These two photos were taken within a couple of days of each other. The view from our front window. I could become all annoyingly moralistic and do a wee homily on the passing seasons, autumnal maturity and the coming of winter as a metaphor of life passing. But why waste two perfectly good photos – they show what they show – life goes on!
Today at quite a low point I turned as often, to several of the writers who act as my spiritual directors and as sources of spiritual refreshment. This was what I found by browsing for ten minutes in their company.
A Church, as soon as it is a believing church, must above all else be a confessing Church, i.e. it must be more concerned to show forth the Lordship of Christ and his Gospel in its every special action, enterprise, than to hum with energy…
…………………..
God approaches our minds by receding from them. We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our won ideas. We know Him better after our minds have let Him go. The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord Arrives from all directions at once.
Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we discover that he has just arrived before us.
………………………
The first by P T Forsyth reminds me what is central, foundational, crucial, and therefore the primary source of sustainable energy for the church.
The second by Thomas Merton reminds me, and often this reminder comes as a jolt, that God is bigger than my ideas, vaster than my wish list, the frustrator of my instinct to control and comprehend.
And both help me understand and nod knowingly in assent, to the older translation of John's words, "The Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not…."
Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world…..
The other night I went looking for a sunset. Around six o’clock, looking down on Loch Skene through the trees, I sat for 10
minutes watching the colour change, but it never went red. One of those
evenings when nature does its own thing just to put sightseers in their place!
And
an astonishing reminder that, for all our manufactured virtual realities, clever
illusions and obsession with appearance and image, we still can't do a nature
makeover, or airbrush a sunset. So I took a photo of an ordinary sunset, and
left it untouched, unedited and unimproved. How do you improve a sunset anyway?
At the centre of the photo there’s a little jewel of reflected gold, stretching
across the loch a mile away, leaving much to the imagination. But imagination helped towards
joy by the noise of hundreds of migrating geese, echoing up the hill, honking
their calls of home and home-going. Another reminder of nature's rhythms, which
are of course natural, and so far, mercifully, beyond our control!
“From
the rising of the sun and to the going down of the same, the Lord’s name is to
be praised.” And the greatest praise is gratitude, recognition of the gift that
is beauty, and life, and the blessings of a world threatened by a combination
of our cleverness and our foolishness. I took a photo of an ordinary sunset!
What an extraordinary thing to write – as if a sunset was ever other than a
familiar taken for granted miracle of Benediction!
Can someone explain to me the purpose, value or social usefulness of sending a man to jail for six months because he swam in front of two competing boats in a race? There's no disputing it was stupid, illegal, ruined a national and internationally important event – at least in the eyes of the BBC and two Universities. So that it was a court case is not in dispute – that it was a public order offence is equally both obvious and conceded.
But in a country where we have the highest percentage in Europe of prisoners handed custodial sentences, there are surely more creative, socially responsible and hopeful ways of dealing with a lone protester who interrupted a race.
What is the judicial system for, and what does the criminal justice process seek to achieve. Punishment, and even that word needs some qualifying – but punishment is not an end in itself. What was the six month sentence intended to achieve for society, for the offender, and for both as they look to the future beyond the crime and the sentence?
Is the sentence intended to act as a deterrent? But where are the hordes queuing up to swim in front of boats on the Thames, or steal the flag at the last green of the Open Golf, or bring a vuvuzela horn to the last night of the Proms and blow it annoyingly during Land of Hope and Glory?
To be sensible. Punishment, let's use the word. Is its purpose deterrence in which case will this deter him from doing the same thin g next year? Probably, but there are more efficient ways of doing that even if he wanted to do the swim again?
Or is the intention to exact retribution for an act of selfish stupidity that ruined the enjoyment of thousands? But are we saying the only way we can think of to express social punishment is to take away liberty and further criminalise the offender in an institution at ridiculous expense to the very people he has offended against?
If the intention is to correct, rehabilitate, re-orientate a person's sense of social responsibility and moral thinking, then the last place suited for that is a prison where it is accepted there are far too few resources, and a deeply counter-productive environment for such mental, emotional and social self-reinvention.
