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Now and again, like every other reader, I wonder, "Why did I ever buy this book?" But, until online book buying gobbled up so much of the book market, only a very few times have I ever wondered where I bought this, or that book. Then there are those books you remember exactly when and where you bought it, and why. This book is one of them.

On holiday in New England, visiting very special friends Bob and Rebecca, in the Hanover Book Store, in the early 1990's, I bought Joan Chittister, The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages. For a good few years I had been studying Benedictine and Cisterician spirituality. During Lent in 1984, at a time in my life when more was happening than was easy to manage and process, I worked through Seeking God. The Way of St Benedict by Esther De Waal. It was a book that considerably re-shaped my inner life, made me re-think the disciplines of obedient Christian living, and provided a new framework within which to practice ministry as care and commitment to community. 

For several years after that I subscribed to Cistercian Studies, a quarterly academic journal on monastic spirituality with many articles on prayer, contemplative spirituality, and community formation. On occasion, I corresponded with a Trappist Brother who was one of the editors, and who had come across my name from an article in the Expository Times. He first wrote to me because he was intrigued to know why a Scottish Baptist minister was interested in a tradition so different from my own. I was quite intrigued myself! 

Back to Sister Joan Chittister OSB, and her commentary on The Rule of Benedict. The first thing to say about reading this book is the immediate impression we are listening to a no nonsense counsellor who knows her own heart well, and who understands other hearts and minds. She is compassionate, funny, sharp as a pin, instinctively alert to the subterfuges and excuses we all make for our outward behaviour and inner dispositions. By leading the reader carefully through the text of the Rule she invites us to be honest about ourselves, to look in the mirror and see what is there, and not hate it. The Rule is a journey towards wholeness which is found in obedience to Scripture, simplicity of life, stability of standpoint, commitment to community, prayer as openness to God, to our community and to the world. 

This book integrated much of my previous reading, thinking and praying about what a Christian life could look like if energised by a disciplined freedom for ourselves, and a commitment of love and service to the other. In the years since, Chittister has become a figure of international importance as a spiritual writer, peace activist and campaigner for social justice, equality and human flourishing. Of her many books I've read a few, but this one remains the most familiar as a source of spiritual commonsense, incisive directness, good humoured patience with human failing, and constant hopefulness for what human life can be when touched into fullness by learning to love the God who loves us first, and last.

Here is Chittister on the Rule practised in the obedient life of community:

"These tools of the spiritual life – justice, peacemaking, respect for all creation, trust in God – are the work of a lifetime. Each one of them represents the unearthed jewel that is left in us to mine."

"Life is a tapestry woven daily from yesterday's threads. The colours don't change, only the shapes we give them."

"God does not want people in positions simply to get a job done. He wants people in positions who embody why we bother to do the job at all. He wants holy listeners who care about the effect of what they do on everybody else." 

"When we make ourselves God, no one oin the world is safe in our presence….Eventually the thought of humility is rejected out of hand, and we have been left as a civilisation  to stew in the consequences of our own arrogance."

"When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own trusths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else's ideas…the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn." 

My copy is so old and used the glue has dried and split. I go back to it often, especially to the pencil marked margins. There is a section on humility and leadership that was written thirty years ago, and which describes with devastating prescience, what moral failings of political leadership lacking in humility, truthfulness, accountability and integrity. Strange, that a Rule intended to create stability, sanctity and service in monastic communities, should speak with such psychological precision into the stress fractures that threaten our own culture's future capacity to renew itself. 

Some books are for their time. This book is now dated in important ways. Chittister would write a different book today. I suspect it would be more outspoken, more angry at injustice, more resistant to the moral laziness and spiritual lethargy of personal piety and self-cultivation. She is now a loud voice in prison and penal reform; she is utterly fearless in calling out the ways culture and church dis-empower women; she is much more impatient with recalcitrant unjust structures and systems of her own church and wider society, that make change difficult and preserve the privileges of the wealthy, the powerful and the loudest voices. Having read both women, Joan Chittister now reads like the spiritual adviser of Madeleine Albright! 

So it may be you would be best going for one of her more recent books. Her latest book, The Time is Now, is a passionate constructive critique of the current crisis of truth in the United States. Between the Dark and the Daylight. Embracing the Contradictions of Life, is an exploration of the ways life can become murky, lose focus and pull us in different directions. Then there's Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, a quite startling exposition of Jacob at Peniel, and one that has grown out of someone who gets it, the legacy and even healing potential of scars and wounds. All I would say is, if you haven't read Joan Chittister, an important voice is missing from the conversations of your life.       

Today has been a busy day of writing to and for other people.

