Living Wittily

Bewilderment and Broken Bread.

 

The Emmaus Supper

“Well, at least nobody died.”

That flippant life coaching quip sometimes works,

usually by minimising the trouble we’re in.

Trouble is, this time somebody did die.

We met Jesus a few years ago. He was a life changer.

The way he lived made us want to be near him,

the things he said turned all the politics and good manners upside down.

The last to be first, serve not be served, love enemies, lust the doorway to adultery,

Peace-making as family likeness to God, losing life to find it.

His laughter came from some well of living joy deep inside him;

He looked at people, not through them;

he listened, understood, and paid attention.

He gazed into the heart of who we are, and wasn’t put off,

And for all our fears and uncertainties, he never once walked away from us.

So yes, we were prepared to follow him.

To build the Kingdom of God, to take up the cross and follow,

To not be anxious about food and clothes and instead trust God.

We walked and learned and travelled and lived the way he showed us,

And when we failed and made mistakes, he understood.

Then we realised he was serious.

He was going to Jerusalem and he would be put to death.

Jesus had become scary, unpredictable, way too extreme for his own good.

That outburst in the Temple, riding into Jerusalem like some self-appointed prophet,

Arguing and criticising and judging and even publicly contradicting powerful people.

He knew perfectly well our Faith Leaders wouldn’t let it go,

And he knew that once Rome was involved,

it would need to be settled, one way or another.

So they crucified him. Finish. End.

Rome trades on finality, no one survives crucifixion.

“It’s finished!” Famous last words of Jesus.

And he wasn’t wrong. It was finished. It is finished

So what in heaven’s name were we to do next?

You give up your life and family, you go walkabout with Jesus,

You build your hopes on a new world of God’s Kingdom,

Of freedom, justice, peace and new beginnings.

And what have we left? Nothing.

Jerusalem wasn’t safe anymore.

So Cleopas and I decided to travel to Emmaus.

Walking might get life moving again,

Give us some impetus, direction, some idea of a way forward.

And Cleopas was usually clear headed and positive,

He’d know what to do .

But Cleopas was as shattered as the rest of us.

Confusion and fear, sadness and regret,

broken dreams and emotional pain,

minds closed to hopefulness by the trauma of already shattered hope.

We talked as we walked,  

because talking about things somehow eased the pressure of hurt,

by talking we recognise and gives in to that deep human need we all have,

to make sense of what messes up life,

to rewrite the pages torn from our story  

to put into words what we fear can't ever be fully described.

Maybe it’s just knowing another heart feels something similar,

that the loss and hurt aren't borne alone,

that by talking we might salvage some sense and purpose

out of what has wrecked a hoped for future.

And then as if heaven sent a stranger caught up with us.

We were glad of the company, and another voice.

Someone who could confirm the horror, share the shock,

Sympathise and understand and give us another perspective.

But he didn’t know what we were talking about.

So we explained about Jesus the prophet, (how could he not know?)

The chief priests and the Romans, the trials and the crucifixion,

And our sorrow, and our emptiness, and our despair,

and that mixture of resentful anger and lost love

that is grief at its most bewildering and fear at its most disabling.

About the burial and the waiting, and the women in denial

with their stupid fairy-tale endings.

But he said it was us, we were the stupid ones,

We were the ones in denial, we who couldn’t see and wouldn’t believe

He looked us in the face and said sadly but not unkindly,

“Foolish and slow of heart to believe all the prophets

Have said about the glory of the suffering Christ.”

And as he talked and explained, we began to feel strangely safe,

His words began to make sense of the whole, tragic holy mess.

Maybe there was more. Maybe it wasn’t all gone.

He seemed to know the heart of things; and to know the world by heart.

He sounded just like Jesus, the way he said the words,

The tough kindness, that faraway look that isn’t fantasy,

But is more real than even that aching, empty space

that used to be meaning and purpose and God help us, hope.

All hope needs is a promise, a gesture towards a different future.

