Living Wittily

Post Brexit: the Gospel's scandalously subversive policies of doing good to those who hate and overcoming evil with good

Hate crimes are on the increase since the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. This according to several independent monitoring groups, and a swathe of anecdotal and recorded incidents broadcast on social media. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the increased outbreaks of verbal and physical abuse, and public hostility towards immigrants, people of other faiths, and people of colour, is directly related to the use of alarmist images and demeaning slogans during the campaign by certain sections of the Leave campaign. It goes without saying, but it is important to say nevertheless, that such despicable behaviour and hostile treatment of others is absolutely unacceptable to the overhwelming majority of those who voted in the Referendum. Those who voted, whether Remain or Leave, did so for many different reasons, and the underlying motivations are psychologically complex, socially complicated and reflect politically varied responses to the economic, national and cultural realities of our relations with Europe.

Nevertheless. Once the rhetoric of rejection and the objectification of others as a problem has been legitimated in political posturing, it is unsurprising that some of those who hold such views will begin to target minority groups and label them a problem, a threat and an unwelcome presence. That is what has been happening in various cities and towns since last Friday's "vistory" for Leave. As a Christian, who voted Remain, I reflect on a campaign that from both sides has been brutal, ruthless, pervasively dishonest, and  sloganised at the cost of substance and evidence. The lack of evidence based argument, indeed at times the deliberate avoidance of such reflective patience and critique, has meant that in the aftermoath many people still only justify their decision by appeal to those slogans, sound bytes and gut feeling reactions embedded in their personal experience and private worldview.

And as a Christian reflecting on all that I have a number of questions, for myself, for my fellow citizens and especially for those who will exploit the lowering of our standards of discourse and use that as a legitimation of hatred, rejection and discrimination against those "others" who are not "us". And as a Christian one of the most pressing questions will be about how in a society where hate crimes are increasing, the followers of Jesus can be just as vocal, public and visbly performative of acts of love, peace, reconciliation and welcome. Whichever way each Christian has voted, there is a Kingdom obligation to be a people of welcome, love, peace and conciliation.

During the Referendum campaign there were statements made, images used, arguments and slogans thrown around without regard to who they hurt or what toxins they released into an atmosphere volatile with fear, uncertainty and amongst many, a determined closing of the ears to voices different from their own. These spores of toxic rhetoric are now infecting our environment. It is now less safe for immigrant workers, people of colour, and any number of "others", to move freely and live without fear amongst us. That is a disgrace. By which I mean as a Christian, that is such an affront to the God I believe in I will not tolerate it, and I will act in ways opposite to that.

Because some have taken the Leave decision as a mandate to reject, abuse and unfriend (literally as well as on FB), it becomes important that Christians take the Gospel as their mandate and welcome, affirm and befriend those who are now afraid, feeling unwelcome, and uncertain both of their future and of their place amongst us. Gestures of welcome such as shared meals, solidarity and public befriending of those whose path crosses our own, defending those ill-treated and ill-spoken to, prayers explicit and specific for people, their families and their struggles to settle amongst us.

I guess what I am saying is - listen carefully, hear God's call in Christ the Crucified to confront hate crimes with love gifts, hear the divine imperative to retaliate against destructive words and actions with redemptive words and gestures, and obey the Gospel's scandalously subversive policies of doing good to those who hate and overcoming evil with good.    

Speaking truth to power - But what happens if power isn't listening, or says "Get stuffed!!"

I am reading a commmentary on Exodus by Peter Enns. What makes it interesting is the way he takes this ancient text and allows it to speak, rather than telling us, and the text, what it does mean, or should mean. The story of Israel in bondage to Pharaoh is a story of slavery and sovereignty, of disempowerment for the purposes of State and economy. People become resources, humans become labour units, value is located in productivity not dignity, and freedom a threat to the constraints of the product and the power of the Pharaoh - and Pharaoh is a concept familiar to all people at all times whose freedom is held by the hands of unregulated power.

Chapter 1 of Exodus is about a people at risk of oppression and life threatening policies. In this chapter God is incidental, all but absent. God neither speaks nor acts, but is referred to obliquely as at best marginal to the main action. The focus is a people ground down into lives of toil and productivity for the empire, their future threatened and their status as the people of God a claim rendered ludicrous by their powerless ,ness and humiliation.

