Living Wittily

Historical Novels as Background for Biblical Texts?

I've just updated the sidebar on what I'm currently reading. Just to mention the most recent series by Conn Iggulden. If you haven't read his historical novels you might want to have a look. Well over a year ago I read The Gates of Athens, the first in his new series on Ancient Greece, begins with King Darius on a punitive expedition to the Greek city states. Failing to subdue them he vows to raze the Greek cities and so the scene is set for the battle of Thermopylae. The sequel, Protector, is set some years later when Xerxes has succeeded Darius and goes to fulfil his father's vow to punish and finally subdue the Greeks. The largest army and naval fleet ever assembled marches and sails in overwhelming numbers. The rest is history.

Which is why Iggulden is such a gripping novelist. He makes it his business to know the history, to imagine within the context of the times the politics, the cultures, and the characters. The detail of social behaviour, ancient values, military strategy, social structures from slaves to senators, the early days of democracy - its benefits and dangers; all of this woven into a narrative in which the main circumstances are already given, but which becomes a story of flesh and blood people, struggling to find and hold on to their foothold on life. It's a story of Empire and power, the collision of cultures and ideologies, and the outcome would shape the destinies of West and East.

Amongst the tests of Iggulden's skill is how far he captures the varying contexts and scenes. I've recently re-read the biblical stories of Esther and Daniel. Iggulden makes you feel the fear and awe of coming anywhere near King Darius and his son King Xerxes. One of primary levers in these novels is the contrast between absolute power which cannot be questioned, and communal decision making with all the messiness of rhetoric, persuasion, political positioning, voting alliances and all the other curbs on power of a fledgling democracy.

All of this makes for novels driven by urgency, two forms of political ideology on a collision course. Having read Iggulden, I'm aware that the biblical accounts take on a deeper texture as the minds and motives of these ancient emperor kings are imagined and portrayed with considerable weight of research behind them. It's an interesting thought, the historical novelist as background reading for getting a better sense of the biblical text. Especially as in this case, when both Esther and the first half of Daniel are themselves told with the literary skill and imaginative freedom that is creative with the facts and the circumstances in ways intended to strengthen the faith of the faithful.  

    

"Love ever lives, and gives, forgives..."

Regular readers here will know that one of my interests is designing and working tapestry. The theme, choice of colours, mixing of coloured strands, decisions about which stitches to use; the scope for messing it up is quite wide!

So there are times when doing freehand tapestry you realise, "No. That doesn’t work!" The colour isn’t right, or the stitch is wrong, and you've done a lot of them. You’ve been stitched up! That’s when you need a wee tool called a stitch remover. A needle pointed hook that cuts out the mistakes and gives you a chance to try again.

Not so easy though, when in the daily worked tapestry of our lives, we've stitched ourselves up by saying the wrong words, or made embarrassing mistakes, or misjudged someone, or behaved in a way we now regret.

Some things can't be unstitched; but where they can, we should do it. Words like forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, kindness, goodwill – they’re all good stitch removers where we made false stitches that don't fit the overall pattern of the life we're trying to lead. “Blessed are the peacemakers…the merciful…the reconcilers.” Words that unstitch our mistakes.

The Importance of The Preface.

One of the most important contents of any significant book is The Preface. A Preface is the story of the book, an author's apologia for ever thinking someone might read the book, and even the Preface. Why was this book written like this, at this time? Why should a reader take the time and effort to read it? Does it say anything new or different?

Yesterday Geetanjali Shree was the first Indian author to win the Booker Prize for her novel Tomb of Sand. In her acceptance speech (let's call it a spoken Preface) she explained her excitement that now a whole Hindi tradition of storytelling and literary art would now be showcased to the world. When writing the book she never dreamt for a moment that she might win any prize, let alone the International Booker. 

"Behind me and this book lies a rich and flourishing literary tradition in Hindi, and in other South Asian languages. World literature will be the richer for knowing some of the finest writers in these languages," she said.

That will be reason enough to go looking for her novel.

But back to the written Preface. One of my particular interests is biblical exegesis, and biblical commentaries are one of the joys of my life. Over the past 50 years publishing of biblical commentaries in series has become a religious publishing phenomenon. One result of this is the to be expected paragraph in almost every Preface, explaining why yet another commentary on a document - say the Gospel of John - a text that has been exhaustively, minutely, and laboriously examined over two millennia and on which at any time there are a hundred volumes of commentary available - and that isn't including the multiplying kingdom of online resources.

