Living Wittily

Emmaus and the journey towards a new wholeness.

The walk to Emmaus is one of the high points of gospel narrative. The journey, the lonely road, two bewildered travellers, the unlooked for stranger who becomes a companion, the change of conversation, and the way the journey passes quickly in such company. Each of these are features of the skilled storyteller, and each of them exactly what I guess are universally recognised clues for what we all need when walking the road of uncertainty ourselves - company, conversation and companionship that stays with us.

The Emmaus walk and the Emmaus Supper have provided artists with some of the most emotionally charged narrative and some of the most poignantly imaginative encounters in the entire Christian tradition. For those who are honestly facing the realities that call previous certainties in question, or who have reached those unknown places of uncertainty and significant life change, Emmaus is a pivotal story. "He took bread and blessed and broke it....And their eyes were opened...and he vanished from their sight".

Easy to miss that. The moment of recognition lasts just long enough to surprise, remind, reassure, and to release vision and energy enough for a lifetime. Open-eyed recognition, and he vanished. Like those first disciples, the reader today wishes he had stayed longer, we long for more permanence. Yet. Whatever else faith is, it cannot be chronic certainty. The constituents of faith are wonder and surprise, risk and trust, voluntary vulnerability, and contentment with hints of truth and glimpses of glory. That walk to Emmaus could have left the disciples where they were - bewildered, resentful, and in terms of life purpose at a loose end.  "and a stranger drew near...and they didn't recognise him...". But he walked with them just the same, won confidence enough to not only speak, but be listened to, and on being asked to stay longer, like a good guest, he welcomed their welcome, and shared their meal.

For all kinds of reasons Luke's Emmaus narrative of that troubled journey and its resolution, touches into those deep places of our human experience, those parts of our journey that are also troubled, from which we don't emerge unscathed or unchanged. But in the breaking of bread, the Guest becomes the Host, our eyes see, and our souls are fed - and life is nourished again towards wholeness.

in trying to get hold of things mysterious
we try to invent something definite
and mystery can never be defined
or must always be redefined
or better yet
come at newly and indirectly
through stories and things around us
thru parables and food

The window was designed by William Morris. The verse is quoted in an early book by Sallie McFague, Speaking in Parables, Fortress, 1975, p.114.

 

Good fences make good neighbours.

Today I'm in the fence-building business. Both sides of our gardens have woven slat fences that are greened with moss, broken and brittle and with posts that are shoogly (scottish word for unstable!) So we do the first one today, my neighbour and I, two amateurs who know how to dig holes, mix postcrete, use a spirit level, and both want a shot of the paint sprayer! As to whether the fence will be the epitome of fenceness - we'll see. But the negotiation and agreement and shared labour needed to build it is one of those episodes when social fabric is repaired and a few strands of neighbourliness woven in. Reminded me of some words from Robert Frost's poem, Mending Wall:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

and spills the upper boulders in the sun,

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

......

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

that wants it down.

.....

Good fences make good neighbours.

Robert Frost.

Frost had such a clear mind about what makes for good and satisfying social relationships. Irrascible, confrontational, unforgiving and at times downright cussed he might be - but he knew how to put into words the way things should and could be, when human beings make good choices (the Road Less Travelled) or cement neighbourliness with postrete (Mending Wall) - as in this case, fallen boulders replaced in the interlocking balance of angle and weight that is the genius of the early New England drystone wall (and the Scottish drystane dyke). 

Questions as the oxygen of faith?

All who genuinely seek to learn,

whether atheist or believer,

scientist or mystic,

are united in having not a faith,

but faith itself.

Its token is reverence,

its habit to respect the eloquence of silence.

For God's hand may be a human hand,

if you reach out in lovingkindness,

and God's voice may be your voice,

if you but speak the truth."

(Paul Ferris, The Whole Shebang).

 

"Every question asked in reverence

is the start of a journey towards God.

When faith suppresses questions,

it dies.

When it accepts superficial answers,

it begins to wither.

Faith is not opposed to doubt.

What it is opposed to

is the shallow certainty that what we understand

is all there is."

(Jonathan Sacks, Celebrating Life).

