Living Wittily

Buechner Week I - One of my Literary Angels

Frederick Buechner is one of the angels in my life. I don't read him all the time, months can go by without me taking one of his books from the shelf behind my study chair at College. 

In my life as in most lives, there have been moments of annunciation when I've been told I'm blessed whether I like it or not, times when good tidings of great joy have lit up my life around me, encounters when I've wrestled with my own struggles and found somewhere in the wrestling that I had a grip on God but God had a stronger grip on me, times too when I've sensed a guardian angel when walking through valleys of deep darkness. Most times those angels are people sent by God to be a friend and companion, and to voice in their actions the love of God. But now and again that angel comes in the holy words that speak heart to heart, and come from the writer to the reader through conduits laid by the Holy Spirit.

Not many writers do that, and just as well. But when I turn one of those scary corners on my journey, find the wind constantly in my face and trying to push me back the way I came, or begin to find the upward road just far too upward, Buechner comes from the shelf, and time and again speaks the kind of sense I'd hear from very few others whom I read. Buechner's sense is uncommon sense, because he is unafraid of pragmatism so long as it's laced with grace, celebrates each precious moment of life not because they are all extraordinary but because they are possible at all because I am alive, shows me again and again that the most important gift is the gift of seeing and embracing the grace that is already there, of perceiving the goodness and mercy that dogs my steps, of discovering in the friendship of those closest to me the faithfulness of God, and in the company of strangers the friendship of God.

So this week is Buechner week. He is now 86 years old, and the wisdom of those years has been generously and prodigally shared in novels, essays, sermons and autobiography. A very good friend introduced me to Buechner's work in 1985 - that was one of the annunciations I referred to above, and the friend, one of the angels.

 

"Listen to your life.

See it for the fathomless mystery it is.

In the boredom and pain of it

no less than in the excitement and gladness:

touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

and life itself is grace."

Now and Then

 

"The world is full of dark shadows,

to be sure both the world without and the world within ...

But praise and trust him too

for the knowledge that what's lost is nothing to what's found,

and that all the dark there ever was,

set next to light,

would scarcely fill a cup."

Commencement Address at Union Seminary, Richmond.

 

Lovers of Discord because Lovers of Truth?

Lovers of Discord is one of Keith Clements' best books, though I guess not all that well known now. Published 23 years ago it is a critical but appreicative account of some of the theological bust ups in England in the 20th Century. Whether or not he agreed with the theological speculations, aberrations and protestations, he clearly admired those who were too faithful to the truth to silence awkward questions, or settle for partial and unconvincing arguments, or put up with dogmatic pronouncements disguised as conviction but in reality strident certitudes scared stiff of hesitation, uncertainty and doubt. On the last page he quotes the well repeated lines about the Lord having yet more light and truth to break forth from his word, and uses it the way most people do - as a warning against ever thinking we have God sussed, or that our views have some kind of secure finality, or that our view of the Bible is the biblical one and other people who differ are, well, unbiblical.

But then on the last page he writes some reflections that could only come from someone whose spirit is ecumenical, whose faith is evangelical, whose theology is liberal in the sense of generous, and whose mind remains open to the Spirit of truth who takes the things of Jesus and makes them known to the intellect, the heart and those secret places within us where truth gains its purchase on our deepest motives, inciters our most passionate longings, and sustains our most persistent hopes. Here is Clements' final words in this book:

"There is a looking back to the past for authoritative reassurance, rather than  an anticipation of some new thing, a continual desire to return and check the tomb is empty before taking the road to jerusalem to wherever Christ is to be met anew....We may believe in an ultimate unity of truth, though not apprehended as yet, and only seen in a glass darkly. The resolution of theological conflict is a hope and it will be fulfilled only when there is no more to be taught us by the Spirit of truth."  (Page 242)

The book is available used on Amazon for 1p - which just goes to show you can't tell a book by looking at its price! The image is from Hubble - and is included here just to remind us of our size, our place, and our insignificance if we are considered apart from the eternal purposeful Love that moves the sun and other stars.

Salley Vickers and the joy of novels

I've just finished Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, and am about to read it again. Vickers lectures on literature and is a Jungian psychotherapist - she is also a writer who can do that rare thing, take religious, metaphysical and psychological themes and weave them into a narrative that helps us love and affirm our own humanity. The painting is by Vittore Carpaccio, and it features only briefly in the novel - it is however used on the cover. Once I've read the novel again I'll come back to this - but I'm happy to encounter a novelist I hadn't read before - and discover I have two friends for whom a Salley Vickers' novel is a favourite. 

Making room, books, shelving and an understanding friend.

