Living Wittily

The abyss of loss - and the promise of recovery

Blessed are those who mourn,

for they shall be comforted.

Mourning is a process of diminishment, a weakening of purpose, the reflexive ache of the human heart traumatised by loss. The death of someone whose life is entwined with ours in friendship, loving commitment or long years of shared experience creates an abyss of loss at the edge of which we tremble. 

But there are other deaths - the dying of a loving relationship that is now suffering from a sclerosis of those channels of trust and communication that are the oxygen of of love. The loss of work, when a hoped for career doesn't work out, when redundancy means more than the technical word for being paid off, but takes on a note of fixedness that defines a human being as being superfluous to economic requirements. Illness and the loss of health, the recognition that the human body is so made that it naturally slows down, grows old and gradually loses its powers. The loss of place, when home no longer feels that secure, familiar retreat where welcome, renewal and belonging simply happen because that's what home is.

Comfort is more than the emotional security invested in a 'comfort' blanket. The word is about strength, fortification, en-couragement. But what strengthens and fortifies is the presence of the one who stands alongside, the one who is there for us. There is something to be said for holding on to the now obsolete name of the Paraclete. And even if it needs recovered significance, refreshed meaning, semantic repristination, there are few words that say better what it is that the mourner needs. A Paraclete, someone who is there for us.

The Matthean text uses the divine passive - comofort isn't available on demand from our own resources. It is that which is given, the gift of presence, the accompaniment of one who understands us, and stands under us, upholding with a strength that supplements our own weakness, and with a persitence and constancy that remains despite the changes that loss has made inevitable.

Mourning is the slow process of sorrow adjusting to loss, of reduced vitality and struggling hopes; comfort is the presence of one who is there for us, looks out for us, who enourages us towards a future still possible.The marble relief below is a moving image of the two poles of this beatitude - mourning and comfort, loss and presence, the reality of sorrow and the alternatiuve reality of hope.

 

Mozart, Christology, Ministry and the Truth of Impossible Realities

 On the trip to Vienna I went walkabout with one of the friends we were visiting. Came across the statue of Mozart and this arrangement of flowers. There aren't many comparisons I would dare make between myself and Karl Barth and Hans Kung - but a love for the music of Mozart, and a sense of the theological inspiration it provides is one that seems safely modest.

While posting this I'm listening to the Ave Verum Corpus which is one of the most beautiful and spiritually consoling pieces of music I know. The incarnation, the atonement and the humility of God are deeply embedded in this serene, composed and gentle hymn of divine self relinquishment.

This week is the anniversary of my ordination to pastoral ministry - the book I've bought to commemorate that milestone is Edward Oakes' new volume, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy. A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011). Oakes is one of the best interpreters of Hans Urs Von Balthasar and has written a major study of Von Balthasar's Christology.

Years ago the veteran theologian T C Oden wrote a three volume systematic theology based on what he called the ecumenical consensus. It remains a repository of ecumenical theology, both constructive and incorporating a wide range of voices from the diverse streams of the Christian theological tradition. This Christology is a major work of ecumenical and eirenic theology, an account of the person of Jesus Christ that seeks to be faithful to the ecumenical consensus but also considers and interacts with contemporary Christological thought. At the heart of hearts of pastoral ministry and Christian faith is the beauty and mystery of the incarnation, the intersection of eternity with history, the impossible reality of the divine becoming human, the majesty of love expressed in the self-surrender of God.

 It is that mystery and beauty and majesty and that impossible reality that is sung in Ave Verum Corpus. The combination of such musical truth telling and heart searching on the one hand, and an ecumenical essay in Christology that takes with utter seriousness the truth of God Incarnate on the other, is for me a reminder of the central core of faith - the mystery of Jesus Christ, revealing the self-giving love of God for a creation gone far wrong, but entered in the power of a love that suffers and absorbs that wrongness, reconciles the alienated, restores and renews so that once again life is lived in the fullness of God. To be a follower of Jesus Christ, a lover of such a God as Jesus reveals, an agent of the Kingdom of God responsive to the Holy Spirit - whatever else ordination means, it means surrender to truths of such magnitude that wonder, gratitude and love for God and all God has made are only the beginnings of an adequate yes to the divine call.

