Living Wittily

A long walk on the cliffs and the beach at St Cyrus - "to consider the flowers..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is where we went yesterday - a walk along the 220+ foot high cliffs and the sands at St Cyrus. Used to have family holidays at a farm cottage 6 miles inland and spent days here - most of those I remember were sunny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love the contrast of yellow gorse and everything else around it, especially on a gray, cold day. Walking along the track below you come to corridors of gorse, inhabited by the usual small birds, goldfinches and great tits - no linnets - I miss them, they were very common in Ayrshire when I was a boy.

 

The Scottish Primrose is one of the delights of Spring.

Everyone should have some in their garden, but not purloined from places like this.

Flowers are masterpieces of precision and profusion. There are banks of them here, celebrating Easter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alfred Noyes described gorse as "great glory of ragged gold", - and close up or far away, it's a sight for sore eyes.

Christopher Smart wrote, "For there is a language of flowers, for flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ." I owe that quotation to Bob MacDonald's blog heading - it's a lovely line from an unjustly forgotten poet (who loved cats!).

 It was a good day, in which the isness of flowers was paid attention to!

"Look at the flowers of the field..if God so clothes them, how much more..

 

 

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A Plea for Foolishness as a More Durable Wisdom?

This was published 50 years ago - tell me if it is now obsolete, dated, passe? I have broken up what is otherwise a sustained and relentless paragraph in critique of a fundamental assumption of contemporary Western existence. You may have to read it more than once - that may be because it seeks to expose what we would rather not see.

The whole modern world is one great campaign against risk and uncertainty; as a money dominated world, it is a world of life insurance. 'The modern world as a whole is a world which thinks only about its own old age. It is a monstrous old people's home, an institution for pensioners.

In economics, politics, and constitutional law, as in ethics, psychology and metaphysics, we should, if only we had better eyes, be able to see one thing and one thing only: how much this terrible need for peace and quiet is invariably a principle of enslavement. It is always freedom that has to pay the bill. It is always money that is the master. The glorious insecurity of the present is always sacrificed to the security of the moment immediately following.

That is the real psychology of the contemporary idea of progress: man would like to live his life in the future, to live in advance of the event, so making his present into his past. Taking thought for the morrow, saving for the morrow, actually means throwing away its freedom, castrating its potency and fertility, which are the supreme blessings for human beings.

Every financial transaction is an expense of spirit; the only genuine miser, storing up his treasures, is the lover. This is the most profound teaching of the the Gospel. And we are so much under the domination of money, the Antichrist, that even when we do not openly name it, we constantly take its name for granted. In this commercial world, everything is commercial, even metaphysics, and theology; they too fall into line and cease to have any true presence in their own right. Christianity, like everything else, is detemporalised and thereby deprived of its 'salt'.

Avarice in the form of anxiety about tomorrow is the lord of all the world. The drying up of the heart makes itself felt both temporally and spiritually. The person who rejects the fluiditiy of the living heart, preferring the rigidity of money and conceptual thought, has already chosen the other kind of fluidity, the liquefaction of the corpse.

The question is simply what in any given world is a commercial commodity and what is not. It is by this standard that every world will be judged.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III A Theological Aesthetics. Studies in theological Style: Lay Styles, (San Francisco: Crossroads) 1986, pages 478-9

Now I guess you could say those are the words of a grumpy old theologian, and that may be so. And it does seem a wholesale condemnation of economic activity for its own sake. But is he wrong? Does he exaggerate to the point where he can be ignored?

Jesus said you cannot serve God and money - so how do we follow faithfully after Jesus in a money dominated culture? What would be the signs that our allegiances are at times tested to the point of capitulation? In the work of the Kingdom of God, how important are financial questions of profit and loss, assurance and risk, generosity and prudence - and should the Church learn again the counter intuitive practices of giving away, free gift, reckless compassion, unlocked resources - and those as acts of freedom and declarations of independence from a cash dominant culture. 

Or is that the idealism of the fool, the naivete of the enthusdiast, the behaviour of one devoid of any practical, viable and responsible strategy? But maybe the strategy is precisely this, the sacramental use of money and possessions to subvert the secular sacraments of compulsive consumption within the free market by deliberate decisions and intentional actions that demonstrate a Christian use of money.

If there is such a thing?

