Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • Good Friday – “exploiting a valuable commercial opportunity!

    Let Good Friday make it a Good Saturday – William Hill advance advert

     

    Horse Racing and Betting on Good Friday. – see the full article here

    "Most
    riders are unhappy about plans to have horse racing on Good Friday, says the
    chief executive of the Professional Jockeys' Association.

    They are
    worried about losing a rare rest day and the effect on their awards night, Paul
    Struthers said.

    The move
    – supported by top female rider Hayley Turner – could provide the sport with a
    windfall of more than £1m.

    But the
    organiser of a Good Friday charity open day has called the proposal
    "greedy and selfish".

    Several trainers and others within the industry have also
    voiced their backing for what they see as a unique chance to exploit a valuable
    commercial opportunity.     "

    It would be easy to be an outraged Christian, and to point out a number of reasons why one day in the calendar, and a day of overriding importance in the Christian Year, should retain its special status as the only day in the year when, up till now, there was no betting. Even easier to point out the vaccuous predictability of the comment see a unique opportunity to exploit a valuable commercial opportunity." And unnecessarily fliuppant to speculate on the lost opportunity two thousand years ago to sell tickets for the three man crucifixion show on Calvary.

    And yet. Betting on Good Friday. Am I not right in saying some of the soldiers from the Roman execution squad gambled at the foot of the cross to settle who got the designer robe, all woven of one piece, that had belonged to the carpenter Messiah with delusions of being the King of the Jews. As if any upstart Galilean could look Pilate in the eye and talk of his Kingdom and expect to walk away. They's nailed him, and now there was a 'valuable commercial opportunity' for one of them. Win the robe and put it on Ebay – or its Greco-Roman equivalent!

    Only those who saw beyond the blood and the nails, the thorns and the dust, and only those who heard behind the anguished cries of a dying would be Messiah, would feel that the gamblers were unwittingly placing bets and throwing dice as the world turned away from God in the ultimate affront of throwing God's love back in his face. So I guess it's unreasonable, I'm not being ironic, to expect a culture insatiable in its search for profit and 'valuable commercial opportunities', to think twice about betting on Good Friday; indeed it would be a Good Friday while so many people are on holiday for some reason or another. That reason being the all but forgotten significance of Easter for a culture where chocolate eggs also represent a valuable commercial opportunity, and where the main argument proposed against racing and betting on Good Friday, in the absence of any others voiced, was that the jockeys needed the extra day off.

  • New Testament Study as Faith Seeking Understanding

    Here is a paragraph that gives New Testament theology and exegesis a good name. It comes from a lecture later published as an essay by J D G Dunn. It is worth reading slowly, and twice – as biblical exegesis, this is faith seeking understanding.

    So too with our hope of Christ's coming again. There is an uncertainty about it which pervades all human prediction about God's future purpose. It is the language of vision and metaphor. It is therefore, strictly speaking, inadequate to the task, as is all human speech about God. But it is the best we have and we should neither be embarrassed about it nor should we abandon it. For it tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future is not random and pointless; God's purpose still prevails and drives forward to the climax of his-story. It tells us and enables us to tell the world that the future has a Christ-shape and a Christ-character. The future will not come to us as a total surprise. For the God we encounter at the end of time will be the God who encounters us at the mid-point of time, God in Christ. And the Christ we encounter at the end of time will be the Christ we encounter in the Gospels, the Christ we encounter in our worship, in the Spirit, in Christ and through Christ to God the Father. We believe that this Christ will come again. "Maranatha. Come Lord Jesus."

    I've read J D G Dunn's work on the New
    Testament since his first book, The Baptism of the Holy Spirit. It's one
    of the great blessings of my life and times that I have lived when some
    of the finest New Testament scholarship has been producing such
    original, high quality studies in the New Testament, and that so much of
    it is so readily available. Dunn's new book, a major study of Oral Tradition and the Gospels is published in a few weeks. In a month or so N T Wright's two volumes
    on Paul will be published – I've waited a long time for this (1680 pages!) instalment of his Christian Origins and the Question of God.

    I was perhaps a bit hard on 'spiritual reading' and 'spiritual writing' in the previous post, not much though. My own alertness to the presence of God is more often heightened when I too wrestle with the text and theology of the New Testament, and read a paragraph like that one above by Dunn. It is a conclusion to an academic essay, a conclusion securely tied to critical scholarship applied by one whose own faith is rooted in the text of the New Testament, and to the experience of God in Christ through the Spirit to which the New Testament bears witness. Dunn, in his preface to Jesus, Paul and the Gospels is up-front honest about this, speaking of "[my] conviction both that recognition of a vital religious experience was an important way in to understanding how Christianity flourished and that one's own religious experience was a vital part of critical interaction with these ancient scriptures".

