Living Wittily

Parties, photos and our literary DNA

OK. After several requests and not a few demands - here's the picture - Sheila and I routinely out for a night....! Unfortunately the picture doesn't show the whole me - which included multicoloured trousers, pink gloves, luminous striped socks and lurid lime green plastic shoes. That one might yet be emailed to me, in which case, for a small fee.......

Must be a new lease of life. Or we've suddenly become socially in demand. Whatever, we are just back from another party in Aberdeen. Not fancy dress this time - a significant birthday of a good friend. But we are back in Aberdeen later this week for a 90th birthday party.

Three parties in 12 days. And each of them special because the person whose life is being celebrated is special and integral not only to our lives but to that sense of who we are, that derives from the giftedness of those relationships that define, enrich and impinge on our lives in many welcome ways. I believe deeply that we are persons in relation, and that individuality only matters when it is encompassed within the shared lives of those who move in and out and within our lives. Who these people are, how we met them, what led to the formation of such enduring connections of love, affection and friendship is part of the mystery of human relatedness, but also part of the graced gift that each person is who troubles to think any one of us worth getting to know.

So not much time for reading you'd think. True enough, but wee corners of time still found here and there. I've just finished Susan Hill's book about a year's reading of only the books already in her home. Along the way she dishes out wisdom and advice, opinion and prejudice, gossip and mini-memoirs - the book is a delight. And there are still a couple of quotes worth inserting here. The last one did get a couple of gentle correctives from Rick and Jason - you can see my comment response on Jason's blog here. Anyway, here's Ms Hill saying what I've long suspected - that the books we read deeply become part of who we are:

"Books help to form us. If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me?....What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA."

 Susan Hill, Howard's End is on the Landing (London: Profile Books, 2009), 201-2.

Ornithology, poetry and around 70 shopping days to Christmas!!!

Feel the need of a poem. Too much theological prose dessicates the imagination, and makes the mental processes sluggish.

(Interesting how we learn words - 'dessicated' I learned as a wee boy who loved coconut and raided the packets bought for baking)

Just watched the robin clearing out the local sparrow scruff from the back garden. Reminds me of Fanthorpe's poem, "The Robin".

It's reference to Christmas is allowed in October - Dobbies have their Christmas cards out. So that's all right then.

The Robin

I am the proper

Bird for this season –

Not blessed St Turkey,

Born to be eaten.

                    

I’m the man’s inedible

Permanent bird.

I dine in his garden,

My spoon is his spade.

 

I’m the true token

Of Christ the Child–King:

I nest in man’s stable,

I eat at man’s table,

Through all the dark winters

I sing

Crowded trains, scowling train drivers and exuberant passengers.

On the train going into Glasgow to meet Sheila around 4 o'clock Thursday.

Stop at Corkerhill and it seems the entire student cohort of Cardonald College want to get on this train.

Three loud talking and laughing female teenagers threw themselves into the seats opposite and beside me.

The one on my side dunted me as she landed, turned and smiled which I think was an apology.

In front of me on the table a glossy Now Magazine, and the girls across from me picked it up and looked at me. No I said, it isn't mine! One smiles, laughs at her pals, and then they flick through it using the various pictured celebs for slagging off target practice.

As we draw into Glasgow Central another train drew alongside and the driver with a permafix unsmile was within four feet of our window. All three girls waved and smiled and he looked across - but his mouth didn't flinch one millimetre towards that place where life might look half tolerable for him.

Which sent all three of them into near hysteria mixed with incredulity at their failure to coax him back to the world where it isn't all so grim.

Embarrassed by this virtuoso facial performance of negative emotional equity I muttered to the three of them, 'Apologies on behalf of my generation'. The one holding the magazine looked at me and said one word 'Awthatsawrightyourcool'

By the time I met Sheila at Queen Street I'd stopped floating, buoyed up by such proximity to fun, energy and young possibilities of life, grinning in defiant goodwill at those daft enough to make a career out of joylessness.

Oh, and while we're on the daft stuff. While waiting for Sheila's train to arrive, I noticed a woman eating chips while texting a friend, and managing both with considerable dexterity. Presumably, despite the fact that the phone keypad must have been getting a bit slippery......multi-tasking develops in ever stranger combinations, huh?

Arch-episcopal fun, local authority foolishness, and food to restore the soul....

OK. This photo has come by a convoluted route, latterly via Maggi and Ben, and it's just too good to not post on every blog hosted by admirers of the finest Archbishop for yonks. Those who criticise Rowan Williams for being too intelligent to be an Archbishop, for being out of touch and having no idea about the life of ordinary folk, could do with some of the unself-conscious playfulness on display here. "Except you become as a little child..." is an appropriate admonition that comes to mind. I wonder how some of the more rasping journalists would have coped with the serious reality of children's play in a way that both enjoys and affirms the life of the child.

And then to another kind of foolishness altogether. You know how we are all to become energy conscious, climate change aware, careful where we put our big stomping carbon footprints? So yesterday driving down near Braehead and we observe the Council workers cutting the roadside grass with muckle big flymos, wearing the regulation fluorescent orange overalls. It was drizzly wet and windy, and the massacred grass lay in green clumps and apparently needed tidying up. So behind the flymo operator came another toiler in the rain - not with a grass rake to gather it into compostable organic stuff. Naw, naw. Nothing so environmentally responsible. he was sporting one of the big petrol fuelled blowers with which he was blowing the slaughtered grass into the adjoining fields, and doing so against the prevailing stiff breeze! Apart from the obvious non composting policy, here we have a machine that cuts but doesn't collect the grass (petrol fuelled), and one which blows grass against the wind, using petrol to disperse what the wind would disperse in half an hour.

