Category: Loving the Church

One Hundred Word Posts; An Exercise in Brevity from Now to Pentecost

At different times in my ministry I've had to work within the limitations other people set. For some years in Paisley in the 1980's I maintained a telephone ministry which had a 2 minute sermon, every day. Actually it was 1 minute 47 seconds of speaking time. That became a daily discipline, sitting at the phone with a script recording no more than 100 seconds of voice time. But many people phoned every day to hear some words that might encourage, comfort, re-energise, help them reconfigure their day, maybe even reflect on the life they want, the person they are. And did so listening to words about God's love in Jesus. Sometimes there was feedback, often not. But like the sower who went out to sow, each day 100 seconds of scattered hope-filled words.

For years now I've written in the Aberdeen Press and Journal, the item they still quaintly and defiantly called the Saturday Sermon, now recently just 'Sermon'. It started as 500 words, then 400 words, and now 275 words. Like some chocolate manufacturers who charge the same price but slowly, unannounced, reduce the weight and size of the product; and sometimes fill the pack with air to make it feel fuller than it is. It occurs to me that some sermons are also made to sound fuller than they are by the same subterfuge…

Combining these two, 100 seconds and 275 words I've decided till Pentecost to limit posts here to saying something in 100 words. It can be less but not more. This is an entirely arbitrary form of personal training in the necessary skill of multum in parvo. After all The Lord's Prayer is only 55 words in its Anglican form minus the doxology. It will mean that for a few weeks a 100 word post will have to be exactly one third the length of this one!

19 April 2015
Listening to Your Life Knowing God Listens Too.

These past few days I've been thinking. I do quite a lot of that. Live inside my own head, reflect on this and that, consider, ponder, worry, praise. Rehearse memories, imagine conversations, read, pray, give thanks, complain. Feel guilty or contented, uplifted or sad, impressed by beauty or depressed by brokenness; these and other emotional and intellectual puzzles are the colours and sounds of that world known only to me, and God. And in the most important sense, thankfully, known better to God than to me.

So how much of all of that inner noise and silence, searching and finding, that continuous flowing of thought and feeling that is the life I inhabit, how much of all this muchness of me is prayer. Do I pray or does God pray in me? Is prayer my seeking God or God seeking me? Is prayer indeed "the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed"? As an introvert I hope so, because there is a lot of living goes on inside our own heads, and inside our own hearts, and much of it a shared secret between us and God. Interestingly I find that more reassuring than worrying.

"O Lord, you have searched me and know me….you perceive my thoughts from afar…you are familiar with all my ways…before a word is on my lips you know it completely, O Lord." All this inner noise, like an orchestra tuning up and never quite ready for the concerto at which I am to be the guest soloist, God hears it, knows and understands the pre-performance anxiety. The closed circuit of action and reaction to all that happens in my life, that turns the affective and emotional kaleidoscope of my inner life into ever changing patterns I can't predict, God sees, and knows and understands the passion and the hope, the longing and the shadows, the joy of love found and the fear of love lost.

All this is a reminder to myself of something too often overlooked and under-appreciated. A human being is a stupendous mystery of unique and eternal worth to God, created and known and enfolded in the creative love that calls us into the freedom and glory that is a human life.

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
¹⁵My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.

There are of course deep and perplexing questions posed by such theological optimism about my life and metaphysical confidence about the way the universe works. I neither ignore them as irrelevant nor answer them with answers by definition partial, limited and speculative. Like everyone else I have to live with them. As a Christian I have no calling to understate the reality of evil, give intelligible answers to the tragedy of suffering, explain with what could only be uninformed impertinence the mystery of life's injustices cruelties and waste. No, as a Christian, facing the full realities of human existence and being a participant in this essential part of the human story that is my life, I think, pray and act out my life in the long shadow of a cross illumined by the blaze of resurrection.

Donald Mackinnon, was a courageous, intrepid explorer of the metaphysical landscape of 20th Century philosophical theology. He was a giant of a man, with steel wool eyebrows, a a love for his Harris Tweed jacket, and a voice that compelled attention, as with the huge hands and the body language of an Olympic wrestler he grappled and swayed to get a better hold on ideas both massive and elusive, but whose truth if it can be held and stated, are words of life. In one of his last publications he wrote movingly of the witness of the Christian church in a world full of just such tragedies and perplexities as our own.

