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After 5 weeks of intermittent posting, when Living Wittily has had its longest interruptions by far, I have discovered our new postman has beautiful feet. He brings good news. My start up pack for Broadband has glided through the letterbox, with the proclamation that we will be online again on April 30 – a mere 43 days after going offline at our last home. Now I'm a patient person give or take a few rants; and I am an understanding customer, provided there is a service to be satisfied with; and I have tried so hard not act as if the whole universe depended on each entity having uninterrupted access to the internet. But 43 days, when staying with the same provider, and expecting to be able to work from home – a home into which we moved on March 24, so it will be 37 days without online facility.

But I'm back regularly from May 1, allowing for a day or two to sort out any glitches, technophobic panics, computer hang-ups. Meantime thanks to those who left comments that had to wait till I could go online to moderate them. Margaret asked about perichoretic relationships – that will get its own post later.

Now started the new weekly regime of days at College and days in Westhill, Aberdeen. Travelling is now part of what I do – so I'm looking for ways to make time in the car more than a mere hiatus. Music, Radio 4, – haven't started talking books yet – not sure that's for me but willing to try. And strap line spotting. Lorries, vans, bill-boards, all displaying clever and not so clever strap lines. Might decide to do a strap line of the week. Followed a large lorry carrying shortbread. How many shortbread fingers on a 30 foot truck? And each one around 200 calories? The back of it had this image of golden crumbly butter enriched shortbread. Made to the recipe of Helen Deans, this family has been making shortbread for two generations. The strap line: "History in the baking", written just under this six foot image of a crumbly, butter shortbread finger. I followed it for a while wishing I'd brought a packet……

Beautiful sunny day here in Aberdeen. Morning spent answering emails, writing a couple of admin things what need to be wrote, and reading in preparation for next week's teaching. Also perused a mass of documents relating to stuff I'm doing next week – I do sometimes wonder just how much documentation is needed to establish a new course, and how that compares with how much is required to wear out a shredding machine. I know! My mood of skeptical impatience is not helpful.

It's been a mixed week of two days of meeting, course preparation and marking, rearrangements of books already arranged and rearranged, and in between in my leisure time I have cut swathes of organised space out ofa garage that was filled with all the stuff we didn't know what to do with under the immediate pressure of making sure the beds were up, the kettle was available, the painting was done for the carpet-fitters,  – oh, and the cold water tap on the bath was still secure…….

Speaking of leisure. The tapestry of the redstart is finished and I think it works. I'll scan it one of these days before it's framed, but I've enjoyed playing again with colour and texture, of wool, cotton and canvas. I am also now well on with the Celtic Cross but I think it is going to grow into a bigger piece of work – it is also free-hand, and I've seen some of the most stunningly dyed wool from Uruguay in a local shop, and I want to use it. The ideas aren't settled yet but I know what I want to try to do – just don't know yet how! Amongst the theological hints I am trying to weave into this is a trinitarian theme and an expression of perichoretic interrelationships. I know. Nothing if not ambitious, but why shouldn't symbol, colour, shape and pattern work on canvas as well as icon wood or oil canvas?

Off to read the next chapter of the new Bonhoeffer biography – in the sun, shaded, and with a large pot of earl gray tea. .  .

The title of this blog and the prescript in the title bar are borrowed and adapted from one of the scenes in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for All Seasons. In the life of Sir Thomas More, statesman with a conscience, civil servant par excellence, scholarly saint, theological policeman, astutely naive politician, one of the most turbulent and dangerous times was played out to its tragic end. Interpretations of More's life, character, motives and significance are varied, controversial, and usually depend on where the interpreter stands – Catholic or Protestant, traditionalist or revisionist, political realist or political idealist.

Yesterday I read A Man for All Seasons again. And over Christmas I read Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which is more about Thomas Cromwell than Thomas More. But which exudes the same atmosphere of power, political menace, oppressive religious change, and a nation in the throes of transition from medieval to modern, and a church convulsed by cultural changes that would compel it to reconfigure its theology, its self understanding and eventually push it from the centre of power to the margins of cultural influence centuries later – now, in fact.

What remains the same is the complexity of Christian obedience and the costliness of Christian witness when the affairs and interests of state collide with the convictions and mission of the Church. And in the weeks leading up to a General Election what became clear yesterday as I read again the story of Thomas More, is at least one telling similarity between post-modern 21st Century Britain and late Tudor England. And that is how hard it is to identify good people who can get the job done. Who in all the vaccous rhetoric of the hustings are we to give credence to? Which political figures speak words that are expressions of conviction, conscience and humane intelligence – by which I mean whose policies are about compassion for people, concern for the health of society, for whom economics are not based on ruthless self-interest, for whom human community is not party coloured?