    That is such a heartening sentence, and places first class biblical scholarship not over and against, but alongside a faith that seeks understanding. In such an hermeneutic the text is allowed to interpret the interpreter. The same convictional foundation underlies N T Wright's work. Mind you I smile when I think that the first book of N T Wrght's which I read in 1986 was a slim, elegant and exciting Tyndale Commentary on Colossians and Philemon, total 190 pages!  

  • The Limitations of Reading So-called Spiritual Writing.

    The poem below, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese, never fails to recalibrate my compass, adjust my altimeter, or guage my inner barometer. And at this time of the year there are large skeins of migrating geese flying over Aberdeenshire, so plenty of reminders of the urgency, movement and impulsion of life.


    Baby-reading[1]I've become increasingly unconvinced by that category of reading called 'spiritual reading', if by that is meant reading that is overtly, designedly and determinedly devotional, or tending towards affecting the affections by self consciously spiritual writing. More and more I am moved by writing that is authentic, alert to human longing and the elusiveness of joy to those who set out to capture it. Oh yes, I still read Julian of Norwich, George Herbert, The Cloud of Unknowing, the Hymns of Charles Wesley -  but also the poems of Emily Dickinson, R S Thomas, Denise Levertov, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, and yes, Mary Oliver. And though I've read Jonathan Edwards Charity and its Fruits regularly for some of the most searching sermons on Paul's theology of the transforming love divine, and try to go swimming in Karl Barth without wearing armbands, and have recently added Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel and First Letter of John to my personal canon of writing worth reading slowly, I'm aware of the limitations of even such deep water theological writing.

    Poetry more than makes up the shortfall of spiritual writing. More often poetry exposes the tendency to religious cliche, reveals the lazy unreality of sentiment run to seed, confronts the religious sins of world evasiveness, challenges contentment with banalityu or manufactured guilt, and most of all requires ruthless honesty in facing up to our own capacity for self-delusion, defensiveness and giving the hard truth a body swerve. 

    That's some of why I love poetry.

    Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

    You do not have to be good.
    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
    You only have to let the soft animal of your body
    love what it loves.
    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
    Meanwhile the world goes on.
    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
    are moving across the landscapes,
    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.
    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
    are heading home again.
    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,
    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
    over and over announcing your place
    In the family of things.

  • Christ who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet


    DSC01286 (1)For various reasons I've found myself reading in and around some of the parts of the Bible that were written out of suffering, loss, and the disequilibrium that can unsettle what we thought were the more secure anchorages. Harvey Cox's commentary on Lamentations in the Belief Commentary series is more a commentary on the experiences which generated the text than the text itself; which makes it a brilliant and illuminating companion when wandering through the dark nights of the soul of that text, written with blood and smudged with the tears of those whose world disintegrated before their eyes.

    Sam Ballentine's commentary on Job is a masterpiece of theological reflection rooted in the text and nurtured by a faith unafraid of questions, and a sympathy with human perplexity and pain that turns theological erudition into an education in existential courage. And then there is Isaiah, those chapters from 40 onwards, hopefully imaginative, scornful of cynical realism, scintillating both in its visions of the incomparable and transcendent God, and in its demolition of the entire structures of idolatry and imperial power games.

    All three compositions are work of the highest art. Which brings me to why I'm writing this. Re-reading the poet Christian Wiman's Ambition and Survival I came across this passage which I marked.

    'John Ruskin..writes in Sesame and Lilies:

    "the more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel themselves wrong; – who are striving for the fulfilment of the law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining the more they strive for it."

     There is a sense in which all art arises out of injury or absence, out of the artist's sense that there is something missing in him [or her].'

    The connections between beauty and the wrongness of the world, between human losss and incompletion and creativity, are powerful, mysterious and defiant of our best explanations, which makes them often a source of further perlexity. Out of such human turmoil as inspired the poet who wrote Lamentations; out of such personal catastrophe when life's deepest ties are torn apart and explanations merely add to the anguish, comes a masterpiece of world literature like the book of Job; and out of such broken spiritual hopes and national humiliation, when exile in an alien culture is  a relentless reminder that hope is suppressed by imperial hegemony, there erupts Isaiah's poetry of passion and power, of liberation coming with the certainty of Divine promise and, renewal envisioned on the scale of the God who is the Eternal and the Creator. Such beautiful art, the distilled essence of faith crushed like grapes for wine, and bearing a hope that springs from the same seeds, to grow again and turn into the wine of God's Kingdom – such beauty from brokenness.

