Living Wittily

Fatal Hesitations About Nuclear Weapons

Election campaigns often bring out the worst in political leaders. The alarming decline in civil respect, and the scorn for accuracy let alone honesty of words is one of the more socially damaging developments in recent electioneering. Disrespect and witting or unwitting deceit are corrosive of trust, and act as solvents which compromise and weaken the most important things that a society has in common. The results of this are not long in appearing; intolerance of views that differ, refusal to listen to other views, unwillingness to consider evidence inconvenient to the promulgated ideology, a lowering of the bars of credibility and credulity as claims and disclaimers become more strident, exaggerated, overstated and untruthful. And all of this in a culture now soaked in information, misinformation and pervasive exchanges on social media, as truths and counter truths, lies and counter lies, ping back in forth on millions of devices.

The example that prompts this post was the recent claim made by the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary, that Jeremy Corbyn would be "reluctant to use nuclear weapons". The Prime Minister's own position is emphatically stated, that she would use nuclear weapons, even on a first strike basis "without hesitation". Now it is well known that Corbyn's opposition to nuclear weapons is a major fault line between him and the Conservatives, and indeed that his position is not one fully shared within the Labour Party. But that is not my concern with the choice of words. It was the word "reluctant", that made me stop, and consider, and then hear what had actually been said.

In the bid to appear strong, resolute, and to be trusted with the security of the nation, her opponent was portrayed as weak, vacillating and not to be trusted, as he would be "reluctant" to order a nuclear strike. She would not hesitate, he would be reluctant. She "would not hesitate." Really? Is that even conceivable in the leader of a democratic and sovereign state, and a human being, standing on the last millimetre of the very edge of a catastrophe of global proportions which she will initiate? Is she claiming that degree of certainty, moral authority and decisive strategic will? This is not even to question the validity of a view that legitimates the use of an ultimate weapon which could have irrevocable consequences for millions of human beings, if not the future of humanity itself. It is to call in question the self-awareness, political wisdom and moral competence of the person who holds that power.

He would be "reluctant", which is not the same as a refusal, but does seem to suggest that awareness of the consequences of the decision made are of such magnitude that they give pause for thought, deep thought. Now such hesitation and reluctance could indeed be fatal if deterrence fails and a first strike is launched against our country. Much of the thinking has to be done beforehand, though in the end the reality of making such a decision will be different from any mental and emotional rehearsals.

And that is my difficulty with the two phrases - would not hesitate versus would be reluctant. How can any person, faced with an exchange of overwhelming military force with unknown figures of human casualties and massive perhaps permanent damage to the earth's biosphere, say what they will do, how they will think, what considerations at present unforeseen will have to be taken into account? The rhetoric of the dispatch box in Parliament, and the bravado and big talk of the hustings (or in the Prime Minister's case) the orchestrated news conference filled with supporters), is, literally light years removed from an operations room and the requirement to say yes or no in response to looming catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. This is not Hollywood. This is real. And it is the mark of the true leader that they demonstrate the moral seriousness and political humility of the one entrusted with a nation's safety and our global future. Boasting of strength is a fundamental weakness that in this case, lacks the requisite moral awareness to look into the abyss, and be reluctant to the very last, to push us all over that edge.

This is not an argument against the retention of a nuclear capability and deterrent. That is another issue I think. I am offering a critique of the dangerous rhetoric that ridicules proper moral caution. I am urging a proper acknowledgement of consequences, and a recognition of the human costs on an unprecedented scale of nuclear conflict. I am saying no to the practice of ridiculing such moral considerations and rubbishing valid differences of ethical principle. And I am also asking the question whether strong leadership which does not hesitate to unleash destruction, is to be preferred to a leadership that recoils from such certainty until the decision has to be made, and only then, with a reluctance weighted with a primal guilt inherent in actions of such finality.

