Author: admin

This is one of my favourite poems, but from a poet I don't much get on with. I've got a wee soft leather bound Victorian book called Devotional Poets of the 17th Century, and Herrick gets most pages ahead of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne. Nowadays I guess 17th Century devotional poetry should be labelled with the nutritional traffic light system. Too sentimental sweet like ladles of condensed milk, too many degree of difficulty semantic gymnastics, too spiritually voyeuristic of others and narcissistic of the inner self with an unhealthy fascination with personal spiritual performance….and so on. 

Certainly, compared with modern religious poetry, the seventeenth century spoke to a a different world, one that seems a solar system or two distant from where we all live now. The leading devotional poets of the 17th Century were coming to terms with civil war and new approaches to military tactics, weaponry and political possibilities beyond absolute monarchy and bloody conflict. It's the difference between the newly effective musket volley, and the laser guided bomb and uranium enriched shell and flechette and cluster bombs. Forget globalisation, they were only discovering the extent of the world, its place in our own solar system post Copernicus, and centuries ahead the importance of international co-operation in economics, collaboration of resources and knowledge in science, technological exploitation of the earth, and capacities for communication that were simply unimaginable. Think Cromwell using social media to make the case against the King, or the international media reporting regicide and a generation later the Restoration.

And yet. Even Herrick, when he got it right, wrote about God in words that still make sense, at least theologically. That's why Herrick's poem on God's Boundless Mercy is such a favourite, because at their best, some of those old 17th C poems give richness to our praise, images to our worship, and a rootedness in the sacraments of creation which communicate the depths of God beyond words.  

Maybe it's living beside the North Sea, replenished up here by two rivers, but this poem works for me:

God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis ne'er
Known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.

One of my favourite walking or running paths takes me past the new Episcopal church in Westhill. An ultra modern, multi-purpose community building that now sits on the outskirts of the town, looking towards the distant hills of Clachnaben and Cairn O Mount.

At one point walking past I had one of those moments when random impressions and ideas, past thoughts and inner conversation, all come together and coalesce in an image. I took the camera this morning on my more causal take it easy walk with occasional bursts of slow jogging. So I took this  picture

The juxtaposition of pylon and cross, both made of steel, both based on the intersection of horizontal and vertical, and, in Christian theology both charged with power to transform and energise – these are some thoughts that coalesce in this image, at least as I saw it. "This the power, of the cross…." is one of the established and rightly more durable songs from the Townsend collection. It affirms in strong language and a powerful and singable tune, the Christian conviction that in the cross we see not the weakness but the power of God made perfect through weakness.

The violent imperial repression of ideas Rome feared, made the cross the chosen instrument of control by terror – when it comes to terrorism no one is better placed to terrorise than the powerful holders of weapons, power and ideology. Then as now. But the framing of the cross against the background of pylons suggests one or more reflections on green theology, the cost to the earth of our energy hunger, the ruining of creation by our manufacturing and consumptive obsessions. And yet. The renewal of creation lies at the centre of the Christian vision of the future; the earth groans awaiting its redemption, creation is about more than human beings, and redemption is about more, much more, than my wee precious unique and eternal soul!

Which is my main hesitation with one line of Townsend's brilliant hymn; I cannot sing "Oh to see my name, written in his wounds…For in your suffering I am free." Not because it isn't true, but because it isn't the most important truth about the cross. Should any of us who have begun to understand the scale and depth of the love of God ever ever be comfortable with the first person singular "I" as the centre of our understanding of the Gospel? Oh to see the wounds of my brothers and sisters in Northern Iraq….. Oh to see Gaza's wounds and Israel's wounds and the wounded earth, and "Oh to see the famished dehydrated children of so many nations…Oh to see their names, written in your wounds, for through your suffering they are free…"

Yes the cross is personal, because God has made the renewal of creation, the redemption of his purposes, the freeing of all creation, yes including me, personal. And yes I am invited to embrace that love, to engage that purpose, to surrender to that vision, to give in by giving myself away to this ridiculously extravagant and scandalous God whose Love dares to be crucified and defy the powers of empires that terrorise. "Death is crushed to death, life is mine to live, won through your selfless love…" He dies that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again.

