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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. .

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!