Travel on, travel on

From the joys and strains of pilgrimage, and a greater pilgrimage to follow? I must remember to leave a couple of days R&R after my next ten days without a day off. Still a bit pie-eyed, here’s a final selection of pictures, from a glorious dawn over Jerusalem to a Cat up Mount Zion who reminded me of the legendary Marcel, whom Lucy and I met out here in 1983. Compare Max the Cat, shortly after my return.




There is a special challenge in doing a Holy Land pilgrimage. We all have a Jerusalem of the mind, which we carry around in us as we imagine the stories of the Bible. Its sites are strangely shapeless and placeless, rather like a theme park where everything relates to everything else, but nothing is really anchored in the place on earth it is situated. For many Western Europeans this Jerusalem of the mind is a place of quiet contemplation, Zeferelli religious picturs, and a clear focus on Jesus.

Then there is the Jerusalem below, as is — heaving with noisy heedless people, its historical stones hacked about, hot, contested and disordered — the last place a half decent Messiah would show up. Somehow these two realities have to be brought together, and that is especially difficult to do when good Christians bicker and squabbe over their shares in the real Holy Places, seeking to impose their cultures and expectations on the raw material like cats marking lamp posts.

Everybody claims some unique correctness. everybody is both right and wrong. Each has their own particular expression of some facet of the truth, but imagine for a moment that God’s will is being done in what is actually here, and no religion or denomination exists anything but cheek by jowl with all the others. If ever God meant there to be one infallible Big White Chief, or Book, or story, or organisation the kindest one can say of him, with Woody Allen, is that he is something of an underachiever.

Or perhaps it is all meant to be messy, and every expression of Christian faith provisional — good for what it is good for, but bound up in its own culture and history. Including us. Including everybody. The Word chooses to become incarnate in human cultures, in the real world. It is the only way we can know him. Our only response can be wonder, humility and realism, not imperial pretension, idolatry of dogma, or Disneyland religiosity. The reality that inspires the former is our best antidote to the latter, and it is there to give us the strength to travel on in faith, not sight.

Why so Crypto?

Before leaving the question of politics, I have been wondering why some of the English have such a fascination with secrecy, and such a horror of public discussion? What’s wrong with vigorous public discussion of points of difference?

Why so much crypto and secrecy?

The Bible is full of open disputation. In Galatians Peter and Paul have a technicolor public row. In the Acts various apostles fall out with each other and take their separate ways. In the gospels disciples vie with one another in front of all the others (or at any rate their mothers do) for hot spots in the Kingdom of Heaven.

All this is done without shame, or any particular feeling that it would have been very much better if the elite had stitched everything up behind closed doors. The only attempt to do this (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15) was a brilliant day out, but its conclusions didn't last five minutes — soon enough Christians were eating non-kosher food anyway, and Peter and Paul arguing as forcibly as ever.

We all, of course, have deeply personal, random and inconsequential thoughts that don’t belong in public. Privacy is precious because it enables us to achieve intimacy and friendship with our friends and families, in a privileged environment where much can be taken for granted. Depth is sometimes only accessible to the solo scholar slogging away in the stacks. we all need space for meditation, solitude and desert experiences.

Also, it is only really possible for to allow particular friends into our full confidence with the security that comes from having invited them. A hot blazing eyeballs world of full exposure disallows this very important aspect of human friendship. So I am not against proper privacy.

However, I suspect we Home Counties Anglicans could allow ourselves a little bit more room for openness, especially about publicly significant issues. Here are some distinct advantages to public discussion, especially if it can be conducted by people who listen to each other with mutual respect and a longing to understand:

• Openness prevents people treating questions as settled before, in fact, they are. Premature closure breeds immaturity in a community, and privileges reductionism.
  
  
• As we discover with open source software, openness is the precondition of collaboration. When I am open I trust others with thoughts that matter to me, and, if they do the same with me, our relationship grows. Modelling a world where you can like and value people with whom you disagree witnesses to the possibility of a kingdom based on transformed relationships.
  
  
• Openness stops people taking hierarchy seriously in the wrong kind of way. In a public discussion peopl's last idea is as good as their last job, which pricks the bubble of hierarchy and gives opportunity to shine to the person with the best idea, which can then be acknowledged
  
  
• As Benedict points out in the rule, the youngest and most improbable person sometimes has the best idea — without being open to this the whole community is stunted.
  
  
• Being open forces me to try and be consistent. If I go round saying to one closed clique that I think the C of E is all washed up and morally bankrupt and to another that I think it’s a marvellous national mission with a big moral message for society, I suggest both cliques going out for a drink together to prick the bubble of hypocrisy and force me to say what I really think to both.
  
