Living Wittily

Three Significant Women Theologians

It has been an interesting year of reading for me. Without setting out to do so I've read several first rate books by women scholars in several theological categories. Sarah Coakley's God, Sexuality and the Self is the first of a multi-volume systematic theology that moves away from intellectualised theology on the classic models, and tries to do something fresh and different. She is deeply committed to theologyas a contemplative activity, and that isn't a contradiction in terms. Prayer may indeed take the form of theological learning and intellectual listening, but it does so in a disposition of humility, reticence and a recognition that for all our study and accumulated scholarship, our findings are provisional and imperfect, because God is beyond the range of our cognitive control.

 

Then there is Kate Sonderegger's astonishingly lucid and compelling account of the unity of God, in the first volume of her systematic theology the title an unadorned description, The Doctrine of God. In contrast to the Trinity-fest of recent decades, and the elevation of God as a social being of Triune love, Sonderegger insists with considerable forthrightness that the starting point and primary truth is the unity of God. The classic terminology is explored, commended and affirmed; omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, the perfections and attributes of God are unabashedly placed in a theological structure that refuses to privilege either Trinity or Christology over the central unequivocal truth that, from start to finish, God is one. How this one God has choosen to reveal Godself does indeed lead to very early and continuing trinitarian and christological constructive theology; but these doctrines arise out of, and are decisively shaped by, the prior truth that God is one. Reading this book, as one who has read much of Moltmann, Boff, Gunton, Lacugna as well as Letham, Levering and a shelf of others, and who has for years been inclined to a social view of the Trinity, I found myself experiencing the theological equivalent of a dressing room team talk in which I was being asked to cast off complacency and rethink my game! And she is not wrong.

I'm just finsishing Marilynne Robinson's The Givenness of Things. She's done it again. A collection of essays that are discursive, moving with ease from literature to culture, from Calvinism to Shakespeare, observing with laser clarity the restless illness of the contemporary church, and urging a return to the great traditions of Christian theology, not least in the Reformed vein. Any one of these essays would serve as an example of why it is important to have an archimedean point on which sound theological reflection can gain leverage. For her it is Calvinism though not uncritically, with some Barth though with quite significant reservations, but generally and firmly Reformed which while not perfect, is a theological tradition unashamed of confessing and defending its faith. There is a short paragraph of precise diagnosis, for example, where she pinpoints one of the near fatal preoccupations of contemporary Christians - "relevance". The test of relevance is narrow, short termed, anthropocentric and theologically myopic and amnesiac at the same time. 

Art as an alternative grammar and vocabulary for theology

Over the summer I've been gradually updating some of the material of a module I'm teaching in Spring 2011. "Jesus Through the Centuries" is one of those modules that cries out for creative experiences of learning, encourages new approaches to reflection, explores radically different media for making theological statements, and allows each student to think more widely and deeply about who Jesus is. Film, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and iconography provide rich and profound challenges to a theology that is often embedded, maybe at times imprisoned, by words.

Part of the course I am developing relates to the incarnation. What I find remarkable is the concentration in the tradition on questions of how. How Jesus could be both God and human, and the sophisticated complexity of various formulations of words in an attempt to capture, contain and convey truth. It isn't that the how question is unimportant - just that it isn't the only question. And it isn't that I have a quarrel with words, I use them as fragments of attempted precision myself. But there are alternatives to words in the human impulse to portray and celebrate the great Johannine vision, 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us'. So I've been looking rather closely at paintings of the incarnation, almost always centred on the image of Mary and the infant Jesus.

And while the infant is usually and naturally central in the painting, the mother is an equally crucial and essential image, expressed with reverent care, portrayed in intimate detail, flowing as a dominant presence around the infant. And what has surprised me, in my admittedly limited reading and study of a number of these paintings, is the extraordinary availability in painted art, of a different theological grammar and vocabulary.

