Living Wittily

Julian of Norwich; Truth for a Time of Foreshortened Hopes

The Journalist and writer Philip Toynbee once wrote that books were his royal road to God. In his second volume of published Journals, End of a Journey,  he regularly commented on his reading of Julian of Norwich's astonishing book Revelation of Divine Love. For much of that Journal Toynbee was journeying through illness, which eventually he discovered would be terminal. So his reading of Julian became an inner conversation about divine love, human suffering, and the dilemma of the benevolent purposes of God being at odds with much of the evidence of a broken world, and his own experience of foreshortened hopes. By the time the reader finishes Toynbee's Journal they know that he is approaching the end of his own journey. The tone has become resigned in a hopeful kind of way, as he holds on to the theological optimism and spiritual assurance of this 14th Century Anchoress, quoting phrases and sentences, and writing his own reflections, which sometimes sound like a gentle preaching to his own tremulous heart, oscillating between hope and sadness.

Last week there was a BBC4 documentary on Julian's Revelation: The Search for the Lost Manuscript of Julian of Norwich. It will be on Iplayer for a few weeks and is worth the watching. That said there's a fair amount of speculation and gap filling with precious little hard evidence, and far too much anachronism about Julian the proto feminist, or medieval suffragette! But that aside the programme provided a well narrated story of how Julian, a woman, wrote the first book by a woman, and in the English vernacular, and a book of theology, and a book of radical and dangerously novel theology by the standards of Medieval Catholicism. Julian lived in a dangerous age, and one which was fatally intolerant of theological novelty. 

I was especially pleased to see that Grace Warrack got a good mention and justice was done to her role in bringing Julian's book into circulation. Grand daughter of a Wee Free minister, she spent weeks in the British Library copying out by hand the entire 17th Century manuscript, and the  persuaded Methuen to publish it. The Manuscript she used, and her own notes provide much of the scaffolding for later translations and critical editions. Imagine - a strict Scottish Presbyterian, in London to resurrect a theological book, written by a 14th Century medieval Catholic mystic whose theology was a galaxy or two to the left of Scottish Presbyterian Calvinism and Medieval Catholic dogma.

I first read and wrote about Julian's Revelation in 1980 and since then have continued to read, study and teach the significance of a book that speaks into the darkest corners of existence words that radiate with hopeful trust and daring, risk-taking prayers. Her most famous line remains an inspiration which seems so unreal and contradicted by the realities of a world at once brutal and beautiful; but they are words that are defiant of the cynicism and despairing desperation of a world afraid of the very terrors human beings, God's creatures, create and bring on each other. "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well...."

I have several copies of the Showings, or Revelation. I doubt a year goes by without further reading, and thinking through the theological conundrums Julian takes on - the meaning of Christ's death, the blessedness of creation, sin as nothing at all and yet as cause of divine suffering, God as mother, hell as an ambiguity and mystery on which no one should pontificate, the great eschatological act of God by which God's justice and love can and will be satisfied, beyond our knowing, perhaps even beyond our hoping for God is greater than even our wildest hopes.

T S Eliot brings Little Gidding, his fourth quartet, to a close with a climactic vision of Julian's hopefulness for a redeemed creation. He too is reticent, allergic to dogmatic certainties which dissolve mystery into doctrinal constraints, or worse, petrify living truth into static propositions:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

 

 

 

 

The Lapidary Work of the Sea - and of God in Our Lives.

Amongst my favourite places in Scotland is Inverbervie bay. We first holidayed near this part of the Scottish coast in 1980 and ever since Inverbervie and St Cyrus are special places to walk, talk and watch the world around. This morning we went down to Inverbervie and walked from there to Gourdon and back. Pleasant sunshine, enough cloud to keep it cool, and still enough of the summer flowers to make it a walk with colour and a sense of life all around.

As always it starts with a walk along the beach, steeply shelved and with cobbles and pebbles so lovely there are signs telling folk not to steal them! The sound of the waves unfolding and collapsing in a muted crash is one of my favourite sounds. I've walked here in every season, sat in the car in howling gales and lashing rain and even in a blizzard, and never tire of the sound of the sea in this bay. But it's the cobbles that make it so special for me. The mile of beach covered is covered with these smoothed stones, multi-coloured, and with all kinds of geological genealogies traceable in their shapes and substance.

