Author: admin

It's now a good number of weeks since we had rain in Aberdeenshire. The grass has lost much of its green, the soil is dusty and the humans are trying to get used to temperatures in constant double figures and with days when it reached 28 degrees!

I know! Anything around 20 degrees is moderate, temperate and pleasant. But for a couple of months leading into Spring the temperatures weren't often in double figures, and it was also a relatively dry winter.

Water conservation, hose-pipe bans and watering the garden with dishwater and not a hose, doesn't happen often in Aberdeenshire.

Despite the lack of rain, the climate has brought out the roses, some of them astonishingly beautiful. As a short break in the dry spell we had a couple of days of what can only be called smizzle; it wasn't heavy enough to be drizzle and it was more than haar. But it was wet, gently and soothingly wet; and it refreshed the roses.

This photo in the early morning hardly does justice to the complex beauty of petals, colours, water, light and stillness. And it reminded me of words from the Bible where often the dew or the soft rain is a metaphor for the refreshment of the human spirit. The words from Deuteronomy 32.2 speak for a rich symbol of God's presence restoring vitality, bathing with life.

" Let my teaching fall like rain
    and my words descend like dew,
like showers on new grass,
    like abundant rain on tender plants."

Health, fulfilment, vitality, hopefulness – hearing and heeding and doing the words and works of God are part of the relationship between the God of life and the life we live. The photo was, for me, a lovely reminder not only of what side my bread is buttered on, but who it is that is the bread of life itself.

In her book Sharing the Darkness, doctor Sheila Cassidy explores the forms of caring and support available within a hospice environment, and how these relate to pastoral care. Her work in palliative care, and her close interaction with patients and their families, brought her into contact with folk for whom suffering, fear and questions of mortality were daily realities.

How to sustain people in hopefulness, support their relatives through the anxiety, sadness and process of bereavement, and yet keep working with dedication and compassion towards their healing and the alleviation their pain, was aburden borne as part of a dual vocation.

As she tells in her early autobiography, Audacity to Believe, Cassidy had trained as a doctor, and had worked in Chile in the 1970's, and been arrested during the coup d'etat and its aftermath. She had treated a wounded insurgent and was tortured by state secret police to extract information which in fact she did not have.

Following her release after a major diplomatic crisis between the UK and Chile, Cassidy became a nun. But her medical training, itself a gift of God and too valuable to simply be abandoned, led her into work with the dying, and into further medical training.

By the time she wrote her book about her hospice experience she was workin in Plymouth. I remember reading that book, and being moved deeply by its model of care based on affirming and upholding the dignity and value of each person within and on the periphery of the hospice community – patients, relatives, carers and staff. It is in this context that she told of one of her inner strategies for coping with people's pain, fear and sadness, and how to bear the burden of expectations placed on her as medical director.

Here's what she did. She looked each day for the sign of the cross, a reminder of the eternal love of God intersecting in our own daily time. The suffering love of Christ, and the hope of resurrection beyond the cross, helped uphold her own faith and emotional resilience day in and day out. She looked for the sign of the cross and found it on window lattices, door panels, floorboards, garden fences, furniture joints. Over the years I started doing the same thing; not in the same continuous way as a form of devotional discipline, but alert to cruciformity wherever it turns up.

Today, standing in John Lewis waiting to pay for a new mattress, there was this old repair to the floor tiles with tape worn thin by the walking of a few thousand feet. And I remembered Sheila Cassidy, hospice director, doctor, former nun and outspoken and outstanding Christian, and her daily attentiveness to the sign of the cross. And I gave thanks.

In the previous post I mentioned this book. There were good reasons for doing so. Amongst the most constant if controversial and significant Christian voices in Germany throughout the 1930's, and until his death by execution in 1945, was the German Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Famous for his involvement with the resistance movement, Bonhoeffer remains implicated in plans and actions which led to the notorious assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler. The various judgments of posterity as to the extent of his specific involvement and on the moral and theological principles he followed, remain undecided and fiercely contested.