Had an interesting conversation with a friend who is a joiner. Well, a ship's carpenter which means he is an elite joiner who can turn his hand to other skills as well. The problem is still fitting a library into a smaller size study without major deletions from my catalogue. So the large clothes cupboard in this modest room, given a ship's carpenter's skills, will provide another 23 feet of shelving and some filing space. The Tardis principle. Or maybe a jig saw puzzle - all the pieces only fit together one way?

While discussing the problem I mentioned a number of suggestions made by well meaning friends, that I should just downsize my library, get rid of surplus, expel the excess. Didn't mention Stuart's much more convenient suggestion to give them to him :)) Anyway, said my friend, I paraphrase, but accurately, - "I have a tool kit, and several planes, saws, chisels, hammers, and need a wee trailer to carry them to go and do a job. Your library is a tool kit - you'll get rid of something and then you'll need it. A library isn't just books - it's a lifelong collection of the things you do your work with." I love a man who understands. I showed him my prized Cambridge hardback edition of the George Herbert's poems and explained the extended mortgage needed to buy it. It's inconceivable I'd part with it. It and the vast majority of my books are not bought on impulse - they are chosen companions, resident scholars of choice, conversation partners, gifts of thought and ideas that have made me who I am. Sure some of them can go.

But I have an annual review of my whole library anyway, have done every year for decades, and a box or two go away each year to new homes. So we spent time conspiring against the limitations of space, doing the math, planning and measuring so as to have adequate shelving without the study being overwhelmingly stuffed - I also like wall space for my pictures, and a sense of beauty as well as utility. 

Wolfhart Pannenberg, God's Patience and a Honda Jazz

Every few years or so I've tried to make time to read through a full blown systematic theology. This is not a novel form of intellectual masochism, but an intentional obedience to the call of God to a discipleship of the intellect. Sure, there are some writers who seem to make it harder than it needs to be. But the recognised theologians, the big names, the substantial presences on the theological stage, are far too important to the life of the church and the mind of its leaders to be sidelined by an arrogant laziness disguised as intellectual modesty. And those same substantial presences are far, far too important to be ignored, neglected or despised by those of us called to preach, to care, to serve the church, to build the Body of Christ, and to do so thoughtfully, reverently and from a foundation more durable and adaptable than the latest time limited pragmatic programmes geared to ecclesial renewal of one form or another.

Which is why over the years I've sat in the study chair, fastened the seat-belt, adjusted the mirrors to give better vision, checked I had enough fuel (chai tea and Hovis digested biscuits the current preferred combination ), gripped the book with both hands, and started to read. Half an hour a day eventually gets it done. Which is how I come to be at page 438 of Wolfhart Pannenberg's volume 1. And this post was born when I read his theological reflection on the patience of God. Pannenberg is not easy to read, but...

No wait. First let me tell you about the other night. I took a long run in the new car, a Honda Jazz with which I am inordinately pleased. We went into Lewis Grassic Gibbon country - Cairn O Mount, Auchenblae, and Arbuthnott. For a while we sat at the view point on Cairn O Mount and admired a huge vista of countryside through heavy rain accompanied by shafts of bright sunshine framed in a vivid half rainbow. It's wild, miles of heather moorland and mountain, but sloping into green uplands and fields towards the Mearns.

Now. Reading Panneberg's theology can sometimes be a similar experience to looking at a challenging rough landscape under dark skies, in heavy rain that reduces visibility. But just as often there are shafts of bright sunlight, a partial rainbow and moments of transfigured thought and intellectual epiphany. Here's one of them, from pages 438-9:

"Barth said of patience that it is present 'where space and time are given with a definite intention, where freedom is allowed in expectation of a response' (CD, II/1, 408). Patience leaves to others space for their own existence and time for the unfolding of their own being. If it is not the enforced patience of those who impotently watch the course of events but the patience of the powerful who can intervene in what happens but refrains from doing so, and if the patience is shown to his own creatures, then it is a form of the love that lets the creatures have their own existence.  God's patience then, is neither indifferent tolerance nor an impotent but brave endurance of circumstances that cannot  be altered. It is an element of the creative love that wills the existence of creatures. It waits for the response of creatures in which they fulfill their destiny."

Patience as love restraining power in order to allow freedom. So patience as the self-limitation that allows space, time and opportunity for the other to grow. And patience therefore as an active form of passivity, an intentional self-imposed limitation which gives permission and trusts the other to be and to become. As a vision of how God is willfully implicated in the life of his creation, Pannenberg's theology of divine patience suggests that in God the three cardinal virtues of faith hope and love have their divine counterpart. The faithfulness, hopefulness and love of God guaranteeing that creation will not forever be in bondage to futility, but in Christ will be brought to fulfilment in the end, and however long it takes, it will not wear out the patience of the God.

