Living Wittily

The Christian Theologian, Nuclear Weapons, Strange Love, Original Sin, and the Sermon on the Mount

I still remember the chill and existential angst as an impressionable if more than a little rebellious teenager watching Dr Strangelove. Two years after the Cuban crisis, and one year after the assassination of President Kennedy, the film dropped into a cultural worldview already distorted by fear, suspicion and the growing insanity of language that spoke of MAD, as mutual assured destruction. The mad antics and the terrifyingly implausibly plausible script did nothing to reassure, nor wat it meant to.

I came across this clip here the other day and watched it with scared fascination. It isn't only the content, it's the jaunty optimism of the narrator describing the triumph of Britain dropping its first hydrogen bomb to explode in the atmosphere in 1957. At the time the fear was an icy terror, a remorselessly spreading glacial fear dubbed the cold war. Perhaps the upbeat BBC commentator was expressing relief that Britain was no longer defenceless against an evil and ambitious Russia. At the very least we could destroy cities of the perceived enemy in retaliation for any attack on our cities. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a million for a million, it's the same principle. It's called deterrence.

 

There has not been a nuclear exchange in the 56 years since that first successful atmospheric detonation of city killing bombs. Supporters of deterrence would say that's because deterrence works. Maybe. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are morally unjustifiable and pose an extinction level threat to human life, and indeed to the future of the planet. I don't know that the argument can be settled - by definition the proof would either never be forthcoming (in which case it worked, maybe) or there will be a catastrophic exchange in which case the argument becomes academic in a nihilistic sort of way.

What's your point Jim? It isn't a global politicised point. I am not an expert in global security, military mind games, or defence strategy and policy. As a Christian theologian I have other concerns, a different perspective, alternative intellectual tools to think through the meaning of human existence and what makes for human flourishing. I watched the clip with a profound and solemn awareness that amongst the crucial components of a Christian worldview is an adequate doctrine of sin. The hydrogen bomb as it was then known carried a mushroom shaped shadow of ultimate menace for humanity's future - and the clip celebrates the success of British efforts to obtain this instrument of mass destruction. I use instrument deliberately - in the background of the clip it would have been entirely appropriate to play Holst's brutal and relentless Mars the Bringer of War to trumpet and announce the newly acquired capacity for orchestrated death on a symphonic scale.

Celebrating the success of such a creation as nuclear weapon capacity is according to the late Lord Macleod, blasphemy, the original sin of creating from the foundation blocks of God's Creation, an instrument capable of global annihilation. I do not see that theological pronouncement as an overstatement. It is one of the most important prophetic denunciations of military and political power in the history of Scottish theology; theology, not politics. But it is theology effectively used to critique all intellectual accommodations to nuclear weapons as an option for the Christian mind. Of course not everyone agreed with Macleod; and not all will agree with what I'm writing here. But go back and look at the clip, listen to the narrative, and then read the Sermon on the Mount. How do the two inhabit the same moral, theological and political universe? 

One further thought - the bomb lauded in the 1950's clip is a mere firework when compared with the destructive payload of current contemporary capacity. I recall Jesus argument from the lesser to the greater...how much more...?

Christian Leadership and the Life of Dag Hammarskjold

It's probably another of the kinks in my way of looking at the world, and listening to the world, but there are a number of words on the back page of my mental Lexicon and Thesaurus that I treat with caution if not some disdain. I recognise the pervasiveness of some of those words in the discourse and thought inside and outside the church. But that simply adds to the suspicions that inform my hermeneutic!

One of those words on my back page is 'leadership'. When most books on leadership are written by those who count themselves as leaders then an hermeneutic of suspicion takes on a different order of importance. Last week on Radio 4 there was a discussion on the 100 books recommended for leaders in the armed forces. They were books on the psychology of influence, biographies of movers and shakers, text books on tactics and management, the psychology of combat and command, military history and hierarchical systems. They weren't only books on leadership, but books leaders should read. Amongst the lives presented as a model of leadership to be studied and learned from was the biography of Steve Jobs, founder of Apple.

