Living Wittily

Leaders - Don't Be a Bottleneck!

Reading an all but forgotten commentary on the all but forgotten biblical book of Numbers, these wise words:

 

Too many leaders in society and even within the family of the Church are protective of their status. Nothing stops a community from growing quite so much as a leader who tries to keep all the responsibility, all expertise, all knowledge, all vision to himself.

Leaders must be constantly seeking to help the Lord create out of their community "a royal priesthood, a holy nation", who will all minister to each other and to the world." (Numbers, Walter Riggans, page 98)

 

The painting is by Ghislaine Howard. You can read about it here: https://www.methodist.org.uk/.../the-washing-of-the-feet.../

Consider the Birds: Start with a Chaffinch

The cost of living crisis touches all of us, some more than others. Value, cost, worth; bargains, rip-offs, shrinkflation and commodity scarcity; we have become fluent in the terminology of anxiety - economic, emotional and existential.

 

So here's the question. How do you price, barcode, and pay for a minute's worth of looking at brother chaffinch?

 

Jesus said, Do not be anxious...Look at the birds." No, he wasn't a romantic dreamer - he was a carpenter, a teacher, a friend of the marginalised, and of the poor - those people for whom a cost of living crisis becomes a struggle to get through each day.

 

The feeding of the 5000 was one of the first community food banks. It happened because "he looked at the crowds and had compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd."

 

Back to my friendly or at least unafraid chaffinch: "Your Heavenly Father feeds them..." Providence isn't always about a concatenation of circumstances no one could have thought of. Sometimes, perhaps most often, providence is when those who have more do the obvious thing out of compassion for others.

 

"Consider the birds..." If you can't feed 5,000, then maybe 5, or 1. I've no idea what the price of compassion is - except I think indifference is much more costly. Somewhere, in our own life orbit, there are folk who are struggling; somewhere in our neighbourhood there is a food bank or donation point; and in the providence of God, who looks after the birds, it may just be that someone will thank God that there are those for whom the cost of living is well worth paying on, for someone else. Or so it seems to me.

'Benedicite. Domine.' "And all manner of thing shall be well." Expanding Our Understanding of Inexhaustible Truth

The image is designed around the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich; in particular her vision of 'the little thing, the size of a hazelnut'. Here is the passage:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. 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 it was answered generally thus, ‘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. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Of course Julian is best known for her theology of hope, in words that have become so popular they are in danger of becoming a cliche: "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." But that theological hopefulness was never for Julian a misleading optimism about the reality of evil; nor was it some form of denial of the realities of human experiences of darkness, such as grief, suffering, loneliness, guilt, fear, and encroaching despair at the brokenness of the world. 

That future orientation towards a renewed creation in which all would be made well, was imagined and energised in a soul that had pondered for years on her visions of the Divine Love, which poured from the wounds of the crucified Christ. Julian's interpretation of the hazelnut, which to her seemed so vulnerable, precarious and fragile and with what seemed a tenuous hold on existence, took its form and confidence from her growing conviction of the eternal Love which creates, sustains and brings to purposed fulfilment all that God has made.

The tapestry images play with images of hazelnut, our planet and the ever expanding realities of "all that is made". The size of the hazelnut, the earth and the sun is the same, because in the Love of God significance is not in size or importance, but in the relationship of Creator to creation.

The work grew out of the text above, and was enriched over the months by regular reading of The Revelations. The eventual pattern evolved, and the lines and colours were trial and error, and occasionally I unpicked some parts which didn't work, seemed wrong, and needed to be reworked. As to the overall concept, one friend captured much of what was being attempted when she wrote, in response to the finished work, "the fluidity of line and shape feel right for Julian, who is never a straight edge person."

The decision to make the earth the same size as the hazelnut, and to frame them separately within the landscape, was made early on. I was playing with the idea of  her hand-held hazelnut, "round as any ball", and the round earth, indeed all that exists, being held in the hand of the Creator. The sun is the same size and the light emanates to the farthest reaches; it also shines brightest behind the hazelnut - a theme important in my own theology, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

The blue ribbon has several layers of significance. Julian makes much of Mary, as one who brings together the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and her colour is blue. Across the landscape of "all that is" flows "the river of the waters of life", the life-giving energy of the God who will make all things well. In Medieval iconography blue is the colour of divine majesty, and in the crucified Christ majesty and meekness coalesce in the redemptive love that is revealed to Julian. That majestic love is edged in red, a colour that signifies sacrifice. 

