Living Wittily

Boredom, Tedium and Learning to Live in the Sacrament of the Present Moment

In the long days becoming weeks becoming months of lock down, like everyone else I'm beginning to feel the tedium of days merging into days of sameness. One of the seven deadly sins is accidie. Nothing to do with accident, and something altogether more invidious.

Not a word we use much today, which is a pity, because there's a lot of undiagnosed accidie around! Accidie has been variously defined as "a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world." This is boredom that has become a mindset. It is different from depression, and different again from those phases of life where we just have to get on with routine, duty, obligation, chores all the sub-structures that give stability to our lives. 

Speaking for myself, the recent lock down experience has felt like a slow growing algae across the surface of my daily life. Many of the usual sources of stimulus, challenge and interest are not available. Human contact, conversation, relationships are limited and constrained by a concern not to be a health hazard to each other. Walking once or twice a day, but in your own locality, has been an exercise in mind mapping not only the streets, but the state of the lawns, the stage of the blossom, recognisable paving stones, familiar horizons becoming a haze of sameness.

So, yes, the result of such unvaried routine could well be a state of listlessness or torpor, and loss of interest because that which makes life interesting is unavailable. Like those empty supermarket shelves when this all started, essential supplies of laughter, affection, story sharing, purposeful work, freedom and movement, social gathering, and so much else is not there.

Thinking about this yesterday I wondered about ways of compensating for all this sameness, and also addressing underlying and harder to acknowledge emotions such as anxiety, uncertainty, resentment and an inner disposition of complaint. Supposing that, throughout a whole day, I took time to notice what was happening around me, and made a select list of what floats in and out of my life, and which I miss, unless I pay attention. I'm talking about gratitude, thankfulness for what is and what is there, using the older but no less important spiritual practice of counting my blessings. 

Of course, to count them I have to notice them, and allow time for inner responsiveness to become understanding, appreciation, and perhaps teach myself to learn again how to be surprised. So I did just that. Here's the select list, each with a clue to its significance. Mostly, they happened in the garden.

A small ladybird makes its way across a forest canopy of oregano, growing down the border beside the garden path. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who didn't like ladybirds. The sun shining on its carapace, slow moving scarlet against fresh new growth of improbable green, a tiny, transient drama of life in Herbland.

A large freshly baked croissant just as it came out of the oven, flaky, buttery and light, needing no further supplement of butter or jam, enjoyed with a cup of chai tea, sitting in the sunshine.

Then, quite literally, out of the blue, a large luminescent bubble the size of a tennis ball, made its way between the trees and floated across our grass, a global rainbow, created somewhere down the street by a child unaware they were manufacturing messages of joy for other folk.

A fading tulip head, breathtaking in the interplay of light and shadow, slowly losing its symmetry as it came to the end of another annual cycle of beauty as gift to whoever takes time to notice.

Four moments of insignificance in the grand scheme of things, whatever we think that might be. But four moments when I knew my life is attached by invisible threads of awareness to a world other than the one inside my own head. John Calvin described the world as the theatre of God's glory. We are part of a continuing drama of creation, change and new possibility.

Gratitude is intentional, it is our inner yes to that drama, and our own part in it, in the theatre of God. By contrast, accidie is resentment that life isn't what we want it to be, and therefore we intentionally withdraw our assent to play our own part in it, and we boycott the theatre.

For myself, a ladybird, a croissant, a bubble and a tulip averted such intentional discontent. Jean Pierre De Caussade's phrase remains for Christian's deeply restorative, that we enjoy and live in "the sacrament of the present moment."      

  

In Praise (mostly) of the End Matter in Books 2. Bibliography

This is an essay in praise of bibliographies. There are select bibliographies, annotated bibliographies, brief bibliographies, long bibliographies. There are even book length bibliographies on particular subjects. A good one of those can be a fast track approach to gaining an overview of the area covered.  

A select bibliography shows an author's footprints and the various paths she has travelled in writing the book. It doesn't list everything she read or consulted, just the ones that are most useful. So much time is saved in research and further reading when a judicious selection of additional resources is the result of someone else doing the sifting and evaluating for usefulness.

