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What beauty is for

Just finished reading this collected volume of Mary Oliver’s poetry. I’ll leave the details on the sidebar for a wee while in case you want to go looking for yourself.

The detailed and affectionate observation of God’s creation is a bit like Annie Dillard’s prose, shaped to verse – but she is gentler than Dillard, her tone more like the appreciative and endlessly wondering David Attenborough. But her guided tour in the natural world often brings her to a different kind of reverie, about key questions we all ask, or are asked, in our more receptive moments. I found this volume reassuring bedside reading – not because her poems didn’t ask searching questions, but because when they did, it came as an invitation to enter the experience of her own questioning, and that deeper conversation .

The Swan is one of my favourites.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

18 January 2007
“Durty Watter” (trans: dirty water)

Yesterday was normalish at both ends and stressful in a thought provoking way in the middle. I’m working mainly from home this week so the morning was lecture preparation for the coming Semester, (Galatians), the occasional phone call. The late afternoon I read and revised a paper I’m doing on Baptist hermeneutics at ICC Post-grad research seminar, ‘Under the rule of the Word as Christ and Scripture’. The evening, after our meal, was a jaunt to Borders where Sheila bought a book and I didn’t!

But around mid-day I was walking down Paisley High Street on the way to the bank, and heard the oddly familiar strains of Hey Jude being played by a tromboning busker. The incongruity of the instrument and a favourite tune I’ve enjoyed for decades both as Beatles original and Shadows instrumental, and the crisp frosty sunshine, raised the feel good factor. Going to give the guy some money when I get back from the bank – because he was quite good on the trombone, it was cold to be standing there entertaining the shoppers (and I was entertained!), and if he was doing it, he needed the money.

I got to the bank and went to do the business and discovered my Switch card wasn’t in my wallet. I know all about the gospel sayings about not being anxious about money and material things, but that slim piece of plastic is invested with considerable anxiety potential when it aint there! I took every other card shaped thing out of my wallet, fled home to check other possible locations, and was back at the bank pdq to ask about the only remaining possibility – did I leave it the day before?

It isn’t just the possible loss of money – it’s the identity thing, the threat that someone has a hold over some part of who you are and what you are about. Then it’s the annoyance at yourself for misplacing it, losing it, being careless when you should know better. I’m quite good at beating myself up given the right scenario – and standing at the bank missing a plastic debit card is as good a reason for self-recrimination as I can think of.

Och well not to worry – doesn’t life consist of more than the abundance of things, like debit and credit cards? Hauerwas has been drumming that home every chance he gets in his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t live by bread alone; daily bread is enough anyway. Aye right! But I needed to get the card or cancel it with all the hassle that was going to cause.

The sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous. My card was indeed left at the bank- unfortunately it was in the safe and couldn’t be available for at least half an hour. Nae problem, said I. Walking to the Piazza I heard the trombone in the distance playing the Trumpet Voluntary – in January, Paisley, 1.30pm, on the trombone – I fair floated to the Post Office grinning at the oddity and grace of it all.

On the way back to the bank a man in a shell suit was standing looking suspiciously at a paving stone. Our eyes met and he said in phonetic Scottish slang

Y’ve goat tae watch thae yins. The durty watter splashes yur legs!

He pushed his foot down slowly and sure enough it was one of those paving stones that rocked, and gathered water under it. He winked, stepped to the side of it, and went on his way. I got my card at the bank, decided to walk the longer way back to the car, and only when i got home did I remember the trombone player. I’m genuinely scunnered at myself because that young guy was making, for me anyway, a contribution to what Sirach meant when all the trades and crafts are praised

By their work they maintain the fabric of the world, and their prayers are in the works of their hands (Sirach 38.34, NEB)

So I’ll go looking for him again – and when I do I will be acknowledging one of the ways in which God intimates the goodness and mercy that follows us.

18 January 2007
“a world that believes we have no time to be just…”

The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace – and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bead, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness to the kingdom that is God’s patience. The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time. That is what it means for us to be an apocalyptic people, that is, a people who believe that Jesus’ refusal to accept the devil’s terms for the world’s salvation has made it possible for a people to exist that offers an alternative time to a world that believes we have no time to be just.

The devil’s temptations are meant to force Jesus to acknowledge that our world is determined by death. Death creates w world of scarcity – a world without enough food, power or life itself. But Jesus resists the devil because he is God’s abundance. Jesus brings a kingdom that is not a zero-sum game. There is enough food, power and life because the kingdom has come, making possible a people who have time to feed their neighbours. Fear creates scarcity, but Jesus has made it possible for us to live in trust….By resisting the devil’s temptations Jesus has made it possible for us to live without fear.

(Hauerwas, Matthew,pages 55-6.)

16 January 2007
Abraham Joshua Heschel

We live in the universe of His knowing, in the glory of attachment. "before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer.1.5). This is the task: to sense or to discover our being known. We approach Him, not by making Him the object of our thinking, but by discovering ourselves as the objects of His thinking. A. J Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1962). First Edition.

Long before Christmas I ordered this volume of Heschel’s magnum opus. It arrived today. It’s a 1962 first edition, handsomely bound, read but cared for, with a gold leafed postage stamp label indicating the seller was Kieffer’s Jewish Bookstore, Chicago. The publisher, The Burning Bush Press only printed quality Jewish publications. It’s a booklover’s book and I’m glad it found me!

I hope some time to write a personal appreciation of this profound and revered Jewish thinker who has taught me so much about prayer, about God’s holiness, and about the lovingkindness that called creation into being and has not abandoned it. His influence was decisive on Christians of such varied backgrounds and such similar calibre as Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Jurgen Moltmann and Walter Brueggemann. He was a substantial presence in the civil rights movement, and as a critic of Vatican II’s caginess about acknowledging the incipient, at times overtly hostile, anti-semitism in much of Christian history. His exposition of the pathos of God in this volume on the prophets was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, and is one of the most telling contributions to religious thinking in the 20th century.

