Living Wittily

The Silent Presence of God and Spiritual Complacency

Thomas Merton remains one of my spiritual mentors: time and again I hear a voice of compassionate rebuke, patient understanding and in a tone of self deprecating modesty. Often enough for me it is a needed corrective, a recovery of perspective which a too driven Baptist needs to consider on the advice of a Cistercian who died nearly 50 years ago.

 

"If our life is poured out in useless words,

     we will never hear anything,

          will never become anything,

              and in the end,

                  because have said everything before we had anything to say,

                          we will be left speechless."

 

"The world our words have attempted to classify, to control,

and even to despise because they could not contain it, comes close to us,

for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

 

When we have lived long enough alone with the reality around us,

our veneration will learn how to bring forth a few good words about it

from the silence which is the mother of Truth."

 

These words are from Thoughts in Solitude, an early intense series of meditations Merton later felt were overstated, idealistic and betraying his early over earnestness. But actually some of the most important spiritual writings are forged in the heat of enthusiasm, and what they lose in moderation and maturity and consistency, they gain by reflecting real and immediate experience that challenges our spiritual status quo, which too often has settled into unsurprised complacency, emotional comfort and a self-serving pursuit of spiritual bargains. Bargains are by definition something worthwhile which we get on the cheap. Spiritual growth and maturity cannot be had on the cheap. Merton was far too self-knowing not to recognise the short cut, the body swerve, the consumer mindset, the natural evasiveness about the demands of God that were a trait in himself. And in pointing out such inner bias he helps us recognise them in ourselves, and then to see more clearly, speak more humbly, and learn again the silence of the heart.

Merton encourages a pursuit of spiritual maturity that is less self-conscious and more focused outwardly on the reality of God, the activity of the Holy Spirit and the living presence of the Risen Christ. Waiting in silence, hoping in the quietness, trusting in the peacefulness, of the Triune God. Activist spirituality is by definition impatient, pragmatic, results tested and evidence based. Integrated silence, contemplative prayer, welcoming the presence of God, and being welcomed by God, seated in hospitality at the table with the Triune God, has no empirical evidence we can point to or demonstrate. Nor should it. God is to be loved for God's self, and whatever else intentional inner and outer silence is, it is an act of love, to pay attention, to adore, to worship. 

Shalom - A Tapestry of Psalms. Psalm 8

In this Psalm Shalom is founded on the majesty and artistry of the Creator. This panel of the tapestry contrasts the vast intricacy of the universe and the small human habitation at the waterside, its light reflected on the water. See the earlier post on the Defeat of Dogma by Understatement for the theological and polemical importance of stars in the Hebrew Bible.

Each of the panel of the tapestry is 9cm by 7cm. What you are seeing is a close-up. The canvas us 24 to the inch guage, and the cotton is six stranded cotton, with the colouts mixed in various combinations of strands - which means endless possibilities of colour and tone.

Psalm 8

¹ Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory
    in the heavens.
² Through the praise of children and infants
    you have established a stronghold against your enemies,
    to silence the foe and the avenger.
³ When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
⁴ what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?^[c]

⁵ You have made them^[d] a little lower than the angels^[e]
    and crowned them^[f] with glory and honor.
⁶ You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
    you put everything under their^[g] feet:
⁷ all flocks and herds,
    and the animals of the wild,
⁸ the birds in the sky,
    and the fish in the sea,
    all that swim the paths of the seas.

⁹ Lord, our Lord,
    how majestic is your name in all the earth!

I remember in 1977, reading W D Davies The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount, a comprehensive examination of the background of that radical Kingdom of God manifesto.

A few years later F F Bruce published the fruit of a lifetime's study and immersion in the life and thought of Paul, his theological mentor whom he called 'Apostle of the Free Spirit'. A year or two later E P Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism forced a fundamental rethink of Pauline studies.

In the mid 1980's Bishop John Robinson, of Honest to God fame, completed the draft of his Bampton Lectures which was published posthumously as The Priority of John. Seldom have I read a more theologically sensitive exposition of the passion of Jesus, even if the underlying thesis was brilliantly argued but with few lasting converts.

Early 90's and John Ashton's major study Understanding the Fourth Gospel, (which cost £65 and was paid for by books tokens!) opened another vista on the theological masterpiece attributed to John.

