Living Wittily

Worship as our amazed yes to the love of God.

Two books being read in tandem provide important comment on worship as foundational to Christian existence, Christian practice and Christian experience. I deliberately put experience last - avoiding the too easy assumption that it is our personal experience that matters. Christian existence is not individual; Christian practice is not personal choice; and Christian experience cannot remain private however specific it is to our own personal circumstances. So N T Wright has an important comment in his book, Virtue Reborn:

"The life of worship is itself a corporate form of virtue. It expresses and in turn reinforces the faith, hope and love which are themselves the key Christian virtues. from this activity there flow all kinds of other things in terms of Christian life and witness. But worship is central, basic, and in the best sense habit-forming. Every serious Christian should work at having worship become second nature."

Worship is a "whole person vocation", according to Wright. And the essential lived relationship between worship, mission and the communal embodiment of the love of God is the core reality of Christian existence and God's good news for the world. And as often in recent years, I am left uneasy at the focus given to mission as the church's primary calling. The spring and source of the church's life, and its first calling, is glad, grateful, self-surrendering worship, expressed in a Christ-like obedience to the out-reaching and in-grasping love of God, an unembarrassed embracing of God's call on the church to be the Body of Christ, to embody the love of God, and to respond with an amazed yes. That amazed yes, that self surrender, that unembarrassed embrace of God's call, is the essential response of worship. And it is the energy source of mission.

Which is why there are probably important questions to be asked about contemporary worship styles, about the assumptions that drive our practices when we meet together, about the importance of customer satisfaction as a criterion for what we do, about the words we choose to sing, and yes, tedious as it may sound, about the theology that shapes all the above. Theology - our way of thinking about God - is betrayed in the how and the therefore of worship. If worship of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit is the energy source of mission, then I am left asking, how often have I been compelled to utter that amazed yes, how powerfully and persistently am I drawn to that act of glad self-surrender, how clearly and persuasively have I been called to that unembarrassed embrace of God's call to be as Christ to the world? Because if the God being worshiped is the God of all grace and love, the God revealed in Jesus, the God active in the church and the world through the Holy Spirit, then worship must surely be more than what we often take it to be. They are important criteria - arbitrary you might think - but as New Testament as they come. Amazed yes. Glad self-surrender. unembarrassed embrace.

Mary Oliver, Staff Retreat and learning to pay attention to our lives.

Been away from here for a few days.But been doing other things that brought me into good company, lovely countryside and conveyor belts of rain! Been at Grasmere with the good folks of Northern Baptist Learning Community sharing their staff retreat and helping provide guidance and stimulus towards renewal and refreshment after a long demanding year. So we had some of Mary Oliver's poems, an eclectic choice of music that reflects my own enthusiasms, a number of pictures and images which express beauty and the joy or sadness that intermingles with our lived experience. And I shared a few soliloquies inspired by several biblical encounters with Jesus - never been sure if they were worth doing more with, but the consensus seems to be a yes. So we'll see.

What became evident though is that on a retreat occasion, a poet like Mary Oliver has the ability to open new doors of perception, encouraging a more attentive, less cursory viewing of the world - to gaze rather than glimpse, to notice rather than merely register, to greet whatever and whoever we meet, with "Hello", rather than to act ignorantly, that is in a way that shows we do not really know or want to know those other presences that would grace our lives if we gave them the time of day, and a little space.

Throughout her recent work there are a number of light-hearted but not insignificant poems about her dog Percy. Here's one that I find irresistible because it is about a dog and books, or in any case about a dog impatient with stupid humans who bury their face in paper instead of looking at the beauty, the fun and the excitement of a colourful world laden with smell and sound.

Percy and Books (eight)

Percy doesn't like it when I read a book.

He puts his face over the top of it and moans.

He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.

The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.

The tide is out and the neighbour's dogs are playing.

But Percy, I say. Ideas! The elegance of language!

The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories

that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.

 

Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was enough.

Let's go.

With summer here, an academic year formally completed tomorrow, I'm with Percy. Let's go! Need a holiday and it will come in a few weeks. Meantime in order to enjoy it, I'm going to try to decelerate gently, a foot movement that doesn't come naturally to me. To help me I'll slowly work through several thin books of Mary Oliver's poems, and learn again how to pay attention, to say hello, and give time of day to whoever asks it, or even whoever doesn't.