    And perhaps, with all our current fascination with words like discipleship and discipling, there is a deep corrective truth to be recovered; from the same root comes the word discipline. There is in Jesus call to discipleship a cross to be borne, a way to be travelled and a sacrifice of self made possible only because the weight of the Cross is more than balanced by the power of the resurrection. And when faith becomes weight-bearing, the great mystery of the Gospel is that our strength to follow the way of the Cross comes from the living Christ, who goes before us, walking on nail pierced feet, but as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith; the living Christ in whom we live and move and have our being; the living Christ of whom Paul wrote "I am crucified with Christ; I live yet not I, but Christ lives within me; and the life I now live, I live by faith in the Son  of God who loved me, and gave himself for me". 

    The photo is of the Shalom tapestry, a visual exegesis of selected psalms.

  • The Daily Mail, the Labour Leader, and the Question – Where is the Head of Steam Coming From?

    http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/30/article-2439593-1869B7C000000578-761_638x423.jpg

    The row between the Daily Mail and the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, is a telling example of the nastiness of innuendo, the damning of people by association with deliberately caricatured ideas, the grievous sin of claiming the high moral ground by appealing to the lowest moral common denominator. When a newspaper uses terms such as 'hated Britain' and 'legacy of evil' and 'poisonous creed' as ways of describing an academic Marxist who was a Jewish refugee from Belgium, fleeing to escape from the consequences of National Socialism's military aggression, who served in the Royal Navy, and whose contribution to the cultural, intellectual and social life of our country has been adversarial rather than confirmatory, then I smell a rat, and perhaps a bloated disease ridden one at that.

    That a man who fled Nazism as a terrified teenager, having experienced German right-wing exteremism in its most destructive and evil manifestations, and known at first hand an ideology with a powerful capacity to reconfigure morals and social engineering to suit its own evil ends, that such a man should be damned, and his children attacked for being his children, makes me wonder which of the descriptors of Ralph Miliband has so infuriated the Daily Mail. Was it Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, Socialist, or academic? The paper claims it is the word Marxist they wanted to highlight, and they did so with all the lethal ambiguity loaded into such a word by a paper which stands at the ideologically opposite pole. Was it Socialist, a word clearly so repulsive, it  was used as a sick joke with a photo of Ralph Miliband's grave, headed 'Grave Socialist'. (The belated admission it was an 'error of judgement' makes it sound as if the wrong font was used in the insult). I don't think it was the word Belgian that triggered this landslide of insinuation and hermeneutic malpractice. That he was an academic, who lived in an environment of contested and debated ideas, and whose role in a democarcy is precisely to engage with ideas critically and with intellectual integrity, cannot surely have so offended a newspaper which claims it is defending the integrity of Britain's institutions by allegedly exposing someone who 'hated Britain'. Was it the word Jewish, something Ed Miliband himself mentioned in two consecutive Party Conference speeches, a fact noted in the daily Mail's defence of the original article, and noted with editorial precision linked to a rather wooden allusion to 'the jealous God' (note the negative pejorative) of Deuteronomy (note the cherished words of the Torah).

    My problem in deciding which of those words launched the article – Belgian, Jewish, Marxist, academic – is that whatever the motives any journalist claims, whatever the public interest a paper says it is defending, they write in the murky unhygienic waters of diverse prejudices and dirty politics. The ambiguities of words that have cultural resonances far deeper than their surface dictionary meanings, the suggestiveness of what is said and what is omitted, the bias and blindness of a paper's ideology, right or left, the toxins thrown up by social insecurity, economic panic, and the survival instincts of a culture in moral and existential disarray, – these require of responsible interpreters an hermeneutic of suspicion. No I don't know with certainty what underlies such an attack on a senior politician's father; but neither will I exclude the possibility there are underying agendas that it may be too dangerous to state openly.

    One further thought. There is something intellectually naive about an article that quotes one sentence against the English and their nationalism as proof of lifelong hatred of the country where he found safety, when that sentence was extracted without context from the diary of a 17 year old refugee from Nazi Europe still trying to find a standpoint from which to view his broken terrifying world. Ralph Miliband's ideas and political views, and his view of the world and of Marxism in particular, could hardly be further from my own; likewise the policies and ideas of his son hardly commend themselves to me as the most ethically sound, economically feasible or politically promising. But they should be judged on their merits, not caricatured as Marxist bogey men resurrected to sinister purpose. History is not a predictable catena of causal connections, whatever a tabloid newspaper would like us to believe.

