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If you didn't hear the Chief Rabbi on Thought for the Day this morning, then take time plater to listen to it on the IPlayer. This is vintage Jonathan Sacks, humane, religiously generous, passionate in conviction, reasoned but within the key principles of his own faith tradition. I listened to it on the way into College and a grey wet Wednesday suddenly didn't seem so grey.

His distinction between regret and remorse, and his understanding of what forgiveness and reconciliation cost and their value to the human future give what he says a moral decisiveness in a blame culture where responsibility is always placed on someone else.

This is religious broadcasting at its very best. Ever since his reith Lectures on The Persistence of Faith, I have admired, listened to and learned deeply from the Chief Rabbi. I guess he stands somewhere between the moral glow of Micah, the sense of the Transcendent God of Isaiah, and the questioning intellect of Qoheleth, but with the sub-stratum of trust that permeates the Psalms, all integrated in a life based on The Torah.

 

Amongst my favourite pastimes is walking on the cobbled beaches on the east coast of Scotland. I spent some time recently admiring, contemplating, enjoying, looking at, considering, wondering, imagining, as I looked at the cobbled beach in sunlight. The colours and textures, the thrown togetherness that looks like creative arrangement, the smooth roundedness surprisingly soft and warm, the hard durability of elemental substances of quiet understated beauty, the random oddity of millions of stones tumbled trillions of times and now available for exhibition to an audience of one, with a camera.

The following Haiku hint at the marvel that is a cobbled beach, with oblique glances in the direction of that relatedness that enriches our humanity – relatedness enriched and stimulated by similarity and difference, tone and shape, angle of repose and interconnectedness so that the whole is greater than the parts, nearness and distance and space, and the provisionality that is essential to avoid sterile sameness.

Stones in Sunlight.  

 

Remorseless friction,

waves lapidary tumbling,

the beauty of grey.

 

Cobbled together,

aeons of geology,

placed by time and tide.

 

Tones in harmony,

well rounded community

of shaped difference.

 

Pebbles of friendship,

in easy togetherness,

colour and contrast.

(copyright. Jim Gordon, 2011)

 

 

O God

you must make your own human word,

for that's the only kind I can comprehend.

Don't tell me everything that you are.

Dont tell me of your infinity.

Just say that you love me,

just tell me of your goodness to me.

But don't say this in your divine langauge,

in which your love also means

your inexorable justice and your crushing power.

Say it rather on MY language,

so I won't have to be afraid

that the word 'love' hides some significance

other than your goodness and your gentle mercy.

Karl Rahner, Encounter with Silence.

And they say rahner is a complex, difficult to read theologian who uses obscure or sophisticated philosophical categories. maybe so. But this is the prayer of someone who knows the limits of language, the constraints on concepts, and the deficiencies of discourse when it comes to describing God, let alone addressing God – and when it comes to God addressing us, all language breaks down and we are presented with Personal Presence, the Word made flesh, God who has spooken in his Son.

 Lead us, great teacher Paul, in wisdom's ways,

And lift our hearts with thine to heaven's high throne,

Till faith beholds the clear meridian blaze,

And, sun-like, in the soul reigns charity alone.

 

Elpis, wife of Boethius (480-524)

Paul has come in for his share of criticism and even calumny in some circles of NT study – his views on a number of issues challenged, contested, the target for a dismissive reductionism. But there is great wisdom, and remarkable  intellectual vision in his writings. I've just finished yet another slow reading of Ephesians, and there are passages there that are amongst the highest points in all Christian literature.

So the prayer of Elpis to St Paul – let's not get into the theological soundness or spiritual efficacy of praying to one of the saints, even if it is Paul. I'd rather just echo the prayer and discover that the blessing of God isn't so hemmed round by theological proprieties as we might think. The direction of the heart Godward seems more important.

 

The day thou gavest, Lord, has ended;
the darkness falls at thy behest;
to thee our morning hymns ascended;
thy praise shall sanctify our rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. We thank thee that thy church, unsleeping
while earth rolls onward into light,
through all the world her watch is keeping,
and rests not now by day or night.

