Living Wittily

historians of the actual

Reverence may be the road to the sacred and wisdom may be the natural song of the spirit, but story is the text of God and the groundkeeper of prayer. (24)

The Shaping of a Life is autobiography bent to the purpose of spirituality, story-telling as the medium of theology. And Tickle is alert to the dangers:

Compressing long years of gradual understanding into single epiphanies or even tying revelations to singular events may allow us to organize our spiritual autobiographies, but it certainly does not make us fine historians of the actual. (34).

So her honesty, and the correctives and disclaimers she inserts, make what might otherwise be an exercise in introspection and self-explanation best kept for a private journal, into a helpful example of how to map the way we have come. Glad I read it - but it's a hundred pages too long. That's a pity because the other 280 pages both as connected narrative, and as a mosaic of shorter stories where God is encountered in ordinariness, make the book worth the effort. None of us can so stand outside ourselves that, when it is our own story we are telling, we perform as 'fine historians of the actual'.

mountain and city

What to make of a woman whose father is a celebrated educationist, whose great grandparents on her mother's side were Jewish, who loves silence and solitude but also the interchange of relationships, who writes of a near death experience in the 1950's that has left indelible marks on her spirit, whose experience of serial miscarriage did not prevent her having a family of 7 children, who has rediscovered her Jewishness but within a clear Christian commitment, who is now a recognised expert on American religion and religious publishing, and is attached as an oblate to an Anglican monastery, and is now a bestselling writer and compiler of a three volume set of The Divine Hours, the ancient prayer practice of the Church?

I know that is one long sentence-question; feel free to put in any helpful punctuation, copy editing. But the book is also one long question - or rather a meandering account of how a life, like a river, makes its way to the sea - in its own time and never in a straight line. The Shaping of a Life is a mixed read; parts of it are chatty and lightweight in a magaziney (new word?) kind of way; some sections are movingly written describing the evolution of a faith with its wits about it; here and there she clunks a big theological nugget on the wooden floor and you're left to make of it what you will; some parts are dispensable, adding weightless bulk and perhaps clouding the focus of a book that I have enjoyed reading - except the bits I recognised as skim-worthy.

Brought up within sight of Tennessee's mountains, and then living in Memphis (in the early days of Elvis fever) she tells of how she 'walked straight into Western religion's most ubiquitous pair of twinned metaphors....the mountain and the city'.

I want to think about this - two metaphors that might give us the two handles we need to articulate a balanced spirituality for the 21st century. The lonely bleak thereness of the mountain, there, not built, a place that is given to us, not taken; and the crowded thereness of the modern city, built as human construct, taken and possessed with little sense of it as gift. Yet the urban owned property (real estate) and the isolated grandeur of the mountain each offer clues that might help us live more humanely - it is easy to demonise the city and romanticise the mountain. In Scotland we learn every winter about the inhospitable bleakness, the unforgiving danger, of blizzard blown mountains -

and while urban decay has its own bleakness, the life of our great cities also creates its own kinds of communities where people are cherished, laughter is made and compassion is there to be seen if we look for it.

Isaiah 2.1-5 combines the two metaphors, the mountain of the Lord's temple and Zion - mountain and city - and the vision is of justice, companionable walking, and the new technology of peace as weapons are recycled into horticultural implements to the benefit of the entire creation. It is one of the great visions - and amongst the key inspirations of my own faith....come O house of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

glimpses of uncoercive glory

Over at Faith and Theology, Ben Myers is doing his usual good job of nudging his blog visitirs towards books they havn't heard of, or would never think of reading - to our loss. This time from a slim volume by Schleiermacher, Two Letters to Dr Lucke (1829), he highlights one of Schleiermacher's rare one liners!

