Living Wittily

Brueggemann, Heschel and Levertov: Lights on the Road.

It was Walter Brueggemann who introduced me to two writers who have been intellectual companions ever since. The first was the poet Denise Levertov; the second was Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Over the years I have read and returned to these two writers, looking for wisdom, reassurance, challenging questions, timely reminders, moral insight and a resumed conversation with two voices that are now loved and familiar to me. 

Both have been treated by serious and scholarly biographers. Edward Kaplan's two volumes (1. Prophetic Witness;  and 2. Spiritual Radical), are the definitive study - Kaplan is the leading scholar of Heschel's writing and thought. The second volume is especially important to place Heschel in the context of post-Holocaust Judaism, and the America of the nuclear age, civil rights movement and the Vietnam war.

Levertov's life and poetry have been explored in two substantial studies. The first by Dana Greene, Denise Levertov. A Poet's Life; the second by Donna Hollenberg, A Poet's Revolution. The life of Denise Levertov. All three of those volumes are rich in detail, fully acquainted with their subject and their writing, and critically appreciative of the subjects of whom they write. The two Levertov biographies are sufficiently different in approach and content to be complementary studies that both repay reading. 

I mention this because I've been thinking about my own reading habits, and trying to understand why I have read what I have, and also why some writers become constant and significant companions, while others I can take then leave. Related to this I've been wondering too about my fascination with secondary studies, sometimes to the detriment of reading more of the primary sources of an author's work. Take Karl Barth for example. I've read Barth off and on for decades now, but not systematically and so far not in whole volumes. So much of his work in those fourteen volumes remains unread. On the other hand I've read much of the key secondary literature on Barth, and the truth is I have enjoyed and learned so much (Maybe more?) from some of Barth's finest expositors.

The same is true of Heschel and Levertov, most of whose primary works I have read, and some of them a number of times. But to read those who have made such writers as Barth, Heschel, Levertov a life study, is to be exposed to informed perspective, considered insight, critical thought, and an enthusiasm that at its best confers significance without the contrasting deficits of hagiography or hatchet job. I am an unrepentant fan of good secondary literature.

Back to Heschel. Brueggemann's early work on the Hebrew prophets' passion for justice within the covenant, owed much to two authors, Gerhard Von Rad and A J Heschel. But it was his engagement with Heschel that sent me looking for more.

Brueggemann is an admirer of Heschel's philosophy of religion and his insistence that to be human is to search for God and to be searched for by God. It doesn't take long for readers of Heschel to feel the force of his insistence that the human response to God is awe, wonder, worship, prayer, Torah obedience and radical trust. These are exactly the themes Brueggemann has spent a lifetime advocating as the strongest interpretive pillars of the Hebrew Bible. Those familiar with Brueggemann's essays and sermons, prayers and exegesis will recognise the longevity of those emphases in Brueggemann's own writing.

This photo of Heschel with MLK is evidence that the goodly fellowship of the prophets is not confined to the Old Testament. I find such personal connections fascinating. People whose lives have explored and expounded the prophetic themes of justice, righteousness and mercy as these are encountered in the God of faithfulness, and without injustice; People who have engaged persistently with the God of mercy and steadfast love whose care of creation and humanity has never ceased; the God who hears the cry of the poor, and sees the tears of the oppressed, and who calls for love of neighbour and radical compassion for life, human and creature. Brueggemann and Heschel, two very different people, but speaking with accents similar enough to place them in the same moral and spiritual regions, even if their theological traditions are from two tributaries flowing into the same river.  

   

A Very Mary Christmas: Imagine That!

A Very Mary Christmas

I was a teenager when we got engaged.

And yes, like every other Jewish couple,

we looked forward to marriage

Our own home, children, a normal family.

That word normal disappeared from my vocabulary

the day the angel came.

 

Hello Mary! Hey Mary!! Hail Mary!

You’re going to have a very Mary Christmas!

You’re going to have a baby.

