June 11 – 15 I’m teaching a course called “Reading the Bible through Literature, Music and Art” and June 18 – 22 a course on Practical Liturgy.

The full list of classes is here – come and join us! it will be fun. Registration officially closes on May 15, but there may be late registration if there are any remaining spaces. And everything you need to know about getting to and around Yale, Yale Transit, Parking, is here

Naming God: Inclusive and Expansive language
Maggi Dawn

“Like the nine billion names of God
Don’t bring you any closer
To anyone you can simply set eyes on…”

(Bruce Cockburn, One of the Best Ones)

Language is a powerful tool. How we employ it in theology matters because we are attempting to articulate truth as we find it. But liturgical language has a particular power to reinforce ideas, images and beliefs; it is a performative utterance, enhanced and reinforced by rhythm, poetry, and music, and it sounds the depths within us because it is employed consciously and deliberately in relationship to God and to the worshipping community. It’s hard, then, to overestimate the importance of the language of worship, and in constructing it we need to attend to concerns that are closely entwined: pastoral, theological and aesthetic.

Innovation in liturgical language always has a theological undercurrent, but the initial motivation for change is often pastoral, rising from a concern to ensure that those who come to worship do not feel excluded, disinherited, or undervalued by the language of worship. In response to this, words that imply feudal, military or imperial power, gender attribution, or other culturally sensitive issues, have often been carefully excised from liturgical scripts, rendering unusable for the purposes of worship a whole slew of names for God, such as Father, Lord, King, Warrior, Strong Tower, Shield, Defender.

Problems raised by “Inclusive” Language

There are, though, a number of problems with this exercise. In the effort to make language inclusive to one group, we can inadvertently exclude another, or we find that we have achieved little more than replacing one problem with another. For example, to exclude any charge of patriarchy, liturgical language may be re-cast by replacing all male pronouns with female ones. Certainly this may have some value in shocking the ear, startling the mind into entertaining a new vision of God. But simply employing a new set of pronouns while leaving the structure and enactment of the liturgy exactly the same is at best a temporary fix. If we merely substitute one power structure for another, a new metaphor for an old one, then we are in danger of merely whitewashing sepulchers, rather than drawing closer to truth.

Another approach is to remove gendered language from liturgy altogether, and instead to engage neutral descriptors for God. One of the most-used replacements for Father-Son-Spirit is Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer, which attempts to retain a three-fold character without attributing gender to God. Yet here again the language has theological limitations. It is a seemingly Trinitarian formula, but these three actions properly belong to God in Unity; to assign them to three functionary names is, by implication, to deny the unity of God in creation or redemption. But perhaps worse, used in exclusion, this kind of language describes God in terms of function rather than relationship. It is fundamental to Christian theology that God, while not a corporeal being, is not impersonal. God is not an “it”, and the language of job-descriptions doesn’t serve to address God adequately.

A further issue with avoiding particular names or pronouns is the tortured relationship that results with historic texts that are undeniably beautiful, but were not written in inclusive language. Adapting anonymous texts from unknown sources is one matter, but can we really justify updating the elegant and captivating language of John Donne, George Herbert, or John Mason? (If it doesn’t disturb the artistic conscience to replace a pronoun in one of their works, at least one would hope that respect for rhyme and meter might deter us!) But once we realize we cannot rewrite their words, are we really going to accept the impossible choice that the demands of inclusivity impose, and impoverish our experience by never reading them at all?

“Expansive Language”: a better solution?

It’s clear, then, that inclusive language poses significant difficulties. But another approach is available in “expansive language”, which has been an undercurrent in liturgics for some time, and has more recently come to the fore.

Expansive language aims to use as many names and metaphors for God as possible; to stretch the imagination towards God, in order to allow our minds and our mouths to discover that alongside the comfort of loved and familiar imagery, there is also novelty, shock, challenge and joyful surprise in our encounter with the Divine. If we limit our language for political, pastoral or personal reasons we run the risk of domesticating God, or even of making God in our own image. But the beauty of expansive language is that rather than limiting the range of language and metaphor available to us, it opens up many more possibilities. Rather than excluding or excising difficult terms, they are brought into balance by contextualizing them within a broad range of language that doesn’t privilege one name above another. Formulations such as Creator-Redeemer-Sustainer become less loaded with theological problems if they are used alongside other names such as Donne’s “three person’d God”, or the abundance of metaphor within the pages of scripture – God is a rock, God is water, God is a shepherd, a lioness, a mother hen. Traditional names such as Father or Lord can find their place when they are moderated by the use of a plethora of other names, which together serve as a constant reminder that God is far bigger than any one of them. And we are able to engage in a “conversation with the Saints” by reading historical texts, in the language of other ages, thus recognizing that our faith is not merely of the moment, but has an enduring quality.

