Living Wittily

Jesus... "a thousand times more frightening......"

Maybe
Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
      stood up in the boat
         and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
   different crosses
      the threshold--the uncles
         mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water--
      sometimes, for days,
         you don't think of it.

Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
      one or two of them felt
         the soul slip forth

like a tremor of pure sunlight,
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
   as they are now, forgetting
      how the wind tore at the sails
         before he rose and talked to it--

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was--
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer sea.

(Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems, Volume One, pages 97-98).

And here is one of my favourite pieces of non-western art that shows Jesus "tender and luminous and demanding as he always was".

 

Leonard Cohen and our human struggles with love, loss and limitation.

Recently been listening to Leonard Cohen. Not sure if he's a poet who sings or a singer who writes poetry, or a singer who reads poetry with musical accompaniment, or a poet who uses the range of his voice to make words sing. It's one of the great omissions of my life that I didn't try to work the miracle of getting a ticket for one of last year's concerts.

But it's hard to listen to the two disc recording of the London Concert and not want to write a review. I'm not qualified. I don't know enough about music. The range of voices in Cohen's oeuvre, from playful raconteur to contemplative poet, from lyricist of longing to apocalyptic seer, and from biblical prophet to lover and lover of words, makes any categorisation ridiculously reductionist. These two discs contain two and a half hours of the London performance and 26 tracks, and listening to them in a sitting has been a musical experience like a limited few others in my life.

One was when the Beach Boys ignited for a generation an enthusiasm for life with what I think is still one of the best tracks they ever produced, "Good Vibrations". Though my favourite Beach Boys track, as those who have lived in my orbit any time know, is "Sloop John B" - not because of its depth, but because of its sheer joie de vivre about heading home when one's vivre hasn't been much joie! Second was when I listened to the first classical LP Sheila ever bought me, Yehudi Menuhin playing "Brahms' Violin Concerto". The second movement, played with heartbreaking intensity, was for me a personal graduation from what I thought I liked to a different musical world where music is heard to serious humane purposes. A third, (and there are probably still one or two more) was the first time I heard the Ode to Joy from "Beethoven's Ninth (Choral) Symphony". It was on a TV Documentary in the early 1970's in which Jimmy Reid the Union Leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders strike, was interviewed. He spoke of his dad's long working life for low wages and long hours of hard graft, and the way those with money made more on a stock market deal than his dad could in several lifetimes of such hard graft. His vision, long before the EU captured the Beethoven chorus for its anthem, was of a society where humanity itself was valued, where materialism was subservient to humanism, and where money and power are means to more humane ends.

Which brings me back to Cohen, and why this recorded concert is itself a musical and humanising experience. Some of Cohen's songs are also about how joie de vivre is often ambushed by circumstance and accident. Witness the masterpiece that is "Hallelujah", at least as sung by Cohen himself - this arrangement has lost none of the intensity and affirmation of humanity and our struggles with love, loss and limitation, and it is sung by a 73 year old who still deeply, defiantly and gently cares. And some of the songs take you to those far reaches of emotional responsiveness we know we have treasured away somewhere deep inside us, but which aren't easily accessed without the right guide - and in songs like "If it be your will", Cohen knows his way there, and back - and the version here by the Webb Sisters is quite simply beautiful. And then you only have to listen to "Democracy" to sense  essential combinations of satire and seriousness, compassion and cynicism, rebellion and patriotism. So many voices in that voice.

And so on. One of the areas I'd like to spend time learning about is music as a form of biblical exegesis. Not the advanced technical stuff about aesthetics and hermeneutics - but the more straightforward use of words and music to sound the depths, to explore the options, to guage the texture of a text. Not just the obvious choices like Handel's Messiah, Bach's Matthew Passion, but lesser known texts which form the basis of musical compositions, or which are echoed in the songs that move us. I once arranged a service around the theme music for the film "2001 Space Odyssey" (Also Sprach Zarathustra) played as background to the first verses of the Gospel of John. That's the kind of hermeneutics I mean. The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music which is totally unrelated, until it is brought into conversation with that specific text and we hear the words and we are affected by the music, we hear the music and we are interpreted by the words.