Reflections on Theological Reading Over 45 Years: 1. From Missionary Biography to Missional Church

For reasons I can't clearly remember, I have kept a note of what I read year on year. I can't remember either, why I map my reading from July 1st to June 30th, rather than work with a calendar year. It may go back to University and College days when at the end of one academic year you started planning for the next. In any case my reading over the years has worked within a clear timeframe and framework. I'll write about the specifics of that in a later post.

In 1976 I devised a way of reading across the areas that seemed to me to matter most in what came later to be called lifelong learning, or continuing ministry development. But in reality it was a way of harnessing my own curiosity and diverse interests so that I could read in a number of disciplines and areas of interest. The only time this approach didn't work so well was when I was in an academic context and where reading, study, and research were largely dictated by courses and other programmed work. So by and large since 1976 I have a record of what I read, and it acts as an intellectual diary, a literary biography of books read. Some of the books I read then, are now gone, out of date, no longer relevant, or have been superceded by more recent scholarship and thinking.

But, and here is the point of this post; some books no longer speak to where I am, though once they both reflected and shaped how I thought. Over the years my understanding of life, of society, of myself and of my faith in relation to each of these has changed, and with those changes an inevitable distance between how I now see things and how I saw and thought then. It isn't that fundamental elements of my faith have eroded, or that my early experiences as a Christian are invalidated by later experience. It is more that, as time passes, and knowledge deepens, and intellectual interests change, and the world requires newer considerations of what is important and even defining for Christian mission and ministry, then the engagement of the mind in the service of Christ makes different choices, follows different paths, is required through simple obedience to journey forward to the new things God is doing, and the new horizons which open up in every future.

Here is one example of what I mean. When I was ordained in 1976 there were significant shifts taking place in a society increasingly impatient with the constraints of a culture less and less Christian. The Church, and the churches, were enaged in a reconfiguration of what mission might look like; indeed it was around that time that missiology became a key focus of Christian theology. In the late 1970s I remember reading John Stott's Mission in the Modern World, and then Lesslie Newbigin's early The Open Secret, and Verkuyl's hefty Introduction to Missiology. All three books are now dated, but not out of date; all three were also part of significant shift in evangelical theology towards a much more considered view of the Gospel, culture, the church and the challenges around evangelism and mission to the wider world.

Around this time the Lausanne Congress on Evangelism launched a global exploration of what world mission might loo like on a global scale that was careful of culture, context, communication and the beginnings of reaction against colonial, imperial and Western based, and biased, views of Christianity beyond Europe and North America. So one area in which there has been a pardigm shift in emphasis is in the developing and diversifying theology, practice and contextual emphases of Christian mission in a globalised world.  One of the lasting fruits of such expanded thinking was the classic and enduring magnum opus of David Bosch, Transforming Mission. This is a book that gathered so much previous thinking into one coherent and inclusive theology, and in doing so also sent out trajectories for continuing wrestling with the great challenges of mission in the endless diversity and powerful agendas of a world in process of becoming globalised and digitised.

Interestingly, amongst the books I read in the first years of my Christian discipleship, several were the all but iconic biographies of missionary endeavour and strategy on the old models. Through Gates of Splendour by Elisabeth Elliot, When Iron Gates Yield by Geoffrey Bull, Hudson Taylor by Grattan Guinness, By Searching by Isobel Kuhn; these and other missionary biographies represented a popular genre of Christian vocational, devotional and motivational writing. They were ubiquitous on bookstalls, the stock in trade of Christian bookshops and were passed on from one grateful reader to another as examples of genuine sacrifice, courage and advdnture, creating in their readers that potent mixture of guilt, admiration and longing to be more effective, fruitful and obedient to Christ's call to evangelise. 

I'm not sure when the last such missionary biography gained bestseller status. But sometime in the 1970's and into the 1980's missionary literature became more strategic in its concern to explore how best to communicate the Gospel. MIssiology grew more theologically self-conscious in formulating a mission theology established on biblical, systematic and contextual principles, aimed at developing new strategies for mission.

