Living Wittily

Disorientation and a study in turmoil

Walter Brueggemann explores the Psalms through the experience of orientation, disorientation and reorientation. The same approach can at present be applied to my study. The painter is half way through decorating it, and I've decanted books to various surfaces around the house, and sit here with abandoned bookcases, bare windows, painter's sheets with a few years of paint drippings draped around the place, sets of steps standing at the door, the pictures removed - and a sense of inner disorientation to match the mess around me.

Remember - this is the guy who likes his books in neat rows on the bookshelves, the same distance from the front of the shelf, arranged in a system so familiar I can tell my PA at College exactly where a book is - bookcase, shelf and roughly where. Same at home; except tonight my study suffers the first two of Brueggemann's rubrics - orientation has given way to disorientation. It will be Saturday before the painter returns, and probably Sunday before there's a hope of reorientation.

No big deal to most folk I suppose. And I'll survive. But moving 23 metres of shelved books is an exercise in dismantling the familiar which raises questions of attachment, comfort zones. Moving around the furniture reminded me of the elderly couple who first gave me somewhere to stay in Glasgow when I started University. Lily was one of the most unassuming, generous and open people I've ever met. Well into her sixties and seventies she went to the chapel next door to 'the jigging', while Bill stayed in the house and watched the telly. When I first met them and we agreed I'd be staying with them Bill warned me,

'Son. When ye come in at night, put the light on before you get into bed. She's aye shifting furniture, an' yer bed might no be where ye left it'.

And true enough. Lily was an experimenter with space and furniture. She was a tireless exponent of orientation, disorientation and reorientation.

Bill painted the ships with red lead, and worked alongside Jimmy Reid. Lily served in the newsagent and grocers downstairs. She smoked like a chimney and always apologised for some of what she called her 'bad adjectives'. They never referred to me as anything but 'the boy'. They were at our wedding, and some years later, within a couple of years of each other, I took their funerals. And the two years I spent in the four up two room flat in Dumbarton Road made it possible for me to afford being at University. We had several arguments about what I should pay. Not how much, but how little - she was mortified, embarrassed, annoyed, when I paid the first week's rent. In the end she agreed to take a fraction of what they could have asked. I look on their friendship as one of those gifts that teach us the connections between hospitality and humanity, and demonstrate the sacrament of unselfconscious generosity.

But Bill was right. Several times in those two years, I put on the light before getting into bed - to make sure it's where it was when I left it! May they rest in peace, whose home was a place of reoritnetation for a young man whose life was going through that disorientation that is an inevitable consequence of hearing Christ's call, and following.

Children's work a hundred years ago

Been an unsatisfying but sanctifying day. Spent most of it doing lots of cosmetic fiddly stuff with a massive 250 page document getting it ready for printing. Whoever formatted the template built in various safeguards that kept making the blessed document ( I use the word beatitudinally) do all the wrong things. This incrementally increased the longsuffering aspect in my overall sanctification portfolio.

Then I spent a while writing a brilliant post for this blog - vintage rant, ascerbic wit, politically subversive, carefully crafted with minimal semantic infelicities. Went to save it and the blessed Web page expired message came up. Again I use the word beatitudinally. This tragic loss to the literary archives tested the resilience of that other slow ripening fruit of the Spirit which is likely to become an area for ongoing self development in any spiritual audit I do, self control. Indeed it probably becomes one of the learning outcomes in my lifelong learning programme.

So here I am. And I've scanned in a wee card I found in a second hand book. The date written in neat fountain pen on the back is March 18th 1903. As you can see it's an invite to a children's meeting in one of Glasgow's biggest public halls. Changed days, eh? The speaker was the renowned R A Torrey, who knew a few things about sanctification. Wrote books on holiness, Bible study, prayer, the work of the Holy Spirit. The singer was Mr Alexander. Not sure if he was an Edwardian Stephen Fischbacher, but apparently the weans were going to be ministered to by a big name preacher and a soloist. Eat your heart out Lynn from 'help I work with Children' (By the way, where are you Lynn - haven't had your wisdom / wit / wistfulness / for a wee while?

