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"Prayer is a gift of God, and a work of his grace…" Those words were written 50 years ago in a book with the telling title, Reality and Prayer. I like that connection. Sometimes prayer is wishful thinking, desperate pleading, meditative reflection and even faithful if passionless routine. I've done all these. Often enough I've thought prayer is something that starts with my decision, my inclination, my need. But here is someone reminding me it is God's initiative, gift, work, grace, invading my life, nudging my mind, kick-starting a relationship I'm in danger of neglecting.

The reality of prayer is a problem in a world where we've become used to scientific explanations, accustomed to problem solving by technology, presuming overall control of our environment, security and safety as built in mechanisms of a developed society. But that deeper reality beneath the surface of things, the presence and power of the God who is both beyond and in the midst, the sense of a personal Presence who seeks us and finds us – that is gift, grace, mystery. And it may be that the way we now live our lives compels the God who seeks us, to first wound our hearts with what the author of the Cloud of Unknowing called "a dart of longing love", in order for us to register on our everyday radar, the real presence of the God we are way too busy to make time for. 

Faithful friendship is when someone is committed to "staying in touch", "thinking about you", "being there for you", and so the text, the email, the phone call, the card, becomes a sacrament, a hard copy of those emotions of care, affection, love, attentiveness, thoughtful kindness and many others that together sustain a relationship that has been allowed to grow into part of who we are. Prayer is the gift of the faithful friendship of God.

Edwin Muir tells of just such a moment in his own life when God in grace and gift addressed the careless poet at bedtime, and re-awakened a friendship gone stale. It is one of the utterly authentic personal stories of being arrested by God.

“Going to bed alone, I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer, in a loud, emphatic voice  – a thing I had not done for many years – with deep urgency and profound and disturbed emotion.  When I went on I became more composed; as if my soul had been empty and craving, and were now being replenished, it grew still; every word had a strange fullness of meaning which astonished and delighted me.  It was late; I had sat up reading; I was sleepy; but as I stood in the middle of the floor, half undressed, saying the prayer over and over again, meaning after meaning sprang from it , overcoming me again with joyful surprise; and I realised that that simple petition was always universal and always inexhaustible, and day by day sanctified human life.”

The first discussion starters of a new Government may not be the most important, or the ones that will come on to the statute books immediately. But they signal intent. Less than a week after the election we are already into the big stuff. When it comes to politics and human flourishing it doesn't get much bigger, or more important than Human Rights.

During the last Government coalition the UK courts found themselves in significant tension with the ECHR Courts about such matters as the deportation of terrorists, anti-terrorist measures and is currently facing an enquiry into how certain welfare cuts are impacting unfairly on disabled and vulnerable people. There are a number of informative articles from different perspectives which have already commented on and critiqued the proposed Bill of Rights as a replacement for the 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA). But this is where, exactly where, I find myself already at considerable odds with the Conservative Government.

Why is the United Kingdom even considering unhitching itself from the accountability and international intentionality that comes from a Convention agreed after the devastation and inhumanity of the Second World War? How does it serve the interests of British people to be out of step with Europe on a matter of such fundamental moral and political importance? Put more pointedly, what exactly in the provisions outlined in the image above does the Conservative Government object to? More pointedly still, why is the word 'human' omitted from the term British Bill of Rights? And why is the word British deemed to be so damned important that it trumps our international obligations and existing legal commitments, which be it noted were undersigned by unanimous and cross party Parliamentary approval?

When an appeal to human rights is seen by a Government as an inconvenience, and a higher Court in Brussels is seen as obstructive and inimical of our national interest, then the time has come to worry, to argue, and to dissent. Bella Sankey is the Director of Liberty, and a barrister specialising in Human Rights. Her piece in the Huffington Post is well worth reading, if only because she has been party to the debates, the issues and understands where the head of steam is coming from to push through the repeal of the HRA. You can find it here.

One more thought. The HRA cannot be repealed in Scotland without the explicit consent of the Scottish Parliament. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that Scotland will support the repeal of the HRA, and even the English broadsheets acknowledge, and largely applaud that. If Mr Cameron is serious about wanting to heal the divisions in the United Kingdom, then he needs to try harder to understand Scotland. The repeal of the HRA is such a regressive and arrogant piece of Westminster hubris that the attempt will be a decisive own goal against that stated intent, and the Scottish people will be forced to acknowledge a major cultural rift opening up at the level of international law, moral imperatives, national identity and ties with the international community, and the social ethos that is the relational bond between the nations on these islands.

