Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Loving Completely Without Understanding

“…Each one of us …will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don't know what part[s] of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part[s] we have to give are not wanted. And so it those we live with, and should know who elude us. But we can still love them - we can love completely without complete understanding…” 

(From the screenplay of the Robert Redford directed 1992 film A River Runs Through It.)

Interestingly Eugene H. Peterson, who introduced me to McLean’s novella, writes of the Norman MacLean novella A River Runs Through It and Other Stories (1976) in the following way: 

“ I know a man who used to buy this book in lots of ten or twenty and give it away, as he put it, to “those who are worthy of reading it.” He gave me a copy. It soon became a family book, as my wife and children and I would read it aloud to each other. One reason that we liked it so much was that it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us. The story MacLean writes takes place a 100 miles from where I grew up in Montana and where our family returned each summer for a holiday. We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence. The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place: this is holy ground – worship God here.”

Walter Brueggemann: Preaching an Emancipating Word

Following on from yesterday’s post, a number of you will be pleased, as was I, to discover that Walter Brueggemann has a new publication (pub. Jan 1^st 2012) out and available. It’s titled: The Practice of Prophetic Imagination: Preaching an Emancipating Word (h/c pp.192). 

“When I ponder what the ancient prophets in Israel are doing as we have them in the text, I arrive at this judgment that will serve as my guiding thesis: prophetic proclamation is an attempt to imagine the world as though YHWH— the creator of the world, the deliverer of Israel, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whom we Christians come to name as Father, Son, and Spirit—were a real character and an effective agent in the world. I use the subjunctive “were” because such a claim is not self-evident and remains to be established again and again in every such utterance. The key term in my thesis is “imagine,” that is, to utter, entertain, describe, and construe a world other than the one that is manifest in front to us, for that present world is readily and commonly taken without such agency or character for YHWH. Thus the offer of prophetic imagination is one that contradicts the taken-for-granted world around us.” 

Walter Brueggemann, Chapter 1, p. 2. 

Contents 

1. The Narrative Embedment of Prophetic Preaching.           

2. Prophetic Preaching as Sustained, Disciplined, Emancipated Imagination.

3. Loss Imagined as Divine Judgment.

4. A Lingering Place of Relinquishment

5. The Burst of Newness amid Waiting           

6. The Continuing Mandate. 

Excerpts from the foreword by John M. Buchanan: 

“…True prophetic preaching is witness, affirmation, proclamation that God is, that God reigns, and that God does not abandon or forget. It is, simply, publicly articulated belief in God. The current climate for this public articulation is ambiguous at best. On the one hand, there are the purveyors of the prosperity gospel who claim, apparently without much concentrated time reading the Bible, that God will bless those who believe fervently enough with this world’s goods, wealth, health, and success. On the other hand are the neo-atheists who sell a lot of books claiming that the whole religion project is anti-scientific, unreasonable nonsense, if it is not positively lethal? There is no God, they insist, and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better off we will be. And multitudes of others—even if they do not go so far as to buy the neo- atheists’ books or gather under their banner—are nevertheless their acolytes when they simply act as if there were no god; they are implicit atheists. In the prevalent American predilection for an “irrelevant transcendence” and a “cozy immanence” Brueggemann perceives the pet gods of our culture. 

Walter Brueggemann has taught us, over the years, to be careful not to circumscribe God. He has reminded us that God cannot be contained in human thought and rhetoric, even theological thought and rhetoric. He instructed us to be modest when speaking about God. He models the lesson himself by declining to translate into English the Hebrew construct YHWH, which designates the Holy One, the “I Am Who I Will Be” of Israel. Walter’s honest, eloquent, and powerful prayers in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth reflect that appropriate theological humility by not using other prayerful modes of address that are so commonly and thoughtlessly used. 

The prophetic tradition, on the other hand, proclaims a God who is an active agent, who is manifestly present in the life of the world and is always up to the business of creating newness. “I am about to do a new thing; do you not perceive it?” (Isa. 43:19). It is precisely when we take the world seriously that the prophetic tradition becomes critical and complex—and urgent. 

