Living Wittily

Ordinary pictures in ordinary time....

Just now and again the juxtaposition of images is unsettling. Walking by this field of ready to harvest barley the barbed wire was at eye level - that path was lower than the field, please note!

The grain that nourishes - by the way, although barley is used for brewing, it's also a staple ingredient of Scotch Broth - is fenced in by tight parallel lines of sharpened steel.

Barbed wire is to keep in or keep out. It has its uses but by definition and design it does its work by fear or hurt. A reminder of the serious issues facing our qworld where grain and steel, food and defence, nourishment and threat, co-exist.

Then there's the moment the bee and the flower come together. Honey is the result of that more creative juxtaposition. Looking across St Cyrus bay, the micro drama of honey making plays out against a background of windswept dunes, distant sea and cliffs for a mile northwards.

Now, what's the flower? Is it a field scabious? In any case, one of my joys of walking with a camera is for just those moments of happening, when nothing unusual happens, except that I am there to see it, and paying enough attention not to miss it!

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At Pitmedden open air Shakespeare and with time at the interval to enjoy the garden in late July sunlight. I love mature trees with a shape formed over years of weather, husbandry and growth mapped to context. This tree wouldn't have grown just like this, anywhere else. And over decandes pushing towards a century it has slowly spread and accommodated itself so that it looks just right.

Three photographs, entirely incidental, lacking any lasting significance, except for the presence of the photographer who notices, bothers and sees....

 

Mr Netanyahu and the corrosive mindset of mercilessness.

These are the words of broken hearted Jewish people:

Remember O Lord against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall.,

How they said “Tear it down. Tear it down.
Down to its foundations.”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against rocks.

These horrendous, brutal, anguished words came from people who could no longer find acceptable words to describe what had befallen them at the hands of a more powerful enemy. The bitter irony of the events in Gaza is that the very people from whose national suffering and shattering such words of imprecation came, are engaged in actions which create precisely the same future-looking rage, and hunger for vengeance, that make these words so chillingly potent.

So in answer to Mr Netanyahu’s speech about preparing for a protracted operation (for which read more killing of innocent civilians), I remind him of the words of the Jewish people, his people, against Edomites and that a simple word change makes the same overwhelming moral case:
How he said, “Tear it down. Tear it down. Down to its foundations.”

And the response of a broken people, brutalised by overwhelming military force, “O Israel, you devastator!”

The Israeli military rhetoric behind the Gaza assaults will inevitably mean those last verses from a Jewish Psalm, are now being said by Palestinian mothers, fathers and children. They have seen their children and parents dashed to pieces by merciless unremitting salvos of military ordnance, sold and manufactured in the UK and US. Overwhelming grief left unassuaged, and violence unleashed with assumed impunity, normalise the mind-set of the merciless. That is what I detected in Mr Netanyahu’s speech last night. Not political obstinacy, though that too; not justified anger and grievance, though that is also granted. But a merciless dismissal of intolerable suffering of those who have no recourse, or defence. Mercilessness is a corrosive mindset, and a contagious and lethal virus. And a world that stands by and sees it take hold, and says nothing and does nothing effectively to end the carnage, shares the guilt and responsibility for the spread of toxins into a bleak future.

These tank shells are dragon's teeth; they are also merchandise traded around the world as if they were as ordinary and necessary as daily bread.

God and the Philosophers, and Why the Interrogative Mood is an Essential Element in the Grammar of Faith.

I remember my first lecture in Moral Philosophy. I was gobsmacked. I was also introduced to the painful process of someone rubbishing my assumptions, neutralising my presuppositions and playing skittles with my convictions. In that first year I read Plato, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant and they'll do for starters. But I came to love moral philosophy, then took philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and ever since have kept company with, and been in discussion and argument with, 'the philosophers'.

Philosophy was a process of owning my own faith, reconfiguring on a sounder basis my convictions, and becoming aware of the importance of assumptions and the equal importance of not allowing assumptions to become padlocks on all the doors that lead to new, deeper, more honest thinking. So when I come across a philosopher who writes like this, I know I'm in congenial company, and if I've any sense I'll keep quiet and listen, and perchance learn.....

