Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

The Poetics of Trinity

Paul writes – Today I want to highlight a series of poetic statements by James Finley that get to the heart – in a wonderfully descriptive way – of a contemplative understanding of the Christian theological understanding of God as one God revealed in three-distinct persons. Its worth reflecting on an coming back to a few times in order for what it expresses to sink in. 

The source is a March 2011 interview / conversation between James Finley and Tami Simon on. You can find the interview here.  I highly recommend that you have a listen if the contemplative is a growing edge or focus for you. Finley gets it, and does so from within the Christian tradition!

[Interviewer]: Now, you talked some earlier, when we were talking about what it might mean to enter the mind of Christ, about Christ and the father, and that relationship in terms of meditation. I'm curious how you see the Holy Trinity in terms of the practice of meditation.

[James Finley]: Well, my sense, really, is that when we read the classical texts of the Christian mystics, you see these constant innuendos and references to the Trinity. That is, I really don't think it's possible to get inside the language of the Christian mystics without this sense of Trinitarian intuitive awareness of what they're talking about. And realize we're now entering into deep water here. Not to take on the Trinity in a few minutes, but just too poetically give a sense of it… 

… I'll say it poetically: How I say it to people is that, in the Christian tradition, this love poetry of the ineffable is that God is ineffable, hidden, [and] ungraspable, like nothing we can say about God is true. By the very fact that we're saying it, God is beyond that. God is beyond that, so God is endlessly abyssive hiddenness, a presence. This birthless, deathless, boundaryless hiddenness is eternally expressing itself, or revealing itself, as divine relations of knowledge and love. 

So intimacy is the first manifestation of the unmanifested. That Father, Son, and Spirit are divine relations of unity in distinction and distinction in unity. In other words, the mystery of being a person is much deeper than being an individual, because the tradition doesn't at all say that there are three individuals, Father, Son, and Spirit. Rather, they are divine relations of knowledge and love as manifesting the mystery of the infinite… 

… God the father-if it was matriarchal society, it would be God the mother, but here let's say that God is origin-is eternally speaking himself or expressing himself, and God, as spoken, is the Word, which is the second person in the Trinity. Or God the father eternally knows himself, and the second person in the Trinity, the Word, is then the wisdom of the father. It's God as knowing and God as known, that distinction between knowing and being known. Now the father and the son, in their infinite knowledge of each other, give rise to an infinite love, and the infinite love arising from the infinite knowledge is the Holy Spirit. 

Now the thing is, if we were to try to find God the father in any way whatsoever other than the son, we'd never find God the father, because there is no God the father, because God in the [kenosis] is infinitely empty in the infinity of himself, and gives all that he is as the son. Likewise, if we would try to find Christ, the second person in the Trinity, in any way whatsoever other than the father, we would search and search and search. We'd never find Christ. There is no Christ, because Christ is in no way whatsoever other than the father. And so with the Holy Spirit. This is the triune, the unitive mystery of the ineffable. 

Now, where we come in is the tradition teaches that, from all eternity, God the father speaks himself as the Word, and from all eternity, contemplates himself in the Word, so the life of God is a contemplative life. And God, in contemplating himself in the Word, eternally contemplates the eternal possibility of all things. 

…What's unique about us is our capacity to realize it [the God-given nature of all things], and this is spiritual awakening. There are fleeting moments where it is given to us to taste this oneness, which is a fleeting moment of contemplation. And in tasting it, we can say "Yes!" to it, because love is never imposed. It's always offered. In the reciprocity of love, we can choose to give ourselves to the infinite love that infinitely gives itself to us. 

So here, then, is our Trinitarian mysticism … [expressed as] a poetic metaphor [for] understanding the mystical contemplative experience…”

 

The Great Convergence, New Perspective, & Missional Praxis

Paul writes - Without much forward momentum I’ve been trying to write a sympathetic review (for several months now) of Andrew Perriman’s extremely thought-provoking book The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans before and after Western Christendom. Without pre-empting my review, my hope is that this will be a widely read book, but in the same way that Andrew wrote in a recent post about “The New Perspective”, my fear is that Andrew’s book will largely find its readership (both supportive, provisionally supportive, and out rightly critical) primarily from within the “academic sphere”. 

