Living Wittily

Reading Dickens at Christmas

Instead of reading one of Dickens' novels this Christmas, I read Claire Tomalin's biography. There are pluses and minuses in that - those who enjoy reading Dickens know well enough the humour, the acute and astute observation of human behaviour, the use and abuse of caricature and pathos, the contrived plots which would embarrass most moderate versions of the doctrine of providence, and the narrative drive frequently interrupted by long descriptive passages, some of which are the most closely documented and vivid descritpions of early and mid Victorian London.

The real gain of reading Tomalin's biography is that it is precisely these prominent features of Dickens' genius and perennial appeal that are traced to their living context in Dickens' life experience. That experience was assimilated, reconstructed and written into the characters, plots and landscapes of his novels. Most of what I learned from reading Tomalin is the significance of such contextualising both as explanation of his immediate appeal to his readers, and as exploration of how a writer's own life experience can be transmuted into fiction without losing its connectedness to the author. Dickens' experience of poverty, of thwarted ambition, his struggle to find his way, and the appearance in his novels of characters and human characteristics traceable to those he knew and observed, are all shown to be woven into Dickens' Victorian tapestries. 

The biography reads well, Tomalin's research is meticulous and seldom pedantically paraded, at times she speculates about motive and argues from silence, not always convincingly, but she is in control of the content of Dickens' novels and well versed in the secondary literature. Her earlier work on Nelly Ternan, The Silent Woman, is well exploited in reconstructing the astonishing feat of secrecy and deception required to keep hidden the real relationship between Dickens and Nelly Ternan. This is told with care, understanding, but without excusing Dickens' behaviour and treatment of others in pursuing an alternative, even parallel existence, away from the public eye.

Each of the major novels is discussed and commented on from this same contextual perspective, and much light shed on the birthing process of each novel. That he wrote so much while living a life of self-consuming intensity is testimony to levels of energy and industry that at times defy belief - and adequate explanation. Today we might use the term driven, but even that diminishes Dickens' achievement, for there was undoubtedly an iron will, an obsessive determination to exact from each day of life the maximum quantity of productive experience.

Buit I finished this biography better understanding this complex and contradictory man, at times pitiless to those who thwarted him, yet capable of immense compassion and extraordinary generosity; capable of loving with utter devotion and yet equally capable of cauterising feelings and moving on without a backward glance. It's a sign of Tomalin's achievement that you read her book and have a much less romanticised view of Dickens - he is both increased and diminished in stature, because this is no hagiography, nor is it a piece of literary hatchet swinging. It is a life told mainly according to the evidence, and where there is speculation it is never unfounded. And we are left to wonder at this storytelling genius, who plays on human emotion like a virtuoso musician, bringing a country to a tearful crescendo at the death of little Nell, but who did not attend his own brother's funeral nor send an acknowledgement of his death.

The Enduring Melody - the fellowship of joy and of suffering

My friend Geoff Colmer - whom I see about once a year at a UK Baptist conference, has gently encouraged me for some time to read The Enduring Melody by Michael Mayne. I first encountered the work of Michael Mayne in his volume This Sunrise of Wonder, which I consider one of the most life affirming and theologically literate books I've ever read. So my slowness in getting to The Enduring Melody is only because other things were pressing, and I know a book of such richness isn't one to skim, cram in, flick through or read dutifully. It should be read - and the verb to read means something much more than mere perusal or hurried shopping down the supermarket aisles grabbing what my limited time allows to throw into the mental trolley.

So for a week now I've been reading The Enduring Melody, and found myself in the company of faith, courage, beauty, wonder, loss, love, pain, anxiety, enjoyment and much else that is expressed in a book that alternates between very personal journal and beautifully crafted essay. In that sense there are two books - the diary of an illness that proves terminal, and essays on some the things that made up the enduring melody of Michael Mayne's life as a Church of England priest, a vocation lived with the classic pastoral genius of Anglican spirituality at its most inquisitively affirming.

