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Reading a Journal I wrote some years ago I came across a short extract from Gerhard Ebeling's book on the Lord's Prayer. This Lutheran theologian has written several books translated into english. His major work awaits translation, especially his Dogmatics. But meantime here is a taste of Ebeling at his astringent best:

"It sounds religious to put God beyond time as the Eternal, and to keep time well clear of God as being something limited, earthly, human. But with this kind of piety we make God unreal and reality godless."

  The last couple of weeks we have been completing the marking and grading of papers in preparation for the end of the session. Every time I do this I'm aware of the work and worry, the learning and writing, the thinking and re-thinking, that is part of that great humanising process we call education and to which our students commit themselves. Leaving all the usual quips aside, the truth is a theological paper is an attempt by one mind to grasp and understand, then to articulate and communicate, something they have come to know about God, their self or the world, and how to live and grow as the person they are. That's what is meant by learning that is informative, then formative and finally transformative.

For that reason, a theological essay is a statement of what one person believes and tries to argue. Their can be little point in simply writing what they think the marker wants to see, if at the same time they don't affirm the validity of what they write. Authentic learning is where we risk writing, saying, speaking out, what we believe to be the case – how much more then when dealing with those things we say matter to us as ultimate, primary, perennial concerns of our lives, and expressions of our deepest commitments.

So when I read an essay on the Triune relations of Father, Son and Spirit; or a Journal of personal discovery in ministry and responsiveness to others; or a review of a tough book that demands critical thought tempered by intellectual humility; or a sermon written out of a wrestling match with the text when like Jacob the preacher won't let the text go 'except you bless me'. That's when the academic discipline of marking is sanctified by the awareness that these assignments are about more than the grades – and to be sure the process of grading is rigorous, fair and open. But alongside the academic achievement, is a process of shaping and forming a mind, nourishing and nurturing a heart, encouraging the spirit to expansiveness, receptiveness and hospitality to new ideas and experiences.

So when people ask how the marking is going, there are two answers. One is about the process of confirming the achievements in learning; the other is being alert to that deeper process of growth and change towards maturity of theological understanding, enrichment of spiritual life, and development of gifts and skills which become the source and resource of the Church's mission and ministry in the world. That's what makes theological education crucial – and that's what makes being a theological educator a crucial ministry in the life of the Church.

Maria Boulding was one of the finest exemplars of the Benedictine monastic life, and a Christian spirit of quite rare depth and insight. I first came across her in the 1980's when I was reading avidly around the Rule of Benedict, and writing a paper on "Baptists, Benedict and the Blessing of Community". Her autobiographical essay in the volume of edited essays, A Touch of God, is a carefully considered and honest estimate of her own formation within monastic community. She writes of the life we live and know as the reverse side of the tapestry, a metaphor I fully understand. My own tapestries are likewise viewed from two sides, and it's a matter of care to keep the reverse side as neat as possible – but it never shows the real beauty, subtlety and definition of the true side. We all have our twisted threads, unintended knots, evidence of short-cuts and partially hidden flaws.

Over the years I've read each of her best known books, all of them more than once. Prayer in the Easter Christ remains one of the clearest explorations of what it means to live an Easter life, and to use the word Easter as a verb that means to look on the world through the lens of the Cross and Resurrection, the realities of Divine Love and the gift of Divine life. The Coming of God is as biblical an account of Advent as there is, and again the book is replete with theological and spiritual thoughtfulness about the kind of God who comes, in Christ. Gateway to Hope is a book about failure which is pastorally sound, sympathetic, but never colludes with self-pity or the paralysis of mind and heart that failure can trigger. Her translation of Augustine'sConfessions has made that masterpiece accessible to generations now impatient with Victorian or highly stylised translations.

Dame maria Boulding died in december 2009, and in her last months wrote her final book, Gateway to Resurrection. In it she takes stock of what remained important and central in her life and faith, and for her it is summed up in her experience of the Risen Christ. I've just bought this book, which will go with me soon on a break when I don't want to do a lot of reading, but need a wise, familiar and understanding conversation partner. The obituary published in The Times is an affectionate and generous account of a remarkable woman who took particular care that the reverse side of the tapestry was as neat as patient skill and constant discipline over detail will make it. Click the link below. 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6938006.ece

New makeover on Living Wittily. I stayed with the Art Nouveau red for a while. But sunshine and blue skies lighten it up and I'll stay with it for a while. Speaking of which, right now there isn't a cliud in the Aberdeenshire sky as I look over towards the hill line.