Annotated bibliographies go further in selection and description. The author evaluates the contribution of an article or book and you quickly get a feel for whether it's a resource you need to follow up. When someone has read a book or article, and tells you what it does, and what it does not do, they guide you towards, or away from that particular resource. Of course you have to trust their judgement, but that's true in all scholarship - critical appropriation. A good annotated bibliography is like watching a prerecorded football match on fast forward, looking for the goals and cutting out ball retrievals and the thespian dramatics of on field divers!

Brief bibliographies are entirely utilitarian and modest in aim; to reduce the options and save time, but often at the cost of the reader's wider grasp. Providing the bibliography contains the key texts, the significant contributions, the authoritative voices, and a range of perspectives within all that, a brief book list does the job. If it's well done, the brief list becomes a further reading list, with the promise that, if you read these additional resources, you won't be wasting your time.

Long bibliographies can be less reliably worthwhile. It depends on whether the compiler has included all they ever read or saw reference to in writing the article, however tangential. There is a very good reason for insisting that the bibliography of an academic work should only contain works referenced in the main text. The number of items in a bibliography may bear no relation to how much the writer has engaged with and processed all the items on that long list; or whether it's there as a stage prop of suggested erudition.

One of the most useful items in any bibliography is the date of publication. I remember being so disappointed when I looked through the bibliography of a large biblical commentary, which the publisher described as definitive, and found the most recent book listed was ten years earlier than the date of publication. That doesn't mean relevance or value depend only on the most up to date and current work; but on key areas of discussion and contested fields of study, contemporary voices are essential to the integrity of the text. That said, no bibliography on Philippians should omit J B Lightfoot's volume from 1868, or Gordon Fee from 1995, separated as they are by 127 years. 

As to whole book bibliographies, I have to confess I have read several of these all the way through, including volumes dedicated to publications about George Herbert, John Wesley, and The Sermon on the Mount. Warren Kissinger's History of the Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is a remarkable achievement completed long before computers and software took the tedium out of sorting data for a publisher.

First published in the early 1970's, it was updated and reprinted in 1991 when desktop computer publishing was in its infancy. I borrowed it from Glasgow University in 1977 on long term loan and filled a card index box with information that anchored my study of the Sermon on the Mount for years to come. It contains hundreds of books and articles, annotated descriptively, and with all the publishers' details for ease of reference in pre-computerised libraries  remember the microfiche? We are spoilt for choice today; back then, a book like this was manna from heaven for the researcher. 

One more thought. When I was writing theological courses for College each module descriptor would have recommended reading. It was always a valuable conversation asking students which they had found most helpful, accessible, worth their time. One student complained about a particular book being hard to read; the response from the teacher, "It's an honours course, isn't it?" So yes. Good to have feedback on the usefulness of recommended reading. Good too to remember that core fitness means pushing beyond what's comfortable. A good bibliography is worth any other half dozen pages of most books.    

A Pastoral Letter to Myself, and Whoever Else Wants to Read It.

Each week I write a Pastoral Letter to those who are part of our church community in Montrose. I thought I would share the latest one here. It says some of what I feel and think as, like everyone else, I come to terms with this world become strange; and do so as a Christian whose answers raise questions, and whose questions have learned to trust some of the answers.  

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The other night I watched a programme on the story of the Hubble telescope. Some of the images of deep space were amazing, scary, wonderful, beautiful, awesome, and utterly unlike anything we could ever see without the marvels of technology, and the intelligence of those who make it all work.

Then I remembered we are in the middle of the kind of crisis that puts us in our place as human beings. We can see light years into the universe, but we are threatened by an invisible and deadly virus. 

We now live in a world where, as human beings, we are being reminded that we are human, not divine. We are here by God’s creative grace and purpose as stewards of creation, not its owners; we are guests not hosts; we can control much, but not everything; our life is precious and so is everyone else's; our life is for a time, but God is forever.