Goodbye normal – hello Gabriel ,God’s facetime stand in.

Was I being asked or told, invited or commanded?

The announcement seemed to take me for granted,

Fait accompli, done deal, no is not an option.

 

And yet. God’s messenger was courteous and reassuring;

This was a blessing not a burden, a gift not a demand.

God was waiting for my Yes – but I had questions!

And I had anxieties, and I had all my own plans,

And I had Joseph – what would he think of me?

So I just told Gabriel, “Impossible.”

I’m a virgin. I’m Joseph’s beloved. Nobody else’s.”

 

Gabriel smiled, not because he hadn’t heard me,

But because he had.

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,

And the power of the Most High will overshadow you…

I listened to it all, dumbstruck, gob-smacked, scared,

For once silenced and subdued by a power

That brought tears of joy and sadness to my eyes,

A ringing in my ears as I heard in Gabriel’s voice,

the vibrations of heaven’s purposes,

my mind a whirlwind of hopeful wonder and …and

a fast scrolling of scary ideas.

A heart bursting to say the right thing,

but not knowing what that might be.

 

Gabriel wasn’t helping!

“The Holy One to be born will be the Son of God.”

The what? God’s Son born of a teenager?

You mean the Eternal reduced to now, this moment? To me?

What about Joseph? What about what people will say?

The gossip? The scandal? All the unpleasantness?

How can this all too human flesh become the home of God?

Why would God choose a woman’s womb as a way into the world?

 

I’m not sure what I felt the most.

Fear or faith, outrage or joy, resistance or surrender.

Why me? Why now? When? How?

Gabriel explained. I listened.

God, said Gabriel, has this sorted.

My cousin Elizabeth, he said, would have a baby as well.

Elizabeth, so much older than me, but pregnant too.

I thought when I first heard the angel say her name

Elizabeth, that she would be a touch of normality, you know,

Something from everyday, ordinary, routine, NORMAL.

But now she too was implicated in what God was about.

 

The biggest decisions we ever make are the ones

when we know nothing will ever be the same again.

I didn’t see this coming, but in that moment of surrender,

all my questions ignited and fused together into one word, YES.

“I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”

I went to visit Elizabeth, and it was if something new and powerful

And revolutionary and world-changing erupted from my whole being.

“My soul magnifies the Lord

And my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.”   

I sang words I didn’t even know I knew,

I said things that later caused trouble,

about rulers brought down and the humble lifted up,

about the hungry being fed and the rich sent away empty.”

 

Well less than a year later the rulers were still there,

As powerful, oppressive, greedy as ever.

Caesar Augustus, Chief Executive of the whole world,

ordered us to get our tax returns done.

So we returned to Bethlehem, Joseph’s home town.

Oh by the way, “the little donkey that carried Mary?”

Spare a thought for Mary, who had to sit on it in my state!

When I said Yes to Gabriel, it never occurred to me

I’d be on a road trip to an over-crowded village,

And staying downstairs in the animal living room.

When I said Yes to Gabriel, I didn’t know,

I couldn’t know what I was saying Yes to.

 

Jesus was a beautiful baby, wrapped in his shawl,

The one who is Immanuel, Saviour and Messiah,

crying mightily for milk and the arms of his mother.

When I said Yes to Gabriel, nobody said

there would be an alignment of the stars,

a whole orchestra of angels doing a Cosmic Strictly

to an earth shaking, ground breaking sound track,

"Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace

And goodwill to all people with whom God is pleased."

 

As I held him, swaddled and cuddled, settled and sleeping,

what was it I held so tightly in my arms?

The Eternal Word through whom all things were made,

now made flesh and blood, and breathing the air of earth.

That’s what I held.

The Royal Messiah, born of David’s line,

promised to his people since the beginning,

the one in whom all God’s promises are YES, and my child.

That’s what I held!