16 January 2007
Hauewas 4: When the devil quotes scripture

Hauerwas is an interesting and disconcerting companion to walk with through a text. He has his own approach, and clearly loves the liberty the remit of this commentary series gives him to indulge in theologically disciplined eisegesis. His treatment of Jesus’ temptations is informed by Augustine and Dostoevsky, two penetrating commentators on the subtle, persuasive, sweetly reasonable psychology of evil. Here’s his authority for not troubling to ‘go behind the text’. When the devil quotes scripture at Jesus, Hauerwas comments:

Jesus teaches us how to read scripture by refusing to go behind the text to discover what God must have "really meant". When you are in a struggle with the devil it is unwise to look for "the meaning" of the text. (page 53-4)

I must confess to being in considerable sympathy with Hauerwas’ determination to read the Gospel, and in reading the story, enter into it as the drama of Christian discipleship, made real for each disciple and each community, in the encounter with the living Lord. So Hauerwas is able to approach the temptation of Jesus, without reducing the latent menace of the story to a generic pietism in which any half struggling believer finds some clues for spiritual warfare. When Jesus is shown the kingdoms, and invited to bow down in order to possess them, Hauerwas is at his acid best, and sees clearly the political consequences, the cosmic stakes, of Jesus’ responses: "Give the devil his due. He understands, as is seldom acknowledged particularly in our day, that politics is about worship and sacrifice. Jesus refuses to worship the devil and thus becomes the alternative to the world’s politics based on sacrifice to false gods".

All Hauerwas’ reading of Bonhoeffer especially over the past several years,and his interaction with and indebtedness to Yoder, are evident here. So are his own well known strictures on any individual piety that ignores the political edge of ethics and the ethical core of worthwhile politics. And likewise those who have been reading him recognise the justice yearning message he hears loud and clear in the Gospel. These and other strands of Hauerwas’ theology mean he does not come innocently to the text, nor does he want to; he has, and will not surrender, his presuppositions rooted in a Christological hermeneutic of the Gospel, and of the reading of each gospel as the story of the Kingdom of God revealed and realised in Jesus. That this might take him beyond safe exegetical territory probably won’t bother him. So long as Hauerwas is convinced he is following after Christ, seeking the truth of His life and teaching, His death and His living, he clearly doesn’t mind the exegetical risk. Next hauerwas post will be a long quote, without comment from me – it is, I think, spiritual reading of the highest order.

15 January 2007
Tax collectors and sinners

In the NT tax collectors and sinners were more or less the same category – outsiders who had no place amongst the pious. That was before self-assessment, January 31 deadlines, advertising campaigns by Inland Revenue about the likely judgement to fall on those late with their tax return. There is this large slowly pouring hour-glass, with a wee taxpayer getting dangerously near the core that will suck him down into fiscal oblivion. Nowadays it seems the tax collectors are no longer in solidarity with the sinners; they are authorised to decide who the sinners are, and to exact penalties that echo the ominous phrase of not getting out till we pay the last penny.

I have no problem at all about being a tax-payer. Many of the best things in our community, our culture, our country, are possible because we contribute some of what we have to make sure everyone gets something of what they need. While taxes are often the instruments of injustice – used properly they can also be effective ways of restoring justice. Health care for all at the point of need, inclusive non discriminatory opportunities for education, social security as a humane system still retaining the ethos of compassionate help for the vulnerable, offering service and support to sustain dignity and purpose in life.

So it’s not the principle, it’s the process – I just hate the figures, the calculations, reducing a year’s work to time consuming feats of amateur book balancing.

15 January 2007
Hauerwas 3 :Anti-Imperial practice

How could Rome know that this man [Jesus] would be the most decisive political challenge it would face? …The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection (Page 37)

Hauerwas’ reading of the early chapters of Matthew is guided not so much by exegetical heavies such as Allison & Davies, and Luz, but by Bonhoeffer, Barth and John Howard Yoder. Intertwined with the nativity themes of promise, mystery, virgin birth and human hopes, Matthew weaves the darker strands of kingship, nationalism, state security, herodian politics, refugees on the move and massacres in the home village – the structures of power guarded by the machinery of terror.

Hauerwas is committed to the idea of the kingdom as an alternative community which embodies anti-imperial praxis.The Kingdom of God is an ‘alternative world, an alternative people, an alternative politics’. As I read Hauerwas’ commentary, unmistakable Hauerwasian themes, like peaceable kingdom, community of character, and against the grain of the universe, emerge in his exposition through a process of eisegesis. Paradoxically, his kind of theological eisegesis seems to expose and articulate the radical political critique and spiritual power of the text, in a way often less accessible to stringent traditional exegesis.

That’s my feeling anyway – there is for me a felt congruence between Hauerwas’ finger-pointing prose as he tells the truth he finds in this trext, and Matthew’s message of cruciform discipleship. His main conversation partners, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, also took Scripture with utmost seriousness. Together they and Hauerwas offer another essential approach to the interpretation of the Bible text – askingthe life disrupting questions, ‘what does this text say to us about following Jesus, about carrying a cross, about who we are, and what that might mean for our own political allegiances’ The kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world – these are stark Matthean alternatives, presented in black and white terms in this gospel from start to finish – and with the call "Follow me" about to be uttered.

Which is a longish way of saying this is one of the most refreshing, disturbing and (overused word coming) challenging readings of a gospel I’ve read since Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (on Mark).

14 January 2007
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