The transformative power of beauty, the longing of the heart, and contemplative prayer

 Have a friend who recently took time to gaze on the original Vermeer masterpiece, The Girl with the Pearl Earing, made famous in the novel and the subsequent DVD. Of course the novel and the DVD are at least two interpretive moves removed from the original, and affecting as they are they leave us at a distance from the thing itself. To search out an original masterpiece, like this Vermeer, and to contemplate its detailed loveliness, is to allow yourself to be taken into an immediacy of experience that permits great art to disarm you, render your mind and heart and spirit vulnerable to beauty, and open your being in responsiveness to the power of beauty to recreate and renew the way you see the world. 

Theologians have long known that beauty, one of the three transcendentals, sets off deep in our human consciousness, reverberations and affinities with those feelings of longing and spiritual yearning we associate with prayer at its most inarticulate yet intimate. We can't find the words, but we recognise the pull towards that which is beyond us and yet which beckons, and that powerful undertow draws us away from ourselves and towards God. Simone Weil, French philosopher, mystic and marginal visionary of life, wrote about some of this:

the beauty of the world is almost the only way in which we can allow God to penetrate us...for a sense of beauty, though mutilated, distorted and soiled, remains rooted in the heart of humanity as a powerful incentive. It is present in all the preoccupations of secular life. If it were made true and pure it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God... 

The paradox of beauty is that it has the power both to break the heart and to restore it; it tells us both what we have lost and what we long for; it shows the world in its actuality as flawed and imperfect, and also provides a vision of an alternative world where perfection need not be impossible; it reminds us of our finitude by allowing us to glimpse that which is beyond our knowing, that which is defiant of calculation, that which radiates with those other two great transcendentals, Truth and Goodness.

My own recent sorties into the realm of the beautiful include patient waiting before several paintings like this, the first hearing of and then repeated listening to Tallis's Spem in Alium, an encounter with a perfectly formed white rose, and a re-watching of an old film in which human life was explored with generous compassion, thespian genius, humane sentiment laced with just enough realism to remind me that life has its anguish as well as joy. In each experience, there was a sense of being taken out of myself, invited, persuaded, coaxed perhaps even catapulted, out of the mundane ordinary routine of a life more or less interesting, and for a few brief moments, taken to a new level of awareness - that life, this life, my life, is suffused with splendour if only I could see it. We are dust, but dust of glory. We are finite, but with eternity in our hearts. We settle for the possible, but then beauty awakens desire for the impossible, teases us with intimations of the perfect, tantalises us towards the fulfilment of all we have it in us to be. That's what great art does, like this Vermeer painting of The Girl with the Pearl Earing. And that's what God the master artist does - persuades us with beauty, invites our gaze, opens our eyes to splendour, and wounds the soul with that which only ever finally heals us, love.

Vivaldi's Gloria and sabbath moments of the soul

New patterns of life are bringing new ways of keeping inner experience nourished, and even enriched. I mentioned travelling in the car as my new place to listen to baroque and early music. Some of the music is an acquired taste I might never acquire. But then I remember I didn't like Yoghurt, loathed olives, didn't fancy smoked salmon, and would have thought stilton cheese was a good cheese gone bad. Now they are each of them staple food, and looked forward to treats. Music has been a bit like that for me too. I now listen with great pleasure to music I first thought boring because it didn't taste familiar on a very limited sound palate.

Now I'm writing this in College at 7.37 a.m. Listening to Vivaldi's Gloria. The fire alarm test has just gone for twenty seconds and shattered the intricate architecture of sound I was exploring. Sound - whether the fire alarm or chamber orchestra, is dependent on context. If a fire has broken out somewhere I want to be scared out of my seat, and a chamber orchestra can't do that; and if my soul needs the balm of music that opens up visions of glory and vistas of sound then I can do without the stress accelerator pedal being floored by a pitched for panic screaming fire alarm.