 

Stating the obvious again - revision is good for the soul!

Having read what I wrote yesterday, I've made the corrections to spelling, spacing and grammar! Since I'm in the middle of marking I guess yesterday's effort before revision was a narrow squeak B1 - now at least it is securely that!!

It isn't that anything I wrote yesterday was unclear because of the typos - but literary carelessness easily erodes the credibility of the writer, as at a subliminal or conscious level, the reader notes the glitches in the syntax and suspects glitches in the content. But  more than that - it is surely important to write with grace and accuracy, with precision and freedom, within the rules of language and grammar yet with creative and imaginative flair. So that factual statements are not undermined by inaccurate spelling; beautiful thought is not deconstructed by being expressed in carelessly shaped language; and persuasive encouragement is not contradicted by red pen marks all over the exhortation.

Of course the spell-check helps, and the wavy green lines - but stick to them all the time and language becomes standardised, those tricks of language and structure, the bending of the rules that identify originality, are flattened out into a prosaic properness lacking the very things that make writing interesting, memorable and worth the time to read and enjoy. 

Amongst those whose lives depend on taking care with words are poets. Elizabeth Jennings has a special place in my personal canon. Her care with words, and her care for human experience, her inward surrender to the power of words and to the wonder of language as the limited expression of what we sense is inexpressible but essential to say, make her a poet of immense sensitivity and insight.

Hours and Words

There is a sense of sunlight where

Warm messages and eager words

Are sent across the turning air,

Matins, little Hours and Lauds,

 

When people talk and hope to teach

A happiness that they have found.

Here prayer finds a soil that is rich

And sets a singing underground.

 

Let there be silence that is full

Of blossoming hints. When it is dark

Men's minds can link and their words fill

A saving boat that is God's ark.

 

O language is a precious thing

And ministers deep needs. It will

Soothe the mind and softly sing

And echo forth when we are still.

                     (Elizabeth Jennings, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 324-5

"O language is a precious thing......"

And therefore our prayers are to be crafted, shaped and formed out of the language of the soul so that the language of our prayers is not insultingly banal, lazily informal, or repeatedly recycled cliche.

And therefore our writing is to be thoughtful and careful, not pedantic nor neurotic in a colourless rectitude, but open and freedom loving, expressing in words the beauty and ordinariness of what is so about our lives.

And therefore our emails may have to take a little more time if our language and meaning are to be clear, and the expression of ourselves as writers is to display courtesy, respect and care for our words, because they convey courtesy and respect and care to the recipient.

"Warm messages and eager words..." - that would be a telling criterion for those emails and texts, those letters and prayers, those compositions in words, of our best thoughts and best feelings.

The responsibility to take notice, pay attention and applaud creation

 

We are here to abet creation

and to witness it,

to notice each thing

so each thing gets noticed...

so that Creation need not play

to an empty house.

Annie Dillard, "The Meaning of Life".

W E Sangster the great Methodist preacher of the mid 20th Century once remarked that to notice a flower is both prayer and one of the sabbath moments of the soul.

I noticed this flower while meandering in the Botanic Garden in Aberdeen, a kind of botanical snowflake. Annie Dillard is one of the great noticers and her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains one of the best expositions of the field study of natural theology.

Holiday for a week so staying at home!

I'm having a holiday week at home in Westhill. It's been a busy time with end of Semester and end of Session marking and processing, but now everything is tidied up. And before we begin the wind up to next academic year I'm having a week to let the horizons draw back again and look at all the other things in life that also matter, indeed yes, they do!

There's much to see and enjoy on our doorstep - castles and gardens, coastal and hill walks, we are bird watchers and coffee shop connoisseurs, I get to do the cooking for dinner, and if it's raining we have DVD's, the cinema - oh, and rain jackets. Will have a day in Edinburgh to meet some folk and I'll carve out an hour at the National Galleries.

Meantime there hasn't been a poem here for a while. remedied now:

Soloist

Seeing above Glen Lyon a forester

sawing in a shaft of sunlight so far

 

downwind the sound is drowned

by perpetual lark-song, I am drawn

 

to that sweltering auditorium decades ago

and Rostropovitch playing Dvorak's cello

 

concerto; folk melody rising, the soloist

silhouetted in a nimbus of gold dust.

                      Stewart Conn, The Breakfast Room (Bloodaxe, 2010), page 54.

