After Eating the Apricot - The John and Kathleen Show

After Eating the Apricot John Goldingay This was originally published by Paternoster Press, Carlisle, UK, in 1996.
I have not checked this digital text; by all means email me if you find
slips. Introduction:
Scripture and our Life with God The chapters which follow offer examples of the way Old Testament stories
may illumine our lives with God. In this introduction I aim to set that
study in the broader context of the way scripture relates to those lives
before God. There seem to me to be two complementary aspects to that.
Essentially, there are times when scripture determines the agenda and we
respond, and other times when we set the agenda and scripture responds. I
want to consider both of these, but to come at each one obliquely, starting
from an issue and a story. Scripture and our worldly drivenness First the issue. With my wife Ann, who is disabled, I once spent a weekend
at the L'Arche community north of Paris. L'Arche is a fellowship of
mentally handicapped people and their companions, living together. After we
came back I read a book called The Road to Daybreak by Henri Nouwen, the
journal of a year he spent at L'Arche. One of the most interesting aspects
of it was Nouwen's account of the contrast and the tension between the life
he had spent as a theologian and lecturer on life in the Spirit in a
divinity school in the United States, the life he then lived at L'Arche,
and what he subsequently found when he returned to the United States. It
was interesting because it rang bells with our own experience in the church
in Britain, not least in the theological college where I work. Nouwen talks
about the competitiveness of the life of his divinity school and of his own
sense of being forever busy but never sure whether he was really on the
right path. Of course he found that the mere move from divinity school to
community for the handicapped made absolutely no difference in itself,
because the competitiveness and the compulsive busyness were internalized.
They were part of our culture which Nouwen knew were therefore part of him.
People sometimes suggest that one of the faults of a theological college
or divinity school is that it is too cut off from the real world. The truth
may be the opposite. It is a microcosm of the world, very like the world,
haunted as the world is. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this can also be true
of people in ministry. A colleague once told me about research which
suggested that one major reason why people were not offering themselves for
the ministry was that they were not attracted by the frantic, harassed,
under the cat-o'-nine-tails nature of the way clergy live. Ordinands come
out of a world - that is a church - which is compulsively busy and
harassed, are on their way back into such a world, and while they are at
college behave in the same way. And the world looks the other way for
inspiration because all it sees in us is the mirror image of itself.
After nine months at L'Arche, Henri Nouwen went back to North America and
found himself talking with people from the Senate and from business. He
discovered two things. One was the importance of taking Jesus into this
world of busyness so that a person himself was not sucked into its way of
being. The other was that what people wanted to talk about was Jesus,
partly because they themselves did not like their way of being.
How might we separate ourselves from that drivenness that characterizes
the world and the church? This question raises managerial issues, but also
personal issues. Because the world and the church are likely to stay
haunted we need to develop the ability for ourselves to stay separate from
it. God is likely not to be calling us into the desert as a witness against
the world and the church in its drivenness. God is likely to be calling us
to the tougher task of staying in the city, in the church, in the world,
but dwelling in our own place of stillness there. To put it another way,
the world, the church, the theological college, have all the temptations of
the desert. They make us face the demons inside ourselves, and we had
better learn to live with these temptations, with our own demons, precisely
because what we find outside ourselves in the world and the church is what
we also find inside ourselves.
Living with scripture is a potential key to being able to do that.
Anthony Bloom tells a wonderful story about a woman who after breakfast
each morning would go to her room and put her armchair in a position that
would enable her to ignore all other things that might worry her, so that
she could sit in quiet and peacefulness and stillness. There she would knit
before the face of God for 15 minutes, until the room was suffused with
God's presence. There, says Bloom, she would experience how ,at the heart
of the silence' there was the One 'who is all stillness, all peace, all
poise' (School For Prayer, p. 61). In the evangelical tradition the place
of knitting is played by the Bible. (I hasten to reassure evangelical
knitters that you can of course simultaneously belong to the knitting
tradition and the evangelical tradition and the catholic tradition and so
on.) You go into your little room as that woman did, you light your candle
if you find that helpful, and you open the Bible and submerge yourself in
it. You believe that it is the story or script of an alternative world, a
world different from the world's world and the world's church, a world (for
instance) not characterized by compulsive busyness and competitiveness
designed to reassure you that you actually do exist. You want not to be
conformed to this world but to be conformed to the image of Jesus, to be
transformed by the renewing of your mind, and you know that the Bible is of
key importance to that end.
If you are a theological student, you know that studying the Bible in the
lecture room and for the writing of essays can play a significant part in
this. But you know that this study is also part of a system which easily
gets allied with competitiveness and busyness, and you know that you need
to be distanced from that. An important role is played by sitting on your
own with the Bible and your candle and/or your knitting and/or your cup of
coffee (but it is inadvisable to try to hold onto all of these at once: it
conjures up a picture like that suggested by a wonderful story in Judges
which I do not consider later in this book, when Gideon and his army run
down a hill into the Midianite camp, each man holding a torch under a
bucket and simultaneously blowing a trumpet, a feat which by my reckoning
requires at least four hands). You sit not on your own but with God and
with the book God gave us to be the means of conforming our mind to that
alternative world, so that we can live in the everyday world in the light
of the nature of this real alternative world of God's.
Being transformed by the renewing of your mind involves recognizing that
your whole framework of thinking and attitude tends to be adrift, and being
given a whole new framework. It is for this reason that reading the Bible
systematically is so important. It is for this reason that a system of
Bible reading such as that published by Scripture Union is so valuable,
because it refuses to let us off with reading only favourite parts of
scripture, or reading scripture to find the answers to questions we already
have. It is for this reason that the weekday lectionary of a church such as
the Church of England is so valuable, because it is much less affected by
the selectivity which inevitably characterizes the Sunday lectionary. Scripture: story, way of life, vision, testimony What is it about scripture that enables it to rework our frame of
thinking in this way? Its most prominent characteristic is the one on which
we will focus in most of this book. Scripture is distinctively a story in
which we locate our own story.
In our age we are a very existential people. Only the present counts,
only what I have experienced counts. The really important thing is telling
my story. Yet in reality we are what we are because of the story in the
midst of which we are. We are who we are because we belong to our
particular century, because we live in our particular decade, because we
live where we live. When people studying church history in two hundred
years' time write essays on the church in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries they will think we were very odd. Living where and when we do has
many advantages, but it also involves limitations, ways in which our
perspective is skewed. Scripture sets us in the context of a different
story, a story which extends from a Beginning to an End, a story which has
Jesus at its crucial point. It sets us in the context of a story in which
things happen which we have not experienced (yet). It does not thereby take
away from our importance; it enables us to see our story more clearly by
seeing it in context. Reading part of scripture's story can therefore do
amazing things to us.
Such reading needs to take us right inside the story, so that we relive
it. We need to allow ourselves to be sucked into it. When my mother-in-law
watched soap operas on television, she did not merely watch them. She took
part. Marshall McLuhan once taught us that television was cool
communication - it does not involve us and our imagination, as radio does.
Ann's mother had not read McLuhan. When someone was about to do something
unwise,