What can be left to be said? Why rehash what's already out there. Qoheleth asks if there is anything new under the sun - he is also the impatient interrogator of authors and publishers about much study being a weariness to the flesh. Still, for those who are interested in such textual immersion, a well written Preface is a window into the mind of the writer and the justification for this further attempt to explain, explore and expound.

Now and again a writer leaves aside the scholarly seriousness and says "yah-boo" to convention. There are acknowledgements and thanks - sometimes a separate page from the Preface - but most often as the last context setting paragraphs. And so I come to what set me off on this post in the first place, a delightful debunking of this courteous practice of Acknowledgements. It comes in volume two of Donald Hagner's commentary on Matthew - I smirked admiringly when I read it. 

 

 

Fun and Faith at a Lochside with a Camera.

Sometimes you just can't get the photo you want, and you have to settle for the photo you get! This small loch on the Dunecht Estate is home to various water fowl, including two nesting swans with cygnets imminent, moorhen and waterhen, mallards (like the two males in the photo, and even a cormorant touring inland and as nonchalant as you like, landing on a tree. I kid you not - see the second photo here.

But back to the photo you get. Two mallard ducks in full profile, reflected on deep blue water with luminescent head feathers. Too much to ask? Apparently so, because one of them, I think with deliberate intent to frustrate, swam slowly away from me, head turned. 

The caption could be: "Keep swimming this way, don't looks back - or your face will be all over his Facebook page!"

I use my camera for fun and for faith. By which I mean the sheer pleasure of seeing something and taking a photo that enables you to look more closely. By which I also mean my camera is as important for my contemplative life as any book however spiritual. Walking slowly round a loch, sharing the space with such beautiful creatures in the business of getting on with their lives, I find that all those essays and chapters I've read on natural theology, confronted by the beauty of the moment, fall into a pattern as varied as a kaleidoscope and as persuasive as an argument.

The philosophical theology and defensive dogmatics that give shape to our intellectual constructs, are sometimes challenged not by an answering logic, but by that instant of perception between seeing and the heart singing. There is an exchange between the seer and the seen in which, for me at least, I sense the depth of things, and want to kneel in that deep place within and acknowledge a communion of creatureliness between this miracle of a world, and my own being, and being here. 

On a blue sky day, the blue reflected on the water and the sunlight highlighting the ripples, I was walking and thinking about those ripples of memory about people we love and have loved, friendships that are amongst life's most durable relationships of mutual investment. The coincidence of thought and circumstance, the fusing of inner environment and immediate landscape, the coalescence of past memory and the present moment, brings on a sense of the fittingness of things, as if Someone had set the world up just this way.

God's voice is of the heart.

I do not therefore say all voices of the heart are God's;

and to discern his voice amid the voices

is that hard task to which we each are born.

Those moments, they don't come often. But that they come at all, for me is enough. I've learned to pay attention to this particular voice of the heart. Taking this photo I moved from frustration at a duck's intransigence, to amusement that I should ever think ducks should behave like stars on a photo shoot! At such moments of frustration, it may well be that the voice is indeed God's voice, the Creator communing with the creature, the summum bonum lovingly frustrating my desire to control, possess, impose my will on a world where I am a guest, not an owner.

Now, that second photo of a cormorant in a tree. There I was looking at swans, coots and ducks when this angular black seabird comes flying in like the bird equivalent of an Apache helicopter!

I knew cormorants could land on trees - there are masterpieces of Japanese prints showing precisely that image. But I'd never seen it till early in May, standing at this same spot, the cormorant circled the loch before a near vertical ascent to the high branches overlooking the water.

To call it an epiphany is pushing it - but it was another of the moments that provoked gladness. And we all need such provocations!

How's that for a description of God interrupting our inattentiveness - provocations of gladness? May there be many thereof! 

Abraham Joshua Heschel: The Echo of the Voice of the Prophets.

It was when reading the early Walter Brueggemann I first came across the name of Abraham Joshua Heschel. I found an old pbk copy of The Prophets and discovered in Heschel a way of writing about the Old testament that was new to me. In my theological education I had used standard introductions, and the dominant names were Gerhard Von rad, Walther Eichrodt, Ott Eissfeldt, Claus Westermann, Artur Weiser and as a conservative pushback R K Harrison. But on the prophets it was Von Rad.

