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Sunday August 28 was the 40th Anniversary of my ordination to Christian ministry, hence the cake from the congregation at Montrose Baptist Church – which I am slicing up to share!).

A whole tangle of thoughts and feelings accompany such a milestone in a life which has been given in service to God and to the church. These include a sense of wonder verging on disbelief; gratitude that others have trusted and entrusted this person in the deep places of their experience; regret, best experienced as repentance for mistakes made, for wrong turnings that could have been foreseen, or experiences underused as resources for future wisdom; humility, which is always in danger of being self-congratulatory that it is felt at all, but yes, humility as a healthy sense of unworthiness; gladness that I have fulfilled a full working life following a vocation out of both necessity and choice, a daily saying of yes when sometimes circumstances and experiences urged and tempted me to say no. 

Anniversaries are more than dates, and are about more than celebration. I still remember the promises I made that day, to God and with all those present as witnesses. I remember too the weight of responsibility and life occasion combined with the kind of faith and trust that perhaps only the young can enjoy and experience as risk, confidence and inadequacy all bundled up in that theological word deceptive in its depth, "calling". Amongst the few unchangeable continuities in my own understanding of ministry through those four decades is that ministry is service, and that Jesus words about us all being unprofitable servants provide the loadstone that points ministry away from ourselves and always to Christ, the magnetic north of the soul.

Called, not because we are worthy, but by a grace that looks beyond our own self-assessments to the truth of who God calls us to be. Called, not to leadership which assumes to itself recognised office and conferred institutional authority, but which is demonstrated, embodied and lived in a life dedicated to Christ and characterised by a basin, a towel, broken bread, poured wine, and a cross carried for love of the world God loves. Called, not in the exclusive sense that only those called to "the ministry" are "really" called, but in the inclusive sense that all are called to self-giving love, disciplined trusting obedience, and grateful, glad service offered to God in Christ, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. And that in the end, we are all unprofitable servants.

The verse that has followed me through my years of ministry is Romans 1.12. It was one of my first sermons in my first church. It taught me that ministry is mutual, reciprocal, communal – we receive more than we give, we share in the riches and poverty of the people of God, we live in a fellowship with others that is both gift and demand. Thus Paul says with a particular care to avoid paternalist pastoral presumptions –

                              "I want us to be encouraged by one another's faith when I am with you, I by yours and yours by mine." (REB)

Reflecting on those 40 years I have countless memories of that exchange of gift that we call ministry, and am grateful to all those so many people whose faith has encouraged me, and by God's grace, whose faith has been encouraged on our journey together.

One of the hymns I chose for that ordination service has remained an occasional check-list of what it is I am about and why, and how, and where, and for whom. I'm not sure if it is ever sung now; it certainly isn't amenable to a praise band, and neither the words nor the tune is upbeat catchy. But it said then, to a young man amazed at what he desired as a chosen way of life, and just as amazed that others didn't laugh at the very thought of it, it said then, as it says now, what is the deep truth that this life has been lived towards. For me, as for all whose lives are disrupted and transformed and energised towards God, none of it would have happened but for the grace of God. Grace is a gift that comes unsought, unlooked for, unexpected, undeserved; it is a gift that ignites the furnaces of gratitude, joy and obedience. It is a grace that calls us to follow, to take up the cross and walk uphill with Jesus. And maybe my love of the hills and the outdoors is about more than my early years of trekking the countryside; perhaps it is also the metaphor that sustains ministry, and reminds of that grace which demands of us the faith of obedience.

In 1960 my aunt and uncle left Scotland to begin a new life in Australia. I remember the postcard they sent from the Liner that was taking them and their suitcases to begin a new life in another country, a foreign culture, on the other side of the world. And given the expense and time of travel, the real possibility they waould never see their family again. My dad was an occasional poet, and he wrote a poem called "The Exiles". That was when I first encountered the word, understood its meaning, and wondered at the courage needed to be "an exile".

This week the Centre for Ministry Studies is hosting a Summer School on the theme "Exile: Living Faithfully and Hopefully". A range of people will share theologically and practically, from their wide and varied experience as ministry practitioners and theological teachers. We will think about Jeremiah's message of hope to a doom laden people needing to see a new and different future. Jeemiah gets a bad press as an aid to depression and doom – but in fact his message addresses exactly the tension of despair and hope, the desire to tear down and to build up, the sense of anxiety and dislocation felt in the hearts and minds of those who live through events that destabilise faith and call in question hope of a good future.The Co-ordinator of the Centre is Ken Jeffrey and he will be leading three Bible studies on the message that broke Jeremiah's heart and paradoxically cracked open springs of hope. Ken has spent years in parish ministry and now brings together such experience into the academic and vocational focus of the Centre. 

