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Last week we had a party. A Graduation party. Five of our students came to the end of their time on College and move on the next stage of their life journey. They have been with us for four years, and brought into the College the gift of themselves, entrusting to us the wealth and wonder of who they are.

To choose a place to study and commit to being there is an act of remarkable trust, and it requires singlemindedness, considerable cost of money and time, and an underlying confidence in the capacity of education to be informative, formative and transformative. By education we learn stuff, the stuff we learn changes us, and equips us to change the world for the better.

We try in the Scottish Baptist College to create a Collegiate community, where each student is allowed to be who they are, and encouraged to be more and more who they have it in them to be. Yes there are academic challenges and intellectual work to be done; and yes there are discoveries about ourselves, disconcerting as well as reassuring. But beyond, yet within personal development, is the unsettling but exciting sense that God is calling us to service, and saying yes to that call takes us into new and life changing territory.

It pushes us to those places where we discover the disciplines and desires of knowing God, studying theology, learning to love others and ourselves, and as ourselves.

It provokes us to reflect on who we are and what we are for, and doing this with the Bible open, in common room, library, lecture room and coffee shop.

It pushes and shoves us around by requiring that we read hard books, discuss big ideas frankly but respectfully, out of our convictions but with a mind and heart open to new truth.

It converts our suspicions into growing confidence, so that we are prepared to ask questions not as expressions of doubt or adversarial interrogation, but as ploughshares that till the soil of our minds.

It allows us, in trusted company, to pray and laugh, to be sad and pensive, to be patient and wanting to understand, as well as being impatient and desperate to be heard.

And above all it gives us safe space to explore together what it means to follow faithfully after Christ, for us, here, now.

And to find in these people, precisely these people, students and staff, a school of Christ, where learning and teaching is a sharing of truth from heart and mind, where we are supported, affirmed and accompanied.

And recognising and accepting that to do all this is to take huge risks, to be outrageously vulnerable, to make of ourselves a gift to God and to each other, because without such gestures of trust, the Church and its mission have little future.

Because risk and trust, cost and gift, need and grace, weakness and strength, humility and confidence, learning and knowing, perplexity and understanding, fear and faith, hurt and forgiveness, question and answer, I and Thou,  – these and many other tensions within and between us and God, and between ourselves and others, make up the raw material out of which God forms and shapes us towards that particular and precise obedience which God asks of us, and no other.

All these students come to the end of a process which has changed forever their way of seeing themselves, others, the world, and God, who transcends our questions, defeats our cleverness, sanctifies our study, ignites our hearts and instils what one of the greatest books written on the spiritual life describes as "Love of Learning and the Desire for God."

Looking for something else I came across this:

The doctrine of the Trinity reminds us that though the capacity to love may not be [fully realisable] in human nature as we have it, it is the essence of God's nature. What is Christianity, if it is not the message that God has entered into the history of the world for the purpose of restoring the image, of re-making our human nature after the pattern of the divine, of changing us beyond our capacity to change ourselves?

Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity, (London: Nisbet, 1943), pp. 186-7.

I have taken the considerable liberty of qualifying Hodgson's original text as indicated in square brackets. For myself I have no doubt whatsoever that the capacity to love exists, albeit imperfectly, incompletely and, in important areas, frustrated and unfulfilled. But love we do, and love we give and receive, and the love of one human person for another, and for the humanity of others in its various expressions of community, is a rather definitive quality in those who are imago dei, and God is love.

The restoring of the image is of a spoilt masterpiece not a blank or erased canvas. Athanasius knew that. But changing us beyond our capacity to change ourselves? Oh yes, that's what we mean by grace that redeems, transforms, transfigures, renews and restores. In that sense we are damaged masterpieces, being conformed to the image of Christ in his humanity, and being transformed by the renewing of our minds so that we discern the m ind of Christ.

One more poignant thought – my copy of Hodgson used to belong to Dr David Wright, lately of New College Edinburgh, and one of Scotland's galaxy of scholars during the second half of the 20th Century. Hodgson is a forgotten theologian – but interestingly this morning, reading a book on Christendom by Aidan Nicholls I came across his name, quoted with approval and as a substantial voice in the debate about how the essence of the Christian Gospel is articulated in both poetry and philosophy.

