Living Wittily

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Friday

EVENING, Emily Dickinson

She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!

You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you've littered all the East
With duds of emerald!

And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars -
And then I come away.

I don't remember my first encounter with the strange beauty and enigmatic brevity of Emily Dickinson's poems. More than many others I've read, even favourite poems of hers read differently every time; they evade critical and even appreciative capture. If poems are capable of playing hard to get, then many of her poems do frustrate our desire to possess, our drive to understand, and refuse to pander to our insecurity pushing us to pin down meaning. What on earth does it 'mean' to say "Till brooms fade softly into stars" - and then you realise, that what it 'means' isnt the point. In six words she makes the transition from dusk to darkness, and the word 'softly' is hushed with reassuring gentleness. It isn't too speculative to say this poem is informed by witnessing hundreds of performances by "the housewife in the evening west".

I am ridiculously fond of fudge with stem ginger, covered in dark chocolate. The collision of flavours and richness of each slice means you don't eat it like sweeties! A bar of this connoiseur's confection lasts me a month (it's quite a big bar though). Likewise Dickinson's poems - hers is a book on my desk and I seldom read more than one or two poems at a time. What a waste of taste, sensation and anticipation to sit down and devour them without lingering over the sheer joy of sampling each poem. Aye, chocolate covered ginger fudge, and Emily Dickinson's poems - you could do worse than enjoy both, together.

The first photo was taken from my study window; the second from a layby near Sherrifmuir looking north west.

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Thursday

Ode To Autumn

1.
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
        Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
    Conspiring with him how to load and bless
        With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
    To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
        And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
          To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
        With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
    And still more, later flowers for the bees,
  Until they think warm days will never cease,
          For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

2.
  Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
      Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
  Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
      Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
  Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
      Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
          Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
  And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
      Steady thy laden head across a brook;
      Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
          Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

3.
  Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
      Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
      And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
      Among the river sallows, borne aloft
          Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
      Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
      The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
          And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

                                                                              John Keats

The best time to read this is just after listening to Nigel Kennedy playing Vivaldi's Autumn movement from his Seasons suite, after which have at least three Victoria plums followed by oatcakes with Ayrshire cheese and pear chutney, then a large pancake with butter and bramble and crab apple jelly, at an open window listening to the migrating geese honking their way south. That's about as devotional as this post gets today! Autumn - love it.

The photo at the top is of a straw swiss roll taken from the field a mile away. The small acer is years old and last winter gave it a hard time. It's still spectacular at this time of the year - for about 5 days.

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Wednesday

Favourite poems sometimes have complex pedigrees. The prayer of thanksgiving by Simon in The Wisdom 0f Sirach 50.22-24 was the inspiration for Martin Rinkart to write the German Hymn Nun Danket Alle Gott. This was translated by Catherine Winkworth as  Now Thank We All Our God, the version printed below. Incidentally that supposedly sweet tempered, gentle Anglican and spiritual director, Evelyn Underhill, was less than impressed with Winkworth's translations of the German Mystics, referring to her as 'wicked Winkworth'. But whatever her shortcomings as translator, she produced a rock solid hymn of praise and thanksgiving adequate to our deepest and simplest theology. Karl Barth was guilty of writing some of the deepest and simplest theology in the history of the Church, and the hymn below was one of his favourites, and its middle verse a personal prayer credo - one which I'm happy to sign up to myself.

The photo was taken in August - Smudge is a crypto-Barthian in her spare time.

Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things has done, in Whom this world rejoices;
Who from our mothers’ arms has blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love, and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God through all our life be near us,
With ever joyful hearts and blessèd peace to cheer us;
And keep us in His grace, and guide us when perplexed;
And free us from all ills, in this world and the next!

All praise and thanks to God the Father now be given;
The Son and Him Who reigns with Them in highest Heaven;
The one eternal God, whom earth and Heaven adore;
For thus it was, is now, and shall be evermore.

Martin Rinkart (1586-1649)

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Tuesday

I took this photo sitting looking across from Brechin towards the coast on an August evening. The moon drifted to and fro between the clouds, or so it seemed. The tracks of the tractor across the cornfield brought a sense of peaceful waiting for harvest, under a harvest moon. Amongst the pleasures of taking photographs is the required reduction of pace, the suspending of other agendas, and the deliberate intention to observe rather than glimpse, and to take in rather than pass by at the maximum allowed speed limit.

