Living Wittily

Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (3) Christian Forshaw

Two or three years ago I bought this CD, because a year earlier I heard Sanctuary and Christian Forshaw on the radio, performing Let all Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. I was converted there and then. Since then I've listened to Forshaw's music whatever the time of year. His performances on the saxophone, and the accompnaying organ, soloists and ensemble create a sound that for me is unique in its range from intensity to serenity. The saxophone solos have the capacity to evoke profound feelings of joy, or longing, and sometimes that mystertious combination of both for their are few things touch our deepest longings more tenderly than joy remembered or joy anticipated.

One of my ambitions is to hear Christian Forshaw at a live concert, most of which take place in England, and often at times I'm not free to postpone other responsibilities and just go! But it's on my must do list - along with several other events / experiences I want to attend or make possible. Maybe I need a  must do this year list - which would include coffee with an as yet unmet friend, a visit to the Amsterdam Art Galleries, and a Christian Forshaw Concert. Mhmm. These would do fine!

Meanwhile, if you're tired of the run of the mill Christmas CD avalanche of average, go to Amazon, get this CD, and redeem advent by recovering or rediscovering that joyful longing that beats at the heart of our Faith, "The Word became flesh, and dwelt amonst us..."

 

Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncracies (2) Blowin in the Wind - does anyone remember this version?

Many years ago, in 1972, I was in Perth. I didn't have much money (I was getting married a month or two later) and I was in a long disappeared record shop. One of the songs that is now part of my inner canon was playing, but it was unlike any version I'd heard before. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, The Seekers, Judy Collins, they each had a trademark version.

This was different - you love it or hate it. I loved it and bought the LP, most of the other songs are ordinary, mostly forgettable but the rendering of Blowin in the Wind was extraordinary, and unforgettable, whether yolu love it or hate it! The vinyl LP is long gone, and the track is now hard to find though I've tracked it down on an import version, You can hear it on Youtube at the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj_bo4KU1yc

Please don't inundate the comments box with your negative reviews because they won't change my mind. There are few versions of this song I don't like, but when I want it to express an exuberant and passionate no to the daftness of a world which finds ever new and imaginative ways of making human life miserable, I go looking for this one, and in the privacy of the study, the car or wherever, add my yell of wistful protest and hopeful anger to one of the weirdest musical accompaniments to any 60's folk song. I love it!

The butterfly photo? Just a reminder of the beauty that gratuitously adorns this planet, and the creatures who share our time and place on it.

Advent Enthusiasms and Idiosyncrasies (1)

My favourite soprano singer is Jessye Norman. Ever since I heard her sing the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass (20 years ago), I've listened, learned and been renewed by that magnificent voice. That double CD is now scratched and looks its age.

I've just bought her double CD, Christmastide for the Aberdeen - Paisley weekly jaunt. So instead of Abba, Mozart, John Denver, Thomas Tallis, Mary Chapin Carpenter,and various other voices I'll play several CD's I've now bought for Advent. The Jessye Norman one begins with O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Sung with slow, deliberate enunciation, like a prayer quietly passionate and long in the saying. It builds towards a crescendo of longing, orchestra and voices demanding to be heard, and above it all the clear confident cry, no longer quietly desperate but sure in its rejoicing, "Emmanuel will come to you, O Israel". 

If it is to be faithful to its own mission and message, then this year the Church, more than any other institution, more than any other source of wisdom or authority, and more confidently than any marketing agency cleverly luring customers, - the Church should speak, live, embody, sing, pray, share, demonstrate, the truth by which it lives. "Rejoice, Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel." Whatever else our culture currently lacks, joy, hope and trust are in highly significant deficit.

The question haunts me - how does believing God comes to us in Jesus Christ make me act differently from my neighbours?

If in Jesus the love and mercy of God have come, and if Christmas brings a message of peace on earth and goodwill amongst all peoples, then why in the name of Jesus do I buy into the gloom and anxiety of a global economy on the critical list?

What listening to Jessye Norman's rendering of O Come, O Come Emmanuel does is question our culture's default position on what matters most. And it lifts my eyes beyond the Euro zone, to the economy of heaven, and the call to live with hopeful joy and trustful peace, not because that makes problems go away, but because it looks with clearer vision at the God who comes near.

