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I've frequently played around with two of my long time enthusiasms, birds and theology. Ornitheology is a form of celebration of the beauty of created nature, birds and God, vulnerability and protection, not one sparrow falls to the ground, said Jesus, but God notices, and is sad.

As long as I can remember I've been fascinated by the beauty and peculiarities of birds, especially the smaller birds native to Scotland and which used to be far more numerous than they are now. The impact of human activity on those other creatures who share our countryside has been a mixed bag of blessing and devastation. Many of the most common birds are now in serious decline, several are moving towards endangered status.

So on a long walk along the Moray Coastal Way today it was a joy to be accompanied at various stages by birdsong and bird movement. I stood several times just listening to skylarks, that trilling music of exuberant joy in flight, and for me a reminder of lying in a farm cottage bedroom, window open at 6.a.m. and hearing precisely that melody of the blythe spirit of Spring.

Walking along a path which at times became a gorse canyon there was a heartening series of encounters with yellowhammers. Ever since as a boy I discovered a yellowhammer's nest in a hawthorn hedge, and identified it in the ISpy book of birds by its warning call, I've found in this beautiful bird a heartening song, and a source of uplift in that brassy yellow face.

Wrens are amongst those that due to human encroaching on land and living space are far less common today. So when one decided to eyeball us on the path that too was cause for a surprising hopefulness and gratitude for such courage contained in one of nature's loveliest miniatures.

Walking and looking, standing and listening, can become intentional acts of devotion. Prayer and how we relate to God is complex as it is, given our own variations of mood, experience, circumstance and life story. For myself a landscape can be a psalm, sky reflected on a river a silently breathed alleluia, a skylark song a private audience with one of the greatest ever singers, and the rhythm of waves and the sight of those white curved surges of energy collapsing in delight at reaching shore, is a liturgy of which I could never tire.

And the swallows have returned. Reminding me, as they always have since I first read Psalm 84, that a long time ago a poet stood and looked up to the joists of the temple and saw a swallow's nest, and was reminded of the imaginative care and faithful attentiveness of God: "Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a place to nest in your house."

Saturday’s Silence. R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading, Richard McLauchan, (University of Wales Press, 2016) £85

In the Easter Triduum silence is the in between time. The Friday cry “It is finished” is history, and the Sunday announcement “He is risen” is unspoken. A hiatus has opened with no promise of closure. For the first disciples, there was no guarantee there was anything, anything at all, after the finished work of burying Jesus and sealing the tomb. Holy Saturday is the time and place of waiting, silence, numbness, when thought falters, hope retreats, and words dare not break the silence for fear of confirming the worst fears.

1. S. Thomas’s poetry has long been recognised as the poetics of divine presence and absence, of speaking and silence. God and the ways of God in the theopoetics of Thomas is a mystery which is inevitably elusive and even intentionally evasive of human grasp. This book approaches Thomas’s poetry by way of a theology of Holy Saturday, a recognition that the work of the priest poet can be read as a way into, and beyond, the paschal mystery of Christ incarnate, crucified and risen.

Throughout, McLauchlan brings Thomas into conversation with three theologians all of whom have thought deeply and long about Holy Saturday as an essential stopping place in the narrative of the Gospel. In that silence in which there is no guaranteed future, the stillness beyond agony finally exhausted in death, the utter self-giving of God resides in the patient waiting that precedes without anticipation or certainty, the next movement and the next word.

Hans urs Von Balthasar argues powerfully throughout his book Mysterium Paschale of Saturday when “God falls silent in the hiatus…and takes away from every human logic the concept and the breath.” The Cross and Resurrection by Alan Lewis is in its own right a remarkable journey of the mind and heart of a theologian writing of Holy Saturday from within his own paschal story of terminal illness. Easter Saturday is for Lewis a powerful metaphor of our society as ”an Easter Saturday society, in the throes, wittingly or not, of its own demise.”  The third participant in McLauchlan’s conversation is Rowan Williams, and especially Williams’ fascination with, and insistence upon, the strangeness of God.

