Living Wittily

When Grief, Questions and Faith Co-exist in the Heart.

"Put yourself into a relation of indebtedness to some of the great thinkers of the past." So the Free Church of Scotland patriarch, Alexander Whyte, in a commencement lecture to students at New College, Edinburgh in the early years of the 20th Century. He himself was a lifelong student of the Puritan Thomas Goodwin; not only a student but an enthusiast, an apologist for Goodwin as one whose depth and penetration of the theology of grace, Whyte believed, was without a serious rival. 

Sixty years later the Christian philosopher Nels S Ferre advised those who wanted to grow an authentic spirituality and an intellectually honest and resilient faith to choose and master one thinker till they knew that person's thought thoroughly. From then on everything else that is read will be measured against that authority; the person whose thought you have taken time to think through, understand, critique and apply becomes a criterion by which to measure the quality of other writers and thinkers. 

My own experience has been something of a combination of Whyte and Ferre. There are several writers to whom I now return to read and read again; and there are thinkers whose thoughts have kept me thinking, and continue to generate questions and insights; and there are books that will be a permanent presence on the shelves because they are now permanent companions on the way. 

Amongst those few thinkers and writers to whom I have "a relation of indebtedness", and whose theology, worldview and ideas give my own judgement critical ballast, is Julian of Norwich. Her one book has been a source and resource to which I have returned several times in my life since I discovered her in 1974.

The Revelations of Divine Love is a spiritual classic, a devotional masterpiece; but it is also a theologically radical exploration of the Christian understanding of God. That God is love, eternally, definitively, essentially Love, is for Julian no mere Christian truism to be qualified by a safety net of dogmatic constraints on what love can and cannot mean. Her anthropology, soteriology, ecclesiology and eschatology are themselves shaped and constrained within the most generous trustfulness and extravagant hopefulness about what God purposes for the entire creation. Julian's view of God walks the tight, high wire between the official teaching of the Church, and what God revealed to her through her vision of the Passion, and her subsequent decades of prayer, contemplation and revision of thought. 

In the past few months, following the death of our daughter Aileen, I have gone back to reading Julian daily, applying her slow and patient thoughtfulness about the love of God to my own heart and mind. When I read those famous outrageously hopeful words, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well", they read differently through the tears. Grief and hope are two utterly different and essentially human dispositions; grief is present suffering which is backward looking to inexplicable and irreplaceable loss. Hope requires a present trustfulness that looks forward, not negating the suffering of grief, but neither allowing such concentrated sadness to claim an ultimate priority over the meaning and purpose of each human life.

Grief by its very nature forces an examination of your life's foundations. If tragedy happens despite all your prayers, what good is praying? If God loves every person as if they were the only one, what about that one who was dearest to us? If all shall be well, what good is that future tense hopefulness to a heart broken right now in the present and for the foreseeable future, and struggling to find any point in whatever further away future is promised? If each human being is precious, unique and created, why do so many of those treasured human masterpieces of God's image,fall outside of that great plan God is supposed to have for all God has made? And especially, why allow the death of that one whose loss we now mourn to the depth of our love for them? 

Reading Julian doesn't answer all these questions; at least not at the level of rational persuasion, or logical argument. Amongst Julian's greatest gifts to those who read and pay attention to her, is the voice of a counsellor who speaks with the wisdom of decades long contemplation on just such questions. That voice is tempered by humility in the face of such desperate questioning; she understands, because she has lived these questions herself. As Rilke advised, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves." Patience is exactly what Julian models, both in her long contemplation of God's revelations to her, and in her willingness to accept that there is much she does not and cannot know. And that is the point at which questions reach the limit of their reach. Grief can co-exist with questions. It is faith and love and hope that enables life to go on without the answers; not because there are no answers, but because the eternal love in which we exist and subsist, historically demonstrated in the passion of Christ, the love of God is revealed as ultimately, finally and completely redemptive. 

And from the time that it was shown, I desired oftentimes to know what was our lord’s meaning And fifteen years after and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding, saying thus: “What would'st thou know thy lord’s meaning in this thing [the whole revelation]? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who showed it to thee? Love. What showed he to thee? Love. Wherefore showed he it to thee? For love. Hold thee therein, thou shalt know more of the same. But thou shalt never know therein other without end.” Thus was I taught that love is our lord’s meaning. 

