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This week is the anniversary of my Ordination to Christian ministry. Every year that's a special date for me, and I find ways of marking it as another milestone on my own Emmaus Road.

I have a list of the books I've bought to mark this date, 36 of them now. You know you're getting on when some of the early ones show their years- not just the ageing of the book and the signs of reading, and in some cases re-reading. But the contents were for a different time, the analysis emerging from a previous cultural cusp, and revisiting some of them the realisation that this isn't just where we are now. But most of them are not so timebound, and remain valuable teachers and conversation partners.

I'll never part with J V Taylor's The Go-Between God, one of the most refreshing books on the creative work of the Holy Spirit in the world, the church and the Christian's personal life.

My hardback edition of the two volumes of The Victorian Church by Owen Chadwick are thick and solid, in contrast to the writer whose prose is lightly erudite and seductive in the way he makes Church History a joy to read.

Belden Lan'es The Solace of Fierce Landscsapes, is a book about the experience of the desert as the place where God is encountered in the experience of absence, loss and longing, and it is that rare thing – a book about loving God for God's sake, and hanging on in trust when all that keeps us going is the grace of the God who is there, and the only evidence of God's presence is the being held.

Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology is a ridiculously provocative book, and apart from a couple of other things I've read on the Old Testament the most stimulating, annoying and persuasive thing around. I've read Brueggemann throughout my ministry, and he is that most helpful of friends – the ones who don't go in for bland niceness, but like a good argument about what's most important.

And David Bosch's Tranforming Mission remains, depsite so much work done and change experienced in the whole wide world, a defining classic of how a theology of mission should be constructed, from the biblical, theological and cultural resources of the church in the world.

Which brings me to Frederick Dale Bruner's commentary on the Gospel of John. My love for this gospel was instilled by a verse by verse Greek exegesis in College, over two years. I don't need another commentary on John given the embarrassment of riches in my own and other libraries. Except Bruner is a different kind of commentator, and his two volumes on Matthew published in the 1970's were early examples of a commentary that takes seriously the tradition of exegesis. So in this commentary several classic treatments from  Augustine to Westcott, by way of Aquinas, Calvin and Godet, are treated as respected voices, alongside the contemporary approaches to exegesis. Bruner's interest is to hear the text, and hear it through the voices of those who have studied it and lived it. It is a commentary for the church before the academy; but it is an academic commentary that takes seriously the text, the Christian intellect and a Church rooted in a faith that calls for our deepest thought baptised in prayer.

From now to Advent I'll let Bruner convene the round the table discussion on John, and hope to learn more about what it means to be ordained to the service of Christ in the Church – maybe by then I'll have reached that story about the basin and the twoel.

The fruit of the Spirit is love

 

Joy is love’s consciousness

 

Peace is love’s confidence

 

Long–temperedness is love’s habit

 

Kindness is love’s activity

 

Goodness is love’s quality

 

Faithfulness is love’s quantity

 

Meekness is love’s tone

 

Temperance is love’s victory

 

The fruit of the Spirit is love.

The words were originally part of a sermon by G Campbell Morgan, preached at Westminster Chapel in the 1930's. Campbell Morgan was one of the most attractive classic evangelical biblical expositors. His sermons on 1 Corinthians 13 are spiritual reading that is both soul searching and psychologically astute. Not often is such literacy, rhetoric and spirituality fused into biblical reflection and made accessible through a demonstrably holy personality.

His commentary on Hosea is still one of the few that explores the full range of emotions in God that makes Hosea 11 amongst the most theologically subversive chapters for those who want a God predictably sovereign or indulgently loving – Holy Love is agony, but agony that persists in mercy.

The photo was taken on a walk beside a burn – (from Scots Gaelic for a watercourse that feeds larger rivers). 

Isaianic Haiku

Walk the ways of God –
the politics of shalom
make peace the new norm.
…………………………………………..

Swords into ploughshares –
weapons for food production,
not mass destruction.
………………………………

Double negative,
"We won't study war no more".
Future positive!

 

We do not live for ourselves alone

and it is only when we are fully convinced of this fact

that we begin to love ourselves properly,

and thus also love others.

What do I mean by loving ourselves properly?

I mean, first of all,

desiring to live,

accepting life as a very great gift

and a very great good,

not because of what it gives us,

but because of what it enables us to give to others.

Thomas Merton, The New Man, page xx.

Merton was one of the great affirmers of life. He was a living paradox, a gregarious solitary, a silent voice that wouldn't shut up, an ascetic who sought to live to the full, a monk who fell in love, and, from his Journals, a Christian who understood the inner conflicts, tensions, and anguishes of Romans 7, spilling over in his own experience into the liberty, joy and and fulfilments of life in the Spirit as in Romans 8.

Professor Larry Hurtado (New College Edinburgh) has several times lectured on the pervasive hermeneutic of love throughout the New Testament, and observed the lack of serious engagement with the theology and practice of love as a faith defining critierion in the life of each Christian community. Worship and liturgy, discipleship and doxology, sexual ethics and ecclesial politics, communal care and personal relationships, theological reflection and moral integrity, are each drawn into the orbit of the New Testament imperative of agape, the redemptive goodwill of God.

If we're honest, there's a clanging dissonance in the theory and the practice of agape as the primary Christian disposition, in much of the communal and personal practices of contemporary Christian spirituality. I find this both theologically intriguing and a rather glaring clue as to what the Church is for and its mandate to embody the good news of the Kingdom of God. So without knowing where this is going, for a few months towards Advent I'll post occasionally on the Hermeneutic and Imperative of Love. Not a chain of harangues nor a catena of moralising winges - both of these are in reality demoralising!