But back to new practices of inner sustaining. In the College and in my study (not an office -  too many books contradict that - the ratio of filing cabinets to bookcases is for me the defining geography - and it's 1 to 5), I have started having half an hour of music, reading and thinking about the day with a sense that life is for joy, peace and purpose, as well as for concentration, work and obligation. I suppose such a half hour is a subversion of any work ethic that needs to have a measurable end product. Not sure how you can ever measure the impact on heart, life, mind, relationships, and overall view of the world and our place in it, that a great piece of music or fine writing can have. So I allow the music time, space, movement in and through those places of  mind and heart that will soon be filled with other stuff. The other stuff is legitimate enough, in fact that's too grudging - not just legitimate but necessary stuff, obligations rightly placed, expectations fairly faced, work requiring to be done well, a vocation to fulfil. But before then - sabbath moment s for the soul. And anyway - you never know when the fire alarm will shatter the conversation between flute, oboe, strings and human voices.

Nihilism, alienation, the church's mission and the Christian as upstart!

Twice in an hour I've come across words that have serious consequences for human happiness. One is nihilism. It's a bleak word, and not to be confused with skepticism, cynicism, or even atheism. One of the most remarkable little books published 50 years ago was by Helmut Thielicke, a theological prophet of a past generation, and it was entitled, Nihilism.  Thielicke confronted the ethical and spiritual vacuum of post war Europe by contradicting the latent nihilism of a world coming to terms with the Holocaust, the Bomb, post war austerity and gradual transition to prosperity. Nihilism isn't simply an ideological stance based on rejection of value, meaning and significance. It is a world-view with its own ethic, its peculiar convictions, its practical consequences in how we live, regard others and look on the future with curtailed hope.

Robert Cording is a poet working out of Holy Cross University, and Jason Goroncy has posted one of Cording's poems on Mozart's starling. It is a beautiful poem, a wonderfully imaginative celebration of life in ordinary, and taking joy in simple things. There is no surprise that Cording in ways very different from Thielicke, challenges the latent but sometimes blatant nihilism that runs through our culture. He does so in poetry, by the creative use of words, writing an alternative story of the world and its consequence, hinting strongly but gently of those spiritual intimations that whisper and murmur loud enough to be heard by those soul-sick enough to listen. Here's his own description of what he is about - and how we need more of what he is doing, taken from his own self-description on the website of the Journal Image, found here.

  "I am teaching and directing a creative writing concentration that is part of the English Major at Holy Cross, as well as working on my fifth volume of poems. My current work strives to reincorporate religious language and content in a way that interests and wins over a skeptical modern audience. My work is rooted in the belief that words can invoke what the critic George Steiner calls "real Presences," and that these presences bring us back again and again to the fundamental question of being: that there is something, rather than nothing. The poems I'm writing lately try to criticize and call into question what we have rarely questioned—our own unexamined nihilism."

Writing over 40 years ago, Thomas Merton often reflected on the experience of alienation, another form of human diminishment so familiar to the modern western spirit. In our own age of self-obsessed concern for the self (and yes that is a deliberate solipsism), Merton's words come as yet another shrewd, compassionate and passionate plea for a much less artificial, posturing, exaggerated presentation of the image of the self we want others to see. Here he is, reflecting on the confusion of personas culture forces us to adopt, as it changes and fluxes, shape-shifts and dissolves only to re-form in new configurations, expressions and expectations.

"The result is the painful sometimes paranoid sense of being always under observation, under judgment, for not fulfilling some role or other we have forgotten we were supposed to fulfill."

"The peculiar pain of alienation in its ordinary sense...is that nobody really has to look at us or judge us or despise us or hate us. Whether or not they do us this service, we are already there ahead of them. We are doing it for them. WE TRAIN OURSELVES OBEDIENTLY TO HATE OURSELVES SO MUCH THAT OUR ENEMIES NO LONGER HAVE TO.  To live in constant awareness of this bind is a kind of living death."

Thomas Merton, Echoing Silence, Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing, (ed), Robert Inchaustri, (Boston, New seeds, 2007), 72-3

I'm not sure who has replaced Thomas Merton as the spiritual director of secular society, and as a prophet who often saw clearly what everyone else only vaguely guessed at. He lived the paradox of worldly contemplative, gregarious hermit, immersed at one and the same time in silence and solitude, and in the world of human affairs, and his heart was open to that world with an openness to risk on behalf of others that was truly Christ-like. Not personal physical danger, but the spiritual ambiguity of being a worldly monk, a vocation to detachment from the world combined with a vocation to attachment to that same world, living out a genuine love for the world that seeks to replicate the outgoing, self-giving love of God. Because whatever else contemplative prayer was for Merton, it was to love the world with the heart of God. 