Thomas Merton and the Emmaus moment of invitation and recognition

There are some writers who become companions on your road. It didn't start out that way. Just that one day you picked up the book and in reading it you heard a voice that you liked, recognised tone and demeanour that was friendly, felt the kind of ease and trust that only comes when you know, you just know, here is someone who would be good company. And once you've walked the length of that book, there is a kind of Emmaus moment, a reluctance to let this companionship on this journey end. Because your heart burned within, the conversation brought healing, understanding, possibility of newness, opened up a different future, and the friend we met on the way is one we now want to spend more time with. And we have the feeling we didn't meet him - he met us, he drew near, at just that time and in just that place.

That's as near as I can describe my first encounter with Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, seeker of solitude, peace activist, inveterate journal and letter writer, and mercifully fallible human being. Few of his books are sustained argument, constructive theology, or innovative spirituality. Most of his writing is informal, occasional, meditative. The best of it reads as distilled thought, not concentrate that is dense, but a cultivated lucidity, with sentences that have extracted from long thought and experience an uncluttered clarity, and confident humility. He is someone who has shared several decades of my inward journey, a writer to whom I've looked at crisis or pivotal moments, and been glad of his company, his conversation, his opening up of a truth I needed to hear. I'm reading him again.

Here is one of his long sentences, formatted as a prose poem, a constructive piece of spiritual theology that says so much about what is so about the life we each have to live.

Therefore each particular being,

in its individuality,

its concrete nature and entity,

with all it own characteristics

and its private qualities

and its own inviolable identity,

gives glory to God

by being precisely what He wants it to be

here and now

in the circumstances ordained for it

by His Love and His infinite Art.

(New Seeds of Contemplation,  Shambala Library ed. page 32)

Love and infinite Art - to see our self as the cherished product of such purposeful creativity is as near to coming to terms with God, our life and ourselves as we can properly expect. I guess it would take love and infinite art to make something worthwhile out of the bundle of contradictions and cluster of insoluble enigmas that is the human being in all the glory and mystery of human living. When those reverberating questions of meaning and purpose and what makes for our happiness shake the foundations of our self, Merton quietly mentions the ultimate fundaments of human fulfilment - "His Love and infinite Art".

That's the kind of key that unlocks chains and doors. The life I live is sometimes glad and sometimes sad, at times exciting and at times exhausting, determined by my good choices and bad mistakes, touched by love and wounded by hurt, but nevertheless my life, the only one I have. Faith in God is the recognition that in that limited and constrained existence, His Love and infinite Art are what confer worth, affirm identity, and make possible the living of a life that is good, generous, joyful and ever  capable of newness and surprise.

 

If you have time, inclination and no other priorities you might do worse than Behold the Lamb of God!

Most of the slim paperback re-issues of John Howard Yoder's work have the symbol of the victorious Lamb slain displayed on the front cover. It is a powerful image going back to the early church, but re-appropriated within traditions which emphasise peace, peacemaking and non violence. The Book of Revelation has in the midst of the throne, not the emperor, and not the image of power, might and force, but the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. I guess that image is just too subversive, too threatening to power, too ludicrous as a political vision, and just too impractical as a religious option, for it to have had widespread adoption as a central motif of Christian theology, spirituality, ethics or political practice. 

My latest tapestry, which is being worked for a friend who stands within that tradition, is an attempt to work this image using purple, gold and red, and framed in a broad goebelin stitch border incorporating these colours representing sacrifice, love and majesty - thereby subverting the majesty of power by using its primary symbolic colours of power and spectacle to convey an entirely different kind of power, strength and purpose.

"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." I still remember those days at college working through C K Barrett's commentary on John, and fumbling my way through the Greek lexicon, comparing the uses John the Evangelist made of that great invitation and command to see, "Behold...." - it's a good word, a take your time word, a get ready to see something new word, a would you stop twittering and tweeting and start looking at life with eyes open and mouth shut long enough to hear and see life changing truth. "Behold!".

One of the by products of freehand tapestry is a process that combines contemplative patience with creative practice. Bringing a symbol into being as a manufactured (ironically the word means made by hand!) artifact is itself a form of beholding, a way of not only seeing but of expressing vision, a slow intentional absorption of the varied meanings and memories of a symbol that resides deep in the mind and heart of the Church.

