He leads me beside the still waters:
He restores my soul.
Author: admin
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Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Transformative Forgiveness.
If you didn't hear the Chief Rabbi on Thought for the Day this morning, then take time plater to listen to it on the IPlayer. This is vintage Jonathan Sacks, humane, religiously generous, passionate in conviction, reasoned but within the key principles of his own faith tradition. I listened to it on the way into College and a grey wet Wednesday suddenly didn't seem so grey.
His distinction between regret and remorse, and his understanding of what forgiveness and reconciliation cost and their value to the human future give what he says a moral decisiveness in a blame culture where responsibility is always placed on someone else.
This is religious broadcasting at its very best. Ever since his reith Lectures on The Persistence of Faith, I have admired, listened to and learned deeply from the Chief Rabbi. I guess he stands somewhere between the moral glow of Micah, the sense of the Transcendent God of Isaiah, and the questioning intellect of Qoheleth, but with the sub-stratum of trust that permeates the Psalms, all integrated in a life based on The Torah.
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The Otherworldly World of Cabinet Ministers, Or Why Chris Huhne Has No Idea!
The Energy Minister, Chris Huhne thinks the consumer is significantly to blame for high energy prices.
85% of consumers can't be bothered to shop around for a better deal, he says.
The average family could save up to £300 a year just by changing supplier.
In other words, let the market set the price, and the most savvy people will benefit.
So what about people who don't have online access;
many of the more elderly and vulnerable people in our communities;
low income families where even if they got a better deal, energy is still so expensive the choice is between heat and food;
Oh – and what about the fact that the big 6 have all put prices up more than 10% and they control 99% of the market.
I suggest Chris Huhne shops around and gets enrolled in one of the following courses:
"Get Real – Towards a Basic Understanding of Social Realities"
OR
"Laissez Faire – the History of a Bad Idea for the Poor."
OR
"Making the Right Choice – Principles for Getting the Balance Right Between Heat and Food"
OR
"Let Justice Flow – and Alternative View of Energy Flow."
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The intellectual life of a highland cow
One of the first photos I took with my new camera.The beast is looking at me with
puzzled perplexity thinking,
"Why do these people bother?"
monumental boredom sighing,
"You sad man. Get a life."
bovine compassion empathising,
"Poor man. So little hair on his wee heid."
territorial aggression, calculating,
"Can I get him before he reaches the fence?"
existential well concealed joy, ruminating,
"Grass, blue skies, celebrity status – I've got it all."
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What kind of God is the Christian God?
What kind of God is the Christian God? The early apologist who wrote the Epistle to Diognetus was utterly convinced of the decisive nature of Christ for any understanding of God that claims to be Christian:"Why did God send the Son? To rule as a tyrant, to inspire terror and astonishment? No, he did not. No, he sent him in gentleness and mildness. To be sure, as a king sending his royal son, he sent him as God. But he sent him as to men, as saving and persuading them, and not as exercising force. For force is no attribute of God.
On this passage the Arthur McGill in his book Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, gives this comment, one of the countless fugitive affirmations of kenosis as the self-giving love that is the disposition of God:
"Force is no attribute of God". – that is the basic principle for Trinitarian theologians. God's divinity does not consist in his ability to push things around, to make and break, to impose his will from the security of some heavenly remoteness, and to sit in grandeur while all the world does his bidding. Far from staying above the world he sends his own glory into it. Far from imposing he invites and persuades. Far from demanding service from men and women in order to enhance himself, he gives his life in service to them for their enhancement. But God acts toward the world in this way because whithin himself he is a life of self-giving.
(The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens – the random design of a cottage border seems to fit with a piece on the generously extravagant, self giving love of the God who does abundance!)
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Haiku and the beauty of the stones
Amongst my favourite pastimes is walking on the cobbled beaches on the east coast of Scotland. I spent some time recently admiring, contemplating, enjoying, looking at, considering, wondering, imagining, as I looked at the cobbled beach in sunlight. The colours and textures, the thrown togetherness that looks like creative arrangement, the smooth roundedness surprisingly soft and warm, the hard durability of elemental substances of quiet understated beauty, the random oddity of millions of stones tumbled trillions of times and now available for exhibition to an audience of one, with a camera.
The following Haiku hint at the marvel that is a cobbled beach, with oblique glances in the direction of that relatedness that enriches our humanity – relatedness enriched and stimulated by similarity and difference, tone and shape, angle of repose and interconnectedness so that the whole is greater than the parts, nearness and distance and space, and the provisionality that is essential to avoid sterile sameness.
Stones in Sunlight.
Remorseless friction,
waves lapidary tumbling,
the beauty of grey.
Cobbled together,
aeons of geology,
placed by time and tide.
Tones in harmony,
well rounded community
of shaped difference.
