Category: Christian Spiritual Traditions

Pentecost, John Wesley and the 24th May 1738

Amongst the gifts of God's grace in my life is a reluctance to limit that same grace as it flows and overflows in the life of our world and the church. Pentecost Sunday is less than a week away when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit whose first demonstration of that overflowing grace was the sight and sound of people talking about the death of Jesus, and the resurrection of the One they'd come to believe is the Son of God. And they heard them in their own language, an ad hoc sacrament of inclusion. During my entire life as a Christian, a commitment I made nearly 50 years ago, I have revelled in the diversity, variety, difference and imaginative inventiveness of a Gospel that takes human lives and fills them with the love of God.

I am an evangelical Christian who is a catholic Christian whose theology is informed and formed in respectful and attentive dialogue with the Christian tradition, as that tradition reaches out to us across the centuries and across all those cultural and denominational and theological differences. The first Christian thinker I seriously engaged was the Reformed Louis Berkhof, whose systematic theology was to a young Christian like stirring porridge with a plastic spoon. Then someone gave me In Understanding Be Men, a manual of doctrine published by Inter Varsity Press and which is still a remarkably clear and accessible summary of evangelical theology in systematic form. Then I was given Mere Christianity by C S Lewis and I was off. Augustine and Francis Schaeffer, Calvin and John Stott, Wesley and F F Bruce, some guy called Karl Barth (way too many words) and another called A W Tozer who wrote mercifully thinner books. By the time I was at University and then College I was revelling in what can only be called the ecumencial library of the ages. I've never lost that love of difference, and appreciation for insights and convictions which are offered as other people's ways of understanding the mystery of God and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.

All of this comes to mind as I am reading that great apostle of catholic Christianity, John Wesley; and there is a double significance in this Sunday as Pentecost Sunday – 24th May is the Anniversary of John Wesley's discovery of the reality of God's love at Aldersgate. Reading the Preface of Luther's Commentary on Romans he so famously wrote:

"I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."

I'm not sure how often before, Pentecost Sunday and Wesley's "conversion" have fallen on the same Sunday, but in celebration of this great Christian preacher, social activist, churchman, revival leader and five foot three dynamo (I mention his height as it is at least one characteristic I share with him!) here's a verse from one of the great Wesley hymns of inclusion in a unversal Gospel:

Oh, that the world might taste and see
The riches of his grace!
The arms of love that compass me
Would all mankind embrace.

And then there's the hymn which is often linked with the conversion of the Wesleys, not to Christianity, but to a living experience within Christianity of salvation which was so compelling, transformative and exuberant that is simply had to be sung:

And can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Savior's blood!
Died he for me? who caused his pain!
For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

2. 'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies!
Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
to sound the depths of love divine.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.

3. He left his Father's throne above
(so free, so infinite his grace!),
emptied himself of all but love,
and bled for Adam's helpless race.
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!

4. Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

5. No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in him, is mine;
alive in him, my living Head,
and clothed in righteousness divine,
bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.
Bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.

18 May 2015
Dreams, books, are each a world…..

Been reading and writing an essay review on the first two volumes of Veli-Matti Karkkainen's Constructive Christian Theology for the Pluralistic World. This is a major theological project by one of the leading Ecumenical theologians writing in the West today. He trained as an Ecumenical theologian, has taught on three continents and has a passionate interest in bringing the Christian faith into constructive conversation with the other living faiths (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism); but he wants to do so by being critically and appreciatively faithful to the range and depth of the Christian tradition.

Not everyone who reads this blog will want to invest the time and energy reading these volumes as they become available. But you can get a good sense of what he is about, and the kind of thinker he is by watching an interview he gave at the launch of the first volume, Christ and Reconciliation. You can find the interview here.

……………………..

Yesterday I spent some time looking through a bookcase of books that used to belong to a friend. I had the pick of them, but the real interest was simply handling books that had been shapers of thought, inspirations for life, companions of comfort. Over 7 or more decades, books that have been bought, ead and reread. Some of them now taped together; others with what the booksellers call foxing, spine split, some highlighting or underlining. The whole lot together wouldn't make much money. But then riches afren;t just about money.

