Living Wittily

Love of learning and the desire for God. Pastoral vocation in the academy.

Saying no in order to say yes isn't so much a paradox as an important principle in time management. When it comes to research, writing and the life of the mind, there are necessary choices - times to say yes, and no. You just can't read all you want to, or follow all the nudges and hunches that push and pull your curiosity down different intriguing research paths.

My own intellectual and spiritual landscape has several well worn paths. One of my favourite hills is Tinto, in Lanarkshire (pictured in winter, with snow on last year's foreground stubble). It's criss-crossed with paths, evidence of thousands of trudging feet over many a year. There are several ways to the top, and none would get you there unless you stay on them! That's not to say you can't make your own way up, ignoring established paths, and ploughing through heather, bracken, moorland grass, the odd bog and on one side some dodgy screes.

I think of my research map as a kind of inner Tinto! There are well worn paths of reading, writing, study and research! Sometimes they criss-cross, sometimes they just stop and don't reach the top. Now and again I want to go up a different way. Familiar paths for me include Evangelical, Baptist and Scottish spirituality; Scottish theology, the poetry of George Herbert, Julian of Norwich, Trinitarian theology, Baptist identity and theology, Bonhoeffer, theology and disability, and more recently the possible conversations between poetry and theology, kenosis and pastoral theology, and the relations between Scripture and Christology. 

At my ordination I chose a hymn that in its first verse also uses the image of hill climbing.

Christ of the upward way,
   my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set thy feet
   may I place mine:
And move and march wherever Thou has trod
keeping face forward up the hill of God.

The impetus to study, the attractiveness of truth and wisdom, the love of learning and the desire for God, are I think integral to the spirituality of the pastor theologian. As a Baptist minister serving our churches in theological education, I've never relinquished that sense of ministry as following the Christ of the upward way, and keeping face forward up the hill of God. Pastoral vocation is a deep and searching calling to a ministry in which the qualifier pastoral defines what I am about as a theologian. Academic research and following Christ, theology and pastoral care, intellectual work and heart work, continually weave together in a pattern of discipleship whose dominant motifs eventually define and reflect who we are.

This weekend I marked the 33rd anniversary of my ordination. For reasons I hope are theological as well as personal, I've always viewed that event on August 28, 1976, as utterly decisive and vocationally defining for me. It was the day I promised to follow Christ on the upward way of a pastoral preaching ministry. Whatever else I am in terms of my gifts, and however others see me in terms of gifts or faults, inextricably woven through my own self-understanding was that call to ministry which has been my way of following faithfully after Christ.

So I'm still climbing, keeping face forward up the hill of God. Here is the whole hymn - it still touches deep chords of longing, aspiration and an astonished sense of privilege.

Christ of the upward way, my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;
And move and march wherever Thou hast trod,
Keeping face forward up the hill of God.

Give me the heart to hear Thy voice and will,
That without fault or fear I may fulfill
Thy purpose with a glad and holy zest,
Like one who would not bring less than his best.

Give me the eye to see each chance to serve,
Then send me strength to rise with steady nerve,
And leap at once with kind and helpful deed,
To the sure succor of a soul in need.

Give me the good stout arm to shield the right,
And wield Thy sword of truth with all my might,
That, in the warfare I must wage for Thee,
More than a victor I may ever be.

Christ of the upward way, my Guide divine,
Where Thou hast set Thy feet, may I place mine;
And when Thy last call comes, serene and clear,
Calm may my answer be, “Lord, I am here.”

Walter J Mathams - composed circa 1915

 

Victoria Plums - a prelapsarian fruit and reminder of Eden?

Victoria plums are back in the shops. As a boy I helped pick several varieties of plums in the orchards which ran the length of upper Clydeside in Lanarkshire - and you were allowed to eat as you picked. The sensible psychology was that a picker would soon have had enough. A theory which worked even for me - there are only so many plums even greedy connoisseurs can eat and enjoy. But I haven't yet encountered a fruit I enjoy more.

