Author: admin

Yesterday was Advent Sunday. The text for the day was the Prologue of John's Gospel. (Jn1.1-14) Wanting to explore the great paradox of the "outcast and stranger, Lord of all", I preached on John 1.14: "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….and we beheld his glory….full of grace and truth."

What to make of the Colossians claim "He is the image of the invisible God". And how to understand the Hebrews prologue:"The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of God's being…" (Heb 1.3) These two verses are theologically implicated in John's Prologue with its vast window on to the cosmos, creation, light and darkness and the invasion of human history by the Word who was in the beginning with God. "The Word became flesh…lived amongst us…we beheld his glory",

So I reduced all that precise, sophisticated discourse to children's talk level. "Jesus is God’s selfie". That contemporary addiction to the smartphone as both mirror and camera gives us a way into the profoundest truth about God. Jesus is God's selfie.

Is that true? Or is that a sell-out of the rich content of our faith by trivialising truth for the sake of some connectedness to contemporary cultural addictions? Jesus is God's selfie. Is this children’s talk mode of the banal "that's a bit like Jesus" type? The Word became flesh…the image of the invisible God…the exact representation of God's being…". Jesus is God incarnate, embodied, humbled to human form. So, Jesus is God's selfie.

When you look at Jesus you see the face of God. The face of Jesus, that looks on harassed and helpless folk, like sheep without a shepherd, and feeds them; the face that looks on vulnerable people, anxious, frightened, confused, and says "I am the good shepherd"; or that looks on Jerusalem and weeps because it has no idea of the things that make for its peace; the face that looks on the Temple, the house of prayer overrun with consumerist commerce and financial services, and that face determined to overturn oppression wrecks the checkouts. Jesus is God's selfie. 

If Jesus is God's selfie, then it follows that by beholding him, listening to him, Jesus' words are heard as the words of the Word of God incarnate. In Genesis 1 God spoke and it was so. "The Word" from the very beginning is the creative word that accomplishes what it says. So Jesus' words have the accent and accomplishing power of God. "Come unto me all who labour…Son your sins are forgiven….God so loved the world…I if I be lifted up….. I am the resurrection…." What Jesus says echoes what God already says, accomplishes what God already purposes, and foregrounds the heart and thoughts of God for all he has created. Jesus is God's selfie.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who turns water into wine, so that the wedding isn't an embarrassment. The God who in Jesus is the bread of life broken, but who also takes bread and breaks it and feeds the hungry, and who takes bread and says this is my body.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who washes feet, even the feet of Judas; the God who looks power in the eye and face and says "You have has no power unless God gives it"; the God who prays for his enemies who are engineering his death with all the ruthless efficiency of Empire and the blind fear of a religion so under threat it validates violence.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who dies for the sins of the world that whoever believes and trusts that love will not perish but have everlasting life. All of that is what John means, "The Word became flesh and lived amongst us….and we beheld his glory."

Advent is the time to remember who God is, and that Jesus is God incarnate. What we see in Jesus is God. In Jesus, God's selfie, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” The fullest revelation of God is in the humanity of Jesus, “outcast and stranger, Lord of all”. In Jesus God did something so completely new the world can never be the same. The world for all its powers and systems, its structures of control and ambitions towards absolute autonomy, can’t change what God has done and is doing by acting as if it never happened. Jesus, the image of the invisble God; Jesus the exact representation of God's being; Jesus, the Word made flesh; Jesus the light shining in the darkness. Jesus God's selfie.

These are Advent words loudly spoken. They try to put into words God’s final Word, who is the person Jesus. And it is this Jesus, incarnate, crucified, risen and coming, who calls us to a new advent, a new adventure.

Advent is the time when if we listen, behold, think outside the status quo and the givenness of things, we will hear God calling us to new directions, new commitments, new risks, new ways of loving the world as God does.

Earlier today I noticed two books sitting beside each other on my desk shelf. I've used both of them at different times in the past few days. But they aren't books you might expect to be comfortable in each other's company. What has Karl Barth in common with Julian of Norwich? Barth in  his entire Dogmatic project, and in his utter conviction that divine revelation is fully and finally Christological, was leary to the point of hostile towards mysticism and mystical experience.

For her part, Julian's theology and theological style was as far from post enlightenment dogmatics and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas as it's possible to be. Her Revelations are embedded in her deepest identity as "a simple unlearned creature", desiring to understand the Passion of Jesus and thus the love of God. She told these revelations in narrative form, as a series of visions, long contemplated and finally articulated in a work of astonishing beauty, insight and provocative theology. But her theology was profoundly and inescapably subjective. And for Barth all revelation is objective, and all we can ever know of God is by revelation, and that revelation is in the Word, Christ the word made flesh, and in the witness to the word, written and delivered to the church as Scripture.

