Living Wittily

Just When You Thought It was Safe to Take a Photo - God Gets in the Way....

 

 Some went out on the sea in ships;
    they were merchants on the mighty waters.
²⁴ They saw the works of the Lord,
    his wonderful deeds in the deep.
²⁵ For he spoke and stirred up a tempest
    that lifted high the waves.
²⁶ They mounted up to the heavens and went down to the depths;
    in their peril their courage melted away.
²⁷ They reeled and staggered like drunkards;
    they were at their wits’ end.
²⁸ Then they cried out to the Lord in their trouble,
    and he brought them out of their distress.
²⁹ He stilled the storm to a whisper;
    the waves of the sea^[a] were hushed.
³⁰ They were glad when it grew calm,
    and he guided them to their desired haven.
³¹ Let them give thanks to the Lord for his unfailing love
    and his wonderful deeds for mankind.
³² Let them exalt him in the assembly of the people
    and praise him in the council of the elders.

Today I sat in the car and watched a troubled sea. My first trip out for a week after being quite unwell, another episode of bodily weakness possibly brought on by living beyond the limits of what is sensible for someone my age; equally it may well have been one of those random things that happens. Either way, I need to start acting my age, it seems, one of those days, maybe......

But through the murk and gloom of a sea roiled and rolling in a wind neither wavering nor weakening, and painted more than fifty shades of grey by rain thrown in messy freehand rather than spread evenly from some invisible palette, came a large container ship slowly making its way to the harbour entrance. It was like watching a documentary based on Psalm 107, the section about "merchants on the mighty waters." With the Psalms open on my knee, I read those words, 107. 23-32, and watched the skill and courage of a crew arriving at "their desired haven". Then I took the photos.

This is a Psalm for people who have tales to tell; who have been hungry and somehow food has appeared, who have been sick but somehow they got well again, whose lives have been closed in, and their bodies, hearts or minds imprisoned one way or another, but have recovered their freedom, who have sailed stormy waters and against the odds, or so it seems, made it to a safe place once more. And as I sat there watching this ship aim for the narrow harbour entrance and slip thankfully into the shelter of those bastion walls, I was aware I had just watched Psalm 107 enacted and performed for my benefit. Because reading the Psalm I had unwittingly said the prayer that I as much as anyone needed to say, "O Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so..."

The Psalm has four case studies of when life seems to fail - hunger, sickness, loss of freedom, danger to our future - but these four examples are framed by the heart cry of gratitude for the steadfast love of the good God (v1-3) and a beautiful poem at the end about what such steadfast love looks like in lives no less complicated and unpredictable for any of us. And it finishes with the no nonsense advice to consider, to think seriously, to take into full account in any assessment of who you are and where your life is right now, to remember not to forget "the steadfast love of the Lord".

 

And sitting at the North Sea front at Aberdeen, in a howling gale, rain battering the windscreen, book of Psalms on my knee and reading aloud the words of this Psalm as the boat arrived at harbour, I was taught again to do precisely that, "to consider the steadfast love of the Lord who brings us to our desired haven... and raises up the needy". The Psalm writer isn't saying everyone will want to do this; but he is blunt enough to say "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so". If they don't, who will?

Gratitude is the emotion we seldom feel whenever life is taken for granted. In a culture where self-sufficiency is maturity, independence and self-determination a life goal, material prosperity considered the best security, and the selfie the ultimate personal statement, gratitude for the sheer gift of being alive, and gratitude for all the gifts we neither made nor deserve but which make our life possible at all - well gratitude is blindingly conspicuous by its being silenced beneath the din of lives lived selfward.

I an thankful for this Psalm; I am thankful for this ship and that it reached safe harbour. But I am also thankful for those experiences that remind me to be thankful, those times when life isn't going so well for me, or those I care most about. Because undergirding, underwriting, this life I live, is the steadfast love of the Lord whose goodness endures forever, and who will bring us, like that boat, to our desired haven.

Commentaries as Manuals of Devotion.

The Christian Spiritual Tradition has its enduring classics, not all of which stand the tests of time, or postmodern-critique. The Imitation of Christ, so introspective, guilt inducing and Pelagian in its emphases towards self improvement; the Letters of Fenelon, patronising and patriarchal in their assumptions about feminine spirituality, yet written with an affected feminine tone which some 21st C women may well find irresistibly funny if not ioffensive; Teresa's Interior Castle, a kind of handbook on spiritual Grand Designs for a residence fit for a king; Julian's Revelations of Divine Love, an uncomfortable combination of morbid fascination with death and a level of denial about the reality and perhaps irrevocability of tragedy, evil and divine failure; The Cloud of Unknowing, that strange mixture of Dionysian mystical strategies and structures and The Dark Night of the Soul of John of the Cross, whicvh may be one of the most helpful guides for a culture utterly sated with its own desires and dying of its own surfeits.

