Living Wittily

An Apple and a Lesson in Reflective Practice!

I park my car in my designated space in the University Car Park.

It is 7.30 am and a cold drizzly day.

Crisp autumn leaves now a layer of mashed soggy brown.

The car park is on a steep slope.

For breakfast I have an intentionally healthy combination.

It includes a banana and a large red apple.

As I get out the car I fumble with the keys and drop the apple.

It rolls under the car and determinedly down the hill, gathering pace.

By the time I get round the car it is bouncing its way towards the rhodedendron bushes.

Dilemma One - do I pursue an apple downhill handicapped by manbag and half put on jacket?

If I do I will be on security CCTV, - and the apple has now disappeared under a bush.

Dilemma Two  - should I now ferret around in the bushes while also on CCTV?

So I reluctantly relinquish half my breakfast.

Existential Question - why couldn't it have been the banana I dropped??

Theological Reflection - what is it about apples, human frailty and a fallen world that frustrates our good intentions?

Thought for the Day - Was I meant to have a bacon roll instead?

Jesus as the Parable of God; Pastors as Parables of Jesus?

Just because something is overstated doesn't make it wrong. I'm readinjg a book which sometimes overstates, generalises and makes claims that need some qualifying. But it is a good book, written by a genuinely interesting and thoughtful pastor. David Hansen's The Art of Pastoring is being read by our Pastoral Care class, and it is all the things a good text book should be - accessible, written out of experience, and sufficiently self deprecating for readers to feel they are learning from a fellow traveller rather than deferring to an expert.

The sub title is Ministry Without All the Answers, and throughout the book there is a refreshing acceptance that much of ministry is ad hoc, instinctive, gift and opportunity, serendipity subverting strategy, a way of being that leads to certain actions and activities - but all such activity governed by who it is done for, Jesus Christ.

So, here is an overstatement - "...time management is the new eschatology. Theology's venerable "already and not yet" has become "what needs to be done today and what can be left till tomorrow". Earlier Hansen had a go at "How to" books on pastoral tasks, and warned, "pastoral ministry is a life, not a technology." By which he means a way of being rather than a set of practical and relational skills. What he is after is a view of ministry that is not trend driven, task driven, or identity conferring. Then he says something not so much overstated as often overlooked - "The pastor as a parable of Jesus Christ" (p.11). 

Balance in ministry is both doing and being, who we are influencing and motivating what we do. It is not mere technique, but neither is it mere trial and error, accidental or incidental. It is a rich and unpredictable mixture of many things, including careful planning, alert adaptability, contemplative reflection, imaginative compassion, spiritual instinct for the significant, attuned listening to others, discipline and organisation balanced with intuitive and subversive openness to change.

Time management need not be the division of the day into quarter hours and each one accounted for - though John Wesley in his own neurotic self-censorship did indeed keep account of such micro-managed life. Nor should ministry be measured bytasks completed, boxes ticked, or skills demonstrated. Like all good books on pastoral theololgy, Hansen's book is a refreshing corrective, and a very good guilt reducing tonic. His key insight, that the pastor is a parable of Jesus Christ informs the whole book. Hansen is obviously not afdraid of the tough theology either - he quotes Eberhard Jungel, "This christological statement is to be regarded as the fundamental proposition  of a hermeneutic of the speakability of God." Ehh...Quite!

Hansen explains, "If Jesus is the parable of God and preaching the story of Jesus brings God to people, if we live our lives following Jesus, maybe our lives canb bring Jesus to people. Maybe we can be parables of Jesus." (p.24) Jesus is the Word of God, God articulated in human life and personality, the Word become flesh. Hansen is arguing for an incarnational ministry in which Jesus is glimpsed, explicated, demonstrated, not in the fullness of the glory beheld in the Word full of grace and truth, but in the much more limited, but no less graced life of following Jesus in the service of the Kingdom of God. As Jesus is the exegete of God, the pastor is called to be exegete of Jesus, His Way, His Truith and His Life.

We await the class discussion.

Big words, large ideas and a vast Gospel

My Gran was a self taught daughter of a miner and the mother of miners in Allanton near Shotts. She taught me to say “A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic movement of the left optic to an equine quadruped devoid of its visual capacity”

Once I had learned it by heart and recited it she said, “James, you are expostulating far beyond the exuberance of your own verbosity and your aristocratic language is too superior to my diminutive sarcastications – so please, be quiet!”