This the power of the cross! That photo makes the connection. Every time I run past this church, from the downward slope I see this image, power and love. In that one line Townsend's hymn, in seeking to make it personal, in my view steps over the line of allowing our personal experience of blessing to eclipse the scale of what took place on the cross. Oh to see their names, our names, all names, written in his wounds….This the power of the cross. That I think restores the scale and eteranl perspective of the Gospel.

Here's a couple of pictures of Westhill Episcopal Church

I've added another typelist on the sidebar, "Off the Beaten Track". This will list books outside my main interest areas, but which have been worth spending time reading, and thinking about. Once I've read each one I'll try to distill into 200 words what made it a worthwhile read. It's my age I'm sure, lending urgency to hours that increase in value year on year, so if a book I start doesn't grab me by the ankles it's just as likely to be kindly placed in the first charity bag that comes through the letter box.

Some of the best things I've read have been in books that found me, or tugged at my sleeve, or propositioned me at a weak moment, or grabbed me by the ankles on the first page. Gillian Clarke's At the Source, was first heard on Radio 4, and the Welsh National Poet's voice and the beauty of her descriptive prose got me clicking on amazon. Conversations with Chaim Potok, brought me into the company of a novelist I've read repeatedly, but who had remained elusive as a person – he is a fascinating conversationalist on his own novels, which takes a bit of doing. Often the writer isn't the best person to say why you should read their work. Michael Foley's The Age of Absurdity is an impressively wise and shrewd account of our culture's capacity to be blind to our own stupidity. Kathleen Norris wrote Dakota as an account of her own spirituality and gave it the subtitle A Spiritual Geography. This is a hard to pin down book – topography and spirituality, observations on climate and the flora and fauna of the Great Plains, her Benedictine predilections and her work as a poet, a wife and an erstwhile yet persistent Christian, – these are all explored against the landscape of the Midwest. Matthew Guerriri wrote The First Four Notes as a historical investigation into how the first four notes of Beethoven's 5th Symphony have captured the imagination and influenced its hearers in literature, history, politics and much else in human reflection and action. 

One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was to make sure I read beyond my interests, my competences and my imagined areas of expertise. And I always have – that isn't a self-promoting assertion, more a self-deprecating comment of indebtedness. Because some of the most important thoughts I have thunk, some of the most interesting vistas opened in my mind, some of the more telling criticisms of my too easily arrived at certainties, have come from those "off the beaten track books". I start with Moving to Higher Ground. How Jazz Can Change Your Life, Wynton Marsalis – a book endorsed by the late and wonderful Maya Angelou.

Not sure how long this will run for; in my mother's phrase, used as a slow let-down alternative to a straight 'no', "we'll see"! The photo shows you some of the beauty discovered, the interest provoked, the previously unencountered viewpoints attained, and the different horizons opened up, when you walk off the beaten track and read something just for the Heaven of it.

"So how are you enjoying retirement?"  "What do you do with yourself these days?""Got any plans?"

These are tricky questions. Not because they are meant to be but because of the assumptions that shape them. At first I resisted the denominator "retired", because I have no intention of retiring just yet. But that sounds like incipient denial, I'm not that old….yet! But it isn't that. It's to do with an underlying vocational pull towards those so varied areas of life and those diversities of gifts and the always to be looked for opportunities which together with inner motives and accumulated experience make up my life past, my life present and life into whatever future lies within the purposes of God.

Now that last phrase is the important one; "within the purposes of God". What I do with myself these days isn't the straightforward question those who ask it (with kindness and interest) think that it is! What I do with myself is an even more interesting phrase if I simply insert a space – What I do with my self. Over the years I've tried to resist the assumption that what we do defines who we are. So on Facebook I am a former College Principal, but I'm also a former and present Baptist minister; a husband, a father, a friend, a brother. I'm a writer, a scholar, a preacher, a gardener, a reader – I do tapestry, take photos, cook the most amazing lasagne, rice puddings and Moroccan chicken. All of these I do with my self, and as I do them, the self that I am changes and grows.