It’s easy for us to see human beings, even ourselves, as the centre of the universe. But the Hubble telescope tells us something very different. We are small and insignificant, tiny specks of dust afloat on the cosmos. But two thousand seven hundred years ago, a singer songwriter stood looking at the night sky and felt small, awed to silence, and prayed:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    any one of us that you care for us?

Yet you have made us a little lower than God

    and crowned us with glory and honour. (Psalm 8.3-5)

It takes great courage, and faith, to look into the infinity of space, and gaze at the vastness of a universe so beyond our knowing we have no words to describe it, no numbers to measure it, no map to interpret it. But the Psalmist long ago got its measure all right. It is the work of God’s fingers; God’s glory is set above the heavens. And us? Human beings with a life span measured in decades? What about us? The Psalm writer says God is mindful of us, and cares for us. Unbelievable! But true.

Seven hundred years ago, a young woman from Norwich, called Julian, had a vision of God’s love. Here is how she described it. 

“God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand… And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And God answered, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.”

Think of the Psalmist looking at the night sky; imagine a young woman recovering from life threatening illness and holding up her the hazelnut against the vast night sky. Both of them are rejoicing that this is God’s universe! Think of it. The ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know. But God has made us, is mindful of us, and cares for us.

Denise Levertov wrote about that vision of the hazelnut, and her poem ends:

All that is made;

A little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe

In God’s pierced palm.

I think all of us are feeling the weight of these days and weeks that are becoming months. We live in a world that is frightened and seems now unsafe. “But the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” What are human beings, folk like you and me that God should care for us? We are beings for whom Christ died. Our worth is indexed to Calvary. God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” We are each a little thing, held safe in God’s pierced palm.

This is a God-loved world. All the suffering and loss that we are now so aware of, it is known to God; all the grief, borne on the heart of the Father; all that is made held safe in God’s pierced palm.

How then do we as Christians live out that faith in the holding love of God? We are called to help out own communities to recover, even rediscover, the truths that make human life and our future possible. That our significance is not in our possessions, our future is not in our own power, but in the power of God’s love. Renewed by that love we are called to become again carers of creation, lovers of humanity, builders of peace and conduits of hope. 

It will be a while yet before we are able to meet again safely and freely as a community of Christ’s people. But in the meantime, it’s important to remember whose we are, who is mindful of us, and in whose hands our lives are held. There are cords of love and affection, of memories and shared worship, of burdens carried and blessings enjoyed, of prayers for each other and times we’ve been there for each other; these are woven together in all that we share in the fellowship of Christ.

Until we are able to gather again, we are scattered. But the God who calls out the stars and names them, whose glory is set in the heavens, and in whose hands he holds all that he has made, including us, is mindful of us, and cares for us.

Grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,

In Praise (mostly) of the End Matter in Academic Books. 1. Indices

Older reviews of academic books used to refer to the Bibliography and Indices as "end matter." The cursory reference to end matter was usually after the contents are described, the overall thesis of the book reviewed, then evaluated for cogency of argument, lucidity of writing, and contribution to knowledge in the subject field. More often than not, the end matter only merited a sentence of commendation for thoroughness, and perhaps usefulness.

Then came the great dilemma for publishers, whether there should be footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes are far more convenient for the reader and expensive for the publisher; endnotes are cheaper for the publisher and hard work for the reader. Being able to glance down the page for a reference is convenient, quick and doesn't break the flow of thought; but having to go to the back, find the relevant page, then the footnote whose number you may have to check again, read said footnote, and then back to the main text - you can see why readers don't like them.

However. For those who spend a lot of their lives within the literary worlds of scholarship, there is more to be said about 'the end matter', not least, that end matter matters.

Let's start with indices. An index compiled by a computer is about as useful as spreading out a packet of cornflakes and arranging them according to shape, size and tone of yellow.

Take for example the first edition of the massive and learned biography of John Henry Newman, by Ian Ker. The index is huge, the entries often in their hundreds, and you are left with no guidance as to whether the page reference merely uses the word, or has a meaningful discussion of the topic in question. Some entries take up more than a column of figures representing hundreds of references. Mercifully in the second edition the Index is made much more serviceable; perhaps in the intervening years computer programmes have become more subtle and flexible in selecting relevant data.

