Living Wittily

Learning the Languages of Humanity.

Prayer request from our home church in Aberdeen at Crown Terrace:

 

"Remember Alison and Ken as they help our Iranian friends with learning English this afternoon in the church."

 

This too is ministry, this too is loving our neighbour, this too is giving words to those in whom we see Christ our brother and sister.

The 'language of Zion' needn't be the closed discourse of Christian in-talk, but the gift of words that enables, as Isaiah and Micah knew well, the coming together of nations to walk together in God's ways.

 

The tapestry is based around Hebrew script "tikkun olam", and celebrates this deeply Jewish notion that translates as "to repair the world. Indeed.

Lament for the Loss of the Index Card Book Catalogue.

One of my blogging friends says of the Index Card Catalogue, "The greatest research tool of all time." 

 

East Kilbride, Carluke, Lanark and Hamilton, all Local Authority Libraries in the sixties, then Langside College, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, Glasgow University Library (Floor six was Philosophy, Theology and Religion) and New College Library in Edinburgh - in all of these I learned the joy of the chase, the excitement of discovery and capture of new roads to knowledge.

 

When the microfiche came some of these libraries retained the index card drawers for a few years. When they were eventually gone, and computer technology made a library search a very different process, I missed them, and still do.

 

The physical pulling out of a meticulously ordered drawer, flipping through thousands and thousands of typed cards in alphabetical order, and some of them in subject category, often typed in purple, writing down the details in the notebook, and then chasing the book to its specified Dewey directed place on the shelf, hoping no one else had got there first and borrowed it.

 

One example from Carluke - I found the book that, long before Hilary Mantel 's literary creation of Thomas Cromwell, opened up the political machinations behind the dissolution of the monasteries.

 

Then at Glasgow Uni in 1971, the books that formed the basis of what became the Principles of Religion Class Prize Essay on "What was distinctive in the Israelite conception of God." These included Gerhard Von Rad's Old Testament Theology, Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret, and the quite wonderful book on Indian religions, The Wonder That Was India by A L Basham. And all of them waiting to be discovered in those wooden treasure chests we called an Index Catalogue.

 

Google is quicker, near inexhaustible, information as fast-food; the Index Catalogue was a work of meticulous and discriminating organisation, information as slowly assembled ingredients in a slow cooker. Or so it now seems to me.

 

And If I ever write a memoir, one of the chapters should be titled: "Prevenient Grace: Books that found me."

When Archbishops Tread where Angels Love to Tread.

The two Church of England Archbishops are not the first outspoken prophets to be told to shut up, mind their own business, and to go away. Nor are they the first to be told to stay out of politics because it's the powerful who call the shots.

 

"Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Get out, you seer! Go back to the land of Judah. Earn your bread there and do your prophesying there. Don’t prophesy anymore at Bethel, because this is the king’s sanctuary and the temple of the kingdom.” (Amos 7.12-13)

 

Mind you Amos could give as good as he got! Those first two chapters are all about the judgement of God on those who have no time for the poor, who stifle compassion for the refugee and the homeless, who make idols out of their ideologies, and who trample on the heads of the poor and sell the needy for the price of a pair of trainers!

 

Yes, on second thoughts, it's not hard to see why Amos was told to shut up and get lost. Those who take seriously the categorical imperative of love for neighbour will continue to pray, "Let justice rtoll down like a river, and righteousness like a never failing stream."

 

Not How to Pray, But Why We Dare to Pray in the First Place.

Right. I know Barth is the big beast in 20th Century Dogmatics. But his sparring partner, Emil Brunner has been too easily overlooked and underestimated in such comparisons. Brunner's Dogmatics were also written for the church.

 

I mention Emil Brunner because while chasing something else I found myself in Volume III, chapter 24, A Theology of Prayer.

 

Reading it was like cycling downhill into a fresh wind, exhilarating and bringing tears to your eyes

 

Brunner understands the struggles of faith, and the complexities and perplexities trying to understand what we are doing when we pray. Here are the last couple of sentences of the chapter, summing up the God-centred and grace enabled experience of prayer, and the wonder that we can pray at all!

 

"The highest possible privilege on earth is that of praising God in the name of Jesus through the Holy Spirit. This is the nearest approximation to the final goal, to eternal life in the Kingdom of God. In this act of praise, faith as a life act 'is actually present.' In this praise we have an anticipation of that which is ultimate and eternal."

The Cross on Holy Saturday: "Beneath O Cross, thy shadow, is my abiding place..."

