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My friend Geoff Colmer has been recommending with much enthusiasm the book Unapologetic by Francis Spufford. The sub title is Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. I got it recently and have been reading it with much laughter, much thought, and am so glad that someone has written an intelligent riposte to the lazy thinking and arrogant opinion-pushing of those who dismiss the whole religious thing. And emotional sense matters, just as much as common sense and intellectual sense.

I found one long passage one of the most original reflections on the nature of guilt, the preciousness of human life and the nature of forgiveness and grace. The honest understanding of the late in life request for the presence of a friend by Field-Marshal Montgomery is a superb piece of pastoral journalism and moral realism. Knowing he would die soon he said 'I've got to go and meet God and explain  all those men I killed in Alamein.' There follows a wide ranging meditation on the importance of taking our moral failures seriously, and recognising the human capacity to mess up life and wound those around us. It is all but impossible to quote or summarise this sustained piece of theologically astute psychology, though the book is crammed with one liners, phrases and paragraphs of cleverness distilled to wisdom.

There's something salutary and earthing about reading such a book during Advent. Christmas and nativity stories and the birth narratives in the Gospels are easy targets for those who want to debunk the Christian way of seeing and being in the world. But the significance of the Incarnation, the Virgin Birth and the intersection of human history and divine purpose which underlies the birth of Jesus and the Word made flesh is about more than over-clever dismissals of religious traditions as mere legend or myth.  Because 'his name will be called Emmanuel, God with us.' And 'you shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.' So there is indeed an issue for Field Marshall Montgomery and the lives lost in war and in all the brokenness of the world, and the need to face God. Except that in the Incarnation, God came to face us, with our own propensity to mess things up, and God's propensity to redeem.

The picture is of Da Vinci's drawing of a woman and child – one of my favourite images of Christmas understood with theological imagination.

 

I continue to work a small tapestry of the Hebrew word for 'shalom'.

 

There is no intended or discernible pattern, no fixed image of what the finished work will look like. It is being worked slowly, in those odd brief spaces of time when the notion to stitch and the opportunity to do so coincide. The colours are being mixed, strand by strand, sometimes three or even four shades woven into one six strand thread – they reflect the mood I am in at the time, but they also weave into a pattern of hope. The colours are greens, yellows, blues, browns, but they are mixed, juxtaposed, blended, sometimes random, so that the overall work is open-ended; and yet.

I hear the Israeli ambassador to the EU defending 3000 more houses in a settlement on the West Bank; and I stitch some more of this beautiful Hebrew word, and its background in the mercy of God. Palestinian outrage, rockets and political maneouvering raises the anger and fear stakes further, and I stitch a few more quiet points of hopefulness. In Belfast the flying of the Union jack creates riots and police officers are injured, I want to stitch.

I guess for me this tapestry has become a metaphor for mercy, a symbol of shalom, a pitch for peace, a protest, a prayer, a promise, or at least a reminder of those great promises in Isaiah, Micah, Amos, the Gospels and Revelation.

about lions and lambs in close but safe proximity

about spears into pruning hooks and rockets into trade agreements

about justice flowing down like rivers, and doing right by each other as natural and reliable as water runs to the sea

about loving enemies and embracing the other so that the other becomes brother

about leaves of the trees for the healing of the nations, and people from every tongue, tribe and nation praising the God who is all in all

about the New Jerusalem, over which the three great monotheistic faiths no longer need to battle and do murder, because there is space and welcome for all in a new creation and in the reconciliation of all things.

That's quite a theological load for a tapestry; but it is also the theological implicate of praying that looks to a different future because God is the God of the future whose loving purpose, just mercy, and reconciling heart, intersects with the reality of our present, but does so with Eternal intent. Whatever else advent and incarnation mean, they open up those wide doors for the King of glory.

I was in a charity shop and found this brass plaque. The inscription shows the initials of two people the dates 1887 – 1937. The relief in the centre is of Jacob and Rachel at the well. The surrounding reliefs are the story of Jacob's journey, his wooing Rachel and working for Laban. The two names are inscribed in Hebrew on the top left and right of the reliefs. My guess is this is a Golden wedding plaque, made in 1937, and featuring one of the greatest love stories in the Hebrew Bible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The quality of the central relief captures the moment of encounter, a beautiful portrayal of accidental providence, those unlooked for meetings when God is at work in the ordinariness of everyday. Except with Jacob, very little is ordinary. Below is one of the scenes from the outer reliefs. I love this plate – it will hang in my study, a piece of brazen exegesis 🙂

Today was a busy day with several appointments to see people, do stuff and have stuff done to me. Coming out of the doctor's surgery facing me was a ridiculously blue sky and two trees that looked made for such an azure background. And not 50 metres from Tesco's car park!

