Living Wittily

What's a bit of ageism between friends?

Had a conversation with a couple of the University administration staff on my way out today. A beautiful late afternoon, sun shining and I was on my way home to get changed and go for a wee trot around Barshaw Park. Nothing too strenuous, just a way of loosening up and sloughing off the worst of a day's wear and tear.

Talking with my two admin friends about the clocks going forward Saturday past, and losing an hour's sleep, one of my friends said it was the next night she felt tired, and was in bed at the ridiculously early hour of 9.30pm. So by way of consolatory conversation, a kind of solidarity with those who go to bed early and get up early, I mentioned that whereas I used to be able to read for an hour in bed at night, now I was struggling to clock five minutes before my eyelids did their portcullis thing.

Whereupon the third member of this conversation said, in tones of unmistakably sincere sympathy, "Aye well - but don't worry. That'll come to us all". Now I don't know if I look older than I am, or if I feel older than I look, or if I am older than I should be for my age!

Anyway - not too old to run round the park for 50 minutes and arrive home still standing and able to hold a conversation, albeit accompanied by heavy breathing! Just about ready to run my first 10k of the year - but only when the weather is good. No point in taking chances at my age.

Easter and Hopeful Imagination

Thanks to Andy for the reminder that I should have posted yesterday at Hopeful Imagination. I'm happy to do that today. The post-resurrection stories in the Gospels are amongst my favourite passages to think about, pray over, learn from and enter into. And the story of Thomas, hurt, bewildered but not ready to be conned, is one of those within which I often linger, and wonder. Tomorrow I'll preach on the passage from John 20, and hope to communicate something of the poignancy and power of this encounter, between bewildered courage and vulnerable availability - "Here touch my hands.........don't be afraid..."......."My Lord, and my God".

Recent acquisitions

No surprise that since I was over at Glasgow University Library in the diligent pursuit of knowledge, and since I was in the immediate vicinity, I found time to engage in some extreme used book searching at Voltaire and Rousseau's. I say extreme because venturing between the stacked aisles of books in that shop isn't all that different from walking through the threatening unstable landscapes of middle earth. I came away unscathed though, and with three purchases -

one of Heiko Oberman's earlier books, Masters of the Reformation.The emergence of a new intellectual climate in Europe (Cambridge, 1981) - a clean, hardback copy of a hard to get book. Oberman was one of the finest Reformation scholars whose detailed research and at times hard to read essays nevertheless provided a much more nuanced picture of the interface between medieval and Renaissance culture and the events and historical contexts of the European Reformations.

John Todd's careful study of John Wesley and the Catholic Church, a book I've read before but am glad to have. There's still alot of important and unexploited insight in some of the earlier work on the Wesleys. This book, along with others like Wesley and the Church of England, and Wesley and the Puritans highlights the range and variety of Wesley's theological taste - he has been called a 'devout eclectic', a classic case of pick'n mix theology long before pick 'n mix was made a cliche for post-modern consumer led choices!

And then it's always good to find a book by a friend - David Smith, Mission After Christendom, a nice fresh copy to replace the one of mine that went the way of most lent out books! What I enjoyed about buying David's book (at a ridiculously good price), was that it was shelved in the esoteric section, sandwiched between - wait for it - Buddhism Without Beliefs, a kind of western new age take on Mahayana Buddhism, and on the other side Awake at 3a.m. a study of the spiritual psychology (whatever that is) of insomnia!

As I looked at this book on mission, pressed on both sides by quite different and alien worldviews, I couldn't help thinking - for a book intended to open up new frontiers for witness in a globalised world, placing it amongst the esoterica seemed like an unintentional but highly symbolic prophetic act, indicating the plight of the church trying to do mission after Christendom!

P T Forsyth, diversionary paths, and the encounter of prayer

Spending some time writing a piece on P T Forsyth, which is all the excuse I need to find all kinds of diversionary paths that lead down fascinating Forsythian avenues. Reading again Harry Escott's small anthology P T Forsyth and the Cure of Souls, I began the now habitual head-nodding that is my bodily acknowledgement that once again he is right, and again, and here again. Here's a chunk of theological granite to weigh alongside some of the overblown plastic of some of the more utilitarian, guaranteed low effort and low-cost approaches to spirituality - what Karl Rahner once called anthropoegoism - (a peculiarly modern heresy evident in a person's self centred and self-interested approach to the Divine as a resource to be used for our purposes). Forsyth will have none of it.