… Many in Israel could not imagine a world without Jerusalem, the Temple, or the Davidic monarchy. The events of destruction, exile, and discontinuity were more devastating than anyone could imagine. Prophets deal with loss, prophetic narrative hovers over our loss and grief… 

…Our culture is inclined to hurry past loss and grief, to rush too quickly to resolution. “Everything will be all right,” we assure ourselves, when every- thing is not at all right. The best and most sensitive of us know this in our preaching and pastoral care. But no one is immune to the deep inclination to “get over it” and move on. The prophets know about loss and grief… 

… The Bible, the prophets, know about loss and the importance of dwelling with it… 

Walter Brueggemann reminds that there is always also a movement toward hope. It is not an add-on: hope is not a belated afterthought. Hope is “intrinsic to the prophetic message” (p. 111). The great prophetic themes of destruction and restoration are reenacted in the central Christian themes of crucifixion and resurrection. God, the prophets imagine, is always doing a new thing, creating a way where there is no way, bringing life out of death, light out of very real darkness… 

… The practice of prophetic imagination is, this good book reminds us, a decision to believe and trust that God reigns. It is to imagine the world as God intends it and as God works to bring it about. It is never to deny or hurry past loss and grief. It is to remember—always—that “weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Ps. 30:5b).” 

John M. Buchanan Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church Chicago, Ill.

Amazon link. 

 

The Prophetic Imagination of Walter Brueggemann

Krista Tippett (Speaking of Faith) introduces her conversation with Walter Brueggemann on her blog (22^nd December 2011): 

“…Walter Brueggemann is not merely an expert. He somehow embodies this tradition of the prophets that he knows as well as anyone living. He is wise and forceful, quick to laugh, passionately challenging, and fiercely hopeful. He demonstrates as much as teaches the way the prophets of the ages are disruptive of politics and culture as usual.

He helps me understand that part of a prophet's power is in wielding language poetically rather than stridently. Beginning with the words they choose, they transcend ideological splits that actually inhibit us from seizing the great challenges and problems of our time.

…He points out that the prophetic voice is not issues-based. It accomplishes the harder, more necessary work of reframing the big picture of what is at stake, so that we can take in the reality of our moment in a new way, with a new sense of what might be possible.

Prophets help us connect the dots between the world as it is and the world as it might be. Prophets tend to emerge in moments of chaos and change, and this is surely a description of our age as of the 1960s or of the era of the biblical fall of Jerusalem. Walter Brueggemann helps us reclaim some important language for being people of change and chaos: the healing necessity of "lamentations," the difference between being bold and being strident, the hard and life-giving work of letting go of comfort for the sake of what is important…”

Krista Tippett. 

You can find the interview here. 

A Wounded Prophet, Arthur, and the Visionary-Prophetic.

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him [Jesus], for they said, “He is out of his mind.” Mark 20-22. 

Mike Riddell over on The Insatiable Moon blog recently featured a fascinating essay, The Wounded Prophet, by Sally Clay. When I read the title I must say I thought of Henri Nouwen, specifically the biography with the very similar title A Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri JM. Nouwen by Michael Ford. Nouwen suffered from debilitating depression (see also the excellent Henri Nouwen: A Spirituality of Imperfection (pub. 2006) by Wil Hernandez). You might also think of Nouwen’s own title The Wounded Healer. Think too of John the Baptist! Picture him in a contemporary urban Western context! 

Anyway, Sally Clay’s essay is well worth a read, and if you’ve had the opportunity to see my favourite movie of 2010 The Insatiable Moon then Clay’s essay will likely bring to mind some of the central themes of that movie, especially as they coalesce around the themes in Clay’s essay. Indeed, reflect on Arthur’s role as a “wounded prophet” (that's Arthur up there on the left). 

