Living Wittily

Pastoral Care, unforeseen consequences and the undercurrent of grace.

A voice from my past came back to bless me the other day, through an email from a friend. My friend was speaking to someone I had helped decades ago, and whose memory of kindness shown then, and non-rejection when life was messed up, remains blessing to her, and is now encouragement to me. That email touched into something that is a given in pastoral care - the invisibility in the present of later consequence. And for me mixed memories, of hard decisions, sometimes unrewarded effort, becoming the target of anger and frustration that has to earth somewhere, and the sense that an undercurrent of grace carries us along sometimes despite our best efforts to row in the other direction.

Mary Oliver's poem below expresses with psychological precision and pastoral prescience what that undercurrent of grace can sometimes feel like - the categorical imperative of caring.

For Example

Okay, the broken gull let me lift it

  from the sand.

Let me fumble it into a box, with the

  lid open.

Okay, I put the box into my car, and started

  up the highway

to the place where sometimes, sometimes not,

  such things can be mended.

 

The gull at first was quiet.

How everything turns out one way or another, I

  won't call it good or bad, just

    one way or another.

 

Then the gull lurched from the box and onto

  the back of the front seat and

    punched me.

Okay, a little blood slid down.

 

But we all know, son't we, how sometimes

  things have to feel anger, so as not

    to be defeated?

 

I love this world, even in its hard places.

A bird too must love this world,

  even in its hard places.

So, even if the effort may come to nothing,

  you have to do something.

From Swan. Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.

The poet achieves accuracy in describing the ambiguity that surrounds those responses we like to think spontaneous, but are often either premeditated or arise out of habits of the heart. Three times she uses "Okay", and it can mean concession or defiance to those who might wonder why she bothered. Her understanding of the language of anger, and why anger may be all a person has to prevent being overwhelmed by circumstance, is one of those profoundly humane insights that makes Mary Oliver essential reading for those whose calling is the care of others. To love the world in its hard places requires commitment to act, without foreseeing consequences beyond that present immediate imperative, "to do something".

The photo comes from here - where you can find a vision of an alternative lifestyle in an altogether different climate from Scotland in November.

Emerging Church, Rabbi Gamaliel and the Theological Curriculum

Just spent the last couple of days meeting with colleagues in Oxford, at Regent's Park College. We were looking at the issues for theological education arising from the flux and diversity of expression in church community that has come to be called emerging church, or fresh expressions, or whatever catch phrase we care to use in the vain attempt to catch in neat definition this phase of the church's life in contemporary Westernised Christian culture.

Stuart Murray Williams is one of the central figures trying to interpret, understand and evaluate what is of permanent value and what of transient interest in the plethora of alternatives on offer for those no longer satisfied with 'inherited church' or 'traditional church' or 'mainstream church'. See - even the non emergent status quo is now accruing nuanced definitions! And given the long list of options from cafe church to to Sci Fi church, Post-Alpha church to Cyber church, from menu church to common purse community, it was an important exercise to try somehow to grasp the significance of whatever is happening, in a culture that values the 'whatever' word.

Not rehearsing it all here, but several really important questions are at least worth posing:

What is necessary for any group to legitimately claim for itself the word church as a valid descriptor of what it is and how it expresses its life? What is the ecclesial minimum for a group to call itself church?

How important is sustainability in any of these new developments in Christian mission and community? If it is a transient phase is that necessarily a sign of failure? And if some of these survive and become self-sustaining is that validation, 'if it is of God it will prosper'?

If a group aim to accommodate a culturally specific group (Goth church for example), how does that relate to the catholicity of the Church? If Christian community is inclusive, how does that square with groups whose nature, aim and identity are so specific and culturally focused that by definition others would find them all but inaccessible?

If these new and imaginative and creative initiatives are part of a search for a more authentic and participatory way of being Christian community engaged with surrounding culture, what are the criteria for such authenticity?

Given that fresh expressions of emerging or emergent church are self-consciously developmental, uncontrolled and organic, what is it that nevertheless enables them to define themselves as Christian? Where are the theological and spiritual parameters, and who sets them?

And the specific question for theological education as formation and preparation for ministry in such a cultural flux - what impact should such developments, and the need to understand them, have on curriculum content, styles of teaching and a theological understanding of ecclesiology and Baptist Identity?

All good questions - much sharp discussion - several tentative conclusions - and most importantly, food for thought and reason for dialogue.

Novels - core texts and essential reading in pastoral theology

Reading Colm Toibin's new novel, Brooklyn. About the emigration of a young Irish woman to the United States, and the experience of separation, loss, disorientation and soul-testing loneliness that we call homesickness. Tobin is a beautiful writer, and writes about women's experience with sensitivity, insight, and a counsellor's sympathy, combined with an admirer's confidence in the resilience and dignity of this woman's ways of meeting circumstance and change. It doesn't make much sense to review a book only a third of it read, so I'll come back to this novel later.

