Category: Uncategorised

My Tongue will sing of your righteousness….(Psalm 51.14)

My heart overflows with a good theme…My tongue is the pen of a ready writer. (Psalm 45.1)

I am a well known champion of thin books, and some previous posts have celebrated a variety of slim volumes of around a centimetre thick. Which means you could get around 100 of them on one metre of bookshelf space. I've often wondered about the concentrated quality and value of such a bookshelf if I gathered together a year's reading of 100 such books, reading around 30-40 pages a day. The first month might include Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; Nicholas Lash's Believing Three Ways in One God; Richard Bauckham's Theology of the Book of Revelation: Alastair Campbell's Rediscovering Pastoral Care; Jean Dauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Henri Nouwen's Genesee Diary; Jonathan Sacks The Persistence of Faith; P T Forsyth's The Cruciality of the Cross; Denise Levertov's The Stream and the Sapphire; Dag Hammarskjold's Markings. Around 10 centimetres of distilled wisdom, theological imagining, contemplative reflection, human experience, passionate enquiry, honest confession, and not least, personal enrichment. Not a bad return for 10 centimetres of shelf space. 

However, I am also an advocate of the carefully chosen tome, freighted with learning and weighted with significance in its field. So the arrival of Volume 5 of Bernard McGinn's magisterial and mind boggling history of Western Christian Mysticism is a welcome parcel which thuds impressively on the desk and makes you feel you've got your money's worth from Amazon's free delivery! This book would take up half the space of the ten volumes above, – it is 5.6 cms thick! 720 pages, 200 of them endnotes. Even the title forces the mind to slow down, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism, 1350 – 5550. Once I've finished the biography of Hammarskjold this is next on my discretionary reading list. Some of the most important names in Christian mysticism are here – Jan Van Ruusbroec, Catherine of Genoa, Catherine of Sienna, Thomas a Kempis, and the English Mystics Julian of Norwich, the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton.I've read or spent time with most of these spiritual writers.

I've been baffled and blessed, fulfilled and frustrated, enriched and at times perplexed by strange discourse, conceptual complexity, the oddities and even extravagances of human experience, the cultural and historical canyons that separate medieval Europe from the post-postmodern West. These are formidable barriers to understanding, and are likely to try patience and stamina. But I've never doubted that these writers thought deeply and adventurously about their encounter with God, felt powerfully and passionately about Jesus Christ, and believed against criticism and rejection that what they experienced and expressed was mediated and befell them by the Spirit of God, calling to communion with the Father in the Son. And at the core of their convictional existence was a consuming apprehension of the Love that ignites, purifies, vivifies and draws the soul along the trajectory that leads to the heart of God. No they didn't always get it theologically right; at times they flirted dangerously with ideas corrosive of core Christian realities; the seduction of ecstatic experience and the afterglow of mystical encounter laid open the possibility of the individual's experience claiming a dogmatic authority free from the theology of the Christian tradition out of which it had grown.

All that is true. But there are rich and searching truths in Christian mystical writers which pose devastatingly apt questions to our own 21st Century understanding of what it means to be human; what our lives mean; which priorities in human society make for death and which make for life; how we construct a framework of moral awareness within which to think and decide in ways which are humane and responsive to others; offering as an alternative to the now this instant, remorselessly innovative, obsessively consumerist, savagely individualist mindset of our times, a perspective in which transcendence, other awareness, self knowing and generosity of mind and spirit have the opportunity to grow, perchance to flourish.

That probably claims too much for those mystical astronauts, pioneers of Christian exploration who boldly went where no one had gone before. But what McGinn's large volumes provide is a sympathetic, authoritative and comprehensive presentation of Christian mystics in the context of their time, by one who understands and can expound their ideas and experiences, and do so from within the mainstream Christian tradition with critical appreciation.

(The photo was taken from my study window)

                        Keep me as the apple of your eye…..Psalm 17.4

The following Quotation is from here, the web page of Prof. Kathryn Tanner. Her work is on the radical edge of theology, by which I mean she explores the theological issues raised by human existence as we experience it in a world that is "savagely individualist", economically destabilised, increasingly fragmented and in which the public and global image of religion is, for entire communities, disfigured and discredited from within. Her theology goes to the roots of such problems, and to the roots of Christian faith as a resource for repairing the world.

"Enlightenment challenges to the intellectual credibility of religious
ideas can no longer be taken for granted as the starting point for
theological work now that theologians facing far more pressing worries
than academic respectability have gained their voices here at home and
around the globe."

"Theologians are now primarily called to
provide, not a theoretical argument for Christianity’s plausibility, but
an account of how Christianity can be part of the solution, rather than
simply part of the problem, on matters of great human moment that make a
life-and-death difference to people, especially the poor and the
oppressed."

" I will incline mine ear……"

He delivers me from all my fears…. (Psalm 34.4)

"in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up" (Psalm 5.3 KJV)

"How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell in  unity."

I talk a lot.

     Teaching.

          Preaching.

               Committes.

                    Conversations.

                         On  the phone.

                               In the coffee queue.

As Merton said, "Words are the sounds that interrupt my silence."

In Christian discipleship, much emphasis is put today on doing, acting, performing, embodying. And yes there is a kind of passivity that is either laziness or boredom with this whole Christian thing. If you've never felt it you're lucky. It isn't loss of love so much as loss of vision, energy and inward motive which together add up to desire for God.

So I welcome the wise words of Philip Toynbee in his unjustly forgotten, even if dated Journal, Part of a Journey.

"To silence the mind is not enough. it has to be a listening silence. Very hard to get there; harder still to stay there."

Yes that's true. And it may be that the word discipleship has become a legalistic doing word, an abstract noun given content by action. Whereas to be a disciple is describing word, a statement of being, a follower, one who has made a commitment in to a relationship.

And relationships need time, communication, and the deepest relationships, communion. A listening silence pays the other the courtesy of attention, hearing and response – all of which are born in silence. 

In the beginning was the Word….all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made…

When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands….what are human beings that you care for them, mortal people that you keep them in mind?

The new images from the Herschel telescope mirror, 3.5 metres in diameter.

This image reminded me of the work of the late Rebecca Elson. I wrote about her in an earlier post here. I quoted the following poem, written by Elson, a brilliant astro-physicist, a deeply thoughtful human being, and one who, suffering a terminal cancer, explored her own mortality with courage, honesty and a deep longing for more.

Let there Always be Light (Searching for Dark Matter)

For this we go out dark nights, searching
For the dimmest stars,
For signs of unseen things:

To weigh us down.
To stop the universe
From rushing on and on:

Into its own beyond
Till it exhausts itself and lies down cold,
Its last star going out.

Whatever they turn out to be,
Let there be swarms of them,
Enough for immortality,
Always a star where we can warm ourselves.

Let there be enough to bring it back
From its own edges,
To bring us all so close we ignite
The bright spark of resurrection.

I find few things more moving than those moments when human beings, and perhaps most of all pure scientists, who recognise mortality as both the given limits of life, and yet hold to a deeper trust that there is that which enables such limits to be transcended by a power and creativity beyond our ken….

And the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory, full of grace and truth.