By the time we got to Emmaus he stopped talking and began walking away.

We asked him to stay, we had to keep him talking.

His words flickered and flamed with truth,

We could feel the energy, see new possibility by their light,

They were words that reconstructed our world,

He told us our story as he told us God’s story,

And he told us the story of Jesus as only Jesus could have told it.

It’s getting dark we said, stay with us.

You must be tired we said, come, stay with us and rest.

You must be hungry and thirsty, stay and have supper with us.

It isn’t safe to travel alone, stay with us, your friends.

And he did. He was our guest, but he acted like the host.

And when we were seated at the table, he took the bread and broke it –

And once again like that broken loaf, our world fell apart,

But this time the pieces fell into place – It was Him!

He is Alive. The women were right. He kept his promise.

He lived his word because he lives and is life itself.

He had said we were foolish not to believe;

But how foolish we only just realised.

To the light of the World we said,

It’s getting dark we said, stay with us.

To the Good Shepherd and the One who says to the heavy laden Come unto me

You must be tired we said, come, stay with us and rest.

To the bread of life, the living bread, and to the living water,

You must be hungry and thirsty, we said stay and have supper with us.

To the one who is the Resurrection and the Life,

who laid down his life for sheer love of his friends,

who walked the darkest places of sin and judgement and suffering

we had said, It isn’t safe to travel alone, stay with us.

That blessed bread! That blessed bread broken

as only he ever broke it, given as only he could give!

NO wonder he knew the story of Jesus inside out

No wonder we felt ourselves understood, the old love rekindled.

And as soon as we knew it was him, he vanished!

But by then we knew. That broken bread

And the way it was broken, and the words that blessed it,

It was Him alright, and because it was him, all is right.

Copyright James M Gordon (c)

 

Images of the Cross. Holy Saturday. No Fast Forward to Easter Sunday

Amongst my most important possessions are three Stations of the Cross which were gifts from Sandy Stoddart the Scottish sculptor. The 13th Station is The Deposition, the taking down of Jesus from the cross. The reverent care of the hand holding the "sacred head, sore wounded", the upreaching embrace of Mary Jesus' mother, and the nakedness of Jesus with all the implied vulnerability, fill this image with pathos and unutterable loss. The rope suspending one arm of the dead Jesus, his arm drooped vertical and helpless even to help himself is eloquent of the kenosis of God, and the power of redemptive love.

In her Autobiography, The Joy of the Snow, the novelist Elizabeth Goudge writes movingly and honestly about her horror of Good Friday, and how when she was younger she wished that the sufferings of Jesus could be removed from the story. The urge to pass quickly from Good Friday to Easter Sunday seems natural, to skip past those year long hours of anguish and humiliation and dying and darkness to the sunlight and joy of resurrection morning, is understandable, and wrong.

Jesus prayed with all the passion of a heart large enough to embrace the world, "Father if it be possible let this cup pass from me." No escape from Good Friday, no fast forward past the pain, the abandonment and the revolt of holiness from the engulfing evil. "He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us, that we might become in him the righteousness of God." No one has mapped the contours and fissures of sin that run through the whole creation and every human heart with more precision than Paul; and no one has worked out with a clearer, more passionate mind, what sin did to the heart of the Triune God. When Jesus cried, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" that cry of dereliction reverberated into every verse in the New Testament that says "God was in Christ", "Christ died for us", "making peace by the blood of the Cross", the "mystery of the ages."

It took a poet of George Herbert's genius to parse the tragedy of the Cross. His poem The Agony is utterly Pauline in its combination of moral seriousness and theological wonder. The transition from Good Friday to Holy Saturday, with Easter Sunday not yet in view, is a compelling account of the suffering of God, the broken hearted emptiness of a heart poured out in a love which chooses to confront and enter into the places of deepest despair and most enduring darkness. This is the God whom Christians claim is with us in our darkest times and places; "though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me..." Holy Saturday is for those times and places in our lives where hope has vanished, loss seems fixed and final, depression has settled with the dead weight of a future empty of joy. Oh Easter Sunday is coming; but we say that from this side of that first Good Friday and Holy Saturday. For now it is a sign of our human hunger for hope, that we wait with the hopeless, grieve with the sorrowful, weep with the bereaved, and like the two figures in the panel above, hold with reverent care and willing embrace, all those who suffer without hope of a different future.