There is something beautiful, accomplished, and spiritually suggestive about stones worn smooth over decades, maybe centuries. The lapidary friction of movement, of external forces of wind, water and other rocks, gradually give shape and character to these accidental rocks, which in all their time and movement, are gradually changing towards a uniqueness of form, colour, weight and shape.

Often I've wondered if all the circumstances and encounters of our lives, the frictions and the movements, through storm forced crashings of grief and loss, and the slow grinding work that is building and maintaining the loves of our lives, and the gradual finding of our place on the beach, juxtaposed with all those other different and unique people who create and provide our life context - yes, I often wonder if the lapidary movements of the sea have their equivalents in this equally demanding lapidary process we call living, and loving, and giving, and growing.

Being a Christian means being changed and being willing to go on changing. Loving and forgiving, crying and laughing, being broken and shaped and re-formed, taking on the shape that all of life's experiences gently impose on the person we are and the person we are becoming. When Paul talks about becoming mature in Christ, of being a new creation, of having the mind of Christ, of each of us being called to lives of faith, hope and love, he's using a spiritual vocabulary that describes the work of the Holy Spirit. And the grinding and crunching of rock on rock, the push and pull of tide, the endless movements, collisions and repositionings, these are all part of being conformed to Christ, transformed with the patient slowness and gentle power of a love that is as vast as any ocean. So I look on these cobbles as works of art, each one an accomplished artefact, all of them different, and each of them carrying in shape, colour and size something of the narrative of the sea, and each one telling the story of their own time and place, and something of how they have come to be here, now, just as they are. 

Those Creative Gaps Between Trust and Risk

Earlier this week I was conducting the funeral service for one of those mythical “old ladies” who sits in the back seat of the church, and to whom in years past ministers were encouraged to preach. The ridiculous idea being that they indicated the accessibility level at which to aim. Patronising nonsense of course, because some of the finest theologians I know, and some of the most mature wise human beings it’s been my privilege to meet, inhabited (and still inhabit) those back seats!

And the woman whose funeral I took this week was one of those theologians; wise, experienced, faith simple and strong, but a faith tested in the hard places and tough times of a long life. She was a single mum in the early 1950's when there were precious few benefits and safety nets; she rented a two up and two down, converted the front room, and opened a corner shop open all hours; learned to drive and got an old Bedford van, became the taxi and supporter in chief for the local football team, and in the late early 60's was road manager for a couple of Manchester pop groups.

And there's more - but that's enough to rebuke the stereotypes. In an age impatient with age, and a society where being old is getting harder to be, maybe it’s those old women and men at the back of the church who can teach us a thing or two about what’s what in life. Edith’s favourite word was “trust”, followed closely by “risk”. And a favourite verse: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your paths.”

Living Wittily means learning to listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully

It's been some weeks since I was reularly posting here. Various reasons for this amongst them a short sabbatical from blogging - I have been at it for 9 years! It isn't that the world has become less interesting, or that there is nothing to be said or written about that same world in all its complexity, tragedy, potential and possible futures. More a sense that, life on this planet is beginning to feel like being in the passenger seat of a car with a driver hell bent on showing off how many risks he can take without crashing!

The epigraph of this blog is taken from the script of the play A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt. Living Wittily is my way of describing that wit and wisdom that comes from trying to see the world from a Christian perspective. To love God with our minds, is to think about things always with God on the horizon, to think Christianly, and to be humble enough to admit that thinking Christianly is neither straightforward nor easily discerned. Not least because Christians think differently, and in their differences of history and context come at questions of theology, ethics, politics, economics, relationships and most other important matters, from their particular perspective, speaking out of their story, and with their limited vision and their unique experience. And their perspective, story, vision and experience are not mine - though if I listen attentively, learn humbly, and consider carefully, what they bring will enrich and broaden, challenge and correct, many of my unguarded or unexamined assumptions. And out of that comes what makes our human existence and experience more humane, and I would argue, more Christian.

That's why Living Wittily has to be done in  the tangle of our minds. Wisdom is hard won, the precious deposit of decisions, choices, actions, insights, mistakes, memories, encounters and experiences; wisdom is what is left when we are humble enough to have learned from our lives up to now. So here is that epigraph again - a kind of manifesto of this blog, and a re-engagement with this God-loved, broken, beautiful, frightening and unique world.And that wisdom comes from many sources - as noted above our encounters and conversations, similarities and differences with others; our wrestling with Scripture through the long hours, refusing to let go until we are blessed and have some hint as to the name and nature of God, and some sense of what God requires of us. 

