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One of the delights of Aberdeen is a very fine second hand bookshop run by a friend who is discerning enough to make sure the shop is full of books that are interesting, tempting, unusual, reasonably priced and arranged more or less in subjects and most of them reachable without precarious acrobatic maneouvres on shoogly steps or over-laden shelves to inch towards that one and ease it out of that far away corner up there.

And I came away with loot. A near mint copy of Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King, an account of the years it took to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, written with the flair of a novelist but in fact a detailed account of genius at work, overcoming tedium, illness, lack of materials, unrealistic demands, and triumphing with one of the greatest achievements of Renaissance art. A rare hardback copy of Thomas Merton's The Monastic Journey, with woodcuts and a number of chapters on such themes as "Solitary Life", "Monastic Peace" and "Contemplative Prayer". And a book for a friend, The English Mediaeval Parish Church, which could be described in a catlaogue as "generously illustrated, spine faded but the volume well bound, solid and unmarked, a good clean copy of a hard to find book". Quite. And my friend will like it muchly. 

There were of course a number I left behind, those books that didn't make the final interview and had to be replaced on the shelf, reluctantly, on account of funds, or lack of same. A clean crisp copy of Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace; a double volume set on Van Gogh which I am tempted to phone my mortgage lender about;
oh, and is there anyone out there still reads Paul Tournier – even know who Paul Tournier was? Some of his books on Christianity and psychology, hugely popular in the 60's and 70's, published by SCM, but now no longer readable two generations on. But for a time this Swiss psychologist was a rare voice trying to build a bridge between Christian faith and therapeutic psychology. The photo belies the compassionate common-sense of this eminently caring man, whose books now read with a patronising tone, but only because we are now constituionally suspicious of all didactic voices. Tournier can sound like a genial grandfather calming over excited, or over-timid children. I still learned things from him that made me think differently about myself, other people, and the sheer complexity of trying to make relationships work in ways that minimise hurt and promote friendship. And yes, the photo does seem to depict a slightly tipsy member of a quiz panel on early TV, but that's Wikipedia for you 🙂

 I'm off on holiday. The East Neuk again. The beautiful village of Crail. Most of the important things already packed. Two novels, one serious and one espionage, a thin theology book, a wee gem called Gift from the Sea, and my slowly being worked through Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. Some white canvas to sketch out a small tapestry project for a friend. The walking boots, suitably refreshed with dubbin and new laces. A sun hat for obvious reasons and likewise Factor 30. A notebook for thoughts I might think, and might think worth hanging on to. A dongle, in the hope that I'll be able to post a few times while away. Probably some clothes as well – and some food – and two or three to be listened to at leisure CD's. The address book cos I still think it's fun to get postcards as long as the writer doesn't gloat about being on holiday. Everything else is negotiable, optional and non-essential. Till the eruption of that subversive thought, "Oh, I might need that".

The title of the post is a way of demonstrating my self-awareness 🙂 Been a time of re-adjustment and uncharacterictic grumpiness – need time to assimilate, to understand myself in the sense of showing myself some understanding. Unassimilated experience becomes a relentless conveyor belt of what is happening to us, and sometimes we need time to see again, and love again, the human person on the receiving end of it all. Maybe a holiday helps us decide what to do with what happens to us, gives space to examine our choices, stimulates those inner processes that enable us to find again a degree of contentment with the life that is ours. Is that what de-grumping might mean? However, I'd like to explore contentment as a disposition. Not sure it's always a virtue – could be willingness to settle for status quo…..hmmmm?

It's a question I've wanted to ask for a while.

To most people it isn't a question likely to occur to them.

The problem only affects a small number of the population.

Indeed the problem only affects the number of the population who are small.

It's a height thing.

Not my height, the height of the object in question.

Here's the question.

Who fixes the height of hand driers in the loo?

What is the optimum height for the average sized person?

If you raise wet hands to use the drier, where does the excess water go.

There are two answers, both of them right.

Up the sleeve and /or down the sleeve.

Maybe where there's more than one they could be at variable heights.

For the record, I am 5'3" so around 3'6" qould ensure dry shirt sleeves.

