Living Wittily

Kay Carmichael: Social Reformer, Teacher and Writer (Died: Dec 26 2009)

Wasn't going to post today. But just picked up the notice that Kay Carmichael, social reformer and teacher, died on Boxing Day. I often talk here about those who have shaped my thinking, my attitudes, my moral values, my theology. I was taught Social Administration in the 1970's by two socially attuned and radically compassionate human beings - Professor Bob Holman and Dr Kay Carmichael. Together they reconfigured the way I think about social justice, human wellbeing and social welfare, the nature, causes and responses to poverty, the cruciality of civic responsibility, and the dignity of each human being. In doing so, Kay Carmichael also changed the way i think about the Gospel, the mission of the Church and the God who sides with the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised.

I want to say more about Kay Carmichael in a later post. For now, I simply want to express appreciation and gratitude for the life of a fine teacher, who embodied the passion for social justice she instilled in her students. And more than its personal impact on me, acknowledge also the differences she has made in the wider public sphere, where she looked for ways to enact the great Hebrew call to prophetic living, "to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God."

The Peaceful Disposition of God

Anything I write on this blog about the execution of Akmahl Shaikh by the Chinese authorities is unlikely to add much to the widespread condemnation already voiced. A Government that used tanks and militia with automatic weapons to crush students in Tianneman Square is hardly going to flinch at carrying out a mandatory death sentence on a tourist with mental health issues found guilty of smuggling drugs. 

The diplomatic war of words will proceed with the age old purpose of posturing and seeking satisfaction of the interests of both sides. None of that changes the deliberate killing of a human being. That a person's mental illness is designated as irrelevant, suggests a cynical level of legal pedantry and a wilful rejection by China of human values upheld in the wider international community.

But China makes no claim to respect the values of the wider international community. And the stronger China becomes economically, the more the West is dependent on Chinese trade and money and debt management, the less China's Government will have to care about international opinion. Maybe the award of the Olympic Games, and their global commercial and media success, conferred a degree of acceptance and arrival that sends the signal that human rights are not non negotiable; put another way, human rights violations are less important than long term, even short term, economic self interest.

I have an inner sense of moral futility about events like this, a confusion of spirit, because I am angry and sad, yet not surprised, at this execution. To expect clemency to be refused, is a bleak mindset. Nevertheless, it is right, indeed morally required, that we hope, pray, plead, for mercy; even when all the evidence and signs are that such cries will make no difference. That raises deep, even troubling theological questions - the unbearable tension that has to be borne, between believing that prayer makes a real difference, and the collision of our prayers with those intractable events and incidents, such as state enacted execution, that make prayer seem pointless and unreal.

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Lighter Interlude

One side of a telephone conversation in a second hand bookshop. You have to imagine what is being said at the other end.....fill in the dots yourself. Here's the one clue you need.  Somebody wants to sell text books.

Bookseller: "What kind of books did you say"

Caller's Answer.......................

Bookseller: " Are they all mental books?"

Caller's Answer.........................

Bookseller: "Naw we don't have a mental section. Mental books don't sell in Glasgow."

Caller's Answer..........................

Bookseller: "You're best to take them tae Edinburgh. That's where most mental books sell. That's where they study mental."

Callers Answer........................

Now leaving aside questions of political correctness and socially appropriate discourse, I wasn't the only one biting a near to hand book to avoid explosive guffaws. As we near Hogmanay and the subterranean levels of TV entertainment dished out to Scottish viewers, I think I might try and sell this sketch to Only an Excuse. Anyway, don't try to sell text books on psychiatry in Glasgow!

.........................................................

More seriously again, at this one time of the year when "peace and goodwill to all people" are words we are less embarrassed about speaking or hearing, I came across some words of the great NT German scholar, Rudolf Schnackenburg (seasonal first name, eh?). Schnackenburg restates the mission of Jesus in terms of peacemaking, that characteristic goal of the Gospel which is to be worked for as a primary sign of the Kingdom:

"Everywhere where people follow Jesus in his way, a portion of God's rule is realized, the strength for peace grown, and peace emerges triumphant over all hatred, clash of weapons, and tumults of war. Whoever has once comprehended the absolute will of Jesus toward peace, which nourishes itself on the peaceful disposition of God, can and must affirm and recieve all human earthly, socio-political efforts toward peace, all small initiatives and large organizational measures. Out of the message of Jesus, that God will eventually grant humankind the last perfect peace, such a person willnever be disillusioned or discouraged. This is the power of Christian peace efforts and peace work."

