Author: admin

The Sinner

Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
   What I have treasur’d in my memorie!
   Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.
I finde there quarries of pil’d vanities,
   But shreds of holinesse, that dare not venture
   To shew their face, since crosse to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heav’n the center.
In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
   The spirit and good extract of my heart
   Comes to about the many hundred part.
Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
   And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
   Remember that thou once didst write on stone.

The inestimable, and theologically grumpy Professor Donald MacKinnon, once interrupted a paper I was giving in Aberdeen with a loud "Yes!" of approval.

I was offering a critique of Julian of Norwich's view of sin, and how at times she seemed to suggest it was no big deal.

I insisted that the cross only makes sense when sin is seen not as temporary inconvenience, but as a cosmic tragedy reverberating in eternity and requiring resolution. It was that insistent seriousness that raised the affirming growl from Professor MacKinnon.

George Herbert's poetry tells of "the many spiritual conflicts between God and my soul".The two primary conflicting forces throughout his poetry, and his life, were human sin and divine love.

When it came to sin as affront to both holiness and love, Herbert got it! Sin, in essence and outcome is moral tragedy, and a destructive shattering of trust and love.

Herbert's own heart was the arena in which he knew himself a sinner, guilty, convicted, conflicted.

Yet at the same time the deepest places of the heart were where he encountered a Love that bade him welcome even when his soul drew back guilty of dust and sin.

Lent is a waste of time if we minimise our sinfulness. The more we trivialise sin, even our own sin, the more we discount the cross, undercut the cost of redemption, and trivialise divine holiness.

We are then in danger of a Gospel made safe, and a God domesticated for our comfort.

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross." (H Richard Niebuhr)

Herbert's poem "The Sinner" is packed with clues about the devastating effects of sin on human relatedness to God.

"I am all ague…"; "quarries of pil'd vanities…"; "shreds of holiness…"; "dare not venture to show their face…".

The last three lines are the sinner's prayer.

Repentance, the cry of the heart for renewal yet again, a deep self-knowing of how inarticulate shame sounds more like flinty reluctance than moral brokenness, and the sinner's faith that dares remind the Almighty of his literary skills when confronted by stone. 

"Yet Lord restore thine image, heare my call:
   And though my hard heart scarce to thee can grone,
   Remember that thou once didst write on stone." 

A true Lent, seriously undertaken, compels uncomfortable questions. Such as:

Is gratitude an emotion that arises spontaneously, or a disposition arising from disciplined practice?

What about its opposite, ingratitude, the lost or never learned habit of thanksgiving?

Ingratitude is the moral fault of overlooking that which comes into our lives as gift.

Today we might call it the sin of presumed entitlement of life's goods.

 

But gratitude? If I have to train myself in thanksgiving does that make gratitude less sincere?

Herbert's poem "The Thanksgiving" is impatient with such moral scruples.

Gratitude is duty, privilege, discipline and gift.

And the grateful heart itself a gift to be prayed for and then strengthened by practice.

Such increase of gratitude is both promised and secured,  

provided only that we view life itself from the perspective of the Passion.

 

The 'King of Grief' and 'King of Wounds' loves with prevenient, persistent love.

Christ's love always outbids us, because infinite in resources and eternal in purpose. 

And Christ's love, "Thy art of love", reduces the grateful heart to the perplexity of silence.

But it is the silence of adoration, of absolute dependence, and of grateful surrender.

We give back what we have been given, even our gratitude is Lent.  

 

Extract from The Thanksgiving.

My musick shall finde thee, and ev'ry string

Shall have his attribute to sing;

That all together may accord in thee,

And prove one God, one harmonie.

If thou shalt give me wit, it shall appeare,

If thou hast giv'n it me, ‘tis here.

Nay, I will reade thy book, and never move

Till I have found therein thy love;

Thy art of love, which I'le turn back on thee,

O my deare Saviour, Victorie!

Then for thy passion – I will do for that –

Alas, my God, I know not what.

Whole poem found  here

 
 
 
Is Lent a time for giving up, or for taking up? 
Herbert's 'Agonie' forces consideration of both;
he identifies the two furthest poles 
of life's most excruciating tensions.
We are stretched in crucifixion, 
by the claims of sin on the one hand
and the demands of love on the other hand.
 
Lent is an invitation and a demand
to recalibrate the relation between sin and love.
We give up sin, we take up love, 
and thus God restores the equilibrium of life.
 