The Main Sessions of input are presented by Marion Carson (see below) and David Smith. David is a leading theologian of mission, deeply read and an extensive writer on the relation of the Gospel to contemporary culture, and has been involved in theological education cross culturally and internationally. Marion will be exploring the theology of hope for those experiencing exile, and exploring faithful and faith-filled hope undergirded by and resourced by the love of God. The building and sustaining of communities of love is one of the imperatives of Christian mission today. David will look particulaly at preaching to exiled people, and bringing hope and transformation through the realities of God's purposeful love and redeeming judgement. In addition to Jeremiah, David will reflect on the ministry of the German theologian Helmut Thielicke, whose preaching to his own people in the last days and the aftermath of World War II, plumbed the depths of human misery and guilt and loss of meaning, and brought a message of hope based on eternal truths on which life could be rebuilt towards hope and a future. David's latest book, Liberating the Gospel, is sub-titled Translating the message of Jesus in a Globalised World.

Three contemporary experiences of exile will be opened up for thought, prayer and reflection. Exile and Mental Health by John Swinton, recognised across the theological world as a leading thinker on the theological issues surrounding mental ill health, disability and the flourishing of human being. Exile and Social Justice has long been a concern in the ministry and writing of Kathy Galloway, former leader within the Iona Community, and continuing in ministry amongst the vulnerable, the poor and those who live in communities that struggle in our increasingly competitive and divided society. Exile and Displaced People includes refugees, asylum seekers and women trafficked in the sex trade across the world; Marion Carson has been a leading Christian voice in confronting such human tragedy and suffering, her recent book is entitled "Setting the Captives Free"; The Bible and Human Trafficking. Marion is one who has researched and travelled with those whose lives are deemed marketable commodities or political inconveniences.

There is great richness and depth in all these occasions of learning and listening, talking and walking in companionship through the days of a week. And it will begin with a keynote address from Doug Gay, who combines ministry and preaching in a congregation with academic teaching and research around precisely the themes of our week – how to live faithfully and hopefully in 21st Century Scotland. Doug is a recognised and important voice in the debates about nationalism, theology and identity and is a reliable guide for us as we ask what it might mean and what it feels like to be in exile where we are, now, here, as the church in Scotland. His book Honey from the Lion explores the ethics and theology of nationalism.

All told it looks like being a memorable and significant week of discovery and new thinking. Which is what is hoped for by all the presenters, the participants and the organisers. There can be few more important ministries today than the raising and realising and resourcing of hopefulness in Christian ministry and mission today.

One of my favourite historical personalities is Erasmus of Rotterdam. With a blatant lack of modesty I should say I won an essay prize at College for a study of Erasmus as Humanist Reformer, and from that immersion in his life and thought I've remained fascinated by a man who in an age of lines in the sand, embattled walls and precious few bridges, he was an admirer, and frequent occupant, of those fences you can sit on, and see both sides.

We are coming up in 2017 to the 500th Anniversary of Luther's posting of the 95 Theses. Incidentally, the verb "to post" makes me wonder what would have happened if Luther had Facebook and he published his rant against the abuses of the Catholic church and invited his friends to "like" them! But in 1516 an event of equal significance took place – the publication of Erasmus's edition of the Greek New Testament, Novum Instrumentum omne, diligenter ab Erasmo Rot. Recognitum et Emendatum. The text was accompanied by Erasmus's own new and fresh Latin translation and with annotations to the text.

The influence and impact of a New Testament, in the original language, and with a serious if rushed attempt to ascertain the most accurate text, is difficult to overestimate. It was a Renaissance masterpiece of vast and at the time incalculable theological import and far reaching literary consequence. Luther's own venracular German New Testament leaned heavily on Erasmus's work; but in addition to literary dependence, there was the breaking of the stranglehold of the Roman curia on the accessibility of the text. Greek and German, not Latin, became the language of translation, exegesis, reading and increasingly the text for preaching. 