Several emails to people facing surgery, having had difficult news, struggling with loneliness, anxious for family or friends. The usual pastoral response would involve presence, visiting, conversation, prayer. Some of that can be written, but much of what we convey in pastoral care is embodied and the body has its own language. Whatever benefits can be found in online encounters, they cannot substitute for the touch of hand on hand, the smile of understanding, the awareness of a physical presence that says we are not on our own. 

A pastoral letter to our church community. No, not the "As I sit in my study watching the daffodils wafting lazily in the gentle breeze" kind of letter, the literary and spiritual equivalent of artificially sweetened dream topping. Rather. Reflection on how we practise hospitality in a time of social distancing, isolation and lock down; find ways of being there for, if you cannot be there with. Then some thoughts on prayer as what the church does alongside everything else. Prayer, not as add on, but as essential source of energy, imagination and compassion. Prayer is not only what the church does; it demonstrates what the church is, – a priestly community open to the world, open to God, and facilitating the connectedness between the grace of heaven and the need of earth.

Then producing a week's Thought for the Day, seven verses from the Bible, each with no more than 70 words of comment, but earthed in the reality of our life together as a community of faith and belonging. Something to think about, words to guide and encourage, a catalyst to change the way the day looks.  

Then the phone calls. To people self-isolating and feeling the long loneliness of another 3 weeks looming, and beyond that. To someone heading for surgery soon and anxious about going anywhere near a hospital just now. To couples where one is shielding the other, and so far it's all going fine and food, medicine and exercise are all working out. From someone checking up on us and taking time to listen as well as speak. From my oldest friend, out for his exercise walk and decided he needed to find out how we are doing, and our promise that as soon as this is over we meet half way between here and Glasgow and have a bacon roll and coffee.

Aye, that kind of day. A privilege kind of day. One of those days when you give what you can and trust it's enough. A bit like the boy with his loaves and fish; the results are the same whatever we put into the Master's hands.

This time I'm going to break my own rules. That's because those who read Walter Brueggemann know that he is the author very many thickly textured thin books. Indeed I suspect the phrase "thickly textured" comes from my reading of Brueggemann from his first books till now, and that, like the twelfth of never, is a long, long time. So I want to mention several of Brueggemann's books, and those reading this, well you can take your pick. 

By way of orientation for those who don't know about him. From his appointment as Professor of Old Testament at Eden Theological Seminary in 191, until his retirement from Columbia Theological seminary in 2003, and still active in scholarship and preaching at the age of 88, Walter Brueggemann has written, preached, taught, lectured and served the church all his life. He remained in Seminary education in order to influence the formation of those who would serve the church as preachers and pastors. It mattered to him what theological and pastoral students do with their studying and their thinking. He wanted to encourage them to become people of prayer, scholars for whom study and contemplation in the world of the biblical text would provide the nourishment and guidance for the people of God in a time of cultural exile and globalised capitalism.

I'm not sure who actually knows how many books Walter Brueggemann has written. According to his own website the total at present stands at 137 – that is not a misprint. There are three scheduled for 2020, but in fact the list omits Virus as a Summons to Faith. Biblical Reflections in a Time of Loss, Grief and Uncertainty, just published. The title and subtitle say much about why Brueggemann has become for many pastors and Christ followers a trusted source of biblical wisdom, pastoral responsiveness, and theological responsibility when dealing with the dilemmas, suffering and injustices of life in our globalised world. You can find more about Brueggemann on his website. For now, some reasons why he has a place in this series of blog posts.

Living Toward a Vision. Biblical reflections on Shalom. (1976.Rev Ed.82). Ever since reading this book 'shalom' has been a keyword in my world view. The word incorporates blessing as wide as the grace and generosity of God. Living towards shalom means deep commitments to peace as a gift and a task; it involves compassion enough to be inconvenienced and generous to those in need; it requires imagination to think newness into old unjust systems of power, in order to transform our social arrangements towards human flourishing; shalom invites change and incites the passions to work for them. And that's Brueggemann just getting started. For me this was a ministry defining book that compels an out of the ordinary kind of obedience, a new way of seeing the world differently, trusting the graced interventions of God through gifts to God's people, and then the people of God heeding the vision and wirlding God's gifts of shalom, serving God to make it so.

Which brings me to The Prophetic Imagination (1978). "The time may be ripe in the church for serious consideration of prophecy as a crucial element in ministry." "The prophets", he argued, "understood the distinctive power of language, the capacity to speak in ways that evoke newness "fresh from the word."  This book introduced to its readers the distinctive themes and tones of Brueggemann's ministry of scholarship: the role of an alternative community with different goals for human community; creating a mindset that is counter cultural in order to be a creative and redemptive presence in that culture; acknowledgement of pain and suffering, openness to human pathos and enough faith in God to voice lament and anger arising out of grief; the prophet's words and visions a energy source of faith, amazement and risk in the reach for newness. Few writers enter more deeply into the biblical text in search of God rather than answers to human crises.

