Justluckie

The Bible Tells Me So...?

I listened in yesterday to a debate in the Church of Scotland's General Assembly about the place of gay ministers in that church's life. The Assembly arrived at a compromise position that strikes me as an awkward solution that is unlikely to persist for very long. I suspect that the Church of Scotland may well move, in time, towards a fuller acceptance of the ministry of gay people as it experiences their ministry more openly in its parishes.

The thing I really wanted to say about that debate is to do with the use of the Bible in discussions of this sort. There was a general consensus among those who spoke in favour of a more traditionalist understanding that the Bible had a straightforward position on the matter, that this position was easily discernable and that the church's duty was to do what the Bible told it to do. I think that this is an unsustainable hermeneutical approach for a number of reasons.

 

The most obvious to me is that no one reads scripture in a vacuum. I said to someone recently that if he wanted to know more about Christianity, he would be ill served in this endeavour by reading the Bible from cover to cover. He would be better off discovering how the Church reads scripture, how it interprets it in the light of an ongoing life of prayer. The Bible is not separable from the community that reads it. The canon of scripture arose out of the life of the Church and its meaning is only slowly yielded as the community of faith reflects on it in the course of its life and experience of the living God. The Church does not and should not give every word of scripture equal weight. It emphasises those parts that most clearly reflect the heart of its teaching - such as the Gospels - and reads other parts in the light of that witness. This process is a constant dynamic and the careful balance between scripture, tradition and reason is maintained by constant and prayerful reflection.

Another reason for my discomfort with this hermeneutical approach is that the Bible did not arise in a vacuum. It seems bizarre to have to reiterate this obvious truth after centuries of Biblical criticism. In Christian tradition, the Bible is not a miraculous text which dropped down from heaven ready-formed. I think it is profoundly heterodox to say that it did. It is the product of prayerful reflection on the things of God and, if the Church describes the Bible as inspired, it is because it has found it to be a reliable guide to the things of God. The Bible does not tell us everything about everything, but, read in the context of the community of faith, it does tell us all we need to know about God. We have an ongoing responsibility to discern how that knowledge shapes our behaviour and decisions and that is not always an easy process.

I think that this process does not work like an instruction manual: the text tells me to do something and I do it. It works more like this: our prayerful interaction with the text is the model for how we engage with the world around us. It is not the text that is primary, but our shared reading of the text. And that shared reading is done with a consciousness of how the text has been read by our spiritual forebears. This does not mean that we are bound to follow their conclusions, but we do commit ourselves in humility to hear how they read and to learn respectfully from their experience.

In this approach, God is present dynamically rather than statically. God's Word is not an artefact but a person, not a book but a body. I do not read the Bible to get an answer to my questions, but to meet God. In that encounter, I hope that I will find myself in a better place to address the questions.

Living Contemplation - An Invitation!

For a while now, I have been planning to start a very simple contemplation group at St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh, and this is advance warning that it will start soon! Here is the plan:

• There will be a 30 minute session every week which is open to everyone, whatever their religious background
• My suggestion is that the group should meet at lunch times with one additional slightly longer evening session once a month
• The session will begin with a brief introduction to contemplative prayer or meditation, offering some insights from experience, including those of the Christian contemplative traditions
• There will be a period of silence (20 mins at lunch times, 30 in the evening session)
• The evening sessions will close with an opportunity for any member of the group to share from their own experiences

I would appreciate thoughts from anyone who is interested in taking part in this, particularly in relation to the timings. I would also welcome some thoughts on advertising this intitiative more widely and in such a way as to make it clear that it is open to everyone, whatever their religious beliefs or affiliations.

I am increasingly sure that the offer of an exploration of spirituality which is experiential and not primarily dogmatic is an attractive one. I am also increasingly sure that it is in the realm of our consciousness that our religious explorations are most fruitful at this point in our history. This is not a kind of quietism, but simply an observation about the starting place for our religious explorations. No authentic spiritual life can fail to find expression in our daily lives, in our political choices and in our actions.

I hope people will find this session useful as a way of engaging with faith and spirituality, whether they are new to it or simply looking for a way to deepen their existing religious life.

 

We Need Solitude in the City

It seems to me that people who, like me, live in a city like Edinburgh, need solitude a great deal more than we often think. I remember the delight of visiting a Jain temple in Delhi in the heat of summer, with its cool marble tranquility, or the hushed mosque of a busy Sufi shrine in that same busy city, and thinking how wonderful it was to have discovered a place like that where the was room to breathe, free from the barrage of sensory experiences.

The same experience can be found somewhere like Edinburgh which, although considerably less busy than Delhi, is still a city of near constant activity, noise, temptation and intrusion. Of course, much of that is energising and is the reason why many of us choose to live in cities. We love the life, the stimulation, the variety, the colour, the challenge, the constant movement. But I think it is true that our souls need solitude. Our awareness of God needs stillness. Our spiritual wellbeing needs silence.