“[T]he verse John 1:14 is the basic text for all dogmatics, just as it should be for the conduct of the ministry as a whole.” (p. 59)

It's the biblical reference that makes the statement meaningful let alone remarkable. The eternal Word embodied, incarnation of divine in human, creator in creature, living amongst us, exuding uncoercive glory, overflowing with grace and replete with truth. The basic text for 'ministry as a whole'? There is an entire curriculum in that one Johannine testimony, "the Word became flesh"; and a lifetime's vocation living out the meaning of "dwelling amongst" the people we are called to serve; a humbling unreachability for us to bear witness to the glimpsed glory of Christ, except - He is still "full of grace and truth", grace for our emptiness and truth for our evasions.

The Shaping of a Life

What keeps theology from becoming a theoretical hobby, self-indulgently pursuing abstract concepts and intellectual structures is the rootedness of all good theology in the context of a life.  Some time before McLendon wrote his book on theology and biography, I had already met the kind of theology I enjoy reading best. It's found mainly in autobiography and biography, written with that combination of self knowledge and life savvy, a willingness to engage in an investigative journalism of the self in relation to God.

In addition to biography and autobiography, there are letters, journals, travel diaries - but each of them seeking to explore and explain the landscape of the spirit, to excavate and examine the rich ore of experience, especially the experience of God. Some of the best church history is in the definitive biographies ( Rack on Wesley, Oberman on Luther, Ker on Newman). But it is the less celebrated writers who often have most to share about their journey, the sights and insights of their travelling, the ways in which theology and faith, doctrine and practice, God and daily life, intersect in surprisingly disruptive and creatively constructive ways. What makes life-story-telling such an effective medium for real theology is simply this; God is the living God, the involved and subversively interested God who is made known in Christ, who became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and whose deepest and defintive statement is made in the life of a person.

So the story of a life is narrative theology. And that is what Phyllis Tickle's book is so good at. The story of a life growing and unfolding towards God. The title, The Shaping of a Life, indicates a slow process, organic and personal; the subtitle is about context, A Spiritual Landscape. I'll write more about this book when I'm finished it. For now three random, but significant influences in the shaping of her life - Psalms, pubs and T S Eliot. The chapter (26) on her discovery of a Memphis pub called The Pigskin is a beautifully observed narrative of community - here's just one sentence:

A pub presupposes not just any neighbourhood, but a particular  one of some density which it serves not as a private home or a public husting would, but is "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy.

Made me wonder about church as "that third good place" of satisfactory human intimacy. Discuss.

Hauerwas 5: Gladly needful and willingly dependent

The Sermon on the Mount is a text which is definitive of Hauewas' entire theological and ethical project. Jesus is not simply teaching an ethical code, but incarnating the Kingdom, which when lived, looks something like the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon is addressed, not primarily to individuals, but to the community of Jesus who as disciples, are called into a Kingdom where Jesus Rules, OK!

I like his emphasis on the communal intentions of the Sermon - not each lonely struggling individual disciple struggling to live up to each Beatitude. No, but a supportive community of the gladly needful and willingly dependent, in all their diversity, discovering and displaying and disseminating - peace, comfort, hunger for justice and so on. The Beatitudes are about us rather than me; about grace given rather than virtue achieved.

Hauewas' take on virtue ethics, as they come into conversation with the Sermon is this: 'For Christians the virtues, the kind of virtues suggested by the Beaititudes, are names for the shared life made possible through Christ'.

Virtue - community - Christ - a community of virtue whose resource and motivation is the presence, example and gift of Jesus. And when it comes to anger and lust, the corrosive antitheses of forgiveness and generosity, the obstacles to peace and gift, Hauerwas' hard headed spirituality says just what's needed:

Alone we cannot conceive of an alternative to lust, but Jesus offers us participation in a kingdom that is so demanding we discover we have better things to do than concentrate on our lust. If we are people committed to peace in a world of war, if we are a people committed to faithfulness in a world of distrust, then we will be consumed by a way to live that offers freedom from being dominated by anger or lust.... (Page 69).

