Living Wittily

Rangers and Celtic - what has sectarian hatred to do with Jesus?

Oops! I came away from College without my copy of Seeds of Contemplation - so the second part of the quote on Trinitarian Spirituality will have to wait - it will come though.

On another subject entirely. The decision of UEFA to fine Rangers Football Club, and ban fans from an away match, is another embarrassment for Scottish football, Scottish Government and the Scottish people. The truth is those songs are sung week in and week out in Scottish football grounds, and there seem to be no effective sanctions available to stop the chanting of such hate liturgies. Several years ago when Rangers were playing Liverpool in the Champion's League a number of English newspapers wrote articles about the bemused, bewildered Liverpool fans wondering what a local skirmish in Ireland over 300 years ago had to do with 21st century European football. Well may they wonder.

I've recently been reading up on social capital, those cultural and social values and norms that give a society its stability, its value systems, and its patterns of ethical and social behaviour, those ligaments and tendons that enable a community's ability to grow, mature, and function in ways that are healthy. Sectarianism is a toxin in the bloodstream of Scottish culture. "Scotland's shame" is merely a phrase that describes our embarrassment - but sectarian attitudes, instilled from birth, absorbed through exclusive sub-cultures, nourished by ludicrous mythologies of conspiracies, battles and demonising of the other. This is not only a cause of shame - it is a lethal virus that replicates itself best in hosts prone to hate, and in whom insecurity mutates into collective hostility against whatever is different. And it seems we lack the social capital to deal with it.

That there are religious mythologies and loyalties on both sides of the sectarian divide makes the whole phenomenon more dangerous, more visceral and more resistant to reason. Religion adds its own distorted legitimation to naming the other as enemy, and raises the stakes by co-opting God to the cause. That people whose occupation is to manage and train others to play a game should have parcel bombs sent to them in the name of some mad cause tainted by toxic religion is a sinister escalation of tolerated hatred into intolerable violence. The truth is sectarian hostility and hate are themselves intolerable, and their presence in the Scottish psyche, spewing out of Scottish minds and mouths, is now seen and known, named and shamed, across Europe.

The answer? Even Ally McCoist sounded depressed and at his wits end when asked that question - don't know if Ally is up on the current interest in social capital - but the deficit of available human funds is at least as dangerous as the fiscal one the Government is so worried about. Government cannot gag mouths, but they can educate, they can legislate, and they can show a moral determination and social imagination by making sectarian liturgical hate chants, from Ibrox or Parkhead, as open to prosecution as other forms of inflammatory, discriminatory language aimed at inciting hate, fear and violence. And the spurious linkages to any expression of Christian faith need to be demythologised. The idea that Jesus of Nazareth can be aligned with such dangerous, irrational behaviour is clear evidence that the sectarian mindset thrives on unreason and is fertilised by all those toxic attitudes that lead to good people being crucified.

And if the communities of Christ in Scotland are still wondering what their mission is then there are few more contextually urgent matters in contemporary Scotland requiring the intervention of communities who live by a Gospel of reconciliation, whose Lord calls them to be peacemakers, and whose reason for existing at all is to embody the justice, righteousness, forgiveness and peaceableness of God. What have the churches in Scotland to say about sectarianism - let the politicians, social commentators, local authority councillors, football boards of directors talk out the practical steps needed - the churches ask different questions and offer more and deeper responses - what does the Gosepl of Jesus demand and command of Christians who live in a culture with such a lethal sectarian fault line running through its social fabric?

I have been convinced for years now that the christian doctrine of reconciliation, lies at the heart of contemporary mission. And the church is called to be agents of reconciliation, peace activists in the name of the Prince of Peace, PR agents for a gospel of forgiveness, communities who make credible another way of seeing those who hate and foment hatred. Loving the enemy is the polar opposite of sectarian attitudes - and perhaps to use old fashioned language - judgement begins at the house of God. Put at its simplest - I can't hear Jesus sing about the River Boyne - Jordan maybe; nor can I imagine the one who was crucified on a green hill, outside a city wall, singing about the walls of Derry. More likely to look on our sectarian addictions and say once more, "Father forgive them; they know not what they do."

The Trinitarian Spirituality of Thomas Merton

The God Who exists only in Three Persons is a circle of relations in which His infinite reality, Love, is ever identical and ever renewed, always perfect and always total, always beginning and never ending, absolute, everlasting and full.