And all the above is argued on grounds of moral philosophical, political and social ethics. As a Christian I find the weakening of law which protects the vulnerable and holds the State accountable is also theologically insupportable. Until the alternative legislation is produced, and shows itself to be an improvement in that it enhances and strengthens the human rights of everyone in this country, I am settled in opposition to the repeal of HRA. The pragmatic urgencies of a Government lacking imagination and moral parameters notwithstanding, the intended repeal of the HRA by a Government commanding 37% of the national vote, is another powerful argument for electoral reform.      

A wee while ago I posted a reflection on clouds. Since then I came across this book which looks like an intriguing read. It's now on my wants list of exegetical studies on Psalms. Here's the blurb.

The weather is all around us all the time. From ancient times people have attributed the weather to the work of the gods. Ancient Israel shared this perception. The book of Psalms reflects theologically significant views on the weather that have not, until now, been fully explored. In this meteorological survey of the Psalms, whimsically called "meteorotheology," every reference to the weather is translated in accordance with the known climate and weather of ancient Israel. Each verse is discussed with particular attention to the function of the weather in the hymnal of ancient Israel. This book will be a resource for translators, clergy, and scholars with an interest in how the weather impacted religious outlooks in ancient Israel. Readers will learn that some expected associations, such as thunder and lightning, did not influence Israelite views on the natural world in the same way that they do today. Yahweh was God of the weather, and the Psalms frequently use this paradigm as a reason for both praise and fear of the Lord.

I remember Radio Four Test Cricket Special, and the commentators filling in during rain delays with coversation and relaxed observations about life, the world and what is so about the loveably human. The hilarious spoof commentary on an empty crisp packet blowing across the wicket, and the discussions and disagreements about the colour, and therefore the flavour to be deduced providing they accurately identified the brand. On another occasion some virtuoso informed descriptions of clour formations, the different types of cloud, their various rain-bearing possibilities, and the memorable reference to the audience as 'cloud connoiseurs', whom they assumed to be listening intently to descriptions of that which they could not see, which were fleeting in shape and position, and transient structures of air and water with no significance whatsoever to the personal lives of the listeners.

I am, I confess, a cloud connoisseur. And the turth is the image of a clouded sky is an important metaphor in my own inner life, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. Mary Oliver, (who else if you want a visionary description) is characteristically celebratory.

How good

that the clouds travel, as they do,

like the long dresses of the angels

of our imagination

or gather in storm masses, then break

with the gifts of replenishment.

She is right. The use of clouds as a metaphor of forebodiing, trouble or gloom is to do a great disservice to one of the great images of hope. That feaful saint, the poet William Cowper could write with terrifying fear of the menace and destructive force of storm clouds. But in one of his finest hymns he redeems the clouds by exactly the same technique as Mary Oliver.

You fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy and will break
In blessing on your head.

Rain is replenishment; clouds are harbingers of mercy; indeed rainless clouds are seen as vaccuous and deceiving. It's the clouds heavy with rain that are most replete with blessing. 

At a different level altogether the cloud is the place where God hides, and our of which God speaks, whether on Sinai or on the Mount of Transfiguration. No one can see God and live so the cloud hides the blinding and annihilating holiness of God at Sinai, and thereafter is the symbol of the resident presence of God in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle; and it is the cloud which hides the mystery of the Father who speaks love to the beloved Son on Mount Tabor. All of this and more lies behind Cowper's hymn, and on a less intense level, Oliver's sense of a benevolent Creation.

For myself, I gladly concur with this positive view of clouds. I am a cloud connoisseur because their very transience and impermanence mean the skyscape of my life, like the sky above, is never fixed, but figures and reconfigures, and yet the faithful God is creatively present, even when hidden. I am with that whimsical cloud lover Gavin Pretor-Pinney who wrote the remarkable The Cloudpsotter's Guide. "The humble Cumulus humilis – never hurt a soul" I'm with him even more when he takes a swipe at the unthinking positivists who yearn for permanent blue skies. “We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.”

God did not call us to cloudless monotony and blue sky thinking. Our calling is to live beneath the variable skies, to be cloud connoisseurs, seeing them as big with mercy, sources of replenishment, hints, clues and nudges in the direction of the God whose mercy is such that he stays a safe distance from us, and in Jesus has come cloer than we are to ourselves.