What I have found as I've thought about all this during a two month sabbatical is that what every one of us has done in all these layers and episodes of life, has been and goes on being the raw material out of which, day by day, we are being shaped and formed into who we are becoming. That present continuous "becoming", should warn us against a fixed, static definition of who we are; we are more than what we have done, and our identity is a dynamic, growing but changing continuity held together by our choices, decisions, circumstances seen and unforeseen, and that nexus of relationships with all those folk who move in and out of our lives. 

Vocation is an important way of living our lives; it has for me a defining Christian urgency. I am called to be me, but a self committed to following Jesus faithfully, living under the rule of Christ. That's true whether I'm preaching or cooking, laying turf in my garden or taking a funeral, stitching and working a tapestry or accompanying people in their lives as they try to discern and live into the patterns and purposes of God. You don't retire from what is a chosen way of life, and whatever else Christian faith is, it is a Way, a way of life we have both chosen and to which we have been called.

So what am I doing with my self these days? Taking time to think, to let the last few years settle and begin to fit into a life lived self-consciously Godward, with more or less understanding of what that means. These words of C S Lewis have helped me to trust God's creative faithfulness, and to believe that it is the grace of God, often undetected at the time, that slowly or quickly, gently or fiercely, persistently and patiently, works away at the envisioned objet d'art that is each one of us :

"All that you are…every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to Him. He made those ins and outs that he might fill them. Then he gave you a soul so curious a life because it is a key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him."

The photo is of one of our roses,another unique presence, called and created to be beautiful for a while……

Has anyone else found it really diifcult to live in two media worlds at once these past weeks?

The Commonwealth Games have brought enormous energy, enjoyment, achievement and social cohesion; for which read a pervasive in your face friendliness from Glasgow people that is infectious, funny and incurably self-conscious without being anything other than glad to host the party and include everybody within loud shouting distance. The interviews with Glasgow folk are a credit to a city that knows its own history, and knows its own place, and is proud of both. Glasgow has been a whirring hub of life engaged in making a big thing happen and doing it in a way that is peculiarly Glaswegian and memorably Scottish. (Apart from not including the Proclaimers in the closing ceremony – what a missed opportunity that was!! 

From such humming euphoria, high visibility human togetherness, days of shared laughter and hopes, international cross cultural goodwill, we turn to the news from Gaza. That shift of focus has required a bewildering change of worldview, a psychological decompression chamber lest we absorb so much tragedy and suffering into minds that need time to adjust. The number dead has reached 1800 with 9,000 injured, the vast majority civilians. Another 10 died yesterday, taking shelter from the sun, under a tree, at the gate of a UN run school sheltering several thousand civilians.

The media constructed alternative worlds are truly bewildering and heartbreaking. Lifetime challenge and ambitions of atheltes, and the life destroying goals of Hamas and Israel; sport as a medium of friendship, and conflict as the nursery of future hatred, enmity and violence; the exchange of shuttlecocks, hockey balls, contrasts with crude rockets and flechette shells, drone missiles and precision air strikes; finish lines and endurance races, contrast with conflict borderlines and the endurance of a people with nowhere to go as the lines of lethal advance concentrate their numbers and the high explosive ordnance keeps raining.

I admit it. I am bewildered, emotionally and morally unsettled, not sure what to think, or do or say. Images of fireworks celebrating our human togetherness keep being contradicted by images of explosions and flashes of fire as death is dealt with computer precision. These past weeks have been so wonderful for Glasgow, so hellish for Gaza. So I do what I can; I sign the petitions; I blog and write to my MP and I argue with the "Israel can do no wrong lobby", and I pray. But none of that makes any visible difference to the inflicted misery and eclipse of mercy that is Israel and Gaza at war.