Of course Julian was equally sure that her Revelations came from God, and their reality depended on their divine origin, and divinely revealed explanation. What we have in Karl Barth and the Lady Julian, are two minds wrestling with the mystery of the love of God, focused on the passion of Christ and the meaning of the cross, and wondering and wrestling with what God has done in Christ and for the world.

For Barth God is all in all; yet, for all her intense subjectivity and mystical ruminations, Julian believes nothing less. Here are her famous words that position her before God as one utterly dependent, and seeking to be utterly obedient:

God, of thy goodness, give me thyself;

for thou art enough for me,

and I can nothing ask that is less

that would be full worship to thee.

And if I ask anything that is less,

ever me wanteth;

for in thee only have I all.

Seven pages into the 800 page first volume on Reconciliation Barth says something theologically similar though in different, more complex, idiom which I have also written as prose poem:

"What unites God and us men

is that He does not will to be God without us,

that he creates us rather to share with us

and therefore with our being and life and act

His own incomparable being and life and act,

that he does not allow His history to be His and ours ours,

but causes them to take place in a common history."

What links these two fragments of theological writing is the common desire to give God his place, to let God be God, to live in an environment of doxology and prayer as the primary sphere and disposition within which to explore the ways of God with His world, especially as seen through the lens of the cross. I have read both Julian and Barth for years, yet I'm not sure I've ever quite grasped the way they share a deep and common crucicentric currency.

The differences in context between a medieval Catholic anchoress writing her spiritual narrative and visions in the vernacular, and a Swiss post-enlightenment Reformed dogmatician writing millions of words over half a century can be overplayed, as if a theological Grand Canyon had opened between them. Differences there are; but what intrigues me is the impact on both, of decades long intellectual and spiritual contemplation on the central mystery of the Christian faith. For both Barth and Julian, the Cross and the Passion of Christ are vividly portrayed and vitally felt both as theological conviction and spiritual experience. Moreover, for both, the Cross and Passion of Christ are the central convictions from which all else that is true of God is derived and must find congruent expression. Christian theology is in Julian and in Barth crucicentric.

Consequently, the human response to the grace revealed and enacted on the cross is self-surrender to the call of the Crucified to take up the cross and follow, to move into a new existence in a life of discipleship and reconciliation that is cruciform, informed and formed by long meditation on Christ crucified. To live in, to inhabit, the words written by another who had thought and prayed and gloried in the cross: "I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives within me. And the life I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."

So the accidental juxtaposition of two books, leads to this essay on two of the church's greatest theologian. They are so different that any comparison that brings them into some agreement might seem ludicrous; and perhaps that is the folly of the cross. That in Christ crucified Christians converge in the reconciliation of deep differences by the even deeper eternal mystery of God's redemptive ways with the world he created, and with humanity created in God's image and for God's glory, which will not be denied.

 

It takes a remarkable balance of capacities to be a farmer and a poet, to plough furrows and write essays, to plant seeds and select words that will grow in the mind and bear humane fruit. For as long as he can remember, Wendell Berry has been writing and cultivating, thinking and harvesting, practising a productive stewardship of the land and an equally productive stewardship of the language. This is a man at home on the farm and in the lecture room, who chooses to plough with horses and to write with a pencil, his deepest thoughts are passionately articulate and passionately agricultural. He is as careful of verbs and nouns and adjectives, as he is of soil, seeds and their fruit.

Coming towards Advent, and a liturgy formed around the ancient dualism of darkness and light, the tensions between light and darkness move towards resolution in the story of how "the true light that enlightens all humanity has come amongst us". What is both earth moving and mind shifting is the cosmic scale and world creating power of the language used in John chapter 1. Shining through the rhythmic prose of John's Prologue (ch1.1-18) are ideas of metaphysical brilliance written as conceptual theology in the form of poetry. The whole chapter moves towards the climactic paradox as the Eternal Creative Word becomes time-bound created flesh in the man Jesus who made his home amongst us.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,… full of grace and truth." The connection between Wendell Berry and the Advent Adventure lies in that paradox. God comes not in words but in a Word. That Word comes in the form of a person, stepping into created relatedness with human beings. This person, Jesus, drinks wine at weddings, cries at missing his best friend's funeral, asks a woman for a drink of water, eats bread, shares bread and even says he is bread. The Eternal Creative Word walks in dust, but walks on water; enables the visually impaired to see, but radiates such luminous truth that those who think they see God's truth so clearly are blinded by a truth they refuse to recognise.

