Living Wittily

Edith Stein, Abraham Heschel, Philosophy, and God.

While reading Abraham Heschel and doing some research on the reception of his thought today I came across a forthcoming book that compares Heschel's doctrine of divine pathos with Edith Stein's philosophy of empathy. Edith Stein was brought up in a Jewish family and converted to Catholicism after a period of overt intellectual atheism. One of her theological and philosophical gifts was a capacity to refuse the temptation of intellectual polarity. The important truths of existence are seldom either or, but more often both and. She was a spiritual ecumenist, and never lost her gratitude for, her respect for, or her supportive interest in, the Jewish people and the Faith out of which Christianity was born. She was a student of Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and so gifted as a philosopher she was Husserl's assistant for a couple of years. The relationship between philosophy and theology was one where she was called to be a bridge between two intellectual continents, a conduit through whom philosophical theology and theological metaphysics passed creating in her a spirituality and devotional depth that remains a rich reservoir of faith.

Following her conversion she taught for a while, before becoming a Carmelite nun in 1932, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She died in Auschwitz in 1942, ironically as a Catholic nun comforting distressed Jewish children. In 1998 she was canonised by her Church.

I'm currently reading a selection of her writings, and am left wondering why it has taken so long to get to someone whose grasp of the eternally significant, and of the connection between contemplatiuve prayer and redemptive activity in the world was well ahead of its time. At the time of her canonisation Pope John Paul II described her:

"Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross says to us all: Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love that lacks truth. One without the other becomes a destructive lie....May her witness constantly strengthen  the bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians."

 Part of the excitement of the rich and varied Christian tradition, is that it is really a river system of tributaries flowing together into the mighty river which reaches the ocean in a rich confluence from diverse sources, which sprung in hills and mountains, merging and separating then coming together in a flowing triumph of life-giving water. That's why to discover new thinkers and new thought, is no threat to the integrity of my tributary, but is a contribution to the onward flow of wisdom, understanding, prayer and worship of the God who is beyond our circumscribing habits of thought, and whose wine of glory and gladness can't be contained in the old wineskins of our intellectual and spiritual comfort zones.

The Prayer of Grateful Longing

Sometimes it just works.

I took this photo in Amsterdam, the same day I saw Van Gogh's Butterflies and Poppies.

Both capture the fragility and complexity of beauty, and life.

Theological reflection seems called for but perhaps contemplation, enjoyment and wonder are themselves forms of theologically productive attention, inviting thought to become prayer of grateful longing.

 

Christian Sacrifice and Limited Liability.

The things we talk about at the breakfast table. Had breakfast with some colleagues yesterday and the conversation moved to what it means to make sacrifices for the things we think are important. Eventually we came up against one of the harder to resolve questions about Christian devotion. When  we offer ourselves to God in service, or when we serve others in the name of God and as servants of Christ in the power of the Spirit, what do we actually, and really mean, when we use the word "all"? I've thought about that off and on since yesterday.

"All to Jesus, I surrender, All to Him I freely give...." Really? Truly? Or is the word "all" a rhetorical device to express intention, but knowing that what we offer is an unattainable ideal, an exaggerated sense of our capacity to love without reserve and give without holding back?

When Havergal wrote her hymn "Take my life and let it be, consecrated Lord to thee", she of course included the couplet "Take my silver and my gold, not a mite would I withold". Are we sure we mean that when we sing it? Or are we assuming a limited liability, or at least a limited generosity, because to give it all would be impossibly self denying and careless of personal possession? One of the first critics of that hymn asked the question, "But what if there are children to feed and clothe?"

"It's all about you Jesus, it's not about me". No, not much! Isn't it nearer the truth that every step off the path of faithful following after Christ, is not about you Jesus, but all about me? And if we really were more self-aware of what we pray for, long for, work our hardest for, what is that all about, and who is it all about?

OK. Enough subversion for now. When Paul urges his readers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice as reasonable worship, it was always ever only going to be possible "by the mercies of God". The paradox is that I can only take up the cross and follow Christ, in and by the strength of Christ. Self giving love is only reasonable if the love of God is poured into my heart by the Holy Spirit.

Only if I am a new creation can I become a minister of reconciliation rather than a servant of self interest and prolonged, pervasive selfishness.

Only if I recognise that I need to learn stuff, will I acknowledge my burdens and wearinness and come unto Him, take on His yoke, and learn of Him.