But yes, Cowper understood, more acutely than the pseudo-secular superficiality of our contemporaries, so dismissive or simply unaware of sin as a reality in human heart, experience and culture. He knew, and we may have to learn once again,that dark clouds are also harbingers of storm, judgement and the reality of a God whose presence is described best in the images of cloud, obscurity, power and weather fronts made up of the consequences and cost of an atheism whose evidence is in a ruined and ravaged creation. That's the thing with images such as clouds – they have an ambiguity and fluidity just as unpredictable and liable to change as that which they signify. God is a God of mercy, and judgement. The One whose chariot is the coulds is to be approached in faith, and with fear; and we do well to remember, the cloud makes possible the rainbow. 

I've just spent the day up on the Moray coast, mainly in Banff. One of my favourite places is the long beach that runs from Banff to Whitehills. It starts off as rocks, then pebble shores and eventually becomes a mile long stretch of sand that is flat, hard and wonderful to walk on. The sky and the water are deeply responsive to each other's colour, and while it's probably an obvious observation, in Banff blue is unmistakably blue when the sun is shining. Is it to do with the cascading light, reflection on water that always seems restlessly energetic, the northerly aspect of a coast that looks towards the Arctic Circle for its next land mass – I'm not sure.

But what is unmistakably true for me is the sense of gratitude and peace that comes from walking a beach like this. The rhythm of waves arriving and withdrawing, and the sound of pebbles pushed and pulled in the forward impetus and backward suction, unforgettably described by Arnold in his poem Dover Beach as the sea of faith's long withdrawing roar; for me the sound has no melancholy, quite the opposite. I am inwardly reconfigured by the rhythm of waves; my inner longings align with the give and take, the push and pull, the restless energy and rhythmic regularity of the sea as it surrounds but does not overwhelm the shoreline.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh's classic Gift from the Sea is her reflective account of a holiday spent on a Florida island in the early 1950's. She too found the sea to have its own rhythms, voices and gifts. The book is a long essay of reflections on shells found on the shoreline, opening up areas of our experience such as solitude, self-care, contentment and the kindness that alone can bring healing and restoration after sorrow and loss. It is a beautiful and unusual display of emotional frankness and that combination of commonsense and imaginative helpfulness that we call compassion.

When considering the ebb and flow of the sea, and of that inner ocean of our emotional and spiritual lives, Lindbergh often spoke with disconcerting honesty: “I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.” Beside the sea, I have that same sense of looking on vastness and potential, an energy and rhythm of created things which is indifferent to those inner distractions and unsettling anxieties that get in the way of living, just that, living, without all the self-questioning and examination. To "function and give as I am meant to be in the eye of God" is no small aspiration, and yet that is precisely what Christians mean when we talk of grace, new creation, hope and faith and love.

Walking by the sea, listening to the waves, watching the water roll and tumble and give its energy till it is spent, and allowing my mind and heart to align with those same movements, is for me a deep form of prayer. It reminds me of Robert Herrick's poem, long a favourite, written at the time when new worlds were being discovered and explored across the oceans of the earth:

God's Mercy

Gods boundlesse mercy is, to sinfull man,
Like to the ever wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis n'ere
Known,or els seen to be the emptier:
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fild-full, then when full-fild before..

Amongst the major and to be welcomed changes in theological scholarship during my own years as a theologian has been the increasing presence of women in the discussions. In particular systematic theology has been dominated by male and western voices, some of them massively powerful and projecting a dominant model of theology as intellectually conceptualised, structurally coherent, often enough abstract and theoretic, speculative or dogmatically constrained. From Barth to Brunner to Jungel to Pannenberg, Otto Weber to Hendrikus Berkhof, Jenson to Moltmann, Rahner to Von Balthasar, McClendon to D J Hall, Oden to MacQuarrie, Karkkainen to Schwarz, I've spent decades wading, swimming and sometimes drowning in those vast pools of thought.

Now two series of Systematic Theology written by women are launched, offering quite different perspectives and expressing with freshness and confidence, approaches to theology that hold much promise to take us beyond the accepted and at times tired paths of everything else on offer. It isn't that women haven't been present in the discussions until now. Names like Catherine Lacugna, Elizabeth Johnson, Kathryn Tanner, Ellen Charry, Frances Young and Dorothee Soelle have been gifts to the church for years. But to my knowledge Sarah Coakley, and now Katherine Sonderegger, are the first women theologians to attempt multi-volume projects of sytematic theology.

