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.

The central mystery of Christmas and the human predicament

This blog began as a way of sharing much of what I think, feel and believe about many things.

I've kept it going because it combines the discipline of writing with the fun of sharing.

It's a forum for theological reflection on the stuff that happens, and also a place for exploring with others the fruit of reading and thinking. 

Now and again, a blog allows not only wider conversations, but deeper ones - the old fashioned phrase "the human predicament" is only old fashioned in terminology, not in reality. As human beings we are indeed in a bit of a predicament - God help us!

And in addition to all that, this blog is for me some substitute for that part of me that always leans towards opening conversations with others around what it means in practice to follow faithfully after Jesus today.

That's all asking a lot, but there it is.

Sometime on Christmas Day the electronic counter will indicate that the 100,000th visitor clicked in. I hope the importance of that isn't only an ego thing - but an indicator that people find stuff here that is worth the bother of looking in the first place.

Anyway.

In a world where even peace prizes no longer seem to make a lot of sense

where post Copenhagen climate change raises major issues of justice to future generations

where religious ideological conflict is replacing the old cold war dichotomy

and where the economic and political self-interest of the rich create dangerous pressures against the poorer half of the world;

in a world like that, our world,

may we know the dawning reality of the Love that moves the earth and the stars,

may we gaze again on the central mystery of the Word become flesh whose glory we behold,

and may we live in obedience to Jesus Christ,

the One whose mission of peacemaking and reconciling love

defines the Christian God,

and sets the trajectories for our own life mission within and beyond the Church.

And in the light of that - a joyous Christmas to you all.

Dorothy Day - the troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble

Paul Elie's book on 20th Century American Catholic writers weaves four lives together. One of them is Dorothy Day. One of the more sympathetic and thoughtful interpretations of what Day was about can be found in Volume 1 of James McClendon's Systematic Theology, subtitled Ethics.

Dorothy Day was about peacefully making trouble; and she was about guarding and protecting the vulnerable; and she was about building community using the flawed material of human lives often enough distorted through sin and suffering; and she was about hospitality as a habit of radical welcome in which each stranger is greeted as Christ.

Like many odd and hard to accommodate people, she was a Christian who inconveniently took Jesus seriously, and interpreted the Sermon on the Mount literally. As if Jesus could have actually meant, seriously intended, that his followers should love their enemies. As if turning the other cheek was any strategy for changing the world. As if forgiveness and peacemaking could be practiced with any hope of curbing brutality, converting hatred to love - as well expect people to beat their swords into ploughshares and so cultivate food instead of killing the enemy.

When Dorothy Day boarded the Greyhound bus to travel to Koinonia Farm run by Clarence Jordan, she did so for reasons of peacefully making trouble, and in doing so trying to convert trouble to peaceableness. The farm had been attacked by white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members offended by the racial integration practiced on the farm - drive by shooting, arson, assault, vandalism, were commonplace. Dorothy Day took her place in the rota of those who stood guard overnight, in a truck parked under a light, and the truck was shot up by automatic weapon fire. She was unhurt. It seems a futile, reckless and provocative course of action, to put yourself in the line of fire. Flannery O'Connor made the astonishingly dismissive comment, "that's a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc". There are those who would say that of Someone else - "that's a mighty long way to come to be crucified etc".

The picture of Dorothy Day shows the face of a troublesome peacemaker peacefully making trouble for the power holders, disturbing the peace of the status quo, a sharp fragment of gravel inside the boots of the troopers. The photo is a powerful Advent image. A poster sized copy is up on Stuart's study wall at the College - it is reproduced in Elie's book, and I think it is a stunning image of Christian resistance. Mess with the rest but don't mess with the best, huh?

Oak trees, Suffragettes, and not taking political equality for granted.

At University of Glasgow Library and parked my car near Kelvingrove Park.

Frustrated and couldn't find what I wanted.

Sauntered back to the car which had collected some large fading oak leaves from the big tree under which I'd parked it.

Noticed a wee plaque at the base of the tree and went over to read it.

Planted on 20 April 1918 by the Women Suffragette Movements in honour of their being granted the vote.

