Amongst the teachers who shaped my social values, moral commitments and ethical worldview were two of the most remarkable human beings from whom it has been my great privilege to learn. Bob Holman and Kay Crmichael in the 1970's were immersed in the social problems and community concerns of the east end of Glasgow. They were respected academics who taught Social Administration in Glasgow Arts faculty, and I spent a year doing a course that started with the Beveridge Report and took us through the philosophy and politics of welfare, the meanings and consequences of poverty, issues of health and social security, the connections between health, housing, employment and human flourishing, the criteria for a humane society, and they did so as acdemics engaged in social activism, or as social activists who could engage in discussion, debate and research at the highest levels.

Ever since those university days I've been a restless but constant reader of Micah, Amos and Isaiah, and have used some of the great Hebrew themes of justice and righteousness as the criteria by which I judge political decisions, social movements and the changing norms of a consumer society. I found it both intriguing and uplifting to find today in the Guardian the column of Polly Toynbee in which she is highly critical of Ian Duncan Smith, the allegedly compassionate conservative, whose flagship benefit reforms have further decimated the lives of people in Easterhouse. Now of course Easterhouse in Glasgow's east end isn't the only place where the benefits hatchet has been wielded with the brute force of an impatient butcher. But is is the place where, ten years ago, Ian Duncan Smith shed tears at the plight of poor people and their courage and dignity in seeking to build, maintain and nurture commnity life in areas where resources are so hard to come by.

Maybe a millionaire isn't the best person to put in charge of the nation's policies for social security, looking after the vulnerable, assisting the poor, and behaving with compassion and respect for human beings. Amongst the new gods in the political pantheon, Austeritas is rapidly monopolising the attribute of cruelty. I'm sick of the word, and the hypocritical inconsistencies of those who mouth it as a mantra, while offering the sacrifices of other people to assuage its lust for human hardship. And all in the name of welfare.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/duncan-smith-poverty-benefit-sanctions-easterhouse

Reading Seamus Heaney again. Dennis O'Driscoll's interviews with Heaney, published as Stepping Stones, allows Heaney to explain what was going on in his life, his head and his country when much of his best poetry was written. Looking for something else I came across one of the loveliest tributes to a mother I've come across anywhere, and the more impressive from someone who combines in such rare fashion words gently written with clear-eyed tenderness. He writes of sitting with his mother as she was dying: "Not a lot being said or needing to be said. Just a deep, unpathetic stillness and worldessness. a mixture of lacrimae rerum and Deo Gratias. Something in  me reverted to the child I'd been in Mossbawn. Something in her remained constant, like the past gazing at you calmly without blame. She was a tower of emotional strength, unreflective in a way but undeceived about people or things. I suppose all Im saying is that I loved her dearly."

Those are words that suggest some of the deep humane reservoirs out of which Heaney's poetry is written. On the other hand Heaney's prose can be just as incisive and lyrical as his poetry, and I've found several of his sentences worth a longish ponder.

And incidentally, with apologies to Heaney, replace the words poem or poetry or poet in the quotations below with sermon, preacher and preaching, and his words still inspire a vision of the power of words to shape and nourish human life in all its tangles and turnings. 

Poetry is like the line Christ drew in the sand,

it creates a pause in the action,

a freeze frame moment of concentration,

a focus where our power to concentrate

is concentrated back on ourselves.

….

A good poem holds

as much of the truth 

as possible in one gaze.

….

Poetry is "the cry of the responsible human".

….

Poetry should, like the Gideon Bible,

be available in hotel rooms

and should be distributed

like handouts at Supermarket checkouts.

….

The vocation of the poet

…to be true to poetry as a solitary calling,

not to desert the post,

to hold on at the crossroads

where truth and beauty intersect.

Howdy, i read your blog from time to time and i own a similar one and i
was just wondering if you get a lot of spam feedback? If so how do you
stop it, any plugin or anything you can recommend? I get so much lately
it's driving me mad so any help is very much appreciated.

This comment came in last week and my experience of spam on this blog is exactly the same. Can anyone offer an explanation, and even better a solution? I am marking more comments as spam as the weeks pass. And yes it is an intrusion, annoying and a bit concerning that there is such easy access to self advertising – some are also offensive and almost require surgical gloves to hit the delete button!

