Author: admin

"Run with perseverance the race that is set before you", that text for everyone who jogs, runs, cycles, cross-country nordi walking and the many other ways we postmodern car mobile, labour saving enthusiasts, take up the need to recover or maintain the fitness of our bodies. I remember a fitness instructor asking me what I want to be fit for. I had no intentions of entering triathlons, becoming an iron man, or even running competitively. I just wanted to be in good aerobic con dition for my age, a healthy weight, and physically able to do the things I enjoy, from 5 a side football to hill walking and any other activity that is as much fun as can be squeezed in per calorie burned.

There is no need for an advanced science of physiology or a PhD in nutrition. Exercise regularly making sure you stretch beyond what's comfortable, and eat sensibly. Problem is doing this as a way of life rather than as something to be endured in order to have a way of life. I sit a lot. If you write, read, study, and parts of your working life are composed at a keyboard, then chunks of time the body is on under-drive.

All of this had me thinking this morning while I was out running. That early I tend to do a walk / run, and depending how I'm feeling more of the one or the other. The person who wrote that magnificent half-time team talk which we call the Epistle to the Hebrews was a brilliant motivator. He could paint word pictures of the superiority and supremacy of Jesus, the great Encourager, and just as quickly create images of the human Saviour who understands suffering and tears. He knew how to appeal to the longing and ambition of those first followers of Jesus, who wanted to train, to be fit, to play their part in the great commission of living for God in a careless world. And he knew the importance of perseverance, of running the race by putting one foot in front of the other, and not stopping.Look to the Captain he said, look to Jesus the One way out front, and go after him, to the cross, to the empty tomb, to the God-loved world.

When I run in the morning at some point I mutter a Bible verse breathlessly, a way of ruminating, and one of the verses with obvious congruence is "Run with patience the race that is set before you, looking to Jesus, the author and pioneer of our faith". It isn't quite the devotional reverie it sounds; it is muttered through gritted teeth, and given urgency by legs complaining about the lungs needing to work harder. But there is something spiritual happening when aerobic exercise is linked with the day after day discipline of obedience to God, the cost and consequence of following faithfully after Jesus, the sheer toil at times, of perseverance. It helps that the route I take looks across some of the most scenic skylines in Aberdeenshire.

The thing about Facebook is you get caught up in the commenting culture and before you know it you've spouted your opinion, cracked a funny, or added to the long list of LOL's. I'm still slightly wary of Facebook and its potential for trivia, gossip, inanity, as well as that immediacy and instant consequence of words too easily posted. I began to think more about this after posting a comment on a friend's page because sshe had just bought a book, and tongue in cheek justifying it because it wouldn;t take up any space, honest!

Being myself a bibliophile, a reluctant Kindle user and a determined accumulator of most things literary, I quickly tapped and typed and posted a sympathetic and morale lifting and guilt dispersing comment ( homily?) – as follows:

" Never apologise for buying a book (My Friend) The great Apostle told Timothy to bring his cloak, and his books and especially the parchments (2 Tim 4.13) – he too needed the solace of words crafted with care to nourish the mind, and the rhythm of syntax to persuade the heart, and the thought of others to enlarge his world. Jings – this rationalisation thing's easy"

Thing is, I actually believe all that tongue in cheek off the top of my head pep talk about the importance of books. Many a time when I've needed solace – whether comfort for sorrow, encouragement when disappointed, diversion when anxious, stimulus when bored – in any case, solace, I have found it in words carefully crafted. Poetry and story, philosophy and biography, theology and art, written and illustrated but in any case gathered between two covers and bound into that miraculously versatile artefact, a book. Whether my mood is interrogative, imperative, indicative or an inter-woven diversity of them all, the rhythm of syntax brings some kind of inner resolution, and the shared thought of an Other "lifts my eyes to the hills, from whence doth my help come", in larger vision of the mystery and perplexity and the demand and the adventure of this so precious and sometimes hard to live life.

And as I write this, I've just finished another book, Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny. The first of her crime novels I've read, and she is good.

