Category: Uncategorised

Just had a few days at a friends house down in the East Neuk of Fife. Cold and wet, windy and grey, but it was a good rest and I'm home less fatigued than when I left! I took the Kindle with me just to try it out for convenience and flexibility.  I'm slowly making my way through Middlemarch, and one of the great bonuses of Kindle is the way it helps redeem those 5 and 10 minute hiatuses (what's the plural of hiatus by the way?) Waiting for the pizza to heat (12 minutes),  or the 9.00 news to come on (5 – 10 minutes usually, or sitting in the car waiting for Sheila (1 – umpteen minutes), and especially those quarter hours that are just about the maximum period of consciousness between sliding beneath the duvet and the onset of eyelid fatigue swiftly followed by irresistible soporific longings.

The point is – I'm reading George Eliot several times a day in byte sized chunks and enjoying the leisurely meandering more than that determined enjoyment with which I usually tackle a big novel. It's a different kind of read, but just as enjoyable, and maybe the slow literary drip is as effective a way of living in a story as the conscientious page turning that may get the book finished quicker and the story absorbed more effectively – but it may be that rather than us absorbing the story, a slower reading allows the story to absorb us, and draw us in. Anyway, that's my experience so far – and as a stunningly obvious commonplace observation for Eliot fans – she is a wonderfully wise, lucidly sharp, comprehendingly compassionate and critical narrator who knows the depths of, and points with unerring skill to, the machinations and motivations of human behaviour. Her novels are post-graduate courses in moral psychology and moral philosophy – impossible to read and not see ourselves in a different, sometimes better, sometimes more critical, light.

I know there are lots of ways to use Kindle – people now use them as the sermon notepad, lecture notes, PDF readers – I'll probably get round to some of these. But it's as a way of filling the unforgiving minute by spending it in the company of an omniscient narrator that Kindle has so far "done it for me". That cliche would have survived a nanosecond within range of Eliot's editorial pen!

The other day a car came towards me with the head of one of the passengers sticking out of the side window. It was a large German Shepherd, Alsatian. Its ears were flattened, its eyes closed to slits, its lips blown back in a manic grin, and it illustrated perfectly the canine equivalent of getting the cobwebs blown out of the head!

Just listened to Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I've listened to it more times than I could count. I love it. And when the slow second movement was played at the climax of the King's Speech I recognised it immediately – and noted the irony that a movement from this over the top exuberant symphony was played to accompany a speech to hearten a population now at war with Beethoven's Germany. That slow melancholic movement, with its slow struggle towards assertion was an inspired choice.

But it's the finale that astonishes. The critic who on first hearing it accused Beethoven of being drunk as Bacchus was entirely wrong, except that the music is undoubtedly intoxicating, an 'unstoppable swirl of ebullience and energy". I can't listen to it and not move! The performance I have allows the brass to blare in triumphant abandon and I enjoy it best when volume is no problem to anyone.

Like Van Gogh, Beethoven walked through valleys of deep darkness, and yet produced some of the most exuberant, celebratory and inspiring music, and some of the most tender, subtle and lovely melodies from the Moonlight Sonata to the Peasants' Thanksgiving. Years ago I read a book on the nine symphonies and from then on have returned to be restored again. Because if anyone knew the valley of deep darkness as well as the still waters and green pastures, it was Beethoven. From a personality potent and vulnerable, with responses on the full spectrum from rage to adoration, and levels of creative genius that were all but self-destructive, comes such music. 

I know us amateur music listeners can over-interpret and over-praise our enthusiasms, misinterpret and misunderstand for lack of technical expertise and passable erudition. But there is that in music which, transcending such limits, is creative and recreative, restorative and redemptive, offering healing of heart and mind and spirit and soul – whichever of these elusive terms describes where our deepest living comes from. During Lent I'm browsing – loved music, loved paintings and loved poetry. No choices made ahead – an indisciplined, desultory but not purposeless indulgence in what I know restores my soul and reminds me goodness and mercy follow me all the days of my life. And if part of that mercy is laughter and joy and sheer life-affirming exultation, then listening to this 7th Symphony at dangerous levels of volume does it for me!

