Living Wittily

37 years on, Small is [still] Beautiful

"Call a thing immoral or ugly,

soul destroying or a degradation of man,

a peril to the peace of the world

or to the wellbeing of future generations;

as long as you have not shown it to be 'uneconomic'

you have not really questioned its right to exist,

grow, and prosper."

That was E F Schumacher in 1973, in one of the great tracts of the 20th Century. Small is Beautiful fell like a benediction on a planet slowly awakening to the dangers of greed, extravagance, exploitation, over-fishing, acid rain, deforestation, habitat destruction, over-consumption and the long term toxicity of the myth of sustainable growth. But a benediction often unheard, and as often unwanted and unwelcome. And the consequences are piling up decade after decade. In the realm of religious economics, the word 'uneconomic' is the definition of sin, and economic growth the terminology of sanctity. The economy is divinely ordered and the quest for economic production, and market growth equates to the search for the good life. And the irony is that our pursuit of economic growth is ruining life, suffocating life, extinguishing, eliminating, crowding out, diminishing, devaluing and finally buying and selling the means of life in a crazy festival of waste. Read Schumacher again  - and ask what is beautiful, moral, peaceful and future preserving about the economic policies of the developed, and yes the rapidly developing world.

And pray, "Lord have mercy".

Vince Cable redefines the discourse of trust, trust me on this!

When is a pledge a promise? When is a promise binding? What is a promise worth if it can be unilaterally broken? Is a public pledge merely a statement of intent, or does it have moral force? The questions are important because on the trust of our promises, and the dependability of our words, depends the social fabric of a liberal democracy. Note, a member of which could be called a liberal democrat, which is a somewhat different creature from the members of the political party "Liberal Democrat".

Which raises intriguing and disturbing dilemmas. Because there is no doubt that the Liberal Democrat Party signed a pledge committing them to oppose a rise in student fees. And now Vince Cable, mouthpiece of the coalition on such matters, not only wants to renege on the pledge, promise and commitment, but wants to redefine the discourse of trust. You can read the whole sorry episode of linguistic gymnastics and ethical obfuscation here.  

What is particularly troubling is that Mr Cable seems to genuinely believe, or disingenuously say he believes, that breaking a promise does not reflect badly on the Party's trustworthiness. That can easily be tested. Ask how many students will now trust the Lib Dems. Are our politicians so inept at ethics that they do not recognise trustworthiness is the characteristic of those who have shown themselves worthy of trust? Are they so out of touch with their ethical side they don't understand that trust is a judgement conferred not a virtue claimed? So entirely otherworldly (intersting word for the culture of realpolitik and discourse revision) that they missed the rather critical point that a pledge, or a promise, or a commitment - he uses all three words synonymously - is only as trustworthy as the person who makes it proves to be?

There are problems for all of us when public discourse is so malleable to political justification that reshaping of truth to Party expediency can be carried out with such sincere conviction and palpable evasiveness. If to "honour" the commitments made within the coalition require the breaking of promises in order to maintain the coalition, then either uphold the promise at the price of coalition partnership, or admit that you broke the promise and can't be trusted in your election pledges. It really doesn't work any other way. The only thing worse than breaking a promise is to insist you did nothing wrong, would do it again, refuse to apologise and insist that you are trustworthy and are working hard to honour commitments.

I realise it may be simplistic, and is near culpable proof-texting - but Jesus did say "Let your yes be yes, and your no be no". Mind you, he was no great politician either - and he had little use for coalitions of self-interest.

Christian witness - bespeaking hopefulness to a culture mired in its own despair

Hope. To look to the future as open and replete with new possibility. To see our past and our present circumstances without conceding they determine who we will be, and what is now possible.

If there's one disposition, one emotion, one word for which our times are sick with hunger, it's hopefulness.

 Are any of us immune to that darkness and heaviness of soul that occasionally descends as we glimpse our own shallowness, sense the superficial transcience of a life lived too rapidly, and long for something more permanent, durable, worth giving our lives to?