But even what I've already read shows why novels are essential reading for people whose calling is to the care of others through pastoral friendship. I'm often asked about good books on pastoral theology, or for recommended titles that get to the heart and the point of what real pastoral care is. You often see the skeptical, disappointed, even dismissive expression on the face when instead of the latest theological heavyweight, or practical how to do it manual, or popular pastoral care in twenty minutes kind of book, (has anyone written pastoral care for Dummies yet:))you offer a list of three or four novels. Now I'd want to add biography, poetry, and some philosophy as other required resources (alongside obvious pastoral theology texts), but for now sticking with novels, here's one novel of one writer I learned from and still do. (Going to do several more over the next couple of weeks).

The Good Husband, Gail Godwin. A magnificent central character, Magda, is a literary scholar, a charismatic liberated and utterly impressive woman, is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Her husband, Francis, who happily lives in her shadow, becomes the carer of a stellar woman facing the greatest challenge of them all. No it isn't sad, morbid, dark - it is humane, compassionate, incisive. Godwin dissects the responses and attitudes of those who come and go, gather and stay, accompany or stay away from Magda in her last months. But the faithfulness, the cost and the self-effacing but effective presence of the good husband holds the balance of a relationship that is both blessed and doomed. And I can't think of a more nuanced and gentle exploration from different perspectives, of the experience of dying, in any pastoral theology book. The wrong things said, the crass questions, the gentle unintended kindnesses as well as the intentional acts of care, the tongue tied visitor embarrassed by pain and diminishment as well as the caring silence of the one who simply sits, holds hands and speaks only in sounds of reassurance, and then the practical carers who get things done without fuss and without intruding, the medical procedures at times humiliating, at times restoring, and all this told by a novelist who should be given an honorary doctorate in the humanities for the sheer humanity with which she writes.

I did a presentation on this book at a gathering of newly accredited ministers. It would make a too long post. I'll adapt it and post it over a couple of days next week - unless of course broadband is up and running at my new hoose up in Aiberdeen, like!

Vocation, our life choices and the live performance of our discipleship...

Been away for a few days and unable to log into the blog. Which is a pity given the number of genuinely pastoral comments, and theologically imaginative suggestions relating to my recent ana - ana- ana-baptist experience in our new bath room. They would have been a source of reassurance and comfort during a demanding couple of days of travel, meetings and being away from home comforts like a warm, uninterrupted bath!

Sorry the comments couldn't be moderated till I returned, but they are now made public so that those whose pastoral credentials are unarguably dubious, and those whose pastoral style is theologically and biblically reflective may be identified :)

More seriously, for the first time since our move I now have a number of weeks which will be fairly standard in terms of diary and commitments, giving me a chance to establish a new rhythm and balance in a different way of living out my vocation - which I've never identified wholly with the work I do. My marriage, family, friendships, intellectual and emotional life, building of home as place of welcome, participation in the Body of Christ, locally and ecumenically, are all part of that far too easily limited word "vocation".

The call of God is occasionally not easy to discern - but usually it is pretty clear, and the issue isn't discernment, but obedience. And by that I don't mean compliance. Hard faced duty isn't half as hard as a smiling faced, grateful yes to what is presented to us as the life we are to live - its circumstances, the gifts of other people's presence, the opportunities to say yes and no which can both be response of glad obedience to the One we seek to follow.

And yes - living with the choices we made in good faith and trust, and creating out of our responsive and responsible decisions, a life and work in which tension and tuning, practice and skill, self-knowledge and self-confidence, (and thus honesty and humility) enable us to perform before God the quite specific, indeed unique music of our own vocation. And since life is not a rehearsal (not always the daft cliche it sounds), what we are asked to do is perform our vocation as a Premiere, an unrehearsed, live, from scratch, one off performance. Just as well the grace of God pervades as well as peruses our performance - and that the Gracious God who is our primary audience knows the script far better than we do!

"Going about doing good" - would this be a counter-cultural form of Christian witness?

I've just slowly re-read H R L Sheppard. Life and Letters. There is in the Church of England, an entire tradition of pastoral theology, impressive, humane, cultured, compassionate, shrewd, theologically subtle, liturgically enriched, open to ridicule by some but not by those on the recieving end of such spiritually enhanced friendship. Not only in the Edwardian years when Sheppard was such a warm and energetic witness to Christianity in action.

Geoff Colmer recently reminded those who need reminding of the equally remarkable Michael Mayne, another of those lovers of God whose faithful costly work in the Church and amongst the community is a labour of love for God and the world. Prompted by Geoff (see his blog at January 22 here) I went looking for more about Michael Mayne and found the Times Obituary. It is a wide ranging and admiring pen portrait of a pastoral theologian who never wrote a book on pastoral theology - he simply lived it.