One of the finest short accounts of Erasmus, his character and significance, is hidden away in the large volume by Owen Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, (ch 3 Scholarship and Religion). I've long run out of superlatives for the erudition and lucidity of Owen Chadwick's writings on church history; this volume is authoritative, entertaining, fresh and crammed with the kinds of details that make history a study of human life and culture as it is shaped by, and shapes, religion and politics. Here is Chadwick on the young and as yet largely unknown Erasmus the Humanist, and I haven't read a better vignette on the Humanist Reformer from Rotterdam:

Since he made ends meet by coaching the young, it was the nature of education about which he first wrote. Literature should revive education, and through schools transform the culture of Europe. From this time he already had misty ideals of a better society because more cultivated. It was an ideal which assumed the dignity and sacredness of the human being. Every member of the species should treat every other member with respect, and strive for peace and harmony and settle disputes by reasonable argument and not by violence. Revolution could never be his ideal. This sweet reasonableness was fostered by religious sensibility, the Christian ideal of gentleness and pity and forgiveness, and not pushing the self forward. And as children develop they must be led to practise eloquence, how to use words and the perception of truth. It brings precision of mind because words have different meanings in different contexts, and this habit of exactness is of the first importance to learn at school.

That kind of writing is why I love the work of Owen Chadwick; and that kind of humanism is why I love the thought of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Amongst the benefits of the Christian year is the rhythm of doctrine, the reminders of the high points of the Christian story and God's story with the world, a six month period from Advent to Trinity and then the ordinary Sundays that bracket the routine and ordinariness of our lives, and which say life in ordinary is ok. I've often wondered about singing Christmas carols in June; well, we sing about the resurrction and crucifixion all times and any time during the Christian year so why not the Incarnation?

Such thoughts came tumbling in while reading and praying again, a prayer written by Doug Gay for Pentecost 2016. Doing some housekeeping amongst my files I came across it and found that it was saying things I need to hear and pray all year, each day, not just Pentecost. So here it is, with thanks to Doug for a prayer which sounds like a 21st century prayer by George MacLeod of Iona. Doug will understand why I say that, I hope. This prayer has a rhythm and climate formed in the recognisable coalescence of biblical image and Scottish spirituality sensible of the sounds and scenery of God's creation around us. 

The tapestry is my own design, Pentecost and Eucharist, a celebration of the Creator Spirit who gives life, nourishes and makes fruitful all that God has made.

Joy and wonder and promises fulfilled
Wind and Fire and strangers welcomed

This is what you bring Holy Spirit –
and so we worship you this morning

Like the graceful descent of a dove
Like water springing up from its source
Like the wind stirring green Spring leaves
Like fruit which ripens into sweetness

This is what you are like Holy Spirit –
and so we worship you this morning

Wind moving over the face of the deep
Breath warming Eden’s clay
Words brimming in the mouth of the prophet
Life conceiving in Mary’s Womb
Body rising from the grave
Breath sending out disciples
Presence making Jesus present

This is what you do Holy Spirit –
and so we worship you this morning

Co-equal, co-eternal,
Third person of the Holy Trinity
Comforter, Counsellor, Advocate
Giver of life and Bringer of freedom

This is who you are Holy Spirit and so we worship you this morning

Calling on you to come and fill our hearts as we gather here,
To come and renew our lives.
Lord Spirit, hear our prayer and hear us as
We worship you and give you glory,
with the Father and the Son,
One God, forever to be praised, AMEN.

(Rev Dr Doug Gay, 2016, Pentecost)

Plagiarism is every scholar's nightmare. It is a continuing and persistent problem in academic study, and all kinds of processes are now in place to deter students from passing off someone else's work as their own. But when plagiarism is confirmed in the work of a senior respected academic scholar, and those works are published by one of the most reputable Christian publishers in the world, then it is imperative that the issue is treated with seriousness and integrity.

Yesterday Wm Eerdmans, one of the largest and most reputable publishers of Christian scholarship in the United States, released a statement about plagiarism in three book which sit in the flagship section of the publisher's catalogue. You can read the full statement on the Eerdmans blog over here.

There are several consierations about all this, and they go beyond the personal tragedy of a scholar's ruined life's work and a publisher's honest and firm addressing of the consequences.