The biggest book I've ever bought! :)) - and the artist as alternative exegete

Two books recently bought. One huge, as in mega-big. I didn't look at the dimensions when I clicked. (36x43x3). Don't care. It's a coffee table book, which could also mean put legs on it and it is big enough for a coffee table! But it is a gorgeously produced, outrageously sized, sumptuously heavy, ridiculously unwieldy, impossible to read in bed, but impossible not to read, study of Johannes Vermeer and His World. And the price is £15 from Amazon! There are 10 posters for framing included and I reckon any half decent print shop would charge you more than £15 for one of them, let alone the book and the set.

There is one painting in particular I want to spend some time with - Vermeer's interpretation of the Martha and Mary story. Of which more in a later post. But this volume is a labour of love; each of the confirmed Vermeer paintings is reproduced, with good background notes, exposition of key details, and building up to an education in the understanding and appreciation of artistic development from gift to genius. What becomes progressively clearer in studying the paintings is the way the eyes of the subjects are portrayed. How they look, the direction and focus, the use of light, each draw the attention of the viewer, and thus influence the way we look, and point us towards what we ought to see. In other words the artist is providing his own hermeneutic, and with Vermeer that includes provoking and directing emotional attentiveness "by rendering visible particular moods and feelings". One of the unmistakable responses to a Vermeer masterpiece is precisely this, the artist setting the emotional climate in which the painting can best be appropriated, and doing so by taking control of how the viewer looks and what it is the artist wants the viewer to notice.

Exegesis of a text requires, and is inevitably accompanied by, a set of hermeneutical assumptions, strategies, principles - which are themselves influenced by the capacity of the text to speak for itself. There is an equivalent process, when the text is not in words but in image. Visibility, seeing and reading the non-verbal text, is with an eye to apprehending the truth, the is-ness made visible and comprehensible not in words but in that emotional and spiritual intuition of the viewer that recognises the rightness, the fittingness, the yes factor in what is being viewed. 

This is an important resource for theological nourishment, as well as a crucial insight for theological understanding. Much hermeneutical activity which surrounds the exegesis of words composed into texts, strongly focuses on meaning and truth. The equivalent hermeneutical activity in art focuses on the response of the viewer to beauty, and the search to understand the process by which the apprehension of beauty opens the mind to truth of another order. This painting is a pictorial exegesis of a gospel incident that has been deeply influential in the development of Christian spirituality, especially the unhelpful distinction between the active and the contemplative life. Vermeer portrays both women as having Jesus' attention, and there is little sense of one being preferred to the other. The active and the contemplative, the kitchen and the prayer stool, food and conversation, Martha and Mary, are equally disciples, and feeding the hungry Jesus is as important as listening to Jesus' words. Dag Hammarskjold, that surprisingly perceptive Christian and Secretary General of the UN, understood the given and creative tension of Christian obedience, that "the way to holiness lies through the world of action".

And Thomas Merton, who to my knowledge didn't write on this gospel incident, though one of the greatest apologists for the contemplative life in silence and solitude, nevertheless linked these spiritual disciplines of passive waiting (Mary) to the richer textured realities of active obedience in the world (Martha), and to demonstable Christian practices which embody and enflesh the virtues of peacemaking, love and social compassion. His finest writing is found in the collision, or perhaps the conflation, of contemplative and political theology, the fusion in his spirituality of prayer and protest, the insistence that true communion with God and love for the world are to be found both in the inward cohesion of a contemplative community, and in the outreaching and scattering of that community in Christian witness to a broken God-loved world. And it is not unimportant that some of his most telling statements are not in words, but in photographs, poems and calligraphic art. And some of his most piercing images are literary and in his best known essays. For Merton, word and image are equally effective conduits of those truths that shape and inspire patterns of behaviour and practice that are demonstrably Christian.  

A new reading chair for the study - wise stewardship or consumer extravagance?

My study isn't a big room. And I have a lot of books divided between home and College. A study needs a desk, computer and printer, and a reading chair, and wall space for pictures and other sources of inspiration, and a sound system for music. And my study isn't a big room. So choices have to be clever, because I don't want to be "cabined, cribbed and confined" in the very place where mind and heart should relax with space and time for thought.

And yesterday which was supposed to be about something else entirely, I came across  the very chair. Comfort, appearance, size are all yes, and I've measured carefully and checked that it would fit. So reserved till later today till I make up my mind. When does "not cheap" take second place to just right? Is that primarily a financial calculation or an aesthetic one? See this stewardship thing, it complicates the process of deciding what you really want - the thing itself, or the knowledge you've used money responsibly and wisely. I mean, how many chairs are there, and why does this one matter? For some people shoppping is uncomplicated transaction. For some of us not quite so. How many decisions do we make in the process of any particular consumer choice? Or how many choices have to be made before we can reach a responsible decision about money? Don't know. But I need a chair. And by the end of the day I might have one....or not. Then I might regret my decision...or not. And then there's the need to change the car.............any shopping advisers out there?

