Once you've spent a day in Glen Dye, Gerard Kelly's poem is even more impressive as a this worldly spirituality that brings heaven and earth, God and creation, our humanity and the Divine, ecology and theology, nature and praise, into that creative relationship that affirms as good all that God has made. Celebrating the beauty of the earth is just as important as lamenting its brokenness and ours, and an equally valid form of praise as any anticipation of being less than we were made to be – which is human beings who image the life of the Triune God, and whose humanity is taken up by Jesus Christ in the renewal and reconciliation of created existence, and human experience.
the very thought
I love the very thought of Heaven:
Where angels sing
In perfect, perpetual choir practice.
Where Father, Son and Spirit rule
Unchallenged
And are honoured in full measure.
I love the very thought of Heaven:
But I was not made
To live there.I was not made
To walk on clouds,
And bask eternally
In immaterial splendour.
I was made for this green planet:
This tight ball
Of aching beauty,
Alive with the unending possibilities
Of his creative power.
I was made for the sunshine
That blazes through the veins of a leaf
And glints on the tiny, perfect back
Of a ladybird crossing my arm.
I was made to be human
In this most human of places.
I was made for earth:
The earth is my home.
That’s why I’m glad that God,
More than anyone,
Is a friend of the earth:
Prepared as he was to die
For its release.
And that’s why I’m glad
That the magnificent, jewelled foundations
Of the mighty pearly gates
Will be anchored
Deeply and forever
In the soil of earth.by gerard kelly
Author: admin
-
Suspended by longing between heaven and earth…
-
A Long Walk up Glen Dye in a Landscape Full of Biblical Allusions
While it's good to be led by still waters, I enjoy the sound of running water, rippling over stones and dark peaty colour after the rain.
This is as pastoral a scene as you'll find – Psalm 23 set in Scotland, and we aren't all that far from Crimond, the most famous Psalm tune of them all – apart from the Old One Hundredth maybe. By this time Sheila was getting impatient with her tag along tourist with a camera stopping every few minutes to gawk.
As a boy on the farms I spent years around sheep at lambing time. I've never lost affection for these gentle, timid animals. And the instinctive protectiveness of a mother placing herself in front of the lamb, between it and danger – see the one peeping through the legs!
I find the sound of water like this irresistible. To sit beside this for five minutes is as good as listening to the most healing music. That story of Jesus and the Woman of Samaria, and the well of water springing up to eternal life; or Amos, let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
This little poser has no idea of the dramatic backdrop of Clach na Ben. Amongst the joys of the day was watching two lambs further down racing each other round the rushes and rocks beside the river. They must have played for several minutes – and as Sheila said, they were intentional in their playing, and their energy and balance reminded me that these animals have their own beauty.
"Mine eyes look to the hills – from whence doth help come? Help cometh from the Lord who made heaven and earth."
Quite so – and it was a great day walking in a Glen between the hills on either side, reminder of that help.
-
Finding a Safe Place when We Are in a Hard Place
The Avowal, Denise Levertov
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall and float
into Creator Spirit's embrace
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
Learning to "attain freefall and float" is sometimes a big ask. It requires faith which sometimes comes hard. Such trust requires the courage to risk it all, which seems beyond us when the inner self is feeling defensive and self-protective. Somewhere in the emotional and spirtitual anatomy of faith there is the fusion of personal response and Divine Gift, or perhaps, personal response to Divine Gift. We are saved by grace through faith, which is the gift of God. Yet we are to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, while giving thanks that he who began a good work in us will bring it to completion.
It's an important pastoral insight, best learned by being pastorally sensitive to our own heart's longings, failures and fears, that being told to believe, to trust, to have faith, can be the hardest ask of all – and the hardest task of all. As well ask me to open a tin with a banana. In countless sermons, in many a praise song backed by enthusiastic singing, there can be a subtle but significant theological slippage that has far reaching spiritual consequences.
On what does my life depend? Where does faith come from? If it is all of grace, why does it seem so much depends on me believing, as if the flow of grace was through a tap I have to have the strength to turn on? And what if I don't have that strength?
Does my security depend on me holding on to God or God holding on to me?
Is it sinners receiving Christ or Christ receiving sinners that is of the esse of the Gospel.
Am I caught up into the Triune life of God, and held in the eternal security of a love that will not let me go, or does that depend on something I do, or give or think?
What I like about Levetov's lines, and why I quote them, is she understands (and later in her life came to understand with deep compassion born of her own suffering) is the last two lines.