The Message of the Psalms is an astonishing book. In it Brueggemann expounds the Book of Psalms using a 'scheme' of orientation – disorientation – reorientation. Some Psalms are entirely positive, affirming creation and the Creator, extolling the blessings of Torah, celebrating occasions of well-being, life is experienced as orientation towards blessing. Other Psalms are much more negative, as tragedy and suffering bring anguish and deep questioning of faith, there is disorientation, and as deep penitence is called for, despair is given voice in some of the most pain filled words in all of world literature. Yet other Psalms speak of reorientation, praise and gratitude for reconciliation, problem resolution and restored relationships, a return to thanksgiving as a default disposition of faith, returning confidence in God and in life in one's place in the world and in the divine purposes. Throughout the book Brueggemann comments briefly, sharply and at times quite brilliantly about the human experiences of orientation – disorientation – reorientation as a cycle of life circumstances that give rise to such apt and to the point prayers as are gathered in the Psalter.

Those who have read Brueggemann over the years would now recognise his voice, his way of saying things, and the remarkable power of his own words. Who else writes like this:

"The subversion of faith has nothing to do with being liberal or conservative. It has to do rather with this question: whether the dominant force of technological, electronic, military consumerism is to have the final say in the world, whether the practices of greed, alienation, despair, amnesia and brutality are to be the shape of the world in which only the privileged have a chance to live well, and that by utilization of the deprivileged as a means toward ends. Or whether the covenantal dreams of Moses, the deep hopes of Jeremiah, and the suffering transformative love of Jesus will draw us to an alternative faith that treasures our common, God-given humanness."

I would recognise that voice anywhere. 

By his own criteria for what constitutes the genuine prophetic element in ministry and in the church's mission, Brueggemann is also amongst the goodly fellowship of the prophets. No, he is not always right; yes at times he says again what he said before; he can at times get carried away by his own passionate lucidity and he can be so provocative you have to close the book, think about it, and more often than not, hear him out because he's on to something important. And you need to listen. 

If you have never read him, try his now famous essay, "The Costly Loss of Lament" which you can read over here. If you want to chase some of his titles, they are all listed over here.  

Two tasters. One from Prophetic Imagination, the other from Sabbath as Resistance:

"The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”

“Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being.”

Around the time Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God was published, a slim book of pastoral and constructive theology was published, with the telling title, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense. Some of Moltmann's most adventurous insights into the suffering love of God were given pastoral purchase in this slim volume.

Canon William Hubert Vanstone (whose contribution to church economic theory was to sell the antique vicarage furniture to pay for the repair of the church roof!) fulfilled a long ministry in Kirkholt (near Rochdale) until ill health forced him into retirement. He wrote Love's Endeavour as a reflection on those years of ministry in a commuter estate in the late fifties until the mid-seventies. It's the story of his search for a theology that would sustain the church in its mission, and himself in his vocation, in a world where God and church seemed hardly relevant.

He wrote of the precariousness of love, insisting that love can have no guaranteed outcome, and that the love of God is expressed precisely in this risk-filled vulnerability of self-giving – love is cruciform, and the cross is divine love personified, Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense.

Vanstone wrote and lived out a courageous and risk-filled theology of God's love that recognises the nature of love as that which confers freedom. Love's essence is relational freedom in which lover and beloved give and respond in grateful commitment and chosen joy. Compelled love is oppression; manipulative love is destructive; love cannot be deterministic and remain love.The idea of an all-powerful love requires, therefore, careful qualification.

The power of God’s love is not coercive, but seeks the response of those so loved. The power of God’s love is not overwhelming force but inexhaustible mercy. The power of God’s love is exerted in patient persuasion, faithful persistence, forgiveness of wrong, and the freely borne cost of loving those who are undeserving, who are hard work, and who may even reject the gift of self that is the ultimate proof of love in its purest form. Divine love is indefatigable in imaginative creativity, uncalculating in generous openness to the one loved, so that what is suffered is borne because the one who is loved is worth it. 

Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, and its sub-title, The Response of Being to the Love of God, remains for me one of the most influential and theologically decisive books I have ever read. I genuinely treasure my now yellowing £2.95 copy of a book that has shaped and liberated many a pastor, minister, or priest engaged in the search for a pastoral theology of the love of God that takes seriously the suffering, struggles, mistakes, sins, uncertainties and anxieties and all the experienced finitudes of human life.

