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Over 40 years ago I read W E Sangster's book, The Craft of Sermon Illustration. It is still a workmanlike book for preachers prepared to do the hard work of careful exegesis and imaginative exposition rooted in the text of the Bible. Amongst other pieces of very clear advice to preachers was, read poetry. As a young man I took that to heart and have never regretted it. Most of my life now I've read poetry. A poem is itself an act of interpretation, and an example of the art of self-interpretation. Whether human life, the world around, or the depths and heights of human experience, poetry is a process of reflection, illumination and imaginative response to the world around us and within us.

Early on I came across a poem by Jean Ingelow called 'Regret'. In particular, four lines have remained as memorised wisdom which at different times in my life has provided a way to understand, and if not understand then to accept, and try to learn from, those experiences that cast a shadow over everything else.

I find myself going back to those lines in the aftermath of sudden bereavement and the raw immediacy of grief following our daughter Aileen's death. They can sound trite and more like timid wishful thinking. They may seem less than honest about the bewildered sorrow and gnawing regrets when someone we love as dear as life itself dies, and is now beyond further words of love, comfort, explanation or apology. But here they are:

For life is one, and in its warp and woof

There runs a thread of gold that glitters fair;

And sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet

Where there are sombre colours.

Now I've designed and worked tapestries for years. And sometimes they have been born out of life crises and they became a way of creating brief interludes of equilibrium. You know you're stressed when the thread is pulled too tight; and the discipline of counting cotton strands, and mixing tone and colour requires an attentiveness that gives the mind a break from more painful realities. 

So those words describe an image that has serious and persuasive power for me, especially those times when my own life tapestry has had to be worked with sombre colours. In the overwhelming sense of loss and disorientation that befalls us with the death of someone we have loved as life of our life, it is hard to see any light, and no thread of gold is either apparent or seems even appropriate. For grief compels and requires of each of us our personal encounter with the reality of who and what we have lost…a journey the Psalmist calls "the valley of the shadow of death."

And yet. As a Christian I believe in that thread of gold. As a looked for pencil line of light along the horizon of the long night; as a seed of hope planted in the deep and dark soil of Calvary, awaiting resurrection; as one whose life is a following faithfully after Jesus, believing his words about resurrection and life, the peace only God can give, the love that never lets go, the forgiveness that never turns away. Or that thread of gold glimpsed in the ordinary yet extraordinary kindness and prayers and companionship of those who have come close to share the sorrow and whose love glitters in our darkness. Threads of gold, woven through sombre colours.

Those sombre colours are inevitable, even necessary, for the integrity and balance of the pattern that is our shared life, and every human life. For myself, the thread of gold that runs through my life is neither sentimental optimism nor certainty based on disallowing hard questions. The thread of gold that runs through my life, and that glitters against the sombre colours, is faith that takes the risk of trusting God. I believe deeply, and try to trust daily, the Eternal self-giving love of God revealed in Jesus – his words, his ministry, his death and his resurrection. In Jesus God placed redeeming love and recreative purpose at the centre of all reality.

Such faith clearly gives no immunity to heartbreaking loss, nor does it allow us to evade grief beyond words, nor does it defend us from that inner brokenness of human hearts that may never fully heal. But it does draw those deeply wounding experiences of bereavement, grief, suffering and loss into a larger pattern of meaning. The redemption of suffering, the reconciliation of a broken world, the forgiveness of all we have wronged and all that has wronged us, the renewal of hope in despairing hearts, the restoring of relationships sliced apart by death; however we describe this world's and our own brokenness, love is at work from all eternity, and came into our human history with healing purpose and the gift of a radical hope. The Cross and Resurrection are the beating heart of the Christian gospel, the place where finally and definitively God takes ownership of a shattered creation, and remakes it towards a new future.

For me faith in that kind of God is the thread of gold that glitters, – sometimes, – in the woven texture of our lives. The sombre colours, when they don't obscure it, are part of a larger pattern and purpose of a God whose love raises as many questions as it answers. Which is why Julian of Norwich, that wisest of theologians of the love of God, chose to speak with a simple image about mysteries beyond our ken:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

And into the eternal care and creative purposes of such love, we have entrusted our daughter Aileen, and ourselves. Sombre colours, and a thread of gold. The tapestry of our lives.  

"I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence doth come mine aid?

