Living Wittily

καταλαμβάνω (katalambano): When Light is Incomprehensible to Darkness

I remember the first time I read the Prologue of John's Gospel, that astonishing poem about the Word. The words immediately fell into rhythms and cadences, with conceptual horizons receding in time and space to the beginning of all time and space. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God...all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made..."

A poem is an arrangement of words, each one placed with precision, redolent of meaning, cumulatively a distillation of the writer's thoughts, and feelings, perhaps even unformed intuitions struggling towards the light of meaning. Even the best poems struggle to articulate ultimacy. However, the writer of John's Gospel was after more than ultimacy, at least in earthly, human terms. He was after eternity as it intersects with creation, giving voice, or at least words, to that primordial act of bringing into being by the One whose Being is the source of all that is or ever can be. And that One has now become flesh and dwelt amongst us. No wonder John ransacked the available conceptualities trying to find words, ideas, images, human expressions to express the inexpressible.

John 1.1-14 alternates poem and prose, or at least, changes gear from images evoking wonder, eternity and cosmic drama, to narrative informing and confirming historic statements. That first reading of John's Gospel, and those first verses, remains for me as a living memory of discovering the beauty of language that has the power to transform the way we think, and how we see the world. 

Later at College, and often enough since, I have returned to those 18 verses and prayed and thought my way into and around them. They are inexhaustible yet always rewarding, beyond understanding and yet they make the startling claim that they announce the light that enlightens every single one of us that is born into this world. And glinting in the last line of the first 5 verses a verse over which I have puzzled and prayed, and pondered and persisted in study. One scholar's translation puts it thus: "And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." But I remember it from the old translation which is still the one I know by heart: "The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not".

And there it is, the ambiguity that has puzzled me all my exegetical life. Is the word that describes the failure of darkness saying it could not "overcome" or could not "comprehend", the defiance of this light. Then I find after a trawl through commentaries, and a study of the words in question, it can mean either and / or both. And that satisfies me. Not that it answers all the questions, but that it acknowledges the subtleties and complexities, the limitations and potential, of words used to describe realities beyond the capacities of human expression.

So from Christmas I've been working on a tapestry seeking to give a visual interpretation of that defiant ambiguity, the light shines, and the darkness has not overcome or comprehended it; has not defeated or understood it; the darkness hasn't a clue what to do about that patient, persistent, life-giving Word of light and love and life. Not a clue. 

Yet John's Gospel is precisely about the strategies and protocols of darkness doing its damnedest to extinguish the light of the world. Throughout the Gospel of John those who reject Jesus are rejecting the light, seeking to extinguish it by eliminating him; and throughout the Gospel Jesus is rejected by those who don't understand. To the powers of darkness the truth of a crucified God is incomprehensible; the one reality the engulfing darkness cannot subdue, overcome, comprehend, extinguish or contradict, is light.

All of this I am trying to make visual, with colour and tone, shape and symbol, an exegesis of that defiant ambiguity that is the essence of light - darkness cannot overcome or comprehend it. I hope to finish the tapestry by Easter, that great festival of Light, when the darkness and the light collided in the decisive confrontation to which John's poem bears witness; early in the morning as the sun was rising....and the darkness comprehendeth it not, and has not overcome it.  

 

The Lord's Prayer. A New Book on an Old Text

Sometimes God surprises us. The poet Edwin Muir tells of one such loving ambush of a man tired, sad and upset. Just before the Second World War he was living at St Andrews. It was a tough time in his life, and his wife had become so unwell she was taken into care in a nursing home. He wasn’t a religious man, but he wrote this in his diary one night after he came back from visiting her.

 

“Last night going to bed alone I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a loud emphatic voice, a thing I had not done for so many years, with deep urgency and profound disturbed emotion. While I went on I grew more composed. As if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished my soul grew still. Every word had a strange fullness and meaning which astonished and delighted me. It was late; I had sat up reading and I was sleepy but as I stood in the middle of the floor half undressed saying the prayer over and over, meaning after meaning sprang from it, overcoming me again with joyful surprise; and I realised that this simple petition was always universal, and always inexhaustible, and day by day sanctified human life.”