The aforementioned drizzle, pushed into our faces by a stiff breeze, tried its best to waste our walk around the Mugdock reservoir. Nae chance! We knew that when we got back home some of Jim's magnifique home made French onion soup, along with a smoked applewood cheese toastie would restore that inner sense of wellbeing that only comes to those who do the walk and wallow in self-righteousness over a large bowl of immodestly described consummate cuisine.........

Rare sighting of Scottish Baptist Hoodie

Recent sighting of a Baptist monk, pictured while in full conversational flow, beside a secluded loch in the Central Highlands in early summer. Note that the habit, or hoodie, hides the monk's tonsure - for those who don't know, that's the remaining halo of hair once the crowning glory has departed. The sideways glance and talkative grin are characteristic of this particular species of Baptist Hoodie. This posting keeps the promise I made to post photos demonstrating that on rare occasions I can appear in public without a tie!

Giving the horse a bath!

The horse is called Summer Bird.
Getting a bath from his trainer after he won
the Belmont Stakes.
(From The Herald, Friday July 31)

Coffee and the complicated complexities of colour coded milk

In Garden Centre Tearoom.

Ask for a latte.

Then, hoping for a skinny latte I ask if they can do one with semi-skimmed milk.

Answer from smiling but bemused sales executive : "We've only got green milk or blue milk."

Now you need to be quick, domesticated and sure of your retail facts but I got it right away and first time.

"Green", I said.

Not the blue - which is full cream.

Not the red which they didn't have - which is skimmed.

But the green - semi skimmed.

Sales executive and customer happy.

Green or blue milk. Sectarianism. Sneaks in everywhere so it does! 

Modest makeover in progress.....

Decided I wanted a change of design on Living Wittily. A recent photo of me at a wedding reception replaces the previous relaxed-tourist-at-the-Eden-Project, pretending he's in the jungle. To forestall rude comments I am virtually teetotal (when asked during a recent health check how many units of alcohol I drank I estimated around 12 - a year! the safe limit is 21 a week!!) - so the smile is genuine pleasure in the company and the occasion!

By the way, I do sometimes look spectacularly bad in photos - I have several which if ever I begin to take myself too seriously I just might post. Possible titles include "The Wayward Pressure Hose"; "The College Hoodie"; "The Sweaty Cost of Fitness"; "The Ridiculous Hat"; "The Cardigan Clad Scholar". The clown in the above painting is not one of mine - or me.

Also making a few changes to links on the sidebar. I'm not all that interested in accumulating long lists of links however generally useful. There are those who do that really well and if you're looking for more comprehensive lists click on Jason Goroncy and Ben Myers - enough links there to span the widest interests.

Short "First Call" lists will replace the miscellaneous list of links to other Blogs, and will include Baptists, Biblical, Theology, and Poetry and Theology. Living Wittily will continue as a forum for exploring what it means to serve God wisely, creatively and obediently; to follow after Christ gratefully and faithfully; and to live in the power and grace of the Spirit. And to do so with a voice that looks humanely forth on human life in a world that is God loved, reconciled in Christ and still creatively touched by the Holy Spirit.

What I'm trying to do is still best understood by this early post, which explained (and still explains) the motto at the head of the Blog, and what I'm trying to be about.

Live - Love - Learn - Hoodies and formative theological education

 

Now I don't want to give the wrong impression. I remain mostly predictable, generally conservative, and occasionally idiosyncratic in my dress sense. I don't think "fashion" is a term that sits comfortably with my approach to choice of apparel, and not one those who know me would immediately choose as a Jim descriptor. So when I step outside my own safe boundaries there's usually a good reason or two.

I am now the possessor of one of those socially problematic garments, perceived as even sinisterly threatening by tabloids and other culturally alarmist groups. I've worn it in public a number of times. It's a College hoodie. Some of our students took the College logo, had it converted to a graphic for printing on textile, added the motto - Live - Love - Learn, and took orders. I ordered a hoodie. Black with a white logo, and the motto backgrounded in rust red.

I can now be seen wearing it in the two places where such a garment is both useful and non-alarmist for people nervous around sweatchirts with hoods. When I'm running round the park on the days it's a bit cool, I wear it - hoping maybe it even makes me look a bit cool. Early morning at my desk before the heating clicks on, it's an easy comfy top - and the hood makes me feel and look even more like a monk at prayer, given my now permanent minimalist hair style.

I'll maybe get Sheila to take a photo, and post it some day when nothing more interesting is happening in the world.

The Mossy Oak Camouflage Bible - The What???

Mossy Oak Personal Size Giant Print Bible, NKJV

Camouflage, Bonded Leather

"Outdoor enthusiasts now have a Bible from Mossy Oak®! The number one brand in camouflage brings their enthusiasm for the outdoors together with the passion for God's Word. "It's not a passion. It's an obsession." That's the way every Mossy Oak® fan feels about their camouflage Bible. Enjoy all of God's creation while reading God's Word!" (From the publisher's blurb!)

Is it just me, or is there something odd to the point of daft about wanting a camouflage Bible?

Who are we hiding it from?

And if it is camouflage what's with the big orange packaging?

More seriously, how come those who say they take the Bible seriously and are passionate about it, (note it's the New King James Version), trivialise by commercialising, and titillating the consumer taste-buds of any niche market with daft dollars to spend, and try to persuade us this is spiritual, OK, sensible. 

Is an ordinary straightforward pocket size Bible nae use outdoors?

Does this one have a built in compass? Is it waterproof? 

Doesn't the Giant Print make it a cumbersome addition to the haversack?

Published by Thomas Nelson, who also publish the Word Biblical Commentary - but, mercifully, not yet in a camouflage edition.