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While away on a short break earlier this week we went to Beauly, a small Highland town west of the Moray Firth. It was cold, windy and enough rain to make you cold within minutes of leaving the car. We were there to see the ruins of Beauly Priory, founded in 1230 by a strict offshoot of the Benedictine Order. It was one of three communities, the others in Oban and Pluscarden (which is still an active Benedictine community). 

It takes a feat of imagination to feel something of what it was like to be an order committed to prayer, contemplation and Scripture in a building like this, in the 13th Century, situated in a beautiful site but subject to a full Scottish winter and the vagaries of every other season in Scotland. Imagine – no central heating; no double glazing; no electric kettle for a quick cuppa; no Berghaus wind and water proof jackets; no microwave for fast food. Indeed fast meant something else to monks when it came to food. A daily routine of early (3am) rising, sung prayers, eucharist, the hours of prayer throughout the day, and the same faces day in and day out.

I mention all this as a reflection on how hard it must have been just to get through each day, and the discipline required to keep going, to not give up, to persevere in seeking God and living with each of the brothers as if they were Christ himself, which they believed in a deep and ineradicable sense they each were to each other. All that, for a life of prayer.

Which brings me to my own easily dislodged good intentions about prayer; my awareness of minor inconveniences that nudge prayer down the to do list; the clutter and clatter of things that get in the way of quietness and commitment to paying attention to God; the contemporary obsession with connectivity which while creating the illusion of social engagement and embeddedness is a form of digital distancing and often a source of anxiety and loneliness and unhappiness that our lives aren't as interesting as 'our friends'. Add to this the focal points of contemporary spirituality, at least on the broadly evangelical circles of my own Christian walk; of worship as experience intended to revify through praise and pervasively subjective music, of mission as yet another driver of activism and programmes and goals, of Scripture as a how to book instead of a here's who you are and here's who God is kind of book, and all this against a background of competing voices in the marketplace pitching for our time, money, energy and engagement. 

Prayer has never been easy, and never been more essential to spirituality and sanity. Monasteries are not the answer today, but by remembering why they came into being we are reminded of the questions we are required to ask, and answer. And the questions, the real questions are not posed by the market, the culture, our context or our life situation. These are constants, but constants that change and change us.

No. The real questions are posed by God. "I have placed before you today death and life, therefore choose life…" "Be still and know that I am God". "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." "I have come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly." "Take up your cross and follow me…" "He died that those who live should live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised…" These are all statements which force us to face the most significant questions in our entire lives. 

So somewhere in our own times there is a need for a radical re-orientation on the scale of the monastic communities. Not a new monasticism, but a renewed sense of urgency about God, a recovered sense of our humanity as invested in the redeeming love of God in Christ. And with that, a relativising of all those important, pervasive drivers that dictate how we live our lives, and a re-setting of our attention to focus more clearly on what matters, and on what matters most. Prayer, and time made and kept for prayer, may be one of the most radical forms of mission, worship and service a Christian can offer in our digitalised, globalised, economised, pluralised and atomised world.

All of this from walking in the cold, in cloisters no longder visible, but in the place where once, in the words of T S Eliot, "prayer was valid."

I've always wondered how Elijah went for forty days on the strength of some oatcakes baked by an angel. Food is one of the necessities of life, but also one of the recurring pleasures, and undoubtedly the right food at the right time is profound soul therapy.

So when I need a few hours on my own, or want to think, walk, pay attention to what's going on around me and inside me, a favourite place is the beach. And sometimes, not always, – occasionally not often, – I'll stop at my favourite cafe for an Elijah half hour. Being a good follower of Jahweh, Elijah didn't have the bacon roll, and wouldn't have milk with meat either. Still once the coffee and bacon roll arrive, there is the feeling that, once this is finished, I can walk in the strength of it for 40 minutes at least.

More seriously, walking by the sea is one of the places where the rhythms and steadiness of waves and tide, the wind whether breeze or gale, the sand soft or packed by the motion of the sea, combine in one of nature's most soothing orchestrations. The old scots word fankle, refers to what happens to wool once a cat gets a hold of it, or what happens to a silver chain taken off carelessly leaving it a recalcitrant clutter of knots. It's a good word, and sometimes it describes a particular state of mind. Walking with the wind in my face, the waves curling over and running for the shore, and with the sand smooth underfoot, is for me a way of unfankling my mind, disentangling trivial and crucial, restoring a sense of proportion to those worries that can undermine and overwhelm. Those rhythms of waves and walking work away at the soil of the soul until it's cultivated enough for new seeds of thought.