In the Father the infinite Love of God is always beginning and in the Son it is always full and in the Holy Spirit it is perfect and it is renewed and never ceases to rest in its source. But if you follow Love forward and backward from Person to Person, you can never track it to a stop, you can never corner it and hold it down and fix it to one of the Persons as if He could appropriate to himself the fruit of the Love of the others. For the One Love of the Three Persons is an infinitely rich giving of Itself which never ends and is never taken, but is always perfectly given, only received in order to be perfectly shared 

 This kind of writing is why Thomas Merton is one of my best friends - a companion on the journey now for more than 40 years - an all too human person whose sanctity is most evident in his flaws and his honesty about himself - and whose theology is much more profound and visionary than is sometimes thought of a contemplative monk. Merton was a contemplative theologian, a deeply reflective and ruminative thinker whose writing is luminous with wonder and mellowed by the tension he recognised between the urge to adoration and that self-knowing that will always humble in the presence of Divine Love. The next two short paragraphs are a distillation of what can only be called a Trinitarian Spirituality - and I'll post them tomorrow.

Posting here is sporadic just now - priorities I'm afraid, but no lessening of the commitment and enjoyment of continuing the conversation. Thanks to those who still look in and send emails etc.

The AV (Authorised Version of the Bible) and the AV (Alternative Vote)

Several times recently I have picked up a headline or a comment about the problems with AV. Now I know this stands for alternative vote, and refers to a complicated but allegedly fairer way of divvying up the votes post any election. But for some of us the abbreviation has much more powerful and biblical resonances. The Authorised version is 400 years old this year. The distilled essence of Jacobean English was carefully crafted into the finest expression in English' of those ancient documents from the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Many of the best phrases and even passages were lifted near wholesale from the earlier outlawed translation by William Tyndale. But the AV, or the King James Version, remains a classic of the English language, a triumph of committee collaboration, its musical cadences and poetic flow such a contrast to the flat prosaic pedantries of most modern translations. I've read my own copy in chunks this year - a beautifully bound, gilt edged copy presented on my ordination.

The say No campaign has been accused of lying, deceit and misinformation - these three words are close cousins if not synonyms. All three refer to the untrustworthiness of words, or at least the untrustworthiness of those who speak them. So when the AV controversy is simmering or boiling over, a quite other set of responses is needed. Andrew Marr asked Simon Hughes how the Lib Dems can go on working within a Cabinet where senior Conservative Ministers have been accused of an unholy trinity of verbal abuse - lying, deceit and misinformation - each of these describes the abuse of words, their corruption into false rather than true expression, their being turned into weapons that damage rather than social tools that uphold verity in public discourse. No convincing answer was forthcoming from Simon Hughes - caught between the rock of not admitting the coalition partners weren't playing fair, and the hard place that would mean dissolving the coalition and Lib Dems only real possibility of having political clout in the decisions of Government.

The AV (Authorised version) has something to say about the AV spat (Alternative Vote) - an alarming warning for politicians whose primary skill is in making words malleable through repeated hammering with the blunt instrument of party self-interest. Here is James, writing the kind of scathing comment that wouldn't be out of place in a John Pilger column on the calumny of political rhetoric laced with cynicism and untruth:

The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts and of birds, and of serpents and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, but the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poision. James 3. 6-8

   
Now steady on James. Just a tad of overstatement there. Human speech isn't quite in the same league as a Californian or Australian forest fire! Well, that depends. If we corrode the platform on which the integrity of public discourse stands, if we slowly reduce our tolerance to deceit and call it spin, and then get used to spin and then begin to believe it.... So who is telling the truth about AV? How would you know? Whose statements are trustworthy, dependable, information rather than disinformation? The AV (Bible) again this time from Proverbs, one of the first self-help books for aspiring diplomats, politicians and wise leaders:

The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters: and the wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook.

There is one that speaketh like the piercings of a sword;but the tongue of the wise is health. 

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Quite so!

Kathleen Raine, Van Gogh, Good Friday and the thought that all might, or might not, be well...