 

My day also took me down to the University and King's College. On a frosty sunny morning it's difficult to believe that this is a modern University campus, so I sat in the quad for some minutes, chilled but cheerful, and watched the world amble past slowly. I love the old crown on the chapel, and in the sunlight it looked its best. Then a cappucino to go, a walk up the high Street, and an impulse buy of three books for the price of two. Work done, folk met, several important conversations, and then tonight five a side football, that spiritual stress buster in which there is an entire absence of the fruit of the Spirit!.

I recently had to write something on the pastoral theology and practices of the Early Church Fathers. Much of what they thought, wrote, did and understood now seems strange, from another world, unenlightened in the view of post enlightenment minds! And yet.

The pastoral heart is evident in
many of the Church Fathers. The inevitable tensions between compassion and discipline, the intellectual and spiritual wrestling over the relationship between the life of grace, the struggle with sin, the holiness and mystery of the Triune God, and the nature of prayer, worship and Christian living as the proper response to the love of God in Christ.Their primary goal and foundational value was
growth in the love of God, towards the perfect love of God and all inclusive love of neighbour.

The route to this love was a
long training, an instilling of spiritual disciplines to train the personality
in the fruits of the spirit, to educate the soul in self-critical ethical
scrutiny, to co-operate with God in the restoring of the image of God, which
though marred remains the defining truth of every human being. To be made in
God’s image is to be able to know God choose the good and learn to love – it is
to have the capax dei, to train the passions by spiritual discipline in
order to love God with that balance of mind, heart strength and will.

Reading some of the Fathers today is an exercise in strangeness, but sometimes that's what a church which is now overfamiliar with God needs; and a church confident of the can do approach to theology can be reminded that living for God isn't about our can do, but about God's enabling grace; and a humbling corrective to theological and pastoral practitioners, that in the end we are all unprofitable servants, and what we seek to practice is a life rooted and grounded in the eternal love of the Triune God, seeking to know and make known the love that is beyond knowledge.

So we ignore the Fathers to our
loss. In the history of the cure of souls they had their own spiritual
psychology, their unique sense of the sacred, a profound sensitivity about sin
but matched by a diamond edged view of grace sufficient to cut and shape
character towards Christlikeness.

Looking for a poem online ( because my own collection of Elizabeth Jennings' poems is at home) I Googled the line "Forgiveness – the word we live by". Still the mighty Google couldn't give me the poem I want. So it made a polite suggestion that maybe I meant something else. "Did you mean 'Forgiveness – the world we live by'?"

Oh well, yes! And no. But Oh my Lord, Yes! The insertion of one letter magnifies the entire idea of forgiveness into one that has global consequences, worldwide opportunities to begin again, intimations that at last, spears might yet become pruning hooks.

So I said the Lord's Prayer in the Office this morning ( the prayer cycle not my College study – though I say the Lord's Prayer there too) with knowing smirk at the subversion of that word, 'forgive', its potential to change a world, whether my inner world of resentments and walls of remembered hurt, or that big world out there where Gaza, Israel, Syria, Afghanistan, and  any other elsewhere where dividing walls of hostility still contradict the peace made by the blood of the cross. 

Your will be done…our daily bread…as we forgive our debtors….deliver us from evil….for thine is the kingdom, and your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven. No wonder that prayer holds countless gigabytes of the truths and realities by which the world lives.

Forgiveness – the word we live by. Forgiveness – the world we live by. So that forgiveness isn't the occasional giving in to our better nature and letting go the odd grudge – it is a way of life, and the way to life.

The photo is from Minsteracres Retreat Centre – "God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself."