Few contemporary writers have thought so long and hard about the meaning of earth, as Wendell Berry. His poetry is soaked in images of soil and trees, land and woods, skies and mountains, seasons and the weather, horses ploughing and reaping. And all of these images have their daily reality in the life outdoors while also serving as lessons in husbandry of the earth, stewardship of the land, love of life, resistance to brutality, and respect for persons and creatures whose precious lives are both gift and responsibility not to be refused. In other words Berry's poetry is informed by environmental ethics, ecological wisdom, a lifetime's agricultural experience, and rests on a sub stratum of spiritual and moral conviction that this earth is gift to be cared for. Our planet is not our property and it is not a commodity; Earth is organic, living, and provides the soil on which we stand and the air we breathe. It is the God given environment within which created beings can grow, co-exist, discover the ways of justice, peace, mercy and generosity, and do so as wisely grateful stewards of a creationion we did not make and do not own.

And so from Berry to Advent. Because he sees the connection between the Word who became flesh, and the Word of whom it was written, "All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made." Advent and Creation belong together. There is an overwhelmng case for including praise for creation, and lament for human destructiveness in an Advent liturgy. Berry's poetry represents a lifetime's praise and lament, thanksgiving and confession, as he considers the plight of the earth, human responsibility, and the prophetic and urgent task of telling the truth that sets free, and noting and explicating the sins that are destroying our human home.

So here is one of Berry's poems. The light that gives life to everything on this planet is absorbed into the plants that we eat. The theme of light recurs in this poem, as metaphor for feeling bright and thinking gratefully as the mood and the prayer are "bright with praise of what I eat". And the last line contains the cultural converse of the greedy entitlement of the consumer who thinks nothing of what they eat other than as satiation of appetite. The moral imperative extends to how we eat what we eat, and how we view the world that is the farm of creation. 

Prayer After Eating

I have taken in the light

that quickened eye and leaf.

May my brain be bright with praise

of what I eat, in the brief blaze

of motion and of thought.

May I be worthy of my meat.

Wendell Berry is amongst the fellowship of gentle prophets who look on the life of the world with reverence for its mystery and the miracle of its ordinariness. I read him when I sense I'm looking at the world through eyes coloured by cynicism. And he never fails to rebuke the moral despair and spiritual accidie that are the eventual fruits of habitual cynicism. 

The following poem is about everyday sameness redeemed by alertness to newness. What I gain from reading a poem like this is a fresh call to pay attention to my life and to see the minute changes that alter the landscape, whether within or outside. Indeed it is one of Wendell Berry's gifts to show the connectedness between our inner climate and our intentional attentiveness to the outer climate of succeeding seasons, and the rhythm of changes in a world awash with wonder – if we have the time and inclination to notice it. 

Travelling Home, Wendell Berry

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

Advent is coming. It's the season of anticipation, watchfulness, alertness for the signs of coming change. Advent is the liturgical contradiction of that attitude that wearily iterates the cliche "same old, same old". The great Advent adventure is that God is coming.

Prophets' promises are coming to fulfilment.

Notice is served on the status quo.

Same old, same old is being rendered obsolete, contradicted by a much more urgent, immediate and durable reality. "For unto us a child is born…" "Emmanuel, God with us." "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…" Advent is an annual reminder that nothing is forever, except God and all to which God gives life and sustenance.

So when Wendell Berry's poem is read the week leading to Advent I'm reading into it deeper meanings than perhaps he intended. Though Berry is not averse to a sense of the transcendent. he is open to those possibilities that expand human potential, to that which comes from outside our own limited sceme of things, that which enlarges our own constrained visions, that which creatively disrupts the sameness of our routines, those interventions which interrupt all those plans and goals of ours, that are simply too tired and self-serving.

Advent ensures we don't go the same way twice, unless we choose to.

Advent offers the possibility that the life of our going changes, and new ways open up.

Advent is when we celebrate the God who in humility and utter love creates a "natural connection to make intent of accident."

And because Advent is about light, lots and lots of light, that final sentence in his poem is, well, pure Advent!

"To get back before dark is the art of going".

"The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world…."

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not…" 

I've just finished watching The Blue Planet II episode tonight. It was exhilarating and heartbreaking; it was wonderful and shameful; I was delighted and outraged. If you watched it you'll know why. If you didn't, then you owe it to yourself to do so. And yes, here comes the spoiler, the last 5 minutes were shocking. Or at least any human being with a sense of oneness with the world around us, with compassion for the creatures who share this planet with us, with even a modest level of ethical sense or moral principle, would and should be shocked.

