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Years ago a friend who took himself and the world a bit too seriously used to talk about his "inner climate". It is a phrase capable of carrying a fair load of emotional baggage. 

Living in the North East of Scotland, you quickly realise that the skies are big, and the cloud formations, the receding horizons and the variations in the shades and qualities of light, all combine to create a huge range of diverse impressions and differing ways of looking at the world. The changing moods of the landscape can move rapidly and dramatically from shafting winter sunlight that harmonises with inner happiness, to a late gloom that gives visible form to whatever foreboding lurks beneath the everyday activities of our living. In other words, sometimes the mood of the weather and landscape mirror the inner climate; but sometimes they determine how we are feeling, or yet again are reminders that our inner climate is neither fixed nor permanent and can change rapidly and inexplicably.

This past week, for example, has included dark days and sunny, and these can be mixed and alternated into several variations in the same few hours. I often become aware of this when I look at photographs taken while walking and watching. In woods, along the beach, around where we live, the skies, the landscape and the weather act as an external commentary of the world, that interacts with the inner landscape and weather of our mood and our inner journey. 

These two photos of the sea (above) was taken around mid day, when the skies were leaden and laden, and the sea reflected that shadowed grey, emphasised and interpreted by white waves tumbling towards the shore. I was aware while taking that photo, of the confluence of symbols; vessels waiting offshore for their next contract, or their place in the harbour; the offshore wind-farm turning turbulent wind into reusable energy; clouds heavy with possibility; the sea restless and rhythmic. On this occasion the whole scene encapsulates one of those key moments in our lives when we see things clearly, and feel them deeply, when outer world and inner world coincide in mood.

At the start of a new year, where will the energy come from that will enable the fulfilment of those hopes and plans we all need to pull us towards our future? And those clouds, which remind me of a verse from a remarkable and far too easily overlooked hymn: Ye fearful saints fresh courage take, The clouds you so much dread, Are big with mercy, and shall break, With blessings on your head. And that wave breaking hopefully towards the shore, an ocean of life and energy concentrated, for this brief moment of its existence, in a movement of breathtaking sound and sight;and that faithful rhythm sounding like the heartbeat of the "Love that moves the sun and other stars". 

Walking the beach with a camera is for me a way of praying, thinking, and sometimes unexpectedly, inner climate change. We all have our places, or times, when God is more or less present. This past year especially, the sea has been a place which refuses merely to reflect my mood; sometimes it does, but sometimes being by the sea has been a place of healing, solace and inner climate change, when the clouds have been interpreted and the sun has broken through, and the horizons have been lines of hope and possibility. 

    God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
    Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
    Which though it sends forth thousand streams,
    T'is ne'er known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
    And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
    Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.
  (Robert Herrick)

The first day of the New Year is –

an artist starting on a fresh canvas – with an idea

a reader discovering a new author – and prepared to give her a chance.

an athlete still wanting to improve their personal best – but comfortable with who they are 

a cook about to try a new recipe – and hoping the result will be edible

a writer looking at a blank page – without anxiety 

a gardener ordering seeds, bulbs – and a new spade

a student on their graduation day – knowing they don't know everything

a driver in a hurry to get there – but without speeding

and

a diary filled full – of possibility, opportunity and clean pages

with enough space to make some of the above actually happen!

(For those unfamiliar with the building, it is the Sir Duncan Rice Library, University of Aberdeen, photographed at the start of a new day. The goal posts in the foreground have their own educational symbolism – go for it!)  

"The truth which liberates is the power of love, for God is love.

The father of the lie binds us to himself by binding us to ourselves –

or to that in us which is not our true self.

Love liberates from the father of the lie

because it liberates us from our false self to our true self –

to that self which is grounded in true reality.

Therefore, 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."

(Paul Tillich, The New Being, page 74)

Timothy Radcliffe is a refreshing writer. Former Master of the Dominican Order he has long and varied experience of the ways in which cultural changes and successive social, technological and economic reconfigurations in recent decades have eroded Christian confidence in the spiritualities, traditions and ethics of Christian existence. As a writer he's hard to label. His books combine spirituality, biblical reflection, cultural comment, and what is best called Christian life coaching, in a gently suggestive rather than guru directive kind of way. Reading him is like listening to the voice of a non directive spiritual director!

Each chapter in this book read like spirituality in the form of literary essays, fairly loosely connected despite the contents page, but in each one wisdom is woven across a framework of Christian devotion, cultural observation, perceptive psychology and humane learning. The plan of the book is an exploration of discipleship which begins with two chapters under the heading 'Imagination'. The eclipse of imagination by technologically generated virtual worlds, or by the reduction of the everyday world to rational pragmatics, economic imperatives of consumption and possession, and reductionist explanations that ignore life's deeper questions,has left our culture under-equipped to seek, and sense and desire the transcendent. The recovery of imagination is essential if human beings are to grow into mature humanity and rediscover the gift of their own creation. "An awakened sense of the transcendent goes with freeing our minds from the trivialisation of contemporary culture, its tendency to be reductive and simplistic." (11)

On the basis that life is to be lived imaginatively as well as responsibly, Radcliffe encourages his readers to 'Choose Life', and that means becoming a disciple of Jesus. Hence the three main sections of the book, Journeying, Teaching, and The Risen Life. As of this post, I'm still at the journeying stage. Throughout the Gospel narrative the disciples are on an adventure with risk and cost as well as blessing; there will always be suffering, hurt and situations that make the heart ache; there will be confrontations with evil and a willingness to negate the negations and negativity in which evil thrives. God's purpose is creation, and evil is the undoing of creation. The journey is a maturing process, as each disciple discovers what true humanity is in obedience to God and service to others in the name of Christ. 