Easter brings together such extremes of emotion, aspiration and human longing. Good Friday carries within it the fundamental contradictions at the heart of all reality  - hate and love, violence and peace, cruelty and compassion, betrayal and trust, torture and tenderness, death and life, defeat and triumph. The cry of God-forsakeness, the deliberate resignation of entrusted commitment to the Father, and the quiet surrender of the "it is finished", are only some of the lights and shadows cast by the suffering of God in the suffering of Jesus. Van Gogh's Pieta is an astonishing juxtaposition of light and shadow, blue and yellow, a mother's grief at the broken body that is flesh of her flesh, and that bright yellow sky behind her - dusk or dawn? And the blue of her robe folded in shadow and light brings the eternal and the mortal together, hands outstretched neither grasping nor beseeching, but embracing and and supporting. From his desperate time of illness, this painting emerged as the embodiment of all that van Gogh felt within himself, of desolation, isolation and alienation from the world around him, which could not understand and did not listen.

Rab Butler, the great academic of a past generation, attended the Messiah as it was performed around Easter in Oxford in the 1940's. He was a respectful agnostic and as intellectually innoculated against sentiment and unexamined piety as could ever be met. As the performance moved towards the Isaiah passages about the suffering servant, he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and muttered to his friend, "Damned sad story that". Like the rest of us, he wished it could be otherwise, and hoped that such a story might help make the world otherwise. It's that longing for things to be better, and then to be well, and then for all things to be well, that Kathleen Raine recognised, and refused to countenance as valid good news for struggling human beings. In her series of poems, The Old Story, the third poem articulates both her own longing and the constraints of reality.

Reader I would tell

If I knew

That all shall be well.

 

All darkness gone,

All lives made whole,

Hearts healed that were broken.

 

Would tell of joy reborn,

Of wrongs made right,

Of harms forgiven,

 

But do not know,

how what is done

Can ever not be,

 

Though love would wish it to.

......

It is that love that wishes, that yearns and works, that suffers and sighs, that gives and struggles, that will not give in - it is that love that was crucified, killed and buried. Which sounds final, and is. Except that after Holy Saturday and the curtains come down, there is God's encore....Because love would wish it so.

Kathleen Raine, Good Friday and the Healing Reality of the Garden

The biblical narrative sometimes turns on the encounters that take place in a garden. The garden of Eden is a place of creation and destruction, of carefree joy and cosmic tragedy, of divine fulfilment and human failing. And however we read that story, it portrays in poignant poetry the two poles and entire latitude and longitude of human experience, from innocence to shame, from life affirming stewardship to earth shattering grasping. Gethsemane is the garden where the tragedies and triumphs of human  sinfulness become concentrated on the soul of the One who gathers within one human being, the cosmic and human toxins of creation alienated. The Gospel phrase for this anguish, "sweating great drops of blood", and the location of the garden of Gethsemane, make this Gospel episode a cross section of a fallen creation, exposing the age rings of human history which has sweat its own great drops of blood.

I think it's no accident, or incidental stage setting, that the tomb was in Joseph of Arimathea's garden, and that garden the place of resurrection. There's something wonderfully playful about that line of John's, explaining Mary Magdalene's grief-stricken confusion, "thinking him to be the gardener...". Eden the place of lost innocence, Gethsemane the place of God's angst, and that morning scene of so human trauma, of grief and joy, of disbelief and scared to admit it faith - so much of what matters in our faith begins or ends up in a garden.

Kathleen Raine wrote about the garden in terms that make it clear it is a place of healing, and not a place of unreality and retreat from the world. Her poem suggests it may be that we enounter what is most real, most urgent for our flourishing, and most telling for our humanity, in a garden.

I had meant to write a different poem....

I had meant to write a different poem,
But, pausing for a moment in my unweeded garden,
Noticed, all at once, paradise descending in the morning sun
Filtered through leaves,
Enlightening the meagre London ground, touching with green
Transparency the cells of life.
The blackbird hopped down, robin and sparrow came,
And the thrush, whose nest is hidden
Somewhere, it must be, among invading buildings
Whose walls close in,
But for the garden birds inexhaustible living waters
Fill a stone basin from a garden hose.
I think, it will soon be time
To return to the house, to the day’s occupation,
But here, time neither comes nor goes.
The birds do not hurry away, their day
Neither begins nor ends.
Why can I not stay? Why leave
Here, where it is always,
And time leads only away
From this hidden ever-present simple place.