Interior solitude, that attitude of simplicity and poverty that is the fertile ground for encounter with God, does not flourish without a degree of exterior solitude. So how do we find that in a city? Here are some of the places I have found this in Edinburgh:

• There are times when the city becomes more silent and having a young baby reacquaints you with the 'small hours' which give as degree of respite from the constant activity of the day. A city is never completely asleep, but sometimes it rests a little and I find some solitude then.
• Edinburgh has some wild places: Holyrood Park, some sections of the Water of Leith, even the Castle Mound when a heavy mist descends. It is possible to sit in these places and know some solitude.
• Quieter corners of The National Gallery can become places of temporary solitude as you stand or sit in front of a painting.
• Many churches are open: Old St Paul's, St John's, both St Mary's Cathedrals, Sacred Heart. I most of these sacred spaces, no one will disturb you if you choose to sit there for half an hour.

There must be many other such spaces in this and every city and I think they provide oases of sanity and peace without which the city may well implode. What matters above all to me is this: 'You have called me into this silence to be grateful for what silence I have, and to use it by desiring more.'  (Thomas Merton, journal for 3 Sept 1952)

 

Drones, Evil and White-Collar Violence

In a radio report on the key issues in the forthcoming elections in Pakistan, I heard repeated references from all side in the elections to the drone attacks carried out by the US against targets in Pakistan. These have resulted in numerous civilian deaths and have, unsurprisingly, created a powerful resentment and fear among ordinary Pakistanis. Why is it that these attacks have occupied so little of our moral imagination in the West? We are captivated in a gruesome manner by the actions of the lone guman, the predatory stalker and the fanatical bomber because they fit our conventional discourse of evil - bad men doing bad things. We are far less well equipped to see evil in the cool, efficient, mechanised, 'precise', remote, technologically sophisticated world of the drone.

Thomas Merton wrote powerfully about this dynamic in an essay called Toward a Theology of Resistence, which opened his book of essays, Faith and Violence. In this essay, he describes 'white-collar violence, the systematically organized bureaucratic and technological destruction of man.' He warns against violence that, unlike the individual murderer, is 'abstract, corporate, businesslike, cool, free of guilt-feelings and therefore a thousand times more deadly and effective than the eruption of violence out of individual hate.' This 'polite' and organised violence might well be now taking the form of unmanned drones, which harness all the power and cleverness of communications technology to carry out strikes which, we reassure ourselves, are clean, surgical, effective, efficient and low-impact. Unlike the nuclear threat of Merton's immediate context, we like to imagine that the war we are currently perpetrating over the skies of Pakistan is well targeted and does not carry the risk of mass civilian casualties. The evidence suggests that this is nonsense.

And from a moral and theological point of view, Merton's concerns remain urgent. How do we respond to violence when it is carried out with such technological precision that the very word 'violence' seems too strong? Merton urges us to remember the heart of the Christian message in the cross, where Jesus responded to violence by taking the full force of evil upon himself and thus breaking the cycle of violent response. He urged a theology that was realistic, not sentimental, in dealing with the reality of 'white-collar violence', a theology that was prepared to seek out the roots of violence and hatred within each one of us, a theology that is an awakening to the suffering we cause others in our sophisticatedly indirect ways. His message is as urgent today as it was in the late '60s. It seems that our imaginations have still not expanded enough to let us see evil beneath the seductive disguise of technological progress.

 

What Makes Liturgy Work?

Priests don't get enough chances to experience liturgy from the 'receiving end' so being on holiday is a good chance to rectify that and to remember how liturgy feels from a different perspective. A week past Sunday in my mother-in-law's place in southern France, I took the opportunity to revisit the Cistercian Abbey of Aiguebelle for their Sunday Mass. Many things made the experience positive - the beautiful simplicity of the monastery's church, the moving (and mostly competent) Gregorian chant, the very full pews, the unhurried pace (though it was not by any means over-long) - but there was one thing in particular that made the liturgy feel good: it was attentive. In particular, I mean that it seemed to me that the congregation was praying. Although much of the liturgy was chanted by the monks and there was little by way of congregational singing, the congregation was thoroughly engaged with the action of the liturgy. Some of this was aided by practical considerations such as the standing posture being maintained throughout from the offertory to the communion but I think the attentiveness went beyond that.

Some time, I may take the chance to talk to people there about why they attend mass at the Abbey church and not in their parish. I suspect that for many in that rural area, their parish church will not have a weekly mass but I guess that most people who go there do so by deliberate choice, perhaps because they want to associate themselves with a praying community. In any case, the experience reminded me that the Eucharist come to life when it flows from a life of prayer and in turn nourishes that life of prayer - from silence and to silence. That great Cistercian, Thomas Merton, described it in this way:

In the words of consecration all solitudes come to a single focus. There is the City of God gathered together in that one Word spoken in silence. The speech of God is silence. His Word is solitude. [Journal for 11 Jan 1950]

So to make the Church's liturgy 'work', all we need do is ensure that it originates in the silence of God, is directed to the silence of God, is celebrated by those who seek the silence of God.