Prayer contains the very heart and height of truth - reality and action. In prayer the inmost truth of our personal being locks with the inmost reality of things, its energy finds a living Person acting as their unity and life, and we  escape the illusions of sense, self and the world. Prayer, indeed, is the great means of appropriating, out of the amalgam of illusion which means so much for our education, the pure gold of God as he wills, the Spirit as he works, and things as they are. (Escott, p. 68)

Prayer in this sense is a form of spiritual clarifying; a willingness to be introduced to the reality of who we are in the presence God and to discover in penitent wonder and surrendering worship who God is. And that encounter strips away our illusions about what our life is for, who and what we are called to be, because 'the soul becomes very sure of God and itself in prayer'. The living, acting Christ becomes known as the one who gives new and regenerated life and who energises and enables action. That is the meaning of one of Forsyth's epigrams: 'Prayer is the assimilation of a holy God's moral strength.'

Which means prayer is transformative - of personality and character, of politics and society, of human failing and human longing. 'Prayer, as our greatest work, breeds in us the flair for the greatest work of God, the instinct of his kingdom, and the sense of his track of time.' (Escott p. 81).

Right back to that article what needs writing!

Exegetical prestidigitation.....Eh?

Her Testimony is True

"Establishing equality for all persons regardless of their gender (or any other characteristic) is a cause surely born in the heart of God. But the cause of women's equality is not advanced, rather, it is hindered whenever we attempt to force biblical texts to say things we might wish to hear but they do not say. Just as it is dishonest to deny that certain New Testament texts sanctioned slavery, but also fallacious to argue that such texts warrant the sanction of slavery today, it is counterproductive to contend that the Gospel of John is a document that passes edicts for its context and for ours on how women can and should function in the church. That sort of reading amounts  to an act of exegetical prestidigitation that in essence admits that those who would use the Bible  as a warrant to impose specific patterns of order from ancient communities onto modern ones have a case worthy of being contested. It is to lend dignity to what is actually a frivolous case for the subordination of women....

God's will for Christians is not that they rigidly duplicate the life and ministry of Jesus or his first disciples or the Johannine community (as if such a thing were possible), but that they discover, through the Spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ for each community in its own time and place. It is possible to discover God's will for any contemporary context by Spirit-led exegetical and hermeneutical study of John's Gospel, but not by prohecting contemporary contexts back on to it. Any exegesis is strained that has the Gospel of John setting out roles for people on the basis of gender or any other category, and is in fact contrary to john's teaching that all believers are God's children who, born of the Spirit, move in ways that defy human delineation (Jn 1.12-13; 3.5-8).

The witnessing disciple responsible for the inscription of John's Gospels defines the book as a testimony, and his testimony is vouched to be true (Jn 21.24). Are the testimonies of the women that this disciple reports also guaranteed to be true? Is her testimony true just as his testimony is true. It depends, then as now, not upon the gender but upon the faith of the witness who is born of the Spirit as a child of God. Their testimony is true who truly believe that the messiah, the Son of God, is Jesus."

(Her Testimony is True. Women as Witnesses According to John, JSNTS 125, Robert G Maccini (Sheffield Academic Press 1996) 251-2.

Bob's own disclaimer in the Preface is an important indication of how hard good scholarship tries to make allowances for the scholar's own standpoint. Just one more reason why I love RGM as a friend and respect him as a scholar.

'Because of my vested interest in the advancement of women in the church, I am predisposed to want the New Testament to be favourable towards women. That predisposition cannot be removed, and so I have tried to keep it in view if not in check by playing the devil's advocate against myself throughout the research. Readers will judge for themselves whether or not this gambit was desirable, successful, or even possible.'

Her testimony is True

I quite deliberately chose all the poems for Holy Week from women poets.(Did anyone notice?) The passion story and its aftermath in the resurrection accounts is populated by women whose intervention at different times is as decisive as that of the men. In a story too often read as if Pilate, Judas, Peter and Caiaphas were the key actors, there is a need to hear those other voices. Like those of the woman who anointed Jesus, of the serving girl in the courtyard, of his mother, the women who stood and stayed on Calvary when the men were hiding, Mary Magdalene, and those practical love driven women who gathered the spices together, along with the anointing and binding cloths, and trudged out to do what no one else was ready to do.

I have a very special book, gifted to me by its author Robert Gordon Maccini (Bob is rightly proud of his middle name, which is only one of the connections between us that keeps us close friends with the Atlantic between us). Bob's PhD was supervised by Dr Ruth Edwards at the University of Aberdeen, and under the rigorous and reverent scholarship that characterises all Ruth's own work, it developed into a close and authoritative study of the role of women as witnesses in John's Gospel - in its published form its title is Her Testimony is True. Over the years I've read a pile of books on John's Gospel, and this one is amongst the most significant, because of its meticulous re appropriation of texts too often sidelined by the claim that the testimony of women was inadmissible in Jewish courts.