But an index compiled by a writer who has inside knowledge of why this or that page reference should be indexed, is a far more laborious process and with a far more useful product. Such an index would be based, for example, on the importance of all those references for a more nuanced understanding of the person, concept or event in question. Indeed to compile an index is itself a process of interpretation, and though inevitably biased by the writer's own perceptions, it is the product of the same mind that wrote the book in the first place. So, by all means an index; but please, a judicious selection of the key page references that aids study and gathers for the reader's retrieval, important fragments of knowledge; and please, not a computer generated data mass, promising little more than the distilled essence of tedium proportionate to pedantic comprehensiveness. Because, even with more sophisticated indexing software, a computerised index lacks the discernment of the scholar in intellectual control of the text. 

A better example of an index which aids the reader's learning is in Katherine Sonderegger Systematic Theology Vol.1 The Doctrine of God. In eight pages, references throughout the book are collated and arranged where necessary in sub themes beneath a main subject. The result is an index that serves the reader, offers manageable data, and doesn't waste your time searching through minor tangential references. Yes I would probably have wanted a bit more on some entries; but if the author thought the reference important enough to index, that's at least a clue to significance.

Allow the indulgence of name dropping. Katherine Sonderegger came to Aberdeen University a year or so before she published that volume. She lectures with the same precision of language as she writes. She takes her subject with utmost seriousness, and her listeners likewise, demonstrating in the discussion afterwards what I can only call patience with the question and humility laced with authority in her answers. I'm not sure any question was asked that she hadn't already pondered. 

At the end I spoke with her for a short time, about Julian of Norwich and what one scholar called Julian "teetering on the brink of universalism". Reformed scholar and critical disciple of Karl Barth that she is, she had considerable sympathy for the theological impulse of Julian towards an understanding of God's love that allows God to be God by acknowledging mysteries beyond our knowing when it comes to speech about God. That's what I mean by a theologian whose scholarly authority is enhanced by intellectual humility. And she compiles a very useful index!

 

Thickly Textured Thin Books. Guest Post 1. Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner

Today's guest post is from a friend I met many a year ago at Aberdeen University when he was doing post-graduate study on P T Forsyth. We share an admiration for Forsyth, and we both continue to delve into historical and systematic theology. Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy now lives in Halifax Nova Scotia, and he kindly agreed to review a thickly textured thin book. Thank you Leslie, and stay safe and well over there. 

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Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale (1977)

Through the years, I’ve been helped by a wide variety of books on preaching, many of them with chapter titles like “Beginnings, Connections, and Endings” and “Sermons for Special Occasions.” Their help has been always welcome. But what happens when the inexorable return of Sunday seems like a doom? Who will breathe new life into the preacher then?

In such times, my sermon-writing life has been propelled and inspired and given new life by two very different books. These are books that not so much teach one how to preach, but preach the gospel to the preacher—and in doing so, yes! prompt the preacher to preach. Both books, interestingly enough, originated as part of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University. One of them, from 111 years ago, is P. T. Forsyth’s Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, which started life as a two-inch thick tome, but the inspiration bursts from almost every page.

The other great encourager comes in at just 98 pages, plus two pages of notes, a “Thickly Textured Thin Book” to be sure. No acknowledgements or introduction, and no index: just one small book of heaven-sent incentive to tell the gospel truth, again and yet again. Frederick Buechner gave these Beecher lectures in 1977, and they were published the same year as Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. In four closely-scripted presentations, he exegeted the title.

First, preaching is telling the truth. “Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are. The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us [so] we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives. Before the Gospel is good news, it is simply the news that that's the way it is….” Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” rings through these opening pages.

Second, the gospel is tragedy; “stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part.” Buechner invites his hearers to attend to Jesus’s invitation, “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden.” The lecturer also insists that we not rush on to the remainder of that invitation until the full weight of our lives is felt.

Third, the gospel is comedy; witness Sarah’s incredulous laughter “at the idea of a baby’s being born in the geriatric ward and Medicare’s picking up the tab.” And so “the gospel is a wild and marvellous joke”: “the comedy of grace.” The contrast between bad news and good news is stark: “The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.” And then this as almost an afterthought: perhaps, from God’s angle, it is “the comic that is bound to happen.”