"...the Bible is conspicuously  lacking in proofs for the existence of God. Insofar as the Bible presents or embodies any method for comprehending the goodness of God or coming to God, it can be summed up in the Psalmist's invitation to individual listeners and readers: Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Whether we find it in the Chambonnais or in the melange of narrative, prayer, poetry, chronicle and epistle that constitute the Bible, the taste of true goodness calls to us, wakes us up, opens our hearts,. If we respond with surprise, with tears, with gratitude, with determination not to lose the taste, with commitment not to betray it, that tasting leads eventually to seeing, to some sight of or insight into God."

Eleonore Stump, 'The Mirror of Evil, in God and the Philosophers. The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, T V Morris, Oxford, 1994, page 241.

Prayer, Seeking God, and the Importance of Not Always Finding

 

The triumphalist having-it-all kind of spirituality is a surprisingly impoverished version of Christian discipleship. Whenever Christians claim too much in their experience, immediacy of fellowship with God, certainty and assurance of every blessed blessing, authority in their knowing and claimed intimacy in their praying, they are in danger of losing one of the most important parts of any deep, enduring and transformative relationship. I mean the gift of mystery, necessary limitation of vision and understanding, God's wise frustration of our desire to know and know and know, and an essential discipline and restraint in the desire to possess. 

Longing for God is by definition a feeling of incompleteness, a confession from the heart of our need, dependency and willingness to surrender. But if we always receive what we long for, always find what we seek, have every desire fulfilled, then what is left? In those deepest relations of love there is, and must always be, a surplus beyond our reach,discoveries awaiting that may never be made, mysteries in the heart and life of the other that are forvever beyond us. So I am content to know that I will never know, not fully, not completely. God is not to be comprehended so easily, the Gospel of grace and love is not reducible to our ideas, statements and controlling articulations and concepts. God is, well, God.

Which is why I love the humility and content with discontent that marks this beautiful poem prayer of Ambrose. The aspiration to seek and find is gthere all right, but so is the recognition that unless God accommodates the reality of who God is to the limits of our understanding we don;t even know where to start to look.

O God

Teach me to see you,

and reveal yourself to me when I seek you,

For I cannot seek you unless you first teach me,

nor find you unless you first reveal yourself to me.

Let me seek you in longing, and long for you in seeking.

Let me find you in love, and love you in finding.

(Ambrose of Milan, 339-397 )

The photo is of an autumn moon, partially clouded, visible but obscured, luminous but distant, a reminder because we need it, that the dark side of the moon is hidden.  One of the deficits of a triumphalist spirituality is a lack of awareness of what Heschel called the ineffable otherness of God. It is that ineffability, that otherness, that frustrates our longing, and saves us from the sin of presumption, and enables us to be Blessed as those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer Readers.

There's a literary genre I don't go in for all that much. The Reader. They are usually thick, often heavy, dense with text, and many of them are compilations of lots of bits often uprooted from context. But there's no doubt they have their uses, providing they are edited by someone who knows what they are doing, remembers who the reader is, and who the Reader is for, and knows the field well enough to include not only the important bits, but the interesting bits.

Not long ago I bought the Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by Clifford Green and Edward De Jonge.  Yes it's thick, heavy and dense with text. The selections are organised chronologically but also thematically, from student years to final imprisonment. I have most of the volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, and almost all that is in the reader is taken from those texts.

 

I also have A Testament to Freedom edited by G Kelly and E B Nelson, a volume that has served Bonhoeffer students as a core resource for nearly 25 years - goodness is it that long. I remember buying it and some of the times I've lugged it around to have something substantial to chew on. It too combines chronology with thematic organisation. When there's a large amount of material, and you don't have time to read it all, but you want to encounter the significant, interesting, mind expanding, characteristic thought of someone who interests you, a well edited Reader is a good deal. Sure it isn't the same as reading a thinker's entire corpus, though you'd have to ask why do that anyway. But with Bonhoeffer a substantial, discerning, well arranged reader works, and works well. So much of Bonhoeffer's corpus is occasional, fragmentary intimations of an intense life, lectures, letters, sermons, and only a few book length items. Even several of them are made up of reconstructed fragments.