(The painting is Caravaggio, John the Baptist Holding a Sheep).

Beethoven - music on the full spectrum from rage to adoration

The other day a car came towards me with the head of one of the passengers sticking out of the side window. It was a large German Shepherd, Alsatian. Its ears were flattened, its eyes closed to slits, its lips blown back in a manic grin, and it illustrated perfectly the canine equivalent of getting the cobwebs blown out of the head!

Just listened to Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I've listened to it more times than I could count. I love it. And when the slow second movement was played at the climax of the King's Speech I recognised it immediately - and noted the irony that a movement from this over the top exuberant symphony was played to accompany a speech to hearten a population now at war with Beethoven's Germany. That slow melancholic movement, with its slow struggle towards assertion was an inspired choice.

But it's the finale that astonishes. The critic who on first hearing it accused Beethoven of being drunk as Bacchus was entirely wrong, except that the music is undoubtedly intoxicating, an 'unstoppable swirl of ebullience and energy". I can't listen to it and not move! The performance I have allows the brass to blare in triumphant abandon and I enjoy it best when volume is no problem to anyone.

Like Van Gogh, Beethoven walked through valleys of deep darkness, and yet produced some of the most exuberant, celebratory and inspiring music, and some of the most tender, subtle and lovely melodies from the Moonlight Sonata to the Peasants' Thanksgiving. Years ago I read a book on the nine symphonies and from then on have returned to be restored again. Because if anyone knew the valley of deep darkness as well as the still waters and green pastures, it was Beethoven. From a personality potent and vulnerable, with responses on the full spectrum from rage to adoration, and levels of creative genius that were all but self-destructive, comes such music. 

I know us amateur music listeners can over-interpret and over-praise our enthusiasms, misinterpret and misunderstand for lack of technical expertise and passable erudition. But there is that in music which, transcending such limits, is creative and recreative, restorative and redemptive, offering healing of heart and mind and spirit and soul - whichever of these elusive terms describes where our deepest living comes from. During Lent I'm browsing - loved music, loved paintings and loved poetry. No choices made ahead - an indisciplined, desultory but not purposeless indulgence in what I know restores my soul and reminds me goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life. And if part of that mercy is laughter and joy and sheer life-affirming exultation, then listening to this 7th Symphony at dangerous levels of volume does it for me!

Mary Oliver who knows a thing or two about prayer

Prayer

May I never not be frisky,

May I never not be risque.

 

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,

and give them to the ocean

 

leap in the froth of the waves,

still loving the moment,

 

still ready, beyond all else,

to dance for the world.

Mary Oliver, Evidence, (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009), page 33

Life is not easily negotiated just now for various reasons. Despite it all, and as a wish to be defiant in a self-preserving way, I pray prayers like this poem. I understand and accept that prayer can be an experience of calming, contemplative, creative and constructive thought. Other times it can be invigorating, ennervating and energising. Or again a serious piece of negotiation between me and God, when I argue and God listens (presumably), and occasionally answers even if I don't always quite pick up the still small voice easily submerged under waves of complaint, self-justification and genuine bewilderment. But this poem is about something else. It is about finding alternative ways to dance when life is like ashes. It's about the latent but faithfully present fun that can be found in life when frisky and risque are not pejoratives to be avoided but compliments to be enjoyed. It's a prayer that says the best way out of ourselves is to love the moment of freedom, to recognise the windows through which joy is glimpsed, to dance not for ourselves, but for the world, and find that the ocean, vast and capacious, has room and energy to buoy us, and turn movement to dance.

Did Mary Oliver mean all that - probably no, and maybe yes. But that's what comes out of my keyboard when I read this poem. Frisky and risque indeed? Indeed! Leap in the froth of the waves - absolutely, where's the beach?

Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Lent, and Restored Trustfulness

Van Gogh painted a series of Sunflowers pictures. Such powerful images of sunlight, yellows and golds, large and exuberant , larger than life, expansive and exaggerated intimations of joy, what happiness might look like if it could be painted. I stood for a while in front of this painting in the National Gallery. Some paintings request our silence, because whatever is said is rendered down into irrelevant chatter, interpretive nonsense, bland commentary on masterpiece.