The old Scottish paraphrase of Psalm 121 is that strange literary hybrid – it lacks literary sophistication, but for those who know it, and have sung it in a Scottish congregation, its homely imagery and verbal simplicity vibrate with spiritual power generated less by liturgical formulae than by an immediate sense of dependency.

Mountains are a challenge, there to be climbed, but often dangerous, demanding and for ancient travellers on foot, full of risk. The Psalmist is engaged in a risk assessment; what are the dangers of the journey? Treacherous screes of broken shale and rock, thieves and wild animals at night, long miles without water in a baking sun, and the threat of madness in moonlight as an ancient fear of the night – all these, and much, much more. Until the Psalmist reduces all the imaginable dangers to a simple theological equation; the Lord and maker of heaven and earth is the protector and guard for every eventuality so that all harm is disarmed, the whole of life is protected, and on the journey, whether coming or going, now and always, the Lord is an ever present help and defence.

Life is risk, and risk aversion can never be the stance of faith. Risk assessment, however, is different. Risk assessment can never exclude danger, but it does avoid both the paralysis of fear that never wants to journey at all, and the reckless certainties of those who think they have life sorted, or that they have God contained in a theology afraid of questions. There are times in our lives when the football cliche rings with a truth that threatens to test our trust to breaking point, when "we've now got a mountain to climb".

Two weeks ago, at our daughter Aileen's funeral, we sang that same old Scottish paraphrase (the full version is below). It was a prayer for ourselves; and it was a prayer for Aileen entrusted to the protective love of the God who never sleeps, God who always watches over, and sees all our comings and goings on earth, and on into the presence of a love eternal and inexhaustible in welcome and blessing. 

We are now climbing the mountain of grief with all its ache, risk and questions, and singing from the deep wells of the heart, "From whence doth come mine aid?" And borne and carried by the prayers and kindnesses of our companions on the way, singing also, "My safety cometh from the Lord, who heaven and earth hath made." 

No, that doesn't settle everything. The journey is harder than we could have imagined. Faith is not unruffled serenity, but a grasping at hope. Faith is a grappling with questions better asked than ignored. Faith is a trust in the preciousness of life and the deepest bonds of love, but also a relinquishing of more than we ever thought we had. And at the heart's core, faith is a vision of a love that understands and comes alongside us on this lonely road, an Emmaus walk that is also a via dolorosa. 

The Emmaus road is an upward road, and broken-hearted disciples of Jesus walk it with questions and sorrow, and the bewilderment of those trying to make sense of a life shattered from within. And the Stranger comes near, walks with them, speaks new things into ears desperate for truth and meaning, and some assurance that all shall be well. Grief is an Emmaus road, up dangerous paths and through dark nights, in the company of the risen Christ. 

1 I to the hills will lift mine eyes:
from whence doth come mine aid?
My safety cometh from the Lord,
who heaven and earth hath made.

2 Thy foot he'll not let slide, nor will
he slumber that thee keeps.
Behold, he that keeps Israel,
he slumbers not, nor sleeps.

3 The Lord thee keeps; the Lord thy shade
on thy right hand doth stay;
the moon by night thee shall not smite
nor yet the sun by day.

4 The Lord shall keep thy soul; he shall
preserve thee from all ill;
henceforth thy going out and in
God keep for ever will.

I have been silent on this blog for well over 5 weeks. That's the longest interruption since I started writing here in 2007. The reason is unarguably valid. On Christmas Eve, December 24th our loved and lovely daughter Aileen, died suddenly and unexpectedly. The silence here is a consequence of sorrow, and the essential ways in which love responds to an all but overwhelming loss. 

On the death of someone so definitive and rooted in who we are as a family, practical things need attending to; priorities are reset with ruthless singularity of purpose; mourning goes along with careful and loving management as itself a signal of deepest love and deepest loss.

Much that could be done has been done, in her memory and in our love for her. Our lives, so diminished and depleted by Aileen's going from us, will take time to recover and find a new shape which carries her presence forward in our family and amongst her friends, as it turns our her many and different friends.

There may come a time when I will be able to reflect more fully on all that has happened. But not now, and not until there are perspectives other than loss, sorrow, and mourning, at present not made easier by memories, but made bearable by our gratitude for Aileen's gift to us of her presence, her personality and the love she gave and inspired. 