Nihilism and alienation. Two words loaded with spiritual toxins, diseases that affect the whole inner person - intellect, heart, conscience, will. While the church seeks new ways of doing mission, maybe it also needs to find new ways of bringing the good news of Jesus to bear on a culture in which nihilism and alienation remain favoured default positions. Whatever else the New Testament contradicts, subverts, challenges, confronts, it entirely and comprehensively negates these two enemies of human wholeness, healing and blessing. The church of Jesus Christ needs more Thomas Mertons, Robert Cordings, more of those upstarts who call in question the spiritual status quo of a culture desperately searching for whatever will fill its self-created emptiness, nature isn't the only force that abhors a vacuum - so does the divine love that seeks to fill all in all.

Health and safety and the way we do our thinking.

Reading about Dorothy Day over the past few weeks has been cause for critical reflection on a number of unhelpful assumptions that clutter up the floor of my mental workshop, and that in the real world would be removed by anyone schooled in health and safety procedures. Interesting concept - a health and safety inspection of the way we do our thinking!! Here's three correctives to such unhelpful assumptions.

One. Just because someone isn't a recognised theologian doesn't mean they aren't. Day never claimed to be, never wanted to be known as, a theologian. But the way she lived her life on the values of the Sermon on the Mount, used her mind to think through the meaning of each human being's existence and value, conflated prayer and social action, ignited compassion with the fire of the Gospel of Jesus, confronted the powers not only with obstinate protest but with lucid argument articulating the nature of God in Christ. She was a theologian alright.

Two. Spirituality has to do with the inner life and piety of the individual. Not so. True spirituality is expressed through the outward witness in works of mercy of a Christ-responsive community. Coming from an Evangelical context I recognise the deadly temptations of what my own College Principal used to call "grovelling around in the dark recesses or comfortable sofas of our own souls".  Day knew the problem. "To cook for one's self, to eat by one's self, to sew, wash, clean for one's self is a sterile joy. Community, whether of family, or convent, or boarding house, is absolutely necessary." It isn't that I don't know that. It's just that spirituality in a consumer culture is always in danger of being an unholy search for personal customer satisfaction. By contrast, Day found God in the messiness of people's lives, in the friction of personal relationships, and in those places where injustice and suffering went unchallenged - until she and others like her went there in Jesus' name and orchestrated a collision of worldviews.

Three. Personal sanctity is a life goal. Not so. Sanctity pursued has no purchasing power for the truly holy person. The self-conscious pursuit of holiness was, in Day's judgement, a deflection from the life of discipleship. When followers of Christ seek him amongst the poor, witness to the Kingdom of God with faithfulness before the powers that hurt and exploit, enact in lifestyle and embodied practices the forgiveness and peacemaking of God, then just at those points where personal holiness is the least concern, sanctity is invisble but obvious. Even in her lifetime some suggested to her she was a saint - her reply, "No. I can't be dismissed that easily".

Three will do for now. My final post Dorothy will include a couple of Dorothy's subversive interpretations, either of Jesus' words or of the actions consistent with Jesus' own subversive lifestyle of self-giving and peacemaking love. Jim Forest's brief biography is entitled Love is the Measure. And so it is.

If love is interpreted with the full costliness of the Gospel

and love modelled on Jesus is lived as a tough and compassionate alternative to the uncaring selfishness of contemporary culture

and love is understood as a Gospel critique of all social injustice that diminishes, discriminates and deprives further the least of Christ's brothers and sisters

and Love is 

Incarnated in practices and habits of compassion

Cruciform in its shape and self expenditure

Resurrection pointing in its vitalising hopefulness

Pentecostal in its dependence on the Spirit who pours the love of God into human hearts

Trinitarian in its reaching out to those who are other

Eschatological as the contemporary enactment of the final reality of a universe where God will be all in all

because in the end, as at the beginning, God is love.

Miscellaneous fragments of experience - or noticing the spirituality of the present moment

Tea Break Haiku

Two dunked ginger snaps,

Whittard's cinnamon chai tea;

nearly Nirvana!

...

A half sentence in Dorthy Day's Journal,

"How to lift the heart to God,

our first beginning

and last end..."

...

Shortest book review ever, of Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain.

