Living Wittily

Two Books: And No Such Thing as a Level Playing Field.

These two books are memoirs of childhood - growing up they were both book loving, library haunting, intelligent and ambitious to write; both girls grew up to be Guardian columnists and fine journalists.

But their childhood and growing up years could not be more contrasting.

Deborah Orr's Motherwell is eye-wateringly frank about herself, her family, her home and the town she lived in till she could leave it.

Lucy Mangan's Bookworm is the autobiography of a reader whose home life was comfortable, secure and lived in an environment created for flourishing.

Both books prove one of my guiding principles when it comes to reading for both pleasure and profit - biography and autobiography, when written with integrity, and read with the right balance of compassion and criticism, are amongst the most important vehicles for human understanding.

Both books are reading time well spent, but they open very different vistas on how our childhood experiences leave emotional and relational legacies that can either undermine or enhance for the rest of our lives. 

Deborah Orr compels the reader to understand from her perspective the long-term emotional damage caused by parents, teachers, playground bullies, toxic male culture, and the sheer guts and risks involved in making decisions that might help you to survive and go on to live your hopes. Lucy Mangan's account of childhood is altogether less painful to read, and tells of how reading itself populates the imagination with hope and confidence to believe that those hopes are possible to achieve. 

I think a reading group could well decide to read both books, then talk about what makes for human flourishing in the first years of life, and those so hard to navigate years of growing up and becoming the person we yearn to be, with more, or less success. But whatever we might think personal fulfilment is, in both of these books, two children, two girls, grew into women with careers of their own.

Even then, the differences create stark contrast; Deborah Orr came late in life to feeling she had the freedom, the right and the capacity to be herself and to come to love herself. Lucy Mangan's account of her years says little of the second half of her life, but the allusions tell a story of a family at ease with itself and its place in the world. 

Reading these books one after another (I read Bookworm first) was an experience that required a huge swing of the emotional register. It's not that Mangan covers her story in unoffending tones of emulsion; more that Deborah Orr refuses to hide the graffiti that is scrawled across the backdrop of her first twenty years. 

This isn't so much a book review of two books, pointing out the merits of the writers, or opting for one or other as the better read. They are both proven writers with a feminist agenda; they tell as honestly as they can what happened to them and how they grew out of their childhood; each is an exercise in the writer's self-understanding, Orr being the more unsparing self-critic, and for that reason the more courageous writer, and the most negatively forceful. You live with constant criticism in the home, you begin to believe the bulletins of your own failure. On the other hand Mangan is equally self-perceptive, except the raw experiential experience she has to work with is much less severe in its ongoing impact into adulthood. Her forte is understanding the importance of the nurtured imagination, the emotionally supported explorer of ideas, and her refusal to settle for professional 'arrival' as a lawyer, choosing instead the freelance writer. I'm glad I read both books.

Apart from anything else reading one after the other confirms what we all know, and what we all require to remember as a moral obligation and an exercise in social understanding; there is no such thing as a level playing field, no way of socially engineering equal opportunity. There is, therefore, no excuse for judging people about the choices they make, until you understand the limits of the choices available, and how those we judge have value added to or subtracted from their lives, by circumstances, people and experiences of which we know nothing. 

As a footnote, Deborah Orr died late 2019, just weeks before her memoir was published. It has been featured this week on Radio 4 - you can listen here. 

A Walk by the Sea: Recovering the Inner Ebb and Flow of Daily Life

Today I was meeting a friend down at the beach for lunch at 12 noon. We've been friends for nearly 40 years, and I was his minister for nearly half that time. Unassuming, kind, quiet, coping with late life issues of illness, bereavement and the probability that soon it would be best to be within a more sheltered living environment. But a man who is so much more than these encroachments; in his day a very good footballer, a lifelong Christian whose faith oozes faithfulness and integrity, a man whose family love and celebrate him, and he them, and someone for whom hundreds of people thank God or their lucky stars or whatever, that they encountered this serial helper of other folk.

It's hard to describe the constituent parts of a human friendship - affection, admiration, shared joy and laughter, also shared sorrow and tears, and as well as that memories of life that intertwined with him and his family, and us and our family. So we were meeting to have a soup lunch, a catch up with recent whatever's been happening, and at least some attempt to understand 'the state of the country'!

