Living Wittily

R S Thomas and Advent: "Within listening distance of the silence we call God..."

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence we call God...

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins; that call us out over our

own fathoms.

It's the eve of Advent which is a season of depth and waiting, of promise, hope and patience. Just as the frantic frenetic fanaticism of fundamentalist consumerism reaches its fantastic fever pitches of greed and getting, I welcome not an excuse, but a reason, to find time and space for silence and ungrasping.

And yes, that last sentence is overwrought and over-written, but it tries to describe a culture that is equally overwrought and precisely at this time of year descends into the chaos of hyper-consumerism.

So these words of R S Thomas draw me towards the mystery of that which cannot be purchased; remind me of a grace that has no barcode, and gives access to the Good and all goods without a credit rating. And Thomas recognises that the depths of human longing and hoping reverberate with the presence and promise of God, that we are beings with our own unfathomable reaches, beyond our ken but within the knowing of a love eternal and constant.

The photo was taken on the Fort William road, the reflection of the hills over the depths of the loch an icon of the human being, the reflected image of God. A place that invites us to come within listening distance of the silence of God.

Veni Emmanuel.

s

 

Winter Haiku

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter Haiku.

Frosted autumn leaves

discarded in the gutter,

defy the greyness.

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

Getting into the car I noticed these frosted now defrosting leaves in the gutter which was full of grit, gunge and oily road surface. In unexpected places there are those who defy the greyness.

The Place Where Prayer is Valid - Loch Lomond as Icon

Five minutes on Saturday morning sitting at the side of Loch Lomond looking at this. What fascinated me was the blueness. Our weather is often grey-coloured, much of the light muted or filtered, making everything seem opaque. That too can be beautiful, dripping with life, what George macleod would call the seeping drizzle of God's gentle grace.

But on a morning like this, you need a blue colour chart to trace the diversity of tones and shades of blue, from denim and sapphire, azure and steel, to Yale and tufts. No, I don't know all these colours by sight; I didn't even know there are 60 indicative categories of blue. But sitting on a large cold rock, with hat, jacket and gloves, just looking, I was aware of the changing of light and colour, sunlight and cloud, calm and ripple; it was like a watercolour being worked in some sky-artist's studio.

One of the thin books I read years ago was The Unattended Moment, by Michael Paffard. It gathered together the experiences of people who had encountered in the world around them, a sense of a presence other than themselves. As a Christian I have no problem with the reality of God's presence in and through the world; nor have I any hesitation in recognising the activity of the Creator who sustains and works in the rhythms and changes of loch and landscape, mountain and forest, - and in the hearts of human beings who attend to such moments of God saying hello.

At such moments, as T S Eliot remarked, we are in a place where prayer is valid. 

Levertov's Political Poetry; Moral Vigilance, Protest and the Determination not to Despair.

 Making Peace

Denise Levertov.

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

Graeme asked what I thought about Levertov's political poetry, and her commitment to addressing public issues in the public square. I think she answers the questions in this poem. As a committed poet she wrote out of her experience and when she became a political and peace activist then it was inevitable, and essential that her poetry would reflect that experience if it was to continue to be the authentic voice of the poet. And what this poem celebrates and demonstrates is the power of words to transform and renew, to articulate and to interrogate, to be instuments of justice and the building blocks of peace.

 

I read this poem yesterday, just after reading online the revelations about children being deliberately targeted by snipers in Syria. See here. Such egregious behaviour appals and outrages; more than that it encourages that most lethal of responses, despair. However. The image in my mind of a human being, staring intently through a telescopic sight, focusing clearly on the face of a child, and believing that by pulling the trigger he is doing something meaningful and praiseworthy for some morally insane master, is so revolting that despair is the last emotion I am likely to feel.

 

Against such images of the hidden sniper looking at a closeup of a childs face, and ending that child's life by moving his finger one inch, let poets write, artists paint, singers sing. The evil and irony that the word 'sight' can mean to look closely and see, and also to center a target for destruction, is precisely the ambiguity and tragedy of human life and language that perhaps the poet captures best.

 

Levertov's famous essay, and her book of the title, 'The Poet in the World' is a manifesto for engagement, involvement, commitment and an existential even visceral protest against all such inhumane practices. But, however inhumane, it is nevertheless a human being who pulls the trigger - and that is the tragedy of evil that has to be addressed, and by human beings who will not despair, will not be silent, and will not respond to such atrocity in kind.

 

Kyrie eleison,

Christe eleison,

Kirie eleison.

The Most Beautiful Country in the World, says he modestly......

On Saturday I travelled from Glasgow to Fort William. I was sharing in the opening of the newly completed extension of the Baptist Church there. It was a terrific afternoon with a packed church, heartfelt singing, and a sense of achievement mixed with gratitude and genuine surprise at the goodness of God.

One of the spectacular bonuses for me was the drive up, through some of the most beautiful landscapes of one of the most beautiful countries in the world. I stopped at least half a dozen times and if I hadn't had a time and destination beckoning I might have spent the day just looking. So I took some photos, and was frustrated by the limitations of the camera. I don't just mean my camera - I mean any camera.

Once or twice I did a 360 degree scanning of the countryside and just wondered, and gazed, and felt that strange ache of sadness that we know isn't so much unhappiness as the authentic sense of our own finitude, discovering yet again the limits of our capacity to behold and see, and yet for all our incompleteness sadness laced with the sheer ecstasy - by which I mean the outgoingness of our inner life of thought and feeling - the sense that we are looking at the work of the hands of God, and the knowledge that the overlap distance sadness and joy disappears at such moments.

This was Loch Lomond at about 11.00, and I could have sat there for ages.

I stopped here and took some photos for young German visitors and took this one for myself. Psalm 121, "I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid?

And this is the Loch as mirror, one of the most serene moments of reflection - both on the water surface, and as I sat and was amazed.

The Gospel of John and Denise Levertov - a So Far Private Conversation.

I've written more than once on this blog about my attachment to the Gospel of John, and my debt to some of the great commentators 'on this most mystical of the Gospel narratives'. One of the Oh My Goodness moments in my research in the papers of James Denney was coming across an entire series of lectures on the Gospel of John. At the time I didn't have either the time or energy to read them; they lie in New College, and they may be of no great moment, though it was James Denney who wrote them, and I'd be surprised if they weren't well worth exploring.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. On page 195 of her biography of Levertov, Greene almost incidentally mentions that during a month when she couldn't write poetry Levertov wrote a commentary on the Gospel of John. Yes, Levertov on John, a manuscript apparently too long for publication. One of the leading poets of our time, whose patron saint was Thomas Didymus, whose religious inheritance included Hasidic Judaism, Anglican parents and her recently embraced Roman Catholic faith, at a key moment of questioning and discovery on the borderlands of faith, produced a handwritten commentary on the Gospel of John.And written by someone whose poetry, letters, essays and lectures demonstrate the power of words to move, fire imagination and persuade.

Somewhere in an archive box at Stanford University, there are some notebooks that if they were ever published would make the most remarkable reading. Levertov in conversation with the Fourth Evangelist would bring two poets, two seekers and two scintillatingly complex personalities together, sparking lights and glints of truth off each other, exegeting the Word made flesh, pointing to those flashes of recognition, as the Light that lightens every human being comes into the world as word again. I can't think how I'd ever have the chance to read Levertov on John. But in a strange way I found it a gladdening thought that a favourite poet would invest such thoughtfulness on a text that uses the images and stories of human life such as give value and poignant fittingness to the themes of her own best work. Maybe just knowing that she wrote that commentary, and it was comfort and guidance at a time when much was uncertain and she was looking, not for certainty but for that which would hold her.

Denise Levertov. A Poet's Life, Dana Greene

What makes Dana Greene such a good biographer of Denise Levertov is Greene's respect for the mystery of her subject, and her honest, even glad acceptance of her own limitations as biographer of such a complex human being.

"A biography tracks the arc of a life over many decades, narrating a story as a subject lived it temporally, appreciating flaws, misjudgements and achievements. It then translates life into art, and in so doing preserves it. Without the unity biography brings to disparate facts, a life would devolve into its various parts and disintegrate. Biography's mission is to rescue a life and make it accessible to future readers." (232)

Referring to her research and reflection Greene closes her book with a statement that helps us discern what makes for a satisfying biography.

"This biography was undertaken as an experiment in penetrating the inner life of Denise Levertov. The voluminous raw materials - diaries, written and oral interviews, correspondence, poems, essays - allow the biographer to investigate and intuit, patch and paste, imagine and verify. To gain a closer hold on Levertov is to discover that she remains elusive, much like the mountain - present and absent, her person never fully grasped, but only pointed to and honored."

Levertov would approve the modesty and honesty of that statement. She was herself ambivalent about the created link between an artist's biography and their art. Yet she made available to the world an entire archive now residing at Stanford University, which includes some of her most personal papers, letters, and diaries. From these papers Greene has woven a credible, affectionately critical and illuminating account of a poet whose rich lived experience of joy and sorrow she distilled into poems that are both uniquely personal, and touch on the familiar and universal in human living and dying.

This isn't so much a review of Greene's book as an appreciation for her work. And if I, a man, may say so without being given a hard time, Levertov's interior life is made more accessible because this biography was written by a woman. Yes, a scholar, one who uses words as a way of life, a writer whose stated aim is to make a poet's life accessible to her readers. But also a woman more likely to understand some of the hurts and healings, relational complexities and self-questionings which are woven into and throughout Levertov's life and personality. Having read this book I now read the poems with more understanding, both of the words, and of the woman with courage and vocation enough to write such words, and such words of life.

The Sapphire at the Fountain's Heart: Denise Levertov and What the Restless Self Misses.

The photo is of a burn running off Glen Dye, filled with melted snow water, and peaty brown. Had I taken time I'd probably have seen some small fish in it, but standing on the bridge looking down I was simply captivated by the play of light on water, the sound of water on stones, and the wild freedom of tumbling water as a sacrament of life and the extravagant brilliance of grace.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. It's always presumptuous to say more than we know, even if we are getting carried away with our admiration and enthusiasm. I wouldn't dare suggest this is Denise Levetov's best poem, nor that it is the one which captures most faithfully her own search for that elusive inner acknowledgement we might call faith. But it is a poem she chose to begin her essay exploration of poetry as 'Work that Enfaiths'. And it is the poem that her biographer suggests has a clear autobiographical reference to her own faith journey. (Dana Greene, p 185).

In any case it is a poem which gives words to those recurring moments of fleeting uncertainty, that follow on the occasional encounter with God, and in which recognition, awareness and captured attention come as a gift for which we are unprepared. Second thoughts and rationalisations, the onward push of life's circumstances and the busyness of our inner lives, and the sheer elusiveness of the transcendent when we seek to recapture it, make such heightened joy hard to maintain over time. Perhaps because olrdinary experience tells us such extraordinary joy is too good to be true, whatever true means.

Few poets I have read combine Levertov's honest searching, persistent longing and determined doubting as a complex intersection of themes as Levertov does in her later poetry. And this poem, speaks to that condition when, in our most honest moments we confess, "Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief". The question which ends the poem, in its poignancy and possibility, is Levertov's version of what the author of The Colud of Unknowing meant by 'the dart of longing love.'

This is a beautiful poem.

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away -- and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn.  Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

Who can write the biggest book on Paul? OR Avoid back injury by bending at the knees when lifting this book :))

Well the long awaited double volume on Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N T Wright has finally thumped on to my desk. I've read the Preface which itself is a good few pages. And I've handled and browsed, and not even tried to read any of the main text yet, and I'm not happy. 

I am a bibliophile. That means I love books - yes I love and have spent years of real time reading; yes, like most readers I realise that what we read and how and why and when shapes the people we are becoming; yes, I never feel more comfortably set up than sitting in a study, or at a favourite reading place, with a good book, and whatever else helps to make time fruitfully pleasant and pleasantly fruitful.

But by a good book I also mean a well conceived, durably produced and aesthetically satisfying book. And this latest monstrous set fails on these counts.

Two volumes, one of 600 pages and the other around 1050 pages - in paperback. Yes they can be bought hardback (at £125) but in these days of paperback monographs the size of monoliths, is any publisher going to concede that there is an optimum, not to say maximum size a book can reasonably be and still have a hope of surviving a first reading and frequent revisiting without splitting into multi-volumes from use.

I've tried with Wright's gargantuan second volume to sit it on the desk open at the place. You have to be 300 pages into it before it lies on the desk. About 400 pages before the end the book flaps closed unless you press on it. Now SPCK are not the only publisher with a problem when a mega book is published. I guess the first paperback one volume edition of Lord of the Rings was just as unwieldy, which didn't stop people lugging it around and reading it on buses, in the Uni refectory in the 1970's, and lying dog-eared and split in many a bookcase. And anyone who bought Douglas Campbell's The Deliverance of God, another mammoth restatement of Paul's Theology of Justification will be having the same dulling experience of wrestling with a paperback which is two and one half reams of paper thick - yes this one is over 1300 pages in one volume.

