Category: Confessions of a Bibliophile

The new Aberdeen University Library is stunning!

This afternoon I sauntered down Old Aberdeen enjoying the bustle of students, the autumn colours, a chill North Sea breeze, and the sunlight and shadows on the old buildings. And in the middle of this back in time olde worlde community sit several large modern buildings built over the years as the campus has expanded.

The latest one, the new library building looks like this!

When it was being built I was skeptical, harrumphing with disapproval at this immense greenhouse.

I was wrong. This is a stunning building, a statement of confidence, an architectural art form that asserts the importance of knowledge and the central, crucial role of a library in any University. Walking towards it I was excited and moved by the sheer sheen of sunlight and sky reflecting outwards and downwards upon those coming under its shadow.

I think it's great such bold creativity is invested in making space attractive and surprising, the building exceptional in concept, and a powerful affirmation of the importance of space dedicated to learning, understanding and contributing to the intellectual and social capital that enriches us all. On the way back to the car I played with words and eventually formed a dedicatory haiku, or two!

Propagation of Thought

Glazed green grass blades shine,

growing towards sun and sky;

greenhouse of wisdom.

The foyer brings you straight into the cafe so the place of learnin g and culture has one of its most important departments in the front window – good coffee, light ambience and a buzz of stuff going on.

Then you look up and this is what you see! I took the photo with the permission of the library staff who love the place. Can see why.

Intellectual Discovery

Mind's aspiration:

thoughts beyond known horizons,

spiralling upwards.

This is a place I will want to come to, and come back to, again, and again.

19 October 2011
Acknowledging Life Enhancing Debts

Every now and again as a reader, thinker, theologian and writer I sit and list in my mind those who have helped me to read, think, do theology and write. Intellectual indebtedness is one of the most enriching forms of being in another's debt. Throughout the years as I have been reading and preaching, thinking and sharing, praying and talking, writing and listening, a number of voices have become familiar, known, trusted, and therefore significant to the point of defining of the way I now think and talk about what I believe.

The list grows, as does the debt. Walter Brueggemann, Jean Vanier, Thomas Merton, P T Forsyth, Evelyn Underhill, Jurgen Moltmann, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Cicely Saunders, James Dunn, Jonathan Sacks, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hans Kung, Julian of Norwich, Karl Barth, Lesslie Newbigin, Dorothee Soelle, Frederick Copleston; poets like Denise Levertov, R S Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, novelists too many to mention or even remember. And biographies or remarkable people, not because they were famous and therefore great, but because they lived lives of exemplary human complexity, in frailty and strength, with courage and sometimes fear, now making right decisions then wrong, but not always because the choices were clear or morally straightforward. Biography is theology enfleshed, embodied conviction, faith evidenced by life.

And amongst those to whom I acknowledge a long indebtedness, intellectual and spiritual, is Frederick Buechner, whose writings include novels, essays and sermons. This is the year of publsished sermons for me. So Brueggemann's volume will appear and Fred Craddock's is already out. Buechner has preached since 1959 and the volume Secrets in the Dark is his selection of sermons, preached and written, over 50 years. The first, and still remarkable for its unabashed faithfulness to the God crucified in Christ, was entitled 'The Magnificent Defeat'. In an age of internet borrowed material and power point illustrated 'teaching', and rigidly pragamatic and practical applied preaching, this stands as a masterpiece of contradiction to all forms of homiletic dumbed-downness. This is rhetorical passion and biblical imagination, theological courage and pastoral honesty that will not short change the listener who comes to hear a Word from God. And throughout this book there are moments of revelation, and sometimes what we learn of the love of God comes through the preacher's own acknowledged frailties and needs.

Late in the book is a sermon entitled "Waiting". Tomorrow and Sunday I'll quote a few paragraphs. Then maybe you'll believe the blurb above!