Pebbles of friendship,
in easy togetherness,
colour and contrast.
(copyright. Jim Gordon, 2011)
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9/11 – when memory gives way to prayers for peace, and a theology of peace is a missional imperative
WHAT KIND OF GOD?
The toy plane comes out of the blue
and zaps the tower as it would do
in comic or cartoon, but this is true.
A hundred storeys up, stick people
wave little banners of forlorn humanity,
already fatally diminished
to their gawping fellow-kind
before the crumbling hell engulfs them.
It's said the terrorists' god
unfazed by death of innocents
will take his fanatics to unending bliss.
What kind of god is this?
Lesley Duncan, poem first published in The Herald, September 13, 2001
I remember exactly where I was when the news came on the TV after the first plane – I watched the second plane.
The world changed that day.
For those of religious faith, religiously justified violence, distorted and destructive devoutness, was from that day seen as blasphemy writ large;
for those of no religious faith, the events of that morning was a powerful persuasive that the idea of God is dangerous, inhuman, and when fuelled with hatred combusts in an evil worse than any secular ideology.
Today analysis and comment on 9/11 seems unnecessarily presumptuous – better to remember, and to learn, and to pray. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself…." What kind of God is this?
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the love of life, and the courage of faith
"If there is one result, one lesson to be learned from history, I would say that it is…the love of life as it really is."
What makes that affirmation remarkable, and full of spiritual adventure, is that Bonhoeffer wrote it while in Tegel prison, and it is put into the voice of a character in one of the fiction pieces he wrote there.
I guess "the love of life as it really is" is what Bonhoeffer means when he says "God is in our life and beyond it", a prevasive presence, a suffusing grace, giver of a transformative vision of the world and our life in it as God loved.
A good thought for a grey, mizzly, drizzly, cold Saturday in mid-September while wondering where on earth summer was, or went.
PS The photo was taken in Aberdeen Botanic Gardens and is one of the best results so far of the now not so new camera.
Secondly, I noticed the miss print "prevasive" – decided to leave it and let it mean what it sounds loike – that God is there before we are!
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Karl Rahner – the simple prayer of a complex theologian
O God
you must make your own human word,
for that's the only kind I can comprehend.
Don't tell me everything that you are.
Dont tell me of your infinity.
Just say that you love me,
just tell me of your goodness to me.
But don't say this in your divine langauge,
in which your love also means
your inexorable justice and your crushing power.
Say it rather on MY language,
so I won't have to be afraid
that the word 'love' hides some significance
other than your goodness and your gentle mercy.
Karl Rahner, Encounter with Silence.
And they say rahner is a complex, difficult to read theologian who uses obscure or sophisticated philosophical categories. maybe so. But this is the prayer of someone who knows the limits of language, the constraints on concepts, and the deficiencies of discourse when it comes to describing God, let alone addressing God – and when it comes to God addressing us, all language breaks down and we are presented with Personal Presence, the Word made flesh, God who has spooken in his Son.
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A Litlle Prayer for Samson and Delilah
Yesterday we were at the Westhill monthly book sale. It is held under the canopy of the shopping centre and there are loadsabooks! The money goes to support a local charity and the variety of books is astonishing, but there are also several genres heavily represented. One of the book sorters, displaying them in supermarket fruit boxes made no concessions to equality and diversity – there were "mens' book" and their were "womens' books". I asked him what defines a man's book – seems that's violence, thriller, military, and other accounts of mayhem. A woman's book is romance, nice story, life story of celebrities and other soft options.
I asked him then why the majority of readers of crime fiction are women, and some of the best crime authors likewise, women – including some of the darker forms of the genre. At which point I realised I was pushing too hard at his useful rule of thumb cataloguing technique by stereotype. I moved on.
Anyway, I bought two books having returned five and a CD for resale. (Net loss to our house of three books!) One of them is a book of poetry where I found this poem which is a brilliant example of biblical exposition that is imaginative, michievous, humorous and serious. There are a number of ways you can treat the story of Samson and Delilah. The weak strong man, the naive Judge who couldn't judge character, his own or Delilah's, the arrogance of strength and power. Then there's the Hollywood treatment of Victor Mature and Angela Lansbury as Delilah!
But this poem is quite different and I'm now wondering if the insight given could ever be preachable by a bald man!
Little Prayer for Samson and Delilah
When all virtue
like Samson's Rastafarian locks
lie strewn about us,
have mercy Lord,
on those who sleep in weakness,
and those who have shorn us of strength.
Like the growing stubble on Samson's head
let us be renewed to undertake
the phenomenal as a matter of course
when we awaken
from the lap of philistine ease.
(Diana Karay Tripp, 20th C, Lione Christian Poetry Collection, Mary Batchelor (ed), p.46.
The painting is by Gerritt Van Honthorst.