All of this is, of course, special pleading, a bibliophile in evangelistic mode and mood justifying his passions and preferences. Yes indeed.

And like my friend, whether overtly or covertly, books find their way regularly into this house. My own ruin became irreversible when online ordering became one click checkout. There's worse things……. 

I'm like C S Lewis at least in this. I struggle to make much of "devotional reading", and don't want other people to put words in my mouth and manufacture appropriate but second hand feelings, emotions and devotional responses. Lewis felt closest to God wrestling with a piece of tough theology, a pipe gripped in his teeth. I know exactly what he means.

One of those whose thought and writing speaks with authoritative bluntness and prophetic clarity is the German New Testament theologian and exegete, Ernst Kasemann. Forget safe and sound theology of a conservative persuasion; Kasemann is entirely impatient with those who want the Gospel reduced to this and that truth nicely connected, packaged and predictable. The Gospel is subversive, counter intuitive and counter cultural, a mystery and a scandal, a cosmic earthquake that shakes the very foundations of metaphysical certainties. 

Forget too, pious and devotional reveries about the love of God, whether conditional or unconditional, whether judgement's essential complement or its polar opposite. God is most fully known in Jesus Christ and him crucified; and God's vistory is not the annihilation of enemies but the resurrection of the Son in triumph over every impulse to annihilate – whether from vengeance, anger, hate, despair and all those other inner drives of the human heart which impel us towards our own inhumane strategies for domination and self and other-destructive behaviours.

On the cross, at Golgotha, on Calvary, God finally and fully dismantled the engines that drive the powers, the authorities and the agents of sin; which is to say, the love and justice and and power and creative pruposes of God found their fulfilment and final expression in the self-surrender of Jesus to the worst the world could do, and to the strategies and ambitions of those powers whose raison d'etre was the death of God and uncreation. God's answer was resurrection and new creation, through a love that remains and must ever remain mystery hidden in the ages, a plan eternal in construction and intersecting in our human history in a way that makes it eternally decisive and infinitely fruitful of the purposes of God. And such a God.

Here is Kasemann's way of saying all this:

At Golgotha, along with the idols and demons, our imaginings about ourselves are driven out. Where the heathen and pious are involved in the murder of Jesus, humanity as such is unmasked and given reality, and only forgiving grace can have the last word. At the same time it is there that the true God is at work, who does not rul unchallenged in glory according to our metaphysics but descends to the suffering, the outcast, and the damned. The depths now become the dwelling of God and his elct, of the festival of the redemption broken in, in which the Beatitudes no longer invite the high, wise and pious but the lost children, all in need of love and mercy. This alone is the salvation of the Gospel, which throughout the course of history was continually despised and slandered by the heathen precisely from out of their religiosity, and by Christian theology and piety unabatedly obscured and betrayed. Every generation stands before the alternative of the first commendment. And after Golgotha this means standing before the choice between gospel and religious ideology disguising itself as Christian.

Ernst Kasemann, On Being a Disciple of the Crucified Nazarene, pages 143-4.

and

So. Yesterday we spent the day at the Aboyne Highland Games, one of the largest Games gatherings in Scotland. The Chieftain of the Clan Gordon opened the games after the entry of the massed pipe bands. The caber was tossed, the hammer was thrown, the races were run, the tug of war was contested, the dancing, fiddling and piping competitions were completed. A huge Aberdeen Angus burger was eaten, and throughout the day I took some photos.

This is a picture of two stewards who are clearly overjoyed at the turnout! This was early, by midday the place was heaving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Forget fairness and handicaps. The highland dancer wanted to be in the 400 metres. Don't think I've ever seen a race with such diversity among the contestants!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The hammer throwing – I didn't enter, I was feart I'd forget to let go! We saw a record throw yesterday of 118+ metres

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Highland Dancing is a display of seriously good contestants who have superb timing, balance, rhythm and discipline. These girls were dancing to a lone piper and in the background the Massed Pipe Bands were entering the park!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think there are few more quintessentially Scottish moments than sitting in the cauld, (10 degress in August!!), in a Highland town, listening to a hundred pipers and drummers playing Scottish Soldier, Fields of Glory, Scotland the Brave, eating an Aberdeen Angus Burger, and with the Highland Dancing taking place twenty metres away! Loved it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And finally the Tug of War – the Coach's roar of encouragement and threats of dire consequences could be heard halfway doon the toon! I think he would make a great worship leader…….