Whatever else Thomas More was, he was a man of conscience, "the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced", according to the opinionated wisdom of Samuel Johnson. And I am left asking, a little uncertainly, which of our political leaders are people of such conscience and conviction that they would risk all on maintaining personal integrity. More unsettling still – where in our modern political discourse does the idea, the concept, of conscience feature. What weight given to the inner experience of conscience as a crucial way of moral knowing, and as a voice that is allowed to share the conversation between reason, pragmatism and expediency?

So here is More again: "God made the angels to show him splendour – as he made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man he made to serve him wittily in the tangle of his mind!"

Innocence, simplicity, splendour – not really the stuff of politics. Political territory is more about the tangle of our minds, complexity, compromise, expediency, manipulation, power-broking. And in all that, to discover what it means to serve God wittily, with subtle intelligence, with wise caution, with lateral thought, but with conscience and conviction as moral parameters. Thomas More wasn't always right in what he thought was right. His treatment of Tyndale was in the technical sense, a scandal – in the moral sense, outrageous. That too is the danger of acting according to conscience, when the conscience is educable, malleable and then given supreme authority in human action. True enough.

But it is still the case that political activity, and the character of political acttivists and leaders, requires some public assurance of integrity, a clear statement of what is believed, articulated convictions about what they are about and what they would do with power. And whoever I vote for, questions of conscience, both mine and theirs, will go far in helping me decide – and that may not mean party lines at all. I will try to serve God wittily in the tangle of my mind!

Over the past week I have been working a tapestry I started a while ago and left in a desk drawer where I regularly came across it and always intended to finish it. I suppose the difficulty was knowing how to finish it. The design is entirely out of my head (don't do tapestry kits) – one of my favourite birds, the redstart, standing on a moss covered hillock against a sky at dusk. How do you capture a sky at dusk on stranded cotton thread, most often separated and mixed in a textile equivalent of pallette working, and the intricacies of colour, tone and shade on moss and heather, and the shape and proportion of a small bird, and all this using only a half-cross-stitch which is by definition a technique dependent on angles of mathematical precision, and on canvas with 20 to the inch guage? Easier to write and preach a sermon – sometimes.

Well it's almost finished and I'm as satisfied as I've any right to be given the outrageous daftness of trying to do this in the first place. There is a Celtic cross on the other frame which is coming along more slowly, a form of contemplative activity that allows reflection on the meaning of symbol, colour and pattern as itself a form of theologising. Mind you, tapestry is also a good tension guage – stitches pulled too tight, a tell-tale sign of stress reaching even to the fingertips. But the co-ordination, the practice that makes it possible to find precisely a tiny hole from the back of a canvas and so working blind, the gentle rhythm of making and allowing to become, is all very therapeutic. Which is just as well – they weren't kidding when they said relocation and house moving are up there in the top three of the premier league of stressors!

When the redstart is finished I'll scan it and post a picture – be a wee while yet. Meantime I need to start thinking about those other forms of tapestry – like life, work, relationships and all the other strands that make up the pattern of our days. Oh, and by the way, on my visit to the craft shop I'll need to buy a stitch remover, a small needle-like tool with a sharp delta blade for cutting out wrong stitches, removing evidence of mistakes, allowing the chance to get it right. Wish life had one of them too! :)).

Amongst the pleasures of the Easter weekend was the BBC programme on Rogier Van der Weyden's masterpiece, The Descent from the Cross. Apart from the fascinating history of how this astonishing painting was commissioned by the guild of crossbow archers, and the subsequent story of how it was bought, purloined, stolen and almost ruined and then restored with near miraculous skill and patience, the images themselves were deeply moving and resonant of spiritual and theological depth.

What surprised me was my ignorance of this painting. In all my trawling and browsing last year, searching for paintings of Christ, especially the crucified Christ, I have no recollection of this painting. The artist was introduced to me by a friend who knows a thing or two about medieval and renaissance art, and I now have on my desk a postcard size reproduction of Van der Weyden's "Magdalen Reading", courtesy of that same friend. To have watched such a programme on Holy Saturday was one of the more reflective hours of a good weekend. And I suppose I'm left with a couple of thoughts I'd like to reflect on  further.

