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I've spent the last couple of months working on a tapestry in which three Greek words – sophia, agape and charis – are woven into a pattern of vivid contrasting colours. In recent years I've been developing a form of contemplative action while doing tapestry. I mainly work in stranded cotton and with a canvas gage of 22 to 28 per inch. 

To spend hours stitching a word like Agape and blending colours of red and purple around it is very different from tracing the use of agape in the New Testament, and exploring the semantic domain and extra canonical occurences which give contextual texture. That too is a contemplative and prayerful study – "bury your head in a lexicon and raise it in the presence of God" – as the great Gospels scholar B H Streeter once urged his students.

But to study a word by forming it in stitches has its own value as contemplative activity, prayerful action, meditative reflection on the inner meaning and outer beauty of a word. Image and colour, shape and form, the creative intention of the artist, bring a different kind of attentiveness no less imaginative, disciplined and valid as an attentive listening and gazing into the reality to which the word points – Agape, Love.

The vivid and dark tone, the contrast and complement of colour, with shades merging or clashing, and shapes emerging and forming rather than fixed and formal, creates a visual exegesis of what this word means, at least to the artist. Stitching a tapestry involves combining thousands of small repetitive acts of precise purpose, each completed with careful attention to what surrounds it, yet each stitch an essential word composed into the evolving story. Every stitch demands the practised co-ordination of hand and eye, the quiet and patient discipline that enables a needlepoint to find the right square, coming back through unsighted, to complete the stitch, and with a choice of 46,080 on a 10 by 8, 24 per inch canvas.

I found myself the other morning doing 20 minutes stitching, while listening to Classic FM, Mozart's Clarinet Concerto slow movement, with a mug of half drunk tea, and paying particular attention to the choice of colours for the surrounding border. Was it the music that took my mind to the First Letter of John, and agape as the test of Christian life, because the agape of God is as James Denney said, "the last reality of the universe"? Maybe so – I have a friend who insists that Mozart composed the music scores for heaven, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

Or was it the colours themselves – blue for wisdom, red for love, green for grace – and golden yellows as the backgound, colours and ideas which invite the kind of reverie in which memorised text, significant experiences, and vivid visuals coalesce in the hermeneutics of love and longing which I for one, dare to call prayer?

 

The Typepad Help Team are working on the problem  of the sidebar feature where I usually list the Current Reading items. I'm being patient with them, because they are trying to fix a glitch and it is proving to be an obstinate glitch, and because they are courteous, quick to respond and work hard!

So just to keep the rolling catalogue up to date, here's some of the books I've recently read or am currently reading:

When I was a Child I Read Books, by Marilynne Robinson. This has been reviewed with enthusiasm elsewhere. My enthusiasm is for some of the essays, but some of them seem less urgent and relevant. But with Robinson that means the least appealing are very good, the good ones are brilliant, and two in particular are stand out pieces of Christian theological writing. Austerity and Ideology is as sharp a critique of penalising the poor by political fiat as you will read; and Wondrous Love is an equally astringent critique of the poor stewardship of Christians entrusted with a Gospel of love but preferring a Gospel much more self-centred.

The Mangan Inheritance, Brian Moore, is a novel I have re-read twenty years after the first read. I didn't enjoy it as much second time round. A washed up American returning to Ireland to try to trace the connection between himself and Mangan a famous and notoriously debauched poet. It may be the changed world of 20 years on, maybe I've become more morally sensitised, but the plot left me feeling the way I do when I watch a TV programme and find myself viewing something unpleasant I wish I'd been warned about beforehand.

Why Go To Church by Timothy Radcliffe is a very good book. I read it over a few weeks, a bit at a time. Sensible, spiritually alert, learned without showing off, pastorally realistic, he is one of the best writers of popular theology around – and by the way popular doesn'r mean dumbed down. After scathing preachers who think they are the most important part of the sermon, this:"Our words should gather in and heal. They belong to our discovery of the mystery of God's will to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Christ. Preaching makes peace." Oh yes!