 

The Democratisation of Writing

There is an excellent new series on BBC 4 looking at the writing revolution of 17th century England, a time when there was an explosion of new ideas, significant social turbulence and the beginnings of what we have come to see as modernity. Adam Nicholson presents The Century That Wrote Itself and he explores the writing of a number of individuals who took up the pen to think through their ideas, express their reaction to the events of the world around them and to share their thoughts with others. In the first episode, I was particularly struck by Margaret Fell's story. This founding member of the Religious Society of Friends was imprisoned for life for her perceived treason in not swearing an oath of allegiance. Her writing campaign acheived an early release from prison after four hard years. She also made a very significant contribution to the development of a society that took equality and liberty of conscience more seriously. Here are some words by Margaret Fell, words which continue to inspire members of the Society of Friends. She spoke these words to herself as she first heard George Fox preaching:

I cried in my spirit to the Lord, 'We are all thieves, we are all thieves, we have taken the Scriptures in words and know nothing of them in ourselves'. I asaw it was the truth and I could not deny it; and I did as the apostle saith, I 'received the truth in the love of it'.

In this simple statement, she summarises much of the Quaker spirit - faith is not a matter of words on a page but of truth in the heart. Having said that, Quakers have been masters at putting words on the page over the centuries and, partly because of an early suspicion of more frivolous forms of writing, these words have often taken the form of spiritual journals. For an approach to religion that is so profoundly based on the authority of personal experience and conviction, this form is very appropriate.

I wonder what, if any, is the overlap between this form of writing and the kind of regular, contemporary reflections that find their way onto blogs and other social media. I suspect the instantly public nature of these media gives the writing a very different character. As a fairly regular blogger, I am conscious of not writing things that I might be tempted to write in a journal - thoughts that are less than half-formed (no comments on that please!), more intimate and personal reflections, things that might be of interest to me, but probably to no one else. And I occasionally find myself wondering how much someone like Thomas Merton was exercising self-censorship in his own journal writing. I suspect he had some awareness of the liklihood of later publication, but he does not always write as if that is at the front of his mind! He was someone who thought through the process of writing, so it is wonderful to see these 'first drafts' of his thoughts in his journals. It is also refreshing to see less reflected impressions of what he observes, and I am sure that he would approve of this Zen-like immediacy!

Please feel free to share any thoughts on the relationship between blogging and journaling - I'd be fascinated to hear!

 

 

The Trees Our Sisters

It is a commonplace to assume that Christianity has not been kind to the non-human world and extreme versions of this assumption would have Christianity bear a great responsibility for the despoiling of the natural world by regarding it all as usable and consumable by human beings, who are commanded to have mastery over it all. By contrast, pre-Christian religions are seen to have a better record in seeing the sacredness of all that is. I have found a couple of reminders in the last week or so that this is a very partial understanding, though I don't deny that there may be truth in it.

The first is a reminder of the place that trees and forests play in the spiritual imagination of Christian mystics. St Seraphim of Sarov made his hermitage deep in the forests and there he befriended the wild animals (a frequent occurence in the traditional lives of the saints - just have a look at the wonderful image of an old monk being towed in his wheelchair by a friendly lion in the Florentine painting of the death of St Ephraim in the National Gallery in Edinburgh). Thomas Merton also had a keen sense that his solitude was located in woodland:

The are so many words that one cannot get to God as long as he is thought to be on the other side of the words ... That is where the silence of the woods comes in. Not that there is something to be thought and discovered in the woods, but only that the trees are all-sufficient exclamations of silence, and one works there, cutting wood, clearing ground, cutting grass, cooking soup, drinking fruit juice, sweating, washing, making fire, smelling smoke, sweeping etc. This is religion. The further one gets away from this, the more one sinks in the mud of words and gestures. The flies gather.

In his poem about the Trappist cemetery at Gethsemani, he also calls the trees 'our sisters' who guard those who lie in the 'green cradles'. At the day or resurrection, creation will 'rise like gold' and 'the trees shall share your resurrection'. To Merton, trees are not neutral stuff, but living, Godly, good, valued. I am sure there are more reflections in Merton's writing on the trees that surround him, and one day I will get round to seeking more of them out.

The second place where I found a clear statement of the Christian vision of the holiness of the natural world was in a monograph On the Invocation of the Name of Jesus written by Fr Lev Gillet, who wrote as 'a monk of the Eastern Church'. From an Orthodox perspective, he wrote of how, the believer 'speaks aloud the secret' of inanimate things by recognising that they are 'the visible symbol of the invisible divine beauty'. For the Christian, the natural world is not inert and consumable, but a sacrament of the divine, an expression of prayer simply by being what it is.