What I've found in this first quarter of the book is a writer whose words have the purpose of inviting exploration, provoking new thought, and facilitating a conversation with the reader that is at times searching, and at other times reassuring. Radcliffe writes as a knowing Christian; as a monk responsible for the healthy development of a long monastic tradition; as a man with his own struggles, illness, and weaknesses; and as a writer who respects the intelligence of the reader.

As someone who enjoys books well seasoned with quotations, even I began to wonder if Radcliffe was trying to cram in more than the argument needed, either as evidence, illustration or as mnemonic summaries of what he was arguing. In the end it makes the book both more interesting, and more meandering, and a treasure trove for preachers; and Radcliffe is a very fine preacher himself. Here is one example of Radcliffe on quotation overload, the first paragraph of chapter 2:

"How then can Christianity engage the imagination of our contemporaries? I shall focus on one question – there are others – which is both the core of our questing faith and also a preoccupation of all human beings; what does it mean to be alive? John Lennon wrote in his lyric 'Beautiful Boy', 'Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans.' He is not far from John Henry Newman's warning,'Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.' In Rose Tremain's novel Music and Silence, one of the characters decides that 'the secret of a successful life is not to die before one's death.'"

See what I mean?

Before Advent I was preaching my way through the Lord's Prayer. Again. This time in the cultural context of the chaotic and at times toxic political climate of this past year. Whose kingdom counts most? Whose will to power should we support? What political leader is the least worst choice when politics itself is losing its capacity for constructive dialogue, civil discourse, a shared commitment to the common good. Is the Lord's Prayer too heavenly minded to be any use in countering the hard-edged cynicism and divisive rhetoric of life online?

And then there's that awkwardly ordinary request for bread. If Jesus was teaching his followers a pattern prayer, setting precedents and priorities, what on earth has bread to do with it? Quite a lot as it turns out, in a world where food is weaponised against those we oppose (sanctions); where food is wasted on an industrial scale; in which starvation and malnutrition remain a way of life for millions of people. What on earth does it mean to pray "Give us this day our daily bread" in the developed world where food security is now a crucial component of a nation's economic, foreign and defence policies? That small loaf makes the Lord's Prayer a searing critique of our politics, economics and ethics. Jesus teaches us to pray for enough food for all of us; and us doesn't just mean me and mine.   

Advent interrupted the sequence, so now on the first Sunday of the New Year, we will confront an even more demanding choice. Can we pray this – "Forgive us our wrongs, as we forgive those who have wronged us." No getting away from it; Jesus requires the kind of openness before God that is nothing less than a health check on all our relationships. 

Forget the walk in the park that is the New Year resolution charade. To pray these words is to enter a binding agreement with God that we will sort out our relationships. Reconciliation takes two sides to make peace; yes, but a Christian is a minister of reconciliation, and carries a portfolio on peacemaking. Forgiveness is something else, and no less demanding. The Lord's Prayer compels us to return regularly to the unfinished business of dealing with anger, memories, bitterness, grudges, grievances, misunderstandings, dislikes, and yes, hates.  

To pray the Lord's prayer as if we mean to practice it, is a daily exercise in reorientation towards others. And to pray for forgiveness and link that to our own intentional forgiving is to begin to take seriously the mercy that has forgiven us. The start of a New Year then becomes an opportunity for relational healing, and a recovery of love as the quality control of our emotional life. The Lord's Prayer is an eye opener, restoring our sight so that we see those who have become strangers to us in a new light. It is to pray for a heart that is Christlike in its default mechanisms of love and peacemaking, working towards mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation.

As much as any sermon a preacher ever dares to preach, a sermon on the forgiveness petition requires to be preached and practised first to the heart of the preacher. For a Christian community which is the embodied life of Christ a life of forgivingness is as demanding as it gets. 

On Christmas morning there wasn't much beach left to walk on. The tide was fully in, and a walk along the shoreline was a game of tag with the waves as they broke on the last two or three metres of sand. So a linear stroll became a meandering wander, avoiding wet feet but wanting to be near the gathered energy and final sprint of each wave. The result was not so much a walk on the beach, as a dance with waves, with the occasional broken rhythm, and these reflecting the inner ebb and flow, and broken rhythms of my own spirit.

