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Forgiveness is one of the hardest won and easiest forgotten hallmarks of Christian discipleship. You'd think in an era obsessed with branding, marketing, celebrity, fame, the product, that the church might have taken time to ask what it is that the world most needs, and how to offer it at an affordable price. If the 21st Century church is serious about mission, has a rudimentary let alone a strategic grasp of the Gospel, is 'missionally engaged' with the surrounding culture of debt and recession, entertainment escapism, technological idolatry, social fragmentation and relational maliase, then you'd think that the connection between a debt ridden world and a Gospel of debts forgiven might be an idea worth considering, demonstrating, practising, and embodying.

Grace has to be one of the most ridiculously straightforward bargains a market idolising culture could ever be offfered, you'd think. Instead of buy one get one free, the invitation to come buy bread without money would be a game losing own goal for Supermarkets, but the ridiculously obvious life disposition of those who follow Jesus.

After all at the heart of the prayer shared throughout the entire Christian tradition we pray 'forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors', and do so in a civilisation where bank bail-outs are a self interested emergency to prevent indebtedness engulfing the world economy. More outrageously still, in moments of the greatest agony and personal grief inflicted by others, Jesus prays 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do'. It isn't as if the ideas of grace and forgiveness are radically new. They are in fact radically old, they lie at the originating centre of Christian faith in the heart of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.

Forgiveness is a fundamental responsibility of the Christian heart, a life-changing gift to be to be given and received freely. The coalescence in our hearts of responsibility and gift, and the life shaping power of forgiveness, should be eye-openingly obvious. The argument goes from the greater to the lesser – if God in Christ forgives me, I am a forgiven sinner, now a willing conspirator of the Kingdom, a grace inspired subversive, a forgiven forgiver.

Buechner puts it more prosaically, but sometimes that's exactly what is needed for us to grasp what the Grace of God both demands and gives, as we try to faithfully follow after Jesus, whose harshest words were sometimes reserved for those who harden their hearts and refuse to be reconciled.

When somebody you've wronged forgives you, you're spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience.

When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you're spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride.

For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins, and to be glad in each other's presence.

Forgiveness is the word we live by, says Elizabeth Jennings in her poem, 'Forgiveness'. There would be more life and less death, more peace and less violence, more love and less hate, more joy and less anger, more gift and less payback, and therefore more grace and less retribution if in the world there were more live demonstrations of forgiveness. Now there's a missional imperative for a faith community called to be reconciled reconcilers, or in Paul's words, words far too often given their soteriological weight at the cost of their transformative ethical urgency, Jesus has given us the ministry of reconciliation.  

Yesterday I bought two things with a combined price of £10 The first was the book in the picture, Paddison's monograph in the Society of New Testament Studies Monograph series, on Theological Hermeneutics and First Thessalonians. The copy was hardback in mint condition, was probably a review copy, and is currently priced at £65 – so when I saw the price was £4.50, I felt like a certain farmer ploughing in a field when his arms are jarred by the blade of the plough hitting treasure. I didn't buy the field but I grabbed the book and handed over my £5 note and fled rejoicing.

As a lifelong bibliophile I am still like a child in a toyshop, or a chocolate factory, when I'm in a bookshop. And a Cambridge or Oxford hardback monograph is still a delight to hold, read and be able to afford to buy! I bought it in my favourite second hand bookshop, having stopped by on impulse, and the whole compexion of the day changed as my faith in providence was shored up by yet another coincidence of circumstance more theologically defined as a blessing!

Later on the drive back I was an hungered. I lapse into King james language when still glowing with recent blessing, and I stopped at the Little Chef beyond Dunblane. I ususally sniff disdainfully as I pass and keep going to Baxters. But by now they were closed. Another good decision. I ordered scrambled egg on brown bread and a pot of tea well, to be exact toasted wholemeal bread and butter, and organic free range eggs, and a three cup pot of tea. For nourishment of mind and body it's hard to beat a good book and crusty brown bread!! .

One of my favourite brief poems, which should be read occasionally at the Lord's Supper, is a reminder of the sanctity of the ordinary. Through the Incarnation of our Lord all matter is made sacred; at the centre of the Lord's Prayer is that petition that shakes us out of our spiritual reveries by addressing our most basic hunger, 'Give us this day our daily bread'; and on the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, and broke it……. and we call that, Eucharist.

Be careful when you touch bread.

Let it not lie uncared for – unwanted.

So often bread is taken for granted.

There is so much beauty in bread;

Beauty of sun and soil,

Beauty of patient toil.

Winds and rain have caressed it,

Christ often blessed it.

Be gentle when you touch bread.

~Anonymous

You can find the picture and the recipe for cider bread over here.

 

Now here's something that doesn't happen every day. Monday was the best day this week, and I'd promised a friend we'd go out on the bikes for the first time after the winter. But the tyres of the bikes were soft and the pump connector unhelpfully burst – and it was well after 5pm.

