Interesting video from Matthew Taylor on the new strap-line of the RSA. Video picking up on a lot of current debates going on in sustainability and epistemology, such as the need for ethical thinking, critique of individualism, exploration of what it is to be human and most of all the need to change our thinking in order to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.
If you’re at all interested in this subject, you’ll end up watching this video again and again, picking up a thought and running with it.
“To be known is to be loved
and to be loved is to be known”
This is an amazing performance art video based on John 4 – there are so many directions to begin taking my thoughts when watching this video, and every time something new jumps out at me.
Today in the car at lunch I finished my copy of “What’s so amazing about Grace” by Philip Yancey. Needless to say, as with all Yancey’s writing, it was a very easy going, pleasurable experience that required little of me and gave a lot in terms of big picture beauty grounded in the reality of human examples. It did confirm what I’ve thought for a long time – Philip Yancey raises the bar of technical quality when it comes to popular Christian writing, and it is really a joy to read books that are both thought provoking and also well written (especially as bad writing seems to be a perennial curse in Christian books, with notable exceptions of course).
Anyone who has read the book will have no doubt been haunted by the scene that Yancey sets out as the premise of the book of a Prostitute who is utterly broke and had to resort to hiring out her two year old daughter to make ends meet. When gently asked why she didn’t seek help from a church, she replied with the words “church? Why would I want to go there? I feel bad enough about myself already!”. Such is the background to the book, and it is one that made me fundamentally question how we ‘do’ church – even if we’re not outright judgemental (and praise God, most of the churches I’ve had the privilege of attending have been welcoming, accepting and loving communities to be part of), can we still be guilty of making people feel bad simply by the fact we try and deal with all our dirty laundry by ourselves and not have the courage or permission to be broken with each other as community.
So what are my thoughts? The book does well in grounding the doctrine of grace deep within both the Biblical tradition and the human experience, both individually and corporately (in fact, I would argue that, unlike many evangelical books, it actually handles the corporate much more confidently than the individual with it’s concept of ‘ungrace’, which makes for a pleasing change). Yancey carefully articulates the ways in which Christians can often be known more for their judgementalism than their grace, and asks difficult questions – also, these difficult questions have a habit of turning their spotlight on me just as I am getting into the mode of “thank God that you did not make me like THOSE Christians”, which is very healthy. He also presents an attractive and reasonable argument for how grace holds the answers to the hurts of society way beyond individual santification.
However, I would offer a counter-weight to that point: I sometimes find Yancey oversimplistic and . . . a wee bit Holywood ‘happy ending’ . . . when dealing with issues of political significance such as the Holocaust or Gulag. I don’t know if it’s simply because I know quite a bit about these subjects or just because the book by its nature is not an exhaustive study of these situations, but either way, I found some of his treatments of these issues to make light of the terrible evil that occured and to simplify the historeography beyond a point it should be simplified. That said, it’s not an easy task to reconcile the unsettling, simple way of Jesus with complex acts of systematic human evil, so I think Yancey is to be forgiven for going more one way than I would like!
At the end of the day, I would recommend the book to anyone who needs to take a breather from all the business of doing church and life and hear again the fresh air of grace that breathes through the world and challenges us and heals us.
Lament is a form of worship that is very little understood both inside the church and outside it. It’s the use of art, music, poetry and speech to express pain.
To mourn.
To communicate grief.
The fact it’s little understood (and even less used in our worship in church) is really weird, actually, because if you look through books like the Psalms and the Prophets, a lot of which are a record of what Jewish worship looked like in the time of Israel, lament makes up about 30%. There’s so much pain and raw emotion in the Bible. It’s a very beautiful and powerful form of worship that expresses the sense that the world and situations in it aren’t right, that bring the pain and the hurt and frustration of life before the throne of God and just leave it there. Not trying to connect all the dots and make it neat and tidy, but just to express the pain and let all the untidiness speak for itself.
Why am I writing all this? Because I think lament is an art that really needs to be recaptured in the church both as joint and individual worship. Let me explain.
Sometimes in life, it seems so hard to simply stop and think and reflect. Especially in our lives, where everything is very on demand and instant and there is so much noise going on everywhere. Lament (and suffering more generally) disrupts. It breaks in. Taking time to examine life, to poke at the places that hurt when we discover them, to not just cover them up but take time to explore the hurt, work through the issues – it’s something very spiritual. Because it’s in the disruption that we grow.