Herbert, a 17th Century metaphysical poet, is one of the great New Testament theologians. Though he would hate the slippage of English style in the phrase, Herbert "gets it". The mystery of iniquity alongside the greater mystery of love, and both of them entangled in the fatal tragedy of Gethsemane and Calvary. 

The Agony

Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

Images of the Cross. Good Friday. Theology as Ballad.

My song is love unknown,
My Saviour’s love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I,
That for my sake
My Lord should take
Frail flesh and die?

He came from His blest throne
Salvation to bestow;
But men made strange, and none
The longed-for Christ would know:
But O! my Friend,
My Friend indeed,
Who at my need
His life did spend.

Sometimes they strew His way,
And His sweet praises sing;
Resounding all the day
Hosannas to their King:
Then “Crucify!”
is all their breath,
And for His death
they thirst and cry.

Why, what hath my Lord done?
What makes this rage and spite?
He made the lame to run,
He gave the blind their sight,
Sweet injuries!
Yet they at these
Themselves displease,
and ’gainst Him rise.

They rise and needs will have
My dear Lord made away;
A murderer they save,
The Prince of life they slay,
Yet cheerful He
to suffering goes,
That He His foes
from thence might free.

In life no house, no home,
My Lord on earth might have;
In death no friendly tomb,
But what a stranger gave.
What may I say?
Heav'n was his home;
But mine the tomb
Wherein he lay.

Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King!
Never was grief like Thine.
This is my Friend,
in Whose sweet praise
I all my days
could gladly spend.

Images of the Cross. Holy Week, Thursday. "Christ plays in ten thousand places...."

It was Gerard Manley Hopkins who described a way of looking at the world Christologically. To see Christ everywhere, to celebrate the ubiquitous presence of Christ round every corner we turn, to see in common things the uncommon grace of God, and to have the wit, or the wisdom, to see what is revealed.

Epiphanies are of two kinds; the ones we discover, and the ones we are given. The ones we discover may simply be those everyday moments which, once we have lived through them, we realise come only every thousand days. The ones we are given are when we know, we just know, we have glimpsed the trailing clouds of glory, briefly sighted a truth both dazzling and elusive, but confirming a depth and texture to life which sustains those deep heart realities of hope, trust, love and joy.

But sometimes it's impossible to say which moment of recognition is which; our discovery, or unlooked for gift. The photo was taken at the sea front in Aberdeen. The old breakwaters had been exposed by stormy seas and I was walking along close to the sea edge. Waves, the play of sky on water, blue on grey in a symphony of colour, sound and movement in rhythm and with a timing that was both regular and varied by water that was restless in motion and restful to watch and hear.The sea is its own orchestra, its motions and sounds and its endless variations in orchestration and composition a 24/7 performance of inexhaustible creativity.

At precisely one angle of looking the old broken timbers opened in a cruciform window, and I was transfixed. I stood and looked, astonished and my eyes watering with something other than the cold wind and a longing in my heart that came from God knows where; and I'm glad God knows where. The contrast of aged timber against sea and sky, the window of the Cross opening out towards the horizon, a moment in my life when whatever else I was thinking or feeling was eclipsed by this glimpse of glory, and I was summoned to pay attention, to wait, and watch, and without conscious decision, to know this moment is one where the heart kneels and "prayer is valid".

Hopkins' poem is a revelling in grace, seeing Christ everywhere and in everything. "Christ plays in ten thousand places"; and one of those places was Aberdeen beach, on a cold January morning when, unasked and unexpected, Christ played, and I cried, "What I do is me: for that I came."  

 

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Images of the Cross. Wednesday. "O Cross that liftest up my head..."