Quoted in Willard M Swartley, Covenant of Peace. The Missing Peace in New Testament Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), page 426.

Schnackenburg is right. And his convuiction which I share, is part of my response to my own threatened disillusion at the end of my comments above on prayer, China and capital punishment.

Health and safety and the way we do our thinking.

Reading about Dorothy Day over the past few weeks has been cause for critical reflection on a number of unhelpful assumptions that clutter up the floor of my mental workshop, and that in the real world would be removed by anyone schooled in health and safety procedures. Interesting concept - a health and safety inspection of the way we do our thinking!! Here's three correctives to such unhelpful assumptions.

One. Just because someone isn't a recognised theologian doesn't mean they aren't. Day never claimed to be, never wanted to be known as, a theologian. But the way she lived her life on the values of the Sermon on the Mount, used her mind to think through the meaning of each human being's existence and value, conflated prayer and social action, ignited compassion with the fire of the Gospel of Jesus, confronted the powers not only with obstinate protest but with lucid argument articulating the nature of God in Christ. She was a theologian alright.

Two. Spirituality has to do with the inner life and piety of the individual. Not so. True spirituality is expressed through the outward witness in works of mercy of a Christ-responsive community. Coming from an Evangelical context I recognise the deadly temptations of what my own College Principal used to call "grovelling around in the dark recesses or comfortable sofas of our own souls".  Day knew the problem. "To cook for one's self, to eat by one's self, to sew, wash, clean for one's self is a sterile joy. Community, whether of family, or convent, or boarding house, is absolutely necessary." It isn't that I don't know that. It's just that spirituality in a consumer culture is always in danger of being an unholy search for personal customer satisfaction. By contrast, Day found God in the messiness of people's lives, in the friction of personal relationships, and in those places where injustice and suffering went unchallenged - until she and others like her went there in Jesus' name and orchestrated a collision of worldviews.

Three. Personal sanctity is a life goal. Not so. Sanctity pursued has no purchasing power for the truly holy person. The self-conscious pursuit of holiness was, in Day's judgement, a deflection from the life of discipleship. When followers of Christ seek him amongst the poor, witness to the Kingdom of God with faithfulness before the powers that hurt and exploit, enact in lifestyle and embodied practices the forgiveness and peacemaking of God, then just at those points where personal holiness is the least concern, sanctity is invisble but obvious. Even in her lifetime some suggested to her she was a saint - her reply, "No. I can't be dismissed that easily".

Three will do for now. My final post Dorothy will include a couple of Dorothy's subversive interpretations, either of Jesus' words or of the actions consistent with Jesus' own subversive lifestyle of self-giving and peacemaking love. Jim Forest's brief biography is entitled Love is the Measure. And so it is.

If love is interpreted with the full costliness of the Gospel

and love modelled on Jesus is lived as a tough and compassionate alternative to the uncaring selfishness of contemporary culture

and love is understood as a Gospel critique of all social injustice that diminishes, discriminates and deprives further the least of Christ's brothers and sisters

and Love is 

Incarnated in practices and habits of compassion

Cruciform in its shape and self expenditure

Resurrection pointing in its vitalising hopefulness

Pentecostal in its dependence on the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts

Trinitarian in its reaching out to those who are other

Eschatological as the contemporary enactment of the final reality of a universe where God will be all in all

because in the end, as at the beginning, God is love.

Susan Boyle dreamed a dream - bless her!

OK. So after all the hullaballoo earlier this year about Susan Boyle, the pros and cons of Britain's Got Talent, the ambiguous roles of three millionaire judges, and the impact of instantaneous celebrity status on a modest Scottish woman who seemed to be unravelling before ruthlessly voyeuristic cameras; the album is out, is selling in millions, and the woman herself much more self possessed and a pleasure to watch and hear.