What was fun about this painting is that people who came to look were keen to talk, to comment, to make noisy pilgrimage to one of the great images of one of the finest artists. And the irony of such enjoyment and conversation with total strangers, some who had no English and I had no Korean!, is that we stood in front of this painting, like pilgrims who had just arrived, knowing it was painted by a man who walked often in the valley of deep darkness, and eventually death's dark vale.

There are moments in our lives when our own hard journey seems somehow not to be just as hard as we thought. How did such exhilaration and creativity survive the bleak inner climate of van Gogh's illness? Where did the confidence and in your face unembarrassment of this painting come from? The answer, or part of it, is in the letters Van Gogh wrote, where he spoke of those flowers expressing gratitude and hope for the future. They are two key words that are essential to human happiness. Gratitude is predominantly backward looking, reflecting positively on the past; hope is primarily forward looking, trusting the future still has gift and grace to be given and received. Dag Hammarskjold's couplet says much the same: "For all that is past thank you; for all that is to come, yes!"

I know Lent is about prayer and fasting, and a penitential demeanour. It's just that I also think there are times when we need to repent of ingratitude and lack of trust, and our inability sometimes to say yes to our future. And by repent I mean the biblical meaning - to change direction, to turn again towards life, conversatio morum, to turn again towards the sunrise, or the sunflowers. That day standing in front of Van Gogh's painting, I understood his need to paint them. Like throwing a grappling hook up into the future, taking hold, and beginning to climb again towards the sunlight. And the constant cluster of people jostling in front of it seems to suggest Van Gogh's defiant yellow sunflowers resonate with a 21st Century longing for that same hopefulness and trust in our shared future.

Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole and the joy of tapestry

Just completed a tapestry of this picture. It's a detailed aspect of Strawberry Hill, the Gothic Castle built in Twickenham by Sir Horace Walpole in the 18th Century. It has since been incorporated into St Mary's University College, and was the place where Pope Benedict addressed thousands of Catholic young people during his recent visit to the UK. Below is a fuller picture.

I spent some time reading Walpole's letters some years ago while researching the life of Hannah More, the bluestocking evangelical playright, committed Tory and writer of moralistic tracts that now read like politically combustible material!

Walpole's Letters are rightly valued as amongst the finest examples of the genre, because Walpole combines literary lightness of touch with imaginative and informative comment, laced with spontaneity and wit, and all the time he is self-revealing in his thoughts and feelings, providing a rich tapestry of detail on the social and cultural conventions of18th Century life. Oh, and the letters can now be downloaded free to my Kindle - which is easier than burrowing in the basement of Aberdeen University Library for the hard to find Correspondence of Hannah More and the relegated multi-volume set of Walpole's letters :))

      

Spring is coming soon - listen for unusual laughter.

This is one of the loveliest poems I know about that slow transition from dark days to light, from winter to spring, from February to March.

Full of sentiment but not sentimental, because Larkin isn't remembering golden days of childhood, and he is well aware of the frostiness and chill that have their equivalent in human relationships - but Larkin's capacity to see beyond winter is optimism sensibly restrained - and "it will be spring soon" is a refrain echoing that most thrilling of bird songs, the mavis or song thrush. 

The song of the thrush and the extending light of day are intimations of life though, new possibility, coming opportunities, including that great human healer of tired spirits, laughter. I've never lost the love of bird song first instilled in the mind but installed in the heart through a childhood spent on farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I can still identify dozens of them, and sadly miss some that used to be common - the Yellow Hammer and Curlew being two favourites now seldom heard unless you go to where you know they still have a foothold on a land so greedily messed up by us lot!

So Larkin's poem is a nostalgic reminder that our world's beauty is fragile, is gift, and is entirely provisional on our capacity to value, appreciate and protect it. (The photo is by Nigel Pye from Aberdeen University - I found it

Coming

On longer evenings,
Light, chill and yellow,
Bathes the serene
Foreheads of houses.
A thrush sings,
Laurel-surrounded
In the deep bare garden,
Its fresh-peeled voice
Astonishing the brickwork.
It will be spring soon,
It will be spring soon -
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin