Living Wittily

Denise Levertov and Why Questions are as Much a Means of Grace as Answers

The cliche that as you grow older you discover you have more questions than answers is just that - a cliche. I'm not sure how many of us are ever so deep core sure of the answers in the same way we feel the poignancy, pain, excitement or apprehension on hearing, sensing, being addressed by, the questions that matter most.

Anyway, for myself the question has always been one of the grace gifts of God. It's the question that creates the possibility of growth, is likely to initiate change, is a first step in a new direction, an invitation to movement rather than stuckness, an opportunity to be different and perhaps, to make a difference. One of the many gift graces in Denise Levetov's poetry is her patience with questions and her impatience with answers. It is seen in her instinct for the transformative imperative of the interrogative mood, and her tireless vigilance to ensure that proffered answers could stand the scrutiny of integrity, humanity, justice and compassion. I could relinquish many other poets, and their disappearance would leave me the poorer.

For those who want to learn to look at the world, and look within, and look above and beyond, Levertov's ouevre is not in the category of the important, but the indispensable. Her voice is an essential accompaniment on my own search for questions that do justice to the most intractable issues the human community faces today. Here is one of her poems, pointing to a via negativa, not of theology, but of how we cherish, hold and pay gentle attention to the mystery and miracle of being here. The title uses the indefinite article - this is not once for all gift, it is gift in the present continuous. The "Yes, perhaps is neither question nor answer, but an affirmation of that wonderful place in between, in which as human beings we live, and move, and have our being.

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers 
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps 
this gift is your answer.

When Shame Collides with Outrage and Inhumanity is Brought to Account

I read this and was angry, ashamed, upset, compassion for the man collided with outrage at any system that allows this, ever. Right now I have no idea what to do with how I felt that would make any difference, that would be a Christlike response, that would be practically useful and make this kind of atrocious lack of humanity not only unthinkable but impossible in a humane society. I am open to suggestions as to what a Christian is to think and do with what we feel when we read an account like this, of work done in our name by our own Government agencies. I will think about this, and post in a few days whatever light might come.

For now, ..... Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie eleison

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

Excerpt

An 84-year-old immigration detainee suffering from dementia, who was declared unfit for detention, died in handcuffs, a report has discovered.

HM Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) compiled the report after visiting Harmondsworth immigration removal centre, near Heathrow airport.

Inspectors condemned "shocking cases where a sense of humanity was lost" at the centre in west London.

The Chief Inspector of Prisons said some services were "poorly managed".

The Prison Reform Trust said the centre had "forgotten the basic principles of humanity and decency".

HMIP inspectors compiled the report after an unannounced visit to the centre last August.

Handcuffed detainees

The 84-year-old was taken to hospital in handcuffs, where he died while still in restraints, inspectors found.

Have the authorities responsible for Harmondsworth forgotten the basic principles of humanity and decency that must apply to any form of custody?”Juliet Lyon Director, Prison Reform Trust

Doctors said the Canadian man was unfit for detention or deportation after diagnosing him with Alzheimer's disease, but he was not released and no referral was made to social services.

Medical notes described him as "frail, 84 years old, has Alzheimer's disease ... demented. Unfit for detention or deportation. Requires social care".

He had been in handcuffs for almost five hours when he died, the report said.

The Prisons and Probation Ombudsman is preparing to investigate his death and inquest proceedings are being conducted by West London Coroner's Court.

You can read the whole sad story here on the BBC website

Abraham Joshua Heschel, "To pray is to become a ladder...."

Prayer is our attachment to the utmost.

Without God in sight,

we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder.

To pray is to become a ladder

on which thoughts mount to God

to join the movement towards Him

which surges unnoticed

throughout the entire universe.

We do not step out of the world when we pray,

we merely see the world in a different setting.

The self is not the hub,

but the spoke of the revolving wheel.

in prayer we shgift the center of living

from self-consciousness to self-surrender.

God is the center to which asll forces tend.

He is the source,

and we are the flowing of His force,

the ebb and flow of His tides.

A J Heschel, Man's Quest for God, (Santa fe: Auroroa Press, 1998 reprint), page 7.

In one paragraph this Jewish genius has said more about prayer, God and the relation of God to each of us, than many a volume of mystical piety, practical devotion or spiritual theology. This volume of Heschel was a recent birthday gift from someone who knows well what makes me tick. Heschel is 'a theologian who speaks the heart's poetry'; in his writings I often recognise my own inarticulate longings articulated, not so as to explain them, but perhaps to explain why longing itself is a blessing.

And just in case anyone thinks Heschel was a Jewish mystic and that we live in a world of hard edged pragmatism impatient of such mystical sorties, this photo tells it different. Marching arm in arm with Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders, Heschel (second from the right), thoroughly understodd the world of politics, social action and their connectedness to justice, righteousness and obedience to God. The photo is now known as "Praying with their feet". It's a civil rights Icon, and if you look at it long enough and contemplate its meaning, like all good Icons it will draw you into the truth of what God is about.