The chapter on ‘Divine Silence and Theological Language’ weaves an analysis of several of Thomas’s poems into a discussion about the limits, necessity, moral seriousness and ultimate inadequacy to its Subject of all theological language. This chapter points the way through the book. McLauchlan quotes Janet Soskice in support of the limits of language to describe that which transcends description: “The apophatic is always present with the cataphatic, and we are in danger of theological travesty when we forget that this is so.”

What Thomas’s poems are determined to avoid, hence their portrayal of the elusiveness, even intentional evasiveness of God, is just this falling into ‘theological travesty’ as the outcome of prematurely claimed certainty. Poems such as ‘Nuclear’, ‘Shadows’ and ‘The Gap’ are explored in conversation with modern theological voices equally diffident about the propensity of theological language to try to say the unsayable, as if God could be contained in human discourse without remainder. Easter Saturday rebukes what P T Forsyth called ‘the lust for lucidity’; it is a bleak reminder of Saturday silence as a time and place stripped of all meaning. And when the silence following death by crucifixion intimates the silencing of the Logos, language itself is eclipsed by silence as the communicative mode of the Word by whom all things were made. As to whether the creative Word will once again be heard?

The whole book is written along similar veins, as the poems, and not only the individual poems, but the poems read together and interpreted inter-textually, are used to explore the dimensions and “resonances of history’s most profound silence.” Reading the poems, argues McLauchlan, is a spiritual discipline, an entering into the deepest mystery and farthest echoes of the Word made flesh, crucified and buried, and utterly alone on Easter Saturday. Such reading can be transformative, but involves a pilgrimage along the via negativa, a willingness to bear the abysmal silence that has no guarantee of resurrection or of creation made new. Thomas’s poetry and its implied theology, is “resistant to our controlling tendencies, our desire for speedy resolution and instant meaning.”

The silence of Holy Saturday portrayed in the style, layout, blanks and words of Thomas’s poems, becomes for McLauchlan the ultimate silence which gives meaning to all silences between words. Easter Saturday resonates throughout creation, and vibrates as unresolved mystery within all attempts at articulation, explanation and communication. The “sign in the space / on the page” provides a glimpse “of the repose of God”. In the Concluding chapter the question is asked about whether the paschal dimension of silence can be represented in forms of art other than words. For example, Michaelangelo’s Pieta, Bach’s Mass in C Minor, a Rothko series, or the music of Messiaen. McLauchlan thinks it can be, and is, and such spiritual discipline through the arts challenges our preconceptions and refashions our vision. The last sentence of the book explains the author’s burden in writing of Thomas as he does: “As all Christian renewal is forged through cross, grave and resurrection, that transformation through silence is a transformation achieved through the silent second day, through the silence of Holy Saturday.” (129)

The book presupposes some familiarity with the concepts and concerns of contemporary theology, and assumes a willingness to read the selected poems in the company of a perceptive commentator, and to do so without interrupting the flow with questions which inevitably surface. This is a particular interpretation of Thomas, an experiment in listening stereophonically to the words and the silence between words. It is also an invitation to the spiritual discipline of reading this particular poet who is now content with divine absence, and now complains of it, for whom ambiguity is all but a theological principle given the limits of language and the constraints of human flesh.

Those familiar with Thomas’s poetry will love this book, if they can afford its price. It is carefully argued, theologically attuned to contemporary angst and questionings, alert and fully engaged with modern theology, and it executes well the inter-disciplinary conversation between literary analysis and theological understanding. It has a superb and wide ranging bibliography, an index, and rich endnotes some of them quite extensive with further comment.

The poems of George Herbert have been to me a source of literary fascination, Christ-centred devotion, theological deepening, and spiritual provocation ever since I discovered him more than thirty years ago. Seventeenth century poetry can be heavy, laden with allusions now lost, or at least remote to us in a digital, image-soaked culture. In that culture we are fast losing the skilled precision of grammar, and syntax, built with near endless possibilities of words connected and inter-connected within a tradition of continuity constantly refreshed by innovation, invention and the disciplined commitment to enriching rather than impoverishing the language we use for our most profound, or playful or prayerful experiences.