This was written while listening to Beethoven's Violin Concerto – there too there is tenderness, vision, playfulness, rumbustious confidence, tension and gentleness, force and movement, and all expressed with the virtuosity of the concert level performer – there are no homiletical concerts, but if there were Buechner would be on stage!

23 September 2011
The Enduring Melody – the fellowship of joy and of suffering

My friend Geoff Colmer – whom I see about once a year at a UK Baptist conference, has gently encouraged me for some time to read The Enduring Melody by Michael Mayne. I first encountered the work of Michael Mayne in his volume This Sunrise of Wonder, which I consider one of the most life affirming and theologically literate books I've ever read. So my slowness in getting to The Enduring Melody is only because other things were pressing, and I know a book of such richness isn't one to skim, cram in, flick through or read dutifully. It should be read – and the verb to read means something much more than mere perusal or hurried shopping down the supermarket aisles grabbing what my limited time allows to throw into the mental trolley.

So for a week now I've been reading The Enduring Melody, and found myself in the company of faith, courage, beauty, wonder, loss, love, pain, anxiety, enjoyment and much else that is expressed in a book that alternates between very personal journal and beautifully crafted essay. In that sense there are two books – the diary of an illness that proves terminal, and essays on some the things that made up the enduring melody of Michael Mayne's life as a Church of England priest, a vocation lived with the classic pastoral genius of Anglican spirituality at its most inquisitively affirming.

The only other published Journal that comes near this for honest spiritual search, human and humane longing, wise reflection on the meaning of this person's life, regret that life is shortening but gladness for what it has been and still is, are the two volumes of Philip Toynbee, Part of a Journey, and End of a Journey. I remember very clearly reading them, the time in my life and the places I was when I did read them. And I remember too some of the moments when I simply nodded in mute but sincere recognition of those deep undercurrents of faith and fellowship that enable us to say I believe in the communion of saints. I'll write more about Toynbee soon.

Over the next week or so I'll write about The Enduring Melody. Not a book review, more reports of conversations between pilgrims who know, you've got to walk that lonesome valley, you've got to walk there by yourself. But pilgrims who also know that you don't ever walk by yourself, even if that is the way it feels. You walk with the company, felt or unfelt, of the One whose rod and staff comort; and you walk with those friends and companions in life who also walk their road and ours; and you walk, or run, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, with perseverance looking to Jesus.

25 August 2011
Van Gogh, Thomas Merton and Rowan Williams – and the connection is?

Had a good day yesterday when important things have been done, said and enjoyed. Journeyed to Glendoick to meet my friend Ken where we spent several hours at the garden centre. In the taciturn and occasionally nasty summer we're having the day was sunny, clear views for miles and the roads still quietish at the end of the school holidays. We don't get the chance to meet often so we tend to make a meal of it. This time we made two meals of it, a bacon and egg roll and a pot of tea, an hour's walk, then Carrot and orange soup with herb scones.

We've been friends more than half our lives and though we'd planned another bookshop crawl in Edinburgh, a civilised conversation over good food for three hours was much to be preferred.

Got home and listened to Albinoni's Oboe Concerto in D Minor while writing and reading, and gloating (no other word will do) over recently bought books. The slow movement of this concerto should be played quietly while reading one of the great narratives of divine and human tenderness in the gospels – for me the encounter of Mary Magdalene with Jesus in the garden.

Of the books being gloated over the one I read next will be The Yellow House, Martin Gayford, (Penguin) is the account of Van Gogh, Gaugin and nine turbulent weeks in Arles. Two geniuses with all their psychological complexities, artists at the zenith of their talent and the extremes of innovation, both eager for friendship but encountering in each other the greatest obstacle to mutual friendship! While working on the Sunflowers tapestry I'm keeping in touch with Vincent in different ways – not trying to understand him, which I think is neither possible nor necessary. But to know the whence of the chaos and the wherefore of the genius, to accept and respect the relationship between his illness and inner turmoil and the immense achievements of his art, and to have an emotional context out of which to work an impression of his favourite painting, and the focus of his desperate longing for sunlight, hope and inner rest.