"The Church in the Power of the Spirit": Still One of the Best Books on Ecclesiology.

This is Moltmann enaging in the best kind of theology - critique and comfort for the church seeking to be faithful to the triune God of love.

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

If the church acquires its existence

through the activity of Christ,

then her characteristics, too,

are characteristics of Christ's activity, first of all.

The acknowledgement of

'the one, holy, catholic, apostolic church'

is acknowledgement of the uniting,

sanctifying, comprehensive and commissioning

Lordship of Christ.

(Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, London: SCM, 1977) 338.

Reading Bonhoeffer's Life Together as Subversion of Totalitarian Claims.

Here is an example of Bonhoeffer at his very best in creating a pastoral christology that dethrones the ego and makes space for the other, in whom we meet Christ.

Because Christ stands between me and an other, I must not long for unmediated community with that person. As only Christ was able to speak to me in such a way that I was helped, so others too can only be helped by Christ alone. However, this means that I must release others from all my attempts to control, coerce, and dominate them with my love. In their freedom from me, other persons want to be loved for who they are, as those for whom Christ became a human being, died, and rose again, as those for whom Christ won the forgiveness of sins and prepared eternal life.

Because Christ has long since acted decisively for other Christians, before I could begin to act, I must allow them the freedom to be Christ's. They should encounter me only as the person they already are for Christ. This is the meaning of the claim that we can encounter others only through the mediation of Christ. Self centred love constructs its own image of other persons, about what they are and what they should become. It takes the life of the other person into its own hands. Spiritual love recognises the true image of the other person as seen from the perspective of Jesus Christ. It is the image Jesus Christ has formed and wants to form in all people. 

(Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Works, Fortress, 1996, 43-4)

The context within which Bonhoeffer wrote these lines makes them naive, idealistic, and the route to spiritual despair. Or so it seems. Except, Bonhoeffer had a profound grasp of the spiritual nature of the conflicts in which the Church was involved. He understood that Christians struggled not against flesh and blood, nor land and blood, but against spiritual wickedness, principalities and powers, in the high places. He self-consciously and with theological and ethical deliberation opposed ideological coercion with a way of seeing the other person that had roots in the eternal purposes of God in Christ. Christians love because He first loved us. The contrast between self love which dominates the other, and Christ love which allows the other to freely be what Christ calls them to be, could not be more absolute, final and non-negotiable; it is founded on the incarnation, atonement and resurrection events of God's saving purpose.

Therefore in the immediate context of the Seminary, such words, ideas and convictions as those expressed in this passage, were a call to the seminarians to live out a love that is respectful of the other as one for whom Christ died; more generally in a Germany wracked with pressures of social coercion, ideological bullying and physical intimidation ranging from ostracism to concentration camps, Bonhoeffer was constructing a theological anthropopology, rooted in a Christology that preserved the worth of every human individual. That explicit Christological claim, Bonhoeffer opposed to all other claims, including and especially, the claims of National Socialism and Hitler as its demi-god. Life Together is a powerful, and pastoral theological rebuttal of all human claims on the human soul, and on the soul of his German compatriots.

Often enough Bonhoeffer's late theology is called revolutionary. The theological anthropology, incarnational Christology and divine ownership of the redeemed, which give Life Together its radical Christian demand are themselves entirely subversive of all forms of earthly  claims to dominance. This is no wee book of monastic spirituality, which is sometimes the way it is read and praised today. It is a book about developing tough virtues, and Christlike love, and a faithful Christ enabled kenosis, nurtured in prayer and the Word, that is able to defy the seductions and oppressions of political and military power. It may be that Bonhoeffer's relevance for today lies as much in those demands for Christlike behaviour and dispositions towards the other, as in the more obvious and overt challenges of the later letters to Bethge. 

Ode to Joy

I love this.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Faith and Community at Finkenwalde

How many of you remember the first time you heard the name Dietrich Bonhoeffer? I'm not sure. While I was in College studying current theology in 1974, we were introduced to recent trends which included 'religionless Christianity'. Around the same time I went to a public library sale of discarded books and picked up Mary Bosanquet's The Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The coinciding of reading around radical late 1960's theology and this well written biography posed intriguing questions which still interest me. How could a man of such obvious piety be a primary source for 'religionless Christianity'? What to make of this German pastor who preached the Word, and grounded his convictions in a theology was that was radically Christocentric? Admiration but also puzzlement at his decision to return to Germany rather than stay in the safety of the United States - but also sadness mixed with gratitude that he did return, and how that decision, and many others over the next ten or so years, defined for the modern world a form of Christian witness as resistance. My own search for the connection points between Bonhoeffer's theology and writing, and the situation of the Church now - a search which can be much more substantially traced in the continuing flow of published writing on Bonhoeffer and his reception decade by decade since the publishing of his Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer has become a decisive presence in modern theology, and there is a vibrant Bonhoeffer publishing industry, including the completion of the English Translation of Bonhoeffer's Works.