That's a holiday poem, and we will be walking in Glen Dye later this week, if there's a sunny day. I don't walk in rain for fun!

s!

Suffer the little children...and keep them safe

Two incidents while driving my Honda Jazz, which I am still loving apart from a predilection for punctures, and a temperamental petrol flap which only opens when it feels like it (which could be a problem if it decided to stay shut when the empty warning light glows greedily). Other than that it's a fun car to drive and makes the weekly Aberdeen to Paisley jaunt a cruise - and the petrol flap is to be healed of its recalcitrance at the Honda correction centre this weekend.

Driving along the street I saw beneath the parked cars two small legs and a ball. I slowed to a near stop and just as in the road safety advert, the ball bounced between two cars and trickled onto the road and the wee legs followed it, by which time I was stopped. Oblivious of the stationary Jazz the ball was retrieved and the child safely on the pavement again. Not sure what you are supposed to do these days - do you get out the car and try to be nice to a young child who doesn't know you, or do you thank God (I mean it!) you saw the wee legs running and played safe with children playing dangerously?

Then last night driving back to where I stay when down at College, I turn the corner into a road with a steep hill. A parked car has its door open and a can of tomatoes drops out and starts rolling downhill. The driver standing by the car door on the mobile scuttled after it to retrieve it before this encroaching Jazz squished it! After she picked it up disdainfully and walked back to the car still on the phone, another can landed on the road and started to roll down the hill..... By which time I was slowly passing the car and saw the child in the car seat cheerfully chucking the shopping out the car door. I'm now wondering how long that game lasted!

Suffer the little children, indeed. But these two episodes made me think - about the preciousness and precociousness of children. When Jesus put a child in the midst he was doing more than using a child as the first children's address. He was pointing to that vulnerability, that combination of mischief and innocence, that imperative on our society to cherish children and make all the allowances needed to make the world safe. And when a child complains about mum ignoring her while on the mobile why shouldn't the child make sure mum gets the messages by chasing the groceries....I love it!

Why it's life-enhancing to creatively and respectfully disagree

I like this!

Division of opinion, too often the fault line of human relationships, is, when we embrace it openly, what invigorates thinking and stirs new thought. It is the ground of new beginnings, the beginning of new insight, the foundation of new respect for the other. If anything sharpens the dull edge of a relationship it is often when it ceases to be boringly predictable. It is when everybody on two continents knows what we are going to say next that we know we have stopped thinking. Then we need to have a few old ideas honed. We need to think through life all over again. "Of two possibilities", my mother used to tell me, "choose always the third".

Uncommon Gratitude, Rowan Wuilliams and Joan Chittister, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), 41

Yes, I do like that. I seldom read Joan Chittister without nodding or shaking my head. She is a wise, shrewd, compassionate but unsentimental analyst of spiritual psychology and human relationships. Reading her is for me a form of therapy, if therapy is that process by which we are helped to think of ourselves and our world, and our relations to self and the other, with more compassion, insight and patience.

Her writings on the Rule of St Benedict are that rare thing in spiritual writing - well considered common sense, moderation without compromising on the essential, and enough humour to remind us that laughter is one of our most humanising and loveable traits. And she faithfully, persistently and persuasively urges Christians to see the world with eyes open - with creative thought and critical consciousness. As to creativity - "We fail to realize that it is precisely the ability to think beyond the context of the times in which we live that makes us fit to live in times to come." But also "Critical consciousness is the testing ground of new ideas, the gatekeeper of tomorrow".

  This resonates in my own spirit on a number of levels. Whatever else it means to grow older, it cannot mean growing narrower, or being content with familiar and limited horizons. However else spiritual maturity might be evidenced, it isn't in static thought, contented convictions, complacent certainties, fixed ideas, or life still drawing on the capital of past experience. Wherever the future of the church lies - and I mean the Church Catholic, the Body of Jesus Christ in all its rich diversity, historic rootedeness and future possibilities - that future cannot be a perpetuation of the present, let alone a repristination of the past.

