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Everything depends on the person who stands in front of the classroom. The teacher is not an automatic fountian from which intellectual beverages may be obtained. the teacher is either a witness or a stranger. To guide a pupil into the promised land, she must have been there herself. When asking herself: Do I stand for what I teach? Do I believe what I say? she must be able to answer in the affirmative.

What we need more than anything else is not textbooks but textpeople. It is the personality of the teacher which is the text that the pupils read; the text that they will never forget. 

The Insecurity of Freedom, 39-40

What do most of us know about the substance of words? Estranged from the soil of the soul, our words do not grow as fruits of insightas, but are found as sapless cliches, refuse in the backyard of intelligence. To the man of our age nothing is as familiar and nothing as trite as words…we all live in them, feel in them, think in them, but failing to uphold their independent dignity, to respect their power and weight, they turn waif, elusive, a mouthful of dust….

Words have ceased to be commitments.

Man's Quest for God, pages 23, 25.

Righteousness as a mere tributary, feeding human interests, is easily exhausted and more easily abused. But righteousness is not a trickle; it is God's power in the world., a torrent, an impetuous drive, full of grandeur and majesty. The surge is chokedm the sweep is blocked. Yet the mighty stream will break all dikes…. In the eyes of the prophets, justice is more than an idea or a norm: justice is charged with the omnipotence of God. What ought to be shall be!

The Prophets, 212-213.

 

reflect the hidden light of His holiness.

His light is above our minds

but not beyond our will.

It is within our power to mirror his unending love

in deeds of kindnes

like brooks that hold the sky.

God in Search of Man, page 290

This has been on of those weeks that we all have to work through once in a while. Been in Fort William, Paisley, Elderslie, Westhill, Manchester and now back in Westhill. Each place on that list represents a different bed each night! No wonder I is confoosed and discombobulated 🙂 But what a rich and full week. An Induction of David, one of our students, at Fort William at the start of the week, and a meeting with UK College Principals in Manchester the last two days. And in between the Graduation ceremony for 8 of our students. Now that is some considerable compensation for the past week's experience as a nomad, a man of no fixed abode. That said it's a miracle I haven't walked into a wall, or fallen downstairs, or walked by accident into the wrong room. So after the next week i have a lengthy holiday much of which will be at home getting used to Aberdeen again for longer than a few days at a time.

Here's a Mary Oliver poem for no other reason than I read it on the plane earlier and know exactly what she means.

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones;just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

(Thirst, Bloodaxe, 2006), 37.

She is right. Praying isn't only, perhaps isn't primarily, our voice speaking. It may be, perhaps it must be, another Voice speaking and us listening for it, and to it. The willingness to not speak, to be silent, and to listen, is a disposition requiring more humility than we can often manage. So how many times have my words, my praying, interrupted and overspoken that other Voice? How many times has God told me to shut up and listen, but I couldn't hear the whisper for my own chatter?

Still in the process of choosing roses for our garden, and have bought a couple as gifts for friends as well. The photo below is of one recently bought and given to a home where roses are loved, and flourish under appreciative eyes. The name of this variety is Strawberry Hill and it is a David Austin rose. 

It's named after Strawberry Hill, an 18th Century Gothic villa (detail of it in the photo), built by Sir Horace Walpole, and now incorporated into St Mary's University College, London. The rose is a vision of loveliness, and the colour begins as deep pink slowly changing to pale at the outer rims. 

Decided to do a one stanza Haiku in appreciation.

Strawberry Hill Rose,

gathered petals of pink dusk,

sun-flushed clouds of dawn.

 

Yesterday I was at the National Galleries in Edinburgh. At one point I was standing within twenty feet of Monet, "The Poplars on the River Epte", Van Gogh "Garden with a Path", and the Singer Sargent portrait of "Lady Agnew". And the odd Gaugin, Renoir and Degas within sight. How good is that then?

But it was the Botticelli I went to see first and longest. "Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child". This masterpiece of art is also a richly theological and devotional statement. The idea that devotional is in some sense sentimentalised theology, or worse still, non-theologically controlled spirituality, is one of the less clever assumptions of those dismissive of those appropriations of art that combine aesthetic pleasure, thoughtful prayer, and theological reflection.

I'll want to make more of this painting later – but for now. What is the significance of the child surrounded by thornless roses? Very rarely is the Christ child portrayed as sleeping. The use of blue for the sky, the robe and the swaddling cloth, and blue as a symbol of heaven, is surely intentionally significant. The contrast of roses, organic thornless beauty, and the geometric sharpness and hardness of the rocks, suggests the meeting of life and lifelessness, fruit and barrenness, garden and desert rock.The roses and the Virgin's dress share the same colour and the child's feet rest on the soft velvet and satin.