Some of the enduring values and gifts evade the commerical tyrranny of the barcode. I only took four. A lot of them I haven't read and won't. Some of them meant more to my friend than to me – it's like that with books and friendship. I don;t have to like what he liked, nor pretend it does for me what it clearly accomplished in his own inner life. There were two or three though that brought memories of ding dong discussions over a lunch table with a crusty loaf, a pot of soup, and a bowl of fruit. Two of the ones I brought away I'll give to someone else.

The two I'll keep are because they say much for my friend's theology, faith and way of thinking and living. One is a biography of Studdert Kennedy, Woodbine Willie, whose theology was generous, passionately questioning of God in the face of suffering, and utterly grounded in Calvary and the Cross as the place where earthly suffering and Divine mercy comingled in the sacrifice of Christ. The other is The Path to Perfection, W E Sangster's volume on John Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection. I've read it before, it's now a book of past generations, eclipsed by so much high standard contemporary Wesleyan scholarship which shows no signs of abating. But Sangster was a saintly man, a deep lover of Jesus, and so was my friend. "Love is the key to holiness" says Sangster – and my frienc's life underlined that sentence.

……………………………………

And then there was this wee red booklet I picked up for £1 at Drum Castle Garden, in the wee shed where used books are there with an honesty box.

I merely mention this. I'll write another post later on the fascinating hopes and optimism of a conference 60 years ago. They say times have changed – but reading this, the aspirations and proposals remain vaslid, and largely unfulfilled. More on this later.

28 August 2014
Recovering a Neglected Text: Songs Based on the Song of Songs

The Song of Songs is one of those hidden treasures of the Bible that is more hidden than treasured in contemporary preaching and liturgy. Its explicit sensuality, its celebration of love in all its emotional fervour and poetic physicality, and its unmistakbable affirmation of love as the utter giving up of the self in deepest longing and passionate embrace, tend to mean that those committed to expository preaching give it a skilled body swerve.

That's a pity, however understandable. Some of the most lyrical writing, and spiritually perceptive devotional expression, and profound theological imagining has been produced by those in the Christian tradition who have studied and sung and prayed over this collection of Hebrew Love songs. From the mystical Bernard of Clairvaux and his eighty odd sermons on the first couple of chapters to the equally mystical if evangelical Charles Haddon Spurgeon's communion meditations, from the speculative and extravagant Origen to the restrained devotion of the 19th C. Lutheran Franz Delitzsch, from Samuel Rutherford the intense and volatile Scottish Puritan whose letters are marbled with the sensual imagery of the Song, to Marvin Pope whose Anchor Bible Commentary remains the vade mecum of previous interpretations, from such diverse directions in the tradition the Song of Songs has been a rich source of devotional and theological nourishment.

But no. It isn't necessarily the text to read out in church of a Sunday morning, either before or after the children leave. And yes, it is probably wise not to decide to do a long detailed series of expositions verse by verse – though that was done 30 odd years ago by the Rev Willie Still in Gilcomston South Church in Aberdeen.

But still, this book about love and passion and longing is there, right in the middle of the Bible, and it won't go away. So what to do with it. Read it. Think about it. It has much to teach a culture saturated by overstated desire, tone deaf to tenderness and delicacy, suffering an ennui of the heart and losing the capacity for imaginative and winsome discourse (a recent article mercilessly mocked the crass opening chat up lines that now pass for respectful introduction and consideration for the other).

Alternatively, buy Patrick Hawes' beautiful arrangement of 6 songs on the Song of Songs. The soloist Elin Manahan Thomas has one of the clearest and sharpest voices I've heard. The CD is a really good example of exegesis by lyric and music, a genuine expansion and exposition of ideas that lie at the centre of the Song. These ideas give content and substance to those words we try to use when we speak of love, desire, longing, passion, anticipation and fulfilment, devotedness given and received, the move from fear to trust and therefore to that joy which, if never complete, at least finds its home in the mutual enjoyment of human togetherness.

The Song of Songs has been understood as an allegory of the love between Christ and the Church, between Christ and the soul, and between a man and a woman. That such rich resources to explore divine and human love lie in this earthy but sublime poetry is one of the great miracles of the canon of Scripture. I guess there are those who, if it were up to them, would have wanted it excluded for reasons of modesty. And the Holy Spirit thankfully thwarted them! So here it is, between Ecclesiastes with his probing mockery of faith that comes too easy, and Isaiah with his defiant imagination in face of exile and imperial power, daring to hope – and between them, Sage and Prophet, this love letter, this unabashed celebration of love, divine and human, love which in the human heart and in the heart of God is the foundation of existence and the meaning and purpose of life itself.