Coakley's first volume, God, Sexuality and the Self. An Essay on the Trinity, is an exploration of human desire for wholeness, intimacy, completion and love. Augustine's cry of the heart, "Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in thee", is a recognition that human longing, desire and ache for union with others reflects the same attraction and longing for God. Now of course her account is more sophisticated and developed than that shorthand, but what I find intriguing is a theologian unafraid to do theology not only with the cognitive but also with the affective ways of knowing that are part of a whole human experience of understanding and wisdom.

This is theology forged, self-consciously and intentionally, in contemplation, prayer and lectio divina, and shaped against the realities and intricacies and ambiguities of our very human experience. Part of my question arises from the hunch that this is one of the gains when theology is written by a woman who has undoubted intellectual credentials, but who uses them in conjunction with other valid and viable ways of knowing God and reflecting on life experience in the light of God's revelation in Christ. 

In May this year, as I mentioned in yesterday's post, Katherine Sonderegger will publish the first volume of her systematic theology, also on the doctrine of God. Having heard her yesterday she will provide an account of God as creator, redeemer and as love in the eternal relations of Father, Son and Spirit. I sense in her whole style of doing theology another step back from the monumental intellectual constructions of Barth, Pannenberg, Jenson and the rest of the theological pantheon that often illumines and sometimes obscures the landscape of modern theology.

There is more of this to come on the blog here; for now I am contentedly excited at the thought of engaging with these two works in progress.        

I've spent the last few days at the Eternal God – Eternal Life conference at the University of Aberdeen. Various scholarly papers ranging from analytic philosophy to bio-ethics and technology to systematic theology, were the primary forms of delivery and discussion. The quality and accessibility was likewise varied and I guess we all have our preferences, personal interests, prevailing presuppositions and particular expectations. But it was the standout paper which set my interest alight. I've heard many a lecture in my time and a very few of them have made a permanent place in the memory as perspective changing and truly transformative of a subject area. This lecture was one of these.

This morning Professor Katherine Sonderegger from Virginia Theological Seminary spoke "Toward a Theology of Resurrection". From the first sentences of reflection on Hopkins' poem God's Grandeur we were in the hands of a theologian whose roots go deep down into the soil and compost of the Christian tradition, and produces food for thought that is edible, assimilable, nourishing and plentiful. This was a magnificent lecture on creation, human life and longing, and the good God who has set eternity in human hearts, and created a hunger for God and righteousness that makes the heart restless and incomplete. Indeed the idea that heaven may be a place of comprehensive fulfilment, completed perfection, speaks of a stasis and fixity that does no justice to our creatureliness, or to the Creator's overflowing purposefulness, and would lead to a creation that would become a "finished futility", my words taken from P T Forsyth.

For a large part of the paper Sonderegger explored the nature of love and longing, of relatedness and connection, and of our lived experience on earth of broken connection, relations gone wrong, a view of the world, people and other creatures as functional and utilitarian that is ultimately reductionist of what it means to be God's creature with eternity in our hearts. The coming of God in Christ, and the forward thrust of reconciliation and redemption through cross and resurrection, point us towards a different kind of ressurected reality when what will be fulfilled will be our capacity for relatedness, a completion that is organic and dynamic, in which growth is part of the completeness of the creature, eternally frowing into the life and fellowship with all that is which we might call eternal life.

It is very difficult to convey the passionate thoughtfulness, biblical erudition, theological confidence rooted in intellectual humility, all of which informed and shaped this paper. At some stage this paper will be published, and when it is I will make it known here. Meantime I am grateful for the privilege of having heard a theologian articulate and enrich the Christian understanding of the new thing that God is and will do in Jesus Christ. Eschatology is too often esoteric in conceptuality, speculative in exposition and analytic in its preoccupation with metaphysics, epistemology and over-rationalised curiosities. This was a lesson in theology that is dogmatically constructive, imaginative and visionary, biblical in parameters and pastoral in orientation. I can easily take much of what she was saying and build deep gospel responses to those who are bereaved, dying, or suffering the deep sense of bewildered anxieties generated by our self-contained culture with its limited and limiting worldview.