By contrast there is the conflict between life pace and life peace, the contrast between rush and rest, and the impoverishment to our view of the world and ourselves if we only ever glance and seldom gaze. I love Hopkins poem because he is realistic about the elusiveness of peace, and the illusion of ever thinking life can consist of rest. Even God rested only after 6 days of creative exertion. But Hopkins is no pietist merely craving inner calm and long term serenity. He recognises that conflict within and conflict without are inevitable because essential in lives that are to grow and reach out beyond the mere interests of the self. He doesn't use the word affliction in this poem, but it is a profoundly pastoral response to suffering, loss and the absence of peace. "Patience exquisite" is the fruit of such peacelessness - and the coming of the Dove of peace, the Holy Spirit, is not to speak words of pointless comfort, or even articulated love, but more importantly to sit and brood. As at the Creation the Holy Spirit brooded upon the waters and God's creative word rang out, so upon the experiences of unpeace, the Spirit sits and broods to coax new life into being. 

PEACE, G M Hopkins

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I’ll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
He comes to brood and sit.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Monday

Time for a mary Oliver poem. In fact this week I'll post a poem a day from my favourite poets. Hard to reduce them to seven, and I wouldn't want to say that these this week are the top seven - but they are seven I read often, sometimes deeply, and seldom disappointingly. I'll indulge myself by combining the poems with a photo - not because the photo holds a candle to the poem, just because I...well, just because!

This first poem is like the flip side of a Psalm of Lament. Often enough I'm a sharp eyed observer of life's apparent negatives; a conscientious barometer of my own inner climate; an alert listener to the background noise of life to hear the rumbling bass more clearly than the melody. And this poem, like many of Mary Oliver's, is a perspective changing poem, an equilibrium restoring poem, a rhythm of words and syntax of lightness that awakens gratitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindful, Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

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

On a different note entirely, well maybe not entirely different - see here

Where is Wisdom to Be Found? .... in the One who is the Reconciliation of All Things.

¹⁵ He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; ¹⁶ for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. ¹⁷ He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. ¹⁸ He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. ¹⁹ For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, ²⁰ and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.

I spent a while today reading around this passage. It's probably a hymn, composed by Paul, or borrowed by him and edited to fit the theme and argument of his letter. Even in English translation the rhythm, images and rhetorical impetus are felt when it is read with care. Seven times the universal "all" is used. The ultimacy and particularity of Christ as Lord of the universe could hardly be more exclusively claimed.

One of the most intriguing articles I've read is Morna Hooker, "Where is Wisdom to be Found? Colossians 1.15-20", in Ford, D., and Stanton, G., (eds) Reading Texts, Seeking Wisdom, (London: SCM, 2003) 116-128. Nearly as good, in the same book with the same title and on the same text is Richard Bauckham's essay. But it's Hooker who shows how the Hebrew scriptures extol Wisdom and Torah as pillars of creation and active agents of God's essential being - and that is Paul's background as he writes. The hymn doesn't mention wisdom - it describes the creative power by which creation and renewal of creation are fully expressed by Christ in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. It doesn't mention wisdom - it describes Wisdom's accomplishments. Hooker shows how the theme of wisdom is a connective thread in elsewhere in Colossians, and finds its focus on the apostolic aim to lead Christians into wisdom and understanding and to "present everyone mature in Christ". This is Christology as the basis of hopeful Christian existence, looking for the reconciliation of all things by the only One able to fulfil such a redemptive reversal of creation's brokenness. Christian maturity is to live within that ethos of conciliatory wisdom, vulnerable love and hopeful trust.

Why is this important enough for a blog post? Here's a few sentences from Hooker's concluding pages. In them she takes with utmost seriousness, in a way many fear to do, the absolute priority of Christ as the interpretive key to Scripture. As a Baptist committed to communal discernment, her words affirm the radical freedom of the gathered congregation to seek the mind of Christ in Scripture:

"The text does not mean what you think it means, because it witnesses to the one who is behind the text, namely Christ. For Paul the 'canon' is not Scripture itself, but Christ, which means that Scripture  must be read in the light of Christ. Where is wisdom to be found. Notr in the written Torah - not even in the epistles of Paul - but in the living Christ.

How do we interpret Scripture? How do we distinguish between and ethical and an unethical reading? Between a reading that is legitimate and one that is illegitimate? Between one that is right and one that is wrong?  Between one that is wise and one that is unwise? ...For Paul the answer is: look at Christ, and at what he reveals to us of the love of God; interpret Scripture in the light of Christ." 

Where is wisdom to be found? In Christ, crucified, risen, living and present in the church and the world, amongst his people as they gather with Scriptures open, hearts receptive, minds alert and hopeful in trust, with fear and faith that the Lord of creation awaits our obedience as discerned in the words that bear witness to the Word.

