Living Wittily

Following Jesus isn't as easy as it sounds.

Following Jesus isn't as easy as it sounds. "Put your feet in my footsteps; obey my teaching; be like me." As if!

Liking and sharing Jesus' message assumes we know what that message is. "If someone slaps you on one side of the fasce, turn the other cheek." "Love your neighbour as yourself" - and your neighbour is whoever crosses your path. "Forgive those who offend you 70 x 7 times", which isn't about doing maths but about forgetting to count. Liking and sharing these messages is a hard call.

If instead we learn from Jesus way with people, how he treated them, spoke of them, thought about them, it doesn't get any easier. In the Gospels Jesus is often and again about relationships, belonging in God's community, breaking down barriers and walls. His parables, those stories about God's love and judgement, and about this God who goes looking for sinners, the marginalised, broken folk, beaten up by life - those stories are about lost sheep found, lost sons struggling their way home, victims of violence tended by the least likely Samaritans, people who work an hour being paid the same as those who worked all day. This is a God of scandlaous grace, who breaks down barriers, whose mercy offends, whose forgiveness is free and costs the very life of God. Liking and sharing Jesus' message is a hard call. Too hard if all we have to do it is our own choices, motives and energy. 

So those people Jesus met, and who were never the same afterwards. Zacchaeus who went looking for Jesus but because he was a small man, had to climb a tree to see over the heads of the crowd. No he wasn't a cheat, more likely on a commission, a cross between a pay day loan agent and a dispenser of benefit sanctions. Understandably he was hated, despised, named and shamed. Maybe the sycamore tree was for camouflage. And what happens. The kingdomn of God happens.

Jesus tells him to come down, quickly; that he must,not might or may, but must have a meal with him. It's the self-invitation and the gift of friendship and acceptance that breaks Zacchaeus wide open and dismantles those inner walls of greed and grievance. Half of my possessions I give away to the poor, and full compensation for all who have been overcharged. To like and share the message of Jesus is to dismantle walls, welcome the stranger, accept and show mercy to those whose lives are lonely, broken, messed up.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;  

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast…..

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.  

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.

And as has been said in thousands of so-called childrens' talks, "that’s a bit like Jesus." Something there is that doesn’t love a wall that wants it down. The friendship of Jesus dismantled the walls inside Zacchaeus by accepting him and embodying the love and friendship of God. What.s more the walls between Zacchaeus and everyone else were breached; this man is restored to the community and himself becomes a living parable of God's welcome.

No wonder Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house." Jesus' message to Zacchaeus is quite simply, yes. Each of us like him, scared, camouflaged, looking for meaning and love, a place to belong and a community to belong to, the same word, Yes. We like and share Jesus' message by liking and sharing the love of God with those people blessed enough to have us in their lives – and those people we are blessed enough to have in your lives. Following Jesus is a hard call, made possible by the very grace that calls us to be forgiven forgivers, merciful receivers of mercy, graced givers who embody the love of God in Christ.

Christians Speaking Truth to UKIP Part 1 Some Semantic Replacement Therapy

More and more I am convinced that Christian witness today requires that followers of Jesus speak with linguistic integrity; and resist by argument and a different rhetoric the lies, half truths, redefinitions, propaganda and semantic erosion of contemporary political and social disourse. A number of key terms, essential for intelligent and constructive political debate have been hijacked by the political far right, and are becoming slogan words of the present Government. Immigrant, increasingly used pejoratively to raise the threat level to 'our way of life', by those we consider 'other'. Welfare, redefined in the now laughably ironic Government pie chart showing the alleged percentage of taxes spent on social care and what used to be called social security. Benefits, a word now heard by many as the first word in the sound bytes benefit cheats and benefit scroungers. Security, often now linked with the word terror, and together providing a rationale for increasing surveillance in our society, intrusion into personal privacy, and suspicion of the stranger, those 'others', who make their homes around us.

Not for a second am I saying that there are no cases of illegal immigration, welfare tourism, benefit fraud, and security threat. It is how these realities are exploited to justify policies and attitudes that, if they continue unchecked, inevitably become deeply corrosive of the common good, toxic for public discourse, and dangerous in creating social attitudes and dispositions which are founded on suspicion not trust, and ruthless regulation rather than responsible discretion. By the way these qwords are being used by politicians, we are educating our society into mistrust of the stranger, resentment of the vulnerable, and fear of social change, cultural newness and human diversity. These three processes are essentials for thebhealth of a humane and open society in which people can flourish.