There hasn't been a poem posted for a while – so here's one that happens to be a favourite song by the singer I listen to most – John Denver. It came up recently in conversation, I know it by heart, and it is as ethically and humanly to the point as it was when it was written in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam and in the Cold War.

Given the global climate of conflict, polarised ideologies and danger to our human future, this song still pleads for different priorities.

 

So you speak to me of sadness
And the coming of the winter;
Fear that is within you now
It seems to never end'
And the dreams that have escaped you,
And the hope that you've forgotten,
You tell me that you need me now,
You want to be my friend.

And you wonder where we're going
Where's the rhyme and where's the reason
And it's you cannot accept
It is here we must begin
To seek the wisdom of the children
And the graceful way of flowers in the wind

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day
Like the music of the mountains
And the colours of the rainbow
They're a promise of the future
And a blessing for today

Though the cities start to crumble
And the towers fall around us
The sun is slowly fading
And it's colder than the sea
It is written from the desert
To the mountains they shall lead us
By the hand and by the heart
They will comfort you and me
In their innocence and trusting
They will teach us to be free

For the children and the flowers
Are my sisters and my brothers
Their laughter and their loveliness
Could clear a cloudy day
And the song that I am singing
Is a prayer to non believers
Come and stand beside us
We can find a better way

It is because the Love of God does not terminate in one self-sufficient self that is capable of halting and absorbing it, that the Life and Happiness of God are absolutely infinite and perfect and inexhaustible. Therefore in God there can be no selfishness, because the Three Selves of God are Three subsistent relations of selflessness, overflowing and superabounding in joy in the Gift of their Own Life.

The interior life of God is perfect contemplation. Our joy and our life are destined to be nothing but a participation in the Life that is theirs. In Them we will one day live entirely in God and in one another as the Persons of God live in One another.

I know. It was a bit late in coming this second part of Merton's lyrical account of what it means to live our lives in the orbit of the Triune God. But what I enjoy about Merton's spiritual theology is the ring of authenticity, a theological and psychological clarity that is like the pure note of crystal glass pinged with a nail. Mystical experience can sometimes be portrayed and described as something we would really rather not have to endure, so strange it seems. But Merton's account of the Love of God as Triune life in eternal self-giving to and joyful affirmation of the Other, in a unity that transcends but embraces and preserves diversity and identity, is an invitation to communion, not a recipe for ecstasy.

If all that sounds too rarefied still, then I guess that might be because our spirituality is much more dumbed down, and perhaps lacking the richly textured canvas of the life and love of the God who comes to us in the mysteries of the Gospel. And perhaps too, certainly very possibly for me, a too long toleration of spirituality which is all about me Jesus, disguised as all about you Jesus. Because the truth is the Gospel is about the love of God, the grace of Christ and the communion of the Holy Ghost. And though we may sing our intimate worship songs to Jesus, we will find precious few such lyrical emotionalism in the New Testament where the meekness and majesty, the incarnational mystery of God in Christ, the impossible but true tragedy of calvary and the even more impossible but true miracle of resurrection, are gathered together in worship to the Ascended Lord in the power of the Spirit. Merton is a particularly fine exponent of contemplative theology, that thinking and adoring and wondering of the intellect and the heart that comes from long pondering of this overwhelming Reality that is Eternal Love, forever giving and receiving, and bringing into being and fulfilment, a Creation fallen and redeemed, broken and healed, marred and forgiven, spoiled by sin and restored and renewed by the costly, creative Mercy that lies at the heart of all things. 

Of course I may be wrong. I may just be off on a rant. But then again…..

 

The God Who exists only in Three Persons is a circle of relations in which His infinite reality, Love, is ever identical and ever renewed, always perfect and always total, always beginning and never ending, absolute, everlasting and full.

In the Father the infinite Love of God is always beginning and in the Son it is always full and in the Holy Spirit it is perfect and it is renewed and never ceases to rest in its source. But if you follow Love forward and backward from Person to Person, you can never track it to a stop, you can never corner it and hold it down and fix it to one of the Persons as if He could appropriate to himself the fruit of the Love of the others. For the One Love of the Three Persons is an infinitely rich giving of Itself which never ends and is never taken, but is always perfectly given, only received in order to be perfectly shared 

 This kind of writing is why Thomas Merton is one of my best friends – a companion on the journey now for more than 40 years – an all too human person whose sanctity is most evident in his flaws and his honesty about himself – and whose theology is much more profound and visionary than is sometimes thought of a contemplative monk. Merton was a contemplative theologian, a deeply reflective and ruminative thinker whose writing is luminous with wonder and mellowed by the tension he recognised between the urge to adoration and that self-knowing that will always humble in the presence of Divine Love. The next two short paragraphs are a distillation of what can only be called a Trinitarian Spirituality – and I'll post them tomorrow.