The painting is The Annunciation, by Fra Angelico. It is replete with biblical clues, it is a masterpiece of reverenced mystery. It is a painting of God at work invading and interrupting with urgency and demand - awaiting that "Yes" that allows the Word to become flesh.

"Welcome all wonders in one night" - the joy of Advent

Advent is my favourite liturgical season. The cycle from First Sunday through to Epiphany is redolent with the great Christian virtue of hope. My favourite book in the Hebrew Bible is Isaiah. The combination of promise and patience, yet the contrast of waiting with urgency, and the simplicity and complexity of what is going on in the heart of God that will invade the heart of the world, all come together in six weeks of growing anticipation and impatience for celebration.

In recent years my interest in art and theology, and in art as a theological and spiritual resource has grown into a questioning of all kinds of iconoclasm. The iconoclast sees a significance in art that is sinister, subversive of Christian truth as they see it. Maybe that is because they read art rather than see it, analyse it rather than gaze at it, are scared of its beauty rather than filled with wonder and caught up into the sheer splendour and loveliness of that which is beautiful, true, and good.

In any case, for myself, I now spend time looking, gazing, contemplating, - and yes questioning, wondering, imagining. And what I find is that as I look and question, gaze and wonder, contemplate and imagine, I pay attention to my feelings and emotions and allow them to come into friendlier conversation with those processes of intellect and thought that insist on understanding. And in all of that I come to recognise that understanding isn't about 'getting it'; but rather, 'getting it' has little to do with understanding and much more to do with response.

And to that extent perhaps transformative learning is that kind of learning that integrates the informed mind with the responsive heart, enabling thought to be affective, and feeling to be thoughtful, but not getting hung up on which is which, but simply accepting the response of who we are, to that which is transformatively Other. And if the Other is indeed transformative, then who I am is changed in the encounter. That, I think, is why I want to go and see art in its beauty, truth and goodness. That's why the art gallery is for me a place of deeply human and pervasively spiritual encounter. 

And for Christians some of the greatest art, and the most transformatively evocative painting has given expression to those subterranean aspirations of the human heart which run in the theological depths of the nativity cycle, from annunciation, to the visitation, to the nativity and beyond. In such paintings thoughtful emotion, contemplative wonder, imaginative exposition and human creativity inspired by devotion, coalesce in the creation of such beauty as reconfigures our worldview.  

PT Forsyth, a Japanese Translation and an Unforgettable memory of Professor Donald Mackinnon

I  opened a parcel yesterday and found in it the recently published collection of essays on P T Forsyth, published in Japan, and in Japanese. I have a chapter in it which is a reprint of the piece on Forsyth from Evangelical Spirituality - never thought I'd be published in Japanese though!

The volume is a translation of Justice the True and Only Mercy, the collection of essays edited by Trevor Hart after the Forsyth Colloquium held in Aberdeen in 1995. That they wanted to add my chapter as a concluding essay is humbling and at the same time makes me feel a wee bit chuffed!

One memory of that colloquium stamped deeply in my affections was the paper delivered with Shakespearean power by Donald Mackinnon. It was a characteristic combination of lucid perplexity and integrated disjointedness! You have to envisage Professor Mackinnon's large presence, big arms waving and hands grasping and ungrasping as he threw out  grappling hooks, seeking anchor points on which to hang a virtuoso account of Forsyth, tragedy, German philosophy and high culture, atonement theology, kenotic christology and much else delivered with passion and in a voice modulating between gruff assertion and poignant questioning. It was as memorable a performance of theology as I've ever seen.

The essay in the book, revised and tidied up for publication, is a pale reflection of that encounter between Forsyth, Mackinnon and a bemused audience. Those of us who were there were both puzzled and moved, taught from deep wells and frustrated by an intellect ablaze, witnessing one of the great minds in 20th Century philosophical theology, like Samson wrestling with huge pillars of thought and threatening to bring it all crashing down on our heads. I exaggerate - a little! But it is the exaggeration of an affectionate admirer who gladly witnessed one of the genuine polymaths, performing an intellectual mini-concert, and displaying genius that eschewed pedagogic techniques that might make his thought more accessible to his audience. We weren't there to hear, but to overhear the theological soliloquy of a mind independent, fierce and passionately religious.