I was given that book for Christmas, and read it, fascinated by the courage and perseverance, the ruthlessness and cunning, his imaginative grasp of marketing linked to human  motivation, his insatiable desire to succeed and to dominate. No question - an impressive leader of a company that still leads in product innovation, market saturation, commercial savvy and gilt-edged instinct. Here comes a stupid question - would Steve Jobs have made a good church leader? Would the values and motives, his goals and management style have made the Church a leading global innovator in people transformation?

I know, it's probably a question flawed by category confusions. And yet. None of the characteristics and qualities and values that drove Jobs sound strange in the receptive ears of a secular consumerism that provides the psychological engine of globalised commercial rivalry.

Here's a curious observation. Some of the most influential leaders did not set out to lead - they live a style of life that is attractive, impressive, influential, fascinating and even successful - however we define success. All of this comes out of my reading of Lipsey's biography of Dag Hammarskjold, and in particular the sense of the person Hammarskjold was. He started his tenure at the United Nations by stating the values by which he lived and would serve the UN. They are almost diametrically opposed to those of a Steve Jobs, perhaps because Hammarskjold's goal in life was at the other end of the human spectrum. Not self expression in global innovation in technology, but self-giving in global transformation of human relations. That all sounds judgemental, over-simple, and setting Jobs up for an unfair put down. But that isn't what I'm suggesting. Apart from anything else a strong case can be made for advanced computer technology as a real enahncement of human life, which was also part of Jobs' motivation.

But the difference isn't only qualitative, it is a difference of worldview. Hammarskjold's values, principles and vision were formed in the depths of a personality that was self-consciously Christian, intellectually rich, emotionally painful and intensely, even ruthlessly ethical in its demands upon his own integrity. Reading of the determined force of his moral personality raises for me profound questions about the nature of leadership within the Christian Church. Yes Hammarskjold was engaged in the world of action; and yes he exercised considerable power, diplomatic, political and personal; and yes admittedly not everyone saw things his way and he had to fight to retain the freedom of the peacemaker and the confidence placed in a trusted mediator.

The time is long overdue when the church requires to examine critically the models of leadership it admires, the missional mindset it desires, and the vision to which it aspires. Because Christian leadership is essentially cruciform, inevitably sacrificial, inescapably accountable, and unflinchingly faithful to the one who was rich but for our sakes became poor; the one who did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself; the one who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.

Without overtly saying so, Hammarskjold's life drew its energy, its ethical imperatives and its core values from a deep and enduring commitment to the imitation of Christ. The book of that name, along with the New Testament, were constant companions, reservoirs of spiritual and personal nourishment, and guides to an inner life that surged outward into a life of public service and high ideals. If ever we look for 100 books on Christian leadership, I would hope that somewhere on that list this remarkable man would appear as one who in the midst of his own days, followed faithfully after Christ.

St Palladius - Apostle to the Scots

St Palladius Episcopal Church nestles in Glen Drumtochty near Auchenblae. We spent a cold wintry afternoon driving over the Cairn O Mount and down to the Clatterin Brig, which has a really fine Cafe and restaurant. Which by the way, we always support as a local source of fine cake and coffee - paradise cake and shortbread yesterday for those interested in these things.

Then we came through Glen of Drumtochty where the small loch was frozen in the middle, a silver grey disc with a dark peaty border, and almost invisble against it, a silver grey heron, standing disconsolately dreaming of a slithery takeaway. Earlier we saw the Red Kite patrolling for food up the hill, just as hungry but a much more impressive hunter, and the same camouflage as the red brown bird flew against a backdrop of heather and woods.