The tragedy of the Mediterranean migrants became a political character attack yesterday. Whether because the Labour party mischievously released a press statement knowing Ed Miliband would say something more nuanced and less specific in its criticism; or because it was an honest statement which Conservatives mischievously misinterpreted and misrepresented in order to accuse Ed Miliband of gross distaste akin to, but even worse than UKIP. Or just because the pursuit of power in this country has become a dirty, corrupting, frantic ego-fest, driven by the greed of vested interests, divisive fear-mongering about the SNP, and the dissolution of public trust in any of the political parties because that same dissolution is caused by disillusion. 

As a follower of Jesus Christ I couldn't be less interested in the shoddy shenanigans of politicians, media and spin. They can argue all they like about who was going to say what, who said what, and what the public should think about who said what. There's something tragic and morally indefensible about the focus and energy being on blame and finger pointing for poltical advantage, when every day desperate people are fleeing from the danger and misery of their home country and risking a 50% chance of death or enforced return, by paying traffickers to bring them to Europe.

I am troubled by the varied use of the words to describe this misery. Are these people migrants or refugees? Are they seeking a change of economic opportunity or refuge? Are they driven by economic aspiration or despair? What drives whole families to risk death on the sea or utter misery if they survive and are returned? These are questions I ask because my worldview is theological as well as economic, geographic, ethical and social.There is all the difference in the world, a world of difference, in the words we use, because human beings are dying of desperation. And as a wise Jewish philosopher said that every time a human being dies, a world dies.

Theologically that is intolerable. Every human being is created in the image of God and has inherent worth, to be respected, cared for and given the chance for life. God incarnate in Jesus Christ confers on God's creation and on human destiny a dignity and hope that is carried into the heart of the Creator and Redeemer God. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, making peace by the blood of the Cross, and to put it in evangelical terms, every human being is one for whom Christ died. As followers of the crucified and risen Lord I am for life, and part of that is the welcome to the stranger, compassion for the suffering, justice for the oppressed, and mercy to those who otherwise have no further hope.

I am haunted by those words of Christ when the nations gather for Judgement: "For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink; I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not visit me." I am haunted because this parable is about the nations; it is a wanring to the intenrational community as well as a caution to every individual person in their ways of treating others.

So I am ashamed of our politicians. Doubly ashamed that in the 21st Century this election campaign has up till now largely ignored Foreign Policy as a matter for serious political debate, until this nasty piece of rhetorical posturing exploded into toxic personal attack. Miliband and Cameron are not the news that matters here. The mess in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistan Border and the relentless inhumanity of ISIS are the issues. Refugees fleeing danger, death and the mayhem of tribal warfare is nothing new – but the scale of it in the modern era is undoubtedly a problem stretching beyond the apparent scope of the national, economic and moral imaginations of the international community.

Do I have practical answers? A few, but they would be based on my own limited perceptions, ignorance of the intricacies of international law, a passion for human rights being upheld as a universal obligation, and a lack of practical power to make things happen. What I do have is a high view of the value of each human being, and a sense of political resposibility to vote for those who demonstrate a will, capacity and conscience to resist the self interested economic and political pressures to ignore our responsibilities to those who are refugees with nowhere else to go. So far I've heard very little fro any party about such a moral vision for the world beyond these increasingly self-absorbed, reactionary and in recent years isolationist shores.    

"It were well you should be thoroughly sensible of this, — 'the heaven of heavens is love.'

There is nothing higher in religion; there is, in effect, nothing else; if you look for anything but more love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way…

Settle it then in your heart, that from the moment God has saved you from all sin, you are to aim at nothing more, but more of that love described in the thirteenth of the Corinthians.You can go no higher than this, till you are carried into Abraham's bosom."

(John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Section 25. Question 33)

…………………..

The plate is a mid-Victorian cockle plate, a gift from Sheila, the mug was bought at Gwennap Pit, and the Oxford Critical Edition of the Hymns is one of my most treasured and used possessions.

Trust the Quakers to take every opportunity to remind us of the basic needs of human life for others.

The photo was taken in the Gents, in the Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham,  strategically placed so you can't miss it!

This also is the Micah principle, acting justly and loving mercy. Hygiene, disease control, conferring dignity and safety, are life-saving ways of loving our neighbours.

Sometimes in our devotions it's better to thank God for blessings basic and necessary, than the highly spiritualised blessings we often associate with prayer.

For millions sanitation is as much a blessing as sanctification.