Aileen loved Aberdeenshire, and the view of Bennachie from any angle in a range of 20 miles is one of the images that she enjoyed whether sunset or sunrise, rain or sunshine, spring or winter or autumn or winter. 

Living Wittily is a blog that attempts to explore how to live wisely and well, as a person of Christian faith, without arid certainties, with life shaping convictions, and with a wide angled lens on human life and experience. I will continue to write here, but as someone inevitably transformed, and I hope both deepened and made more open, by the gift and the loss of Aileen, whose coming amongst us was such joy, and whose going from us into the safe arms of God is the deepest sadness of our lives.  

This book arrived today. I've looked for a reasonably priced and clean copy for a long time. I collect literary criticism on George Herbert, and I have several editions of his poems, from mid 19th Century to the more substantial modern editions. They take up over three feet of shelf space and I don't grudge a centimetre of it. Metaphysical poetry is a niche interest, and academic books for limited interest groups can require an equity raid on your house to afford them. So I was pleased to get this volume, shipped from Kentucky, for under £7. It's an ex-library copy, and inside it says it's a 14 day loan book from Lexington Public Library. It's tight, clean, forty something years old, and as often, I wonder who read it beforre me?

Herbert was never everyone's taste, although there was a surge of admiration and new editions in the Victorian period. Herbert's devotional lyricism, albeit often expressed in clever (too clever?) linguistic conceits, appealed to a deeply religious culture impressed by the immediacy, intimacy and restrained passion of Herbert's poems. 

In celebration of this book, whose title comes from Praise II, one of Herbert's better known poems, here are the first three verses. The direct address to God is caught up in a rhythm of I and Thee and Thou and me. The combinations of intimacy and reverence, of familiarity and formality, and of emotional warmth and devotional frankness, are features of Herbert's best poetry. These lines are a lovely prayer for start of day, or indeed for end of day. There is an entire lexicon of meaning in those two words, 'utmost art', the dedication of skill, energy, gift, artifice and imagination, to the praise of God

KIng of  Glorie, King of Peace,
I will love thee:
And that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
Thou hast heard me:
Thou didst note my working breast,
Thou hast spar’d me.
Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
And the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.

I have been a student of your love

and have not graduated. Setting

my own questions, I bungled

the examination. Where? Why? When?

Knowing there were no answers

you allowed history to invigilate

my desires. Time and again I was

caught with a crib up my sleeve.

This poem is the last in a sequence of eleven poems under the title 'Incarnation'. They are part of the Counterpoint collection, published in 1990. They are poems in the interrogative mood, and in this last poem the mystery of the Incarnation frustrates by its elusive allusions, and its answerless, or even unanswerable questions.

In eight lines Thomas addresses the one whose love became incarnate. The 'I' and 'you' are, however, the pronouns of a monologue. What is striking on a slow reading of this poem is the honest self-awareness of someone who not only failed the exam, but asked, and then answered, the wrong questions. Central to the poem are three monosyllabic questions essential to understanding the everyday phenomena and events we perceive. The question where is locative, and places the event. The question why is purposive and seeks explanation. The question when is about temporal placement. Together the three questions triangulate the event enabling the mind to fit it into categories of understanding.

Which misses the point. The student of love is not examining an event or phenomenon, but a relationship. The missing question is the clue to the poem; Who? This is the word that prevents the poem being mere description, and exposes the three questions as category errors. The student of love incarnate fails the final examinations by answering the wrong questions. The questions are not wrong because their answers are irrelevant, but because the questions are secondary. The primary question is who is the 'you' whose love is studied. Who is it who invigilates our desires and uses history to keep us honest?

And yet. For all those efforts to tutor our desires and prepare us for the examinations, the student of love incarnate persists in cheating. There is a crib with the correct answers up the sleeve. And that word 'crib' Thomas has packed with playfulness. The crib is the student's secret revision sheet; it is also the place where love incarnate lies, secretly, vulnerable, the Who of the unasked question. 

There is a lightness of touch in this last poem in the Incarnation sequence. There is also the characteristic note in R S Thomas, of unresolved tension and the admitted inadequacy of human answers when faced with the God whose ways are not human ways and whose thoughts are not human thoughts. The line of the sentimental and overplayed nativity hymn 'no crib for a bed',is contradicted by the cleverness of that last line which suggests there was a crib, but it has been stolen by the student of love incarnate who has the answer up his sleeve. 