I spent the last couple of days at Minsteracres Retreat Centre near Consett at the second Annual Convocation of the Order of Baptist Ministry. It came at an awkward time for me, half way through Semester but I wanted to be there to explore and discuss the purpose and motivation for such an Order. The members of the Order can explain best what it is all about, and why this particular way of following faithfully after Christ in ministry has commended itself as a significant expression of pastoral spirituality today.

The background and the plans for the future are explained here.

The climax of the time together was when a number of members took vows and entered the novitiate, a way of exploring if this way of ministry is right for them. This was both solemn and informal, taking place within a communion service, and affirmed and supported by others who were there. One of the strengths of the Order is the Daily Office – you can see the text for these on the website, and you are free to experiment and try them for yourself. I now use them and try to be faithful in observing the Office, in fellowship with others.

I guess I have some questions and hesitations, but I also find something compelling and attractive and urgent about a group who wish to root their ministry in the spirituality of a Daily Office, to journey in the supportive company of fellow travellers, and to explore for themselves a contemplative and attentive approach to ministry that is resourced from the wide and cathholic tradition of Christian theology and spirituality. I am both a critical and sympathetic friend, but the word critical is not in any sense negative or carping. It is encouraging and curious, humbly inquisitive and gently excited by the fusion of Baptist ministry with contemplative reflection, and the combination of Daily Office and spiritual welcome to insight and nourishment from across the Christian traditions.

I met up with people I love and respect as friends of some time, and others I hadn't met before who were immediately friendly and welcoming. I came away with food for thought, and with a spirit already nourished by the food of shared vision, hopes and struggle. It was a good time.

The self portrait was taken standing inside concave steel mirrors – I took the photo:) 

 

 

 

"The doctrine of the Trinity declares –

and that is the point it stands up for on its fighting front –

that and how far

He who reveals Himself to man according to the witness of Scripture

can be our God,

that and how far

He can be our God."

 

 

Like a compacted gem of enigmatic Zen poetry, Barth pursues the truth of the Trinitarian love of God, aware he will never find, and even if he could would never find the words, to adequately explain, extol or adore the mystery. But mystery or not, Barth has unabashed confidence that this God of love and mystery, of distance and nearness, of transcendent power and inexhaustible love, this God is for us.

And this Lord can be our God,

He can meet us and unite us to Himself

because He is God in these thrtee modes of existence

as Father, Son and Spirit,

because creation, reconciliation, redemption,

the entire being, language and action,

in which he wills to be our God,

is grounded and typified in His own essence,

in His goodness itself."

(Quoted from German original in Karl Barth,  David Mueller, Peabody: Hendrickson, 1972, page 69)

Nobody does it better!

 

 

 

 

Autumn is a season of mixed emotions, the beauty of warm colours sharpened or softened by sunlight, the sense that the trees are bleeding out the remainder of this year's vitality, and can no longer hide the obvious signs of fading glory, life retreating to replenish, leaves falling as they inevitably do and of biological necessity must. Poets and artists, novelists and naturalists have all written about the gentle melancholy of Autumn, the combination of regret and relief as life moves on and a new cycle begins.

Earlier today I sat looking out at the trees, now passed their best colours and semi-naked following the high winds, and listened to Vivaldi's Autumn. Gentle melancholy set to music. Early this morning I took this photo, of two leaves lying in the gutter beside my car, frosted but the sun beginning to melt the crystals. The amazing complexity of a leaf, its skeleton becoming visible, one of thousands of leaves that ensure the tree lives and grows and fruits; and the equally astonishing architecture of ice crystals; together they provide no conclusive evidence of the existence of God, nor require the assumption of a Creator.

But once recognise in our encounter with the Divine, the Love that creates and sustains, that gives richness and diversity out of a nature infinitely and eternally giving, and the vast intricacies of our universe and the micro-miracles at our feet and in the gutter, become not clues to a possibility, but glimpses of a reality beyond the controlling reach of our intellectual categories.

The other moment of significance was on the way back from Banchory, I slowed down to let a red squirrel cross the road safely. Rare beautiful little animals, and against the golden sunlight and amber leaves, a joy to behold.

Muriel Lester

“The day should begin by focusing on God as

     shining beauty,

          radiant Joy,

               creative power,

                    all-pervading love,

                         perfect
understanding,

                              purity and peace.”

We spent some time today in class finding out about this remarkable woman. 

This website gives you a good summary –
deatspeace.tripod.com/muriel.html