I watched the repeated documentary the other morning, in which she did indeed sing with Elaine Paige - who was encouraging, supportive without a hint of patronising. We bought the CD for Christmas. And yes it's good. She has a voice that is versatile though I don't like the arrangement of several of the songs - Daydream Believer was never a slow croon.

But the overwhelming sense I had as I listened to the Cd, and watching the Documentary, was of a woman who had shown immense courage in ever going to those auditions at all. And then seeing it through, right through to a final in which she came second and ran out of places to hide. But there she is. Doing what she dreamed of doing. I don't buy into the "dream it and it will happen" approach to life. I've known too many people whose dreams just didn't happen for them. But unfulfilled dreams have never been a reason to stop dreaming; nor to depsise what we have, who we are and what is still possible. Still less to knock someone else whose dream has come true

I salute this brave woman. She should be made Scot of the Year. Her talent, her personality, her vulnerability and her sheer guts, her self effacing sense of who she is, make her the best kind of ambassador for Scotland, a country that too often blaws its own bagpipes while simultaneously letting the air out of the air bladder. Nobody can predict what will now happen for her and to her - but I wish her well, and have nothing but admiration for the way she has taken hold of her life, and walked into a different future.

We all know reality TV cans its audience responses and plays on viewers' mixture of gullibility and cynicism. The wide road that leads to exploitation is too easily taken. But now and again someone transcends the polyfoam programming. I for one will never foget that first night when she sang "I dreamed a dream" - that kind of moment transforms viewer voyeurism into a much more wholesome human solidarity, rooted in recognition of significance, beauty and the sheer triumph of immediate human gift over mediating technology.  

I've now spent the more relaxing hours of Christmas and Boxing Day reading Sisters of Sinai, by Janet Soskice. It's the story of two women, twins born in Irvine in 1843. Their early years were spent in Kilbarchan before moving to London and then Cambridge. It's the story of two Bible-hunters, scholarly sleuths with brilliant linguistic gifts matched only by a capacity for hard work that's nothing short of stunning. Combine that with an adventurous appetite for travel, personal courage, infuriating determination and sheer intellectual obstinacy and you begin to get the picture.

The book reads like a novel but is deeply rooted in meticulous research; it deals with an area of my own interest over many years, the textual criticism and reception of the New Testament; it champions two women whose story deserves more than one telling while exposing the sheer weight of prejudice and social convention against which they (and subsequent generations of women) have had to struggle towards recognition. My enjoyment of this book goes alongside the similar feelings I had on first reading Stephen Neil's History of New Testament Interpretation which places the discovery of key NT manuscripts in the 19th century against the larger background of palaeontology and archaeology.

Janet Soskice is a philosophical theologian in Cambridge University. This isn't her usual kind of book at all - but if it has been a mere diversion then it has been a very worthwhile one. This isn't a review of the book. It's a plug for the book;

if you care about how the New Testament text has been shaped by scholarly investigation, wheeling and dealing both honest and dishonest

if you care about the marginalisation of women in the academy and the sheer injustice of gender discrimination that arises from male sponsored small-mindedness

if you care about the stories of Scottish people who made their mark against the odds

if you care about those who care about ancient cultures, and who respect and learn deeply from cultures unsettlingly dissimilar to our own

and yes, if you care about history as the truth that isn't always told, but should be - get this book and read it.

(You might want to wait for the paperback - due late Spring 2010) 

Here's just one example of why this is such a readable and important book. Soskice is helping us understand the initial collision but eventual collusion of two radically opposed views of sacred text, what it is and what we do with it. The Scottish Presbyterian widows, for whom the Bible is the text not the artefact, encounter in St Catherine's monastery, a procession of Orthodox monks following behind a jewel studded Bible, complete with incense and acts of adoration. The black, leather bound bible of Protestantism which the Scottish Presbyterian sisters revered, is contrasted with an Orthodox work of religious art, executed in gorgeous colour, copied with painstaking neatness, jewel studded and bound in the most expensive material, and then handled only with elaborate ceremony and unabashed adoration by the community.

