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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.

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.