Then, this set comes in what is euphemistically described as a slip case. It's a flimsy card slipover which once you take the two volumes out, is too tight to easily slip them back in. Now Raymond Brown's two volume The Death of the Messiah, produced by Yale 20 years ago, is different; it comes in a real slip case and is in two finely produced hardbacks. It comes in paperback with the same slip case. I would happily have paid a few pounds more for this set in a decent slip case, and as three volumes of manageable size. 

All of which said, this work on Paul has been years in gestating, growing and finally being published. It isn't an author's call as to the dress and cost of the finished book. And I will enjoy reading Wright (whether every page from start to finish may depend on my longevity). But I still have a wistful, niggly, no indeed a worrying question; how come 20 years ago F F Bruce, a scholar of immense erudition and accomplishment, wrote his magnum opus on Paul. Apostle of the Heart Set Free, and in it summed up a lifetime of scholarship, and did so in under 500 pages. I know times have changed. And yes Wright is engaged in a once in a generation scale opus aimed at rewriting of early Christian origins.

But I remain niggled. The advent of the computer, the plethora of search programmes, research assistants, and online availability of major texts and data-bases, is in danger of encouraging what begins to feel like bloated, over-indulged, over-written and under-edited tomes. They are increasingly counter productive volumes, not unreadable because of the prose but because of the information overload, which discourages thorough reading. I get the feeling such volumes happen because authors no longer have editors who say a book should be of such and such a length, albeit with discretion and tolerance of the importance of the subject, but also with some understanding of the needs of the reader.

I rest my case. And yes, I'm still delighted to have Wright on Paul. Glad too my desk is oak and seriously weight bearing.  I will try to perform the right Wright rite ( or should it be the Wright rite right?) as I place the volume beneath my desk lamp and start reading what Wright writes, right? And despite all the above, this is at least for me, one of the great biblical studies events in my lifetime. I will learn much.

 

Learning to Live with Ambiguity as a Reader of Paul.

I'm going through one of my regularly recurring Paul phases, probably stimulated by the imminent arrival of N T Wright's desk buster 2 volume magnum opus on Paul and the Faithfulness of God. The hype surrounding Wright's "Paul" is understandable, and understandably overstated. There are plenty other substantial, significant, scholarly and in their day, groundbreaking studies of Paul, an apostolic succession into which Wright is now rightly co-opted. W D Davies, H N Ridderbos, F F Bruce, E P Sanders, J D G Dunn, J C Beker, E Kasemann, Udo Schnelle, M Gorman, are only some in a succession of serious attempts to understand, interpret and illumine the mind of St Paul.

When it comes to commentaries on Paul's letters, some of the most dedicated, imaginative and disciplined scholarship of the last 50 years has pored over and been poured into exegesis of Pauline texts. In my own lifetime Barrett, Cranfield and Dunn on Romans, (a Durham Trinity plus of course Wright himself who was Bishop of Durham), Fee then Thiselton on I Corinthians, Furnish and Harris on II Corinthians, Martyn on Galatians, Markus Barth and E Best on Ephesians, O'Brien on Philippians, Dunn on Colossians, Malherbe on Thessalonians and Marshall on the Pastorals. There is something about the mind of Paul that defies the best efforts of those who want to get at 'the centre' of his thought, who look for coherence and system and tidiness.

So I was heartened by these words in and essay on Paul :

"Accepting the fluidities of Paul's statements means accepting a certain amount of ambiguity.  This is helpful in restraining us from imposing our modern penchant for precision on his thought. That is, a thinker's ambiguity is precisely part of his or her thought structure."

R Scroggs, "Salvation History", in Pauline Theology, vol. 1, Ed. Jouette Bassler, Fortress 1994.

And given that Paul himself recognised he had been entrusted with proclaiming the mystery of the ages and the unsearchable riches of Christ, and whose doxological theology is both invitation and warning that the grace of God defies human categories and the love that surpasses knowledge, eternally and essentially eludes the capture of human concepts. It may be that what we can only apprehend partially, and articulate falteringly, means that our theological and exegetical explorations ought to be hospitable to ambiguity rather than certainty, and conducted with humility rather than alacrity. In the end, doxology

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
    How unsearchable his judgments,
    and his paths beyond tracing out!
³⁴ “Who has known the mind of the Lord?
    Or who has been his counselor?”
³⁵ “Who has ever given to God,
    that God should repay them?”
³⁶ For from him and through him and for him are all things.
    To him be the glory forever! Amen.

(The photo looks across Loch Skene, a late autumn evening while watching migrating geese. Nothing at all to do with Paul - just a photo of a favourite place.)