You turn the corner and this church sits as an incongruous reminder of the saint known as the Apostle of the Scots. The bleak weather and the cold feel to the photo are however quite congruent with a saint whose life was hard, whose ministry was tough and whose sense of mission makes utter nonsense of the assumption that mission is a late comer to the theology and practice of the church. In the North East of Scotland the Light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

I like old churches. They are reminders that we are the latecomers to the party, that the mission of the church is 2000 years in the making and may be another many a thousand years in the fulfilling. Because it is the mission of God, and is the realisiation in time and eternity of the reconciling love of the Eternal Triune God. In that mission, which the church is called to share, the righteous mercy of the God of grace and peace, works itself out in our history; and so we trust in the God of hope in whose purposes and power the ultimate hope of the creation rests, as it and we groan awaiting our redemption.

This stern old apostle gazes over the glen, with either serene patience or stoic indifference. Or maybe he glowers at the mess the world has become since his day and his time. That staff and mitre aren't the usual equipment for missionally challenged Baptists. Yet I wonder, for all our talk of strategy and resources, our plans and projects, our entrepreneurial enthusiasm and spiritual rationalising, I wonder if there is something we are missing in the courage and resilience, the willingness to suffer for the Gospel, the counter cultural offensiveness of 'in yer face' holiness, that characterised those earlier Christ-followers. I'm not appealing to a romaticised early Celtic whatever, but asking about the ongoing relevance for our cutting edge theology, of those ancient pioneers of mission who, unlike modern pretensions to the title, by their hardship and sacrificial faithfulness, earned the name apostle. Or so it seems to me as I look at this grey, lichen shaded statue of the Apostle to the Scots.   

 

Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life. 

And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs. 

Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto - there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer - there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!

Confessions of a Bibliophile - The Hound and the Falcon

I was recently asked to look through several boxes of books which came from  a house being cleared. If there was anything there I wanted just feel free to take it!

That's a hard ask then, isn't it?

Could I  make an appointment to come and browse them?

Yes - how about this evening I said.

Now the problem with browsing several boxes of books, any one or any hundred of which you are free to take, is that you begin to have daft ideas that you have enough time in life to read everything. Or if that unreasonable rationalisation isn't convincing, you begin to see each book as a possible masterpiece you have just overlooked so far for lack of opportunity - no matter that it is brown, cracked, smells musty and dusty and looks rusty. So there's a need for the fruit of the spirit which is self control, and a reminder that greed and acquisitiveness, possessiveness and an all embracing yes to intellectual appetite is indeed a work of the flesh.

So from those five boxes I only took half a dozen, and three of those were novels which will find their way soon to one of the far too many charity bags now coming through the letter box. Another was one I knew someone else would like, Wild Swans, (in bookseller speak, ' nice fresh copy, hardback, binding solid, dustcover very good and unclipped). The other two I have kept. C S Lewis once said the sign of the well read person  is one who looks over the gathered miscellanea on the second hand book barrows in the market (O for such events and literary adventures to return alongside the book chains and Amazon) - anyway to look and find something you haven't read and now want to. And though you don't know the book you now have an instinct for that which is mentally nutritious, emotionally satisfying, and promisingly interesting - and this previously non-existent book now presents itself and demands to be read.

The Hound and the Falcon, by Antonia White answers all three criteria, and I'm nearly finished it. Not a novel, but the letters she wrote to someone called Peter in 1940,41 during the London Blitz. The letters are intense, regular accounts of a woman struggling to return to and hold on to her Catholic faith. At times searingly honest, she is both a profound critic of her Church and a conscientious practising Catholic. But for her practice is more important than dogma, and what she does and who she is matters more than the specific articulations of what she believes. In mind and conscience, in her spirit and emotions she collides with much popular piety and official dogma, and the result is a glimpse into the inner life of one who genuinely loves God and struggles with the institutions which claim to represent God on earth.

Amongst her heroes (of whom she is also critical) is Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, whose letters are a strange mixture of teutonic reasoning and spiritual insight, stern doctrine and compassionate understanding of spiritual struggle. I've only read a few other books in which the authentic and costly struggle for integrity in spiritual life is so movingly recorded, so convincingly honest, and articulated in such penetrating yet personal prose to a friend she clearly had come to love and trust.