But before then, I had arrived early enough to have a coffee, before a long walk the length of the beach and back. The tide was out and on the turn, the sea was that January blue that can't be improved by photo-editing, and the waves were in determined mood to draw attention to themselves. The result was a couple of hours of alternating thinking, and not thinking, paying attention to my inner climate but then looking outwards to a world that gets on with what its doing no matter what my inner world is like. The result was a sense of the presence of the Creator who makes waves. The sea is like an extra sacrament to me, a place of grace, of remembered encounters, of healing and hearing, an ancient rhythm of movement, sound and sight. Several times I stopped, stood, waited, wondered, looked, listened, breathed in beauty and breathed out thanks, in general and in particular.

On the shell-encrusted breakwaters there are usually turnstones feeding. So small, swift, fragile and persistent. Photographed (picture at the top) against the backdrop of the waves, they have perfect timing to skip, fly and dart back, an instinctive ballet performed to the accompaniment of that same ancient rhythm of musical waves. Jesus said, "Look at the birds of the air..." - being the inclusive kind, he would also mean "look at the birds near the sea". Same lesson to be learned. They don't spend their lives anxiously predicting what might happen; instead they go about their lives, turning stones to eat, doing what they do and being what they are.

A two hour walk becomes a mini pilgrimage along the shore. At one point I stopped for some minutes, camera in my pocket, paying attention to the play of light on water and sand, raking around amongst the multi-coloured pebbles, listening for that pause just as the wave balances for the right moment to tumble. I was obviously absorbed in the pebbles because the wave tumbled noisily enough, but I found myself in six inches of foamy water. I'm obviously less agile than the turnstones.

By the time my walk was finished the sea had done its work as nature's specialist in sensory therapy. No matter the inner climate, the weather of the heart and the pressures on the inner barometer, the sea is a reliable counsellor. Gathering to itself the words spoken and the more difficult thoughts of guilt and gratitude, washing away the deep footprints of resentment stamped on the sand; and then re-setting the rhythms of come and go, of give and take, enabling us to recover faith in the inner ebb and flow of daily life, as regular as the tides, and as renewing.   

 

Tikunn Olam: small seeds of honesty.

The other day I bought a sausage roll. I was given the wrong change. The person serving me was talking to his colleague and not paying attention. As I walked away I realised I was seventy pence up.

So I went back, explained, and handed back the right money. The other folk in the queue overheard, the man who made the mistake was very grateful, and said, I quote, “You’re brilliant mate.”  

I know. Jesus said don’t do the right things in a way that makes you look good. Kindness doesn’t need to be advertised; honesty doesn’t need a Facebook virtue signal. So why publish it here.

Call it tikkun olam, a rich Jewish phrase that means “to repair the world”. What I did was nothing much; what’s seventy pence in a world obsessed by billions? Small things though. Small seeds of honesty matter; quiet words of kindness help folk walk the next mile; a prayer for hearts broken but not beyond repair, aids the healing; racist words consistently contradicted by words that dignify; this is to be faithful in the small things, “to repair the world”.

Tikkun Olam: Redemptive Gestures and the Common Good.

Tikkun Olam is a humane and humanising Hebrew phrase. It is also a moral principle to inspire, guide and enable gestures of redemption, acts of mercy, plans for constructive renewal, commitment to the common good, and much, much more. It is a rich, fertile, flexible but focused phrase. The popular translation is "to repair the world."

The current political divisions tearing through the political and cultural landscape of Western democracies have not become fissures overnight. The subterranean pressures and forces have been building for a long time, weakening the protective layers of decency, trust, the common good, love of freedom, mercy and care for the vulnerable, inter-cultural co-operation and understanding. In the past few years those fissures have opened and out of them have poured some of the most damaging substances for our human future. The normalisation of lying; the prevalence of divisive speech; building cruelty into systems of assessment for social benefits; the acceptability of "othering", that is emphasising differences and instilling negative emotions towards those we consider "other"; economic policies that fail to control the concentration of wealth and which hardens the social structures that give permanence to poverty; each of these, and much else erodes the common good and corrodes the moral purposefulness of a genuinely democratic and socially responsible society. 

