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Once you've spent a day in Glen Dye, Gerard Kelly's poem is even more impressive as a this worldly spirituality that brings heaven and earth, God and creation, our humanity and the Divine, ecology and theology, nature and praise, into that creative relationship that affirms as good all that God has made. Celebrating the beauty of the earth is just as important as lamenting its brokenness and ours, and an equally valid form of praise as any anticipation of being less than we were made to be – which is human beings who image the life of the Triune God, and whose humanity is taken up by Jesus Christ in the renewal and reconciliation of created existence, and human experience.

  

the very thought

I love the very thought of Heaven:
Where angels sing
In perfect, perpetual choir practice.
Where Father, Son and Spirit rule
Unchallenged
And are honoured in full measure.
I love the very thought of Heaven:
But I was not made
To live there.

I was not made
To walk on clouds,
And bask eternally
In immaterial splendour.
I was made for this green planet:
This tight ball
Of aching beauty,
Alive with the unending possibilities
Of his creative power.
I was made for the sunshine
That blazes through the veins of a leaf
And glints on the tiny, perfect back
Of a ladybird crossing my arm.
I was made to be human
In this most human of places.
I was made for earth:
The earth is my home.
That’s why I’m glad that God,
More than anyone,
Is a friend of the earth:
Prepared as he was to die
For its release.
And that’s why I’m glad
That the magnificent, jewelled foundations
Of the mighty pearly gates
Will be anchored
Deeply and forever
In the soil of earth.

by gerard kelly

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamic and erratic,

spontaneous and radical,

audacious and immature,

committed if not altogether coherent,

ecumenically open and often experimental,

visible here and there,

now and then,

but unsettled institutionally.

Almost monastic in nature

but most of all….

enacting a fearful hope

for human life in society.

William Stringfellow, Quoted in Celtic Daily Prayer, page 634

Three things came together today and turned ordinary time into time when the ordinary and everyday, the routine and the easily missed, become for us extended moments of moment, not momentous, but not trivial either.

Sitting in  church looking at a prayer, beautifully rendered in cross stitch, a prayer I use often in worship, and which someone noted down some years ago, and worked in threads, framed it, and gifted it to the church. Now it hangs just to the left of where I sit. It's a prayer about accepting each day as God's gift, to be cherished for the freedom and possibility that every minute brings to us.

On the way to church listening to Classic FM, the second movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto. The gentle melody exudes inner yearning, as if musical notes, carefully composed and skillfully played contain a more adequate grammar of longing, a logic of the heart's desire, a capacity for expression that doesn't need to answer all the deep questions of our existence, but merely to remind us that God has put eternity in our hearts, and yearning is prayer, 'the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.'

 Then there were the chocolate gingers! My interest in spirituality and mystical theology has never attained that high level of ascetic practices that would call in question the delight, the God given pleasure, and the necessity for my inner happiness, of the combined taste of dark chocolate and stem ginger! I'm struggling to give a spiritual or intellectual twist to this which is just as well. Few things waste good food more than rationalising the joy of taste. I suppose I could quote "O taste and see that the Lord is good"; or compare the rich spiced sweetness of chocolate gingers to the Psalmist's equivalent comment on the Word of God, "sweeter also than honey, and the honeycomb".

No, on this holiday Sunday blessings can be counted. A prayer that receives each day as gift and offers it in worship; music that pulls our hopes and trust upwards in a longing only God can fulfil; sweets, the intensity of taste, spice and sweetness, the pleasure to mind and body that makes us so aware of our physical reality. Each of them a sacrament, a means of recognising in that moment, the presence of grace and the gift that is God and the God who comes as gift. 

 

Just finished the class on the rediscovery of the Triune God. The discussion on Mission and Trinity was an exciting collaborative hour which eventually produced the theological goods that only come from a class engaged, informed, excited and willing to make space in their minds for new and dynamic thought.

Some of that discussion will continue to niggle away at our theological assumptions and the limitations to our practices and convictions that unexamined assumptions often impose. I have an idea. This is not news, it happens now and again. But the theological goods captured on the whiteboard and preserved on Ipads and emails will make an interesting project for this class to take forward. Except it's the final year class. That's ok – they aren't going to stop thinking, they're going to think deeper, longer and more adventurously out of what they have worked so hard to learn during their journey with us. It would be interesting to see where yesterday's thinking might lead if they continued the discussion on an online blog and developed it into a way of bringing Trinitarian theology, missiology and a Baptist ecclesiology together. Not right away of course – but we may decide on a collaborative project aimed at pushing our own thinking as far as it will go….and then some more…

Talking to a friend tonight who spent the day at Inversnaid. No excuse needed for posting Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, but the reminder was enough. Few poets have written of a loved part of Scotland with more precise and sympathetic insight into the inscape of a captured corner of Scottish scenery. Hopkins, along with Clare, Dickinson and R S Thomas, open eyes and ears to the beauty of living things. Hopkins' prayer for the wilderness, those undisrupted places of displayed wildness, comes as a lament for countryside too easily consumed by human acquisitiveness. INVERSNAID THIS darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth	5
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,	10
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;	15
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Last night I didn't die and go to heaven. I went to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and found a piece of it there. The performance of Monteverdi's Vespers by the Dunedin Consort was a very rare experience, and one that would be hard to repeat in just that way and just that place at just that time.