In daring, passionate prose, Vanstone provided me with a generous but honest vocabulary about what love is and what love must be if it reflects the love of God; precarious, out-going and out-giving, passionate, costly in investment, risk-filled, self-donating, no guaranteed outcome, faithful waiting which is patient of purpose. Vanstone gathered much of that conceptuality into one of the finest hymns on the love of God that I know, Morning Glory, Starlit Sky.  The words are set out below.

But before that, two testimonies from people who knew W H Vanstone as their priest. Years ago I wrote a couple of things about Vanstone, and had correspondence from several people who knew him well. One was a child during Vanstone’s ministry:

"My childhood memories of Mr Vanstone are magical. I was born on Kirkholt in 1957 and lived next door to the church, St Thomas. He brought all the community together what with the gang shows, cleaning his coverage (paving slabs) when we were small children for some plums, and listening to his ghost stories. I remember one especially about a dog with a man's face! We had brilliant times going Carol singing each Christmas with Mr Vanstone, singing in the stairwells of flats and always finishing up at Mrs Morgan's house for supper. Best memories of a lovely, down to earth, community gentleman. What fantastic work he did."

Then there is this brilliant character reference from one of his curates in the early 1970’s:

“I was Bill's curate in Kirkholt from 1971-74. He used to bin all his parish sermons after use. To this day, I wish I had raided the bins on Monday morning. I could have had a treasury of spiritual insight and learning.”

At the end of Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, Vanstone included a hymn which is the strong concentrate of his profound and personal theological narrative of the love of God for this wayward and recalcitrant universe, for this heartache of an earth, and for each being created by him, especially those made in God’s image.

Morning glory, starlit sky,
Leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
Autumn gales, tremendous seas,
Sounds and scents of summer night;

Soaring music, tow’ring words,
Art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
Joy supreme of human love,
Memory’s treasure, grace of youth;

Open, Lord, are these, Thy gifts,
Gifts of love to mind and sense;
Hidden is love’s agony,
Love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Love that gives gives ever more,
Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

Drained is love in making full;
Bound in setting others free;
Poor in making many rich;
Weak in giving power to be.

Therefore He Who Thee reveals
Hangs, O Father, on that Tree
Helpless; and the nails and thorns
Tell of what Thy love must be. 

Thou are God; no monarch Thou
Thron’d in easy state to reign;
Thou art God, Whose arms of love
Aching, spent, the world sustain.

– Canon William (Bill) Hubert Vanstone

In yesterday's post I conceded that only a few books on prayer have significantly influenced my own understanding and practice of prayer. But there are several that did have lasting effect, and to which I've gone back when I needed a nudge in a prayerly direction. Oh I do realise that 'prayerly' is a made up adverb, and without needing spellcheck getting all upset about it. Sometimes if a word is not to hand, there's a case for temporary semantic improvisation.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean capable of drawing me back to that state of mind that is considerate towards God, a bit like remembering I haven't spoken to a close friend for ages.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean awakening awareness that life has become too much hassle, the day and my head is overly busy, and God is being forgotten in the whirlwind of my imagined service to Him.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean recognising and provoking that unexplained longing for God knows what; yes literally, for God knows what.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean opening up new horizons of faith, hope and love, initiating a work of inner expansion towards new trust, forward impetus, and radical compassion for the world.

It's hard to find all that in a book, and probably impossible to find it all in one book. But Richard Harries' Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness is one of those few that even attempt nudging us in a prayerly direction. The 1985 Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book is subversive, exhilarating, and wise. It subverts the common assumption that holiness is the crucifixion of desire, and that happiness is an unworthy human goal. It is a robustly positive account of happiness as a cluster of life qualities that lead to human fulfilment. It is filled with wisdom from across the ranges of literature, theology, art, philosophy, and all of these filtered through the pastoral experience and instincts of the author. 

The first chapter is like counter intuitive spiritual direction. Listen to what you want, and never despise wanting. Desire is a fundamentally motivating human passion and to be guided rather than suppressed. Then a whole chapter argues for the seriousness of happiness, and against the view that happiness is a trivial fascination with effervescent pleasures. The human heart hungers; for joy, for peace, for justice, for love, and for more than our words can say or our hearts can hold. Happiness may often depend on circumstances, and it's neither good nor possible to be happy all the time. But the constituents of happiness are embedded in the purposes and nature of God. Happiness matters and can be found, Harries argues as he explores joy and resurrection, joy and suffering, joy and contemplation, and all of these are rooted in the God to whom we pray and whose purpose is in our coming to be all that he calls us to be. 

