Hymn: Pure Act of Being
Pure act of Being: our Lord the Transcendent
Imagination spills forth from your hands
Pure act of working your joy to fulfilment:
Breathing your image in woman and man.
Celestial poetry of cosmos and cradle
Transposing eternity’s rhythm and rhyme
Distilling all hope to a cry in a stable:
A single bright essence in space and in time.
Jesus, your love is a draught for the thirsty
In fascination we sip your life-words
Renewing our vision with new eyes of mercy
Lifting our heads to consider the birds.
Abundant River, in ceaseless procession
Blessing, affirming: the Dove and the Voice
Jesus, self-emptying Servant of Heaven –
Sovereign, submits to humanity’s choice.
Holy Community, bliss undivided
Thrust wide your arms on our cruelty’s cross
All our black thoughts to your body confided
Die with our sin and rise new from the dross.
Pure act of following where Jesus beckons
Sweated with doubt and Gethsemane fear
Defeating with weakness what power misreckons
On to Eternity’s Jubilee year.
Commentary: Composing Theology
I’m a worship leader – it’s my job to help the church to praise God. Debates about how best to do this are as old as the hills, but the current conversations around worship have become rather dull terrain. In many lively churches – my own is fairly typical – ‘contemporary’ worship has largely won the day. The urgency of ‘relevance’ in worship for the unchurched majority has usurped concerns for the tradition and a certain kind of artistry in both form and content. In some ways, this has been a necessary corrective to a mothballed and complacent hymnody that no longer speaks to the man in the street; I have argued this case myself more than once. However, in several corners there seems to be growing sense that the winning of the ‘worship wars’ by a genre of simple (sometimes simplistic) Scripture-toting soft-rock songs has been something of a hollow victory.
Why are we fighting about it?
Who is the ‘man in the street’ really anyway?
Have we even bothered to ask ‘him’ what he is capable of comprehending?
Don’t misunderstand me: I love contemporary worship, and I meet God through it, and thank him for it. But everyone agrees that the health of the church requires a worshipping diet that is both emotionally and theologically nourishing. The intriguing way in which songs teach theology has long been noted, and the marginalization of this dimension frequently lamented. One of the things we aim to do at Westminster Theological Centre is to rekindle the romance of beautiful theology and charismatic experience where we recognise the two have become estranged. Worship is one such meeting place. Both the greatest hymns of the ages and the best modern songs work to enlighten our minds, hearts and spirits by opening a window onto the majesty, mystery and friendship of the triune God, revealed gloriously in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. It is his Spirit we invite to inhabit our praises as we seek to follow in his way.
So, here is my attempt to reimagine something of the scope and narrative of the hymns of the past, tapping into what I believe the Spirit is revealing to the Church now. As such, I have retained a traditional metre and rhyme scheme, employing both familiar biblical metaphors and some of my own poetic riffs on those images. I hope sincerely not to render truth inaccessible by verbosity, but rather to invite the hearer to engage with the language imaginatively and questioningly. If too many old hymns languish in linguistic impenetrability, then too many modern songs simply give everything away on the first hearing. If my attempt at a new hymn in the great tradition invites the reader both to worshipfully encounter and to faithfully examine the ideas it brings up about God, then I will have in some way succeeded. If it winds up glorifying God, I will have truly succeeded!
The lyrical themes came out of a series of spoken and email exchanges with my teacher Brad Jersak. These discussions centred on kenosis, the self-emptying of Jesus (see Philippians 2), and how this illuminates our doctrine of God – one of Brad’s key interests and at a touchstone of his forthcoming book. Pondering these exchanges and coming to peace and joy in my own heart with the conception of God that they invoked, I began to wonder if these theological insights could be reflected in poetry or song.
The title and controlling idea of the hymn is the idea of God as ‘pure act’. This concept comes principally from Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica 1.Q2.A2.). Aquinas set out to prove that as the Divine ‘First Mover’, God must exist as ever-‘acting’, rather than in a state of prior ‘potentiality’. To attribute to God such potentiality, Aquinas argued, would suggest something less than perfection in God, who is perpetually ‘full’ in himself, and can never change to become greater than he already is. It’s a rather technical point the way Aquinas frames it, but as a concept, God as ‘pure act’ can help us out in a number of ways. The classical conception of God as immutable (unchanging) can be misconstrued to suggest a static, even inert nature. But if God is pure act, then he retains his eternal immutability while also being released (in our conceptual framework) to be the dynamic, ingenious, ascending/descending God whom we see in Scripture, and indeed, who really meets us in prayer. Here also is the radically ‘free’ God whom Walter Brueggemann celebrates – the God who begins the transformation of a corrupt, controlling society through the inspired and liberating words of prophets and poets (see The Prophetic Imagination, 6-7; 40). Put another way, we say with St. John that God is love, and love is always more of a verb than a noun. Of course, all of this is supremely revealed in the dynamic life and actions of Jesus, the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15).
Just as a Christocentric hermeneutic dominates our vision, so a Christological narrative gave my hymn its structure. So we move from creation, to incarnation, on to the ministry and teaching of Jesus, lingering for a time on his baptism: a luminous moment of dynamic Trinitarian unity that hinges upon the kenotic act of a perfect God who is baptised by sinful human hands. Then comes the volta or shift – God’s sovereignty is here revealed in his very submission to humanity’s choice, our choice, ultimately, to crucify him. The low point of the Cross is, paradoxically, the high point of this kenotic vision: ‘the kenosis of love is the plerosis (fullness) of glory’ (Brad Jersak, in email correspondence). The verse concerning Cross and Resurrection points to my view of the Atonement, into which I shan’t go in detail here, but which perhaps is clear in my emphases – especially on the undivided nature of the Trinity.
The eagle-eyed reader will note that my final verse echoes the first, with the restatement of the idea of ‘pure act.’ However, the act being described here is the act of discipleship – a human act, baptised, as it were, in the saving grace of God. This is a nod to the idea of theosis – that in Christ, we are brought up into participation in the divine life. God, as pure act, makes our acts pure and we become like him in our dynamic life of discipleship. As I was writing the hymn, I felt strongly that I should try to reflect the sheer difficulty of this journey, as part of an honest depiction of the cost of the cross-bearing life. This is something that the old hymns frequently fall down on – too often the story shifts straight from salvation to heaven without due recourse to the struggles we face in the meantime. Further, as my penultimate line suggests, we must be committed to conquer, not through violence and coercion, but through weakness, as Christ did; this is the great scandal and hope of the Christian life. The final line is, of course, a look forward to heaven, and I think, a particular view of heaven which is maybe not so much like the eschatology of the old hymns. I was greatly struck by John Howard Yoder’s compelling case for the spiritual-political reality of Jubilee as the paradigmatic background to Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God – a comprehensive societal transformation, giving rise to a radically grace-filled domain of justice and love (The Politics of Jesus, 64-68). Kingdom and King become almost synonymous here, because this unchanging-yet-dynamic existence brings us back once again to the character of God. To enter the kingdom is to be united with the Pure Act of Being for whom we all long (not least as we come to worship) and who is extended to, transforms and ultimately enfolds us through his beautiful grace.
Martin Little works as a Worship Co-ordinator for an Anglican church in Bath, and as a Hub Director for www.wtctheology.org.uk
He blogs poetry at https://bryanmartinlittle.wordpress.com/