The Enduring Melody - the fellowship of joy and of suffering

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

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

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

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

Knowing we are understood - those moments when we are least alone.

Elizabeth Goudge is an author whose kind of writing would now be dismissed as old fashioned. Most of her novels were written in the middle of the 20th century and she was classified as a writer of novels for women. Just goes to show - such categories are useless at best and mischievous at worst. I've read a lot of her novels, and remember a conversation with an English teacher who knew her novels, who said The Dean's Watch was the most complete and satisfying novel she had ever read. On her recommendation I read it - and twice again since. I have a lovely first edition hardback with a quaint dustcover that is unmistakably mid twentieth century.

I was thinking about her the other day, and now today came across an epigraph at the start of a chapter in The Disciplined Heart. Love, Destiny and Imagination by Caroline Simon. This is a very fine book, the kind of writing I revel in.  A philosophical discussion of key human experience, opening into theological reflection, and laying tribute on literature and bible. At the centre is the meaning of human love in all its diverse and rich expressions, including friendship - an area of human experience coming to the fore in theological consideration today.

And here is the epigraph - taken from Goudge's novel, The Scent of Water:

If you understand people you're of use to them whether you can do anything for them or not. Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see."

There is an entire week's teaching of pastoral theology waiting to be extracted from that. Unfazed empathy, imaginative listening, accessible wisdom, thoughtful compassion, accompanied waiting, patient faithfulness, persistent presence. There are few more therapeutic moments in our lives than when we feel and know ourselves understood. One other person stands alongside us, exactly where we stand, and knows, with that intuitive gift that is kindness and friendship, just knows, how it feels at this precise moment and in this exact place. And we know they know.

Michael Ramsey and missional psychology.

 

"The lessons of the crisis of faith may have helped us and may help us still to know the glory of the Triune God, the Creator, the Judge and the Saviour of Humanity, and to proclaim it with more humility, more love, and more understanding of those who find faith hard...it is through the facing of dark nights, whether in the mysery of God or in the agonies of the world, that the deepening of faith is realised."

Michael Ramsey was writing in the 1960's  - but those simple priestly words have considerable resonance for the confused and anxious Church of the 21st century on these islands. In them he identified humility as the essential tone of missiology in a secular society, and love as the distinctive hallmark of truly Christlike discipleship, and compassionate understanding as the required emotional psychology of the follower of Jesus. Hard to improve on that.

The radical disconnect between managerial leadership and the graced community

What is the connection between leadership and management? And what then is the connection between leadership, management and grace? And finally what is the connection between leadership, management, grace and an authentic way of being the Body of Christ in the world?

My problem is one of resistance to and suspicion of theologically misleading discourse. Leadership and management are about efficiency, control, direction, achievement, development, intentional actions, presumed effectiveness and humanly contrived success. All of which is fine in the company, the business, the  commercial organisation, the corporate entities that make up most of contemporary social structures. But is the church that is the Body of Christ a corporate entity of the same order as all the others in the world, or even entirely of the same ontological sphere?

The church exists to embody the life and reality of the risen Lord Jesus, the Body of Christ. And as such, its organisational principles, its ethos and values, its convictions and actions, are likely to be qualititatively different, perhaps even threateningly alien, to the principles, ethos, values, convictions and values of other corporate bodies with no transcendent affiliation. Or is that just too radical? Is such a disconnect between the culture of managed commercial and political society and the culture of the church just too unreal? Are the basin and towel embarrassing relics, revered symbols, sacred ideas - or are they part of a story that is to be lived, practiced and perpetuated in the witness of the church? And is the table, set with bread and wine, the place for private, individualised devotional reverie and remembrance, or the place where we are reminded of that vast disconnect between power and brokenness, between management and mystery, between the lust to control and the passion of surrender, and that surrender which is the Passion.

So any discussion of church leadership which presupposes forms of management and hierarchical models of direction and authority, for me will always be judged by those radical symbols of disconnect - the basin, the towel, the table, and yes, the cross. Which brings me back to the awkward and disconcerting juxtaposition of the words management and grace. And to that table around which Christians gather to be reminded of how different from the pervasive cultural norms we are called to be. And to be recalled to a way of life, a form of being, a lifestyle of convictional practices that show why this disconnect, this radical difference is not only necessary, but is the benchmark of faithfulness to a Gospel of grace which enables and renews the mind, heals and restores the heart, beckons and summons the will, humbles and lifts the spirit, breaks down the barriers of our mistaken self-confidence, and remakes in us the capacity to trust, to love and to serve.

Grace and management presuppose a different order of relationships; leadership and grace only co-exist in Christian discourse and practice when acts of service, not expressions of authority and power, bear witness to that example that was given at the heart of the Christian story, and is told out around the Christ-given table. At that place, the Christian table, the radical disconnect between the styles and activities of managerial leadership and the lived practices of the Body of Christ as a graced community are most visible, and there witness is borne to the way of Jesus.

And if you ask what that means in practice - I'm sorry the specifics will only arise in each of our lives when we make those choices that mean for us what it meant for Jesus who laid aside the garments of status and took the basin and the towel; and when we learn what it means in our own living, in this particular relationship now, to not count our own status a thing to be clung to; and when grace as gift, as being weak yet strong, as being generously given thus a generous giver, as not looking to our own interests, when grace not our own overriding intentionality, takes of our not much, and multiplies it in blessing to others. Because that's what God is like.

 

 

Pastoral Care, unforeseen consequences and the undercurrent of grace.

A voice from my past came back to bless me the other day, through an email from a friend. My friend was speaking to someone I had helped decades ago, and whose memory of kindness shown then, and non-rejection when life was messed up, remains blessing to her, and is now encouragement to me. That email touched into something that is a given in pastoral care - the invisibility in the present of later consequence. And for me mixed memories, of hard decisions, sometimes unrewarded effort, becoming the target of anger and frustration that has to earth somewhere, and the sense that an undercurrent of grace carries us along sometimes despite our best efforts to row in the other direction.

Mary Oliver's poem below expresses with psychological precision and pastoral prescience what that undercurrent of grace can sometimes feel like - the categorical imperative of caring.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

  from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the

  lid open.

Okay, I put the box into my car, and started

  up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

  such things can be mended.

 

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I

  won't call it good or bad, just

    one way or another.

 

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

  the back of the front seat and

    punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

 

But we all know, son't we, how sometimes

  things have to feel anger, so as not

    to be defeated?

 

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

  even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

  you have to do something.

From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.

The poet achieves accuracy in describing the ambiguity that surrounds those responses we like to think spontaneous, but are often either premeditated or arise out of habits of the heart. Three times she uses "Okay", and it can mean concession or defiance to those who might wonder why she bothered. Her understanding of the language of anger, and why anger may be all a person has to prevent being overwhelmed by circumstance, is one of those profoundly humane insights that makes Mary Oliver essential reading for those whose calling is the care of others. To love the world in its hard places requires commitment to act, without foreseeing consequences beyond that present immediate imperative, "to do something".

The photo comes from here - where you can find a vision of an alternative lifestyle in an altogether different climate from Scotland in November.

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.

Novels - core texts and essential reading in pastoral theology

Reading Colm Toibin's new novel, Brooklyn. About the emigration of a young Irish woman to the United States, and the experience of separation, loss, disorientation and soul-testing loneliness that we call homesickness. Tobin is a beautiful writer, and writes about women's experience with sensitivity, insight, and a counsellor's sympathy, combined with an admirer's confidence in the resilience and dignity of this woman's ways of meeting circumstance and change. It doesn't make much sense to review a book only a third of it read, so I'll come back to this novel later.