In an age when we are more attuned to moving images, graphic realism, and a selection of secularised saviour stories, I wonder if part of the church's mission is to go on persistently presenting and patiently preserving, the deep symbolism and the subversive otherness of the Gospel story. Relevance, accessibility, the Gospel popularised to the point of caricature, impatience with profundity, dismissive noises when thought and reflection are required, the default assumption that attention spans are now measured in 5 second info-bytes – all of this is fundamentally challenged by a painting like Van der Weyden's deposition. And while I am entirely comfortable with the idea of a church culturally attuned, and alert to the meaning and message of the Gospel as it relates to 21st Century experience, I am equally sure that somehow the church needs to hear what my theological hero James Denney called "the plunge of lead into fathomless depths". That sound of lead sounding the depths is missing from  much of contemporary Christianity.

The other thought is more straightforward, but complex too. The absence of symbol, art and representation in the worship and devotional life of my own tradition is, in an image soaked culture, now a missed mission opportunity. Sure, a number of churches have banners, ranging from the cliche to the art form, from the textual to the pictorial, but few if any survive repeated contemplation. A telling comment in a recent conversation with Sandy Stoddart, Professor of Sculpture at University of the West of Scotland comes to mind. Great art is never capable of exhaustive explanation; there is that which is beyond articulation, comprehension, cognitive control and aesthetic appreciation. There is a depth beyond us that draws us towards it. I would call it the transcendent, and a great theologian like Hans Urs Von Balthasar took 7 large volumes to explore that depth beyond, the place where the mystery of God's love is all but inaccessible – except that God in love comes to us in Christ, and what is revealed in Christ is the fullness of God, the one who fills all in all.

And until we recover a sense of that vast mystery of grace and mercy, and find ways to explore, contemplate, cherish and celebrate the reality of God whose 'eternity dost ever besiege us', (Helen Waddell), then our faith will remain prosaic, practical, partial, pragmatic, everyday accessible – and to that extent culturally conditioned. And we will, often without knowing it, long for that depth beyond, an encounter with the mystery of God who cannot be reduced to the measure of our needs, and for the chance now and again in life to stand in that place of bewildered wonder and nameless longing that is the place of adoration. A picture like Van der Meyer's has for many people, been a window where such moments happen. 

Whingeing about sporadic internet access is not an attractive trait, so I won't complain, explain, decry or cry. Update on relocation as follows

Our landline phone went live today after a hiatus of 12 days.

The study is approaching usable, though one or two key itmes still to be installed, including a small armchair which short legs, to give comfort to the study occupant who also has short legs.

After years of faithful service, and numerous trips to the recycling and waste disposal depots, the springs of my wee Corsa finally gave in and it is currently having a spring transplant at the local car clinic.

Currently on annual leave and finding it hard to remember what to do when on holiday – suggestions welcome only if they are unrude.

Had our first guests over Easter weekend and enjoyed good company, laughter and fun, and time to make good conversation over various high calorie desserts.

Started A S Byatt's The Children's s Book, which is taking a bit of getting into – but she is a novelist I rate and can still remember the first time I read Possession, one of her finest novels, and have read it twice subsequently.

Just had a phone call to collect the wee Corsa which is now post anaesthesia and will have to be driven gently home.

Will try to log in again soon – bear with us, we will be living wittily again once the blessed broadband is up – not whingeing, just explaining……

Today

One of the other cures for grumpiness is to encounter a worldview that exposes the essential small-mindedness of the grumpy spirit. A theological critique of grumpiness isn't so much an analysis of whatever it is that disorders the self, as the posing of an alternative vision of what is important in life. So when I came across these lines from Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison my spirit was lifted above the basement level grumpiness threshold to look again at the world through the eyes of faith, and to consider the essential selfishness of complaining that reality wasn't configured sufficiently around my own interests.

It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith…By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes, and failures…experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw oursleves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not only our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with christ in Gethsemane.

It's the word 'unreservedly'. Grumpiness is not much more than an inner list of reservations, complaints, criticisms, resentments which culminate in a spirit of holding back. Worldliness is the opposite – an engagement with the world in the name of the god who loved the world, loves the world, and will never rescind the fiat, "let there be".

Only very occasionally can I be accused of being grumpy.

My cheerful smiling disposition is evident from most photographs.

Yesterday I was accused by three people of being grumpy.

Guilty, my Lord!

1. Might be because I've lived in four different houses in 12 days.
2. Might be because I painted two rooms with three coats of paint in 14 hours the day after moving into the house.
3. Might be because as a lover of routine I ain't got one yet.
4. Might be that I am missing Sheila who is a major grumpiness cure.
5. Might be because despite the clock change the weather is still miserable.
6. Might be because I am becoming a grumpy old man.