  
• being open forces theoretical thinkers to earth their wisdom in human reality, and test it in an open forum. It brings together people who are big on ideas and those big on pragmatism.
  
  
• Open discussion privileges the kinds of people who like to think out loud, indeed cannot develop ideas without sharpening them up in a group discussion. That means it disciminates against reflective learners, who need space to develop their thinking before they feel it worth brining into the light of day. That’s why you need some conventions, disciplines and routines; to protect thinking space, and prevent either kind of thinker from stealing the show.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit sometimes reveals his will, Quaker style, in a gathering of people, when a deep conviction emerges among them through processes of open debate. This communal activity transcends the arrogance of individual primacy, and expresses the corporate nature of authority in the Christian tradition.
  
  
• Public debate builds trust. Stitch ups breed cynicism.
  
  
• What is public belongs to the public. If a community knows not only what was decided but how it came to that conclusion, it can move on to the next decision with understanding, and own what has happened.
  
  
• Public life destroys the myths of perfection. People interacting publicly show their weaknesses and absurdities as well as their shining intellectual process, or lack of it. In a Hungarian public bath earlier this year, splashing around with the family and several hundred people of all sizes, ages, shapes and proclivities, I noticed how everybody is absurd, but everybody is also, in their own way beautiful.
  

Scripture as Spiritual Reading

One of the great illusions about prayer is that you have to abstract yourself on your own from everything that really matters to you, light up a few tea lights, engage a soapy “spiritual” gear and hope for the best. Many would like to enrich their praying lives, in a way, but suspect they’ll never manage.

What we all need is a bit of encouragement and a few pointers that engage us where we are.

Fr William Mills is rector of an Orthodox parish in Charlotte, NC. His 30 Day Retreat, billed as “a personal guide to spiritual renewal” is a tool to get you going on Lectio Divina using a few minutes each day spread over a month. He takes well known Bible passages from the gospels and Paul, and invites the reader to slow down, chew over them and reflect. Each section ends with some practical questions and follow up Bible reading. This book could work very well for a group that read daily, whose members kept some personal notebooks, and met weekly like a book club.

Fr Mills’ approach is practical rather than narrowly academic, but its author does happen also to be an a professor of philosophy of religon. His experience with students gives extra resonance to his rather homsepun comment. Written by an Orthodox priest, published by a Roman Catholic publishing house, this book is broad guage classic Christianity rather than anything narrowly denominational. As a get-you-going guide for groups or individuals who want to explore well-known Scriptures as a Spiritual resource, what you see is very much what you get. There are some helpfully surprising questions, though, for a book aimed foursquare at Christian believers — “what irritates you about Jesus?” for example. The book should prove a significant help for those suffering from what the author calls Dusty Bible Syndrome, as well as people who’ve not engaged with Scripture as spiritual reading as much as they would like.

Bible and Culture 101

Back in the 1960’s school RE was boring and worthy but predictable, and largely based on the Bible. You might decide it was a load of old tosh, but at least you ended up able to understand Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Milton’s Paradise Lost. The past becomes a completely foreign country, however, when a society obsessed with the latest of everything loses touch with its own roots, and compromises its own corporate memory.

Let me illustrate. As a sixth former I learnt that after the death of Palmerston, in 1866, a group of anti-Reformists called the “Adullamites” forced the resignation of Lord John Russell as Prime Minister. This interesting bit of Lib/Con coalition building has much contemporary resonance. John Bright, leading political commentator of the day, coined the term to draw attention to Lowe and Elcho’s unwillingness to be led by either Gladstone, whose reformism they had consistently opposed, or Disraeli. The meaning was plain to anyone who knew I Kings 22. Trouble is, not many of today’s students know I Samuel 22. We even have students who have never read Genesis 1 or Matthew 5, let alone I Samuel 22.

Enter Maggi Dawn, and her new book The Writing on the Wall. It’s a trip through the Bible for the biblically ignorant but otherwise educated reader, giving some basic info and background on the stories that have shaped our literature and history. She doesn’t just tell the story, but gives enough background to it to help you understand its meaning, and why it may have been used as it has been. So she turns on a light bulb to illuminate a range of cultural basics — Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Milton, Senser, Jacob Epstein, Wilfred Owen, William Blake, Tennyson, Oscar Wilde, yea even Monty Python... and hundreds of others.

So, here is an ideal present for the sixth former in your life who seeks some background to our culture. Its clarity and sense of perspective may also help the busy preacher. No cave of Adullam, though. Now someone’s done Literature, could it be History next for this treatment?