A J Heschel's The Prophets is a masterpiece, and a classic. Mind you, Gerhard Von Rad has retained classic status too, both for his 2 volume Old Testament Theology and as commentator on Genesis and Deuteronomy. But Heschel made no attempt at "objective critical scholarship" rooted in the historical critical project. Not that he dismissed such approaches - it simply wasn't his way of reading the sacred texts of the prophets.

I began reading more of Heschel, and eventually he became a regular conversation partner in my study. Philosopher, humane scholar, Hasidic lover of the text, passionate apologist for a faith that was humane, laced with wonder, fuelled by moral passions, humble and awe-filled in his conception of human existence lived out before the presence of God who speaks, acts and relates to each person alert enough to notice the miracle that is life itself.

Heschel has been one of my teachers since I bought that first book over 40 years ago. As one who wrote a great book on The Prophets, over the years many recognised Heschel as a latter day manifestation of that same ethical passion and theological vision brought to bear on the urgent and at times dangerous questions of our times.

I go back to him regularly, to hear him say again words that make sense of those times in our lives when what we need more than anything, is someone who can confirm, yet again,

that doing good is worth it,

that compassion is better than selfishness,

that hope is defiance of despair

that creating generously trumps selfish consumption every time,

that life lived with God on the horizon enables us to see deeper, further and at times, more clearly the mystery and miracle of it all,

and that prayer isn't about me making God notice me, but being open to God so that when God speaks in silence or in word, I notice God because I'm learning to pay attention, listening with the soul. 

I guess you could say I'm encouraging you to seek out Heschel's wisdom. The slim anthology, I Asked for Wonder is a good place to start. Here is just one extract:

"We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open our thoughts to Him -- feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts. We see more than we can say. The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting; the flowers like signposts of His goodness -- only we have failed to be testimonies to His presence, tokens of His trust. How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it." Pages 38-9. 

  

Wisdom and the Willingness to Wait While Understanding Grows.

I've been silent here for a while, the longest hiatus since I started Living Wittily at the beginning of January in 2007. There are reasons, and there are seasons, but I'm back. It would be easy to say I had been having a sabbatical, but that would sound as if non-activity here was intentional. Or that I couldn't be bothered, but that wouldn't be fair on myself - I'm someone who writes to share from that inner place where we each do our thinking, hoping, worrying, arguing, wondering and thanking.

Truth is, I had writing deadlines to fulfil which take priority as they carry obligation, promises and the goodwill without which many important writing projects couldn't happen. Then there is the post-Covid mystery of why when a virus is allegedly gone, its shadow continues to be felt. Several important changes in life are also being navigated and there's only so much can co-exist in a mind spending much of its time and energy being pre-occupied by what is important to the exclusion of most other discretionary pastimes!

And that is an admission of limitation, finitude, or to put it in less rarefied language, you can only do so much, and the amount, I find to my surprise, reduces as the years increase. But there it is. However in all of this, every day is a gift, and each day full of its own gifts. The motto on this Blog was chosen when it started, and it remains the guiding philosophy of what I'm trying to do and say when I write here:

"God made the angels to show His splendour - as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds."

Stephanie Paulsell, now of Harvard Divinity School, once wrote a remarkable article called "Pastoral Agility and Intellectual Work."  In it she argues persuasively, and persistently, that the intellectual discipline required to study whether history, science, theology, philosophy, mathematics, logic or whatever, fulfils the deeply humanist urge to learn, know, understand, and to grow therefore as a human being in wisdom. Such intellectual work requires patience, a willingness to wait while knowledge builds towards understanding.

But not only understanding of the subject studied - understanding of the self that is studying, the mind that is learning, and the world around in which life is to be lived, people related to, communities built and sustained, vocations fulfilled, tragedies and achievements to be navigated. I've read Paulsell's article many a time in the 20 years since I discovered it. I used it in theological education with students impatient to learn, and at times impatient with learning as a delay to actually getting things done. 

Living Wittily is a place where I do some of that intellectual work, or report on some of my own findings, thoughts, and experiences in this quite wonderful capacity we have as human beings to look on the world with wonder, and if we're half way wise, to be grateful for every gifted day as time and place where we can do intellectual work, grow in understanding of God, our world, ourselves and each other. That could be called, amongst many other terms we could use, living wittily in the tangle of our minds.

The motto is from Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons. 

The photos are taken in Dunecht Estate in early May, on a day when the new leaves on the beech trees seemed to be suggesting autumn!