How to bear witness to Jesus who brings freedom in a culture suffering an advanced case of creeping exhaustion through trying to keep the creaking economic machinery going through the cycle of sustainable economic growth, global recession, and economic recovery. Remorselessness engenders hopelessness, and it's no accident that a theology of hope has an umbilical connection to liberation theology.

And alongside the search for meaning and identity through our capacity to participate in a consumer culture, isn't there something existentially significant about the contemporary pursuit of belonging, identity and connectedness through Facebook, Twitter and yes the blog? 

One way or another we each try to locate our own living in the excitement and sameness, the creativity and the mess, the valuable and the trivial, the enduring and the disposable, the worthwhile and the wasteful, the optimism and the despair,  that is the cultural flux of our times.

So I think of some of the great words that bespeak hopefulness. Bespeak - that is speak and make be. Speak into existence. Talk up. Not in the silly sense of make-believe, but in the prophetic sense of re-imagining a world in which hope and not cynicism is the default posture of our forward thinking. For example:

Amos 9.13, at the end of a doom laden sermon or two:

The time is surely coming, says the Lord, when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps, and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.

Isaiah 55.12, as a promise that simply denies to the status quo its claims to permanence and determinism

You shall go out with joy, and be led forth in peace, and the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

Revelation 22.1-2, one of those texts that Hollywood would need CGI's to do justice, a vision of life and movement, of growth and fulfillment, of international healing and peace. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. on either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

And the lines from Browning's Paracelsus, Victorian rhetoric and human longing for a future drawn forwardt by the sense that in the murk and darkness we might be a bit like Moses sometimes, and have to draw near to the thick darkness in which god dwells.....

If I stoop
Into a dark tremendous sea of cloud,
It is but for a time. I press God's lamp
Close to my breast; its splendour, soon or late,
Will pierce the gloom. I shall emerge one day.

God is love. God is light. But a Christian understanding of God, standing this side of resurrection, manages to look at a tired, scared, fragmented world, buckling under the strain of human activity, and pray, The God of hope fill you with all hope. It is God who bespeaks the future, not us. Thank goodness, and thank God!

Faith then, is  both defiant and imaginative - refusing to concede that how things are is how they must be. Instead faith sends out trajectories of hope towards a future differently imagined. Not because we can simply wish fulfil the future - but because wherever our human future takes us, God is already there, and there as eternally creative love, reconciling our shattered cosmos, and bringing to completion our own brokenness through that same reconciling love.

The Colossian Christ, the image of the invisible God, the one in whom all things hold together, in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell - there is the core of any theology that claims to be Christian and relevant to a culture mired in its own despair, and apparently hell-bent on foreclosing on its own future. To bear witness to a different future, and live towards that future by a life of peace-making and conciliatory love, and to embody these in actions of generous, gentle, costly healing of whatever is hurting around us, - that is to bespeak hopefulness, is to be the Body of Christ, broken for the nourishment of the world.

In Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.

(The painting is Hope in a Prison of Despair, Evelyn De Morgan, Pre-Raphaelite)

(The space image above can be found here )

Guernica - the novel and the painting

Guernica, Dave Boling, (Picador)

This is a carefully researched novel about Basque village life in the 30's seen through the eyes of three generations, culminating in the atrocity that was Guernica. Picasso's presence is woven throughout, and the novelist  makes him neither hero nor villain, but simply what he is; an artist who lives with the ambiguity of his own life story and the politics of his time. His painting of the raids on Guernica (which is brilliantly repulsive in conception and creation) is an example of art as moral outrage and political protest - and of how the representation of human anguish when it is well done as in Picasso's Guernica, is potent not by its power to attract, but by its power to repel. The medium conveys exactly human recoil from the evil the painting depicts.

 

It’s an interesting thought, that art, so naturally identified with the creation of beauty, grace and human loveliness, is equally potent in depicting ugliness, violence and human suffering. There are some paintings that are hideous both in their content and in their execution, and that makes them great art because they compel attention to the human experience of that which dehumanises, degrades and violates. In class last year when looking at artistic representations of Jesus on the cross, there were several images which students found repulsive, even upsetting, there was “no beauty that we should desire him”. Crucifixion is utter unremitting cruelty, and some artists refuse to surround such inhumane infliction with light or hope or theological concessions. Likewise, Picasso in his painting of the atrocity of Guernica, was unsparing of the sensitivities of the public viewers of his art. There are times when art speaks truth, the representation of a subject contributes to its reality, the medium successfully conveys the message, the viewer is forcibly confronted with what we would rather not see and think, and thus moral judgement is demanded by the stark uncompromising portrayal of moral evil.