 

One of the important and unexpected by-products of using a camera is the way it trains you in paying attention, and herefore seeing things otherwise overlooked. It isn't only the subject of the photo, but the perspective, the capacity of framing to focus and interpret what is there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; there are moments of pure revelation and you know, you just know, you have captured a moment never to be repeated. There are times when what seemed innocuous begins to form into significance, and you see the world differently.

I've looked through some of the photos taken in the last two months and chosen a few which express what for me was a new way of looking and seeing the world, of gazing and beholding the place I am, of noticing and attending to the moment in time that brings me here, now. In that sense a photo is more than a memory – the act of taking a photo is an inner response to what presents itself to us. And if we listen to what is said in that being present to the moment, we come quite near to some forms of contemplative prayer in which our inner preoccupations are relinquished to make room for that which is beyond us, that which summons us and invites our attention.

Each of these photos is such a moment of listening, encounter and presence.

 

 

 

 

 

It's many years since as a Baptist I discovered the Rule of Benedict, that remarkably restrained document of spiritual and monastic formation which exerted formative influence on all subsequent Christian monasticism in the West. Some years later I discovered the writing of Sister Joan Chittister, (photo below) in my view one of the most honest and careful interpreter's of Benedictine spirituality, and an effective apologist for Benedictine values as antidote to the consumptive consumerism which is in the heavily polluted air we now breathe.  

WISDOM

To the wise life is not a series of events to be controlled. Life is a way of walking through the universe whole and holy.

LEADERSHIP.

God does not want people in positions simply to get the job done. He wants people in positions who embody why we bother to do the job at all. God wants holy listeners who care about the effect of what they do o everyone else. Imagine a world ruled by holy listeners.

EGOTISM

“When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own truths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else’s ideas. When a person debates contentiously with anyone, let alone with the teachers and the guides of their life, the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn.

ARROGANCE

When we make ourselves God, no one in the world is safe in our presence.

TIMIDITY

We cxling to our own ways like snails to sea walls, inching along through life, hiding within ourselves, unconscious even of the nourishing power of the sea that i seeking to sweep us into wider worlds.

THE ORDINARY

God does not come on hoofbeats of mercury through streets of gold. God is in the dregs of our lives. That's why it takes humility to find God where God is not expected to be.

COMMUNITY

If we do not serve one another we are, at best, a collection of people who live alone together.

HOSPITALITY

The message to each stranger is clear. Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.

All quotations are from The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages. STrangely it is more easily available from Amazon.com rather than the UK site. I don't usually advertise Amazon, but no point in recommending a book that's hard to get in this country!

On a recent short break to Crieff Hydro, that Victorian hang out for the well off, I spent a couple of hours in the winter gardens on rainy afternoons. Earl Grey tea, bakewell tart, and a book chunky with theology and New Testament exegesis, made for a surprisingly enjoyable interlude.

The interesting thing is the way the holiday mood easily elides into something altogether more serious. Maybe it's the intentional giving in to the desire for some peace, space, time and the expectation of a reader that when you read something worthwhile, there is a residual dividend of the mind stretched towards new ideas and previously settled thought is unsettled. And perhaps too it is the physical environment of comfort, low buzz conversation, excellent food and the irrelevance of the watch and the diary and the Iphone, that makes us more open and less defensive, more attentive and less preoccupied, more inclined to receptivity than productivity.

In any case, on holiday these occasional hours of serious reading while relaxed and out of the usual routines and context, can be times of fresh orientation, regained perspective, and even inner paradigm shifts in how we see our lives, "going forward". I don't actually like that cliche of the developmental mindset, "going forward". It often seems added on to remind us, or persuade us, that buying into whatever strategy or project will enable us to make real progress in our lives. But here I use the phrase to suggest the fruitfulness, and energy renewal, that can come from stopping with purpose. In my case a time to listen to my life, attend to what I am saying but often refusing to hear, and a time also to listen to a carefully chosen companion, another voice external and coming from another direction. And then to go forward.

