There is a difference between Truth and truthiness. There is a difference between Faith and faithiness. Can you see it in your own life?

 

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Today, 27 February, is, of course, the feast day of George Herbert, priest, poet, who died this day in 1633.

King of glory, King of peace,
who called your servant George Herbert
from the pursuit of worldly honours
to be a priest in the temple of his God and King:
grant us also the grace to offer ourselves
with singleness of heart in humble obedience to your service;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The private chapels of Bavarian farmyards reminded me, most peculiarly, of Alisdair MacIntyre and his search for a new Benedict.

 

 3MT : Waiting for Benedict in Bavaria [3:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (101)

Consider this question. (You don’t have to write an essay, but just think through what your answer might be.)

• What is the single most satisfying thing in your life?

Read through Matthew 5:5-6 (either alone or as a group). As you read, look at the notes you made when you read the Beatitudes during the first week:

• !! for that which makes you think;
• those things you agree with, or approve of;
• those things you find difficult to believe or understand;
• ?? those things which require you to go a little bit further.

Can you answer these questions?

• How would you define the quality of ‘meekness’?
• Is Jesus encouraging us to be wimps?
• How is meekness different from being amenable and undemanding?
• What does it mean to ‘inherit the earth’?
• Do you have any sympathy with the attitudes shown in this passage from Monty Python’s Life of Brian? It shows the group at the back of the crowd listening to the Sermon on the Mount. They can’t hear Jesus’s speech very well:

MAN 2: You hear that? Blessed are the Greek.
GREGORY: The Greek?
MAN 2: Mmm. Well, apparently, he’s going to inherit the earth.
GREGORY: Did anyone catch his name?
MRS. BIG NOSE: You’re not going to thump anybody.
MR. BIG NOSE: I’ll thump him if he calls me ‘Big Nose’ again.
MR. CHEEKY: Oh, shut up, Big Nose.
MR. BIG NOSE: Ah! All right. I warned you. I really will slug you so hard–
MRS. BIG NOSE: Oh, it’s the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? I’m glad they’re getting something, ‘cause they have a hell of a time.

• What is the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness?
• How does Isaiah 58:6-8 affect your understanding of ‘righteousness’?

What do you think of this quotation:

• It is all too easy for us to treat the Pharisees as embodying all that is worst in humankind. But in fact they were most probably the best men of their time, the most religious, the most devoted to the will of God, the most eager to express their loyalty to him in obedience to his every word, the most determined never to compromise with the world around them. But as St Paul came to see it in retrospect, they were exposed to a fatal flaw: the trouble with their outstanding righteousness was that, all too easily, it could be viewed precisely as their righteousness. It was a righteousness that could be measured, so that, at a certain point, you could say that you had now achieved it. This meant it could all too easily come adrift from the original inspiration in devotion to God and become self-sufficient, an end in itself. Simon Tugwell : Reflections on the Beatitudes (1980)

Polyphony : The Beatitudes (1990); Arvo Pärt (b.1935)

Born in 1935, in Estonia, Arvo Pärt first won recognition as a composer in the late 1950s by writing a cantata for children’s choir and orchestra. In 1968 he wrote Credo for piano, mixed chorus, and orchestra; it was banned in the Soviet Union because of its religious text. While in a period of internal exile, Pärt immersed himself in the study of Gregorian chant and Orthodox liturgical music. He began to write using a tonal technique he called ‘tintinnabuli’, in which he surrounded a melodic phrase with triadic notes sounding like bells ringing. A number of large scale choral works were swiftly considered to be modern classics.
The Beatitudes was the first work Pärt composed to an English text, and it was written for the RIAS Chamber Choir in Berlin. Pärt has composed his music carefully, with an ear to the rhythms and syntax of the English version of the verses from Matthew’s Gospel: he uses note lengths to emphasise significant texts. The piece gradually builds in volume and intensity, climaxing in a sung ‘Amen’ (thus taking the piece from the concert hall and into the Church). Pärt begins to explore the consequences of the Beatitudes with an organ postlude, which, working on the themes of the sung passages gently fades away into eternity.
How does the organ playing affect the piece? How does the composer set the different Beatitudes? What difference does his choice of arrangement (melody, harmony, volume, voices) make to your appreciation of each Beatitude? The whole?

Consider this question. (You don’t have to write an essay, but just think through what your answer might be.)

• What five things do human beings need most?

Read through Matthew 5:3-4 (either alone or as a group). As you read, look at the notes you made when you read the Beatitudes last week:

• !! for that which makes you think;
• those things you agree with, or approve of;
• those things you find difficult to believe or understand;
• ?? those things which require you to go a little bit further.

A note to help you:
In the Old Testament “the poor” has a complex meaning. Look at the way various English bible have translated Isaiah 61:1:

• KJV : The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek
• CEV : The Spirit of the LORD God has taken control of me! The LORD has chosen and sent me to tell the oppressed the good news
• RSV : The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted
• GNB : The Sovereign Lord has filled me with his Spirit. He has chosen me and sent me to bring good news to the poor

The Hebrew word is ‘anav, and the King James Bible translates it ‘meek’ thirteen times, ‘humble’ and ‘poor’ both five times, lowly twice, and once as ‘meek’.
Can you answer these questions?

• What does it mean to be ‘poor in spirit’? Write a definition.
• Read Jesus’ encounter with the rich young ruler (Luke 18:18-25). What light does it shed on the first Beatitude?
• Is there any relationship between spiritual and material poverty? How does one illuminate the other?