Finally, the gospel is fairy tale, says Buechner, “and one thinks of the angel in the book of Revelation who gives to each a white stone with a new name written on it which is the true and hidden name that he was named with even from the foundation of the world.” The truth, perceived with a childlike faith, is that “the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after.”

Such a breezy outline, of course, leaves so much unsaid. Buechner’s writing reproduces his spoken lectures—spare prose, mostly, with long but simple sentences that lilt with a preacher-poet’s delivery. Extended illustrations abound, and then return again and again—Henry Ward Beecher, the first of the Yale lecturers, cutting himself with his razor as he gets ready for the first lecture back in 1872; Sarah laughing; the various characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear; Pilate and Jesus; Jesus and Lazarus; and the Wizard of Oz. And always, the one with a sermon in hand:

The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?

       Let him tell them the truth.

(Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy)

Denise Levertov The Sapphire and the Stream 6 What the Fig Tree Said.

From earliest days the story of Jesus cursing a fig tree has created problems. It was early April; fig trees didn't fruit until late May; it would be unreasonable to complain about there being no fruit when the fruit season was weeks away. Is this mere petulance? Some commentators even describe the fig tree as innocent. What are we to make of a miracle that is destructive, against created things, and seems to be the very showing-off of power that Jesus refused to perform when asked for a sign as proof of his divine status.

One answer is that the incident comes immediately before the cleansing of the Temple, and the withering of the tree is only evident after that cathartic exercise of religious outrage. The point, it's argued, is that the fig tree is God's people, from whom God expected the fruits of righteousness, justice and obedience to Torah. But the people did not deliver; the Temple had become a sham of performance without the fruit of a righteous people. Jesus words of condemnation to the fig tree are an enacted parable of the coming of God in judgement. Most exegetical efforts go in this direction.

Denise Levertov's father had converted from Judaism to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. After leaving home she spent much of her life agnostic to defined religious identity, and only in the last decade or so, slowly moved towards conversion, becoming Roman Catholic in 1989, eight years before her death.

Much of her searching included the Ignatian Exercises, and the discipline of imagining the scene and the characters in the stories and putting yourself into the situation. Something of that same technique is at work in Levertov's poem "What the Fig Tree Said." She personifies the fig tree, which explains to all those exegetical reductionists, empirical rationalists and wooden literalists,  that they are missing the point.

Far from being cursed as a fruitless fig tree, the tree explains to the slow witted readers, that it has been co-opted into Jesus teaching ministry, a living metaphor, a visual aid to get it through the thick skulls of the disciples that they were the fruitless ones. The had walked in the sunlight of Jesus' example and teaching but showed no promise of the fruits of compassion, understanding and growth. Absent fruit is metaphor for barren hearts. 

The curse is not directed at the tree, not even at the disciples, but at the state of mind that is deaf and blind to truth, possibility, newness and a different kind of kingdom. This poet has deep allegiance to metaphor as conduit of meaning. and as an instrument subversive of settled complacency, and disruptive of controlling intellect.

The story of a man cursing a tree for being fruitless out of season is shocking; which means it has done its job. Now it's up to those who were there, and those who are now present through reading the text, to use their imagination. This poem does exactly what Levertov attempts in so many of her poems. She compels the reader to think imaginatively and outside the familiar categories and limits of those who think they know more than they do.

For Leveretov, imagination is "to live with a door of one's life open to the transcendent, the numinous." She goes on, "The imagination, which synergises intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God." ('A Poet's View', New and Selected Essays, 241. 24)

And now to read the poem, with ears that hear, and eyes that see.  

What the Fig Tree Said

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blurting for Him
in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me!—yet how could the Lord
be unfair?—so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
in His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits—compassion, comprehension—
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.

In Tribute to Francis I Andersen, 1925 - May, 2020.