6 August 2011
Haiku and Holiday in Ireland 5: The Burren, the Faith and the Pub

Amongst my favourite books are those which don't have their edges trimmed. Instead of neat guillotined sides there is a roughly textured layering of paper sheets, not a concession to economy but an aesthetic delight that makes each page unique, and when lying on its side, gives the whole book a soft sense of happenstance, the binding together of different sheets into a finished whole that looks so right that any attempt to machine it into uniform neatness would be unthinkably crude.

Imagine then a large geological volume with sheets made of rock, miles long and wide, lying on its side with the edges facing the sea, grey and green in colour, and formed over millions of years. The layers are clearly differentiated but belong together, the geological pages lie flat one on another and their edges are untrimmed. And if you can imagine that, then you have some idea of what The Burren is. A massive geological structure and substructure that dominates northern County Clare. We visited it and walked on it, over it, alongside it by the sea. And looking at those places where it layered its way down to the sea was like standing beside a gigantic volume of natural history, created millions of years ago.

The Burren has some of the most diverse fauna in the world. Even the small area of seashore we explored displayed all kinds of small plants, flowers and grasses.

1.

Laid aeons ago,

Carboniferous limestone,

layered stone pages.

2.

Barren Burren rock,

diversity of flora –

fertile paradox.

We also visited a number of Irish pubs, and as well as the company and conversation, I took time to look at some of the pictures and writings on the pub walls. In several we saw fading photographs or pictures of three very different historical figures. I couldn't help sensing that the fading pictures were slow process reminders of a slow relinquishing, generation by generation, of the Catholic faith, the Christian tradition that has so defined the history, culture and spirituality of Ireland. There were often pictures of Jesus or Mary; sometimes a photo of JFK; and often images of John Paul II (and the present Benedict XVI) – but I was interested in the reluctance to remove the pictures of the Pope of the people. A long conversation with two Irish friends, over a wonderful meal and an afternoon of meandering, themselves no longer regularly practising their faith, but a tangible sense of loss, and anxiety that their grown up children, and their grandchildren would be very different people living in a historically changed Ireland, leached of the dynamic cultural colour that comes from shared religious belief.

Whatever theory of secularisation we buy into, and however we interpret the decline of Christian faith and belonging in Western Europe, there is something profoundly unsettling in living through a transition away from those values and convictions that have, like the Burren, been laid down over generations till they all but defined the human landscape. And the Church of Jesus Christ, in its varied traditions and expressions, is called now to exist in a place where familiar landscapes, known topography, cultural comfort zones and previous privilege are being swept away with the same ruthless thoroughness as those last glacial ice flows that stripped vegetation and topsoil from 1200 square kilometers of NW County Clare, leaving a more barren surface – but one where smallness, diversity and beauty could still flourish.

And maybe that is as good a metaphor as I can think of for the reinvention of the Christian community – flowers in rocky places, beauty surviving an ice-age environment, Christ-embodying community flourishing in a globalised world where human value, and humane values might otherwise perish in an inhospitable climate.

2 August 2010
Elton Trueblood – in affectionate remembrance of a Quaker Philosopher

My good friend Bob Maccini, who is a black-belt in karate Quaptist, who plays the coronet and the guitar with consummate skill, who has a doctorate in Johannine studies from Aberdeen, who with his wife Becky gave a home to three Russian children, who is an ordained Baptist pastor, a highly sought after copy editor of academic publishing, a cross country skier and a qualified football ( I mean football) referee – anyway, my friend Bob had his first pastorate in the Quaker meeting attended by Elton Trueblood.