The Light of the world and the Light of the nations,

born into the darkness and dangers of the world,

with its Caesars and Herods, its cruelties and killings,

its refugees and casualties, its broken lives…

But the Light that shines on in the darkness,

The Light that can never be extinguished --

That’s what I held.

 

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son…”

That’s what I held.

“The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us”

That’s what I held.

“Born this day in the City of David, a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.”

That’s who I held.

I knew. Oh yes, I knew.

 

Maybe only a man could write words that ever doubted this.

"Mary did you know, that your baby boy is Lord of all creation

Mary did you know, that your baby boy would one day rule the nations."

Did I know? Seriously?

I’m a mother. I knew that a child born of a virgin is God’s doing.

Flesh of my flesh and gift of God.

Jesus my son, the Son of God...I knew!

 

Did I know then, in Bethlehem, what would happen 30 years later

in Jerusalem, on Golgotha, and in that early morning Garden?

Mary did you know? No. Not all of it.

But as I looked into the face of Jesus, wrinkled and newly born,

Gabriel’s words came back to me.

“Do not be afraid Mary, you have found favour with God.

You will be with child and give birth to a son called Jesus.”

 

I knew – this was God’s plan, God’s doing.

All the scandal, the gossip, the innuendos about Joseph –

All those long miles on that blessed donkey –

All the doors knocked before we got a space in the corner

among the animals

from whom there was no gossip, innuendo or rejection,

by the way.

 

The star, the light, the music, the shepherds,

the three travellers with their gifts –

it all fits together. So Yes, I knew.

As Gabriel said and God promised, the Holy Spirit came upon me,

And the shadow of the Most High overshadowed me,

 

And now this little holy one is born,

this utterly dependent, beautiful, vulnerable, fragile baby,

my son - held fiercely in my arms against the whole world –

and yet, in ways I don’t know, my son is God’s gift to the world.

My love and God’s love, a mother’s love and a Father’s love,

join together in this little bundle of eternal possibilities.

In Jesus, human motherhood and divine fatherhood

intersect in a plan and purpose made in heaven,

conceived in the mind of God,

and born and borne out of God’s faithful love

for all that he has created.

 

In my son Jesus, I enfold the One

Who is the mystery and miracle of God’s ways with each of us.  

Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, hail the incarnate deity…

Mary, did you know, when you kiss your little baby,

you kiss the face of God?

Oh yes, I knew.

But it would take a lifetime to understand,

years of treasuring all this up in my mind,

and pondering with a mother’s heart

The miracle, the mystery, the meaning..

But yes, I knew, and because of that

‘My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me –
holy is his name.

Christmas in a War Zone: For Thou wert called By Love unwalled,

Over the weeks of Advent I've been slowly making my way through Music of Eternity, a series of meditations on the writing of Evelyn Underhill, compiled by Robyn Wrigley-Carr.

 

It was Underhill who first introduced me to some of the more obscure Christian mystical writers, including Jacopone da Todi, a medieval Italian Franciscan monk. 

 

In of of her essays Underhill quotes a passage from Jacopone's Lauds, a long reflection on the Incarnation of our Lord. The same passage I later found in a huge anthology of Christian poetry, and it is now one of my regular readings on Christmas day. 

 

Thyself from love Thy heart didst not defend;

From heaven to earth it brought Thee from Thy throne.

Beloved, to what sheer depths didst Thou descend

To dwell with man, unhonoured and unknown,

In life and death to enrich us without end?

 

Homeless and poor, with nothing of Thine own

Thou here didst come alone,

For Thou wert called

By Love unwalled,

That all Thy heart did move.

And as about the world Thy feet did go

'Twas Love that led Thee always, everywhere.

Thy only joy, for us Thy Love to show,

And for Thyself no whit at all to care.