These more substantial and strategic studies left behind the model of the missionary hero and the life story of the remarkable exception. The evolution from missionary story and appeal, towards missiology as a recognised theological and academic discipline, and mission as an essential locus in any biblically based Christian theology, has created a status for all things "missional" in contemporary evangelical theology, and that missional mindset as an all encompassing and defining element of evangelical activism and strategic focus. 

Indeed words such as "missional" and "mission" are validating qualifiers for church activities and strategies. Missional as a criterion is also understood as an essential mindset of the kind of church and kind of leadership required for the church to be an effective bridge communty into each church's context. With globalisation, sensitivity to post colonial concerns, the decline of Christianity in the West, and the realigning of Christian weight and influence throughout the 20th and into the 21st Centuries, mission is no longer about overseas, and the missionary church is learning the scale of the tasks in its own contextual doorstep. A case can be made for suggesting that the last 40 years the church has had to unlearn much that was taken for granted, and quite literally repent in the sense of change direction from older models to new ways of the church becoming the Gospel in the changing fluidity of 21st C culture.

A recent book which now sits near the top of my must read list is Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, himself a significant thinker in the areas of mission and culture. The increasing interest in "the missional hermeneutic" as an interpretive key to the whole of Scripture is gathering pace and support. Where this will lead remains to be seen; but the age of the missionary biography is now one phase in the history of missions. It is previous, past, a form of apologetic no longer capable of those past feats of inspiration and challenge to personal commitment. But they remain classics of Christian experience, narratives of sacrifice and vision, examples of a nascent missional theology as biography even if the theology has required reformation and reformulation in a very different world.

The Misleading Mantra of "Ordinary Working Families"

The patronising phrase "ordinary working families" leaves me wondering what other kinds of families politicians have in mind?

 

I know some extraordinary working families and I know some ordinary non-working families who all show remarkable resilience and courage in holding their lives together.

 

I know lots of ordinary working single people and some extraordinary non working single people who show the same resilience, dignity and desire to be part of the community of life around us.

 

"Ordinary working families". Politicians talk down to all of us using terminology like that. Those words categorise narrowly, exclude intentionally, and aim to divide our communities into those who deserve and those who don't, those who are approved and those who are not, those who are "us" and those who are not.

 

I refuse to play this cynical game of false empathy, manufactured concern, and blatant appeal to self interest in trying to win the uncritical support of "ordinary working families."

 

And if and when someone canvasses at my door I will be asking about that ubiquitous abstraction.

A Pastoral Questioning of Some of Those Motivational Memes

Like everyone else I have good days and bad days. A good day comes down to a whole number of reasons, of which one will undoubtedly be my attitude. So when I'm having a good day and someone posts one of those motivational positivity things on Facebook, I'm likely to read it with a self-congratulatory nod in my own direction, a kind of self-praise for feeling good about my day, my self, my life. And, perhaps, just maybe, an underlying complacency bordering on arrogance that life is ever and only what you make of it.

Point is, not every day has the same content, circumstances, events and eventualities. There are bad days, and no matter how hard I try to rethink it, reconfigure it, explain it, try on varying perspective spectacles, it's still a bad day. Not all bad days are caused by our own negativity; and not many can be cured by self-summoned positivity. Some can, but not all; and for some people, not many,

For some of us, sometimes, very few bad days are improved by someone thrusting the benefits of self-induced positivity into a face that is wet with tears, or creased with anxiety, or nervous of yet more hurt. And then there are those whose face is rendered expressionless through the utter fatigue of trying to face a world when their sadness of heart is chronic, the wounds of the spirit are deep and sore, and resources to cope are so exhausted the distinction between a good day and bad day has dissolved into despair. And for such folk self-reproach is already so normalised that every one of those blessed meme things merely rubs their face in the rubbish of every bad day.