"The monks at Sinai did not just honour but venerated their icons, regarding them almost as members of their community at prayer. For related reasons they also reverenced the physical form of their bibles and religious manuscripts, as well as the contents. For the Western visitors, the idea of processing with a Bible whose covers were studded with jewels and whose pages were illumined with gold, of incensing it and bowing before it was abhorrent. But to the monks, the Bible processed in church and embellished with leaf of gold was, metonymically, the Word incarnate present to their community...

Prior to the invention of printing, the reproduction of a book was a costly, lengthy and- for the monastic scribes - a devotional matter...For those who first wrote and read the manuscripts at Sinai, the formed strokes of ink that made up the words of the Gospels in a handwritten manuscript, the words laid laboriously letter by well formed letter on sheets of precious vellum, or the paints laid on wooden boards that were the images of saints, were emblematic of a God who indwelt the physical world as man."

Easy pleased at Christmas.

Easy pleased so I am. Christmas come and gone and I'm happy.

The big read is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, a book I've put off buying cos Aileen promised it and kept her promise. The combination of historical research and historical imagination when done well is almost irresistible to a mind like mine. History and good storytelling don't have to get in each other's way, and with a writer as good as Mantel, they don't. This is a historical novel that combines the best of both genres. If it is as good as Mantel's earlier To a Safer Place, which explored the inner dynamics and the historic and political consequences of the French Revolution, then it will be worth a long read.

But a good read needs a good drink, and Whittard's Cinnamon Chai Tea is as good as it gets on a winter's night, with a big book, in the front room while the others indulge themselves with Dr Who.

It was recorded so I will see it - but I don't want to wait a week between episodes, so later in the week.

Meanwhile what more than a big book and a good drink of spiced tea.

Well, actually some of these. Courtesy of Sheila who works on the assumption (mistaken obviously), that a large packet of small chocolates will last longer than a big bar.

So. Book. Spiced Tea. Chocolate Caramel Nibbles. Be interesting to see if the book or the chocolate is finished first! :)

Told you. I'm easy pleased.

Hope yours was as good as mine.

The central mystery of Christmas and the human predicament

This blog began as a way of sharing much of what I think, feel and believe about many things.

I've kept it going because it combines the discipline of writing with the fun of sharing.

It's a forum for theological reflection on the stuff that happens, and also a place for exploring with others the fruit of reading and thinking. 

Now and again, a blog allows not only wider conversations, but deeper ones - the old fashioned phrase "the human predicament" is only old fashioned in terminology, not in reality. As human beings we are indeed in a bit of a predicament - God help us!

And in addition to all that, this blog is for me some substitute for that part of me that always leans towards opening conversations with others around what it means in practice to follow faithfully after Jesus today.

That's all asking a lot, but there it is.

Sometime on Christmas Day the electronic counter will indicate that the 100,000th visitor clicked in. I hope the importance of that isn't only an ego thing - but an indicator that people find stuff here that is worth the bother of looking in the first place.

Anyway.

In a world where even peace prizes no longer seem to make a lot of sense

where post Copenhagen climate change raises major issues of justice to future generations

where religious ideological conflict is replacing the old cold war dichotomy

and where the economic and political self-interest of the rich create dangerous pressures against the poorer half of the world;

in a world like that, our world,

may we know the dawning reality of the Love that moves the earth and the stars,

may we gaze again on the central mystery of the Word become flesh whose glory we behold,

and may we live in obedience to Jesus Christ,

the One whose mission of peacemaking and reconciling love

defines the Christian God,

and sets the trajectories for our own life mission within and beyond the Church.

And in the light of that - a joyous Christmas to you all.

Nativity: Love both hazardous and purposeful

Voltage

Wet streets,

shining slates,

indigo on a tremble

as if dew

is wrung from it,

the mistle thrushes

of Paradise Street

nesting in January

on a lamp post

in Liverpool.

Casual, particular

as when Mary

in electric blue

before the angel,

kept the place

in the book she was reading

with her left thumb.

Pauline Stainer, Crossing the Snowline, (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2008) page 78.

By the time we get to Christmas Eve we are nine months after the Annunciation. But that moment when heaven articulated the divine love for creation, is the hinge point of salvation history. Overwhelming love refusing to overwhelm, and instead awaiting the yes of a young woman who could have no conception of what it might mean, to conceive and bear the life of God made flesh.

