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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.

 

"The biblical witness to God's revelation

leads to a response and participation in Christ.

This means in turn that epistemology is insufficient without ontology,

both in terms of the transformation of the believer,

and ultimately of the whole created order,

as the Incarnation makes knowledge of God

an engagement with being itself."

The words come from Karl barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar, by Stephen Wigley. This is a rich and demanding study of the mutual respect and contested differences between two of the greatest theologians of the 20th Century.

Listening to Radio 4 last night on the way down from Aberdeen, there was a discussion about the appointment of the new BBC Science Correspondent whose remit is to make the leading edges of scientific knowledge and discovery "accessible". There was considerable worry that accessible means dumbed down, and that to popularise is to distort by simplification to the point where knowledge itself is dangerously reduced and pre-packaged.

The same holds for theology. By all means popularise, make accessible, eliminate needless jargon, be inclusive in writing, teaching and learning. But do not deprive key intellectual disciplines of the discourse needed for precision, necessary nuance, development of ideas, explorations of complexity and contested concepts. In other words, not all theology can or should be "accessible" if by that we expect to grasp, understand and integrate what we read on its first reading. If there are words we don't easily recognise, concepts that perplex and puzzle, sentence structures that force us to slow down, read again, and, bless us, think -then don't assume bad writing, or abstracted thought, or ideas under-developed or overworked. It may be that we are being educated, drawn out towards truth and insight beyond our comfort zones. Both Barth and Von Balthasar are such theologians, thinkers and intellectual mentors – if we have the patience and respect, to sit at their feet.

The picture is from the centrepiece of the Ghent Altarpiece by Van Eyck. Based on Revelation 5 it depicts the central subversive paradox of the Lamb slain, adored, worshipped, and the centre of attention in heaven during the vision of John.

Two prose poems follow describing worship. They sit near the front of a notebook I kept years ago, and they are now like theological tram-lines on which my own understanding of worship runs.

 

The first recognises, as Tozer always does, that our knowledge of the Holy is both biblical and mystical, revelation and mystery, eternal and incarnate, humbling and affirming, transcendent and intimate.

The second describes how worship is transformative of the personality, character and spirit of a human being so that all that is within us may bless His holy name.  

What is worship?

Worship is to feel in your heart

and express in some appropriate manner

a humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe

and astonished wonder

and overpowering love

in the presence of that most ancient Mystery,

that Majesty which philosophers call the First Cause,

but which we call Our Father Which Are in Heaven. 

A W Tozer

 

For worship is the submission of all our nature to God.

It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness;

the nourishment of mind with His truth;

the purifying of imagination by His beauty;

the opening of the heart to His love;

the surrender of will to His purpose —

and all of this gathered up in adoration,

the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable

and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness

which is our original sin

and the source of all actual sin.

Archbishop William Temple

Ever since farm days in Ayrshire I've regarded sheep with affection and interest. Jack Duncan was a good farmer – knowledgeable about the land, and careful and respectful of animals which he referred to as 'the beasts'. He was a keen if not great golfer who took a couple of clubs and some golf balls out into the fields on a summer night to practice and we got two shillings ( probably around £5 nowadays) each for retrieving them.

It was on his farm that I first helped with sheep dip, sheep shearing and working the sheep with a dog. My father trained working dogs, always the border collie, and sold them to other farmers, some of them going abroad. Not many people know that! I still remember a spring night walking miles across the fields with Jack Duncan, the dog gathering the sheep, and Jack taking out one or two that were limping, examining their feet, cutting off the horn where foot rot was beginning to take hold, and putting ointment on.

It's such experiences, listening to the peewits complaining loudly at our intrusion, and displaying the most stunning aerobatics as they dived and swerved towards us. These same memories are what makes the cry of the curlew the most poignant and powerful Scottish sound to my ears. I still can't hear that cry without a lump in my throat and a sense of gratitude that, for all that I might have missed brought up in the country miles from shops, I have a love and affinity with the woods and the fields and the hills, and all who live therein, that is part of who I am.

Jack Duncan's care for his 'beasts', (he's standing at the right in the photo taken when I was a boy!) and my father's reputation as a first rate dairyman who cared for the herd, mean that when I read Psalm 23, or John 10, I have no sentimentality at all about sheep and shepherds, or cows and byres (I helped muck them out at weekends!). It isn't sentimentality that sheep need – but watchful care, reliable provision, a safe environment and a knowledgeable shepherd. 

The coloured photo above was taken on a walk to Drum Castle – the photo could be better, but the image of sheep sheltering under a massive conifer is biblical, pastoral and evokes memories for me of a boy wearing large wellingtons, a holy jersey, and stressed jeans long before they were made fashionable, chasing across fields after a sheepdog, taking seriously the welfare of sheep. And whatever else the Lord is my Shepherd might mean, it has to do in my mind with that welfare that comes looking for us, that protective wisdom that singles us out for care and healing, that watchful care that means there are indeed times of green pastures and still waters, dark valleys and tables spread. If the goodness and mercy that follow me all the days of my life are the perfect expression of Jack Duncan's humane husbandry, then without an overload of sentiment it is true to say 'I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me'. By the way, that one line contains an entire theology of divine – human encounter, the I that I am, encounters the Thou that God is.

Psalm 23 is never quoted in the New Testament  but the pastoral image is recurrent, as Jesus described variously as the Good Shepherd, the Chief Shepherd and the Great Shepherd. I've read many a commentary on Psalm 23. It is such a richly textured, spiritually resonant text that echoes throughout the corridors and cathedrals of Western Christianity. The best reception history of this psalm is in the remarkably fine book, The Psalms in Christian Worship. A Historical Commentary. Bruce Waltke and James Houston (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010) pp. 416-445.

But Jack Duncan remains in my mind and memory as the most persuasive existential commentary on the spiritual experience of being a sheep under the care of a good shepherd.

A search for new books on George Herbert, the Anglican poet par excellence, brings up an intriguing not to say amusing range of options. George Herbert's poetry, to modern ears, can seem bizarre in its conceits and metaphors, flowery in its language, and at best distant echoes from a previous age. But his poetry has enduring value for human development and spirituality, and explores the intensity of guilt and gratitude, of self criticism and divine acceptance, of insatiable longing and unbearable bliss.

But the name also brings up books about and by George Herbert Mead, the American philosopher of social consciousness and psychology. He too explored the nature of the self, not through prayer but through the importance of play and game in developing social values and relations. The give and take of human activity such as asking and giving, seeking and finding, winning and losing, talking and listening becomes the basis out of which the self is created. Mead's work also has enduring value for human society

Then there are books about George Herbert Walker Bush. At which point you become aware of the bizarre juxtapositions of the Amazon search engine. And you become aware too of the weird fact that an Anglican 17th century priest and patron saint of devotional poetry, and a 19th Century philosopher of human development and social values, share the same name with a President of the United States whose contribution to human spirituality and development and social inter-relationships is of an altogether other kind.