. Or do they?

    Then there is the Baptist thing. If I ask, how do we develop effective leadership within Baptist communities, what difference does the word Baptist make to the style and implementation of leadership initiatives?

    Is it idealistic to say that in a Baptist fellowship the congregation is the source of leadership as it seeks through prayer, conversation and listening to Scripture, under the superintendence of the Holy Spirit, to discern the mind of Christ together?

    What then, is the role of the prophetic individual? The persuasive motivator, the convincing strategist, the inspirational thinker whose ideas seem exciting, attractive – are these gifted individuals to be muted in a process that seeks the common denominator of communal agreement?   

    Savior_1 Or, put more positively, what in practice does it mean for the body of Christ to function effectively, to act in a co-ordinated and purposeful manner, under the head who is Christ? Specifically, what does leadership look like in a Baptist community, where the word Baptist is definitive as well as descriptive. I mean by that, Baptist as a self-description given content by such identity conferring principles as personal discipleship following after Jesus, covenanted community of shared mission and ministry, co-operative faithfulness to Jesus as revealed in Scripture. What is leadership that emerges from such a context?

  • Ministry and the pragmatism of God

    I’m off to a two day meeting to talk about ministry, in particular how to intepret the apparent dearth of ministry candidates in the current cultural and church climate.

    1. Is God calling fewer people to traditional forms of ministry?
    2. If so is that being compensated by churches and people  developing different forms of ministry, perhaps more fluid and adaptable to a culture now in chronic rapid-change mode?
    3. Or has the career displaced vocation, and the career trajectory replaced the sense of upward calling, so that against a career with its rewards, ministry is unattractive as a vocation with its cost?
    4. Or is it that the forms and styles of ministry being modelled are increasingly unattractive – because of tolerated mediocrity in standards and competence, obsessive attachment to outmoded forms, negative joylessness about ministry as a way of life, churches resistant to change and frustrating to the point of muting calls for change, or whatever else?

    That the hard-edged distinction between ministry and laity, or between clergy and the rest, is neither valid nor healthy, has long been conceded by those interested in learning from NT understandings of the correlation between ministries and gifts. The recovery of vocation as God’s calling on each life, and as conferring on all ethically legitimate work that Christians do, the blessing of God’s call, was one of the clear gains of the Lutheran Reformation.

    But still, churches need leadership as service, and such service requires the freedom to evolve and the equipment to be effective to fulfil it well. So how are we to resource needed ministry today? And accepting the theological clumsiness of that question (because it is Christ who resources all ministry in the power of the Spirit), what are the promising possibilities presented by today’s experience of church decline, contemporary ministry needs, missional thinking, accepted human limitations, ongoing pastoral uncertainty?

    • If there’s one kind of ministry the contemporary church needs it’s………….what?
    • If there’s one underlying vocational motivation ministry needs to ignite it it’s………what?
    • If there’s one thing God is saying through the experience of "ministry shortage" it’s….. what?

    33_1 These are pragmatic questions – they look for answers that might work – I’m not worried about that. I wonder if amongst other attributes discernible in the creative and redemptive activity of God,there is an element of divine pragmatism? Though seldom addressed as such in the more careful categories of systematic theology, is the pragmatism of divine grace, God’s love looking for ways of redeeming that work – would that be pragmatism from an eternal perspective? And for all our agonising about the hows and whys, isn’t that eternal perspective the needed reminder that the health and future and completion of the church’s mission in God’s purposes is secured by sovereign self-giving love, that chooses to use us?

  • bewilderment fatigue

    In a recent post I mentioned (tongue in cheek) the Blessed John Reid, who has given us such bon mots as ‘Not fit for purpose’ and ‘Get it! Recent mismanagement of Home Office remits has put one of the most durable and varied political careers of recent years in serious jeopardy. Now I can’t begin to make sense of how and why so much has gone wrong – and like most others I am suffering from bewilderment fatigue, that rare but serious condition when the mind has been exposed to so much incredible nonsense and self-contradictory claims, that it resigns itself to accepting nonsense as the norm.

    I suppose what I’m trying to do is make sense of something like this –

    • prisons are in short supply, overcrowded, and in crisis (all agree)
    • too many people are being imprisoned for offences better dealt with by alternative sanctions such as community service, tagging or fines ( some, perhaps most agree)
    • the Home Secretary is obliged and expected to keep the judiciary up to date with the current position, and to remind of guidelines about appropriate sentencing (some agree, but it seems some judges don’t)
    • the judiciary is independent of government, and due legal process is expected to operate beyond political interference ( all, or at least most, agree)
    • so why have some judges acted on the Home Secretary’s reminder as if it were an order they had to obey – and in doing so have used the independence of the legal process to make a political point by acting as if they were not independent, which they are free to do because they are independent.

    See what I mean, bewilderment fatigue!

    Cd746_royal_courts_l That a judge who could have detained a man convicted of serious offences involving child pornography, chooses not to in response to the Home Secretary’s memo, is, it seems to my less complex mind, an abuse of the independence of the judiciary. If the appropriate sentence is custodial, and that is what the law requires, surely the availability of a place is a secondary and practical problem – the primary obligation is that a law intended to safeguard the public (in this case children) should be upheld. Had the judge in question imposed a custodial sentence, that would have upheld the independence of the judiciary. Instead, the judge chose to make a statement – by acting as if he were not independent of political pressure.

    Or have I missed something?