On Christmas morning, walking the shoreline watchfully at full tide, I became aware of an inner coalescence of deep and self-defining emotional responses. That sentence needs some explanation. The first part is theological conviction; the second is personal history; and the third part is when these two perspectives merge in a deep acceptance of what faith in God entails when great loss and great joy reside in the same heart. 

1. Christmas day is the high holiday of Christian faith, its priority over Good Friday, Easter morning and Pentecost being both liturgical and theological. Advent begins the liturgical year and comes prior to everything else; it is also true that the incarnation is the theological prerequisite of the ministry, passion and resurrection of Jesus and is the precondition of making any sense at all of the Christian story. The incarnation, the voluntary vulnerability of God in Christ is the high tide of Divine Love at its most creative, purposeful and self-expending. The birth of Jesus is the decisive initiative of God in revealing, demonstrating, and evidencing once and for all his purpose of reconciliation. Every Advent the Christian soul is confronted with the scandal of Bethlehem, and the sheer embarrassment of that manger. Three times Luke mentions it; but not without spelling out the shocking paradox: "born to you..a Saviour, Messiah, Lord…and this sign…wrapped in cloths, lying in a manger." The one whose three names out rank Caesar's claims to deity and lordship and world authority, is a baby in a cow feeding trough.

2. Advent this year has had a deeper than usual significance for me. The celebration of the birth of the Christ child inexorably reminds every parent of the birth and the gift of their own children. Exactly a year ago on Christmas Eve, our daughter Aileen died, and the rhythms of our family life were irreparably broken. Life of course goes on, but no metaphor is near adequate to explain or describe what that means. A jigsaw that has lost pieces and is now essentially incomplete; a journey that seemed to have a set destination now diverted into strange and even frightening landscapes of life experiences; a piece of rare china falls and is broken, and however skilfully repaired, will never again ring with the clear sound of intended wholeness. Something beautiful, unique and irreplaceable is lost beyond recall, and that loss is felt in the deepest fundaments of the human heart where love, hope, joy, fulfilment and our own ultimate identity are formed. 

3. So walking by the sea on Christmas morning, dodging the more determined incoming waves, my heart was already in tune with the deepest chords of my faith; "for unto us a child is born…God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace." But there were broken rhythms too, because my heart was also ebbing and flowing with memories of love and laughter, loss and longing. In contrast to the joy of the angels, the nosy curiosity of the shepherds, the adoration of the Magi, there was the now familiar ache of love seeking its rightful owner, Aileen. There is in the Christmas story, at least for this bereaved parent, something of the pierced heart of Mary and, God knows, a sense that on this day of all days, God comes close to those who grieve for their child.

It took the whole day for all of this to settle into words that might make some sense. Not complete sense, but a way of holding in one heart the joy of the birth of the Christ child, and the sorrow of a parent's greatest grief. An understanding glimpsed, of how the waves of joy and sorrow, the ebb and flow of faith, the rhythms of life, are to be lived as faithfully and fruitfully as our weakness and strength allows. And in all of this, the growing acceptance that brokenness and wholeness, risk and trust, grief and gladness, fear and faith, despair and hope – these are the rhythms of life, the low and high tides of a life mysteriously gifted, and graced by the God who came amongst us in the Christ child, knowing that self-surrender would break His heart.

(The photo immediately above was taken some years ago, showing the storm-exposed remnants of old breakwaters on Aberdeen beach, viewed from a quite precise angle).    

Advent finishes with the advent of the Christ child. At the pivot of midnight, the hand of God moved forward, and creation's new beginning began.

Infant holy,
Infant lowly,
For His bed a cattle stall;
Oxen lowing,
Little knowing
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.
Swift are winging
Angels singing,
Noels ringing,
Tidings bringing,
Christ the Babe is Lord of all.

Flocks were sleeping,
Shepherds keeping
Vigil till the morning new,;
Saw the glory,
Heard the story,
Tidings of a Gospel true.
Thus rejoicing,
Free from sorrow,
Praises voicing,
Greet the morrow,
Christ the Babe was born for you!

Promises made and kept, but not the way we thought.

Prophets foretelling and forth-telling the truth as they saw it.

Empires on the make and populations on the move. 

Mary and Joseph, angels and shepherds performing the first scratch nativity.

A baby born in underprivileged circumstances.

A refugee family fleeing the slaughter of the innocents looking for a safe home.

All told, not the greatest story ever told.

Every day the story is retold in Syria, Myanmar, on the Mediterranean.

Advent is when Eternal love intersects with human history,

when reconciliation, peace, justice and hope

came gift-wrapped in swaddling cloths.    

Don't know who Anonymous 15th C was. But they were content with wonder, paradox, mystery. Some facts have no known precedent. Advent by definition is a first, and last.  

Wit Wonders

A God and yet a man,

A maid and yet a mother:

Wit wonders what wit can

Conceive this or the other.

A God and can he die?

A dead man can he live?

What wit can well reply?

What reason reason give?

God, Truth itself doth teach it.

Man’s wit sinks too far under

By reason’s power to reach it:

Believe and leave to wonder.

(Anonymous – 15^th C)