In 1976 I bought the newly published Tyndale commentary on the book of Job, by Francis I Andersen. It set a new standard of scholarship for the series, and remains an important study of a book that is like a theological Matterhorn. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Andersen had died at the age of 94. In the intervening years his name became one of the most recognised in Old Testament and Judaic studies.

The range and depth of Andersen's scholarship was truly astounding, and his subsequent commentaries are amongst the definitive critical commentaries - on Hosea, Amos, Micah and Habakkuk. They are huge volumes, their usefulness arguably limited to those who require minutiae of Hebrew syntax, exhaustive alternative interpretations, and comprehensive coverage of Ancient Near Eastern history, culture and religious practices. Such volumes are to be consulted, used as reference works, repositories for research purposes.

The commentary on Job is different. Under 300 pages of exposition which is readable, careful, pastoral and rooted deep down in the biblical text. When I read of Professor Andersen's death I opened his small commentary, and remembered the times it has helped me navigate the ocean depths of one of the great classics of world literature. Of course there are more up to date and larger volumes on the book of Job; on my own shelves Sam Balentine holds pride of place, alongside several other standard commentaries. I never invested in the Behemoth of Job commentaries, David Clines' 3 volumes at pushing towards 2000 pages! Life is short and books are getting longer!

What strikes me about Andersen's commentary is the Preface. I always read the Preface of a book. It is a courtesy to the author to know what they are attempting to say, and why. Many a reviewer of books would have been far less unfair if they had taken the time to read what the book is, and what it is not. Andersen's Preface reads like a personal testimony of faith. It is a clue to the tone and approach of his commentary.

"It is presumptuous to comment on the book of Job. It is so full of the awesome reality of the living God. Like Job, one can only put one's hand over one's mouth."

Now there's a scholar who recognises his limitations, and the limits of the exegetical exercise! Near the end of the Preface Andersen refers to friends who "brought the love of God to us in a dark hour." His book was written out of personal sorrow and suffering, and he continued, "Everything is a gift, suffering the holiest of all..." 

Throughout the commentary Andersen allows God to be the mysterious, majestic, awesome reality who gives existence and reality to everything else.

"But God has revealed himself, preserving at the same time the inaccessible mystery of His own being. So we must attempt the impossible thing which He makes possible (Mk 10.27). However forbidding, He fascinates us irresistibly until by 'kindness and severity' (Rom 11.22), He brings us in His own way to Job's final satisfaction and joy."

Recent experience of grief and suffering, living the questions about God that sorrow and loss inevitably provoke, and as a scholar excavating a biblical text, Andersen  wrote this commentary for others who stand at the foot of the Matterhorn gazing up at the clouded summit. But all that said, this isn't a 'devotional' commentary. It is however exegesis of a text that helps the reader to better understand both the argument of the book, and the vaster argument between human beings in their suffering, and God as Creator. 

I took time yesterday to be grateful once more for this volume. It is, as many of the best biblical commentaries, an exegesis that expounds the text, and in doing so expounds the experience of the exegete. The Preface is an important part of the whole, a kind of apologia pro vita sua.  

Denise Levertov. The Sapphire and the Stream 5. The Servant Girl at Emmaus (A Painting by Velázquez)

( The Kitchen Maid, Diego Velazquez, National Gallery of Ireland)

There are two versions of this painting. The one in Ireland was viewed by Levertov shortly after its restoration, and the bringing to life of the maid and recovery of the details over the maid's shoulder of the depiction of Jesus and the disciples at supper in Emmaus. Is it a window from the kitchen to the table, or a painting of the biblical scene at Emmaus? Velazquez does a similar thing with Martha and Mary, leaving the viewer to collapse the time between the original Emmaus event and the encounter of the maid with the Emmaus Christ.

Here, in this painting, the black Moorish kitchen-girl has her head tilted, as one overhearing a conversation coming from behind. The artist has captured the moments of dawning understanding and recognition, and therefore the servant girl's coming to faith. The expression of perplexity, surprise, and the intensity of expression create a sense of discovered newness for someone whose life was predictably timetabled and task oriented.