Posting here is sporadic just now – priorities I'm afraid, but no lessening of the commitment and enjoyment of continuing the conversation. Thanks to those who still look in and send emails etc.

Several times recently I have picked up a headline or a comment about the problems with AV. Now I know this stands for alternative vote, and refers to a complicated but allegedly fairer way of divvying up the votes post any election. But for some of us the abbreviation has much more powerful and biblical resonances. The Authorised version is 400 years old this year. The distilled essence of Jacobean English was carefully crafted into the finest expression in English' of those ancient documents from the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible. Many of the best phrases and even passages were lifted near wholesale from the earlier outlawed translation by William Tyndale. But the AV, or the King James Version, remains a classic of the English language, a triumph of committee collaboration, its musical cadences and poetic flow such a contrast to the flat prosaic pedantries of most modern translations. I've read my own copy in chunks this year – a beautifully bound, gilt edged copy presented on my ordination.

The say No campaign has been accused of lying, deceit and misinformation – these three words are close cousins if not synonyms. All three refer to the untrustworthiness of words, or at least the untrustworthiness of those who speak them. So when the AV controversy is simmering or boiling over, a quite other set of responses is needed. Andrew Marr asked Simon Hughes how the Lib Dems can go on working within a Cabinet where senior Conservative Ministers have been accused of an unholy trinity of verbal abuse – lying, deceit and misinformation – each of these describes the abuse of words, their corruption into false rather than true expression, their being turned into weapons that damage rather than social tools that uphold verity in public discourse. No convincing answer was forthcoming from Simon Hughes – caught between the rock of not admitting the coalition partners weren't playing fair, and the hard place that would mean dissolving the coalition and Lib Dems only real possibility of having political clout in the decisions of Government.

The AV (Authorised version) has something to say about the AV spat (Alternative Vote) – an alarming warning for politicians whose primary skill is in making words malleable through repeated hammering with the blunt instrument of party self-interest. Here is James, writing the kind of scathing comment that wouldn't be out of place in a John Pilger column on the calumny of political rhetoric laced with cynicism and untruth:

The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell. For every kind of beasts and of birds, and of serpents and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed, but the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poision. James 3. 6-8

   
Now steady on James. Just a tad of overstatement there. Human speech isn't quite in the same league as a Californian or Australian forest fire! Well, that depends. If we corrode the platform on which the integrity of public discourse stands, if we slowly reduce our tolerance to deceit and call it spin, and then get used to spin and then begin to believe it…. So who is telling the truth about AV? How would you know? Whose statements are trustworthy, dependable, information rather than disinformation? The AV (Bible) again this time from Proverbs, one of the first self-help books for aspiring diplomats, politicians and wise leaders:

The words of a man's mouth are as deep waters: and the wellspring of wisdom is a flowing brook.

There is one that speaketh like the piercings of a sword;but the tongue of the wise is health. 

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.

Quite so!

Easter brings together such extremes of emotion, aspiration and human longing. Good Friday carries within it the fundamental contradictions at the heart of all reality  – hate and love, violence and peace, cruelty and compassion, betrayal and trust, torture and tenderness, death and life, defeat and triumph. The cry of God-forsakeness, the deliberate resignation of entrusted commitment to the Father, and the quiet surrender of the "it is finished", are only some of the lights and shadows cast by the suffering of God in the suffering of Jesus. Van Gogh's Pieta is an astonishing juxtaposition of light and shadow, blue and yellow, a mother's grief at the broken body that is flesh of her flesh, and that bright yellow sky behind her – dusk or dawn? And the blue of her robe folded in shadow and light brings the eternal and the mortal together, hands outstretched neither grasping nor beseeching, but embracing and and supporting. From his desperate time of illness, this painting emerged as the embodiment of all that van Gogh felt within himself, of desolation, isolation and alienation from the world around him, which could not understand and did not listen.

