Living Wittily

Health and safety and the way we do our thinking.

Reading about Dorothy Day over the past few weeks has been cause for critical reflection on a number of unhelpful assumptions that clutter up the floor of my mental workshop, and that in the real world would be removed by anyone schooled in health and safety procedures. Interesting concept - a health and safety inspection of the way we do our thinking!! Here's three correctives to such unhelpful assumptions.

One. Just because someone isn't a recognised theologian doesn't mean they aren't. Day never claimed to be, never wanted to be known as, a theologian. But the way she lived her life on the values of the Sermon on the Mount, used her mind to think through the meaning of each human being's existence and value, conflated prayer and social action, ignited compassion with the fire of the Gospel of Jesus, confronted the powers not only with obstinate protest but with lucid argument articulating the nature of God in Christ. She was a theologian alright.

Two. Spirituality has to do with the inner life and piety of the individual. Not so. True spirituality is expressed through the outward witness in works of mercy of a Christ-responsive community. Coming from an Evangelical context I recognise the deadly temptations of what my own College Principal used to call "grovelling around in the dark recesses or comfortable sofas of our own souls".  Day knew the problem. "To cook for one's self, to eat by one's self, to sew, wash, clean for one's self is a sterile joy. Community, whether of family, or convent, or boarding house, is absolutely necessary." It isn't that I don't know that. It's just that spirituality in a consumer culture is always in danger of being an unholy search for personal customer satisfaction. By contrast, Day found God in the messiness of people's lives, in the friction of personal relationships, and in those places where injustice and suffering went unchallenged - until she and others like her went there in Jesus' name and orchestrated a collision of worldviews.

Three. Personal sanctity is a life goal. Not so. Sanctity pursued has no purchasing power for the truly holy person. The self-conscious pursuit of holiness was, in Day's judgement, a deflection from the life of discipleship. When followers of Christ seek him amongst the poor, witness to the Kingdom of God with faithfulness before the powers that hurt and exploit, enact in lifestyle and embodied practices the forgiveness and peacemaking of God, then just at those points where personal holiness is the least concern, sanctity is invisble but obvious. Even in her lifetime some suggested to her she was a saint - her reply, "No. I can't be dismissed that easily".

Three will do for now. My final post Dorothy will include a couple of Dorothy's subversive interpretations, either of Jesus' words or of the actions consistent with Jesus' own subversive lifestyle of self-giving and peacemaking love. Jim Forest's brief biography is entitled Love is the Measure. And so it is.

If love is interpreted with the full costliness of the Gospel

and love modelled on Jesus is lived as a tough and compassionate alternative to the uncaring selfishness of contemporary culture

and love is understood as a Gospel critique of all social injustice that diminishes, discriminates and deprives further the least of Christ's brothers and sisters

and Love is 

Incarnated in practices and habits of compassion

Cruciform in its shape and self expenditure

Resurrection pointing in its vitalising hopefulness

Pentecostal in its dependence on the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts

Trinitarian in its reaching out to those who are other

Eschatological as the contemporary enactment of the final reality of a universe where God will be all in all

because in the end, as at the beginning, God is love.

Miscellaneous fragments of experience - or noticing the spirituality of the present moment

Tea Break Haiku

Two dunked ginger snaps,

Whittard's cinnamon chai tea;

nearly Nirvana!

...

A half sentence in Dorthy Day's Journal,

"How to lift the heart to God,

our first beginning

and last end..."

...

Shortest book review ever, of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.

Not a bad summary of Christian witness either:

"The way to seek God is firsthand,

through religious experience.

So I have done.

Here is the story.

Now go, and do likewise."

...

At the end of Merton's autobiography a Latin motto;

SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QAERENDI -

Let this be the end of the book,

not the end of the search.

Good motto for theologians who read their way towards God, and who believe much of the finding is in the seeking.

...

At church this morning we exchanged the peace.

An elderly member couldn't remember if she and I had already done it.

We had, but I suggested we do it again.

So we did - our own wee peace dividend.

...

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one's knees?

          R S Thomas

...

The above miscellaneous thoughts come from the book I'm reading, the tea I'm drinking and odd moments of ordinary life. Spirituality is about all this kind of stuff - a good book, a favourite drink, the wish for peace, and for me as a reader and writer, those connections between thought written, read and lived in the flow of moments which accumulate into a life. Feeling wistful and uncertain today - and that's OK, I'm nervous about undisturbed certainty.