That, at least, is Levertov's interpretation, and given her own slow coming to faith, there is a strong identity of her own experience of gradual dawning of understanding, with that of this marginal woman's encounter with the living presence of Christ. 

This beautiful piece of autobiographical poetry expresses movingly Levertov's ownexperience of listening to the voice of Christ, her move from incredulity to faith, her desire to serve the One she sensed walking alongside, and now seated in the place of revelation and blessing.

This is one of an increasing number of ekphrastic poems, the impulse and desire to write poems about specific paintings which reflect the poet's experience. For the reader of the poem, who is also the viewer of the painting, there are two forms of seeing that invite the imagination to be present, to hear the voices, see the scene, and to encounter the central player in the drama.

The Servant Girl at Emmaus
(A Painting by Velázquez)

She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his—the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one ever had looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?

Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he'd laid on the dying and made them well?

Surely that face—?

The man they'd crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumoured now some women had seen this morning, alive?

Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don't recognise yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching
           the winejug she's to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,

swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.

Surely...surely...surely; slowly but surely Levertov explains the thought processes of the kitchen maid, as memories, hopes and new possibilities come into clearer focus. Levertov imagines the girl is ahead of the game; she now knows, and she knows now, what the disciples at the table have yet to discover. When she takes the jug of wine through, and he breaks the bread, then they will know too.

But for now, she knows; she has seen the light surrounding him, and is sure. And for these brief moments there is secret joy when the least is centre stage, the last is first. The servant encounters grace before the hosts, which is as it should be in a resurrection topsy turvy world. 

And like this Black servant girl, Levertov who often felt herself to be on the margins, has succeeded in giving clear expression to her own process of coming to faith. For now, she knows, has seen the light around him, and is sure. Three times Levertov reminds the reader that this girl is sure because she listens, and listens intently. The poet has been listening intently for a voice that had spoken as if to her; and found it to be so. 

Denise Levertov. The Stream and the Sapphire 4. The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

In a world where as human beings we are being reminded that:we are stewards, not owners; we are guests not hosts; we can control much, but not everything; our life is precious and so is everyone else's; our life is for a time but God is forever; faith, hope and love abide, but the greatest of these is love. Yes. In such a world, we could do with another revelation of divine love, a recovery, even rediscovery of the truths that make human life and our future possible; that significance is not in our possessions, nor in our power, but in our capacity to live as carers of creation, lovers of humanity, builders of peace and conduits of hope. 

Late in her life Denise Levertov discovered Julian of Norwich, and found in her a deep source of healing wisdom, immense and optimistic love for her fellow humans and patience with the world and with the eternal love and purpose of the Creator. A small suite of poems weave some of Julian's themes most resonant with where Levertov was in her own life journey.

Her conversion to Christianity was neither routine nor typical. As a poet who deliberately wrote in prophetic and political mode about the injustices, cruelties and violence scarring the world, she was never going to be be content to toe any credal or ecclesial line that was drawn in the wrong place on the sand. In the early years of environmental concern she picked up on the threats to the future of the earth and to the future of humanity and wrote about the exploitation of nature, and railed against the militaristic mindset of conquest, dominance and greed. 

Positively she was passionate about peace, and  no more passionate about peace than about its negatives, war, inflicted suffering, systemic injustice, racism and the avoidable poverty of countries stripped of resources and labour to feed the markets and appetites of the rich powerful nations. Levertov was a poet, a prophet and a political activist whose poetry was protest against abuse of power, truth telling to the deliberately deaf, and moral resistance to the market assumptions that flatten the hopes of the majority of the world's people.

So when she came to read and write about Julian, she discovered a theologically wise and spiritually resilient guide who had looked the Black Death in the face and clung nevertheless to her faith in the Divine Love.

And that brief parable of the hazelnut - Levertov considered that image, held the hazelnut against the vast night sky, the complexity of existence, the  ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know, and nodded her agreement with Julian.

The result is this poem. The lineation is predictably left aligned, apart from the pivotal moment of affirmation. The last line is theological gold. 

Psalm 8 vibrates in the background of Levertov's mind. "When I look at the heavens, the work of your fingers...what are humans that you care for us...are mindful of us?" 