The Collected Works has thousands of pages of biographically arranged letters, relevant contextual papers, and other written material from the pen of someone whose life and thought was compressed into such a relatively short life. Not many will want to plough through them or go to the expense of buying them. So between them, these two readers give a wide selection, with quite a lot of overlap - the most recent of which is, of course,based on a critically grounded text. So those who are looking for a way to engage seriously with Bonhoeffer, and to do so beyond the core gifts he left the church (Life Together; Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible; Discipleship; Ethics), are well served by these two hefty volumes, printed 25 years apart. having used both of them a bit now, I still like A Testament to Freedom. Reading Bonhoeffer on a daily basis for a few weeks is like training for a 10k of the mind, and heart. Either of these books would do.

Then there's always A Year With Dierich Bonhoeffer. I have to say I've often smiled at the likely response of Pastor Bonhoeffer to the thought his writing would one day be a daily devotional. But reading Bonhoeffer is an exercise in expansion, deepening and toughening; expansion so that devotional isn't about a theology of my fulfilment, but a theology of the cross; deepening because for Bonhoeffer devotional is a word redolent of sacrifice, cost, consequence and daily dying; toughening because everything Bonhoeffer wrote that has enduring value for the Church is a distillation into words of the experience of confronting, subverting, challenging and having to live under the oppressive controls of National Socialism. The July 24 reading has these words: " The people who love, because they are freed through the truth of God, are the most revolutionary people on earth. They are the ones who upset all values; they are the explosives in human society." Not for Bonhoeffer the chronic niceness that avoids confrontation and calls it peacemaking!

Gardening as a Spiritual Discipline, and the Temptation of Tomatoes

It's been a week of Garden Therapy, Horticultural Healing, Soul and Soil, Sweat and Sunshine, Water, Wellies and Dirty Hands - loved it. The turf is laid and we have a new lawn in the making; the flowering currant bush, gnarled, aged and past it, has been removed though its ancient roots registered angry reluctance; the potentilla is re-sited but not happy, but we hope it survives; the bottom corner is cleared of other territorially greedy shrubs and is ready for reshaping into a cottage flower border.

Not everyone knows this, but I once sold geraniums and pelargoniums door to door in Lanark! The previous summer dad and I took cuttings, propagated, repotted, and produced a couple of hundred healthy potted plants. They flew out of the car boot in less time than it took to say pelargonium, and we came away wondering if there was a business in this. There wasn't of course; our prices were too low, the plants had been cared for and nurtured in a too time expensive way, and there's only so much you can do with an 18ft greenhouse!

My first job was in one of the plant nurseries on Clydeside - I used the rotavator in the 20 or so 50 metre greenhouses, ploughed the fields and prepared the soil for the winter bulbs, was responsible for 6 greenhouses of Clydeside tomatoes, from planting to shooting and de-leafing, to watering, to harvesting - has anyone who reads this ever sat down in a hot greenhouse, picked a tomato that is just on the turn from orange to red, bit off a small chunk, just enough to suck out the seeds, and then eat the whole delicious thing, and declared with the juices on the chin and the quiet certainty of one who knows, who just knows, this could well have been the fruit Eve fell for - a Clydeside tomato plant, laden with trusses of go on eat me tomatoes, growing in tempting abandon in the Garden of Eden.....!

All of which is a way of saying that when it comes to spiritual discipline of the physical manual work variety, it's hard to beat the liturgy of dirty hands, organic life, and the chance to help maintain the fabric of God's created world. My dad of course is long since dead, and at his funeral someone who had never met him, but who took time to speak gently and attentively to my mother, drew a word picture of a man whose roots were in the ground, whose working life had been on farms amongst beasts, and whose feet had worked the earth. He said, "John Gordon was a man of the soil", and in all the other deep and emotion churning moments and memories in that service, that's the one that cracked me open.

So when I garden, I get stuck in. Mostly I'm the labourer, taking instructions from the horticultural choreographer; but always I recognise the genetic predisposition to pray not by clasping my hands, but by getting them dirty.

