Living Wittily

Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life. 

And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs. 

Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto - there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer - there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!

The necessity for preachers to undergo the world...

In her Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton writes of a moment while tending her garden border, and she was overcome by tiredness, and particularly a sense that too much had happened without enough time to process it. She later wrote of the fatigue caused "by unassimilated experience." My parents used to have a wee devotional book, given them at their wedding by the minister, but long disappeared - it was called Come Ye Apart. The title came from an old translation of Jesus' invitation to the disciples at the end of a draining day, "Come ye apart and rest awhile". A good title for a book about restoring the soul - also a good phrase to describe what happens in an overstressed life "come ye apart"! -  or as Yeats said, "things come apart, the centre cannot hold".

The poet Denise Leveretov - for me one of a personal canon of poets who assimlate experience and cherish human existence in a troubled world - Levertov writing about her friend Robert Duncan quoted his criticism of a fellow poet - "he has enthusiasms but not passions, he collects experiences but he does not undergo the world". I sometimes think that about preaching today - "enthusiasms but not passions", the preacher collects experiences but does not undergo the world."

When we've done the training, read the books about new hermeneutics, had fun with the homiletical plots and narrative theology, made the necessary concessions and expressed the expected cautions about postmodern suspicions of authority and engaged in discourse analysis and the dangers of social construction through linguistic power games, and then preach; or when we've done the biblical thing and subjected the text to atomised exposition, contextual application, faithfully (so far as our own limited grasp of it goes) proclaimed the gospel to our own satisfaction and even the satisfaction of those privileged to hear us. Well when all that kind of stuff is done and said, the poet poses a fundamental question to the heart of the preacher -

Do you have enthusiasms but not passions?

Do you collect experience but refuse to undergo the world?

To undergo the world is to live deeply, to feel the joy and anguish of other human beings, to come to terms with ambiguity and doubt and struggle and hurt as people try to make ends meet in the economy of the heart. What I sense in much preaching now is a lack of depth, by which I mean a willed unfamiliarity with the deep places of human experience, a superficial stone-skimming-the-surface impatience with profundity or difficult thought, a salesman-like confidence that is entirely uncritical of applied practical answers to life's most troubling complexities, and these delivered in sound-bytes and bullet points as if the conversation was about the latest three for two offers from our preferred supermarket. OK that's exaggeration - but the poet is right. It's too easy in the image saturated environment we inhabit to become collectors of experience and refuse to undergo the world. A preacher is the last person who should shirk depth - maybe those who shirk depth are afraid of sharks.

To undergo the world is a deeply Christ-like journey.

The Word became flesh and made his home amongst us" - the Word did not refuse to undergo the world.

"He emptied himelf....and being born in human likeness...he humbled himself..." the one in the very nature of God, did not refuse to undergo the world.

To undergo the world is to love it, to live in it, to be in the world as a reconciling presence, to hold the world in the heart, to explore the depths and darkness as well as the surface and light of human experience, to struggle with thought in the face of tragedy and to find words to express the joyful mystery of existence, and to do so in order to know when we are short-changing those to whom we dare preach. To undergo the world is to live with openness of mind, ears, eyes and heart - not a collector of experiences, but an experienced human being who in undergoing the world, transfigures experience into wisdom. It is that wisdom that best informs our preaching, and that wisdom which emerges from the encounter between our personal lived experience, the biblical text, and the real lives of those to whom we are privileged to preach.

The sound of silence interrupting our words....

Preaching later today on the Lenten theme in our local church which is about listening to the sounds around us. My theme is "The Sound of Silence", which I chose from the menu of other options. Preparing for this particular sermon has taken on for me the sense of a minor epiphany. Early on I decided not to explore the contrast of noise and silence - I'm actually doing a bit on that at another occasion later this week. Likewise the cultivation of a contemplative disposition I have long practised, but for just as long I've recognised how hard such centering and attentiveness is to practise well. So not a sermon on contemplative prayer. And yes there is the Elijah story about earthquake, wind and fire and God being elsewhere, namely in the whispered quietness. But I'm not thinking of silence as the context for my own spiritual reflection and theological struggle.