One of the traits of the bibliophile is gloating over a forthcoming book yet to be printed! This one brings together the Christian whose writing has shaped my own spirituality and thinking in ways decisive for my view of ministry, myself, human relationships, the nature of prayer and the paradoxical imperatives of community, silence and solitude as places and times where and when God is to be found. Ever since I read The Seven Storey Mountain, followed by Thoughts in Solitude I have never had a year when I haven't read Merton's writing. This forthcoming book is by Rowan Williams, and I can't think of someone I'd rather have exploring and reflecting on Merton's continuing relevance in a world where the things Merton made deep concerns remain deeply concerning – cultural conflicts, violence, consumer greed, cultural superficiality and human creativity turned against human interests and flourishing. Merton's great insight that the contemplative was a necessary presence in a world in desperate need of redemption, righteousness, peace and justice remains a major portion of his legacy that is of enduring value. He spoke into the cultural urgencies and reconfigurations of the 50's and 60's and much that he wrote remains valid half a century later. Is that because human nature, our profligacy and pretensions, our anger, angst and anxiety, our propensity for self-preservation and self-harm, remain humanity's greatest threat? And thus a great and fallible human being like Merton can bring together the contemplative and the active, the promise of divine grace enabling human goodness, the monk as holy person in whose prayers are gathered up the broken pieces of a God loved world?

10 August 2011
Confessions of a Bibliophile – The Hound and the Falcon

I was recently asked to look through several boxes of books which came from a house being cleared. If there was anything there I wanted just feel free to take it!

That's a hard ask then, isn't it?

Could I make an appointment to come and browse them?

Yes – how about this evening I said.

Now the problem with browsing several boxes of books, any one or any hundred of which you are free to take, is that you begin to have daft ideas that you have enough time in life to read everything. Or if that unreasonable rationalisation isn't convincing, you begin to see each book as a possible masterpiece you have just overlooked so far for lack of opportunity – no matter that it is brown, cracked, smells musty and dusty and looks rusty. So there's a need for the fruit of the spirit which is self control, and a reminder that greed and acquisitiveness, possessiveness and an all embracing yes to intellectual appetite is indeed a work of the flesh.

So from those five boxes I only took half a dozen, and three of those were novels which will find their way soon to one of the far too many charity bags now coming through the letter box. Another was one I knew someone else would like, Wild Swans, (in bookseller speak, ' nice fresh copy, hardback, binding solid, dustcover very good and unclipped). The other two I have kept. C S Lewis once said the sign of the well read person is one who looks over the gathered miscellanea on the second hand book barrows in the market (O for such events and literary adventures to return alongside the book chains and Amazon) – anyway to look and find something you haven't read and now want to. And though you don't know the book you now have an instinct for that which is mentally nutritious, emotionally satisfying, and promisingly interesting – and this previously non-existent book now presents itself and demands to be read.

The Hound and the Falcon, by Antonia White answers all three criteria, and I'm nearly finished it. Not a novel, but the letters she wrote to someone called Peter in 1940,41 during the London Blitz. The letters are intense, regular accounts of a woman struggling to return to and hold on to her Catholic faith. At times searingly honest, she is both a profound critic of her Church and a conscientious practising Catholic. But for her practice is more important than dogma, and what she does and who she is matters more than the specific articulations of what she believes. In mind and conscience, in her spirit and emotions she collides with much popular piety and official dogma, and the result is a glimpse into the inner life of one who genuinely loves God and struggles with the institutions which claim to represent God on earth.

Amongst her heroes (of whom she is also critical) is Baron Friedrich Von Hugel, whose letters are a strange mixture of teutonic reasoning and spiritual insight, stern doctrine and compassionate understanding of spiritual struggle. I've only read a few other books in which the authentic and costly struggle for integrity in spiritual life is so movingly recorded, so convincingly honest, and articulated in such penetrating yet personal prose to a friend she clearly had come to love and trust.

