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"So how are you enjoying retirement?"  "What do you do with yourself these days?""Got any plans?"

These are tricky questions. Not because they are meant to be but because of the assumptions that shape them. At first I resisted the denominator "retired", because I have no intention of retiring just yet. But that sounds like incipient denial, I'm not that old….yet! But it isn't that. It's to do with an underlying vocational pull towards those so varied areas of life and those diversities of gifts and the always to be looked for opportunities which together with inner motives and accumulated experience make up my life past, my life present and life into whatever future lies within the purposes of God.

Now that last phrase is the important one; "within the purposes of God". What I do with myself these days isn't the straightforward question those who ask it (with kindness and interest) think that it is! What I do with myself is an even more interesting phrase if I simply insert a space – What I do with my self. Over the years I've tried to resist the assumption that what we do defines who we are. So on Facebook I am a former College Principal, but I'm also a former and present Baptist minister; a husband, a father, a friend, a brother. I'm a writer, a scholar, a preacher, a gardener, a reader – I do tapestry, take photos, cook the most amazing lasagne, rice puddings and Moroccan chicken. All of these I do with my self, and as I do them, the self that I am changes and grows.

What I have found as I've thought about all this during a two month sabbatical is that what every one of us has done in all these layers and episodes of life, has been and goes on being the raw material out of which, day by day, we are being shaped and formed into who we are becoming. That present continuous "becoming", should warn us against a fixed, static definition of who we are; we are more than what we have done, and our identity is a dynamic, growing but changing continuity held together by our choices, decisions, circumstances seen and unforeseen, and that nexus of relationships with all those folk who move in and out of our lives. 

Vocation is an important way of living our lives; it has for me a defining Christian urgency. I am called to be me, but a self committed to following Jesus faithfully, living under the rule of Christ. That's true whether I'm preaching or cooking, laying turf in my garden or taking a funeral, stitching and working a tapestry or accompanying people in their lives as they try to discern and live into the patterns and purposes of God. You don't retire from what is a chosen way of life, and whatever else Christian faith is, it is a Way, a way of life we have both chosen and to which we have been called.

So what am I doing with my self these days? Taking time to think, to let the last few years settle and begin to fit into a life lived self-consciously Godward, with more or less understanding of what that means. These words of C S Lewis have helped me to trust God's creative faithfulness, and to believe that it is the grace of God, often undetected at the time, that slowly or quickly, gently or fiercely, persistently and patiently, works away at the envisioned objet d'art that is each one of us :

"All that you are…every fold and crease of your individuality was devised from all eternity to fit God as a glove fits a hand. All that intimate particularity which you can hardly grasp yourself, much less communicate to your fellow creatures, is no mystery to Him. He made those ins and outs that he might fill them. Then he gave you a soul so curious a life because it is a key designed to unlock that door, of all the myriad doors in Him."

The photo is of one of our roses,another unique presence, called and created to be beautiful for a while……

Has anyone else found it really diifcult to live in two media worlds at once these past weeks?

The Commonwealth Games have brought enormous energy, enjoyment, achievement and social cohesion; for which read a pervasive in your face friendliness from Glasgow people that is infectious, funny and incurably self-conscious without being anything other than glad to host the party and include everybody within loud shouting distance. The interviews with Glasgow folk are a credit to a city that knows its own history, and knows its own place, and is proud of both. Glasgow has been a whirring hub of life engaged in making a big thing happen and doing it in a way that is peculiarly Glaswegian and memorably Scottish. (Apart from not including the Proclaimers in the closing ceremony – what a missed opportunity that was!! 

From such humming euphoria, high visibility human togetherness, days of shared laughter and hopes, international cross cultural goodwill, we turn to the news from Gaza. That shift of focus has required a bewildering change of worldview, a psychological decompression chamber lest we absorb so much tragedy and suffering into minds that need time to adjust. The number dead has reached 1800 with 9,000 injured, the vast majority civilians. Another 10 died yesterday, taking shelter from the sun, under a tree, at the gate of a UN run school sheltering several thousand civilians.