Tikkun Olam is the moral opposite of such destructive principles. To live with the daily intention of repairing the world requires a different set of motivational triggers; truth instead of lying; words that heal division rather than cause them; compassion and understanding of people, rather than enforcing a system that frightens, humiliates and robs of dignity; welcome and respect as default responses to the stranger who is other than us, but who by befriending would become one of us; generosity, kindness and honesty about money, rather than greed is good, self-interest and making money the primary life-goal. 

For a while now I've lived with this phrase, Tikkun Olam. It fascinates me to think of human community being constructed with the goal of promoting these two nouns, humanity and community. All around us in daily life situations are going wrong, relationships break down, hearts get broken and people damaged, there's waste and damage to our planet on a scale that threatens the future, social media and all kinds of communication technology call the tune on what we are to think, and algorithms confirm what we like and close out wider choices and tastes. None of this is small stuff. 

And yet. Tikkun Olam is a disposition to repair what is broken; to heal what is wounded; to give rather than take; to listen as well as speak; and then to speak truth into the darker corners of our own and other hearts. However it is a Jewish phrase, not a mere cliche from some pop psychology or self help manual. Its fuller version is to repair the world under the sovereignty of God. God is Creator; humans are stewards. To repair the world is to work under God's management, and to do the work characteristic of God - creative, purposeful, compassionate, and rich in possibility and the freedom to be.

Over the next couple of months there will be occasional further explorations into the dynamics and inner levers of this phrase. I will also be working a tapestry based around the Hebrew script and while reading some key passages from the Jewish Wisdom Books, particularly Proverbs and The Wisdom of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus). Well, reading around the theme helps, but it isn't the same as doing it; and tapestry can be a way of meditative absorption into ideas, images and contemplative internalising of thought and emotion, but all that inwardness has to have a purpose beyond itself. That's why there's the need for the spiritual equivalent of drive shafts, those parts of our inner moral mechanisms that transmute motivational energy into actually turning wheels, moving forward and practically, visibly, making a difference.

So until Easter I'll keep a daily Tikkun Olam Journal. Theological reflection is a way of avoiding overdone introspection and self-concern. Life each day is lived in the presence of God while going our way about the world. The Journal will interact with Scripture, daily experience, and the theological work involved in tracing the presence of God, feeling the nudge of the Holy Spirit, and learning a new, and more simple responsiveness to the world, as one who serves God by being a good steward and a willing repairer of its fabric.    

When, without warning, banter becomes a prelude to that moment of trust when heart speaks to heart..

Sometimes banter slides unintentionally into a conversation where, unexpectedly, heart begins to speak to heart.

I went into one of my coffee places today and said to the two staff, "So where are the happy people today?" 

Without a half second pause my bantering partner said, "Aw ye just missed them! Ye'll have to put up wi' us miserable b*ggers!!"

"How did Christmas and New Year Go?" I asked.

And her voice wobbled.

She spent the holidays in bed, then a few days in hospital.

"I've had my bloods taken, and I've a scan next week."

And so friendly banter becomes a bridge from one heart to another.

As a regular we've gotten used to each other's sense of humour. Now all that laughter and joking and kidding each other on, changes into something altogether more meaningful; the encounter of one soul seeking comfort and companionship in a lonely place, with another soul who has his own fears and needs. 

There are few more testing moments of faith and love and hope, than in those conversations when we are invited to listen, to walk beside, to be a friend. Banter is a prelude to that moment of trust when heart speaks to heart.

In a few quiet sentences we talk about next week's scan, and afterwards, and when I'm in next week, and the one after. We may talk again. We may not. Whether or not, the promise of my prayers and the sharing of her story now mean we are more than sounding boards for each others banter. Her story and how it unfolds has become important to me, because she has told it, and I have heard it. How that story turns out now matters, because such a conversation becomes a covenant of care, and underlying the words the unspoken acknowledgement that something precious has been handed over.

Pastoral theology and a life of pastoral ministry never fully prepare you for such astonishing trust and courage.   

The Faith of the Theologian: Trusting God and Troubled by God.