Then, and only then will I know what I mean and intend by that word "all", when I learn of the One who "reconciles all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross", and so am given permission to blurt out that word "all", in the exaggerated devotion of the consciously forgiven, unconditionally loved and joyfully liberated. And yes I'll struggle and fail repeatedly, in delivering the full content of that word "all".  But the generous, outrageous, unreasonable love of God will go on working and enabling that continuous presenting of my whole self as a living sacrifice, which is my reasonable worship - and all because of the mercies of God. For which, thank God.

The photo was taken in Glen Dye. The image of the lamb lies at the centre of Christian theological reflection on sacrifice, Agnus Dei - Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world....worthy is the Lamb....

When prayer feels like being in a half nelson!

This Sunday coming I have the opportunity to preach in our church on that mysterious and scary encounter in Genesis between Jacob and the angel of the Lord, or was it God? It's one of those incidents that makes no sense by itself. It has to be fitted into the story of a dysfunctional family where jealousy, cheating, deceit, possessive love, emotional manipulation, violence and just about every other act and attitude corrosive of good relationships between relations, has wrecked any basis for trust.

The sermon will be part of a series about struggles, one of those inoccuous words that hides a multitude of uncertainties and unpredictable tight corners on the journey we make towards God. Whatever this story means, it isn't a story of bland reassurance or blind faith. God is moved by neither.

So. We'll see! My mother used to say that as a way of not disappointing us with a straight 'No!' I have a feeling this story isn't about how to live the voctorious life, but, we'll see!

The painting by Gaugin, "Vision of the Sermon" is one of my favourite expressions of biblical art. A large print hangs above my desk, a daily reminder of the struggle and cost of living faithfully, and of the God who engages with our humanity with stern demanding compassion, severe gentle mercy and fierce creative love, bearing with our contradictions and urging us towards every new day.

 

How to Pray the Cursing Psalms during Holy Week

Dame Maria Boulding OSB wrote out of deep scholarship, alert self-awareness, and perceptive compassion about human hopes and failings, and all this informed by a lifetime of obedience within a Benedictine community. I treasure her books. During Lent I've made my way slowly through her last book, written as she endured painful terminal illness, within the loving support of her community.

Gateway to Resurrection is a gentle reaffirmation of fundamental Christian beliefs centred on God's coming in Jesus, and the ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a world class scholar and translator of Augustine, and as one who has reflected and practised the Rule of Benedict for a lifetime, she offers us a rich weaving together of her own experience, Benedictine spirituality, the biblical riches of Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms and the psychological narrative of his Confessions. But this is spiritual writing that is humble yet assured, accessible but utterly unpatronising, full of faith without for a moment encouraging uncritical piety or unthinking assertion in the face of disturbing questions - doubt too, has its place in our journey to God.

She is spiritually shrewd on the vexed question of what we do with some of the cursing Psalms - for example, how does a Christian pray, 'O God break the teeth in their mouths'. (Mind you I guess some of us, some of the time, know perfectly well how to pray a line like that!).  But to pray for the extermination of our enemies children, and to wish those we hate dead and their children orphans - hard to reconcile prayers like that with the Sermon on the Mount. Her answer is profoundly theological, based on taking the humanity and divinity of Jesus with equal and utmost seriousness:

When the Word of God, the Son of God, became man, he was not man in some abstract sense, but a man of a particular race, culture and time. What the instinctive Jewish response to injustice, cruelty or hatred were like, we hear in many of the cursing Psalms. Jesus was personally sinless, and his response sprang from love, but because he came in the loikeness of sinful flesh and to deal with sin (Rom 8.3), he took up all our passionate responses into the raw material of his prayer, as he also took the flesh of Israel as the raw material of his sacrifice. We may find it possible as we pray these psalms simply to be with Christ in his Passion, as he assumes all these shouts of rage and despair, all these raw demands for vengeance, and transforms them: 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do'.

At least we can be sure of two things about these psalms: first, that the sweet singers of Israel were rithlessly honest before God, and never thought that anything that was important to them was unsuitable to mention in his presence; second, that there are pre-Christian and non-Christian elements in ourselves that may benefot from exposure to God in prayer.

Over the years I've read so many commentaries and theologies that wrestle with the imprecatory psalms. Here at last is a suggestion that is profoundly Christian because deeply rooted in a full and practised Christology. That our worst thoughts can become our most honest prayers, and be redeemed by being caught up into the Passion of God in Christ, and our darkest places flooded with resurrection light, and that these our most destructive responses are drawn into the eternal life-giving love of the Triune God - that's a thought worth pondering, and a way worth trying to walk, starting this Holy Week.