Each will find their own meanings within the work. It's hard for me as the artist to reduce to words and explanation what is a work of creative and visual exegesis, using colours, techniques, materials and stitches which are both deeply personal choice, and creatively purposeful improvisation. It is a prayer in stitches, an exegesis in colour and form, a tapestry of a text in which theological truth, mystical vision and spiritual experience distil into Revelations of Divine Love. 

But one further thought. Julian has no interest in speculative mysticism cut loose from Christian orthodox doctrine. Oh yes, she pushes the boundaries to their limits, but when she writes of the love of God, her ideas are deeply embedded in orthodox Christology, coloured through and through by a richly embroidered atonement theology. Themes of creation, fall and redemption are woven throughout her work, and the central image of the Cross and the crucified Christ constrain her theological speculations, and results in a mind that is restlessly curious, yet patiently contemplative, and therefore produces a work that did not fit existing categories of ecclesial teaching.

Julian's Revelations are at one and the same time, securely orthodox but with deep and well nourished roots capable of subverting the foundations of some of those fixed boundaries; not to diminish the Gospel, but to expand understanding of inexhaustible truth. Some of that creative subversion may also be hinted at in the finished tapestry. 

Can the Church Come to Terms with Not Being Needed the Way It Used to Be?

Aberdeenshire is a very large shire. A run in the car the other day was a round journey of around 100 miles, and we never came near crossing into any of the neighbouring local authorities. Given its size Aberdeenshire presents itself in so many different landscapes - sea and coast, mountain and glen, arable, cow and sheep farming, forest and moor.

Running throughout the shire is a network of minor roads and single tracks with passing places. It really is possible to travel miles and miles on these traffic capillaries and not encounter anyone else - well apart from the occasional tractor. Our own meanderings took us into Glenbuchat, a place that used to be a hidden hamlet known only to those who had their annual holiday in one of the under developed cottages scattered along the way. Now most of those cottages are gone, mainly because they are now overdeveloped second homes or holiday lets.

Still, so long as there is still life in the glen, and the occasional visitor can still enjoy a landscape more or less maintained and retaining its character as rural agricultural Aberdeenshire, there's little reason to be anxious about the continuing joy to be found in those hidden places of solace and silence. And there, up one of the lesser used single track dead-ends, is the Old Kirk of Glenbuchat.

I've often wondered if old places of worship retain the vibrations of previous prayers and praise within the ancient stones of a sacred space. The Precentor's tuning fork is still there, a reminder of a past community in which singing of the Psalms was as necessary to the soul, as ploughing and farming the soil to keep it fertile.

This parish and church was born in the late 1400s after a tragedy, when some of those coming to worship were drowned crossing the River Don. It has twice been rebuilt in 1629 and again in 1792. Now it has an annual communion service on the third Sunday of August, a tradition now centuries old. 

The photograph shows a church enclosed within a graveyard. In taking it I was aware of the long slow decline in the numbers of those for whom church retains any significance or even relevance for human life and flourishing. The communion of saints is made up of the gathered company of Christian believers throughout the world and across the centuries. An isolated Kirk, in a Highland glen, where worship has all but ceased after more than five centuries, could be reason to sigh in sad resignation, and hard to resist nostalgia for what has been lost.

But as I stood there, trying to align my own faith with those for whom this was the place of worship, communion and prayer, I prayed a prayer of both relinquishment and hope. To relinquish the past is not to invalidate or devalue it; but to surrender it to the providence of God. Hope is to go on asking, "So what is the form and mission of the church in our own times, and how do we till the soil of our own souls so that we too are fertile with ideas, and fruitful in our living of the Gospel of Jesus?"

T S Eliot had it right about the church. For all our human strategies and anxieties, ultimately the church as the Body and presence of the risen Christ, as the community of the Kingdom of God, lives and moves and has its being in the grace and mercy of God. T S Eliot had it right about the church in the flux and furores of human history:

There shall always be the Church and the World
And the heart of Man
Shivering and fluttering between them, choosing and chosen,
Valiant, ignoble, dark and full of light
Swinging between Hell Gate and Heaven Gate.
And the Gates of Hell shall not prevail.

Or to put it in the language of the church in much more militant mood:

The Church's one foundation
is Jesus Christ, her Lord;
she is his new creation
by water and the Word.
From heav'n he came and sought her
to be his holy bride;
with his own blood he bought her,
and for her life he died.

Elect from ev'ry nation,
yet one o'er all the earth;
her charter of salvation:
one Lord, one faith, one birth.
One holy name she blesses,
partakes one holy food,
and to one hope she presses,
with ev'ry grace endued.