What is beyond doubt was his opposition to National Socialism on theological grounds. The claims of the Nazi party and of Hitler and his propagandists he believed were nothing short of blasphemous, and required of the church the same level of resistance as first generation Christians faced in the face of the totalitarian and religious claims of Caesar. Hitler required nothing less than total allegiance, and the fusion of those political and religious claims were denounced as tantamount to idolatry by the Christians who eventually formed the Confessing Church. The issues were political, but they threatened the theological integrity and spiritual freedom of the entire German people. Hence the title of Barnett's book; the struggle was nothing less than For the Soul of the People.

Victoria Barnett is one of the world's leading authorities on the thought and historical context of Bonhoeffer. Her acccount, which includes interviews with over 50 survivors of the Nazi years, is a carefully considered analysis of what goes so wrong in a nation's cultural and political life that catastrophic and destructive forces are detonated. Out of such research and expertise she worked for decades with the international team of scholars editing The Works of Dietirch Bonhoeffer. Her analysis of 1930's Germany, and of what led a nation to such catastrophic conflicts and subsequent programmatic evils such as Auschwitz, must not be lightly set aside by anyone open to the evidence of those historical realities from which such consequences derive.

When parallels are drawn between the 1930's in Germany, and recent events in our own day, they can too easily be dismissed as exaggerated or even ruled out as invalid. But a reading of Barnett's book is a sobering reality check for those who argue that we have learned the lessons of the past and we are better than those earlier generations who saw their democratic freedoms dissolved by the acids of an ideology founded on making Germany great again.

Her book is also a warning to those who simply dismiss the comparison as ludicrous and an hysterical reaction to a form of politics that has become necessary in order to halt the bogeyman of "liberal progressivism". Barnett demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that the strategies and rhetoric of Hitler and his party machine appealed to populist emotions of resentment, neglect, powerlessness and deprivation; and they promised the reversal of the causes of resentment and neglect, and a recovery of power and material prosperity. Sound familiar, in Western democracies today? When there is an upsurge of complaint and claim that the culture is degenerate and needs to be cleansed, and old values recovered, that too is an echo of 1930's Germany.

If we consider the discourse and developments in western liberal democracies in recent years, there are further ominous echoes to be heard and pondered; pervasive and recurring anti-immigrant rhetoric, rising statistics for hate crimes against minorities, demeaning of the judiciary and branding judges the enemies of the people, reversing freedoms and tightening rules by which the poor and vulnerable can be helped and cared for at public expense, finding scapegoats for social ills and "our" failed hopes, turning some media into instruments of state propaganda and seeking to silence opposition and criticism, laying blame for present ills on others than ourselves whether in Brussels, North Africa, Mexico or anywhere else distant and alien enough to be made into a plausible threat. These are not novelties of 21st Century tensions and anxieties. We've been here before, and it wasn't good. 

In this book Barnett doesn't make connections from 1930's Germany to our 21st Century times of cultural flux and political ferment. The book is 25 years old. But its analysis remains relevant to situations like the present in which extremes of language, reactionary politics, nationalistic revivals all point to a different and no less dangerous kind of climate change. An environment previously friendly to freedom and trust, liberal thought and progressive thinking, now encounters opposition which challenges the very nature of those freedoms, institutions and structures on which for several generations the world's security ultimately has depended.

Social improvement and cultural correctives are an inescapable part of healthy and responsible human life and society. But when such correctives are driven by fomented discontent and scapegoating of others for any and each social reversal, then echoes from a time and place no longer familiar, need to be identified and named. The relevance of Bonhoeffer for our times may well be in his absolute rejection of all claims to authority and power and public allegiance which are attached to political ideologies and their accompanying mytholgies. These are claims to which the church cannot concur, and indeed must resist in the name of the One whose Lorsdship is cruciform and whose power is life-giving. 

The letter of James has some wise warnings about teaching and the qualities needed in a good teacher. The Jewish Wisdom background of James becomes obvious when, more than once, he urges the importance of wisdom, maturity and responsibility in the ways we use words. 

Not many of you should become teachers, my fellow believers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly.

We all stumble in many ways. Anyone who is never at fault in what they say is perfect, able to keep their whole body in check……

Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.

But if you harbour bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.