 

 To Live in the Mercy of God

By Denise Levertov

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

               before ribs of shelter

                                           open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

                      Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

                as salt water

                would hold you,

                                        once you dared.

         

                  .

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

                              to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

                                                   O or Ah

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

                              To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

                              Arcs

of steelwhite foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

                              Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

                      flung on resistance.

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

A poem for those times we are taken aback by the givenness of life, and the inner imperative that reminds us of the givingness that is at the heart of what Jesus called life more abundant. I've often thought about a cycle of 31 poems, collected into a booklet, and used one a day for 6 months, call it Psalms of the Poets perhaps.

 

The hunger for awe and the awareness of the vast rock faced mountain that is God's categorical imperative to seek, and climb and risk falling in order to climb; or to live the alternative metaphor, standing in the spray of torrential water hurtling over the cliff, the self-sacrifice and passionate surrender of that

"............................Vast

flood of mercy

                     flung on resistance."

 

Levertov was such a brilliant expositor of human longing and divine elusiveness, human devotion and divine amplitude, our capacity for finitude and God's infinite mercy.

And so, today begins, with a willingness to lie beneath the tree, stand barefoot at the waterfall, know however fleetingly, the drenching spray of mercy.

 

Gaza, a Poppy, and words that lie too deep for tears

 

 "The meanest flower that blows can give

thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

The petals of this poppy are gossamer thin, yet the depth of crimson, scarlet and other tones of red give this flower a startling presence, demanding attention. The photo was taken in Aberdeen's Botanic Garden, yesterday around noon. I wasn't looking for a photo, I was walking by myself, praying in a garden about the anguish and blood and tears of people in Gaza. That tragic agony weighs heavily on my heart, because much of my own spirituality and many of the values by which I try to live have long established roots in the soil of Israel's faith. What is happening in Gaza has little connection with the great light bearing statements of that faith about how to live before God.

I remembered Jesus in a Garden, when he sweated anguish like life blood, drenching his brow and stinging his eyes, and I tried to imagine how a mind that could speak of the flowers of the field and the care of God, could survive the pain and cruelty of political and religious zealotry about to unleash power that crushes, dehumanises and demonises its victims. The cross of Jesus Christ is a scandal that saves the world.  That brutal celebration of human ingenuity and artistic skill in extracting maximum pain in protracted time, is, nevertheless, despite our worst and best efforts to explain it, the foolishness and wisdom of God.

So I'm not able to understand the flint faced hatred of Hamas and Israel. As a follower of the Crucified Christ I accept that in a broken and fallen world, I am called to take up my cross, daily, and follow. I accept it and find it so hard to do it, but not for want of trying, and not for want of God's grace. My encounter with this flower was as near an epiphany as I tend to have, a moment of revelation, when the vivid hues of red cut through my questions and complaints, interrupted my anger and outrage, rebuked the impotence and lurking despair of thinking I can't make a difference. Or at least not enough of a difference to register in any way that I could consciously own, and then the words of the old hymn forced a rethink:... "and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be."

No that doesn't remove the obscenity of tank shells hitting a hospital;nor does it excuse the evil zeal that uses unarmed human beings as human shields in the name of God. This fragile, beautiful, so transient flower is a prophetic word of defiance against steel, computerised missiles and flechettes - Google that word - this technology is being used in civilian areas. I find it ironic to the point of logical puzzle, that I a Christian, find in the Cross of Jesus Christ, hope for Hamas and Israel. But I am not within a light year of miles of suggesting that will be any consolation to the people of Gaza this morning. There are times when it is our calling to hope, and to hope on behalf of others. I believe God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. 

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 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 believe in Christ God breaks down dividing walls of hostility. All this I believe. But never for a moment do I accept that such faith on my part can be content with seeing this as reason for the disengagement of personal comfort. The call to hope for others is also the call to share something, however remote the reality, something of the lamentation of people whose suffering is deliberately inflicted by others who mean them harm.

My encounter with a red poppy, opens up thoughts that, with apologies to that old Romantic Wordsworth, do not, indeed do not, lie too deep for tears.