The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,
unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all
language can name or fail to name, unutterable
swarming of molecules. All Pascal
imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine
is known to exceed his dread.

And there’s the earth of our daily history,
its memories, its present filled with the grain
of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen
to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,
this word or that, a tune in this key not another,
beat of our hearts now, good or bad,
dying or being born, eroded, vanishing–

And you ask us to turn our gaze
inside out, and see
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe
it is our world? Ask us to see it lying
in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses
every awareness our minds contain? All Time?
All limitless space given form in this
medieval enigma?
                             Yes, this is indeed 

what you ask, sharing
the mystery you were shown: all that is made:
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe
in God’s pierced palm.

(This poem is found in Breathing the Water, (Bloodaxe Books, 1987.) The date coincides with the period when she was moving decisively towards Christian commitment and conversion). 

Denise Levertov. The Stream and the Sapphire 3 On Belief in the Personal resurrection of Jesus

The poem, "On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus', was written after Levertov had spent eight months going through the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, devoting an hour a day to prayer and journal reflection, and meeting regularly with her spiritual director. Out of such immersion in the Gospel narratives came a clearer grasp of her own spiritual tendencies.

As an intellectually engaged critic of texts she inevitably brought analytic tools to her study; as a seeking pilgrim she knew she needed to know and believe out of her own spiritual experience arising from these Gospel stories. By imagining herself into each story, the walls of time and culture between her and the original Gospel events dissolved briefly, so that she could find herself, and be found, in the encounter with Jesus. 

In her journal she wrote a prayer in which she asked "keep her intellect sharp and yet not be a vehicle for the spirit that denies." She knew that belief for her consisted both in intellectual grasp and in personal commitment. Faith is both cognitive assent and affective response, both thought and emotion. 

The poem is printed exactly as Levertov herself insisted; each line a step, with time to pause and feel its weight, before the next phrase. To read is to descend a stairway of thoughts, each one a step in her argument, which progresses across the page, returns and again progresses, the downward movement of a spiral of continuous, contemplative and imaginative thought.

In the encounter with the risen Christ intellectual and cognitive grasp are essential but not enough. Miracles are not established by mere reasoned evidence; that conclusion is reached by the confirmation of deeper ways of knowing; to feel the truth, taste the truth, and bear witness that a miracle such as resurrection is known because personally witnessed in its transformative power.

This is one of Levertov's most explicit testimonies about her personal experience of God. Faith is both knowledge and trust, engaging intellect and emotion, reason and feeling. The propositional truth  'Christ is risen', must find evidence in the experiential truth of personal encounter. Around the same period, in a poem about the conversion of Brother Lawrence, Levertov articulated her own experience of prayer as unending 'silent secret conversation / the life of steadfast attention."

At the foot of the stairway of this poem, is the surprised joy of Emmaus. That story of bewildered disciples, the talkative stranger, the yearning for companionship, and bread in the hands of the unknown guest, contained all that Levertov sought in her quest for peace, assurance and a faith that allowed for both questions and trust.   

On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus

It is for all

         ‘literalists of the imagination,’

                  poets or not,

that miracle

                   is possible,

                                   possible and essential.

Are some intricate minds

                                      nourished

                                                     on concept,

as epiphytes flourish

                               high in the canopy?

                                                           Can they

subsist on the light,

                             on the half

                                       of metaphor that’s not

grounded in dust, grit,

                                 heavy

                                          carnal clay?

Do signs contain and utter,

                                        for them

                                                     all the reality

that they need? Resurrection, for them,

                               an internal power, but not

                                              a matter of flesh?

For others,

                of whom I am one,

                                            miracles (ultimate need, bread

of life) are miracles just because

                                                 people so tuned

                                                                          to the humdrum laws:

gravity, mortality--

                           can’t open

                                           to symbol’s power

unless convinced of its ground,

                                              its roots

                                                           in bone and blood.

We must feel

                    the pulse in the wound

                                                       to believe

that ‘with God

                      all things

                                    are possible,’

taste

        bread at Emmaus

                                  that warm hands

broke and blessed.