Living Wittily

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  • 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?

  • Hauerwas 7:the gospel is not a conquering idea

    Now and again Hauerwas is so engrossed in his conversation with Matthew, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, that his view of Christian discipleship, and of the Jesus who calls, is couched in the language of all three! Here’s a quotation where Yoder’s view of the non-violent Gospel precluding aggressive forms of evangelism, and Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the self-emptying Word, and Matthew’s portrayal of discipleship as a radical unselfing of the self, coalesce in a theological restatement of Christian obedience.

    Bonhoeffer Following Christ requires our recognising that the one I am tempted to judge is like me – a person who has received the forgiveness manifest in the cross. The recognition that the other person is like me – in need of forgiveness – prevents those who would follow Jesus from trying to force others to follow Jesus. We must, like Jesus, have the patience necessary to let those called deny that call. It means that the disciples are not called to make the world conform to the gospel, but rather the disciples are schooled to be non-violent – which means that the Gospel is not a "conquering idea" that neither knows nor respects resistance. Rather,[as Bonhoeffer comments]  "the Word of God is so weak that it suffers to be despised and rejected by people. For the Word, there are such things as hardened hearts and locked doors. The Word accepts the resistance it encounters and bears it."

    That paragraph is a needed antidote for the underlying triumphalism that informs much thinking about mission, church, christendom, evangelism. And I’m left wondering, because I’ve seldom been asked as bluntly to think about it, what a Christian existence might look like if we stopped thinking of the gospel as a "conquering idea"; if in Christian apologetics the underlying principles were forbearance, patience and respect for this other person, who needs God’s forgiveness which cannot be imposed by logic or compelled by argument, but perhaps which can be caught by the contagion of the Kingdom, the love that does not need acceptance to endure and persist. One of hauerwas’ magnificent overstated but necessary one liners, "The Father has refused to let our refusal determine our relationship to him….we are God’s enemies yet God would still love us – even coming to die for us."

  • all weather walking………

    Dscn0071 Decided to get my walking boots dirty today. The weather forecast was bright, mostly dry – where we went, it was dull mostly wet, at least till about 1.00 o’clock. By then we had just passed Broughton and ate our packed lunch – observing the horizontal drizzle, psyching ourselves up for an all-weather walk along the banks of the River Tweed, doing a self-peruasion act to convince ourselves that the exercise would do us good, that rain is only water without which human life is impossible, and trusting the car thermometer which was indicating a bearable 5 degrees – but with no allowance for wind-chill.

    Dscn0068_1 So dressed for all weathers – that is three layers of jersey, fleece and a wind and waterproof jacket, (and a seriously ridiculous hat) we succeeded in two or three minutes in getting the walking boots not only dirty, but clarty, slaighered wi’ glaur, ( both Scots terms for impressively muddy!). But we did have a walk, with intermittent slitherings and constant squelchings, along what was probably the recent flood plain. And I believe ( I do, really), that it did us the world of good, that it was healthy despite the chill and drizzle, that the fresh air obliterated all sign of mental cobwebs, that we did more than our 10,000 steps worth of daily exercise – but it wasn’t the pleasant wee dauner (Scots for leisurely walk), we had hoped for, to get us back into walking ways.

    Instead it was the kind of walk you do when you have some serious guilt to shift and you believe in more than nominal penance, or if you want to train for the 100 metre dash through a slurry sump – not kidding, we passed a huge shed up on the ridge which was full of happy, noisy, excrementally productive pigs. All that said, the rolling hills, the surrounding woodland, the quiet of the river, the company of a heron, a wren, a kestrel and a bevvy of arguing oytercatchers, a hundred sheep, and of course the pigs, followed by a pot of tea at the Tearoompic1 Laurelbank Tearoom, made for genuine Sabbath – if that word means rest, a halt to productive work, freedom from toil, and time to enjoy what God is doing – then yes, Sabbath. And Aberdeen won!

  • Building a new life

    Banlc_s1e2_1_1 Watched last night’s episode of Build a New Life in the Country. You can read more about it on the programme website, http://homes.five.tv/jsp/5hmain.jsp?lnk=451

    A Whitby middle aged couple bought a ruined farmsteading and bastel house and spent a year making it habitable. Reminded of my own early years in old farm cottages, some of them needing major renovation in days before makeovers. But this project was in a different league. No roof, with decades of weather damage,it was an 18th century bastel house – that’s a fortified farm house on the Scottish borders to deter Scottish cattle stealers! Walls 2-3 feet thick, and parts of the floor feet deep in centuries of dung, muck and rubble; the cows shared the building nights and winters to protect them from the Lowland rustlers.

    It takes a combination of desire, acquired skills, co-operation, muscle and perhaps a little oddness, to envision such a ruin transformed into a dream home. Centuries of dung removed, tons of concrete laid by hand, the stone tiling roof rebuilt, floors, windows, electricty, plumbing, the lot. As an example of a marriage of minds and sharing of a life project it was simply inspirational – and I was moved by the indomitable, resilient, optimism of this pair – and the way they simply, ‘got on with it’, through snow, flooding that washed their building materials away, and serial night shifts of hard graft.

    This would be the place to get homiletical and expand on dilapidation and ruin as metaphor of life, and how vision and passion can make the impossible achievable – but that would be to look for spiritual lessons. And it trivialises the realities this programme was about. It was about stone tiles, hung floors, bolted cross beams, hard packed dung requiring pick-axes, a 50 odd year old 5 foot grandmother revelling in the power of a power hammer. Lord Macleod’s doctrine of creation was deeply biblical because he took matter, the sheer materiality of this world, with theological seriousness. That’s what I saw happening last night – two people tackling ruined chaos with creative energy fired by a vision of the beautiful. Great television!