Those who spend their time alongside people who are going through "the valley of deep darkness", who weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh, who befriend the sad, accompany the lonely, listen to the complaints and laments and anger and sorrow of those who are having yet another bad day, realise the importance of editing that meme above. The psalm poet knew perfectly well that we are "fearfully and wonderfully made", that is, that we are complex, complicated, uniquely created, and every one of us flawed, broken, vulnerable and yet with such immense possibility for joyful embrace of life. But not everyone's possibilites come to pass; and it isn't always down to their attitude. Life has a way of shattering hopes as well as illusions, and some things in life can't be so easily fixed, if at all. 

I think of that meme before it was corrected, and the message it sends to folk who are struggling just to get through the day intact, no worse off, maybe even with some regained strength, purpose or hope. And I am full of admiration for their courage, yes, their atttitude. It takes more determination, guts, courage, sheer human persistence against encroaching circumstance, to work through a bad day feeling bad, than it ever will to sail through a good day feeling good.

When I read the psalms of lament, those prayers of anger and anguish, those poems of heartbreak, resentment and complaint against God himself, I am reading authentic prayers from those who know that a bad day isn't all down to their attitude. Psalms of lament show the power of negative thinking, of looking the worst in the face and telling God it is intolerable, unfair, cruel, an affront to faith itself. And instead of trying to change their attitude something else happens.

"Why are you cast down, O my soul,

and why are you disquieted within me?

Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,

my help and my God. (Psalm 42,5)

Not a change of attitude, as if someone so cast down could somehow find the strength of will just to "accentuate the positive". These psalms of lament work by looking away from my own broken resources to the God in whom is hope, and from whom hope will come, and it will come. "I shall again praise him" is an assertion of faith in a different future, but it is not a denial of the hard to endure present. The soul is not telling itself to change its attitude; it is re-orienting mind, heart and spirit around the reality of the God who "by day commands his steadfast love" (v8) Indeed the whole of that verse is about how my personal attitude to good days and bad days is the least relevant thing about them. What matters is the faithfulness of God who by day commands his steadfast love, while "at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life."

And when in that same Psalm the poet let's God have it all, the questions, complaints and pleadings of his case, he addresses all this to the God whom he calls, "My Rock". (9) Whatever else shakes, shifts, shatters, the Psalmist thinks of God as impermeable, durable, stabilising Rock. Or as Samuel Rutherford says,“Believe God's love and power more than you believe your own feelings and experiences. Your rock is Christ, and it is not the rock that ebbs and flows but the sea.”

As a pastor, often sharing those experiences that make up the bad days in people's lives, I read some of those superficial feel good, feel different memes with their underlying wishful thinking. "The difference between a good and and a bad day is.....", well, obvious to those who are having a bad day. And what makes the difference is not being told to change their attitude, but being accompanied and supported in that difficult place, and being free to pour out their negativity and hurt, their complaint and sadness, their sense of loss and longing for hope, to God who is a Rock of immovable love. The Book of Psalms is a wonderful book to read on bad days, because it will never offer the saccharine artificial sweetness of mere positivity. "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him."

Let all the world in every corner sing......

This past week of walking stretches of the Moray Coastal Trail we have enjoyed quite spectacular scenery lit up by blue sky sunshine. A quick list of small birds heard, seen and occasionally, when they permit, photographed: chaffinch, goldfinch, yellowhammer, wren, dunnock, swallow, sand martin, wheatear, siskin, skylark and song thrush (mavis).

Much of this coastline and clifftops are covered with gorse which this year has been like walking beside golden walls or through gold coated canyons. We have seen a young deer grazing peacefully until it sensed us watching, I watched a shag and a great black backed gull having a standoff at the shoreline, and we've been watched from offshore by seals off Portessie.

In Cullen there's a great used bookshop which I took time to have good rake through. And I bought two books, by the same author. I collect good quality editions of the poems of George Herbert.

The Chandos Classics edition was mass produced to cater for a late Victorian market; it was cheap and in godd condition.

However the main find was an 1857 leather bound Dale and Baldy edition in very good condition, and at a fair price. 