Not a bad summary of Christian witness either:

"The way to seek God is firsthand,

through religious experience.

So I have done.

Here is the story.

Now go, and do likewise."

...

At the end of Merton's autobiography a Latin motto;

SIT FINIS LIBRI, NON FINIS QAERENDI -

Let this be the end of the book,

not the end of the search.

Good motto for theologians who read their way towards God, and who believe much of the finding is in the seeking.

...

At church this morning we exchanged the peace.

An elderly member couldn't remember if she and I had already done it.

We had, but I suggested we do it again.

So we did - our own wee peace dividend.

...

The wrong prayers for the right

reason? The flesh craves

what the intelligence

renounces. Concede

the Amens. With the end

nowhere, the travelling

all, how better to get

there than on one's knees?

          R S Thomas

...

The above miscellaneous thoughts come from the book I'm reading, the tea I'm drinking and odd moments of ordinary life. Spirituality is about all this kind of stuff - a good book, a favourite drink, the wish for peace, and for me as a reader and writer, those connections between thought written, read and lived in the flow of moments which accumulate into a life. Feeling wistful and uncertain today - and that's OK, I'm nervous about undisturbed certainty.

,

Thomas Merton on the humility of the theologian who dares to write about God

I wish I could write better out of respect for God, who gave me these small and very usual and familiar and unstartling and generous graces...

But if I am humble I will write better just by being humble. By being humble, I will write what is true, simply - and the simple truth is never rubbish and never scandalous - except to people in peculiar perplexities of pride themselves...

May I write simply and straight anything I ever have to write, that no dishonour come to God through my writing about Him.

Thomas Merton, quoted in Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon, 1986), 191

Holy, wondering delight in God

"Truth sees God;

wisdom gazes on God.

And these two produce a third,

a holy, wondering delight in God,

which is love."

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Penguin, 1976, 130.

Few writers manage to combine commonsense conclusion and speculative reflection as successfully as Julian. (A second thought: after writing that I realise it could easily be written, "commonsense reflection and speculative conclusion", which would be equally true.)

Some of her sentences, like the above, read like a theological prose-poem celebrating those experiences of God that sharpen, deepen and extend our grasp of the Love that grasps us - and my use of three different terms is deliberate.

Loving God can never be one dimensional - it is the response of our being to God. It begins with understanding truth, grows to contemplative wisdom, and flowers into worship - which in the end is that deep, transformative response of our being to the Being of God.

Conformitas Christi......

L Gregory Jones writes theological ethics. In his approach, the credibility of any theological assertion has to be established through the Christian practices such theologising engenders. Theology to be real has to be embodied, not only in the individual, but in the community that takes the name of Christ. What is believed is most authentically expressed not in words and articulation, but in practice and performance of a life shaped by Christ.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from Transformed Judgment. Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2008) that have had me thinking again about the how, and why and what of following after Christ. The painting by Caravaggio is a favourite - the young Jesus inviting middle aged Peter and Andrew to follow him.

What is needed is a way of speaking of the prior action of God, namely the saving life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which also calls forth an account of the shape human activity is to take in response. Such an emphasis is found by recovering the relationship between being conformed to Christ and being called to imitate - or as I think is preferable language, to pattern one's life in - Christ. God befriends humanity in Jesus Christ, and in that gracious action, which originates in God alone, humanity is conformed to Christ independently of particular characters, virtues and actions. Grace is the fundamental orientation of Christian life. The context of this conformitas Christi is discovered in the salvation wrought by Christ; it is a salvation revealed throughout the context of his life, deathn and resurrection.

In the light of Jesus friendship, the Christian's vocation, in response to God's prior action in Christ conforming humanity to his righteousness, is to pattern her life in Jesus Christ through discipleship.A person is called and enabled to pattern her life in Jesus Christ because God in Christ has patterned human life into God's life in order to save humanity. Such practices as baptism, eucharist, forgiveness-reconciliation and "performing" the Scriptures are indispensable practices, whereby people learn to become disciples, whereby people learn to be frinds of God and to befriend and be befriended by others. Through such practices, people are aenabled to acquire the habits and skills reflective of the pattern discovered in Jesus Christ." (pages 110-11)

That's about as attractive and complete an account of following after Christ as I've read for a long while. Conformitas Christi. Wouldn't mind a T-shirt with that on it -

Conformitas Christi!