Good Friday - "exploiting a valuable commercial opportunity!

Let Good Friday make it a Good Saturday - William Hill advance advert

 

Horse Racing and Betting on Good Friday. - see the full article here

"Most riders are unhappy about plans to have horse racing on Good Friday, says the chief executive of the Professional Jockeys' Association.

They are worried about losing a rare rest day and the effect on their awards night, Paul Struthers said.

The move - supported by top female rider Hayley Turner - could provide the sport with a windfall of more than £1m.

But the organiser of a Good Friday charity open day has called the proposal "greedy and selfish".

Several trainers and others within the industry have also voiced their backing for what they see as a unique chance to exploit a valuable commercial opportunity. "

It would be easy to be an outraged Christian, and to point out a number of reasons why one day in the calendar, and a day of overriding importance in the Christian Year, should retain its special status as the only day in the year when, up till now, there was no betting. Even easier to point out the vaccuous predictability of the comment see a unique opportunity to exploit a valuable commercial opportunity." And unnecessarily fliuppant to speculate on the lost opportunity two thousand years ago to sell tickets for the three man crucifixion show on Calvary.

And yet. Betting on Good Friday. Am I not right in saying some of the soldiers from the Roman execution squad gambled at the foot of the cross to settle who got the designer robe, all woven of one piece, that had belonged to the carpenter Messiah with delusions of being the King of the Jews. As if any upstart Galilean could look Pilate in the eye and talk of his Kingdom and expect to walk away. They's nailed him, and now there was a 'valuable commercial opportunity' for one of them. Win the robe and put it on Ebay - or its Greco-Roman equivalent!

Only those who saw beyond the blood and the nails, the thorns and the dust, and only those who heard behind the anguished cries of a dying would be Messiah, would feel that the gamblers were unwittingly placing bets and throwing dice as the world turned away from God in the ultimate affront of throwing God's love back in his face. So I guess it's unreasonable, I'm not being ironic, to expect a culture insatiable in its search for profit and 'valuable commercial opportunities', to think twice about betting on Good Friday; indeed it would be a Good Friday while so many people are on holiday for some reason or another. That reason being the all but forgotten significance of Easter for a culture where chocolate eggs also represent a valuable commercial opportunity, and where the main argument proposed against racing and betting on Good Friday, in the absence of any others voiced, was that the jockeys needed the extra day off.

New Testament Study as Faith Seeking Understanding

Here is a paragraph that gives New Testament theology and exegesis a good name. It comes from a lecture later published as an essay by J D G Dunn. It is worth reading slowly, and twice - as biblical exegesis, this is faith seeking understanding.

So too with our hope of Christ's coming again. There is an uncertainty about it which pervades all human prediction about God's future purpose. It is the language of vision and metaphor. It is therefore, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, as is all human speech about God. But it is the best we have and we should neither be embarrassed about it nor should we abandon it. For it tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future is not random and pointless; God's purpose still prevails and drives forward to the climax of his-story. It tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future has a Christ-shape and a Christ-character. The future will not come to us as a total surprise. For the God we encounter at the end of time will be the God who encounters us at the mid-point of time, God in Christ. And the Christ we encounter at the end of time will be the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, the Christ we encounter in our worship, in the Spirit, in Christ and through Christ to God the Father. We believe that this Christ will come again. "Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus."

I've read J D G Dunn's work on the New Testament since his first book, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's one of the great blessings of my life and times that I have lived when some of the finest New Testament scholarship has been producing such original, high quality studies in the New Testament, and that so much of it is so readily available. Dunn's new book, a major study of Oral Tradition and the Gospels is published in a few weeks. In a month or so N T Wright's two volumes on Paul will be published - I've waited a long time for this (1680 pages!) instalment of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.

I was perhaps a bit hard on 'spiritual reading' and 'spiritual writing' in the previous post, not much though. My own alertness to the presence of God is more often heightened when I too wrestle with the text and theology of the New Testament, and read a paragraph like that one above by Dunn. It is a conclusion to an academic essay, a conclusion securely tied to critical scholarship applied by one whose own faith is rooted in the text of the New Testament, and to the experience of God in Christ through the Spirit to which the New Testament bears witness. Dunn, in his preface to Jesus, Paul and the Gospels is up-front honest about this, speaking of "[my] conviction both that recognition of a vital religious experience was an important way in to understanding how Christianity flourished and that one's own religious experience was a vital part of critical interaction with these ancient scriptures".

