Living Wittily

Jurgen Moltmann quotes Bonhoeffer - "love and remain true to the earth".

Just started this book. In it I find one of my favourite quotations from Bonhoeffer, an essential inclusion in my personal canon of 'Theologians We Dare Not Ignore', quoted by Jurgen Moltmann, one of my most admired theological conversation partners.

Bonhoeffer wrote to his fiance Maria Von Wedemeyer, "God give us faith daily. I don't mean the faith which flees the world but the one that endures in the world and which loves and remains true to the earth  in spite of all the suffering which it contains for us. Our marriage is to be a Yes to God's earth, it is to strengthen our courage to do and to accomplish something on earth."

Moltmann points out that these words were written under a death sentence, and while allied bombing was razing German cities to the ground, "and the blood of murdered Jews cried out to high heaven".

So, Moltmann goes on, "The important thing today is to live this faithfulness to the earth in the crises in which the man made catastrophes to the earth are being heralded. The important thing is to prove this faithfulness in the face of the indifference and cynicism with which people knowingly accept the destruction of the earth's organism and foster ecological death."

Driving up the road from St Andrews I turned off as I usually do to come from Stonehaven to Westhill across some of the shire. In 20 minutes I saw the red kites,those aernonautic show-offs, a yellowhammer sitting on the fence beside the gorse wearing its designer yellow against the golden background. And a field with over a hundred sheep and lambs, and nearer Maryculter an ostrich. Yes, an ostrich. Every time I see it, I'm reminded of a sentence in a book review years ago, used to describe someone who sees what no one else wants to see. In that sense Bonhoeffer and Moltmann are essential theologians because they "stand with head erect amongst the ostriches"!

Multum in Parvo (III) The priority of questions over answers

Always we find ourselves at the divergence

Of two paths travelling out.

Otherwise, our questions

Would already have been answered.

......................

Turning nightward in these domes

Our shutters opening like secrets

We set our silvered cups to catch

The fine mist of light

That settles from our chosen stars

On the edge of the unanswerable

Even here, our questions.

....................

These are two samples of poetry written by a brilliant astrophysicist whose field of research was 'dark matter'. Rebecca Elson wrote as an agnostic whose religious scepticism was tempered by imagination, compassion and a visionary hopefulness for humanity and for a future worthy of the beauty and potential of a universe shot through with mystery.

Reading her poetry and Journal entries is like encountering a 20th Century Qoheleth, questioning, enquiring, redolent of responsibility, capable of awe and wonder at the sheer intransigence of existence in the face of the human urge to mastery and comprehension.

Reading her poetry is to have your too easily and carelessly held assumptions about faith and life interogated by someone who was an Isaac Newton scholar at Cambridge, and interpreter of the Hubble data, a Harvard researcher, and a poet whose precision with words had more to do with nuanced meaning than technical skill.

Reading her poetry is like standing in a hot shower when someone turns on the tap downstairs and suddenly the water is freezing and there's no easy or quick escape from its jetted cold.

Hubble, Poetry, Creation and Christ

CHRIST IN THE UNIVERSE

by: Alice Meynell (1847-1922)

• ITH this ambiguous earth

  His dealings have been told us. These abide:

  The signal to a maid, the human birth,

  The lesson, and the young Man crucified.

   

  But not a star of all

  The innumerable host of stars has heard

  How He administered this terrestrial ball.

  Our race have kept their Lord’s entrusted Word.

   

  Of His earth-visiting feet

  None knows the secret, cherished, perilous,

  The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,

  Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.

   

  

  No planet knows that this

  Our wayside planet, carrying land and wave,

  Love and life multiplied, and pain and bliss,

  Bears, as chief treasure, one forsaken grave.

   

  Nor, in our little day,

  May His devices with the heavens be guessed,

  His pilgrimage to thread the Milky Way

  Or His bestowals there be manifest.

   

   
  

  

  But in the eternities,

  Doubtless we shall compare together, hear

  A million alien Gospels, in what guise

  He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.

   

  O, be prepared, my soul!

  To read the inconceivable, to scan

  The myriad forms of God those stars unroll

  When, in our turn, we show to them a Man.

In the beginning was the Word - and then there was the Hubble

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made....and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

The mystery of vastness, the perplexing notion of infinity, the "cerebral inconveniences" of impossible mathematics, the loveliness and terror of images that reduce human significance to the omega point. That's what my new book is about - or at least that is what it's about if you can combine rational processing of data with aestheric responsiveness and an educated but not too loopy imagination.

A multi-tasking exegesis of John's Prologue might include simultaneous listening to Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001 Space odyssey), looking at these Hubble space images, saying by heart the text about the Word printed above, and asking the question with bewildered humility, "What are human beings that you are mindful of them?'

Not all theology is verbal. And not all pictures are theological. But as a human being capable of reflection and self-consciousness, I contemplate these images of the universe, and wonder, and trust, and hope, that "all indeed shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well". Julian's image of the hazelnut is more manageable -

"In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it
was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and
thought "What may this be?" And it was generally answered thus: "It is all that is
made." I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have
sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my
understanding: "It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it."