As all academic teachers know, plagiarism is established by the weight of evidence which demonstrates the work of someone else is being presented as the student's or the scholar's own work. In the field of education it is not relevant whether the unattributed material is there because of deliberate deceit and stealing of someone else's work, or whether it is carelessness, even sloppiness in research discipline that led to the omission of quotation marks and footnotes with reference to the original author. An essay, assignment or book has been presented as the original work of the author and has been shown to be someone else's work without due attribution. That is plagiarism.

As to motive there are all kinds of pressures for students in the learning and teaching environment. Deliberate plagiarism is an intellectual own goal, the undermining of the very purpose of education. Put bluntly it is cheating, and a level of self-regarding dishonesty which if unchecked will seep into those other areas of life which flourish only where there is trust, integrity, and love of those things that matter for their own sake. Where it is carelessness, oversight, confusion of one's own notes and quotes from others, or sloppy research disciplines, these are equally failures of integrity and honest work. In the case with Eerdmans this has happened in the three major works of this author, and repeatedly in each. This is a habit, a way of working, and one which only meticulous attention to detail and an equally meticulous attention to intellectual ethics would have avoided this.

When academic work is published, reviewed and establishes its place in the field as an authoritative source, it is in turn consulted, cited and referenced for credit to the author of the authoritative written piece. The assumption is that such credit is conscientiously and carefully embedded. The problem with texts compromised by plagiarism is that it sets off a form of academic contamination. Every time a plagiarised book is cited it confirms the lie, reproduces the error, perpetuates the injustice of intellectual knowledge being credited to the wrong scholar. The best scholarship thrives on the trust and integrity and reliability of the texts on which research has been built; indeed the academic and scholarly community flourishes only where intellectual standards of integrity and transparent learning are upheld as primary values.

That is why Eerdmans are to be commended for their swift and decisive action. It means a previously renowned scholar's life work is ruined in terms of its admissibility to ongoing debate and discussion; but it also means the publisher can be trusted to mean what it says on the publisher's data at the front of every book – that the copywright refers to original work by the named author. 

So this morning I find I have three substantial commentaries on three New Testament books, which I have used often, and one of them worked through carefully, and I don't know what to do with them or what to think of them. Such is the spoiling effect of plagiarism, giving a new slant on the phrase "hermeneutic of suspicion". And one final thought. Self-righteousness is an unlovely, and unloving disposition, and perhaps all of us who write and publish should have, alongside that checklist of how to reference and attribute other people's ideas, a note reminding us, "Let those who think they stand secure, take heed lest they fall." 

Amongst God's greatest gifts are the people who come into our lives, often unannounced, and with no indication that having met them, we would look at the world differently, and they would help us to see further, deeper and to look harder. Amongst the nicest compliments ever paid to me was when someone said "It was a lucky day for us when you walked into our lives." Of course I knew what she meant, and would hope I'm self-aware enough, and appreciative enough of others, to know that whatever enrichment and help I brought, in all such relationships there is mutuality, reciprocity, and the humility to know that all the important relationships we have with others involve exchange and shared cost.

I have been reminded of that comment this past week or two since hearing of the death of the Rev Dr Moyna McGlynn. I met Moyna over 10 years ago, because a mutual friend suggested she would be the right person to teach a new module in our College. Minutes into the conversation with her it was already obvious that our students needed to meet, and hear, and learn from someone who thought like this, cared like this and lived out that care and commitment.

The module was called Community and Church; it was intended to push students doing a degree in theology and pastoral studies to think about the world and the culture and the people around them. Too much theology presupposes fairly static models of church which limits the imagination and vision of those who want to share the radical and subversive good news of Jesus. Moyna was already engaged in her work in Govan, healing the hurts and wounds of two congregations becoming one, with both communities feeling their losses, and wondering how the two could ever become one. Not only that. She was passionate about church not being thought of as the, or even a, dominant voice in conversation with the local community. 

Who better to teach students about risk and trust, vulnerability and solidarity, grace as both gift and demand, love as the practical standing alongside as advocate, friend and when need be, shield. The way asylum seekers have been treated, and the grudging and at times obstructive policies that hinder the settlement and recovery of dignity and worth of refugees, became for her issues of theological importance and of moral concern – and that meant outspoken and passionate advocacy. So for several years Moyna taught in the Scottish Baptist College – interactive conversation, unsettling questions and stories, probing and pushing for critical engagement with a Gospel that confronted injustice and made ridiculous demands about love, forgiveness, generosity, welcome and mercy. For Moyna, make no mistake about it, these were barcode identifiers stamped on those serious about following Jesus and building community. Disciples showing such identifiers are the living conduits between the church as the Body of Christ and the community within which God has placed each particular Christian community to be light, salt and the very epitome of the welcome of God.