Relinquishment then, of what is past. Hope as we live in our own time. But relinquishment must include gratitude for faithful worship and practice of the way of Christ, and repentance for failures in such faithfulness. And hope when it is rooted in the grace of God, becomes hope which is imaginative, creative and energised by love for Christ, and keeping in step with the Spirit hope with a vision of human community towards which we work with humility, welcome, generosity, and joy.

R. S. Thomas and Lent as an Easter-Informed Lifestyle.

From Bleak Liturgies ¹

"Alms. Alms. By Christ's

blood I conjure you

a penny." On saints'

days the cross and

shackles were the jewellery

of the rich. As God

aged, kings laundered their feet

in the tears of the poor.

Economics eventually lead back to God. Because justice and injustice, generosity and greed, compassion and callousness, sharing and possessiveness, these and many other contrasts in the human condition are inextricably woven into the fabric of human ethics, and for people of faith, provide the texture of holiness in practical terms. Living in contemporary Western affluence there was a time, in the not too distant past, when we could say at least people didn't starve, there is a welfare safety net, that our economy budgets for the vulnerable. The days just before the advent, then the normalisation of food banks.

We believed that, at its best and with all its faults and holes in the safety net, our benefit system seeks to be all those positive things listed above; just, generous, compassionate, sharing - not in order to create dependency, patronise or undermine a person's independence, but to support and enable and empower people to participate as fully as they are able in the wider life and culture of our society.

Much has changed in the past decade or two of this new millennium, and there are multiple explanations for those changes in the ethos of our society. But whatever selected explanations satisfy us, we are still left with an increasing deficit in the social capital, and I would argue the moral vision, of a society more and more fixated on individual self-interest, national economic advantage, and tectonic shifts in the distribution of wealth as fewer and fewer have more and more. Our worldview is increasingly monoscopic, its focus on economic growth and prosperity so fiercely specific, that much else which is essential to human flourishing is deemed secondary. More significantly, these other aspects of human welfare and flourishing are often presupposed to depend upon economic prosperity, which is assumed to be morally and politically prior in demand for resources and sacrifices.

The poem above comes as the critical comment of an odd, often angular, sometimes angry Christian man who 30 years ago sensed the trends of a culture becoming more and more one in which obscene rewards are available in the cultures of celebrity, entertainment, sport, financial industries, and with their con-commitant attitudes of self-expression, self-promotion and ultimately self-manufactured individuality. It isn't a large step from such unexamined self-importance to a selfishness which is made socially acceptable and politically validated.

What I read in this poem, Bleak Liturgies is R. S. Thomas as Amos the prophet. Amos condemned those who sold the poor for the price of a pair of slippers; Thomas condemns those 'kings' who launder their feet in the tears of the poor. Both prophets are raging against the inequalities and cruelties of a society in which it is just so hard for the poor to have life chances. And both reserve their sharpest words for the rich whose opulence and extravagance in money and material things, are the distorted sacraments and physical embodiments of their greed and arrogance. Thomas makes no mention of judgement, but of course, presupposes it; while Amos lays about him with graphic threats and sarcastic images of overfed cows, ivory beds, rotting fruit baskets of wasted food. Mind you, Thomas has his own ironic edge - the cross and shackles reduced to trivia, baubles of the rich who long forgot the realities to which the symbols point.

Easter brings an end to Lent. But not the need for critical self-reflection, refreshed repentance, changed ways, renovation of our moral furniture, refurbished lifestyles more aligned with the contemporary living Christ who strode out of the tomb into the resurrection possibilities of peace, justice and hopeful actions let loose by the Resurrection.

Those two images in Thomas's poem take us back to basic realities of human life - the contrasts of those who need alms and those who give them; and the scandal of a secularised power elite, 'laundering their feet in the tears of the poor.' And if we ask where Jesus is in such a society, he is more likely to be in the food bank than the 3 Star Michelin restaurant where a meal costs more than 4 weeks benefits.

The cry of the poor in this poem invokes the most sacred of obligations - 'by Christ's blood'. Till we acknowledge the imperative of that invocation, it's doubtful if we have the slightest clue what Easter is all about, and what its consequences if we commit to living an Easter faith.² 

1. R. S. Thomas. Collected Later Poems. (Bloodaxe, 2004) p. 185.
2. I collect cruciform images. This one was taken in John Lewis's, an old repair to the floor covering, worn and scuffed by countless feet. The trampled cross is a telling image of a culture which values value for money, and confers worth mostly without reference to human value and human worth. 

The Resurrection and Discipleship as Radical Commitments to Justice, Peace and Compassionate Service.