They only ever met twice. The correspondence is one sided as Peter's letters are not extant. But she responds so fully and frankly that it's possible to piece together some of the content of the letters she answers. But it is her own search and struggle that is of interest here. Reading these letters from a woman impatient with metaphysics but who reads Aquinas, highly intelligent and likely to tear a strip off me for pointing that out as if that were unusual, devoted to the Gospel but sharply critical of the Church, Catholic to the core without buying into much she saw as superfluous or unnecessarily obstructive to faith, I have come away once again aware of two things.

First, the letter is a magnificent lens into a person's heart and mind. The combination of personal relationship and inner journey is ideal for the articulation of faith. An exchange of letters is a thoughtful, considered dialogue. Some of the finest theological and spiritual writing is woven into correspondence. Second, the journey of the soul towards God, the longing for intimacy and belonging, the search for truth that can be lived, the love of beauty that can be adored, the yearning for goodness in ourselves and in others, the desire for God and the love of learning, – these are the signs of a soul alive, the evidence of spiritual awareness, the result of life received as gift so not taken for granted, but taken as granted, from God. Over the years I have met many in the communion of saints, which has absolutely no denominational barriers, who have so enriched my own faith and helped my own life, by the honest telling of their story.

Books come into our lives by accident, by providence, by chance – who knows? And what does it matter? The Hound and the Falconis one of a number of special books on my shelves which could be labelled 'serendipity'. I choose to believe that the Holy Spirit is the bringer of possibility, the Divine opportunist whose nudges and pushes are as far as divine coercion will go, but whose wisdom is unsearchable yet searches us to the core of our being, and speaks truth. Maybe that's what Jesus meant when he spoke of the Paraclete who leads into the truth, but taking the things of Jesus and explaining them to those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the pure in heart, the meek, the person for whom Beatitude is to be found in God.

9 August 2011
Lovers of Discord because Lovers of Truth?

Lovers of Discord is one of Keith Clements' best books, though I guess not all that well known now. Published 23 years ago it is a critical but appreicative account of some of the theological bust ups in England in the 20th Century. Whether or not he agreed with the theological speculations, aberrations and protestations, he clearly admired those who were too faithful to the truth to silence awkward questions, or settle for partial and unconvincing arguments, or put up with dogmatic pronouncements disguised as conviction but in reality strident certitudes scared stiff of hesitation, uncertainty and doubt. On the last page he quotes the well repeated lines about the Lord having yet more light and truth to break forth from his word, and uses it the way most people do – as a warning against ever thinking we have God sussed, or that our views have some kind of secure finality, or that our view of the Bible is the biblical one and other people who differ are, well, unbiblical.

But then on the last page he writes some reflections that could only come from someone whose spirit is ecumenical, whose faith is evangelical, whose theology is liberal in the sense of generous, and whose mind remains open to the Spirit of truth who takes the things of Jesus and makes them known to the intellect, the heart and those secret places within us where truth gains its purchase on our deepest motives, inciters our most passionate longings, and sustains our most persistent hopes. Here is Clements' final words in this book:

"There is a looking back to the past for authoritative reassurance, rather than an anticipation of some new thing, a continual desire to return and check the tomb is empty before taking the road to jerusalem to wherever Christ is to be met anew….We may believe in an ultimate unity of truth, though not apprehended as yet, and only seen in a glass darkly. The resolution of theological conflict is a hope and it will be fulfilled only when there is no more to be taught us by the Spirit of truth." (Page 242)

The book is available used on Amazon for 1p – which just goes to show you can't tell a book by looking at its price! The image is from Hubble – and is included here just to remind us of our size, our place, and our insignificance if we are considered apart from the eternal purposeful Love that moves the sun and other stars.

