Came across an old journal I kept during a week at St Deiniol’s library, near Hawarden, a few miles from Chester. For those who don’t know this quaint, unique, old fashioned haven for Casaubon like scholars, religiously inclined eccentrics, aspiring eremites and many other interesting visitors, it still claims to be the Uk’s only residential library. It’s welcome is to ‘interested persons wishing to puruse divine learning’.
Gifted by Gladstone’s family after the great man’s death, it retains its Victorian ethos, with oak shelving, occasionally creaky chairs, the book shelves designed by Gladstone for maximum books in allotted space. It’s a mixture of the delightful and the odd; the community works to the gentle rhythm of matins and vespers; the bedrooms are basic, the food OK. But the setting and the building, the ethos and the very idea of a library you can live in!
While there I’ve noted in the Journal that Sheila’s uncle died, and we went to the funeral from holiday – which meant me searching Oxfam shops for a dark tie! We also did some "ye olde churche" viewing, chapels mostly. One of my study projects was to prepare a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer which would span Advent and the first three Sundays of the new millenium – I gave them the title ‘Is Your Faith Y2k Compatible?’
From my notes I have a comment from Gerhard Ebeling’s The Lord’s Prayer in Today’s World. There is a combative, non-submissive note to Ebeling’s theology of prayer, reminiscent of P T Forsyth’s insistence that prayer is a struggle of wills, and petition and intercession are God’s call to us to trust, to believe, to defy the will-lessness and resignation that too quickly become a giving in to the way things are. Importunity, sheer dogged desire for change is a more Christian spiritual virtue than passive or premature surrender to things as they are. In speaking of the Father who is in heaven, Ebeling warns:
It seems religious to put God beyond time, as the Eternal, and to keep time well clear of God, as being something limited, earthly, human. But with this kind of piety we make God unreal, and reality Godless. (page 72)
I still remember the thrill of reading that, and still find that comment a needed corrective to over spiritualised prayer. Into the limited, earthly and human, comes God in Christ, with love unlimited, holy love incarnate in the earthly and human, transforming existence, human life, and creation itself. The one in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, in whom creation is summed up and comes together, and who reconciles all things making peace by the blood of the cross, is not one who can be placed beyond time. So why should prayer be timid, or resignation to circumstance be deemed a higher spirituality?
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