Edith Stein. The Essential Writings, Ed. John Sullivan. This is in the series Modern Spiritual Masters – the irony of that gender exclusive name for the series is the more obvious, but I suppose Modern Spiritual Mistresses wouldn't be much of an improvement. Maybe Modern Spiritual Thinkers? Anyhow. I've only recently paid attention to the writing of Edith Stein (because of a connection with A J Heschel in a recently published book). Someone who rubbed shoulders with leading Catholic and Jewish intellectuals became herself a philosophical theologian of a contemplative disposition whose practical Christian service earthed deepest thought in daily realities. I like her.

Frederick Dale Bruner, The Gospel of John. This is the most remarkable commentary! I knew it w3ould be for I've used his two volume Matthew commentary for years. This would justify a year in the company of John's Gospel, stimulated by a commentary that is neither technical nor popular, which engages in historico- critical exegesis but pays attention to the reception of the Gospel and the history of interpretation. And Bruner loves this text – Augustine, Aquinas, Chrysostom, Luther, Calvin, Bengel, Matthew Henry and other classics are brought into conversation with the dozen or so best commentaries of the last hundred years. I don't use the word often, indeed I don't like the way it overstates everything – but in this case I use it advisedly – Bruner's work is awesome!

This is one of the loveliest stories I've read for a long time:

When one of our brethren, Osmund Lewry, was dying, the whole community squeezed into his small room, on cupboards and under the desk, to celebrate the Easter Eucharist. After Communion, we sang the Regina Caeli, and then I went to get champagne from the fridge, so that we could drink to the Resurrection. I commented on how beautifully the the brethren had sung and Osmund replied that really, if his timing had been better, he would have died while it was being sung, but he had to hang on for the champagne!

Tomorrow the Son of Man will walk in the garden

Through drifts of apple blossom.

(Why Go to Church, Timothy Radcliffe, page 126)

Dandelion Haiku

Precise profusion

of seed-bearing parachutes:

dandelion clocks!

Autumn Fields

 

Sunshine on harvest:

throughout winter, cows
enjoy

straw coloured swiss
rolls.

For Von Balthasar, "Beauty is love made visible".

Calvin spoke of the created order as "The theatre of God's glory."

Aquinas, "Art is the promise of happiness, and the splendour of truth."

This summer, sometimes unintentionally, or as experiments that surprisingly worked, I have taken photos which have their own persuasiveness in the argument about whether there is a natural theology, a theology of nature in which the beauty and goodness and truth of God is glimpsed. Appreciation and interpretation of images that move us will always be inescapably subjective. Not all will see or agree with or even understand what it is that moves, and attracts, and opens us up to that which is beyond mere conceptualisation but which invades our complacency with an unexpected excitement, with moments of recognition that can change the way we see the world, if we pay attention to them. For in them is the promise of happiness and the splendour of the truth that lies at the heart of all that is.

One can never wrestle enough with God

if one does so out of a pure regard for the truth.

Christ likes us to prefer truth to him

because, before being Christ, he is truth.

If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth,

one will not go far before falling into his arms.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God, (Fontana) page 69.

It's the conference season and the past few days have been in Manchester and Malvern – the first with UK Baptist theological educators, the second with Regent's Pentecostal College as External Examiner. So a week to think about what theological education is, or should be all about.

Theological education outside the public funded universities is a loss leader for the church. The training of the mind to plunge deep pillars into the bedrock of Christian theology is a necessary way of loving God with our minds, and an essential preparation for a life of spiritual care, a foundation for responsible and responsive pastoral guidance, a commitment to personal growth in the impossible task of knowing the love of God that passes knowledge, and an inner disposition of being content to acknowledge both the limits and the possibilities of a heart that thinks passionately and a mind that feels deeply, and a life open to the truth of God that always comes to us as risk and opportunity.