The media constructed alternative worlds are truly bewildering and heartbreaking. Lifetime challenge and ambitions of atheltes, and the life destroying goals of Hamas and Israel; sport as a medium of friendship, and conflict as the nursery of future hatred, enmity and violence; the exchange of shuttlecocks, hockey balls, contrasts with crude rockets and flechette shells, drone missiles and precision air strikes; finish lines and endurance races, contrast with conflict borderlines and the endurance of a people with nowhere to go as the lines of lethal advance concentrate their numbers and the high explosive ordnance keeps raining.

I admit it. I am bewildered, emotionally and morally unsettled, not sure what to think, or do or say. Images of fireworks celebrating our human togetherness keep being contradicted by images of explosions and flashes of fire as death is dealt with computer precision. These past weeks have been so wonderful for Glasgow, so hellish for Gaza. So I do what I can; I sign the petitions; I blog and write to my MP and I argue with the "Israel can do no wrong lobby", and I pray. But none of that makes any visible difference to the inflicted misery and eclipse of mercy that is Israel and Gaza at war.

One of the most remarkable advances in human behaviour and social hopefulness was the establishing of the lex talionis principle, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. No that is not a licence for vengeance, it is an imposed constraint upon hatred, an agreed control of violence, a crude but essential justice based on proportionality, and with the intention that such exchange is limited to the offender and the offended. The collective punishment of the Palestinian people lacks all proportionality, has no relation whatsoever to justice, makes no pretence at limitation and is made worse not better by rhetoric about seeking to avoid civilian casualties when the numbers are as they are.

But then, this is the 21st Century, we know better than the ancients, our sophisticated weaponry doesn't require us to personally kill each person – that can be done remotely, more efficiently and with greater killing power. And when one protagonist couldn't care less about the lives of its own population, then the provocation takes on lethal persistence; and when the other protagonist has overwhelming military capacity to inflict death at will, it can be done with impunity until the international bystanding stops. And whether I like it or not, British arms sales to Israel make me implicit; and our Government's supine silence makes me ashamed; but I pray the Lord's Prayer, and believe in its hopefulness, its defiance of those who think their Kingdom is unshakeable and their will is to be done.

Just now and again the juxtaposition of images is unsettling. Walking by this field of ready to harvest barley the barbed wire was at eye level – that path was lower than the field, please note!

The grain that nourishes – by the way, although barley is used for brewing, it's also a staple ingredient of Scotch Broth – is fenced in by tight parallel lines of sharpened steel.

Barbed wire is to keep in or keep out. It has its uses but by definition and design it does its work by fear or hurt. A reminder of the serious issues facing our qworld where grain and steel, food and defence, nourishment and threat, co-exist.

Then there's the moment the bee and the flower come together. Honey is the result of that more creative juxtaposition. Looking across St Cyrus bay, the micro drama of honey making plays out against a background of windswept dunes, distant sea and cliffs for a mile northwards.

Now, what's the flower? Is it a field scabious? In any case, one of my joys of walking with a camera is for just those moments of happening, when nothing unusual happens, except that I am there to see it, and paying enough attention not to miss it!

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At Pitmedden open air Shakespeare and with time at the interval to enjoy the garden in late July sunlight. I love mature trees with a shape formed over years of weather, husbandry and growth mapped to context. This tree wouldn't have grown just like this, anywhere else. And over decandes pushing towards a century it has slowly spread and accommodated itself so that it looks just right.

Three photographs, entirely incidental, lacking any lasting significance, except for the presence of the photographer who notices, bothers and sees….

These are the words of broken hearted Jewish people:

Remember O Lord against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall.,

How they said “Tear it down. Tear it down.
Down to its foundations.”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us.
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against rocks.

These horrendous, brutal, anguished words came from people who could no longer find acceptable words to describe what had befallen them at the hands of a more powerful enemy. The bitter irony of the events in Gaza is that the very people from whose national suffering and shattering such words of imprecation came, are engaged in actions which create precisely the same future-looking rage, and hunger for vengeance, that make these words so chillingly potent.

So in answer to Mr Netanyahu’s speech about preparing for a protracted operation (for which read more killing of innocent civilians), I remind him of the words of the Jewish people, his people, against Edomites and that a simple word change makes the same overwhelming moral case:
How he said, “Tear it down. Tear it down. Down to its foundations.”