(Jacopone da Todi, 1250-1306)

 

Context matters, and these words were written out of a mixture of anger, disillusionment and a deep devotion to the love of God as revealed and practically demonstrated by Jesus. The city states, which were powerful military entities in their own right, were constantly at war. The church was conflicted by power games, and deeply corrupt at its core as a succession of Popes behaved more like secular despots than ecclesial guides. Jacopone wrote his Lauds and other poems as both critique and satire of the ecclesial status quo, and the incongruous nonsense of Christian city states willing each other's destruction. Two centuries before Luther he was one of those writing, arguing, preaching and working for reform.

 

This extract from his much longer meditation on the Incarnation is itself both deeply devotional and politically critical. The critique is by way of contrast. Love is the driving force of the incarnation; not self-defence but care for others the otive at the heart of Christian redemption. Fame and honour was what drove military commanders and ecclesial rulers, Popes and Cardinals alike; but the Son of God came 'unhonoured and unknown.' The Christ came not with armies but alone, not wealthy but poor, and not to knock down walls but as 'love unwalled.' Motivation is about what moves us to act - Jacopone is relentless in his insistence that un-defensive Love, enacted and embodied led Jesus 'always everywhere.' And those who take his name are called to the same self-giving Love as the motive of all Christian living.

 

To read those words again is to begin to sense the revolutionary vibrations of incarnational theology. Mary's Magnificat had exulted in the powerful brought low and the lowly lifted up, the poor and hungry fed and the rich and replete sent empty away. Jesus is the epitome of such redemptive reversals. Pope's and City Rulers in Jacopone's day, and US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers in our own day, are targets of such moral and theological critique. The Incarnation of the Son of God is not an occasion for power games, honour competitions, or celebrity jealousies, but for those much more fundamental responses of the human heart to the deep movement of God into the world and human life - humble worship, adoring wonder, moral transformation, reconciling passion, in short love unwalled.

 

From my first reading of Jacopone's verses, those two words have appeared as Christmas illuminations at the centre of the text. The entire poem in two words - and I know of no other juxtaposition of precisely these two words. They are the sum and substance of both Christian redemption and Christian existence, tied as they are to the act and being of God in Christ.

 

And the last two lines speculate on the perfect humanity of Jesus as mirror of Divine love. Out of a life of singing and praying, came words that seven centuries later still play the familiar chords of Christian praise and Christmas wonder.

 

Thy only joy, for us Thy Love to show,

And for Thyself no whit at all to care.

 

Advent: Light of the World

Whimsical Haiku

The long journey from

Bethlehem to Calvary:

the Light of the World.

"Adeste Fideles" - Miracle, Mystery and Meaning.

The first Latin I ever learned by heart was in primary 5. Our music teacher taught us to sing ‘O Come All ye faithful’, in Latin

Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes,
venite, venite in Bethlehem;
natum videte regem angelorum:
[Refrain:]
venite, adoremus, venite, adoremus,
venite, adoremus Dominum.

The feeling of achievement, speaking in an ancient language, and the sense of power in knowing something so odd; it was satisfyingly mysterious.

More than sixty years later I can still repeat it verbatim. I also remember the school choir singing this at the carol service in our wee rural school, feeling we were the last and the first word in educated diction and tamed mischief.

And that second verse, which we sing with so much sincerity, joy and wonder, quotes key phrases in the Nicene Creed. Who would have thought that seventeen centuries later, folk like us, living in 21^st Century Montrose, would be singing words that have shaped and preserved our understanding of Jesus as Son of God and Son of Man. “God of God, Light of Light, Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; Very God, begotten not created. O come let us adore him!

Why does all this matter? Because we make the long journey from Advent to Christmas for reasons more important than the presents and the cards, the food and the carols. Christmas is the day when as Christians we are given the chance to begin to wonder once more.

Bethlehem was no big deal, other than the birthplace of David. Mary was in her middle teens, and struggling to understand all the changes of a woman’s body bringing a child to birth. Joseph had his own thoughts, but he stuck by Mary, then and later. Rome wasn’t interested in a Jewish couple eloping to Bethlehem, just so long as their names were captured by the tax census. Herod, like all small minded tyrants, could only hold on to power through fear, violence and deceit. And those journeying Magi were the kind of exotic star-gazing travellers you were likely to meet where the trade routes crossed. From outside the story everything was ordinary. But from inside the story everything was about to become extraordinary.