Of course it may be that there are some sections of our population who think the time for a humane and open society is not now, if ever. Conservatism isn't only a political party As a worldview, often unacknowledged, it can also be a determined protection of the status quo, a holding on to what serves our personal interests, a refusal to move in new directions even if the alternative is standing still. But human flourishing, like much else in this wonderful world, presupposes growth, fruitfulness, new seeds of possibility, the risk of the seed dying and the hope of it propagating and bearing fruit tenfold, and a hundredfold.

Which brings me back to an ethic of language, and the possibility of Christian witness as the redeeming of words, the reclaiming of a vocabulary that implies generosity to the stranger, compassion to the vulnerable, and responsibility towards the poor. Such redemptive language will have to be to the point, in the face of plain-talking nastiness, confronting and denying the discourse of fear, resentment and injustice. What do Christians do about UKIP? At the very least, speak defiance of the propaganda that seeks to persuade us that narrow-minded nastiness is nothing of the sort but is understandable impatience with those who are making mugs of us all. I beg to differ. No, I don't beg! Indeed I insist, loudly and persistently, to differentiate between the discourse of deceit and scapegoat explanations, and the discourse of truthful words and friendly welcome. UKIP stands behind narrow-minded nastiness, the politics of resentment, rejection and division. The popular appeal at the ballot box of its 'plain language' diagnoses of what is wrong with our society and how it can be put right by its policies, is clear evidence that eventually regular irrigation of peoples fears and worries and resentments produces bitter fruit. Water the seeds of malign discontent and don't be surprised at the height or toxicity of giant hogweed. 

In the old KJV translation, "Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer everyone." The immediacy of communication through social media makes it possible to disseminate and multiply words in ways unprecedented in our history. Not for nothing did Jesus liken his disciples to salt, whose influence for good, in healing, sterilising and fertilising, is out of all proportion to quantity. Jesus also said every word will have to be weighed and accounted for some day.

When that day comes I for one hope that some of the most weighty words I have spoken, have been words of contradiction, spoken in the face of those whose view of the world has no space for redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace....goodness, once you start to list them, an entire lexicon of ethically enhanced words are missing from the UKIP manifesto. Some semantic replacement therapy is needed in the political discourse of our country, and Christians have nothing better to do than start speaking these words. I mean it. These are the words that challenge precisely and prophetically, the attitudes, policies and ideologies of closure, exclusion, alienation and isolation.  Redemption, forgiveness, compassion, hospitality, love, hope, peace, justice, goodness. Speak them. Live them. Be them.

God's Passion to Multiply Joy

Two sentences from P T Forsyth, This Life and the Next - showing why it's always wise to read him with a pencil to underline and retrace our footsteps to such throwaway theological sense..... the photo is from Scolty Hill looking towards Aberdeen, where Forsyth was born. Wonder if he did his hill-waliking around here?

"We were created by God not out of his poverty and his need of company, but out of his overflowing wealth of love and his passion to multiply joy."

"The pursuit of perfection is a greater moral influence than the passion for power."

Here is love vast as the ocean.....

 Not had a poem here for a while. Looking over a few photos taken off the Moray Coast (the day we saw the pod of dolphins), they made me wistful with inward hard to name longing. The sea does that to me. Maybe it's the rhythm of the waves, the play of light, my own smallness gazing at immensity.

Keats was a Romantic poet - I'm not sure how much credible currency he carries in a culture that can be crudely unromantic about the natural world. But his words place me in front of the sea, insist that I look and listen, and be startled back into a deeper perception of who I am, what life is really for, and why being a human being capable of such reflective thought and self knowing humility in front of a vast gentleness of dangerous power, is a reminder of the truth at the centre of all existence, including my own - "Fear not, I have called you by name, you are mine....when you walk through the waters they shall not overwhelm you...... ".

On the Sea John Keats

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found
That scarcely will the very smallest shell

Be moved for days from whence it sometime fell
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude
Or fed too much with cloying melody -
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!

