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A multi-purpose floor standing tapestry frame. That's what it's called. And it ususally costs anything from  £70 up to the deluxe at £120 or more. This one is nearer the bottom of that range, but it does all I need it to do. It can hold any of my other four frames. It allows you to use both hands in stitching, one behind, one in front. Its adjustments make it fit any seat; it's portable, lightweight and made with good wood and substantial wing screws. What more could a man want, eh?

I concede it looks like a wooden skeletal robot. And it could become a pretentious piece of interior design with a part worked tapestry on display to impress whoever. The good news is I bought it this morning in my favourite charity shop for £10, and it's virtually unused. I've a couple of larger pieces I want to work on so I'm hoping it will make the working easier and a little quicker. I don't mind the slow, time expensive work of creating something that has its own integrity. 

Meantime one of my good friends has reminded me there's more to life than tapestry, and while my recent experiments in using colour, shape and image to express theology and explore textual and exegetical possibilities is all very well, it;s time I got writing again. As it says somewhere, or ought to, in the book of Proverbs, "Aye OK! Gie's peace!" But he's right – and part of my sabbatical time in July to August will be creating from a different kind of frame. I want to bring together much of my recent research, teaching and reflection into what I hope will be a publishable volume. So I will try to create a theological framework within which to work out a viable book proposal focusing on Trinitarian theology, kenosis, and the christian community as embodied pastoral care.     

In 1968 in his book Faith and Violence, Thomas Merton wrote about the news as a stimulant,an indulgence bordering on addiction. What would he make of the News Channels and the pervasive news chatter of the cyber world?

I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV anyway. Certainly I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too.

One of the marks of a prophet is prescience, knowing before it happens where events, trends and cultural habits will lead. Merton was deeply suspicious of media generated information, interpretation and opinions clothed with spurious authority. He worried about distortions of perspective by the sheer volume of news; he feared that historical consciousness was threatened with death by bloating; and he was never the naive monk cloistered in secluded ignorance of the world:

" in addition to the sheer volume of information there is the even more portentous  fact of falsification and misinformation by which those in power are often completely intent not only on misleading others but even on convincing themselves that their own lies are 'historical truth'". 

And all that before the computer, the worldwide web, the mobile phone, Ipad, tablet and all other forms of connectivity which now contribute to the deluge of information that flows over and around us, denying time and space and unclaimed energy for analysis, critical distance, ethical and political reflection and considered thought and judgement.

"Where is the life we have lost in living", Eliot asked. Another poet complained, "What is this life if full of care, we have not time to stand and stare"….. and wonder, and think, and dream, and remember, and be grateful, and begin to own the experience that is our life. When Jesus said, citing an older translation, "Come ye apart and rest awhile", he said it to people who were in danger of coming apart, to troubled spirits, torn apart by conflicting loyalties, minds and emotions over-stimulated and under nourished. 

May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude has the important observation that one of the great frustrations of human contentment is 'unassimilated experience', when so much happens, and so quickly, we have no time to process it, understand it, adjust to it. So we spend our lives wrongfooted by the remorseless flow of a frantic world diluting our own experience, watering down the rich potential of an inner life that is responsive to and nourished by something other than external stimuli, mostly uninvited. 

I got the Merton quotations from the smallest book in my library, my wee Pocket Merton, 7cmx11x1.5 cm of wisdom from a man who died 55 years ago.

I mentioned that last week I attended a three day course on Transformative Coaching, and I learned a lot. The course is designed by Youth at Risk and the overall aim of the three days is to enable participants to discover new ways of thinking. Nothing radically new, we spent a lot of time examining paradigms as master interpretive filters with the power to construct thought, form attitudes and therefore influence action; we acknowledged the importance of paradigms, and the necessity of being critically aware of our own; and then the more personal acknowledgement that our current paradigmatic way of looking at the world may distort rather than creatively interpret the world in which we live and move and have our being. Changes in our lives may only happen if there is such a radical deconstructing of a mindset resistant to fundamental change because our paradigm is not on the table for discussion.