 

3. As o'er each continent and island
the dawn leads on another day,
the voice of prayer is never silent,
nor die the strains of praise away.

 

4. So be it, Lord; thy throne shall never,
like earth's proud empires, pass away.
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
till all thy creatures own thy sway.

 

The North east of Scotland has some of the most spectacular sunsets in Scotland. I know about the West coast, from Machrahanish to Ullapool, and I've watched sunsets there too. These pictures were taken last night, one of the most spectacular sunsets we've seen up here for years. Impossible not to link them with this evocative Victorian evening hymn. By the way, Lesley Garrett sings this hymn on her album Amazing Grace, and it is one of the most resoundingly over the top and enjoyable versions I've ever heard!

Readers of Living Wittily will know I have a particular interest in and affinity with the Gospel of John. It was the Gospel I worked through in the Greek text in College, guided by R E O White, for whom the Greek New Testament was peerless literature. He was a classic exegete, training us to explore the text by establishing the basis of the text, working through the grammatical and syntactical issues, carefully reconstructing background in cultural, social and historical contexts, and finally writing out the theological and practical implications of the text so explored.

Amongst R E O White's exegetical resources of first rank was C K Barrett, whose commentary on John was the class textbook. I have it in its revised form, and am sorry that when I bought the new edition I gave away my first edition – the one with the terracota coloured dustwrapper, a book whose very appearance conjured up impressions of serious, sober scholarship wrapped in unfussy but serviceable dustrwaps.

Today we heard of the death of C K Barrett at the venerable age of 94. So I took my Barrett on John from the shelves and spent a wee while browsing, remembering and giving thanks for the scholarship and devotion to the text of C K Barrett. Pencil marks in the margin still mark places where I had my eyes opened by Barrett. Just one example –

John14.6 is the famous threefold I am the way the truth and the life. Barrett is quite sure the primary claim is "I am the way by which men and women come to God". And he is certain that Jesus refers to his coming passion – "the way which he himself is about to take is the road which his followers must also tread. He himself goes to the Father by way of crucifixion and resurrection; in future he is the means by which Christians die and rise….Because Jesus is the means of access to God who is the source of all truth and life, he is himself the truth and the life for men and women."

Page 458, The Gospel According to John, (SPCK, 1978 rev.ed.)

Barrett unabashedly acknowledged that even the 1978 revised commentary on John was then old fashioned. So it was, and is. But it is old fashioned in the same sense as any classic – that is, old fashioned does not mean irrelevant, unimportant, dispensable. On the contrary – a classic commentary remains relevant, important and indispensable! I have a shelf of commentaries on John, and some of them I have read through, others have been consulted times without number. It would be untrue to say Barrett is my favourite – I have several favourites for different purposes – and Raymond Brown's two volume commentary is my most used. But Barrett on John was the first Greek Text commentary I worked through with grammar and lexicon, and that habit, instilled by R E O White has never left me as my favourite form of lectio divina. R E O White used to quote Noel Davey, one of Barrett's close friends, who urged students to 'bury your head in a lexicon and you'll raise it in the presence of God".

C K Barrett now knows the full depth of those words, "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life…" May he now, with gladness and gratitude, raise his head in the presence of God and know the fullness of truth and life. Thanks be to God.

 

Sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing. I mean by that, you are happily reading something, minding your own business and a perfectly good train of thought is interrupted by who knows Who?

Last night after a satisfying day of travelling, preaching, talking and catching up with various folk, I'm lying in bed reading, intending to lull myself closer to that edge where the closing of the eyelids gets easier than the holding of the book.

Then I read this from Nicholas Berdyaev, whom I hadn't anticipated as a voice in this book:

There are two symbols, bread and money; and there are two mysteries, the eucharistic mystery of bread and the Satanic mystery of money. We are faced with the great task; to overthrow the rule of money, and to establish in its place the rule of bread.