As one who worked with Moyna during those years, and saw and heard her in class, and later as she welcomed students to Govan to see for themselves what she was about, it was obvious the affection and respect students had for who she was and what she was committed to in her ministry. Since the announcement of her death, several students have written of her warmth and kindness and the way she quietly and persuasively lived the Gospel she preached and embodied in ministry.

It was a lucky day when Moyna walked into our lives in the College; those several years of teaching now have their legacy in ministries deepened and differently formed by their encounter with her. And when I use the word lucky, I do so the way John Wycliffe intended in that early translation of the Bible into English: "And the Lord was with Joseph and he was a luckie fellow." In what is often called our luck and good fortune, we see the mystery that is God's way of working, disguised as the grace which surprises with unexpected blessing. Moyna was such a gift. May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

Earlier this week we spent a day with our good friend Richard Kidd, who was one of the exhibiting artists at the Pittenweem Art Festival. For those who don;t know Pittenweem, it is one of several historic fishing villages in the East Neuk of Fife, around 10 miles south of St Andrews.

The East Neuk is a popular area for tourists and has a vibrant artistic community which exploits and expresses the beauty and diversity of the coastline and surrounding countryside. It is an idyllic place; and art is an idyllic sounding pastime, or profession, whichever motivation is the driver.

Richard is a retired Baptist Minister, previously Principal of one of our leading Colleges in Manchester. He is a thoughtful and imaginative theologian, a poet and a painter. Readers of this blog are entitled to ask so what? So let me tell you what.

Richard started painting as a hobby, then as a way of seeking visual representation of his own experience and theology, and then as a way of exploring the relations between art and spirituality. Shortly after retirement on a visit to India he encountered the work of Freeset, a movement aimed at providing education, work opportunities and the chance of a new and free life for women trapped in the sex trade in Kolkata. To develop this work takes money as well as commitment and willingness to offer the skills and experience of an accomplished educator and artist.

It became clear to Richard that a strategic use of his time and energy would be to use his painting as a means of raising money for Freeset. But he had never sold a painting; had never wanted to or thought of selling a painting. His art was an expression of his own inner life as he observed and interpeted the world around him. But two major themes in his life and undergirding his own spirituality are beauty and justice;and here was an opportuity to bring these two abstract but essential human longings into conversation, and into practice.

So began the journey of creating a business in which painting became an expression of beauty, and an activity to fund justice for others. It has meant learning to paint for reasons other than personal vocational and spiritual expression. It has meant spending much more time and energy on producing, all the while determined not to sacrifice quality and integrity of gift, to the demands of quantity. Along the way as opportunities come, Richard has had to adapt and develop his own thinking and ways of working, and fit the demands of his art around the life of his family and with his partner in life Rosemary.

Two years ago, while painting on an East Neuk beach, Richard was approached about perhaps exhibiting at Pittenweem in 2015. He did this and sold some of his paintings, books and cards. He has his own website with options for online purchase. He has just founded the charity Painting for Freedom which you can read about over here. And yesterday he announced that he had passed the £1000 mark for purchases this past week at Pittenweem.

My admiration for Richard is not only the affection of a friend, rich and fulfilling as our friendship is. But this is someone who has put into practice the conversation between beauty and justice, who is daily embodying that conversation. I will want to explore this theologically in another post soon. But for now just to say, there are few uglier sights in our world than the slavery and degradation of human beings by other human beings; injustice is, always, everywhere, ugly. Conversely there are few more beautiful sights and sounds than the face joyful with new freedom, and the evidence of lives redeemed from injustice, the sounds of anguish transformed into the laughter of the free. That art is willingly gifted in the service of justice, and beauty is the key to freedom, is a thought that reverberates with prophetic intent and moral intensity. Because whatever else art is, and however much we think about aesthetics, we live in a world where living the gospel of Jesus will always mean the miracle of exchange that is beauty for brokenness.

"Religion and race. How can the two be uttered together? To act in the spirit of religion is to unite what lies apart, to remember that humanity as a whole is God’s beloved child. To act in the spirit of race is to sunder, to slash, to dismember the flesh of living humanity. Is this the way to honor a father: to torture his child? How can we hear the word “race” and feel no self reproach?"   National Conference on Religion and Race, Chicago, 1963, A J Heschel.