I think it's a combination of 1 to 5. Number 6 is impossible.

One of my favourite art forms is stained glass. The picture is from Bar-Hill Shared Church in Cambridge and i designed a tapestry of this some years ago. When I feel grumpy an image like this acts like a grumpiness evaporator – it reminds me that God's wonderful world is far too much fun, and has far too much beauty for grumpiness to be anything other than a transient aberration of spirit. Or so I hope. I'll do another blog post on this window – it is an ecumenical treasure.

Not normal service yet but an improvement on the previous 10 days of sporadic silence. Thanks to all those who sent good wishes on the move. I survived, apart from some creaky shoulders and a body that protests albeit mildly at having to shift endless boxes, apply numerous coats of paint to the room whose colour scheme made the abomination of desolation seem aesthetically pleasing, lay a couple of carpets and reconstruct the study with all books reshelved and in their appointed places.

The aerobic exercise involved in celing painting (which was also previously coloured in bright pink with a blue one foot border!!) has put me in fine condition for a session of energetic charismatic worship, complete with the requisite arm movements when words like glory, power, praise, honour exalt and other words from the semantic domain of charismatic liturdgy occur in the praise / worship / songs. The swinging motion required to apply a smooth coat of emulsion, and in my case the rising on tip-toe and stretching forward at a dangerously destabilising angle, provided practice in a new repertoire to be used when ever I am singing songs in which passionate expressions of spiritual longing or fulfilment are called for :))

More seriously, I am now at College and started a new way of working away from home three days a week and working at home two days a week. No idea what this will feel like until it has been road-tested for a while. Meantime, after a hiatus of over a week, I am back in the melee of the Spring semester, preparing teaching and meeting with students, staff meetings and planning, marking and feedback, liaising with colleagues on campus, and generally reminding myself of what it is I do, am and am for!

This morning spent nearly an hour with a University colleague discussing the connections between Schopenhauer and Richard Dawkins and their shared interest in biology not as science but as philosophy, the furore surrounding Philip Pullman's new book on Jesus and the scoundrel Christ, the capacity of Christianity to turn toxic and embody the opposite of all that Jesus stood for and died for, and the implications of each of these for a church that is so busy trying to work out the meaning of mission that it seems oblivious of its core task – embodying all that Jesus stood for and died for!

Not sure about how it is for others, but I find such a conversation a liberal education in why Christian apologetics is an ultimately futile project of trying to win an argument. What is needed is more than winning the argument – much more important to win the assent of the heart, to work for the liberation of the spirit, to encourage the renewal of hope, to welcome the dawning of an understanding deeper than the mind but not dismissive of intellect and thought; by which I mean, what is needed is a church that lends credibility to its own message of peace, reconciliation, love as the bottom line, hope and hopefulness as rooted in God's mercy in Christ, and the offer of forgiveness, new beginnings and those gestures of compassionate self-giving that are redemptive and attractive and, finally and persuasively, Christ-like. Not even a Schopenhauer could out-argue a witness less interested in argument than in the integrity of a life lived in consistent faithfulness to the radical demands and gifts of the Gospel. 

 !

Scary thoughts – I have most of my books from my home study fitted comfortably into the new study at Westhill. But I have the same number of books at College – Church History, Theology, Pastoral Theology and Spirituality with miscellaneous other stuff. Not a problem just now – but six years down the line when retirement might just about catch me up – what then? Those who don't understand scoff and see the easy answer as a major literary cull. Oblivious to the terror such vocabulary arouses, insensitive to the passionate attachment of soul to library of books, never occurs to such literary utilitarians that a library isn't an aggregate of disposable units, but an organic collection of people, places, ideas and conversations bound up with personal identity, individual history, human development and prolonged intellectual adventure.

So what to do? Thinking about it. Open to suggestions – but not suggestions that upset my inner equilibrium which is finely calibrated and depends on the presence of books collectively bonded together into not just a library, but MY library.Don't want to go digital – I love books not just text. Don't want to throw out furniture to make room for more bookcases – though that may well be negotiable, though the person I'll need to negotiate with is no pushover. Don't want to put books in storage, why keep books to hide them away on the off chance you MIGHT read them. I've always wanted books around me as companions I notice, acknowledge and spend time with. However in a previous post or two I did concede that pushed to the place of having to choose, I could reduce my library to manageable proportions. It's just that the reality is likely to be harder than the hypothesis, the empty claim, and the cheap boast! Meantime I'll do a W E Gladstine and work out how to cram maximum books into minimum space.

Never mind though – as long as I don't retire there won't be a problem 🙂