So in the car and out to look for a bike shop. Thought we'd found one at 5.30 but could only park across the road in a side street in the last space. The rush hour in full swing, the cars kept coming and the pedestrian crossing was a ways down the street. Finally got to the shop but the lights had gone out and the door locked. Looked in the window and the owner came and opened the door and asked if he could help. "No", he apologised – it was mainly a fish tackle shop – but we should try the new bike shop down the road.

Ran down, hoping it was open, and it was. Asked about the connector, yes he had one. Went to pay for it. Had changed into different clothes and had no money – a suit and tie being less than helpful on a bike!

"That's ok", he said, "hand it in next time you're passing".

So in 10 minutes I'd been at a closed shop which opened, been kindly directed to an open shop but had no money, and still came away with a pump connector because the owner took a risk and trusted.

There are days when it's all worth it – the hassle, the conveyor belt of stuff we all try to handle, the couldn't care-less-ness of much that passes for service in our recession ridden times. But the sun was shining, a closed shop was opened, a £3 connector was given away on trust.

As we walked up the street we waved to the owners of the fish tackle shop, and got the thumbs up. And eventually got half an hour on the bikes before the sun set. The sun which shines on the righteous…..I know the rest of the verse about also on the unrighteous, but on Monday according to the Torah, these folk had been kind to strangers, and multiplied happiness, which is pretty righteous!

The bike shop in question is Thomson's – its website is over here. If you live near Paisley I can recommend it for customer service and downright helpfulness – it also has loadsa bikes!

"At Assisi once, when a theologian attacked Fra Egidio by the usual formal arrangement of syllogisms, the brother waited till the conclusions were laid down, and then, taking out a flute from the folds of his robe, he played his answer in rustic melodies."

Quoted in Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder. The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (San Francisco: Harper Collins), 1991.   Peterson has never written a better book.

…….

 

 

 

 

 

"Do you want to know what goes on at the heart of the Trinity?

I'll tell you.

At the heart of the Trinity,

the Father laughs and gives borth to the Son.

The Son then laughs back at the Father,

and gives birth to the Spirit.

Then the whole Trinity laughs,

and gives birth to us."

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)  

I know. Eckhart jumps right into the filoque controversy despite the playful language. Still like the idea of laughter as creative and life-giving though!

…..

"A shallow mind is a sin against God", Chaim Potok, In the Beginning.

Potok was one of the finest interpreters of Hasidic Judaism, and his novels remain a source of delight and instruction for me. But don't read them if you have a shallow mind – they move in a world of spiritual intensity and serious reflection on the collision between faith convictions and the pressures towards cultural accommodation. His novel, My Name is Asher Lev, is I think a masterpiece as an account of a young man growing up under the dilemma of being faithful to his artistic calling and remaining within the community that confers identity.

Last night was one of those strange juxtapositions of experience the oddity of which isn't obvious till you think backwards.

9.00 to 10.00 was five a side football, requiring someone my age to have a sufficient sense of recklessness, to resurrect whatever skills I ever had, and balance these with a sensible consideration of what is still possible. Got flattened near the start and was playing catch up with my dignity for the rest of the game!

10-10.20 drove back listening to the CD of the month for me – Renaissance, Harry Christoper and the Sixteen, and listened yet again to Allegri's Miserere and felt that was Vespers and Compline sorted for the night.

10.20 to 11.00 a cooling shower, tea and buttered toast, and some time browsing in Karl Barth IV.3.2 chasing a paragraph I'd read earlier but hadn't marked and wanted to post on this blog – still haven't found it.

11.00 till 11.25 reading poetry while having a bottle of water and came across a poem by Robert Herrick that I'd all but forgotten but which used to be a favourite – an entire blog post could be dedicated to what that means 'used to be a favourite. Anyway here's the poem I read just before lights out – the quaint olde worlde spelling and erratic punctuation is found in a late Victorian anthology of devotional poems, bound in green leather which I picked up for 80p years ago.

GOD'S MERCY

Gods boundless mercy is, to sinfull man,

Like to the ever wealthy ocean:

Which though it sends out thousand streams, 'tis n'ere

Known, or els seen to be the emptier:

And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more

Full, and filed full, then when full-fild before.

Does anyone still read Robert Herrick?

The photo is of the North Sea from Aberdeen front – not quite the ever wealthy ocean of God's mercy, – too cold for that!

Believing Three Ways in One God, Nicholas Lash. (SCM, 1992)

I love this book, published 20 years ago and read three times, and returned to often as one of those thin books, but 'thickly textured' and richly nourishing.

It is popular theology without being populist, theologically fresh without being merely different, provocative in the positive sense of making you think differently about familiar things.

 

God's utterance lovingly gives life,

all unfading freshness:

gives only life,

and peace, and love,

and beauty, harmony and joy.

And the life God gives is nothing other,

nothing less,

than God's own self.