Don't tell me to believe more. To trust more. To do this or that as if I wouldn't if I could, and if I knew what. To believe when my heart is wrung out of trust and I need to be held rather than take hold. Because it's that holding, that grace, that gift of Love Divine which as Julian says, enfolds us – it is that initiative of God, that perseverance, not of the saints but of God, whose untiring and inexhaustible grace as Levertov says bears, sustains and embraces, " and no effort earns that all-sustaining grace".
Just now and then in our lives, we come to the place where for all our uncertainties, we take the risk of saying to the God into whose life we are caught up in the love of the Father, the Grace of the Son and the communion of the Spirit, "Lord I believe – help my unbelief". The one reality that transcends thought and emotion, reason and the heart, and which persists as the truth that holds us even when we ourselves doubt it, is the spectacular assertion of Paul "Your life is hid with Christ in God".
We use the phrase a lot today, being 'in a hard place just now'. I guess we all know what it means. And that hard place can be a place where faith, trust, hopefulness, confidence, and courage require more than we are able to offer, just now. The hard place is the one that feels most real, determined by outer circumstance and inner anxiety. But the all sustaining grace perseveres, the untiring love does not weary, the life we live is surrounded and drawn into the eternal exchange of love and peace and joy – no we may not be aware of it, "our life is hid with Christ in God", and that depends not on my believing it, but on the love of Christ Crucified, the life of the Holy Spirit, and the sustaining mercy of the Father.
-
The Body of Christ – the Church in the Flesh and the Spirit
Dynamic and erratic,
spontaneous and radical,
audacious and immature,
committed if not altogether coherent,
ecumenically open and often experimental,
visible here and there,
now and then,
but unsettled institutionally.
Almost monastic in nature
but most of all….
enacting a fearful hope
for human life in society.
William Stringfellow, Quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer, page 634
-
Paying Attention to those Moments of Moment….
Three things came together today and turned ordinary time into time when the ordinary and everyday, the routine and the easily missed, become for us extended moments of moment, not momentous, but not trivial either.
Sitting in church looking at a prayer, beautifully rendered in cross stitch, a prayer I use often in worship, and which someone noted down some years ago, and worked in threads, framed it, and gifted it to the church. Now it hangs just to the left of where I sit. It's a prayer about accepting each day as God's gift, to be cherished for the freedom and possibility that every minute brings to us.
On the way to church listening to Classic FM, the second movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto. The gentle melody exudes inner yearning, as if musical notes, carefully composed and skillfully played contain a more adequate grammar of longing, a logic of the heart's desire, a capacity for expression that doesn't need to answer all the deep questions of our existence, but merely to remind us that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yearning is prayer, 'the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.'
Then there were the chocolate gingers! My interest in spirituality and mystical theology has never attained that high level of ascetic practices that would call in question the delight, the God given pleasure, and the necessity for my inner happiness, of the combined taste of dark chocolate and stem ginger! I'm struggling to give a spiritual or intellectual twist to this which is just as well. Few things waste good food more than rationalising the joy of taste. I suppose I could quote "O taste and see that the Lord is good"; or compare the rich spiced sweetness of chocolate gingers to the Psalmist's equivalent comment on the Word of God, "sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb".
No, on this holiday Sunday blessings can be counted. A prayer that receives each day as gift and offers it in worship; music that pulls our hopes and trust upwards in a longing only God can fulfil; sweets, the intensity of taste, spice and sweetness, the pleasure to mind and body that makes us so aware of our physical reality. Each of them a sacrament, a means of recognising in that moment, the presence of grace and the gift that is God and the God who comes as gift.
-
The Excitement of Trinitarian Theology – Honest, no kidding!
Just finished the class on the rediscovery of the Triune God. The discussion on Mission and Trinity was an exciting collaborative hour which eventually produced the theological goods that only come from a class engaged, informed, excited and willing to make space in their minds for new and dynamic thought.
Some of that discussion will continue to niggle away at our theological assumptions and the limitations to our practices and convictions that unexamined assumptions often impose. I have an idea. This is not news, it happens now and again. But the theological goods captured on the whiteboard and preserved on Ipads and emails will make an interesting project for this class to take forward. Except it's the final year class. That's ok – they aren't going to stop thinking, they're going to think deeper, longer and more adventurously out of what they have worked so hard to learn during their journey with us. It would be interesting to see where yesterday's thinking might lead if they continued the discussion on an online blog and developed it into a way of bringing Trinitarian theology, missiology and a Baptist ecclesiology together. Not right away of course – but we may decide on a collaborative project aimed at pushing our own thinking as far as it will go….and then some more…
-
Inversnaid – place of beauty, and inspired poetry
Talking to a friend tonight who spent the day at Inversnaid. No excuse needed for posting Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, but the reminder was enough. Few poets have written of a loved part of Scotland with more precise and sympathetic insight into the inscape of a captured corner of Scottish scenery. Hopkins, along with Clare, Dickinson and R S Thomas, open eyes and ears to the beauty of living things. Hopkins' prayer for the wilderness, those undisrupted places of displayed wildness, comes as a lament for countryside too easily consumed by human acquisitiveness.