Now I'm not sure how many people now recognise the name of Elton Trueblood (1900-1994), that deeply wise and intelligent philosopher-Quaker. Phiosopher, chaplain to Stanford and Harvard Universities, ecumenical pioneer and in at the founding of the World Council of Churches, leading thinker in the post World War 2 Quaker renaissance across the United States. But he is another of those Christian thinkers whose writing shaped my early thinking, and whose wisdom still lightly guides the way I think a community of Christians should live, treat each other and look with compassionate understanding on the world of people. Three of his books, even in their titles, suggest why the theology and spirituality of Elton Trueblood merges with Baptist theology into that attractive kind of Christian Bob refers to as a Quaptist. The Company of the Committed is a clear argument for human community, centred on Christ, and expressed in costly service in which the cost is the least important thing. The Incendiary Fellowship portrays a community of Jesus' followers who burn with hopefulness, love and a trustful openness to life in the Spirit. The Yoke of Christ is a volume of sermons in which following Jesus is spelled out as learning through living, and living in such a way that Jesus' words are both harness and freedom, that our faith is both a calling and a chosen obedience, the grateful yes with which we embrace the invitation to follow after Christ.

The books don't read so well now. They were so clearly attuned to their times from the 50's to the late 70's, that they have lost that counter-cultural edge because the culture they were countering is long past. And in its place a world infinitely more complex, less congenial to Christian thought or indeed any other over-arching view of the way the world is or should be, and thus a world in which human hopefulness has to survive in an ecology much more fragile, and in a cultural and moral ecology increasingly awash with newly developed toxins we are not sure how to control.

I read a couple of the sermons from the Yoke of Christ a week or two ago – it's the one volume I still have. And the sermons still work at the level of the classic – Trueblood touched on things that are always important, and each generation should at least consider. And in his day, he wrote with diagnostic skill, identifying the malaise of modern culture. His book The Predicament of Modern Man was summarised for the Reader's Digest, received sacks of reader response mail, and he answered every one of them personally. But the cost of contextual popular writing is its effectiveness wanes as the context changes. Still, I'm glad my Quaptist friend reminded me of this fine, modest but spiritually impressive Quaker leader, who embodied the name of this blog and who lived wittily in the tangle of his mind. You can read a bit more about him here.

23 May 2010
Augustine and Kierkegaard; On not trying too hard to understand

Some theological writers are as hard to understand as other creative artists, and what they write is to be appreciated in a similar way to other works of art. Indeed we might be doing a disservice to them and ourselves if our primary purpose in reading them is to "understand" what they write, or understand them through what they write. I'm thinking of those times when reading something, I become aware of its power, its capacity to affect me, that something or other that alerts in me the crucial appreciative quality in the theological reader, and not to be easily dismissed, of being mystified. At one level I do understand what is written, but at a higher (or deeper?) level there is something elusively present in the writing that seems more important than my own cognitive grasp, that evades intellectual control, that gives what is written an authority over my conscience and will and affections. That makes me say Yes, more from intuition and instinct than crtical analysis

Augustine was good at this kind of thing. In Book 1 of the Confessions he tries to tease out by talking out, the relation between his own existence and the Eternal Being of God. He compares his own sense of being time-bound, time limited, dependent on Divine will that he exists at all.

"Because your years do not fail, your years are one Today. How many of our days and days of our fathers have passed during your Today, and have derived from it the measure and condition of their existence? And others too will pass away and from the same source derive the condition of their existence. 'But you are the same', and all tomorrow and hereafter, and indeed all yesterday and further back, you will make a Today, you have made a Today.

If anyone finds your simultaneity beyond his understanding, it is not for me to explain it. Let him be content to say 'What is this?' (Exod. 16:15). So too let him rejoice and delight in finding you who are beyond discovery rather than fail to find you by supposing you to be discoverable"

Confessions (Trans. Henry Chadwick) (Oxford:OUP, 1991), page 8.

This line of thought, (about what some theological writing does to us rather than what we do with it), was triggered by reading a brief passage of Kierkegaard the other day. It bothered me in a positive kind of way. It made sense at a deeper level than seeming straightforwardly reasonable. It isn't the kind of passage with which you agree or disagree; as well try to agree or disagree with a sunset. It is precisely a passage that mystifies, unsettles the conscience, evokes an immediate and appreciative Yes, while also saying "What is this?." Yet though inwardly I assent, not without misgivings that, if Kierkegaard is right, then much else I swallow uncritically about how to live my life in the world is wrong.