Rab Butler, the great academic of a past generation, attended the Messiah as it was performed around Easter in Oxford in the 1940's. He was a respectful agnostic and as intellectually innoculated against sentiment and unexamined piety as could ever be met. As the performance moved towards the Isaiah passages about the suffering servant, he wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and muttered to his friend, "Damned sad story that". Like the rest of us, he wished it could be otherwise, and hoped that such a story might help make the world otherwise. It's that longing for things to be better, and then to be well, and then for all things to be well, that Kathleen Raine recognised, and refused to countenance as valid good news for struggling human beings. In her series of poems, The Old Story, the third poem articulates both her own longing and the constraints of reality.

Reader I would tell

If I knew

That all shall be well.

 

All darkness gone,

All lives made whole,

Hearts healed that were broken.

 

Would tell of joy reborn,

Of wrongs made right,

Of harms forgiven,

 

But do not know,

how what is done

Can ever not be,

 

Though love would wish it to.

……

It is that love that wishes, that yearns and works, that suffers and sighs, that gives and struggles, that will not give in – it is that love that was crucified, killed and buried. Which sounds final, and is. Except that after Holy Saturday and the curtains come down, there is God's encore….Because love would wish it so.

I left Glasgow Airport at 7.00 am having been up since 5.am! I'm now in Manchester waiting for a taxi to take me to the airport, where I'll wait for a flight to take me to Glasgow, where I'll wait in the car park for Honda Assist to come and fix a punctured front tyre. Then I'll wait till it's fixed and decide what to do about dinner, and swither (Scots for "cannae make up my mind yet") whether or not to make it a longer day still, and head for Aberdeen, .

All this waiting, reminded me of the title of a favourite book. If you know me at all, you'll know that W H Vanstone is one of my theological must haves. Three short slim books give the distilled essence of ministry that was selfless, awkward, traditional, inspiring, focused on divine love and lived out in the most ordinary parish settings. One of his books, The Stature of Waiting is a profound study of passivity, surrender and patient waiting upon circumstance. Vanstone is hard to emulate, hard to follow as an exemplar, I guess he was a one off! Yet even when I can't go with him, or he says things I resist, I know I'm listening to an important voice, and if I disagree I realise I have to have cogent, viable reasons of my own. And sometimes his one liners are simply unanswerable – one of them comes to mind, capturing his traditional commitments in liturgy, his deeply reflective theology, and his sharp observations articulated in sharper comment:

 "Sometimes the church is like a swimming pool, where all the noise comes from the shallow end"

No answer to that. At least, not one I'm prepared to offer. 

Yesterday amongst other things we went a walk up Brimond Hill. Nothing ambitious, just a 2 mile walk, half of it uphill, and half of it down! But it was bright sunshine, seriously windy, and at the top a sound recordist for the BBC would have had exactly the sounds needed for a documentary or film that needed the wail and whine and muted roar of the wind. The telephone masts with their enormous drum disks provided a weird wind instrument that varied the note and tone depending on the direction and force of the wind.

Standing at the top you can see a 360 degree view that starts with Aberdeen, the North Sea, the white early warning globes, Inverurie in the distance, Benachie, hills all the way down to Clach na Ben looking like a distant pimple, and so down to the mearns, and then the dip towards the sea again, and Stonehaven beneath the horizon 15 miles sse. A while ago some ill meaning person removed the brass viewpoint information disc which means you have to guess the names of the far mountains unless you are an expert. The photo can be found here which gives a good route guide for mountain bikers.

And on the way up we saw the red Kites patrolling over the fields and trees. Several pairs were recently released near where we live. Their delta tails and pointed wings make them unmistakable – they have only recently been reintroduced to Scotland and most recently Aberdeenshire. Reading about them later, it's obvious what caused their decline and near extinction. In the late Victorian age, and into the 20th Century when grouse shooting was the pastime of the rich and the absentee landlords, 267 of these birds were shot as vermin on one huge estate in several days. I've always been slightly puzzled and more than slightly annoyed at the idea you shoot the birds that feed on the birds you really want to shoot! Such arbitrary values reflect a ruthless kind of stewardship.

There's an environmental brain teaser – how to balance the interests of the leisure seeking human being, with the survival needs of the varied species that share our land. Watching the red kites entirely at home in the gusts and fickleness of a strong North East wind, I was glad to see them be what they are. I might have thought different if I'd been a grouse – but then I'd likely have more chance being chased by the occasional kite for food, than when I'm forced to fly towards 20 shotguns held by people hiding behind screens, and calling it sport!

The photo is from The Guardian, ironically accompanying an article about the systemativ poisoning of red kites, this time in the Scottish Borders. .