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Confessions of a Bibliophile 1

I love books. I enjoy handling a beautifully made book. I delight in the heft and feel and smell of a new, good quality, hardback. There is an aesthetic in bookbinding, in page design, choice of font, type of paper. Those who predict the demise of the book make me nervous and anxious in case they are right- maybe I am stockpiling against the day!

Books have made my own journey with God more informative and formative, with interesting intersections where my mind has met another – and when truth, wisdom, beauty, insight, knowledge have often been the consequence of the meeting. I am deeply grateful for the silent conversations I have had. I have a note of every book I’ve read in the past 30 years – and of most of the ones I’ve bought. Mind you I offload books too – I’ve no interest in mere accumulation. If push came to shove I could get by on a select, rather than a comprehensive bibliography from my library.

However, as a half-way responsible bibliophile I am increasingly aware of the ecological cost of paper, printing and marketing of books. I can recite most of the excuses and rationalisations others make, and can invent a few novel ones of my own. But yes – libraries, trusting friends, used books, charity shops, these all help through cumulative use and recycling- though I already do these. So then we come to the self-denying ordinance – why is another book necessary, and why do I need to possess it? When does a hobby become an obsession, legitimate enjoyment a dependence, fun become compulsion? The full title of the book in this paragraph is Bibliomania, or Book Madness Containing Some Account of the History, Symptoms and Cure of this Fatal Disease, Reginald Heber.

So each month I’ll fess up to the next proposed purchase, and display the evidence on the sidebar under ‘confessions of a bibliophile’. I will write no more than a one hundred word post, not to review the recent acquisition, (since I haven’t acquired it yet!) but to justify its purchase. Maybe I can persuade myself not to click on the confirm order button! "Of the making of books there is no end, and much clicking is a weariness of the flesh" – with apologies to The Preacher. The first book to be considered is this one, details on the Confessions sidebar. My justification will be the next Confessions post.

12 January 2007
Money! Money! Money!

I’ve been thinking about money – for the purposes of this post multiply the Scottish pound note by approximately 128 million.

The following three headlines appeared on The Glasgow Herald website. One speaks of ‘record starting salaries and unprecedented competition’; the second suggests £128 million is incidental to a footballer’s lifeplan; the third comes on top of reports of record debt amongst Uk consumers.

Graduates are set to earn record starting salaries when they leave university this summer but face unprecedented competition for the best jobs, research has found.

Former England captain David Beckham has denied his £128 million move to the United States is purely for money, saying he wants to boost the game’s popularity.

Homeowners were dealt a New Year blow after a shock decision by the Bank of England to raise interest rates for the third time since August.

Away from the headlines was another piece of news with financial implications:

Scotland’s manufacturing industry received a massive blow last night with the loss of 650 jobs at NCR’s Dundee plant.

I have to say the money link was easy enough to make. And my unease came closer to distress listening to David Beckham’s disclaimer followed by the bewildered anger of hard working folk who feel they’ve been sold down the river (Tay, Danube?). Decades ago Abba inadvertently gave us lines of prophetic satire

I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay
Aint it sad
And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me
Thats too bad
In my dreams I have a plan
If I got me a wealthy man
I wouldnt have to work at all, Id fool around and have a ball…

Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich mans world

There’s something linguistically ironic about ‘bread’ being a slang term for dough, sorry money. ‘Human beings shall not live by bread alone, but by the words that come from the mouth of God.’ And anyway, said Jesus, ‘What does it profit any person, to gain the world and lose their soul?’ Jesus wasn’t against wealth, he just understood it better than us – he also understood us better than us – that part of us so easily tempted to equate security and happiness with the bottom line.

Is my unease, sadness, and simmering anger only the politics of envy, or do they stem from the feeling that the politics of Jesus inevitably give rise to such an accusation? How do we effectively call in question the set-up of a society where the bottom line is such a lethal economic weapon, and such a powerful economic motive? I don’t feel informed enough, or competent in economics to explain the decisions of the management of NCR, the inflationary fears of the Bank of England, or the ludicrously lucrative footballer contracts – not in business terms, anyway.