The passage itself? Tell you tomorrow 🙂

18 January 2010
Music, Calvin, cultural critique, and missional relevance

Here's an extract from a readable and sympathetic biography of Calvin:

In the very depths of his being Calvin had a most intimate awareness of the power of music. He feared and relished it at the same time. It possessed an ascendancy over souls and bodies that could either capture them by its evil spells or liberate them by its beauty: "Among the things that are proper to divert a man and give him pleasure, music is either the first or one of the most important….For there is hardly anything in this world that can more readily bend the manners of men this way and that…And in fact we find by experience that it has a secret and almost incredible ability to move hearts one way or another."

Music, that deceitful power, should be put to the service of the text and the Word, illustrating them and not obscuring their meaning. "All evil speech…, when accompanied by music, pierces the heart much more strongly and enters into it in such a way that, just as wine is poured into a vessel from a funnel, so also venom and corruption are distilled to the bottom of the heart by melody."

Calvin analysed the double potential effect of music, at once destructive and creative, on a sensibility whose dangerous instability he perceived, an instabilty that would shortly reveal itself to be fundamental to baroque psychology.
Bernard Cottret, Calvin. A Biography, (Edinburgh:T&TClark, 1995), pages 173-4.

There is a pastoral realism and cultural awareness about Calvin that is annoyingly inconvenient for those who simply want to dismiss him as either cultural philistine or theological bogey man. When Calvin's shortcomings are acknowledged, and the problems of his thought aired, he remains a theological source and resource for a church desperately looking for its voice, and struggling to remember the words that articulate the Word. For all our fascination with relevance, our accommodation to the postmodern mindset, our neglect of transcendent mystery in favour of the accessible and experiential, the contemporary Church often enough lacks a sense of its own calling to bear witness to the Eternal, to see the world as the theatre of God's glory, and to understand its own vocation as the Body of Christ which embodies the Word it proclaims in repentance, faith and the fear of God.

One remedy, astringent and at times uncomfortable, is to include the voice of Calvin in the conversations the Church must always have between surrounding prevailing culture, its own diverse theological traditions, and the innovative impulses of a Church so anxious to be missionally relevant that it can fail at the level of its own vocational integrity as the community of Christ. Missional relevance itself can be driven by the Church's survival instinct as much as by Gospel imperatives – Calvin's theology of divine sovereignty, built on the centrality of the Word, is a necessary corrective.

This year is the 400th anniversary of Calvin's birth, on 10th July 1509. I'm going to celebrate it by reading his sermons on Ephesians. However, Calvin is only the second most important person born on July 10 – that's also my mother's birthday!

The portrait of Calvin above is less severe than some of the more popular ones on book covers. And given the sheer volume and quality of Calvin's written output – what would he have done if the quill had been replaced with a keyboard?

14 May 2009
Wisdom for learners and teachers, from the Desert Fathers

Wisdom for learners and teachers, from the Desert Fathers:

A visitor came to the monastery looking for the purpose and meaning of life.

The Teacher said to the visitor, "If what you seek is Truth, there is one thing you must have above all else."

"I know", the visitor said. "To find Truth I must have an overhwelming passion for it."

"No", the Teacher said. "In order to find Truth you must have an unremitting readiness to admit you may be wrong."

26 March 2009
Gifts, blessings and Greetings

A red Cashmere sweater that makes me look soft, cuddly and slim. (not many people look cuddly AND slim).

A new 2 CD production of Haydn "The Creation" which I intend to leave a couple of hours for some afternoon when everyone else is doing much less civilised stuff around the telly.

Coldplay, James and the Beethoven's 7th Symphony wrapped together as a gift package of eclectic music.

A book of the Duke of Edinburgh's politically incorrect gaffes and hilariously witty put downs which makes the Duke sound like a lot of fun to accompany.

Chocolate laced with chillies, and a large bar of chocolate with caramelised hazelnuts and praline.

A box of three bottles of rather fine selected red wines.

A hand cast metal paperweight in the shape of the dove of peace now sitting on my desk beside several other important objects of spiritual import to me – (including my holding cross, a 19th century brass light switch, a framed 1940's postcard of Izaak Walton's window in Winchester Cathedral).