What do you think of this quotation:

• It is hard for us to say, ‘Yes, I am poor,’ and to say it simply, and it is even harder to say it and then leave it at that, without the rider, ‘And something has got be done about it.’ Simon Tugwell : Reflections on the Beatitudes (1980)
  
• Why might Jesus’s disciples be mourning?
• In what way would their mourning be comforted?
• What things do you mourn over?
• What is the effect on people and communities of refusing to mourn? Can you think of examples?
• What is the connection between mourning and repentance?

What do you think of this quotation:

• For the Christian, the starting point in… mourning is personal confession and repentance. We dare to face and own our wounds before attempting to help others, and take the beam out of our own eye first before helping to remove the speck in the other person’s eye. So mourning is the capacity to face the gap between present reality and perceived good. Robert Warren, Living Well (1998)
  

Simon and Garfunkel : Blessed – Sounds of Silence (1965); Paul Simon (b. 1941)
Simon and Garfunkel were, for many years, producers of the best selling record of all time with their final album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Simon’s work has suffered by being if anything too familiar: it is hard to hear the original recordings as if for the first time, with fresh ears. ‘Blessed’ is from their early break-through album, recorded after the unexpected success of The Sound of Silence. Written during his stay in England (hence the reference to Soho in the first verse).

Two versions are included here. The first is the original album version, complete with jarring electric guitars and drum backing, which add to the sense of alienation and dislocation Simon conveyed by his lyrics. If that is too loud for your ears the second version, recorded live, unaccompanied except for Simon’s acoustic guitar, at a concert given by the pair in the Lincoln Center, New York City in early 1967 shows a mastery of weaving harmony lines and the precision of their performance.

What do you think of the people Simon mentions in the song? Can they be ‘blessed’ too? Are you ever able to “bless the church service which makes me nervous?”

Saoirse, the 12,000 km pilgrim was sighted today in Canterbury. For more see here.

Do you know the drinking game “Six degrees of Kevin Bacon“? Sam Norton and Mike Higton have just invented its theological/philosophical equivalent: Wittgenstein to Williams in two steps.

First, this is what Sam Norton would like to be read at his funeral:

I should like to say that … the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life. How do I know that two people mean the same when each says he believes in God? And just the same goes for belief in the Trinity. A theology which insists on the use of certain particular words and phrases, and outlaws others, does not make anything clearer… It gesticulates with words, as one might say, because it wants to say something and does not know how to say it. Practice gives the words their sense.¹

(Good on you Sam! No “Death is nothing at all” for you. I bet you don’t even want Crimmond and Abide with me to be sung)

Then Mike Higton wrote this about Rowan Williams:

He assumes that ‘freedom of religion’ isn’t just a case of freedom of opinion, or freedom of speech, or freedom of association – not because religions deserve some extra aura of special ‘respect’, but because none of those freedoms quite captures what religions actually are. To be free to practice a religion is to be free to be involved in a complex, social, ongoing context – a ‘tradition’ or ‘community’ to use some shorthand - that deeply forms ones identity. If freedom of religion is to mean anything at all, it must mean freedom to be formed by such a community, and freedom to participate as a citizen in public life as one who has been formed by such a community.

Simple: W to W in two steps. In other words, (for any broadsheet journalists out there who don’t understand the big words), religious is as religious does.

Hats off to Sam and Mike.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, English translation with the amended second edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 85e. [↩]

Around the fringes of every crowd, there is always a group who doesn’t understand what you say or mean. The reactions to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech about civil and religious law show that the fringe of misapprehension has just got a whole lot bigger.

 

 3MT : Misapprehension at the fringes [3:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (104)

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Three Minute Theology is now available for (free) subscription via the iTunes store. In a day or so you should be able to just search for 3 Minute theologian but until then you can find it by clicking here:

Again, Mike Higton has nailed it exactly in his excellent commentary on ‘Shariagate’ (and I’m so disappointed it hasn’t been called that by the tabloids and broadsheets). This is how Higton concludes, with two potential narratives for any journalist still uncertain how to report the story:

The first is the story that the Archbishop is a head-in-the-clouds academic, with no real grounding in the real world – and that this lecture is the latest in a series of blunders that could only be made by someone almost terminally naive. Accompany this by pictures that emphasise his eyebrows, and you have the makings of a convincing article. If you’re careful, you can make it sound like he’s been stuck in some academic cloister all his life, and has only emerged blinking into public in the last five minutes. You’ll have to brush over the fact that he’s exercised rather a lot of pastoral ministry, responding to quite an impressive range of quite-real-enough-thank-you circumstances¹, and you’ll also do best not to mention how long he’s spent handling eye-watering arguments across the Anglican Communion that involve some of the most fractious and wilful antagonists you could hope to find – but just use the words ‘ivory tower’ a couple of times and your job will be done.

The second, rather similar, is the story that the Archbishop naively assumes the world to be stocked with ‘people of good will’ who will be reasonable if we speak to them nicely – and that he’s rather charmingly surprised when people turn out to be quite as wilfully unpleasant and selfish as they normally are. You’ll have to hide the fact that few contemporary theologians have as dark a view as he does of human beings’ ability destructively to deceive themselves – but people are always prepared to swallow a ‘genial vicar’ stereotype, so you should get away with it.

Go read the whole thing, and applaud.

1. I love that phrase! [↩]