That that will inevitably be the case is sad because both Andrew’s theological / historical-interpretative framework offers another significant way of reading and engaging the biblical text from a missional / contemporary cultural context. For his readership to be wider than the academic sphere, what will be required is well-read thoughtful readers who on-the-ground in local contexts and church communities can enable the interpretative / hermeneutical / missional conversations and discernment.

Meantime, two recent posts/reflections (the latter in particular) by Andrew, get at some of the issues in what I think is a more broadly accessible way. Both posts are accompanied visually by diagrams Andrew has constructed. The first is his post The Great Convergence: The Emerging Church and the New Perspective (3^rd March 2011 / read the comments as well): 

“…The emerging movement has been a messy and at times incoherent attempt to liberate people from the claustrophobic mindset of the modern church, but it has changed the rules of engagement for many believers and many communities. It has demonstrated that church in the aftermath of the collapse of Christendom must adjust to marginalization, must find ways to develop an authentic sense of community, must develop habits of cultural, moral and intellectual integrity, must discover in itself the power of the creative Spirit, must concretely and practically embody the compassion and justice of God, must learn to tell a publicly significant story, must become an incarnating presence in the world rather than a programmed absence…” 

Read the whole post here. 

The second is Andrew’s From New Perspective to Missional Praxis: Plotting the Tensions (25 March 2011):

 

“…The old perspective. Under the “old perspective” the New Testament is read retrospectively through the narrowly focused lens of a set of theological abstractions—that is, a belief-set that has been abstracted from the texts under the particular cultural and intellectual conditions of Western Christianity and then used to control subsequent readings of the text. Traditional praxis has been grounded in this theological perspective, but so too has much of the new missional/incarnational church thinking—basically because the missional/incarnational model was developed before question 1 could be properly resolved. But we are running ahead of ourselves… 

The new perspective. Under the “new perspective”—all these categories have to be rather loosely defined—the intention is to read as far as possible from within the text, prospectively, giving due consideration to the narrative constraints and trajectories generated by the historical context. It is interesting that this has emerged as a critical but faithful return to Christian origins. I suspect that it is motivated, at least in part and for some more than others, by a desire to by-pass the massive controlling influence of the Christendom paradigm. 

Theology-formation-praxis. The second progression or dynamic is a top-to-bottom movement from theology through a process of formation to the concrete praxis of the church. Although this sequence looks theoretically correct, in reality the movement is often in the opposite direction: (Spirit-led) praxis forms theology. I should also say that by “theology” I mean that layer of theological enquiry that purports to be directly engaged with the reading of the Bible and of the New Testament in particular. 

Emerging and missional praxis. Praxis, you will notice, comes in two different colours. A significant development in recent years has been the quite radical rethinking of the relationship between church and mission. Traditionally, church has been seen as a secure place of gathering out of the world for a very limited set of mostly “spiritual” functions. Mission was understood either as the invitation—through personal evangelism—to be part of the church, or as the sending of missionaries to establish similar institutions in distant places. In reaction against this many missiologists—Frost and Hirsch spring immediately to mind—have argued for a centrifugal or incarnational approach to mission, according to which the church is by definition a community sent into the world to be the presence of Christ. So centrifugal, so incarnational, has this movement appeared at times that David Fitch has expressed concerns about the “de-ecclesiologizing of the church’s relationship to society”. But that’s another story…”

Read the whole post by Andrew here. 

Thanks Andrew. Useful diagrams accompanying both posts and fascinating thoughts which take us to some interesting places. 

 

Two Anglican Bishops, The Hospitality of God & Emerging Worship for a Missional Church

Paul writes – Jonny Baker recently brought to my attention a book about what sounds like a fascinating journey by two Anglican Bishops “…undertook a pilgrimage of discovery across England and the United States, experiencing the liturgies created by alternative faith communities and pioneering Christian leaders…” The book is titled: The Hospitality of God: Emerging Worship for a Missional Church.