Tapestry is one of the things I do. Regular visitors to this blog will know this. Birds, houses, stain glass windows, flowers, Greek and Hebrew scripted words are amongst the subjects designed and sewn over the years.

In recent years I've become more theological in some of my designs, using tapestry to explore and express the colour and forms of religious texts and symbols. This started as an experiment when I was studying and teaching Trinitarian theology, and I was intrigued by the possibility of using colour and form to explore the mystery at the heart of the Christian understanding of God.

The most recently completed tapestry is called Eucharist and Pentecost, and the small central panel focuses on the Cross, in the colours of the passion. The scale of the detail shown is 3cm.

An hour or so after posting yesterday's entry on Images of the Cross, the news broke of the bomb attacks on Brussels. Throughout the day the horror and anguish that befell ordinary folk unfolded with a frightening predictability as figures of casualties rose, and the cruelty and range of the injuries were described. As I watched I recalled again the words that go to the dark heart of human evil and brokenness, and illumine from within with the determined purpose of Eternal Love, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son..."

We live in a world where it is becoming increasingly easy, perhaps even attractive, to hate the enemy, to wish vengeance, to make retaliatory violence our preferred modus operandi. I for one need a theology of the Cross that feels the full force of the evil we humans inflict on each other, and does not despair. One of the most lethal strains of despair is to give up on reconciliation, to educate our hearts in hatred, to train our emotions away from mercy and justice and to seek the elimination and destruction of the enemy. If we despair of reconciliation, give up on peace, refuse to even try to understand and listen to the reasons why we have been attacked, then we surrender hope and settle for a mutual exchange of deaths and inflicted suffering, which in turn fuels hate, fear and fury, that unholy trinity worshipped best with weapons and strategies of terror.

The Cross of Christ stands as God's decisive No to that despair which implies our preference for death, our own or those we wish to kill. Despair is never more dangerous than when we decide, choose, conclude, that hope has ceased to be an option. Centuries before Jesus was crucified Isaiah spoke more than he knew: "He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed."

I've spent the best part of 50 years gazing into the theological abyss which opens up beneath these words in Isaiah 53 - but it is not an abyss of despairing darkness or blank, bleak silence. The Cross is an abyss in which "we hear the plunge of lead into fathomless depths." And so today, at different times, I sit and will sit, before the Cross, and think of all that it means for Jesus, the Son of Man and Son of God, to be crucified in a world like this.

O Cross that liftest up my head,

     I dare not ask to fly from thee;

I lay in dust life's glory dead,

And from the ground there blossoms red

     Life that shall endless be.

 

 

Holy Week Images of the Cross. Tuesday. The Cross is God's negation of all other negations of life.

 

 Amongst the anguish and debris of the Twin Towers, two broken girders stand in cruciform lament. This is the Cross emerging from the wreckage of human suffering, bearing witness to the destructive powers of a cosmos in chaos.

Holy Week is the time when sin can no longer be trivialised, when violence is confronted for what it is, and when hatred is seen to unleash the destructive anger whose end is death and whose means is the murder of the other. Christian theology sees in the Cross the mystery of iniquity and the greater mystery of an eternal love which renders all evil and all destructive powers penultimate. 

"In the cross of Christ I glory towr'ing oe'r the wrecks of time.." can never be a triumphalist escapism from the wreckage of human life and the wasting of Creation that are the realities of our global history and our economic, cultural, military and technological adventures. Instead, we glory in the Cross as those who know such evil, sin, iniquity, what Paul called the principalities and powers, to be defeated by the self-giving love and searing holiness in judgement of the God whose Creation is defaced and defiled by all our ancient hatreds, incurable covetousness, territorial and materialist empire building, and by the infused and cherished divisions and fears, hatreds and enmities of a grace-averse world.