Motivation is found in the same darkly illumined places, 
Gethsemane and Calvary. 
Lent is the time to visit those two places, 
where sin meets love in a garden
and mercy bears judgement
on a rubbish-strewn landfill 

Observing Lent helps us get the measure of things.
To know sin in ourselves, 
and to know that we are fully known
and fully loved by by a Love beyond knowing. 
 
               The Agonie
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
        But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.
        Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
        His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.
        Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
        If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

 

There are ambush moments in life which jerk us out of the routine, familiar, unsurpising predictability of everyday actions.

Like going out to the car, opening the door, putting on the seat-belt and putting the key in the ignition.

Then the sun shines through the external condensation on the windscreen, which earlier in the morning crystallised into ice, and now there is a filtered light masterpiece a foot from your face.

And I wonder at the way the ordinary transfigures before our eyes by an illumination that comes from beyond ourselves, but touches the deep core of wherever joy comes from.

What are the constituent elements of joy? Can it be analysed by an emotional spectrometer, that clever instrument that can "measure a continuous variable of a phenomenon where the spectral components are somehow mixed"?

Certainly I have found that joy is a "continuous variable" of mixed components. The joy of love, and hope, and discovery; the joy of laughter, achievement, music; the joy of a friend's voice, a skein of geese, a perfectly timed football shot; the joy of reconciliation after an argument, of a shared meal, of silence in good company. And on it goes.

I've sometimes wondered if joy is one of the more persuasive arguments for God, by which I mean those moments of ambush that take us out of our own heads, touch us to a new attentiveness, and so change the way we see the world.

So a frosted windscreen becomes a sacrament of grace, a nudge towards joy, well more of a rugby players shoulder charge impelling us outwards to a world we now notice, and learn to love again.

There's no point in going looking for joy, it usually comes looking for us. Unless we are too busy to notice it, too preoccupied by what's going on in our own heads and hearts.

But all the time, God lays ambushes, plots against our well worn routines that obscure those continuously variable  signs and sacraments of God's beauty, truth and goodness.

Like when sunlight turns a frosted windscreen into a sheet of liturgical lalique! (See photo)

I think it was John Stott, preacher, Bible expositor and world Evangelical leader who first taught me the word 'ornitheology'. Amongst Stott's interests beyond Bible teaching and writing was his lifelong fascination with birds. He was a twitcher, and a very knowledgeable ornithologist. He often used the habits and lore about birds as illustrations of spiritual life.

My own interest in birds goes back to my childhood on the farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I grew up surrounded by fields, woods, rivers, burns, small lochs, endless hedges, farm buildings and always one or two meadows or fallow fields. It was a bird habitat paradise. Without a pause I can rhyme off lists of the birds we heard, saw, and took an interest in. Field birds included lapwing, curlew, snipe, skylark, partridge, pheasant; around the farm pied wagtail, house sparrow, starling, swallow, house martin, jackdaw, wren, robin, jackdaw, wood pigeon; along the hedges and grass verges yellow hammer, chaffinch, hedge sparrow, mavis, blackbird, greenfinch, linnet, goldfinch; down at the lochs there were coot, waterhen, heron, mallard, geese; along the burns and in the woods, dippers, sand martins, mistle thrush, yellow wagtail, kestrel, cuckoo, blue tit, great tit, long tailed tit; and in the meadows blackcap, coal tit, meadow pipit, and several of the above where there were bushes, gorse or other promising nest sites. 

It is one of the great blessings in my life that I lived at a time of ornithological abundance, before so much industrialised agriculture laid waste the habitats and reduced the food sources of all those feathered beauties that populated my days. I remain passionate about birds; their beauty, their fascinating variety, their habits and habitats, and the hard to explain sense of companionship I feel when I hear bird calls and song, and see birds in flight and going about their lives. 

So ornitheology is also one of my subsidiary interests. The geese migrating and heading unerringly where they need to go; murmurations of starlings demonstrating ballet in flight; skylarks soaring and singing as if life depends on it, and maybe sometimes it does; the patience and stillness of the heron; lapwings showing off moves that are amongst the best displays of aerobatic mastery; the partridge chicks clustering together around a mother trying to run an impossible creche; and the kestrel, hovering with deceptive laziness moving only the wingtips tilted in breeze. All of these have been the subject of various poets, not least because of their achievements as creatures who learned to live and survive and flourish, until human activity began to threaten their future.

Jesus said consider the birds. At the risk of anachronism, those urgent words of Jesus come whispering down the centuries to a world increasingly hostile to the non human species who share this planet with us. And whatever else the doctrine of Creation addresses, it raises questions of human responsibility as stewards and curators of a fragile planet. A strong Christian doctrine of creation cannot co-exist in the same mind as an attitude of careless, ruthless exploitation of world resources for economic power. That would require a moral contradiction and a genuine distortion of a biblical theology of creation. 