I've read all of these, and taught them in classes as substantial building blocks in Christian spirituality, acknowledging all these weaknesses but still insisting that these are the legacy of souls who struggled with the cost and consequence of seeking God.

Each of those spiritual classics is the product of a life lived Godward, and a desire to leave a few footprints for others to follow. (The photo is of my 1831 edition of Fenelon's Lettres) And yes they can be shown to be limited, flawed, less relevant, even harmful in the way they can perpetuate oppressive ideologies and attitudes if read uncritically and without regoard to context. And yet. The wisdom of some of the Christian tradition's greatest thinkers and explorers of the spiritual life is that these classics of devotion are gold, albeit mixed with the dross of their own times and contexts and normative frameworks. So every now and again I go back to one or other of them and recalibrate my own spiritual sensitivities, push back my hermeneutical horizons, revisit landscapes which I remember but which on returning I find to have changed, or perhaps that I have changed and can never see things this way again.

For most of my intellectual life as a Christian I have found spiritual and intellectual sustenance, stimulus and enjoyment in another kind of reading altogether. The biblical commentary is a particular genre of biblical studies, itself a major discipline under the wider roof of theology, subsumed under the canopy of the humanities! In these later years of semi-retirement when there is time for more discretionary reading I confess to indulging in more of what I;ve always done - reading commentaries. Yes commentaries are for consulting, they are reference wqrks, they gather in one place as much of the relevant information needed for responsible intepretation of the text, and I use commentaries in that way. But I also read them; like a story, with a plot, characters, tensions, resolutions and ongoing questions about where this is all going.

Commentaries have always been my manuals of devotion, to be placed alongside the classic works of that genre, and often to be given more time, and in return they give more for the effort and time spent. One example. The story of Martha and Mary and Jesus occurs in St Bernard, in the Cloud of Unknowing and in Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton. Each of these treatments eventually commends the contemplative over the active. But pursuing this gospel story through several academic commentaries opens up other interpretive possibilities and perspectives. I haven't looked at so called devotional commentaries on Luke, whatever they might look like. Instead I spent a while with the scholars who have dug deep into the text, who know the layers of cultural and social signals, who are alert to the assumptions and constraints that can skew a text and load an intepretation. The result is a profound sense of gratitude for the residual ambiguities in the story; is Jesus rebuking or comforting Martha? Will Jesus refuse the bread Martha has baked in the hot and bothered kitchen? Can the church ever thrive on the false dichotomy of contemplative prayer versus hand dirtying service?

The Bible remains the primary text of the Christian Church. For two thousand years saints and scholars, readers and writers, prayers and preachers, have found there words that have become the Word of God to them. The immense learning and energy that has gone into the work of biblical interpretation is one of God's great gifts to the church. And while I fully recognise the market pressures and commercial advantages of publishers multiplying commentary series and finding increasingly flimsy justifications for yet another allegedly indispensable, authoritative, ground-breaking, innovative or whatever else seem plausible reasons, the work of biblical interpretation remains a vital and vitalising activity of the Christian Church.

Were I to reduce my library to a hundred volumes, I'd want more commentaries than classic manuals of devotion and systematic theologies put together.   

Prayer in the Fluctuating Flux of Post-Modern Malaise.

 

Franciscan Benediction

May God bless us with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that we may live from deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God's creations
So that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with just enough foolishness
To believe that we can make a difference in the world,
So that we can do what others claim cannot be done:
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and all our neighbors who are poor.

Amen.

I came across this prayer attributed to St Francis. It sounds too modern, western, and reads too rhetorically tidy for me to have much confidence it came from the medieval monk and troubadour. But then again, someone who spent three weeks in dialogue and as a peacemaking envoy to the Sultan of Egypt may well have shown the inner dispositions for which this prayer asks. So there's a spiritual congruence of these prayer petitions for converted attitudes with what we know of what Francis was about. And there is a further alignment of the heart if this prayer is read alongside the more famous prayer attributed to Francis - Make me a channel of your peace.

