What do I value?
My best good news is people. I believe in people like I used to believe in God. Because of this I believe in the meaning that people find and create for their lives.
We need to find meaning to be able to live with the chaos around us. We need a sacred canopy under which we can live. We need to be storied, folklored, traditioned into life. This must happen or nothing happens.
“either our lives become stories or there’s just no way to get through them.” Coupland
“we feel ourselves to be incapable of countering chaos by constructing, in fact or even in imagination, a human world. Political cynicism expresses our sense of practical impotence, and the poverty of our imagination is evident in the collapse of any common grammar of ends and means, of value and virtue.” Nicholas Lash
“This is nightmare par excellence, in which the individual is submerged in a world of disorder, senselessness and madness. Reality and identity are malignantly transformed into meaningless figures of horror. To be in a society is to be ‘sane’ precisely in the sense of being shielded from the ultimate ‘insanity’ of anomic terror.” Peter Berger
My good news, is that this text is somewhere that the human story becomes re-opened. A process that first involves suspicion with the story we have received, and then imagination for how this story can become our own.
Suspicion
My good news is that our disconnectedness is genuine, and results from a faulty handing on, and a misconceived receiving of our tradition.
Much of the tradition we are handed has become frozen, and disconnected from its roots. It has become something solid and unchanging, missing the attributes of a living tradition, that it is able to flex and change to meet each new situation.
“telling legitimately disconnected people to find the source of the discontent in themselves was to tell them to shrink further from testing their powers in the society around them” Donald Meyer
My instinct to be suspicious of simplified answers, to protest about inadequacies in the story and hyper-sensitivity to papering over the cracks, turns out to be not such a bad thing after all. This suspicion and protest that we share is valuable, because it leads us to question and grapple with the trappings of our tradition so we can both understand and own it.
Part of the genius of our peers is our sensitivity to the deadness of a closed future and conversation and the ability to refuse that future in favour of our own imagined worlds. Worlds that may be smaller and haphazard when set beside the monoliths of our parents, but that have enormous power for the reopening of the conversation of our lives.
This connects us strongly to Jesus program of diss-assembling and subverting the tradition’s perceived view of the world and the future. We find him dividing opinion and challenging the establishment. Wild and un-containable, he gets his hands all over the established lines of meaning. He seems ever busy rewriting expectations, standing up to the weight of the tradition’s perceived values and creating space for something both entirely new and genuinely old.
Imagination
My good news is that the bible is one of the texts which people through history have found meaning. Furthermore it bears the marks of this process, so it is not a little worn, ragged and thread-bear.
The ability of the text to provide meaning is not, as we have often thought, through a communication of truth. Rather meaning comes from the genuine ownership and connectedness between the text and its community.
“Scripture does not offer eternal truths or theological doctrines but a set of stories, along with the various ways in which the believing communities have found life in those stories” Callaway
“The bible as canon may be best understood as a paradigm on how to monotheise.” James Sanders
“The layered canonical resources reveal both testimony and countertestimony that declare that the legitimated recital is partly false because it is partial” Middleton/Walsh
“It is possible that the testimony of Israel is to be seen, even in out own time, not as the dominant metanarrative that must give order and coherence across the full horizon of social reality, but as a subversive protest and as an alternative vision that invites criticism and transformation.” Brueggemann
My good news is that we, us right here and now, can continue this hands-on editing process. We are well placed to re-start the whole process for a fresh set of people. Although for us the text is technically, although not necessarily, closed. How we read this text is still very much open. Once we have debunked the closed tradition we often encountered growing up, we start to discover ways in which we can work imaginatively with the text again, and the text can work surprisingly with us.
In the gospels I find Jesus instilling in people their ability to be part of this process. And his very lived out message provides resources for them to get started on the road back to ownership and participation in what they believe and who they are. We see God declaring both his interest and investment in the unfolding of the new possibilities for this group of people.
It becomes difficult to determine where his involvement stops and the meaning-full conversations begin. His spirit intermingles the community as they imaginatively take hold of their tradition. So much so that their collective meanings mysteriously find wisdom and in part join and become his spirit.
“Yahweh lives in, with, and under this speech [text], and in the end depends on Israel’s testimony for an access point to the world.” Brueggemann
Andy Robertson