The rest of the book explores peace, fulfilment, success, security, and love, each one an essay on the heart's longing and the pull of God's love, mercy and grace. Each chapter ends with a prayer. One example, from the prayers at the end of the reflection on success. "O God, most perfect love become most vulnerable, help us to share in and not spoil your great work." Happiness and success is to give our lives to sharing in, and not spoiling God's great work.

There are seven chapters, so 40 minutes a day would be more than worth the risk of investment. I would hope at least some would find themselves nudged in a prayerly direction. Now one of my friendly interlocutors complained tongue in cheek yesterday that book recommendations on this blog are costing him a fortune. Here's the thing. Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness can be had for £2.80 postage included, or thereabouts, on a certain marketplace platform.

One of the closing prayers at the end of the book, one that always nudges me in a prayerly direction for those I love:

We hold in your presence, O Lord,

all those we love and those who love us.

Your love is so much greater than ours

and you work unceasingly for our well-being.

With all your resources of infinite wisdom and patience,

bestow on them the fullness of your blessing.  

"A religious man

is a person who holds God and man

in one thought at a time,

at all times,

who suffers in himself harm done to others,

whose greatest passion is compassion,

whose greatest strength is love

and defiance of despair."

( Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, (New York: Crossroad, 2010.)

 Heschel was a biblical prophet born out of time. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, part of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, educated in Vilna and Berlin, fled the Nazi invasion via England to America in 1939, and became one of the most respected and influential religious figures in  the mid 20th Century United States. 

He is described as a man of "astounding knowledge, keen undersating and profound feeling; an awareness that man dwells on the tangent of the infinite, within the holy dimension; that the life of man is part of the life of God." (11) One of my all time favourite photos is of Heschel arm in arm and linked in protest with Martin Luther King on the Selma march.

Much of Heschel's writing is a gathering of essays, lectures, sermons, addresses and other occasional writing. His writing is religious writing in one specific sense; reading his words gives us a view of the heart that felt before the mind chose the words to write. In  other words his writing has the quality of the prophet who writes of what he has seen, and who has seen the indescribable. One of his favourite words in reference to God is ineffable; and as a theologian and man of faith his default disposition is wonder, awe and what he called radical amazement. 

In the Preface to his book of Yiddish poems Heschel confided about a conversation with God: " I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And you gave it to me." The anthology I Asked for Wonder distils into 150 pages excerpts from Heschel's writing under various headings. I mention them all because it shows the range of his thought and the core values and convictions by which he lived, and of which he wrote: God, Prayer, Sabbath, Religion, Man (Humanity), Bible, Holy Deeds, The People, The Land. 

"God is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance." That is a foundation presupposition of Heschel's thought. His struggle for words to convey the ineffability of God was lifelong, and surfaces repeatedly in his writing: 

"To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…The tangent of the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable…. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder."

If I'm honest, there are very few books about prayer that I have found helpful. That isn't a dismissal of the careful thought and holy learning and rich experience that went into writing such books. I think it is acceptance that prayer does not consist in practices and techniques, nor approaches modelled by others, nor even good advice or uplifting accounts of personal experience of God. All of these have their place. It was Heschel who, along with one or two others, helped me to break out of the self-centred, self-interested and overly self-conscious practice of prayer as a kind of contract with the Almighty. 

"The focus of prayer is not the self…it is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centred thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to His concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right." 

It was that view of prayer, and a lifetime of such praying that impelled Heschel to march against the Vietnam war, to walk alongside the Selma marchers, to rail against the blasphemy that uses the fundamental elements of matter to create nuclear weapons, a reversal of God's creative purpose. 

Sabbath is one of Heschel's most widely read books. Written to describe an alternative to consumer frenzy, the pursuit of affluence, and the commodification of time, it reads like the slow movement of a concerto about God's runaway world. 

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time. It is a day on which we are called to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

And so on. This is a wonderful anthology of the richer thoughts of a great religious thinker, one who took God with utmost seriousness as an agent of mercy and justice in His own creation. He was an ecumenical Jew, open to understand other faith traditions, and deeply secure in his own faith convictions. To read Heschel is to listen to a wise voice speaking hopefully in a despairing world, and telling a truth that arises from the deep core of reality to be found in such human longings as eternity, transcendence, everlasting mercy, and the home of the heart in the heart of God.  

 

 

In 1989 I walked into Waterstone's in Aberdeen and headed for the poetry section. There it was. The paperback edition of The Echoes Return Slow. I'd been reading R S Thomas for some time and found him to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the paths of the Lord." 

It isn't all that far fetched to compare RST to John the Baptist. Thomas shows the same righteous anger, zeal for justice founded on peace, and determined passion about a God most clearly seen on the cross. Some of RST's best poetry has as the cantus firmus, "Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." The Welsh priest, no less than the Judean prophet, spoke uncomfortable truth to comfortable power, raged on behalf of a God too easily taken for granted, and had his times when he had to ask if the One he followed, believed in, wrestled with, really was the Promised One. 