Naturally the course itself assumes certain things about paradigms, and how we construct them, and are not always aware that we do, or that our way of looking at the world is itself open to challenge, question and critique. Every half decent training approach has to make assumptions about how human beings think and feel, the inner climate of ethics, values, convictions, and their intellectual isobars like assumptions, learning experience, cognitive awareness, conscience and the part inner environment plays in the creation of standpoint.This training course is no different in making such initial assumptions, and it is a very good course.

Another approach altogether is mentoring. Like many buzz words  mentoring carries its own cultural baggage of meaning, and becomes used so often that it becomes unexamined, and the in crowd who use it assume it means a certain way of being and practice. Amongst the strengths of  having a mentor is the benefit of learning from an experienced person, seeing how 'it is done', finding support, guidance and example in this other, more senior colleague or trainer. However I remain gently sceptical about mentoring in these terms, especially if such mentoring has a directive remit, whether explicit or through the authority and influence of someone who in the mentoring relationship inhabits the position of knowledge, experience and therefore power. Mentoring can become a way of shaping people as copies of the mentor. Admiration is its own filter, and is by definition reluctant to see that which might be open to critique and challenge. And the person being mentored is not always in the position of 'knowing better' so that the habits of thought, action and attitude of the mentor consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or not, shape ways of being and doing and thinking and feeling in the mentoree – I know, isn't that an ugly word.

So whether I am at a course aimed at transforming my thinking by challenging my existing paradigms, assumptions and ways of being, or whether I am working within a relationship of learning with a mentor, I am still required to be critically aware not only of my own questionable presuppositions, but also of those who challenge them. Everyone has a position, standpoint, worldview, mindset.

Against the background of all such thinking I hear the words of Jesus:

Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn of me;

for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

And no, I'm not making the banal point Jesus is my mentor, or Jesus is my paradigm shift. That kind of T-shirt theology is just that. Neither of those terms or ways of seeing our lives and the world are sufficiently descriptive of the disruptive and regenerative  consequences of responding to Jesus invitation.

Take up your cross and follow;

become as a little child; love your enemies;

inasmuch as you did it unto the marginalised, vulnerable, poor,

God-forsaken, you did it to me; blessed are the peacemakers;

anger and hate are murder; forgive seventy times seven.

We don't just need a mentor for such behaviour, we need an inner renewal, a spiritual invasion of grace, a comprehensive renovation of heart and mind. And yes that will indeed require a paradigm shift, not as a one off, but as a way of life in which repeatedly and continually we see the world anew and renewed. The Incarnation, Transfiguration, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus do not only renew my way of looking at the world – they have renewed the world I look at and live in. The resurrection is, for Christian theology, the ultimate paradigm shift.

   

Just been up the Moray Coast for a few days enjoying sunshine, looking up some friends and taking it easy.So. Booked B&B at the West Manse in Deskford, near Cullen. The Proprietors, Chris and Peter are interesting, fun, very hospitable and we had a great stay with them.

Peter showed me a book on the history of Orkney Baptists which is fascinating, full of that mixture of pious narrative and specific detail that makes up so much of local church history writing, when the history makes no attempt whatsoever to be impartial. That doesn't make it untrue, it just means you have to remind yourself of the context of the narrator and the narrative. I've come away with a loan of the book – thanks to a generous fellow historian. The book belonged to a 92 year old Orkney Baptist who was baptised in the sea 80 years ago, and who died 6 years ago.

We sat up waiting for the local badger to appear, which he did around 11.15. We talked about quilting, their time in Orkney, the story of the Manse, tapestry, the Disruption, and the fascinating details of the finance ledger of the original Deskford Free Church from 1843 to 1904 – Peter is preparing a paper for the local historical society on the entries to the book. Fascinating – including the amount this new, local and quite small congregation were prepared to contribute annually for the building of New College Edinburgh, the new training centre for Free Church ministers.

I got up early and sat in the conservatory watching the birds feeding – a great spotted woodpecker doing its ususal heid-banger thing, a green woodpecke*r likewise drilling at the peanuts, nervous shy siskins, coal, blue and great tits, and I heard but didn't see the yellow hammer, and all this while reading my holiday book, with a cup of tea, the patio doors open, and wearing sunglasses already in the early sun.

