Living Wittily

Books, good books and beautiful books

  There are books, good books and beautiful books. And while the contents are the thing, the physical production is not an irrelevance. Can you imagine reading your favourite book in a brown edged, split spine, dried glue crackling, acrid smelling cheap paperback. Well - yes if it was my favourite book, and the only available copy. But the enjoyment would be seriously diminished.

The ideal book is the one which has just what I want to read, well written, and contained in a volume that is attractively bound, printed on quality paper, a careful choosing of the right font, and even with features such as more than one ink colour. There is an aesthetic imperative in the production of a quality book. I'm much less dismissive of the softback or paperback than I used to be, but I can still be found guilty of paying much more for the hardcover when there is an option. There are well produced softcovers that do survive several readings, and can be opened a few years later without the spine disintegrating and the book being reduced to varied length pamphlets that need an elastic band to hold them together.

All this is because I spent some time over the weekend reading several chunks of Margaret Odell's commentary on Exekiel. That weird prophet, whose chapter one became a chapter in Chariots of the Gods, a best-selling speculative effort by Velikovsky on space ships and bible times, takes a bit of understanding. And Odell is way ahead of others in trying to interpret the outpourings of a man deeply disturbed by catastrophe, and trying to make sense of a God who permits catastrophe within a covenanted relationship with the very people on whom such catastrophe is visited.

But as well as the contents, which along with Kathleen Darr's careful and imaginative treatment in the New Interpreter's Bible are the best treatments around, Odell's book is a joy to use, read and handle. It is in the Smyth and Helwys series. It is inordinately expensive. The volumes are near impossible to source even from Amazon. The publisher's marketing approach is well nigh obstructive. But persevere. Phone Gracewing, the UK distributor. Don't visit their website unless you are an extraorinarily patient and understanding browser. Still. Several volumes including Odell's, are amongst the best exegetical helps around. Who wouldn't want Brueggemann on Kings, Fretheim on Jeremiah, Balentine on Job?

The production is lavish, expensive, includes sidebars, text boxes, varied ink text, high quality binding and paper, and it looks and feels like a volume you won't ever want to lend to anyone. That said, if my favourite book was out of print and my copy was a beat up brown edged paperback, held together with an elastic band, I'm not sure I'd lend it either. But a commentary with pictures! And sidebars. And a searchable CD. Bound in hardback with a distinctive dust-cover! Cherry pick the series, and own at least one if you appreicate high quality production of high quality content.

Blessed are the Poor - Except in a Recession

A conversation recently veered backwards to what I used to do before I was a minister. Long time ago. Hardly seems relevant it was so long ago. But then I began to think about it. In the years between leaving school at 15 and starting as a minister I was a tractor driver (16 the legal age then), worked in a Clydeside tomato / bulb nursery, did two years as an electrical engineer, worked as a brick setter in a brickworks, two summers at Easterhouse social work dept as a debt advisor, and one or two other bits and pieces including house plant cultivation and greenhouse glass repairing!

The point is I learned stuff doing all these things, and what remains is a set of skills all these years later. I can still drive a 16 gear tractor, make a difference in any garden I'm let loose in, know a good brick when I see one, and have a deep sympathy and at times an angry solidarity with and on behalf of folk caught up in hopeless webs of debt. But more than residual skills, there's the hard to explain and harder to replace experience of finding out what I could do, what I was good at and not so good at. But also the sobering thought that a young and unskilled man with no educational qualifications managed to stay in work for 5 years to earn his way to University. Not sure what chances anyone has today of repeating that career trajectory. Had I needed to draw up a CV then, not sure there was enough relevant content to fill half a page - and much of what was relevant would hardly have encouraged an employer.