The only other published Journal that comes near this for honest spiritual search, human and humane longing, wise reflection on the meaning of this person's life, regret that life is shortening but gladness for what it has been and still is, are the two volumes of Philip Toynbee, Part of a Journey, and End of a Journey. I remember very clearly reading them, the time in my life and the places I was when I did read them. And I remember too some of the moments when I simply nodded in mute but sincere recognition of those deep undercurrents of faith and fellowship that enable us to say I believe in the communion of saints. I'll write more about Toynbee soon.

Over the next week or so I'll write about The Enduring Melody. Not a book review, more reports of conversations between pilgrims who know, you've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk there by yourself. But pilgrims who also know that you don't ever walk by yourself, even if that is the way it feels. You walk with the company, felt or unfelt, of the One whose rod and staff comort; and you walk with those friends and companions in life who also walk their road and ours; and you walk, or run, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, with perseverance looking to Jesus.

Going on retreat, toasted muesli and the Go-Between God.

I was recalling with Ken the other day the time we went on a clergy retreat to Scottish Churches House. The Director was the late Bishop John V Taylor and we looked forward to a rich time of thoughtful and theologically literate reflection. We weren't disappointed. Out of an A5 spiral notebook, with full written notes he spoke of the Christlike God and the ministry as service to the God of Creation, Reconciliation and Communion in the Trinity.

However there was not a little consternation when with episcopal authority of a unilateral kind, he announced it would be a silent retreat, with strictly designated times for talking. That was a problem for two friends who wanted to catch up. It was more of a problem when he said that meal times would be silent - I mean, how do you ask politely for the salt without which chips are incomplete? But problem became difficult to suppress hysteria at the breakfast table when in silence, around 20 people are munching the toasted muesli. My immediate memory was of my boyhood on the farms and heard the munching of bovine jaws in the byre after feeding cattle cake to 40 cows. Unconditional love of the brothers and sisters is stretched painfully when trying to chew muesli, not choke and hold back guffaws of laughter which if they erupt are likely to spray the table with semi-masticated oats much to the spiritual benefit of no one!

                                                                                                     

 Nevertheless, that was a rich encounter with Bishop John. I went on the strength of reading his The Go Between God.

That is a book of seminal importance in my thinking about the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the created order, in the church, and in my life as it impinges on all the others who are affected by the ripples of influence that emanate from this one life.

Here is one paragraph which says so, so much:

 

 

The Holy Spirit is the invisible third party who stands between me and the other, making us mutually aware. Supremely and primarily he opens my eyes to Christ. But he also opens my eyes to the brother ans sister in Christ, or the fellow human being, or the point of need, or the heartbreaking brutality and the equally heartbreaking beauty of the world. He is the giver of that vision without which the people perish. We commonly speak about the Holy Spirit as the source of power. But in fact he enables us not by making us supernaturally strong but by opening our eyes.

Circles of Thorns: Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human

One of the most telling and illuminating moments shared in class was when we discovered that we can learn as much from what we don't like as we can from what we do like! It was during the class on Jesus Through the Centuries a year or two ago, when images and paintings of Jesus were shown and we listened to how we reacted to them. I don't mean we listened to what we each thought of them - well we did that, but we didn't only listen to what we each said. We listened to what was going on inside us as we looked at images that were unfamiliar, theologically alien to our tradition, at times disturbing.

An artist has done her job brilliantly if in portraying suffering, evil, cruelty, or anguish, the viewer recoils, is disturbed, is affected by sympathy for the sufferer and moved from bewilderment through to outrage at the perpetrators. This is particularly true of religious art, and in Christian art the portrayal of the Passion of Jesus. I had another of those moments of illumination while reading Justin Lewis-Anthony, Circles of Thorns. The book is subtitled Hieronymous Bosch and Being Human, ande the whole book is a series of reflections on one painting, Christ Mocked. 