For several minutes, while David Attenborough narrated and described the scene, we saw a pod of pilot whales, visibly distressed at the death of a whale calf. The mother had been carrying it around for days. It had died of plastic poisoning, possibly through drinking the milk of a contaminated mother. Rarely, in a longish life of watching nature programmes have I sensed the power of the parable enacted by creatures, nor felt more the potent force of reality brought into the living room through these beautiful creatures performing what can only be described as a dance of lament.

I am unashamedly a biblical theologian, that is, one whose theology as a Christian is rooted in and shaped by ancient texts as they bear witness to Jesus Christ. And when it comes to the world around us, nature, the environment, human stewardship and human agency in the way we treat the earth – all these things are held together in my mind by the doctrine of creation. This isn't about the conflict of science and the Bible, evolution versus creation. I am after bigger fish. This is about what happens when human power and human know how and human technology combine to release the forces that answer to human greed, undermine ethical constraints, and see the world as one global commodity market, and the earth's resources as an infinite source of all we want, all we need, all we can grab, all we can sell, all we can use and all we can waste.

No. I don't expect everyone to share my outrage and sadness, or my anger and shame. But I do expect anyone who half way claims to think Christianly and to read the Bible seriously, to think about what we are doing to our planet and home, and ask if this is what God the Creator intended and intends. For a start the Psalms with their delight in the sheer exuberance and diversity and life affirming extravagance of the world God has made. Then the book of Job with its final chapters where God dares anyone to understand the universe more deeply, love the Creation more profoundly, care for our earth and its creatures more compassionately. For good measure Jesus' teaching and handling of food and water, observation of birds and flowers, and in an oblique throwaway comment that should make anyone who takes Jesus seriously stop and gulp; "Are not five sparrows sold for a penny. Yet not one of them falls to the ground but your heavenly Father sees it."

So what about a pilot whale calf? Does God see it? What does God think? And a pod of mammals so deeply affected you can see it in their behaviour and body movements? Is God's compassion for the whales too? Whatever else The Blue Planet II has shown us, it has shown us ourselves. We are mirrored in the environment we pollute. And our judgement before God is all tied up with what we do about the damage we are doing. "All tied up" is a deliberate choice of terminology – its reference to the turtle also seen in tonight's episode, all tied up in frayed plastic rope, and without hope.

What to do? It will take political will pushed by the impetus of political change to move away from plastics, to begin to limit industrial pollution of the rivers, land and seas, to dethrone the idols of consumerist growth, to change the mindset of mechanised exploitation and national self interest, without stewardship or thought for the environmental consequences. Each of us will have our arguments, and counter arguments. But I defy anyone to watch those five minutes when the choreographed grief of pilot whales conveyed the anguish of our planet, without feeling ashamed of our species. And further I defy anyone who claims to takes the Bible with any kind of seriousness as a way of knowing the ways of God, and to watch those whales without feeling this is wrong.And awakening to the knowledge that our own hearts are echoing the broken heart cry of creation articulated by those beautiful creatures.

The Moor, R S Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Reading and re-reading 'The Moor' is both unsettling and reassuring. Unsettling because the poet recalls a memory of encounter with "whatever God was there", yet that brooding sense of presence seems accidental, incidental, one of those moments which are given and cannot be contrived, and when the one encountered is as yet unknown. Reassuring because throughout the poem there are clues of a grace which is both pervasive and elusive, drawing from the poet, gestures of reverence which set the mood for prayer, though prayers are neither said nor required. In the poem divine grace and human reverence drift like water-bearing mist, seeping with promise, and slowly settling over empty moorland in need of refreshment. 

The moor itself is not explicitly mentioned in the body of the poem. Instead what is described is response to the moor, a range of human feelings gathered into an inner stillness, and then rippled over by the restless presence of "whatever God was there". "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but know not whither it cometh or whither it goeth." (John 3.8 KJV) Only near the end of the poem does the poet move, and walk on; most of the poem describes stillness, silence, and passions reducing to passivity. At the same time, and in contrast to humanly achieved quietness,  Thomas uses the same image of the moor's wild emptiness to describe what was like a church to him. Entering on soft foot may suggest unshod feet, perhaps Thomas is hinting at another wild place with holy ground.

'The Moor' compels softness of step, respect for silence, and due deference of "cap in the hand." The "breath held like a cap in the hand" is yet another biblical hint, this time to those first God-given breaths that animated the first humans; and being dependent on God for breath, the cap in hand is both respectful deference and humble asking, cap in hand.

On that first step onto the moor feelings overwhelm and tears well up at the sense of being called to attentiveness by the rippling waves of grass orchestrated by "the wind that bloweth where it listeth". The sight moves the poet to tears, perhaps of longing and loss, perhaps of gift and gratitude, because in every human life, at different times, both are the work of the heart.