Walter Brueggemann encourages expanding, rather than restricting the range of terms we use, pointing out that the cutting down of metaphors leads not merely to impoverished language, but to idolatry. “The Biblical defense against idolatry is plural metaphors. If you reduce the metaphors too much, you will end with an idol. So more metaphors gives more access to God…”[1]

What if I don’t like certain names, or don’t use them on principle?
If you are entirely unused to hearing God addressed as mother, it will sound strange the first few times. Or, if you have resolved never to name God with male pronouns, then it may appear retrograde to hear them included. But the invitation to expansive language is a call to stretch the imagination towards God, rather than focusing on those words that touch our own personal reflexes. It is more than merely a request to tolerate things we dislike for the sake of others, even though that has a value in itself; but an invitation to discover a richer imaginative world. Naming God in ways that are unfamiliar or uncomfortable pulls us out of our comfort zones, and thus we are enabled to catch a glimpse of the God who is “other”, a mystery that is beyond human telling.

Expansive language, then, delivers the freedom to play with language creatively, to encompass grammatical elegance and poetic beauty, to include unedited ancient language that underlines the historicity and enduring quality of faith. And the result of expanding rather than eliminating vocabulary is a liturgical language that is more broadly inclusive of those who come to worship. Rather than adjusting our language to remove all offence, then, let us stretch our imaginations: use the names that others use, listen to the various narratives encompassed within this community, and try out the names that emerge from them. Each of us may encounter names that are unfamiliar, curious, or even a little disturbing. But as Desmond Tutu famously said, we are a “rainbow people of God”; our language needs to reflect that diversity, rather than the dullness of neutralization.

Rather than make our capacity for naming God smaller, then, perhaps it would be better to explore the breadth of the ways God has been named; to reflect on the refusal to articulate any name for God as a way of acknowledging holiness and mystery. We might rediscover, from the scriptures, and from two thousand years of Christian theology, some of the many names of God: helper[2], Lord[3], servant and friend[4]; compassionate father, a mother who breastfeeds her children and who knits for them[5], a tigress, a mother hen, a shepherd, a rock and a tower, a shield and a defence, a landowner, a housekeeper[6], a baker of bread, a mighty ruler and a powerless infant, the light that lightens the world, and the darkness that is above all light[7]; the God who is both love and wisdom,[8] and at the same time the God whose name, however close we try to get to it, will always elude us.

Let’s take all these names and more besides, let’s roll them around in our mouths, and taste and see whether they are, in fact, good; and let us feel our way towards articulating our worship in a way that is both inclusive and respectful of one another as it is honoring and worshipful of the God whose name, as St Paul says, is above all names.[9]

[2] John 14:16

[3] John 20:28

[4] John 15:15

[5] Julian of Norwich

[6] Luke 15 – see Letty Russell, Household of Freedom

[7] Dionysius the Areopagite

[8] Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith

[9] Philippians 2:11

From three o’clock on Friday until sunrise on Sunday – this is the one day in the year when – liturgically speaking at least – we contemplate the absence, the silence of God. Where is God when everything goes catastrophically wrong? That’s what the disciples and friends of Jesus must have been asking. What happened? Did we get the whole thing wrong? Why did God not fix it?

What a terrible thing, this slow and tortured death. “Man’s inhumanity to man”, as Robert Burns put it, as horrifying as it is heartbreaking. Today as we contemplate the death of Christ, there will be people suffering unspeakable torture behind closed doors in the dark corners of the world. Let us remember them, pray for them, seek to make it cease.

Many of Jesus’ friends had already fled the dangerous scene. Among the few that stayed was, of course, his mother. Stabat Mater – the standing mother – not just standing as opposed to sitting, but standing firm, with him in death as she was in birth. “Fac me tecum pie flere, crucifixo condolere, donec ego vixero. (Let me mingle tears with thee, mourning Him who mourned for me, all the days that I may live…)

John, his close and slightly other-worldly friend; Mary who felt she owed him everything – these were the bedraggled few who stayed through the horror, the bravest of friends who would not desert him in this terrible hour. “Here might I stay and sing; No story so divine - Never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine…”  Today we might also think of who it is that has stuck by us through thick and thin – not always the friends we expect, but definitely the ones we should take note of. And today we might pray that we have the strength and courage to be a true friend to others.  ”Whatever you do to the least of these, you do it to me.”

And at last the moment of death – at once a relief and a grief. No-one wants to watch their loved ones suffer. But no-one wants to say goodbye either. Today we might think of those who walk, and sit, and stay, with the suffering and the dying.