But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.  (James 3.1-2,13ff)

Reading, even praying these words every day would be an interesting exercise in quality control of the inner climate that generates the words we speak and the way we say them. The concept of the speech-act is not a modern (or post-modern) form of rhetorical analysis. James and a whole tradition going back to the book of Proverbs was there long before us. Words are active deeds, performative acts, transformative vocal events. When words are said, things happen. James is interested in what words do, and what they set out to do. The good life of the wise and understanding teacher is self-evident in "deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom." Amongst the many deeds done are words wisely spoken.

What we say is who we are. That truth raises questions about what people say online. There is a potent afterlife in words. The good that comes from wise and peaceable words doesn't merely evaporate; lives are challenged or changed by words that forgive and reach out. Words offered as gifts of peace are like seeds sown in hope.

Words that sprout from hate, fear, resentment and a distorted view of others also encapsulate toxins with a long afterlife. Lives are wounded and people's dignity, value and hopefulness are sometimes decisively diminished by hate speech, fear speech, and bitter speech. James' analysis of such bitter envy and toxic words may well offend a culture like our own, slowly but surely getting used to extremes of speech. Rhetorical combat and the weaponising of words is a serious threat to our human security and our social and political future. Words are made to carry such destructive payloads when we devalue their capacity for reasoned truth, and increase their power in polarising and dividing, harnessing their energy towards making those who disagree with us our enemies. Such sinister wisdom allied to the will to power is "earthly, unspiritual, demonic."

The rhetoric around questions of immigrants and refugees, the latent and blatant racism of policies and discourse using terms such as "hostile environment" and "zero-tolerance", are alike rhetorical trends that James would describe as "earthly, unspiritual, demonic". Unearthly means a way of speaking by a mind set on lower values, self-interest, material gain. Much contemporary political discourse has "earthly" as its default setting. "Unspiritual" is very similar but pushes the selfishness and ruthlessnes to the next level where questions of ethics, right and the good are lower order values and goals of gain, influence and power become priorities.

But it is the word "demonic" that is the most illuminating, and worrying. James is not using the word for effect by exaggeration. He is talking about what happpens when hate words take on a life of their own. Envy and unrestrained selfishness are powerful drivers towards power, and once let loose there is "every evil and disorder." Paul uses the same concept of evil hijacking the persuasive power of words to fly beneath the moral radar. "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." The older translation captures exactly the menace of intentional malice and unintended consequences in the clash of values between the wisdom from below and the wisdom from above.

Whether on Twitter or at rallies, political press conferences or election and referendum campaigns, whether in Parliament or party politically biased news headlines, the effect is the same. Degenerating discourse is both a symptom and a contagious cause of cultural peril.

Some anxious commentators suggest historical parallels between recent rises in nationalism and nationalistic sentiments accompanied by suspicion of minority groups and the dilemmas of immigration, with similar social disruptions in the 1930's in central Europe. Others call appeal to such historical precedents alarmist, insulting, hysterical, and naive historical anachronism.

It is interesting that when warning voices were raised in Germany on the election of Hitler and the National Socialist party to power, the same dismissive disclaimers were voiced by many of the most respected voices in the nation. My own advice to those who are so dismissive of historical parallels is to read the history. Wisdom is seldom served by hanging loose to evidence, nor in being over-confident in what we are so sure of. A good starting place is Victoria Barnett's For the Soul of a People. Protestant Protest Against Hitler. It's in the title. Words both form and reveal the soul of a nation. Amongst other things that is why the phrase "create a hostile environment" used in relation to other human beings is so dangerous, foolish and morally indefensible. Does that phrase define the soul of the British people?   

The words of James about the risks of being a teacher extend to the risks of everyone who uses words persuasively and powerfully. Words are deeds and have consequences. Words are performative acts which persuade towards change, for good or ill. Words have transformative power as they change minds, harden attitudes, motivate wills and form character. The character of a society is not an abstract thing. When someone says this is not my true character, as an apology for damaging and diminishing words they have spoken or written, they use a disclaimer that lacks evidential credibility.