I've been a theologian for over 50 years. Of course that's on a fairly generous definition of what a theologian is, and what theology is. Still, it's true enough that for all of that time I've thought about God, spoken to and with God, praised God and been mad at God, trusted God and been troubled by God. All of which makes me a theologian even if I never opened a book.

But I have opened books. Hundreds of them. I've learned theology and taught theology; I've read it, written it, preached it, prayed it, sung it and most times have loved it. Because theology is just what the word says; God-talk. Words about God and words spoken to God - and words and the Word spoken by God. My faith has deep roots in my own experience, but that experience is in turn embodied in a community, and that community is sourced and resourced from within its own story, traditions and convictions, going back to where that story started, in the biblical narrative of God's love affair with the Creation.

One of the theologians who has faithfully thought and taught theology out of his own immersion in the community of faith across history and cultures, is Jurgen Moltmann. In an essay he explains the inner dynamic, and the energy centre of theology as both spiritual discipline and way of life:

"Theology comes into being wherever men and women come to the knowledge of God, and in the praxis of their lives, their happiness and their suffering, perceive God's presence with all their senses."

Suffering and happiness, two poles of human experience and between them we actively live out, in practice, what it is we say we believe, have come to know and have given our lives to. In the end theology is faith put into practice, experience of God and thoughts about God transforming behaviour and character, forming convictions which fuel motivation, energy and vision. 

As a minister for 45 years I've done what ministers do. The obvious things like preaching, pastoral care, community building, praying, spiritual direction, study, all have been dependent on the study and application of theology "in the praxis of our lives". However, informing each of the tasks of ministry is the character and unique identity of the person called by this community now, and by those communities in the past. Integral to that call is the invitation from a particular community to take the risks of sharing in the lives and experience of others in the companionship of Christian obedience. To follow faithfully after Christ in community is to enter a covenant of learning and teaching, a commitment of loving and living together in and through the shared suffering and happiness in which God is to be found.

Because Moltmann is right. It is in the suffering and happiness, the grief and the joy, the despairing and the hoping, the frustrations and the fulfilment, the tears and the laughter, the hurt and the forgiveness, it is in all of the life we live that we will "perceive God's presence with all our senses." "O taste and see that God is good", meaning we open our souls to the nourishment only God can give. Our prayers become fragrance rising out of our hurt and our healing to God who is right in there with us, so near you can smell the holiness. The voice of God, as whisper or shout and even sometimes heard as silence, and this despite our insistence for noise and certainty. And then there's that bread and wine which we touch and taste and see, the faithful aide memoir of the faithful, lest we forget what kind of God it is whose presence "besieges us". That phrase was used by Helen Waddell, in a beautiful prayer in which she felt the fear and the awe and the thrill of the God "whose eternity doth ever besiege us." Hemmed in by God.

So theology isn't merely the faith in theory; nor is theology an intellectual sudoku puzzle to keep Christian minds usefully occupied; nor is theological study an academic specialism aimed at domesticating mystery, and reducing living experience of God to words, propositions and a manageable coherence. Long ago Augustine heard those accusations and this was one of his responses:  

"What is needed is a loving confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To reach out a little toward God with the mind is a great blessedness; yet to understand is wholly impossible." (Augustine, Sermon 117)   

The theologian embarks on a lifetime's learning and praying and studying and worshipping, knowing that the God whose presence we perceive and seek, is always beyond our controlling grasp. This is the God whose love we know though it is beyond knowledge, and whose glory shines with a radiance that makes seeing a form of blindness, that this God is beyond our grasp, thankfully.

The theologian begins with a loving confession, and ends with that same loving confession of the God whose love passes knowledge. A living and loving confession of God whose ways are beyond our understanding, and who has come to us in Christ. In that sense, to accept the invitation of Christ, to "take my yoke upon you and learn of me" is to find ourselves on the way to being a theologian. And beyond that, to learn from Scripture, to read what others have learned, to enter into conversation with the great cloud of witnesses, to build and be built into a community of faith in  Jesus as Lord, to think God's thoughts after Him. To do all this, is to take that invitation seriously, and own the name of theologian. 

When Scholarship Gets Caught Up in Spaghetti Junction Sentences.