I'm not one for praying as I walk; unless walking is a kind of praying, which I suppose it is. After all following Jesus isn't mere metaphor, it has a referent in the real world of feet on the ground, even footprints in the sand! But the hymns I cherish and know by heart; the bible passages I've dwelt on so long they are part of my intellectrual breathing apparatus; memories and thoughts of people who are in my life, or have been and their memories remain as another kind of presence. Each of these makes for a well stored mind and an equally well stored heart. A long walk along the sea edge, preceded by a coffee and bacon roll. There is a spirituality of the favourite places, sounds and food!

The Christian Spiritual Tradition has its enduring classics, not all of which stand the tests of time, or postmodern-critique. The Imitation of Christ, so introspective, guilt inducing and Pelagian in its emphases towards self improvement; the Letters of Fenelon, patronising and patriarchal in their assumptions about feminine spirituality, yet written with an affected feminine tone which some 21st C women may well find irresistibly funny if not ioffensive; Teresa's Interior Castle, a kind of handbook on spiritual Grand Designs for a residence fit for a king; Julian's Revelations of Divine Love, an uncomfortable combination of morbid fascination with death and a level of denial about the reality and perhaps irrevocability of tragedy, evil and divine failure; The Cloud of Unknowing, that strange mixture of Dionysian mystical strategies and structures and The Dark Night of the Soul of John of the Cross, whicvh may be one of the most helpful guides for a culture utterly sated with its own desires and dying of its own surfeits.

I've read all of these, and taught them in classes as substantial building blocks in Christian spirituality, acknowledging all these weaknesses but still insisting that these are the legacy of souls who struggled with the cost and consequence of seeking God.

Each of those spiritual classics is the product of a life lived Godward, and a desire to leave a few footprints for others to follow. (The photo is of my 1831 edition of Fenelon's Lettres) And yes they can be shown to be limited, flawed, less relevant, even harmful in the way they can perpetuate oppressive ideologies and attitudes if read uncritically and without regoard to context. And yet. The wisdom of some of the Christian tradition's greatest thinkers and explorers of the spiritual life is that these classics of devotion are gold, albeit mixed with the dross of their own times and contexts and normative frameworks. So every now and again I go back to one or other of them and recalibrate my own spiritual sensitivities, push back my hermeneutical horizons, revisit landscapes which I remember but which on returning I find to have changed, or perhaps that I have changed and can never see things this way again.

For most of my intellectual life as a Christian I have found spiritual and intellectual sustenance, stimulus and enjoyment in another kind of reading altogether. The biblical commentary is a particular genre of biblical studies, itself a major discipline under the wider roof of theology, subsumed under the canopy of the humanities! In these later years of semi-retirement when there is time for more discretionary reading I confess to indulging in more of what I;ve always done – reading commentaries. Yes commentaries are for consulting, they are reference wqrks, they gather in one place as much of the relevant information needed for responsible intepretation of the text, and I use commentaries in that way. But I also read them; like a story, with a plot, characters, tensions, resolutions and ongoing questions about where this is all going.

Commentaries have always been my manuals of devotion, to be placed alongside the classic works of that genre, and often to be given more time, and in return they give more for the effort and time spent. One example. The story of Martha and Mary and Jesus occurs in St Bernard, in the Cloud of Unknowing and in Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton. Each of these treatments eventually commends the contemplative over the active. But pursuing this gospel story through several academic commentaries opens up other interpretive possibilities and perspectives. I haven't looked at so called devotional commentaries on Luke, whatever they might look like. Instead I spent a while with the scholars who have dug deep into the text, who know the layers of cultural and social signals, who are alert to the assumptions and constraints that can skew a text and load an intepretation. The result is a profound sense of gratitude for the residual ambiguities in the story; is Jesus rebuking or comforting Martha? Will Jesus refuse the bread Martha has baked in the hot and bothered kitchen? Can the church ever thrive on the false dichotomy of contemplative prayer versus hand dirtying service?