“The Church exists in part to manifest to the world, albeit in a splintered reflection, that ultimate love whose expression in time is found in the crucifixion of the Son of God – to call men and women to their rest in its unfathomable deeps.”

Out of such ultimate love, we live and move and have our being.

(Both photos were taken early morning – one at the beach in Aberdeen, the other looking across the Mearns from the Bervie Road.)

10 February 2015
The Remedy for Perplexity and Dulled Conscience

Both for perplexity and dulled conscience the remedy is the same;

     sincere and spiritual worship.

For worship is the submission of all our nature to God.

It is

     the quickening of conscience by his holiness,

     the nourishment of mind with his truth;

     the purifying of the imagination by his beauty;

     the opening of the heart to his love;

     the surrender of the will to his purpose…

and all of this gathered up into adoration,

the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable….

Archbishop William Temple, Readings in John's Gospel.

Ever since I was introduced to these words by my own College Principal many a year ago, they have set the gold standard by which to measure what we mean when we use the noun to define worship, and the verb to refer to the act of worship. The submission of all our nature and the integration of all our life into adoration and self-giving love describes a deep rootedness of mind and soul in the love of God.

William temple was far too alert to the social and moral problems of society and church, the dangers and tensions of national and international politics, to ever be described as other-worldly, vaguely mystical or naive about human capacities for evil and destructive purpose. What I find interesting, and enduring in his words, is that they still identify the deficit of life meaning and the dissolving of moral imperatives which contribute decisively to our 21st Century malaise.

Readings in John's Gospel is a two volume series of meditations written between 1939 and completed in 1945; precisely the years when the world was confronted by dictators who demanded obedience of conscience, mind, imagination, heart and will, and ultimately self sacrifice in the name of the human will to power. These words of Temple are much more than a prose poem for devotional souls; they provide a set of criteria as specific as a barcode that enables us to critique and unmask those lesser, life diminishing, penultimate goals of human life too often presented to us as life's ultimates. Conscience, mind, imagination, emotion and will are precisely those aspects of our humanity which require to be dedicated to recognising, cherishing, healing, loving and enabling to flourish the very humanity in which such remarkable capacities exist.

A christian anthropology is open eyed about human sinfulness, and open hearted to the grace that renews, restores, enables and recreates the image of God in us. Temple knew this – here is the rest of the quotation, which balances the urgency of worship with the realism about human waywardness and a distorted sense of our own importance:

and all of this gathered up in adoration,
the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable,
and therefore the chief remedy of that self-centeredness
which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.”

I wonder if a key part of the church's mission today is to demonstrate attractively, enact convincingly, perform persuasively, live credibly, witness faithfully, by worship which has the height, depth and length and breadth of the love of God, that immense gracious love drawing from us and answering adoration which distils into a new and radical discipleship.

29 April 2014
Living Wittily is Retiring Kind Of…….

Many of those who regularly visit Living Wittily will be aware that life is in process of changing for me. For the past 11 years I have served Baptists in Scotland as the Principal of the Scottish Baptist College, and done so with a burden of responsibility and an awareness of high privilege. When a 19 year old lad from Lanarkshire turned up in the West End of Glasgow on the steps of the Scottish Baptist College, with Highers gained at night school after leaving school at 15, and asked to come and study for ministry, he had no idea that 30 years later he would be appointed Principal. Nor that, untrained, untried and untested as he was then, he would later be entrusted with the formation of women and men towards Christian ministry within and beyond the church.

During my time as Principal I have grown and changed, learned more than I ever conceived I would need to know about Higher Education and ministry formation, and met and worked with a remarkable staff in the College and in the wider circle of UWS staff. It has been a rich time, not without its considerable expenseof emotion and energy and time, but always with an awareness of gift, purpose and shared vision, and it's hard to ask for more.