In one of those co-incidences of thought, memory, familiar text, life circumstance, emotional climate, human longing, and imagination, I decided to do something else. Because I instinctively yet intentionally refer questions of theological and pastoral significance to the defining centre of my Christian life, I asked,"What does the theme "The Sound of Silence" evoke when considered in the lived actions and spoken words of Jesus of Nazareth?" What are we to make of the sound of silence, the role of silence, in the stories of Jesus' encounters and conversations with those many people whose lives he touched, healed and loved back to wholeness? Those of us who revere and live by Jesus' words, what are we to make of the sound of Jesus' silences? And that's when (for me) epiphany happened.

Frederick Buechner: life lived humanly and looked at honestly

Trying to figure out why Buechner is so moving and persuasive in his account of human longing as it meets divine promise, need as it encounters grace, and this in the event of preaching, I think it's because he finds words to bring into the light of day thoughts I now see and recognise but didn't know till he showed me that they are also mine. But only now he has told me.

Switching on the lectern light and clearing his throat, the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them of the truth and because Jesus speaks them both, blessed behe. The preacher tells the truth by speaking of the visible absence of God because if he doesn't see and own up to the absence of God in the world, then he is the only one there who doesn't see it,and who then is going to take him seriously when he tries to make real what he claims to be able to see as the invisible presence of God in the world? Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between tham and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens. Let the preacher preach the Gospel of their preposterous meeting as the high unbidden hilarious thing it is. (page 71)

As much as it is our hope, it is also our hopelessness that brings us to church of a Sunday, and any preacher who, whatever else he speaks, does not speak to that hopelessness might as well save his breath. (page 55)

Hope and hopelessness, community and loneliness, voice and silence, presence and absence, gain and loss, laughing and crying, beauty and ugliness - a list of contrasts that has no end as long as life is lived humanly and looked at honestly. And Buechner's idea that where such contrasts collide in our experience, there the Gospel happens, is one explanation of why the Gospel is the good news of God, and why grace is experienced as the enlivening miracle it is.

Von Balthasar's birthday & Frederick Buechner: the wordless truth of who we are and who God is...

Today is the birthday of Hans Urs Von Balthasar. I know it's Buechner week, but wanted to show the catholicity of my spirit by celebrating two such different voices! And also, you get two posts rolled into one! :))

Mark McIntosh is one of the most lucid and penetrating interpreters of Von Balthasar. Here is a brief extract from his essay on Von Balthasar's christology, with a quite stunning couple of sentences from Von Balthasar on the Cross:

Thus the space, the 'room', which God had made for the creature to respond to divine life was either collapsed into idolatrous creaturely self assertion or else distorted into an angry distance or fearful and bitter alienation. And with that distortion, all the other differences within the created order became toxic and antagonistic divisions.

On such a stage the human being could never pursue the calling which would lead to relationship with God and thus to authentic personhood. But Balthasar's christology re-situates human being within its true acting space, upon a stage whose structures and rhythms have been purified and reconfigured by Christ. In Balthasar's view this is possible because the divine Persons have themselves, on the Cross and in the Resurrection, revisited the alienated distance between humanity and God, emplotting it once more within the 'space' between the Father and the Son:

"The extreme distance between Father and Son, which is endured as a result of the Son's taking on of sin, changes into the most profound intimacy...The Son's eternal, holy distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy distance of the world's sin can be trnasposed into it, can be transcended and overcome by it."

(Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs Von Balthasar, chapter 3, 'Christology', Mark McIntosh, p. 35)

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Buechner imagines the preacher ready to preach, and the congregation ready to listen, or to be bored. And what is the preacher to say?

Who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them.

Let him tell them the truth. before the Gospel is a word, it is silence. It is the silence of their own lives and of his life. It is life with the sound turned off so that for a moment or two you can experience it not in terms of the words you make it bearable by but for the unutterable mystery that it is. Let him say, "Be silent and know that I am God, saith the Lord". (Ps 46.10). Be silent and know that even by my silence and absence I am known. be silent and listen to the stones cry out.

Out of the silence let the only real news come, which is the sad news before it is glad news, and that is fairy tale last of all. The preacher is not brave enough to be literally silent for long, and since it is his calling to speak the truth with love, even if her were brave enough, he would not be silent for long because we are none of us very good at silence. It says too much. So let him use words, but, in addition to using them to explain, expound, exhort, let him use them to evoke, to set us dreaming as well as thinking, to use words as at their most prophetic and truthful, the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve. Let him use words which do not only try to give answers to the questions that we ask or ought to ask, but which help us to hear the questions thast we do not have words for asking, and to hear the silence that those questions rise out of and the silence that is the answer to those questions. Drawing on nothing fancier than the poetry of his own life, let him use words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the Gospel of our meeting."