Heschel is widely recognised as one of the greatest American religious leaders of the 20th Century. He came to the US as a refugee in 1940 after he and his family were threatened and eeported to Poland, before escaping to England. The humane discourse of Heschel is a reminder that humanity is always vulnerable when language becomes dehumanising. In the politics of the Western Democracies it has become urgent, perhaps even crucial to our future, that the language of dehumanising rhetoric be challenged and exposed like the lancing of a lethal infection before the application of antibiotics.

The simlarities between the Trump phenomenon and the rise of Fascism and National Socialism are simply too obvious to ignore, and are only denied by those with self-inflicted moral blindness. That so-called Evangelical Christians are supportive of Trump, and find labyrinthine moral obscurities and ethical conundrums to justify such support in the face of overwhelming evidence that Trump is unfit for high political office, says all that needs to be said about the meaningless nonsense that the word Evangelical has become in North America.  But that's the least of it.

I have no idea how anyone who understands anything about Jesus can suggest with a straight face that Trump is the moral choice for Evangelical Christians. The Sermon on the Mount is the polar antithesis to the speeches and pronouncements of Donald Trump. The arrogant egotism of his addiction to the first personal singular is not, I think, what Jesus meant about the Kingdom of God. Even Pilate was interested in questions of truth, and when it comes to political expediency, cultural understanding and military pragmatism,Trump is no PIlate.

So I read A J Heschel and ask, "What has happened to a country so divided that neither candidate for the Presidency has qualities of personal integrity, political wisdom, humane qualities and at least the required minimum of trustworthiness?"  Amongst the reasons for such a tumble in the moral worldview of a nation is the use of language to diminish those others, those strangers, those incomers, and then to blame them for whatever isn't going right. To diminish others is to devalue the worth of human beings, and then comes the justification for fearing the other, and then the reasons are to hand why we must see them as a threat, and then we have the right to remove them as a threat. It's not new, it is sinisterly familiar. It is the toxic mix of fear, anger, loss of hope and the inner subversion of the values that matter most. When torture is thinkable, then humanity is in danger. When building walls is the idea that has caught the imagination, then our common humanity is slashed in pieces. When hate and discrimination are lauded as virtues, then we celebrate our own rights and value by depriving others of their rights and value.

So as a follower of Jesus, trying to be faithful to his words, his atoning death and his risen life-giving Lordship, more than ever I feel the weight of responsibility for words. Both the words I speak and the words I refuse to let pass without challenge; both the way I speak to people and about people, and the discourse I am prepared to resist by using another discourse. For in the end bearing witness to Jesus will now inevitably require an ethic of language, a discipleship of discourse, a witness through words, a rhetoric of conciliation, a speech that is peacemaking, vocabulary that is visionary of an alternative way, and all of this sustained and inspired by the One whose evangel is in direct contradiction to those who abuse the word Evangelical by making it a politically charged currency that has no purchasing power in the Kingdom of God.   

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The Journalist and writer Philip Toynbee once wrote that books were his royal road to God. In his second volume of published Journals, End of a Journey,  he regularly commented on his reading of Julian of Norwich's astonishing book Revelation of Divine Love. For much of that Journal Toynbee was journeying through illness, which eventually he discovered would be terminal. So his reading of Julian became an inner conversation about divine love, human suffering, and the dilemma of the benevolent purposes of God being at odds with much of the evidence of a broken world, and his own experience of foreshortened hopes. By the time the reader finishes Toynbee's Journal they know that he is approaching the end of his own journey. The tone has become resigned in a hopeful kind of way, as he holds on to the theological optimism and spiritual assurance of this 14th Century Anchoress, quoting phrases and sentences, and writing his own reflections, which sometimes sound like a gentle preaching to his own tremulous heart, oscillating between hope and sadness.

Last week there was a BBC4 documentary on Julian's Revelation: The Search for the Lost Manuscript of Julian of Norwich. It will be on Iplayer for a few weeks and is worth the watching. That said there's a fair amount of speculation and gap filling with precious little hard evidence, and far too much anachronism about Julian the proto feminist, or medieval suffragette! But that aside the programme provided a well narrated story of how Julian, a woman, wrote the first book by a woman, and in the English vernacular, and a book of theology, and a book of radical and dangerously novel theology by the standards of Medieval Catholicism. Julian lived in a dangerous age, and one which was fatally intolerant of theological novelty. 

