Living Wittily

The responsibility to take notice, pay attention and applaud creation

 

We are here to abet creation

and to witness it,

to notice each thing

so each thing gets noticed...

so that Creation need not play

to an empty house.

Annie Dillard, "The Meaning of Life".

W E Sangster the great Methodist preacher of the mid 20th Century once remarked that to notice a flower is both prayer and one of the sabbath moments of the soul.

I noticed this flower while meandering in the Botanic Garden in Aberdeen, a kind of botanical snowflake. Annie Dillard is one of the great noticers and her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek remains one of the best expositions of the field study of natural theology.

Kneeling in the dark, at the place where prayer is valid.

 As the rain hides the stars,

as the autumn mist hides the hills,

as the clouds veil the blue of the sky,

so the dark happenings of my lot

hide the shining of thy face from me.

Yet, if I may hold thy hand in the darkness,

it is enough. Since I know that,

though I may stumble in my going,

thou dost not fall.

(Celtic, unknown)

The dark night of the soul is an experience of stripping away the assurance of the senses. Disorientation, uncertainty, loss of impetus, mean that absence is more real than presence, and the unfamiliar displaces the familiar. A spirituality fixated on the positive, and in which dogmatic assurances silence those important murmurs of dissent, is for all its triumphalist note, a spirituality of denial. Not self-denial to be sure, but a more toxic form of refusal, a denial of that mysterious withdrawing of God's sensed presence by which we grow beyond adolescent claimfulness.

The above prayer doesn't express the classic experience of the dark night of the soul. The last line of it is reminiscent of Isaiah at his most pastorally poetic, and as the theologian who best describes the rhythm of feeling forsaken by the one who promises not to forsake.

This is a prayer that allows us to be both honest and modest about our experience of God. Honest enough to confess that sometimes God's presence is not felt; modest enough not to think our own sense of God or lack of sense of God makes any difference to the reality of things, that God remains actually present even in acutely felt absence.

"Though I may stumble in my going, thou dost not fall."

Since I know that, I know the most important thing.

And even if I am overcome at times

with doubt,

uncertainty,

and the pain of unknowing,

more important than what I know,

is that I am known,

and by whom I am known.

And one day I will know as I am known,

and see face to face

the radiant p[resence

of that greatest Love.

Inconvenient hospitality and the interruptive grace of God

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just framed a print of this painting by Chagall and hung it in my study at College. It's a bit loud in its red frame alongside other prints in more sedate burnished bronze, pine and gold.

Is the mood in this scene anxious, expectant, hilarious, poignant, tense?

All of these and more - how else draw the artist into the trap of painting the impossible communion of heaven with earth, eternal purpose with quotidian humanity, outrageous promise with long familiar disappointment, God's laughter of future joy and human laughter of disbelief subverted by the glimpsed beginning of risky trustfulness.

The angels are central to the picture, but Sarah is central to the story - no wonder she laughed. And no wonder we always fail to explain in our superior cleverness what that laugh meant. Chagall depicts hospitality in all its mutuality, ambiguity, inconvenience and possibility.

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

Came away to College without my copy of Buechner - will be a couple of days more waiting before the second part of the quotation from the previous post - hope it feels worth waiting for!

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

 

The Importance of Waiting - in a Culture of Impatience.

Preaching at the on the Anniversary of a congregation, Frederick Buechner decided to preach on the theme of "Waiting".

Not future mission strategy, not church growth, not a call to more activity, not reflections on the piety or pragmatism of previous generations - but the unfashionable virtue of patience founded on trust.

 

 

Today and tomorrow, here is Buechner on the priority of waiting over impatience, and the wisdom of waiting over anxious activism.

"Look at the windows that burn like fire when the sun shines through them, and at the images of Christ and his saints, at the flowers and candles on the altar. Consider the silent space that these walls enclose and also the sounds that break the silence like the choir, the organ, the sounds of our own voices singing or praying, the voices of the men and women who stand up in this pulpit doing their best to proclaim the gospel. What does it all add up to?

What is it that we are essentially doing here in this building? The immediate answer is that we are worshipping God here. We are trying to speak to God here and to speak about God. We are trying to listen for God. We are searching for something of God's peace, trying somehow to take God into our lives the way we take the bread and wine into our mouths. But deep beneath all of this, in our innermost hearts, I think we are doing something else.