Swallows Swoop in God’s house

Evensong on Trinity Sunday at Kingsey (Many thanks to Martin Hodson for pictures, and Charles Deane, churchwarden, who provided refreshments for all in his most amazing garden.) It’s good to see traditional liturgy flourishing in a rural benefice fed by, not set against, more contemporary worship. Main object of attention afterwards, however, was a swallow’s nest in the porch, with young peeking over the edge demanding food.

Psalm 84:3 proclaims that swallows nest in God’s house. They have a distinctive flight pattern, looping freely in and out.

This is exactly what Margot Hodson the Vicar and I saw a mother swallow doing, inches away from us. With an extraordinary freedom and grace, ignoring people entirely, Ma Swallow wheeled in looping circles outside the porch, then swooped in with incredible precision and, seemingly without interruption of her flow, dropped off food in a baby’s open mouth, before looping out again into what Scots call the gloaming.

For those of us who mis-spent too much of our youthful prime filling notebooks with word-by-word Hebrew parsings, this is significant. In most English translations of Psalm 84 “Sparrow” figures — poetic coloration, into which translators were led by the Vulgate’s mis-rendering the second bird in the strophe as “passer.” The first is correctly rendered as “avis” — any old regular common-or-garden bird (צפור — as in Psalm 8:9 צפור שמימ). Attention is drawn to its ordinariness in the psalm by the enclitic “גם”.

Seeing Ma Swallow’s feeding routine for real shows why it is important to the meaning of the verse that the swallow is, in fact, a real swallow. דרור is most definitely this bird not (as in the reformed monastic psalter) “Turtur” — more elegant metrically than “hirundo”, but completely the wrong animal. (Root דרר cp: Arabic دَڗ .t √דרר means “flow freely” and is used of running horses, streams, and light, as well Liberty in Jubilee passages like, e.g., Leviticus 25:10 / Isaiah 61.)

The point isn’t that the bird homes in the temple (though that is a nice enough thought) but that, exactly as the pilgrim in the psalm wishes s/he could access God’s altar gracefully and freely, this bird swings in and out to and from its nest. It was strangely moving to see this precise behaviour from a real swallow in a real church, before our very eyes, on a summer’s evening. One swallow does, perhaps, make a bit of a summer.

Discipleship starts with 10 Questions

Google Brian McClaren’s name, and you don’t have to read many of the 237,000 links that pop up to see that his work inspires, annoys, stimulates and challenges people all over the world. In an age when any Christian who thinks about the circumstances, opportunities and frustrations around our life knows damn well we need realism, a firm grasp of tradition as a springboard for fresh thinking and action, that is what he offers as a resource for mission.

Those whose anxiety or paranoia drive them take desperate refuge in conventionality and institutionalism will thus find him annoying, judging him to be less Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant, whichever they are, than themselves. And, as is ever the case, from their own self-referential points of view they will be entirely correct. The truth is, in fact, he is engaged in the brave enterprise of pioneering how to be more of all three of those things than those who think tradition is a matter of increasingly shrill conformity to type rather than a living stream.

Brian Claren’s new book, A New Kind of Christianity, Ten Questions that are transforming the Faith, gathers up and recapitulates the great themes he has been exploring for many years. In it, he prefers to talk about “discipleship,” a word he points out occurs 262 times in the Bible, rather than “Christianity,” a term unknown to Scripture, except for 3 instances of the noun “Christian”. For those who use labels as mapping pins instead of flick-knives or shibboleths, his challenge to the Pharisees is radically Protestant, generously Orthodox and profoundly Catholic.

It is radically Protestant because he centres his thesis, ruthlessly, on a historical rather than institutional Jesus. He points out how many take their concept of Jesus mediated through lenses supplied by the theoligical giants of the past, Luther, Aquinas, Augustine, and friends. That’s a choice you can make, but what makes those theologians themselves giants is their radical Christocentricity. Unless their work points you to Jesus, they are wasting your time. Which Jesus? Well, Jesus seen in the light of the tradition from which he came, within which the gospels are at pains to locate him, represented by the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Bible is, he suggests, best read as a narrative in its own terms, rather than a compendium of soundbites to reinforce a priori dogmas. Thus our shallow infatuation with the unchanging first Cause Greaco-Roman god of the philosophers who cannot do change is a poor substitute for the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses who is ever in dialogue with his people, working through their lives in weal and woe, giving them compassion and hope, and weaving his love as a golden thread through the warp and weft of their story. This book begins with Scritpure and takes it utterly seriously as the living, active Word of God, constantly to judge and reform the Church. Its intent is to be more, not less, Evangelical than conventional Biblicism.