I was especially pleased to see that Grace Warrack got a good mention and justice was done to her role in bringing Julian's book into circulation. Grand daughter of a Wee Free minister, she spent weeks in the British Library copying out by hand the entire 17th Century manuscript, and the  persuaded Methuen to publish it. The Manuscript she used, and her own notes provide much of the scaffolding for later translations and critical editions. Imagine – a strict Scottish Presbyterian, in London to resurrect a theological book, written by a 14th Century medieval Catholic mystic whose theology was a galaxy or two to the left of Scottish Presbyterian Calvinism and Medieval Catholic dogma.

I first read and wrote about Julian's Revelation in 1980 and since then have continued to read, study and teach the significance of a book that speaks into the darkest corners of existence words that radiate with hopeful trust and daring, risk-taking prayers. Her most famous line remains an inspiration which seems so unreal and contradicted by the realities of a world at once brutal and beautiful; but they are words that are defiant of the cynicism and despairing desperation of a world afraid of the very terrors human beings, God's creatures, create and bring on each other. "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well…."

I have several copies of the Showings, or Revelation. I doubt a year goes by without further reading, and thinking through the theological conundrums Julian takes on – the meaning of Christ's death, the blessedness of creation, sin as nothing at all and yet as cause of divine suffering, God as mother, hell as an ambiguity and mystery on which no one should pontificate, the great eschatological act of God by which God's justice and love can and will be satisfied, beyond our knowing, perhaps even beyond our hoping for God is greater than even our wildest hopes.

T S Eliot brings Little Gidding, his fourth quartet, to a close with a climactic vision of Julian's hopefulness for a redeemed creation. He too is reticent, allergic to dogmatic certainties which dissolve mystery into doctrinal constraints, or worse, petrify living truth into static propositions:

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

Amongst my favourite places in Scotland is Inverbervie bay. We first holidayed near this part of the Scottish coast in 1980 and ever since Inverbervie and St Cyrus are special places to walk, talk and watch the world around. This morning we went down to Inverbervie and walked from there to Gourdon and back. Pleasant sunshine, enough cloud to keep it cool, and still enough of the summer flowers to make it a walk with colour and a sense of life all around.

As always it starts with a walk along the beach, steeply shelved and with cobbles and pebbles so lovely there are signs telling folk not to steal them! The sound of the waves unfolding and collapsing in a muted crash is one of my favourite sounds. I've walked here in every season, sat in the car in howling gales and lashing rain and even in a blizzard, and never tire of the sound of the sea in this bay. But it's the cobbles that make it so special for me. The mile of beach covered is covered with these smoothed stones, multi-coloured, and with all kinds of geological genealogies traceable in their shapes and substance.

There is something beautiful, accomplished, and spiritually suggestive about stones worn smooth over decades, maybe centuries. The lapidary friction of movement, of external forces of wind, water and other rocks, gradually give shape and character to these accidental rocks, which in all their time and movement, are gradually changing towards a uniqueness of form, colour, weight and shape.

Often I've wondered if all the circumstances and encounters of our lives, the frictions and the movements, through storm forced crashings of grief and loss, and the slow grinding work that is building and maintaining the loves of our lives, and the gradual finding of our place on the beach, juxtaposed with all those other different and unique people who create and provide our life context – yes, I often wonder if the lapidary movements of the sea have their equivalents in this equally demanding lapidary process we call living, and loving, and giving, and growing.

Being a Christian means being changed and being willing to go on changing. Loving and forgiving, crying and laughing, being broken and shaped and re-formed, taking on the shape that all of life's experiences gently impose on the person we are and the person we are becoming. When Paul talks about becoming mature in Christ, of being a new creation, of having the mind of Christ, of each of us being called to lives of faith, hope and love, he's using a spiritual vocabulary that describes the work of the Holy Spirit. And the grinding and crunching of rock on rock, the push and pull of tide, the endless movements, collisions and repositionings, these are all part of being conformed to Christ, transformed with the patient slowness and gentle power of a love that is as vast as any ocean. So I look on these cobbles as works of art, each one an accomplished artefact, all of them different, and each of them carrying in shape, colour and size something of the narrative of the sea, and each one telling the story of their own time and place, and something of how they have come to be here, now, just as they are.