Those familiar with this blog will know I like commentaries. Not just to consult as reference books; but to read, and yes, some of them cover to cover. An exegetical commentary is an aid to understanding a text. When that text is a biblical document, establishing the meaning of the text is much more than an academic exercise of scholarship and intellectual engagement. It is all of that, but it is more.

Having established the meaning of the text, a person of committed faith who views these texts as authoritative truth and guide for life will then want to go further: What does this text require of me? If I try to live in the light of this text what might that look like? Are there discernible connections between what the text says and the world we now live in?

Answering such questions requires careful reading, alert listening, and expectation of questions. But those questions are two way - our questions to the text, and the text's interrogation of our heart's desires, our mind's thoughts, and our motives and actions each step of our journey. So a commentary can be an important help, a stimulus to thought, a source of key information about language, concepts, context and social milieu; all of that, and much more.

Now all of that is by way of introduction to one of the most opaque paragraphs I've come across in a long while. I think I know what the author is trying to say, but my, what a tortuous semantic path he constructs to get there:  

"In the New Testament there are other instances in which the causative sense would not make obvious nonsense - it is abstractly possible. But, on the other hand, there are so many instances where the causative sense is out of the question, so many other considerations arising from correlative and antithetical expressions indicating the forensic meaning, and the suitability of the forensic meaning in those cases where there is the abstract possibility of the causative sense that to impose an abstract possibility, contrary to the pervasive usage in the New Testament, in such cases would be wholly arbitrary and indefensible."

That paragraph is worthy of submission for pseudo corner in Private Eye! But it occurs in a commentary written by a respected scholar in the Reformed tradition, which had on of the most respected editors of the series in which it appeared. Even one or two commas might have helped - or perhaps not!

Carrie Newcomer: Faith to Believe in the Holiness of Ordinary Life.

Holiness is not an easily marketable quality. Few would put it on their CV as a strength that will impress the job interviewer. Which is a pity. Because holiness isn't the scary, self-righteous spoilsport word that everyone's glad is now a discontinued line of human development.

Holiness is the inherent value of something. Holiness is what sometimes makes us wonder about the miracle of yet another day of life. Holiness isn't about heroic demonstrations of goodness, but the cultivated habit of ordinary kindness. Holiness is good food shared, the laughter of friends, a new thought that changes the way we see the world. Yes holiness eventually finds its way back to God as its source and origin; it is our everyday evidence all around us that God looked on all that he had made and it was very good. Holiness is, therefore, the determination to look for that "very goodness" even in a world as broken and overclouded as this. That takes maybe more faith than some of us think we have, to believe that this life we live as ordinary folk in a broken world has holiness as its gift and goal. But suppose that's exactly what we're meant for?   

The word holy occurs in a number of Carrie Newcomer's songs. The lyrics below are to her song "I Believe". It's the personal credo of a woman whose own faith is embedded in a Quaker spirituality. Acknowledging the pain and brokenness of life, allowing too for the blessings of love, learning, creativity and care for all that comes our way, Newcomer looks humanely on life around her, and within, and writes words that insinuate hope into that low grade despair we call world-weariness. (You can listen to her singing it over here. 

What this song achieves is a level of honesty with her own shortcomings, a gentle acknowledgement of human fallibility in all of us, and a mind and heart alert to blessing that is as ordinary as any miracle ever gets (like ginger tea!). And that repeated credo, "I believe" is not an argument it is a testimony, and an invitation to her listeners and readers to look at life with unjaundiced eyes until we too can say, "I believe", and "All I know is I can't help but see / All of this as so very holy. Amen

I believe there are some debts
That we never can repay
I believe there are some words
That you can never unsay
And I don't know a single soul
Who didn't get lost along the way

I believe in socks and gloves
Knit out of soft grey wool
And that there's a place in heaven for those
Who teach in public school
And I know I get some things right
But mostly I'm a fool

Chorus

I believe in a good strong cup of ginger tea
And all these shoots and roots will become a tree
All I know is I can't help but see
All of this as so very holy

I believe in jars of jelly
Put up by careful hands
I believe most folks are doing
About the best they can
And I know there are some things
That I will never understand

Chorus

I believe there's healing in the sound of your voice
And that a summer tomato is a cause to rejoice
And that following a song was never really a choice
Never really

I believe in a good long letter written on real paper and with real pen
I believe in the ones I love and know I'll never see again
I believe in the kindness of strangers and the comfort of old friends
And when I close my eyes to sleep at night it's good to say
"Amen"

I believe that life's comprised of smiles and sniffles and tears
And in an old coat that still has another good year
All I need is here.