Reading this poem in Advent I sensed echoes of the Johannine theology of the Word, become flesh. John's Gospel embeds divine love in the history of creation and in human history. Love is embodied, and while the great questions of Where? Why? and When? are all answered in the unfolding Gospel, they can only ever be fully and correctly answered in the light of the central, final and primary question of Who?

The author of the Gospel of John would also have said, "I have been a student of your love and have not graduated." It was he who wrote, "No one has ever seen God. The only one who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known." Mystery is not susceptible to our questions, nor answerable to our answers. No student of divine love ever attends a Graduation ceremony. In the divine learning economy sufficiency of knowledge and proficiency in the subject are impossible. However much we cheat, or set our own questions, time and again we come back to the crib.

The reluctant agnosticism of Thomas contrasts with the exuberant confidence and embrace of mystery in Richard Crashaw's poem; taken together they bring us to the crib where we learn that intellectual humility is a precondition of adoration.

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth.”

At the back of Drum Castle, amongst the trees, is the private chapel. It is small and old, secluded and quiet, and is reached by climbing a gentle sancta scala. 

On a winter morning of diluted sunlight, the steps softened with autumn leaves, I walked up to the door and stood outside the sacred space dedicated to prayer and worship.

Anticipating a few moments of being enclosed in a place "where prayer is valid" I turned the handle and pushed.

The door was locked, itself a metaphor for those prayers that go unanswered, maybe even unheard.

On this occasion, the locked door disconcerted and then dissolved the intention to stop, sit, reflect, and see what happens when God is given a chance to get a word in edgeways. 

Momentary disappointment. 

Then I started doing the spiritual equivalent of lateral thinking. Why should a closed door get in the way of awareness, attention and contemplation?

Isn't it part of the mystery of God that we experience God as a Presence who is sometimes absent, and an Absence which makes us yearn for presence?

True enough, prayer becomes faithful communion through trust in the One who comes, and to Whom we come. 

But isn't it also true that faith may require we sometimes experience the absence of the One who promised never to leave or forsake, and to be with us to the ends of the earth and the end of time.

Otherwise we take grace for granted.

Standing in the wood, outside a locked chapel door, is an education in such faithful trust, an exercise in the discipline of believing without seeing, a determined communing with a promised Presence without the warm feelings of reassurance. A refusal to take grace for granted.

There is a process of deepening and recovery for the soul best described in the metaphor of winter.  The winter shutdown of the natural world is a time of minimal output, a yielding to slow replenishment, a stripping away of what was last year's foliage, a time of minimal sunlight, low temperatures, and nothing discernible happening. But along with the shutdown, the promise of Spring.

Perhaps now and then, we need the winter season. Only then do we undergo the ascetic pruning back of what is no longer fruitful, the forced slowing down as energy sources reduce output, the inner soil broken down by the rhythms of frost and thaw, and enriched by rotting leaves and the gift og humus.

In other words a closed door is just another kind of gift, a different facet of grace, an absence that makes the heart grow fonder. 

Yesterday I spent the morning walking around the grounds of Drum Castle, about 5 miles from where I live. I needed sky, trees, fresh air, birds, a different diet from books, indoors and people. Now people I love, but not to the exclusion of time to be alone. It has been a demanding time, with far more output than input, more expenditure than replenishment. What was needed was space to breathe, and look and take in. When I feel the need for solitude and new horizons I take my camera.

For some years now I've used my camera as an aid to reflection, and photography as a way of disciplining mind, eye and attentiveness to the world around. I've found that if I want to pay attention to what's going on outside, it has to be intentional. No point trying to find time. Time is there, it just has to be taken! So, sometimes the best way to start dealing with the busyness going on in my own head is to go somewhere to pay attention to what's going on in the larger, richer world outside the propagator of my own self-consciousness. 

So off to Drum Castle and its grounds. Winter in the North East can provide extraordinary light and shadow. Walking alongside a silver birch wood the low winter sun lanced through the silver shining trunks and darker branches. The dialogue of horizontal sunlight and reflective bark highlighted the network of close-knit, entangled branches.

I sat on a drystane dyke and watched it for a while, a theatre in which the action was sparse and the low lighting was an impressionist masterpiece. The contrast of liquid light and blue sky, of green frozen moss and trees picked out in monochrome, gave the impression of a natural sunbreak, diffusing the light so that it was possible to look without being blinded.