In both prayers, the sentiments and ideas, the psychological insight and spiritual intelligence that gets to the heart of what is wrong in the world, and how God is seeking to make it right, show considerable family resemblance. So if the prayer isn't by St Francis - it could have been, indeed it should have been! In any case Christians seeking to follow faithfully after Jesus in the fluctuating flux that is our western cultural malaise, will find in this prayer important clues for living intelligently, faithfully and with inner integrity. Because we are called to witness to Christ the way, the truth and the life amongst the greed and injustice, the lies and deceit, the fear and anxiety, the hedonism and sadness, the individual uncertainties and collective confusion of a society so lost and blurred in vision that it gets harder to distinguish between a road and a cliff edge. 

 

Meditation on a Photo in 100 Words (5) Rosehips in October

Rosehips are the legacy left to us when the fragility and form of the rose has gone. Both are beautiful, but in autumn the defiant green refuses yet to fade, and sets off scarlet globes crammed with seeds. Such fruitfulness after the beauty of blossom, October remembering June, protecting the promised seeds of next year, and the next.

So rosehips combine memory of beauty and hope of tomorrow. If Jesus had preached his sermon somewhere on the road to Bervie where this photo was taken, he might have said, "Consider the roses, and the rosehips...not even Solomon's glory.....

Keir Hardie, The Labour Party and the State We Are In.

I've been enjoying Bob Holman's study of Keir Hardie for various reasons. Professor Holman was one of the finest teachers I had at Glasgow University. Much of Hardie's life was lived in and around Cumnock, in Ayrshire, where much of my own childhood was spent. His background in mining, and the importance of the mines in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire resonates with my own family history in which back to 1860 on both sides, my own family were predominantly miners. And therefore his passionate outspoken criticism of wealth built on low wages and dreadful housing, of inherited privilege and its political protections, and his compassion for poor labourers, destitute unemployed and all but abandoned elderly poor likewise fires my own political and ethical opposition to injustice that is systemic and the valuing of human life on economic and financial scales.

An intriguing series of parallels with Jeremy Corbyn makes it even more interesting. Hardie was mocked and verbally abused for daring to come into Parliament dressed in workers' tweeds; he was not prepared to validate the class elitism of the monarchy and on numerous occasions was outspoken about the cost of the monarchy, the indifference of the royal family to the plight of workers, and the validation of the Czar by a royal visit seeking trade agreements; he was vehemently opposed to militarism and especially the recruiting of working class young people to fight in the interests of Empire economics abroad. It would be too far to say Corbyn has modelled his political style and actions on Hardie, but there is strong DNA evidence of a common ancestry of ideas.

Reading this story shows the vast distance that the modern Labour Party has travelled away from its social, ethical and ideological roots. In some ways it has had to adapt and develop, reshape and reinvent, in a rapidly changing world. But you are left with the question: If the blade of my spade wears out and I replace it, then the handle breaks and I replace it, do I still have the same spade - indeed, depending on what I replace the aprts with, do I still have a spade at all?

 

Have Mercy O Lord. The sea is so large, and my boat is so small.

(Prayer of Breton Fishermen)

Shakespearean Party Song......

Martha and Mary and the Problematic Guest

The past few days I've spent some study time exploring the story of Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary. You know the one - Martha banging pots, rattling dishes and cutlery, checking oven, swearing at the beeping microwave, piling everything in the dishwasher, trying to set a table while stirring a sauce, checking the recipe online, and Mary sitting at Jesus' feet. It isn't fair. Even less fair when Martha complains to Jesus and gets a telling off for getting so worked up.

What's that about? Well it's a long story trying to explain this short story. Martha is the one who welcomes and invites Jesus, assuming that for such an important guest everyone will muck in and get on with what needs to be done. Usually Mary and Martha are a team but this time Mary is sitting, all ears on what Jesus is saying. One of my favourite paintings is the Vermeer Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It's in the National Galleries in Edinburgh and it's now a regular stopping place if I'm in the city and it can possibly be done.

This painting sent me chasing for other visual interpretations of this story and there are a lot. And they all tell the same story, but often with variations of how the scene is interpreted. Is Jesus annoyed or gentle? Is Martha criticised or consoled? Is Mary lazy or is she doing the right thing? Is conversation more important than food on the table when it comes to hospitality for a hungry guest? Does Martha miss the point, does Jesus overlook Martha's practical kindness or indulge Mary's fascination with the radical teacher from Nazareth? How has Mary chosen the better part and the one thing necessary? Does that mean that all those practical souls whose kindness and friendship is expressed through their own nature as doers of the word, are to be told what they are doing isn't the way to love God? As if those who pray and read the Bible are more in line with what God wants than the person who bakes the bread, drops in with the casserole, misses the prayer meeting to take someone for a hospital appointment?