This is Good Friday. I have slowly read through "The Sacrifice", sixty three stanzas, 252 lines, and every fourth line either the wondering sorrow of the question "Was ever grief like mine", or the equally awe-struck certainty in the affirmation, "Never was grief like mine." Throughout this long dolorous walk on the via dolorosa, Herbert imagines the inner anguish, and soul-crushing questioning of Jesus. The bruised and battered humanity experienced in the heart, mind and fleshly body of the Eternal Word, the Creator made creaturely, and assaulted by the creative evil of creatures made in the image of God, but now bent on marring, breaking and erasing that image of the invisible God whom they encountered, unknowingly, in Jesus.

Herbert takes a whole Medieval tradition of meditation on the passion of Jesus, and weaves it with a rich complexity of biblical reference and allusion so that, as Herbert the Protestant parson reflects on the core and climax of the Gospel passion narratives, and weaves a tapestry of scriptural imageand traditional Catholic liturgy, creating an imaginative soliloquy from the mouth of Jesus. It is a long poem; there is a monotonous rhythm, a slow stepping journey from the betrayal and arrest in Gethsemane, through the halls of Herod and Pilate, through the abuse and mockery of career soldiers careless of human suffering, and on up the hill to crucifixion, mockery, self questioning and final surrender.

Some day I would like to create a Good Friday service with this poem as the centre-piece, bracketed by hymns such as When I survey the Wondrous Cross and O Sacred Head sore wounded. "The Sacrifice" is a poem that demands time, attention, patience and a willingness to be delayed by a sorrowful story slowly told, a narrative composed of complaints at the cruelty and complacency of those whose "bitternesse / windes up my grief to a mysteriousnesse…" Interestingly that word "mysteriousnesse" sits at line 127 almost exactly at the centre of the entire poem of 262 lines. It's quite possible, Herbert being a master of metaphysical poetry and the linguistic conceits of the age, that the word is deliberately fixed there as a hinge point in a poem where the narrator is emotionally baffled, spiritually bewildered, physically battered, and cognitively beaten up by the extremities of suffering laden with ironies which borrow their weight from the identity of Who it is who suffers, the Eternal Creator on whom the lives of the creaturely perpetrators depend. 

The poem ends in words of relinquishment, but with an undercurrent of defiance.

But now I die: now all is finished.

My wo, man's weal: and now I bow my head.

Onely let others say, when I am dead,

                                Never was grief like mine.

"My wo, man's weal." Or as Isaiah says, "He was wounded for our transgressions….with his stripes we are healed." Or Paul, "He who knew no sin was made to be sin so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." For all the controversy down the centuries about the meaning and extent of the atonement, Herbert condenses the "mysteriousnesse" at the heart of our faith into a distilled couplet of two clauses, two words each. That's the genius of Herbert.   

If you have time, and want to read The Sacrifice sometime today, there is a good and clearly legible version here.  

I've just finished William Boyd's latest novel, Sweet Caress. I've read a number of his novels over the years, none of them likely to make my all time top 20 novels, but each of them worth the reading. My favourites are probably Brazzaville Beach and Any Human Heart. These two novels exhibit two of Boyd's strengths as a novelist. Any Human Heart is written as a lifelong journal and a micro study of one person's life through all the relationships that make up that life. It begins to matter how the book ends because the central character has begun to matter, and how his life turns out is something the reader wants to know, having accompanied him though much of the 20th Century.

Brazzaville Beach is a much more substantial novel which reads at times like a thriller and at other times explores profound and at times disturbing aspects of human behaviour. A struggling marriage, higher maths, and ecological science and research into primates all weave together in a story that is a modern parable. I found echoes of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Graham Greene's A Burnt Out Case. Not that Boyd borrows from them or is merely derivative; more that he writes of Africa in a way which respects its otherness, its mystery, and recognises the ambiguity, even ambivalence of human scientific dominance as a way of managing the world through control, especially when that control is through applied science and technological mastery. The menace of the unknown is disturbingly convincing in the violent tribalism of chimpanzee colonies, with their echoes in human societies of aggression, cruelty and violence.