On one of my regular walks we pass the Episcopal Church. The side of the building has this cross displayed. It faces the road, the car park, and towards the distant hills. Do those parking their cars notice it? What about the regular walkers going down to the village for their daily constitutional, does it ever occur to them to give it a passing thought? Do passing motorists glance over and see it? If not, then who is it for?

I photographed this mathematically precise cross on one of those late winter days of bright sunlight and blue skies. It was the shadow that made me look twice - it was evocative of lines that came to mind without searching through the memory files.

Whatever else Holy Saturday conveys of emotion, image, memory, devotion or whatever, it's the day when we face the reality of an empty cross, without the comfort of an empty tomb. I find the sharp angled plainness of this cross deeply disconcerting, which is as it should be. The cross is not a thing of beauty, and perhaps we are too quick to soften its lines, round off its angles, give it some colour, make it more aesthetically and therefore more emotionally acceptable.

But what can possibly make the cross acceptable, attractive even? All this week I have explored images of the cross, and tried to understand even the first fringes of truth knowing it would still be beyond our grasp. And yet. One of the paradoxes that goes to the heart of our faith is that there is, despite all that points to the contrary, a beauty and a cause for wonder in the cross, whether imaged in art and photograph, sung or played in music, read or prayed or written in word. There is a strange beauty in the brokenness, a glory in the tragedy, a truth that renders hopeful so much else in our lives that seems cause for despair, or at least indifference. 

The words that came to mind as I took this photograph are these: 

I take, O cross, thy shadow
  for my abiding place:
I ask no other sunshine than
  the sunshine of his face;
content to let the world go by,
  to know no gain nor loss;
my sinful self my only shame,
  my glory all the cross.

The hymn begins:

Beneath the cross of Jesus
  I fain would take my stand,
the shadow of a mighty Rock
  within a weary land...

Forgive the following personal reminiscence, but it helps explain much of what my life has been, and been about. Fifty five years ago today, exactly to the day, I enacted those first lines of the hymn. I can remember the place, the time and the circumstances in which as a young man of 16 years, I took my stand alongside Jesus, and beneath his cross. Yes, a classic evangelical conversion narrative, complete with a life already in trouble, potential squandered, and life chances already decreasing in a life going down the drain. But on April 16, 1967, in repentant faith and then wondering gratitude, I offered my life to Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. Ever since, beneath the cross of Jesus has been my abiding place.

All that has happened in my life since, I owe to what I now know was my response of faith to a love that came looking for me, love such as I never imagined. Throughout the subsequent years of Christian existence I have prayed and read, preached in churches and shared in conversations, written books and articles, about the love of God in Christ. These Holy Week blog posts are part of that same ministry of glad indebtedness 'beneath the cross of Jesus'.

On this Holy Saturday, 55 years on, looking again at this steel grey cross engineered with such precision, its shadow cast by sunlight, the remaining words of the hymn take on a deeply personal note of gratitude:

Upon the cross of Jesus
  mine eye at times can see
the very dying form of One
  who suffered there for me:
and from my stricken heart with tears
  two wonders I confess,
the wonders of redeeming love
  and my unworthiness.  

 

The Cross 5: Two Vast Spacious Things: Sin and Love

This Triptych is comprised of three studio models of The Stations of the Cross. They are a personal gift from the artist. Standing before them, if we look carefully, we overhear the conversation between art and theology. When, in contemplation, we are attentive to beautiful and accomplished art, that conversation continues, even in silence.

So much of Christian faith is expressed and communicated in words, but words have their limitations. The Scottish theologian P T Forsyth, died almost exactly 100 years ago. His writing was once described by a reviewer as "like watching fireworks in a fog". Forsyth was well aware of his own stylistic limitations. But in fairness, the difficulty is experienced by every theologian seeking to talk with reverence about what for Christians is the deepest mystery of the universe.

"Words are hard to stretch to the measure of eternal things, without breaking under us somewhere," Forsyth once confessed. But few have wrestled with more determination to find thought and words worthy of such an urgent and sublime subject as the Cross of Christ. Some of Forsyth's most passionate and persuasive writing is found in such volumes as his slim masterpiece aptly titled, The Cruciality of the Cross.

Back to the triptych (above), and a theology of atonement without words. The first panel is brutal in its historical realism. Roman soldiers had done this work, and it was all in a day's work, hundreds if not thousands of time. The third panel conveys gentle tenderness as powerfully as the first portrays banal brutality. Between the indifferent act of crucifixion by a soldier, and the loving actions of those who loved Jesus, is the anguish of the Crucified, in the presence of His mother.