The book is a good reason to go back – but we will anyway; there is unfinished conversation about stuff.

* Just had an email exchange with Pete and he points out, rightly, that a green woodpecker would be way off its usual patch that far North. Which is a puzzle, because it was a woodpecker, and it was green, and they were on separate bird feeding tubes at the same time. So not sure what it was – a juvenile great spotted would be much less distinctive, but not green. I checked it out on my vast two volume Forrester and Andrews set on Scottish Birds. It isn't impossible but would be pretty unlikely, especially in the breeding season, for a green woodpecker to be so far north. So puzzle unsolved – I was awake, it was green, it was a woodpecker, I've seen them before, but it shouldn't have been there. Happy to hear from other twitchers about this.

Regular readers will have noticed a slowing of posts – this isn't blog fatigue. My laptop has terminal symptoms and I'm in the process of replacing it. So blogging opportunities are a bit limited.

Is there a Laptop Funeral Liturgy out there? All you imaginative, contextual and practical theologians – are there appropriate words and prayers for a dying computer – loss of memory (RAM), terminal slowness (AGE), loss of communication (wi-fi and cable!), the detectable disintegration of the life force (processor / Hard Drive). And words of thanksgiving for a friend who has put up with my thinking and writing, surfing and downloading, key-board hammering and frantic mouse movements for years. It wouldn't be true to say nobody had a bad word to say about my computer – I often did! Nor that it never did anyone any harm – it lost a lot of my stuff!

But it has been a long time companion; there are many things I couldn't have done without it. It has kept me in touch with hundreds of people, dozens of colleagues and many a friend. It shares my enthusiasm for photographs and has happily stored years of digital images which are part of the story of my life. It has travelled 17000 miles a year with me for the past 4 years, and apart fro  cracked casing is still in one piece.

So a prayer of thanksgiving for a Laptop to celebrate how a wee machine can be such an important part of life. OK – that has gone as far as it can go. It's a flipping computer not a person; technology not human; disposable, replaceable and obsolete – unlike human beings.

Next week or so I'll post when I can.

 

One of my favourite Pentecost poems.The freedom and wildness of the Spirit is divine subversion unimpressed with every attempt to pin down Pentecost to a date in the liturgy, or anything else contrived for our own convenience.

PENTECOST

I share and share and share again

sometimes with a new language

which, if you are so open

will take you behind the sky

and award you cartwheels across the sun

I give and give and give again

not restricted by the church calendar

or concocted ritual

I have no need of anniversaries

for I have always been

I speak and speak and speak again

with the sting of purity

causing joyous earthquakes in the mourning soul of man

I am and am and am again.

Stewart Henderson.

Simone Weil is hard to understand. That’s a reason for reading her. Simone Weil was weird and one of those people who give saints a bad name. But what do we expect of people whose sanctity offends our most cherished presuppositions? Holiness isn't temperamentally tidy or comfortably predictable, and often is not remotely familiar. Her biographer describes Simone Weil as ‘unclassifiable’, someone who believed that ‘to be always relevant you have to say things that are eternal’.

Her lived anguish over the agonies of the world, (she died in 1943) the spiritual importance she placed on uncompromising self-immolation, the coalescence in her of supreme individualism and determined asceticism, made her , well, weird. But such characteristics generated in her laser lights of insight into the meaning of love – the love of God both terrible and tender; the call on human personality to learn to dwell in deepest Hades and highest Heaven and find God in love is indeed there, or not; and love for others, neighbour and enemy, and both with their humanity claiming forgiveness, atonement, compassion and service.

I’ve just been reading Nancey Murphy’s essay again, ‘Agape and Nonviolence’,[i] and she explores some of Weil’s thought on this. Here are a couple of extracts from Weil, via Nancey Murphy:

“To forgive debts. To accept the past without asking for future compensation. To stop time at the present instant. This is also the acceptance of death…To harm a person is to receive something from him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance.  We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.”  Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 1992) 6.