Sweet Caress is less compelling than Brazzaville Beach, but has more drive and impetus than Any Human Heart. It is the life story of a woman photographer from 1917 till 1977, the story told as narrative interspersed by reflections from the author later in life. The book also has a number of photos, illustrations of the story – I found these unconvincing, ordinary and unnecessary in a novel, and annoyingly fuzzy; leave them out and save 20-30 pages per volume. The early life is of a girl raised in a home then boarding school, desperate for security, finding her way later in London as a photographer's assistant. Out of this comes a daring experiment covertly photographing the sub-culture of pre-war Berlin. The subsequent exhibition in London made her name, or at least made her infamous. From there to America, then to France as a photographer accompanying the invasion force, then followed marriage to a war hero, widowhood, a year as a war photogtrapher in Vietnam, and on the way through her life, encounters with the six men who were her lovers, one of whom was her husband.

The central character is Amory Clay, and her story is rooted in her search for love, with an equal passion for photography. Through her camera Amory seeks to explore and even explain the world, through artistic expression, by fixing snapshots of history, attempting the capture of a moment, crystalising an event in an unforgettable image. It would be a finer novel if there had been some attempt to explain the lure of the camera, some exploration of photography as art and the human desire to see deeply and see far. I wondered if Boyd might have written with more depth if he had read Susan Sontag. Amory's fascination with the camera, the photograph and the act of framing moments of time and angles of view are never explained or explored in the flow of the narrative; but such reflective paragraphs might have resulted in a more thickly textured novel, and engaged the reader at that more satisfying level of learning new ways of looking at the world. The novel is the poorer for that deficit, because Amory Clay remains throughout a woman whose experience is rarely probed at the levels of motive and purpose; nor is the reader persuaded to believe that her existential anxieties, some rooted in her father's troubled life, are sufficient to carry the weight of a 60 year autobiography.

But I finished the book, and I enjoyed it. There are important issues explored in the bygoing; the impact of mental ill health on a young family; the moral quicksand of pre-war Berlin and the rise of nazism in Germany and the blackshirts in Britain; war seen with the eye of the reporting photographer looking for images that sell; alcoholism as a solvent that corrodes love; life itself and what might make a person wonder if it's worth going on.

As a human being I learn much about my own inner climate from reading novels. As a minister I am alert to pastoral and relational insights. As one interested in words, written and spoken, I appreciate a well told and well written story. As a reader, I don't expect every novel to be "gripping", "profound", "unputdownable" or be a contender for the Booker or any other prize. I can settle for a good story with interesting issues and a few good observations on human nature, the vicissitudes of life, and the longing for love, significance and some meaning that is the restless centre of our being. This book achieved that.

The care taken by George Macleod of Iona in the writing of his prayers is evident in his small collection, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory. Written as prose poems, or as poetic prayers, they have the rhythms of the waves, the mood and colour of Scottish moorland, the rustle of leaves, or the varied vistas opening up for the hillwalker.

Almighty God, Creator:

the morning is Yours, rising into fullness.

The summer is Yours, dipping into autumn.

Eternity is Yours, dipping into time.

The vibrant grasses, the scent of flowers, the lichen on the rocks, the tang of seaweed

All are Yours,

Gladly we live in this garden of your creating.

But creation is not enough.

Always in the beauty, the foreshadowing of decay.

The lambs frolicking careless: so soon to be led off to slaughter.

Nature red and scarred s well as lush and green.

In the garden also:

always the thorn.

Creation is not enough.

These are the first lines of one of his prayers. Often Macleod is accused of being a romantic visionary, trying to recover a spirituality called Celtic, which has little historical foundation in fact, but which is more of an exercise in nostalgia and wishing what might have been. That sells him short. Macleod was a realist, but that included being a theological realist. Reading his prayers, and his other writing and sermons, this was a man well aware of sin, not as mere moralist harking on about sex as commodity, drink and gambling to excess. All three of these he understood in their hold on human weakness; and all three of them he encountered in the folk he cared for, whom he always treated with respect, compassion and a hopefulness that for them life could be better.

Reading his prayers there is a realism about what in old fashioned theology is called a "fallen world". Sin is more than the sum of all acts of human disobedience, brokenness, weakness, wickedness; more than the evident consequences in lives broken, hurts unhealed, cruelties unanswered with justice, hopelessness in the face of a life too hard to live without the downward haul of despair on the heart.