The centre panel has its own story, hinted in the detail. The extensive empty spaces surrounding Jesus, create a sense of stark contrast with the suffering Jesus. The flat, vacancy visually shouts a hard to grasp truth, that in the presence of such suffering every human word and artistic statement is silenced.

On one side, Jesus' mother stands, unable to help. Her presence is one of impotent love and infinite tenderness, physically helpless yet powerfully present. On the other side, beneath Jesus elbow, the outer edge of one of the other crosses, a reminder that Jesus is just one of three executed that day, and one of countless thousands in the history of Roman Imperial power and administration.

On the ground, the only other telling detail, a small pile of refuse, mere rubbish. Calvary was a dump, a place where worthless detritus was disposed of, and thrown away.

In the triptych, the crucified Christ stands between two panels, we could call them Cruelty and Love. In the central panel Christ stands between the determined love of the mother who gave him life, and that small pile of worthlessness which is a world broken, futureless and worthless.

Except, it is not so!

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting humanity's sins against them."

The Christian gazes on the cross with a hushed and grateful joy, with the quickened heart of the penitent and with the awakened wonder of the forgiven. Forsyth likewise for all his theological writing, acknowledged again and again: "It is beyond all thought, beyond poetry...God himself in that mighty joy, refrains from words."

Three panels. The first, sin in all its banality and brutality, the third, love that stays and will not go away. And in the centre, Jesus. Yes, it's all beyond words, beyond poetry. Though George Herbert, perhaps comes closest to stating the real mystery of Good Friday:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

Wonderful art as they are, and profound the theology they convey, but these three Stations of the Cross, like every other art form and literary effort, ultimately fall short of our human capacity to explain. But then, they join every other human attempt to describe the love of God in Christ. How could it be otherwise when, "In vain the first-born seraph tries, to sound the depths of Love Divine."

The Cross 4: When Concrete Posts Take on Concrete Significance.

We've learned to live with Covid over the past two years. But that first lockdown. The shock of learning a life threatening disease was spreading; the perplexity engendered by the unreality of immediate restrictions on when we could leave the house, go shopping, visit family and friends, go to a concert, attend church, play a round of golf and almost everything else that was ordinary, normal and routine.

The one concession was an hour's exercise, but within a set radius of home. So we walked. And walked. We varied the route, half an hour outwards, half an hour return. Right, that's it till tomorrow. Where we live, ten minutes takes you to the edge of town and into rural Aberdeenshire.

The photo is of a broken down fence, two concrete posts, the steel reinforcing bent and rusted, the wires only just holding them up. A crazy cruciform wreck of a fence, no longer needed to keep animals in the field which for several years has been intensively farmed. 

I remember quite clearly taking this photo. The digital date shows it was April 17, five days after Easter Sunday which was April 12 in 2020. It was the first and only year since 1967 I wasn't in church on Easter Sunday.

On 17 April 2020, the date of this photo, there were 54 deaths from Covid in Scotland, and the 7 day average was 48 and rising. The sadness and anxiety were palpable. It was hard not to be scared. Each day we, and most other folk, went out for our walk, came back, watched the news briefings, found something useful to do or interesting to watch. Then there were the reinforcing rituals of face-coverings, sanitiser, and the new aversion therapy called social distancing.

So at the turning point of our walk down to Skene village, there is this crazy broken down fence, its ruined posts an Easter conspiracy, an emotional ambush, like a mocked up Calvary, but witnessing to something deep enough to bear the weight of what had befallen us. I had cycled past that broken cruciform wreck so many times and didn't notice. But walking down that day, living now in a changed and chastened world, those concrete posts took on concrete significance.

Behind them the outer edges of the Highlands, and visible to the left, a glimpse of Loch Skene. The looming, hard-edged grey posts, stark against a light sky, were making a statement, or so it seemed to me. In all the suffering that was unfolding in the world, here, right at the turning point of the path, a Cross. We were troubled about illness and an increasing mortality rate, praying and cheering and willing on our medical scientists and virologists working flat out to find treatment and perhaps a vaccine, anxious on behalf of Health Service staff under increasing pressure and knowing worse was to come. And this broken old fence pushed us back to the previous Sunday, Easter Sunday.

