Living Wittily

Where in the world? The table, is where.

Heading towards New Year I've been thinking about the church. 

Where in all the cultural flux of the times?

where in the midst of spiritual pessimism not unrelated to economic gloom?

where in the massed choir of competing voices that is our digital cyber inhabited environment; where in our confusion, anxiety and driven existence?

where, is there a place to stand, or to sit, and regain a sense of perspectve?

Where is there a centre that will hold against the centrifugal and centripetal forces of a world complex and dangerous, self-destructively greedy and unable to curb the human appetite to possess, have power over, and assert the will to life and power over against the imperative to be on the side of life itself?

Where is the place where the church's life is renewed, it's purpose reconstituted, its raison d'etre reaffirmed and its mission reconfigured.

The table, is where.

Gathered in Jesus' name, around the sacred table, sharing blessed bread and wine, hearing again the Gospel promise, giving again our deepest love, owning again our deepest longings, and realising that our loves and longings derive their importance from that which is prior to them - the love of God in Christ made known in the Spirit.

To the question where, the answer of the Christian heart will be - there, at the table.

How that works out in the theology and practice of each Christian community has been told with succint pointedness by Walter Brueggemann. The next few days I'll post Brueggemann's take on the central importanc eof the Gospel table, the place where shalom is proclaimed and from which it is to be lived.

 

Salley Vickers, Pastoral Care and the Complexity of Human Love

I have a very good friend who has an all but uncritical enthusiasm for Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, the first of her books I read. Another friend, Geoff Colmer, has been at me to read Vickers' The Other Side of You. I'm getting there Geoff! But I recently picked up a couple of other novels by Vickers in the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an establishment I have no hesitation in advertising here. (Organised, discerning, reasonable prices, a proprietor who leaves you to browse without ignoring you - The Old Aberdeen Book Shop 140 Spital ABERDEEN Aberdeenshire AB24 3JU tel: 01224 658355 map.).

So having read Mr Golightly's Holiday, a strange novel, somewhere between modern novel, and timeless fable with religious overtones and metaphysical undertones, I've just finished Instances of the Number 3.

I'm beginning to notice recurring themes, recognise the wise interpretive voice of the author, and becoming familiar with the narrative contexts Vickers creates as she examines and explores the topography of human relationships. Mostly her novels are about love of one kind or another - its failures and triumphs, its capacity to mortally wound and miraculously heal, its puzzling complexity and frightening simplicity, its power to extend forgiveness to the heartbroken or to withhold absolution and peace from those who make life choices that deny love's sovereign demands.

But love is neither to be domesticated to human whims, nor limited by the all too human urgency of selfish desire which is indeed love's negation. Vickers is a Jungian psychoanalyst; she is also an accomplished literary scholar; in addition she is a consummate observer of human motivation, behaviour and character; which makes her a consummate novelist. So metaphysics, religious experience, supernatural phenomena, the world of high art and serious literature, become in Vickers novels important perspective giving lenses into human aspiration as it grows or diminishes in the life and circumstances of the characters she creates. And she creates characters who are immensely persuasive, attractive, instructive - the outcome of the story matters because the destiny of the characters matters to the reader. 

Instances of the Number 3 is a novel that requires of the reader certain things. First a more than curious interest in what it is we are all looking for, hoping for, longing for, suffering from in those relationships that matter most to us - love. Second, a willingness to read slowly, and read much of the novel more than once in the first reading, in order to apprehend, and comprehend, the comments of the authorial voice, less didactic than George Eliot, but often as ethically perceptive and psychologically enlightening. Third, a patience with a writer who assumes her readers know enough about art and literature to grasp the more important allusions in chapters and passages of pivotal significance. But fourthly, a willingness to learn the art of sympathy and hopefulness, because Vickers' characters are on the whole likeable, flawed, people caught in the snares of circumstance, or constrained by previous life choices, so now longing for new purpose, direction and meaning, and all of this within the sphere of human relationships.