They only ever met twice. The correspondence is one sided as Peter's letters are not extant. But she responds so fully and frankly that it's possible to piece together some of the content of the letters she answers. But it is her own search and struggle that is of interest here. Reading these letters from a woman impatient with metaphysics but who reads Aquinas, highly intelligent and likely to tear a strip off me for pointing that out as if that were unusual, devoted to the Gospel but sharply critical of the Church, Catholic to the core without buying into much she saw as superfluous or unnecessarily obstructive to faith, I have come away once again aware of two things.

First, the letter is a magnificent lens into a person's heart and mind. The combination of personal relationship and inner journey is ideal for the articulation of faith. An exchange of letters is a thoughtful, considered dialogue. Some of the finest theological and spiritual writing is woven into correspondence. Second, the journey of the soul towards God, the longing for intimacy and belonging, the search for truth that can be lived, the love of beauty that can be adored, the yearning for goodness in ourselves and in others, the desire for God and the love of learning, - these are the signs of a soul alive, the evidence of spiritual awareness, the result of life received as gift so not taken for granted, but taken as granted, from God. Over the years I have met many in the communion of saints, which has absolutely no denominational barriers, who have so enriched my own faith and helped my own life, by the honest telling of their story.

Books come into our lives by accident, by providence, by chance - who knows? And what does it matter? The Hound and the Falconis one of a number of special books on my shelves which could be labelled 'serendipity'. I choose to believe that the Holy Spirit is the bringer of possibility, the Divine opportunist whose nudges and pushes are as far as divine coercion will go, but whose wisdom is unsearchable yet searches us to the core of our being, and speaks truth. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Paraclete who leads into the truth, but taking the things of Jesus and explaining them to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the pure in heart, the meek, the person for whom Beatitude is to be found in God.

Tired of giving in - Rosa Parks and a new missiological disposition?

Amongst the most remarkable and inspiring people who show us the ways of righteousness is Rosa Parks. I came across her name again in parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  The people who matter in a community are those who embody, enact and embrace their convictions, and in the demonstration of a life lived well, wisely and with disturbing courage affirm their identity and integrity. So when she sat in the whites-only section of that bus over 50 years ago, Rosa Parks asserted her humanity, affirmed her identity and confirmed her integrity. Not by words, but by an action that declared "her heart's knowledge of her own humanity". Why on that day did she sit there and refuse to move?

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually wasat the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of meas being old then. I was forty two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in"

Tired of giving in. Weary of wearing the weight of the status quo. Exhausted by the tedium and tyrranny of laws formed by imprisoned minds, intended to imprison the minds and hearts of others. By the simple act of sitting, Rosa Parks defied an entire mindset, challenged a racist worldview, embodied a protest against inhumanity by placing her human body in the way of harm and witnessing to the value, dignity and equality of each human being.

Now it would be easy enough to identify in our time those social practices and political policies, those economic decisions and legal impositions that diminish, devalue and demonise others. But instead of doing that simply the question, what have we too long given in to? Put up with? Culpably tolerated? Too easily accepted? And will we reach the stage where we are tired of giving in to institutional and unchallenged injuistice? What is our equivalent of sitting in the wrong place in the segregated bus? That I think might be a missiological question, and one the churches of Jesus Christ could do worse than address - and then find the place where we are called to sit.   

Biography as Theology - communal self scrutiny

Talking with Stuart yesterday about our mutual interest in biography as theology. McClendon's book, Biography as Theology, may not be the first use of the phrase- there's a chapter title in the William Stringfellow anthology that uses the same phrase, possibly earlier. No matter. My own interest in biography as theology was quite unintentional and for years I was unaware that was what I was doing. I've read biographies all my life. Hundreds of them. From Rowan Williamsto Yehudi Menuhin, Mahatma Gandhi to Vincent Van Gogh, George Macleod of Iona to Einstein, Dorothy Sayers to Thomas Aquinas, Emily Dickinson to Marilyn Monroe, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel to Martin Luther King, George Eliot to Elie Wiesel, Shirley Williams to Rembrandt, Katherine Hepburn to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Diana Princess of Wales to Sir Alec Guinness, Dorothy Day to Abraham Joshua Heschel, Beethoven to Bernstein to U2, and so on. Poets and trade unionists, artists and politicians, inventors and theologians, novelists and engineers, celebrities and explorers, travellers and stay at homers, doers and thinkers, the nice and the not nice, historical and contemporary.