Walking amongst trees is an exercise in humility. Feet trampling on years and years of leaf compost, moving amongst trees that have mostly survived, with one or two dying off and over years adding to the humus, life returning life to the earth. Amongst silver birches there is also the low murmuring of the breeze playing ancient rhythms and tones on the hanging branches. It isn't difficult to walk speechless, and listen to another form of speech.

Where there are trees there are birds. I heard the jays before I saw them. Like their name they are sociable, party birds whose song and call are unmodulated loudness. I walked around the pond which is surrounded by mostly conifers but with some berry bearing trees intermingled. The birds love it in there.

The song thrush (mavis) was busy chasing dinner high up, and appeared on a branch in silhouette. From childhood years I have admired the sheer virtuosity of the song, and the architectural brilliance of a nest shaped like a large cup and lined inside with mud smoothes to a shell and lightly lined with soft grass and feathers. Seeing this one yesterday is precisely why it's worth the bother to go looking for newness, and a reconfiguration of the imagination.

John Clare was a wonderful observer of the world around him, and his bird poems are amongst the most keenly attentive descriptions of birds, their habits and habitats, their songs and their colours. In the early 19th Century garden and field birds were common and part of everyday life, in days long before changed agriculture, chemical pesticides, destroyed habitats and overworked fields, took a toll that has pushed many species to the point of endangered status. Here are a few lines about the thrush:

I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy

Seeing a thrush, high in a tree amongst the berries, on a bright and frosty winter morning isn't something you see every day. Nor is it something you will ever see if you don't go looking. That moment when you see what you are seeing, when you hear what you are hearing and start to listen, when you quieten your own inner commentary and allow the world to get a word in edgeways – that moment is a gift. The photos took a few minutes of standing still, being patient, taking the risk of wasting time if it flew away before a photo was possible.

Those ten minutes sitting on a dyke watching trees filter sunlight, and those five minutes watching a thrush filling up with calories and energy on a freezing morning, those are times when prayer happens without us realising it. The unexpected encounter with a beautiful bird living its life in the simplicity of its needs is as good an illustration of Jesus' teaching on trust as I know. And walking amongst trees you hear the wind and don't know where it came from or where it's going, but like a sacrament of the Spirit we necome aware of the movements and currents of grace in our lives. I had come into the countryside poor and went away rich; I had come hungry and had gone away full; I had come anxious and inwardly dissipated, I came back reconfigured in heart and mind.

Here is John Clare's poem, including the lines quoted earlier.

The Thrush's Nest.

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise, and I drank the sound
With joy; and often, an intruding guest,
I watched her secret toil from day to day –
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs, as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

When Archbishop Michael Ramsey walked to his enthronement in Canterbury, his biographer described him as bearing “the perplexed look of a lion who had turned vegetarian for philosophical reasons” Ramsey was fond of hard questions, and he always gave himself time to think about the answer by muttering, “ Yes … yes …Yes..” It was a way of looking for light in a dark conundrum.

Isaiah was “one acquainted with the night” to quote Robert Frost. He understood human distress, darkness and fearful gloom, and the human spirit, crushed by the weight of darkness.   Isaiah is a prophet whose whole view of life, even of a darkened world was, Yes… Yes…Yes. Isaiah also took time to think, to look for light in a dark conundrum. Acquainted with the night, but no stranger to hope either. Hope is a defiant yes to life in the face of and in the presence of darkness. And faith is to trust that light will come as new freedom, fresh growth and emergent new life. Another poet, Robert Browning faced up to the same stark contrast of darkness and light, and the search for hope and faith:

If I stoop into a dark tremendous sea of cloud

it is but for a time: I press God’s lamp

close to my breast: its splendour, soon or late,

will pierce the gloom: I shall emerge some day.

Isaiah 9 is about darkness, the hope for light, and a poem about God's astonishing planned reversals. In this poem of protest and faith-reconfiguration, all the distress, darkness and fearful gloom of Isaiah 8.22 encounter their opposite; gloom is eclipsed by light. Hope takes the courage to look back on despair, to imagine a different future, and then to see the present reality, however dark, transformed by that thread of light racing across the horizon.

