Living Wittily

Advent and the Light on Our Faces

 

Marianne Stokes, "Candlemas Day", 1901

Advent I turn to my favourite poets. Even those poems I know by heart, shed light into the duller recesses of routine, and illumine the dark corners that threaten hope. Candlemas is the other side of Advent, but Levertov's poem, in three short sentences, contrasts the certitude of faith with the realities of cross, tomb and darkness.

Candlemas

With certitude
Simeon opened
ancient arms
to infant light.
Decades
before the cross, the tomb
and the new life,
he knew
new life.
What depth
of faith he drew on,
turning illumined
towards deep night.

Denise Levertov

Advent is for a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

Fra Angelico, Naming of John the Baptist.

Advent is when, in an impatient world, we wait patiently. The connection between waiting, patience and hope is strong, and if we can wait in patient hope then perhaps we are beginning to understand what it means to live by faith. Because to wait patiently and hopefully is an act of continuing trust.

In an impatient world we've become used to speed of delivery, everything from fast food to same day online pick up points. Saving time, filling time, using time, we've slipped into a mindset that thinks we can control time. Slow it down, speed it up, adapt it to our own purposes. The default secular worldview ignores, perhaps deliberately obscures our ultimate helplessness to control time. Indeed, the pace of our lives these days, our determination to compress as much energy, achievement, possession, entertainment, work and doing into every hour and day and week and year, is making us impatient with, well, with waiting. No wonder hope is all but obsolete, and the long view of the forward looking spirit seems hardly relevant in a world of the short term solution, selling its soul for immediacy.

Advent comes as a reminder to our time obsessed times, that time is passing. God is not the servant of our wants. The determined redemptive purposes of a love that is Eternal are not likely to be derailed by our impatience. "Time like an ever flowing stream , bears all its sons away; / They fly forgotten, like a dream dies at the opening day."

So as Advent begins, even if we do live in a frantic culture which idolises now and worships time saving efficiency; wait patiently; hope trustfully; look attentively; live faithfully. Pray with urgent slowness. Speak with considered kindness. Let longing be as the word says, long. Wonder cannot be rushed. Mystery takes time to unfold.

Year on year, each day of our lives, God comes with the slow deliberation of eternal purpose into the frantic filling of our days. If we can slow down, stop and wait long enough, the Advent of God brings life's renewing. The connection between our waiting, our patience and our hope is secured only by God's unbreakable promise. Advent is the time to offer once more the vulnerable but heart meant yes to that promise: "But to you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings." And no. For all our attempts at control and speed, we can't make the sun rise on demand. In God's time. That's what Advent is. Learning to live in God's time.

Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen. 

.

Come Thou long expected Jesus: Advent is Just Round the Corner.

Reading Joan Chittister can sometimes feel like someone has had access to your personal journal and decided to read it back to you sentence by sentence, with her own comments and asides. She is a Benedictine no nonsense nun, and is both shrewd and sensible, writing with candour and compassion. Her insights into what makes community healthy, organic and fruitful are constant gifts scattered throughout her books. Discussing how stability is an essential of Benedictine life, and how that is rooted in community, she recognises that a community never stays still, unless it has become paralysed by the anxiety that clings to where and who it is. Relationships are central and essential to Christian discipleship, and to Benedictine obedience, which is one ancient and distinctive style of Christian discipleship.  Here is her take on how all that works:

"That's how relationships sanctify me. They show me where holiness is for me. That's how relationships develop me. They show me where growth is for me. If I'm the passive-victim type, then assertiveness may have something to do with coming to wholeness. If I'm the domineering character in every group, then a willingness to listen and be led may be my call to life. Alone, I am what I am, but in community I have the chance to become everything that I can be." (page 49)

Those words come from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily, is Chittister's take on what it means to commit to Living the Rule of St Benedict Today (the sub title). Bob and Becky, my friends from Henniker New Hampshire, won't be surprised I bought this book while with them on holiday years ago. The Dartmouth Bookstore was where I discovered several writers and books that have stayed with me after making the point they were 'meant' to make! The photo is Becky's church.

The Rule of Benedict has been a constant source of thought and redirection for me over a long time. The emphases on stability, contemplation, community, hospitality, study, prayer and scripture have been necessary if quiet correctives to a life that often enough has been restless, activist, self-absorbed, too busy to have enough time for others, including God.