What it all means? Incarnation is both mystery and miracle, yet there is in this painting a tenderness and vulnerability that does not suggest overwhelming power. The central image is of adoration as in the title; the loving gaze of a mother becomes prayer for her child, and merges in the mind of the viewer with our own knowledge of the story. This is unembarrassed Christian story, complete with Christian character, symbol and requiring a Christian hermeneutic. We know the tragedy that follows, but it is the tragic love of God intent on overcoming the tragic brokenness of a world where roses have thorns, and rocks crush, and doing so not in overturning power but through love incarnate, made human, surrendered to the same suffering and death that we all must face. And in that surrender, redeeming suffering, overcoming death and making possible new beginnings of life, the tragic is transformed into hope and a future in God. And all that concentrated in the birth of a child, a child asleep under the watchful love of a mother, whose hands are folded in supplication, the deep longing of love for what she has created, that which is part of her. And the scandal of Christian faith is that such a story as incarnation, love incarnate, is the story of the God we have come to know in Christ. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…

An old postcard, found in a second-hand book and now a framed reminder on my desk of the meaning of study and rest as idealised in a different age. Notice the lack of a laptop, and I don't think he's holding his mobile phone to his ear, and it's a book not a Kindle or an Ipad.

It's a photo in sepia of Isaac Walton's commemorative stain glass window at Winchester cathedral. The author of The Compleat Angler, he is one of the celebrated writers in English prose and his book a vade mecum of fishing folklore, human observation and the detailed descriptions of fish and fauna which in an earlier age substituted for David Attenborough.

I have no interest in sitting beneath trees in the country reading a book on fishing, beside still waters and green pastures – but just now and then, in our very different unrelenting world, I do have a hankering to rediscover the virtues of slowness, and to do so without feeling guilty:) Takes lots of practice though, and I suspect a I would need a temperament adjustment, slowness not being one of my more obvious characteristics.

Just been to the most attractive Garden Centre right in the middle of St Andrews. It's up a close, roofed over, and filled with plants, shrubs, and assorted garden stuff – it also has what could be called a judicious selection of roses. There is beauty, delicacy, fragility and generosity in a rose – also vulnerability and poignancy, because such glorious extravagance of colour and scent is transient. Maybe such living beauty is only possible at the cost of permanence.

My father grew roses in every garden of each house we lived in – and that was quite a few. The one I remember with most affection was a huge white rambling rose that covered half a gable end of our cottage. Then there was the time I discovered the Peace rose, and for all kinds of reasons, emotional, theological, political and horticultural, I want one again. Emotional because of its story, political because peace-making is in my view the highest political goal, theological because every reminder, intimation, symbol of peace seems to me to touch the deep places in my understanding of God, horticultural because….well just because.

Mary Oliver has several poems about roses. Here are some lines from "The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts".

For a long time

   I was not even

      in this world, yet

        every summer

every rose

   opened in perfect sweetness

      and lived

         in gracious repose,

in its own exotic fragrance,

   in its huge willingness to give

      something, from its small self,

         to the entirety of the world.

I took time today to look at a rose flower, not thoughtfully as in analytically, more observantly as in contemplative waiting. I've no idea how to guage perfection, but the rose I gazed at seemed richly formed, pink white and pale yellow shaped around petals more precisely fitted than any geometry could achieve, and to my eyes achieving what can only be described with the grammatically clumsy term unimprovable. Is it claiming too much to say that looking at and smelling such a flower gives the heart an emotional holiday, and then suggest that this act of recreative attentiveness can for each of us, sometimes, be compared to prayer. Not prayer as petition and intercession; not prayer with words at all; just the willingness to see in fragile beauty and extravagant if casual attention to detail, a miracle that argues against all the functionalism of our technology worshipping world. And in that miracle and argument the rose always wins – but not by arguing. Simply by being and by the beauty of that being, the rose through the utter functionlessness of its beauty, points us beyond our habits of calculation to a way of recognising in this God soaked world, that some things are invaluable in the sense of unvaluable, they are not amenable to the criteria of utility. Like love, kindness, and goodness, beauty, as Mary Oliver says, exists in gracious repose, extravagant self-giving, and encounters us with transformative grace. Or so it seemed as I spent two or three minutes in contemplative waiting before, of all things, a rose.

The blue rose is called Rhapsody in Blue – a David Austin variety that will soon be in our own garden.