My own partial solution is to moderate all comments and post only the ones that are clearly interacting with the content of the blog, or which come from recognised sources.If it continues to increase it becomes a time consuming problem as well as an unasked for intrusion, and an abuse of social hospitality.

The title of the post gives two alternatives for the Acronym SPAM. If you can think of others, make sure they are printable, I'm happy to make a collection!!!

I love the simple depth of Wendell Berry's writing. His essays are an education in humane writing and words woven into patterns of reasoned argument, passionate persuasion and intellectually powered ethics. His poetry is earthed in the earth – which isn't the tautology it seems, because he is a man of the soil who understands the rhythms of growth and life, fruitfulness and dying. The combination of patient observation and words shaped to what is seen and felt give his best poems that subtle urgency that compels recognition that life is blessing, and to be cherished as such. I share his passion for trees.

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches

and come in beneath

the blessed and the blessing trees.

Though I am silent

there is singing around me.

Though I am dark

there is vision around me

Though I am heavy

there is flight around me.

Commentaries on the Psalms are yet another sub genre of spiritual reading I find all but irresistible. Some of the greatest works of scholarship and spirituality ever produced within the Christian tradition are founded on the Psalter. The history of Christian interpretation of the Psalms is a fascinating dive into the theology, spirituality, liturgy and cultural adaptability of these biblical texts as they have been appropriated by previous generations seeking the face of God.

Note I said Christian interpretation of the Psalms, not interpretation of Christian Psalms. The Psalms are the Praise Book of Israel, the core text of the Writings in the Hebrew Bible, and a thickly textured symphony of human responses of faith and questioning, of trust and desolation, of joy and lament, of peace and despair, of recovered hope and crushing loss. There are prayers and conversations, complaints and eulogies, monologues and dialogues, and the Psalmists reveal a remarkable confessional integrity of soul, hearts learning to risk transparency before the Holy One, if only because they know that they are already and inevitably deeply, intimately, knowingly, understood by the Lord. The Psalms presuppose that every experience of our lives, between gift and blessing on the one hand, and sin and suffering on the other, can nevertheless be drawn together into poems and prayers of trust, and then further drawn into the orbit of mercy and judgement, compassion and forgiveness, repentance and restoration which is the gravitational pull of the Divine Mercy.

One of my favourite commentaries on Psalms is by John Eaton a lifelong student of these Songs of Israel. His volume has the unusual merit of being a work of accessible scholarship, by a believing critic, and which incliudes after each psalm, a brief prayer written to distil thought. Psalm 66 ends with this prayer:

O God, whose work of creation embraces all that exists, grant us to know what it is to be brought near to dwell in your courts; cleanse and replenish our souls, that our prayer for the earth may be a song in tune with the trust of the distant seas and the music of the gates of morning and evening.

Not a bad prayer to begin the day, after reading a Psalm which asks for a renewed ecology of a human heart forgiven, and of an uncherished earth renewed by praise.                                                                                                                                   

The Vast Ocean Begins Just Outside Our Church: The Eucharist

Mary Oliver

 

Something has happened

To the bread

And the wine.

They have been blessed.

What now?

The body leans forward

To receive the gift

From the priest’s hand,

Then the chalice.

They are something else now

From what they were

Before this began.

I want

To see Jesus,

Maybe in the clouds

Or on the shore,

Just walking,

Beautiful man

And clearly

Someone else

Besides.

On the hard days

I ask myself

If I ever will.

Also there are times

My body whispers to me

                                                      That I have.

Commenting on her poem Oliver wrote words of wisdom for theologians.

"Centuries ago theologians claimed they had parsed with precision how God acted on the bread and wine during the celebration of the Eucharist.

This wasn't helpful.

Their lust for certitude bruised a mystery which was best left alone. It eventually birthed theological wars about the nature of a meal that was ironically intended to mend, not tear apart.

I don't need to know what happens to the bread and wine to experience the oceanic love of God that I feel when I receive it, anymore than a newborn needs to know the mother's name and address to see and feel the adoration in her gaze."

To which I wish all God's people might say, "Amen".