Sin is the inexplicable violence that erupts and consumes the innocent; sin is the turning of the fundaments of matter into nuclear bombs; sin is the decay of what is beautiful when exposed to greed, cruelty, pride or hate; sin is that power of uncreation that seeps into our deepest hopes, the spoiler that betrays our most treasured loves, the question the tempter always asks that undermines our basic trusts and best purposes. Sin is evil, and it is there and it has to be resisted in prayer and trust in the One whose purposes are redmptive and whose love is eternally determined in the face of all that threatens the life and light of God's creation. But. "In the garden also: always the thorn."

Walking on Brimmond Hill the other day I noticed the gorse beginning to bud and burst, and alongside the path, hedging in the gorse, barbed wire. There was a moment's clarity, and I recalled that line from Macleod's prayer, "always the thorn". Some of those thorns are the natural protection of plants, and they provide protection too for various birds that nest in gorse, including goldfinches, yellowhappers, chaffinches, and at one place on the hill, a robin. And the barbed wire is also to keep animals in the field, much less natural but used as a restraint for farm animals – though in my childhood at least two farmers refused to use barbed wire because "it would hurt the beasts". The juxtaposition of gorse thorns and barbed wire, glimpsed on the calendar journey towards Holy Week, jolted memories of those pictures we have all seen of barbed wire used to imprison people, a tool of the justice system. But at a darker deeper level, tools of the oppressor, the capacity to tear flesh and hinder escape, reaching the nadir of evil in Auschwitz.

"In the garden also: always the thorn." But Macleod wasn't prepared to leave it there. Sin isn't the last reality of the universe, the Cross as the embodied love of God is the penultimate divinde word followed beyond the divine anguish by the ultimate cry of God's heart, the cry of resurrection, "He is risen!" And thus Christian faith sees, and prays, and hopes, and works with patience and cost for the coming of God's kingdom, in God's time.

"Till that day when night and autumn vanish:

and lambs grown sheep are no more slaughtered:

and even the thorn shall fade

and the whole earth shall cry glory at the marriage feast of the Lamb.

In this new creation, already upon us,

fill us with life anew."

When I want to clear my head, or need to think, or feel the urge to pray, (and sometimes all three can combine in a feeling of longing and wish for solitude) – when any of that happens, a favourite place to go is Brimmond Hill. Recent years when I go out and about I take my camera, and try to pay more attention to what is there. To see what is there, to step outdoors from the constraints and concerns of our own mind and to observe the world around, to breathe and listen to the environment in which we walk, to be alive and alert to the context of which we are more or less aware, is for me a deliberate act of self-discipline.

So today I was at it again. The gorse is just beginning to bloom, much of the winter moorland is still barren and flat, but the birds were active, noisy and letting the world know they are there. I was preoccupied, and not at home in my own mind and heart. The news from London of people being killed and injured as an intentional act of political violence is a difficult series of events to process. Some call it a hate crime, others think that is to underestimate the brutal reality of evil. Such acts are the opposite of mindless. On the contrary, they are mindful acts. They are planned, rehearsed and motivated by drives that are devoid of any braking system. They are not inexplicable. On one level the explanation is as clear as the video footage of a man in a car intent on carnage.

Yet, at another deeper and darker level, a disturbing and terrifying question insinuates itself, weaving its toxic trail into our deepest fears: What is it that prepares a human mind, conscience and emotional constitution to carry out actions of such indiscriminate violence, studied evil, and suicidal determination? What kind of human being thinks, feels, acts like that? What barcode traits of humanity have to be erased to make it possible for one human being to simply see a crowd as an agglomerate of targets for hate, violence and killing?

Thinking such thoughts as I walked on the beautiful hillside overlooking east Aberdeenshire, I was also doing my best to pay attention to what was there, to step outdoors from the constraints and contours of my own mind. And I came to the old stile near the top of the hill. I pass it every time, and often wonder about the feet that have walked this path, the people who have climbed its step, and made their way safely over the barbed wire fence that used to be there. Stiles are for crossing barriers, for overcoming obstacles in our path. From the angle I was standing the stile looked old, rugged, and something else. Where the step and the post intersected there was the weathered, lichen covered shape of a cross. The cruciform image is ubiquitous on doors, windows, telegraph poles, and yes, fences.