So have a look again at the epigraph at the top of this page: it shows the underlying presupposition of what is written on this blog:

God made the angels to show his splendour - as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds.

The Kind of Commentary that Gives Commentaries a Good Name.

Robin Parry, Lamentations. Two Horizons Commentary on the Old Testament. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010.)

At the very start of this fine book Parry comments on Western culture’s aversion to pain, tragedy and grief. He observes:

“We have been robbed of a vocabulary of grief and we suffer for it. The book of Lamentations accosts us by the wayside as a stranger who offers us an unasked-for, unwanted, and yet priceless gift – the poetry of pain. We would be wise to pay attention.”

Indeed. But it is a difficult book. Not only an alien and ancient text, and with its own exegetical conundrums and textual entanglements. But Lamentations is a howl of pain, exposing its readers to the raw brutality and anguished afterlife of disaster that ruins everything; city, worldview, economy, political structures, faith, society of family, neighbourhood and nations. The result is trauma, a disorientation of the soul, a numbing of the mind, and an emotional life blighted from fruitfulness into wilderness by events that were overwhelming. It is well named, Lamentations, a poetry of pain, recited in the desolating loneliness and emotional agony of lives evacuated of meaning.

It is a hard but necessary read. At least it is necessary if faith is to be adequate to the brutal violence and calculated cruelties of war, terror, and destruction unleashed by those called the enemy, whose hatred is implacable and in whom mercy never took root. In a world where drones deliver death by remote control, and suicide and barrel bombs inflict death and terror, the victims and the bereaved utter their own bewildered, despairing laments. Words, the grammar of the voice, enable reality to be named, even if that reality is tragic beyond reason and is experienced as unassuaged grief, fear and rage.

The book of Lamentations was written to be read, and is to be read so as to be heard. It is a warning of the consequences of enmity let loose with weapons, of hatred equipped with imperial power, of all those acts and activities, attitudes and mind-sets, in which the destruction of the means of life, and the taking of life itself, are each seen as not only acceptable, but by twisted logic or toxic faith, are celebrated as offerings to god, or nation, or race.

Reading Lamentations is an exercise in depth explorations, a willing listening to the human spirit articulating its own shattered hopes. Commentary on the text must involve exegetical care, historical discipline and an alert sense of how poetry, image, theology, and faith are straining at the limits of meaning. So there must also be a further step beyond exegesis, historical context and constructive commentary. It is this further step that makes this commentary a quite exceptional treatment of Lamentations.

The Two Horizons Commentary aims at both traditional exegesis, but supplemented and developed by a series of theological reflections which send out new trajectories for further exploration and application of the text in question. That approach is made to work quite brilliantly in the exposition of this book so laden with sadness, so bewildered in its anguish, so vulnerable in its anger and guilt and loss, and yet, and nevertheless, defiant of giving in to ultimate despair.

The Introduction constructs the context, explores the genre of poetic lamentation, and seeks to show the canonical connections. A fine 10 pages looks at modern attempts to identify and explore the theology of Lamentations, and considers in brief essays “Sin and Punishment in Covenant Context” and “Hope in Covenant Context.” The theological oscillation set up between sin and punishment and hope, and these in the context of an unbreakable Covenant broken, takes us to the very heart of the book. Then for 125 pages Parry moves through the text, using his own translation, opening up the interpretive options, and demonstrating the rich tapestry of words woven together into poems and songs of lament, with occasional glimpses of hoped for recovery, restoration, and perhaps renewal of covenant faithfulness. This first horizon of the text is lucid, packed with interaction with secondary scholarship and making intertextual connections with the wider canon of Scripture. In particular, as brought out in two later sections, the relations of Lamentations to Isaiah 40-55 and to the New Testament.

The second section of the book is 76 pages of Theological Horizons which pick up a wide range of themes and connections which further illumine the text. Taken together, the two horizons fuse into a series of essays of varying length and development. One particular highlight for me was the connections made between Lamentations and Second Isaiah, and the significance of Second Isaiah picking up some of the key themes and in some cases the actual text of Lamentations, and showing how they are reversed. The “no one to comfort” of Lamentations, gives way to the call “Comfort, comfort my people”; the children as casualties of war give way to children being born and rejoicing in return. Lamentations as the cry of victims of anti-Semitic violence, Lamentations and political theology, particularly the critique of empire were further well-made implications for contemporary reflection and action.