 A birthday is always to be celebrated. Today would have been my mother's birthday. I'm not announcing this as an expression of sadness, but as a day of thankfulness.

The obvious self-interested gratitude of a son to the one who gave him life – but  gratitude also that in my mother I was given a remarkable gift.

In a culture that has grown used to benchmarks as standards of quality, she benchmarked several human qualities that I now value and try with varying degrees of success or frustration to live towards.

Generosity that could be reckless but never calculating.

A capacity for work that lived up to one of her own greatest compliments -'not a lazy bone in her body'!

Laughter that revealed a sense of humour always sharp, but never cutting.

Courage to bear and forbear an illness that often undermined her deepest sense of self.

Compassion for others that was neither ashamed of tears nor afraid of the cost of helping.

A love for animals that was Schweitzer-like in its reverence for life.

An instinct for the circumstances of others that made her alert to those small, random acts of kindness we all like to have happen to us.

My mother also had her faults – I recognise some of them in me. But today I simply celebrate a life to which I owe my own, and incalculably more besides.

Requiescat in pace.

"Our task is not suddenly to burst out into the dazzle of unadulterated truth

but laboriously to reshape an accurate and honest language

that will permit communication between people on all social levels,

instead of multiplying a Babel of esoteric and technical tongues

which isolate people in their specialities."  Thomas Merton, Literary Essays, P. 272.

Whatever else our celebrity intoxicated, sound – byte obsessed, advertising dependent, txt diminished language could do with, it could do with laborious reshaping towards accuracy and honesty. Perhaps one aspect of Christian witness would be to live for a day or two in the light of Jesus' warning that every word we speak will have to be accounted for. And the criteria will not be what our language sells, but what it heals; not what it subverts, but what it builds; not how clever but how wise, and not how manipulative but how restorative.

And that's as true of our preaching and teaching theology, as it is of any other sphere, from markets to banks, from Parliament to Church, from family to friends. A recession of truthfulness in speech is just as damaging to the fabric of society as an economic downward spiral.

Just flicked  and found the Yesterday channel and was transported to 1965 when I was young, not too innocent and loved the music!

The Seekers, Carnival is Over, (EVeryone was in love with Judy Durham) Sonny and Cher, I Got You Babe, Dave Dee, Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch, Hold Tight, (to which I used to dance with unbelievable energy) The Byrds, All I Really Want To Do, (I used to wear the tall white polo necks too!)

I remember watching each of those performances on TOTP without realising we were on the cusp of a cultural revolution. There are chords and bars of those songs that simply erase 47 years and make the record play again 🙂 Mhmm.

Rowan Williams is too often dismissed as an otherworldly academic, or an amateurish ecclesiastical politician , or an intellectual mystical theologian. I guess he comes over as each of these on occasion. But they are caricatures – there is substance, spiritual, moral and intellectual in this man. And I can well understand the Government of any day trying to maintain those caricatures, because time and again Rowan Williams has spoken truth to power. And he understands power.

So his comments on the big society idea promoted by David Cameron are likely to annoy and irritate, Good. That's what prophets do – they point out the Emperor's nakedness, and describe expedient moralising as 'aspirational waffle'. And then he goes on –

"And if the big society is anything better than a slogan looking increasingly threadbare as we look at our society reeling under the impact of public spending cuts, then discussion on this subject has got to take on board some of those issues about what it is to be a citizen and where it is that we most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity."

The same day it's leaked that the Prime Minister is consdiering axing housing benefit for under 25's as a further corrective of what he and his Government call the welfare culture. Just how is that fixed by destabilising the provision for young people who are already at the hard end of the employment  and opportunity spectrum of our economy. It isn't the Archbishop who lives on a different planet, or who is out of touchwith the realities of modern life.

In terms of where we 'most deeply and helpfully acquire the resources of civic identity and dignity', I'd be more hopeful of the future if the Government supported and resourced such places, as schools, college and universities to do precisely that. Education for employability is one element of human formation – but only one, and the shaping of character, instilling of virtue, opening of minds in generous critical engagement, creating and sustaining self-confidence alongside respect for others, encouraging the celebration of difference and the importance of welcome. Where does all that happen, and whose responsibility, if not the Government's, to create a context where such human fruitfulness flourishes?