How do I Defeat the Enemy? (4)

 

 

The most poignant exposition of the heart of Psalm 23 is Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, the piece that brings together Psalm 23 and Psalm 2. The pure soprano singing in Hebrew, "Adonai, is my Shepherd", draws you into the security, peacefulness and contentment that underlies the lovely word Shalom. But just as the still waters and green pastures come into view, the melody is shattered by aggressive male voices singing in Hebrew, "Why do the heathen rage?". The entire history of persecution, conflict, rage and violence against other human beings is encapsulated in that musical yell accompanied by explosive drums drowning out the melody of human well being.

So when I read Psalm 23, and come to that verse that says "You spread a table in the presence of my enemies" I wonder if it is a taunt song line, a mockery of the enemy by our joy, prosperity and power – a kind of Nan, na, nana, na. Other psalms do the taunt song very well, and to sing the words of some of them on our football terraces would result in immediate prosecution. But there’s another way of singin those words.....

I remember a moment of sadness that became a moment of truthfulness, and then a memory that changes the way I hear the word ‘enemy’. Having visited the place where "Silent night was written, we went next day to an Austrian village, and went into the church to cool down - and to pray. In the cool of the village church we looked at the beautiful black marble memorial plaque – a young German soldier, rifle thrown aside, holds his dying friend and in German, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’. He too had been knitted together in his mother’s womb – he too no matter in heaven or hades cannot escape the presence of God; he too was fearfully and wonderfully made, in the image of God.

At the front of the church was the altar, where bread is broken and wine poured out, and where the people of God gather to celebrate the sacrifice of Christ for the sins of the world. The great gift of God to the church, and the great gift of the church to the world, is a table that proclaims peace, that is the enactment of reconciliation, that is open and inviting to all who will come, and yes, which far from taunting my enemy, is the place of welcome, the embrace of acceptance, the shared sorrow for a broken world. And shared joy that the world is redeemed by the love of God in Christ, so that with good faith, with strong hope, and gently persistent love, we finish the psalm, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life". So no place or time for that perfect hatred, instead the voice that sings of peace is finally able to be heard without interruption.

The Psalms force us to be honest – we do dislike, even hate; we are people with prejudices; we have long memories about people who hurt us; there are some things that to us can never be forgiven or forgotten; try as we will, there are times when it is impossible to move on, get over it. Which is why we regularly meet around the table in the presence of our enemies – to be reminded of how God treats enemies, and to pray that the bread and wine, symbols of a fruitful earth and the passion of our God, will be medicine to our souls, and healing to our hurts. And to seek and humbly receive that grace to enable us to live as blessed peacemakers, ministers of reconciliation, people who walk the banks of the river of life where the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. People who sit at a table spread not by us but by God, and in the presence of enemies break bread, and offer it to this other human being whom I no longer will call, enemy.

 

How Do We Defeat The Enemy (3)

The Poem "How do I defeat my Enemy" by Michael Rosen, is a profound and searing indictment of the modern nation state and its political cynicism. The primary concern is not what is right, or good, or has ethical principle - but what is in the interests of the state, regardless of ethical fallout. 

In Christian spirituality sin can be so personal and so petty, so visible and obvious – but sometimes sin is insidious, toxic, insinuating itself not only into human hearts but into human structures. Who is the enemy? And why do I need to, wanto, defeat him or them? Psalm 139 describes the beauty, the dignity, the uniqueness of each individual human being. In a prayer poem a prose chain of beautiful phrases are used to describe the process of creation. God is like an artist, with care and vision, skill and that gift of bringing out the once in the life of a universe specialness of this one creation, this one individual, this person - me, you, him, her. And then there’s the end of the Psalm, which clatters on the floor like a dropped baking tray interrupting a Baroque oboe concerto, about hating those who hate God with a perfect hatred – despite the deep truth of the Hasidic ethic, that to kill a human being is to kill a universe.