Chorus

I believe in a good strong cup of ginger tea
And all these shoots and roots will become a tree
All I know is I can't help but see
All of this as so very holy

I believe

Carrie Newcomer: Hope Set to Music.

I've long listened to Carrie newcomer as a voice to be trusted. Her poetry is set to music, her music is in the words as much as the notes. Some of her best work explores our deep places where ache and longing are felt most acutely. Her words come with that gentle and humane understanding that sometimes hearts break, and aren't easily put together again.

Consolation is one of those words that sounds old fashioned, archaic, hard to use in our Twitter-Instagram-Facebook-Text saturated social media exchanges. But I like it. My equally old fashioned non-online bulky Collin's Dictionary defines its meaning:  "a person or thing that is a source of comfort in a time of suffering, grief and disappointment."  Some of Carrie Newcomer's songs are best described as consolation set to music. Of course, there is a much wider emotional and experiential sweep to her poetry and music, including issues of justice, peace-building, human kindness, love as so much more than  romance, but not denying that either. 

Once we listen to someone's work over a long time, (and my first Newcomer encounter was 25 years ago with albums like My True Name. I've learned how to listen to her and like that recent bestselling book The Poetry Pharmacy, her music is a prescription pad of medicines capable of being applied to the whole rainbow of human experiences. Including those times when our hearts need consoling.

Another word in danger of being devalued by either misuse or falling into disuse is 'comfort' The word stripped back to its original oak grain means to surround with strength, to fortify, and so to help the heart hold itself together. Newcomer's music is comfort in this strong sense of inner transformation, renewal of strength and hope, pushing back the shadows, noticing the first green shoots, pointing to the first fingers of dawn, inviting us to sing again with words that are both prayer and a recovery of thew ability to say yes. 

Here are the lyrics of one of the songs that I think does this. It comes from the album The Beautiful Not Yet. It can be heard over here.  

Winter is the oldest season
But quietly beneath the snow
Seeds are stretching out and reaching
Faithful as the morning glow

Carry nothing but what you must
Lean in toward the Light
Let it go, shake off the dust
Lean in toward the Light
Today is now, tomorrow beckons
Lean in toward the Light
Keep practicing resurrection

The shadows of this world will say
There's no hope why try anyway?
But every kindness large or slight
Shifts the balance toward the light

Waters wind and open wide
Lean in toward the Light
Don't just walk when you can fly
Lean in toward the Light
When justice seems in short supply
Lean in toward the Light
Let beauty be your truest guide

The shadows of this world will say
There's no hope why try anyway?
But every kindness large or slight
Shifts the balance toward the light

The prayer I pray at eventide
Lean in toward the Light
All left undone be put aside
Lean in toward the Light

When forgiveness is hard to find
Lean in toward the Light
Help me at least to be kind
Lean in toward the Light

The Importance of Forgivingness

Preaching this morning on "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors."
Which is a prayer for forgivingness,  a committed disposition towards reconciliation, marked by patient persistence in peace-building and cultivating habits of mercy.
On the way back, on the skyline over the sea, a murmuration of starlings demonstrating the beauty of synchonised movement in a world so often conflicted.
At the same time, The World at One on Radio 4 reporting and discussion of Iran and Australia, both in very different ways, places of human crisis in this so often conflicted world.
Changed to Classic FM and found some light-hearted Baroque.
Over lunch watching Monty Don in Japanese Gardens, and the story of the rose called Peace. Hence the photo
Tonight reading again Dag Hammarskjold, whose words were quoted this morning:

"Forgiveness is the answer to the child's dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, and what is soiled is made clean again.

That word 'again' -

              a hope filled word,

                      a hope restoring word,

                           which we need to hear,

                                 again and again.