How does "stillness of the heart's passions" become "praise enough"? Perhaps if, and only if, having stepped softly onto the moor,  the poet, and any one of us, take time to see, to feel, to attend to the presence that can be absence.

And that only happens when we hear the commanding imperative, "Be still and know that I am God." The "breath held" suggests an instinctive urge to silence, reinforced by the following abrupt line, "It was quiet". Imposed silence prepares the reader for that particular stillness when the heart's passions subside. Only in such stillness will God make himself felt, if at all. Incidentally Thomas was steeped in the Bible, and this poem could usefully be printed with a sidebar of biblical references, which would include Psalm 46.10 with its command "Be still and know…" as well as references to the Gospels, Genesis, Exodus and Psalms.

"The mind's cession of its kingdom" is the severe self-denying ordinance of a poet suspicious of the totalising claims of rationality, while yet being deeply interested in the intersections of science and religion, and the relation of nature to God, and the attempted rapprochement of honest doubt towards what might constitute an honest faith. But the "cession of the mind's kingdom" also recalls the warnings of Jesus about just who will enter the Kingdom of God. And it is precisely those who cede the mind's kingdom, and who thereby become as little children, hungry to learn, willing to trust and open to growth.

"I walked on, simple and poor…" is a resolution surely reminiscent of the pilgrim, the travelling troubadour, indeed the disciples in the Gospels taking no heed of clothing or money, but choosing to be simple, poor followers on the way, trudging behind the One who had called them to a "cession of the mind's kingdom" and the carrying of a cross into the Kingdom of God.

And as they walked the air crumbled and broke on them generously as bread. The Eucharist is one of the theological constants in Thomas's poetry, the central act of his priesthood, and bread a richly textured and recurring theme. In an early poem 'Bread', Thomas explored the contrasting experiences of hunger and having bread. The poem is also about prayer, and how whether we get what we pray for or no, when we rise from prayer something inexplicable as grace happens. The poem ends loudly echoing resurrection:

…rising he broke

Like sun crumbling the gold air

The live bread for the starved folk.  (Collected Poems, page 93)

Bread crumbles and is broken in order to be shared, and the Eucharist both celebrates and performs that act of self-giving in love and ministry to the people who take in their hands the crumbled bread, and discover in the generosity of bread, the hospitality of God. In the early poems Thomas evokes the 'bread of life' and 'the bread of love', crumbling and crumbled in the Eucharist.

The two stanzas of 'The Moor' are about a wild untamed place which feels like a church, but the poet's experience of stepping onto the moor caused a perplexing loss of the familiar to which his response is wonder edged with that fear which is the beginning of wisdom. Echoing some of his own earlier poems, laced with biblical allusions and clues, the poem is an atmospheric account of one man's discovery that sometimes, without our planning it or even wanting it, prayer happens. Our restlessness is stilled, we stand cap in hand, eyes moistened by the moment, the heart's passions subdued to deeper purpose, and before we know it "the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."  

"It was like a church to me." In a much later poem included in Counterpoint (1990), Thomas brings together modern compromises of faith, scornful regret for an ailing church, and his defiant often quarrelsome faith that at the heart of all things is the Cross, and therefore at the heart of the Church, eucharist.

We have over-furnished

our faith. Our churches

are as limousines in the procession

towards heaven. But the verities

remain: a de-nuclearised

cross, uncontaminated

by our coinage: the chalice’s

ichor; and one crumb of bread

on the tongue for the bird like

intelligence to be made tame by.              (Collected Later Poems page 105)

But the verities remain…", Rising he broke, like sun crumbling the gold air, the live bread for starving folk,… one crumb of bread on the tongue… I walked on, simple and poor, while the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread.   

"Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed…"

That is the opening couplet to one of the finest hymns in the English language, a concise and generous exploration of the kaleidoscope experience of Christian prayer. I mention this hymn here because a number of the words and ideas used by its author, James Montgomery, have significant echoes in the poem "The Moor" by R S Thomas. It is likely that Thomas knew, and even sang Montgomery's hymn. Reading hymn and poem together, several parallels in thought may be traceable, though I think it very unlikely Thomas was in any conscious sense borrowing from Montgomery.

Rather, these two authors were men for whom prayer was a complex form of communication with the Divine, and required the full range of human sensibility, capacity and affective responses. When they tried to articulate the inexpressible and sometimes all but inaccessible truth of communing woth God, and when they attempted any adequate description of experiences both diverse and ambiguous, they settled for oblique references rather than direct definition. In doing so they created space for prayer to be far more than liturgical carefulness or extempore verbalising. Prayer has to be understood on the scale of God rather than reduced to manageable human tidiness. There has to be room for risk, unpredictablity, wildness, and times of silence, absence, unexpected dislocations and surprising revelations of God and world and the heart that dares to pray.