But even in this first chapter, God is the Creator who saves; and it is indeed, God who will deliver. Pharaoh thinks he is domesticating slaves; actually he is on a collision course with God. The God of Exodus is the same God of Genesis - who creates, calls and judges. The God of Creation is the God of Salvation. The present experience of slavery is connected in the purpose of God to creation, call and judgment. God is therefore in the wings, not absent from the theatre. By late in chapter 2 God will begin to move centre stage, where Pharaoh has already staked his claim as the star of the cosmic show.

I'm reading this commentary in the midst and mess of the EU Referendum, all the little would be pharaoh's squabbling over the centre stage. I find it reassuring, though no less disturbing, that all those claimants are at best penultimates and secondary movers; God is the ultimate and prime mover in human history. Which doesn't mean an irresponsible shoulder shrugging que sera, sera, but an inner call to align with those whom God privileges. And from Exodus to Exile to Bethlehem, Calvary and beyond an empty tomb, that has been with the powerless, oppressed, poor and voiceless people.

The Chosen. One of the Great 20th Century Novels

There are novels which once read become part of the way you think and look at the world. The story draws you in, you become identified with the characters and plot, you slowly invest yourself in the narrative flow and in the outcome and resolution of the plot. Chaim Potok's The Chosen is one such novel in my own life. I read it in 1974, on my way to University on University Avenue in Glasgow. I was in the upstairs deck of a double decker bus, it was dreich and wet and nearly dark, and I was lost in that first chapter about the baseball game and how an enmity turned into a friendship between two boys from very different Jewish traditions, living in Brooklyn in the 1940's.

I've re-read The Chosen several times since, and saw the movie which had Rod Steiger as the Rebbe and a cameo by Potok as a Talmud Professor. If you've never read it, do yourself a favour and do so, and the sequel The Promise which continues the story of the two friends, Danny Saunders and Reuven Malters.

Here are a number of reasons why I think this is a wonderful novel, and transformative of the way we look at the world

This is the story of a friendship. Two 15 year old students become friends after they have a serious confrontation in a baseball game, injected with religious hostility between two different ways of being Jewish. Reuven's father is a professor of Jewish studies, expert in historical criticism, liberal in his methods and conclusions, but nonetheless devoted to Talmud and Torah as the foundation of his people's identity. Danny's father is the Rebbe of a local Hasidic sect, a powerful and charismatic religious leader of conservative and even reactionary views about Talmud, and the Messiah the hope of Israel. Through the two friends, these two cultures clash, and the friendship is threatened by the collision of two worlds.

Throughout the story Talmud, the text, has the significance of a pervasive character, which takes on a life of its own in the studies, discussions and collision of ideas as Jewish faith either accommodates to or confronts the modern world. The historical critical methods call in question the fixed integrity of the text and look for meaning through scientific research and text critical methods. The vast traditional oral and written commentaries provide the given options for the conservative Talmudists of the Hasidic community. The confrontation of these approaches to Talmudic text at several places is a revelation of the piety, passion and devotion of both traditions to the text, and these are embodied in the two friends, and their fathers. 

A major theme of the novel is silence. The use of silence as a formative imposition on Danny by his father the Rebbe, the enforced silence between the friends by the Rebbe's reaction to the foundation of the State of Israel, but also the times of silence for healing, grieving, listening both to the world and to others. In libraries the two friends find a place to meet and talk and think; not so much silence as a congenial place for listening, another major theme woven throughout the story.

The novel begins with an eye injury, and then time in a hospital ward where others have eye problems. All the main characters have spectacles, and different eye problems, whether from lack of sleep, tension headaches, overwork in studying and writing, and these background references are subtly suggestive in the accounts of reading and studying Talmud, Danny's feverish study of Freud, and also in the background a refrain from the start of the book by an eye-injured boxer that the world is cock-eyed.

These and other elements of Potok's novel are interlaced with the main theme of friendship and its tensions, and the place of religion in the modern world. That the friendship survives and indeed flourishes points to the possibility of religious accommodation, mutual respect and an alternative to the need to negate the other in order to secure one's own identity.

I'm reading a number of Potok's novels again. And being made aware of the significant nudges still felt in the reading. The Palestine and Israeli conflict and the exclusion of Torah from the political and civil legislation of Israel; the dangers of both fundamentalism and of scientific criticism when they claim a monopoly of authority, methodology and interpretive validity; the importance of the sacred text in a religious tradition, and its capacity to be a power for enlightenment or ignorance, or its capacity to bring together or divide. This is a novel written in 1966 - 50 years later it still has prophetic echoes.