Paintings emerge from a context, and are best understood within that context, whether as reflecting or reacting to the cultural, political, social and religious realities. Lewis-Anthony has lived with this painting for years, reflected and read around the historical context, and now offers an exposition that explores what it means to be human against the background of what it meant for God in human form to be the victim of mockery, abuse and violence leading to death. Along the way he explores politics, psychology, science, religious devotion as these developed in the early Modern period. This means at times having to be patient while the context is constructed and we are given the information needed to know what Bosch was about, and why, and how. But each chapter brings rewards and by the end of the book the reader has been educated in context and enabled to look at the painting as the politically subversive and theologically potent statement it is. And on the way Thomas a Kempis, Terry Pratchett, Bob Dylan, Etty Hilesum, Rowan Williams and Brian Eno are all co-opted into the conversation. 

Not everyone is likely to admire Bosch's art - some of his paintings are frankly weird, a kind of proto-surrealism that depicts the nightmares of an age that saw the ravages of war, plague, and political and religious revolution. What this book does is pay attention to one painting, and patiently unfold the mind of the artist, teaching us in the process not only how to read a painting, but in doing so teach us also that great art reads also the human heart.

The Cross in Our Context - an eye-opener for sleepy Christians!

Here's why I think Douglas John Hall is one of the most challenging theologians around. His book The Cross in Our Context, is a distillation of his three volume systematic theology. It is a passionate and compelling book, learned without being technically forbidding, and written as a forthright challenge to the church to stop lamenting the loss of Christendom and embrace again the call of God to be a community of the Cross. What that means is explored by a theologian who has spent decades teaching a theology that critiques power, empire and cultural conformity to consumerism. Here's his primary point:

If you claim to be a disciple of the crucified one you must expect to participate in his sufferings; if you preach a theology of the cross, you will have to become a communityof the cross. Anything else would represent a kind of hypocrisy. A purely doctrinal or theoretical theology of the cross is a contradiction. This theology is only authentic - only "for real" - insofar as it gives birth to a community that suffers with Christ in the world. Nowhere does Christendom difference from the New testament church show up more glaringly than in the fact that the birth of Christendom in the fourth Century C.E. brought about a species of Christianity that with rare exceptions could be practiced without any threat or hint of its being a process of identification with the one who was "despised and rejected". (pages 140-1)

Further comment superfluous.

Tomas Halik - on not flat-packing the Infinite

The Renaissance of interest in Kierkegaard in recent decades is not without significance for Halik. The move in the 19th century from "study of God" (philosophical theology) to "an hermeneutic of the existential experience of faith" leads Halik to suggest that faith is the most radical existential expereince. And that theological tradition may have even more to say to our culture now than it did even in the existentialist high points of the mid 20th century.

 "Out of all theological disciplines, that theological current is probably closest to spiritual theology; after all, spirituality is without doubt the dimension of Christian faith most relevant to the spiritual climate of present-day Western society. However if the theological impulses I have indicated  are embodied in a lived faith and spirituality, then this liberation spirituality or exodus spirituality should not lead to shirking our responsibility for the society in which we have been placed. On the contrary, one of its essential tasks is sensitivity to the signs of the times in the cultural and political climate of today's world. "Solidarity with seekers" implies sharing in their seeking and questioning."

Here again Halik is arguing for a Church that vulnerably and willingly moves away from assertion and proclamation of claimed truth, to the much more humble position of listening, seeking and offering of truth from the experience of lived faith. To live responsibly in our culture, alert to the signs of the times, listening to the heartbeat and longings articulated by those who share our times and places, seeking a life more humane in which peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy are lived out precisely as principles of a Gospel of peace, forgiveness, conciliation, justice and mercy. It isn't that the church should not be confident in the Gospel, but that it should stop being so self-confident that in its words and concepts, by its institutions and worship, in its history and traditions, through its theological articulations and apologetic arguments, it in any definitive sense HAS the Gospel as possession, has the truth in its finality, knows all there is to know, understands the incomprehensible, or conveniently flat packs the Infinite. The Church itself receives within its limited finitude only what it is given of the infinite riches of God in Christ, and so the Gospel is bigger than the church's idea of it, as Christ is greater than any formulation or conception purposed to contain Him. 