As Advent comes, such correctives are important. Waiting, longing, being open to others, sharing generously the gift that is our life, looking attentively at the wounds of the world, finding ways of showing mercy, listening for the sounds of hope, allowing our minds and our lives to be enlarged.

Come Thou long-expected Jesus,

     Born to set thy people free;

From our fears and sins release us;

     Let us find our rest in Thee.

Christians Speaking Truth to UKIP Part 1 Some Semantic Replacement Therapy

More and more I am convinced that Christian witness today requires that followers of Jesus speak with linguistic integrity; and resist by argument and a different rhetoric the lies, half truths, redefinitions, propaganda and semantic erosion of contemporary political and social disourse. A number of key terms, essential for intelligent and constructive political debate have been hijacked by the political far right, and are becoming slogan words of the present Government. Immigrant, increasingly used pejoratively to raise the threat level to 'our way of life', by those we consider 'other'. Welfare, redefined in the now laughably ironic Government pie chart showing the alleged percentage of taxes spent on social care and what used to be called social security. Benefits, a word now heard by many as the first word in the sound bytes benefit cheats and benefit scroungers. Security, often now linked with the word terror, and together providing a rationale for increasing surveillance in our society, intrusion into personal privacy, and suspicion of the stranger, those 'others', who make their homes around us.

Not for a second am I saying that there are no cases of illegal immigration, welfare tourism, benefit fraud, and security threat. It is how these realities are exploited to justify policies and attitudes that, if they continue unchecked, inevitably become deeply corrosive of the common good, toxic for public discourse, and dangerous in creating social attitudes and dispositions which are founded on suspicion not trust, and ruthless regulation rather than responsible discretion. By the way these qwords are being used by politicians, we are educating our society into mistrust of the stranger, resentment of the vulnerable, and fear of social change, cultural newness and human diversity. These three processes are essentials for thebhealth of a humane and open society in which people can flourish.

Of course it may be that there are some sections of our population who think the time for a humane and open society is not now, if ever. Conservatism isn't only a political party As a worldview, often unacknowledged, it can also be a determined protection of the status quo, a holding on to what serves our personal interests, a refusal to move in new directions even if the alternative is standing still. But human flourishing, like much else in this wonderful world, presupposes growth, fruitfulness, new seeds of possibility, the risk of the seed dying and the hope of it propagating and bearing fruit tenfold, and a hundredfold.

Which brings me back to an ethic of language, and the possibility of Christian witness as the redeeming of words, the reclaiming of a vocabulary that implies generosity to the stranger, compassion to the vulnerable, and responsibility towards the poor. Such redemptive language will have to be to the point, in the face of plain-talking nastiness, confronting and denying the discourse of fear, resentment and injustice. What do Christians do about UKIP? At the very least, speak defiance of the propaganda that seeks to persuade us that narrow-minded nastiness is nothing of the sort but is understandable impatience with those who are making mugs of us all. I beg to differ. No, I don't beg! Indeed I insist, loudly and persistently, to differentiate between the discourse of deceit and scapegoat explanations, and the discourse of truthful words and friendly welcome. UKIP stands behind narrow-minded nastiness, the politics of resentment, rejection and division. The popular appeal at the ballot box of its 'plain language' diagnoses of what is wrong with our society and how it can be put right by its policies, is clear evidence that eventually regular irrigation of peoples fears and worries and resentments produces bitter fruit. Water the seeds of malign discontent and don't be surprised at the height or toxicity of giant hogweed. 

In the old KJV translation, "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer everyone." The immediacy of communication through social media makes it possible to disseminate and multiply words in ways unprecedented in our history. Not for nothing did Jesus liken his disciples to salt, whose influence for good, in healing, sterilising and fertilising, is out of all proportion to quantity. Jesus also said every word will have to be weighed and accounted for some day.

When that day comes I for one hope that some of the most weighty words I have spoken, have been words of contradiction, spoken in the face of those whose view of the world has no space for redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace....goodness, once you start to list them, an entire lexicon of ethically enhanced words are missing from the UKIP manifesto. Some semantic replacement therapy is needed in the political discourse of our country, and Christians have nothing better to do than start speaking these words. I mean it. These are the words that challenge precisely and prophetically, the attitudes, policies and ideologies of closure, exclusion, alienation and isolation.  Redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace, justice, goodness. Speak them. Live them. Be them.

A Prayer for Those Who Suffer a Deficit of Love

This prayer was written for the worship Service I was leading tonight:

 

Eternal God and Father,

Whose infinite yet intimate love

shared from all eternity between Father and Son,

is the love you have poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

 

We pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

Children whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

Friendships ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

Marriages shredded by unfaithfulness and broken promises;

Families fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods where love is thought weakness, and compassion is despised.