Maybe a good allegory would be this: imagine you were going to the posh shopping mall in Edinburgh and you were walking through, surrounded by all sorts of exquisite clothes, dresses, jewelry. Everywhere you looked there were just gorgeous items where the light just seemed to reflect and refract in all sorts of mysterious ways. And then slap bang in the middle of the shop someone had parked an old rusty car. And this car had a few geese pecking around, and a couple of the windows were broken.
It would make you stop. Think.
It would play with what you expect.
It’s the same with the little things. The little hurts. The things we pass of as “oh it’s nothing”. Sometimes what’s required for us to grow is to take time to stop and listen to those things. To explore what’s underneath them. The hurts and the pains we thought we had dealt with or we never even knew we had. And then we can hand them over to God and invite him into the hurt and the pain and heal and transform it and be with us through it.
And it’s not a quick process. Sometimes healing takes years. It is this constant process of engaging in and recognising death and hurt to get to life. And sometimes all we can know is we’re slightly less broken than we were yesterday, or last week, or last year.
And that’s OK. Because God can deal with the tension and confusion and time.
Slowly, bit by bit, we’ll come out of our prison and learn to fly.
But it takes that constant effort of working with God to find the places that hurt and invite him into it.
Christianity has had a very chequered history with the environment. On some hand, there are those who point the finger at Christianity for being one of the most guilty ideologies in widespread exploitation of global resources beyond sustainable levels.
To a large degree, this criticism is warrented, especially of Reformed schools of thought, which have often taken a very unhealthy view of the idea of “having dominion” and seen it as being a license to take without thought for the future. You also have the negative influence of futurist eschatologies, the ‘Left Behind’ idea of the future that says the Earth is going to burn anyway so why waste time trying to save it?
At the other extreme, you have the work of conscientious theologians aware of the justice and scientific issues involved with a growing awareness that the global ecosystem is in danger and who have therefore tried to come up with theologies that emphasise the importance and goodness of creation (distinguished names such as Jurgen Moltmann and, in his final book, John Stott, come to mind).
The Catholic Church also recently named Climate Change to be one of the new deadly sins in a revision of the famous 7.
Yet I can’t help wondering if much of the contemporary discussion of the environment is somewhat hindered from being built upon Western Protestantism which has, not completely unfairly, in my opinion, been described as “the most anthropocentric of all religions” (Lynn White).
So I would like to humbly offer a few understandings from Eastern Orthodox thought as a contribution to the discussion.
Bear in mind I am myself a Protestant and by no means a specialist in Orthodoxy. Nonetheless, it is a subject I have some interest in and I think that we can be enriched by the perceptions that come so naturally to Eastern theology.
Creation is cracked. The fall of humanity had cosmic significance, with the cracking and fracturing spreading throughout the world. Perhaps with this understanding, climate change, water shortages, earthquakes, famines and other natural processes don’t seem so much of a surprise, though the extent to which humanity exagerrates and enhances the effects of these processes is definitely a cause for grievance, repentance and penitence.But this has another implication.
Because the fall of humanity has cosmic implications, it follows that any atonement understanding also has to have cosmic significance. Perhaps one of the biggest flaws of Western theology, especially in its Evangelical forms, has been the way we major on personal sin, which (whilst an important and true part of the problem of evil) leaves us without a theological framework to grapple with things like the healing of the creation, reconciliation between societies in conflict and other macro issues when we are thinking about the atonement.
This is a challenge we have only just begun to wrestle with.
Creation is ultimately good. This is an understanding shared across the spectrum of Christian thought, but I think Orthodox theology captures it in a deeper and more holistic way than Western theology. Creation is seen as the dwelling place of God and filled with his glory.
It’s bursting with life and possibility and potential. Yet, creation is deeper than this. The Orthodox church sees creation as being an ikon of God, a visible window into the invisible, teaming with possibility and truth and beauty as the whole of Creation is charged with the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit.
Therefore, worship includes art, poetry and wonder at nature. Mimicking it’s patterns and colours and capturing its beauty as signs of the Creator God who gave it all beauty in the first place.What’s more, Resurrection affirms the beauty and truth of this world – in a very real, very physical act, God shows life bursting forward into the present, meaning that this world of oceans and mountains and trees and kisses and chocolate matters.
Humans are a part of creation. They are not transcendent. Despite this, they are not just any part. They are a pivotal part of creation. Although the fracturing of the world stretches throughout the cosmos, the way of healing happened in a human story in the death and resurrection of the God-man.
Therefore, we need to find a balance between exploitation of the planet and the social injustices that this brings on one hand, and a kind of Essene withdrawal from the world for fear of making any demands on the planet on the other.There’s more.