  

Julian of Norwich: Envisaging the Unimaginable

This year in my study is going to be the year of Julian of Norwich. Every summer I choose a subject to focus on, and spend the year exploring and writing and taking time to listen to what I don't know, or, just as important, to hear again truth I've let slip and slide towards the periphery.

By regularly reading and thinking in company with significant literature there is time for words and ideas to seep into the soil of the mind and the heart. I'm not looking for someone to be an echo of what I already think, but to be a voice that interrupts my self-told narrative, and a friend who, for my own good, would rather speak truth I might not like than simply nod agreement with what I already think I know - and don't! 

Previously I spent regular time over the span of a year reading and thinking and in conversation with such friends as: Abraham Joshua Heschel, Charles Wesley, George Herbert, Thomas Merton, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sister Joan Chittister, Psalms and Psalmists, John the Evangelist, Walter Brueggemann, Denise Levertov, R S Thomas and a number of others since I started doing this, which was yonks ago!

I first read Revelations of Divine Love in 1972, on a grey and wet October afternoon, sitting on the top deck, front seat of a double decker bus, crawling slowly up Gilmorehill, heading for a late afternoon tutorial on Moral Philosophy. I've read, studied, prayed, taught (In Hanover, New Hampshire), and written on her masterpiece over all these years. I have a number of editions, including that first one I read in 1972 edited by Clifton Wolters in the Penguin Classics.

That bus journey is still a vivid memory. Looking through the front window, the rain was pouring down, like tears steaming down the glass, distorting the reality outside, yet fluid lenses through which we look at the broken heart of the world, through our tears. What I was reading, written in Medieval Norwich, aimed at creating the same effect in the reader; a telling of the Passion of Jesus, narrated by a woman whose vision of the Crucified would leave stigmata on her heart for the rest of her life. That life would be relatively long, but she was not to know that. Those two days of her vision, experienced in a near death experience of a woman desperately ill in an age of primitive medicine, these two days were 48 hours of physical, psychological and emotional suffering which for Julian replicated in her own anguish, the utter love and tragic Passion of the crucified Christ, pouring out with his life blood, the love of God. What all that would come to mean, after over twenty years of reflection and risky theologising, is told in the book that now bears Julian's name, Revelations of Divine Love.   

This time round, reading Julian's revelations deeply, I want to repeat an experiment I first tried several years ago. That year I was spending time with Paul the Apostle, and his letter to the Colossian Christians. Alongside the study of the Greek text, with regular slow reading through the letter over months, and working through the text using scholarly commentaries, I worked on a tapestry which was a visual representation of the heart of what Paul was writing. I had started with a blank canvas, read Colossians several times, and drew a tough but provisional sketch. 

The new tapestry (photo above) is called "All manner of thing shall be well..." Not much beyond a sketch just now, but I hope it gradually takes on the colours of hopefulness, life, beauty and trust. Once again I want to make connections between reading a written text, and seeking to express the ideas it contains, and the inner responses it evokes, and provokes. The sketch is entirely provisional. From my previous knowledge of Julian and her book I have a sense of what I would like to attempt - but I'm open to whatever nascent ideas I might have at the moment, being revised and even supplanted by whatever arises from the experience of reading and listening to this wise woman whose book is such a rich gift to the Church. To interpret a text using colour, shape, image and texture is itself an art form common in the Medieval church. So, we'll see.  

Some Important Metaphors in the Moral Grammar Book.

Standing in the grass lane between two high hedges. On the right, and on the other side of hedge, the 18th Century rose garden. On the left, and over the hedge, is the 17th Century rose garden. Between them, this motorway of manicured grass, and at the intersection, the crossroads of paths, this summer house with neither glass in the windows, nor doors in the frames. It is a building open to whoever wants to enter.

At the end of the path, in both directions there are walls; it is, after all, a walled garden. But in the wall, in the distance, a gate. So not the wall of a fortress, a garden wall, a sheltering wall.