  • “Divinity saturated and clothed his world….” A New Book on George Herbert.


    51aOnMyStaL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_SX385_SY500_CR,0,0,385,500_SH20_OU02_I'm slowly and satisfyingly making my way through John Drury's new book George Herbert's life and poetry, Music at Midnight. Drury's book Painting the Word was an eye opener to the ways in which art provides exegetical images which are their own hermeneutical essays on the biblical text. Along with Jaroslav Pelikan's Jesus Through the Centuries, and Graeme Finaldi's The Image of Christ, which doubled as the National Gallery's catalogue of the exhibition of that name, Drury's book is an important contribution to a revived interest in visual art as exegesis. And I see Richard Harries has a new book due in a few weeks on The Image of Christ in Modern Art.

    Now Drury's book on Herbert comes at the end of years of reading and studying the quintessential Anglican Divine and poet. What makes Drury's book fascinating is the space given to Herbert's world, his early life and the connections between early experiences and the later poems. For example The Collar, with its opening line Drury links to a row breaking out at the table during a meal. "I struck the board, and cried, No more:" The choleric temper of the Herbert brothers, Edward and George are well documented, and Drury exploits the storm of rage between the brothers as the key to understanding a poem which both describes the inner psychology of anger, and the deeper psychological search for peace, harmony and serenity. The form of the poem is erratic, varied line lengths, rhymes and assonance all over the place. As Drury says, "It is an eruption". Such family experience recalled, provides for Herbert familiar experience on which to hang his own religious discontent and spiritual conflict as resentment of life's inner and outer chaos battled in his heart. Until eventually a parental voice addresses him, "Child", to which he replies, "Lord".

    I've read The Collar often enough, and am surprised at the obviousness of the connection Drury makes, but only after he pointed it out is it obvious. And so in other parts of Herbert's experience, for example living near the busy intersection of business and society at Chring Cross, and another fascinating connection between Magdalen Herbert's hospitality in an age of genteel etiquette, and that same etiquette made famous in Herbert's best loved poem, "Love III". More about this fine book later – but here are the two poems, The Collar, and Love III. No wonder Rowan Williams chose Love III as his favourite poem, and T S Eliot admired Herbert enough to echo some of his lines in his own work.

     

    The Collar

    I struck the board, and cried, "No more;
                             I will abroad!
    What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
    My lines and life are free, free as the road,
    Loose as the wind, as large as store.
              Shall I be still in suit?
    Have I no harvest but a thorn
    To let me blood, and not restore
    What I have lost with cordial fruit?
              Sure there was wine
    Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
        Before my tears did drown it.
          Is the year only lost to me?
              Have I no bays to crown it,
    No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
                      All wasted?
    Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
                And thou hast hands.
    Recover all thy sigh-blown age
    On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
    Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
                 Thy rope of sands,
    Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
    Good cable, to enforce and draw,
              And be thy law,
    While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
              Away! take heed;
              I will abroad.
    Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;
              He that forbears
             To suit and serve his need
              Deserves his load."
    But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
              At every word,
    Methought I heard one calling, Child!
              And I replied My Lord.
    ……………………….
    Love III
    Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

            Guilty of dust and sin.

    But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

            From my first entrance in,

    Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

            If I lack'd anything.


    "A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

            Love said, "You shall be he."

    "I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

            I cannot look on thee."

    Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

            "Who made the eyes but I?"


    "Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

            Go where it doth deserve."

    "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

            "My dear, then I will serve."

    "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

            So I did sit and eat.

    Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
    Guilty of dust and sin.
    But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,
    Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
    If I lacked anything.
    "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
    Love said, "You shall be he."
    "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
    I cannot look on thee."
    Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
    "Who made the eyes but I?"
    "Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
    Go where it doth deserve."
    "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
    "My dear, then I will serve."
    "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
    So I did sit and eat. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf
    Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
    Guilty of dust and sin.
    But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
    From my first entrance in,
    Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
    If I lacked anything.
    "A guest," I answered, "worthy to be here":
    Love said, "You shall be he."
    "I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
    I cannot look on thee."
    Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
    "Who made the eyes but I?"
    "Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame
    Go where it doth deserve."
    "And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
    "My dear, then I will serve."
    "You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
    So I did sit and eat. – See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16121#sthash.fkrHOZe9.dpuf