 

We pray for those we’ve only heard of on television,

Whose lives disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence

People who are in different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, the vacuum filled by the power of hate.

The baby thrown from a bridge by an enraged jealous father

The 23 year old man whose reckless driving killed a local pensioner

The 82 year old man jailed for attempted murder in a retirement home

The pensioner kicked to death for refusing to hand over cigarettes

These and so many more, human lives caught in the crossfire of fear and hate,

we hold them before your healing mercy

 

God of love and hope,

Fill us with compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

Like Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

Courage to ask the name of violent terrified Legion,

and to stand between the sinner and those holding the stones;

Compassion to touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded,

and to see the attentive care of the Samaritan, and go do likewise –

Generosity to open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father,

and to bring our loaves and fishes to be belssed for blessing of others.

 

We dare to pray to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect,

whose sunlight love gives life to all within its radiance,

whose rain of mercy falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds and heals, broken worlds and broken hearts alike,

and all this in Jesus name and in the power of your Holy Spirit,  Amen

J M W Turner: Art in which "Peril Has the Power To Please."

The film Mr Turner is an intriguing, at times annoying, but always fascinating attempt to answer Elizabeth Jennings question: What were the bonds and limits, the constraints and disciplines that enabled such innovative art to establish itself as a profoundly new but powerful form of seeing the world? The inner vision of the artist is part of the mystery that may even elude conscious capture by the artist himself. The film never answers the questions of motives and origins, refusing to attempt an explanation by source criticism of the emotions, experiences and relationships which deeply engage the mind and heart and find expression in creative art.

Jennings poem simply celebrates the reality. Such form is there, and most there when invisible. The artist's self-expression, paradoxically, is at its most visible when the self is eclipsed by the actions and inner impulses which strive towards something as yet imagined, but no less real for that. As a matter of fact, this poem would be a good critical framework within which to ask the question, Is this a good film? What does it achieve? Do I understand more about how the artist works within limits but always pushes them, to the limit of of the limits. 

Tribute to Turner

What were your bonds and limits? It is hard

For us to see them yet there must be some

Since art can only flourish locked and barred

By form. However inward; it must come

 

To keep off sprawl and chaos. Out of sight

Yours are but they are firm. Within your craft

The storm, the tides are held by day and night,

Leashed strongly in and so the looker's left

 

With fire and blood and steam. There is no fear

For us but only wonder. Nature is

At your command when you most disappear

 

And so we're caught up in your ecstasies

And large delight that's present everywhere

And what seems peril has the power to please.

 

 

Van Gogh and the Dark Paths of Uncertainty, Doubt and Struggling Faith

I hadn't really thought much about Elizabeth Jennings poetry on art and artists till reading through her collected poems it becomes obvious - this woman loved art, and deepened her heart gazing at it. As a poet familiar with the inner ambiguities and tensions of creativity, she imaginatively entered the inner life of the artist, perhaps by asking the question, "Where does this painting come from? And, what goes on in the heart and mind, the fluidities of human experiece in an artist who paints this picture, and just like this?" Her poem on this painting is a moving and understanding reflection on prayer, the mystery and the anguish, the uncertainties and the occasional assurance, the fragility and necessity of that risky trust that enables us to say, or not say, the fears and longings and joys and hopes of our lives.

In his young years Van Gogh was an Evangelical fiery Gospel preacher, and sent home to his brother some copies of English hymns that meant a lot to him. Two are worth quoting because they help us understand the painting above, with its darkness and shadows, the crooked building, the lone figure going dutifully to prayer in a church with no lights on at night.

"Thy way not mine, O Lord, However dark it be; Lead me by thine own hand / Choose out the path for me." More poignant and significant still,

Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee.

E'en though it be a cross, that raises me.

Still all my song shall be, nearer my God to Thee,

Nearer my God to Thee, nearer to Thee

There's a really good chapter on Van Gogh's Evangelical phase in Disenchanted Evangelicals. Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt, David Hempton, Yale, 2008. It shows Van Gogh's transition towards a faith much less secure, far less explicitly Christian, but clinging to an elsuive sense of some ultimately benevolent Onlooker whose purposes transcend his own grasp of things. Elizabeth Jennings' poem on the painting above redeems a more hopeful portrait from the remnants of Van Gogh's earlier faith commitments. This is a beautiful poem, revealing a deeply pastoral sympathy for those in life who struggle to make sense of why it is, sometimes, that it is indeed a cross that raises them nearer to God, and who then use that so dearly bought proximity as opportunity for protest. Van Gogh understood better than perhaps we allow, the need to articulate that cry of the heart, "Why?"