The brief benediction at the end of the concert comes from the book of Ruth, so the concert ends with a prayer that people of difference learn to live together, not in mere tolerance but in faithful companionship, which is the more telling gift of blessing for our times, living in the jagged fragments of a broken world.

Off to listen........ again.
 

Leonard Cohen - tell you what I think tomorrow

Not much time for the blog today. All my spare time being spent marking papers, or (note, not while), listening to this. Tonight I'll find a couple of hours to listen to it all. Tell you what I think tomorrow.

Would you like coleslaw with that sir?

Just been out doing the messages. (Shopping to the uninitiated)

Someone's carrier back had burst and some groceries littered the road.

Car in front of me runs over a large tub of coleslaw.

Big audi coming the other way is now beautifully garnished on the driver's door!

Don't want to be lacking in Christian empathy, but glad it wasn't mine.

Running to do God's will.....

In his rule St Benedict quotes John 12.35, "Run while you have the light of life...". Then, knowing that obedience is about disposition and performance, he urges those seeking God,  "If we wish to dwell in the tent of that kingdom, we must run to it by good deeds or we shall never reach it. In fact Benedict calls the life of faith a marathon in which we "run in the way of God's commandments".

The great Hebrews 12.1-2 text, "Run with persevarance the race that is set before you, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith".

My suggestion. Go listen to the London Marathon theme tune over here. (It comes from the movie "The Trap", conducted by Ron Goodwin). Then listen again but read Hebrews 12.1-2; Philippians 3.12-16 with this music as background. The months of training, the hard slog, the longing to give up, the determination to keep going - following after Jesus isn't a dawdle and it isn't a sprint. Every year I watch the start of this race - not the elite runners - the mass crowds of folk who have trained and looked forward to running the race and finishing it. As an image of the church it works quite well - running for charity, helping each other along, fulfilling a life goal, pushing beyond our comfort zones, "having the same purpose, being of the same mind", the sacrament of water for the thirsty, and the great refusal that every step represents to not give up.
  

When grace slaps us on the face to waken us up.

The best reflection I've come across on the phenomenon that is Susan Boyle can be found in The Herald, see here. It is a very fine piece of morally reflective journalism, respectful, compassionate, utterly unpatronising and says many things about human life, humanity and what is important.

I've no idea what lies ahead for Susan. The song she sung was about that great human gift of dreaming, and that less humane gift of wasting other people's dreams. I wish we weren't such a self-centred, celebrity obsessed culture. Susan's gift, talent, courage, performance started a landslide of attention, but what if her voice had been ordinary, and the sniggers graduated to outright ridicule?

If theological reflection means thinking about ordinary people's most human experiences, alert for that pervasive, invasive, inviting presence of God active and subversive in this blessed but ambiguous world, and then taking note when grace slaps us on the face to wake us up, then that performance deserves serious reflection. And those who sniggered then, now face the embarrassment of nearly 50 million viewers (latest hits stats on YouTube) who have witnessed "the laughter of fools". Grace does that. Reverses expectations, brings down the mighty and exalts the humble. Now take time to read that article in The Herald on the link above. If not precisely theological reflection it is nevertheless some of the most telling ethical reflection and cultural critique I've read for a while.

Moral imagination and the body politic.

I think it was Edmund Burke who said the body politic should be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination. At a time when a whole world faces some of the biggest moral, political and economic challenges for decades, it does look as if we need enhanced ethical imagination and revitalised imaginative morals. Problem is morality is boring. Morality limits our options, constrains our freedoms, disqualifies our preferred choices. And imagination is too busy creating unsustainable fantasies, celebrating the ephemeral, serving up stories, ideas and images relevant to the desires of a culture. Relevance to the culture is the prime directive where the culture in question, and its desires, happen to be consumer fuelled and credit driven.

"Clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination" - is that how to describe Wednesday's budget? Moral imagination, is that a phrase that is any help to a world economy imploding because there wasn't enough imagination to envisage the consequences of economic fantasy? And not enough morality to see that the prime directive reduces human beings and our projects to instituionalised but uncontrolled appetite?

As a reminder of an alternative worldview, where moral imagination critiques the body politic, and where the desires of the culture were so dominant they crushed the poorest, I've been listening to the prophet Amos, (reading his words out loud):

they sell the righteous for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
they who trample the head of the poor into the dust....
Seek good and not evil, that you may live...
establish justice in the gate...
Let justice roll down like waters
and righteousness like an everflowing stream...

That's the moral bit.

Alas for those who feel at ease in Zion....
for those who feel secure....
the notables of the first of the nations...
This is what the Lord God showed me: he was forming locusts at the time the latter growth began to sprout...This is what he showed me: The lord was standing beside a wall with a plumb-line in his hand...See I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people...

That, and much else, is the imagination bit.

Moral imagination, the capacity to see wrong and name it, and to see it against the history of a world where the rich waste and spoil by their greed, where the poor are cheated and the body politic have lived as if fantasies are made real by systemic denial of reality. The credit crunch has been described as a problem of biblical proportions. The right diagnosis is certainly of biblical proportions - a lack of moral imagination, economics without enough ethics to control greed, and selfishness devoid of imagination enough to measure consequences. No "wardrobe of the moral imagination". 

I'll continue to read Amos.....and Micah.....and Isaiah. Because moral imagination, like chronic credit, doesn't grow on trees. It is the fruit of a theology that ascribes justice, mercy, compassion and wisdom to the creator God whom we marginalise at our cost. Maybe the failure of banks once imagined globally secure, was due to the creation of banks no longer ethically sound. The spinners of economic fantasies from financial imagination, are now naked of the virtues that both make money and make making money more just. Or to go back to Burke's image, the body politic and the body economic should once again be clothed from the wardrobe of the moral imagination, in garments that should never have gone out of fashion - compassion mercy, justice, wisdom. Attributes of God, each of them, and thus theological concepts which are needed to inform, then form, then transform the moral imagination of our culture.

And I'm left with the disquieting question of where, and when, and how the communities of Jesus Christ we call the Church, bear witness, by the kinds of communities we are, to a different economics, a richer more humane understanding of the body politic, a different dress sense when it comes to the moral values with which, as followers of Jesus, we clothe ourselves. The credit crunch and its consequences for the poor, vulnerable and marginalised people and peoples of the world, isn't just the fault of the bankers and the governments. The Church is at its least attractive, and least "missionally incarnational" (sometimes I like using words I dislike!), when the Church scolds 'them' and we fail to show by our own repentance, that we too took our eye off God. You cannot serve God and money - so either you serve God,  - or you make money God and solve the dilemma.

The Lord's Prayer...."Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven".

What would that look like in economic, political and moral terms?

Use your moral imagination!

George Herbert and the Orchestration of Scripture

Not sure what poem Mike refers to that was cruciform. (See Mike's comment on previous post). One of David Adams' prayers is cross shaped, but it's pushing it to call it poetry, I think.

When it comes to shape poems, the few examples in George Herbert's The Temple are skilled artifices of poetic playfulness. The shape of the poem images its content. In the poem below, the four capitalised words distil the essentials into spiritual concentrate: -

ALTAR -> HEART-> SACRIFICE-> ALTAR.