That is such a heartening sentence, and places first class biblical scholarship not over and against, but alongside a faith that seeks understanding. In such an hermeneutic the text is allowed to interpret the interpreter. The same convictional foundation underlies N T Wright's work. Mind you I smile when I think that the first book of N T Wrght's which I read in 1986 was a slim, elegant and exciting Tyndale Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, total 190 pages!  

The Limitations of Reading So-called Spiritual Writing.

The poem below, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, never fails to recalibrate my compass, adjust my altimeter, or guage my inner barometer. And at this time of the year there are large skeins of migrating geese flying over Aberdeenshire, so plenty of reminders of the urgency, movement and impulsion of life.

I've become increasingly unconvinced by that category of reading called 'spiritual reading', if by that is meant reading that is overtly, designedly and determinedly devotional, or tending towards affecting the affections by self consciously spiritual writing. More and more I am moved by writing that is authentic, alert to human longing and the elusiveness of joy to those who set out to capture it. Oh yes, I still read Julian of Norwich, George Herbert, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Hymns of Charles Wesley -  but also the poems of Emily Dickinson, R S Thomas, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, and yes, Mary Oliver. And though I've read Jonathan Edwards Charity and its Fruits regularly for some of the most searching sermons on Paul's theology of the transforming love divine, and try to go swimming in Karl Barth without wearing armbands, and have recently added Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel and First Letter of John to my personal canon of writing worth reading slowly, I'm aware of the limitations of even such deep water theological writing.

Poetry more than makes up the shortfall of spiritual writing. More often poetry exposes the tendency to religious cliche, reveals the lazy unreality of sentiment run to seed, confronts the religious sins of world evasiveness, challenges contentment with banalityu or manufactured guilt, and most of all requires ruthless honesty in facing up to our own capacity for self-delusion, defensiveness and giving the hard truth a body swerve. 

That's some of why I love poetry.

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
In the family of things.

Christ who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet

For various reasons I've found myself reading in and around some of the parts of the Bible that were written out of suffering, loss, and the disequilibrium that can unsettle what we thought were the more secure anchorages. Harvey Cox's commentary on Lamentations in the Belief Commentary series is more a commentary on the experiences which generated the text than the text itself; which makes it a brilliant and illuminating companion when wandering through the dark nights of the soul of that text, written with blood and smudged with the tears of those whose world disintegrated before their eyes.

Sam Ballentine's commentary on Job is a masterpiece of theological reflection rooted in the text and nurtured by a faith unafraid of questions, and a sympathy with human perplexity and pain that turns theological erudition into an education in existential courage. And then there is Isaiah, those chapters from 40 onwards, hopefully imaginative, scornful of cynical realism, scintillating both in its visions of the incomparable and transcendent God, and in its demolition of the entire structures of idolatry and imperial power games.

All three compositions are work of the highest art. Which brings me to why I'm writing this. Re-reading the poet Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival I came across this passage which I marked.

'John Ruskin..writes in Sesame and Lilies:

"the more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel themselves wrong; - who are striving for the fulfilment of the law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining the more they strive for it."

 There is a sense in which all art arises out of injury or absence, out of the artist's sense that there is something missing in him [or her].'

The connections between beauty and the wrongness of the world, between human losss and incompletion and creativity, are powerful, mysterious and defiant of our best explanations, which makes them often a source of further perlexity. Out of such human turmoil as inspired the poet who wrote Lamentations; out of such personal catastrophe when life's deepest ties are torn apart and explanations merely add to the anguish, comes a masterpiece of world literature like the book of Job; and out of such broken spiritual hopes and national humiliation, when exile in an alien culture is  a relentless reminder that hope is suppressed by imperial hegemony, there erupts Isaiah's poetry of passion and power, of liberation coming with the certainty of Divine promise and, renewal envisioned on the scale of the God who is the Eternal and the Creator. Such beautiful art, the distilled essence of faith crushed like grapes for wine, and bearing a hope that springs from the same seeds, to grow again and turn into the wine of God's Kingdom - such beauty from brokenness.

And perhaps, with all our current fascination with words like discipleship and discipling, there is a deep corrective truth to be recovered; from the same root comes the word discipline. There is in Jesus call to discipleship a cross to be borne, a way to be travelled and a sacrifice of self made possible only because the weight of the Cross is more than balanced by the power of the resurrection. And when faith becomes weight-bearing, the great mystery of the Gospel is that our strength to follow the way of the Cross comes from the living Christ, who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet, but as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith; the living Christ in whom we live and move and have our being; the living Christ of whom Paul wrote "I am crucified with Christ; I live yet not I, but Christ lives within me; and the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son  of God who loved me, and gave himself for me". 

The photo is of the Shalom tapestry, a visual exegesis of selected psalms.