The God who inhabits Thomas's poetry is recognisably biblical, the God whose coming is in fire, judgement and apocalyptic warning. Much of The Echoes Return Slow is autobiographical, not only the chronology and circumstances of the poet's life, but the experiences of love and loneliness, faith and questioning, and in particular his experience of ambiguity and even ambivalence, about the awe inducing mystery of God.

There isn't a sentimental line in all his poetry so far as I know. The God who is present can be oppressively present, or painfully absent; the Creator's prerogatives over nature are usurped by human science and technology at humanity's peril; the countryside, the sea and coast, the mountains, all provide a theological landscape where God hides, and can be found only, and if at all, on God's say so.

The Echoes Return Slow is a strangely beautiful book. On the left page is a prose poem, its theme echoed in verse on the right page. The book progresses from his birth, through his growing up, marriage, priesthood, and into those later years. He would live twelve years after Echoes was published, and three more volumes would follow. Those who love the poetry of R S Thomas have their favourite volume – I would cheat and claim his Collected Poems were my favourites, but if I had to choose from around 25 published volumes I'd go for Experimenting with an Amen (1986) and Echoes.

I find it hard to quote bits of Thomas's poems. They are complete statements, and fragments distort, obscure or miss the point of the whole. So I quote two poems in which the priest poet, late in life, is still seeking and sometimes finding, and sometimes being found.

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity. 

……………………………………..

The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

……………………………………………

 The blurb on the back of Echoes is written by someone who 'gets' R S Thomas. It was from a review written for The Listener (How I miss that weekly tonic for the mind).

"One of the few living poets whose language one feels emerges from a genuinely silent and attentive waiting on meaning…he gives us the best religious poetry we are likely to get."

Waiting on Meaning; now there's a ready made title for a monograph on Thomas's faith, spirituality and poetry! 

In 1976 Amos N Wilder published a brilliant and seminal book on the relationship between poetry and theology. The title was Theopoetic. Theology and the Religious Imagination. It explores the relationship between poetic language and theological language. The search for words adequate to the ineffable will inevitably frustrate. The crafting of images even approximate to the writer's experience of God requires imaginative reverence, disciplined restraint, and the courageous risk of being misunderstood. Patience with the limits of language, persistence in fashioning words with capax dei, and urgency of soul in seeking to know and be known by the God who is nevertheless worshipped, that requires a lifelong willingness to "wait on meaning." 

(The two poems are found in The Echoes Return Slow, R S Thomas, (London: Papermac, 1988)  pages 79 and 83.

I first came across the writing of Antoine De Saint-Exupery at Glasgow University. Existentialist, pioneer air mail pilot, novelist. and author of one of the most enduring and popular children’s books, Le Petit Prince.

If you haven’t read The Little Prince then prepare for that mixture of pleasure and puzzlement when an adult is drawn into the imaginative world of the child. In that world what is real is not limited by adult logic, habituated rationality and grown up small mindedness.

This is a book about friendship and loneliness, about love and commitment, longing and disappointment, of seeking and finding and losing. In other words it is about the relationship between a pilot stranded in the desert after his plane comes down, and a strange child who has come from another world at least a star’s journey away.

In the growing relationship between the two we are never sure if the pilot is hallucinating or giving an account of a real empirical encounter between the pragmatic pilot and the space sojourning little prince. But there is wisdom in the child, and initial scepticism in the pilot.

As the Little Prince describes his previous life on another planet he speaks of a rose uniquely beautiful, a domesticated fox, and of the relationships that grow out of trust, then move to commitment, and become obligations that coalesce in love. The keyword throughout the book is responsibility. If you love and are loved, then you are responsible for that person, to keep them safe, to look after them, to be there with and for them.

If you plant a rose it’s your responsibility to water and feed it; you are not entitled to enjoy the beauty but ignore its need of care. As the Little Prince says, ““It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

Likewise if you tame a fox it needs your company and has acquired the right to the very thing you have made it depend on, your trust, care and love. We interrupt a conversation between the boy and the fox, overheard by the desert stranded pilot:

“What does that mean — tame?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”

Interwoven with these fanciful conversations about the Little Prince’s world far away are sentences that touch into some of our deepest emotional needs and responses.

• “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
• “What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well…”
• “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
• “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

There are a few books I have bought several times. Usually because I gave them away. This is one of them. However, one of Saint-Exupery’s other books, Wind, Sand and Stars, gathers together many of his wider reflections on human existence. He asks the classic existential questions: what makes our lives meaningful? what is tragic and what brings joy? what is an authentic human existence? How to live a responsible life, to act creatively for the sake of the world, how to be truly human, these were challenges that haunted Saint Exupery.