Here’s some excerpts from Clay’s essay: 

…I found psychology presented as part of a spiritual process, a psychology of the heart (Freemantle, 1975; Govinda, 1969; Trungpa, 1972). Finally I could admit openly that my experiences were, and always had been, a spiritual journey -- not sick, shameful, or evil. I was already a worthwhile person, right from the start, and there was a way to work with my own mind to transform fearful mental states to peaceful ones… 

…If mental illness is a disease of the mind, what is the nature of the mind? If altered states have value, what is there to recover from? What is our model of wellness? Is it true, as some say, that spiritual realization is the highest aspiration of the human race? If it is, should not that be our model of wellness? How do we recover to that state of wellness? Is recovery for a mental patient something different from the wellness of any other person?

Why do people in mania consistently experience an urgent call to save the world, and call themselves messiah or savior? Is this merely grandiose, or do such people truly hear a call to help others?

We know that people called schizophrenic hear voices. But why do they listen to them? Why in this culture are some forms of mental illness so excruciatingly painful and so interminable? Is illness the reason, or is there a tragic misunderstanding of global proportions? Who is ill -- is it the visionary or is it the society itself? 

… Until recent times, altered states of the kind I have described were an integral -- and integrated -- part of human experience. Among the ways they were incorporated into society were the shamanistic/healing way, the contemplative/teaching way, and the prophetic/leadership way. It is only recently that altered states have been medicalized and stigmatized. It is only recently that powerful drugs have been used to suppress the altered states that once produced our prophets and our saints.

Not surprisingly, it is also recently that society has fallen into a spiritual crisis of unprecedented proportions. In case you had not noticed, we no longer have any shamans or prophets. There may be those who go by those names, but somehow the mental experience that shapes such people is missing. This lack is sorely felt. We are lost now, lost on a global scale. Our world has lost its meaning, and our religions have lost their authority.

Not surprisingly, millions of people today are seeking to reach an altered state in the only way that they know how -- through the use of mind -- altering drugs. We may try with all our might to get rid of the drugs, but as long as we are human, we will not get rid of the need for altered states…”

You can read Sally Clay’s full essay here. I highly recommend it as a meditation written around the core question: what does it mean to be human, to be truly human…?

Reel Formation: The Gift of Cinema

Canadian friend Len Hjalmarson sent me a great little 2010 reflection on cinema as spiritual formation – Cinema Divino by Ron Reed. It echoes many of my own thoughts on film and its importance – see here or here as examples. 

Here’s the opening two paragraphs:

“Sister Rose Pacatte writes for the National Catholic Reporter. In her recent article Seeds of the Gospel in Cinema she talks about cinema divina – a practice of watching film as a spiritual discipline, derived from lectio divina. She mentions Father Benedict Auer’s article “Video Divina: A Benedictine Approach to Spiritual Viewing,” in which he writes “Video divina requires a set disposition which says, ‘This evening, I wish to get closer to God, so I think I’m going to watch this film, which might give me better insights into myself or why my neighbor acts as she or he does.’” 

I’m quite in tune with this idea, though it has its risks. If you enter into a story “looking for the message,” or intending to distill some simple moral lesson, you’re really not engaging with the film on its own terms. Playwrights say “If you want to send a message, use Western Union,” and the desire to boil a story down to a handy tip for living or a high school English paper theme statement may deny us the rich experience of actually engaging with the piece as a narrative, a world to inhabit, a work of art (or at least craftsmanship). The story – indeed, the performances, the design, the film’s rhythms and music and cinematic aesthetic – are not just the pretty wrapping paper to be discarded to get to the good part, the message. They are themselves the good part, the thing itself, and whatever a film (or play, or novel) may mean is entirely embodied in those particularities. A good story doesn’t say just one thing: it layers meanings and perspectives and contradictions and ideas, choices and consequences, all the complexities of actual life intensified and shaped by the artists…” 

You can read Reed’s complete reflection here. Thanks for the link Len. 

For more resources through which to engage film, I’d recommend:

John Pungente SJ and Monty Williams SJ, Finding God in the Dark: Taking the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius to the Movies, Ottawa: Novalis, 2004. 