I've always taken a book of chunky theology or history with me on holiday, along with the more usual and less demanding Lee Child, Henning Mankell, Anne Tyler, Kate Atkinson and various other peddlers of imaginative literature. Mind you, Eugene Peterson is convinced that the best way to understand the doctrine of sin is to read crime novels. Still from that first year in ministry in 1976, when we holidayed on Tiree, that beautiful island jewel set in a sapphire Atlantic as I remember, and I took Hans Kung's 800+ page On Being a Christian, I have always taken one substantial theology book with me on holiday. Friends and colleagues, family and anyone else who discovers my guilty secret, are less than convinced of the wisdom of going on holiday and taking work with me. But it's those occasional hours in the winter garden, or on the sea shore behind rocks or dunes, at the back door of the cottage, on the hotel balcony, in the corner of the bar, that we begin to listen to our lives, and our heart gets a word in edgeways.

At least so it has been for me. I have sat on the hotel balcony in Selva looking at the Dolomites illumined by sunrise, with Wittgenstein's Poker on my knee, and a deep sense of the mystery of how we come to know, and believe, and trust. I have lain on silver sand on Tiree reading Hans Kung's tour de force On Being a Christian, and finding myself moved to prayer by this Catholic priest's passion for truth. I have sat under a tree in a cottage garden near Goathland in Yorkshire reading Elie Weisel's autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, his chapter on the trains so efficiently running to Auschwitz, and being hurled into the present as the Yorkshire steam train came through the bridge, its steam whistle coinciding with Weisel's description of the death trains. And in Mayerhoffen, late in the evening in the corner of the hotel bar, finishing Jurgen Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, knowing I could never think of God in the same way again.

So there it is. An apologia for some heavy reading on holiday. Not for everyone, I know. But for me alongside the fun and intrigue and sheer escapism of the novel, short cumulative interludes for deeper reflection, and at times openness to that even deeper work that God is always doing, mostly unnoticed, to work and to will his good pleasure.

A visit to Crathes Castle Gardens in mid summer is always a feast of colour and abundance. There are wide cottage borders of flowers that have been decades in growing, the colours either blending or clashing, and the blooms planned so that throughout the summer there is colour coming or going. I enjoy the diversity, extravagance and multiplicity of such a long established garden; and then those moments when one particular flower invites and persuades attention.

That happened this morning. At Crathes there is a surfeit of colour and shape, contrast and complement, and it is easy to drift and meander, simply absorbing an environment created for pleasure. We had walked the paths, sat in the shaded seats, taken time to read the names of roses and thistles, trees and shrubs.

I had as usual spent some time at the poppies and meadow flower beds, taking photos which, however well they turn out, are always moments in time frozen for later consumption.

I've never quite reached that place described by Dorothy Frances Gurney, and reproduced in Garden Centre kitsch plaques, "One is closer to God in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." Maybe because as a child and into my teens, in my spare time I was often in greenhouses taking cuttings, growing geraniums, pellargoniums, and other house plants for sale; and my father kept a cottage garden capable of being honourably mentioned in any flower show. I got used to a garden as a work of art, and flowers as a contradiction that everything in life has to be utilitarian or made for a barcode.

But that said, Crathes Garden is a beautiful place to linger, and look, and listen, to the garden and to your heart. Walking out of the garden we came to some trees, amongst them a Japanese Kousa Dogwood in flower.

Unexpectedly, this flower invites and persuades attention. The flower is white, plain, four petalled, and the tree is covered by them, four petalled flowers, white, and cruciform. And it was that observation that made me stop, and look, and think the most obvious thought for a Christian looking at a cruciform flower. There in the delicate profusion of hundreds of flowers, the symbol of love, mercy, holiness, forgiveness, reconciliation and peace.

The connection once made, becomes a prayer, "the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." – "Love so amazing so divine, demands my love, my life, my all" – "We stand forgiven at the cross".