Now this is a thought I am developing, but as one example of what I am after - I have been studying the body language of the mother and what that might imply about the child. Especially the facial expression. Sad, serene, joyful, composed, in prayer eyes closed, in wonder eyes wide open, head bowed in adoration - or resignation...and so on.

I came across the ink drawing of Rogier Van Der Weyden, now held at the Louvre. It is exquisite, a softly lined and shaded sketch that says more than any finished oil, a most beautiful theological statement of purity and feminine beauty, and while the head is bowed, the eyes are open, the face is strong, and her attention is focused off stage, contemplative yet concentrated. What is going on? Just as in film the look off-stage is towards that which the viewer cannot see, but must imagine through the facial expression of the actor, so in this sketch we have to imagine what it is she gazes at in that way. Artists know very well that facial expression and the focus of the eyes is deeply suggestive to the viewer's imagination. "The Head of the Virgin" is inclined towards ...what? Depends whether this is before the annunciation, after it but before the birth, or after the child is born. Before the annunciation, a young woman thoughtful and composed; after the annunciation resigned to a future to which she willingly surrendered; after the birth, wonder, even adoration but qualified by an expression of sadness?

And my question is - knowing the Christian story, and being familiar with the nativity  and birth narratives, and belonging to a Christian community of faith, what theological conclusions are drawn from that face, that attentiveness, that focus off-stage? And how important is our imagination as a nourishment of what we already believe, and an enrichment of how we think of Jesus? 

Prayer as the risk we take in being honest with God

This poem about God, prayer, and us, was written by Renita Weems in 1980, when as a young woman she needed to find a way of relating to God that was her own. Not inherited reverence, not borrowed piety, not well rehearsed habits, not words worn with familiarity - but the determination to be a young black woman whose voice has its own integrity, and whose sense of God resists the reductive pressures of conformity to 'the done thing'. It is reproduced in her autobiography, Listening For God. A MInister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). Professor Weems is a biblical scholar, an ordained African Methodist minister, an outspoken critic of systems and social attitudes of discrimination and exclusion, and a woman whose spirituality combines hunger for righteousness, impatience with injustice, and a relationship with God in which love and trust enable prayer to be a robust debate about the things that matter. Her blog is over here.

I usedta bow,

now I stand

before God's throne.

I usedta close my eyes,

now I stare

straight ahead

I usedta do what was expected,

nor I do what I want

to make this faith

faithful to me.

I usedta be afraid of God

now I take chances

and wait

and wait

tapping my feet,

listening for God.

(Listening for God, page 35)

"And all manner of thing shall be well" - the applause of God's creation

Just received from Amazon the beautifully produced translation of Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love. The type font, the page layout, the paper quality, and the overall production makes it a treat to read and handle. The translation by Julia Holloway is somewhere between medieval and modern in the range of vocabulary and sentence structure. It reads smoothly, and with a care for the cadences and stylistic oddities of one of the finest writers in early vernacular English. It's a sign of high quality translation when a text you know well, reads with freshness and an absence of deliberate novelty, the translator content to let the voice of the text be heard without literary amplification and sound effects. I've read the Penguin translation by Clifton Wolters, and the Paulist Press one by James Walsh, and they still have their place for Julian enthusiasts - the Walsh one remains the definitive modern version.

But this lovely edition (now in protective plastic cover courtesy of a friendly member of UWS library staff) will accompany me through Lent - because Julian is my chosen read this year. Time to enjoy a classic statement of theology that is both radical and orthodox, that was the fruit of twenty years of contemplative prayer, and that speaks with profound relevance to a world that needs as never before, to hear the love of God redemptively defying all that makes for diminishment, futility and waste:

"And thus our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make, saying full comfortably, "I may make all things well, I can make all things well, and I will  make all things well, and I shall make all things well, and you shall see your self that all manner of thing shall be well."

Julian, more than any other theologian except Traherne, celebrates the wise, good love of God by seeing beyond the immediate and transient to a time when all of creation will applaud the Creator.