Thinking of that outside animal pen we may well sing of the little Lord Jesus, and accept the carol is mistaken, because like all babies, quite a lot of crying he makes! If you’re like me you can manage the first few verses of ‘The First Noel’, but the refrain seems to go on forever, and even singing the shorter version, you’ll sing Nowell 20 times!  And yes, some of the carols say exactly what we want to say – “Hush the noise you men of strife and hear the angels sing.” But always, always, the best carols bring us back to the miracle and the mystery.

This howling infant, leaving the warm security of the womb, was the long promised Messiah. Wrapped in blankets against the chill of the night, being fed by an exhausted mother, is the one whose name is Immanuel, God with us. The naming of the baby is much more than keeping a family tradition and identity, “You shall call his name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.”

So there we have it. The utterly normal, billions of times repeated event, of the birth of a new human being, a baby. And in that same event, God comes amongst us in human form as promised Saviour, as redeeming Love, as the desire of the nations, as the hope of the ages. As “God of God, Light of Light…very God, begotten not created.”

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth.”

O Come, let us adore him. Or as my amazing music teacher would say, “Adeste fideles…venite adoremus!”

Wisdom for the Journey: Hospitality.

 "Hospitality always places us in the position of having to receive rather than being able to be in control...hospitality is not simply something that I offer rather hospitality means that I receive.

Hospitality in this sense is quite 'defenceless' - it lets its guard down and stands unprotected. Perhaps that is why hospitality is so difficult, because we are so fearful.

The Greek word for stranger is 'xenos'. Our English word xenophobia means fear of the stranger. If we turn this word around, we get the New Testament word for hospitality: philoexenia, love of the stranger.

Pure hospitality, like perfect love, casts out fear (iJohn 4.18)."

 

(Practical Theology. On Earth as It Is In Heaven, T Velling, Orbis, Pages 232-3)

 

 

 

 

Wisdom for the Journey 1: "To avoid the anxieties which may be caused by either regret for the past or fear of the future, here in a few words is the rule to follow:

the past must be left with God's measureless mercy, the future to his loving providence; and the present must be given wholly to his love through fidelity to his grace."

 

Jean Pierre De Caussade, Letters, Book VIII, 1/433.

 

Tidying Up the Reading Desk Before New year.

I usually have two or three books on the go - in this case four. I also like to finish whatever I'm reading by the end of the year. I'm well through two of these, the Advent one is a daily read but will get there, and the heavier one on Glory and Longing is the heavy lifting one.

 

Many of my reading habits go back to three books. One by a largely forgotten Christian philosopher, Nels F S Ferre, Making Religion Real - there is a chapter on reading as an intellectual and spiritual discipline. Read widely, read difficult texts, know one writer thoroughly, read novels and poetry, and don't worry about the number of books read. What we do with a book is far less significant than what that book does to us.

 

The second The Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel - repeatedly Von Hugel advised reading those authors who keep the mind supple, responsive, curious, patient, and unwilling to settle down on the well shaped comfort of our favourite intellectual easy chair. From Von Hugel I learned to value the spiritual experience of others, and to stop using my own experience as some of validity check on how others related to and thought about God.

 

Then there's the biography of Alexander Whyte, who remains for me an exemplar of that older Scottish tradition of education in the humanities before education in divinity. Whyte read with wide ecumenical sympathy across the theological traditions, in literature and biography, and in a spirit of both enquiry and prayer as he sat at the feet of those from whom he wished to learn. Read, pray, think were three imperatives he drummed into students at New College Edinburgh.

As to reading several books at a time, that's just how it works for me.

 

Anyway, these four will complete this year's agenda / menu / list.