Last week I posted some thoughts on Miroslav Volf's work on reconciliation, peacemaking and questions of human identity and otherness. I omitted to give the quotation from Volf, incorporating his encounter with Jurgen Moltmann. Here it is.

" After I finished my lecture Professor Jurgen Moltmann stood up and asked one of his typical questions, both concrete and penetrating: "But can you embrace a cetnik" It was the winter of 1993. For months now the notorious Serbian fighters called cetnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches and destroying cities. I had just argued that we ought to embrace our enemies as God has embraced us in Christ. Can I embrace a cetnik – the ultimate other, so to speak, the evil other? What would justify the embrace? Where would I draw the strength for it? What would it do to my identity as a human being and as a Croat? It took me a while to answer, though I immediately knew what I wanted to say. "No, I cannot – but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to".

That is one of the most courageous and honest theologically anguished exchanges I know in theological literature. Moltmann's own theology has been hammered out for decades, using the raw material of his own experiences in war and imprisonment, supplemented by deep reflection on the nature of hope, the meaning of the cross and the mystery of the Triune God. Volf's theology is equally born of profound suffering, experienced and witnessed, and passed through the lens of Christian theology and discipleship. For both men, what is believed has to be able to be lived, faith issues in action congruent with what is believed, convictions about God have decisive purchase on human behaviour, relationships and community.

It is one of the great ironies of Christian history and contemporary Christian existence that a faith tradition which proclaims a Gospel of reconciliation, is embodied in communities and alternative traditions characterised by grievance, suspicion, unhealed fractures and unresolved differences. It is difficult to maintain credibility when the forgiven resist the call to forgive, and when the reconciled build walls of self justification, and construct a rationale for defining identity over and against "the other". Yet it was ever thus, and it may be that the Gospel of Reconciliation entrusted to the church, and the ministry of reconciliation entrusted to those who seek to follow faithfully after Christ, together provide for all Christians an obvious mission imperative in a fractured world, divided by mutually hostile ideologies; a world in which peacemaking, community building, forgiveness and active compassion are to be given embodied presence through the witness of communities of reconciliation, from which attitudes and actions of willed vulnerability and hopeful courage flow outwards offering a radical alternative utterly earthed in the truth of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

All of which is idealistic – as most far reaching visions of human flourishing tend to be in their origins. The issue is whether these ideals find embodiment, commitment and the willed practices of a community resourced by the grace, mercy and peace of God who, like these his children, hungers and thirsts for righteousness.

Miroslav Volf is a theologian whose work has built into an impressive corpus of reflection on the nature of the church and its mission. He has consitently explored the relation between Trinitarian theology and the life of the Church, and the theology and practices of forgiveness, reconciliation, peace and graced living with which the followers of Jesus Christ are called to address the disturbingly compelling realities of human conflict, historic hatreds and the resort to violence.

Reflecting on the nature of forgiveness and reconciliation, and the consequent practices of peacemaking, conciliation and openness to the other, Volf offers at times a profound and demanding challenge to the contemporary Christian and the contemporary Church, whatever the Christian tradition. His  Exclusion and Embrace is a seminal work whose relevance and argument go beyond any narrow theological concerns. It grew out of his experience of violence fuelled by historic hatred, depersonalising mythology and these expressed in barbaric behavious in the Balkans in the 1990's.

It is a hard book to read – rigorous and determined theological reflection on the darkest and hardest human experiences, arguing towards a conclusion that those who follow Jesus ought to be able to forgive. But recognising that the human reality, emotionally, spiritually and therefore practically, is all but impossible for those who have witnessed such brutality or been the victims of such violence. This paradox, of categorical imperative and human incapacity lie at the heart of the dilemma – how can Christians love their enemies in obedience to Jesus' command when the person they are to embrace and welcome is guilty of atrocity against them or their family? What are the resources of the Gospel of reconciliation that would make such a miracle of embrace possible? Volf's book grew out of precisely that question, asked at a seminar where Volf was teaching and Jurgen Moltmann was present, and asked the question. Volf's account of it is better told by himself:

This poem by e e cummings is just the thing for weather like this! And it's a  sonnet, one of my favourite forms of poetry. Hard to read this and scowl, or frown, or moan – and notice where the higher case is used – not the first person singular, but the second person transcendent! Love it.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)