For the past three years I've travelled from Aberdeen to Paisley, living away from home 4 days a week, and working from home. Family life remains as it should the foundation of my life, and the time has come to be at home more, to reconfigure life around a new sense of vocation, and to plan for the next stages of our lives. That sounds as if I am feeling my age! Well yes, and no. At 62 I am indeed feeling my age, as I did at 52 and even 32. But more important is to accept, even embrace change, as what keeps us alive; to understand that movement is what gives impetus; and to co-operate with the reality that desire and hope and vision give life its energy, direction and purpose. All of that I feel, and clearly recognise in the disjunctions and changes, in the stirring up and invitation, that is the continuing work of the Spirit, disturbing with a deeper peace, and calling into newness and risk.

It would be wrong to say I've been pulled out of my comfort zone! Whatever else the past 11 years have been, it hasn't been that, thankfully.

To teach and share with students at the great creative cusp of life that is study; to encourage and support the discovery of new things that converts monochrome faith to plasma screened subtlety; to accompany students in the at times painful but fruitful work of rediscovering what seemed lost; to bring to birth the recovery of faith as proper confidence, so that life becomes both thoughtfully trusting and responsibly informed, what is not to like in that vocation.

To learn how to encapsulate high vocational ideals and powerfully transformative spiritual principles into the framework and discourse of academic documents, that is itself a gift of the Spirit intepreting the glossolalia of the academy!

To demonstrate in church and academy, that academic excellence, vocational integrity, creative scholarship, and formation of character and competence are hard work, and entirely to be the goal of the student life, and to do so in an intentional community, that is what I mean by responsib ility and privilege.

I will complete my tenure as Principal on August 31. It is likely I will continue to teach at the College part time, at least till August 2014. My heart has always been in pastoral work and in sharing the life of a Christian community as theologian, preacher, friend and servant. Where opportunities present I hope to still be of service to Christ and to the work of God's Kingdom. And in addition? God knows!

3 June 2013
A Theological Reflection on Three Mornings of Problematic Commuting!

On the way to College each morning this week I've been delayed.

Monday it was the lolipop man stopping the traffic with a high waving lolipop, stopping the traffic for one adult to cross the road and no children in sight. That got a few irate horn blasts for lolipop abuse.

Tuesday I was a witness to a motor cyclist who came off his bike because a dog on an extension lead (not the electrical kind) had run across the road and created a tripwire. The biker wasn't too badly hurt but was rightly mad – I've no idea what the insurance issues will be.

Wednesday it was the huge articulated European transport Lorry which stopped within inches of the Nitshill Bridge and blocked the traffic both ways. No way to reverse because backed in by the Traffic queue – no way forward because, well because of the bridge.

Not the best start to the working day – not talking about me, but the lolipop man who thought he was being helpful, the motorcyclist who probably has no comeback for the damage, and the lorry driver who stopped on time but had nowhere to go, and surrounded by impatient to hostile commuters!

Hard to go in after such encounters of commuting life and sit down with a cup of tea and pick up where I left off in my reading of the more abstract realities of contested ecclesiologies, patristic Trinitarianism and contemporary approaches to mission for faith communities on the cusp of a culture fuelled by disruptive innovation and recessional panic!

But such is the life of a theologian – and seriously, the social and civic attitudes that underlie anger at a car having to stop for a walking human being does indeed provide food for theological critique of the values we live by;

and the questions raised by the unforeseen accident, the injury to others we intend or don't intend, and how to resolve situations that have gone wrong between people, there is an entire theological and ethical agenda for the church;

and to ask ourselves what resources we have to deal with those situations where we are stuck at a low bridge with no easy way forward or back, and all around us people just wanting to get on with their own lives.

I guess that embarrassed lorry driver mirrors the experience of so many folk trying to work out how to make their lives work and be able to move forward from the mistake they have made.

And I'm pondering the parable of the church as articulated lorry, confronted by a low bridge, trapped by the traffic, nowhere obvious to go, the driver frantically directing traffic around a vehicle made for movement but stuck by its own shape and wrong turnings…….

The image of the Eagle Nebulae always reminds me of the context within which all the strangeness of the ordinary is held, 'In the beginning was the Word…and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us'. And whatever the future of the church, that truth is the intellectual, spiritual and and moral directive for how the Church as the Body of Christ is to live in the creative energy of resurrection, and with trust in the God who in Christ is reconciling the world into the life of the Triune God.