“To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”

Human consciousness was for Saint-Exupery a miracle in itself. To imagine the vastness of a universe, to contemplate why we love as we love and live as we live, to be self-conscious of our mind and heart, to know ourselves known and to know others, and yet always only partially; what a mystery a human being is.

Saint Exupery made no explicit religious claims, though he was born into a Catholic home. But his sense of eternity and the mystery of being, comes close to that great declaration of religious wonder:

When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?

Out of that sense of mystery and imaginative reflection on human existence, came his classic novella, Le Petit Prince. 

There's something astonishing about a group of young theological students gathering and into an underground theological seminary in Nazi Germany. They represented a different kind of resistance to National Socialism as they struggled on two fronts, for the soul of their nation and for the soul of the Church in Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been appointed Director of the seminary, and his approach produced a curriculum  and context  radically different from the more cognitive, and traditional theoretical education that dominated theological academia in the renowned Universities of Europe's premier intellectual centres.

The Editor's Introduction to the critical edition begins, "In an ironical way we are indebted to the Gestapo for this remarkable book." Because the underground seminary at Finkenwalde was closed down on Gestapo orders, Bonhoeffer was persuaded to "compose his thoughts on the nature and sustaining structures of Christian community based on the "life together" that he and his seminarians had sustained…" (Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol., p.3)   

The curriculum at Finkenwalde had presupposed a communal life of monastic spiritual disciplines, as these pastors-in-training plunged into studies of what it would mean to live as a disciple of Jesus in the hostile environment of a culture intent on destroying the vital organs of the Body of Christ. The book Life Together gathers together the principles, ethos and structures that shaped life in Finkenwalde Seminary. The sole purpose of all the teaching was to guide and encourage those who took their faith seriously, and were seeking ways of embodying the life of the crucified Lord of the Church in their own discipleship. 

This is a book about community and prayer, about time together and time alone and time with God, and about the dynamics that vitalise and co-ordinate the communion of saints in the Body of Christ. It is also a book about sacrifice and service, humility and honesty, love that does not calculate, and which sets no conditions for loving actions of forgiveness, ministry, healing and compassion.

Bonhoeffer's description of the pastor praying for the people is a searching account of how disciplined regular praying grow out of love, and where love for people is fading, sincerely praying for them has the reflexive effect of growing to love them again.

"A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner." (65)

Elsewhere in the book Bonhoeffer writes of the ministry of listening. He is unsparing about voluble Christians, loving the sound of their own voice, ever ready duracells with their endless output of opinions, arguments and self-absorbed spirituality. If that sounds harsh, here is Bonhoeffer in even more astringent mood:

"Just as love for God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that he not only gives us his Word but also lends us his ear. So it is his work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they can render." 

"Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can n o longer listen to his brother will no longer be able to listen to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words." (75)

You can see why this book is essential reading in any serious course on pastoral theology, spirituality and even ethics. It is a thickly textured thin book of ninety five pages. The words flow from the heart of someone who lived what he spoke, and whose determined and determining passion was to follow Christ up the hill carrying his own cross. This is astringent stuff, it stings the heart, but it cleanses away illusions and all pretence of self-importance. No it is not a nice devotional book; it's more like a workbook for the gym, or a manual of disciplines to strengthen mind and heart and soul in living for Christ in community, or a handbook of team building for communities of light resisting darkness.

So Bonhoeffer is training pastors to lead communities of faithful witness and Christlike character in a world turned dark, and intentionally alien to all that Christ is, and all the church was called to be. There was a full curriculum of theological studies at Finkenwalde; these are gathered in two very thick volumes of lectures, essays, sermons and letters from these years. But this small volume describes a remarkable experiment in Christian community whose principles retain their original challenge to any community content to live in the comfortable settled status of business as usual.

I read Life Together fifty years ago. I don't use casual exaggeration much, but it blew me away. I've read it often, taught it over ten years, and still feel the intensity and uncompromising demands Bonhoeffer makes. Just because he can be accused of being unrealistic doesn't make the book less valuable, or true. They say the same about the Sermon on the Mount; which incidentally forms the core of Bonhoeffer's much larger work, Discipleship. 

Please note, in Life Together, Bonhoeffer was recording the pprocedures and result of an experiment in community intended to demonstrate its principles to church, congregations, communities and every brother and sister who hears the call of Christ to discipleship. This book shouldn't be dismissed as 'for ministers'. It is a book about how a group of pastors-in training were helped to develop structures, disciplines, and capacity for God and others, that would sustain them in their Christian calling.