 

This is one testimony to the power of the Lord's Prayer to awaken faith and trust, to stir up restlessness for a deeper, more durable peace. I once used the Lord's Prayer as a Rule of Life for a year, praying it each day and creating a number of practices to live into and beyond the Lord's Prayer. These included working out how praying "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven..." could find traction in the ordinary life situations and relationships of my day to day living. Or asking how I could more generously, faithfully and sacrificially pray "Give us this day our daily bread" in relation to those in my city, country and my neighbours and fellow humans across the world, for whom daily bread is not a certainty.

 

Those words of Jesus have been prayed for two thousand years. The Paternoster, the Lord's Prayer, has had a central place in the liturgies of the church universal. The overly righteous might accuse others of saying the Prayer by rote, without paying attention, not seriously and practically engaging with those petitions, allowing the familiar to slip past unnoticed for all the difference it makes. That may be so, and yet. The very act of speaking the words, the process of thought and the repeating of a habit, isn't to be so easily disparaged or discouraged. Who knows but the slow accumulation of prayers spoken, the echoes and re-echoes of words returned to, and the disciplined faithfulness that at least knows, recites, or even only occasionally remembers the Lord's Prayer, may act on our soul like the slow irrigation of ground that would otherwise be barren.

 

But where the Lord's Prayer is intentionally prayed and faithfully lived, it gives expression to a radical trust in the Father and a costly service in His Kingdom; it urges us to embody practices which ensure the neighbour has bread and that forgiveness is a way of life; and it forces upon us a healthy realism about temptation, evil and our own tendencies to sin, compromise and live otherwise than in the way of the Father's Kingdom. 

 

For those reasons amongst others, the Lord's Prayer has always been part of my Christian devotion, and has served as a constant reality check when all the other stuff is happening in life and clamouring to be attended to. Which brings me to the book pictured above. I'll do several blog posts on this book between now and Easter. Nijay Gupta is a writer with a growing reputation as an exegete whose scholarship is deep, and who writes for the building up of the church as well as for the academy. I've read several of his books, and a number of his articles.

 

The good news is that this book, originally hardback and seriously expensive to obtain from America, is now available to UK readers through Amazon as a print on demand paperback. I've just received my copy. It is a high quality production, durably bound, the same contents and style which includes sidebars of additional and illustrative material, graphics and art and a superb bibliography. As well as careful exegesis, Nijay explores the history of the interpretation and use of the Lord's Prayer, making it a rich and satisfying exposition. It costs around £17.50 on Amazon, post free. That makes it a bargain.

 

More later.

 

 

 

The Kindness of Strangers, and Friends, and Shopkeepers

 

In Duncan's furniture shop in Banchory where the Sale is on.

Elderly couple come in, and man is a bit uncertain, but is known to the staff.

 

Turns out he is a person with dementia but loves the shop.

 

He is escorted by a staff member to the large sofa in the even larger shop window, which is bathed in sunshine.

 

He sits down and watches the world go by in Banchory main street, quietly contented and smiling, while his wife goes to look around.

 

That's the kind of social care that costs nothing and is worth a fortune.

 

You can't buy it, you embody, enact and donate it.

 

Later talking to him and his wife we got round to what price tag we would put on him - decided there wasn't a price tag would go high enough.

 

Aye, right enough.

 

The Suffragettes, Social Change and a Baptist Minister in the Wrong Place at the Wrong TIme.

Last night we went to a lecture by Prof. Sara Pedersen of Robert Gordon University. It was in the Central Library, Aberdeen and on The Scottish Suffragettes. It was a brilliant, enthralling piece of historical storytelling. I learned so much about a subject I thought I knew something about. 

It included the incident in November 1912 when Emily Wilding Davison, the militant Suffragette activist, mistook the minister of Crown Terrace Baptist Church for Cabinet Minister Lloyd-George at the Joint Aberdeen Station, and proceeded to assault him. You can see how she made the mistake. Here is the photo of Rev Forbes Jackson, from the official church history of Crown Terrace. And a photo of Lloyd George at around 1912. It's the moustache, I think!

Amongst the fascinating questions raised in my mind after the lecture, and still thinking about it, was the nature and status of Suffragette activism as defined and understood by the Governments of the day, by the Suffragettes themselves, and by disenfranchised women and the wider public. The militant tactics of the later movement leading up to the First World War, included arson, explosives, vandalism and deliberate criminality leading to jail as an awareness-raising form of publicity. Some of those acts which endangered life and threatened public safety could be defined in today's terms as terrorism.