The historian Owen Chadwick is one of those scholars who give church history a good name. I'm currently reading the two volume The Victorian Church, which I have as two breize block hardbacks. I've dipped in and consulted them often enough, but never till now read through the thousand or so pages. Unsurprisingly Chadwick writes with authority and the required skill of instinct for the significant in constructing an account of an age transformed by revolutions in thought, heightened religious sensitivities in tension with growing secular and dissenting voices, constantly moving political alignments, and the expansion of British power and influence by means of Empire.

But add to that narrative verve, ironic but always gentle humour, the skill of a master craftsman in words to draw pen portraits of the dramatis personaeof Victorian culture which match the equally miraculous accuracy of those near photographic miniatures of the 17th and 18th centuries. Chadwick makes history a pleasure to read  through; he makes ideas matter; and he brings personality and character alive so that you make up your own mind whether you agree or disagree, like or dislike, the key players. 

I found his account of John Henry Newman satisfyingly honest, respectful and non-hagiographic. The narrative of the Oxford Movement is one I wish I'd come across when I was studying this High Anglican movement for a return to Catholic liturgy and ritual as a rather inexperienced young Baptist wondering what all the fuss was about because in my then less than humble opinion, both sides were wrong!!

When I've finished both volumes I'll extract two or three of the best pen portraits and succinct one liners. ! 

Rose tinted
twilight;

alert
serenity, poised

with effortless grace.

Jim Gordon

Yes haiku is poetry, and at least once this week I though I might be permitted a wee bit self indulgence and share one of my own Haiku!
The photo was taken at Loch Skene this Spring during a long slow sunset. This time it isn't really the poem that "does it", its the combination of the poem and the picture, the memory of such a beautiful moment and its capture in words that in turn recall the memory.

What is it about beauty that brings a lump to our throats and makes it hard to swallow? Then there's the deeper sense, that the power of beauty to apprehend us floods us with an inner joy and outer clarity so that we see, we pay attention and we glimpse that which is beyond us. There are few moments in our lives in which we more closely encounter truth, than those moments of clarity when unexpected beauty illumines our world, and our painful longings for goodness are strengthened from ideal into resolve. Such transforming moments of encounter with beauty, goodness and truth are what Aquinas understood as contemplative theololgy, when the three transcendentals of beauty, goodness and truth are integrated by love, experienced and expressed as a transformative trinity of human responsiveness to the Eternal Love that occasionally irupts and bathes all creation with radiant glory.

EVENING, Emily Dickinson

She sweeps with many-colored brooms,
And leaves the shreds behind;
Oh, housewife in the evening west,
Come back, and dust the pond!

You dropped a purple ravelling in,
You dropped an amber thread;
And now you've littered all the East
With duds of emerald!

And still she plies her spotted brooms,
And still the aprons fly,
Till brooms fade softly into stars –
And then I come away.

I don't remember my first encounter with the strange beauty and enigmatic brevity of Emily Dickinson's poems. More than many others I've read, even favourite poems of hers read differently every time; they evade critical and even appreciative capture. If poems are capable of playing hard to get, then many of her poems do frustrate our desire to possess, our drive to understand, and refuse to pander to our insecurity pushing us to pin down meaning. What on earth does it 'mean' to say "Till brooms fade softly into stars" – and then you realise, that what it 'means' isnt the point. In six words she makes the transition from dusk to darkness, and the word 'softly' is hushed with reassuring gentleness. It isn't too speculative to say this poem is informed by witnessing hundreds of performances by "the housewife in the evening west".

I am ridiculously fond of fudge with stem ginger, covered in dark chocolate. The collision of flavours and richness of each slice means you don't eat it like sweeties! A bar of this connoiseur's confection lasts me a month (it's quite a big bar though). Likewise Dickinson's poems – hers is a book on my desk and I seldom read more than one or two poems at a time. What a waste of taste, sensation and anticipation to sit down and devour them without lingering over the sheer joy of sampling each poem. Aye, chocolate covered ginger fudge, and Emily Dickinson's poems – you could do worse than enjoy both, together.

The first photo was taken from my study window; the second from a layby near Sherrifmuir looking north west.

Ode To Autumn