Just a thought…..not a complaint…..just a plaintive plea

This is very, very sad. A wee lad playing with his pals, and one of them gets into trouble in deep water in the River Kelvin. And his friend Declan Shanley jumped in to help him, but was swept away in the current, and later found to be drowned.
He looks a smashing lad, and the tributes from his family, friends, school describe him as just that. You can read about it here.

Tonight, a young lad I've never heard of before, moves to the centre of evening prayers. And his family too, in their bewilderment and loss, but also so proud of their son, brother, grandchild – they too are held in the place where we know God is – that quiet centre of communion, prayer and compassion, from which we reach out in love and mercy to people whose lives will never now be the same. I am persuaded, and I use the words deliberately as an echo of the King James Version's way of being certain, I am persuaded that the credibility of the mission of the Church that is the Body of Christ, is only as strong as the compassion and empathy that same Church as Body of Christ has for all those borne down under tragedies like this. May Declan rest in the peace of God, and his family be borne up on the love and prayers of the Church which, if it is the Body of Christ, then loves with Christ's heart, serves with Christ's hands, and goes to all the places Christ would go with his feet, and sits down there to be with and stay with those whose greatrest need for now is comfort.

Lord have mercy:

Christ have mercy:

Lord have mercy.

 
Recently while conducting a retreat my computer decided to teach me a lesson in panic. Not how to deal with it, how to remain functional while not dealing with it! Don't know what I did but after pressing some keys the entire screen inverted and I was looking at Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring upside down. Now that's a problem when the first ten minutes of the retreat session were to be spent contemplating beauty, and reflecting on human creativity as a response to those deep longings that impel our hearts outwards and our minds upwards. It doesn't work if the masterpiece is upside down. And it doesn't help when a retreatant suggests we all stand on our heads, a spiritual discipline I neglected to develop. But once we had found a way round it, by showing the painting the right way round, we were indeed able to contemplate beauty and be impelled outwards and upwards beyond the usual limits of routine.

Yesterday, continuing my explorations of beauty and theology, I spent a while gazing attentively at another Vermeer, "View of Delft". This painting was drawn to my attention by a Vermeer enthusiast and I can see why she loves it. The simple and initial response to great art such as this painting is the least complicated and perhaps therefore the most significant. Admiration, wonder, joy, a sense that the painting does something to us, and then a growing appreciation of what the painting does to us. Not so much what the painting says, which may come later, but what the painting is, the sense of real presence, that first urgent intimation and initial invitation that we look, and be captured, not by force against our will, but by the more compelling persuasion of beauty whose summons to surrender is both irresistible and willingly answered.

Perhaps it's only after being arrested by beauty, taken unawares with all critical faculties stilled and silenced, that we are then able to look more closely and begin to understand what has happened to us. That's when we ask why and how beauty has such invasive and transformative power over us. It may be that the most important thing a great painting "says" is heard most distinctly through that summons to wait, to linger a while, to gaze slowly and to be affected, to appreciate and then reconsider, in the light of such an attended-to moment, what else relative to such commanding beauty, could we ever think was so important in our lives that we would so give ourselves to it.

The connection between beauty and God doesn't lie only with the obvious overlap of creativity between Creator and creature. When God looked on all that was made and thought it very good, was that the first such willing surrender of heart to created beauty? I find the thought of God as artist, and as One who enjoys aesthetic pleasure, intriguing. And it makes me wonder if in the painting by Vermeer above, there isn't an intentional underlying recognition of divine presence, the subtle pressure of beauty as intimation of God. The skyline with its churches, the sky itself showing the blue of heaven, and that blue reflected on the water; and the reflection of sky on water of blue and cloud, the given mixture of divine and human, heaven and earth, human longing and frustration, human joy and hurt. And there in the forefront, people going about their work and their lives, and reaching across to them, the reflected spires of the churches. A harbour scene from Renaissance Europe becomes in its detailed composition and through the medium of beauty, a way of both communication and communion, a glimpse of a world where God is present, not overwhelmingly, but with subtle faithfulness, there.