It started at 8, at which time the setting sun was blazing through the gallery windows, illuminating the organ pipes and chandeliers. And as the music progressed the light mellowed, blended with shadow and bathed the interior in breathtaking benediction. To sit there and listen to a performance that was professional in the sense of a performance that is careful and cared for by the artistes, and to do so in the magnificent Kelvingrove Main Hall illuminated by sunset, and listening to music intended for high spaces, exacting acoustics, and for end of day, was more than memorable.

It was an experience absorbed into those fibres of our being that are not for mere remembering, but for taking away beauty, peacefulness, gratitude and wonder, as part of who we now are. It wasn't just the music; it was more than the glorious building; it was more than the passionate professionalism of the performers; it was even something other than the setting sun and encroaching peace of night. It was all of these, which taken together, allows the Spirit of God to insinuate into our deepest selves that longing and yearning that is love for all that is, for all that we are or can be, and for the Divine Love rarely more powerfully voiced than in the harmonies, aural and visual, of certain rare experiences in our lives. What someone called the unattended moment, a glimpse of glory, and for me, an evening when inner concerns of every human heart, are transcended for a while, by an encounter with that love 'that moves the sun and other stars.'

Other can write a review – I am simply content to acknowledge a debt.

 

Just learned a new word – "inconcinnity" – which apprently means 'lacking congruity or harmony; the quality of unsuitability'.

It would help my self esteem if any of the readers of this blog were also able to acknowledge their semantic deficit in relation to this word! I thought it was a typo at first 🙁

 

 

I I know I'm not very tall, but this photo was taken standing up in high reeds and exuberant gorse.Whenever I'm standing with things growing all around me ( and sometimes above me) I often think of the Sermon on the Mount – about the grass of the field, the flowers, and the pretensions of all those Solomons who think they are eye stoppingly glorious!

More seriously – yesterday I was chasing a number of biblical themes and passages and came across several suggestions that certain biblical texts are particularly fitted to where we are now, in our time, at this place in our history as a world in a mess. Suggestions included Qoheleth (the fatuity and vanity of so much contemporary culture), the Tower of Babel (the power of the Web and Social Network), Amos (inequity and injustice pushed to extremes of social situation). It made me wonder about how we each find a canon within the Canon, selected Scriptures that seem really to 'do it' for us! And one of the ways that might happen is when certain Scriptures seem to have a deep moral and human resonance with our contemporary history – personal  social, global. Those Scriptures may bring hope, warn of judgment, describe and analyse our fears and anxieties.  Which means that Christians who claim to be biblical in their thinking, ethics, world-view should perhaps stop insisting loudly on their own view of what the Bible says, means. And as an act of obedience to God listen for the still small voice of a text that bears witness to Christ, and like Him will always call in question our assumptions, challenge the closedness of our certainties, undermine and expose the toxic roots of our prejudices, open our eyes to the blind spots we can't see because our cultural lenses have visually impaired our insight.

It will require a deeper more disruptive encounter with Christ the Word for us to hear, and then amplify his voice, which is the voice of self-giving love, reconciling judgment, renewing mercy, the Voice of the Crucified Risen Lord of Life.

 

 

Less than a centimetre across, a single flower, and the only one I saw on the St Cyrus path through the dunes. We think it's a dwarf Storksbill – but prepared to be corrected. How could this little beauty not remind me of Emily Dickinson's playful poem, which like all her poetry, nudges us out of our mental laziness and dares us to think! Life isn't all available on Google – thank God – there is still mystery, surprise and wonder – Emily Dickinson celebrates both. 

   

As If Some Little Arctic Flower

S if some little arctic flower,

Upon the polar hem,

Went wandering down the latitudes,

Until it puzzled came

To continents of summer,

To firmaments of sun,

To strange, bright crowds of flowers,

And birds of foreign tongue!

I say, as if this little flower

To Eden wandered in–

What then? Why, nothing, only

Your inference therefrom!

(Emily Dickinson)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upon a bank I sat, a child made seer
Of one small primrose flowering in my mind.
Better than wealth it is, I said, to find
One small page of Truth's manuscript made clear.

 

I looked at Christ transfigured without fear–
The light was very beautiful and kind,
And where the Holy Ghost in flame had signed
I read it through the lenses of a tear.
 

And then my sight grew dim, I could not see
The primrose that had lighted me to Heaven,
And there was but the shadow of a tree
Ghostly among the stars. The years that pass
Like tired soldiers nevermore have given
Moments to see wonders in the grass.