More a sowing of seeds of thought, a series of small perpsectival studies as experiments in what love might look like in practice, pieces of a jigsaw which may in the end have some pieces missing, but enough to make it worth looking for the lost pieces! 

However. Not to get too philosophically carried away. The photos above and below depict a different perspectival study, entitled 'Smudgy Love'. The two favoured places are the cushion and the cardboard box.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday I went to the Aberdeen University Library because I was on holiday. I didn't take my camera so this is the photo I took last year when I did the same. If holidays are about relaxing, finding space, being intrigued, discovering new things, having fun, ignoring the watch, then some hours in a book depository does it for me, every time.

No it's not the same as being where it's sunny and warm, and where new cultural experiences, sights and sounds are all around, where food is different and reliably good, and where there is enough distance to feel the ties that bind slacken enough to give freedom from work, relaxing of usual circumstance and some reduction of the pressures of what we misleadingly call "life". 

But then again – what worlds there are in a library; what new vistas to be opened up standing surrounded by thousands of books and free to open any one of them. It's a place of reflective silence, of respected space, of generous extravagance and freedom of movement, of deliberately created opportunity to think, and feel, and wonder. You can sit and read in the sun – as I did yesterday from Floor 6 looking out over the North Sea.

It so happened I was looking for paintings and sculpture – pictures thereof. So I was in early Northern Renaisance Netherlands, then Southern Renaissance Venice, then 19th Century Arles in France, before a flying visit to Victorian England. With a visit to Amsterdam looming I wanted to check on what I absolutely must see in the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. But I got waylaid at the end by the Pre-Raphaelite section as well.

I've had several holidays in this same place, this green glass intellectual travel agency where the only limit on destination is imagination, thought and curiosity. Poetry, theology, philosophy, and art tend to my usual intellectual resorts, but with unscheduled trips to other, stranger subject areas. I'll be back, and long before next year….

 

Today we followed the sun up to the Moray coast, and spent the afternoon in Banff. By now we are all but acclimatised to wet, cold, mist and pretending life's happiness and contentment doesn't depend entirely on the weather. So this photo captures evidence to the contrary – happy folk on a North Scottish beach!

 

Walking along the costal trail the sun came and went, and the sky changed like the backdrops of a theatre show, quietly and stealthily shifting scene without giving the show away. Then I looked out at the sea and saw this, like a split photo in which one side has had the colour faded for effect. The mackerel sky and the blue sky reflected on the water. It was a magic moment.

And from the macro-picture to the micro-picture - a botanical juxtaposition.

 

 On top of all this, a prolonged sighting of a seal bottling, suspending itself with its head and neck out the water like a curious tourist wondering where the best fish supper is to be had. And the school of dolphins tailing and piloting the Lifeboat out doing its routine training and servicing, graceful movement and the uncanny sense that they were the ones playing along with those limited intelligence creatures who need a boat to cope with water!

 

Yesterday's surprise was an accident of providence that forunately I was lucky enough to experience due to a remarkable coincidence of cirucmstances intersecting by pure chance! I was preaching in Fife despite being on holiday because I promised a year ago and I like the folk.It meant passing through St Andrews. And there was an exhibition of paintings by Samuel Peploe the Scottish Colourist artist. So on the way home we stopped to go see.

In one afternoon I saw, enjoyed and digested two masterpieces. The first was a pizza margherita with black olives in Little Italy in St Andrews. One of the best pizzas I've ever had, with iced lemon water and time to savour. Each wedge able to be held and enjoyed without that disappointing wilt towards sogginess in the centre that is often the experience of the dedicated pizza connoisseur.

Then there was Peploe's painting, The Blue and White Teapot. Don't ask me why I think this is a beautiful painting because analysis usually descends into explanation and diminishment. Aesthetic enjoyment, spiritual insight, emotional contentment, paying attention with both sides of the brain – all of these – but for me it's that inexplicable  power to command attention, that gently persistent summons to the desultory wandering Sunday afternoon painting spotter, "Stop! Look! See!.

Like spending time with words and text in Lectio Divina, you are dutifully reading, and to be honest, often skimming, and then the voice is heard, the text speaks, and you listen, pay attention, or rather – give attention. Because I'm more and more convinced that in front of great art what is required of us is the willingness to give ourselves to beauty, goodness and truth. That's why I appreciate seats in an art gallery. Time to inhabit space not our own, intentional slow-down against the inner impetus to keep moving, permission to sit in front of a subject so Other that we ourselves are called into question. 

God looked on all God created, and is creating, and saw that it was good. Strong echoes of that inward approval and appreciation are felt when we encounter that which addresses us, catches us unawares. I dare say that is the work of the Holy Spirit, leading us into truth, opening us up,to goodness, and silencing our nervous chatter as we encounter the Beautiful. And just in case we get too carried away by aesthetics narrowly conceived, there is the beauty of a perfectly made pizza! No photo of the pizza – by the time I thought of it it was gone! 

Can't think of a better poem for a holiday from home on Deeside and amongst the loveliest scenery in Scotland. I know Edna St Vincent de Millay isn't a Scottish poet – but what she sees and feels looking at this beautiful world through eyes that have learned contentment, is not geographically specific – it's the response of human createdness to the joy of being created and having a place in God's creation.

Afternoon on a Hill I will be the gladdest thing   Under the sun! I will touch a hundred flowers   And not pick one. I will look at cliffs and clouds   With quiet eyes, Watch the wind bow down the grass,   And the grass rise. And when lights begin to show   Up from the town, I will mark which must be mine,   And then start down!