Then I ploughed through N T Wright's The Origins of the People of God, volume 1, published in 1992. It was, and is, a hard read, but it too changed the way I read the New Testament, more fully aware of worldview and cultural norms and codes and social context.

Jesus and the Victory of God moved the discussion to a further level, and once again a massive book compelled new thinking, rewarded careful reading, and takes its place as a milestone in my personal study of the New Testament.

Sometimes commentaries have the same ground-breaking and ground-shifting effects. Ulrich Luz's three volumes on Matthew in the Hermeneia series are such. Beautifully produced, replete with learning long and slowly distilled, ranging across hermeneutical disciplines, developing a particular study of 'effective history', that is the effect of the text on readers throughout history - (different from reception history). They are a joy to use.

And now. News of another gold strike in New Testament studies! SPCK have announced N T Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Three volumes including the long awaited monograph on Pauline theology, a second volume on Paul's recent interpreters, and a third collecting Wright's most significant and seminal essays over 30 years. You can check this out for yourselves here. Me? I'm saving up!

http://www.logos.com/product/29160/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god?utm_source=prepublication&utm_medium=email&utm_content=4343421&utm_campaign=prepub

The Defeat of Dogma by Understatement - and the Fruitful Companionship of Dictionaries

Amongst other things this blog is a celebration of the book, a conservation area for those who, without despising Kindle, still require as a life necessity, the proximity and availability of books. I await the advent of an e-reader that is as flexible, quick and easy to flick through and back and forth, as a solid reference book. Because some of the most important books are for reference.Thumbing through a reference book is education by serendipity, and the best reference books send you chasing in all directions, to articles and topics you hadn't realised were connected to your first enquiry. A good article in a quality reference book will have cross references to other articles and treatments of similar or related material. Now I guess hyper links and other devices allow a similar cognitive tour on an e-reader but I'm now so incurably attached to those large repositories of print and picture that I'll persist with the dictionary, encyclopedia, companion, handbook, and lexicon in book form.

One such dictionary I use often and am seldom disappointed. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, published in 1998 by IVP is according to its impressive sub-title "An encyclopedic exploration of the images, symbols, motifs, metaphors, figures of speech and literary patterns of the Bible." While working away at the Shalom tapestry I've consulted it on shepherds and sheep, moon and stars, mountains and rivers, trees and fruit, water and sunshine, cups that run over and my going out and coming in! The literary texture of Scripture is rich and dense, colourful and subversive, the range of its imagery drawing from many cultures, several languages, and centuries of history. The column and a half on stars is an eye opener to those who read biblical, texts with minds as dulled in vision as our eyes as we stand in a brightly lit street and see through a glass obscurely, missing the sheer magnificence and cosmic artistry of a night sky that should rightly reduce our utilitarian view of the world to a humbler respect for that whose vastness renders our self-importance of no intrinsic significance.

Because that's what Psalm 8 is saying. Human beings are made a little lower than the angels, because the Lord God made it so, not because we made ourselves so. Street lights are themselves metaphors for illuminated blindness, artificial light that obscures the billions of divinely appointed lights for the universe. Fanciful? Come on, stop being a literalist - the great Psalm poet wrote, "God determines the number of the stars; he gives to each of them their name"(147.4). In a world awash with astrological predictions, stellar worship and fear of the astral forces that fix human destiny, the psalmist upsets the game board and announces that the God of Israel, far from being subject to the whims and fates of the stars, is the one by whom they exist, the one whom they serve, and the one who gives each star its name - naming being a fundamental act of ownership. And yes, in the creation narrative of Genesis 1, as a fatal deflation of Babylonian arrogance and astrological controls, the writer says in a devastating parenthesis at the end of the story of the creation of earth and heaven, "he made the stars also". I don't know anywhere in all literature a more comprehensive defeat of dogma by understatement. 

All of this from a dictionary. Love them!

Karl Barth and the Cure for Desultoriness of Spirit

Earlier today I was desultorying. There's much to be thought about just now, life taking new turnings, decisions that involve both risk and trust, and I was looking around for a conversation partner, someone to take me out of self-pre-occupation for a while. In the corner is a tall narrow bookcase which houses Barth's Church Dogmatics, and sundry other Barthian writing, along with a number of the key monographs on Barth's theology from McCormack to Hunsinger, and Busch to Webster. I took down the Romans commentary - that angry, passionate, turbo-charged bulldozer of a book that didn't only disturb the scholars in their playground, but proceeded to demolish their school.

