We lose what on ourselves we spend

Thinking about living beautifully and well, the words of this hymn stood out to me when we sang it last Sunday. Peaceful homes and healthful days - as good a summary as any of what we all want - are indeed treasures, but we can't keep them, not least because we live in a world undone. Curious, I looked up the hymn and found it was written by Christopher Wordsworth (1807 - 1885), nephew of the more famous William. Later in a splendid ecclesiastical career Christopher became Bishop of Lincoln, but one of his first posts was University Orator at Cambridge - a job George Herbert had roughly two centuries before him. There is something Herbertesque in this hymn's strange rhythm and homely idiom. Herbert would certainly have agreed that we lose what on ourselves we spend, though, like me, I think he would have found the move from the affirmations of the first three stanzas to those of the final two hard - and lifelong - work.                   

O Lord of heaven and earth and sea,     
To Thee all praise and glory be.
How shall we show our love to Thee,     
Who givest all?

The golden sunshine, vernal air,     
Sweet flowers and fruit, Thy love declare.
When harvests ripen, Thou art there,     
Who givest all.

For peaceful homes and healthful days,
For all the blessings earth displays,     
We owe Thee thankfulness and praise,
Who givest all.

Thou didst not spare Thine only Son,     
But gav'st Him for a world undone,
And freely with that Blessed One     
Thou givest all.   

For souls redeemed, for sins forgiven,   
For means of grace and hopes of heaven,   
What can to Thee, O Lord, be given   
Who givest all?

We lose what on ourselves we spend;   
We have as treasure without end   
Whatever Lord, to Thee we lend,
Who givest all.   

To Thee, from whom we all derive   
Our life, our gifts, our power to give. 
Oh, may we ever with Thee live, 
Who givest all!

Keeping the bathwater

A week ago I wrote that the best way to live is beautifully. Alain de Botton, without meaning to, has made me think twice about that. His book Religion for Atheists is all about living beautifully with the borrowed plumes of religious life, without the burdens of religious devotion. It opens with the statement that he can’t imagine any question asked of a religion more boring than ‘Is it true?’ Listening to him talk about the book, it strikes me that for him truth is neither here nor there. It’s almost as though it has never occurred to this atheist philosopher to wrestle with the question of God’s existence at all. 

His conversation with Krista Tippett of On Being was littered with the language of feeling and sentiment, curiously lacking in intellectual rigour. His argument could be (unkindly) boiled down to a quaint nostalgia for the hymns and cups of tea that come with churchgoing, and a desire to appropriate all the nice bits of church (the architecture, the neighbourliness) without having the tiresome bits (the Incarnation, the Resurrection) thrown in. Put less unkindly, he wants the best, by which he means the most beneficial or beautiful, aspects of religious practice without the obligations of belief. Logically, it’s hard to say that he can’t have them. Of course beautiful art and music, a sense of community, and even the cardinal virtues can be detached from belief in God or an adherence to the Gospel. But what this appropriation leaves out of the account is accountability. It’s the benefits of religion without its demands.

One of the demands made most persistently through the Bible is for the hearts and minds and souls of men and women, not just their religious observance. “These people honour me with their lips,” complains God in Isaiah, “but their hearts are far from me.” Jesus is even more forceful: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside you are full of dead men’s bones.” 

Botton argues that religions ask and answer the question of how we should live, which modernism, atheism, secularism seem to ignore. As interested as I am in the question of how we should live, it's a secondary question, not a primary one. In the New Testament at least, ‘how should we then live?’ is a question asked in the shadow of the return of Christ, in the shadow of another world always pressing on this one. The Christian life is lived in the presence of much greater questions than how we should live. For example, what comes after this life? What came before it? How free are we really to act in a universe divinely ordained, divinely unfolding all the time? All of which seem to me essentially philosophical questions - none of which this philosopher seems interested in answering. 

Over each one its own particular sky

It was strange and unsettling to see placards in the streets of Sydney citing blasphemy and calling for beheadings. Violence is not uncommon in Sydney’s streets, but this kind of religious passion, bloodthirsty and globalised, feels alien to us. I hope it remains so. Author Bruce Feiler has said that September 11 was the day the Middle East came to America. On that day, Americans felt what their enemies felt: terror, pride, connection to place. 9/11 was as much infection as invasion. I hope terror and pride never flourish here the way they have there.