We glory in the cross because "having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacke of them, triumphing over them by the cross." (Col 2.14) Earlier Paul explained, "For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things on earth or things in heaven,  by making peace through his blood shed on the cross." (Col 1.19-20)

Holy Week is the time to reflect on how violence spawns violence, hatred enacted provokes hatred as vengeance, in an upward spiral of destruction ever more creative in its lethal intent. The Cross is God's NO! The Cross is God's negation of all other negations of life. The Cross is, as Paul said elsewhere, the place where "in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself."

 

Holy Week: Images of the Cross - Monday

The woodcut prints of Eric Gill are some of the most carefully crafted and imaginative pieces of religious art. The simplicity and contrast of black and white, dark and light make the image stark but then with a softness of line giving shape to the human body.

The presence of two young people walking behind is deeply resonant of discipleship and the wonder and curiosity that every disciple feels since those first words of Jesus to two earlier followers who asked Jesus "Where do you live?". And he said, "Come and see."

Gill made many different prints of the Passion, but this small early print has the kind of immediacy and uncomplicated appeal that is stripped down gospel. The Simon of Cyrene figure in the middle stands tallest but does not dominate; the bowed Christ under the heavy crossbeam, head radiated with cruciform light as cross is superimposed upon cross, seems nevertheless unbowed in purpose; the taller child with the staff is on a holy walk behind, and the smaller child obscures the hand of his friend; and at the exact centre of the image the hand of the Cyrenian lifting the weight from the back of Jesus. 

At the start of Holy Week, this picture is a contradiction of the tradition which has us sing in the first line of the great Passion hymn, Alone Thou goest forth O Lord. And yet. There is for Jesus, the Son of the Father, an encroaching loneliness that will eventually leave him alone and isolated, not only from the support and company of other people, but cut off from the source of life itself. "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"

The cry of dereliction is at times too painful to bear even the reading of it in the Gospel, too theologically devastating to be analysed or deconstructed. That great reverberating cry of the anguish of God will come later than the scene in Gill's print. To read Abelard's great hymn while contemplating Gill's more humane episode of the Passion, is to ponder what Paul meant; "He who knew no sin was made sin, that we might become the righteousness of God...."

1 Alone thou goest forth, O Lord,
in sacrifice to die;
is this thy sorrow naught to us
who pass unheeding by?

2 Our sins, not thine, thou bearest, Lord;
make us thy sorrow feel,
till through our pity and our shame
love answers love's appeal.

3 This is earth's darkest hour,
but thou dost light and life restore;
then let all praise be given thee
who livest evermore!

4 Give us compassion for thee, Lord,
that, as we share this hour,
thy cross may bring us to thy joy
and resurrection power.

"Self-congratulation of a good photo...or losing the self in uncomplicated attentiveness..."

Yesterday the haar made Westhill and Aberdeen cold, grey and decidedly unspringlike. So we headed inland towards the Highlands, through Banchory, Aboyne, Ballater and out to Braemar. By 11.00 the sun was breaking through at Braemar and then the skies cleared and they were a deep blue, by which I mean the kind of blue you feel you could fly into forever. On the way we saw a red kite patrolling its borders, two swans reflected on the water along with the snow brushed hills and silver birch drapery, and high in the sky a long trailing skein of geese heading home.

I have become very fond of my small Sony camera, now 5 years old, and a much used gift from Sheila for my 60th birthday. It doesn't do all the technically clever things more expensive and more up to date technology achieves. But I resist the latest camera, not as a luddite or technophobe, but because I enjoy capturing a good photograph with a good enough camera - and my wee sony is good enough. 

Yesterday I could have stopped the car and tried to get a photo of the red kite, the swan loch reflection, the geese against a blue sky. What I have is the memory of those moments of heart magic. To stop and take a photo would be to have merely the memory of losing the real gift of attentive joy in order to capture the digital image of those lost moments of true wonder, praise and gladness.

Yes - the swans on the loch, with snow draped mountains and elegantly drooping silver birch would have looked great on the computer screen, and on Facebook. But I would have chosen the self-congratulation of a good photo over the losing of the self in uncomplicated attentiveness and presence to the beauty that comes as gift that cannot be captured, and as summons which cannot be ignored; what C S Lewis called, surprised by joy. 