Those orchards are long gone - either garden centres, road upgrading or housing developments have removed all but a couple which are now neglected. The season is late August to mid September so it isn't long to enjoy your favourite fruit. And maybe the sheer enjoyment of them is because they are only available once a year, and not for long. The imported other kinds of plum don't come near British Victorias. You can find out why over here.

William Carlos Williams has this delightful poem about eating cold plums from the fridge, and about the temptation to eat them before anyone else does:

This is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

R S Thomas and the heart of pastoral care

"Preach the simple gospel. Make sure the old woman who sits at the back of the church can understand you". That kind of comment is patronising nonsense not far away from uninformed arrogance. So forgive me, but I've just heard it or something like it one too many times.

On a par with thinking visiting older people is a chore rather than a privilege, or an inefficient use of a dynamic church leader's time, a task for ancillary ministry rather than strategic leadership. As if accompanying friendship, pastoral companionship, available presence, attentive conversation, weren't a privilege, a gift and an opportunity to share in richly textured experience.

Some of the finest practical theologians I know sit in the back seats at church, or at their tea table, and I've coveted their nod of approval for the truth I've tried to speak, framed in words with maybe half the depth of their experience of life with God.

Hence the prophetic edge to this entire treatise in pastoral theology distilled into just over 60 words. An R S Thomas prose poem, written late in life, that tells us why we might never be near good enough to preach up to, let alone down to, the level of "the old woman who sits in the back pew".

'The holiness of the heart's affections.' Never tamper with them. In an age of science everything is analysable but a tear. Everywhere he went, despite his round collar and his licence, he was there to learn rather than to teach love. In the simplest of homes there were those who with little schooling and less college had come out top in that sweet examination.

(R S THomas, The Echoes Return Slow (London: MacMillan, 1988), 62.

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Terry Eagleton: "Truly civilised societies don't hold predawn power breakfasts"

This book is one of the best reads for a long time - pity the dust cover is so dull, even if the simulated tear is meant to symbolise the torn fabric of human ways of knowing). In the London Review of Books, Eagleton (no friend of religion) previously punctured the ego of Dawkins by administering what can only be called a massive dose of qualified rationality! The straw men set up by Dawkins, the caricatures of religion in general and theism in particular, the sloppy argumentation, his culpable unawareness of his own prejudiced assumptions and emotional toxins - an absolutely unanswerable critique of a book that had it been submitted as an undergraduate dissertation would have struggled to survive the flaws of its own methodology. Treat yourself to the tonic of refined academic polemic, a masterclass by one of the sharpest and most controversial literary and cultural commentators. Eagleton in full flow can be read here in his review "Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching".

This book, Reason, Faith and Revolution consists of lectures he recently delivered in the United States (hence the references throughout to USA). Here he takes on the new atheists with the same verve, conflating Dawkins and Hitchens into the new protagonist Ditchkins - and sometimes with hilarious effectiveness.

"Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labour. The sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States [and United Kingdom!]. Truly civiled societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale, 2009), page 10.

Quite so!

R S THomas on "the contemporaneity of the Cross".

There were other churches from which the
populations had withdrawn, Celtic foundations
down lanes that one entered with a lifting of the
spirit, because there were no posts, no telegraph
wires. Is God worshipped only in cathedrals
where blood drips from regimental standards as
from the crucified body of love. Is there a need for
a revised liturgy for bathetic renderings of the
scriptures? The Cross always is avant-garde.

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The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow, and behind
that the shadows of the shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of those recessions
are brought up short by
the contemporaneity of the Cross.

(R.S. Thomas, The Echoes Return Slow, (London: MacMillan, 1988), 82-3.

In this slim volume Thomas juxtaposes prose and verse, and both must be read as twin perspectives, perhaps as two light-casting candles. In the prose poem, my copy has no question mark after "crucified body of love". Was that Thomas's intent or a miss-print? Is the absence of the question mark a hint that such a rhetorical question is no question, but a statement from one who had thought long on the human capacity to shed blood and think it justified in heaven, and had shaken his head in defiant negation? The cross is not the validation of war but its nemesis. And for Thomas, God is known not in the theology of glory but in the theologia crucis. So that the crucified God, symboled in shadow-casting light and crucified love, remains the most powerful critique of a theology of glory dressed up in religion too closely aligned with the centres of secular power.

The Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality

If you are at all interested in Christian spirituality as both personal discipline and intellectual interest, then this is a book you might want to have on your desk, rather than the shelf - it's way too big for reading in bed. There are now several text books on Christian Spirituality, suitable for class use or personal study, offering breadth but not always depth. What makes this book worth buying and working through is the obvious virtue of its having grown in dialogue with students, being refined through collaboration with other scholars, and the alert attention the author has paid to his own spiritual development; and all this taking over thirty years of slow and healthy gestation towards publication.

At 500 pages, double columns and hardback, the book has every appearance of meaning business. Each chapter begins with a clear outline and aim, then ends with a section on Christian spiritual practice, a chapter summary, several focused questions and a section for further study with suggested resources. There are sidebars developing content, excerpts from classic texts and figures in Focus boxes and illustrations which aren't there simply to break up the text.

All in all I reckon this is the most user friendly substantial Introduction to Christian Spirituality now available, and one mercifully free from the desire to be comprehensive at the cost of depth. I've spent time on and off over the past few days reading, browsing, getting a feel for the overall schema and discourse level. My feeling is that the book still reads as a substantial handbook on Christian Spirituality which balances essential information and analysis of key theological concepts and disciplines, with practical focus on the personal and formative implications of spirituality. At around £15 Hardback and high quality production, the book is good value - and in more ways than the near giveaway price.

This isn't a review - just a mention of a book I bought on the recommendation of friend and colleague, Deans Buchanan - who knows a thing or two about Christian Spiritual development. Have a look for yourself at the Brazos Press website here. .

The weekend that flew past full of good things

This post is a day late - yesterday it seemed more important to try to make some sense of events surrounding the actions of the Scottish Justice Minister and the furore about prisoner release, compassion, and the ends of justice.

Anyway. Had a great weekend in Aberdeen, and for multifarious reasons.

Friday evening went to see our niece Gael, in the production of The Chorus Line at the Aberdeen Arts Centre. Never seen this musical before. The combination of a theatre that is big enough for a sense of occasion while allowing the audience to remain intimately involved with the action, a hugely enthusiastic amateur cast, and some exceptionally good acting and musical skill on the part of several of the leads, made it a very enjoyable night. One soliloquy, by a dancer trying to explain his experience of discovering he was gay, his own inner confusion about his identity, the prejudices of class-mates and parents, the anguish and aspirations of a young man simply longing to be accepted and affirmed as who he is - it was beautifully and convincingly acted, and at a quite different level from the rest of the production. I can't help feeling that such dramatic expression and imaginative construal of human experience has its own validity as a contribution to the ongoing moral debates surrounding sexual mores, personal identity and theological ethics. Imagination and creative art possess their own distinctive and essential style of moral discourse.

Saturday morning had a long walk right along the Aberdeen front, most of it at the water's edge on the beach, and balanced the calorie burn with a bacon roll and coffee at the Inversnecky Cafe, sitting outside, in short sleeved short, wearing sunglasses - in Aberdeen!

Made time on the Staurday afternoon to listen to the Hamilton - Aberdeen game which we won 3-0.

Had a Saturday evening meal with friends that brought the day to a close with a feeling of stuffed contentment - food and friendship, the one enriching the other.

Led worship and preached at Crown Terrace,(the oldest of the Baptist Churches in Aberdeen), caught up with lots of friends and met some of the new folk around the church.

Successfully planned and executed a pre-arranged meet between Perth and Dundee, with a family travelling to Aberdeen from Edinburgh. Did I say we met at Glendoick Garden centre which does amazing iced gingerbread loaf, cut in three quarter inch slices?

Major roadworks at Castlecary and predicted 40 minute delays. So decided to go via Kippen and Drymen, dropping down into Milngavie. It was a wet misty day, with black and grey clouds, occasionally pierced by defiant but fleeting shafts of sunlight, the distant mountains only occasionally visible as slightly darker shadows lurking on the horizon. Hate to admit it, but there are times when Scotland looks impressive and almost other-wordly when heavy rain acts as a darkened filter over some of the finest scenery anywhere. (The photo isn't mine - it's courtesy of Glasgow University medics hillwalking group).