,

Thomas Merton on the humility of the theologian who dares to write about God

I wish I could write better out of respect for God, who gave me these small and very usual and familiar and unstartling and generous graces...

But if I am humble I will write better just by being humble. By being humble, I will write what is true, simply - and the simple truth is never rubbish and never scandalous - except to people in peculiar perplexities of pride themselves...

May I write simply and straight anything I ever have to write, that no dishonour come to God through my writing about Him.

Thomas Merton, quoted in Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon, 1986), 191

Holy, wondering delight in God

"Truth sees God;

wisdom gazes on God.

And these two produce a third,

a holy, wondering delight in God,

which is love."

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Penguin, 1976, 130.

Few writers manage to combine commonsense conclusion and speculative reflection as successfully as Julian. (A second thought: after writing that I realise it could easily be written, "commonsense reflection and speculative conclusion", which would be equally true.)

Some of her sentences, like the above, read like a theological prose-poem celebrating those experiences of God that sharpen, deepen and extend our grasp of the Love that grasps us - and my use of three different terms is deliberate.

Loving God can never be one dimensional - it is the response of our being to God. It begins with understanding truth, grows to contemplative wisdom, and flowers into worship - which in the end is that deep, transformative response of our being to the Being of God.

Conformitas Christi......

L Gregory Jones writes theological ethics. In his approach, the credibility of any theological assertion has to be established through the Christian practices such theologising engenders. Theology to be real has to be embodied, not only in the individual, but in the community that takes the name of Christ. What is believed is most authentically expressed not in words and articulation, but in practice and performance of a life shaped by Christ.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Transformed Judgment. Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008) that have had me thinking again about the how, and why and what of following after Christ. The painting by Caravaggio is a favourite - the young Jesus inviting middle aged Peter and Andrew to follow him.

What is needed is a way of speaking of the prior action of God, namely the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which also calls forth an account of the shape human activity is to take in response. Such an emphasis is found by recovering the relationship between being conformed to Christ and being called to imitate - or as I think is preferable language, to pattern one's life in - Christ. God befriends humanity in Jesus Christ, and in that gracious action, which originates in God alone, humanity is conformed to Christ independently of particular characters, virtues and actions. Grace is the fundamental orientation of Christian life. The context of this conformitas Christi is discovered in the salvation wrought by Christ; it is a salvation revealed throughout the context of his life, deathn and resurrection.

In the light of Jesus friendship, the Christian's vocation, in response to God's prior action in Christ conforming humanity to his righteousness, is to pattern her life in Jesus Christ through discipleship.A person is called and enabled to pattern her life in Jesus Christ because God in Christ has patterned human life into God's life in order to save humanity. Such practices as baptism, eucharist, forgiveness-reconciliation and "performing" the Scriptures are indispensable practices, whereby people learn to become disciples, whereby people learn to be frinds of God and to befriend and be befriended by others. Through such practices, people are aenabled to acquire the habits and skills reflective of the pattern discovered in Jesus Christ." (pages 110-11)

That's about as attractive and complete an account of following after Christ as I've read for a long while. Conformitas Christi. Wouldn't mind a T-shirt with that on it -

Conformitas Christi!

The Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality

If you are at all interested in Christian spirituality as both personal discipline and intellectual interest, then this is a book you might want to have on your desk, rather than the shelf - it's way too big for reading in bed. There are now several text books on Christian Spirituality, suitable for class use or personal study, offering breadth but not always depth. What makes this book worth buying and working through is the obvious virtue of its having grown in dialogue with students, being refined through collaboration with other scholars, and the alert attention the author has paid to his own spiritual development; and all this taking over thirty years of slow and healthy gestation towards publication.

At 500 pages, double columns and hardback, the book has every appearance of meaning business. Each chapter begins with a clear outline and aim, then ends with a section on Christian spiritual practice, a chapter summary, several focused questions and a section for further study with suggested resources. There are sidebars developing content, excerpts from classic texts and figures in Focus boxes and illustrations which aren't there simply to break up the text.

All in all I reckon this is the most user friendly substantial Introduction to Christian Spirituality now available, and one mercifully free from the desire to be comprehensive at the cost of depth. I've spent time on and off over the past few days reading, browsing, getting a feel for the overall schema and discourse level. My feeling is that the book still reads as a substantial handbook on Christian Spirituality which balances essential information and analysis of key theological concepts and disciplines, with practical focus on the personal and formative implications of spirituality. At around £15 Hardback and high quality production, the book is good value - and in more ways than the near giveaway price.