Gran didn’t say that with a twinkle in her eye. She didn’t do twinkles – she said it with a glint, a kind of steely “I dare you to answer back” look.

At the end of last Session our leaving students bought a hoodie with their personal motto on the back. Mine had the claim “I’m a sesquipedalian”. A lover of big words

Theological education is about learning big words – obvious ones like hermeneutics, eschatology, epistemology, these are the secondary ones; others like Gospel, Jesus, grace, sin, faith are of primary and defining importance. Words are big not because of their length or syllable count. It’s the content that makes words large, expansive and vast.George Herbert's poem "Agonie" begins with this verse:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains
        But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

An entire theological and philosophical syllabus is contained in those two words, sin and love. But all the other big words we learn to use in theological thinking and discourse, are the tools we use to understand, to analyse, to apply and with the aim of living the Christ life as Christians who can give good reasons for the hope that is within. Though often our vocabulary is over-strecthed by the vast realities of the Christian Gospel, the words we use help to give clarity to ideas which in turn shape and form vision, and train the mind to think precisely, critically  and creatively about Gospel, culture and church – about witness, mission and discipleship, and how those double threefold strands weave into a whole and holy Christian life.

Two books I have lived with for a year or two couldn’t be more different yet they exist between the same covers of the Bible, Ecclesiastes and Colossians. As Christians we exist between the two poles of “all is vanity”  and “He has made all things one, reconciling to Himself all things, making peace by the blood of the cross.”

So a theological education which aims at formation for ministry holds the place of tension between culture, church and Gospel. The goal and the focus of spiritual and intellectual energy is on equipping and enabling students, working with them and for them, deepening understanding, sharpening thinking, helping explore gifts and experiences in their lives. And then to support them in enabling and appropriating these, to integrate them, to take hold of all they are and make it a living sacrifice as they are transformed by the renewing of their minds and conformed not to our culture but to Christ. So they become powerful conduits and efficient conductors of the Gospel, bridge people who understand the connections and disconnections between Gospel  culture, and church and who speak and think always and everywhere, with Christ on the Horizon,  the Colossian Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

Autumn to winter in a day or two

These two photos were taken within a couple of days of each other. The view from our front window. I could become all annoyingly moralistic and do a wee homily on the passing seasons, autumnal maturity and the coming of winter as a metaphor of life passing. But why waste two perfectly good photos - they show what they show - life goes on!

Christ of the Upward Way My Guide Divine

He is a path, if any be misled;
He is a robe, if any naked be;
If any chance to hunger, He is bread;
If any be a bondman He is free;
If any be but weak, how strong is He!
To dead men life He is, to sick men health;
To blind men sight, and to the needy, wealth;
A pleasure without loss,
a treasure without stealth.
- Giles Fletcher

Browsing for Words to Help....

Today at quite a low point I turned as often, to several of the writers who act as my spiritual directors and as sources of spiritual refreshment. This was what I found by browsing for ten minutes in their company.

A Church, as soon as it is a believing church, must above all else be a confessing Church, i.e. it must be more concerned to show forth the Lordship of Christ and his Gospel in its every special action, enterprise, than to hum with energy...

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

God approaches our minds by receding from them. We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our won ideas. We know Him better after our minds have let Him go. The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord Arrives from all directions at once.

Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we discover that he has just arrived before us.

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

The first by P T Forsyth reminds me what is central, foundational, crucial, and therefore the primary source of sustainable energy for the church.

The second by Thomas Merton reminds me, and often this reminder comes as a jolt, that God is bigger than my ideas, vaster than my wish list, the frustrator of my instinct to control and comprehend.

And both help me understand and nod knowingly in assent, to the older translation of John's words, "The Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not...."

Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.....

Leaves, Trees and the Healing the Nations?

                 "And the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations..."

When Great Trees Fall  (Maya Angelou)

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

(Photo taken on rentreat at The Bield in Perth)

The other night I went looking for a sunset. Around six o’clock, looking down on Loch Skene through the trees, I sat for 10 minutes watching the colour change, but it never went red. One of those evenings when nature does its own thing just to put sightseers in their place!

And an astonishing reminder that, for all our manufactured virtual realities, clever illusions and obsession with appearance and image, we still can't do a nature makeover, or airbrush a sunset. So I took a photo of an ordinary sunset, and left it untouched, unedited and unimproved. How do you improve a sunset anyway? At the centre of the photo there’s a little jewel of reflected gold, stretching across the loch a mile away, leaving much to the imagination. But imagination helped towards joy by the noise of hundreds of migrating geese, echoing up the hill, honking their calls of home and home-going. Another reminder of nature's rhythms, which are of course natural, and so far, mercifully, beyond our control!