It is Bonhoeffer's gift, and legacy, intended as a contribution to the urgency and challenge of living for Christ in a world come of age. It is a spiritual workbook for the church in a secularised culture oscillating between indifference and hostility to the Gospel of Jesus, and inherently resistant to the presence of his disciples as salt and light. Bonhoeffer's short book is an attempt to "infuse new life and a new sense of Christian community into a church grown cowardly and unchristlike." (5) It was written as Hitler  annexed the Sudetenland. But it was written for the whole church, then and there, and here and now. 

I don't have all that many books of prayers. My two favourites are very different. The SPCK Book of Christian Prayer was given to me by the publisher for suggesting several prayers for inclusion. I'm so glad they included the one by George Macleod. It is taken from his diamond of a book, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory.

Lord Macleod of Funiary, is one of the jewels in the crown of the Church of Scotland, and the Church in Scotland. The biography by Ron Ferguson is affectionate, detailed, and written by someone who knew Macleod well enough to be fair about his faults, honest about his achievements, and perceptive in understanding a complex, fiery minister who made a virtue of impatience and infused a can do pragmatism with a passionate and immensely obstinate idealism. And in all of that, Macleod was a man of granite spirituality, incapable of being eroded by the lesser ideals of those he believed tolerated social inequality, settled for mediocre Christianity, endorsed nuclear weapons and other blights on God's created order.

And out of that furnace of spiritual ideals and theological vision, like twice refined gold, poured some of the finest prayers in the Scottish tradition. His prayers hewn out of a deep love for language, display awe struck reverence for the holy love of God, heartfelt compassion for human weakness and failing, and a stern compassion that made him a lifelong opponent of social injustice. The keynote of his spirituality and eschatology is distilled into the title of his small book of prayers – the whole earth shall cry glory. 

Years ago I spent a couple of days sifting through several boxes of unsorted papers at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. I was looking for his written prayers. He was known to spend longer preparing his prayers for Sunday worship than he did on his sermon. The sermon was the minister speaking to people, the prayers were the minister speaking to and with God, crafting words to articulate in God's presence, the heart of each member of the congregation.

What I found were scraps of paper, many of them handwritten, some typed in red or black or both, every one of them with corrections, scoring outs, phrases inserted; they had all over them the fingerprints of hands calloused by the hard work of praying, and finding words worthy of worship. Several were written on the back of corn flake packets, used envelopes, assorted recycled bills, and receipts – and some were written on real writing paper.

There is something almost impertinent about handling such painstaking drafts of prayers intended for God, and for no other eyes. But the time spent reading, taking notes, trying to trace dates, provenance and context, make this thin book one of the treasures of my library. There are thirty prayers, one a day for a month; then, if you're wise, repeat.

Macleod called Iona a thin place, meaning a place where the veil between heaven and earth had worn thin. His prayers are thin with something of the same quality. 

I have written more extensively on George Macleod's prayers. Those interested can find the article online, over on this website.

For now, here is the prayer that was included in the SPCK anthology:

Almighty God, Creator:
In these last days storm has assailed us.
Greyness has enveloped and mist surrounded
our going out and our coming in.
Now again Thy glory clarifies,
Thy light lifts up our hearts to Thee,
and night falls in peace.
But through mist and storm and sunshine,
the crops have ripened here
and vines of Spain have grown.
Thy constant care in all and everywhere is manifest.

Almighty God, Redeemer:
Even as with our bodies, so also with our souls.
Redeemer, Christ:
Sunshine and storm, mist and greyness
eddy round our inner lives.
But as we trace the pattern, looking back,
we know that both darkness and light
have been of Thine ordaining
for our own soul’s health.
Thy constant care in all, and everywhere,
is manifest.

Almighty God, Sustainer:
Sun behind all suns,
Soul behind all souls,
everlasting reconciler of our whole beings:
Show to us in everything we touch and in everyone we meet
the continued assurance of Thy presence round us:
lest ever we should think Thee absent.
In all created things Thou art there.
In every friend we have
the sunshine of Thy presence is shown forth.
In every enemy that seems to cross our path,
Thou art there within the cloud
to challenge us to love.
Show to us the glory in the grey.
Awake for us Thy presence in the very storm
till all our joys are seen as Thee
and all our trivial tasks emerge as priestly sacraments
in the universal temple of Thy love.

Of ourselves we cannot see this. Sure physician give us sight.
Of ourselves we cannot act. Patient lover give us love:
till every shower of rain speaks of Thy forgiveness:
till every storm assures us that we company with Thee:
and every move of light and shadow speaks of grave and resurrection:
to assure us that we cannot die:
Thou creating, redeeming and sustaining God.