Feiler’s written many books, but his breakthrough was Abraham: A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths. Muslims, Jews and Christians all share Abraham. Ancestor, both genetic and spiritual; archetypal desert monotheist; father of a shared blessing sometimes obscured by bloodshed. Feiler points out that what began as a generous overflowing of this central figure’s significance has hardened over time into narrow arteries of fixed and heavily defended meaning. This poem, “Abraham,” is Scottish poet Edwin Muir’s imagining of an aimless, generous wandering, the progenitor unaware of warring kingdoms that would arise after him, waterless under their own particular skies. 

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks
With the meandering art of wavering water
That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way.
He came, rested and prospered, and went on,
Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms,
And over each one its own particular sky,
Not the great rounded sky through which he journeyed,
That went with him but when he rested changed.
His mind was full of names
Learned from strange peoples speaking alien tongues,
And all that was theirs one day he would inherit.
He died content and full of years, though still
The Promise had not come, and left his bones,
Far from his father's house, in alien Canaan.

Scatter these blossoms

Winter's over, and for a few brief weeks, the fruit trees - cherries, peaches, apples, apricots - are in furious bloom. They're gorgeous, and everywhere, but they don't last. No-one knows this better than Japan's poets, for whom the cherry blossom has long been a symbol of evanescence. “It is just because / they scatter without a trace,” says one ancient anonymous fragment, “that cherry blossoms / delight us so, for in this world / lingering means ugliness.” The eighth century poet Takahashi Mushimaro wrote mostly about local folk tales, and about Mount Fuji and Mount Tsukuha. This poem (roughly 1280 years old this spring) was composed when one of his noble patrons, Lord Fujiwara no Umakai, was sent to be Commander of the Western Sea Circuit - hence the reference to ‘my lords return.’ Charging a god to keep the blossoms on the trees an extra week is the kind of effrontery of which only poets, God bless them, are capable. But the sentiment's in all of us I'm sure when the cherry trees flower. 

Where white clouds rise
Above soaring Tatsuta
And the mountain torrent
Plummets down Ogura’s peak,
Blossoming cherries
Burgeon in great swirls of bloom;
But the mountain is high
And the wind is never still,
And the spring rain
Goes on falling day by day,
So that by now the petals
Have scattered from the upper branches.
O blossoms remaining
On the branches down below,
For a little while
Do no scatter so wildly,
Until my lords return
From the journey where they go,
Grass for their pillow.

This journey of mine
Will not last beyond seven days:
God of Tatsuta,
I charge you, do not let the wind
Scatter these blossoms to the ground.

Domum tuam, Domine

Growing up vaguely puritan, I somehow nursed the notion that beautifying one's space was wasteful or worse, and that decoration was eminently dispensible. Church in particular was deliberately bare, and the Catholics were missing the point with their soaring visual romance. Yet I had aesthetic tendencies that struggled against this apparent prohibition. I would read interior design magazines furtively, guiltily. I would draw and then tear up houseplans or pictures of furniture, knowing they were worldly. I would secretly enjoy the architecture and atmosphere of stony, incense-ridden chapels.

As I grew up, read more and thought more, I decided the Puritans were wrong about space. Whatever level of spiritual detachment you might reach, the space you inhabit influences your state of mind and wellbeing. The ideal of a non-visual theology doesn't quite match our intensely visual lived experience. Besides, there's nothing irreligious about beauty, and ordering one's private space, as much as ordering an ecclesiastical space, is a thoughtful activity, perhaps even a wise one. I still belong to a church that doesn't oblige aesthetically, but I now think that time and imagination should be given to arranging one's domestic life, not in defiance of one's spiritual life, but in accordance with it, as a reflection of it and an aid to it. 

When we got married, a truckload (literally) of presents arrived. Having travelled fairly lightly for many years, this sudden profusion of stuff in my house, especially in my kitchen and my linen cupboard, left me delighted and alarmed. The delight came not, I think, from having more stuff, but from a feeling of being, for the first time as an adult, replete; well equipped, well prepared. It gave me a sense of kinship with women through generations who were wardens of domestic wealth, who had a place for everything and everything in its place, who, like the paragon in Proverbs 31, laughed at the days to come.  

And here's the heart of what I struggled with as a child and for years afterward. How am I supposed to live in this world, knowing there's another? There always seemed to me two models to choose from: the first was the life of the world-renouncers, the zealots, martyrs and ascetics; the second was the life of the wise - those who found joy and order in creation, who celebrated ordinary human loveliness. Paul might have belonged to the first category; Job and John to the second. As I get older, the second comes to seem more valid, not just more appealing. I grow more and more sure that the best clue we have to that other world is beauty, and the best way to live is beautifully.