Kathleen Raine

Kathleen Raine and Rumours of the Abyss

Kathleen Raine's poetry is not a recent discovery for me - but it is a recent re-discovery. I'd forgotten just how perceptively she sees, and the lucid integrity with which she describes, the human condition.  And there are lines that give voice to those subterranean longings that run through our souls, their sound the distant echoes of what we have lost or have never yet found.  Her poetry is imaginative and wondering, mystic without being vague, compassionate but avoiding indulgent sentiment that distorts the vision of what life is at its most real, and what it might be if only we had the courage to see it  and say it and live it with honesty and freedom. Some of her poems exemplify the poet at her most visionary and prophetic, able to play with ideas that are light or dark, allusive yet descriptive of her way of seeing the world, and beyond. Here's one.

WORLD'S MUSIC CHANGES

World's music changes:

The spheres no longer sing to us

Those harmonies

That raised cathedral arches,

Walls of cities.

 

Soundings of chaos

Dislodge the keystone of our dreams,

Built high, laid low:

Hearing we echo

Rumours of the abyss.

 

There was a time

To build those cloud-capped towers,

Imagined palaces, heavenly houses,

But a new age brings

A time to undo, to unknow.

 

There are few poems I know that so succinctly define post Christendom and the Post-modern malaise of the spirit, as Christians struggle to come to terms with a fading tradition, lost influence, the confused climate of moral life and the intellectual challenge of transposing the Gospel into a different key for a different and changing age.  In my own canon of poets R S Thomas comes closet to her in voice and in the unflinching honesty with which he sees the world. More of Raine in the next few days.

Michael Ramsey and missional psychology.

 

"The lessons of the crisis of faith may have helped us and may help us still to know the glory of the Triune God, the Creator, the Judge and the Saviour of Humanity, and to proclaim it with more humility, more love, and more understanding of those who find faith hard...it is through the facing of dark nights, whether in the mysery of God or in the agonies of the world, that the deepening of faith is realised."

Michael Ramsey was writing in the 1960's  - but those simple priestly words have considerable resonance for the confused and anxious Church of the 21st century on these islands. In them he identified humility as the essential tone of missiology in a secular society, and love as the distinctive hallmark of truly Christlike discipleship, and compassionate understanding as the required emotional psychology of the follower of Jesus. Hard to improve on that.

Waiting - road to frustration or way to fulfilment?

I left Glasgow Airport at 7.00 am having been up since 5.am! I'm now in Manchester waiting for a taxi to take me to the airport, where I'll wait for a flight to take me to Glasgow, where I'll wait in the car park for Honda Assist to come and fix a punctured front tyre. Then I'll wait till it's fixed and decide what to do about dinner, and swither (Scots for "cannae make up my mind yet") whether or not to make it a longer day still, and head for Aberdeen, .

All this waiting, reminded me of the title of a favourite book. If you know me at all, you'll know that W H Vanstone is one of my theological must haves. Three short slim books give the distilled essence of ministry that was selfless, awkward, traditional, inspiring, focused on divine love and lived out in the most ordinary parish settings. One of his books, The Stature of Waiting is a profound study of passivity, surrender and patient waiting upon circumstance. Vanstone is hard to emulate, hard to follow as an exemplar, I guess he was a one off! Yet even when I can't go with him, or he says things I resist, I know I'm listening to an important voice, and if I disagree I realise I have to have cogent, viable reasons of my own. And sometimes his one liners are simply unanswerable - one of them comes to mind, capturing his traditional commitments in liturgy, his deeply reflective theology, and his sharp observations articulated in sharper comment:

 "Sometimes the church is like a swimming pool, where all the noise comes from the shallow end"

No answer to that. At least, not one I'm prepared to offer. 

Martin Buber, Friendship and Some Limits of Social Networking

It was Martin Buber who called attention to the life-giving distinction we all must make if we are to value, respect, care for and take responsibility towards, each other. From the deep wells of Hebraic experience of God and community, Buber distinguished between relating to that which is beyond ourselves as "It" and relating to the Other who is beyond ourselves as "Thou". Only as I address the other person as "Thou" do I acknowledge the full dignity of their personhood.

And when that relationship of "I and Thou" takes root in the heart and in the will, then deeply human ties of respect, affection and shared commitments grow into committed and close relationships with those we call our closest friends. And within such friendship deeply human responses begin to be naturally expressed in trustful conversation, playful enjoyment of the other's presence, an inward orientation of care and commitment, and an investment of time and energy that is incalculable because unselfconscious, unreflective generous gift, the response of person to person and heart to heart. Friendship is not therefore a duty or a task, but the name we give to those few "I and Thou" relationships that not only enrich us but slowly and gently over time begin to define us by their very nature as gift and grace.