In other words prayer needn't always require words or form. Often without giving a thought to God the experience of God's presence or absence is signalled in the ordinary moments and days of human experience; but also, even if occasionally, when prayer may be furthest from our minds, a presence is intimated in times and places surprising, extraordinary, frightening or consoling.

Before turning to Thomas's poem it is worth pondering several of Montogomery's words and phrases. Prayer happens when "sincere desire" distils into the concentrate of what ultimately we give our heart to. It might find words, or it may simply be whatever it is that sets our heart on fire, with anticipation and with longing. Desire is not wrong; in fact we are more likely to die of complacency than passion. But desire what? Montgomery doesn't say. "The burden of a sigh" is the body language of sadness; can sadness be prayer, with or without words? "The upward glancing of an eye" is that instinctive acknowledgement that however clever, resourceful, vulnerable or empty we are, beyond our own horizons is a mercy and grace all but invisible, but on which we depend, all the while hoping it is dependable. We live by breathing air and oxygen; Montgomery crafts a couplet that uses that hard reality of existence to make prayer a matter of life and death:

"Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air,…"

The echoes of God breathing into the first human beings to make them living souls are unmistakable, and intended. "Native air" is about feeling at home, the smells, the taste, the familiarity, the sense that this is what, and this is where, and this is who, we are made for. In all these phrases there is a reluctance to closely define prayer, even less an interest in creating a doctrine of prayer. Instead human experience of longings articulate and inarticulate, of anxiety that troubles and sadness that burdens, of speech both simple and exalted. Even the deeply human lifegiving yet all but unconscious rhythm of breathing by the contraction and expansion of muscles. Each of these is something like what it is to pray. Prayer is more than any of them, more even than the sum of them, but each of them is capable of reminding us of our capax dei, our capacity for God.

With those thoughts – that prayer can erupt from nowhere, often needs no words, is initiated from outside of us by One we neither control by our will nor constrain by our words, and that prayer is more about desires and tears, our praise and penitence, and that prayer is as natural as breathing and as necessary to life as air – with such thoughts, now read R S Thomas's poem about "The Moor", and hear faint echoes of Montgomery's words.

And to say it again, those echoes are not set up by any conscious borrowing on Thomas's part. The explanation lies in the rich common discourse and reserve of men like Montgomery and Thomas (and George Herbert, but that's another story). Such poets refused to define prayer because in so doing they would be in danger of defining too closely the God who both initiates and answers our prayers, who ambushes when we are not looking, and interrupts when we are speaking and not listening.

This is the God who may choose to be present or absent, and whose choices must always be according to a will that is beyond our understanding but is known to be gracious and generous; a God whose love when felt brings " a moistening of the eye…", and who is ever and forever in the background and foreground of our lives, the proof of which is in those moments when the "air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."  

The Moor, R S Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

"For a number of reasons I have been feeling deeply lately."

I put the quotation marks around that first sentence because I want to think about what it says, and why I wrote it. Feeling deeply is one of those neutral phrases, given its edge and direction by naming what it is that creates or causes deep feeling. The metaphor of depth – like deep water, deep space, deep thought, is intended to convey seriousness, the opposite of superficial; profundity in contrast to shallowness, of lasting worth and weight rather than transience, feelings that endure and have to be endured.

In a revealing essay Denise Levertov tells her friend, "we [human beings] are not that different from one another at the deepest levels. In fact, it is precisely at the deepest levels that we are most alike." Here Levertov identifies a peculiar and precious quality of human relationships. She refers to those resonances we feel when in our deepest experiences, our in-depth moments, we know we are not alone; others have felt this too. The French existentialist philosopher-pilot and novelist, Saint Exupery, considered suffering to consist of the vibrations of the soul that remind us that we are alive and that we are human.

The slightly embarrassing confession that lately "I have been feeling deeply", is best understood against those kinds of thoughts. Over the last several months, within my personal circle of friends, we have journeyed through long debilitating illness, bereavement, newly diagnosed conditions that have forced life changes, people striving against the inner darkness and coldness of depression, or living through the bleak haze of the isolation and shame of mental ill health.