Gloom and darkness are real, but behind it all is a deeper reality, a truth even more real. Isaiah tells it as it is, like an existentialist who discovers something more ultimate than personal existence. We either look at the darkness across our world, feel the hopelessness of millions, and weep over all the shattered dreams and blame God for not being there. Or we look with tear filled eyes at that darkness, feel the weight of that hopelessness, shed our tears over all those shattered dreams and hear that past tense made present experience – “those living in the land of the shadow of death, on them light has dawned".

Those words about darkness annd dawn take Christian imagination to another past-tense eclipsing of the gloom, when the darkness of Calvary was eclipsed by the sunrise of resurrection. Darkness is real but it is not the final, last reality in the universe. James Denney wrote of this often: “What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is…you wish to know the final truth about God; here it is, eternal love bearing sin’. No more gloom, …unto us a child is born.

What follows in verses 3-6 is one of the most astonishing passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. War is reversed, disarmed, and the implements of oppression are shattered beyond repair. Isaiah uses the very images of war to show how God extorts peace from conflict, prises liberty from the iron grip of oppression, and forces the darkness, distress and fearful gloom give way to light, human welfare and shalom. The 'enlarging of nations' in verse 3 is a term for imperial conquest but this time, God's time, it is to be an empire of joy. The increase isn't by plundering the weak but by curtailing the destructiveness of the strong. Yes there is joy, but now it will be rooted in justice. That violent word, ‘shattered’,when applied to a nation, is the word for national humiliation, devastated hopes and destroyed communities. To people in exile, the terminology of ‘shattering’ has a permanently bitter flavour in the nation’s vocabulary. But now it is the yoke that is shattered, the chain gang shackles of POW’s are shattered, the machinery of oppression is smashed beyond repair. War is reversed…for unto us a child is born.

The imagery of fire used in verse 5 is never ambiguous in the context of war. Fire represents the destructive, punitive power of the conqueror. What isn't plundered is torched; home, culture, community, economy all burned, reducing the conquered people to aimless despair. You break hearts and you prevent rebellion. But here is the great reversal.  It is the marching boots that trample that are burned, along with the soldiers uniforms…for unto us a child is born.

This is a magnificent poem of defiance; peace defying war; joy defying distress; hope defying fearful gloom. No wonder oppressors imprison poets. No more gloom because God’s hope child is born. A world reversed from darkness to light. And it is not yet finished. The great messianic text of verses 6 and 7 redescribe the world into a new created order. Chaos is ordered by the establishing of justice and righteousness. Isaiah is unafraid to look into darkness, not because he belittles fears and distress, but because this prophet poet knows that no darkness is absolute in a universe created and loved by God. The last reality of the universe is not darkness, distress and fearful gloom…but a child born, a pin-point of light shining with the dazzling holy love of God who will not abandon his creation.

One of the great creation hymns begins, “Thou whose almighty word, chaos and darkness heard and took their flight” I remember being present when that happened at a musical Premiere. James Macmillan’s, Veni Emmanuel, was premiered in Aberdeen in 1992. The Scottish concert solo percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, who is deaf and feels music in the soles of her feet, was the percussionist that evening. The music begins in the harmony of creation and relentlessly descends into the darkness of discord and noise. Out of the discordant noise there is the occasional fragment of a tune that may be familiar. As the vibrations of drums, bells, chimes, cymbals threaten to drown out the music, the vibrations of chaos are subverted by tremors of hope, then there is a fanfare of defiance and the half recognised tune is played in all its glory,  O Come O Come Emmanuel. The percussion is now allied with the orchestra, beating back the darkness, hammering out a message of hope until the triumphant noise gives way to the triumph of a slow quietening of the tubular bells to the peace of silence.

Isaiah plays similar music; the darkness distress and fearful gloom of his people are like the noise and discord of a tune gone badly wrong, an orchestra out of control, until his message, muted and fragmented is blazed forth, "No more gloom…the people who walked in darkness…seen a great light…for to us a child is born….and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

………………………

Robert Frost's 'Acquainted with the night' can be read over here.

Veni Emmanuel, composed by James MacMillan, performed by Evelyn Glennie can be heard and seen here

Eugene H. Peterson: Reversed Thunder – The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination Harper Collins p/b edition 1991

Reversed Thunder is not, by Peterson’s own admission, ‘a work of expository exegesis (xii).’ ‘Mostly I have enjoyed myself. I have submitted my pastoral imagination to St John’s theological poetry, meditated on what I have heard and seen, and written it down in what I think of as a kind of pastoral midrash (xii).’