22 June 2011
Friendship, book shops and “the heart in pilgrimage”

Sometimes, not always, I write in a book where I bought it, when and why. I had reason to go looking for George Herbert the other day and opened "This Booke of Starres" Learning to Read George Herbert, by James Boyd White. Inside I had written – "Oxford August 1995, while on a bookshop tour with Ken Roxburgh" That was a wonderful three days away which took in York, Oxford, Cambridge and Durham and the various bookshops therein.

We had an appalling and hilarious B&B expereince which included a room with broken window sashes, a landlord with open shirt, sweaty chest and non-designer stubble, and a railway line that serviced the main Oxford sorting office and mail trains through the night, during a heatwave in August – oh and the sweaty landlord was also the cook for breakfast!

But I still have several books bought in different places, Ebeling on Luther, Boyd White on Herbert, Keeble on Richard Baxter and a hardback copy of John V Taylor's exquisite The Go Between God. The friendship we have shared for a long number of years transcends but could not exclude our shared passion for books, reading, theology and the joy of the chase. Only, the on line availability of most things has reduced the urgency, the sweaty palms, the raised metabolism, the nervous searching of the eyes along rows of books for that one, just that one, which you've looked for for ages and at a price that leads you to faith in miracles.

So I'm glad I have books like this – and a one sentence memo to myself to good companionship, literary hunting parties and long pilgrimages to those holy places where books live.

The book itself is one of the best studies of Herbert's poetry of which I have a shelf full. Boyd White has a particular interest in literature and its relation to law, and especially how poetry expresses and expounds human experience of language, self and community, and how language is fluid, shaping the community which shapes it, and how the speaking self is also the listening self, the influencing self also the influenced self. Just the qualifications in complexity needed to appreciate the filigree of self-referential connections which adorn and decorate Herbert's poetry. It is part of Herbert's genius that such metaphysical elaboration nevertheless articulates the deepest and most intense spiritual longings, and in verse where the sense of the transcendent God is suffused with a sense of the self as broken, yearning and hungering for wholeness. Boyd White's book is a wonderful interpretation of Herbert, and a treasured book, for which I am grateful, because of where I bought it, because of the company I kept, and for the sheer brilliance of the writing itself.

Thou hast given so much to me,

give one thing more, a grateful heart

…Not grateful when it pleaseth me:

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be

Thy praise.

1 June 2011
Why the library matters as a humanising refuge for the soul.

Amongst the public services under threat of cuts, and a too easy target for budget trimmers, money squeezers and compulsive cost cutters, are our public libraries. You would expect me to be vocal and verbal about any threat to those opportunities and privileges of knowledge that are essential to the health, life and culturedness of – well, of our culture.

I came across the quotation below (by E B White the novelist) written to the Troy Public Library in the US in the 1960's. One hundred writers were asked to write to the children at the school and tell them what a library is, and what it is for. The library has recently posted all the letters on its website here.

I suggest you click and go read some of them – then email a couple of them to your MP, Councillor, (and the Library staff at your local library – to encourage them).

A library is many things. It's a place to go, to get in out of the rain. It's a place to go if you want to sit and think. But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books. If you want to find out about something, the information is in the reference books — the dictionaries, the encyclopedias, the atlases. If you like to be told a story, the library is the place to go. Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together — just the two of you. A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

14 May 2011
How to save your local library

I love this!

Go see!!

And smile!!!

Bibliophiles of the world unite!!!!

Been having a down day till I saw this.

15 January 2011
Salley Vickers and the joy of novels

I've just finished Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, and am about to read it again. Vickers lectures on literature and is a Jungian psychotherapist – she is also a writer who can do that rare thing, take religious, metaphysical and psychological themes and weave them into a narrative that helps us love and affirm our own humanity. The painting is by Vittore Carpaccio, and it features only briefly in the novel – it is however used on the cover. Once I've read the novel again I'll come back to this – but I'm happy to encounter a novelist I hadn't read before – and discover I have two friends for whom a Salley Vickers' novel is a favourite.

25 November 2010