Jonny reviews it here in full, but in part he writes:

“…It’s delightful, hugely generous and encouraging. They have clearly really enjoyed the journey. The book weaves together descriptions and stories of their encounters trying all the while to discern themes, discoveries, patterns and challenges along the way. They then seek to try to ask what the mainline/inherited churches might learn from the emergent and vice versa all the while focused around worship. They suggest that the emergent churches are quite small and the movement will probably never be huge but like a lot of renewal movements in the church its impact will be widespread.

In the second chapter they lay out 20 principles that undergird Anglican worship. I’ve not seen quite such a succinct accessible summary and I suspect it will be used in many courses on worship - I’ll use it when I teach pioneers who are Anglican I’m sure! And they reflect on each principle how emergent churches sit with those. The reason I say the book is hugely generous is that the lens with which they approach this (which reflects the title of the book) is really welcoming of this newness that is emerging as wholeheartedly part of the tradition and offering gifts to help the tradition be renewed. There’s no sense anywhere of an attitude that 'you're not welcome because you're not obeying the rubric'. If anything it's the other way round - they are open to sensing that the rubric may need to listen and change because of some of the challenges of what the spirit might be doing…”

On the publishers website (US publisher here) the book is described in the following way:

“God is hospitable and generous, always inviting, always welcoming and always wanting to draw us in.  Yet many people feel that church is no place for them and that Christian communities do not welcome them.  Our ageing churches need to be revitalized so that they share God’s generous hospitality with everyone.  The imaginative worship found in the emerging church movement can inspire us to find new ways of creating communities of love and acceptance.

Bishops Mary Gray-Reeves and Michael Perham undertook a pilgrimage of discovery across England and the United States, experiencing the liturgies created by alternative faith communities and pioneering Christian leaders.  The Hospitality of God recounts their findings and builds a bridge between the emerging church and the traditional church.  Detailed case studies examine the underlying principles behind these fresh forms of worship. Thoughtful analysis shows what emerging and mainstream churches can learn from each other, and how the confidence and creativity of the emerging church movement can be brought to the traditional church.

Full of inspiring and practical insights, this book will enable you to bring fresh ideas to the worship and mission of your church so that all may share in God’s hospitality.”

 

James Finley: A Palace of Nowhere, Meditation, Brokenness and Non-Judgmental Compassion

Paul writes - James Finley, Ph.D. lived as a monk at the cloistered Trappist monastery of the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where the world-renowned monk and author, Thomas Merton, was his spiritual director.

He leads retreats and workshops around the world, attracting men and women from all religious traditions who seek to live a contemplative way of life in the midst of today's busy world. He is also a clinical psychologist in private practice with his wife in Santa Monica, California.

He is the author of several books including the excellent Merton’s Palace of Nowhere: A Search for God through Awareness of the True Self, and Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God. You’ll find a brief reflection by Finley on why we meditate here. Also a longer and very good written interview / conversation with Finley on the theme of Christian Meditation: Experiencing the Presence of God (PDF).

You can listen to James in a recent (broadcast March 22, 2011) interview on Sounds True, here. The theme under which the interview was conducted was Brokenness and Non-Judgmental Compassion.

Below you will find and excerpt from the interview

“…Interviewer: You know, I think I'm going to let our listeners listen to the audio series, Christian Meditation: Entering the Mind of Christ, to learn more about your view on intentions, feelings, and the body, what you discovered through the deep practice of meditation.

At this point, though, I just want to make the comment, Jim, that sometimes I think I've had this-I don't know if you want to call it a bias or prejudice, but that, oh, you know, the Buddhists are the ones who really mastered the art of meditation, and Christians, they're better at heartful actions and service, and their specialty is a different part of spiritual practice. But talking to you, you've blown that idea to bits, because you're such a deep meditator, and you know so much about the practice, and you come from the Christian tradition. I'm just curious what you might have to say about that.