Being a friend is one of the highest callings on our time and energy, our money and our possessions. At least it seems so to me. I hope that more often than not, I hold to Levertov's insight that at the deepest levels we are most human and most alike, and because of that, when I feel deeply I place myself in imagination in the place where my friends live. And consequently I pray too, that in doing so, their suffering and my longing to ease it, share it, lift it, or bear it for them, that such deep feelings are themselves prayers. And as that brilliant agnostic Saint Exupery wrote, not knowing he was describing empathy as prayer, I pray too that the vibrations in my soul that their suffering sets off become reminders to me, and in ways wrapped in mystery and grace, become also to them, intimations of what it means to be most fully human and most fully alive.

One of the reasons I read Levertov, regularly and deeply, is because she not only understands deep feelings; she articulates them, or better, she exegetes them, shows what they are, and explains in much of her poetry how they give the thickening texture to love and compassion, sorrow and sadness, joy and hopefulness. In one place she says to be human is to drift on "murmuring currents of doubt and praise", and to "kneel in awe and beauty." We are mortal, vulnerable to time and circumstance, created in the image of God who is eternal love, and thus made capable ourselves of such love as makes bereavement and grief inevitable, suffering and sorrow inescapable, and at times life all but unbearable.

To contemplate our own feelings, and analyse what "feeling deeply" means, can easily become selfish indulgence, surrendering to the whispering temptations to self-importance, and anxious to preserve our own souls from a too costly encounter with the pain of others. On the other hand, to reflect on our deepest feelings, especially those we experience on behalf of others, whose suffering and struggles and sorrows we know, and choose to bear, that is neither selfishness nor indulgence. It is, or can become through such contemplative 'unselfing', prayer as passion, perhaps even prayer as passionate identification with the Passion of Christ and taking up the cross and condition of those we love.

When Paul talked of filling up the sufferings of Christ he spoke of what he barely grasped, and hardly dared give words. Nevertheless, he spoke of the final realities which intersected at the Cross, the nexus of time and eternity, where love with open arms eclipsed hate, mercy absorbed judgement, and suffering redeemed suffering by bearing it. There, at the Cross, God in Christ felt deeply, the sin of the world, felt more deeply still love infinite in mercy for that same world, and then in the desolation of loss and God-forsakenness, Jesus the Christ, the Word become flesh of our flesh, descended to death and the final relinquishment of all feeling. 

Is that too theologically stretched, to compare feeling deeply with the anguish of God in Christ? Perhaps. But at times of grief and sorrow and sadness, when deep feelings of sympathy and love for others preoccupies the mind and sets up those humanising vibrations in the soul, there is an inclination, an inner turning towards that one place where all of this is understood in the deep recesses of the divine life of the Triune God. That is, for me at least, the place where when feeling deeply, I am confident of being understood, and under-girded.  

 

Essays. The word is a reminder of student days with looming deadlines and frantic accumulation of words to meet the word count. But the essay is an important way of thinking. A good essay assignment provides a laboratory for thought, with limiting parameters which focus the subject and discourage irrelevance, diversions and imbalance. Books of essays therefore tend to be repositories of crisp, lucid, concentrated, considered writing. They may be organised under an overarching theme, or strung like pearls according to size and subject fit, or they are all written by the same person and their particular style, interests and writing goals make them self-selecting.

I like reading essays. Whether books of essays by one author, Journal articles pushing the boundaries of the discipline, Feschriften honouring the life work of distinguished scholars, or papers published post- conferences on whatever. The variety of writers in essay collections enriches perspectives, provides variety of approach, or specific examples of in-depth study of the detail in a restricted and specific small corner of what may be an enormous subject. On the other hand a book of essays by the same author gives access to the thought forms and intellectual wrestlings of one mind, either over the range of a subject or over a period of time as thought has gestated, germinated and grown.

Currently I'm reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson. If you haven't heard of her she is the author of the novels Gilead and Lila. If you haven't heard of them, treat yourself to storytelling that combines the sharp wisdom of a compassionate philosopher, the honest observation of someone who loves humanity and likes human beings, and who quite naturally tells her stories with God on or just over the horizons. Robinson is a theologian, a public intellectual, a precise and observant critic of contemporary Western culture, in all its unpredictable ebb and flow. Her standpoint is unabashedly Christian, and her criteria for what is good and worth defending are rooted in a moral philosophy informed by wide reading across the major humanities and sciences. She is not an easy read. She is a tough thinker who feels deeply, and an author who expects her readers to feel the effects of the workout in the muscles of the mind, not always used to such strenuous effort. But the effort is worth it. 

If you want self-help positivity, look elsewhere. If thinking about what it means to be human, and to wrestle with the mystery and joy and terror of existence, is too much like hard work, stick with tweets, memes and feel-good literature. If the reality of a world drifting dangerously close to self-harm seems mere scaremongering, and you prefer the alternative and virtural realities churned out for our comfort and to keep our complacency levels viable, then Robinson's wisdom won't help you, even though one of her heroes diagnosed your condition decades ago: "humankind cannot stand too much reality." (T S Eliot).