Not sure why but I decided one of those oak leaves, from this 100 year old oak tree, should find its way into one of my books for a while.

100 years is a long time, even for a tree. It is though, a magnificent tree.

But it's astonishingly recent in the history of discrimination - just 100 years ago women were largely excluded from political decision-making. 

The photo below is of women protesting outside Duke Street prison in Glasgow. The City had a Women's Socialist and Political Union (WSPU), just one of the organisations far too easily forgotten, but made up of women of courage, conviction and passionate commitment to social justice and political equality. My oak leaf honours them!

Frederick Buechner - telling the truth in parables

"When Jesus said love your neighbour, a lawyer who was present asked him to clarify what he meant by neighbour. He wanted a legal definition he could refer to in case the question of loving one ever happened to come up. He presumably wanted something of the order of "A neighbour (hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part) is to be construed as meaning a person of Jewish descent whose legal residence is within a radius of no more than three statute miles from one's  own legal residence unless there is another person of Jewish descent (hereinafter referred to as the party of the second part) living closer to the party of the first part than one is oneself, in which case the party of the second part is to be construed as the neighbour to the party of the first part and one is oneself relieved of all responsibility of any sort of kind whatsoever.

Instead Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, the point of which seems to be that your neighbour is to be construed as meaning anybody who needs you."

(Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking. A Theological ABC (San Francisco: Harper, 1973), pp. 65-66.

Two pictures face my desk in my study at College. One is the Rublev icon of the Trinity. The other is the above exegesis of the Good Samaritan by Van Gogh. Both were gifts from good friends - and both have nourished my mind, my heart and my imagination for years. And I think Buechner's fun-poking at the reluctant dutifulness or trip-up intentions implied in the lawyer's question capture exactly the subversive and transformative nature of parable - the lawyer who lived by definitions, legal terminology, words of entrapment finely balancing precision and ambiguity, professionally trained in loaded questions, wants his answer. Instead, Jesus told a story, in which, if the lawyer looked closely, he would see himself, and discover not an answer but a judgement, a calling, and a way into the Kingdom.

Nationalistic, military power is not the power of the cross....

The kenotic cruciform God is the substance of divine holiness. The embedded theology of most Christians still revolves around a non-cruciform model of God's holiness, character and power, and a crucial corrective is needed.

This brings us inevitably back to politics, to the "normal" god of civil religion that combines patritoism and power. Nationalistic, military power is not the power of the cross, and such misconstrued notions of divine power have nothing to do with the majesty or holiness of the triune God known in the weakness of the cross. In our time any "holiness" that fails to see the radical, counter imperial claims of the gospel is inadequate at best. Adherence to a God of holiness certainly requires the kind of personal holiness that many associate with sexual purity. That is one dimension of theosis. But particpiation in a cruciform God of holiness also requires a corollary vision of life in the world that rejects domination in personal, public or political life - a mode of being that is often considered realistic or "normal". Kenotic divinity and a corollary kenotic community constitute "both the best possible commentary" on Paul and a "frontal assault" on "normalcy".

Michael J Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God. Kenosis, Justification and Theosis in Paul's Narrative Soteriology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), Page 128.
Picture "The Face of the Saviour of the World", Noehani Harsono, Indonesia)

As one who stands in a radical spiritual tradition, when it comes to theology and its impact on our civil and political life, I'm all for asking serious questions about normalcy, status quo, use and abuse of power, patriotism, and the religious validation of national and international exercises of political and military power. Time we started more faithfully attending to "the counter imperial claims of the gospel". Hm?

(Wish Michael Gorman had chosen a better sub-title for his book- good fun memorising the sub-title and going into Wesley Owen to ask if it's in stock though.....  :))

Moral imagination and the body politic.

I think it was Edmund Burke who said the body politic should be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination. At a time when a whole world faces some of the biggest moral, political and economic challenges for decades, it does look as if we need enhanced ethical imagination and revitalised imaginative morals. Problem is morality is boring. Morality limits our options, constrains our freedoms, disqualifies our preferred choices. And imagination is too busy creating unsustainable fantasies, celebrating the ephemeral, serving up stories, ideas and images relevant to the desires of a culture. Relevance to the culture is the prime directive where the culture in question, and its desires, happen to be consumer fuelled and credit driven.

"Clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination" - is that how to describe Wednesday's budget? Moral imagination, is that a phrase that is any help to a world economy imploding because there wasn't enough imagination to envisage the consequences of economic fantasy? And not enough morality to see that the prime directive reduces human beings and our projects to instituionalised but uncontrolled appetite?

As a reminder of an alternative worldview, where moral imagination critiques the body politic, and where the desires of the culture were so dominant they crushed the poorest, I've been listening to the prophet Amos, (reading his words out loud):

they sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust....
Seek good and not evil, that you may live...
establish justice in the gate...
Let justice roll down like waters
and righteousness like an everflowing stream...

That's the moral bit.

Alas for those who feel at ease in Zion....
for those who feel secure....
the notables of the first of the nations...
This is what the Lord God showed me: he was forming locusts at the time the latter growth began to sprout...This is what he showed me: The lord was standing beside a wall with a plumb-line in his hand...See I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people...

That, and much else, is the imagination bit.

Moral imagination, the capacity to see wrong and name it, and to see it against the history of a world where the rich waste and spoil by their greed, where the poor are cheated and the body politic have lived as if fantasies are made real by systemic denial of reality. The credit crunch has been described as a problem of biblical proportions. The right diagnosis is certainly of biblical proportions - a lack of moral imagination, economics without enough ethics to control greed, and selfishness devoid of imagination enough to measure consequences. No "wardrobe of the moral imagination". 

I'll continue to read Amos.....and Micah.....and Isaiah. Because moral imagination, like chronic credit, doesn't grow on trees. It is the fruit of a theology that ascribes justice, mercy, compassion and wisdom to the creator God whom we marginalise at our cost. Maybe the failure of banks once imagined globally secure, was due to the creation of banks no longer ethically sound. The spinners of economic fantasies from financial imagination, are now naked of the virtues that both make money and make making money more just. Or to go back to Burke's image, the body politic and the body economic should once again be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, in garments that should never have gone out of fashion - compassion mercy, justice, wisdom. Attributes of God, each of them, and thus theological concepts which are needed to inform, then form, then transform the moral imagination of our culture.

And I'm left with the disquieting question of where, and when, and how the communities of Jesus Christ we call the Church, bear witness, by the kinds of communities we are, to a different economics, a richer more humane understanding of the body politic, a different dress sense when it comes to the moral values with which, as followers of Jesus, we clothe ourselves. The credit crunch and its consequences for the poor, vulnerable and marginalised people and peoples of the world, isn't just the fault of the bankers and the governments. The Church is at its least attractive, and least "missionally incarnational" (sometimes I like using words I dislike!), when the Church scolds 'them' and we fail to show by our own repentance, that we too took our eye off God. You cannot serve God and money - so either you serve God,  - or you make money God and solve the dilemma.

The Lord's Prayer...."Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven".

What would that look like in economic, political and moral terms?

Use your moral imagination!

Palm Sunday: Peace as the hoped for negation of violence

Palm Sunday is about power, and about surrender. The crowd acclaim a king, but what a king. Jesus rode into a city boiling with violence and gave himself up. No one takes his life from him. He surrenders to judicial, political and religious processes of power. Within and beyond the Passion of Jesus, power is subverted because beyond his suffering and death there is hope, beyond the violence the reaching out of reconciliation, beyond the angry fears and arrogant unilateralism of the powerful, is this one man who comes as king and peacemaker.

What W H Vanstone called, "the stature of waiting", the patient handing over of self that renders force futile, the refusal to retaliate whether by the cutting off of an ear, or as the Evangelist observes, Jesus could call on legions of angels - but declines. In a world of hard moral choices, when we are confused by suffering and our own weaknesses, Palm Sunday is a call to trust the Lord of creation, believing that ultimately, finally, in God's good time, there will be peace, justice and the fulfilment of our farthest reaching hopes. And not through our fighting, but through God's victory in Christ crucified and risen. Palm Sunday reminds the church that Hosanna is not a war cry, but a peace cry, arising from the heart of the Church and giving voice to hope, and hope to those voices that sing the song of a creation that awaits its redemption.