I think we are waiting. This is what is at the heart of it. Even when we don't know that we are waiting, I think we are waiting. Even when we can't find words for what we are waiting for, I think we are waiting. An ancient Advent prayer supplies us with the words, "Give us grace that we may cast off the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light."

We who live much of the time in the darkness are waiting not just at Advent, but at all times for the advent of light, of that ultimate light that is redemptive and terrifying at the same time. It is redemptive because it puts an end to the darkness, and that is also why it is terrifying, because for so long, for all our lives, the darkness has been home, and because to leave home is always cause for terror."

Tomorrow I'll post the next two paragraphs - and maybe there is something to be learned about waiting till tomorrow to learn from Buechner the theological, spiritual importance of waiting as our disposition towrds God.

Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life. 

And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs. 

Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto - there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer - there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!

Come ye apart, and rest awhile......

 

 He leads me beside the still waters:

He restores my soul.

Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Transformative Forgiveness.

If you didn't hear the Chief Rabbi on Thought for the Day this morning, then take time plater to listen to it on the IPlayer. This is vintage Jonathan Sacks, humane, religiously generous, passionate in conviction, reasoned but within the key principles of his own faith tradition. I listened to it on the way into College and a grey wet Wednesday suddenly didn't seem so grey.

His distinction between regret and remorse, and his understanding of what forgiveness and reconciliation cost and their value to the human future give what he says a moral decisiveness in a blame culture where responsibility is always placed on someone else.

This is religious broadcasting at its very best. Ever since his reith Lectures on The Persistence of Faith, I have admired, listened to and learned deeply from the Chief Rabbi. I guess he stands somewhere between the moral glow of Micah, the sense of the Transcendent God of Isaiah, and the questioning intellect of Qoheleth, but with the sub-stratum of trust that permeates the Psalms, all integrated in a life based on The Torah.

The Otherworldly World of Cabinet Ministers, Or Why Chris Huhne Has No Idea!

The Energy Minister, Chris Huhne thinks the consumer is significantly to blame for high energy prices. 

85% of consumers can't be bothered to shop around for a better deal, he says.

The average family could save up to £300 a year just by changing supplier.

In other words, let the market set the price, and the most savvy people will benefit.

So what about people who don't have online access;

many of the more elderly and vulnerable people in our communities;

low income families where even if they got a better deal, energy is still so expensive the choice is between heat and food;

Oh - and what about the fact that the big 6 have all put prices up more than 10% and they control 99% of the market.

I suggest Chris Huhne shops around and gets enrolled in one of the following courses:

"Get Real - Towards a Basic Understanding of Social Realities"

OR

"Laissez Faire - the History of a Bad Idea for the Poor."

OR

"Making the Right Choice - Principles for Getting the Balance Right Between Heat and Food"

OR

"Let Justice Flow - and Alternative View of Energy Flow."

 

The intellectual life of a highland cow

 
One of the first photos I took with my new camera.

The beast is looking at me with

 

puzzled perplexity thinking,

                                     "Why do these people bother?"

 

monumental boredom sighing,

                                      "You sad man. Get a life."

 

bovine compassion empathising,

                                     "Poor man. So little hair on his wee heid."

 

territorial aggression, calculating,

                                    "Can I get him before he reaches the fence?"

 

existential well concealed joy, ruminating,

                             "Grass, blue skies, celebrity status - I've got it all."

 

What kind of God is the Christian God?

 
What kind of God is the Christian God? The early apologist who wrote the Epistle to Diognetus was utterly convinced of the decisive nature of Christ for any understanding of God that claims to be Christian:

"Why did God send the Son? To rule as a tyrant, to inspire terror and astonishment? No, he did not. No, he sent him in gentleness and mildness. To be sure, as a king sending his royal son, he sent him as God. But he sent him as to men, as saving and persuading them, and not as exercising force. For force is no attribute of God.

On this passage the Arthur McGill in his book Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, gives this comment, one of the countless fugitive affirmations of kenosis as the self-giving love that is the disposition of God:

"Force is no attribute of God". - that is the basic principle for Trinitarian theologians. God's divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding. Far from staying above the world he sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing  he invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from men and women in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to them for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because whithin himself he is a life of self-giving.

(The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens - the random design of a cottage border seems to fit with a piece on the generously extravagant, self giving love of the God who does abundance!)