The near idyllic account of taken for granted diversity and pervasive presence of birds in my childhood only sounds near idyllic because the plight of bird life has become so critical. The catastrophic fall in numbers, and the large increase in the number of endangered species populating lists of birds at risk on our islands means it is very unlikely future generations of children will ever experience what I took for granted as the way the world is. Ornithology therefore becomes ornitheology. Birds, with their relatively recent security, and now their fragile hold on survival putting them at risk of extinction, are reminders that this world is not a supermarket for humans to raid and plunder.

Call it what we will; green theology, ecology, environmental ethics. But one way or another the bird population, its diversity and health levels, are pretty accurate measurements of the overall impact of human economic activity. And unless we consider the birds, we may well find that once they, and the bees, and the ice, and the forests are pushed to the cliff edge, our human future likewise will be put at risk. That would be ornitheology. I for one cannot subscribe to the irresponsible shoulder shrugging of those whose beliefs bring them to say, "God is in control; it's not down to us." Stewardship is freighted with responsibility, and accountability. We have been entrusted with much, and of us, much will be required.
     

 

On a wet, freezing Tuesday night, with wind gusting around 50 mph we made our way to the rehearsals for the Skene Singing Group.

The church hall window, illuminated from behind, beamed with rainbow promise.

And the rainbow surrounded a cruciform window, the coincidence of light and darkness.

Sometimes, when you least expect it, and perhaps don't know you need it, light shines.

Walking through a darkened car park, with puddles reflecting rainbow lights,

ambushed by grace and gently lifted towards hope.

"The light shineth in the darkness,

and the darkness comprehendeth it not." 

 

 

Living in the North East of Scotland the sight and sound of migrating geese is a regular experience of nature at its most beautiful, haunting and heart lifting. A mile or two beyond where I live is Loch Skene, one of the most important staging posts for migration and a place where thousands of geese winter before heading North again.

What is it, though, about the sight and sound of those voyagers from the North that unfailingly lifts the affections towards hopefulness and renewal of spirits? Flying in formation, honking their perseverance, hundreds of ink marks flowing on a blue sky, at times strung together in chevrons drawn with a care for geometry, they proclaim both freedom and discipline.

A flock of geese takes off in an apparent chaos, and almost immediately, without a conductor,  orchestrate their movements into the most economical dynamics for birds their size and weight. Survival is by cooperation; shared workload prevents exhaustion; and somewhere inside those aerodynamic heads, a compass more accurate than most human technologies. Geese in migration intimate a change of season, they announce that life doesn't stay the same, they demonstrate that travel and the journey are as important in life as routine and a stability that can easily become stuckness. 

 Late on this February afternoon, while engaged in the routines of making life work, a thousand geese passed overhead, give or take a few. I'd spent much of the day in a reflective and lowered mood, for various reasons. Part of it the continuing work of grieving and rebuilding in a time of loss.

 Sometimes stuckness isn't what you seek, it's what happens, routines are safe, change requires energy, imagination and the strength to take off and fly. Then this happens to pull you out of your own head; a thousand geese haul you out of your own head, lift up your heart, and force you to look at the world less unseeingly. Or to put it more positively, those aviators from elsewhere, now heading somewhere else, have seduced you into seeing the world again in its rawness, its beauty, its unending possibilities, and it sheer magnificence as a place to be alive.

Being a Christian is itself a way of seeing the world, a worldview. And amongst the more stringent demands of trying to live the life of faith is to hold on to the view that this world is God-loved, because God-created. We will all have our moments of revelation, epiphany, those gifts in time when we become aware of our belonging on earth, and of our longing for more than we can say. Those overhead and overheard geese, honking their encouragement to each other, compel us to look beyond where we are, creating that strange feeling of contentment that is hard to distinguish from a form of discontent that urges us outward, upward, forward.

Contentment cannot be permanent; there comes a time to move, change, and trust to the power of the One who calls us to newness, and out of the routine, the familiar, the comfortable and if we are honest, the stuckness of life that has settled for what it already has. I think the birth of such trust is called hope, and it is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Standing in a car park, looking at the sky, watching geese on the move, hearing their wild cries, somewhere inside bolts click back and doors open, curtains are pulled back and light spills inward, and God has spoken through the ancient migratory patterns of creatures who know their way home.     

 

 

 

Now here's the kind of thinking we could do with more of. This is Paul Tillich preaching in a University Chapel on the text "What is Truth?" He finishes with these words:

"Distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth united with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves."