Prayer

May I never not be frisky,

May I never not be risque.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,

and give them to the ocean

leap in the froth of the waves,

still loving the moment,

still ready, beyond all else,

to dance for the world.

Mary Oliver, Evidence, (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009), page 33

Life is not easily negotiated just now for various reasons. Despite it all, and as a wish to be defiant in a self-preserving way, I pray prayers like this poem. I understand and accept that prayer can be an experience of calming, contemplative, creative and constructive thought. Other times it can be invigorating, ennervating and energising. Or again a serious piece of negotiation between me and God, when I argue and God listens (presumably), and occasionally answers even if I don't always quite pick up the still small voice easily submerged under waves of complaint, self-justification and genuine bewilderment. But this poem is about something else. It is about finding alternative ways to dance when life is like ashes. It's about the latent but faithfully present fun that can be found in life when frisky and risque are not pejoratives to be avoided but compliments to be enjoyed. It's a prayer that says the best way out of ourselves is to love the moment of freedom, to recognise the windows through which joy is glimpsed, to dance not for ourselves, but for the world, and find that the ocean, vast and capacious, has room and energy to buoy us, and turn movement to dance.

Did Mary Oliver mean all that – probably no, and maybe yes. But that's what comes out of my keyboard when I read this poem. Frisky and risque indeed? Indeed! Leap in the froth of the waves – absolutely, where's the beach?

Yes. it's been quiet over here for a week or two. No excuses – just explanations, but they aren't of much interest either. Backlog of other things that have to have priority; a computer that died at work, and one here that's needing to see a specialist with some urgency; and a severe attack of cannae be bothered led to a near fatal case of demotivation!

I guess there are times when the useful, desirable and fun things get squeezed by the required, the essential and serious! But I'm hoping that was a hiatus in creativity brought on by an indulgent birthday weekend in London, a concatenation of circumstances at work and home, and a consequent fatigue of the spirit that led to the earlier mentioned cannae be bothered.

All of which said. I have a new Kindle which is proving to be a further recalcitrant and unco-operative piece of technological must have – and it won't connect to our broadband at home. Tried the various options of passowrd and all that, but it refuses. So going for a coffee to the cafe tomorrow and see if Kindle face likes the Wi Fi there. Would be good to have George Eliot's Middlemarch in a pad no thicker than a slice of bread. That novel of novels is due for a reread. Left me wondering what Marian Evans would have said about Kindle in the Westminster Review. I suspect the Empress of Victorian fiction may have approved of it – though considering her fortune was made in the serialised novel, she would probably have opted for monthly downloads of the latest instalment. Let you know how I got on. 

Lent starts next week – I'll begin the series on pictures I spent time with at the National Gallery, one of the highlights of the Birthday weekend – the other was The Lion King!

"We preachers are summoned to get up and utter a sub-version of reality, an alternative vision of reality, that says another way of life in the world is not only possible but is peculiarly mandated and peculiarly valid…This sub-version intends to empower a community of sub-versives who are determined to practice their lives according to a different way of imagining".

Walter Brueggemann, quoted in Disruptive Grace, page 8.

Yesterday the big furore over the Sky Sports sacking of Andy Gray, and the resignation of Richard Keys, filled the back pages of the papers. Apart from the unpleasant suggestiveness of some comments off screen, which were then broadcast, there seems to me to be more than adequate grounds for sacking them both on the grounds of sheer gender prejudice. And alleviation or mitigation on the excuse that this was merely dressing room banter is beside the point and both ethically and culturally puerile.

But also yesterday, a research project Vrije University shows that some decisions are impossible for the human eye to call. It requires the assistant referee to be looking at two different places at exactly the same time. So a good assistant referee is likely to get 90% of the decisions right and 10% wrong. Male or female. And also, the female assistant referee in question did indeed get the crucial decision right, demonstrated conclusively by technology which she didn't have available to her.

Now would the ex Sky pundits say that men would get the 90% right but women less than that? Or are men so omnisciently endowed and so intellectually quicksilver that they could improve on the 90%? And if men are so technically and physiologically gifted of eye and brain, particularly brain, why would male pundits fall for such a spurious and prejudiced viewpoint in the first place. Don't they SEE their own prejudice? Or are they unable to interpret the rules of the game we call human life, community and respect for others?