 
A church confident in the Gospel is by definition one that should be the last to be guilty of self-confidence, and the first to confidently sit alongside the seekers of our age and culture and converse, explore, share and commend, review and revise, persuade and be persuaded as true, a way of life that in its embodied integrity gives credibility to those humble words we feel are capable of telling the truth, of bearing witness, to the reality of God as we have discovered that Loving Reality in Jesus.

I doubt if Halik would own all the weight I put on this - but I am largely persuaded for myself that such humble confidence, shared in the confidence of trust, would be a deep, and patient, and valid alternative form of witness to the One who once said to seekers who asked where he stayed, "Come and see". Confident in the Gospel of Jesus? Absolutely. Confident too, that the One for whom all things were made, who is the last word in wisdom and understanding, will lead those seekers in our own times, into that way that is truth and life. The role of the church may well be to create places of openness, moments of graced meeting and speaking, occasions of spiritual hospitality, encounters between those who seek and the One who is sought.

Tomas Halik and the felled, lifeless trees of wrongly presented truth.

  When I said I was reading this book slowly, I meant patiently, taking time to let a different voice say new things, or familiar things in new ways. I wasn't aware it would be read slowly, a page or two at a time, lying in hospital, with time to think between each reading, a miasmic doze, and the next couple of pages. Not sure anyone sucks lozenges nowadays - the word lozenge seems to refer now to a medically laced sweet from a bygone age. But as a sweet to be sucked rather than crunched, slowly ingested rather than consumed, enjoyed for lasting taste rather than eaten for short term satisfaction, the metaphor still works. This book is a lozenge type read.

The cliche graffiti story, "Jesus is the Answer" to which someone allegedly wrote below "What is the Question", may in the end be mere baseless anecdote at best; at worst, a preacher's invention. But Halik pushes the point and arrives at a different intellectual level. Quoting the philosopher Eric Voegelin, Halik asks whether the biggest problem for Christians today is not that they don't have the right answers, but that they've forgotten the questions to which they were the answers. Then Halik continues:

Answers without questions - without the question that originally provoked them, but also without the subsequent  questions that are provoked by every answer - are like trees without roots. But how often are Christian truths presented to us like felled, lifeless trees in which birds can no longer find a nest?

There in a couple of sentences is the diagnosis of the church's contemporary malaise and missional confusion. We talk dialogue and practice assertion. We claim to present, embody, live by, know, the truth, but to put it in the words of that most unmetaphysical of movie characters, Jack Nicholson, "Son, you can't handle the truth!" Because the truth is bigger than our capacity; the truth is stranger than our conceptual field can contain; the truth is never our possession always our gift, and never entirely given. And whatever else I make of the Colossian Christ, the Johannine Logos, the Hebrews "God's last word" claim about Jesus Christ, whatever else I make of the NT claims to apostolic testimony to the truth, it never was that the church can simply take truth for granted. We don't possess it, it possesses us; we don't control it, truth compels and constrains us.

And while Halik can push too far his hesitations about just how much truth can be understood, held to, made the base convictions of life, he is absolutely right in his image of felled lifeless trees, truths nobody cares about any more; truths that don't shelter; truths that have lost the sap of life. And therefore truths cut off in the deforestation of a landscape that should include mystery, miracle, question, search, enquiry, discovery, newness, oldness, longing and finding, losing and recovering, sunlight and shadow, the colour and tone of life rather than the settled leafless skeletal greyness of what used to be a magnificent rain forest, a life-giving canopy under which human life is explored in the mystery and history of a God loved world. 

And yes that is idyllic, and a bit overblown. But I do sense in our cultural landscape that deforestation of religious ideas is well underway, a land-stripping of those vast questions that have always fascinated and terrified, opened us up in mind and heart, to a universe at once alien and home. Which brings me back to the New Testament. Because I happen to believe its outrageous claim that in Jesus Christ the universe co-inheres, all things hold together. That in Jesus Christ, the Lamb Slain from the foundation of the world, the Word uttered by the Father, the Life that Lightens every human being, the heart of God is revealed. And the mind of God is glimpsed - not captured, not contained, not comprehended - but we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth. And when it comes to beholding glory we can only glimpse -  because to gaze would be blindness.