At which point thought, prayer and a sense of having been addressed took over. Oh, and when I say "sometimes God speaks to us from oblique angles of our hearing", I do mean us – each of us – all of us. While the politicians from Cameron to Blair indulge in diagnosis skewed by questionable political assumptions, Berdyaev's contrast of the two ways human beings live gets much nearer the reality - bread  or  money, and only one is eucharistic, that which proclaims the celebration of thanksgiving.

Headline this morning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chris popular – but loses listeners.

……….

Headline 2000 years ago

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christ popular – but loses listeners.

 

 

This is one of the photos I took recently while playing with my new camera. I took it while wandering in Crathes Castle Gardens, in the rain. It's currently on my desktop. To tell the truth, I didn't so much take the photo as the camera – which has features much smarter than the photographer! Still, I am rather chuffed with it.

 

I posted on Van Gogh's Sunflowers on March 12, you can chase it here if you want. I am now starting a near scale version in tapestry which is both a piece of unhumble cheek and an act of devotion to Van Gogh. I know perfectly well that any attempt to portray, construe, replicate a masterpiece is doomed to failure, and seems an act futile and foolish.

But. And there are several buts. First, I am not seeking to replicate but to contemplate. The scaled drawing on canvas, the choice of coloured thread, the slow building up of stitches, the immersion in the images and colours, the combination of freehand stitching and the constraint of Van Gogh's shapes and colours, all combine in a disposition of attentiveness.

So, second, I know that multi-tasking is the thing, do more than one thing at a time, even do three at a time and each of them well – that's the ideal, I know. But  not with tapestry. I can listen to music, but can't watch televison while doing this. So far from showing any disrespect or trivialising these glorious* paintings by trying to copy one of them, I am taking time and trouble to follow the artists hand and eye.

Third, if you look at the previous post you will see that Van Gogh painted Sunflowers to show forth gratitude and hopefulness. They are studies in yellow, because that is the colour that radiates from the sun, the centre of all life and the source for Van Gogh of all positive hopefulness and thankfulness. The miracle is that Van Gogh painted such dazzling exuberance while struggling with inner turmoils that would eventually close in on him in a self-destructive cycle of despair. Add to this recent research that shows Van Gogh used compounds in his paint that means some of the most vivid and brilliant yellows have turned brown with age and, irony of ironies, by exposure to sunlight.

So my tapestry is not an attempted replica of the painting in the National Gallery. It will be an impression of an Impressionist; the vivid yellows and contrasting brilliances of colours which are a study in yellow, I'll show in brightest stranded cotton. I'm not trying to reproduce Van Gogh's painting; I'm trying to capture in colour his courage, his vision of hopefulness, his immense humanity and passion for life, the tenderness and intensity with which he looked on created things and saw to the essence of existence, and believed at the centre of all things goodness could be found.

 It's one of the neglected facts about Van Gogh that he was a man of intense Christian faith earlier in his life and career. He moved away from Evangelicalism of a Reformed style to a much less personal form of theism. His loss of religious faith, or at least his move away from certainty and dogmatic convictions, was never a loss of belief in life itself. Whatever else the Sunflower sequence of paintings express, they affirm for Van Gogh the reality of light, the vitality of life, the vibrancy of colour and the radiance of existence – and it is to his credit as a courageous human being, that such affirmation was possible only by the most costly and creative defiance of which he was capable – to paint the opposite of what he felt inside.

So his Sunflowers make real and vivid the human life that is the alternative to death; they announce the hopefulness that argues against despair; they radiate the riotous energy that gives the lie to the lethargy and ennui of his depression, and yet those same flowers caught in a still life, celebrating beauty captured and released in its living essence, contrasts with the inner agitation and mania of a man whose emotional life burned with consuming passion. To read Vincent's letters about these flowers, and sense the joy he took in painting them, is to begin, only begin, to understand the vision that saw within the anatomy of this perfectly named flower of the sun, realities that he might never grasp fully, but which he sensed were sufficient to grasp him, and perhaps save him. Van Gogh's Sunflowers are above all else a spiritual, personal and deeply existential statement, hope made defiant by magnificent art which construes the world as a place where the sun shines on the righteous, and the unrighteous.