James Finley: That's certainly a good point. Thomas Merton once said, "You know, there's a lot of people losing their faith, and they're losing it in church." And he said, "There's a lot of people leaving Christianity, looking for this unitive experience in other traditions. The tragedy of it all is that this unitive state of realization we're talking about is the pull of all world religions, including Christianity. The scandal of the church is that it does not teach its own traditions."

So you get into this ideology of God, these belief systems and morals-which is fine! I think it helps people live good lives, and it's God's present and all of that. But there are so many people who are not aware of this ancient path of contemplative Christianity. Since I was blessed by this when I went to the monastery, and I saw Merton as a living embodiment of this, and when I started to read these mystics, I just thought it was so profound.

Then when Thich Nhat Hanh came to Gethsemani and met Merton, and Bede Griffiths came from India to meet Merton, and Abraham Heschel came to meet Merton in the Kabbalah, in Judaism, and when Merton went to Asia to talk with the Dalai Lama, there is this sense of a deep mutual respect for the historical differences of the traditions, in which each of them came to this unity that transcends and wholly permeates the traditions. So I have been deeply influenced by Buddhism, and the whole sense of the dharma is a very-well, we could have had this same talk, I guess, in dharma language.

But for me, the mystical heritage of Christian faith, contemplative Christianity, is really-I don't know! It's just eloquent, it's simple, and I feel like whatever I can do to help people see that and be open to that, I feel fortunate to do that…”

For more on Contemplative practice and Meditation within a Christian framework in a New Zealand context a good place to start is The Contemplative Network. It has some useful resources and information.

 

An Evening with Rev Dr Cynthia Bourgeault

Lost Things, Lost Faith and the Wonder of Shaun Tan

Paul writes - One of my favourite storytellers is Shaun Tan and his story The Lost Thing – turned into a 15-minute animated short film – took Best Animated Short prize at the 2011 Academy Awards. Here’s the news story from the Huffington Post. 

“…Tan, 37, co-directed the movie and was only 25 when he wrote and drew "The Lost Thing," the shadowy but playful tale of a beach-combing boy who sees what others can't – or won't: a lumbering rust-colored being with little red bells on lobster-like claws and an industrial shell wandering unnoticed in the sand…” 

You can find a pre-Oscar podcast interview with Tan about the film here. 

The website for the film, including a trailer, can be found here. 

Tan’s story’s can be read at a number of levels. For example, Alan and Sandra Jamieson read The Red Tree in the context of lost faith, and disillusionment as a story of rediscovering hope and small signs of faith when all looks and feels bleak. The Arrival can similarly be read from the perspective of the journey of a growing and changing faith… of setting out on a journey beyond the familiar and into the unknown. I suspect too that both stories could be fruitfully read in some spiritual direction contexts, as a way into exploring seeming experiences of lostness and distance / discomfort with the familiar, or the fear of the new and the uncharted. 

While the story of Eric (a visit from a nut-sized foreign exchange student) in the wonderful Tales from Outer Suburbia can be read from the perspective seeing and experiencing the surprise oftentimes unnoticed and to all intensive purposes hidden in the midst of the ordinary and everyday. 

I enthusiastically recommend Shaun Tan’s storybooks and look forward to seeing the award-winning The Lost Thing. 

 

The Lost Art of Reading

“Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. It connects us at the deepest levels; it is slow rather than fast. That is its beauty and its challenge: in an age of instant information, it requires us to pace ourselves. What does it mean, this notion of slow reading? Most fundamentally, it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of all we need to savor – this instant, this scene, this line. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. As we do, we join a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged (150-151).”

From The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, an extended essay (160 pages) by David L Ulin

 

On Dying and Grieving

Paul writes - I read James K A. Smith’s blog (and also Barry Taylor’s too) as much for its content as for the invariably interesting places a Smith or Taylor reflection often takes me. 