Imagine being told that as you come to the end of a worship service. That you can get a handle on who you are and what your life is about if you take seriously the connection between truth and love. How does that work? Well here's Tillich earlier in the same sermon:

"If you seriously ask the question, 'Am I of the truth?', you are of the truth. If you do not ask it seriously, you do not really want, and you do not deserve, and you cannot get, an answer! He who asks  seriously the question of the truth that liberates is already on the way to liberation."

Of course Tillich is talking about more than factual truth, establishing what is verifiable by investigation. He certainly includes that. But he is after the deeper levels and originating sources of truthfulness that we might call integrity of character, authenticity in behaviour, consistency in values and ethical choices, an absence of cynicism, an aversion to lies whether spoken, implied or by self-deceit. All of these grow out of the deep subsoil of the soul, the accumulation over time of mistakes and missteps, of good decisions and unselfish choices, those moments of self-discovery, self-awareness and self-correction which are the often hidden work of the Holy Spirit in the conscience and at the well-springs of motive and self-knowing.

Tillich in this sermon exposes our capacity for self-deceit, and our innate tendency to give a body swerve to whatever challenges our distorted notions of who we are, our perfections, importance and carefully constructed self-image. That's why he is careful to distinguish between our desire to grasp the truth, and our willingness to be grasped by the truth. Those who wish to control truth, to be the final arbiter of what is true, right, real for me, are unlikely to listen when even the truth addresses them, contradicts them, and judges them.

Even Pilate, who uttered that question, "What is truth?", and looked into the face of the truth of all things, knew somewhere deep down in a conscience hardened by military law and arbitrary power, that he could not master the truth. He could flog it half to death, he could crucify it and bury it. But truth will out. And the resurrection of Jesus became the truth that judges all other truth claims. Love, not hate, is true; life, not death, is true; hope, not despair, is true; light, not darkness shines with truth; reconciliation, not enmity, is built on truth. Pilate asked, "What is truth?" Angels answered him three days later, "He is risen."

The ending of Tillich's sermon is about that risen life and its transformative power: "be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you and has started to make you free from yourselves." The words echo much of the teaching in the First Epistle of John; but they are themselves paraphrased, albeit unwittingly, by the last verse of Stuart Townend's excellent Easter praise song:

One with the Father, Ancient of Days,
Through the Spirit who clothes faith with certainty.
Honour and blessing, glory and praise
To the King crowned with pow'r and authority!
And we are raised with Him,
Death is dead, love has won, Christ has conquered;
And we shall reign with Him,
For He lives: Christ is risen from the dead!

This kind of truth is not a truth we grasp, but one that grasps us. The "Spirit clothes faith with certainty", but it isn't the empty certitudes of those who think they can win all the arguments, and impose their version of truth. It is the assurance of those who know that truth unites with love, and both unite with life, and these are found in Jesus Christ, incarnate, crucified and risen.

Using Tillich's italicised emphasis, truth is found by those who seriously seek truth, those who are open to truth, not as a power to impose on others, but as a way of being which is expressed in the love of God and lived out in loving action for Christ's sake. When love and truth take hold of us, only then can we answer what is truth, and discover as Jesus said all along, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." John 8.32   

Prayer of Intercession Following Brexit.

(The refrain of Seek ye first the Kingdom of God can be used as response as indicated)

Our Father, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. You have called us to seek first the Kingdom of God and your righteousness. We pray for our country, this place where we live, and where so much that is important in our shared life will now change in ways we cannot predict. 

Brexit has made many stressed and angry, afraid and divided. We have strong opinions and not enough understanding; we take sides, point fingers of blame, refuse to listen to others and shout louder ourselves.

We pray for our Parliament, and all those we have elected and appointed to represent the interests of our country and our people. Father that is one of our greatest fears – we are starting to choose who are our people. We use words like LEAVE and REMAIN as slogans and insults. We have each used used phrases like ‘enemies of the people’, ‘no surrender’, ‘disaster capitalism’ ‘do or die’ as if we are at war with ourselves.

We pray that you will give wisdom and humility to those who have power; undermine the pride and arrogance that often closes off good ways forward; enable those who speak for us to do so with truth and integrity, and to refuse acceptance of lies as if the truth doesn’t matter.

God of the nations, our country must now make far reaching decisions. Guide and direct us into the paths of peace; stem the flow of invective and hostility; bring minds together to find understanding and a way ahead that enables justice, the common good, and care for each other. Our continent has known terrible wars, and these past 75 years we have lived peaceably and constructively. Whatever the outcomes of these next weeks, may we find ways of living in friendship as partners rather than as competitors and rivals.