 

Gaza, Israel and the Book of Lamentations

I posted this on facebook this morning. Don't like posting the same stuff on both places, but 1) I feel deeply and strongly on the matter of Israel and Gaza 2) there are different constituencies between this blog and facebook.

.....

The Book of Lamentations is one of the masterpieces of human art. The art of articulating suffering; the art of living without hope but beyond despair; the art of using words to persuade us that for some experiences there are no words; the art of looking on a devastated land, a crushed city and a people broken by a violence disproportionate, ruthless and revelling in its triumph, and doing so through the lenses of tears that will not stop flowing.

The Book of Lamentations is one of the great gifts of Jewish faith to a world that always needs reminding of the sorrow we visit upon one another. It represents the heart cry of a people who want to live. The deep spirituality of such suffering is a call for compassion, the anguished cry of the suffering in the face of the taunts and cheers of the enemy is a sound every human being should recognise and seek to comfort.

When I see the flag of David waving and crowds cheering missiles and shells raining on Gaza, I am reminded of the Book of Lamentations, and a people shattered by the cheering of their enemies. And when Mr Netanyahu tells me the problem is a terrorist Hamas organisation that uses people as a human shield I share his outrage, but not his ruthless intent to destroy the shields, because they are human beings. People compelled to be human shields are by definition powerless, and the slaughter of the powerless is precisely what the Book of Lamentations immortalised in words that come from the heart of a people who know.

No, I have no answers to Hamas' ruthlessness, nor Israel's ruthlessness so I pray as the Prophet did that God will silence the song of the ruthless.
Kyrie Eleison

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem ... and Gaza

Rockets and missiles. Ground troops and guerilla fighters. Women and children. Dead and wounded. Hatred and revenge. Jew and Muslim. Walls and razor wire. Oppression and freedom. Oppressor and opressed. East and West.

The problem is these are not polar opposites; they are mirror images. They represent vicious circles of violence, grievance, vengeance; of trauma, fear and lost trust; of memory, hatred and outrage; of Gaza, Israel and history; of Jew, Muslim and Christian.

During the renewed conflicts between Israel and Gaza I;ve been reading Yopssi Klein Halevi's book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden. A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. This is a deep book, with revolutionary possibilities in the service of peace.

"There is nothing diaphonous or ethereal about  the striving toward God. It is all about the striving for an end to the bloodshed in one holy, tortured corner of Earth".

This book is written by a Jewish soldier turned journalist turned spiritual seeker for peace amongst the three monotheistic faiths. This isn't a book about inter-religious dialogue for the sake of it; this is an account of how hope is hard won, tough minded, but in the end adamantine in its persistence, because hope is one of the essential persepctives of human being and humane living.

Here are some sentences from the end of this remarkable eirenicon.

More than ever, the goal of the spiritual life in the Holy Land is to live with an open heart at the centre of unbearable tension. Still, I regularly disappoint myself, unable to exorcise, except for brief interludes, the jinns of fear and rage...

The one enduring transformation that I carry with me from my journey is that I learned to venerate - to love Christianity and Islam. I learned to feel at home in a church, even on Good Friday, and in a Mosque, even in Nuseirat. The cross and the minaret have become for me cherished symbols  of God's presence, reminders that he speaks to us in multiple languages - that he speaks to us at all.

Then, he takes his children to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, this Jewish soldier journalist who has spent months learning new language and discourse with those of other opposing faiths, and who has come to see that these faiths are not irredeemably hostile, but are different languages of faith and faithfulness to God,

This Jewish soldier finishes his book with these words, as he stands in the historic centre of Christian faith in the incarnate God in Christ:

I am suddenly aware of the muezzin , summoning me from the next hill. I get on my knees, press my forehead to the floor, immobile with surrender."

Not since reading Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret have I read a book of such deep understanding which has grown out of humility, courage and hopefulness. Courage to reach out seeking the other without fear, humility to listen to new visions and unlearn old prejudices, and hopefulness as goodwill and humane openness of heart and hand. And at heart a determined peacableness which sees those of other faiths, not as enemies, but friends, not as aliens but as neighbours, not as strangers but as family - "For this reason I kneel before the father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem - and Gaza.