So I've had a good Christmas – enriched further by good company and some surprise emails, phone calls and other people stuff. I'm just off to phone Bob and Becky – Becky is the much loved minister of the church in the gloriously Chirstmassy photo above. So if you read this Becky, leave a comment as kind of literary footstep in the snow!

Peace to all and joy forbye!

26 December 2008
Manchester, Obama celebrations, Pre-Raphaelites and Bookshop dissonance……

Just returned from my say cheerio to Sean trip to Manchester. Turned out to have all the most important ingredients in abundance.

Met with Catherine (married to Sean), Sophia and Lucy ( two delightful daughters) and so made three new friends. They are a family skilled in welcome, and where hospitality includes inducting the guest into the delights of CBBC. Then there was the bonfire and fireworks party (actually a mini street party chez Winter) doubling up as both Guy Fawkes commemoration and Obama celebration, (complete with pre-printed Obama badges universally distributed to all attendees by Sophia) and sustained through the cold by Sean's gourmet pumpkin soup and piles of rolls and sausages, apples and tangerines.

Good conversations with Sean and others about the next stages of life, the logistics and the plans, the new job and the new country. All very exciting, only tinged with the (slightly selfish) sadness that distance might be a factor in future opportunities to sit, talk and enjoy.

Had a varied cultural day on Thursday on which I'll post later. Just to say I went to the Holman Hunt and Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and the Manchester City Gallery and saw several versions of Hunt's 'The Light of the World.' I also saw paintings I hadn't known about, and a couple I did and was so pleased to see – not least 'The Scapegoat', a painting of powerful imaginative pathos.

Part of the day was a visit to the John Rylands Library. As I walked in I thought of F F Bruce, that great Scottish Evangelical NT scholar closely associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library. Bruce did so much to erode the bulwarks of academic suspicion that all but excluded evangelicals from the higher echelons of academia. Some time it will be important to properly assess the influence of people like Bruce in redeeming evangelical scholarship from its own defensiveness. And the John Rylands building! What a masterpiece of Gothic showing off! But my main mission was to see Papyrus 457, that tiny fragment of the earliest part of the NT we have – itself a work of art, painstaking strokes of ink painting on papyrus, words about the Word. Just realised that works as Haiku.

Painstaking strokes of
ink, painting on papyrus,
words about the Word.

As a piece of spoil-sport reality crashing in on such cultural peregrinations, I also found Wesley Owen Bookshop and the Catholic Truth Society Bookshop just round the corner. I, the patron saint of impulse book buyers and incorporating those who will buy a book to mark any occasion that serves as excuse, bought nothing in either of them. They are two examples of what happens when bookshops stock only what is theologically congenial to the dominant clientele. I am left wondering what the underlying message is when a shop only sells what certain sales managers think is congruent with the true gospel message, as they see it, from their perspective, as represented by their company / branch of the church, over and against those who, when it comes to key essentials, are, by and large, more or less, wrong!

In one I could buy Banner of Truth and in the other Ave Maria Press; I could have Raymond Brown on Hebrews in one, or Raymond Brown on John in the other – the first was a Baptist minister, beloved expositor and Principal of Spurgeon's College, the second a Jesuit NT Scholar who was a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Both shops had music playing, – one a gently insistent Benedictine chant, the other was a hymn compilation that happened to be playing Amazing Grace – and as I listened to Newton's hymn, I smiled at the subversive activity of the Holy Spirit – the Benedictine chant had been playing in Wesley Owen bookshop, and 'Amazing Grace' in the CTS, – perhaps a gesture of impatience from the One who urges the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.

Time spent in the MLK Library was mainly given over to reading a particular book I want to finish, and burrowing in unfamiliar journals like a manic truffle hunter. Came away with several heavily annotated slips of scrap paper with references to articles, books to go looking for and various other fragments of data that, like the jars of screws, nuts, ball beairings, clips, clamps and nails in my father's shed, are captured and kept because 'they might come in handy some time'.

Tomorrow I preach in my own church in Paisley – Remembrance Sunday. And Isaiah 25 which begins with a hymn about a dangerous world, and the acts of God that 'silence the song of the ruthless'. In Congo and Darfur, in Afghanistan and Iraq, in Gaza and Israel, in the US and the UK, the song of the ruthless has drowned out the cries of complaint for long enough.

8 November 2008