When Failures of Justice Twice Victimise the Victims, and Make Justice Itself an Illusion

I am troubled by the decision not to press charges in the MI6 Rendition case. No one is denying that two couples were sent to Libya. The torture allegations have no been disproven. The evidence of communication between British Intelligence and Libya is extant. And there is no suggestion of clean hands or non-involvement. The question is about the nature of the involvement and the capacity of available evidence to stand up in court.

That the United Kingdom through either its Government, its Intelligence Services, or a combination of both, are implicated and found at the scene is morally disgusting. Rendition is a process that bypasses the judicial system and neutralises all claims to human rights. It should never happen from the territory of a country that is a signatory of the UNDHR.

This news comes when it is also confirmed that the Police in Northern Ireland colluded in the murder of six Catholics in a pub in Loughinisland 22 years ago. Once again it is already suggested the time that has elapsed will make it difficult to achieve conviction of those repsonsible. 

In the aftermath of Hillsborough, and the growing unease of what happened with police and miners during the strike confrontations, there is an accelerating devaluation of the integrity and trustworthiness of policing and security institutions in our country. Right at the top, whether MI6, The Met, or wider police authorities, there is a recurring theme of failed public responsibility, and hard to achieve public accountability. More and more cases of corruption, cover-up, career protection, collusion with criminality, culpable inaction ranging from incompetence to deliberate delay to sabotage evidence, - such revelations undermine the trust and reliability essential to good policing, public confidence in the judiciary, and the place of the United Kingdom on the global ethics scale of international justice.

The public good can never be served by its own core values subverted for the purposes of, well, serving the public good. At that stage the word good is itself misleading - serving the public interest? - serving the public by deceiving? Or as was said in the recent Line of Duty drama series. " I want justice and I'm prepared to commit injustice to have it." That way lies the erosion of all that makes a society healthy, robust in the face of evil, hate and violence, and actually worth preserving in the first place. That I pay taxes to a Government, whose politicians and intelligence services reek of plane fuel from rendition trips, is something that fills me with, I use both words advisedly, righteous indignation.   

In defence of the conservation of words, old and new.

Reading a review of Landmarks, by Robert Macfalane, by the excellent essayist Alan Jacobs, I came across a lexical controversy I had forgotten. Jacobs who is an expert in words and reading, brought it back to mind. By the way when I say an "expert in words and reading" I am not being merely rhetorical or spouting ill-considered exaggeration, as if the same could not be said of every good writer. Alan Jacobs has written important work on A Theology of Reading, and The Distracted Reader, as well as numerous volumes of essays known for their literary range, psychological astuteness, theological and philosophical awareness and, as important as each of these, their ability to educate both intellect and heart.

Here is an extract from the review:

"Near the outset of Landmarks, Macfarlane describes a controversy that emerged only at the beginning of 2015, though it centered on something that happened in 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary appeared:

A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow. The words introduced to the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player and voice-mail.

A representative of the press explained the ratonale for this decision: " 'When you look back at older versions of dictionaries, there were lots of examples of flowers for instance … that was because many children lived in semi-rural environments and saw the seasons. Nowadays, the environment has changed." A number of writers, including Macfarlane, protested this change, and one of them, the poet Andrew Motion, commented with some heat: "Their defence—that lots of children have no experience of the countryside—is ridiculous. Dictionaries exist to extend our knowledge, as much (or more) as they do to confirm what we already know or half-know."

Jacobs goes on to point out that the important issue at stake isn't the retention of the words in the dictionary, but the loss of knowledge, experience and awareness that underlies the redundancy and then excision of words from the language of ordinary experience. My reasons for thinking more about this go deeper still. The learning of language, and the associated tasks of education, interpretation, writing and communication, are each dependent on the availability and currency of words. If words are removed from use then the world is reconfigured around their absence, and shaped into the future by the presence, and often the aggressive presence, of new words, many of them related, as indicated in the quote above, to technology and IT.

It is the work of people like Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin, Nan Shepherd, three of the best British nature writers of the past century, to chronicle the surrounding natural world, to conserve the richness of language and naming, to describe what others may not have the opportunity or inclination to see, and thus to keep our semantic currency rich in traditions local and parochial, and therefore capable of maintaining the richly woven fabric of description and meaning that such humane writing preserves. The idea that we could ever think, let alone make lexical and publishing policy of key reference texts, on the assumption that a child does not need a description of an acorn because they may never see one or come across the word, is one that should alert a culture awash with technologisms to the dehumanising effects of language culling.