In all our lives there come times when we have to think beyond the context of our times, think creatively, and be critically conscious of who we are, how the world is, and what it might mean for us to live faithfully for Christ in that context. That can be a soul stripping experience, a re-orientation that can only take place out of experiences of disorientation. And at such times prayer becomes a crie de couer, a re-aligning of what matters as we discover what matters most. And at such times I find T S Eliot's words from Little Gidding express better than any words I could compose, the risks and consequences of any one life that dares to be open to the love of God and to the mystery and miracle of human life, the range and beauty of human thought, and to human relationships in all their complexity and capacity for wounding and healing.

You are not here to verify,
instruct yourself,
or inform curiosity or carry report.
You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more than an order of words,
the concious occupation of the praying mind,
or the sound of the voice praying.

Good fences make good neighbours.

Today I'm in the fence-building business. Both sides of our gardens have woven slat fences that are greened with moss, broken and brittle and with posts that are shoogly (scottish word for unstable!) So we do the first one today, my neighbour and I, two amateurs who know how to dig holes, mix postcrete, use a spirit level, and both want a shot of the paint sprayer! As to whether the fence will be the epitome of fenceness - we'll see. But the negotiation and agreement and shared labour needed to build it is one of those episodes when social fabric is repaired and a few strands of neighbourliness woven in. Reminded me of some words from Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

and spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

......

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

that wants it down.

.....

Good fences make good neighbours.

Robert Frost.

Frost had such a clear mind about what makes for good and satisfying social relationships. Irrascible, confrontational, unforgiving and at times downright cussed he might be - but he knew how to put into words the way things should and could be, when human beings make good choices (the Road Less Travelled) or cement neighbourliness with postrete (Mending Wall) - as in this case, fallen boulders replaced in the interlocking balance of angle and weight that is the genius of the early New England drystone wall (and the Scottish drystane dyke). 

Questions as the oxygen of faith?

All who genuinely seek to learn,

whether atheist or believer,

scientist or mystic,

are united in having not a faith,

but faith itself.

Its token is reverence,

its habit to respect the eloquence of silence.

For God's hand may be a human hand,

if you reach out in lovingkindness,

and God's voice may be your voice,

if you but speak the truth."

(Paul Ferris, The Whole Shebang).

 

"Every question asked in reverence

is the start of a journey towards God.

When faith suppresses questions,

it dies.

When it accepts superficial answers,

it begins to wither.

Faith is not opposed to doubt.

What it is opposed to

is the shallow certainty that what we understand

is all there is."

(Jonathan Sacks, Celebrating Life).

Living Wittily is four years old

It's now 4 years since Living Wittily came on-line.  Even by then blogging seemed to have reached its peak and others who had been blogging for a while were giving up and moving on. Any activity that takes time and commitment to maintain on a near daily basis has to have some justification. And there is the challenge of actually saying something worthwhile, that someone else might read, and that might make a difference to their day.

Making a difference doesn't have to suggest world-changing scale. It can mean making someone smile, encouraging someone to keep going, changing a viewpoint, challenging assumptions that are unjust or untrue, opening up new perspectives, pushing back limited horizons, adding to the sum of knowledge (rare I think!), bringing others into conversation, pointing others to good reading as a beggar telling other beggars where there's the chance of some bread. And way at the beginning of Living Wittily I tried to say what the blog would be about, why I thought it worth investing time, ideas, and daily discipline of thought.

In four years there has been a lot of traffic, emails to take conversations further, from friends in Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand and places in between, and a regular stream of comments. I've happily desiderated on poetry and art, discussed theology and current affairs, recommended books and books. And it has been great fun. I often think as I write, and so end up writing what I didn't know I thought! Or I've felt strongly about something and felt better not just by saying it, but by taking time to understand why I felt so strongly in the first place.

But whatever I've written, has come out of the experience and the intellectual life that is who I am. Down the years of trying to live this life we call Christian, on this journey of following faithfully after Jesus, a discipleship of the intellect, I've tried to keep my heart open and my mind generous, itself a spiritual discipline that is the intellectual and affective expression of humility. That is, truth is not so much what we say, but what we seek; listening to the unfamiliar and hearing from another country of the mind and soul, is a disposition of hospitality and welcome; and so amongst the deeply rooted assumptions of my own intellectual life, which I try to tend with an all but horticultural carefulness, is the vastness and beauty of God, the limited horizons of all our human thought, and therefore the graced excitement of knowing that to seek truth, beauty and goodness, is to be truly and fully engaged as a human being, and a child of God. It is to live wittily.