  • The Gospel According to John and the Fathomless Depths of Grace upon Grace……

    Petworth House © NTPL
    The portrait of St John the Evangelist, is by Adam Elsheimer, and provides the front cover for F D Bruner's commentary on John. I hadn't heard of Elsheimer till I read the small attribution at the back of Bruner's book. I like this painting – which is hardly the last word in art criticism! But it's just the truth. I suppose it can be analysed and compared with other contemporary artists, influences traced and duly noted, ethos and provenance established. Then it can be examined for symbolism and the whole painting subjected to hermenecutical scrutiny. Maybe some other time. I just like it – simplicity with enough of mystery, a serpent lifted up and a chalice held for blessing, and the background of a world both vague and detailed.

    As to Bruner's commentary, near 1300 pages of commentary on a gospel would once have been considered definitive. But Bruner has aimed at something more realistic, and satisfying. This commentary is a receptacle for the gathered fruit of decades of study and teaching, and at least a third of its length is given over to sections on the history of interpretation of the text. These read like catenas of wisdom from Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Henry, Bengel, Godet, Meyer, Westcott, and then we come to the 20th century with Bultmann, Dodd, Brown, Schnacknburg and beyond. It is a vade mecum on John, and for me at least, is a feast of fun to read.

    No it won't displace Raymond Brown as my most loved and used commentary on John; and I still persist with Barrett as the commentary that taught me how to actually enjoy NT Greek and its fruits; and yes there is an embarrassment of riches on John's Gospel from Ashton, Dodd, Carson, Moloney, Michaels, O'Day, Keener, Morris, Beasley Murray, Lincoln, Witherington, Ridderbos to the too easily overlooked John Marsh in the Pelican Commentary Series which manages to combine common sense with spiritual acumen in exploring a complex text. And then there's Richard Bauckham's long promised commentary on the Greek Text, still to appear and looked forward to But John's Gospel is an embarrassingly rich text, and coming back to Bruner, his is a commentary that any preacher worth her salt will value and enjoy!

    Here are the words of Rabbi Johannan ben Zakkai about Torah, with pardonable exaggeration enthusing about the value of our greatest teachers:

    "If all heaven were a parchment, and all the trees produced pens, and all the oceans were ink, they would not suffice to inscribe the wisdom I have received from my teachers of Torah; and yet from the wisdom of the wise I have enjoyed only so much as the water that a fly who plunges into the sea can remove".

    In much less hyperbolic terms, James Denney could refer to Johannine and Pauline theology as waters in which we " hear the plunge of lead into fathomless depths…"

  • Lament for a Church With Way Too Low Expectations of God

     

    "We have lost our nerve and our sense of direction

    and have turned the divine initiative into a human enterprise…

    And all these drab infidelities are committed

    not because too little power is available to us

    but because the power so far exceeds the petty scale we want to live by.

    God has made us a little lower than the angels,

    while our highest ambition is to live a little above the Joneses.

    We are looking for a sensible family-sized God,

    dispensing pep pills or tranquilisers as required

    with a Holy Spirit who is a baby's comforter.

    No wonder the Lord of terrible aspect

    is too much for us…..

    (John V Taylor, The Go Between God (London: SCM, 1972) 48.

    Slightly dated now in its langauge, but this remains a powerful and original exploration of the work and reality of the Holy Spirit in creation, church and human experience. This remains an early milestone book in my theological awakening.


    DSC01550

    The photo of a battered Bible in a country church notwithstanding, the Word of the Lord endureth forevermore!

  • Brambles and Victoria Plums – as good as it gets!

    What a year for blackberries, brambles as i call them. I can remember one year picking brambles after a hard frost and it was the easiest picking ever. Mind you the fingers were numb in minutes. But the frozen brambles came away so easily and into the margarine tub. There are few tastes from my childhood more vivid and memory jogging than bramble jellly. I still love it.

    Obviously so did Seamus Heaney – is this poem not a marvel of long ago reminiscence, remembered delight, mouth-watering recall of those moments when our taste-buds learned how to explode?

    Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney

    At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
    Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
    You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
    Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
    Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
    Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
    Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots
    Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
    Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills
    We trekked and picked until the cans were full…

    While on the subject of wonderful fruit – it's the Victoria plum season, and oh my goodness, apart from chocolate, I happily forego all other sweets and treats to eat my fill of these fruits of Eden. You think an apple is a temptation……. 🙂

  • An email from America from a Rowan Williams Fan!