Likewise in a community, whether church or local neighbourhood, the quality of discourse by those in influential positions, is a telling index of character. Of course character is not fixed. People change. And amongst the most effective instruments of change are words, other words, that challenge our assumptionsand open our eyes to new truth. By their power and freedoms, words expose those other false and self-interested words that are more about the speaker's fears, prejudices and unacknowledged desires to have the world only as they wish it to be. Boasting and truth denial are close rhetorical cousins according to James. But so are mercy and peace-loving consideration of others.  

I only meet with my good friend Ken once or twice a year when he is back in Scotland. We meet somewhere halfway, have coffee, a walk, a long conversation about the things that matter most, lunch and that's it for another while. Phone, Facebook, email are all good for keeping up to date. But face to face in a meeting of friends is a renewal of companionship in which presence to each other is the deepest gift celebrated in laughter, confidences, and shared enjoyment of the adventure that is our lives.

In a friendship that has lasted well over thirty something years, that's enough. That kind of friendship is a gift entrusted, to be valued and enjoyed by wise and grateful stewards of that which we realise doesn't come along often in life.

Yesterday while walking along the country road behind Glendoick Garden Centre on a warm summer morning, we fell into the familiar rhythms of conversation, reflection on family, life, books, football, theology and even politics and the worrying trends of a world unsettled by reverting to narrowing nationalisms and fomented discontent.

It's hard to put the world to rights in one morning, but we made a start. More important was the process of remembering in each other's company the importance of those rare but essential friendships that provide ballast against the changeable, the transient and the unforeseen. The meeting of minds and the intersection of life stories was embodied by two people walking together in a rich and enriching fellowship, to use precisely a word worn thin by overuse. 

As we walked I stopped only a couple of times to take photos. This tall grass spike, luminous with sunlight, was framed by trees with which it moved in a synchronised life dance. The orchestration of breeze and sunlight, grass and trees, birdsong and two voices talking, and all this in the context of two people going to some trouble to be present to each other is impossible to capture in image or word. And yet so much was distilled into this photo, and that one moment of recognition when beauty and warmth, companionship and conversation, movement and stillness coalesced in blessing.

Amongst the flowers of the field grass has its own grace and beauty. Jesus used the telling metaphor of how grass is 'clothed' by the creator, provided its own beauty and its inner capacity to renew itself through seed and flower.

But grass is transient, as is each day of life. Time is also gift, but one that cannot be stored, and how we choose to spend time, and who we spend it with, becomes one of the key questions to a life lived wisely and well.

As for man, his days are like grass;

he flourishes like a flower of the field.

The wind blows over it and it is gone,

and its place remembers him no more. (Psalm 103.15-16

Life's deepest blessings and most cherished relationships are also subject to the passing of time. Trust the Psalm poet to nudge us awake with a note of realism. But that same Psalm starts and ends on praise and gratitude. "Praise the Lord O my soul, and forget not all his benefits." Indeed. And amongst the life-shaping benefits are those friendships and loves that define who we are and encourage from us what we may become. Yesterday was a day that acknowledged once again one of the great benefits for which I don't forget to thank God.

Collected essays of a Scottish presbyterian dogmatician of global repute, early provocative work of the Methodist doyen of American homileticians, a French sociologist with a penchant for theology deconstructs human fascination with the city, a later title from the Catholic priest and original initiator of Latin American liberation theology, and the published thesis of an ecumenical church historian wrestling with atonement and the means of grace.

I love the serendipity of the Oxfam bookshop, the excitement of the 'you never know what you might find' feeling, so different from the online targeted searching for what I already know I'm looking for.

Looking in a second-hand bookshop is an exercise in accidental purchasing! What makes any book lover buy a book is neither explicable nor necessary to explain. My own interests are wide but I also have my particular subject areas to which I come back again and again. The thing about these five books, apart from the eclectic contents, is that they are the chosen ones. A number of others were left on the shelves which were equally interesting. So why these ones?

Indeed why any at all given the creaking shelves in the study, and the probably creaking floorboards holding them up? A spur of the moment surrender takes place while standing browsing at bookshelves. All the rationalising in the world won't reverse that capitulation. Each book is chosen, and has its reasons for being bought.