There is no comfortable distance from which to view Picasso’s Guernica. It is an offence, searingly effective, and the depth of negative reaction to its images and overall composition is precisely the intent – a jolt in the nerve centre of our moral perceptions and political complacency. This novel doesn’t operate at this kind of level, at least not self-consciously. But by giving human face and character to the villagers, by drawing us into the family life of the Basque people, and by making us care for the outcomes in the stories of their lives, such personal and moral reactions are inevitably evoked. Near the end, there is a beautifully conceived insight into how human beings deal with loss and love. It comes as a comment on how two men coped with the violent deaths of their wives and children in the bombing raid:

"...if you lose someone you love, you need to redistribute your feelings rather than surrender them. You give them to whoever is left, and the rest you turn towards something that will keep you moving forward."

So the novel is a romance and a lament, a celebration of human courage and consolation, an affirmation of the love that humans have for each other and the finite miracle of love that survives brutal death; but all this set against the chronic capacity of human beings to hate, or worse, to not care about the consequences for other human beings of military action and political violence. And Picasso's painting, now an iconic image, an artistic monument of 25 feet by 12 feet, ensures that the name of a the small historic town of Guernica is not forgotten. And Picasso's poignant image of the dove flying over broken weapons of war is also a necessary and urgent reminder that human creatvity, industry and reason, can also be persuaders and builders of peace. This is a fine novel, about a remarkable painting, a flawed artistic genius, and an act of human barbarity that changed the nature of war.

The book ends with the following few lines. It isn't a spoiler to quote it. The opposite in fact, it's an invitation to read the book, and enter with moral imagination the experience that inspired a masterpiece of poltical protest, moral outrage and symbolic resistance to war.

Picasso is sitting in his favourite cafe in Paris. He is approached by a German officer.

"One officer who considered himself culturally advanced approached the artist as he sipped his coffee at a table beneath the green pavement awninga. The officer held a reproduction of the mural Guernica, barely larger than a postcard size.

'Pardon me', he said, holding the card out. 'You did this didn't you?'

Picasso put his cup delicately on its saucer, turned to the picture, then to the officer, and responded, 'No. You did.'

Friendship and Prayer; when the global becomes local, and the international becomes personal.

Funny how the global becomes local, and the international becomes personal, and major crisis for millions is felt at the level of individuals. Almost everyone in Western Europe is now likely to find that they, or someone important in their lives, is stranded abroad, and as of today with no clear idea of when they will be able to come home. Ease and safety of travel has become such an integral part of what we take for granted as normality, that this past week has created a new level of awareness of just how vulnerable technology is to the elemental physical forces that drive and shape our planet.

Easy now to slip into apocalyptic scenarion; but just as easy to assume that once the direction of the wind changes the situation will revert to normal. Somewhere between apocalyptic meltdown and complacent unconcern is the harder reality of having created a world dependent on air flight, air freight and air defence systems. And for the first time total shut-down has simply negated that assumption. The unprecedented now has precedent. In a world where risk assessment, risk management and rehearsed emergency scenarios have become standard activities of corporate bodies, it seems this particular combination of circumstances escaped the risk assessors and the Hollywood script writers.

I'm not sure what to make of all this. But I do have friends stranded abroad; and I am only too aware of how little can be done to help them from a distance other than support by text, phone and email. And it is when the global becomes personal that the issues of life on our planet become much more persuasively focused, and the unyielding limits of our can do confidence are exposed.

Meantime our politicians are out electioneering. I may have missed it, but has there been any statement from our Government about what it will do to help our citizens who are stranded abroad. Governments can't fix volcanoes or change wind directions, but it's an interesting question whether a forthcoming election is more important than one of the most significant natural disasters to impact on our country for a very long time. We don't have a Parliament or cabinet sitting in emergency session - but we do have election battle-buses, road trips and hustings tours. Am I being unreasonable, or is there a lost perspective, a wilful blindness to the real world beyond the horizons of politicians and Govenrment ministers and officials.