Three more substantial pieces are on Lamentations and the Rule of Faith, The Place of Lament in Christian Spirituality and Theodicy and Divine Suffering. Together these reflections climb down into the theological crevasses that split across the human experiences that gave rise to Lamentations; and they provide us with profound reflections which compel us to hear those lamentations with 21^st Century ears, and to pay attention to the peoples of this world for whom the devastation of their cities, the blowing up of their hopes and the tearing down of their cultural identity are real, and now, and just as unforgiveable.

We are in debt to Robin Parry for a commentary that takes such suffering seriously, and has thought about it deeply. His treatment of divine suffering is theologically nuanced, careful but not constrained by those who would foreclose too early on divine suffering as an aspect of God’s willing love. There are a number of good commentaries on Lamentations, including Paul House in the Word Biblical Commentary (twinned with Duane Garrett on Song of Songs), Dobbs-Allsop in the Interpretation series, Leslie Allen’s Pastoral Commentary, A Liturgy of Grief, and Kathleen O’Connor’s Lamentations and the Tears of the World. I’ve used each of these with considerable profit and learning. But this volume by Parry offers more, and due to the format of exegesis and theologically reflective essays, more that is different. This is a commentary, read alongside one or other of the above, that makes Lamentations not only preachable, but important to preach.   

Elie Wiesel, All Rivers run to the sea, and the sea is not filled......

Elie Wiesel has died. This man was a giant of our times, one whose humanity was lumninous with the complementary passions of peace building and resistance to inhumanity. A survivor of Auschwitz, he has spent the long life that was spared in the pursuit of truth telling, moral remembering, peace building and a more humane and humanising view of all human beings regardless of all things whatsoever by which they are different from us. There will be important things written in the obituaries, and as the fruit of his life is harvested in words, memories, tributes and evaluations.

I simply want to tell one story of my encounters with Elie Wiesel through his writing. Like many theologians and Christians keen to make sense of what it is I believe about how God works in the world, and how I hear God's voice. I puzzle over those moments of wonder when God's presence rubs against my commonsense, those coincidences of circumstance that couldn't be contrived, those times when you reflect on what has just happened and say, "You couldn't make it up."

We were on holiday in Yorkshire, in an old railway cottage near Goathland. It was a week of sunshine, the cottage had an old fashioned cottage garden, in full bloom, a small river running along the bottom edge, and across it a field full of cows. twice a day the Yorkshire steam train came through the tunnel at the edge of the field, puffing, and whistling as it exited the tunnel. There was a tree on the lawn which I sat under most days, reading. That holiday I had taken a bag of books - I know this because I always do - one of which was the recently published volume 1 of Elie Wiesel's memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea. 

On a sunny afternoon I sat reading his harrowing and deeply personal account of being transported to Auschwitz, and his continuing terrors years afterwards on hearing a steam train whistle. As I reached that part of his story, and just as I was reading his description of the steam whistle as a scream of fear, the Yorkshire steam train emerged from the unnel over the field and whistled. It was a moment heavy with a meaning I couldn't then, and still now, cannot fully fathom. It was eerily appropriate, the timing precise and the sound like an echo vibrating down the years as a reminder of how technology, machinery and industrial scale mechanisation, are forces for immense good and incalculable evil.

I remember closing the book, a hardback with its dustcover photo of Wiesel the survivor, writer of books that seared and commanded human conscience, teacher of peace and Nobel Laureate; and I remember thinking of how a teenage boy arriving at Auschwitz had heard that same sound, with a nameless dread that had crystallised through the years into an adamantine resolve that what happened would not be forgotten, or forgiven. Wiesel's life work was to be a witness; to tell what happened; to refuse any diminishment of the enormity and perdurance of those crimes of mechanised and state resourced genocide. Forgiveness is for God he has argued. His own refusal to forgive the unforgiveable is not a defiance of God, it is in obedience of his call to witness. But the complementary commitment is to peace advocacy, bridge building, support of humane neighbourliness.

That sunny afternoon, in a Yorkshire country cottage garden, seated in the shade of a tree, two worlds intersected, and I have a memory of a penny dropping into the fathomless depths of human suffering, and just the beginnings of understanding the capacity of this man to not only survive the death camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, but to survive the attempt to destroy his own humanity, and that of millions of others. It remains one of the most solemn interludes of my life, and one of the most vivid experiences of learning that goes deeper than intellectual cognition - it was a moment of recognition.