Now if the intention is restitution, seeking to put right what was done wrongly, making recompense for loss or hurt to others, then I fail to see how he can do that while locked away from the very public to whom he owes a debt, and again, at their considerable expense.
Would several hundred community hours of work have been better? Oh, I think so. Would a fine have been more appropriate – fines depend on how much money a person has anyway. If he is a millionaire then a few thousand pounds is more inconvenience than restitution or any other alleged good consequence of punishment. If he is on benefits, then a fine merely goes unpaid and we are back to jail with no get out of jail free card.
So I'm still asking – how does sending him to prison provide a satisfying resolution to a disrupted boat race? We are not talking about a football fan inciting violence, or behaving in a way likely to endanger life and limb around them. There was no crowd who would become a threat to public order lining the Thames that day. But to require the offender to repay the public money this whole incident incurred, and make restitution for ruining the hard work and enjoyment of many others, that could surely be better achieved by community service, a re-education in what makes a society good and just, and a reminder that human community cannot flourish unless there is a mutual recognition of rights, and obligations, and these balanced in socially responsible actions.
Haiku on a Favourite Picture
Beauty in repose,
eyes gazing wonderingly
at futures unknown.
This is one of my favourite images of the Virgin Mary. An early European sketch by Rogier Van der Weyden. Alongside much more developed images this near neutral sketch exudes mystery, beauty, and an all but tangible intimation of the sacred.
I don't mean in any soft, unreflective devotional reverie, those responses that are best summed up as "nice". Art like this communicates the inner meanings of faith through those hints and clues of tone and technique, the power of form and capacity to set off those inner resonances which are prompts to recognition; that what we are looking at is more than we see, and signifies deeper than we can often feel, or think.
Mary's "Yes" at the Annunciation is one of the pivotal points in salvation history. Maybe so. But what makes it so, is it is also one of those moments when a human heart transcended the limits of human possibility and said "Yes" to an unknown future, not out of mere resignation, but from a willed act of costly obedience.
The art that surrounds the Annunciation is an embarrassment of masterpieces; but this small sketch has its place amongst the most theologically focused, because the face, understood in human encounter, is the mirror of the embodied self, the reflection of our inner being, the outward expression to the world of our most personal self.
The beauty of repose is therefore a profoundly reassuring image of God's modus operandum in the loving of the world.
Next June this book is being published. I don't usually pre-order 9 months in advance. Few books that interest me sell out within the first few weeks, or years.
But here's an interesting thing. In 1977 I bought Howard Marshall's commentary on Luke, the first volume in the series New International Commentary on the Greek New Testament (NICGNT). One of the ones I most want to get my hands on is still not written: Richard Bauckham on the Gospel of John being one of them. That book has been scheduled for 35 years, and I would really, really, like to read it before I die!
There are, for the commentary lover, desiderata that we dream about. I still remember going into the tiny St Paul's Bookshop when it was at the top of Buchanan Street in the early 1970's. It was staffed by several warmly welcoming and knowledgeable Catholic nuns, who knew a thing or two about reading the Bible seriously.
Now I worked for a couple of years in a brickwork in Carluke, Lanarkshire, while earning the money to get to University. I was a brick setter – which means I placed the bricks in the kilns, stacked neatly in rows of five with a finger breadth between them and built in pillars 10 high, before building a wall across them to the ceiling. You lifted 28 a minute, and each weighed around 4 kilos (actually just over 7lbs). Forget any idea of doing weights – this was a gym you got paid for working in, and it was warm too – so you only worked 30 minutes on, and 20 m inutes off.
Back to the bookshop. I took a book off the bookshelf that was just about exactly the palm spread of an uncooked brick! Remember I know this – Every half hour in the kiln I lifted and stacked hundreds of them. It was of course a fraction of the weight of a clay brick, but its dimensions were uncannily similar. And so, for £6, I bought volume one of Raymond Brown's commentary on John's Gospel. In 1972, £6 would buy you 19 gallons of petrol – I'll leave you to do the maths of 86 litres times the current cost of petrol.