A Wing and a Prayer

The juxtaposition of huge wind turbines,

a ship standing off,

and a lone cormorant drying its wings,

for reasons I can't properly explain,

left me feeling hopeful,

that human technology and earth's creatures

can still fit into the same picture,

and that our capacity for creative innovation

will find ways for life to flourish

beyond the limited horizons of our present experience.

 

For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30.18)

At the pharmacy there’s a queue, because only two people are allowed into the shop at any one time. At Greggs the queue is even longer from 8.00am till around 9.30 am, because it’s the favourite breakfast takeaway for folk going to work or school. The coffee and bacon rolls are very good, and very good value – I’m able to confirm this from personal experience!

If it’s worth waiting for, people don’t mind waiting. Patience isn’t a problem if you know that, when your turn comes, you’ll get what you hope for. But there’s another kind of waiting. It goes on and on and on, until it seems there’s no end to the waiting.

Advent is when we rediscover the importance of waiting for God. “They that wait for the Lord will renew their strength,” said Isaiah the prophet. True enough. But sometimes waiting can be frustrating. Maybe that’s because we’ve become used to getting things done quickly. We value immediacy, right now - from making coffee, to ordering online with delivery today or tomorrow, to binge-watching a TV box set so we don’t have to wait for weekly episodes. Take the waiting out of wanting is one of today’s most powerful marketing promises.

So we need Advent to slow us down, to train us in patience, to recover the wonder of waiting. Here is Isaiah again, this verse is not so well known, but an important word from the Lord to hearts becoming impatient with long term promises.

“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30.18)

 The story of Jesus, from Advent to Second Coming is a story punctuated by waiting, allowing God’s purposes to be worked out in God’s time, at God’s pace, and to our blessing. Mary receives the annunciation that she will have a child named Jesus, the Messiah, the Saviour, Emmanuel. Nine months later we are in Bethlehem, and not long after the baby is a refugee. Please don’t overlook that dark corner of the Christmas story. Joseph, Mary and their baby were fleeing from the violence and terror of murdering soldiers. Christians of all people should understand the importance of welcome and protection for those fleeing for their lives.

The Bethlehem refugees waited in Egypt till Herod died and the threat was past. They re-settled in Nazareth and Jesus waited 30 years, “growing in favour with God and all who knew him.” For three years Jesus healed, taught and lived the life of one utterly obedient to the Father. There was a lot of waiting, because as John regularly says throughout his Gospel, “His time had not yet come.”

But come it did, and Jesus was crucified and buried. That three day wait was too much for the disciples. Rather than wait for the promise of Jesus rising from the dead, they panicked, ran away, hid themselves, kept busy, and gave up - anything but wait for something that was never going to happen. But happen it did. What started with angels and celebration at Bethlehem, came to an earth-juddering halt on Calvary. Until early on the third day! Just as the sun was rising, the Son was rising, and indeed as angels once announced his birth, now angels announced “He is risen!”

But still the waiting continues. “Wait in the city,” Jesus says, “till you are clothed with power from on high.” Pentecost comes and the Gospel overflows from the hearts of disciples now filled with the Holy Spirit, flowing out to the ends of the world and to the end of the ages. And the waiting continues, as we await the second coming of Jesus, the One to whom every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth.

This Advent, we will try to learn again that God’s purposes don’t work out to our timetable, nor to our agendas. As Isaiah said, “The Lord is a God of justice.” He will make things right. Why?  “The Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion…” No wonder Isaiah goes on to say, “Blessed are all who wait for him.”

Those queues outside Gregg’s are their own testimony. Experience has shown those folk that it’s worth the waiting. You can almost hear those words of Jesus in his favourite teaching style. If waiting at Gregg’s is worth it, “How much more” is it worth waiting before God, in quiet trust, in patient faith, and with hearts open to the coming of Jesus into our world, into our community life, and into our hearts. Live this week with Isaiah 30.18, and discover again the Lord who longs to be gracious to you, who rises to show you compassion, and who blesses you as you wait before him,