That isn’t the stuff you come across in any ‘how to’ book I know. It isn’t the stuff that feeds our hunger for ways to increase our self-esteem. The opposite. The aim of nonviolence is to ensure we do not diminish the other person. I guess what she is saying is that a Christian doesn’t try to make someone ‘pay’ for what they have done to us. I told you she was weird, and hard to understand.

But sometimes her uncompromising, unreasonable so called wisdom reminds me of someone who understood the foolishness of the cross.

I've spent a while filleting back issues of The Tablet, passed on to me by my friend Derek. The Tablet is one of the main Journals of contemporary Catholicism in which news, opinion, cultural comment, theological and ethical issues and much more are explored from a faithful but critical Catholic persepctive. One of the regulars is Father Daniel O'Leary whose columns contain some of the best spiritual writing around on the graced gift that is life in a God-loved world. In the 24th August 2013 issue (I told you they were back issues!!!), he wrote about the Eucharist as the feast of the love of God.

Quoting St Symeon the New Theologian he then moved on to celebrate the Eucharist as a deeply transformative re-reception of the embodied grace of God in the sacrament of bread and wine. At the miracle of communion:

…. everything that is hurt, everything

that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in him transformed

and recognised as whole, as lovely,

and radiant in his light

he awakens as the beloved

in every last part of our body.

O'Leary goes on: "These infinitely intimate experiences of our sacred senses …purify and confirm our graced potential, for recognising God's bread in every bread, God's incarnate body in  every human body, God's own need in every need. And we do not just receive the holy bread….we become it.

In becoming it we are gifted with our true identity. Reputations, titles, possessions, power and prestige do not determine our identity. They die when we die. Who we are before ourselves and our God is who forever we are. And we become the blessed bread and wine not just for ourselves, as Pope Francis preached recently, we become it to light the way for others.

That is one of the most penetrating and generous expositions of the Eucharist I've read in a long while. Leaving aside the theological pragmatism many others indulge in trying to reduce the miracle to the spiritual technology of God's workings, what Daniel O'Leary offers here is a glad receiving, and faithful living into our true identity as the Body of Christ, a regular recovery and rediscovery of our graced potential, a thankful taking of the bread for which we hunger and thirst, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice and and for peace in a reconciled world. 

Father O'Leary goes on:

It is in the ordinariness, accessibility and blessing of bread that this ravishing love incarnate is experienced and celebrated. And it is the sacramentality of the celebration that reveals a most comforting truth; in all our daily efforts to be human and loving, eucharistic grace is always surrounding us, enfolding us, empowering and consecrating us.

Like R S Thomas at the end of his poem, 'The Moor', I read this and then

I walked on

Simple and poor, while the air crumbled

And broke on me generously as bread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I finished the last batch of marking in College yesterday. The process of grading, marking and feeding back on student work is an intriguing mix of discipline, yes at times tedium, enjoyment and reflection on what theological education achieves in the process of forming and transforming people.

Driving home in the car with Emmy Lou Harris singing sadly, then with Dave Crowder blasting out his Happiness Mass in C Major, I had time to think about the formative impact on a teacher of twelve years reading the work of our students.

Theological education is one of the most important foundations for Christian mission today. I am not going to argue that; I take it as self-evident for followers of Jesus who dare to take up the double invitation 'take my yoke upon you and learn of me….take up your cross and follow me.

But one overwhelming argument is the evidence Semester after Semester, of students growing in their faith, beginning to move out of constrained comfort zones into the risky place that is thoughtful discipleship, and engaging with adventurous thinking about a faith that is never safe and sound, but :

celebrates God incarnate in Jesus,

argues, because life depends on it, for the foolishness of the cross,

lives always towards newness and hope, because that's what resurrection people do

comes alive and learns to serve within the orbit of an eternal community of Triune Love

studies and wrestles with Scripture as if their lives depended on it, which it does

learn to love the Church again because it is the Body of Christ and they are part of it

begin to discover, and learn to accept, who they are, God's gift to the church today

and in all of this, to read, pray, think and follow faithfully after Jesus.