And the response of a broken people, brutalised by overwhelming military force, “O Israel, you devastator!”

The Israeli military rhetoric behind the Gaza assaults will inevitably mean those last verses from a Jewish Psalm, are now being said by Palestinian mothers, fathers and children. They have seen their children and parents dashed to pieces by merciless unremitting salvos of military ordnance, sold and manufactured in the UK and US. Overwhelming grief left unassuaged, and violence unleashed with assumed impunity, normalise the mind-set of the merciless. That is what I detected in Mr Netanyahu’s speech last night. Not political obstinacy, though that too; not justified anger and grievance, though that is also granted. But a merciless dismissal of intolerable suffering of those who have no recourse, or defence. Mercilessness is a corrosive mindset, and a contagious and lethal virus. And a world that stands by and sees it take hold, and says nothing and does nothing effectively to end the carnage, shares the guilt and responsibility for the spread of toxins into a bleak future.

The triumphalist having-it-all kind of spirituality is a surprisingly impoverished version of Christian discipleship. Whenever Christians claim too much in their experience, immediacy of fellowship with God, certainty and assurance of every blessed blessing, authority in their knowing and claimed intimacy in their praying, they are in danger of losing one of the most important parts of any deep, enduring and transformative relationship. I mean the gift of mystery, necessary limitation of vision and understanding, God's wise frustration of our desire to know and know and know, and an essential discipline and restraint in the desire to possess. 

Longing for God is by definition a feeling of incompleteness, a confession from the heart of our need, dependency and willingness to surrender. But if we always receive what we long for, always find what we seek, have every desire fulfilled, then what is left? In those deepest relations of love there is, and must always be, a surplus beyond our reach,discoveries awaiting that may never be made, mysteries in the heart and life of the other that are forvever beyond us. So I am content to know that I will never know, not fully, not completely. God is not to be comprehended so easily, the Gospel of grace and love is not reducible to our ideas, statements and controlling articulations and concepts. God is, well, God.

Which is why I love the humility and content with discontent that marks this beautiful poem prayer of Ambrose. The aspiration to seek and find is gthere all right, but so is the recognition that unless God accommodates the reality of who God is to the limits of our understanding we don;t even know where to start to look.

O God

Teach me to see you,

and reveal yourself to me when I seek you,

For I cannot seek you unless you first teach me,

nor find you unless you first reveal yourself to me.

Let me seek you in longing, and long for you in seeking.

Let me find you in love, and love you in finding.

(Ambrose of Milan, 339-397 )

The photo is of an autumn moon, partially clouded, visible but obscured, luminous but distant, a reminder because we need it, that the dark side of the moon is hidden.  One of the deficits of a triumphalist spirituality is a lack of awareness of what Heschel called the ineffable otherness of God. It is that ineffability, that otherness, that frustrates our longing, and saves us from the sin of presumption, and enables us to be Blessed as those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

It's been a week of Garden Therapy, Horticultural Healing, Soul and Soil, Sweat and Sunshine, Water, Wellies and Dirty Hands – loved it. The turf is laid and we have a new lawn in the making; the flowering currant bush, gnarled, aged and past it, has been removed though its ancient roots registered angry reluctance; the potentilla is re-sited but not happy, but we hope it survives; the bottom corner is cleared of other territorially greedy shrubs and is ready for reshaping into a cottage flower border.

Not everyone knows this, but I once sold geraniums and pelargoniums door to door in Lanark! The previous summer dad and I took cuttings, propagated, repotted, and produced a couple of hundred healthy potted plants. They flew out of the car boot in less time than it took to say pelargonium, and we came away wondering if there was a business in this. There wasn't of course; our prices were too low, the plants had been cared for and nurtured in a too time expensive way, and there's only so much you can do with an 18ft greenhouse!