Biographies can be hagiography or muckraking, tragic lives (a whole new genre) and blessed lives, authorised and thus sanitised, or unauthorised and sometimes destructive. Not all biographies are good - by which I mean accurate, fair, dealing with significant experience, contributing to our understanding of human life by examining and telling the story of a particular human life. And then there are the autobiographies, written to self advertise, or as catharsis, or as serious life evaluation, or as either perpetuating self-importance, or genuinely offering experience that is reflected on, assimilated into a new and mature self-awareness, with lessons learned and gratitude not absent.

  Biography as theology is a way of reflecting with critical sympathy, believing that in the living of a human life, there is the raw material that helps us understand what it means to encounter God, and for life to be changed by that experience. The underlying premise is simple - how we live is the demonstration of what we hold as our convictions. If we don't practise it we don't believe it; our practice exposes the convictions that move us to such actions. The life we live is the expression of those convictions that do indeed, practically and decisively, shape and form us. Not what I say; not what I think; not what I believe - well, all of these, but all of these translated into human practice in that performance of daily life that is the final, convincing evidence of what it is we actually do, when it comes down to it, believe.

More about this later. Here's McClendon:

"Undertaken in Christian community, biography can be a mode of communal self-scrutiny...the exercise in which the community holds a mirror to those it finds its finest in rder to discover what God has been doing in its midst...- if such communal self scrutiny is undertaken under the eyes  and in the light of God, then it may be a prime example of what we prioperly call theology. This is biography as theology."

He so contained the Gospel in its intensity, that its light radiated from the cracks

There are several biographies of Christian people that for me are definitive of the genre - and I mean the genre of Christian biography. Not hagiography. Not over devotionalised life stories projected as exemplars to make the rest of us feel guilty, inadequate or spiritual amateurs. Not propaganda for Christian projects, lifestyles, or personalities.

I mean the telling of a life in such a way that we can see how far what the person believed and what they lived coincided, and where they had more than a little resemblance in practice and values to the life and person of Jesus of Nazareth.

I mean the skilled unfolding of the delicate parchment of a person's lived experience, with such care and comprehension that those of us reading over the biographer's shoulder can appreciate the living text of a human life given in its own way to God.

I mean the quite rare ability to be both appreciative and critical, honest but understanding, imaginative yet without making things up for effect, open to the disappointments that are part of every life and alert to the gifts that are easily hidden.

I mean a reading of a life that is both theological and biographical, so that the experience and convictions of faith are allowed to inform the flow of the narrative, while the story provides a plausible framework for a portrait of a life given Christianly, both complex and living.

On my own shelves, as a select biographical bibliography there are a dozen or so books that are treasured for such reasons.

Helen Waddell, by Dame Felicitias Corrigan; R. W. Dale, by his son A. W. Dale; Temple Gairdner of Cairo, by C E Padwick; The Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel; Jonathan Edwards, by George Marsden; Michael Ramsey, by Owen Chadwick; H. R. L. Sheppard. Life and Letters, by R. Ellis Roberts; George Macleod, by Ronald Ferguson; Dorothy Sayers, by Barbara Reynolds; Thomas Chalmers, by Stewart (Jay) Brown; Cicely Saunders, by Shirley Du Boulay. And a few more.

But I suspect most (?) readers of this blog will wonder who H R L Sheppard is or was. He was one of God's fragile, flawed, earthen vessels who so contained the Gospel in its intensity that its light radiated from the cracks. One of those rare and magnificent pastors of the people that the Church of England produces, and critics of Anglicanism far too easily overlook and underrate.