For millions of people in this country, who wins the political leaders' TV Debate is less important than what is currently happening to members of our family and our friends, and what our Government has to offer by way of help, support and credible response to a world where party politics is an irrelevance. Volcanoes are not influenced by rhetoric.

Intercessory prayer in churches this weekend should be the longest part of the service. Earthquake in China, major disruption across Europe, the mourning of Poland, - and these are just this week's news. Across the world, their are situations of human suffering and loss of which we seldom hear, or which come to our attention and disappear under the constant pressure of the next story. And whatever else intercessory prayer is, it is the holding of a God-loved world before God, and a willingness to reach out in that same love for the healing, the wholeness and the blessing of that world - in whatever ways we can, and where we can't, in supplication to the Father of mercies.

State of Play, and Wolf Hall - two studies in the ruthlessness of the self

Over New Year we watched the six episodes of the TV version of State of Play - way much better than the Hollywood version. Whatever we think causes the moral malaise and public cynicism surrounding current politics and journalism, this drama tackles some of the underlying causes of that dangerous disillusion with the capacity of public figures to be trusted. It also explores the fankled mess of divided loyalty, blackmail, betrayal, the ruthlessness of the ambitious self, the ease with which relationships are peddled in the marketplace where power is brokered; and it does so against the background of corporate business, government, energy policy and those unprincipled decisions that shatter lives.

All in all, a satisfying confirmation that all have sinned, and that the insatiable appetite for power and self preservation drives human beings to deeds and dispositions that do indeed fall far short of the glory of God. And yet the series portrays human behaviour and its consequences as tragic, the broken lives and inflicted anguish as not in the end what was intended, but rather the consequences of actions which if they could have been foreseen.....

But of course foresight isn't in our gift as human beings; we can't foresee all the consequences of our compromises, betrayals, lies, power games. Not so. Foresight isn't a crystal ball we don't have access to; it is that creative process of moral imagination, awareness that actions have consequences for those near and distant to us. And foresight, in the ethical sense is to be responsible and responsive to that inner voice we call conscience, because when conscience is persistently shouted down by the claims of the strident self-determined ego, it is gradually silenced. But John Stuart Mill wasn't far wrong when he spoke of the conscience as that web of moral feeling which when violated is later encountered as remorse. And remorse is brilliantly portrayed by David Morrissey in this drama.  

Running parallel with my viewing of State of Play, my reading of Hilary mantel's Wolf Hall. Take most of the above review of human cruelty and cynicism, and the description of the State and the individual in ruthless pursuit of power, and the parallels become fascinatingly close. Especially when it is very clear that power is not grasped and wielded for its own sake, but for the sake of the person who pursues it and cultivates it. Yet both State of Play and Wolf Hall have characters who act within a recognised code of honour; the journalist in pursuit of the story, protecting sources, upholding the public right to know; Thomas Cromwel's rise as advisor to Henry VIII, making and breaking lives as he orchestrates the court intrigue and lethal alliances of Tudor politics. In Wolf Hall the question of morally generated foresight and the slow reorientation of conscience to the service of the self is also explored in the relationships and conflicts between political expediency and moral consequence. Mantel's novel is a partial rehabilitation of Cromwell, a sympathetic portrayal of the English Machiavelli whose volume The Prince is Cromwell's textbook on political survival and required ruthlessness.

All in all, a few days of enjoyment - laced with reflections on how power, tragedy, human ambition and failure, love and betrayal, cruelty and compassion, manifest themselves differently in different historical periods. But it is the same tragedy, the same broken glory of the human being, lacking moral foresight yet culpably ignoring their best lights, human life unredeemed but not unredeemable. Because against the bleak sense of the inevitability of the tragic, and the contemporary loss of faith in the goodness of life, the Christian story is of God entering into the full tragic consequences of human sin. And not as Machiavellian Prince bent on violent re-ordering and manipulative exploitation of the world, but as Prince of Peace. As self-giving love the Prince of Peace contradicts the will to power, and in his death all that makes for implacable death is crucified; and as the life and love and light of God, hope is resurrected as He is risen with healing, embodying the promise of a new kind of humanity, signal of a renewed creation, the beginning of the reconciling of all things.