 

Emotion and Serenity in Religious Imagery

Towards the end of his life, while on his journey through Asia, Thomas Merton experienced a powerful spiritual awakening at an ancient Buddhist site in Sri Lanka. Here is how he described the impact of the massive statues of the Buddha at the 12th century rock temple of Gal Vihara in the city of Polonnaruwa:

...the silence of the extraordianry faces. The great smiles. Huge yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence can be frightening.
...I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious.
...All problems are resolved and everyting is clear, simply because what matters is clear ... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion.
I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination.
I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise.

This is a wonderfully lucid description of a state of serene detachment, of deep awareness and of illuminated unity. Such a state is not a rarefied moment of attainment by a spiritual master but an ordinary experience available to all who simply give themselves to seeing things as they are, who place themselves gently in the presence of Life, of God. It is the gift of peace that seems to be such a running motif in the resurrection stories.

So it is interesting that Merton describes the experience as an aesthetic one. Merton was a keen and accomplished viewer of art and he knew that the act of looking well at an image is an act of contemplation. What is interesting to me is that the images that might lead one to the kind of awakened experience Merton describes here are not easily found in Western religious art. The artistic canon of the Western Christian tradition is much more given to depicting depth of emotion and capturing movement than it is to drawing one into serene contemplation. The role of icons in the Eastern tradition is closer to this contemplative aspect. When I think around the images in the cathedral where I work, it is hard to think of one that is not a piece of frozen narrative, that might lend itself more to explication than to contemplation. Even the space itself is oriented towards a liturgical drama rather than a gathered stillness although it is always possible to find a quiet corner.

Having said all of that, Merton's spiritual awkening was one that was rooted in his practice of Christian prayer, personal and liturgical, though I am not sure if it would have come to fruition had it not been for his sense of the value of solitude. As always, he leaves me with much to think about.

In Praise of Second-Hand Books

I love second-hand books. They're cheap, they can bring us wisdom and entertainment that the publishing world has lost interest in and they have a story all of their own. They have been places, been read by someone else and may even bear their marks or their name. They fall open at interesting places. They have covers and design that bring us face to face with an unfamiliar aesthetic. Above all, they make us realise that when we read, we read as part of a community of readers and within a history of reading. We do not read alone but with in the light of the readings of others, whether we know it or not.

You can pass on a book to someone else and ask them to let you know what you think. You can leave it somewhere public in the hope that someone else will pick up the story of that particular instance of that particular text. You can even give it back to another charity shop so it can keep on doing its good work in many different ways. I was delighted to discover recently that you can also order books from Oxfam through Amazon - one way of mitigating some of the dodgier aspects of their operation...

While I do read ebooks and find them convenient in many ways, they do lack the physicality of books and they can never be second-hand. You can't pass on an ebook in the way you can a used paper book. It doesn't bear the stories of its readers in any obvious way. And those electronic bookmarks are no substitute for the coloured sticky kind I favour.

Writing our Lives

When I read Jeanette Winterson's memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, I was struck by the honesty with which she described way in which a writer can write or rewrite their own story. On a day when many people are offering their recollections of or reflections on the life of Margaret Thatcher, we might ask just who has the 'right' to write the authorised version of someone else's life story. Of course, it is undoubtedly true that everyone who contributes to the writing of a life does so from a partial perspective. To some extent, that must also be true for anyone who writes autobiographically, as Winterson suggests. However, my rather unsystematic journey through the journals of Thomas Merton suggests another kind of writing.

Although Merton does, from time to time, use his journals to think aloud about his own life journey, its direction and its purpose, he uses most of his writing to give form to what he sees. There is a contemplative dimension to this writing that is more concerned with the seeing itself than with the inner conversations of the one doing the seeing. In doing so, he is giving space for his contemplative self to grow. Robert Waldron's short book on Merton's approach to contemplation, Master of Attention, shows how his observations gradually become something as close to pure seeing as it is possible to get in language - short, unadorned statments of what is before his eyes. Here is one example:

Kanchenjunga this afternoon. The clouds of the morning parted slightly and the mountain, the massif of attendant peaks, put on a great, slow, silent dorje dance of snow and mist, light and shadow, surface and sinew, sudden cloud towers spiraling up out of icy holes, blue expanses of half-revealed rock, peaks appearing and disappearing with the top of Kanchenjunga remaining the visible and constant president over the whole slow show.

I love the idea of a memoir that is more of a journal of observation than an introspective apologia. It seems to fit with the idea of life as a continual growing in the art of seeing, more concerned with a joyful self-forgetting than an anxious self-justification.