The Ugliness of Wasted Books and the Beauty of Worn Books

Yes, I do. I mark my own books, with a system I've used since University and College days. Always in pencil, and books I know I will want to revisit, consult, read again, and books I want to review, precis and take notes from. There is a discipline close to an art form to marking up a text that has been studied, read closely and deeply, listened to and heard. Personal notes in a personally owned book are like footprints left on the journey, or guideposts left as aids for the next time we pass on this particular path.

And that's the thing. Personal notes in a personally owned book. The first two photos on this post are of books in the University Library in Aberdeen. Disfigured, vandalised, rendered all but unreadable by anyone coming after the perpetrated horrors of ink, highlights and addiction to underlining. The readers who did this, students or staff, have stolen the property of the library as surely as if they had shoved the books up their jumpers and sauntered out into the sunshine carrying, irony multiplied, books about the providence of God! Paul Helm's lucid survey of this difficult yet comforting doctrine about the God who sees and foresees, is an unreadable mess of ink from pens leaned on so hard that the pages are indented on the back as well as defaced on the print side. The use of liquid ink makes it even worse as the ink bleeds through to obscure the print behind.

It's an interesting, and surprisingly depressing exercise to ask what goes on in the mind of a person who takes a book from the shelves which is the property of all students, and feels free to lay it waste as an aid to their education. Education, that process that seeks to make us more informed, wise, responsible, civil, equipped for life in society, open to new ideas and willing to question our old ones. How do you educate people to not destroy the means of education? Or how can you alert potential readers to the privilege, gift, responsibility and opportunity that is a library, and that all that richness and possibility depends on the integrity and stewardship of the hundreds of thousands of volumes held in trust for the purposes of humane learning? And that's the other word, trust. These photos are accurate diagrams of broken trust; they are blueprints of a selfishness that unless converted or checked, will carry on into the world after graduation, as an assumed entitlement to take rather than give, possess rather than share, lay waste whatever can be consumed and steal whatever they want enough to have, but don't want enough to pay for.

Now this picture is different. These are two dilapidated, almost disbound books sitting a couple of feet from each other on the shelves. They are surprisingly unmarked by readers, of whom there have been hundreds. Bultmann on John's Gospel and Carson on John's Gospel. Goodness! For those not familiar with New Testament Studies, the approach of these two scholars could not be more different - almost all they have in common is the title, and it is a given! The issue slips inside have been replaced countless times; they have been consulted, read, studied, plundered, referred to, for years. They should really be sent to be rebound, and no doubt some time they will. But there is a noble shabbiness in such well used books, and honourable dilapidation of burst spines, bumped corners and frayed hinges.

If there was a library sale tomorrow, I'd buy these. They are witnesses to the discipline of study and the durability of classic works. Because different as they are, Bultmann on John is a classic of 20th Century exegesis, famously described as a volume in which Bultmann asked all the right questions and gave mostly the wrong answers. And Carson represents a tradition of conservative scholarship, alongside Leon Morris, which takes the historicity and theological integrity of John with great seriousness. I am a bibliophile, and few sights are more satisfying than books which have enriched generations of students, and have the wear and tear to prove it. There are many books on those shelves, some as old as these, which have hardly been disturbed since acquisition - that doesn't make them worthless or useless. But these books, and others like them, they carry the fingerprints of many readers, the bindings are shaken and split, but their worn shabbiness has its own poignant beauty.

The Word "Just" and the Slow Drip, Drip, Drip of Reductionism.

At the Community Cafe talking with a group who came in for the scones - as you do - they are very fine scones. And they aren't the size, or the weight, of curling stones. One of those friends had retired from Wimpey Houses, where he had been as he phrased it, just a humble joiner. Which was his hook line to say, "Like Jesus."

Those who know me will be aware I have conducted a long term campaign, gentle but persistent, against the adverbial use of "just". Yes I know, it is overused and bankrupt and redundant when used in prayers as a semantic breathing space to keep the words flowing as if God might interrupt in any space we leave. But I am also referring to that use of the word which is self-diminishing or other-diminishing. "I am just a whatever" is a form of self-deprecation that can become a habit, and is based on making comparisons between what we are and what we, or others, expect us or wish us to be.