Stainer's poem (and El Greco's painting) is no easy exposition of this pivotal response, nor of the invitation that was not so much a request as an announcement. The freedom of Mary to say no is in tension with the purspose of God to redeem by assuming the flesh of creation; in the divine - human encounter, the will of God and the will of Mary, the condescension of God wins the yesfulness of a woman. But it is her yes to give, and God will not superimpose divine will and intention on human freedom to surrender by, simply taking her for granted. What this poem does, is point to the disconcerting fact that this most significant intervention is understood as no more than an interruption. And Mary keeping the place in the book she is reading signals Mary's intent to pick up life where it was left off to attend to that brief interlude on which the salvation of the world turned. When the angel left, life went on, but this brief interruption, signalled the irruption into history of love both hazardous and purposeful.

So when we get to the nativity story, and coat it in sentiment, there's a need for those poets who won't let us ignore the reality of a young woman, an unexplained pregnancy, and the astonishing risk she took in co-operating with the astonishing risk God was taking. Have a happy, and thoughtful Christmas.

Dorothy Day and diamonds for the poor

Dorothy Day again.

A well dressed and well off woman went to one of the Worker houses and gave Dorothy a diamond ring. She thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later that day gave it to an old woman who lived alone.

Somebody protested the ring could be sold and pay the woman's rent for a year. To which the reply was let her sell it and pay the rent, or use the money for a holiday in the Bahamas, or just enjoy wearing it. Whatever choice the old woman made, it would be her choice and she would have her dignity.

Anyway, Dorothy asked, " Do you suppose that God created diamonds only for the rich?"

Those are the stories that enflesh the sayings of Jesus, have that recklessness of the Beatitudes, and echo another woman's act of extravagance.

Ernst Kasemann - the provocative questioning of a great man

The 20th Century produced several great commentaries on Romans. Barth, Cranfield, Wilckens, Jewett. Then there were some very good ones, Sanday and Headlam, J D G Dunn, Douglas Moo, Jospeh Fitzmyer, N T Wright. The one that's missing is the one I found hardest to read, which says as much about me as it does for the book.

Ernst Kasemann's commentary on Romans was published in English by SCM in 1980, and bought with a gift from my first church who knew well my love of books. Because it was a gift, (and I chose it for goodness sake), I felt obliged to read it, not to waste a generous gift. For weeks, in my wee sloping roofed study, I slowly made my way up the steep brae that is Kasemann's dense style, theological wrestling and absolutely uncompromising approach to theological exegesis - something Kasemann was doing long before it has become a fashionable innovation to the hermeneutical industry. But I got to the top of the brae - I finished it, and it is one of those few books you begin as a chore, continue as a discipline, persevere as a matter of sheer determination not to be beaten, and then like climbing in low cloud, you move above the cloud base and see the view that makes it all worth it.

And the view Kasemann opened up changed our way of looking at things Pauline. Justification isn't to be limited to the specific individualistic benefit of the justified Christian; justification is cosmic in scale, is gift and power to accomplish, and is the dynamic reality that displays the reality and promise of the Lordship of Christ, now and in God's future for the creation. Not so much a breath of fresh air as a gale that blows you off your feet. For that reason Kasemann goes in the list of great commentaries.

And the man who wrote this dense masterpiece of exegetical toil? It takes a special kind of faith in God and faithfulness in discipleship to Christ, to take Isaiah 26.13 as the text to preach in 1937 Gestapo ridden Germany. Read the text and you'll see why he was arrested. In 1941-2 Kasemann argued passionately for the validity of womens' ministries. No surprise either, that he was a vociferous anti-nuclear campaigner. His daughter was killed in and Argentinian jail in 1977, an event that deeply affected him, pushing his theology in directions of radical critique of power, injustice and economic greed, and fuelling active inviolvement in the theology of world mission. He latterly became a Methodist - John Wesley and Ernst Kasemann!

There is a point to all this. In the Spring Eerdmans will publish collected sermons and lectures of Kasemann, who died in 1996 aged 90. The book cover is pictured above.  In my view this is a publishing event. An absolute necessity in early summer will be allocating blocks of reading time to gather the fruit of what Kasemann was saying and writing to the so complex world in the last quarter of the 20th Century.