  I've said it here before - there are entire mornings in pastoral theology seminars when students would learn so much about themselves by reading novels. How the human heart works, about the constraints and disappointments, the quiet patient sacrifices that love both requires and bestows, and about how there are experiences and situations in all of our lives that are not resolved by changing them, but by recognising that their givenness and intractable nature, and how we respond to them, is what makes us.  And no, this isn't a review of a Salley Vickers novel. It's more and less than that. It is a push and a plea to those who dare claim the work of the cure of souls is their vocation. To take time to read those writers who sharpen our insight, ignite our imagination, stimulate emotional sympathy, teach us to interpret a life story - our own and that of others, and do so by drawing us into and involving us in their stories, where so much of our own experience is rehearsed, or questioned, or touched with the coal from the altar so that we understand ourselves more compassionately, see ourselves more honestly, and so speak of ourselves more modestly, and mercifully.

As one reviewer said there is an "essential optimism" in Vickers' writing. And there are sentences in her novels that are amongst the wisest counsel I have ever received from the pen of someone who has never met me, but who has, it would seem, been reading my private journal and plagiarising my experience.

(The photograph above is included just because it is a great photograph of avid readers! It came from here and I gladly acknowledge its use.)

The theological possibilities of a Pre-Raphaelite sketch

Burne Jones is famous for his Christmas angels. But this sketch of Mary and the infant Jesus has delicacy of touch and gentleness of line, and softness of tone.

Of course the subject matter has inspired great masterpieces from iconography to Renaissance masters, but I've often been moved more by the preliminary sketch, the idea in outline, which seems to be the more expressive for not being fixed and made permanent in a final work.

This is an idea being born, its incompleteness and preliminary status suggesting a living conception, a paradox of provisionality and finality, because it portrays its subject in definitive lines.

Is there a theological claim, or at least a theological clue, when the incarnation is portrayed in such ambiguity, the sketch that points to the masterpiece, but which stands in its own integrity even if the masterpiece is never attempted. The divine makes do with the human, the eternal inhabits time, spirit is embodied in flesh, and thus God comes to the world as the Creator to the creature, and inhabits the limitations of God's own art. Maybe so, or not. In any case, this is beautiful - and beauty itself points to God.

The Cost of Being Joseph, and Loving Mary.

 

 

 

For years U A Fanthorpe wrote a Christmas poem for her friends.

These and other Christmas poems are now gathered in the Collected Poems.

A favourite is the one about Joseph - not because it's great poetry, it isn't - but it is imaginative psychology with just enough theology to hold it together.

And Poussin's painting shows him suitably worried and wondering what in Gabriel's name he's got himself into!

 

 

I am Joseph

I am Joseph, carpenter,

Of David’s kingly line,

I wanted an heir; discovered

My wife’s son wasn't mine.

 

I am an obstinate lover,

Loved Mary for better or worse,

Wouldn't stop loving when I found

Someone Else came first.

 

Mine was the likeness I hoped for

When the first-born man-child came.

But nothing of him was me. I couldn't

Even choose his name.

 

I am Joseph, who wanted

To teach my own boy how to live.

My lesson for my foster son:

Endure. Love. Give.

The Adoration of the Magi: Comparing and Contrasting Cultural Assumptions.

Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.

Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.

In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?

One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.

Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold - the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.

That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.

The Theological Possibilities in a Damaged Painting of the Nativity

From countless depictions of the Nativity I have chosen this one by Fra Filippo Lippi (mid 1400's), because paradoxically it says something the artist intended but not in the way it now appears.

What do I mean? Mary's robe was originally painted in blue, a tradition of honouring Mary by sparing no expense in portraying her purity, beauty and sanctity. On this painting the blue was a thin coat on dry plaster, rather than blue pigment mixed into the plaster in a true fresco. Over the centuries the colour has degraded into grey. This cost-cutting device has the unintentional irony of portraying Mary as she saw herself, a poor handmaiden unworthy of honour. Thus an upmarket depiction of the Nativity now shows Mary in a flaked and entirely faded cloak. "He was rich yet became poor, that we through his poverty might become rich". So many Renaissance paintings of the Nativity are all but perfect; their codes and symbols, narrative drive and cultural context, theology and piety, their execution and technique - the finest art the world has ever seen.

Perhaps especially at Christmas, we are helped to see the scandal and the loss, the cost and the consequence, the trust and the terror, the extraordinary ordinariness of the Word made flesh, and the frightened courage of the Mother of the Son of God sharing that poverty as an act of self impoverishing faith in a God who somtimes asks the impossible, and then by divine grace enables and embraces human trust, so winning the response of the human heart.