My first reading of Bonhoeffer's Life Together coincided with the reading of two other books which in some ways are at the other side of the theological dining room. Jean Vanier's Community and Growth remains a watershed in Christian understanding of kenotic community based on welcome, servant presence and profound love for the other, expressed in care, accompaniment and recognition that every person is both gifted and disabled; we are both wounded and sources of healing; we are forgiven forgivers. W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense was a theological eye-opener. His exposition of Divine Love as precarious, vulnerable and by its nature unable to guarantee the Divine Lover's response, reconfigured my theological assumptions at the time. While wanting to qualify some of Vanstone's conclusions, the connection he made between Divine Love and kenosis has become an essential perspective in my own theology.

So when I read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, I had already encountered two very different expositions of what Cjristian community would look like, and how it might reflect the image and ministry of Jesus Christ, and do so as the Body of Christ. Bonhoeffer's theology, his doctrine of God in Christ and the relations between Christ and Church, was altogether more radical, stern, alert to the transcendent otherness and reality of God, more biblically grounded in text and dogma. But no less pastorally aware of the disciplines and faithfulness that gives Christian love its kenotic character, expressed in humility, service, prayerful openness to the other, and gratitude to God for the gift of each person.

I mention all this because I am awaiting delivery of the volume of Bonhoeffer's Works covering the Finkenwalde period when Life Together was written, and The Cost of Discipleship was gestating in the mind of someone whose witness and actions would grow out of profound personal appropriation of the Sermon on the Mount. I fully recognise the importance of Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison, and especially the late letters to Bethge. But putting Life Together into the overall contrxt of Finkenwalde, National Socialist Germany, and the life of Bonhoeffer himself will be a fascinating process. And perhaps for me will bring me full circle with Bonhoeffer whose luminous presence has been like a winking light on the shore of the Clyde - I know, a stretched metaphor, but one used by someone who loves the Rothesay ferry!

The Wisdom of St Benedict

The ancients say that once upon a time a disciple asked the elder, "Holy One, is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?"

And the Holy One answered, "As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning."

"Then of what use", the surprised discipole asked "are the spiritual exercises you prescribe."

To make sure, the elder said, that you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise".

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

"We are each an ember of the mind of God and we are each sent to illumine the other through the dark

places of life to sanctuaries of truth and peace where God can be God for us, because we have relieved

ourselves of the ordeal of being god for ourselves."

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

Two short extracts from Joan Chittister, The Rule of St Benedict. Insights for the Ages. (Slough: St Paul's, 1992)  32, 73. 

The Spiritual Discipline of being an Idealist - The Prologue of St Benedict

In the Prologue of his Rule,  St Benedict describes the genuine enthusiasm for holiness that is the exact opposite of dutiful discipline, grim obedience or calculating commitment. Not that he soft pedals on discipline, obedience or commitment. But what he is after is faithful discipline, glad obedience and a generous self-giving in commitment. Here is how Benedict describes the ideal spiritual disposition of the monk, and indeed of anyone who is seeking to follow faithfully after Christ.

        We shall run

on the paths of God's commandments,

        our hearts overflowing

with the inexpressible delight

        of love. (Prologue.49)

So that is the ideal. Like all aspirational goals there is the risk they will be diminished, diluted, reduced by what we call realism, and that most limiting of criteria for those who aim high, practicality. Yet Benedict is the most sane, practical, sensible and pragmatic of spiritual teachers. The Rule is replete with the mundane and the daily, the ordinary and the routine, because it is in the daily routine of relationships and work, of feeding and cleaning, of housekeeping and caretaking, that worship, study and prayer are to be pursued.

"We shall run", with eagerness, energy and enthusiasm on the paths of God. And the heart, centre of thought and emotion, engine of motive and conscience, the heart will overflow with the delight of love. The spirituality of love is complex and mysterious. Those made in the image of God, and drawn into union with Christ, are made for fellowship with God who is love, an eternal communion of self-giving grace, overflowing, creative, and purposeful. The 'inexpressible delight of love' is  the reflecting in our human existence, our daily behaviour, our growing character of precisely that eternal love of the Triune God.That is neither simple nor instant; but it is the ideal to which we look, with longing and delight, and with a realism not determined by our limitations, but by grace unspeakable, sufficient alight with the fires of divine Love.

These brief words in Benedict's Prologue become a daily reminder - this is what we are made for, redeemed for, called towards, and not in our own strength but by the grace and mercy and love of God.

"Sometimes" - the Importance of Evidence to the Contrary

 

Sometimes - Sheenagh Pugh

 Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.

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

This was sent to me this morning from a close friend, whose instincts for the right words at the right time is unerring. It seems to me to be one of those poems that contradicts the one damn thing after another syndrome that grows out of negativity become chronic, and we are convinced there are far more valleys of deep darkness than green pastures or still waters. Sometimes it's not as bad as we think, or feared; sometimes we do get it right; sometimes we are merely looking for the wrong things, in the wrong place, or in the wrong direction, so that we miss the good that is there to be seen. But yes, sometimes life does have ambushes, hidden trip-wires, unforeseen circumstances, and recurring disappointments. But then again, sometimes......