I came back a month or two later for volume 2. And those two volumes, published by Geoffrey Chapman before Doubleday, and now Yale took over the series, remain lifetime companions in the study of John. I later bought Brown's volume on the Johannine Epistles. It's just as thick, magisterial and impressive, but by then I had lived with Brown on John's Gospel long enough to appreciate the spiritual investment of buying the right commentary, at the right time.
So this post is by way of a plea, a prayer even. Richard Bauckham on John, Tom Wright on Philippians, Walter Brueggemann on Psalms – These three things Dear Lord I pray!
The Mayfield Brockworks closed at the end of 2011. Look here and you can see a slide show of the whole process and the remains of the Works, including the interior of the kilns. I worked there from 1970 to 72, night shift, from 7.00 pm to 7.30 am Monday to Thursday, and Friday 1.00pm to 5.00pm, and Saturday 7am – 12 noon!
Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention
I did what I had to do and saw it through without exemption
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way
Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew
When I bit off more than I could chew
But through it all, when there was doubt
I ate it up and spit it out
I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way
I've loved, I've laughed and cried
I've had my fill, my share of losing
And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing
To think I did all that
And may I say, not in a shy way,
"Oh, no, oh, no, not me, I did it my way"
For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!
Yes, it was my way
As well as the hermeneutic of love, on which I have previously written once or twice, I am equally fascinated by the imperative of peace. I tend to think of the term "imperative" as strong and forceful, energetically purposeful, persistently assertive, likely to override other legitimate and alternative viewpoints. Used with certain other words it can be less than peaceful – for example to pursue a "territorial imperative", or legislate an "economic imperative", or promote a "political imperative", even, and perhaps especially those actions deemed to be imperative in the interests of that many headed originator of monsters, "security".
But I'm not prepared to yield a word that is strong and forceful, energetically purposeful and persistently assertive. And while it would be nonsense to override other alternative viewpoints in the name of peace, that doesn't mean I'm prepared to surrender the moral imperative of peace-building, peace-making, peace-seeking, peace-arguing, even if it means costly peace-paying and patient peace- praying.
All of this comes out of spending time on the new tapestry on the word Shalom. My guide and mentor on things eirenic and pacific is Walter Brueggemann. Few biblical scholars have such a prohpetic gift of debunking, demythologising, deconstructing and de-clawing the ferocity of language used to justify economic, military and religious aggression. His wee book Living Toward a Vision is now in its third reading on my desk. Much of his later writing is in the same hopefully defiant tone of Kingdom critique of the powers that be.
Alongside that early manifesto on Shalom, is his commentary on the Psalms a decade later with its hallmark analysis of faith, God and disrupted human experience encountering disruptive grace – orientation, disorientation, re-orientation. And that re-orientation after fear, fire, anxiety, tragedy, depression, conflict and many another sideswipe from life, is another, and life renewing form of peace, shalom.
Having spent some time forming and shaping words for love, wisdom and grace, it seems a providential but predictable step to bringing those three within a more practical and inclusive worldview – shalom as that which we seek for ourselves by seeking it for others; peace as both gift and goal; the common good a life aspiration because it is an essential for human life if we and our planet are to flourish; indefatigable goodwill, which means the persistent presentation of kindness, embodied expression of mercy, a continuing in the community of the love of God in Christ which is rooted in the Eternal Community of Love which is the Triune God.
The God of hope, the God of peace,
the God of grace, the God of wisdom,
whom we know as the God who is love,
fill us with all hope in believing,that peace is possible
because made possible in Christ,
and that peace-making is an imperative for ministers of reconciliation,
and that the Prince of Peace has defeated the Prince of the Power of the Air,
and that the Lamb in the midst of the throne
subverts all other pretenders who clamber on to thrones of their own making,
and God's unmaking.
In the name of the Prince of Peace.
The Beauty of Dreich
Dreich Scottish
mornings:
Drizzled
moistures coalesce,
Liquid crystal light.
"Dreich" – dull, wet, cold, lacking colour and vitality, an undertow of melancholy.
But in the right place, at the right time, unexpected beauty is glimpsed, and a jewel glints in the one ray of sunshine.