I read the volume in 1976, again in 1986, and once more since. Then I lent it to someone who later couldn't find it to return it. A pity - it was a marked copy, and marked by me when I was in my first pastorate, and as receptive of heart as I've ever been since, I reckon. Last week I remembered a passage from my lost book - and no I didn't then find that by a miracle of providential circumstance or awakened conscience it turned up.

No miracle, just Amazon. I went looking for it and found a crisp clean copy which has now arrived. I've browsed in it off and on since it arrived - and now decided more people need to know about this pastor whose missiological methodology was love embodied, enacted, exemplified and enmeshed in the lives of others. So I'll read it again - and post on it again. Here's a sampler:

The biographer speaks of Dick Sheppard who for "snatched and precious moments in the early morning, came ardently, humbly to Jesus in prayer, remembering his friends, remembering his family, remembering himself, wrestling with God for Dick, desiring passionately to understand God enough to be able to proclaim him to all people as the Love he knew Him to be."

One of the most complex and vulnerable personalities of his generation, Dick Sheppard was no emotionally overwrought pietist - he was an emotionally engaged human being whose compassion and drive was traceable to an intense love for God, understood as the One exhibited in the ministry and passion of Jesus. I can think of only two or three Christians as attractive and available as a human being to those who knew him and found Christ through him. I wish I'd met him.

Mary Oliver on why life should be lived with energy and intentionality.

The photo is of a gardener whose 100th birthday has passed. And he is sowing seeds with the expectation of organic veggies next year!

A poem. About why life is good, and why it is important to receive it as a gift and enjoy it as a blessing. Mary Oliver understands that mixture of hard-headed strategy and wistful longing that recognises life only happens once, and is precious and is not ever to be devalued as mere routine, or wasted through unamazed disdain. We are ourselves God's investment, created by a love that knows our possibilities, capax dei, "dust, but glorious dust", as Richard Holloway once wrote in a magnificent reflection.

When Death Comes

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement:

I was a bridegroom, taking the world

into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something

particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing

and frightened

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having

visited this world.

"Tiny as we are" (Jacques Maritain)

Jacques Maritain was one of the great Catholic intellectuals of the 20th Century. His book True Humanism deeply influenced Dorothy Day. Asking herself why she and ten other Catholics made a spectacle of themselves as a way of voicing opposition to war, why they made themselves "a spectacle to the world, to the angels and to men", she found the answer in her annotated personal copy of Maritain.

"We are turning towards men to speak and act among them, on the temporal plane, because, by our faith, by our baptism, by our confirmation, tiny as we are, we have the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresover we are, the sap and savor of Christianity."

Words like these transcend Christian differences, elude the grasp of categories, render traditions and denominations relative though not unimportant. These are words of Christian witness that vibrate with purpose, are born of authentic spiritual experience, sourced and resourced in Christian conviction, and as clear a statement of determined compassion as an indifferent world is likely to hear - even if it stopped long enough to listen. Maritain is both Catholic enough and Christian enough to recognise the foolishness that confounds the wise, to smile knowingly at the strength that resides in weakness as a paradox of grace, and to register a gentle defiance in that four word qualifier, "tiny as we are..."

The call to discipleship, the imperative mood of the Gospel, the uncompromising yet persuasive voice of Jesus calling us to follow faithfully after him, now, here, in our time and place - these are each implicitly present, and to be explicitly lived out in Maritain's one sentence missiology:  "the vocation of infusing into the world, wheresoever we are, the sap and savor of Christianity." I am not so narrowly Baptist I don't recognise the authentic New Testament adventure of grace such vocation implies. Of course our capacity to infuse, and that which we infuse, is gift and grace, and mystery and mercy; and of course the different sacramental theology of Maritain feels like an annoying and persistent elbow in the ribs for self-respecting Baptists like myself. But I share the vocation because I hear the same voice, and it calls all God's people; I can only be the light of the world as Christ commanded, if Christ the light of the world radiates through my being; and that word savor (even with its American spelling), is a welcome if unnecessary reminder of how the function of salt is directly dependent on, well, its savor.