The ingenious chair pictured is the ultimate reading chair, eh? it's on the Scottish Poetry Library website. Not sure how comfortable it is - anyone ever sat on it, maybe the poets and poetry readers who come in and out of this blog?

Shakespeare disbound and diss-assembled by dissembling book thief

Here's a story to break the hearts of all bibliophiles, infuriate Shakespeare scholars and admirers, and confirm the truth that for some people everything has a price, even a priceless folio. Paste the link below into your browser, a facility the Bard never dreamed of - imagine Shapespeare with an IPad :)) And then weep for the philistinism unleashed by the love of money - and lament the lack of cultural conscience in a person who can bring themselves to.....well, read for yourself :((

http://news.aol.co.uk/man-mutilated-priceless-book/article/20100617111317194947074

On top of this, a new film titled "Anonymous" is currently being produced which plays out the controversy about the authorship of many Shakespeare plays. Was it Shakespeare or Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford who wrote those great works of genius? In the background of the literary sleuthing is the dangerous rivalry between the Tudors and the Cecils, scheming and plotting over the succession to the throne. And Vanessa Redgrave is an absolutely inspired casting for Queen Elizabeth.

Oh, and I have an opaque blue china decorative plate of the bard in Question, that doesn't seem to go anywhere obvious in the new house. It won't scan so can't show it, but it's an impressive Victorian plate produced by Sampson Hancock and Sons at the turn of the 19th / 20th Century. It will however find a place - a reminder of what can be done with 26 letters arranged into a few thousand words, which in turn are arranged into sentences and scenes and chapters by authorial choices from a near infinite number of options. So a Shakespeare theme seems destined this weekend - I intend to have an early Saturday morning viewing of The Merchant of Venice, lent to me an unconscionable length of time ago, and my favourite Shakespeare play from school days. By early I mean, well, early. Will have watched a play by Will long before breakfast arrives for most other sensible bloggers. 

Books, good books and beautiful books

  There are books, good books and beautiful books. And while the contents are the thing, the physical production is not an irrelevance. Can you imagine reading your favourite book in a brown edged, split spine, dried glue crackling, acrid smelling cheap paperback. Well - yes if it was my favourite book, and the only available copy. But the enjoyment would be seriously diminished.

The ideal book is the one which has just what I want to read, well written, and contained in a volume that is attractively bound, printed on quality paper, a careful choosing of the right font, and even with features such as more than one ink colour. There is an aesthetic imperative in the production of a quality book. I'm much less dismissive of the softback or paperback than I used to be, but I can still be found guilty of paying much more for the hardcover when there is an option. There are well produced softcovers that do survive several readings, and can be opened a few years later without the spine disintegrating and the book being reduced to varied length pamphlets that need an elastic band to hold them together.

All this is because I spent some time over the weekend reading several chunks of Margaret Odell's commentary on Exekiel. That weird prophet, whose chapter one became a chapter in Chariots of the Gods, a best-selling speculative effort by Velikovsky on space ships and bible times, takes a bit of understanding. And Odell is way ahead of others in trying to interpret the outpourings of a man deeply disturbed by catastrophe, and trying to make sense of a God who permits catastrophe within a covenanted relationship with the very people on whom such catastrophe is visited.

But as well as the contents, which along with Kathleen Darr's careful and imaginative treatment in the New Interpreter's Bible are the best treatments around, Odell's book is a joy to use, read and handle. It is in the Smyth and Helwys series. It is inordinately expensive. The volumes are near impossible to source even from Amazon. The publisher's marketing approach is well nigh obstructive. But persevere. Phone Gracewing, the UK distributor. Don't visit their website unless you are an extraorinarily patient and understanding browser. Still. Several volumes including Odell's, are amongst the best exegetical helps around. Who wouldn't want Brueggemann on Kings, Fretheim on Jeremiah, Balentine on Job?

The production is lavish, expensive, includes sidebars, text boxes, varied ink text, high quality binding and paper, and it looks and feels like a volume you won't ever want to lend to anyone. That said, if my favourite book was out of print and my copy was a beat up brown edged paperback, held together with an elastic band, I'm not sure I'd lend it either. But a commentary with pictures! And sidebars. And a searchable CD. Bound in hardback with a distinctive dust-cover! Cherry pick the series, and own at least one if you appreicate high quality production of high quality content.

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.