There and back again

Coming home after a month away made me realise how thin was our veneer of habit. It's taken more than a month to retrieve all our good habits (I count blogging among them). Being away was wonderfully refreshing and produced the kind of serenity only distance and utter detachment can, but it makes it all the harder to again take up one's ordinary life. However, if Bilbo Baggins is to be believed journeys change you for the better. Ordinary life is larger when you come back to it, sweeter for being left so long. And the road is waiting at your door whenever you choose to travel it. Here's to habits, and hobbits, and coming home again. 

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known. 

When I put out to sea

This is the last post for a while as we're travelling overseas for the whole of October. Tennyson's “Crossing the Bar” is really more about death than travel, but it's beautiful and I've been wanting to post it for a while.  

Sunset and evening star,

  And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

  When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

  Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

  Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

  And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

  When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place   

  The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

  When I have crost the bar.

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.