But I was given life-chances. There were life chances to be given, and I'm not sure when that will be said again with some confidence about young people who don''t make it in the more fiercely selective and streamlined walkways to a career in a post recession culture sinking beneath the weight of its own debt, and looking to throw overboard anyone unable to pay their way. It's a hard time to be young....or middle aged....or old. It's a hard time. And I'm increasingly impatient with the rhetoric of politics, economics, and social theory that suggests we are all going to have to bear the pain. I'm sorry. But pain is relative, and during a recession there is no equal distribution of financial hardship, no common levels of anxiety, no universal experience of having to choose between food and fuel. Not all of us will have to make that kind of choice - we may have to pay more, but we will manage with a bit of adjustment. Not so for everybody.

So my impatience extends to the church, and the lack of evidence for a new approach to missiology that borrows from Amos, the Lucan Beatitudes and the preferential option for the poor that is definitive of the Kingdom of God. Because wherever else Jesus of Nazareth might place his vote, it would certainly be on the side of those who are the easy targets, the marginal folk who are too easily deprived of social benefits rather than cost us more money in taxes. I just don't think an increase in VAT feels the same for me as it does for a single parent with several children and no full-time job, or an elderly person on a basic pension. The church's voice could do with being heard, and speaking with a Galilean accent.

So that conversation about what I used to do? The great thing was, there used to be things to do that you could be paid for. Now an entire generation of people with skills, training, education, and life hopes and plans, are encountering a world no longer congenial to their life plans, and where life chances have to be fought for, and with no guarantees. Now whatever else I think the Gospel of Jesus means, it has to have something to say not only to people who are struggling to hope, but something to say on behalf of those who struggle to hope, in the face of massive economic and social forces aligned on the side of the haves.

  .

An unexpectedly graced hour amongst the dust

Made a new friend last night. I was on a mission to procure ornamental aggregate for a garden feature. The merchant was in the process of moving premises - hundreds of tons of pebbles and cobbles to be moved from here to wherever. It was good of them to entertain a customer given the logistics of relocating fragments of a mountain, or at least a mountain of fragments. But I knew what I wanted - they said they had it - somewhere. So I arranged to meet the man, a very helpful if a tad late, man. 

Waiting at the gate, no one around, phoned for the umpteenth time and discovered there are two gates, half a mile apart! No problem - my new friend said he would come and pick me up in his van, which he did. His apologies were genuine and his determination to fix the hassle I'd had just getting to the place was even genuiner! Should say I'd just finished at College and was dressed in some of my best clothes. So well dressed academic theologian and gravel shifting friend rummaged around the stacks of bags till we found what we wanted - no facilities for extracting the right amount I needed. So we started fishing for the best coloured and shaped cobbles in the 2 tonne bag. At which point my new friend suggested I take off my "guid jaickit". Right enough. 20 minutes later he decided we had enough for the job and we lugged it to the van, loaded it without a crane, and without doing mischief to muscle or disc, and dusted off hands, trousers and the "guid jaickit".

The point of all this is really simple, but not trivial. Someone I hadn't met before put himself out considerably for a tie wearing, dark-suited, not over-big, academic, happily mining in a large bag of stones, and the conversation ranged from the chances of the business surviving, to family challenges, to the problems of being on a salary with no provision for overtime - the last point his complaint, not mine:) Part of who I try to be is someone who tries to see each person as someone like myself, just trying to make life work, and trying to make sure those who share our lives are cared for, looked after, and that if the choice is to make someone's day better or worse, will always opt for the former. My new friend seemed to see life the same way. He could have gone home. Switched off his mobile. Told me to come back he didn't have a key to the place. But decided to make my day better.

So in the end, mission accomplished, conversation enjoyed amongst the dust, and two people who might never see each other again, spoke about important things, and reached out across those barriers too easily taken too seriously. It was an unexpectedly graced hour, and touched me in deep places that leave me still wondering about all those possible friendships just waiting the right encounter. Pondering too, how to live more generously and with that openness of heart that simply reaches out from one to another for no other reason than the recognition of someone else who happens to be here, now, and walking the same way.

Mary Oliver, Staff Retreat and learning to pay attention to our lives.