Now for the rest of the week I need to eat porridge for cholesterol control, and up the exercise regime to compensate for a justifiably indulgent weekend.

Cursed are the merciful? Megrahi and the collision of legal worldviews

"Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy".

I suppose we've grown used to so reconfiguring these words of Jesus in our minds and hearts that we have lost the sense of the aboslute nonsense they can sound. I too was embarrassed and angry at the Scottish saltire being used to celebrate the return of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi to Libya, his homeland.

• Because the St Andrews Cross is a powerful and culturally embedded symbol of a Scottish nation whose positive contribution to the world is out of all proportion to our size.
• Because Scottish lives were also lost when the plane fell from the skies on a rural Scottish town, which means Scottish people also have an interest in ensuring justice is done.
• Because the assumption is being made by many in the watching world that there was some kind of collusion between Libya and Scotland, a fact and a motivation denied by the Scottish Government.
• Because undoubtedly many families affected by the Lockerbie atrocity genuinely feel let down, betrayed, denied closure of their grief and desire for justice, by what they see as an act of weakness and injustice.

But on the other hand, I am neither embarrassed nor angry that the Scottish saltire is linked to an act of mercy, and to a form of justice that incorporates the option of compassionate release - not as a negation of justice as we are accused, but as its proper expression by a people whose legal system operates on different principles from the United States, and under whose legal system there was international agreement Megrahi should be tried and if guilty sentenced. That our judicial system is not the American way is a reality of history, of politics, of social ethics and of unarguable legal fact. If Megrahi is to be treated in a way that is just and legally defensible, then he must bear the full weight of the law, and be afforded the full range of options to which he is entitled under Scots Law. And Scots Law provides for compassionate release, which is not an act of pardon, which is not a statement of forgiveness, poltically, nationally or privately, which is not a declaration of any kind about the prisoner's legal status of guilt or innocence. It is, pure and simple, an act of compassion to a dying human being.

However it's more than a pure and simple act. Far from being an absolute mistake as Senator Clinton asserted, it is a demonstration by a small country that law doesn't have to be as savage as those it punishes. Far from being outrageous in the sense that FBI Director Robert Mueller meant, it is outrageous that the head of a law enforcement agency should presume to criticise the legal processes of a sovereign nation acting within its own judicial and legal traditions. It can just as cogently be argued that this act of compassion under the provisions of Scots Law, as it encounters the terrorist mindset, breaks the eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth mentality which is a primary driver in cycles of violence. Far from being regrettable as President Obama has claimed, it would have been more regrettable still if an entire legal tradition of a small country, with its humane provisions that have stood for centuries, were to be overturned because of political pressure from a powerful ally.

That pressure, overtly exerted by the United States, is entirely understandable. The American Government represents the interests and human rights of its own citizens, and the release of Megrahi seems to fly in the face of law, friendship and the realities of the 21st Century so called "war on terror". The truth is, nothing can compensate for the years of anguish and the enormous loss experienced by those families whose relatives were on the airliner that was blown out of the skies over Scotland twenty years ago. Nor the similar loss of other nations, including Scotland.

  But I would offer one further observation. Acts of compassion and mercy are far too often portrayed as weakness. They are not. They are acts of strength. Enacted statements of mercy publicly recognise the humanity even of those who may have acted inhumanely. Tne Scottish Saltire is the St Andrew's Cross, a symbol of crucifixion, and an embedded declaration of our rootedness in the Christian tradition as a major source and influence in the development and principles of Scots Law. To be accused of compassion, to be condemned for showing mercy, to be politically vilified for upholding our own judicial provisions with their humane instincts, perhaps we should expect no less, and simply be prepared to be misunderstood, though seeking to act justly. Compassion it seems, is expensive in our polarised world, and may cost friendships. But I still think that Scotland as a nation would carry a more just shame had our Government denied Megrahi his legal right to be treated within the legal provisions for compassionate release, to avoid offending powerful and vocal friends whose own judicial system operates on quite different principles. The clash of legal worldviews makes mutual understanding all but impossible.