Theological ethics is something else. There is something unsettling about the fact that money can be so corrosive of our humanity. If you get £128m over 5 years are you a person or a commodity? If you have to fight in the marketplace of ‘unprecedented competition’ for a job are other people to be seen as opponents, rivals, threats to our life aspirations? On the other hand, what does it do to a person’s sense of worth and human purposefulness, to feel lied to, used, and then disposed of to protect the bottom line?

‘Two things I ask of thee; deny them not to me before I die:

Remove far from me faleshood and lying:

give me neither poverty nor riches;

feed me with the food that is needful for me,

lest I be full and deny thee and say ‘Who is the Lord?’,

or lest I be poor, and steal and profane the name of my God. Proverbs 30.7-9.

A good prayer – wise sentiments – but the cool realism of the sage needs supplementing with the radical outrage of the prophet. "Selling the needy for a pair of trainers", "trampling on the heads of the poor", "the notable people of the foremost nation who feel secure" – Amos, Micah, Isaiah, and Jesus, represent an alternative, less comfortable economics!

12 January 2007
Hauerwas 2: Oblation familiar to the faithful

Hauerwas on Herod. You would expect Hauerwas to have some astringent comments about power politics, Herod and the slaughter of the innocents. Two of his comments on Matthew 1 indicate the depth of Hauerwas’ commitment to the politics of Jesus, because he is less interested in Herod bashing than in emphasising the significant alternative that is Jesus, born of Mary, son of David.

Matthew’s gospel is about the "politics of Jesus", which entails an alternative to the power politics of the world. The politics of Jeus, moreover, entails not only the politics in the gospel but also the politics of reading the gospel. A right reading of the gospel requires a people who are shaped by "the oblation familiar to the faithful", that is, a community whose fundamental political act is the sacrifice of the altar – an alternative to Herodian power politics. (Page29)

So a right reading of the gospel is when its story, its plot, its narrative drive, is expressed in self-giving love for the other, sacrifice – and this embodied in a lifestyle redolent of political implication, cruciform in shape, and offered as the only true reading of the gospel – Christlikeness.

To be trained as a disciple is to learn why this Jesus, the son of David, the one true king, must suffer crucifixion. Matthew’s gospel is meant to train us, his readers, just as Jesus had to train his disciples, to recognise that the salvation wrought in the cross is the Father’s refusal to save us according to the world’s understanding of salvation, which is that salvation depends on having more power than my enemies.

When salvation is thought to depend on having more power than my enemies, the only way such salvation is effective is if that power is used – to retain, increase, secure its own survival. The result of herodian politics is, all too often, the slaughter of the innocents.

11 January 2007
To serve God wittily… explanation
To serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds….

Almost every word of this phrase has significance for an obedient following after Christ. At least for me. Unpacking this I use the inclusive ‘we’ – others may not think or feel this way, which is fine. I would be interested though to hear from you what you think it might mean "to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds".

To serve implies obedience, but as willing grateful surrender, an inner attitude of consistent readiness, from which each action and activity derives its value as an act of devotion following after Christ.