Been away from here for a few days.But been doing other things that brought me into good company, lovely countryside and conveyor belts of rain! Been at Grasmere with the good folks of Northern Baptist Learning Community sharing their staff retreat and helping provide guidance and stimulus towards renewal and refreshment after a long demanding year. So we had some of Mary Oliver's poems, an eclectic choice of music that reflects my own enthusiasms, a number of pictures and images which express beauty and the joy or sadness that intermingles with our lived experience. And I shared a few soliloquies inspired by several biblical encounters with Jesus - never been sure if they were worth doing more with, but the consensus seems to be a yes. So we'll see.

What became evident though is that on a retreat occasion, a poet like Mary Oliver has the ability to open new doors of perception, encouraging a more attentive, less cursory viewing of the world - to gaze rather than glimpse, to notice rather than merely register, to greet whatever and whoever we meet, with "Hello", rather than to act ignorantly, that is in a way that shows we do not really know or want to know those other presences that would grace our lives if we gave them the time of day, and a little space.

Throughout her recent work there are a number of light-hearted but not insignificant poems about her dog Percy. Here's one that I find irresistible because it is about a dog and books, or in any case about a dog impatient with stupid humans who bury their face in paper instead of looking at the beauty, the fun and the excitement of a colourful world laden with smell and sound.

Percy and Books (eight)

Percy doesn't like it when I read a book.

He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

The tide is out and the neighbour's dogs are playing.

But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

 

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

Let's go.

With summer here, an academic year formally completed tomorrow, I'm with Percy. Let's go! Need a holiday and it will come in a few weeks. Meantime in order to enjoy it, I'm going to try to decelerate gently, a foot movement that doesn't come naturally to me. To help me I'll slowly work through several thin books of Mary Oliver's poems, and learn again how to pay attention, to say hello, and give time of day to whoever asks it, or even whoever doesn't.

Poetry, the hidden treasure of the heart, and being made to feel differently

Amongst the subsidiary blessings of being a staff member at the Scottish Baptist College, is a generous books allowance to underpin our personal research and help us keep abreast of new work in the subject areas we teach. Of course there are those who call such blessings a perk - but that's cos they don't have the high vocational commitment of the bibliphiole for whom a book is synonymous with blessing, and reading an activity that Philp Toynbee called "the royal way to God".

This week the book allowance for the next academic year becomes available. And I don't have what I often have, a long list of waiting to be bought goodies - perks - ehhh - blessings. Which said, there are a few essentials that are food for the soul, the heart and the spirit - before we ever get to the mind.

Mary Oliver is a poet entirely comfortable swimming in the emotional depths, yet possessed of an uncomfortable and discomforting instinct for bringing our own more hidden emotions to the surface; not to embarrass or frighten, but to reconcile us to the richly textured, gloriously ambiguous world of our own deep feelings. And she does this in ways so deceptively simple that only because I know her ways with words, am I expecting to feel differently by the time I reach the end of one of her poems. But how I then feel, is still a surprise, because the reading of the poem becomes a medium of self-discovery, the poem itself a field in which, ploughing, I discover hidden treasure. Then again my own reading self is also the field in which the treasure is hidden - there but undiscovered, till her ploughshare turns the soil and there I am, laughing, or crying, daring or caring, restored or reconciled, interested or integrated, convinced or content, - the alternatives are endless, but the point is, I seldom read one of her poems without thinking and feeling differently about life, the world, me, those I love, problems I have or that have me, hopes fiercely cherished or disappointments that weigh heavy.

I've often enough said that the poets are the ones who take us to the heart of things, and to the heart of our own hearts. Mary Oliver's best poetry performs such cardiac surgery using words as both scalpel and needle, skillfully healing and repairing that centre of our being which gives our lives rhythm, oxygen and the vital energy for life. And in the process, she brings to the light of our days, treasures we did not know we had, treasure we did not know we were. Tomorrow I'll post one such poem - read earlier in the week, in the middle of a jaded afternoon to each of our staff members, read and heard by each as a benediction framed in loveliness, and welcomed as a gentle corrective for lives perhaps too prone to self-important anxiety about getting the job done. Whatever is true of my colleagues, Mea culpa! 

The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

 Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world. 

Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us...for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God... 

The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does - persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.