The divine in the midst of the human, the eternal mirrored in time, the surprise of beauty discovered in the ordinary, the composition of light and shadow, the juxtaposition of human bodies and human buildings and both as temples of God; such theological hints and clues may or may not have been in Vermeer's mind. No matter. Any theology of beauty requires the full range of height and depth, of simplicity and complexity, of concept and expression. Beauty and its transformative effects is a mystery profound, an experience of that which is Other and to which we are drawn without needing to know why, an encounter with the kind of truth that therefore requires of us adoration before analysis, and an inner surrender that is closer to contented wonder than frustrated intelligence. And as for the artist Vermeer, there is no need for didactic doctrine in paintings like his – the beauty of the human face, the loveliness of the world, the honouring of domestic life by portraying it, the contemplative care with which detail and story are told, are aspects of his art that should be all that the religious imagination needs. Any commentary on the paintings is all but superfluous – not useless, just unnecessary if the imagination is attuned to beauty.

Stuart has announced the closing of his blog as from this week. His reasons are characteristically straightforward. Blogging gets the ideas out there for whoever wants to engage, discuss and think. But ideas and convictions though born from mind and heart, require to be lived, practised, embodied in a life. In other words ideas are for trying out; convictions are only convincing when those who hold them experiment and implement what is thought and said. Convictions are finally articulated and explained when they are demonstrated and bear witness to their truth not by argument only, but by embodiment in a life truly lived.

So I understand why Stuart moves on from his blog. But I have also appreciated the sharp perceptions, the radical questions, the passionate edge, the dissenting voice, the genuinely baptist (small b) spirit (small s:) in which Stuart has developed much of his thinking. I hope he will occasionally guest here on this blog when the word from the barricades can still occasionally be spoken, whether shouted or whispered.

For now, thanks Stuart for several years of good natured cajoling towards a more radical discipleship, for much laughter, and for introducing me to blogging as a way of inviting discussion, exploring ideas, and having fun at no one's expense because fun should always be our gift to the other, to build up rather than diminish. Unless of course the fun is satire, the laughter a judgement, and the joke on the powers that be who use power at the expense of others. At which point……

A conversation recently veered backwards to what I used to do before I was a minister. Long time ago. Hardly seems relevant it was so long ago. But then I began to think about it. In the years between leaving school at 15 and starting as a minister I was a tractor driver (16 the legal age then), worked in a Clydeside tomato / bulb nursery, did two years as an electrical engineer, worked as a brick setter in a brickworks, two summers at Easterhouse social work dept as a debt advisor, and one or two other bits and pieces including house plant cultivation and greenhouse glass repairing!

The point is I learned stuff doing all these things, and what remains is a set of skills all these years later. I can still drive a 16 gear tractor, make a difference in any garden I'm let loose in, know a good brick when I see one, and have a deep sympathy and at times an angry solidarity with and on behalf of folk caught up in hopeless webs of debt. But more than residual skills, there's the hard to explain and harder to replace experience of finding out what I could do, what I was good at and not so good at. But also the sobering thought that a young and unskilled man with no educational qualifications managed to stay in work for 5 years to earn his way to University. Not sure what chances anyone has today of repeating that career trajectory. Had I needed to draw up a CV then, not sure there was enough relevant content to fill half a page – and much of what was relevant would hardly have encouraged an employer.

But I was given life-chances. There were life chances to be given, and I'm not sure when that will be said again with some confidence about young people who don''t make it in the more fiercely selective and streamlined walkways to a career in a post recession culture sinking beneath the weight of its own debt, and looking to throw overboard anyone unable to pay their way. It's a hard time to be young….or middle aged….or old. It's a hard time. And I'm increasingly impatient with the rhetoric of politics, economics, and social theory that suggests we are all going to have to bear the pain. I'm sorry. But pain is relative, and during a recession there is no equal distribution of financial hardship, no common levels of anxiety, no universal experience of having to choose between food and fuel. Not all of us will have to make that kind of choice – we may have to pay more, but we will manage with a bit of adjustment. Not so for everybody.