What brings these two observations together is a week of enjoying and celebrating the beauty and diversity of Scotland's wildlife, and the acquisition of two attractive volumes of poems by the poet priest who wrote these words:

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The heavens are not too high, His praise may thither fly,
The earth is not too low, His praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!
The church with psalms must shout, no door can keep them out;
But, above all, the heart must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing, my God and King!

A skylark song - a private audience with one of the greatest ever singers.

I've frequently played around with two of my long time enthusiasms, birds and theology. Ornitheology is a form of celebration of the beauty of created nature, birds and God, vulnerability and protection, not one sparrow falls to the ground, said Jesus, but God notices, and is sad.

As long as I can remember I've been fascinated by the beauty and peculiarities of birds, especially the smaller birds native to Scotland and which used to be far more numerous than they are now. The impact of human activity on those other creatures who share our countryside has been a mixed bag of blessing and devastation. Many of the most common birds are now in serious decline, several are moving towards endangered status.

So on a long walk along the Moray Coastal Way today it was a joy to be accompanied at various stages by birdsong and bird movement. I stood several times just listening to skylarks, that trilling music of exuberant joy in flight, and for me a reminder of lying in a farm cottage bedroom, window open at 6.a.m. and hearing precisely that melody of the blythe spirit of Spring.

Walking along a path which at times became a gorse canyon there was a heartening series of encounters with yellowhammers. Ever since as a boy I discovered a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge, and identified it in the ISpy book of birds by its warning call, I've found in this beautiful bird a heartening song, and a source of uplift in that brassy yellow face.

Wrens are amongst those that due to human encroaching on land and living space are far less common today. So when one decided to eyeball us on the path that too was cause for a surprising hopefulness and gratitude for such courage contained in one of nature's loveliest miniatures.

Walking and looking, standing and listening, can become intentional acts of devotion. Prayer and how we relate to God is complex as it is, given our own variations of mood, experience, circumstance and life story. For myself a landscape can be a psalm, sky reflected on a river a silently breathed alleluia, a skylark song a private audience with one of the greatest ever singers, and the rhythm of waves and the sight of those white curved surges of energy collapsing in delight at reaching shore, is a liturgy of which I could never tire.

And the swallows have returned. Reminding me, as they always have since I first read Psalm 84, that a long time ago a poet stood and looked up to the joists of the temple and saw a swallow's nest, and was reminded of the imaginative care and faithful attentiveness of God: "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a place to nest in your house."

 

Review of Saturday's Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchlan

Saturday’s Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchan, (University of Wales Press, 2016) £85

In the Easter Triduum silence is the in between time. The Friday cry “It is finished” is history, and the Sunday announcement “He is risen” is unspoken. A hiatus has opened with no promise of closure. For the first disciples, there was no guarantee there was anything, anything at all, after the finished work of burying Jesus and sealing the tomb. Holy Saturday is the time and place of waiting, silence, numbness, when thought falters, hope retreats, and words dare not break the silence for fear of confirming the worst fears.

1. S. Thomas’s poetry has long been recognised as the poetics of divine presence and absence, of speaking and silence. God and the ways of God in the theopoetics of Thomas is a mystery which is inevitably elusive and even intentionally evasive of human grasp. This book approaches Thomas’s poetry by way of a theology of Holy Saturday, a recognition that the work of the priest poet can be read as a way into, and beyond, the paschal mystery of Christ incarnate, crucified and risen.

Throughout, McLauchlan brings Thomas into conversation with three theologians all of whom have thought deeply and long about Holy Saturday as an essential stopping place in the narrative of the Gospel. In that silence in which there is no guaranteed future, the stillness beyond agony finally exhausted in death, the utter self-giving of God resides in the patient waiting that precedes without anticipation or certainty, the next movement and the next word.

