Author: admin
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Looking for something else I came across this:The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that though the capacity to love may not be [fully realisable] in human nature as we have it, it is the essence of God's nature. What is Christianity, if it is not the message that God has entered into the history of the world for the purpose of restoring the image, of re-making our human nature after the pattern of the divine, of changing us beyond our capacity to change ourselves?
Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity, (London: Nisbet, 1943), pp. 186-7.
I have taken the considerable liberty of qualifying Hodgson's original text as indicated in square brackets. For myself I have no doubt whatsoever that the capacity to love exists, albeit imperfectly, incompletely and, in important areas, frustrated and unfulfilled. But love we do, and love we give and receive, and the love of one human person for another, and for the humanity of others in its various expressions of community, is a rather definitive quality in those who are imago dei, and God is love.
The restoring of the image is of a spoilt masterpiece not a blank or erased canvas. Athanasius knew that. But changing us beyond our capacity to change ourselves? Oh yes, that's what we mean by grace that redeems, transforms, transfigures, renews and restores. In that sense we are damaged masterpieces, being conformed to the image of Christ in his humanity, and being transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we discern the m ind of Christ.
One more poignant thought – my copy of Hodgson used to belong to Dr David Wright, lately of New College Edinburgh, and one of Scotland's galaxy of scholars during the second half of the 20th Century. Hodgson is a forgotten theologian – but interestingly this morning, reading a book on Christendom by Aidan Nicholls I came across his name, quoted with approval and as a substantial voice in the debate about how the essence of the Christian Gospel is articulated in both poetry and philosophy.
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The Greatest Story in the Greatest Story Ever Told……
The irony of a vulnerable woman circled by hostile men with rocks at their feet or in their hands; the contrast of soft flesh and tears of terror, with lumps of hard igneous missiles lying in the dry dusty heat; the tragedy of a woman reduced to a case study of man managed Holy Law (the gender is not generic but specific – men were the interpreters of the Law) while they tried to trap and damage one whose whole life was a fulfilling of that law; and yes, that film director's dream of an image of the self-possessed nonchalance of the lead man, tracing something in the sand without saying a word.
In conversation with a good friend yesterday about that displaced but not misplaced Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery. It comes at the start of John chapter 8 and if read there (rather than in the further displaced position of bottom of the page in small type) then it comes immediately before Jesus' outrageous declaration, "I am the Light of the World". Whoever placed it there made one of the great interpretive text critical decisions in the entire formation process of an early church cherishing its foundation documents.
This is one of the great scandalous stories in a Gospel full of them; this is subversion of power personified in the casual therefore unmistakable authority of one who will look power in the face and die rather than let it win; this is the story of a man and a woman in which neither man nor woman get each other and instead the exposed woman is clothed with dignity, mercy and love, and the departing men are stripped naked of their self righteous postures and sent away judged by their own departure and closed to the realities of the love and mercy that lies at the beating centre of the faith they represent.
It is a story in which the Light of the World blazes with love and the shadow of each person's own sins are seen to fall on the ground behind those who dare stand before the Light and question its truth. As to what Jesus wrote, or doodled, or drew? We'll never know – commentators guess and the possibilities are richly ambiguous. You does your exegesis and you takes your pick – my own modest suggestion, entirely speculative textually, but in the person of Jesus replete with internal probability, is that the phrase 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice' was doodled the first time – and when there was no response and he stood holding the stone and daring them to enact their claimed sinlessness, he knelt and doodled again. And my mind goes to those searing searching words in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery starting in the heart…and he who is without sin becomes a much harder case for men to prove of themselves. Whatever he wrote the second time - they scarpered!
The painting is by Titian and is in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.
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Remembering with gladness for the gift
A birthday is always to be celebrated. Today would have been my mother's birthday. I'm not announcing this as an expression of sadness, but as a day of thankfulness. The obvious self-interested gratitude of a son to the one who gave him life – but gratitude also that in my mother I was given a remarkable gift.
In a culture that has grown used to benchmarks as standards of quality, she benchmarked several human qualities that I now value and try with varying degrees of success or frustration to live towards.
Generosity that could be reckless but never calculating.
A capacity for work that lived up to one of her own greatest compliments -'not a lazy bone in her body'!
Laughter that revealed a sense of humour always sharp, but never cutting.
Courage to bear and forbear an illness that often undermined her deepest sense of self.
Compassion for others that was neither ashamed of tears nor afraid of the cost of helping.
A love for animals that was Schweitzer-like in its reverence for life.
An instinct for the circumstances of others that made her alert to those small, random acts of kindness we all like to have happen to us.