The final sentences from the very well argued book by Thorwald Lorenzen. Of the half dozen or so volumes I have on the resurrection, Lorenzen argues the most insistent and consistent case that the resurrection of Jesus is transformative at the levels of radical commitments to justice, peace and compassionate service of a still broken world.

 

"Neither individual piety nor worship liturgies nor doctrinal orthodoxy, but the concrete following of Jesus in our everyday lives, is the most adequate way of responding to the resurrection of the crucified Christ.

 

By retrieving some theological emphases from the nonviolent Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and by acknowledging modern hermeneutical discussions on a theology of witness, I have suggested that the believer and the believing community are part of the resurrection reality -- without removing the procedural priority of Christ."  Page 169.

 

The resurrection of the crucified Christ calls for a life of faith in which Jesus' passion for God and therefore for justice is echoed."

A Thought for Holy Saturday, Based on a Photo Taken on Good Friday.

 

Looking over a Winter hedge in Spring, the field prepared for seed freighted with fruitfulness for an Autumn harvest, and in the middle distance Loch Skene reflecting a slate grey sky now empty of the geese who come to keep us company every year, and in the distance the sculpted and layered horizons of hills at the edge of the Highlands. And all of this, a mile from the door.

 

 

Hills of the North, rejoice,

river and mountain-spring,

hark to the advent voice;

valley and lowland, sing.

Christ comes in righteousness and love,

he brings salvation from above.

 

I know. This is an Advent hymn: but it fits the photo, and it's a reminder on Holy Saturday of what happened yesterday, and what will happen tomorrow. Or so it seems to me.

 

 

 

Poem for Good Friday: George Herbert, "The Agonie"

'The Agonie'

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.

Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Good Friday with R. S. Thomas: "The fiercer light of the thorns' halo..."

Not much comment needed on this poem.¹ Just three by way of context, and a comment on Jurgen Moltmann, the theologian whose work most closely mirrors some of Thomas's theological questions.

1. By juxtaposing the inspired, disciplined agony of the artist, with the creative suffering love of God, Thomas revitalises theological imaginations smothered by the tedium of the overfamiliar. Ever since a friend chose to read this at a Good Friday service years ago, I've never again been able to listen to solo violin music with previous innocence, or been able to separate the vision of a musician giving his or her all, from the God who does the same.

2. The copy you are reading was written by a man who attended that service, wrote out the poem and presented it to me. It is for me a literary Icon. Alistair first started doing calligraphy in an Asian POW camp, sharing accommodation with Laurens van der Post. His first tools were split bamboo nibs, with mud and water as ink. Though he almost never spoke of those experiences, he knew more than a little about suffering, and that in human faith and experience which makes "such music as lives still".

3. That Good Friday reading of 'The Musician' alerted me to the theological profundity and complexity of the mind of this poet who composed and played such poems. Repeatedly, as poet-priest, Thomas returns to the Cross, the place where the mystery of the God who speaks through suffering love, and the place where the God who listens closely to the music of heart-broken humanity, performs the unoriginate music of the Passion of God.

I finish with some words from Jurgen Moltmann, from whom I continue to learn not so much by way of satisfying answers, as by a fellowship rooted in both honest perplexity and steadfast refusal to give up on truth that is beyond the grasp of human reach.

"The Son suffers death in this forsakenness. The Father suffers the death of the Son. So the pain of the Father corresponds to the death of the Son. And when in his descent to hell the Son loses the Father, then in his judgement the Father also loses the Son. Here the innermost life of the Trinity is at stake. Here the communicating love of the Father turns into infinite pain over the sacrifice of the Son. Here the responding love of the Son becomes infinite suffering over his repulsion and rejection by the Father. What happens on Golgotha reaches into the innermost depths of the Godhead, putting its impress on the trinitarian life in eternity." ² 

One of the most controversial elements in Moltmann's theological explorations is the way he takes with utmost seriousness, Jesus' cry of abandonment, and its implications for the inner life of the Triune God. Not everyone is comfortable with Moltmann's theology of divine agonising and his insistence that the death of the Son implies the grievous bereavement of the Father, borne and absorbed into the life of God through the Spirit, embedded within the divine love from all eternity.

But here is mystery beyond all our efforts at lucid coherence and systematic control. The truth is, no honest grappling with such searing realities should leave us feeling other than uncomfortable - because all honest and prayerful struggle to understand, and adore and surrender should be recognised for what it is - taking off the shoes of our intellect in acknowledgement of Love's eternal and redemptive and patient purpose.