The last photo, of "swift rushing water cool and clear" was a reminder of the ever changing movement of God, reflecting light, refreshing the spirit and touching with the wound of grace those places within us crying out for renewal.

When words like "Incentivising" are "Scarifying."

Our neighbour has a severely disabled son who suffers from a chronic degenerative condition and lives alone some distance away. She spends 10 hours 6 or 7 days a week caring for and being with her son, the kind of commitment that leaves little time in life for much else.  She doesn't complain, she does get very tired, but she is unremitting in her efforts to make sure her son's life is as comfortable and supported as possible, as humanly possible. And that of course is the only limit - what is humanly possible for one carer looking after someone who needs long term care for long periods of each day.

I mention this because cuts to welfare benefits for disabled people, in the name of austerity, remains a first line policy of the Conservative Governement. The latest cut is to the Employment and Support Allowance reducing by £30 the amount payable to support disabled people. The ESA was designed for two good reasons; to support disabled people who are unable to work, and to pay for personalised support so that those who can work are helped to do so. The reasons for the cuts are quite straightforward, and lack the imagination, compassion and social responsibility which ought to be evident in good government. In laying out the arguments for these cuts ESA is defined as a "passive" benefit which does not "incentivise" those who are unable to work to find work.

So the frontline argument is not reducing the deficit; the reason is not that austerity is an unfortunate but unavoidable necessity. No, the intention is to incentivise disabled people to work. One of the lasting legacies of this Government may be the invention of ugly words to screen out the moral dubiousness of its proposals and policies. "Incentivise" - how does that differ from compel, force, manipulate, bully, all of which are ways of incentivising people to do what the person who holds the power wants them to do? 

All of this was going through my mind as I was doing my neighbour's garden yesterday; well actually doing our gardens (plural) since I am now honorary looker after of her garden so that's one thing less she needs to bother about. I want to incentivise her to look after her son without feeling bad about the state of her garden. I want to incentivise her to go on doing what she does with a selflessness and determination this Government does nothing to recognise, reward or support. I am incentivised to prune apple trees, dig over the front garden and plant bedding plants and shrubs and apply mulch. I am incentivised to paint her fence. I am incentivised to scarify her lawn.

Now there's a word replete with ambiguity, "scarify". This Government is incentivised to scarify the vulnerable and to compel the disabled to find work by reducing their financial support. Or to use the word another way, there is a scarifying lack of moral imagination, human empathy and personal integrity in politicians who even tolerate such a proposal let alone dress it up in the rhetoric of board rooms where everyone is rich, powerful and blind to the ethical vacuity of their own euphemisms.

Incentivise indeed! Many, many disabled people could teach those same politicians, civil servants and accountants of the nations resources a thing or two about incentives, life achievements, overcoming obstacles, and living as independently as circumstances allow. Such remarkable people do not need incentivising, they simply need to be valued, encouraged and treated as full members of our society whose contribution to our community is not sommensurate with whatever money it takes for their support and care.

On Loving God with the Mind, and the Importance of Dogmatics in Christian Thought and Growth.

In the introductory description of a new series of Studies in Reformed Dogmatics comes this superb description of what Dogmatics is for, and why it is an important discipline within the ongoing life of the Christian Church.

"The source of dogmatics is Holy Scripture, its scope is the summing up of all things in Jesus Christ, its setting is the communion of the saints, and its end is the conversion, consolation, and instruction of creaturely wayfarers in the  knowledge and love of the triune God until that knowledge and love is consummated in the beatific vision."

I could happily write an entire post on this description, but I'm content to allow this rich, rhythmic sentence to make its own way into our minds and hearts. Loving God with the mind and the understanding is far too often dismissed, as if somehow the God who gave us minds might disapprove of the use of these same minds in the pursuit of God, truth and the wisdom to live an obedient, grateful and graced life.