The way of following Jesus is the way of becoming truly human and truly alive in Christ (what Paul calls ‘life in the Spirit’ in Romans 8), and in so doing uniting ourselves with Christ. So Christian mission – the outwards expression of inwards life – has a cosmic significance in a creation that is ‘groaning’ for liberation and healing. Mission has a clear ecological dimensions.
Healing of the earth needs healing of the soul. This follows on from the last point, really, but sometimes environmental movements fall into the same trap as Enlightenment thinking falls into. If only we could be better at working together, understand the science more, come up with better technology – then we can fix the environmental and sustainabiliy challenges that face us.
What Christianity reminds us is that it is because we have been ourselves healed that we can bring healing to the world. All healing and putting right ultimately comes from the heart of the Creator. Is this to say we should stop studying, stop trying to increase cooperation, stop trying to find solutions? No! If anything we need more, and much, much faster.
But it should affect the attitude with which we approach the crisis. And it should mean we’re not afraid to take time to stop and be healed ourselves, to listen to the melody of God’s good world, to hear the haunting voices of poetry and art and literature and music that speak of patterns and cadences that science alone cannot begin to descibe.
Faithful tackling of the environmental crisis needs geographers and scientists and politicians and diplomats. But it also needs artists and poets and prophets who are prepared to just encorage us to stop, listen and see a world which is still “charged with the grandeur of God”, to quote Manley Hopkins.
Finally, I’d like to finish with a quote from one of the Orthodox fathers who reminds us that, when all is said and done, the world has been saved and is being saved thanks to the wonder of God’s grace. God has already acted, and everything else is commentary. Important commentary, for sure. But commentary.
This last word is that it is not up to us to save the world, for it has already been saved by the Eternal Word through Whom it is ever created, and Who has already promised us that “creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Rom 8:20).
That is, as Orthodox Christians, we are allowed neither the arrogance of believing that we are the saviors of nature, nor the despair that there is nothing we can do. We must, rather, humbly and hopefully lay claim to our ancient legacy as heirs to innumerable generations of loving communion with, and heedful obedience to, the God who always already loves creation more than will we ever know.
“In mission when people see the new creation, the transformed reality that is set before them, they will need time to learn what it’s about. Don’t look for short cuts. Draw people in to the newness and mystery and excitement, and then let them know that it’s a lifetime’s work to find your way into it. Take the time that is needed for people to learn and to grow to be disciples. Of course Christ asks from his disciples service, obedience, sacrifice, but all the time Christ asks us to continue learning, day by day taking up the cross, walking this path and discovering as we go.”
It’s a great reminder for us. Especially as evangelicals, we get so focussed on the moment of conversion (however we choose to define this) that we forget the real point of the Christian life is the process of becoming alive and becoming real bit by bit, day by day. It’s a process of becoming alive that can’t be rushed through programme X or course Y but it’s the slow process of learning to love and realising we are loved.
It’s kind of what Paul is talking about in Romans 8 – life in the Spirit, discipleship, is the process of becoming alive and becoming human in the deepest sense of the word – and that’s something that I could take hours and hours peeling away at, seeing different angles and beautiful sights. What it seems it definitely isn’t, however, is a world of black and whites, quick fixes. I think Jesus honours the complexity of life more than that and comes into the tension of what is and what is not.
Another quote to finish, one that comes from a very different source, the pen of Ellis Peters and the genius that is Cadfael:
For even the pursuit of perfection may be sin, if it infringes the rights and needs of another soul. Better to fail a little, by turning aside to lift up another, than to pass by him in haste to reach our own reward, and leave him to solitude and despair. Better to labour in lameness, in fallibility, but holding up others who falter, than to stride forward alone.
Maybe the challenge for us is to slow down, bear with each other more and learn to slow down and enjoy the journey of becoming alive in Christ.
I'm a student from Didcot studying German and Russian at St Andrews University. These pages chronicle my
thoughts about life,
faith and just about everything else.
Today in the car at lunch I finished my copy of “What’s so amazing about Grace” by Philip Yancey. Needless to say, as with all Yancey’s writing, it was a very easy going, pleasurable experience that required little of me and gave a lot in terms of big picture beauty grounded in the reality of human examples. It did confirm what I’ve thought for a long time – Philip Yancey raises the bar of technical quality when it comes to popular Christian writing, and it is really a joy to read books that are both thought provoking and also well written (especially as bad writing seems to be a perennial curse in Christian books, with notable exceptions of course).
RSS
Twitter