For now, I decided to write a Fibonacci in honour of Julian the theologian of the love of God.

Fibonacci on Julian Of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Look!

Love!

Behold!

Crucified!

Divine Love Revealed!

All manner of thing shall be well.

I saw a little thing the size of a hazelnut!

It represents all that is made, and it exists and ever shall, because God loves it!

Would you know your Lord's meaning in this? Know it well, Love was his meaning. Hold yourself therein, and you shall understand and know more of the same.

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

Kay Carmichael - Social Reformer, Academic Teacher, Peace Activist - She looked humanely forth on human life

By the time I met Kay Carmichael in 1974 she was already a highly respected and influential leader in social policy. She had served on The Kilbrandon Committee in 1964, under whose Report recommendations the Scottish Children's Hearing System came into being under the Children's (Scotland) Act 1968. The introduction of Children's Panels not only decriminalised many of the actions of children normally taken before Juvenile Court, they moved thinking from punishment to help. The approach recognised that many childhood difficulties, including neglect, abuse, criminal activity and other situations that put children at risk, required to be addressed with support, understanding and actions taken "in the best interests of the child", and decided by trained members of the local community guided by a Children's Reporter, and in conversation with the responsible adults in the child's life. The philosophy underlying these policies was, and remains, creative, forward looking, and optimistic about the difference that can be made in young lives if good decisions and adequate resources can be put in place. The result is a way of viewing children and their families that is widely admired across the world; and one which successive Scottish Governments do well to maintain, develop and protect from those accountancy viruses that so destructively undermine in the interests of money the health of something almost unqualifiedly good.

Later in the 1970's Kay Carmichal was involved in the Lilybank project, working with those on benefits in the East End of Glasgow. Controversially she went incognito for three months, and was filmed living on the Benefit Level of £10.50 per week. She exposed the humiliation, the indignity, the sheer grinding inuhumanity, that so many people encounter in dealing with the State Welfare system. Again, what was being demonstrated and thought through was the revolutionary impact on social policy of respect for persons and humane social policy as default values in a political philosophy.

She began working with the most violent prisoners, trying to reconnect alienated people of violence to the community. It was experimental thinking like hers that would lead to the setting up of the Barlinnie Special Unit, once again encouraging at the level of policy-making, the search for understanding, relational co-operation, and how to harness the resources of the wider community in addressing social and human failings. Later in life she explored much more deeply the issues of sin and forgiveness, society's response to criminality and the deeper human questions of restorative justice and human rehabilitation. Kay Carmichael was my teacher, the best kind, who managed to combine impressive intellect, creative pragmatism and awareness of the significance of teaching young minds to look humanely forth on human life. There is therefore something deeply moving about the thought that she completed her PhD on Sin and Forgiveness at the age of 76, after a lifetime's professional, academic and political experience in the social implications of human failure and community response, sin and forgiveness.

More could be said - her lifelong anti-nuclear activism as a peace delinquent (her word), her work on behalf of those ensnared in prostitution, her instinctive resistance to all kinds of social discrimination, her support for schemes to give disabled people the right to as much independent living as they could manage, and her deep moral antipathy to poverty that in her view is not inevitable, if only we could develop a more humane politics and a less ruthless economics.

Social work is a hard place to be now. Seldom are those who work within the systems rewarded by public respect, moral support, and a wider awareness of just how hard it is to get everything right all of the time. And I do have a troubling suspicion that future Kay Carmichaels may be unable to break free of the current love affair in large service providers, with micro-managed constraints that discourage creative reflection, and avoid the risk of experiment. Which in turn suppresses (as by product or deliberate policy the result is the same) the expression in professional theory and practice of that social compassion, those imaginative ideas that are building blocks of vision.

For now I salute this woman whose articulate and passionate voice spoke for so many whose voices were seldom listened to. And time spent in her class was as important in the formation of my understanding of a truly pastoral and good news ministry as love for others, as any other course I took - including an intense theological training in our own College.