There is a book I've been looking for (Torrance). 

That looks interesting, I've never read that one before (Ellul).

Oh I didn't know he had written that (Craddock).

Thirty years on does this writer still speak into the mess of the world (Guttierez).

I used the library copy of this in my doctoral research years ago and remember how good it is (R S Paul).  

So when will you read them Jim?

Oh quite soon.

The Craddock then the Guttierez. A

fter that we'll see.

Over the decades that I've bought books, sold books, given away and been given books, and yes read books, lots of books, I've never given up the chase for whatever it is a book brings to the mind and soul of the reader. Amongst the most mind expanding conversations we ever have, are those with other minds. Thinking meticulously with an Edinburgh dogmatics professor, born in China the son of missionary parents; learning the overlap of technique and inspiration from an American preacher who teaches preaching; developing cultural criticism from a French sociologist deconstructing social institutions and urban ideologies with a mixture of philosophy and theology; sharing the passion and anger and love of a ninety year old Peruvian priest who lives in a Lima slum and whose writings critique oppressive power structures of wealth, militarism and social division; listening and seeking to model a church historian, previously director of lay training for the World Council of Churches, seeking dialogue with the people of God under the cross that unites in order to overcome the tragedy of sacraments that divide.

All that from twenty minutes browsing innocently with intent in Oxfam.

We all have our favourite places, and when we need to, we go there. Walking along the edge of a full tide yesterday evening was the right place to be. The rhythm of waves in conversation with the sand, the shoreline washed in pastel colours of fading sunlight, old wooden steps descending to the shore, and a horizon given perspective by support vessels and wind turbines; a place to stop and take a breath was what was needed.

I wonder if that is a reverse perspective of the word breathtaking. Not the beauty that takes your breath away, but the beauty that invites us to breathe. The regular and gentle tumble of waves finally reaching shore and surrendering to the mystery of movement; is there an equivalent relaxing of the soul, when energy is felt as gratitude, and we stand in the moment, heart and mind synchronised with the world around us? 

The past year I've been in search of moments when prayer happens, sometimes even without being conscious that is what it was, till afterwards. Unintentional prayer, is that a thing? Yes, I think it is. If God is out and about in the world, and if that clumsy word omnipresence is an essential truth about God, then I can expect to bump into God when I'm in a hurry and turn a corner without watching where I'm going.

Prayer can't be confined to the constraints imposed by my own whims or disciplines. Prayer doesn't just happen when I say so. Prayer is not, thank God, something I do when God becomes one more resource I turn to for my own needs and ends. Prayer happens when I bump into the God who is at work in the world. That happens more times than I recognise. Grace is God's way of touching our lives. In ways we only rarely and partially recognise, the God of grace is gently resolute, like the waves on the shoreline, a recurring movement towards us of immense patience and creative energy. The omnipresence of God is a presupposition of the life of faith, though often enough we forget the reality, the here there and everywhere of that necessary word.

As a reminder that prayer happens wherever God is, whether we like it or not, there are these slightly scary strangely comforting words:

⁷ Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

⁸ If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

⁹ If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

¹⁰ Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

¹¹ If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

¹² Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Psalm 139 is a wake-up call. Our busyness and self-absorption in our own life project makes no difference to the reality and the real presence of God in the midst of it all. And where God is, grace is, and prayer happens. If prayer is to seek the presence of God, then that seeking is rightly intentional. But God seeks us, and that is also prayer. That wonderfdul scholar of medieval devotional literature, Helen Waddell, once wrote a prayer with the line, "Thine eternity dost ever besiege us.' The word besiege is a brilliant image of the God who just won't go away.

The 'thereness' of God means that for all our prying and seeking, we are but looking for a presence we would otherwise miss. But whether or not we seek God's presence, God is there, and whether we like it or not. Grace is always there before us, awaiting our arrival, inviting our attention, and evoking our grateful yes to the God who, like those waves on the shore, is endlessly patient in approach. And why? Because God works on the scale of eternity and from horizons beyond our knowing. We are besieged by an eternal and holy Love.