23 August 2012
Karl Barth on One of His Salutary Rants!

I enjoy a good rant. whether it's mine opr someone else's. Strong feelings, passionate convictions, intellectual energy, just the right degree of unreasonableness, unshakeable confidence in the rightness of the cause and in the analysis of the problem, all of this harnessed to verbal facility with a strong rhetorical accent, these are the active ingredients of the effective rant.

Karl Barth's writings are full of them – they are amongst his most enjoyable paragraphs. They can feel like a loud shout from someone who crept up behind you while you were minding your own business journeying purposefully through some well meaning theological reflection

"Theology is…a function in the Liturgy of the church. One had better take ca\ution what he does, when he neglects theology, or takes it less seriously and thereby practically eliminates it, because it has only this one function. Of all the functions of the Church's liturgy none is to be dispensed with if the Church is to be kept totally intect.

And it is quite in order to say very emphatically today, that it is precisely this function, that of theology, this critical self-examination of the Church regarding its reason for existence and its origin, is not to be eliminated.

Try to carry on your practice without a theory!

Go on, praise "life" at the expense of intellectual work, knowledge or creed.

Worship "reality" and despise truth!

It will quickly become evident that the practical things are not all there is to it; it is only human endeavour, and yet, in its own autonomous nature it is not a worthy human endeavour. Where such a path leads can be illustrated today before our very eyes, and concerning which the Churches of all countries have every reason to fundamentally rethink themselves.

A Church without an orderly theology must sooner or later become a pagan church.!"

That's what Flannery O'Connor meant when she said Barth throws the furniture around. When Barth takes on the role of exasperated Headmaster he can be fun, but if we laugh we tend to do it discreetly, and nervously, because underneath the impatience is the passion of someone who wants the best and sees it thrreatened by complacency, carelessness or self indulgent minds seeking amusement rather than wisdom. The quote is from God in Action, Edinburgh, 1936, page 49-50

16 July 2012
The Unwise Impatience with the Contemplative Mission of the Church,

When E M Forster in A Passage to India sniffed with the disdain of the omniscient narrator at 'poor little talkative Christianity' he was doing what the best novelists do so well, exposing pretension and presumption and daring to name what is ridiculous. Of course not all Christianity is talkative in that embarrassing way when much speaking disguises insecurity, or pretends maturity, or silences other viewpoints by not shutting up about itself.

But there's still a sharp enough barb in Forster's words to make me uneasy about the contemporary expressions of evangelical spirituality and worship. The urge to talk to the point of overtalking, the impatience with silence as if silence were wasted time, the compulsion to fill every unforgiving minute with maximum information, our praise song factories churning out new stuff at increasing rates of quantity, our uncritical acceptance of prayers that seldom reach the depths of our love or the heights of our aspirations and are often the mere immediate chatter of Facebook exchanges with God.

Add to that our programmatic approaches to mission, activism as the index of discipleship, the concessions made in Christian practices and social attitudes to consumer culture and the radical individualism of personal choice and privatised lifestyles, and there is little time, energy or inclination to stop, shut up, listen, pay attention and let the engines that drive us slow down, quieten down and cool down.

Now all that is overstated, and mostly unfair, and anyway I can much-speak and fast-talk and non-stop with the best of them. But perhaps that enables me to say all this less self-righteously than it might sound. T S Eliot's question (was it wistful, angry or resigned) 'where is the life we have lost in living…' remains one of the most important questions the contemporary church has to ask, and with which the contemporary disciple of Jesus has to grapple.

I know that discipleship is at the centre of current thinking on the nature of the Church's mission, but I'm not persuaded that the way the idea is used to shape and fashion people towards a particular view of mission does justice to the New Testament vision of what it means for each person to follow Jesus. There are other calls of Christ, other ways of being, other paths of following that are equally important to the Kingdom of God, if we take the time to consider and ponder the richness of the people of God and the unsearchable riches of Christ. But the irony is that the more we talk and the faster we live, the harder it is to even see what the important questions are, let alone what kinds of answers there might be.