But this time, in the context of my own brooding thoughts about the evil and hate that visited innocent and defenceless people yesterday on Westminster Bridge, the cross exuded a power that pulled the rug from under my best attempts at making sense of such irruptions of evil. The cross is also about overcoming barriers. And yet reconciliation is impossible where hate persists, enmity is normalised, violence is the default mechanism of human exchange, and no solution is tolerated other than the death of the enemy. 

At the living core of Christian faith are the most outrageous statements about God, and what God is about. "God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them… "If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God…"…"God commends his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Forgiveness is not reconciliation, but it is the first and essential move towards reconciliation. Repentance is not reconciliation, but it is likewise a first and essential step towards reconciliation. What the cross demonstrates beyond the limits of human imagining, thinking or feeling, is a love that absorbs the distilled essence of evil and drains the toxins of their never ending half life. "He who knew no sin was made to be sin, so that we in him might become the righteousness of God."

With camera in hand, held steady to capture the image of an old rugged cross, I was made aware today, yet again, of the impenetrable mystery of evil. But I was also made aware, yet again, of the revealed mystery of a love that defies our most categorical certainties. I prayed sitting on that stile, for people I don't know, them and their families and friends. With my back against the cross, I prayed for a world broken, divided, with jagged edges and lacerating fences, and I prayed to the God whose reconciling love embraces a bleeding world, and whose own blood reaches our deepest suffering with redemptive intent.

O Cross, that liftest up my head,

I dare not ask to fly from Thee;

I lay in dust, life's glory dead,

and from the ground there blossoms red

Life that shall endless be.

In the marketplace of therapies for the soul and mind and body, colouring books are a relatively recent innovation. Nothing new about colouring in; generations of parents and teachers have used books of pictures and patterns for children to amuse them, develop motor skills, stimulate imagination and pass the time in a useful pastime. But colouring books for grown ups? Sophisticated, expensive, in a wide diversity of themes, requiring the same skills and dispositions as children – patience, care, paying attention, imaginative expression? Really?

The psychology of relaxation is complicated and different for all of us. For some recreation is rest, for others activity, for others socialising and yet others solitude. The means of relaxation is equally varied. Sport, art, tapestry, walking, bird-watching, poetry, photography, music, film, quilting, archaeology, reading, writing, swimming, tai chi (and for me chai tea!) – and these are only the ones I can think of that I know my friends do.

And I have a young friend who does colouring books. He does a lot more and lives a very active, even at times exhaustingly full life – but he does colouring. The photo is of one of the pages in his latest colouring book. I met with him for coffee and cake recently and we talked, laughed, enjoyed the food, and then did some colouring. He invited me to do some of the leaves on a particularly complicated pattern of interwoven branches. So we sat and talked some more, and coloured in. What makes a colouring book so relaxing is that the process is very simple. Choose your colour and stay within the lines; colour each shape till the pattern is completed. Simple.

But what was happening was far from simple. It was rich with possibility, a social interchange of two friends collaborating in a task that needed care, patience, co-operation, staying within the lines, agreeing the colours, or at least trusting each other that the colours would be "right". This was a shared project, though my part would be very small, and by the time we parted, by far the largest part of the page had still to be coloured. But when it's finished it will be the work of two people, and it won't matter, indeed it will never be known, that more than one person did it.

In another sense it matters immensely, because the two people who did it are friends, and the picture captures not only those moments in time when we ate, talked, laughed and coloured together, but the friendship that led to us meeting to do this in the first place. I don't do colouring books. I do tapestry, and the similarities are close enough to know that patience, imagination, choices and staying with it till its finished are needed for both. And the same disciplines of patience, imagination, and staying with it faithfully and willingly, are just as important in the colouring in of our relationships, and friendships.

And my young friend taught me, without it ever being an intended lesson, that the best colouring books are the ones where we have shared the work and the joy of making something good, and maybe even beautiful, and doing it with others who have contributed what they have to give. Life is like that, My life is like that – a colouring book where various people have helped in the colouring in.