And in the miracle and mystery of the life of any one of us, God is there. It is right that we pray, intentionally and with that seriousness of commitment that every relationship of depth requires to stay healthy. But without our ever intending it, and sometimes when we are least expecting it, on the shoreline of our lives, another wave tumbles, and prayer happens. 
 

One of the great names from Twentieth Century British Christianity is W E Sangster. As an evangelical preacher his two main emphases were conversion and growth in personal holiness. One of the characteristics of evangelicalism is giving testimony to a personal experience of conversion through faith in Jesus' atoning work on the cross, and entering into a personal relationship with the living Christ. This personal daily experience of the living presence of the love of God was for Sangster more than devotional; it was expressed in a practical life of obedient living towards Christlikeness. He dedicated his life to preaching and promoting 'holiness', a word almost comically old fashioned in modern discourse, secular or religious. Such conversionist and holiness centred experience has often meant that evangelical spirituality has a particular intensity inherent in spiritual experience, an activism often tipping over into evangelistic drivenness, and subsequently a cost to be paid in exhaustion, dissipation and spiritual disillusion.

All of that W E Sangster understood from the inside. His own health broke down through overwork and too high expectations by the time he was 30. From there onwards he learned the lesson that self-care started and was made sustainable only by reliance on God's grace rather than his own wrong-headed sense of carrying the fate of the world by his own efforts. He once wrote a short prayer about building into each day what he called a "holiday for the soul". What he meant for our own times 70 years on, is honouring those moments of gift by stopping the inner whirring of the hard disk, and looking up from the limiting screen of our own busyness. Amongst the examples he gave was the habit of never walking through a garden without taking time to look at, smell, and wonder at a flower. In the fragility, intricacy, transience, frutifulness and sheer gift of that particular flower, there is grace to be discerned, and a God to be praised.

There is a discipline and a habit involved in looking for, and paying attention to, the grace of God around us. I once hit a wall in my own life trying to cope with a range of life situations that were emotionally draining and physically tiring. So I started doing that. Instead of trying harder, doing more, giving myself a hard time for not 'solving' various problems and resolving situations, I started to look for and pay attention to those reminders all around me that the world doesn't depend on my energy, cleverness, activity, ideas and performance, but on the sustaining grace of God. 

It's the same experience as Julian of Norwich describes unforgettably in her vision of a hazelnut. Get that! This is not a mystical vision of lightning laced clouds, flaming fire across a darkened sky, the complex geometry of God's arrival on dazzling multi-wheeled chariots whizzing across the cosmos at terrifying speed. God's sustaining grace is discovered in a hand holding a hazelnut. All it took was to notice, pay attention, and create enough time to see:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity 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 marveled 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.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”  

So there it is. A Methodist preacher as old fashioned as they come, wjose doctoral thesis was entitled The Path to Perfection, being taught not to ignore the miracle of a garden. And a medieval mystic waxing lyrical in vernacular English about a hazelnut as cypher for the whole God loved shebang that has or ever shall exist.

The photos of the roses were moments the other day in a garden centre, when I paid attention, and marveled how all this came to be, and thanked God that whatever else He calls me to do and to be, the sustaining care of Creation is ultimately God's project. We are God's delegates, called to be free agents of wonder, and commissioned to be careful and caring activists on behalf of the grace and mercy of God.

I started reading Salley Vickers realtively recently. About five years ago I came across Miss Garnet's Angel while looking for a couple of things to read on holiday. I think of novels as narratives of human experience in imaginary form. They can be contemporary or placed in another time and place, the plot can be linear, multi-layered or oscillating between times and places. The narrative drive, the complexity of the characters, the social or historical context, the dilemmas, tensions and resolutions are each part of a mixture which is endless in creative possibility for the skilled storyteller. Because the good novelist, for myself at least, has to be a consumate storyteller who early on in the novel persuades you that this story is interesting, these people matter, and I care enough to know how it all grows and goes and turns out in the end.