Most recently for example, Smith commended British author Julian Barnes as “the best contemporary writer you’ve never read”. On the basis of his book Nothing to be Frightened Of, I would likely agree, albeit with the caveat that Barnes would likely be on a list of “best contemporary writers” I have read, or who at least sit upon my book shelves because I’ve been drawn to them; oftentimes because somebody like Smith, or a reviewer in a publication, recommended them.

 One of the advantages of living “in between” the US and the UK is that our used bookstores have both US and British authors on their shelves, and more besides. We readily access both book-publishing-reading markets. 

Back to Smith and his most recent post featuring Barnes. The excursus for me in this case was to Julian Barnes’ New York Times review of Joyce Carol Oates’ latest A Widow’s Story. 

Like Smith I was very moved by the review and would commend it and Barnes’ observations around death and grieving. As he says, “…Of course, at one level we know that we shall die; but death has come to be looked upon more as medical failure than a human norm. It increasingly happens away from the home, in hospital, and is handled by a series of outside specialists – a matter for the professionals. But afterward we, the amateurs, the grief-struck, are left to deal with it – this unique, banal thing – as best we can. And there are now fewer social forms to surround and support the grief-bearer…” 

As I’ve said, the review is well worth setting aside some time to read it and a cup of coffee of tea. 

You can read Jamie’s initial post here.  Undoubtedly worth a read is the 2009 publication Conversations with Julian Barnes.     

 

James KA Smith and a Few Thoughts on Writing

Paul writes – More from James K A Smith. Some really useful thoughts on writing. Here's a few excerpts from him: 

“…You will know you're on your way to being a writer when you have a love/hate relationship with language: when you can be either thrilled or vexed by the cadence of a sentence or turn of phrase--when you can't quite leave the paragraph on which you're laboring because there's a tic of timing that's driving you mad. Or when you begin to consider the force of a sentence in terms of its ability to move rather than prove. In sum, you'll know you've become a writer when you consider the sheer play of language to be a country to which you'd gladly emigrate… 

… consider some of these as new habits:

1. Immerse yourself in fiction and poetry. If you don't love fiction, I can't imagine how you'll ever be a solid writer. The imaginative worlds of novels and the linguistic intensity of poetry should be your daily bread. Central to your apprenticeship should be mimesis, learning to imitate good writing. To familiarize yourself with that, you need to be regularly swimming laps in the deep pool of literature. If you can't imagine this being true for you, then stick to being an "author." 

2. Apprentice yourself to the craft of writing. Granted, there's an entire industry of wannabe writers out there that keeps Poets & Writers afloat. But there are also some very helpful books that are themselves examples of engaging writing. I'd recommend starting with Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life… 

…4. Be patient. Recall Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule (in Outliers): What looks like overnight "genius" exploding onto the scene is usually the product of about 10,000 hours of practice. This is the (admittedly discouraging) math of expertise. Now, I think you can log credit for all the hours you spend reading fiction and poetry as hours of practice. But you also just need to write. And write. And write. Write stuff that will never see the light of day. Write blogs. Take form seriously in your emails. Never miss an opportunity to make language dance and play. Embrace the craft at every turn. You might just become a writer…” 

You can read his full post here. Also worth a read are his two earlier reflections Writing (and) Theology, and (Unsolicited) Advice for Young (Theological) Writers.

 

New Book Engages NT. Wright

Paul writes – Following the theological gathering at Wheaton in 2010 to engage with the theological work of NT. Wright, IVP have now published the papers. Standouts for me were Kevin Vanhoozer’s paper Wrighting the Wrongs of the Reformation? 
The State of the Union with Christ in St. Paul and Protestant Soteriology; and also Richard Hay’s paper Knowing Jesus: Story, History and the Question of Truth.

You’ll find more information on the publication here. Its title is Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright Edited by Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays.   

Also, a “heads up”. Richard Foster has a new book out later in the year: Sanctuary of the Soul:Journey into Meditative Prayer By Richard J. Foster. More on it here.