Hans urs Von Balthasar argues powerfully throughout his book Mysterium Paschale of Saturday when “God falls silent in the hiatus…and takes away from every human logic the concept and the breath.” The Cross and Resurrection by Alan Lewis is in its own right a remarkable journey of the mind and heart of a theologian writing of Holy Saturday from within his own paschal story of terminal illness. Easter Saturday is for Lewis a powerful metaphor of our society as ”an Easter Saturday society, in the throes, wittingly or not, of its own demise.”  The third participant in McLauchlan’s conversation is Rowan Williams, and especially Williams’ fascination with, and insistence upon, the strangeness of God.

The chapter on ‘Divine Silence and Theological Language’ weaves an analysis of several of Thomas’s poems into a discussion about the limits, necessity, moral seriousness and ultimate inadequacy to its Subject of all theological language. This chapter points the way through the book. McLauchlan quotes Janet Soskice in support of the limits of language to describe that which transcends description: “The apophatic is always present with the cataphatic, and we are in danger of theological travesty when we forget that this is so.”

What Thomas’s poems are determined to avoid, hence their portrayal of the elusiveness, even intentional evasiveness of God, is just this falling into ‘theological travesty’ as the outcome of prematurely claimed certainty. Poems such as ‘Nuclear’, ‘Shadows’ and ‘The Gap’ are explored in conversation with modern theological voices equally diffident about the propensity of theological language to try to say the unsayable, as if God could be contained in human discourse without remainder. Easter Saturday rebukes what P T Forsyth called ‘the lust for lucidity’; it is a bleak reminder of Saturday silence as a time and place stripped of all meaning. And when the silence following death by crucifixion intimates the silencing of the Logos, language itself is eclipsed by silence as the communicative mode of the Word by whom all things were made. As to whether the creative Word will once again be heard?

The whole book is written along similar veins, as the poems, and not only the individual poems, but the poems read together and interpreted inter-textually, are used to explore the dimensions and “resonances of history’s most profound silence.” Reading the poems, argues McLauchlan, is a spiritual discipline, an entering into the deepest mystery and farthest echoes of the Word made flesh, crucified and buried, and utterly alone on Easter Saturday. Such reading can be transformative, but involves a pilgrimage along the via negativa, a willingness to bear the abysmal silence that has no guarantee of resurrection or of creation made new. Thomas’s poetry and its implied theology, is “resistant to our controlling tendencies, our desire for speedy resolution and instant meaning.”

The silence of Holy Saturday portrayed in the style, layout, blanks and words of Thomas’s poems, becomes for McLauchlan the ultimate silence which gives meaning to all silences between words. Easter Saturday resonates throughout creation, and vibrates as unresolved mystery within all attempts at articulation, explanation and communication. The “sign in the space / on the page” provides a glimpse “of the repose of God”. In the Concluding chapter the question is asked about whether the paschal dimension of silence can be represented in forms of art other than words. For example, Michaelangelo’s Pieta, Bach’s Mass in C Minor, a Rothko series, or the music of Messiaen. McLauchlan thinks it can be, and is, and such spiritual discipline through the arts challenges our preconceptions and refashions our vision. The last sentence of the book explains the author’s burden in writing of Thomas as he does: “As all Christian renewal is forged through cross, grave and resurrection, that transformation through silence is a transformation achieved through the silent second day, through the silence of Holy Saturday.” (129)

The book presupposes some familiarity with the concepts and concerns of contemporary theology, and assumes a willingness to read the selected poems in the company of a perceptive commentator, and to do so without interrupting the flow with questions which inevitably surface. This is a particular interpretation of Thomas, an experiment in listening stereophonically to the words and the silence between words. It is also an invitation to the spiritual discipline of reading this particular poet who is now content with divine absence, and now complains of it, for whom ambiguity is all but a theological principle given the limits of language and the constraints of human flesh.

Those familiar with Thomas’s poetry will love this book, if they can afford its price. It is carefully argued, theologically attuned to contemporary angst and questionings, alert and fully engaged with modern theology, and it executes well the inter-disciplinary conversation between literary analysis and theological understanding. It has a superb and wide ranging bibliography, an index, and rich endnotes some of them quite extensive with further comment.