The photo is of the assistant referee whose skill, athleticism and knowledge of the gaem, got her in the right place, at the right time and making the right judgement.

The drive to Aberdeen from Glasgow was a journey of two halves, or a journey of two worlds. Glasgow to Dunblane was frozen fog, a thick grey blanket of low visibility .

Beyond Dunblane the sky cleared and just about Gleneagles the full moon appeared above the hill line. Pale orange, a luminous disk suspended like a chinese lantern over Perhshire hills, creating the impossible illusion of glowing warmth on a frosty night.

Then passing Forfar the same moon reflected on the loch that is home to hundreds of waterfowl, as if an artist with a coarse hair brush had painted the surface the colour of the moon with one stroke – and decided to leave it at that.

By the time I got to Laurenckirk the magical moments were beginning to come with alarming and delight filling frequency. The moon still low over the Mearns, I looked at the new windfarm and at just the right moment the gigantic three blades were framed against the now bright cream moon. And for a brief epiphany it was the CND sign captured by heaven and earth, the moon and the mill co-operating in the sign of peace.

Finally, crossing the River Dee at Maryculter, the entire river seemed to be illumined by a thousand ripples of pale cream light, and against the background of silhouetted Scotch Pines through which the moonlight streamed with carefully controlled extravagance.

There's an enchantment that I guess is embedded in our spirits when we see such beauty, and we feel and know deep down the reverberations of our own createdness, the answering upreach of our own longing. A journey like that can change an entire perspective on life, or at least remind us that to enjoy and grow through the life we have, a first necessity is open eyed wonder at the gratuitous loveliness of the world. Tonight I gazed at the varied canvases of a night sky, painted from the palette of the One in whom is truth, beauty and goodness. 

Heading towards New Year I've been thinking about the church. 

Where in all the cultural flux of the times?

where in the midst of spiritual pessimism not unrelated to economic gloom?

where in the massed choir of competing voices that is our digital cyber inhabited environment; where in our confusion, anxiety and driven existence?

where, is there a place to stand, or to sit, and regain a sense of perspectve?

Where is there a centre that will hold against the centrifugal and centripetal forces of a world complex and dangerous, self-destructively greedy and unable to curb the human appetite to possess, have power over, and assert the will to life and power over against the imperative to be on the side of life itself?

Where is the place where the church's life is renewed, it's purpose reconstituted, its raison d'etre reaffirmed and its mission reconfigured.

The table, is where.

Gathered in Jesus' name, around the sacred table, sharing blessed bread and wine, hearing again the Gospel promise, giving again our deepest love, owning again our deepest longings, and realising that our loves and longings derive their importance from that which is prior to them – the love of God in Christ made known in the Spirit.

To the question where, the answer of the Christian heart will be – there, at the table.

How that works out in the theology and practice of each Christian community has been told with succint pointedness by Walter Brueggemann. The next few days I'll post Brueggemann's take on the central importanc eof the Gospel table, the place where shalom is proclaimed and from which it is to be lived.

I have a very good friend who has an all but uncritical enthusiasm for Salley Vickers' novel, Miss Garnet's Angel, the first of her books I read. Another friend, Geoff Colmer, has been at me to read Vickers' The Other Side of You. I'm getting there Geoff! But I recently picked up a couple of other novels by Vickers in the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an establishment I have no hesitation in advertising here. (Organised, discerning, reasonable prices, a proprietor who leaves you to browse without ignoring you – The Old Aberdeen Book Shop 140 Spital ABERDEEN Aberdeenshire AB24 3JU tel: 01224 658355 map.).

So having read Mr Golightly's Holiday, a strange novel, somewhere between modern novel, and timeless fable with religious overtones and metaphysical undertones, I've just finished Instances of the Number 3.

I'm beginning to notice recurring themes, recognise the wise interpretive voice of the author, and becoming familiar with the narrative contexts Vickers creates as she examines and explores the topography of human relationships. Mostly her novels are about love of one kind or another – its failures and triumphs, its capacity to mortally wound and miraculously heal, its puzzling complexity and frightening simplicity, its power to extend forgiveness to the heartbroken or to withhold absolution and peace from those who make life choices that deny love's sovereign demands.