There is a fine Obituary in the Scotsman here. I haven't found an online photo of Kay. Her funeral service will take place in Glasgow later today. I greatly regret I won't be able to be there, so this post is intended as a modest acknowledgement of an immodest personal debt - by the way her funeral is to be followed by champagne and sausage rolls at a local hotel - how characteristic is that!

Dorothy Day and the price of coffee

"Nothing but the best, and the best is none too good for God's poor. What a delightful thing it is to be boldly profligate, to ignore the price of coffee and to go on serving good coffee and the finest bread to the long line of destitute who come to us."

This is Dorothy Day at her subversive best, living the values of the Kingdom. I find it interesting that her spiritual life was nurtured by the Greek New Testament, which she wore out with use and for which she wrote her own translation. I suppose that careful weighing and measuring of text eventually weaves words and ideas into the very texture of a person's thought; in the process of translating Greek into English, language itself translates into spirituality which in turn translates into actions with New Testament precedent. No wonder the Sermon on the Mount was for her a manifesto of life lived in radical contra-distinction to any culture conservatively protective of its economic status quo. In such a culture, like our own, Jesus is not so much a personal saviour to be claimed, as a friend of sinners to be talked about and enfleshed in acts of redemptive hospitable love.

Clothes, charity shops, the Sermon on the Mount and a Rule of Life

"The coat hanging in your closet on a winter day belongs to someone who is freezing without it; give it away."

Recent years, the way to do that is hand it in to a charity shop, or put it in a plastic bag to be uplifted on the doorstep. Either way, the personal gesture that is the gift is short-circuited.

Does that matter?

Almost certainly not, provided the coat gets into the right hands, onto the right back.

The above line is from the biography of Dorthy Day, Love is the Measure".

One of her other one liners, repeated ad gloriam,"Our rule of life is the works of mercy."

No wonder they want to make her a saint. And no wonder she dismisses such nonsense with the warning, "I won't let them dismiss me as easily as that".

Wish I'd met her.

Kay Carmichael: Social Reformer, Teacher and Writer (Died: Dec 26 2009)

Wasn't going to post today. But just picked up the notice that Kay Carmichael, social reformer and teacher, died on Boxing Day. I often talk here about those who have shaped my thinking, my attitudes, my moral values, my theology. I was taught Social Administration in the 1970's by two socially attuned and radically compassionate human beings - Professor Bob Holman and Dr Kay Carmichael. Together they reconfigured the way I think about social justice, human wellbeing and social welfare, the nature, causes and responses to poverty, the cruciality of civic responsibility, and the dignity of each human being. In doing so, Kay Carmichael also changed the way i think about the Gospel, the mission of the Church and the God who sides with the poor, the oppressed and the marginalised.

I want to say more about Kay Carmichael in a later post. For now, I simply want to express appreciation and gratitude for the life of a fine teacher, who embodied the passion for social justice she instilled in her students. And more than its personal impact on me, acknowledge also the differences she has made in the wider public sphere, where she looked for ways to enact the great Hebrew call to prophetic living, "to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God."

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.

Dorothy Day and diamonds for the poor

Dorothy Day again.

A well dressed and well off woman went to one of the Worker houses and gave Dorothy a diamond ring. She thanked the visitor, slipped the ring in her pocket, and later that day gave it to an old woman who lived alone.

Somebody protested the ring could be sold and pay the woman's rent for a year. To which the reply was let her sell it and pay the rent, or use the money for a holiday in the Bahamas, or just enjoy wearing it. Whatever choice the old woman made, it would be her choice and she would have her dignity.

Anyway, Dorothy asked, " Do you suppose that God created diamonds only for the rich?"

Those are the stories that enflesh the sayings of Jesus, have that recklessness of the Beatitudes, and echo another woman's act of extravagance.