One of the very best books on Herbert's poetry by Chana Bloch is called Spelling the Word, in which Bloch demonstrates Herbert's virtuosity with biblical text. The instructions for the tabernacle and the altar in the Pentateuch, the worship on the altar of the heart that is Jeremiah's new covenant, and the spiritual worship that is the living sacrifice in Romans 12 are only three of many texts which provide layers of meaning and suggestion throughout this poem. The poems are first written as records of Herbert's personal devotion, their essence drawn from his own scripture-informed contemplative conversations with God. Of course, unlike today, Herbert was able in his time to assume biblical literacy in those readers who came after him. But for those who still hear the scriptural symphonies through the Word orchestrated, this poem remains disconcertingly clever and to the point, and the product of a devotional genius. 

The Altar

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

Arithmetic-free generosity as the default monetary policy of the Christian community!

A conversation the other day about churches, Christians, money - and the relations between the three of them. Well actually, since we were talking of those who confess Christ, and who seek to embody the life of Christ in their living, and through the witness of Christian community, the relation of all three to Christ. The particular issue was the way Christians often want to do things, or have things, on the cheap.

Now for communities of people who believe that grace is undeserved favour, and who 'have no problem' with Paul's theological extravagances in Ephesians 1, all of this puzzles me. For example - "God who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing...according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us..and the riches of His glorious inheritance  among the saints...". And so on, using words like lavished, immeasurable, incalculable and climaxing in the great Evangelical cry,  "For by grace you have been saved...."

So how does it come about that followers of Christ, themselves receivers of the most extravagant, reckless, arithmetic-free generosity, can often sound as if the spending and giving of money, the cost of celebration, the creation of beauty and the investment in human wholeness, joy and friendship, should all be subject to budget considerations, financial reality checks and the communal and personal self-interest that considers money more valuable than giving?

I'm not arguing for financial irresponsibility - but for instinctive generosity, for a recovery of the Christian default response of giving rather than saving, of sharing rather than keeping. I wonder where in the care of our churches, in the support of our ministries, in the setting of priorities for spending, in our love for God's world and the people in it, in the key decisions we all make about what to do with what we've been given, I'm wondering - where is the place of extravagance, generosity, that lavish uncalculating, joy-discovering , grace-driven, Christ-inspired gift of giving. When did Christian stewardship move from generous costly gift to prudent wise planning? Where in all our budgetary balancing, do phrases like those used by Paul feature as primary levers for the kingdom - "abundant joy and extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity..." and this rooted in the key evangelical principle "He was rich yet for our sakes became poor that we through His poverty might become rich".

Anyway. My own heart has its own constraints, its own inner resistances. As a follower of Jesus maybe I need less stewardship and more generosity, less responsibility and more responsiveness, less prudential giving and more prioritised generosity, not saving but giving. What would happen in our lives, communities, neighbourhoods if as followers of Jesus, words like lavish, extravagant, generous, graceful, were amongst the first to be used of how as Christians we live our lives, and bear witness to the One "from whose fullness we all have recieved, grace after grace after grace ..." (John 1.16)

Here are some wise words from an unjustly obscure saint:


There are two ways
   of bringing into communion
   the diversity of particular gifts:
      the love of sharing
      and the sharing of love.
Thus the particular gift becomes common
   to him who has it
   and to him who has it not:
      he who has it
         communicates it by sharing,
      he who has it not
         participates by communion.

(Baldwin of Ford, quoted in Esther De Waal, Seeking God, page 125)

Reduced price ethics!

Just got a customer care promotion email from a bookstore I regularly patronise - in the positive sense of the word, not the talk down sense!

Here's the offer

Save 40% on Ethics

I'm intrigued by the idea that ethics can be made cheaper, that you can have reduced cost ethics, or that it would be an ethically praiseworthy thing to do to save money on your ethics.

Aye, I know. The bookseller didn't mean it the way I'm taking it, and was only trying to find a strap line that would get attention. And obviously succeeded cos here I am, paying attention! But ethics aren't to be had cheap - acts have consequences. Just think of that first choice, that primal moral dilemma, about whether or not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil! And where did that happen? Yes, in the garden of Eden!

The email came from Eden.co.uk

Nae kiddin!  :))  Go look here.