Thus, in Radical Protestant mode, this book throws down afresh Luther’s challenge from 1517:

Out of love for the truth and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed... in the Name our Lord Jesus Christ: (1) Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance...

This traslates for McClaren as a suggestion that Jesus our Lord

“when he said Poenitentiam agite willed that the whole history of the Christian faith should be repentance, rethinking and quest.”

This idea is not less red-bloodedly Protestant and Christocentric than conventional Evangelicalism. It’s more of both, in spades.

The label “Orthodox” can being appropriated, ludicrously, as a synonym for “Conventional.” Real orthodoxy, even in the merely denominational sense of the term, is far from that. Although you may say Orthodox Christians have a funny way of showing this aspect of their faith, its first principle is to be is radically plugged into a living tradition, with a dynamic view of the Holy Spirit. Checkbox conformity to type is very much less than that.

This book expresses generous Orthodoxy, to use the title of another of Brian McClaren’s books, because it emphatically does not substitute modern thought for tradition — something it will be doubtless accused of doing by people who know very little about either. McClaren ain’t no Jack Spong. His working materials are the ancient creeds and practices of Christianity. These he uses as bricks with which to construct a building rather than smash windows or construct coshes. To continue the building metaphor, this is not a new building, but a tithe barn conversion in which the materials of the old structure have been lovingly taken down and cleaned to give them another 500 years of life, rather than disposed of.

Finally, this book is profoundly Catholic. Those who think Catholic is just a label for a denomination will disagree. For McClaren Catholic is the great mark of the Church in the creeds. Catholicity is not secured by trading in your brain at the door and doing what the Pope commands, a silly concept that the Pope himself rejects by his very Christocentricity, but by being baptised. Catholicity is an inherent mark of the Church, and the Church is not a club or an institution, but the whole company of Christ. McClaren’s book is radically and thoroughly trans-denominationalist in its Ecclesiolgy.

This book’s Catholicism is a spirit, temper and extension inherent in baptism, not an institutional mechanism for exclusion. It is not based on Roman Imperialism, but the Holy Spirit, enabling us to embrace the whole work of Christ in other people’s lives for what it is. True Catholic instinct for him is not measured or secured by what the Italians call romanità, but by capacity for extension and comprehension in the sprit of Edwin Markham’s famous tag:

He drew a circle that shut me out
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in

Some will think this book less Catholic than their own attachment to the RC denomination, and if that’s what catholicity is they wil be right from their own point of view. Most readers will find it, in a broader sense, more Catholic.

Ten questions? Here goes...

1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
   
   
2. How should the Bible be understood?
   
   
3. Is God violent?
   
   
4. Who is Jesus and why is he important?
   
   
5. What is the Gospel?
   
   
6. What do we do about the Church?
   
   
7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
   
   
8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
   
   
9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
   
   
10. How can we translate our quest into action?
    

You may find his answers disturbing, but I challenge any who care about following Jesus today not to profit from asking these questions. However you answer them, they supply an agenda for anyone wanting to follow Jesus honestly and authentically. Read this Book.

Lent, Faith and Clarity

Our capacity to build conclusions on what we think we see is the most useful but also the most dangerous trick in the bag. We catch a perception of something that matters,then crystalise it mentally into something we think we know. All well and good, often. But when mental ruts grind deep, what we think we see becomes more real than what’s there. Mark Twain pointed out that what makes us dumb isn’t what we don’t know — It’s what we think we know, but it’s wrong.

Faith is the capacity to hold something that could be true at arms length, accepting its apparent reality but not at face vaue. Faith is looking deeper, and lookign around. Faith is comparing our experience to other people’s within the Catholicity of a whole company of people and the Scriptures. Then faith is acting, but fully aware of the provisionality of anything we can think we know, compared to the blazing reality of God.

So this Lent I’m using Maggi Dawn’s Lent guide, Giving it Up, as a daily read. She starts with some classic meanings and disciplines of the season, but then invites us to bring our various cheished notions about God, the world and everything back to some significant Biblical passages and characters for checking, cleansing and re-envisioning. Having used Maggi’s materials for Advent before, I am very much looking forward to the journey...

People of the Book? Really?