A vast universe that exists because it is loved presupposes a God of love beyond telling. Stands to reason.

Why we are not a waste of time and space

I like this. Not the final knockdown argument that demolishes Dawkins et al. Too subtle for such intellectual dogmatism. And why demolish straw anyway?

No. This is affirmation, hopefulness, trustful optimism that this glorious, beautiful, perplexingly addictive world around us, is more than the collisions of infinite variations of chance. I like the thought that beautiful music skillfully played is a crucial clue to why life matters, and matters to more than ourselves. 

For today let's pause

At my first groping after the First Cause,

Which led me to acknowledge (groping still)

That if what once was called primeval slime

(in current jargon pre-biotic soup)

Evolved in course of eons to a group

Playing Beethoven, it needed more than time

And chance, it needed a creative will

To foster that emergence, and express

Amoeba as A Minor. 

Martyn Skinner, Old Rectory, (Michael Russell Publishing), 1984, Quoted in This Sunrise of Wonder, Michael Mayne, (London: DLT, 2008), p. 110

Becky Elson: an astronomer-poet and the intellectucal gifts of wonder and joy

Rebecca Elson was a remarkable human being. One of the best ways to persuade those who don't know about her that she was a human treaure is to point to this obituary from 1999. Becky Elson filled her 39 years with an astonishing range of human achievement, and would have been the first to dismiss living a full human life as any kind of achievement at all. Rather life is gift to be unwrapped and enjoyed, life is a love to be embraced, living is the response of the whole being to that which is, because it is. Ten years after her death, this astronomer poet, who climbed mountains and studied stars, who played football and taught creative writing at Harvard, who played the mandolin and understood the deep harmonies earlier generations called the music of the spheres.

I came across her work in a book on science and poetry, a juxtaposition of disciplines I still find intriguing. Even the title of her published work, Responsibility to Awe, tells you something of this woman's depths - intellectual, spiritual, emotional. She exulted in the physicality of life, the mystery of matter, the joyous enigmas of existence, the unimaginable vastness of a universe still expanding away from human attempts to calculate, control and bring under the domestication of intellect. Her poetry is a celebration of human knowing, its triumphs and limits, the textured varieties of human epistemology, and amongst the ways of knowing that she respects and from which she learns, those two words "responsibility" and "awe". Our age could lose its capacity for both, so superficial and mindless in ways of life that obsess on the transient and immediate, and ignore the vast mysteries of existence in a universe like ours. To enthuse about an awesome star more likely refers to a recent gig than a response to a several billion year old source of light that populates a night sky now permanently invisible above our well lit, energy greedy urban landscape. A recovery of responsibility and awe might be initial steps in that change of mindset needed to prevent ecological catastrophe and give impetus to a humane reform of the destructive economics of irresponsibility and avarice.

Rant ended. Here's a poem that says more, much more, about what matters, and why.

Carnal Knowledge by Rebecca Elson

Having picked the final datum
From the universe
And fixed it in its column,
Named the causes of infinity,
Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary I, it seems

The body aches
To come too,
To the light,
Transmit the grace of gravity,
Express in its own algebra
The symmetries of awe and fear,
The shudder up the spine,
The knowing passing like a cool wind
That leaves the nape hairs leaping.

Alas, that Wisdom is so large - And Truth - so manifold!

My current enthusiasm for bringing theology and poetry into conversation, means I'm reading and re-reading poems I mistakenly thought I already understood. Here's one by Emily Dickinson - a poem that is theologically charged, and which recognises the tensions between learning and ignorance, and exposes our childish attempts to expound with great certainty the things we hardly begin to understand.

It is one of the great gifts poetry bestows that it challenges the mindset that always, everywhere and everything must explain and expound - the needed reminder that our intellectual grasp can never be sufficient to the richly textured tapestry and mystery of our all too human existence. And indeed, the word grasp is encoded throughout with the idea of possession and control - but it may be that the most important things remain beyond our grasping grasp. That's true of both theology and poetry, forms of human speech which imply more than they say, reveal much less than their whole, just as what is visible of Atlantic icebergs is superficial, above the surface, implying unseen mass and weight. 

Emily Dickinson - Poem 531
 

We learned the Whole of Love -

The Alphabet - the Words -

A Chapter - then the mighty Book -

Then - Revelation closed -

 

But in each Other's eyes

An Ignorance beheld -

Diviner than the Childhood's

And each to each, a Child -

 

Attempted to expound

What neither - understood -

Alas, that Wisdom is so large -

And Truth - so manifold!

The same general point is made with remarkable force by Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his meditation on the 'simplicity of sight' that is essential in all true seeing.

Here, finally it becomes clear why it is crucial to stress "simplicity of sight" (Mt 6.22; Lk11.34) so much when we encounter the form of Jesus. The Greek word for the simple people, haplous, means here both "lacking convolutions" and "healthy". For only the healthy / simple eye can see together the apparent contrasts in the figure of Jesus in their unity, only the little ones, the poor, the uneducated, are not seduced by an ever-increasing accumulation of nuggets of knowledge to consider individual traits only for themselves, thereby missing the figure because they are lost in pure analysis.
(Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Epilogue, page 96)