My first job was in one of the plant nurseries on Clydeside – I used the rotavator in the 20 or so 50 metre greenhouses, ploughed the fields and prepared the soil for the winter bulbs, was responsible for 6 greenhouses of Clydeside tomatoes, from planting to shooting and de-leafing, to watering, to harvesting – has anyone who reads this ever sat down in a hot greenhouse, picked a tomato that is just on the turn from orange to red, bit off a small chunk, just enough to suck out the seeds, and then eat the whole delicious thing, and declared with the juices on the chin and the quiet certainty of one who knows, who just knows, this could well have been the fruit Eve fell for – a Clydeside tomato plant, laden with trusses of go on eat me tomatoes, growing in tempting abandon in the Garden of Eden…..!

All of which is a way of saying that when it comes to spiritual discipline of the physical manual work variety, it's hard to beat the liturgy of dirty hands, organic life, and the chance to help maintain the fabric of God's created world. My dad of course is long since dead, and at his funeral someone who had never met him, but who took time to speak gently and attentively to my mother, drew a word picture of a man whose roots were in the ground, whose working life had been on farms amongst beasts, and whose feet had worked the earth. He said, "John Gordon was a man of the soil", and in all the other deep and emotion churning moments and memories in that service, that's the one that cracked me open.

So when I garden, I get stuck in. Mostly I'm the labourer, taking instructions from the horticultural choreographer; but always I recognise the genetic predisposition to pray not by clasping my hands, but by getting them dirty.

 "The meanest flower that blows can give

thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

The petals of this poppy are gossamer thin, yet the depth of crimson, scarlet and other tones of red give this flower a startling presence, demanding attention. The photo was taken in Aberdeen's Botanic Garden, yesterday around noon. I wasn't looking for a photo, I was walking by myself, praying in a garden about the anguish and blood and tears of people in Gaza. That tragic agony weighs heavily on my heart, because much of my own spirituality and many of the values by which I try to live have long established roots in the soil of Israel's faith. What is happening in Gaza has little connection with the great light bearing statements of that faith about how to live before God.

I remembered Jesus in a Garden, when he sweated anguish like life blood, drenching his brow and stinging his eyes, and I tried to imagine how a mind that could speak of the flowers of the field and the care of God, could survive the pain and cruelty of political and religious zealotry about to unleash power that crushes, dehumanises and demonises its victims. The cross of Jesus Christ is a scandal that saves the world.  That brutal celebration of human ingenuity and artistic skill in extracting maximum pain in protracted time, is, nevertheless, despite our worst and best efforts to explain it, the foolishness and wisdom of God.

So I'm not able to understand the flint faced hatred of Hamas and Israel. As a follower of the Crucified Christ I accept that in a broken and fallen world, I am called to take up my cross, daily, and follow. I accept it and find it so hard to do it, but not for want of trying, and not for want of God's grace. My encounter with this flower was as near an epiphany as I tend to have, a moment of revelation, when the vivid hues of red cut through my questions and complaints, interrupted my anger and outrage, rebuked the impotence and lurking despair of thinking I can't make a difference. Or at least not enough of a difference to register in any way that I could consciously own, and then the words of the old hymn forced a rethink:… "and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be."

No that doesn't remove the obscenity of tank shells hitting a hospital;nor does it excuse the evil zeal that uses unarmed human beings as human shields in the name of God. This fragile, beautiful, so transient flower is a prophetic word of defiance against steel, computerised missiles and flechettes – Google that word – this technology is being used in civilian areas. I find it ironic to the point of logical puzzle, that I a Christian, find in the Cross of Jesus Christ, hope for Hamas and Israel. But I am not within a light year of miles of suggesting that will be any consolation to the people of Gaza this morning. There are times when it is our calling to hope, and to hope on behalf of others. I believe God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. 

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross…." I believe in Christ God breaks down dividing walls of hostility. All this I believe. But never for a moment do I accept that such faith on my part can be content with seeing this as reason for the disengagement of personal comfort. The call to hope for others is also the call to share something, however remote the reality, something of the lamentation of people whose suffering is deliberately inflicted by others who mean them harm.

My encounter with a red poppy, opens up thoughts that, with apologies to that old Romantic Wordsworth, do not, indeed do not, lie too deep for tears.

One of the images on my study wall – a tapestry of the word Shalom based on Isaiah 35 

"In Christian worship declaring that Jesus is Lord creates a world before us.

The world and the church do not make it look as if Jesus is Lord;

world and church do not live in light of this fact.