Perhaps. A happy and thoughtful Christmas to all who come by here regularly. Because for Christians Christmas is a time when joy should be unconfined, and thought too!

BBC Nativity: Good TV and not bad eisegesis either.

The BBC adaptation of the Nativity finished last night, and I thought it was a beautifully conceived mini-series. Written by Tony Jordan (Eastenders, and Life on Mars) who researched the historical and theological background over four years, it struck the right balance between the discourse of historical drama and soap opera. Tatiana Maslany as Mary was compelling and convincing, both in her confusions and then her growing certainty of the mystery that had engulfed her. The men, Joseph and her father, perhaps understandably rejected her story as fantasy, and their hostility was grudgingly tempered by enough humanity to send her away, and accompany her as far as Bethlehem. Herod was suitably psychotic, just the kind of egomaniac who would have children slaughtered to secure his own security! The Magi were an attractive combination of the comic and and the mystic, otherworldly and well versed in the real-politik of Herod. The portrayal of astrology as a life study and serious epistemology in its own right was sympathetic and I think an authentic depiction of the best science and mathematics of the time.

The climactic scene of the birth was a remarkable sequence of old, old story and original juxtapositions. Joseph, turned away in Bethlehem by his family so long as he insisted on staying with Mary; his frantic search in crowded streets for a midwife or at least a woman to help Mary; the accidental desperation of kicking in the door of the stable; the labour of Mary, lonely, primal and anguished, and the pivotal moment when Joseph took her hand as the baby is being born; the coincidence of the stars reflected in the convergence of Magi and shepherds; the midwife donating her blue outer garment, signifying much that would come to be revered in Mary. These are thoughtful interpretive moves that gave freshness to familiarity, and depth to a story often enough reduced to shallow thought and surface sentiment.

On the critical side I have a couple of serious reservations. Rabbi Jonathan Romain, and adviser to the BBC on religious themes, took serious exception to the portrayal of a Rabbi refusing sanctuary to Mary when she and her mother fled into the synagogue to escape a stone throwing baying mob. I think Romain is right. The Torah provides for places of sanctuary, and requires compassion and mercy be shown in sacred space - such a response of mercy would have been more typical of Jewish religious ethics of the time, at least at their best. Rabbi Romain saw the scene as anti-Jewish, and likely to have a negative impact on Jewish-Christian relations. I'm surprised if he is an adviser to the BBC that he wasn't shown the scene much earlier and asked to comment. The refusal to help two life-threatened women did jar, and for me was inauthentic, an unfair caricature of a religious tradition that has always understood mercy is woven into the very texture of law.

My other comment is about why there wasn't a fifth episode. The omission of the flight to Egypt, against the background of the Herod's mad power paranoia, and the Slaughter of the Innocents, sanitises a story in a way that is morally and theologically misleading. There are enough holocausts still happening in our world, enough recurring slaughters of the innocent, for us to be able to locate such atrocity within the very story that points to a promised end to such normalised cruelty. Not for nothing is the Wonderful Counsellor and Prince of Peace prophecy of Isaiah 9 contrasted in the same text with the burning of the trampling boots of the soldier and the blood soaked garments of war.

The birth of this child is a threat to the world's power structures, from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, from Nazareth to Rome, from Washington to London, and beyond. The birth of this child is a statement by God, reiterated wherever innocent lives are rendered dispensable and redefined as collateral damage, from Bethlehem to Egypt, and from every site of murder and cruelty in the pursuit of power. The birth of this child triggered the ensuing political madness of power paranoia, and this also is part of the story. Not for Christmas cards of course, but for those who follow the One born in the stable, and do so with theological and moral seriousness, there is the call to see and name the cruelties and atrocities of inhumane power systems and unjust structures and merciless economies.

(The image above is from the pulpit of Siena Cathedral, a detail of The Slaughter of the Innocents.)

"Peace on earth, good will to men" - believing against the noise of the artillery

CHRISTMAS BELLS

 

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familar carols play,

     And wild and sweet

     The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And thought how, as the day had come,

The belfries of all Christendom

     Had rolled along

     The unbroken song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

Till ringing, singing on it's way,

The world revolved from night to day,

     A voice, a chime,

     A chant sublime

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!  