But if you're tired of cheap consoling clichés, perplexed by the unravelling of local and global communities, open to analyses of our cultural shifts that pays serious attention to history, literature, religion and humane learning, then read Marilynne Robinson's essays. They are astringent in their criticism, both cleansing and  stinging. She cares deeply and patiently for human goodness, and believes it is found in human communities, from households to villages, from cities to countries. She is unafraid of the conversation that must take place between science and religion, and she is a wonderful facilitator in that conversation. She knows that liberal democarcy is in trouble, and knows at least some of the reasons, and a few possible remedies. Read her, and ponder the wisdom which is built on foundation pillars plunged deep into the bedrock of a faith at home in the Bible, articulated in reasoned conversation, funded by humane learning, and which is tempered by reverence, awe and a simmering joy in the wonder of things viewed from the truth that God is.   

Here are some points to ponder from her book When I was a Child I Read Books

"In my Bible Jesus does not say, I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free market principles." (139)

"It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community. The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another."(33)

"Wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one's own inevitable share in human fallibility." (27)

"I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification." (21)

"At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together make the world salubrious, savory and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental." (93)

"I think it is a universal sorrow that society, in every form in which it has ever existed, precludes and forecloses much that we find loveliest and most ingratiating in others and in ourselves. Rousseau said men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has been the role of the outsider to loosen these chains, or lengthen them, if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise." (92-3)

 

Sometimes the Apostle Paul leaves you no room for maneouvre. LIke a playground tough guy he backs you to the wall and is in your face with his face. The same zeal and uncompromising demanding strictures that made him a persecutor of Christians in the first place, can sometimes make him sound like some spiritual absolutist, even a religious bully.

"I consider everything as loss for the sake of Christ" he writes, with a force that make you wonder if he snapped his stylus writing that. All the advantages and  status of being a highly educated, publicly approved, validated and authorised religious policeman he now considers rubbish – and that word rubbish is a euphemism for what the older translation called, in a less sqeamish word, dung. 

That's why reading Paul is an exercise in astringent theology. None of the soft theology of self-care masking our hunger for spiritual convenience; no concessions to the slow, the sensitive or the moderate who might be put off by too much promised discomfort; not a minute's consideration of those who might want to be reasonable and comfortable and at least take their time to think it through. No. Just the starkly stated absolutes. All. Everything. Nothing.

But the key to understanding Paul is to recognise that his greatest absolute was Christ, the one who apprehended him, arrested him, stopped him in his tracks, confronted him with the monster he was becoming with the question, "Why are you persecuting me?"

In most of his letters Paul takes off in flights of theological vision about this Christ who is cosmic in reach and grasp, eternal in purpose and perspective; this one who is equal with God yet surrendering all claims for the sake of a love that would stop at nothing to love a broken creation back to wholeness, and love God's alienated children back to friendship with God. Over years, Paul forged vast theological words like reconciliation, grace, redemption, faith, justification, sin, forgiveness, hope, kenosis, parousia and poured into them all the passion and pain of the story of God, revealed in Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen.

Late in life, by the time he is writing Philippians, Paul knows he's no longer playing a game of averages or varied options, as if there was the luxury of selecting a suitable worldview from the supermarket of Greco-Roman religions and philosophies. He's on trial for his life, and when that happens most folk, Paul included, begin to wonder what that life has been about, what matters and what matters most. Hence the strong words and unyielding conviction. Christ is everything, and since that absolute reversal of direction on Damascus, he has known that he absolutely belongs to Christ. His whole life meaning is derived from that hinge moment of soul interrogation – "Saul, Saul why are you killing me?"

Ever since, all faith-seeking and faithful and even faith-struggling readers of Paul are likewise questioned about their seriousness of purpose, faithfulness to calling, and responsiveness to the One whose death makes other lives, like ours, worth living. He discovered something cross-carrying Christians inevitably come to know. It is Christ who turns work into service, career into calling, vitality into vocation. It is the life of Christ lived in us that transforms personality, shapes and conforms character to Christlikeness. It is the love of Christ that constrains us, compels us, controls us so that there is a Christ echo in our voice and words, a Christ image in our actions, a Christ love in our relationships, hints and clues and glimpses of God at work in ways beyond our own ability, touching us with grace and teaching us of hope and peace and forgiveness. In other words, slowly and maybe reluctantly, sporadially but repeatedly, we are learning in our own way to say, "For me to live is Christ."