I don't know about you, but I would love to have such a preacher for my pastor. One through whom we are enabled to share the sacrament of words and the sacrament of silence, and one wise enough to know the difference between them, and the right time for each. Preaching is now far too readily dismissed, diminished, downgraded and de-centered in our quick sell-out to the post-modern critique. In these lectures, delivered more than 30 years ago, when post-modernity was still a philosophical and cultural adolescent worldview, Buechner was already pointing to a way of preaching that can never be reduced to informational exchange, disembodied exposition, practical how-to spirituality, intellectual wrestlings with doctrinal fankles. This is an appeal for preaching that is existentially honest, spiritually adventurous, pastorally compassionate, rooted in the lives and losses of an all too human and all too loved community. Preaching that is unafraid of truth because unafraid of questions; preaching that waits for words out of silence, and then only breaks that silence in order to speak those words out of love for the privileged ministry of the cure of souls, beginning with the preacher's own soul.

The picture is by Holman Hunt, "The Shadow of Death". The weary carpenter strectches in the satisfaction of hard work done, unaware that his shadow is cruciform, and therefore a fore-shadow of Calvary. Mary sees it though. I saw this painting at the Holman Hunt Exhibition in Manchester, and sat and looked at it for a long time.

Frederick Buechner: Telling the Truth in Love

Sometimes Buechner can be heart-breakingly accurate in his diagnosis of the preacher's weakness, and heart-liftingly optimistic about how that weakness is the preacher's primary strength

To preach the Gospel is not just to tell the truth but to tell the truth in love, and to tell the truth in love means to tell it with concern not only for the truth that is being told but with concern also for the people  it is being told to. Who are they? What is going on inside them? What is happening behind their faces...to make them strain to hear the truth as it is told? The preacher must always feel what it is like to live inside the skins of the people he is preaching to, to hear the truth as they hear it. That is not as hard as it sounds because, of course, he is himself a hearer of truth as well as a teller of truth, and he listens out of the same emptiness as they do for a truth to fill him and make him true.  (page 8 - forgive the gender exclusive discourse Buechner uses - the book was written 32 years ago)

Describing the great Prophets of the Old Testament as first and foremost poets, he was by no means diminishing their authority, or their capacity to see and speak truth.

They put words to things untill their teeth rattled, but beneath the words they put, or deep within their words, something rings out which is new because it is timeless, the silence rings out, the truth that is unutterable, that is a mystery, that is the way things are, and the reason it rings out seems to be that the language the prophets use is essentially the language of poetry, which more than polemics or philosophy, logic or theology, is the language of truth. (page 19)

What makes Buechner's lectures on preaching so telling, is that, God help me (the phrase is a prayer not an expletive), they make me want to preach, and for what can begin to feel like the right reasons and in the right frame of heart.

The painting is The Sower With Setting Sun, images of human frailty, nature's toil and promise, the lonely work of hopeful scattering, and the possibilities embedded in grains of wheat that fall into the ground and die...and so do not abide alone.

Frederick Buechner - Telling the Truth

Decided to have a Fred Buechner week. Telling the Truth. The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale is Buechner's Beecher Lectures on preaching. It is full of that kind of wisdom that you instinctively listen to, because it sounds true - not only its content but the voice that speaks it. Genuine wisdom has a tone, a timbre, a listenability that comes from the unmistakable notes and cadences of humanity that inform it, a combination of compassion, humour, joy, sadness and gratitude for the life we live.

Here's Buechner the preacher doing what he does best - preaching the text of his own heart interpreted through the text of the Gospel - or, if you will, preaching the text of the Gospel through his own heart.
 

"If preachers or lecturers are to say anything that really matters to anyone including themselves, they must say it not just to the public part of us that considers interesting thoughts about the Gospel and how to preach it, but to the private inner part too, to the part of of us all where our dreams come from, both our good dreams and our bad dreams, the inner part where thoughts mean less than images, elucidation less than evocation, where our concern is less with how the Gospel is to be preached than with what the Gospel is wand what it is to us. They must address themselves to the fulness of who we are and to the mptiness too, the emptiness where grace and peace belong but mostly are not, because terrible as well as wonderful things have happened to us all." (Page 4, Telling the Truth)