My mother also had her faults – I recognise some of them in me. But today I simply celebrate a life to which I owe my own, and incalculably more besides.
Requiescat in pace.
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Preaching, Theological Education and Honesty of Language
"Our task is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of unadulterated truth
but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language
that will permit communication between people on all social levels,
instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues
which isolate people in their specialities." Thomas Merton, Literary Essays, P. 272.
Whatever else our celebrity intoxicated, sound – byte obsessed, advertising dependent, txt diminished language could do with, it could do with laborious reshaping towards accuracy and honesty. Perhaps one aspect of Christian witness would be to live for a day or two in the light of Jesus' warning that every word we speak will have to be accounted for. And the criteria will not be what our language sells, but what it heals; not what it subverts, but what it builds; not how clever but how wise, and not how manipulative but how restorative.
And that's as true of our preaching and teaching theology, as it is of any other sphere, from markets to banks, from Parliament to Church, from family to friends. A recession of truthfulness in speech is just as damaging to the fabric of society as an economic downward spiral.
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The Advent of Smudge
New resident has moved in to our home. As from today goes by the name of Smudge.
We've had a cat in the home all our lives other than the past two years since Gizmo went to the Celestial Catnip Mountains two and a bit years ago. The advent of Smudge restores the domestic balance and provides an endless source of fun on tap, affection on demand, conversation with and about Herself, curiosity and laughter, ongoing expense, years ahead of inconvenience, and all worth it, totally worth it.
One of the worst mentors for living kenotically is the cat, imperiously indifferent, manipulatively affectionate, instinctively self-interested, morally impervious, purringly contented most times, and furry fury now and again. Such a good balance to help us avoid that anaemic kind of Christian disposition that Thomas Merton called "chronic niceness".
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A Harbinger of Hope in a World of Knowledgeable Cynics
Not often that North East Scotland reminds you of Isaiah the prophet. But this photo, due only to the coincident thought flashes in my own imagination, reminds me of Isaiah 35, one of the most remarkable poems in the Hebrew Bible.
1 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,
the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly,
and rejoice with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the LORD,
the majesty of our God.
Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
"Be strong, fear not!
Behold, your God will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you."
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a hart,
and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
And a highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not pass over it,
and fools shall not err therein.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the LORD shall return,
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain joy and gladness,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Isaiah was a harbinger of hope, a good news correspondent in a world wearied by waste, a visionary who could imagine an alternative reality and make it sound realisable. He is the patron saint of indomitable faith, not fideistic naivete, but someone who spoke out of a living core of obstinate belief that God is faithful, come hell or high water. Deserts blossom, streams flow out of rock and sand, safety is not a mirage, and joy doesn't have to be sought in artificial stimulant or chronic mental distraction, nor emotional satiety, but in the deep, deep knowledge of a love beyond grasping, holding and being held by that inexplicable hold God has on us that provides subterranean permanence beneath our doubts.
In other words, God is the renewer of deserts, the restorer of hope, the giver of joy, the eye-opener extraordinaire, the sound that penetrates the dullest deafness and speaks new truth. For jaded 21st Century Christians Isaiah is the fifth Gospel, the good news for a world whose ecology is being devastated, for a world of jagged fractures and frantically maintained walls, for souls parched with too much flux and hype, starved of silence, cheated of joy for the sake of pleasure, and deprived of peace.
I love this book – to use an older phrase, "it speaks to our condition". What would it be like if, after the usual litany of what we now call the news, someone was brave enough to say "And finally, the wilderness will be glad, a highway for the righteous, streams in the desert, and everlasting joy shall be upon our heads". I know – daft, naive, – but Isaianic naivete is preferable to what we call political sophistication and realpolitik.
, s a
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Refusing to confer ultimacy on evil
Funny how sometimes several scattered moments of cognition can be drawn together by one of those rare migrating coincidences of thought, when against all odds, we are made attentive to something precious and important to capture,which otherwise would disappear in the fast flowing stream of consciousness which passes for thought in an overstimulated world.
It started when I read a novel last week by David Silva, The Rembrandt Affair. It's the story of a lost Rembrandt masterpiece, an SS Officer who combined an obscene courtesy to those he robbed with indifference to the plight of those same Jewish victims, a Jewish painting restorer who works for Israeli intelligence, and a little girl who, like Anne Frank was hidden by neighbours. A key moment in the story is when against all warnings, she crept out into the snow one moonlit night to play and dance. She was seen by the neighbours, reported, and the family were transported, except her, whose freedom was bought with the painting. Like so much of the literature of the Holocaust, there is the tragic irony of guilt clinging to the soul of the victims, who have done nothing wrong – other than exist.