This isn't a review - just a mention of a book I bought on the recommendation of friend and colleague, Deans Buchanan - who knows a thing or two about Christian Spiritual development. Have a look for yourself at the Brazos Press website here. .

Kierkegaard as man of prayer

" To pray, to know how to pray, becomes more and more difficult the more one prays. The more one understands what he is trying to do - to have a relationship with God - the more presumptuous this appears to be...The more one comes to realise the difficulty of prayer, the more one relaises that in a sense the only real prayer is that one might be enabled to pray; then prayer becomes a silent surrendering of everything to God...

For one who truly struggles in prayer, there always seems to be something more upon his heart. One must become transparent before God in all one's weakness and hope, but this is difficult indeed. This resolution of faith is hard, and yet  when one has prayed to exhaustion as one can weep to exhaustion, then there is only one thing more: Amen."

This from Lefevre's chapter on Kierkegaard as man of prayer. He goes on to illustrate by citing Kierkegaard himself:

"I almost feel the urge to say no single word more except this: Amen: for my gratitude to Providence for what It has done for me, overwhelms me...but thus even, through the unspeakable grace and help of God have I become myself."

"It is wondeful how God's love overwhelms me - alas, ultimately I know of no truer prayer than what I pray over and over again, that God will allow me and not be angry with me because I continuously thank him for having done and for doing, yes, and for doing so indescribably much more for me than I ever expected."

The Prayers of Kierkegaard, Perry D LeFevre, (University of Chicago Press: 1956), pages 201-2.

Spirituality - conjugating the verb "to be".

Evelyn Underhill once observed, in her little book The Spiritual Life.

"Most people spend their lives trying to conjugate the verbs 'to want,' 'to have' and 'to keep'— craving, clutching, clinging—when all the Spirit wills us to do is to conjugate the verb 'to be.' "

This comfortably off, middle class, Anglican spiritual director, whose devotional writing is a mixture of shrewd psychology and pastoral compassion, rooted in contemplative prayer, lived those words well. I still treasure many of her books - some of them in places laughably dated, but time after time you recognise, with a perhaps questionable spiritual envy, this woman's been 'far ben' with God.

The phrase "far ben" is Scottish, used by Alexander Whyte (one of Scotland's finest preachers and most catholic spirits), to describe a shepherd he knew in his teens, who used the isolation of his days sheep herding in 1860's Glen Clova, to think and pray towards a closer walk with God.

Both Underhill and Whyte, who I'm not sure ever even knew of each other, were steeped in the literature of spirituality - and from their starting points of high traditional Anglicanism with open edges (Underhill), and Scottish militant Free Church Presybterianism in which Whyte pushed the edges outwards beyond confining narrowness, they couldn't be more different. But as one of the puritans remarked of those he admired for their piety, they both "carried the scent of the same distant country of the soul."

Reading some of their work again, along with other spiritual writers from the past century or so, I'm not persuaded, not even half convinced, that what is available in today's spiritual writing comes anywhere near the quality and spiritual perceptiveness of people like Whyte and Underhill. And without being overly judgemental, I wonder if that's because writing today is aimed at the niches of the market, rather than being an essential by-product of a heart and mind with much to say that grows with organic healthiness out of lives that are and have been "far ben" with God. 

Risk assessment and following faithfully after Christ

I said something recently in a discussion, and I didn't know I felt so strongly about it until I said it, thought more about it afterwards, and concluded that, for once, I strongly agreed with myself! Here's what I said:

"If we are committed to following faithfully after Christ, do we follow One who leads us to the place of safety, or to the place of risk? Are we called to save our lives or lose them?"

The thought didn't arise just because I'm familiar with Bonhoeffer and his call to sacrifice as the norm of Christ-like living. And I don't think it's just my age, and me pushing against the inevitable limitations looking for excitement. But recently I've begun to be impatient with attitudes and dispositions that make a virtue out of erring on the side of caution. I like the phrase - "erring on the side of caution" - it sounds so sensible, so prudent, so responsible, so safe - and not a bit like Jesus. I like the phrase, not because I agree with it, but because it tells the uncomfortable truth. We err when our anxieties and uncertainties, our self-concern and preferred comfort zones, shape the style and habits of our discipleship, and etch deep neurological paths that become the default settings of "responsible living".