    The other day I received an email from Meri, who came across this blog by accident. It seemed to me to be the kind of response that makes blog writing worthwhile rather than a self-indulgent personal platform. The following is her email and my reply – I marvel at the way friendship, fellowship and shared experience are possible and made rich with meaning through such serendipitous actions as Googling a ridiculously erudite ex-Archbishop of Canterbury and ending up with, well, me :))
    ………………………….
    "Serve God wittily in the tangle of their minds"

    I love that.

    Hi
    James,

    My name is Meri.  I came upon you by way of searching for Rowan Williams.  I found him as holy fool with a delightful photograph of  him
    looking quite mad.  If it were not for reading Rowan Williams  "Writing in
    the Dust"  contemplations after 911,  I would not have become the lonely
    G-d botherer that I am.  This kind of writing was  nothing like the messages
    in the church of my youth,  Church of England.  That kind of religion never
    "took" on me and I left as soon as I was able.  But,  the biblical
    narratives and Christian values are deeply embedded in
    me.

    Loneliness and loss has dogged me all my life,  leading me to a love of literature and a life of the mind.  Reality has disappointed. Fate
    has not been kind.  Now, I see myself as an isolated, literary and poetic
    soul who has never found a place to fit in.  Certainly not in
    establishments.

    I discovered theology through RW and it spoke to me, made
    sense, was not simplistic. I am not an academic, but reasonably
    educated, literate and thoughtful.  If I am to untangle my mind,  I need help.   Where to find it?  I believe my only option is to reach out on-line to those with similar interests.  The idea of an on-line holy book
    club is appealing.  Have you heard of such a thing?  Do you know of any
    serious theology forums? and would they allow a novice in?  (I am 82 years
    of age) a little slower, but still teachable…… Do you think this is a
    good idea?

    I have a dog eared copy of "Open to Judgement"  which has
    been invaluable for my sanity.  An essay on "The Abbe Huvelin"  a theology for neurotic and suffering souls was written especially for me.  I am 
    indebted. I used to follow Dr. William's web site when he was
    Archbishop, and I miss it.  Have you read any of his recent books, and
    would you recommend one?   Perhaps he has written another phrase or
    paragraph  especially for me………

    My devotions are eccentric. 
    They are connected with a humming bird I feed and will help through the
    winter.  And with the barns I visit where the police horses live.  Last
    week Dalton, the horse,  was all gussied up ready to visit a dying child at
    the hospital.  These kinds of things let in the light and help with the
    untangling.

    The photo of the heather is lovely,

    best
    wishes,  Meri

    And my reply
    Hello Meri!

    What a
    delightful letter, thank you! You are precisely the kind of person for
    whom much of the blog is written. I'm glad it's of some help.

    I too miss
    Rowan Williams. The fact that some said he was too clever to be Archbishop says
    more about dumbing down leadership to management, than it does about someone who
    is chosen under God to be a spiritual leader. Have you had a look at his book
    Tokens of Trust? Apart from his more substantial theological work, he writes
    some books as a brilliant man whose intellectual power is used in the service of
    faith seeking understanding. This is a really good introduction to the Christian
    faith through the thick glasses of Rowan!

    Can I also suggest you get a
    hold of Benjamin Myers book Christ the Stranger. The Theology of Rowan Williams.
    I think it will give you a lot to think about because it is what a good
    introduction does – it gives you Rowan Williams rather than someone else's much
    less interesting opinions about it!!

    Now I haven't personally gone
    looking for an online theological forum but there must be such things. An online
    theological reading group – now that's a good idea though again not one I've
    pursued, so can't help much there. You may see yourself as a novice, but someone
    whose life experience is a rich tapestry of light and shadow, and whose
    spirituality is formed in the hard places as well as the comfort zones, is no
    novice in theology, if theology is to be lived as well as thought.

    I
    wonder – would you allow me to put your letter on the blog – I can remove your
    name if you wish. I think it would encourage others who struggle with other
    people's claimed certainties and closed timidity in the face of the mystery and
    meaning of that Reality whom we name as God, and have come to know through
    Christ. No pressure whatsoever if you feel hesitant. Just let me
    know.

    Shalom, and give dalton an apple on my
    behalf,


    Well as you can see, Meri was happy for our correspondence to be published, and she sent a photo of Dalton – I need to convert it from a bitmap file to one this platform supports – I can't work it out, any suggestions?