The Nature of Prayer

Maybe a mad fit made you set it there
Askew, bent to the wind, the blue-print gone
Awry, or did it? Isn’t every prayer
We say oblique, unsure, seldom a simple one,
Shaken as your stone tightening in the air?

Decorum smiles a little. Columns, domes
Are sights, are aspirations. We can’t dwell
For long among such loftiness. Our homes
Of prayer are shaky and, yes, parts of Hell
Fragment the depths from which the great cry comes.

 

Michaelangelo's First Pieta

One of the miracles of Renaissance art. It is presumptuous to comment, critique, expound or even praise. It just is, or to use our so unpoetic reality cliche, "it is what it is". Elizabeth Jennings' poem "Michaelangelo's First Pieta" is a contemplative appreciation, and one with the precise and essential tone of prayer that has taken shoes off in recognition of holy ground. 

Michaelangelo's First Pieta.

Carve a compassion. Older than you are

He lies upon your lap. What can you do

But hold him with the trust you also fear?

       Thus Michaelangelo

 

Saw what a girl may do for gods. O we

Have mercy on this man a woman holds,

God in the grip of our humanity.

       All this the sculptor moulds.

 

But more. It is a prayer that he is saying

Wordless, except that written on her breast

He writes his name. The girl he is displaying

       Has also brought him rest.

Giotto and Jennings: Through the Flesh the Best Compassion Runs.

Two frescos by Giotto, the artist whose genius and contemplation of the Christ story opened up new ways of artistic expression, pushed the boundaries of aesthetics and religious sensibility, and pushed out new trajectories in exegetical imagination.

Again Elizabeth Jennings gives every impression of having gazed and wondered at the human experiences depicted in these paintings. And from them she has articulated the inner life and emotion of those caught up in the drama of redemption. She was a devout Catholic, and her poetry has a remarkable quality of sophisticated simplicity about the the things of faith. And she manages this while also articulating that creative frustration of the poet who is trying to expound mystery, and finds herself ultimately rendered inarticulate by that which is incomprehensible yet has to be contemplated.

In that sense Giotto and Jennings, (there names have a fitting alliterative sound!) are artists of mystery, prophets in search of a medium adequate to their message, which is what makes their work so attractive to those who also contemplate the incomprehensible with eyes that wonder, hearts that gasp and a mind made humble by immensity.  

In Praise of Giotto

Giotto, lover of tenderness, you were

The first great painter who showed man as man

Not icon or pure spirit but entire

For through the flesh the best compassion ran.

 

You taught this, when you painted Joachim

And Anna, Mary's parents, standing with

Their faces close and intimate. In him

Was gratitude, in her, surrender. Death

 

You also knew was glad surrendering

Without a dread. So God himself was laid

Gently in his tomb, all suffering

 

Wiped from his face. You understood men prayed

And found right peace when they could speak and sing

As Francis did for whom the birds delayed.

Elizabeth Jennings

 

 

Art and the Unselfing of Our Looking.

Impression: soleil levant ( Impression: Sunrise)   Claude Manet

This painting was exhibited in the first Impressionist Exhibition in Paris in 1874. Whether or not it gave its name to the movement, it exudes a confidence in the inner responses of the viewer that could without much exaggeration be called revolutionary.

I post the painting only to point to another of Elizabeth Jennings poems, this time her tribute to C V Wedgewood who taught her how to look, see, enter and inwardly absorb the vision of the artist, and the gift of his and her art. This may well be an example of contemplative prayer, the unselfing of our looking in order to see that which is beyond us, and calls us beyond ourselves.

Looking at Pictures

In Memory of C V Wedgewood

 

Your presence lit the paintings for me but

Only to show more radiantly how each

Impressionist, say, in his own way caught

A slant of sun, a pool of shade. To teach

 

Like this is not to teach at all but fill

Another's eyes with your own way of seeing.

You let the biggest buffet go so still

That I too entered the painter's being.

 

And so we walked from galleries to see

A world transformed. That every visit went

When you were picking paintings out for me

 

Making the shortest time a large event,

Now I'm alone but you have set me free

In all art's history by those hours we spent.