Life is God, given.

Page 104

Now here's an interesting observation:

It is a humorous paradox that in a faith that speaks about the "journey" of following Jesus, Christians claim to have total and absolute truth from the beginning, while scientists, who are supposed largely atheists and agnostics, are quite willing to work for decades knowing that their theories and hypostheses are merely provisional."

(The Naked Now, Richard Rohr, p.85)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michaelangelo's First Pieta

Carve a compassion. Older than you are

He lies upon your lap. What can you do

But hold him with a trust you also fear.

        Thus Micahelangelo

 

Saw what a girl may do for gods. O we

Have mercy on this man a woman holds,

God in the grip of our humanity.

         All this the sculptor moulds.

 

But more. It is a prayer that he is saying

Wordless, except that written on her breast

He writes his name. This girl he is displaying

         Has also brought him rest.

(New Collected Poems, 124)

 

Poem and sculpture,

word and image,

chiselled form and crafted articulation,

one representation seeking to interpret the other,

one medium mediating the ungrasped essence of the other,

compassion hand carved and hand written,

because passionately felt and expertly expressed.

Elizabeth Jennings' poetry is replete with religious themes, experiences, aspirations, questions and speculations. Profoundly Christian yet alert to the ambiguities of human experience, immersed in the Catholic tradition but without unqualified surrender to dogmatic formulations, learned in incarnational theology and the astonishingly aware of the connectedness in Christian thought between the suffering of human beings and the passion of God.

Advent and Easter, year on year, provoked her to poetry, attempting again the impossible puzzle of arranging words so that eternal truth is sufficiently framed in language to embrace and communicate the realities to which language refers. Yet words we have, and limited though they are, words represent one of the great gifts of human exchange, and Babel nothwithstanding communication is a bedrock of culture, civilisation and human community.

So when Jennings writes a poem called 'Clarify', 12 brief lines making three short stanzas, she manages to make it a prayer for two great yearnings from our deepest being – the longing for meaning and the struggle for freedom, but meaning that is purposeful, and freedom that is not destructive. Lucid brevity, knowing naivete, self- knowledge

CLARIFY

Clarify me, please,

God of the galaxies,

Make me a meteor,

Or else a metaphor

 

So lively that it grows

Beyond its likeness and

Stands on its own, a land

That nobody can lose.

 

God, give me liberty

But not so much that I

See you on Calvary,

Nailed to the wood by me.

(New Collected Poems, 161)

Talking with a good friend after church about poetry – well, as you do, and why not? He was saying when he read poetry he often didn't understand what he read, but enjoyed reading poetry just the same. In our conversation I suggested perhaps sometimes poetry isn't meant to be understood, but rather, it helps us to understand – ourselves, the world, others, those perplexities and mysteries of the life we live. 

In that remarkably evocative book, Mr God This is Anna, there's a definition of poetry that has always intrigued, and largely satisfied me: "Poetry is something made up of different bits that is different from all the bits." I too have come away from reading poetry with that strange intellectual and existential paradox – while I haven't understoood it, it would be quite wrong to say I was none the wiser. Because wisdom isn't only about knowing all the answers, or even knowing all the questions. Wisdom is to know the limits of the question and answer approach as the only way to understanding much that makes up our lives. Curiosity is its own justification; the inner search is not always the search for an answer. The quest for truth isn't so easily reduced to the limits of vocabulary. Poetry allows us to both think and feel, to search and only perhaps find, to question without being overanxious to fix, sort and nail down in words alone, those profound insights and experiences that like time and tide, climate and geology, give shape and character to our inner world.

So it's important who we choose as companions on the road, whom we invite to be conversation partners, those voices that can be relied on not to let us off with shallow and superficial answers, or predictable and unsearching questions. Amongst the poets I have several such critical friends, and readers of this blog will guess most of them. R S Thomas; Emily Dickinson; George Herbert; Mary Oliver; Gerard Manley Hopkins: Robert Frost; Denise Levertov; Elizabeth Jennings; Carol Ann Duffy; Seamus Heaney. There are others of course, and in any case one of my favourite kinds of book is the poetry Anthology of which I have several which are now as familiar as any collected corpus.

But this week I'm having an Elizabeth Jennings week on the blog. She is one from whose poetry I've learned amongst other things the importance of relationships in any spirituality that takes the divine and human intersections of our experience seriously. Here she is on friendship. And this one poem says why each special friendship is cause for celebration, gratitude and the glad recognition that such blessing is ours, undeserved gift, grace at its surprising best.

FRIENDSHIP

Such love I cannot analyse;
It does not rest in lips or eyes,
Neither in kisses nor caress.
Partly, I know, it’s gentleness

And understanding in one word
Or in brief letters. It’s preserved
By trust and by respect and awe.
These are the words I’m feeling for.

Two people, yes, two lasting friends.
The giving comes, the taking ends
There is no measure for such things.
For this all Nature slows and sings.