The treatment of the women in jail, especially those who went on hunger strike included various forms of force feeding and eventually the Cat and Mouse Act. This Act was intended to stop the hunger strike tactic by releasing those on hunger strike, on licence, but returning them to jail when they were well enough, then sending home, then returning,  until the full sentence was spent. This absolved the Government and judiciary of the accusation of torture. The impact on the overall health of the women themselves was however a different kind of persecution in the name of prosecution, a less invasive form of torture.

Terrorism and torture; protesters and status quo; seekers of power and holders of power. Much of the above I knew and had considered before. But listening to an expert, using archives and contemporary photographs, telling the narrative with dramatic force and and a leading scholar's familiarity with the material, gave me a quite unsettling and persuasive perspective on how hard it is to change the levers that drive social changes and lead to a more just society.  Were these women enemies of the State, or its conscience? Did the tactics they used further or hinder their cause, precipitate or delay a resolution? Does the status quo ever relinquish its comfort zones of power without being challenged by alternative expressions of power? 

Then there's the coming together in a historic process of the right people, with the right gifts, at the right time. Or does an issue of social justice bring forth the most effective people, with the most useful gifts and skills, and thus create a time when change can begin to be thought, desired, worked towards and become a movement? The leaders and movers of those women were above all organisers, activists, publicists, and representing more than half the population, had huge potential power if it could be organised.

The Pankhurst dynasty, the co-ordination of action on a national scale, the splits within the movement itself, the ironies of who supported the Suffragettes, who opposed them, and who eventually won the vote and who were the first women elected - not your dyed in the wool Suffragettes. One hundred years on from the first enfranchisement of women (only of women over 30 and holders of property) there are miles of this journey yet to be travelled towards genuine equality for men and women. The continuing question of who is entitled to vote now provokes discussion with pressure beginning to come for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16.

What the Suffragettes achieved, and whether they chose the right tactics, the checks and balances between Governments, the status quo, and those who desire change, all of this can be argued by scholars of social and cultural history. I found the story of their lives inspiring, the collisions and conflicts instructive as examples of social change through deliberate actions challenging the status quo and institutional power. The after-life of a good lecture is that it goes on educating by prompting questions, undermining longstanding assumptions, shedding light into previously unnoticed corners, keeping us alert to human courage and foolishness, to new visions and freedoms, and helping us towards some of the wisdom required to go on living in human communities where each person has the chance to flourish. 

Thinking about Thinking and Who Does Our Thinking For Us

The following text from Philippians 4.8 is deliberately printed here in the 1611 translation, the King James Version. Read it slowly like a prose poem about how to think and what to think

Finally, brethren,

whatsoever things are true,

   whatsoever things are honest,

      whatsoever things are just,

         whatsoever things are pure,

            whatsoever things are lovely,

               whatsoever things are of good report;

         if there be any virtue,

      and if there be any praise,

   think on these things.

Now ask yourself. What would change in our public discourse, our political exchanges, our preferred vocabularyin discussion and argument, or in our use of language on social media, if these criteria applied to our way of thinking, and our way of viewing the world and seeing and responding to other people?

Here's a fact that may now surprise us all. The Latin form of those words is chiselled into the stone in the entrance hall of the old BBC headquarters. (See photo below) If these were intended as criteria for content and overall policy, they were always going to be an ideal beyond fulfilment, a wish list destined to disappoint. And there are compelling reasons why they would fail. They set standards so high they would be unattainable given the way the world is. We live in a world where bad news dominates the news platforms because bad news has become the actual reality of some people's lives when it goes wrong, and bad news is the virtual reality of the rest of us sucked into the vicarious pain and borrowed brokenness of the people in the stories we consume. Further, that relentless flow of bad news sustains levels of anxiety and uncertainty that have an overall impact on how those of us who consume the news view the world, conceive of threats, and seek security in whatever political and economic structures might seem to offer the more credible protections. So the high ideals of justice, truth, honesty and the rest as the quality controllers of what is aired are already and always under huge cognitive and emotional pressure.