Yet we know that Jesus is Lord,

and proclaiming this reality builds up our capacity to to keep believing it

even though empirical evidence imperils this conviction,

and also builds up our capacity to live on the basis of the statement's truth."

(John Goldingay, Key Questions About Biblical Interpretation, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 359.

It was Dr Sheila Cassidy who made me start looking for the cross in unlikely places. While working at St Luke's Hospice she started noticing the cruciform image on windows, door panels, furniture joints. These were daily interruptions of her duties, bringing her mind back to the reason she was doing this kind of work, for love of Jesus who died for all humanity, and in whose resurrection is the hope of the world.

Last night walking along Aberdeen beach, a long intentionally solitary walk beside the lapping waves of a receding tide, I stopped at one of the old encrusted wooden barriers. Just about my eye height, under 5 foot, I took this photo. The moment I saw the shape a whole set of connections started to flash alight. These rugged encrusted timbers are there to meet the waves of a sea that can be relentless, ferocious and destructive, as well as calm. This cross shaped barrier remains solidly there, as the tides come and go.

This week I've walked alongside people who are suffering, and whose humanity and hopes are besieged by waves that come rolling in with relentless energy. Alongside a calm sea like this, Jesus walked after a busy and dangerous day when people wanted him to be a king, and didn't realise he already was a king, just not on their terms. And alongside such a sea he walked in early morning after his crucifixion, when he came looking for his friends, and found them becalmed and hungry. Even in my own life just now, this symbol of the love of God beyond telling, ruggedly made flesh in the gift of incarnate deity, tells a Gospel story encrusted with eternity and covered with the marks and realities of history, and reminds me, in all the encrusted realities of my own life, of a hymn about a cross towering o'er the wrecks of time, and another about the cross as refuge tried and sweet, and yet another about the place where sorrow and love flowed mingling down.

It was dusk – and I took the picture with no thought of the camera setting, so this dark, wet, apparently immovable barrier against the dangers of a relentless sea, was for a fraction of a second, illuminated and bathed with light. I took time to pray for those going through their own experiences of what must at times feel like crucifixion….alzheimer's disease, cancer, depression, addiction, betrayal, rejection and that core deep loneliness that now and again we all feel and wonder why God has forsaken us….O cross, that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee….

It's been a rich and fun few days. Prestigious lecture, student graduations, Romeo and Juliet and a day in Aberdeenshire at the Echt Show. In this post, the lecture and the Love Story.

First, the Lecture. Former Lord Advocate and Chamncellor of the University of the West of Scotland, Dame Elish Angioli, delivered the Brough Lecture in the University of the West of Scotland. She spoke with expert familiarity about Women and Justice in Scotland: Three Perspectives. Even those who reckon they know a bit about the Scottish Justice system, and about women in relation to justice, crime and society, were left in no doubt, we don't know enough, think enough and at times seem not to care enough. I'll come back to some of her content in a later post; but there are few better spent hours in my life this past year than the two spent listening and learning to a woman who combines rapier intelligence,  authoritiative experience, accumulated wisdom, critical compassion and that important strand of the Scottish Enlightenment, common sense.

Then there was the Love Story on Thursday evening. The picture is from Twitter. The contagious energy, unselfish commitment, up for it gutsiness, line learning discipline, musical know how and uninhibited belief in what they do makes the PACE performance therapeutic enough to want to bottle it and take some away. I loved it, and here's the thing – these young folk made me want to go and get my Arden copy out the back of the bookshelf and read it again through the exegetical lens of young passionate West of Scotland voices.

After the show we went to a local good place for Italian ice cream (chocolate and vanilla) and cappuccino – hey, come on, it was Romeo and Juliet after all. Paying the bill I told our table service person where we'd been, and said the starring couple had died brilliantly. 'Oh that's the best bit", she enthused. She reckoned the better they died the better we cried! Love it, that universalisation of the human tragedy of all consuming love frustrated by adamantine circumstance and human misunderstanding!!

Occasions like these, lecture and love story, help explain why I love the West of Scotland, its University and its folk. And why, living in the North East, I'll still be doon the road now and then to top up my accent!

Tomorrow pics of Graduation and some of the main participants at the Echt (agricultural) Show.