Those familiar with his canon will recognise the themes in this short quote: pastoral, imagination, theology, poetry, meditation, midrash – and pleasure. He applies his fertile mind to Revelation and unpacks a series of ‘last words’ – on Scripture, Christ, Church, Worship and seven others – working his way through the Apocalypse as he does so. It is a book full of quotable quotes.

What is it that grabs people, especially Pastors, about Peterson’s writing? Here are a few examples.

The breadth of his reading. Pastors are bibliophiles, but often in certain areas of biblical studies or theology. Peterson has read, and in this book draws on, theologians and exegetes from across the centuries, but also from poets, novelists, literary critics and preachers. He soaks himself in words and brings them to bear on the text of Revelation to illuminate its meaning and arrest his readers.

The depth of his reflection. Peterson is enthusiastic about Scripture and for decades has chewed on it, then he gave us the benefit of his ruminations. Often the words are simple, but the thoughts expressed are profound, and strike home like a sharp double-edged sword, as in his comments on Christ and the Apocalyptic image of military violence (37). Words for today’s politicking.

The beauty of his language. I have no idea who edited this book, but I sense their task was easy. Peterson has a way with words that make this work a joy to read slowly, savouring the flavours that infuse it. Technical language is rare, whereas the skill of the wordsmith abounds, transporting the reader by disciplined use of a sanctified imagination into the son et lumière world that is the Apocalypse. He is an artist in his use of words, just like John the Divine.

His passion for pastoral work. Preaching, prayer, worship, spiritual direction: these are the forces that shape Peterson’s style and rhetorical purpose. He says that his primary question here is about how Revelation will work among the people he pastors (xiii). It is not a book of predictions. It is a book that spoke to the pastoral situation of the church of the first century and speaks now to ours. ‘In the Revelation we are immersed not in prediction, but eschatology: an awareness that the future is breaking in upon us. Eschatology involves the belief that the resurrection appearances of Christ are not complete (21).’

Revelation is a book that touched Peterson’s own soul. ‘What walking through the Maryland forests does to my bodily senses, the Revelation does to my faith perceptions (x).’ We are the beneficiaries of these perceptions, for in this work he not only teaches us what to think about Revelation but how to think about it – and how to respond to it in our time.

Jared Hay, 30 October 2018. (Jared is a retired Church of Scotland minister, who knows a lot, I mean a lot, about the Book of Revelation.

Eugene Peterson, The Pastor: An Appreciation

There are only two books that I have read more than twice. The first is Middlemarch by George Eliot and the second is The Pastor by Eugene Peterson. I was introduced to the work of Peterson by Rev Dr Will Storrar at a Retreat he led for Aberdeen University candidates for the ministry and their wives at Carberry Tower in 1995. Later, in 1997, it was my privilege to meet Eugene at another Retreat held in Crieff.

My appreciation of Peterson knows no bounds. I read his trilogy of pastoral theology (Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work; Working the Angles; Under the Unpredictable Plant) first when I was a student at Aberdeen in the mid 90s, and again when I spent a short sabbatical at the Royal Scots College in Salamanca in 2009. These books formed my pastoral vision and shaped the ministry I was given among the people of Cupar where I served as minister. I was and I remain a committed Petersonite.

I always wanted to know more about the man who had inspired me so much. Peterson’s autobiography appeared in 2011 and I devoured it in three evenings when I was in Pittsburgh studying for my DMin. Later, when I came home, I read it again deliberately and then again slowly.

Perhaps more than anything else Peterson, especially in The Pastor, provided me with an honest,  realistic yet wonderful vision of the church and the calling I had received to get to know people and recognise them as participants in the story of God. He provided me with a new way of seeing people and a new understanding of church. In this way, he recalibrated my expectations of others and helped me appreciate and understand the calling I had received to be a pastor of a congregation of saints and sinners. Peterson facilitated a fundamental paradigm shift in the way I looked at the world so that I slowly began to recognise that grace is everywhere. He also gave me a love and a fascination of stories, the stories of people’s lives and the place we hold in the story of God.

Eugene was and will always remain among the most significant people in my life. Everyone who is called to be a pastor should take time to enjoy the company of this wise and gracious companion.

Rev Dr Ken Jeffrey, Co-ordinator Centre for Ministry Studies, University of Aberdeen