We live in a world where such precious, unique, dignity and worth are, according to the Bible, to be accorded to each person, made in the image of God. Yet we inhabit a world of suicide bombs, improvised explosive devices, remote controlled drones, death by enemy action and friendly fire, - it is such an unpredictable, complex, confusing and heartbreaking reality, this life that is both precious and disposable.

And Psalm 139 captures it with the kind of honesty we may find it hard to take. “See if there is any offensive way in me”. The psalmist has just spouted an atrocious hymn of personal hatred, following on a beautiful song of human worth, dignity and God given value. This is hatred in the name of God, and it isn't only a historical fact, or something that happens elsewhere. In Scotland, sectarian attitudes come very close to this religiously inspired hatred, this distorted, grotesque view that God can be co-opted to be on the side of our prejudices and hatreds. Followers of Jesus can never say, ‘I hate with a perfect hatred those who hate you’ – why – because while we were God’s enemies Christ dies for us – oh and that verse begins, ‘God commends his love towards us in that....’

How Shall We Defeat the Enemy? (2)

The poem in the previous post asks a question that for me lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and therefore at the apex of Christian witness to the subversive reality and radical call of Jesus Christ. "How shall we defeat the enemy?" At church today I was leading the Remembrance day service, and reflecting on what we understand by the word enemy, and its connection with fear and faith. The next three posts share the gist of what I was trying to explore. Three Psalms informed my thinking; the first is psalm 46.

When we come to church, we come to the place where God expects us to be honest, but often enough we try to be pious and spiritual and behave the way we think God expects. But seldom does God expect what we offer, and not often enough do we offer what God expects. We just don't see ourselves clearly enough, our self-awareness is clouded by our self justifying habits of mind, and ready made excuses reduce our sense of unworthiness to stand before the Love that knows us to the depths of our being.

The Psalms are a powerful corrective to that unreality, indeed dishonesty, with which we view ourselves. They are laced with raw emotion – glad gratitude, honest hatred, aggressive anger, silent serenity, hard won hope, downward dragging despair, jubilant joy – and that inevitable and recurring tension in mind and soul, of faith and fear. In Psalm 46 there is a towering confidence, "God is our refuge and our strength...", that defiance that looks at the worst and won’t run away. "Though” – though mountains shake; though the seas roar and foam - that word "though" contains most of the things that can go wrong in our lives and in our world. It is a hinge point in the Psalm, and a picotal word of faith. Whatever it looks like, it looks different when God is in the picture.

We now live in a world where it seems most of the things we thought were fixed and given, have been shaken and may be taken away – from personal pensions to world peace, our children and grand-children’s future now threatened by an impoverished world – global recession, accelerating consumption of earth resources, the spoiling and soiling of the planet.

Psalm 46 is no escapist vision – it is faith calling in question the way things are – and saying the way things are can be changed by a different vision – God in the midst of the city. Political uproar is nothing new, nations in turmoil is the story of history, war threatened by the brink of economic collapse is a recurring crisis in our human story. But against that threatening sky, the Psalm speaks of "the river that makes glad". Instead of panic, gladness, instead of terror, trust, and in place of resignation, hope.

That verse must be interpreted beside Rev 22.1 Another river flowing from the city, and there are trees growing along this river, and the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations. In our day it is the eurozone that may "fall into the sea", the collision of religious and political ideas that "roar and foam", the shift of economic power to Asia has "nations in uproar", the evidence of a planet anaemic from being drained of its life-blood feels like "the earth giving way". And still, and yet, there is need for that people who witness to the leaves of the tree that are for the healing of the nations.

Remembrance Sunday is when we remember the cost of war, and though we say we will not fear, it is right to fear the possibility, the reality, the consequences of war. V9 is one of those verses that is both comfort and terror – "He shatters the spear". But if the spear is pointed at me and God breaks it then I am saved; if I am pointing the spear at a dangerous enemy and it is broken, I am defenceless. At which point, and only then, the command of God is heard, “Be still and know that I am God.....I will be exalted..."

Being still is hard for a technological, consumer growth driven world. But sometimes faith has to rest content without practical answers – and acknowledge that God is within this glorious, tragic, rich, broken but beautiful creation and only his promise she will not fall. But alongside our renewed trust in the redemptive love and costly mercy of God, we have to face with honesty one of our deepest human  wounds - our love affair with hatred, which I'll reflect on in the next post..