The Bible remains the primary text of the Christian Church. For two thousand years saints and scholars, readers and writers, prayers and preachers, have found there words that have become the Word of God to them. The immense learning and energy that has gone into the work of biblical interpretation is one of God's great gifts to the church. And while I fully recognise the market pressures and commercial advantages of publishers multiplying commentary series and finding increasingly flimsy justifications for yet another allegedly indispensable, authoritative, ground-breaking, innovative or whatever else seem plausible reasons, the work of biblical interpretation remains a vital and vitalising activity of the Christian Church.

Were I to reduce my library to a hundred volumes, I'd want more commentaries than classic manuals of devotion and systematic theologies put together.   

Franciscan Benediction

May God bless us with discomfort
At easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships
So that we may live from deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger
At injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God's creations
So that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with tears
To shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,
So that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and
To turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with just enough foolishness
To believe that we can make a difference in the world,
So that we can do what others claim cannot be done:
To bring justice and kindness to all our children and all our neighbors who are poor.

Amen.

I came across this prayer attributed to St Francis. It sounds too modern, western, and reads too rhetorically tidy for me to have much confidence it came from the medieval monk and troubadour. But then again, someone who spent three weeks in dialogue and as a peacemaking envoy to the Sultan of Egypt may well have shown the inner dispositions for which this prayer asks. So there's a spiritual congruence of these prayer petitions for converted attitudes with what we know of what Francis was about. And there is a further alignment of the heart if this prayer is read alongside the more famous prayer attributed to Francis – Make me a channel of your peace.

In both prayers, the sentiments and ideas, the psychological insight and spiritual intelligence that gets to the heart of what is wrong in the world, and how God is seeking to make it right, show considerable family resemblance. So if the prayer isn't by St Francis – it could have been, indeed it should have been! In any case Christians seeking to follow faithfully after Jesus in the fluctuating flux that is our western cultural malaise, will find in this prayer important clues for living intelligently, faithfully and with inner integrity. Because we are called to witness to Christ the way, the truth and the life amongst the greed and injustice, the lies and deceit, the fear and anxiety, the hedonism and sadness, the individual uncertainties and collective confusion of a society so lost and blurred in vision that it gets harder to distinguish between a road and a cliff edge. 

Rosehips are the legacy left to us when the fragility and form of the rose has gone. Both are beautiful, but in autumn the defiant green refuses yet to fade, and sets off scarlet globes crammed with seeds. Such fruitfulness after the beauty of blossom, October remembering June, protecting the promised seeds of next year, and the next.

So rosehips combine memory of beauty and hope of tomorrow. If Jesus had preached his sermon somewhere on the road to Bervie where this photo was taken, he might have said, "Consider the roses, and the rosehips…not even Solomon's glory…..

Have Mercy O Lord. The sea is so large, and my boat is so small.

(Prayer of Breton Fishermen)

 "The church is not the building, it's the people." Those words are a truth which, if pushed too far, lose their grip on the truth they affirm. A church is a people being formed in community, gathered and scattered and gathered again for worship. A church building is a place where prayer and praise, baptism and communion, year on year, are offered. The building is not sacred; yet what is done there, like slow falling rain, soaks the nutrients of holiness into the soul. In this building, over centuries, souls have prayed, and holiness has taken root in their lives.

August in Aberdeen, early morning mist, laden with drizzle, the crown and the cross silhouetted against soft grey skies.

The cross that, when lifted up will draw all people to the Crucified, seen rising above the trees, the gentle wetness seeping through branches and leaves, coalescing in large drops that fall as tears on those walking below.

The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous; not a thow-away remark, but one of Jesus' one-liners in which is condensed an entire theology of the love that falls with extravagant benevolence, and gentle mercy, on our broken, God-made, love drenched world.

Round your table, through your giving,

show us how to live and pray

till your Kingdom's way of living

is the bread we share each day.

bread for us and for our neighbour,

bread for body, mind and soul,

bread of heaven and human labour –

broken bread that makes us whole.

Dean Ramsey tells of the parish minister of Stonehaven giving thanks for the safe ingathering of harvest, "except for a few stooks between here and Bervie". Clearly it's good to be precise with the Almighty and the extent of blessing received, not to limit gratitude, but to earth praise.