Reading Buber again for quite other reasons, I've been reminded of how profoundly relevant his view of the world is, in a world which is increasingly enmeshed in the endlessly trivial and restlessly fascinating web spinnings of social networking. It may be that Buber's passionate advocacy of personhood as that in the Other which we address as Thou, offers a way of putting social networking in its place. Facebook, Twitter, even this blog, can never be a substitute for person to person address, an intentional relationship of I and Thou.

At its best social networking supplements, informs, communicates and provides fuel and energy for existing relationships. Friendships as personal exchange and attentive address are nourished by such communication. In social networking stories are not only told but written in the fragments of exchange, and changed as they are responded to in the writing. But there are essential and defining qualities of human relating that cannot be replicated in social networking - they are what Buber means with his distinction between subject and object, Thou and It, - a vital life-enhancing distinction between that which I use as an "It" for my own ends, and this person whom I address as an end in herself or himself.

Here's vintage Buber - I and Thou take their stand not merely in relation, but also in the give and take of talk...Here what confonts us has blossomed into the full reality of the Thou. Here alone then, [in human friendship] as reality that cannot be lost, are gazing and being gazed upon, knowing and being known, loving and being loved.

The interactive gaze of two people, the knowing and being known, the loving and being loved, talking and listening, laughing and crying, supporting and being supported, these and much more that is of the extraordinary ordinariness of human friendship, are only visible expressions and signals of that address that in the presence of the other always, and faithfully, says "Thou". That is why the conversation of friends is such a great sacrament, the grace of words and silence, both alike interpreting and articulating the shared experience of the mystery and mercy of the life that is ours to live, and to share. 

Why it's life-enhancing to creatively and respectfully disagree

I like this!

Division of opinion, too often the fault line of human relationships, is, when we embrace it openly, what invigorates thinking and stirs new thought. It is the ground of new beginnings, the beginning of new insight, the foundation of new respect for the other. If anything sharpens the dull edge of a relationship it is often when it ceases to be boringly predictable. It is when everybody on two continents knows what we are going to say next that we know we have stopped thinking. Then we need to have a few old ideas honed. We need to think through life all over again. "Of two possibilities", my mother used to tell me, "choose always the third".

Uncommon Gratitude, Rowan Wuilliams and Joan Chittister, (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2010), 41

Yes, I do like that. I seldom read Joan Chittister without nodding or shaking my head. She is a wise, shrewd, compassionate but unsentimental analyst of spiritual psychology and human relationships. Reading her is for me a form of therapy, if therapy is that process by which we are helped to think of ourselves and our world, and our relations to self and the other, with more compassion, insight and patience.

Her writings on the Rule of St Benedict are that rare thing in spiritual writing - well considered common sense, moderation without compromising on the essential, and enough humour to remind us that laughter is one of our most humanising and loveable traits. And she faithfully, persistently and persuasively urges Christians to see the world with eyes open - with creative thought and critical consciousness. As to creativity - "We fail to realize that it is precisely the ability to think beyond the context of the times in which we live that makes us fit to live in times to come." But also "Critical consciousness is the testing ground of new ideas, the gatekeeper of tomorrow".

  This resonates in my own spirit on a number of levels. Whatever else it means to grow older, it cannot mean growing narrower, or being content with familiar and limited horizons. However else spiritual maturity might be evidenced, it isn't in static thought, contented convictions, complacent certainties, fixed ideas, or life still drawing on the capital of past experience. Wherever the future of the church lies - and I mean the Church Catholic, the Body of Jesus Christ in all its rich diversity, historic rootedeness and future possibilities - that future cannot be a perpetuation of the present, let alone a repristination of the past.

In all our lives there come times when we have to think beyond the context of our times, think creatively, and be critically conscious of who we are, how the world is, and what it might mean for us to live faithfully for Christ in that context. That can be a soul stripping experience, a re-orientation that can only take place out of experiences of disorientation. And at such times prayer becomes a crie de couer, a re-aligning of what matters as we discover what matters most. And at such times I find T S Eliot's words from Little Gidding express better than any words I could compose, the risks and consequences of any one life that dares to be open to the love of God and to the mystery and miracle of human life, the range and beauty of human thought, and to human relationships in all their complexity and capacity for wounding and healing.

You are not here to verify,
instruct yourself,
or inform curiosity or carry report.
You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid.
And prayer is more than an order of words,
the concious occupation of the praying mind,
or the sound of the voice praying.