A more hopeful attention to the future...

World Beyond

He stands by a window.

A flock of starlings

settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree.

Then, like black buds unfolding,

they open their wings;

black notes in music.

He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure:

that something almost extinct,

some small gesture towards the future,

is ready to welcome the spring;

in some spare, desperate way

he is looking forward to Easter,

the end of Lenten fasting,

the end of penitence.

There is a world beyond this black world.

There is a world of the possible...

He sees it; then he doesn't.

The moment is fleeting.

But insight cannot be taken back.

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

......      ......      ......

Actually not a poem. A beautifully written paragraph (which I've restructured) from Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's novel about Thomas Cromwell and the intrigues, betrayals and political shenanigans of the Tudor Court. It describes the inner change of worldview and self-determination in Thomas Cromwell, as he moves finally from grief at the death of his family from plague, to a much more hopeful attention to his own future. His star is on the ascendant and he begins to sense it without yet fully understanding it. He has discovered the world of the possible.

This is historical fiction of exceptional standard - recreating the early modern world, Renaissance and Reformation Europe, and the reverberations across Christendom of Henry the VIII's obsession with producing a male heir. Reading this one slowly. 

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!

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution - Martin Luther King's dream.

Today is an historic day. The inauguration of Barack Obama will mark another step towards the fulfilment of the most famously articulated dream of the 20th Century. On the obvious public, contemporary, global media level, the day belongs to Barack Obama - but in terms of history, human significance, Christian witness and political theology, the day belongs to the Baptist pastor whose dream, nearly fifty years ago, inspired others to dream.

So on this inauguration day, instead of quoting from Obama's autobiography, quoted below are important words with which he is required to engage if he is to be anywhere near true to the vision of Martin Luther King. The extract comes late on from a remarkable sermon in which MLK tackled politically embedded racism, world poverty and the tragic stupidity of the Vietnam war. I've inserted italics at a sentence which is not only quintessential MLK - it states the grounds of a Christian political ethic as a stance of Christian witness. The sermon is called

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution

This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most vicious way.

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.

***<<<>>>***

In a world where hope comes hard, expectations of this Presidency are understandbly but unreasonably high. But lovers of peace and makers of peace, dreamers of hope and makers of hope, those who hunger and thirst for that righteousness of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God, will today pray God that the newly inaugurated President will live up to his own rootedness in those ideals and values determined to use rather than abuse power.

The problem is, "If we're not careful....."

Massacre in Mumbai.
Kidnap of Karen Matthews.
Murder of Baby P.
IED's in Iraq and Afghanistan (Improvised Explosive Device).
Murder of Vicky Hamilton
Violent riots in Greece
Debates on assisted, now televised, suicide
Cholera in Zimbabwe.

Some of the week's news. It's hard not to develop defence mechanisms. There's only so much information the mind can process, only so much weight of moral evil mind and conscience can evaluate. There's only so much suffering and human anguish the heart can feel with and feel for, before we begin to care less, and if we're not careful, finally couldn't care less.

Eventually then, if we're not careful, we become accustomed to familiar reports of bloody violence, abuse of children, politically driven brutalisation of peoples, the orchestrated moves of deregulated power. The moral danger of saturation news coverage, with detailed and graphic reporting, authoritative comment and skilled techniques of image, word and story, is that it eventually sets the emotional, mental and moral tone of our worldview. If we're not careful. And we will interpet the world politically, economically, ecologically, sociologically, demographically, militarily, - from multi-perspectives, except the theological. If we're not careful.

 Advent keeps us careful. Advent is Magnificat, an alternative worldview, theology at loggerheads with power politics. Advent is Jesus, a name not to conjure with, but to speak as God's embodied promise of peace. Advent is Emmanuel, God with us, truth to keep in the heart and ponder. Advent is, to live in the light of the coming of God as Advent people. Advent is a worldview illuminated by hope.