 

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

     And with the sound

     The carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

It was as if an earthquake rent

The heart- stones of a continent,

     And made forlorn

     The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

 

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no place on earth," I said;

     "For hate is strong,

     And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;

     The Wrong shall fail,

     The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807- 1882)

Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift....

The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity; God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words. To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how Truth is mangled and torn.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future, Harcourt brace and Co, 1940, p. 6

Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it know is can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about himself on his own terms...By faith one not only attains to truth in a way that intelligence and reason alone cannot do, but one assents to God Himself. One receives God. One says "yes" not merely to a statement about God, but to the Invisible,  Infinite God Himself.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Burns and Oates, 1962, p. 98

Perhaps something of what Lindbergh and Merton were saying is captured in Paul's apophatic exclamation - "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift" - generosity beyond articulation, the Word made flesh because the Word overflows the expressive capacity of words. When all our words are spoken, and all our thoughts are thought, the residue of meaning is immeasurable, infinite, eternal - but has become personal, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Him....and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. And we have beheld his glory.... Gloria in Excelsis Deo! 

Baroness Judith Hart - Conviction Politicians, Education and Giving Young People Life-chances.

One of the most important letters I ever received was from a Member of Parliament, the Honourable Judith Hart, MP, Later Baroness Hart of South Lanark. (Photo taken the year I was born). When I needed a Local Authority grant to afford further education my application was declined for reasons beyond my control, and which seemed at the time unjust. Judith Hart intervened and I was able to afford a year full time to get the Highers needed for University. My parents could never have afforded to keep me and pay for fees and accommodation and travel.The grant was small but enough.

Yesterday I listened to a young woman of 18 talking on radio about not having an Education Maintenance Allowance of around £30 a week. Without that little amount weekly, would she be able still to stay in education - "yes" she said, "but I would go without lunch".

That is a disgrace.

I don't mean that word to mean only that it is regrettable or even outrageous - though disgrace absolutely means both. I mean it is a policy that lacks grace, generosity, vision, imagination, compassion, understanding, - apart from lacking in any political sense whatsoever.It is a decision stripped of grace, and a decision that strips the hopes and ambitions of young people of grace, and turns aspiration into desperation.

Consider the figures. £1200 per annum is sufficient top up to keep a young person in Education for a further year, consolidating their qualifications and preventing them from going on the dole. So apart from that saving - how many could be afforded if a couple of bankers were not to receive their, let's say modest £1 million bonus? Huh? Do the maths. It's about 850 x 2 = 1700. Or how much does the taxpayer pay for a meal on an MP's expense account - much change from £30?

There are political and economic decisions that are always going to be hard to call. Choices are inevitable. But the choices we make as a society aren't just about what we do with money and where we make the cuts. Each choice is either for or against someone's life chances. I wonder how many of today's MP's in the Coalition Government have ever had to think twice about what to do with limited income. Eighteen millionaires in an austerity cabinet does suggest a lack of experience of the real world, the hard choices others have to make everyday. Would that today's decision makers had the political stature of Judith Hart to fight for the right of the young to have education based on ability not social class or economic security.

Are we really saying, you and me, ordinary UK taxpayers, are we saying to that young student that it's ok for her to go without lunch as the price for her education, that as a society we own that choice? Surely if she becomes a social worker, or a lawyer, or an IT specialist, or a manager, - whatever her eventual employment, will she not be a tax-payer who then carries the cost of others coming after her? And even if she doesn't - is education as a humanising and developmental process not something we value enough to underwrite some of the cost to make it as accessible as possible for each person?

There is something depressingly banal about a Government that lacks moral imagination, that rationalises broken pledges, that picks easy targets, that makes choices that are so against the least powerful they are embarrassingly partisan, and ridiculously out of touch with ordinary folk's struggles.

Amongst the letters I received on the occasion of my ordination, having completed University and College training, was a brief note of congratulations from Judith Hart, who had followed my progress for five years, and seen the difference a small bursary made to the life chances of a young man from a low income and working class home. Not just moral imagination, but political conviction married to wise priorities based on humane goals. For a return to such politics, I pray and read Amos, Micah and Isaiah.