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At Hopeful Imagination Today

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!

28 February 2007
Rehumanising

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.

27 February 2007
Hauerwas illustrated by Picasso!

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!

26 February 2007
The blade of the plough…….

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.

24 February 2007
Almond flavoured latte

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…………………..

23 February 2007
Scottish Spirituality?

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.

22 February 2007
more Hopeful Imagination….please!

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!

21 February 2007
hopeful imagination

Andy has set up a Lenten Blog to which I am contributing during Lent. I decided to do Wednesdays, which means I do the first one – which happens also to be my birthday! So the giving up for Lent bit is going to be in some tension with celebrating my continuing existence!

So every Wednesday for the next 6 weeks I will be posting at "hopeful imagination" See here . Meanwhile, before Lent begins, some verses from that spiritually precise metaphysical poet, George Herbert

Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
      But is compos’d of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
      To ev’ry Corporation.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
      When good is seasonable;
Unlesse Authoritie, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it lesse,
      And Power it self disable.

It ‘s true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
      Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior’s purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
      In both let ‘s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
      That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
      May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
      As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
      And among those his soul.

20 February 2007
Humankind cannot bear very much reality. (Eliot)

An English College is trying to attract adults back into education by offering a course on BB – yep, Big Brother. The cultural impact, the significance of celebrity, the nature of vicariously enjoying other people’s fear, aggression, verbal wrangling, psychological warfare, alliance making, mickey taking, the whole package of what is ironically called Reality TV. Put that term into a search engine and you will come up with scores of articles from Time, New Yorker, a whole cluster of respectable broadsheets, offering serious social and cultural comment on one of the most powerful media developments in years. And now you can do the course.

The attraction of Reality TV, Big Brother, Temptation, Pop Idol, I’m a Celebrity etc, is explained by cultural commentators in various ways. Fascination with the psychology of trust and betrayal, a voyeuristic interest in other people’s problems, desire for status and fame being nurtured by watching unknowns suddenly become famous, or infamous – depending on the article, and the vested interests of the writers, you takes your choice.

Made me wonder though, what does a church that believes in the reality of Jesus, have to say to a culture and its people, saturated in manufactured experience, fascinated by lives not their own, absorbed into the world of cctv video-gossip and relationships driven by the desire for audience approval? Would it be possible to win BB without being selfish? Could you survive if you acted in the best interests of others? Is truthfulness and sincerity an assett or a liability? How far does big brother dehumanise relationships by pushing contestants to forms of rivalry that require calculated alliances and personal betrayals? And what is taking place when BB creates a context of proximity to others and invasive spying from the outside – for one thing a worldview in which every ‘other’ is a rival for the prize.

Maybe the first thing the church is able to offer our culture is an unembarrassed sense of moral realism (NOT MORALISM) – all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Why be surprised by the relatively mild form of sinfulness that can be exposed by Reality TV? Maybe sin is one of the few truths that reality TV does accurately portray. Our original sin of putting self at the centre of the universe; the sin of Cain, jealous of his brother; the human capacity to dehumanise others who are a threat to our purposes and ambitions; our love of approval, even if it is bought by fundamental dishonesty……. and so on.

But a second offering from church to our culture is evidence of communities where we seriously resist all that makes Reality TV so precisely accurate in its portrayal of post-modern self absorption. Yes, I know, post-modernity is resistant to any concept of the self – but in reality, the less sure we are that we have a self, the more frantically we go searching for who then we really are.

Whatever else the cross of Jesus means to the Christian, it is the place where we truly discover who we are, who God is. And there we discover too, that the reality of God and the reality of our sin, are taken into the deep purposeful love of God and we are given back the self God made us ( and is making us) to be, in Christ.

For freedom Christ has set you free – stand fast therefore in the liberty of Christ! In that freedom, there is created space for love, capacity for compassion, energy for peaceable peacemaking conversation, commitment to forgiveness, joy in the other’s blessing, celebration of the other’s gifts, defence of the other’s worth – now that is reality. But whether it would make peak viewing……..?

20 February 2007
‘A wee cocksparra…….

Being situated in the middle of the University Campus, and sharing the accommodation with all kinds of other classes taking place (from food safety & health to drug dependency, to corporate marketing), we often get folk coming in asking for directions, drinks of water, the use of the phone to check on lecture times, and various other requests. Last week a lecturer from along the corridor asked us to phone estates and buildings to tell them a small bird was trapped in the room and would need to be released before the weekend. He was quite insistent about the University’s duty of care in this matter, and as a bird lover / watcher I was fully supportive of his concern for the wellbeing of said sparrow (Passer Domesticus). He waited till the incident was duly phoned in and an assurance given of imminent liberation.

The bible verses are self -choosing:

Are not five sparrows sold for a penny, yet not one of these falls to the ground but your Heavenly Father knows it

[In your house] even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest, where she rears her brood beside your altars. Psalm 84:3.

This particular sparrow later flitted off with a little encouragement from University security. Security – how apt is that, like?

19 February 2007