The phrase most closely associated with Jurgen Moltmann's theology, and the title of his most famous book, could just as easily describe much of the poetry and implied theology of R.S. Thomas, and could stand as a sub-title of his poem 'The Musician.' - The Crucified God.

1. R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems. 1945-1990, (London: J M Dent, 1993), p.104.
2. The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, Jurgen Moltmann, (London: SCM Press, 1981), p.81

Maundy Thursday: "you call and claim us as your friends and love us as we are."

 This evening, Maundy Thursday, I get to preach on John 13.1-17, that hinge passage in John's Gospel, when Jesus washes the disciples' feet.

The atmosphere in that upper room was dangerously charged by emotional friction, a build up of static energy looking for a point of discharge. 

Judas is there, his inner world weighted with the menacing ambiguities of a man about to do what he thought was right for the right reasons, but feeling as if he was about to carry out the worst decision of his life. How to justify betrayal of the Messiah whose crime is to be peacemaker?

James and John are there, still simmering in their arrogance that they even asked about the seating arrangements in the Kingdom of God, and getting their applications in early for the most important seats. Had they learned nothing from three years of following Jesus. And still puzzling over Jesus answer to their ambitions: "The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 10.45)

Peter was there, troubled and yet confident of his resilience to defend Jesus and be absolutely there for Jesus no matter what. Sure enough, he had a habit of promising more than he could deliver, but always well-intentioned, enthusiastic,  guilty only of being impulsive, unreflective and honest in that sometimes embarrassing wear your heart on your sleeve way of his.

The others, Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, who had followed every step of Jesus from day one. All of them, still outraged at the arrogance of James and John scheming for their place at the top table. They had all made sacrifices, they shared a love for the strange glory of this Son of Man who turned water to wine, and transformed ordinary routine hopelessness into the extraordinary extravagance of a love that couldn't be contained in any containers however huge. 

There's something almost amusing about a group sulk. But given the danger Jesus was in, the excitement of the crowds when Jesus entered the city and the sense that whatever happens next, life will never, ever, be the same. This meal, this time together, this is the slope above the ski-jump - once you push off, you can only hope to jump safely, or fall to disaster.

Who will first put that into words? What words could possibly reassure each in their personal anguish, calm things down, draw out and deal with the cocktail of toxins such as fear, anger, jealousy, and love helpless to make the bad stuff stop?

There are no words. That cliche is sometimes true. Jesus used no words, nit at first.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end... The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. 

Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

 Jesus kneeling, holding each foot of Judas. Feet that had followed, walked with Jesus as companion; com panus, eating bread with. Feet that, once washed, would soon walk out the door, hurrying to betray his companion, friend, Lord.

Jesus kneeling, holding the foot of John the Beloved disciple, who would later write the Gospel, and this story of the word become flesh; kneeling and holding with firm gentleness the foot of Thomas, who had his own doubts and hopes and who a few days later would kneel at the feet of Jesus saying, My Lord and my God.

And Peter, big mouth, big feet, big ego. Loud, proud and centre of attention - "No. Not my feet." Yes Peter, your feet, those feet that first left nets and boats and came with me; those feet that climbed the mountain of transfiguration; these feet, Peter, with which in three days time you will run all the way to the tomb and beyond.

When stripped down to the story, Maundy Thursday has two lessons.

The humility of the eternal Son of God. "All things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made..." Those "hands that flung stars into space, to cruel nails surrendered...This is out God,m the servant king. And here is the Eternal Word, God's creative energy, in a human body handling human feet. He who was equal with God "emptied himself of all but love" - the humility of God in disposition of love. Washing the feet of his disciples was not the docile humility of submission; it was the strong humility of assertion. That basin and towel are the silencing of all arguments about who's right, who's first, who's the leader. The answer is kneeling at our feet, washing them. 

Jesus demonstrates the radical no-nonsense hospitality of God. Jesus is the host, we are the guests. Jesus is the welcome of God wearing a towel and holding a basin. In the upper room, humble love breaks the silence of resentment, and washes feet. This is Jesus, showing with human hands the humility and hospitality of God to each of us. Those same hands will take bread and break it and give it; pour wine and share it. Those same hands will be tied behind his back and nailed to the cross. And it isn't only the nails that hold the arms of God open in welcome - it is the embrace of eternal love, bearing the sin of a broken world. 

Dear Christ, uplifted from the earth,
your arms stretched out above
through every culture, every birth,
to draw an answering love.

Still east and west your love extends
and always, near and far,
you call and claim us as your friends
and love us as we are.