 

Giving up rubbish

Millet's 'The Gleaners' has been reproduced on jigsaws and biscuit tins. It portrays a different age, culture, pace of life; and it shows our wasteful, extravagant ways when contrasted with people whose daily lives depended on 'what was left'. The large stacks in the background, the loaded horse and cart, the bundles of harvested straw and grain, contrast with the fingerpicking, back-breaking thrift of the gleaners. I don't want to wish myself back into an era when so many of our technologically derived life comforts and provisions were uninvented or unavailable.

But a picture like this argues for a way of treating our world less as a machine that produces the goods, more like the place where we find what we need; what we need to live humanly and humanely, not what we need to live at the expense of life itself. Stewardship presupposes an accepted responsibility for looking after and using wisely, that which is entrusted, given and therefore not mine. It shoudln't take an old story about a woman's fight for survival to make us aware of the fragile hold we have of this delicately poised, gloriously gifted, and now humanly threatened place where we live.

Millet's picture, those three gleaners who know the value of grain, and the story of Ruth and the providential accidents of divine happenstance, are enough to reflect on for today. I write this as the dustbin lorry comes up the street to take away our rubbish by the big bucket load - even our rubbish bins are getting bigger. I feel a lenten theme emerging here - suppose we give up producing rubbish for Lent? And suppose we apply the gleaning principle as a way of cutting down what we waste, throw out, use up? So instead of asking how much holier my soul is at the end of Lent, suppose I ask how much emptier the bin is of rubbish? Instead of denying myself luxury, I'll deny myself the luxury of producing rubbish.

How?

Need to think about that - maybe I need to find a modern equivalent of gleaning, not wasting, valuing grain....

By the way, we have a wee cheap print of Millet's masterpiece, in a wee cheap frame, which came from the home of one of the most generous, gentle and merciful people I've ever known. Married later in life, and a widow much too early, Ruth was her favourite book in the Hebrew Bible - which was only one of the things which she and I had in common, enriching a friendship founded on honest questioning about what God is about, turning lives upside down and yet, as Winnie believed, faithfully working all things together for good.

Gleaning, globalisation and putting boundaries on greed.

Two things come together in the Bible sketch by Chagall, 'Ruth Gleaning'. My favourite Bible story and the economic principle of enough applied to social ethics as mercy. For a while now I've promised myself a good read around the literature of Ruth, and what is becoming known in biblical studies as wirkungsgeschichte. The term means the history of the influence of the text. I'm wondering where the story of Ruth, or the incidents that drive and coax the story to its ending, are expressed in art, music or in literature.

Globalisation and gleaning seem to suggest two different worldviews; perhaps gleaning, the practice of leaving the edges of the field unharvested as a giving back to God by giving to the poor and the stranger, was a good principle for 'undeveloped' cultures. Maybe in our more 'developed' society, fair trade is an equivalent today. The quotation marks in the previous two sentences are meant to help you envisage me doing that annoying thing with the finger signalled quotes, as my way of questioning any comparison between our economics and the practices of that ancient culture.

The institutionalisation of mercy in the economic practices of an ancient culture like early Israel, and these underwritten by the religious experience of those who understood the impact on a human life in being a stranger, poor and hungry, is a standing rebuke to the rapacious efficiency of globalised capitalism. The comparison does seem anachronistic given the contrast between the simplicity of life in an emerging ancient culture where gleaning wouldn't cause global markets to tumble, and the complex inner structures of economic self interest and faceless finance that enable a French bank official to play the markets like an amusement arcade. Gleaning is a principle that sets parameters on greed.

Anyway, if you know of art pictures / sculptures, music, creative literature that borrows from or tells the story of Ruth I'd be grateful for nudges in the right direction.

A man's a man, for a' that'.

No doubt about it.

I saw what at least one Scotsman wears under his kilt.

It happened in broad daylight, outside an Estate Agent's at Cardonald, at 11.55 a.m.. today. There he was playing his bagpipes, accompanied on the pavement by one of the Estate Agent staff who was holding glasses of something liquid for drinking and proffering said liquid to passers by.

Now in the widely predicted and living up to their description strong winds which were battering the West of Scotland, complemented by rain alternating between vertical and horizontal stair rods, two otherwise sensible people were engaged in what I can only guess was a publicity stunt on Burns Day. It takes two hands to play the pipes, so what happens when gusts of wind elevate the tartan, eh? And have you ever tried to balance a tray with filled glasses in one hand, while giving said glasses to passing punters, and the wind threatening to turn the tray into an alcohol laden frisbee?