Miss Garnet's Angel did that for me. I've now read all her novels, including this her latest, The Librarian. What's not to like, if you're a reader? Libraries and librarians, books and children discovering the world of the imagination, and the library as community hub threatened by the remorseless knotweed of budget cuts and local politics. The title will be enough for many novel readers. What makes Vickers' such an accomplished novelist is the way she takes seriously the complexities, mysteries and predictabilities of human behaviour and human relatedness. This is the story of a young woman in the late 1950's, going as children's librarian to an English market town. The socially constrained and unexciting routines of post war town life are deceptive, because like all human communities the town has its alliances and divisions, long held grudges and deep seated loyalties. And the people are unremarkable, from the several children who become the focus of the story to the several adult protagonists who range from the dislikeable to the too good to be true – almost. 

Because Vickers is a moral realist. "Good" people are capable of behaving in ways that can be dishonest, thoughtless, well meaning but mistaken and with significant consequences which influence, even determine the future of "innocent" others. And those who for whatever reasons "intend harm", can in a novel and in real life, unwittingly set in train circumstances and events which turn out to be someone else's "luck". Not only what we do, but why we do it; not only what we think, but the kind of person we are who thinks such things; not only circumstances of inheritance, context and personality, but how these grow and develop over time; these and much else arise out of the incredibly complex and elusive mystery that is the human heart, mind, self and being, and each of these as we come into relation with other such people.

In her best novels, Salley Vickers gets to the heart of human self-awareness as that impinges on and is shaped by all those other selves amongst whom we live and move and have our being.  As a previous teacher of children with additional support needs, a Jungian psychiatrist, and a lecturer in English Literature,  Vickers draws on deep wells of human experience. But of course our greatest insights come when raw human experience is processed, reflected upon, compared and contrasted with our own inner lives and the outer lives of those with whom we live and talk and share time and space.Having an experience is one thing; learning from it is quite another. Assimilated experience, reflected upon and processed into writing like this displays an enriched wisdom.

The Librarian is a book which allows Vickers to play to her own strengths as observer, questioner, analyst and empathetic narrator of human stories. Sylvia Blackwell the librarian is also a daughter with parents reluctant to relinquish control, she is inexperienced in love and relationships and thus vulnerably innocent, warmly idealistic about books, children and the wonders of reading as a power that can shape and reshape life. The various children have home backgrounds that differ, from the emotionally robust to the fragile, and scarily vulnerable – but all of them one way or another come within the orbital pull of the library and its children's librarian. Then there are the adults, the apparently staid WI, the amorous GP, the head librarian who is both ridiculous and spiteful, the neighbour from Hell, and one or two people who are no nonsense good folk and whose determination to interfere with events make all the difference to how the story ends.

Yes but what's the book about? It's about reading. Reading alters the inner landscape, influences the inner climate, and allows new seeds of possibility to germinate and grow. It's about books and children and the trajectories which reading sets off in the imagination and leads to who knows where in later life. It's about friendship and self-interest and how the two can co-exist, sometimes painfully; it's about the malice of telling secrets and using truth to hurt; it's about love, infatuation, being used, wanting the best of both worlds, and discovering how fragile is the fabric out of which some of our most durable and formative experiences are created.

The Librarian is an old fashioned novel – it is even produced in a hardback edition with a front cover drawn from a 1934 painting (see above). I think the old fashioned format and style of writing is deliberate, and I found it an effective way of persuading the reader that the book they are reading is an important example of the novel's central argument; that reading fiction, inhabiting a story, enjoying a novel, is life changing. Such reading is a transformative process of supplying the intellect and emotions with new imaginary possibilities that shape and reshape often unconsciously, what we see, desire and come to want for our own reality.

Of course what we see and desire for our own reality often doesn't happen, sometimes cannot happen. Disappointment is written into the terms and conditions of a human life. Relationships fulfil and frustrate; friendships grow and can wither; as life moves on, many who are part of our lives for a while are left behind; ambition, hope, possibility may or may not be realised. But, as this novel weaves together towards its resolution,wer are asked to ponder an important life-truth. In all the vicissitudes and what today are euphemistically called challenges that make up our several lives, there is the inner urge towards whatever it is we have it in ourselves to be. There is nothing bleak in this book, nothing overtly dark. Except those apparently little spites and enmities, which when injected into the shared experience of a small community, have power to make or break lives.