 

Anguished Protestants and Grumpy Catholics - according to Von Balthasar

Here's one of my favourite theologians putting miserable Christians and arid theology in their place:

How could Christianity have become such a universal power if it had always been as sullen as today's humourless and anguished Protestantism, or as grumpy as the super-organised and super-scholasticised Catholicism about us?...It is not dry manuals (full as these may be of unquestionable truths) that express with plausibility for the world the truth of Christ's Gospel; it is the existence of the saints who have been grasped by Christ's Holy Spirit. And Christ himself foresaw no other kind of apologetics."

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. 1. A Theological Aesthetics, Seeing the Form, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 493-4

Larkin, Vivaldi, Monet and a walk in the park

Walked in the park yesterday and found myself looking for signs of life on the trees.

No joy. Too early.

It was around 4.00p.m. and still light.

Yet felt as if something was being signalled.

Nearly a month after the shortest day.

And in that month all but unbroken cold.

Wanting it to be Spring doesn't make it so.

But in anticipation here's Philip Larkin.

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

and we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

......

This should be read just before listening to Vivaldi's Spring Suite....and then read again as it finishes.

Yes.

Honestly.

Try it. 

Oh, and then admire a Monet!

Evelyn Underhill on Intercession

The great intercessor must possess an extreme sensitiveness to the state and needs of souls and of the world. As those who live very close to nature become tuned to her rhythm, and can discern in solitary moments all the movements of her secret life, or as musicians distinguish each separate note in a great symphony and yet receive the music as a whole; so the intercessor…is sensitised to every note and cadence in the rich and intricate music of common life. He stretches out over an ever wider area the filaments of love, and receives and endures in his own person the anguish of its sorrow, its helplessness, its confusions,  and its sin; suffering again and again the darkness of Gethsemane and the Cross as the price of redemptive power. For it is his awful privilege to stand in the gap between the world’s infinite need and the treasuries of the Divine Love.

Evelyn Underhill, An Anthology of the Love of God, (Lobndon : Mowbray, 1953), 162-3.

Imaginative, theologically sensitive, a practical mysticism of intercession as love for the other and as redemptive activity. Writing like this is one reason Evelyn Underhill remains a spiritual writer whose work expands our sense of God, and helps us notice His work in our lives.

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

John Donne's pun on the end of God

John Donne and Julian of Norwich couldn't be more different in temperament, spirituality, lifestyle and life circumstance. But every time I read this sentence from Donne, I hear clear echoes of Julian's confident assurance in the eternal constancy of God's love: “whom God loves, he loves to the end and not to their end and their death, but to His end, and His end is that He might love them more”.

Cheap paperbacks aren't made to last, and I confess I don't have many of those glue-split, spine-peeling, brown-edged, once-read books that weren't supposed to stay important after that first read. But sometimes in a bundle of other people's discards one turns up that your haven't read. Like a Fount paperback on preaching by Colin Morris, Raising the Dead. And on page 55 is a paragraph that is really a theological expansion of Donne's pun,  that in turn echoes Julian's theological optimism:

"Those who have known the love of God last as long as his love lasts. For whatever we make of Jesus, its fair to say he died to show us that whoever we are, we matter to God. And since by definition, God must be perfectly consistent, there can never be a time when we cease to matter to him. Therefore we must be the objects of his love eternally. If God loves us, he must love us till the end, not our end but his end, and since God has no end, in the sense of ceasing to be, he must love us eternally."

Of course Donne was playing with the word "end" - God's end is also God's purpose, which is equally constant since grounded in eternal love. I mention all this because of what Morris goes on to say about the preacher and such doctrines as the love of God and the resurrection of Jesus:

Now for the preacher to be diffident about such doctrines in a time of despair and confusion is much more serious than false modesty; it is a dereliction of duty.

To reiterate yesterday's blog - quite so!

Pencil Notes in the margin: Kathleen Norris

"The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug".
(Flannery O'Connor, quoted in Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, page 54)

"We are not our thoughts. Thoughts come and go. Unacompanied thought pass quickly. Thoughts that are thought about become desires. Desires that are thought about become passions".  (Mary Funk, Thoughts Matter, Norris, page 91)