Then I listened to Sheila Hancock's audio version of her autobiography Just Me. One chapter describes her visit to Hungary, and her discovery of the 600,000 Jewish people who were there before the War, and the tiny remnant who survived. Her sorrow and anger, her utter bewilderment at such organised human cruelty, combined with her rage that this could happen while she was betwen the ages of 8 and 13, in her lifetime, is one of the most telling pieces of soliloquy she has ever uttered, including Shakespeare.
I then watched the programme on Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, a pre-olympic docu-drama that filled out the stories of these two remarkable human beings. Both of their later lives overshadowed by war, and the cost and consequences of ideologies that reduce human beings as means to ends, rather than privilege every human being as ends in themselves.
By now, inside a few days, one of the 20th Century's most systematic forms of madness had insinuated itself back into that conscious reflective place in the mind, where prayer, ethical judgement, moral energy, critical thought and human wondering mix together in the search for meaning. As if the discovery of meaning could lessen the evil, reduce the guilt, redeem the suffering, restore hope or render the Shoah as something less than the mystery of iniquity it is. Because at the same time it arose in an historical nexus of events imagined, initiated and implemented by human beings, morally accountable, made in the image of God, and utterly capable of denying to others the humanity they claimed for themselves, thereby raising by their actions, in the tragic irony that accompanies moral suicide, a more potent question mark over their own humanity.
And then I came across this – and I realised again the spiritual genius of God's people, the miracle of human hopefulness and goodness, the capacity of that of God in us to look Hell in the face and refuse it ultimacy.
O Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill but also those of ill will. But do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us.
Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to the suffering; our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this.
And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness. (Prayer of a condemned Jew in Belson)
I'm glad I was in my study on my own when I read this, and I am glad for two reasons. First, because together with the clues and intimations above, I was ready to hear words that in their truth and hope and love, slice through the dark tangle of hate and anger, sorrow and shame, despair and distress that grips the heart when we are confronted by intolerable but unalterable truth. Secondly because I cried, confronted by the distilled essence of goodness and mercy.
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Unashamed nostalgia
Just flicked and found the Yesterday channel and was transported to 1965 when I was young, not too innocent and loved the music!
The Seekers, Carnival is Over, (EVeryone was in love with Judy Durham) Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, Dave Dee, Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch, Hold Tight, (to which I used to dance with unbelievable energy) The Byrds, All I Really Want To Do, (I used to wear the tall white polo necks too!)
I remember watching each of those performances on TOTP without realising we were on the cusp of a cultural revolution. There are chords and bars of those songs that simply erase 47 years and make the record play again 🙂 Mhmm.
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The Poet reveres the word, the mind and the heart
Every now and then I come across a poem by Alice Meynell, and decide to go look for her and find out more about her. Till now, I haven't. But already it's obvious she was someone whose life experience was rich and enriching, whose contribution to her times like that of many women was overlooked by virtue of her being a woman. Late Victorian patriarchy and anti Catholic bias led to her being shunned for Poet Laureate; her contribution to the Suffragist movement is all but ignored, and at times misleadingly omitted from the narrative. She was one of a growing number of literary Catholics whose poetry and essays explored those realities of faith and questioning, from the standpoint of a Catholic heart and mind seeking to be faithful, yet doing so with intellectual integrity and emotional honesty.
I want to know more about her, and I want to read her best poems. Because again and again I've found that the poet who reveres the word as the currency of human thought and feeling, has a charsimatic quality of language that makes mystery communicable; not as lucid clarity and definition, but as articulated longing, as holy imagination, as intellectual and spiritual humility in the presence of the sacred.
Here is one of Meynell's poems which I know well, and need to know better, because it points to a way of seeing people, and seeing Christ in and through others.
"The Unknown God”
One of the crowd went up,
And knelt before the Paten and the Cup,
Received the Lord, returned in peace,
and prayed Close to my side. Then in my heart I said:
‘O Christ, in this man’s life
This stranger who is Thine in all his strife,
All his felicity, his good and ill,
In the assaulted stronghold of his will,
‘I do confess Thee here,
Alive within this life; I know Thee near
Within this lonely conscience, closed away,
Within this brother’s solitary day.
‘Christ in his unknown heart,
His intellect unknown – this love, this art,
This battle and this peace, this destiny
That I shall never know, look upon me!
‘Christ in his numbered breath,
Christ in his beating heart and in his death,
Christ in his mystery! From that secret place
And from that separate dwelling, give me grace!’