Amongst the first casualties of a pandemic, if we're not careful, is hope. Followed quickly by faith. In a way too strange to explain, two accidental fencing posts interrupted whatever I was feeling - probably anything between self-pity, being more scared than I admit even to myself, and that inner guilt of those who are still safe (so far as we knew) when so many others were not. Corroded steel reinforcements, rusty wire, and crumbling concrete had conspired to demand my attention, and turn my mind to the Easter Christ, crucified and risen. 

In all the suffering of our world and our lives, there is the not always discernible reality of the Easter Christ, whose suffering for our broken world takes us, and our suffering, into the heart of God. I still pass these fenceposts on foot, on the bike, in the car - I cannot un-see what I've seen. 

Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, 'God is love';
he bears our sins upon the tree;
he brings us mercy from above.

The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angels' theme in heaven above.

And to finish, two brief sentences from Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God, one of the theological masterpieces of the 20th Century. The first one could not be more apt for the photo!

“In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God." 

“The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.” 

The Cross 3: The Complex Intersection Which Centres on the Centre of the Cross.

This image evokes so many memories for me, and so provokes numerous thoughts and emotions. It never fails to touch that deep place where faith, hope and love abide.

I choose that older quaint word 'abide' quite deliberately. "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love." (John 15.9) In the background and foreground of those words is the cross, foreshadowed. "I take, O Cross, thy shadow for my abiding place..."

The photo is of the rose window in Crown Terrace Baptist Church. I remember nearly forty years ago asking one of the church members, a gifted carpenter, to make a plain cross as a focal point beneath that window. The combination of light and shadow, of word and image, creates a complex intersection which centres on the centre of the cross.

The text from the prologue of John's Gospel is relevant for both Advent and Easter. But especially in Holy Week, and with Good Friday approaching, those words surrounding the sunlight and shadow, vibrate with significance. "In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men." (John 1.4) Light comes through the cross; life comes through the dying of God's Son; the One who is Life and Light is God's gift to the world. 

Looking deeply into the centre of this photo, where the window of light is circled by sacred text, and is supported by the shadowed cross, I found my mind rehearsing the verse of a Christmas carol which, like the text, easily translates from Advent to Easter:     

               Light and Life to all he brings, risen with healing in his wings.

mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die

born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth,

Hark the herald angels sing, glory to the new born King.  

The Cross is the necessary prelude to resurrection, and resurrection the required climax of God's triumphant love. Easter combines darkness and light, death and life, despair and hope, violence and peace, hate and love, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Those simple spars of wood, joined and shaped, placed just so beneath the lights and under the source of sunlight, draw our wondering eyes, and tell a story. And often enough, as I sit somewhere in this church, and reflect on my own story, of light and darkness, of life and death, of hope and despair, of joy and sadness, the words of that text, encircling the window and crowning the cross, reaffirm what it is I believe.

Because the story of Jesus draws us in, and invites us to join our story with His. I think of this text, window and cross, as a special place where it's possible to be put together again, the mind's fugitive thoughts regathered, the heart's anxieties and regrets brought to the place where we are fully understood, and where the story of my life so far can pause, before continuing on.

Because of Holy Week and its penultimate act of crucifixion, followed by the ultimate event of resurrection, some anonymous follower of Jesus wrote words that explain the mystery and the miracle of Easter, and how the story of Jesus becomes our story:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.  

The Cross 2: Seeing the Cross Where It Is Least Expected to Be.

Window frames, door panels, fence posts - these are a few of the everyday furniture I notice cruciform intersections. But it turns up in other places, some of them surprising and even incongruous.

We were in John Lewis in Aberdeen (before it closed down!), in the furnishing department. As we walked round, I saw this and took a photo. Some health and safety conscious member of staff had taped down the corners of the tiles to avoid customers tripping, with perhaps litigious consequences!

This is one of my favourite images of the cross, despite the lack of artistic intent. Isaiah 53 is one of the most powerful poems in the entire range of literature that makes up our Bible. It has from the earliest beginnings of Christian thinking, been associated with the passion and death of Jesus. Phrases like " no beauty", "despised and rejected", along with emotions of shame, and dismissive scorn are woven into a poem about the sufferings of the Servant of God - for Christians, Jesus of Nazareth.

Try it. Read Isaiah 53, remembering the tied hands, the soldiers' mockery, the stripes, the thorns, the whole paraphernalia of interrogation, humiliation and dehumanising torture. The parallels between Isaiah and the Gospel passion stories are unmistakable. One of my favourite Holy Week hymns, sung to a tune in minor key, expresses the anguish of being the despicable one whose suffering is mere entertainment, and whose body is there to be violated, trampled - yes, despised and rejected. 