And the obvious consequence of open air waitressing in a gale, and wearing a kilt in a storm force wind?

Nearly crashed my car.

Why?

Cos I saw what he was wearing under his kilt. But I'll pull a tartan veil over the shocking reality witnessed as an anti-epiphany.

Did wonder though if it was one of the £24.99 Lidl kilts that sold out in less than an hour?

Forgiveness - who can tame the inner tiger?

February is Charles Wesley month for me. Early March I am doing two lectures in Cardiff on Evangelical Spirituality and I've chosen to explore the theological rhetoric (rhetorical theology?) of Charles Wesley's hymns. The tercentenary of his birth in December 2007 has once again focused attention on a hymn writer whose poetry articulated evangelical experience in all its immediacy, diversity, strangeness and controversy. During and after the Evangelical Revival the hymns provided emotional and spiritual narratives into which converts and those seeking a deeper sense of God, could enter as participants,recognising that they shared many of the experiences described. And for those who sang them or heard them sung as observers, they proclaimed the spiritual realities of a Gospel scandalously accessible, free from ecclesial or doctrinal disqualification.

It's a commonplace hardly worth mentioning that a poet who wrote thousands of hymns consequently produced a corpus of mixed quality; hilarious doggerel co-exists with joy-filled devotion, banal cliche with inspired invention, repetitive predictable rhymes with some of the most precise and original spiritual theology. I've read and studied Wesley's hymns for years now, and I still think his best hymns represent an original high point in Evangelical spirituality, and some of the finest spiritual theology in our language.

This morning I discovered a hymn I hadn't know before, entitled 'Forgiveness'. The first two stanzas begin by asking the question, "Forgive my foes? it cannot be:/My foes with cordial love embrace?" Then for ten lines Wesley describes the helplessness of the 'fallen soul' to draw the "envenom'd dart", and laments that till the Spirit is recieved and grace renews, forgiveness is impossible. Then come the last two stanzas in which the destructiveness of hate and anger are described in powerful images, and in the context of prayer, the miracle of forgiveness takes place by the coming of Christ into heart and will so that the offender is now thought about through the Saviour's mind:

Come, Lord, and tame the tiger's force,

Arrest the whirlwind in my will,

Turn back the torrent's rapid course,

and bid the headlong sun stand still,

the rock dissolve, the mountain move,

and melt my hatred into love.

.

Root out the wrath thou dost restrain;

And when I have my Saviour's mind,

I cannot render pain for pain,

I cannot speak a word unkind,

An angry  thought I cannot know,

Or count my injurer my foe.

Tiger, whirlwind, torrent, blazing sun, rock, mountain - images that make you think of cruelty, violent energy, destructive force, white hot rage, hard implacability, immovable persistence. And only the work of the indwelling Saviour can tame, arrest, turn back, halt, dissolve, move, melt such naturally destructive forces - and not by power but by love.

Now - there's a hymn to sing at the end of a fractious church meeting; or as a prelude to sharing the broken bread and poured out wine we dare to call communion. Forget the emotionally fluffy, self-absorbed feel-good praise songs - here's a hymn that requires a bit more honesty before God. My experience of Evangelical religion, theology, spirituality - choose whatever word - has not always been consistent with Wesley's Evangelical ethic of relationships which are rooted in a theology of reconciliation, and which are repeatedly repaired through the inner renewal that is the work of the indwelling Christ.

I have long felt, in my own heart and spirit, and in wider Christian experience, that forgiveness and love, as actions and attitudes of the renewed will represent one of the tougher tests of our devotion, much harder than singing ourselves into devotional reveries; readiness to forgive, and awareness of how much we need to be forgiven ourselves, are truer marks of genuine discipleship.

Now Charles Wesley could give as good as he got, and had as much need of grace as the rest of us. Some of his verse written against others drips with sarcasm and is positively corrosive of goodwill. But here, in a hymn like this, the Gospel is shown to be the power of God unto forgiveness, redeeming love miraculously melts hate, and the grace of God converts my foe into one whom I now see through the eyes of the Saviour. Evangelical spirituality is not only about a renewed heart - but about a heart indwelt by Christ - the evidence of which is a ministry of reconciliation, reconciled reconcilers reconciling, forgiven forgivers forgiving.