To serve wittily means an end to naivete, a call to attentiveness and alert observation of the world in which we live and move, and within which we are called to serve. So having our wits about us will mean, (and this only for starters – feel free to add to this unpacking process)
1. Not being rendered myopic by cultural assumptions, but rather see the world through the lens of the Gospel – not war but peacemaking; not greed but generosity; not lies but truthfulness; not power over others but power serving others.
2. Not being pushed around by consumer pressures but rather being intentionally shaped and transformed by Jesus. And what are the economics of the Kingdom; what is it that profits a human being?
3. Not being morally domesticated by ethical and cultural accommodations, but rather seeking to live in the radical freedom of the Kingdom of God where the only rule is God’s rule. The culture of hard realism challenged by visionary compassion; the idolatry of the bottom line questioned by gestures of sacrificial extravagance; the semantic cosmetics of political correctness superceded by communities of Jesus embodying radically inclusive love.
4. Not being embarrassed by the evidence of Christendom in decline, but rather seeking and embodying a lifestyle more faithfully rooted in the teaching of Jesus.
1. The tangle of our minds – tidiness and system, an imposed order on life, what P T Forsyth called the lust for lucidity – none of these answer to the sheer messiness and inconvenience of the world, our culture and our times. There is that in the Gospel which resists being combed into shape, style and fashion. ( I use the metaphor as one who no longer has much use for a comb!) My own experience has been that Christian theology, ethics and practice have to relate to a world constitutionally ambiguous, unpredictable, inconsistent – and each human life is entangled in the consequent joy and suffering that is a human life together.
And it is the tangle of our minds; speaking here only for myself, my deepest theological convictions, and even my most passionate spiritual experiences, are often rooted in the life of the mind. Thought, reflection, consideration, contemplation, reason, understanding, prayer – however deeply I feel the truth of things, they become most real and I own them as life convictions mostly as they are received and welcomed as ideas rooted in experience and expressed in the life God gives me to lead. Loving God with my mind is an essential not an optional devotional attitude and aptitude in my own spirituality – and for better or worse.

So as a motto, ‘to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds’, provides a number of perspectives on my personal discipleship. However, in case I get too serious about this, serving God wittily could also mean humorously, good humouredly, and with hilarity. Fun and laughter being an essential presupposition of healthily, gladly, en-joy-ably, serving God. That sets me thinking about the spiritual discipline of fun – is there a discipline of fun, an obligation under God to be a gladness maker?!
11 January 2007
Hauerwas 1 Matthew Commentary

I read Bible commentaries. This doesn’t mean most commentaries are readable – it’s just that I regard a commentary as a conversation partner, and reading it is a form of listening to another voice, a different take on the text, and often a far better informed one than me.

But this one is by Stanley Hauerwas, on Matthew. This is Hauerwas turning his assertive, perceptive, – at times infuriating and at times utterly convincing – take on things, to the Gospel – by commenting on a gospel. It is in a series which is unembarrassed by being a theological commentary. Which is why Hauerwas, who makes no claims to being an expert textual exegete,(see page 21), took on the task believing that this most theologically ethical of gospels might yield a different kind of treasure if cultivated by one asking different questions, or asking the same questions in a different way. Here’s his apologia for assertiveness as a pre-requisite of the theological exegete!

I discovered that writing a commentary is an invitation to indulge in assertions. I have not tried to resist asserting what I know to be true. But assertions are not meant to end the conversation. Rather, assertions are intertwined in a manner that hopefully illumines why, faced with the reality of God, all we can do is proclaim the reality of what we have been given. Assertions are the grammar required by the story being told, but the story being told should illumine why the assertions are required if what we say is to be considered true. In short, assertions are reports on judgements that require further enquiry.

More on Hauerwas now and again, as our conversation continues.

11 January 2007
To serve God wittily

For over a year I’ve been a blog voyeur! And the problem with voyeurism is that it quickly becomes a bad habit. The voyeur observes without participating, enjoys without contributing, is a taker without giving back. Mind you, I do now and again post comments – but that is always in response to someone else’s work, their willingness to comment, criticise,amuse, inform, annoy, encourage – and all in an open forum discussion.

So. Time to kick the habit of getting kicks from playing a spectator sport. This blog is the place where I want to comment, criticise, amuse, inform, annoy, encourage – and do unto others what they have been doing unto me. Every blog writer has a perspective, a sense of what they want to say and how to say it. Me too. The other day I read an article which quoted Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. Make allowance for the gender specific language of the genre and the period:

"God made the angels to show him splendour – as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man he made to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind."

What does it mean to ‘serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds’? Have a think about More’s understanding of what humans were made for. Next blog I’ll try to explain why I think ‘living wittily’ is an interesting take on living wisely (OT) and following Jesus (NT).

10 January 2007