A purple robe, a crown of thorn,
a reed in his right hand;
before the soldiers' spite and scorn
I see my Saviour stand.

He bears between the Roman guard
the weight of all our woe;
a stumbling figure bowed and scarred
I see my Saviour go.  

On a Saturday morning in John Lewis's, I saw a cross made of tape, trampled by countless feet, mostly unnoticed, dirty and worn, an image not worth a second look. Until, following that first look the sign of the cross and its deeper significance is allowed to emerge. Trampled, dirty, worn, but the cruciform shape still unmistakable. 

The cross has been an artefact throughout Christian history, and not always as a sign of reconciliation and peace. Manufactured crosses are strewn throughout history and place, from fabulous gold encrusted with jewels to plain wooden carvings, from wrought iron to paint and canvas, and from textiles to sculpture. But now and then there is the accidental, the incidental, when the cross is seen where it is least expected to be - on a shop floor for instance.

I look at this photo now and think of the Crucified Christ, that whole parody of justice in which a life of perfect love to God and others was besmirched, trampled on, by countless eyes unnoticed. Holy Week can easily become a form of domesticated spirituality, the cross seen through eyes that are familiar with the story, its anguish domesticated and diluted over decades of Holy Weeks

An image of soiled duck tape used as a temporary repair, might just help us to acknowledge how easily through familiarity and years of practice, we filter out the banality of evil, the lack of beauty, the scorn and cruelty and terrifying spectacle of indifference to human suffering. 

There is a carelessness by which the cross of Christ doesn't always tower over the wrecks of time; instead it becomes invisible to hearts too preoccupied to realise what it is we trample. 

Fast to the cross's spreading span,
high in the sunlit air,
all the unnumbered sins of man
I see my Saviour bear.

He hangs, by whom the world was made,
beneath the darkened sky;
the everlasting ransom paid,
I see my Saviour die.

(There is a good rendition of "A Purple Robe" available here. )

 

The Cross 1. Let Prayer Be Wordless Until Words Eventually Come.

For a long time now I have collected images of the cross as and when I see them. It is one of the perplexing but crucial realities about being a Christian that the cross is central to Christian discipleship and devotion, and an essential focus of Christian theology.

After all Jesus defined discipleship as taking up the cross and following him, and Paul, Jesus' greatest interpreter, declared the paradox, "I am crucified with Christ, I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me..."

During this Holy Week I would like to offer a brief reflection on one or other of the images of the cross that sheds some light and insight into the dark recesses of the greatest mystery of our faith. 

This is an olive wood, hand-held cross that sits on my desk. It was given to me by a friend at a time when life was hard and prayer was even harder. We all have times, episodes, events in our lives when we suffer, when our inner resources are dangerously depleted, the heart is sad and the mind struggles to think clearly. More than that. Without ever trivialising the passion of Christ, or suggesting our suffering compares with that of the Crucified Christ, nevertheless, there are times when it feels as if we are sharing the sufferings of Christ. 

This small piece of wood is shaped and smoothed to be held on to. It is something tangible, the hand and therefore the body responding to the cruciform shape of wood so that it becomes a wordless prayer; or at least wordless until the words eventually come. In that sense holding and clutching a few ounces of olive wood becomes an act of sacramental grace, when a created object reminds us of God, the Creative Subject of our lives and life of the world.

On this Monday of Holy Week, I hold this cross as I read the updated news on the war in Ukraine. Sometimes I have words, but they never seem adequate, though I pray they are at least honest. The suffering of God in Christ is played out through the anguish and cruelties of human conflict, so perhaps my prayers are a way of aligning my heart with that of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Perhaps that is the true meaning of intercession, to love the world in all its brokenness.

Perhaps too, Christian theology has to recover a deeper, more searching, and more honest doctrine of sin and evil. I am not aware of a recent major theological work that compares to Emil Brunner's Man in Revolt, or Reinhold Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man, both written in contexts of gathering conflict, ideological confrontations, and major threats to human peace and justice.

So I pray, I hold my cross and I imagine the cries of those who are suffering and bereaved, made homeless and brutalised by acts of human aggression, cruelty and, yes let's name it, sin. And this Monday of Holy Week, holding this cross, I ponder the meaning of the coming Good Friday. Like the angels in the Palm Sunday hymn, it may be that our sadness speaks our prayers more truly than words that for all our trying, fail to grasp the depths of human suffering and Love Divine: 

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wond'ring eyes
to see th'approaching sacrifice.