A J Heschel: Sincere intensity and intense sincerity

The elephant is a bonny bird,

it flits from bough to bough;

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

Nonsense verse, when considered sensibly, usually has some plausible reference to sense! In this case, I realise that, judging from my blogging posts, it must look like my reading pattern flits from book to book. I haven't abandoned Rob Warner's Evangelicalism book -but I was, as promised, ambushed by Moltmann's In a Broad Place, and I'm too much of a Moltmann fan to allow any discipline or prior commitments to keep me from reading it undistracted. I'd just finished it when I was ambushed again - this time by the arrival of Edward Kaplan's second volume of his biography of A J Heschel, entitled Spiritual Radical. My enthusiasm for this Hasidic philosopher, rescued from the Holocaust by immigration to the US, who combined social justice with mystical piety, and who wrote some of the most sublime prose poetry about the reality of God, will be well enough known to regular readers of Living Wittily.

So again I am sidetracked by a book about someone who is anything but a sidetrack on my spiritual and intellectual journey. Here are a few sentences from some of Heschel's earliest writing in English:

Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.

Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies. Our face is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.  Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the Holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men and women of faith He is the light.

Such sincere intensity, and intense sincerity; reading the story of Heschel's life, and pausing over words forged and glinting in such mystic fire, I sense the shallowness and emotionalism of what we evangelicals call 'the devotional life. And I further sense the misguided rationalism of many forms of Evangelical apologetics, as if the reality of God, the God who burns with Holy Love revealed in Christ, could be proven into existence by ensuring we were working with the right epistemology. The immediate experience of a Holy God demands self surrender not self indulgence, adoration not argument.

Sir Edmund Hillary and human greatness

Football commentators manufacture and then spend their lives reproducing cliches. One cliche suffering chronic impact deflation is, 'Now they've got a mountain to climb' - usually a reference to one or two goals conceded to a stronger team. In 1924 George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest said, 'Because it's there'; and another cliche was born.

Today in New Zealand, at the State funeral service for Sir Edmund Hillary, a tribute was paid by a representative of the Sherpa communities in Nepal. Following the conquest of Everest, Sir Edmund raised funds for schools, hospitals, bridges and other important social developments amongst these people. After a moving reference to Sir Edmund as a second father, the Sherpa representative said, 'our loss is as great, and as heavy, as Mount Everest'. From those who live in the vast shadow and magnificent mass of Everest, the tribute carried an enormous weight of affection, respect and admiration. There is indeed something mountainous, vastly and reassuringly solid, about a great man, whose greatness was never self-proclaimed. It was articulated by others who recognised in him extraordinary strength of character and vast reservoirs of patient, compassionate concern for this planet and all of us who live here.

The comparison of Sir Edmund Hillary with the mountain he climbed and conquered, but forever respected, is one of those metaphors whose effectiveness borrows from the familiarity of the image. Everest is unique; the highest peak on the planet, a symbol of all that is beautiful, enduring, challenging and humbling, providing eyes and minds are clear enough to recognise what such a mountain means; human longing set in stone.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote  'The mountain remains unmoved / at its seeming defeat by the mist'.Once again words from one who had gazed on the gigantic permanence of mountains, the ephemeral beauty of mist, and who knew the things that last.  Sir Edmund Hillary was a great man, in a world now more familiar with celebrity, perhaps because it's more user friendly; he was a man of substance and character, in a world fixated on image and personality; he was a man who long before live-aid and all the subsequent generations of collective media driven charity, made it his business to make life better for a little known people who lived in the shadow of Everest. Mist shrouds the mountain - but soon enough it evaporates, and what's left is just as solid and great, and remains reassuringly there. The death of Sir Edmund Hillary diminishes all of us, consigns living greatness to the mists of memory; and for his beloved Sherpas, his death takes away one who was always reassuringly, there.

Courage for truth as an act of witness

Been thinking quite a lot about courage recently. People I know, struggling with bereavement, and trying to live through the aftermath of a grief that may be getting easier but it still doesn't feel like it. In any case, there is no cure for such sorrow, because to no longer feel the loss seems no longer to care. And yes life must go on, but....the courage to grieve, and to go on.

Someone coming to terms with the sheer intransigence of the ageing process on their body, so that the mind and will and personality, still strong and vibrant, are living within encroaching limits. The demoralisation of decreasing capacity is a hard process to resist...the courage to witness our own decline, and somehow go on trusting.