Yes, I know. Mary was listening to the word, and Martha was clattering in the kitchen. No amount of working, doing, activity is a substitute for prayer, devotion and looking after your soul. But Martha, if she ever gets a fair hearing, might want to say, "Well no amount of praying and Bible study and worship songs are going to feed the proper hunger of the body - give us this day our daily bread is, for a baker, a command to use gift and energy in feeding others." The word activism is a good put down word, usually used by those who want to be super-spiritual and dismiss the spirituality of those who like Bezalel in Exodus 31 was gifted by the Spirit with the practicalities of hand and mind to get the job done.

Annette Everett created a beautiful statue of Martha and Mary standing together, back to back, the sculptor's way of saying that contemplation and action, listening and doing, being with Jesus and working for Jesus, are both required in the model disciple. This, and Vermeer's painting are interpretations in which Martha isn't put down, but helped to see that all the effort in the world isn't a substitute for attentive listening to what the guest actually wants, needs and expects. Hospitality is not to foist the host's agenda driven approach to making the guest feel welcome; it is to pay attention to what the guest says, to offer first the gift of presence and that precious time needed to get a good meal on the table.

There is a rich and varied tradition of how this story has been used in the church down the centuries, across the world in different cultures, and often as a co-opted script to put women in their place! That's another story, but reader beware and be aware, Luke in telling this story has Mary doing what a man does and a woman is never expected to do in Jesus' time. And Martha's activism (a word too often used in a pejorative dismissal of people's hard work) is described as diakonia, ministry, service. Together these two women contain the rich diversities of Christian ministry and devotion to God, the love of neighbour and God, the practical kindness that prepares food and the attentive listening that receives the gift the guest brings.

Such a rich story.

Autumn, Compost and Living Towards God

Autumn is one of the hinge seasons of the year, a turning from summer to winter through the slow process of maturation, fruitfulness and letting go. As a boy I helped my dad run a market garden sized greenhouse, growing and selling pot plants, many of them grown from cuttings. The compost was home made, a combination of soil (often collected from molehills in the spring), river gravel from the Nith, peat and finally leaf mould.

The leaf mould came from one of the woods within walking distance of our cottage, that layer of rich, rotted humus accumulated over years and years of shed leaves, which felt like the richest pile carpet you ever walked on. With a hessian sack, a small riddle and a pair of old leather gloves I would happily go and collect a bag of leaf mould, riddled under the branches of beech, lime, oak, sycamore, elm and rowan trees. The smell of rich composting vegetation still creates for me images of a boyhood spent in fields, woods, by riverbanks, hills and small lochans.

This time of year is an evocative month or two when, despite all the changes to the countryside, I walk in a state of moderate wonder-looking, or in the words of John's Gospel, 'beholding', 'gazing' and 'contemplating', the range of colours in trees on the turn. Leaf mould is a benevolent legacy, a gift from previous years, a store that nourishes and gives life beyond its own life. Each autumn, another downpayment to the fertility of our earth and its soil. One of the lessons learned in boyhood, but not realised till later life is the slowness and hiddenness of those layers of leaves, gently decaying into a medium for new life.

In my mind perhaps a similar process takes place. Ideas that years ago seemed so gripping, real and certain, mellow into a maturing compost of thought, memory, experience and a restfulness no longer needing such gripping certainty, and content with a wondering thoughtfulness I take to be wisdom. Not the resignation of 'all passion spent', as if nothing mattered much any more. Rather, an intellectual steadiness and spiritual humility that looks on the world not as a competition to be won, but a game to be played, a play to be performed, a score to be improvised using as much of ourselves and our gifts and our hard learned skills as we can bring to it.

It's over half a century since I went for sacks of leaf mould. I trust that over those intervening decades my thoughts and feelings, ideas and emotions, decisions and choices, words and silences, tears and actions, have settled like falling leaves onto the compost that is my life. And year on year that topsoil supplemented by the rich materials of a life lived so far as grace and love allow, towards God.

Meditation on a Photo in 100 Words (4) Kings College Chapel.

 "The church is not the building, it's the people." Those words are a truth which, if pushed too far, lose their grip on the truth they affirm. A church is a people being formed in community, gathered and scattered and gathered again for worship. A church building is a place where prayer and praise, baptism and communion, year on year, are offered. The building is not sacred; yet what is done there, like slow falling rain, soaks the nutrients of holiness into the soul. In this building, over centuries, souls have prayed, and holiness has taken root in their lives.