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new History of Christianity: the first Three Thousand years arrived in the post last Thursday. This is not a skimmer, and it certainly deserves a good day out to read it properly. This reading challenges our customary English-speaking Rome-Centric interpretation of Church history that has tended to ignore the lives of the majority of Christians, who actually lived in the East and had nothing to do with Rome or the partcular issues that marked out Western Christianity. For that reason alone the book is worth a read, let alone for its elegance, good humour, sure-footedness and clarity. Dipping in at a few points around which I have specialist knowledge, MacCulloch came up trumps every time. Overviews require profound understanding and broad reach, and in those terms this book is a phenomenal achievement.

MacCulloch locates the Bible historically in the Christian tradition, in a way that is true to the actual contents of the Bible. This challenges the slick and unreflective use of the adjective “Biblical” as a synonym for “Customary morality wot I like” that we sometimes encounter:

The Bible thus embodies not a tradition but many traditions. Self-styled “Traditionalists” often forget that the nature of tradition is not that of a humanly manufactured mechanical or architectural structure with a constant outline and form, but rather that of a plant, pulsing with life and continually changing shape while keeping the same ultimate identity. The Bible’s authority for Christians lies in the fact that they have a special relationship with it that can never be altered, like the relatinship of parent and child. This does not deny relationships with other books which may be both deep and long-lasting, and it does not necessarily make the parental relationship easy or pleasant. It is simply of a different kind, and can never be abrogated. Once we see this, much modern neurosis about the authority of the Bible can be laid aside. Maybe the Bible can be taken seriously rather than literally...

All the world faiths which have known long-term success have shown a remarkable capacity to mutate, and Christianity is no exception, which is why one underlying message of this history is its sheer variety. Many Christians do not like being reminded of Christianity’s capacity to develop, particularly those who are in charge of the various religious institutions which call themselves Churches, but that is the reality and has been from the beginning.

I am very much looking forward to the attendant TV series, but above all to some hours reading this book properly this autumn...

Saw God. She’s Black...

at London’s Garrick Theatre she is, anyway. The Mysteries —Yiimimangaliso are the medieval Chester Mystery plays recast exuberantly in five languages into a carnivalistic but intense couple of hours by Isango Portobello, from South Africa.

This was the theatrical experience of the year — a riot of colour, movement, and joy, with an intense burn — real flames, real joy, and some strange and original play on sound, enhanced by occasional random undergrond trains rumbling deep below the theatre.

The Mysteries from Portobello Pictures on Vimeo.

The company contains an impressive mixed array of old and young actors. The stories are all the more powerful for being allowed to stand up for themselves.

Small touches of genius abound, from poor ol’ Noah’s problems getting Mrs Noah aboard the ark, to the risen Christ, disguised as a gardener, reinstating Peter in the garden by throwing him his shovel.

Of course all there’s time for is to scratch the surface of the original cycle, but it’s brilliantly done. It’s joyous, uplifting and playful — even warmer and more engaging than the National Theatre Mysteries a few years ago, with God on a forklift truck. Sell your shirt for a ticket, before it’s too late.

How to read the Bible story fruitfully

Holy Week is built around multiple retellings of the passion story. As well as events in Church, round here that means listening to the whole of two Bach passions. To profit from this week’s activity, we need to hear the story in itself as for the first time, noticing fresh details, engaging our imaginations with the world around us and our personal circumstances, and listening for a sympathetc resonance between those realities.

We live in a world of powers and empires, of brands, logos and globalized world order. St Paul’s letter to the Colossians engages with the realities of empire, its principalities and powers, and reveals Christ above and beyond it all, yet also deep within us.

There’s a wonderful description of how the Church uses Scripture corporately for this purpose in a great, creative commentary on Colossians I have been reading recently:

In order to have vision we must have memory. Indeed forgetfulness or amnesia is precisely what strips us of vision — without the past there can be no future. So our contemporary improvisation must be informed and directed by both a profound indwelling of the biblical vision of life and a discerning attentiveness to the postbiblical scenes that have already been acted out in the history of the church.

There is a certain dynamic in this approach to Biblical authority that could be described as a dance between innovation and consistency. Our serious reading of Scripture must be characterized by fidelity to the thrust of the narrative and thus provide our life with a stability and consistency, a rootedness. At the same time, however, the Bible as an unfinished drama gives us freedom for historical innovation and thus a creative and imaginative flexibility in our historical responses. It is only by maintaining the essential relationship between stability and flexibility that we “may avoid the hazards” of both a rigid fossilization of our faith and “a deeper relativizing that gives up everything for a moment of contemporary relevance.”

As we read through the Biblical Story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns. Indeed without such dynamic interpretation, the texts and traditions contained within them were seen to be incomplete...

Stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation — these are key if a narrative text is to have any current authority in our lives.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
Colossians remixed — Subverting the Empire
pp 134-5