Then add this. The huge diversity of sources for news and comment, perspectives and prejudices, information and misinformation, means that the authority of any one source is questioned and contradicted by other sources. The result is a Babel of voices, a supermarket of opinions and standpoints from which the consumer chooses. The subject matter of the news is selected, edited and scripted from a world of stories, mostly of life gone wrong for others, often far away, and not us. Whether war in Syria, terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other planetary events that destroy and desolate human communities; whether organised crime, economic oppression as slavery, human trafficking, systems of economics that exacerbate poverty in a globalised world; or again, the use and abuse of technology so that breaches in cyber security are now a risk to national security, a threat to democratic processes, are capable of undermining global business integrity, or they adversely affect confidence in financial data and transactions. Any combination of these stories is told from one perspective or another, edited and presented and shaped by the assumptions and presuppositions of those who choose and tell the narratives. Again, what of truth, honesty, justice, loveliness and good report?

To go back to the text. Those words on BBC House are the ideals of an institution formed to report with informed authority on the events of the day. That was Lord Reith's vision. The world of human affairs has been spectacularly unco-operative with words like true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report. And yet. Those words are from an Apostle who knew his Greek moral philosophy, and was steeped in the ethics of the Hebrew Prophets. For millenia human thought, behaviour, values and character has been a central concern in the formation and sustaining of human community and culture, and therefore also values that historically have been held to quality-control rhetoric, discourse and debate. Ask any citizen of the 1st Century Greco-Roman world about the values that are foundational in a civilised culture and they would have naturally spoken of truth, justice, goodness, beauty. These values were expected to govern words and thoughts, actions and social attitudes, and therefore the instilling of such values was a large part of education and learning in the wisdom that sustains the good life. 

What I find interesting about Paul's words, and their permanent inscription on a public broadcasting organisation, is that these words are about mindset. "Think on these things". Whatever words we use are to come from a mind open to truth, committed to honesty, insisting on justice, unembarrassed by purity, admiring of loveliness, and careful of goodness. In the harsh world of news broadcasting, entertainment production, and documentary reflection on the real world, those seem impossible ideals, ludicrous criteria, a strategy for saccharine sweetness and solipsistic sentiment.

All of the above reflections, admittedly pessimistic but I hope not cynical, are prompted by the text I'm preaching on this Sunday; Philippians 4.8-9, as written above. They will be explored with an ordinary congregation of folk whose lives are all entangled in the world as it is, and the world as it's portrayed on TV, online and on social media. And yes, Paul's words are for Christian individuals and Christian communities, and not for massive news organisations, even if one of them hijacks Paul's words as its earliest mission statement. It's a gift of a text if all I want to do is moralise, tell people to be nice, to think good thoughts and aim at a life of undisturbed peaceableness.

On the other hand it is a text that calls in question much that is now normalised in the speech, discourse and rhetoric of 21st Century global politics, economics and the deeper forms of human and cultural exchange. To preach on this text means taking seriously the way we speak and listen to others. It also means interrogating the lenses and filters that colour and may well distort the way we view the world and hear and see the other. Human discourse is the making audible of thought, it is in effect speaking our mind. Aa destabilised Peter was reminded within earshot of the Lord he had denied, "Your speech betrays you!". It's a searching, searing question; what kind of mind is exposed to public view and hearing through the words we speak? As an old preacher once said in one of the first sermons I ever heard, "It's not what you think you are, it's what you think, you are." The comma is of decisive hermeneutical importance.

The sermon isn't finished. Had I been content to moralise it would be done and dusted. But this text is not so easily domesticated. It cannot be confined to the personal and individual as if those 'whatsoevers' were merely about being nice to each other. Yes, to be sure, Paul's whatsoever imperatives have decisive purchase on the Christian mind and conscience. And yes, his words are addressed to you plural, so to Christian communities as witnesses to truth, justice and loveliness. But that witness will require, demand, resistance to all that is untrue, dishonest, unjust, impure, unlovely and disreputable. And that is a political imperative, a requirement that Christian thinking and speaking intentionally invade the polis, patiently pervade the human city, slowly soak into the cultural community. The Gospel of reconciliation, peace, love, truth and justice is to be thought and re-thought, spoken and repeated, lived and performed. And as Paul says at the end of his litany of community health, "...think on these things, and the God of peace will be with you."