So when an essay on Christology and Ecclesiology, or a sermon in Creative Homiletics, or an Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, or a Journal of Theological Reflection on a church placement, or a review of a chapter on the significance of Nicaea for a wee local Scottish Baptist church in the 21st Century – when any of these 'assignments' comes on to the desk for marking and grading, they are sacraments of learning, they are formative spiritual exercises, they are attempts at loving God with mind and heart, they are snapshots of a soul growing and a spirit spreading its wings towards a bigger sky.

So yes. There is the tedium of overload, the deadline for marks to be submitted, the pressure of marking; before that, for the student, the hard graft of reading and researching, of finding the right books and articles, of deadlines looming and 1000 words to go. But theological education is about something much more enduring and transforming than ticking the assignment boxes.

Theological Education is a commitment to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength so that, in service to God in Christ, we can learn to love our neighbours as ourselves, live as peacemakers, be ambassadors for Christ and ministers of reconciliation. And in all that commitment to develop wisdom and discernment, to open ourselves up to God's wide and wonderful world with the confidence of those who know enough to know they'll never know enough; but to live as those who take what they know, what they deeply know, of the grace and truth of Christ, and live it out so that once again in the Christian community, the Body of Christ, the Word becomes flesh and dwells, tabernacles, makes its home in this God-loved world. A world forever changed by Love incarnate, crucified and resurrected in Jesus, the One in whom God was pleased to dwell, and to unite all things to Himself, making peace by the blood of the cross.

All of that underlies an academic assignment in a theological College which is committed, students and staff, to personal formation for the ministry of Christ and His Body the Church. "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…take up your cross daily, and follow me…you are the Body of Christ."

Yesterday was an N T Wright day here in Aberdeen. The Launch event for the Aberdeen University Centre for Ministry Studies included an evening lecture by Wright on his recent 2 volume study of Paul and the Faithfulness of God. It was a virtuoso performance by a scholar whose grasp of the height depth, length and breadth of Paul's Gospel was shared, with passion and Christian seriousness in full flow, with a full house of all kinds of people; and it was earthed in the pastoral implications and resources of Paul's theology in the service of Jesus the messiah and the church as the Body of Christ. That by way of acknowledging the contribution of Wright as NT scholar, Bishop, and Christian to the wider church. Post grads, theological educators, ministers and priests, a wide range of church people in none of the aforementioned groups, and an audience whose average age was impresssively low, and whose attention was held for over an hour. 

Is Wright right or wrong is one of those clever bytes that wear thin after the first time! Of course he is right and of course there is room for disagreement, debate, alternative interpretation; and of course he has an agenda, who hasn't. What was obvious was his control of the NT text, his deep reading of Paul and his immersion in the history of the times of Jesus and Paul. Equally evident was his insistence that context and particularity are part of the givenness of revelation in the incarnation, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Messiah, and the rootedness of the narrative of God and the people of God in the election of Abraham and Israel fulfilled in Jesus.

I'm reading Charles Marsh's new biography of Bonhoeffer. One of the real strengths of this book is the clear account of Bonhoeffer and his early collision course with National Socialism over the question of the Jews, and particularly the Aryan paragraph adopted widely in the German Church. So last night Wright's insistence that to decontextualise and de-historicise the New Testament makes the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul dispensable, is in my view a crucial and ethically required element of responsible hermeneutics. In Nazi Germany that historical move of de-historcising and decontextualising opened the door to a distorted Christianity characterised by a legitimated anti-Jewishness; helping lay the ideological rail track that would eventually lead to Auschwitz; and creating an Aryan Jesus abstracted from his own Jewishness and turned into a reason for the lethal hatred of Jews. Evil has its own lethal ironies. 

The evening ended with the ususal reception, book signing and conversation. I took along my early copy of The Climax of the Covenant, in which Wright's essay on Philippians 2 was published (the reason I bought the book in 1991), and now have the imprimatur and greeting of the author.

A good night, one when it was fun to sit at the feet of a Gamaliel and learn how much I don't know, and feel again the importance of attentiveness to the centre of our faith, Jesus Christ, witnessed to in Scripture, and living in the new community, the Body of Christ.