I see Monty Williams also has a revised and updated edition of “Finding God” and a new book out in March 12 on discernment. It looks like some of the material I heard him lecture on in Auckland a few years back. Mike Frost also has a useful book which he co-wrote with one of my everyday theology hero’s Robert Banks: Lessons from Reel Life: Movies, Meaning, and Myth-Making; see also: Cinema & Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology by Clive Marsh (film watching, what films do to people, and cinema going as religious practice); Reframing Theology and Film: New Focus for an Emerging Discipline edited by Robert K. Johnston (a collection of technical theological essays – some real gems amongst them); and Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue by Robert K. Johnston.  

St Ignatius [Of Loyola] and John Wimber in Dialogue – Part 1

Earlier in the year I read an interesting Grove Booklet. Its title was Open to the Spirit: St Ignatius [Of Loyola] and John Wimber in Dialogue (pub. 2000 / 24 pages). The author is Robin Stockitt, and he’s written under the following section headings: 

The Gift of Dissatisfaction.

Origins.

Discernment – The Heart of It All

Checks and Balances to Discernment

Spiritual Warfare

Points of Difference.

So What? 

Here’s a selection of quotes and insights: 

“..So what should St. Ignatius talk to John Wimber? Or, more pertinently, what is there to gain for their offspring if they dialogue? The danger of any ‘movement’ within the Christian church is for its proponents to remain in a self-contained world, where all the complexities and difficulties of life are understood and interpreted through one filter. When just a single lens is used to understand and interpret our place within God’s world then it is possible to limit the way God engages with us. Our horizons become rather too clearly defined, our checks and balances may become a little skewed and what began as an initiative from God becomes formalized, crystallized, bottled, and preserved. The freshness and the spontaneity of the Holy Spirit can be reduced to a formula for ‘success’ So, I believe that there is much to be gained from being open to other approaches to spiritual growth. After all, as Gerard Hughes puts it, God is a God of surprises… 

…the purpose of St Ignatius’ “Spiritual Exercises” by enabling people to “make choices”… “To follow
Christ wherever that may lead… “The person who is undertaking the exercises learns to discern the ongoing work [and invitations] of the Holy Spirit. These include, for example, using the five senses to enter imaginatively into the text of Scripture, paying close attention to the pattern of one’s emotional life, learning to respect the boundaries and limits of one’s own discernment and using a guide or mentor as a sounding board… For Ignatius true understanding began with God’s initiative in his life…”experience was the main catalyst of change in his life…he noted the main features of his own experience and reflecting on them saw them as signs of God’s presence and action… 

…The key point for both men was that in sensing the presence of God I their own lives they subsequently sought to develop a theological framework within which they could contain and interpret their experiences. It was not that their rationality became redundant but rather that it became the servant of their experience. For both men the starting point of their theology - experience – influenced everything that followed. The pressing need was to make sense of God’s overtures. If intimacy with Christ was discovered by responding to Divine initiative then it followed that the one overriding concern was to learn to discern what God was doing and to cooperate with [God] in that process… 

…God’s will was conceived in a far more dynamic way, an interweaving of our free responses and choices with God’s [discerned activity and] purposes. There would always be a creative tension where God was continually calling, [and] inviting a response of love from us. The desire to sense God’s will was paramount for Ignatius and he rarely concluded any of his letters without expressing the wish that his readers would ‘feel the will of God in order that they may fulfil it perfectly. It was because of the centrality of this in his thinking that Ignatius devoted much of his energies to developing guidelines for the ‘discernment of spirits’… 

…Ignatius urged his students to approach God in a state of ‘indifference’, a condition which describes contentment with the work of God in our lives, whatever that may be. Ignatius likened indifference to a balanced set of weighing scales, believing that by being in a state of equilibrium we are more likely to be truly open to whatever God is saying to us. 