Which brings me to a question I am considering and pondering myself. What would be the impact on our ways of being the church if we recovered,, in our midst, the contemplative tradition of Christian discipleship? I have in mind certain words that seem to me to offer important theological and spiritual correctives to a church perhaps too fond of unexamined assumptions.

Attentiveness to the way the world is without assuming our quick diagnoses are always accurate. Amos didn't come to the conclusion overnight that worship is a waste of time for those who grind down the poor. His entire collection of prophecies detonates beneath unexamined assumptions.

Attendance – in the sense of waiting before God, just waiting. If we are attending before God our minds can't be in two places at once. Prayer isn't multi-tasking, it is letting God be God, instead of telling God who to be.

Pondering – rumination and turning things over in our minds, may not be the preferred approach to problem solving in our quick as you can solutions culture. Somewhere in Christian spirituality there is a necessity for the long view, the slow maturation of thought, the virtue of patience which is in fact waiting trustfully. Isaiah looked down the long winding road of exile and realised it would eventually be the road that led back to God.

Recollecting – so many fugitive thoughts, fleeting experiences, volume of emotional and mental traffic passing through our inner processors. Time to assimilate, to collect together what is important and taken in, to absorb the significance of things. Where in our life together in Christian community is there the same urgency towards non-urgency, the same valuing of that discernment and sifting that turns experience into wisdom?

Remembering - in the sense of recalling our calling; meaning time to reorient our hearts towards the Love that not only moves the sun and other stars, but moves our hearts; and with a view to being re-membered, joined together, co-ordinated, so that over time our disjointed living recovers co-ordination, and our strained activism gradually gives way to living that is purposeful, creative and balanced in its intake and outflow of energy.

No this is not all a rant. It's a plea for a recovered humanism towards ourselves, a cherishing of our humanity in a way that takes our deepest selves seriously as ones loved by God. It is a recognition that Christians are called not only to do, but to be, and to give time of day to that genuine instinct for stillness and slowness, two dispositions I for one find unfamiliar, but out of which may come the finding of our life's hopes. It is an acknowledgement that the trivialisation of God is an inevitable process of trivialising our own lives. And it is a growing conviction that Isaiah was right to say to a people who had exhausted their capacity to hope, "they that wait upon the Lord shall renew theyr strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint…" Waiting – yet another word with which our culture, and the church, and our own hearts, are impatient.

3 November 2011
Hauerwas and what the church is and is not about

Stanley Hauerwas, self described as a truculent Texan who swears, is one of the leading exponents of discipleship as theological ethics embodied in virtues and practises that are so reminiscent of Jesus they tell forth the same good news, albeit in fallible humanity trying to be faithful in our following.

Those who have heard Hauerwas lecture know that he doesn't do scintillating rhetoric, and at times is just plain hard to listen to. But he's always worth the effort and irritation it takes to grasp what he's saying because he seldom misses the hearer and hits the wall. His writing likewise can seem at times obtuse, other times persuasive, and occasionally needing to be read with some patience and that intelligent watchfulness that comes from realising this man is a teacher, and a very, very, good one. And if we come away from an encounter with his voice, mind and keyboard with nothing much new to think about, it may be that our own capacities of thought and capaciousness of heart are the limiting factors.

Just been reading his essay on 'The Servant Community: Christian Social Ethics' in the book Living Out Loud, edited by Luke Bretherton. He's at it again. Telling the church to be the church and stop trying to be what people think the church should be.

"The church serves the world by giving the world the means to see itself truthfully. The first question we must ask is not 'What should we do?' but 'What is going on' Our task as church is the demanding one of trying to understand rightly the world as world, to face realistically what the world is with its madness and irrationality."

I used to have an elderly friend who would emphasise her emphatic tone by mixing up her words, and to borrow one of them in response to Hauerwas, abso-bloomin-lutely!!

And how does that work out in practice? Here he is again:

"It is particularly important to remember that the world consists of those, including ourselves, who have chosen not to make the story of God their story. The world in us refuses to affirm that this is God's world and that, as Loving Lord, God's care for creation is greater than our illusion of control. The world is those aspects of our individual and social lives where we live untruthfully by continuing to rely on violence to bring order."

10 October 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
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