How else explain a man who arranged the 50th Anniversary Commemorative service for El-Alamein, and had the sons of Rommel and Montgomery doing the Bible Readings?

How else explain a priest whose involvement amongst those with Aids, and their carers, his chairmanship of various charities dedicated to the care of those who suffer, was exemplified in a reputation for meticulously prepared chairmanship and intentionally informed leadership?

And how else explain a man who wrote several books out of the depths of his own suffering, and from the breadth of a profoundly cultured and humane scholarship in literature, science and spiritruality, books that are masterpieces of spiritual insight and pastoral reflection, not least on his own suffering and the rich meaning he discerned in his own living?

Susan Hill, in Howard's End is on the Landing, her autobiographical trawl through most of the books she ever read or that inhabit her overcrowded bookshelves, singles out the writing of Michael Mayne as amongst the most significant spiritual writing she knows. It was her who put me on to Michael Mayne, and increased my personal indebtedness to an increasing cluster of Anglican priest theologians immersed in pastoral vocation that embodies the care of Jesus for folk.

For all our anxious chatter and strategising about mission, and our frantic (at times frenetic) searches for relevance, impact, innovation and hoped for durability of church as we know it, there is something impressive, too easily understated and overlooked, about lives of exemplary priesthood, publicly demonstrable goodness in Jesus' name, thoughtful and patient understanding of the surrounding culture as a disposition of loving attentive witness, borne before the world and born in prayer. We too easily underestimate the salt and light of a good life, radiant with a humanity that reminds people of the sheer attractiveness of Another who "went about doing good".  

Pastoral theology as honouring care-givers

Renita Weems again - this time on a society that has its values upside down.

"We are bereft because we lack traditions that elevate caring for children, the aged, and the informed to meaningful venues for encountering spiritual wisdom. Our society views caring as an impediment that squanders our potential and ties us down. It demeans mothering, underpays day-care workers and teachers, and penalises adults who take time off to care for aging parents....A society that spurns the work of caregiving cuts itself off from learning about life itself. Relegating all the caregiving that faces us to spouses, nannies, housekeepers, maids, live-in nurses and paid personnel threatens to make us overestimate our strengths and can blind us to our own vulnerabilities. We miss the work that can help to civilise us."

Question: What would change in the way the Church functions, and in the way the world sees the Church if, as the Body of Christ, it gave priority to caregiving in a reversal of the priorities of our culture?

Thomas Merton: Warnings for careless theological bloggers

Thomas Merton on integrity and care in writing. I've broken his two paragraphs into six guidelines that should help quality assure hastily posted blogposts - or at least raise embarrassment levels amongst the pious but careless.

And in fairness to Merton, some of his strictures were directed at several of his own early overcooked spiritual writings.

"We who say we love God: why are we not anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God?

If we do not try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all....

It is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well.

I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead....

The fact that your subject may be very important in itself does not necessarily mean that what you have written about it is important.

A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book...there are many who think that because they have written about God they have written good books."  (From The Sign of Jonas, Harcourt Brace, 1979, pages 60-61)

A strange mixture of a day - of funerals and laughter

Yesterday was a strange mixture of a day. Made up of attending a funeral standing for over an hour in a packed church; being at the afternoon session of our Baptist Assembly; having a meal out with friends between Assembly sessions; and then the evening Assembly session through most of which I was by then exhausted.

At the funeral met people I hadn't seen for anywhere between 35 and 5 years - some of them thought I'd aged. Is it that obvious 35 years on.....? The funeral itself was for Linda. We've known Linda and Jim for, well, 35 years, nearly all our married life, and been friends all that time. The funeral service was an experience that even this experienced pastor found heartbreakingly comforting, emotionally overwhelming in a way that seems even the day after, both inexplicable and right.

You see Jim presented the eulogy for Linda, preceded by a Visual Tribute of family photographs showing Linda as she was from baby to this year. And in what Jim said, he ministered to those who were there sharing in his love and gratitude for the life of his wife and lifelong friend. Then this man who couldn't sing, told of how during Linda's illness he took voice coaching so he could sing at her funeral, the love song that had meant so much to them as a couple down the years and in these past months. Being their friends for all these years, knowing the two of them, and hearing a non singer singing so well in leading a congregation, is simply one of the most moving events I've ever shared. And this was no exercise in denial - we all knew the reality of what was lost, and along with the promise of comfort within that loss, the deep human bonds of recognition that lie at the heart of love and loss, joy and grief, life and death - and how in the best friendships, these are shared.

May Sarton the poet once warned against wasting life's deepest experiences by being so busy in life we move on without assimilating and understanding what they have done to us. So maybe sometime later, when all of this is assimilated, I'll want to write something more - and only with Jim's permission. For now I am simply humbled though not puzzled, by how the love of these two people was made so astonishingly evident and then given as a gift to Linda, and us.