Consumed by a way to live - that seems to encapsulate what Hauerwas, and his conversation partners Bonhoeffer and Yoder, are so serious about. Christian discipleship is walking a way in such a way, that it leads to the cross, where God is most fully revealed, and from which the community of Jesus takes it moral and spiritual, and therefore political bearings.

Grateful remembering and proper sadness

You know how it is when you can't be in two places at once? The prayer meeting or the football? Work or Starbucks? Family or friends? There are two places you want to be, two people or groups of people you want to spend time with, but it's the same time, and they are different places. Such choices are balancing acts, and the degree of difficulty depends on the occasion, and who else matters in the decision.

Next week I'll attend the funeral of a woman who, with her husband, share with us decades of friendship, both generous and graceful. At precisely the same time, on the same day next week, a close friend has invited me to his mother's funeral thirty miles away. I've known them for ages too. Can't do both - so I'll stay with the one that already had a promise around it, and explain why to my other freind, even when I know such explanation isn't needed.

A clash of funerals is a deeply felt reminder that life isn't to be taken for granted, nor the happiness that comes from our deepest relationships squandered. Three weeks after my own mother's funeral I'll again be celebrating a life well lived, giving thanks for the gift that is a person's presence, and doing so while acknowledging now the sadness and loss that is their absence. There are few human gestures more significant than honouring life, remembering gratefully, offering back to God praise with proper sadness. 

The circular argument of consolation

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we might be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort by which we ourselves are comforted by God.

It is difficult to improve on Paul's circular argument of consolation. In the community of Christ we are comforted comforters, consoled ministers of consolation. Following in the way of Christ isn't always a serene saunter; the places of affliction become hard schools of learning, in which the lessons learned, are transmuted by grace, to become a source of strengthening for others. So any help we can be is as conduits of God's comfort, making real and present to those struggling with the hard times in life, the faithful compassion of a God who also carries our sorrows. Hard to improve on this - and maybe even harder to live it - but living the love of God, and the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Spirit, is the essence of the obedience that is faith.

Over the past six weeks, a number of those close to me, in our family, the College, personal friends and colleagues in ministry, have been living through the kinds of suffering and anxiety that fill the heart with sorrow and fearfulness. The last week has brought several pieces of what we ominously call 'bad news'. Recent bereavement, life-threatening illness, major surgery, worry about those we love as part of ourselves- for any one of us such experience tests our faith at the sore places. My own trust in God has seldom been of that anxiety free variety that gives outward shows of serenity. I suppose the urge to live, and to live fully, the need to love and to be loved, the joy and preciousness of all that makes this existence of ours both human and yet precarious, makes it hard to be prepared for those scary interruptions to our well-being; hard not to panic and be afraid; making trust a big ask. It's then we need the faith and faithfulness of each other, the trust and love of others holding and supporting us, because most of our usual handles on life are broken.

Years ago, Joseph Parker, on the sudden death of his wife, preached on 'When life crashes in - what then? It was a brave protest sermon against catastrophe - and it was made from the standpoint of faith. Asking hard questions of God - refusing simply to acquiesce as if God was beyond the reach of his most passionate complaints - owning both his sorrow and fearfulness for the future, admitting the need for God's love and mercy to be translated into the kindness and companionship of others. So that life could go on.

So today Paul's circular argument of consolation becomes for me a focus of activity and reflection and prayer. Intercession is to love others in the presence of God - it is to comfort with the comfort by which we ourselves have been comforted, it is to look on others from the perspective of the Crucified and Risen Saviour - who has been, and is, where they now are.

As promised - only 100 words on why I want to buy and read this:

Scotland’s role in the slave trade has two contradictory sides. Glasgow streets, commemorating tobacco lords (Glassford, Ingram, Buchanan) highlight the vast commercial benefits derived from tobacco. Likewise West Indies islands such as Virginia, Jamaica and Tobago. 

I am ashamed of this history of complicity.

But there’s another side, represented by campaigners and protesters like Zachary Macaulay. Tireless fighters confronting powerful vested interests, excoriating politically expedient rationales, lambasting their ethical emptiness, exposing the theological scandal of a so-called Christian nation founding prosperity on oppression. 