Good Friday. Not Good at all, in one sense. But good in the sense of holy. For these are the profound moments, when the joy and ease is cut away and all we see is the nakedness of human vulnerability. Peace to you in the shadows of this Holy Day.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…

From the waters’ edge, looking past the White House and towards Lincoln, stands Jefferson, surrounded by words from his Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men.

From the elegant grandeur of the Jefferson memorial, though, you can see another memorial across the water. Walk around the edge of the water, and you find yourself looking up at an enormous statue of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Like most memorials, this one caused both controversy and admiration when it was unveiled. But I love it – not just the memorial itself, but where it stands in relation to the others.

Also hewn from white stone, this memorial is not elevated onto a high platform with a broad staircase, but stands with its feet firmly placed on the ground. Stand before Martin Luther King, and this immense figure stands not a hundred feet above contradiction, but on the very same ground as you and me. And he stands looking directly across the water at Jefferson (who is looking at Lincoln), as if to say – when? When are we going to live out in reality what you both said we believe – that we are all created equal?

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

It strikes me forcibly, living on this side of the pond, that national and local news are constantly laced through with stories of disadvantage, of senseless violence, and tragic death, too much of it intricately connected to the fact that this society doesn’t live its creed that all people are created equal. Fear, prejudice, greed, suspicion of the “other” – all these lead to something so much less than MLK’s dream.

On this day, in memory of him, let’s honour his dream; let’s seek again ways to live as if it is a dream that will come true. Just as, at the end of this week, we will honour the resurrection, and hope for the realisation of its promise.

One day. One day.

What difference does it make to the way an author writes, and a reader reads, that the writing is blogged rather than posted as an essay, or journalistic piece? What difference does it make that it has the capacity for multi-media? Who is/are the reader(s)? Who is/are the writer(s)? what is the relationship between them?

I’m pretty chuffed that two students have chosen to study blogging for their term paper. Memoir and poetry seem to be the other two top contenders for subject choice. Interesting times.

The Place Where We Are Right

by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

I came across this poem in Giles Fraser’s column in the Church Times.

LENT

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is compos’d of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
To ev’ry Corporation.

The humble soul compos’d of love and fear
Begins at home, and lays the burden there,
When doctrines disagree,
He says, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandal to the Church, and not
The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
When good is seasonable;
Unless Authority, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it less,
And Power itself disable.

Besides the cleanness of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fulness there are sluttish fumes,
Sour exhalations, and dishonest rheums,
Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
And goodness of the deed.
Neither ought other men’s abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
We forfeit all our Creed.

It’s true, we cannot reach Christ’s forti’eth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Saviour’s purity;
Yet we are bid, ‘Be holy ev’n as he, ‘
In both let’s do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn and take me by the hand, and more:
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast,
As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlour; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

George Herbert

I spent the weekend in Canada, exploring in some places I’d never been before. On Saturday morning I found myself standing with one foot on each side of a fault line – by now a stable one, with no risk of an earthquake, but nevertheless a huge rupture in the earth. Either side of this rupture, as far as the eye could see, the entire landscape was covered in still, silent snow and ice. But down the centre of the fault line flowed a river too dramatically powerful to freeze over. The only place where life and movement could be seen was down this great crack in the earth.

Ash Wednesday is something that our modern-day culture finds it hard to grasp. We’re so used to positive thinking and self-help and assertiveness and therapy to build ourselves up that we’re not quite sure any more what to do with this thing called sin – the acknowledgement of which is all over the Bible, and threaded through all our historical theological literature and our prayer books.

Ash Wednesday is supposed to bring us face to face with two undeniable truths about ourselves. The first is that we are mortal. In a few moments we will invite you – if you wish – to receive ashes on your forehead, and the words that accompany the ritual are drawn from the Bible – from dust you came, and to dust you will return. They are similar to the words we use at funerals. They remind us that life is short, and fragile: we are neither immortal nor invincible. And secondly, we are reminded that we are both made in the image of God – gloriously so – and yet fractured right through. We are not perfect. We hurt each other, we hurt ourselves, and we hurt God in the process.

Ash Wednesday isn’t a call to return to some medieval inquisition, or to self-punishment, or to a loss of self-esteem. The faultline that runs through us has the possibility to be like that waterfall in Canada – that if we recognize our sinfulness and become stable in our self-knowledge, then life can flow; for – as Leonard Cohen put it – “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. The recognition of our flawed nature, together with the knowledge that – as the Psalmist said – “God remembers that we are but dust” – is immensely freeing; it enables us to accept and know ourselves as we are, to forgive ourselves and one another, and to know that God’s love has always been there for us, without measure, in the full knowledge that we have always been flawed, and we always will be.