Now in fairness my new joiner friend wasn't the least bit bothered by his use of the word; in fact he was perfectly content with being a joiner, indeed a ship's carpenter which is the Premier League of joiners. But the conversation set me off thinking about the consequences on our view of ourselves, or of another person, when that word "just" is used in the description. The long slow drip, drip, drip of reductionism, the danger of habit growing into mindset, as I compare who I am with who others are, their status and mine, their gifts and mine, their worth and mine. I guess none of us set out to think that way; and indeed many of us don't consciously think that way, though we often do unconsciously. And yet.

It's that niggling "and yet" that has turned me into someone who can occasionally sound rude when I correct mid-conversation by gently asking the word "just" to be dropped, along with its downward pulling ballast. And I do that as a Christian, and for reasons of Christian pastoral understanding. Paul's great charter of liberty, implies as much. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." No room for a diminishing "just" in that description of the new community that is the body of Christ; no patience with any suggestion someone is just a Greek not a Jew, just a slave not free, just a woman not a man.

Then there's that long narrative metaphor of the body in Corinthians, where Paul has fun imagining all kinds of distortions and incongruities when any part of the body becomes self-important at the expense of the other parts. The whole passage is about the relative worth of each part of the body to the rest. None is all important and none is disposable; each is required and all are needed; any assumed hierarchy of importance that looks down on other parts as "just" a toe, ear, appendix or whatever is, well, just wrong!

To those of Pharisaic mind, those who think otherwise are just sinners; a woman with an alabaster flask saying thank you with attention grabbing extravagance is just an embarrassment; a man mad with grief or fear or rage or these and many other destructive and addictive urges is just mad Legion; and that woman in bed with the wrong man was just an adulteress. And the scandal of each of these stories is that nowhere in their telling, can the word "just" ever be heard on the lips of Jesus.

So as a follower of Jesus, part of my continuing education is to identify the word "just" in my own speaking, or in my inner attitude to others, and correct it. And yes, as a trait of pastoral attentiveness to others, to hear and even more gently correct the stated or implied "just" in the telling of their story. In nearly all cases the diminishing adverb "just" devalues, betrays comparisons of worth and status, and generally damns with faint praise. The Gospel on the other hand is the good news that in Christ all such comparisons are redundant, and personal worth indexed to a love both cruciform and transforming.

When the Holy Spirit Vetos Our Negativity

While on holiday in Whitby we visited the famous St mary's Church which sits beside the ruined abbey, on the exposed headland. This is a fascinating building, with box pews, the best positioned and best appointed were family owned, and a church maid was paid to keep them clean and free from soot and dust from one sunday to the next.

The architectural furnishings reinforced those social divisions, and remain monuments to social arrangements with which the church has too long colluded. Those boxed pews were so high it is unlikely anyone of smaller stature would see much beyond them, and so enclosed that it was possible to be in the house of God in your own wee room, not inconvenienced by the visible presence of other human beings. The high pulpit meant the preacher could at least see the heads of the congregation, but how there could ever be a meeting of hearts, or anything like human communication across the chasms of social convention, architectural exclusion zones, and rhetorical remoteness is hard to imagine. The one positive surprise was the notice on the pulpit about the hearing tubes and the Rector's wife. The idea of the Rector's wife having her personal loop system 200 years ago is an early recognition of inclusion, an ironic gesture before its time, of building modification to accommodate those with disabilities, albeit a privileged member of the congregation.

Now, with the rapid decline of Christian influence in society the church, established or not, is having to come to terms with a different social context which will require a different configuration of Chrstian community, and a radical change in how Christians understand mission, the gospel and the world in which that mission and that gospel are to be embodied, proclaimed and made present. Sitting in that old church, established, respectable, visited by tourists out of curiosity, viewed as a museum of a faith threatened with extinction in the polls and comments of our data fascinated culture, and already with the smell and feel of a long history of disengagement, I felt both poignancy and the slip towards acceptance, resignation and inner adjustment to anticipated loss.

But just as quickly I felt the no of the Holy Spirit, that inner defiance of observed realities that we call faith, trust in a deeper and more enduring reality which is the life and gift and activity of God. The work of the Holy Spirit in guiding, enabling and driving the mission of the church, convicting the world of sin and its own brokenness, as creator and guardian of creation in a world trashed and rubbished by our consumerist obsessions, and as the transforming gift of God in Christ calling and creating community in the Kingdom of God - that work of God is to be prayed for, and our lives to be given to God, that he may bring to completion the work he has started in those leaven-communities of believers, called to be salt and sent to be light.