*SEEK YE FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD

Father, in times of crisis and anxiety your prophets spoke words of comfort and truth. May we hear and obey their words, and make those words our prayers in these next weeks:

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever rolling stream.

 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare

He has shown every one of you what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Teach us and enable us to go on being a nation which is a place of welcome and refuge for others; lead us as a people to a new understanding of our place among the nations; bring us to repentance and changed ways; to be less selfish and more generous; to be less afraid of others and more welcoming; to be less angry and more peaceable; to turn down the volume of our own shouting and listen more carefully to what others say, and think, and feel; to be impatient with lies and defenders of truth.

As your church we pray you will forgive our own part in the divisiveness, by ways we speak, how we treat others, or when we refuse to listen to those we disagree with; forgive the faintness of our light and the lost savour of our salt; make us peacemakers and seekers of justice; fill us with passion for a society where people are safe, where compassion is on the increase, where we learn again the joy of kindness, and in which we walk the way of Jesus with arms open in welcome to the stranger, hands reaching out to the hurting, and feet walking in the narrow ways of loving God and neighbour for Jesus’ sake

SEEK YOU FIRST THE KINGDOM OF GOD

These two books are memoirs of childhood – growing up they were both book loving, library haunting, intelligent and ambitious to write; both girls grew up to be Guardian columnists and fine journalists.

But their childhood and growing up years could not be more contrasting.

Deborah Orr's Motherwell is eye-wateringly frank about herself, her family, her home and the town she lived in till she could leave it.

Lucy Mangan's Bookworm is the autobiography of a reader whose home life was comfortable, secure and lived in an environment created for flourishing.

Both books prove one of my guiding principles when it comes to reading for both pleasure and profit – biography and autobiography, when written with integrity, and read with the right balance of compassion and criticism, are amongst the most important vehicles for human understanding.

Both books are reading time well spent, but they open very different vistas on how our childhood experiences leave emotional and relational legacies that can either undermine or enhance for the rest of our lives. 

Deborah Orr compels the reader to understand from her perspective the long-term emotional damage caused by parents, teachers, playground bullies, toxic male culture, and the sheer guts and risks involved in making decisions that might help you to survive and go on to live your hopes. Lucy Mangan's account of childhood is altogether less painful to read, and tells of how reading itself populates the imagination with hope and confidence to believe that those hopes are possible to achieve. 

I think a reading group could well decide to read both books, then talk about what makes for human flourishing in the first years of life, and those so hard to navigate years of growing up and becoming the person we yearn to be, with more, or less success. But whatever we might think personal fulfilment is, in both of these books, two children, two girls, grew into women with careers of their own.

Even then, the differences create stark contrast; Deborah Orr came late in life to feeling she had the freedom, the right and the capacity to be herself and to come to love herself. Lucy Mangan's account of her years says little of the second half of her life, but the allusions tell a story of a family at ease with itself and its place in the world. 

Reading these books one after another (I read Bookworm first) was an experience that required a huge swing of the emotional register. It's not that Mangan covers her story in unoffending tones of emulsion; more that Deborah Orr refuses to hide the graffiti that is scrawled across the backdrop of her first twenty years. 

This isn't so much a book review of two books, pointing out the merits of the writers, or opting for one or other as the better read. They are both proven writers with a feminist agenda; they tell as honestly as they can what happened to them and how they grew out of their childhood; each is an exercise in the writer's self-understanding, Orr being the more unsparing self-critic, and for that reason the more courageous writer, and the most negatively forceful. You live with constant criticism in the home, you begin to believe the bulletins of your own failure. On the other hand Mangan is equally self-perceptive, except the raw experiential experience she has to work with is much less severe in its ongoing impact into adulthood. Her forte is understanding the importance of the nurtured imagination, the emotionally supported explorer of ideas, and her refusal to settle for professional 'arrival' as a lawyer, choosing instead the freelance writer. I'm glad I read both books.

Apart from anything else reading one after the other confirms what we all know, and what we all require to remember as a moral obligation and an exercise in social understanding; there is no such thing as a level playing field, no way of socially engineering equal opportunity. There is, therefore, no excuse for judging people about the choices they make, until you understand the limits of the choices available, and how those we judge have value added to or subtracted from their lives, by circumstances, people and experiences of which we know nothing. 

As a footnote, Deborah Orr died late 2019, just weeks before her memoir was published. It has been featured this week on Radio 4 – you can listen here.