A cabin crew find that one of the biggest commercial planes in commercial service is approaching a runway with no engine power and 120 people on board. They were just doing their job, but that doesn't diminish the achievement of a team of highly trained people doing what they are supposed to when their own survival is now tied up with their responses in the next few seconds, and even that might not be enough...the courage to do the right thing in an emergency.

And then another kind of courage, what might be called the courage for truth. Isaiah 26.13 says,"O Lord our God, other lords besides thee have ruled over us, but thy name alone we acknowledge." There's a verse to put tyrants in their place. And Ernst Kasemann, the German NT Lutheran scholar was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 for preaching it, persistently quoting it, and living by its State-subversive theology. In 1977, nearly forty years later, his daughter aged thirty, was killed in an Argentinian jail, for reasons that never made sense. Kasemann's social activism, anti-nuclear weapons stance, support for student protests and liberation causes, arose directly our of his study of the NT and the central theme of his theology, the Lordship of Christ crucified. And in all these varied situations, what becomes clear is the moral and intellectual courage of a scholar unafraid to ask questions from the standpoint of truth. It's no accident that some of his best essays are in New Testament Questions for Today, and Perspectives on Paul.

Apparently he was a difficult man to get on with. Moltmann speaks with a mixture of admiration and exasperation about his colleague, Kasemann. But maybe what the church needs today, in a culture deeply suspicious of certainty, allergic to truth claims, and itself certain that nothing is certain, is a number of Christian leaders for whom the courage of truth takes priority over the prudence of being relevant, and where martyrdom as bearing the cost of bearing witness, becomes a form of evangelism much more authentic than any programmes born out of the marketing strategies of a need manufuatcuring and need providing culture.

A certain Church of England cleric who cut his clerical collar in pieces on prime time Sunday morning TV, comes to mind as one example of courage for truth. I'm now going to think of what courage for truth will mean as an act of witness, in all the varied places and times of my own life this week.

St Deiniol's Library and the Lord's Prayer

Came across an old journal I kept during a week at St Deiniol's library, near Hawarden, a few miles from Chester. For those who don't know this quaint, unique, old fashioned haven for Casaubon like scholars, religiously inclined eccentrics, aspiring eremites and many other interesting visitors, it still claims to be the Uk's only residential library. It's welcome is to 'interested persons wishing to puruse divine learning'.

Gifted by Gladstone's family after the great man's death, it retains its Victorian ethos, with oak shelving, occasionally creaky chairs, the book shelves designed by Gladstone for maximum books in allotted space. It's a mixture of the delightful and the odd; the community works to the gentle rhythm of matins and vespers; the bedrooms are basic, the food OK. But the setting and the building, the ethos and the very idea of a library you can live in!

While there I've noted in the Journal that Sheila's uncle died, and we went to the funeral from holiday - which meant me searching Oxfam shops for a dark tie! We also did some "ye olde churche" viewing, chapels mostly. One of my study projects was to prepare a series of sermons on the Lord's Prayer which would span Advent and the first three Sundays of the new millenium - I gave them the title 'Is Your Faith Y2k Compatible?'

From my notes I have a comment from Gerhard Ebeling's The Lord's Prayer in Today's World. There is a combative, non-submissive note to Ebeling's theology of prayer, reminiscent of P T Forsyth's insistence that prayer is a struggle of wills, and petition and intercession are God's call to us to trust, to believe, to defy the will-lessness and resignation that too quickly become a giving in to the way things are. Importunity, sheer dogged desire for change is a more Christian spiritual virtue than passive or premature surrender to things as they are. In speaking of the Father who is in heaven, Ebeling warns:

It seems religious to put God beyond time, as the Eternal, and to keep time well clear of God, as being something limited, earthly, human. But with this kind of piety we make God unreal, and reality Godless. (page 72)

I still remember the thrill of reading that, and still find that comment a needed corrective to over spiritualised prayer. Into the limited, earthly and human, comes God in Christ, with love unlimited, holy love incarnate in the earthly and human, transforming existence, human life, and creation itself. The one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in whom creation is summed up and comes together, and who reconciles all things making peace by the blood of the cross, is not one who can be placed beyond time. So why should prayer be timid, or resignation to circumstance be deemed a higher spirituality?