The balance of open and enclosed, the symmetry of windows and doors, produced one of those important moments of insight that demand later reflection.

At the time I felt the aesthetic impact of open doors and windows, a clear inviting path, sheltering walls and high hedges, and an unlocked gate. But I took the photo because the harmony of shape, light and evocative metaphor was demanding more of me than aesthetic appreciation and joy in perceived beauty.

On the warmest, sunniest day of the year so far, enjoying an ancient garden filled with old roses and laid out in the garden geometry of previous centuries, I glimpsed some of the most important metaphors in the moral grammar book.

For walls, read borders. In the current cultural climate in the United Kingdom our current Government is busy constructing and defending legal and administrative guidelines to narrow the gates of entry to our country. At the same time within those walls /borders, policies are developed with the intention of creating a "hostile environment" for illegal immigrants; the problem with this is that an environment is pervasive, inescapable, it is where people live and move and have their being. The hostile environment affects everyone who who has to breathe the cultural air. It means those who rightfully have their home in our midst, have to prove they have a right to live amongst us and to stay here. And the gate is being deliberately narrowed. Hostility is seldom an improvement in a culture's ecology.

That summer house with open doors, and limited space within. The global pressures on people whose lives have become intolerable are not going to recede because we build bigger walls, make the gates increasingly narrow, and make it known there is no welcome here. Openness is an important moral metaphor in my own ethical syntax. Those open doors and windows, and that broad path of tended grass between two high hedges, argue a generosity that contradicts narrow gates and high walls and the whole mindset that sees the 'other' as threat.

The aesthetics of the photo seemed to require appreciation of uninterrupted geometry, symmetry and balance. The only person present, and he is invisible, is the photographer. Would the presence of people 'waste' the picture? Aren't gardens human creations, for human enjoyment, and however beautiful and manicured, don't they remain sterile and incomplete without a human presence? Is there a danger that, in wanting the garden for ourselves, the whole hostile environment mindset is less about controlling borders, and managing immigration, and more an exercise in exclusion of those who are 'other' and 'different' and whose presence is perceived to 'waste the picture'? 

Of course borders are an essential political reality. And yes, immigration must be managed in ways that maintain social stability. The challenge is how to do this in a global, multicultural world going through one of the most disruptive periods in recent human history, especially for people in the less resourced and developed parts of the world.

In the photo one hedge is in shadow, the other in sunlight; earlier that day it was the other way round. Time passes; history is fluid; human experience changes and adapts in the attempt to live together, to build peace and co-operation, to plan a future that includes all of us. There is a quite subtle but ultimately significant difference between optimism and hopefulness, at least as I experience and understand those words.

Optimism is less well founded in reality and human intention than hopefulness. Optimism more easily dissolves into wishful thinking. Hopefulness is more about worldview, mindset and core conviction. For me, as a Christian, I see the world as a place where resurrection happened. In human history, in a garden in the early morning, the life of God blazed out of the bleakest blackness with a Yes that reverberates through space and time, to this day, and tomorrow. John Bell says something like that in his Easter Hymn:

In a garden, just at dawn,
Near the grave of human violence,
The most precious Word of Life
Cleared his throat and ended silence,
For the good of us all.

It is hard to be open to the future if we are closed to people who are other than ourselves. It is impossible to build peace with the materials of a hostile environment. We cannot build a better future with higher walls, narrower gates, and paranoia about who walks into our photos and wastes the harmony and symmetry of our comfort zones. As a follower of Jesus, I remain hopeful, but not passive. There is in Christian hope a note, a tone, of defiance. Christian hope is biased, leaning towards justice, tilted into whatever makes for peace, weighted towards reconciliation as the eternally preferred modus operandi of God in Christ. 

Look at the photo again. The red rose intruding on a scene dominated by greens and white. It is incongruous, out of place, and could easily be edited out. But no. It is there as a protest and a presence, as a reminder and a reason to be hopeful. The flower and colour of love celebrates a world where resurrection happened, where reconciliation is God's categorical imperative, and where the Christian vision culminates in the most inclusive scene of the Bible:

 "I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands." (Rev 7.9)