As a reassertion of the role of women as credible witnesses in the life of Jesus, their original and pivotal role in the story of the Gospel, and as an eloquent questioning of the marginalising of women in the ministry of the Church, Her Testimony is True is a book of continuing significance. Bob doesn't force biblical texts to say what he might want them to say, given that he is a passionate advocate of women's ministry - Becky supported Bob's studies by working in ministry in Aberdeen, and has gone on to develop and focus her own vocation in a pastoral and preaching ministry. No, the texts should speak for themselves, when content and context are carefully and honestly examined. Tomorrow I'll post the last couple of paragraphs which both sum up Bob's research, and explain why during Holy Week this blog insisted we hear the voices of women - whose testimony is true.

Speed and spirituality

Yep. Driving responsibly is a spiritual discipline. Christians should know their Highway Code well enough to drive safely, understand the rules and recognise and interpret the signs. They should also keep to the speed limit. Driving along a dual carriageway in a built up area, the Micra in front was doing exactly 29mph. The car was in the outside lane and had been for a distance. Truth to tell I wasn't bothered as it was a rare sunny spring morning, blue sky, sun shining and Sheila and I with the day off, (Good Friday) on our way to one of our favourite coffee places. I too was on the outside lane cos I was bearing right at the next roundabout. And yes, I was getting a bit itchy at the slow progress.

Then this massive big black BMW came tanking up behind me till I could see the whites of the driver's eyes, and feeling unreasonably pious, I moved to the inside, whereupon he bore down on the wee Micra lights flashing to scare its driver into the inside lane. But no. Steady as you go, at 29 mph the wee car tootled along - so big BMW with a surge of power and a Lewis Hamilton swerve, cut inside just ahead of me, passed on the inside of the unintimidated wee Micra, gunned the engine and took off - then slammed on the brakes. But too late. There, in the middle of the road, a hundred metres ahead, was the luminous yellow jacket and the raised hand of the nice local speed cops.

I'd like to deny the sin of gloating, but I can't. I'd prefer to say I behaved in an emotionally mature way and didn't shout 'Oh yah beauty'. I'd also feel less embarrassed if I could report that I prayed for the driver of the BMW, that he might not lose his licence, that he would just see the error of his ways, Lord. But instead I have to confess that for years when someone has behaved like that I've lamented the absence of the polis just when you need them. So I have to confess to a culpable sense of personal uplift, a smug feeling for the justness and rightness of things, a quite unreasonable degree of self-righteousness; and as the wee Micra turned right into the Rouken Glen car park I wondered how many coffees you could buy with the standard speeding fine.

I need to learn to love other road users more!

A Sacrifice of Praise 8 The Resurrection

The Resurrection

I was the one who waited in the garden

Doubting the morning and the early light.

I watched the mist lift off its own soft burden,

Permitting not believing my own sight.

.

If there were sudden noises I dismissed

Them as a trick of sound, a sleight of hand.

Not by a natural joy could I be blessed

Or trust a thing I could not understand.

.

Maybe I was a shadow thrown by some

Who, weeping , came to lift away the stone,

Or was I but the path on which the sun

Too heavy for itself, was loosed and thrown?

.

I heard the voices and the recognition

And love like kisses heard behind the walls.

Were they my tears which fell, a real contrition?

Or simply April with its waterfalls?

.

It was by negatives I learned my place.

The garden went on growing and I sensed

A sudden breeze that blew across my face.

Despair returned but now it danced, it danced.

(Elizabeth Jennings)

Whether intended to or not, Jennings' poem is an exposition of Luke's description of disciples who 'disbelieved for joy'. The triumph of the resurrection came later, on reflection. The more immediate responses were fear, bewilderment, disbelief, panic, the consequent confusion of thought and emotion when confronted with impossibility dawning into a clear perhaps. The mist lifts, and sight is permitted, but faith needs more than sight, and how do you 'trust a thing you do not understand?'

Today I will celebrate the resurrection of our Lord. And like those first witnesses, there will be the thrill of recognition, that 'sudden breeze' of new possibility, of fresh and refreshing movement, and that inner redeeming movement, as despair is reborn in hope, and sorrow is turned to dancing. There will also be, I trust, time for deeper reflection of how a resurrection faith can be practised and lived by the community of Christ who are witnesses to the Easter faith. And in our worship, the affirmation that life overcomes death, darkness gives way to light, and 'love, like kisses', is heard behind the walls', and then lived out in the streets.

A joyful and reflective Easter to all who now and again come by here.

A Sacrifice of Praise 7. 'Oblique Prayer' for Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday - the essential hiatus in the story of redemption, when the Son of God entered into the abyss, and when the death throes of death were entered into and endured; Holy Saturday, when the reality of the Son being made sin who knew no sin, fell with tragic force on the heart of God. Some of the most profound theology of the past few decades has tried to take seriously the suffering of the Son who died, and the suffering of the Father bereft of His only begotten Son, and that anguish communicated within the eternal communion of the Triune God through the Spirit.

Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Mysterium Paschale is a masterpiece of reflection on the theology of Easter, and the significance of Holy Saturday as the quiet, empty, menacing abyss where death, loss and defeat intimate the triumph of the tragic, the death of God, with a persuasive finality; Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God and his later reflections, explore with theological courage, perhaps even some theological recklessness the meaning of Christ's death for the inner life of the Triune communion of love that is God; Alan Lewis, whose Between the Cross and the Resurrection was written during the last months of his life when he was dying of cancer, and out of his suffering came a book of immense integrity, of movingly engaged theology, the theological and personal testimony of one who built his own hope on the mystery of life overcoming death, enduring light rescinding final darkness, redeeming love eclipsing the power of sin.

Here is one paragraph from the end of Lewis's remarkably penetrating and contemplative understanding of the paschal mystery:

For surely it is only in the mode of prayer ---in meditation, reflection, and straining of the heart and ear for a word of God beyond human speechlessness, that one could finally do justice to a narrative like ours which at its centre-point has God buried in the grace on Easter Saturday. What is there left to do but pray, if the story of God's own death and burial be true? (p. 463)

What Lewis is suggesting is not prayer that is fuelled by certainty, but prayer that grows out of the bewilderment and speechlessness that must overcome mind and heart when the implications of Holy Saturday are thought and felt.

All of which reminded me of Denise Levertov's poem, 'Oblique Prayer', a poet's take on spiritual truth that is too profound for words, too elusive for certainties, and a poet's honesty about those experiences of God that speak more of absence than presence. The poem is set out in a way that allows the text to convey the fragmented, at times fearful, yet finally hopeful searching of those for whom Holy Saturday speaks of God's own dark night.

Oblique Prayer

Not the profound dark

night of the soul

.

and not the austere desert

to scorch the heart at noon,

grip the mind

in teeth of ice at evening

.

but gray,

a place

without clear outlines,

.

the air

heavy and thick

.

the soft ground clogging

my feet if I walk,

sucking them downwards

if I stand.

.

have you been there?

Is it

.

a part of human-ness

.

to enter

no man's land?

.

I can remember

(is it asking you

that

makes me remember?)

even here

.

the blessed light that caressed the world

before I stumbled into

this place of mere

not-darkness.

This Holy Saturday, I am glad to pay tribute to Alan Lewis, an alumnus of New College, Edinburgh, and one whose theology was lived and written in the presence of God. The book cover shows Alan's memorial window at Austin Presbyterian Seminary. I have bought his book three times - because I have twice given my own copy away as a gift - there aren't many book you buy three times.

A Sarcifice of Praise 6 The Eternal Cross

Good Friday is a day of heaviness. The weight of a world's pain borne in the heart of God in Christ crucified, the very nature of crucifixion compelling the body to feel its own weight in proportion to the physical anguish of wounded limbs supporting a broken frame. It is inevitable that the passion of Christ should reverberate within the penitent devotion  of hearts bewildered by the agony of love.

Saint Exupery writes that 'sorrows are the vibrations of the soul that remind us we are alive'. And early in devotional verse Jesus was called the Man of Sorrows, absorbing into the infinite spaciousness of divine love the malignant consequences of a world's sin; and in his case those sorrows were linked at one and the same time to his death, and the gift of life it released. Elizabeth Jennings' poem while acknowledging the anguish of Christ crucified, faces up to the reality of sin as more than radical evil; sin is also the accumulation of small acts of selfishness, cruelty, indifference, neglect; it is the diligently learned skill of witholding acts and words that bless and care for and heal those who are carrying the heavy end of the cross in their lives. The weight of sin is made up not only of those occasional vast blocks of granite, but also of mountains of sand, that inumerable and unimaginable number of microscopic rocks that defies our best calculus. A bag of sand is as heavy as a lump of granite - but easier accumulated, perhaps representing the sheer quantity of our lost opportunities to bear the weight of someone else's struggle - and when that happens, says Jennings, Jesus is crucified again.

The Eternal Cross

He'll blossom on the cross in three weeks now,

The saviour of the world will die again.

He is the flower upon a hurting bough,

The crown of thorns and nails will give him pain.

But the worst one is how

.

We go on daily wounding him and he,

Although he's out of time, still feels the great

Dark of betrayal. He's nailed on a tree

Each time we fail him. Suffering won't abate

Until the liberty

.

This God-Man gave us is used only for

Kindness and gentleness. Our world is full

Of dying Christs - the starved, the sick, the poor.

God sleeps in cardboard boxes, has no meal.

We are his torturer

.

Each time we fail in generosity,

Abuse a child or will not give our love.

Christ lets us use our fatal liberty

Against himself. But now and then one move

Of selfless love sets free

.

The whole of mankind whom he saw at play

And work as he lay dying, when his side

Was pierced. That spear was how we fail to say

We love someone, but each time tears are dried

It's Resurrection Day.

(Elizabeth Jennings, from An Easter Sequence)