And to the questions, "Why should we show compassion? What compassion did he show"? The answer is because enacted implacability and denial of humanity are precisely the crime for which Megrahi has been convicted. Scotland, still indebted to the Christian faith for some of our pivotal legal principles, operates on a different level of human responsiveness. I doubt if Jesus intended the Beatitudes as a political platform for nations - but "Blessed are the merciful" seems to me to be a better basis for human relations than "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth". But I do recognise, that if my children had been on that plane, my own hermeneutic would be under enormous pressure to give priority in law to the Old Testament injunction. Which is why it will always be wisest not to allow the victim to write, or re-write the law.  

jurgen Moltmann - "the unquencahble spark of hope..."

Here's Jason's contribution to the Moltmann series.

"Moltmann will always be for me a theologian of hope, not pie-in-the-sky hope but hope grounded in the being of God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, and especially in Jesus' journey into hell and subsequent resurrection":

‘Hope does not only give the power to break out of oppression, like Israel, and to seek the promised land of liberty. Hope also alienates people from their native land, their friendships and their homes, and makes them ready to let these go and to seek something new. By this I mean that hope for an alternative future brings us into contradiction with the existing present and puts us against the people who cling to it. The contradiction to existing reality into which the Christian hope brings believers is nothing other than the contradiction out of which this hope itself was born: the contradiction between the world of the resurrection and the world in the shadow of the cross. If we had before our eyes only what we see, then we should come to terms with things as they simply are, either cheerfully or unwillingly. The fact that we don't come to terms with them – that between us and the existing reality there is no harmony, either friendly or resigned – is the unquenchahle spark of hope for the fullness of life, for righteousness and justice on the new earth, and for the kingdom of God. That keeps unreconciled, restless and open for God’s great day’ –

Jürgen Moltmann, A Broad Place: An Autobiography (trans. Margaret Kohl; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 103–4.

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I'm currently re-reading Moltmann's Church in the Power of the Spirit. Nigel Wright once suggested that this volume is the best account of a Baptist ecclesiology by a non Baptist. I'd like to keep the Moltmann series going for a few days more. So if you want to send an excerpt for posting just email it to me. We'll have one every other day for a wee while longer.

Moltmann on the cry of dereliction - "taking off the shoes of our intellect...."

One of the most stunning elements in Moltmann's theological explorations is the way he takes with utmost seriousness, Jesus' cry of abandonment, and its implications for the inner life of the Triune God. Not everyone is comfortable with Moltmann's theology of divine agonising and his insistence that the death of the Son implies the grievous bereavement of the Father, borne and absorbed into the life of God through the Spirit.

But here is mystery beyond all our efforts at lucid coherence and systematic control. The truth is, no honest grappling with such searing realities should leave us feeling other than uncomfortable - because all honest and prayerful struggle to understand, and adore and surrender should be recognised for what it is - taking off the shoes of our intellect in acknowledgement of Love's eternal and redemptive and patient purpose.

The following comment and poem comes from Chris, a friend I haven't met yet! She has her own poetry blog here and she can also be found at Blethers which you can access on my sidebar. I found Chris's blog when I was chasing theology and poetry stuff last year during my sabbatical, and I liked it a lot. I asked if she'd contribute her poem to our Moltmann week and I'm grateful to be able to share it more widely.

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Sometimes poetry seems to me to be the only vehicle suitable to express an idea or an emotion. This poem arose from my reading of a small part of Jürgen Moltmann's "The Trinity and the Kingdom".

RESPONDING

It is dark, dark night.
Take this cup – suddenly in the dark
it is too awful. But the warm tide
is receding into the dark
and the cold sweat of emptiness
takes its place. The desperate words
fall unheeded on the stony ground.
Withdrawn in a point of light
God has no ears, only pain
and tight-focussed squeezing of the great
love now raw and bright
above Golgotha. The night is past
but dark remains, and emptiness.
A searing cry bruises the great mind
drenched in the pain of loss and
separation – and this is done
for me, this hellish loss, this bruising …
so that I can see, can understand,
am not forsaken. It is too much.
Too much for me. Too much.

© C.M.M.