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.

 

The Cloud of Unknowing and the Clouds We See Every Day.

"I've never seen an ugly cloud."

Driving home last night with a friend I haven't seen for 15 years, we were admiring the evening sky and sunset over Aberdeenshire. Blue pink occasionally smudged by dark gray as if a Chinese brush artist had randomly played with tinted paper to include a few contrasting shadows, long, thin one-stroke lines - not too dark, but warm gray and feathered at both ends as the brush was flicked up. The finished sky looked like a delicate watercolour, which would have been spoilt if it had been framed.

At which point he said, "I've never seen an ugly cloud." What strikes me about that quite spontaneous observation was the affirmative worldview it revealed. That my friend is travelling a hard road just now made the words even more poignantly positive. There are moments of meaning when a chance remark gathers to itself a significance made up of coincidence of circumstances, emotional preparedness, shared memories and that profound mystery of heart reaching out to heart in agreement and thankfulness. That was such a moment.

Since last night I've let those words dwell in those deep places where meaning slowly forms and understanding is never more than humble recognition that somehow love and life and laughter are definitive of human fellowship. I've thought often and sometimes thought long, about clouds. And I don't mean in the sentimental and fluffy sense of silver linings, and naive denials that clouds are somtimes harbingers of storm and can be ominous and well as beneficent. Yet William Cowper, that gentle 18th Century rural poet, whose courageous battle with depression and an oppressive predestinarian theology brought him often to breakdown, could still write words that were first penned for his own encouragement:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take,

The clouds ye so much dread,

Are big with mercy and will break

with blessings on thy head.

At the other end of the spectrum of Christian spirituality the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, urged the Christian that you can apprehend God through the cloud of unknowing by love, but by thought, never. That cloud of unknowing represents the mystery and beauty of God, like Moses in Exodus, who drew near to the cloud of darkness, where God dwells. So much in our self-explanatory, information sated, google shaped omniscient culture makes it hard to appreciate, long for, be content with, contemplate with a proper sense of our own smallness, the mystery that lies at the heart of all existence.

Perhaps the clouds are there to help us recognise the obscurity that limits our knowing, and to make us respectful of those opaque experiences and thoughts that tease and trouble, lure and disturb, attract and pull our minds and hearts towards that which is infinitely greater than even our most inspired imaginings. Out of such attentiveness and receptiveness, perhaps we will discover also, there are no ugly clouds.

Or as another wise man wrote, "May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.  May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.  ~Edward Abbey

 

 

Why the word mystical shouldn't be used as a synonym for woolly thinking.

Now here's an interesting way of thinking, of looking at the world, at the self, and at others.

"I can survive only by trying to build bridges, both affirming and also denying most of my own ideas and those of others. Most people tend to see me as highly progressive, yet I would say I am, in fact, a values conservative and a process liberal.

I believe in justice, truth, follow-through, honesty, personal and financial responsibility, faithful love, and humility - all deeply traditional values.

Yet in my view, you need to be imaginative, radical, dialogical, and even countercultural to live these values at any depth.

Whether in church life or politics, neither conservatives nor liberals are doing this very well. Both are too dualistic...they do not think or see like the mystics"

Richard Rohr, The Naked Now (New York: Crossroad), page 10

The Unwise Impatience with the Contemplative Mission of the Church,

When E M Forster in A Passage to India sniffed with the disdain of the omniscient narrator at 'poor little talkative Christianity' he was doing what the best novelists do so well, exposing pretension and presumption and daring to name what is ridiculous. Of course not all Christianity is talkative in that embarrassing way when much speaking disguises insecurity, or pretends maturity, or silences other viewpoints by not shutting up about itself.

But there's still a sharp enough barb in Forster's words to make me uneasy about the contemporary expressions of evangelical spirituality and worship. The urge to talk to the point of overtalking, the impatience with silence as if silence were wasted time, the compulsion to fill every unforgiving minute with maximum information, our praise song factories churning out new stuff at increasing rates of quantity, our uncritical acceptance of prayers that seldom reach the depths of our love or the heights of our aspirations and are often the mere immediate chatter of Facebook exchanges with God.

Add to that our programmatic approaches to mission, activism as the index of discipleship, the concessions made in Christian practices and social attitudes to consumer culture and the radical individualism of personal choice and privatised lifestyles, and there is little time, energy or inclination to stop, shut up, listen, pay attention and let the engines that drive us slow down, quieten down and cool down.