Theological education like that is unaffordable, if what we mean is it pays its way in hard cash. The time and the investment of resources, by student and College, makes the deal a non-starter if what we are looking for is break even, let alone profit. So it becomes a question not of cost but of value. The things we value we pay for – the gain is in the benefit we purchase at a cost we think "is worth it". Which raises important questions for us a theological educators, and pushes questions just as urgently for our churches. We are all experiencing the destabilising pressures of a culture in which change, development, progress, growth, celebrity, security and wealth creation and possesion collide with the realities of recession, climate change, political and religious extremism, the reconfiguration of expectations based on a now defunct financial market, and the consequent slow evaporation of hope as previously planned futures look increasingly uncertain.

Who will be the community theologians in our churches? I don't mean the minister, pastor, ordained leader. Where are our thinkers, those of faithful imagination and thoughtful presence, informed and humble in their wisdom, sharpened and poised in critique and creative encouragement, of church and culture, and rooted in the permanent sub-stratum of the Gospel of Jesus. I mean how is the church responding to the need for minds trained in loving God, those called to a discipleship of the intellect, spiritually alert, theologically astute, pastorally agile?

How do you put a price on the presence in our churches of people who learn and teach, who share and give the gift of thoughful prayer and prayerful thought? Not all theological education is about forming people for ordained ministry. Nowadays many of our students are those who are seeking precisely this deeper rootedness in the Faith, working their way to a place where they know where they stand, and why. But not as minds closed – rather as minds that are open to the new things God is always doing. Horizon scanning was one of the gifts of the Hebrew prophets before it became organisational management speak. 

Theological education is one of the Church's most important missional resources. To dialogue with the culture in which we are embedded, requires a clear grasp of our own faith, a living active commitment to the truth of God in Christ, and a humble but critical listening to what's going on around and amongst and within us as we live out the life of the the Body of Christ – the Light of the World.

To spend a day or two thinking about all of that – it's not time wasted, it's time invested. Likewise for those who sense God's call to come to College and study theology. Maybe we have to honestly recognise that God calls people to study in the school,of Christ – and of course it doesn't stop there. Study begins with information, then formation, and then transformation as good thinking and good practices are disseminated in the community of Christ.

The Caravaggio of the Emmaus Supper shows what happens when people walk the journey with Jesus, learn deeply, and discover life changing truth that they have to go and share with the world. .

Prayer – Seek ye
first the Kingdom of God

 

 

 

Lord,
the life we live is too full;

Too
full of expectations, our own and other people’s

Too
full of demands, the ones we make and the one’s we meet

Too
full of responsibilities, to others, and for others

We get
used to being reviewed and appraised, developed and trained

As if
our value was indexed to how well we function

 

Lord
help us to be still in your presence

Just
to stop, to be, and to like who we are.

Teach
us to cherish silence,

to
distinguish between loneliness and solitude

to be
at ease with the life you have given

and
with you the Giver of Life.

Give
us the sense to seek first your Kingdom :   
 

 

*********************

 

Lord
you have made us human, our bodies instruments of life and sense

We are
sentient, sensitive, sensory – but our life of sense is overloaded

Too
full of loud noise and fast movement.

Instant,
efficient, fast, – the core requirements of a consumer culture.

Now,
immediately, no waiting, – we can have what we want, –

Because
credit cards collapse time, but credit too collapses..

Our
eyes too full of things to touch, and purchase, and possess

As if
life could ever consist in the abundance of things.

Even
taste and smell have become addictive

As our
society eats its way to un-wellness;

So now
the delicious and the aromatic, have become dangerous and tempting,

And
food a threatened epidemic rather than a daily blessing.

 

Lord
you are the one who heals and nourishes the hungry soul,

Who
cures our addiction to self, to things;

Teach
us again what it is we live by.

Remind
us that having you we need no more,

and
lacking you nothing else matters much.   

 

**********************

Lord,
our lives are full, busy, hyper-active,

Driven
by our purposes rather than lived to yours,

And so
we have become self-important, self-propelled,

The
indispensable player in our own lives.

 

Lord,
bring us to our senses,

And to
a proper sense of life’s proportion, balance, intention.

Our
chief end is to glorify you, and to enjoy you forever.

Grant
us the joy that comes from trusting in you.

Give
us wisdom to ask, patience to seek, and joy in the finding

Of you
love in Jesus Christ your Son.