INVERSNAID
THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home. A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth 5 Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning. Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, 10 Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn. What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; 15 Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. -
Khalid Dale and the Death of the Righteous
The righteous of the world aren't those who claim to be righteous, but those who do righteousness. That religiously motivated followers of God believe they act righteously, and in the name of their God, by murdering another human being is one of the tragic ironies of religion contaminated by the toxins of hate, greed, cruelty and self-validated violence.
But to brutally behead a Red Cross worker, qualified as a nurse, and working in the killers' own country to bring help and healing to the people, and under the auspices and for the medical and humanitarian ends of an organisation committed to humane and humanising behaviour – there are those who would say such blind hatred and religiously inspired cruelty is beyond words. But it is not beyond words, and must not be allowed to be.
Khalid Dale was a human being, whose humanitarian values and humane compassion, led him to a place of opportunity to help others, and knowingly putting himself in a place of personsal risk. But his presence as a Red Cross Worker, and the universal recognition of Red Cross neutrality and goodwill, should have been sufficient to guarantee his safety and dissuade opportunist or ideological kidnapping. It didn't, which is one of those events that corrodes the foundation pillars that enable the Red Cross to sustain and protect that most fragile but essential attributes of a human being – a humane humanity. That is not a tautology – it is an intensive adjective. Few things diminish the value of human life more rapidly and fatally than war, conflict, hatred, grievance, or any of these combined with religious or political ideology which eclipses all other moral concerns and itself becomes an idol.
We can guess at the motives of those who killed Khalid Dale – but it would illumine little. Some enactments of evil are beyond such explanatory analysis. They are best understood by the act and its consequences. Whole communities will suffer as a direct result of Khalid Dale's murder. People whose lives would have been saved by his experience and influence, his commitment and expertise; people struggling to survive and whose humanity is further diminished by the killing of a trusted and resourceful Red Cross Commission reprersentative. But above all that, a good man was killed by those who show little evidence of that humanity which Khalid Dale cherished, revered and died for in the name of his God – who, whatever the theological complexities, it is hard to believe is the same God as that owned so violently by his killers.
This was not an action beyond words – it was an action beyond understsanding, but not, and never, beyond condemnation. Such acts gave the original impetus to the magnificent work of the Red Cross, and they will not discourage that deeper and more resilient human motive of love, compassion and humanity. To believe otherwise is to give in to the darkness – and I for one believe "the Light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it". Khalid Dale converted to Islam, and therefore he, and not his killers, is the benchmark of that great monotheistic faith and its ethical imperatives.
-
The Day Thou Gavest Lord Ended Very Well!
Last night I didn't die and go to heaven. I went to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and found a piece of it there. The performance of Monteverdi's Vespers by the Dunedin Consort was a very rare experience, and one that would be hard to repeat in just that way and just that place at just that time.
It started at 8, at which time the setting sun was blazing through the gallery windows, illuminating the organ pipes and chandeliers. And as the music progressed the light mellowed, blended with shadow and bathed the interior in breathtaking benediction. To sit there and listen to a performance that was professional in the sense of a performance that is careful and cared for by the artistes, and to do so in the magnificent Kelvingrove Main Hall illuminated by sunset, and
listening to music intended for high spaces, exacting acoustics, and for end of day, was more than memorable.
It was an experience absorbed into those fibres of our being that are not for mere remembering, but for taking away beauty, peacefulness, gratitude and wonder, as part of who we now are. It wasn't just the music; it was more than the glorious building; it was more than the passionate professionalism of the performers; it was even something other than the setting sun and encroaching peace of night. It was all of these, which taken together, allows the Spirit of God to insinuate into our deepest selves that longing and yearning that is love for all that is, for all that we are or can be, and for the Divine Love rarely more powerfully voiced than in the harmonies, aural and visual, of certain rare experiences in our lives. What someone called the unattended moment, a glimpse of glory, and for me, an evening when inner concerns of every human heart, are transcended for a while, by an encounter with that love 'that moves the sun and other stars.'
Other can write a review – I am simply content to acknowledge a debt.
-
The joy of new words
Just learned a new word – "inconcinnity" – which apprently means 'lacking congruity or harmony; the quality of unsuitability'.
It would help my self esteem if any of the readers of this blog were also able to acknowledge their semantic deficit in relation to this word! I thought it was a typo at first 🙁