Barth is one of a few theologians who provide (for me at any rate) a theological and spiritual antidote to the debilitating condition of desultorying. Loss of impetus, boredom with transcendence, spiritual attention deficit, emotional reductionism, theological complacency, - there are plenty of phrases and they describe some forms of desultorying. Nearer where I am just now is something different - experience overload, much happening at once and the need to have time, space and energy to work through what it means, how it feels, and how best live with and through life as it is. In her wonderful Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton wrote something I adopted as a spiritual principle. She spoke of the depletion that comes from 'unassimilated  experience' - she meant those times when life is too stridently demanding, expectations of ourselves are unrealistic, too much happens before previous experience is reflected upon, learned from, made peace with.

One way of interrupting the flow of information, experience and circumstance is to change the subject away from  yourself to that which is beyond, more than, extrinsic to, our own inner world with its worries, problem solving, calculation and self- centred attention. Open a volume of Barth, and I find myself interrupted! Romans 8 belongs in the Alpine range of Paul's theology, and Barth on Romans 8 in his commentary provides a stunning viewpoint to take in the vast vista and far away horizons of the love of God in Jesus Christ. Is it an exegesis of Romans 8? Absolutely not, more like a conductor inspiring an entire orchestra to improvise with passionate responsiveness to the composer's musical vision, and therefore to treat the script with such massive respect that it is not slavishly followed but teleologically fulfilled. The result is an artistic triumph, a virtuoso performance that is unique and arises out of the specific coincidence of musicians, conductor, musical score and historical moment.

Barth's Romans is like that. I spent a while reading him on Romans 8.28, that massive granite rock of a verse that you either stand on because it will never move, or that falls and flattens you if you try to duck beneath it! Here is what I read, the cure for today's desultoriness:

The Love of God stands where there is disclosed,...the pre-eminent affirmation - Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. Blessed discovery! God stands in light inaccessible. Blessed discovery! All flesh is grass and all the glory of men is as the flower of the field. When in Spirit and in Truth, one of these discoveries is made, the other is involved in it, for both are in fact operations of the One God, whose universal majesty is the 'Yes' in the 'No'. The Love of God dares to see everywhere on this side and on that side, not a 'Here' and a 'There', but wholly and altogether beyond all tension and duality, the revelation of the one Truth, proclaiming that the free and righteous, blessed and living God, knows us, prisoners and sinners and condemned and dead, to be His own. And so in our apprehension which is not-knowing,  and in our not-knowing which is our apprehension, there is shown forth the final and primal unity of visibility and invisibility,  of earth and heaven,  of man and God...Thus God rewards those who love Him. 

Flannery O'connor loved Barth because he 'threw the furniture around'. He did, and he does. But here is an even earthier description that comes from one of those comments at the door after preaching, made by a farmer in the North East, that he was "glad to get a good kick up the backside". Not sure that was the aim of the sermon, but for him it did seem to be the outcome. And his phrase aptly describes Barth's theological impact on a desultory spirit!

The photo is across the Mearns at early sunrise into a liquid sky.

Prayer for Wider Horizons and an Enlarged Heart

Prayer of Response

We confess to you our Father, our small-mindedness and limited appreciation of your greatness and almighty power.

We confess that we scarcely consider your mighty movements at the beginning of time, creating the heavens and the earth. 

Forgive us and enlarge our understanding.

We confess that the life and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ do not infuse our thinking as they should: we are so hemmed in by transitory interests and temporal pursuits that we lose sight of the essential and eternal.

Forgive us, and deepen our love,

We confess that we do not value and often do not welcome the gift of your Holy Spirit to liberate our tongues to praise you and our lives to serve you. 

Forgive us, Creating and Redeeming God, and open our hearts,

Through the love of our Lord Jesus

And by the power of the Holy Spirit,

Amen

A Photo, a Haiku and Paying Attention as an Act of Gratitude

PAYING ATTENTION

Sunshine illumines

a million raindrops; turning

life’s kaleidoscope.