Whatever else following Jesus means, it can't mean a safe, comfortable, defensive life of controlled consequences and negotiable demands. The seed must die. Take up the cross and follow. The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head. Greater love has no one than this... Whoever saves their life will lose it. These are some of the texts I offered in College prayers yesterday as I thought out loud about how far risk assessment is compatible with following faithfully after Christ. Going where He leads, living by His words, relying on His grace, believing that, no matter when or where or what, if He calls and we follow, He will always be there before us, ahead of us. But knowing too, that Jesus may take us where we don't want to go, which means faithful following may require us to go against all those well reasoned out inner defense mechanisms that make us want to stay put, or opt for the more prudent alternatives.  

Which makes me wonder. What's the relationship between trust and risk? Between faithful following and business as usual in this quite comfortable life? I read alongside such thoughts a poem of Mary Oliver. It says something of what I'm trying to think, say, and yes, find ways to live.

West Wind #2

 

You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap

into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me.

Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without

any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me.

Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and

your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to

me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent

penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a

dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile

away and still out of sight, the churn of the water

as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the

sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable

pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth

and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls

plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life

toward it.

 

I can hear Jesus say something similar - "row for your life - toward it". Life without risk is life without love, because love, for God and for others, requires openness, vulnerability, self-expenditure, a willingness for the unknown, a radical valuing of the other, for Jesus' sake.

The poem can be found in Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume 2, (Beacon Press, 2007) ISBN 978-0807068878

The Divine Comedy, Everyman's Library, and taking our lives seriously.

In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Jonathan Rose celebrates the magnificent achievement of J M Dent's Everyman's Library, 'the largest, most handsome, and most coherently edited series of cheap classics'.

Over the years I've read a number of literary classics in the Everyman's Library Editions, and now own a number of them in their contemporary dress. They're still remarkably cheap given the quality of the production. I don't collect them, but now and again when I want to appreciate the beauty of a book as well as the quality of its contents, I indulge. How is this for a publisher's description of their product:

Everyman's Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.

The original series reflected the choices and prejudices of its time - 1906 Edwardian England, in which Empire, Western Europe and maleness acted as cultural blinkers - though not as much as some have claimed. The new series begun in the mid 1990's is much more inclusive, and though it still gives prominence to items in "the Western Canon", there is now due recognition of other important voices. It's this modern Everyman's which I enjoy reading, holding, looking at. There are several key poets, several of the great novels, and an assortment of miscellaneous personal preferences I'd like to accommodate in the already tightly budgetted space on my bookshelves. (Now the Everyman's Pocket Poets - they are already claiming space on the narrow shelves and wee corners where others don't fit).

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever". More prosaically, a number of life coaches and social psychologists are suggesting one way to beat the credit crunch, defy  economic despair, dispel the can't-afford-it gloom, is to go on allowing ourselves the occasional luxury enjoyment, the regular encounter with beauty, a deliberate evasion of barcode valuation. For some it's chocolate, or concert tickets, flowers, colourful clothes - actually I like all these options as well - but a selection of them kinda books what are described above? Would that be credit crunch defiance - or denial? Well no - it would be commendable cultural responsibility, responsibly developed literary taste, judicious aesthetic choices made in a crass consumerist market - aye right.

Anyway, I've quietly been making my way through Dante's The Divine Comedy, which I've never read all the way through. The photo (a reminder of sunshine on a dreich Scottish January weekend) is of Dante's statue which we visited a couple of years ago when in Verona - and I remember wondering why I'd never tackled a full reading of one of Europe's literary masterpieces. So I've started. 100 Cantos - finished by Easter? There are now several industries devoted to things to do before you die - places to visit, foods to eat, people to meet, ambitions for which to reach - haven't come across one yet about books to read before you die. Nevertheless.

Hazlitt's comment on Dante's achievement explains why Dante's is a voice to be attended to at some time in life:

" He stood bewildered, not appalled, on that dark shore which separates the ancient and the modern world...He is power, passion and self-will personified".

Each day for around twenty minutes I'm attending to a voice which to me is strange, often compelling, at times perplexing, but which requires sufficient honesty and courage to have mind and heart, motive and desire, act and being, sifted by verse which is surgical in psychological exposure, but ultimately therapeutic in spiritual vision and intent. At times I've suspected Dante has been reading that diary of our inner life we all keep, which records in encrypted code those truths about us that no one else is allowed to know - but God knows, and in a moral universe, eternal consequence follows.

Robert Browning once described Dante in two lines:

Dante, who loved well because he hated,

Hated wickedness that hinders loving.

The paradox of that line, hating "wickedness that hinders loving", at least recognises the ambiguity of shame and dignity, of guilt and glory that comprises, and compromises, human existence at its worst and best.