One of the most remarkable advances in human behaviour and social hopefulness was the establishing of the lex talionis principle, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. No that is not a licence for vengeance, it is an imposed constraint upon hatred, an agreed control of violence, a crude but essential justice based on proportionality, and with the intention that such exchange is limited to the offender and the offended. The collective punishment of the Palestinian people lacks all proportionality, has no relation whatsoever to justice, makes no pretence at limitation and is made worse not better by rhetoric about seeking to avoid civilian casualties when the numbers are as they are.

But then, this is the 21st Century, we know better than the ancients, our sophisticated weaponry doesn't require us to personally kill each person – that can be done remotely, more efficiently and with greater killing power. And when one protagonist couldn't care less about the lives of its own population, then the provocation takes on lethal persistence; and when the other protagonist has overwhelming military capacity to inflict death at will, it can be done with impunity until the international bystanding stops. And whether I like it or not, British arms sales to Israel make me implicit; and our Government's supine silence makes me ashamed; but I pray the Lord's Prayer, and believe in its hopefulness, its defiance of those who think their Kingdom is unshakeable and their will is to be done.

Just now and again the juxtaposition of images is unsettling. Walking by this field of ready to harvest barley the barbed wire was at eye level – that path was lower than the field, please note!

The grain that nourishes – by the way, although barley is used for brewing, it's also a staple ingredient of Scotch Broth – is fenced in by tight parallel lines of sharpened steel.

Barbed wire is to keep in or keep out. It has its uses but by definition and design it does its work by fear or hurt. A reminder of the serious issues facing our qworld where grain and steel, food and defence, nourishment and threat, co-exist.

Then there's the moment the bee and the flower come together. Honey is the result of that more creative juxtaposition. Looking across St Cyrus bay, the micro drama of honey making plays out against a background of windswept dunes, distant sea and cliffs for a mile northwards.

Now, what's the flower? Is it a field scabious? In any case, one of my joys of walking with a camera is for just those moments of happening, when nothing unusual happens, except that I am there to see it, and paying enough attention not to miss it!

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At Pitmedden open air Shakespeare and with time at the interval to enjoy the garden in late July sunlight. I love mature trees with a shape formed over years of weather, husbandry and growth mapped to context. This tree wouldn't have grown just like this, anywhere else. And over decandes pushing towards a century it has slowly spread and accommodated itself so that it looks just right.

Three photographs, entirely incidental, lacking any lasting significance, except for the presence of the photographer who notices, bothers and sees….

These are the words of broken hearted Jewish people:

Remember O Lord against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall.,

How they said “Tear it down. Tear it down.
Down to its foundations.”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against rocks.

These horrendous, brutal, anguished words came from people who could no longer find acceptable words to describe what had befallen them at the hands of a more powerful enemy. The bitter irony of the events in Gaza is that the very people from whose national suffering and shattering such words of imprecation came, are engaged in actions which create precisely the same future-looking rage, and hunger for vengeance, that make these words so chillingly potent.

So in answer to Mr Netanyahu’s speech about preparing for a protracted operation (for which read more killing of innocent civilians), I remind him of the words of the Jewish people, his people, against Edomites and that a simple word change makes the same overwhelming moral case:
How he said, “Tear it down. Tear it down. Down to its foundations.”

And the response of a broken people, brutalised by overwhelming military force, “O Israel, you devastator!”

The Israeli military rhetoric behind the Gaza assaults will inevitably mean those last verses from a Jewish Psalm, are now being said by Palestinian mothers, fathers and children. They have seen their children and parents dashed to pieces by merciless unremitting salvos of military ordnance, sold and manufactured in the UK and US. Overwhelming grief left unassuaged, and violence unleashed with assumed impunity, normalise the mind-set of the merciless. That is what I detected in Mr Netanyahu’s speech last night. Not political obstinacy, though that too; not justified anger and grievance, though that is also granted. But a merciless dismissal of intolerable suffering of those who have no recourse, or defence. Mercilessness is a corrosive mindset, and a contagious and lethal virus. And a world that stands by and sees it take hold, and says nothing and does nothing effectively to end the carnage, shares the guilt and responsibility for the spread of toxins into a bleak future.