But even what I've already read shows why novels are essential reading for people whose calling is to the care of others through pastoral friendship. I'm often asked about good books on pastoral theology, or for recommended titles that get to the heart and the point of what real pastoral care is. You often see the skeptical, disappointed, even dismissive expression on the face when instead of the latest theological heavyweight, or practical how to do it manual, or popular pastoral care in twenty minutes kind of book, (has anyone written pastoral care for Dummies yet:))you offer a list of three or four novels. Now I'd want to add biography, poetry, and some philosophy as other required resources (alongside obvious pastoral theology texts), but for now sticking with novels, here's one novel of one writer I learned from and still do. (Going to do several more over the next couple of weeks).

The Good Husband, Gail Godwin. A magnificent central character, Magda, is a literary scholar, a charismatic liberated and utterly impressive woman, is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her husband, Francis, who happily lives in her shadow, becomes the carer of a stellar woman facing the greatest challenge of them all. No it isn't sad, morbid, dark - it is humane, compassionate, incisive. Godwin dissects the responses and attitudes of those who come and go, gather and stay, accompany or stay away from Magda in her last months. But the faithfulness, the cost and the self-effacing but effective presence of the good husband holds the balance of a relationship that is both blessed and doomed. And I can't think of a more nuanced and gentle exploration from different perspectives, of the experience of dying, in any pastoral theology book. The wrong things said, the crass questions, the gentle unintended kindnesses as well as the intentional acts of care, the tongue tied visitor embarrassed by pain and diminishment as well as the caring silence of the one who simply sits, holds hands and speaks only in sounds of reassurance, and then the practical carers who get things done without fuss and without intruding, the medical procedures at times humiliating, at times restoring, and all this told by a novelist who should be given an honorary doctorate in the humanities for the sheer humanity with which she writes.

I did a presentation on this book at a gathering of newly accredited ministers. It would make a too long post. I'll adapt it and post it over a couple of days next week - unless of course broadband is up and running at my new hoose up in Aiberdeen, like!

Vocation, our life choices and the live performance of our discipleship...

Been away for a few days and unable to log into the blog. Which is a pity given the number of genuinely pastoral comments, and theologically imaginative suggestions relating to my recent ana - ana- ana-baptist experience in our new bath room. They would have been a source of reassurance and comfort during a demanding couple of days of travel, meetings and being away from home comforts like a warm, uninterrupted bath!

Sorry the comments couldn't be moderated till I returned, but they are now made public so that those whose pastoral credentials are unarguably dubious, and those whose pastoral style is theologically and biblically reflective may be identified :)

More seriously, for the first time since our move I now have a number of weeks which will be fairly standard in terms of diary and commitments, giving me a chance to establish a new rhythm and balance in a different way of living out my vocation - which I've never identified wholly with the work I do. My marriage, family, friendships, intellectual and emotional life, building of home as place of welcome, participation in the Body of Christ, locally and ecumenically, are all part of that far too easily limited word "vocation".

The call of God is occasionally not easy to discern - but usually it is pretty clear, and the issue isn't discernment, but obedience. And by that I don't mean compliance. Hard faced duty isn't half as hard as a smiling faced, grateful yes to what is presented to us as the life we are to live - its circumstances, the gifts of other people's presence, the opportunities to say yes and no which can both be response of glad obedience to the One we seek to follow.

And yes - living with the choices we made in good faith and trust, and creating out of our responsive and responsible decisions, a life and work in which tension and tuning, practice and skill, self-knowledge and self-confidence, (and thus honesty and humility) enable us to perform before God the quite specific, indeed unique music of our own vocation. And since life is not a rehearsal (not always the daft cliche it sounds), what we are asked to do is perform our vocation as a Premiere, an unrehearsed, live, from scratch, one off performance. Just as well the grace of God pervades as well as peruses our performance - and that the Gracious God who is our primary audience knows the script far better than we do!