But love is neither to be domesticated to human whims, nor limited by the all too human urgency of selfish desire which is indeed love's negation. Vickers is a Jungian psychoanalyst; she is also an accomplished literary scholar; in addition she is a consummate observer of human motivation, behaviour and character; which makes her a consummate novelist. So metaphysics, religious experience, supernatural phenomena, the world of high art and serious literature, become in Vickers novels important perspective giving lenses into human aspiration as it grows or diminishes in the life and circumstances of the characters she creates. And she creates characters who are immensely persuasive, attractive, instructive – the outcome of the story matters because the destiny of the characters matters to the reader. 

Instances of the Number 3 is a novel that requires of the reader certain things. First a more than curious interest in what it is we are all looking for, hoping for, longing for, suffering from in those relationships that matter most to us – love. Second, a willingness to read slowly, and read much of the novel more than once in the first reading, in order to apprehend, and comprehend, the comments of the authorial voice, less didactic than George Eliot, but often as ethically perceptive and psychologically enlightening. Third, a patience with a writer who assumes her readers know enough about art and literature to grasp the more important allusions in chapters and passages of pivotal significance. But fourthly, a willingness to learn the art of sympathy and hopefulness, because Vickers' characters are on the whole likeable, flawed, people caught in the snares of circumstance, or constrained by previous life choices, so now longing for new purpose, direction and meaning, and all of this within the sphere of human relationships.

  I've said it here before – there are entire mornings in pastoral theology seminars when students would learn so much about themselves by reading novels. How the human heart works, about the constraints and disappointments, the quiet patient sacrifices that love both requires and bestows, and about how there are experiences and situations in all of our lives that are not resolved by changing them, but by recognising that their givenness and intractable nature, and how we respond to them, is what makes us.  And no, this isn't a review of a Salley Vickers novel. It's more and less than that. It is a push and a plea to those who dare claim the work of the cure of souls is their vocation. To take time to read those writers who sharpen our insight, ignite our imagination, stimulate emotional sympathy, teach us to interpret a life story – our own and that of others, and do so by drawing us into and involving us in their stories, where so much of our own experience is rehearsed, or questioned, or touched with the coal from the altar so that we understand ourselves more compassionately, see ourselves more honestly, and so speak of ourselves more modestly, and mercifully.

As one reviewer said there is an "essential optimism" in Vickers' writing. And there are sentences in her novels that are amongst the wisest counsel I have ever received from the pen of someone who has never met me, but who has, it would seem, been reading my private journal and plagiarising my experience.

(The photograph above is included just because it is a great photograph of avid readers! It came from here and I gladly acknowledge its use.)

Browsing for different art images of the adoration of the Magi I came across this from a modern illustrated French Bible.

Can't think of any profound observations to make. The mixture of ethnic and cartoon art give it lightness, movement and though the whole thing seems slightly eccentric, that adds to the strangeness.

In any case what is more strange than three powerful scholar nobles, crossing several national borders through the desert to reach an obscure out sized village at the back of beyond in occupied Judea, carrying valuable gifts, and offering them reverently while kneeling at the feet of a peasant woman who has just given birth so far as the world knows, to a child of dubious parenthood?

One of the functions of cartoon art is to nudge us out of the familiar and confront us with a strangeness that may be more true than we are ready to admit.

Anyway. If what we are looking for is realism, then none of the great art masterpieces come any closer. Each sets the story in the cultural context of the artist. In that sense the strangeness is twofold – the story itself is strange, but then there is the interpretive chasm we need to span and the leap of imagination required for us to have any idea of the meaning of this scene by an unknown Fleish artist, for 15th Century Renaissance Europeans, many still unable to read, but living through the cultural flux of new knowledge challenging old certainties.

That two such different pieces of art could refer to the same biblical incident, and portray them with cultural congruence despite a gap of 400 years and generations of historical and cultural change, seems to suggest that art is its own kind of exegesis, or eisegesis; and each artist is one whose hermeneutic approach like our own, is culturally conditioned, historically limited and theologically partial. None of which need be a problem if we are open to learn, to compare, to critique and then to look again at the story and its meaning for our own time. Whatever else art does, it cautions against that first instinct to pin down a story to a single meaning, and opens up meanings we never imagined before.