“From the rising of the sun and to the going down of the same, the Lord’s name is to be praised.” And the greatest praise is gratitude, recognition of the gift that is beauty, and life, and the blessings of a world threatened by a combination of our cleverness and our foolishness. I took a photo of an ordinary sunset! What an extraordinary thing to write – as if a sunset was ever other than a familiar taken for granted miracle of Benediction!

The Courage and Preciousness of Malala Yousafzai

This is the face of courage, bearing witness against a brutal world

Malala Yousafzai is slowly recovering.

This also the face of hope - for Muslim girls and women.

She is not out of danger. Medically she has a long journey ahead.

Her enemies remain incensed by their own lethal hatreds.

She was shot because she wanted to go to school.

If ever there was a time to uphold the value and human significance of education in our own culture, and across the world

If ever there was a person who embodies the human passion for learning

If ever there was a personality and character more worthy of our admiration than any amount of "celebrity personalities"

If ever there was reason to hope for a better human future for children across the world

If ever there was a time to contradict and subvert prejudice and religious hatred

If ever there was a demonstration of how one person's actions can make a difference for others,

Then Malala Yusafzai is such a person, and the time is now.

And,

If ever there was a young woman entitled to immediate nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize

it is this young teenager

whose blog was answered by bullets,

whose love of learning is threatened by lethal force,

whose young life has been spent in an environement of fear, repression, violence and religiously fuelled hatred,

and who only wants to go to school, in peace, to learn.

May the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob, protect and bless her.

Some Sentences on Prison Sentences

Can someone explain to me the purpose, value or social usefulness of sending a man to jail for six months because he swam in front of two competing boats in a race? There's no disputing it was stupid, illegal, ruined a national and internationally important event - at least in the eyes of the BBC and two Universities. So that it was a court case is not in dispute - that it was a public order offence is equally both obvious and conceded.

But in a country where we have the highest percentage in Europe of prisoners handed custodial sentences, there are surely more creative, socially responsible and hopeful ways of dealing with a lone protester who interrupted a race.

What is the judicial system for, and what does the criminal justice process seek to achieve. Punishment, and even that word needs some qualifying - but punishment is not an end in  itself. What was the six month sentence intended to achieve for society, for the offender, and for both as they look to the future beyond the crime and the sentence?

Is the sentence intended to act as a deterrent? But where are the hordes queuing up to swim in front of boats on the Thames, or steal the flag at the last green of the Open Golf, or bring a vuvuzela horn to the last night of the Proms and blow it annoyingly during Land of Hope and Glory?

To be sensible. Punishment, let's use the word. Is its purpose deterrence in which case will this deter him from doing the same thin g next year? Probably, but there are more efficient ways of doing that even if he wanted to do the swim again?

Or is the intention to exact retribution for an act of selfish stupidity that ruined the enjoyment of thousands? But are we saying the only way we can think of to express social punishment is to take away liberty and further criminalise the offender in an institution at ridiculous expense to the very people he has offended against?

If the intention is to correct, rehabilitate, re-orientate a person's sense of social responsibility and moral thinking, then the last place suited for that is a prison where it is accepted there are far too few resources, and a deeply counter-productive environment for such mental, emotional and social self-reinvention.

Now if the intention is restitution, seeking to put right what was done wrongly, making recompense for loss or hurt to others, then I fail to see how he can do that while locked away from the very public to whom he owes a debt, and again, at their considerable expense.

Would several hundred community hours of work have been better? Oh, I think so. Would a fine have been more appropriate - fines depend on how much money a person has anyway. If he is a millionaire then a few thousand pounds is more inconvenience than restitution or any other alleged good consequence of punishment. If he is on benefits, then a fine merely goes unpaid and we are back to jail with no get out of jail free card.

So I'm still asking - how does sending him to prison provide a satisfying resolution to a disrupted boat race? We are not talking about a football fan inciting violence, or behaving in a way likely to endanger life and limb around them. There was no crowd who would become a threat to public order lining the Thames that day. But to require the offender to repay the public money this whole incident incurred, and make restitution for ruining the hard work and enjoyment of many others, that could surely be better achieved by community service, a re-education in what makes a society good and just, and a reminder that human community cannot flourish unless there is a mutual recognition of rights, and obligations, and these balanced in socially responsible actions.