The second principle of Ignatian discernment concerns paying lose attention to the affective movements within the soul. These are the kind of involuntary feelings and moods that arise often, but not solely, as a result of meditating upon the Scriptures. In the course of everyday life each of us faces a bewildering array of experiences, desires, impulses, revulsions and attractions. Many of these operate on a superficial level. Ignatius was concerned with the more profound affective movements, those critical times when decisions need to be made which have an effect on the direction of our lives even though we may not understand the origin of these feelings or what they mean…

…In what direction do these emotions draw us? Towards God or away from [God]? Ignatius noticed that some emotions pull us towards God and help us to be ‘less centred upon ourselves and more open to others. We might feel, for example, a sense of gratitude to God that leads to a deeper faith, trust and love or a joyful awareness and appreciation of the presence and action and gifts of God in people. Alternatively we may feel a keen sense of sorrow over our own infidelities in following Christ [and this leads to repentance. Ignatius calls these times of] ‘consolation’… 

To be continued.

 

Liberated By Our “Free Fall into Pure Be-ing becomes our Very Best Do-ing.”

“… God’s one-of-a-kind description is that God actually uses our problems to lead us to the full answer. God is the perfect Recycler, and in the economy of grace, nothing is wasted… 

…God’s power for justice is precisely God’s power to restore … people when they are broken or hurt and to use their mistakes to liberate them, to soften them, to enlighten them, and to transform them… 

…Without grace, almost everything human declines and devolves into smallness, hurt, and blame. 

Grace humiliates our attempts at private virtue. Grace makes us feel powerless, where before, we knew that if we did this, then we earn that. Accepting grace can make us feel poor and empty and even useless… 

… So it seems to me that true progress, or the hope that we have, is not naively optimistic, a straight line, or without regress. Spiritual progress, ironically, develops through tragedy and through falling, where we end up ironically, as CG. Jung said, “finding pure gold,” the gold of the Gospels, and, most surprising of all, the hidden gold of our own souls, and the lovely gold of Life Itself. All at the same time. And all is gift… 

…Our free fall into Pure Be-ing becomes our very best do-ing…”

Richard Rohr, A Lever and a Place to Stand (pub. 2011 / being the publication of his 2005 John Main Seminar).

Far From Me: An Ending

Following on from yesterday’s post, here’s the promised song. It’s titled Far From Me. It’s track # 11 from his brilliant album The Boatman’s Call. It’s a song that draws its inspiration from intense love affair between Cave and English singer-songwriter PJ Harvey. He finished this song when their affair went wrong and the pair broke up. Cave reaches my soul and the deep recesses of my heart like no other musician. He is also the only musician who has journeyed with me since my late teens. 

For you dear, I was born

For you I was raised up

For you I've lived and for you I will die

For you I am dying now

You were my mad little lover

In a world where everybody fucks everybody else over

You who are so far from me

Far from me

So far from me

Way across some cold neurotic sea

Far from me

 

I would talk to you of all matter of things

With a smile you would reply

Then the sun would leave your pretty face

And you'd retreat from the front of your eyes

I keep hearing that you're doing best

I hope your heart beats happy in your infant breast

You are so far from me

Far from me

Far from me

 

There is no knowledge but I know it

There's nothing to learn from that vacant voice

That sails to me across the line

From the ridiculous to the sublime

It's good to hear you're doing so well

But really can't you find somebody else that you can ring and tell

Did you ever

Care for me?

Were you ever

There for me?

So far from me

 

You told me you'd stick by me

Through the thick and through the thin

Those were your very words

My fair-weather friend

You were my brave-hearted lover

At the first taste of trouble went running back to mother

So far from me

Far from me

Suspended in your bleak and fishless sea

Far from me

Far from me.

Nick Cave. YouTube footage of the song with an introduction by Cave can be found here. 

 

Inexplicable Longing

"We all experience within us what the Portuguese call "saudade", an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul, and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration, and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world. The love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting up though our wounds.”

Nick Cave, via Barry Taylor.

For more from Nick Cave on the “love song”, I highly recommend his stunning 1999 London lecture The Secret Life of the Love Song (an example tomorrow of one of the songs Cave includes in the lecture. The song took four months to write, “which was the duration of the relationship it describes”. It’s a love song that “attaches” itself “to actual experience”.  Also, Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s In Search of Duende, to whom Cave refers to in his lecture noted above.  

1 Corinthians 13 (NIV)

“1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”