So my impatience extends to the church, and the lack of evidence for a new approach to missiology that borrows from Amos, the Lucan Beatitudes and the preferential option for the poor that is definitive of the Kingdom of God. Because wherever else Jesus of Nazareth might place his vote, it would certainly be on the side of those who are the easy targets, the marginal folk who are too easily deprived of social benefits rather than cost us more money in taxes. I just don't think an increase in VAT feels the same for me as it does for a single parent with several children and no full-time job, or an elderly person on a basic pension. The church's voice could do with being heard, and speaking with a Galilean accent.

So that conversation about what I used to do? The great thing was, there used to be things to do that you could be paid for. Now an entire generation of people with skills, training, education, and life hopes and plans, are encountering a world no longer congenial to their life plans, and where life chances have to be fought for, and with no guarantees. Now whatever else I think the Gospel of Jesus means, it has to have something to say not only to people who are struggling to hope, but something to say on behalf of those who struggle to hope, in the face of massive economic and social forces aligned on the side of the haves.

  .

I've always liked William Sloane Coffin's maxim (slipped into a comment on the Faith and Theology blog recently) as the description of good writing, a good conversation, and maybe even good preaching:

"Think thoughts that are as clear as possible, but no clearer; say things as simply as possible, but no simpler."

No need to enthuse, explain or review this classic of Christian faith as lived in the mid 20th Century. This is engaged theology, hammered out in the context of imprisonment and paradoxically composed out of a mind and soul insistent on freedom under the God  revealed in Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Consequently, the academic and scholarly study of Bonhoeffer and its application to the ongoing experience of the Church into the 21st Century, continues to interrogate lesser theologies. Bonhoeffer's thought disturbs settled minds, contradicts received arguments, subverts easy or even hard won assumptions, and simply will not fit comfortably into categories of intellectual control.

Phrases like "world come of age" "religionless Christianity", "the church for others", "worldly transcendence", "who Jesus Christ actually is for us today", act like theological detonators setting off chain reactions of thought and energy that lead to surprising and often disconcerting reconfigurations of theological reflection. As De Gruchy says, these papers contain "theological explorations in a new key…". The new Fortress Edition, volume 8, is complete with Introduction and Afterword, Bibliography and Notes, and provides over 500 pages of Bonhoeffers letters and papers. It is a miracle of production, from the first lonely but determined writing out of a mind soaked in Scripture and prayed theology, to the process of smuggling and accumulating and later editing and publishing after Bonhoeffer's death, till now 60 years later, we have this definitive translation, edition and presentation of the distilled essence of a martyr theology, a theology of witness.

This will be a slow, reverential, and I don't doubt deeply affecting re-reading of one of those treasures of the church, the lasting impact of which we will only finally know when all the broken world is gathered again to the wholeness and hopefulness that Bonhoeffer himself did not live to see, but lived, and died, to point towards. One of the most important parts of the volume is the new translation of the prison poems. These are distilled essence of spiritual search, the legacy of Bonhoeffer's own wrestling in the night at the brook Jabbok. Reading them you can sense, even glimpse the lone figure of Bonhoeffer limping towards the sunrise. Some of these poems should only be read, perhaps, when we have learned the meaning of our own tears, accepted the cost of our own faithfulness in following after Christ, recognised in the deep places of the heart where trust is born, the quiet voice of the God who knows us, and enables us to say, "Whoever I am, thou knowest me: O God, I am thine!"

Been out of touch with other bloggers on my sideabr for a wee while. Which is probably why I have only just learned of the death of Olive Morgan from Rishard hall's Connexions. Olive blogged at Octomusings where she wrote with wit and wisdom about living Christianly in a complex world. Olive was 88 when she died, a committed Methodist, a peace campaigner and much else. There aren't many octogenarians out there blogging and arguing for a world more peaceful, more compassionate, less dangerous. Her last post was on "Ban the Bomblet", her approval of the Bill which bans the use of and the storage of cluster munitions. Her sharp enagagement with the world is a powerful argument against the unspoken but pervasive assumption in too many Christian circles, that the future of the church rests almost exclusively with the young people. The future rests with those who live faithfully in the present, look hopefully to the future, and learn wisely from the past.