So we invite you to receive ashes here today. If you have never done this before, what happens is this: you simply come forward to the centre – as you would for communion – and four ministers will be here at the centre holding a bowl of ashes – made from burning the Palm Crosses from last year’s Palm Sunday. These are mixed with a little oil, and the sign of the cross will be put on your forehead with these words: “From dust you came, and to dust you will return. Turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.”

I have mixed feelings about the “Imposition of ashes” ritual that many churches enact at the beginning of Lent. The ashes, from which Ash Wednesday gets its name, are made by burning palm crosses from the previous year’s Palm Sunday. The grey ash is mixed with a little oil and pressed in the shape of a cross onto the forehead of each worshipper with these or similar words, adapted from Genesis 3:19 “Remember that you are but dust: from dust you came, and to dust you shall return. Turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.” The ashing ritual is a symbol of the fact that, as Joni Mitchell sang in the 1970s, we are quite literally made of stardust – billion-year-old carbon from burnt out stars – and thus Lent is, in part, about recognizing our own humanity. But the words “dust to dust” put us squarely in the same territory as a funeral service; they can seem a dour and punishing declaration of sinfulness, making it hard to see the overriding sense of redemption that the gospel should always carry.

Acknowledging both the sinful nature of humanity and our own particular flaws may be essential if we’re to escape the arrogance that makes the human heart leaden and ugly, but there’s a fine line between that and the over-emphasis on sinfulness that so easily transforms the lightness of the gospel into the straitjacket of religiosity. How can ashes be, in any sense of the word, redemptive and light?

I think, in fact, that a lightness of spirit is exactly what emerges from the process of facing down our own demons. When we look our mortality in the face, the inevitability of our own death asks of us, “What are you going to do with the life you have?”

Years ago I attended the funeral of a friend, known to all his friends simply by his surname, ‘Fairnie’. He was a remarkable and talented man who died suddenly and unexpectedly, and I was unprepared for the blow, not only of losing a friend but of facing the fact that young people – people like me – could just be gone from this world, overnight and without warning. The shock of his death was intensified by the sharp realization that my own life was far more fragile than I had thought, and the resulting mix of grief and disbelief left me feeling in a slightly dream-like state for some weeks to come. ‘I don’t think I’m ready for this,’ I wrote in the words of a song, ‘the thread I’m holding onto is thin. Would somebody please wake me up? I feel like I’m living in a dream…’

The huge church was packed for the funeral with maybe a thousand people or more – groups of friends, colleagues and students from widely different contexts. His art students were there, and a number of high-profile members of the music industry; there were leading members of various denominations and large contingents from arts festivals where he had performed. In place of a traditional sermon, there was a series of tributes and eulogies given by people who had known him in these various contexts, and all over the church you could see people’s faces lighting up as they registered the extent of his gifts and achievements. After the funeral service was over, tea was served by a group of women from the local community, and one of them confided to me as she poured some tea, ‘We had no idea that he knew all these people. We just thought of him as the college teacher from around the corner.’

In the midst of grief, it seemed to me that one of Fairnie’s parting gifts to his friends was the realization that we had no idea how long we were going to live. All the things I’d thought I might do one day suddenly seemed a little more urgent. Not only that, but the breadth of Fairnie’s interests seemed to give permission to flout the cultural wisdom that you can only really do one thing well. That day I consciously picked up Fairnie’s Renaissance attitude to life and decided that if I couldn’t decide between theology and art and music, then perhaps I would just do them all. Later that year I went to Cambridge to take the degree I’d been putting off, made another album in my spare time, started writing my first book, and just for fun began painting again – something I’d let lie dormant for a number of years.

But perhaps Fairnie’s most important legacy was the impression he left that, despite his many gifts, he was never solely focused on achieving things. People were always more important. I can’t count the times he would just stop for a ten-minute chat; he always left you feeling ten times better, six inches taller, and infinitely more capable of living your life. Knowing him left me with not only with the certainty that you should find out what you’re good at and do it for all your worth – but also that it really is possible to build community around you, and not build a personal empire.

Pausing to contemplate our mortality on Ash Wednesday is not for the sake of making us bleak, but to startle us into an awareness of the gift of life. We’re neither perfect nor immortal: we are merely and yet wonderfully human, and we need to know who we are in our imperfections as well as our gifts in order to live every day as if it counts for something. The call to repentance isn’t supposed to leave us morbidly obsessed with our failings. Instead it’s a call to turn away decisively from what keeps us from God, alienates us from other people, and stops us living well. Lent begins with a challenge to clear out the mental and spiritual clutter in order that we will be ready – when the moment of resurrection comes – to grab life with both hands and live it to the full.

Adapted from Maggi Dawn, Giving it Up: Daily Readings from
Ash Wednesday to Easter Day [Oxford: BRF, 2009]