 

 

How shall we defeat the enemy? (1)

 

How Shall We Defeat The Enemy?

How shall we defeat The Enemy?

We shall defeat The Enemy by making alliances.

Who shall we make alliances with?

With people in whose interests it is, to be enemies with The Enemy.

How shall we win an alliance with these people?

We shall win an alliance with these people by giving them money and arms.

And after that?

They will help us defeat The Enemy.

Has The Enemy got money and arms?

Yes.

How did The Enemy get money and arms?

He was once someone in whose interests it was, to be enemies with our enemy.

Which enemy was this?

Someone in whose interest it had once been, to be enemies with an enemy.

Michael Rosen, 2001

Contemplative Mission and Thoughtful Compassion

The activism that is generated by Evangelical experience, and which is a largely unexamined element of Evangelical spirituality, worship and church lifestyle, has made Evangelicals at best impatient and at worst suspicious of the contemplative tradition of Christian spirituality. Not that many Evangelicals would have much interest in harking back to the privatised spiritual traditions of French Quietism, or the apparently world denying flight of the Desert Fathers and Mothers away from a sinful world, in their criticism or rejection of the apparent passivity and introspection and individualism of such self-absorbed piety. Always assuming such parts of the varied Christian tradition were known well enough for such critique, and assuming even more doubtfully whether such criticisms of Fenelon, Francis De Sales and the Desert Fathers and Mothers are anywhere near the truth and realities by which these earlier Christians lived.

But there is within Evangelicalism an inner reluctance to validate forms of prayer other than petition and intercession and personal devotion, and a dismissive superiority when comparing the activism of an evangelistic imperative and impulse to mission, with a more monastic and meditative approach to the world, to God and to the relations between them. As with much of my own thinking, I don't see an either-or here - I am pleading for a both-and. Only as the church learns to recover and practice its contemplative disposition to the life of the world, the church and the created order of God, will it have some deeper and fuller sense of what mission is in that world, and its own purpose within the creation and redemptive goals of God, and therefore its call to adapt and respond to this context of time and place that is our own peculiar calling in history . 

Contemplative Mission sounds like an oxymoron, a strained attempt to bring two mutually exclusive mindsets together. But I am not so sure. It may be that if mission is building a city, contemplation is designing and planning it; if mission is the artistic masterpiece of God executed by the church, then contemplation is the artist seeking vision, shape and composition in those preliminary sketches, essential to the completion of that realised vision in beauty and truth.

Thoughtful compassion is another form of contemplative mission. John Stott in a small Falcon publication on mission reminded Christians decades ago of the call of Jesus to practice "uncomplicated compassion". By that he meant no ulterior motives - you make friends to make friends, you care because you care, you reach out because that's what you do. It isn't a preliminary tactic for evangelism, or to create a chance to witness - the act of love in the name of Jesus is its own witness, the reaching out is to embody the way Jesus is, you care because God has shown his care for you and you live under an imperative of love, so you love for no other reason, benefit or goal.

Add to that the word thoughtful, look at the world around and bring thought to bear, ask the questions that matter about peace and its absence, pervasive and chronic hunger, persistent intractable injustice, gratuitous systemic cruelty, lethal levels of poverty - and then ask what is to be done. And the answer won't always be obvious, there may not even be one, humanly speaking. Contemplative mission means a disposition of caring about the world around us, noticing what is going on, seeing the global and the local and the glocal as that God loved world into which Christ came and comes, pervaded by the Spirit of God, held in the purposive intentionality of the Creator Redeemer.

Thoughtful compassion is to think God's thoughts after Him, and to align our affections with the faithful mercy, redemptive patience, and imaginative energy of Divine Love described as inexhaustible, immeasurable and indescribable. Thoughtul compassion embodies, and then seeks ways of practising so that the inexhaustible becomes available, the immeasurable visible and the indescribable finally described in the miracle of God loving through human acts of kindness, conciliation and caring. The photo of Dorothy Day shows how radical that can be - the face is that of a thoughtful, compassionate confronter of injustice, in the name of the God made known in Jesus