And the rest of the day went by in a haze - except the moment at the evening Assembly Session when, sitting with my friend Catriona of Skinny Fair-Trade Latte fame, the hymn THESE ARE THE DAYS OF ELIJAH was announced.

That was a moment of clarifying mischief, electrifying accidental providence, belief-defying coincidence (or did I pre-arrange it - no honest, I didn't!!) Eye-contact with Catriona came dangerously near irreverent guffaw. Instead I sang it with triumphalist gusto! If you read this Catriona, you can explain the metaphysical implications of your least favourite Assembly hymn being chosen at your first Scottish Assembly.

A strange mixture of a day.................

Induction, covenant and celebration - Catriona has arrived in Scotland!

Every induction of a minister to a pastorate is an event to be celebrated, a covenant to be sealed by promises, a confirmation yet again of the surprising call of God to all too human people to serve the Body of Christ, the Church. As Baptists we gladly hold to the practice of making covenant. A church is a gathering of believers who in their membership of the local church, embody the promise to walk together, faithfully, after Christ. And the call of God is to do so together, and to persevere and work at it even if at times it exhausts patience and breaks the heart. And to do this while also knowing that in the shared fellowship of the journey, they have discovered joy, the understanding of others, the generosity that humbles, and that one surprise, repeated so mercifully often, that one surprise of being loved.

 And so to Hillhead Baptist Church on Saturday October 3rd, and Catriona's induction. Most people who visit this blog will know Catriona as the skinny fair trade latte blogger (see sidebar), minister till recently of Hugglescote Baptist Church (aka Dibley). I met her the year before she went to Hugglescote, and then several times more recently as she came up to Scotland to meet those who will now be the congregation amongst whom her ministry will be. The Induction service was built around the theme and the experience of making covenant. Catriona told her story, the Church told theirs, and we sensed how these stories coincided. And of course the church from which Catriona came, Hugglescote Baptist Church, they too are part of the story and they were there too. Then Catriona and the Church made promises, and in our prayers we laid hands not only on the new minister, but on representatives of the congregation, so that they set out together on their journey, in covenant with each other, and looking to God to lead, accompany and hold them true to themselves and each other. All of this gathered together by Ruth Gouldbourne, preacher for the day, under the deceptively simple command, "Be kind to one another". Except that kindness is patterned after the kindnes of God, who in Christ chooses to be kind, to come close, to empathise, to walk the way of human life.

Then there was the biblically mandated buffet meal. This is one of my favourite icons, depicting an early buffet meal, complete with angels unawares. The fact that the icon images the Trinity and the Triune communion of love and perichoretic purpose, enriches further the idea of hospitality. Food, good talk, laughter, the shared satisfaction of being together, the courteous recognition of the other, the welcome that makes the presence of another both wanted and felt to be wanted, - and all expressed with good food, the mutuality of serving, and the fun of not knowing everyone who is there, providing opportunities to reach out with the offer of our name and the gift of their name.

So the day closed around 8.pm and we made our way home. But only after taking time to acknowledge the spiritual potency of those occasions when you know you stand on the brink of new possibility. And however hard we try, and no matter how much we think we ourselves achieve, we know that those possibilities come to be, not merely or mainly through our energy, but because when it comes to kindness, God takes the lead. He is there long before us; his generosity has no inbuilt limitations, and time and again we discover to our embarrasment, his grace second-guesses our needs.

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John Bunyan on the proper "status" of Baptist ministers

Most Baptists, including myself, claim John Bunyan was a Baptist in the best and most important senses of that ecclesial descriptor. By 1669 his Bedford congregation were described as Anabaptist. Whether he would own the modern denominational term or not, he held in classic Baptist terms to a profoundly unclerical non hierarchical view of the church and her ministry, and has some uncompromising correctives for all those in whatever tradition, who want to link ministry with authority rather than service, and for whom office and status seem more important than gift and privilege.

The quotation below comes from The Minister's Prayer Book. An Order of Prayers and Readings, ed. John W Doberstein (London: Collins, 1964). This book is a wide and eclectic gathering of orders for daily devotions, shaped around aspects of ministry, supplemented by an anthology of readings. I bought it for 75 pence second-hand years ago and it has travelled most places with me as a focus for reflection and prayer.

The following extract from Bunyan is on page 191. Unfortunately it was culled from another anthology so I can't give the precise reference to Bunyan. It's from Solomon's Temple Spiritualised and you can find it online over here.:

"Gifts and office make no men sons of God; as so, they are but servants; though these, as ministers and apostles, were servants of the highest form. It is the church, as such, that is the lady, a queen, the bride, the Lamb's wife; and prophets, apostles and ministers are but servants, stewards, labourers for her good."

"As therefore the lady is above the servant, the queen above the steward, or the wife above all her husband's officers, so is the church, as such, above these officers."