The suffering of our world's conflict spots, the toxic rivers of hate that flow between religious and cultural enemies, are grim reminders that the stakes God was playing for on Calvary were high, nothing less than the healing of that incurable violence that tears creation in pieces. The creation itself groans, awaiting its redemption - and that Sunday, which we now celebrate as Palm Sunday, was the beginning of the end for the life of Jesus, and the beginning of the end for all those powers of destruction so hell bent on human ruin and Jesus' death.

So on Palm Sunday I always make time to pray for peace. The latent but lethal violence of that disillusioned mob who had just seen their Messiah make a fool of their expectations by arriving on a donkey and refusing to fight, hints at that more profoundly disturbing bias of human hearts, turning too easily to conflict. And when hate locks on to its target, crucifixion becomes thinkable, then probable, then justifiable. Strange how God turns occasion of original sin into occasion of final redemption, and converts violence to reconciliation. The God of peace, indeed.

But just so this isn't all taken so seriously we lose our perspective, the underlying purposes of God are allowed to inform the best Palm Sunday poem I know:

The Donkey. G.K.Chesterton

When fishes flew and forests walked

    And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

    Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

    And ears like errant wings,

The devil's walking parody

    On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

    Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

    I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

    One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

    And palms before my feet.

  

William Stringfellow and "What befits Christian witness?"

William Stringfellow asks at the end of his essay on 'Discernment', "What befits Christian witness?" In a world as dangerously broken as the one we now inhabit, sense-surrounded by the life denying noise of Babel, how is Christian witness to be evidenced? Here's his answer:

" In the face of death, live humanly. In the middle of chaos, celebrate the Word. Amidst babel, speak the truth. Confront the noise and verbiage and falsehood of death with truth and potency and the efficacy of the Word of God. Know the Word, teach the Word, nurture the Word, preach the Word, define the Word, incarnate the Word, do the Word, live the Word. And more than that, in the Word of God, expose death and all death's works and wiles, rebuke lies, cast out demons, exorcise, cleanse the possessed, raise those who are dead in mind and conscience."  (A Keeper of the Word, page 305)

Stony the road we trod....remembering James Weldon Johnson

The portrait is of the black activist, poet, diplomat, educator and musician, James Weldon Johnson. (d. 1938). Not so well known as MLK and other civil rights campaigners but I came across references to him recently and went chasing. In all the euphoria surrounding Obama, such great men as Johnson are too easily and conveniently forgotten.

Amongst the most interesting things I found out:

Johnson qualified for the bar but found the law boring, not least because it functioned within the way things are...and he wanted to be a catalyst for change.

He composed 'Lift Every Voice and Sing' a song that eventually became a national anthem for American Blacks, and with his brother composed music and lyrics for many Broadway shows.

He was a leading influence in the Harlem Renaissance, a resurgence of black cultural and artistic activity in the 1920's, and a vocal supporter of black artists struggling against white prejudice in the publishing houses.

He lived to see the first all African American orchestra formed, a symbol of collective creative energy, disciplined harmony and human co-operation that transcended socially contrived discrimination.

And not least, Johnson was a poet, whose poetry was unashamedly political because he knew the power of words to frame a different reality, and shape political vision. MLK used one of his poems in the great landmark speech 'Where do we go from here?' in 1968, 30 years after Johnson's death in a rail accident.

Men like Johnson created the context, set out the paramenters, exposed the issues, modelled the tactics, that would later coalesce and radicalise into a full civil rights movement.

The words MLK quoted are from "Lift Every Voice and Sing"

         

    Stony the road we trod,

Bitter the chastening rod

Felt in the days

When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,

Have not our weary feet

Come to the place

For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way

That with tears hath been watered.

We have come treading our paths

Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,

Till now we stand at last

Where the bright gleam

Of our bright star is cast.