Now all that is overstated, and mostly unfair, and anyway I can much-speak and fast-talk and non-stop with the best of them. But perhaps that enables me to say all this less self-righteously than it might sound. T S Eliot's question (was it wistful, angry or resigned) 'where is the life we have lost in living...' remains one of the most important questions the contemporary church has to ask, and with which the contemporary disciple of Jesus has to grapple.

I know that discipleship is at the centre of current thinking on the nature of the Church's mission, but I'm not persuaded that the way the idea is used to shape and fashion people towards a particular view of mission does justice to the New Testament vision of what it means for each person to follow Jesus. There are other calls of Christ, other ways of being, other paths of following that are equally important to the Kingdom of God, if we take the time to consider and ponder the richness of the people of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. But the irony is that the more we talk and the faster we live, the harder it is to even see what the important questions are, let alone what kinds of answers there might be.

Which brings me to a question I am considering and pondering myself. What would be the impact on our ways of being the church if we recovered,, in our midst, the contemplative tradition of Christian discipleship? I have in mind certain words that seem to me to offer important theological and spiritual correctives to a church perhaps too fond of unexamined assumptions.

Attentiveness to the way the world is without assuming our quick diagnoses are always accurate. Amos didn't come to the conclusion overnight that worship is a waste of time for those who grind down the poor. His entire collection of prophecies detonates beneath unexamined assumptions.

Attendance - in the sense of waiting before God, just waiting. If we are attending before God our minds can't be in two places at once. Prayer isn't multi-tasking, it is letting God be God, instead of telling God who to be.  

Pondering - rumination and turning things over in our minds, may not be the preferred approach to problem solving in our quick as you can solutions culture. Somewhere in Christian spirituality there is a necessity for the long view, the slow maturation of thought, the virtue of patience which is in fact waiting trustfully. Isaiah looked down the long winding road of exile and realised it would eventually be the road that led back to God.

Recollecting - so many fugitive thoughts, fleeting experiences, volume of emotional and mental traffic passing through our inner processors. Time to assimilate, to collect together what is important and taken in, to absorb the significance of things. Where in our life together in Christian community is there the same urgency towards non-urgency, the same valuing of that discernment and sifting that turns experience into wisdom?

Remembering - in the sense of recalling our calling; meaning time to reorient our hearts towards the Love that not only moves the sun and other stars, but moves our hearts; and with a view to being re-membered, joined together, co-ordinated, so that over time our disjointed living recovers co-ordination, and our strained activism gradually gives way to living that is purposeful, creative and balanced in its intake and outflow of energy.

No this is not all a rant. It's a plea for a recovered humanism towards ourselves, a cherishing of our humanity in a way that takes our deepest selves seriously as ones loved by God. It is a recognition that Christians are called not only to do, but to be, and to give time of day to that genuine instinct for stillness and slowness, two dispositions I for one find unfamiliar, but out of which may come the finding of our life's hopes. It is an acknowledgement that the trivialisation of God is an inevitable process of trivialising our own lives. And it is a growing conviction that Isaiah was right to say to a people who had exhausted their capacity to hope, "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew theyr strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run  and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint..." Waiting - yet another word with which our culture, and the church, and our own hearts, are impatient.

Summoned by the Bell, Reverberating from the Touch of God

"Faith is not the clinging to a shrine,

but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.

Audacious longing,

burning songs,

daring thoughts,

an impulse overwhelming the heart,

usurping the mind --

these are all a drive towards serving Him

who rings our hearts like a bell."

 

Abraham Joshua Heschel is in the prophetic line of Jewish poets.

He chooses metaphors for God with the instinct of Isaiah, an inner sensitivity to the power of an image created by association.

"Him who rings the heart like a bell" is a quite extraordinary way of referring to God, until you begin to think of the rich resonances struck by the image of the bell.

The alarm bell warning of danger, the bell inviting to dinner, the chimes of the bell on a clock reminding of time's transience, the musical notes that ring true from the integrity of the bell and clapper, the ringing of celebration and the ringing of summons to worship; God is each, all and more than these.

And Heschel places that subversive metaphor after listing some of those inner moments of urgency, whether fear or surprise, that sometimes overtake or overwhelm us. And when they do, they strike the heart, and the purity of the note and clarity of the sound are evidence of that integrity by which our whole being resonates in sympathy with the touch of God.