Here's Halik again

It takes the confrontation of questions and answers to return a real meaning and dynamic to our statements. Truth happens in the course of dialogue. There is always a temptation to allow our answers to bring to an end a process of searching, as if the topic of the conversation was a problem that has now been solved. But when a fresh question arrives, the unexhausted depths of mystery show through once more. let it be said over and over again; faith is not a question of problems but of mystery, so we must never abandon the path of seeking and asking.

I think Halik is, quite simply, right. And I wish the church was able to recover the intellectual humility to recognise that what is now needed is a reforestation of the cultural landscape, a church with a sense of the greatness of God's humility, a church unembarrassed by the vastness of the truth of who God is in Christ. And a church lost in wonder at a Love way beyond our mere intellectual constructs, but purposefully present and deeply entangled within those profound and mysterious depths of human brokenness and aspiration that define us as human beings, made in the image of God.

Patience with God, Tomas Halik - to be read slowly, and patiently....

I'm enjoying a slow read of Patience with God. Tomas Halik's writing is beautiful even in translation from the Czech, and there is a quite different sense of the importance of religious experience and of God from someone whose early background is in state communism, but now is a priest free to practice in a Westernised country which has less sense of God!

 

 

Oh God, how I pray for the church to fulfill St Paul's vision of a body in which all the parts complement each other in their diversity and respect each other's specific purpose, where the eye doesn't say to the hand or the head doesn't tell the foot, "I do not need you".  How I wish that we could realize at last, with all its implications, that the "body of Christ" needs eyes that look progressively ahead, feet that stand firmly on the soil of tradition, hands that intervene actively in the world's affairs, and attentive, hearing ears that silently and contemplatively liste to the beating of God's heart.

Page 79.

In the beginning was the Word - and then there was the Hubble

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made....and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The mystery of vastness, the perplexing notion of infinity, the "cerebral inconveniences" of impossible mathematics, the loveliness and terror of images that reduce human significance to the omega point. That's what my new book is about - or at least that is what it's about if you can combine rational processing of data with aestheric responsiveness and an educated but not too loopy imagination.

A multi-tasking exegesis of John's Prologue might include simultaneous listening to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001 Space odyssey), looking at these Hubble space images, saying by heart the text about the Word printed above, and asking the question with bewildered humility, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?'

Not all theology is verbal. And not all pictures are theological. But as a human being capable of reflection and self-consciousness, I contemplate these images of the universe, and wonder, and trust, and hope, that "all indeed shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". Julian's image of the hazelnut is more manageable -

"In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it
was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and
thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is
made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have
sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

A vast universe that exists because it is loved presupposes a God of love beyond telling. Stands to reason.

Novels, and the pleasures of other people's worlds

In the bookshop in St Andrews on Saturday.

Had a book token and a gift token.

Bought four novels and paid 74 pence.

Decided not to take a historical novel about Elizabethan martyrs - the blurb said, "enjoyable, bloody and brutish".

Decided I don't need any more novels about murder, mayhem and maggots.

Tried to buy a children's book, Klimt and His Cat - I do also read children's books though they have to be a bot different - this one is.

Did buy an Alexander McCall Smith for Sheila who has become a fan of this undemanding though not unsophisticated writer who seems to think human nature isn't all bleakness, blackness and bloodletting. I happen to believe he is right.

The one I'm looking forward to reading over the next couple of days, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - one of those social novels that explores human relationships, politics and how the two inevitably affect each other, for better, for worse and in ways not so easily categorised.

A favourite writer, Daniel Silva, writes about Israeli intelligence, the new Moscow underworld and the web of power, corrutpion and greed that provides fertile soil for terrorist activity.

And I've been a fan of Douglas Kennedy ever since I read The Big Picture, and discovered that he is always rewarding as a thoughtful, knowing and sympathetic teller of people's stories as they try to find their way out of whatever life throws at tem - as the blurb says,' he delivers the message that whatever hole you dig yourself into, you're probably not alone.'

So. Some good reading over the next few days, before the van delivers our stuff to our new house, and the priorities of making home take over from the pleasures of other people's worlds.