I am proud of this history of dissent.

Ashamed – proud - I need to understand both sides.

What beauty is for

  Just finished reading this collected volume of Mary Oliver's poetry. I'll leave the details on the sidebar for a wee while in case you want to go looking for yourself.

The detailed and affectionate observation of God's creation is a bit like Annie Dillard's prose, shaped to verse - but she is gentler than Dillard, her tone more like the appreciative and endlessly wondering David Attenborough. But her guided tour in the natural world often brings her to a different kind of reverie, about key questions we all ask, or are asked, in our more receptive moments. I found this volume reassuring bedside reading - not because her poems didn't ask searching questions, but because when they did, it came as an invitation to enter the experience of her own questioning, and that deeper conversation .

The Swan is one of my favourites.

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

"Durty Watter" (trans: dirty water)

Yesterday was normalish at both ends and stressful in a thought provoking way in the middle. I'm working mainly from home this week so the morning was lecture preparation for the coming Semester, (Galatians), the occasional phone call. The late afternoon I read and revised a paper I'm doing on Baptist hermeneutics at ICC Post-grad research seminar, 'Under the rule of the Word as Christ and Scripture'. The evening, after our meal, was a jaunt to Borders where Sheila bought a book and I didn't!

But around mid-day I was walking down Paisley High Street on the way to the bank, and heard the oddly familiar strains of Hey Jude being played by a tromboning busker. The incongruity of the instrument and a favourite tune I've enjoyed for decades both as Beatles original and Shadows instrumental, and the crisp frosty sunshine, raised the feel good factor. Going to give the guy some money when I get back from the bank - because he was quite good on the trombone, it was cold to be standing there entertaining the shoppers (and I was entertained!), and if he was doing it, he needed the money.

I got to the bank and went to do the business and discovered my Switch card wasn't in my wallet. I know all about the gospel sayings about not being anxious about money and material things, but that slim piece of plastic is invested with considerable anxiety potential when it aint there! I took every other card shaped thing out of my wallet, fled home to check other possible locations, and was back at the bank pdq to ask about the only remaining possibility - did I leave it the day before?

It isn't just the possible loss of money - it's the identity thing, the threat that someone has a hold over some part of who you are and what you are about. Then it's the annoyance at yourself for misplacing it, losing it, being careless when you should know better. I'm quite good at beating myself up given the right scenario - and standing at the bank missing a plastic debit card is as good a reason for self-recrimination as I can think of.

Och well not to worry - doesn't life consist of more than the abundance of things, like debit and credit cards? Hauerwas has been drumming that home every chance he gets in his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. I don't live by bread alone; daily bread is enough anyway. Aye right! But I needed to get the card or cancel it with all the hassle that was going to cause.

The sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous. My card was indeed left at the bank- unfortunately it was in the safe and couldn't be available for at least half an hour. Nae problem, said I. Walking to the Piazza I heard the trombone in the distance playing the Trumpet Voluntary - in January, Paisley, 1.30pm, on the trombone - I fair floated to the Post Office grinning at the oddity and grace of it all.

On the way back to the bank a man in a shell suit was standing looking suspiciously at a paving stone. Our eyes met and he said in phonetic Scottish slang

Y've goat tae watch thae yins. The durty watter splashes yur legs!

He pushed his foot down slowly and sure enough it was one of those paving stones that rocked, and gathered water under it. He winked, stepped to the side of it, and went on his way. I got my card at the bank, decided to walk the longer way back to the car, and only when i got home did I remember the trombone player.  I'm genuinely scunnered at myself because that young guy was making, for me anyway, a contribution to what Sirach meant when all the trades and crafts are praised

By their work they maintain the fabric of the world, and their prayers are in the works of their hands (Sirach 38.34, NEB)

So I'll go looking for him again - and when I do I will be acknowledging one of the ways in which God intimates the goodness and mercy that follows us.