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During these sabbatical months I've quietly pursued my interest in conversations that might be possible between theology and poetry. I am interested in how the different approaches of these two disciplines can be mutually enriching to matters of life, truth and meaning. As a theologian-pastor I've long felt it important to listen to voices that speak in a different tone, from other perspectives, about life, truth and meaning. I know such pastorally responsive listening includes philosophy, the sciences, ethical and social reflection, and cultural voices in music, film and other media. But it's the particular discipline of poetry that currently fascinates me; and by discipline I mean human creativity bent to artistic purpose for the common good.

Now I recognise that such a view of poetry could become reductionist and utilitarian, a form of theological imperialism that wants to lay tribute on whatever can be used to theological advantage, without thought of poetry's right to self-determination. At the same time though, there are undoubtedly poets whose work flows from inner depths of experience that resonate profoundly and sympathetically with theological concerns. When theology makes comprehensive truth claims the poet more modestly demurs, "instead of saying that's true, I could say, there's truth in that…" This altogether more tentative approach to the world and our experience,is rooted in responsible and responsive openness to what is seen, listened to and cared about. This makes the poet an important reference point for theological convictions, which without pastoral rootedness and lived actuality ossify into truth claims lacking that purchase on human embodiedness that alone gives them credibility.

What does the systematic theologian make of Seamus Heaney's claim that the poet "enters and explores and exceeds himself by entering and exploring and exceeding the language"? The Word became flesh and dwelt among us – that is, the truth of God, embodied in the Word made flesh, entered, explored and exceeded all the languages of human life. Theology therefore exists as a process of articulation happily and necessarily incapable of ultimate success – likewise poetry. Both poetry and theology are only possible on the understanding that articulation of our ultimate concerns is proximate, provisional – because the perfect poem is not so much the one that pins truth down in final form, but the that which enables truth to be transformative of how we see the world and how therefore we henceforth and now live in the world. Here's Heaney again talking of what he had hoped for one of his poetry collections:

The poet's role, and the gift of her poetry, is to enable the reader to journey towards a clearer view of their place in the world, because they see the world differently. That might equally serve as a vitalising vision of a genuine pastoral theology, in which words about God are carefully shaped and spoken, where journeys are undertaken together, and when in the miracle of life and truth, human transformation is earthed in that grace ad infinitum which was embodied in the Word made flesh, and which is given as the light of every person.

"…the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not"
Our language neither comprehends by intellectual control, nor encompasses by systematic constructions, nor extinguishes by exhaustive explanation. From the poet the Christian theologian could learn intellectual and spiritual attitudes more in keeping with the source and style of Christian theology in the Incarnation. Kneeling before mystery, waiting in contemplative trustfulness, giving voice to questions of justice, meaning and faithful living, pushing outwards the boundaries of faith and understanding – and always in language not fully up to the task, but within which all stories must be told.

Walking through Buchanan Galleries (Glasgow's upmarket shopping mall), past the open stalls in the walkways. Ahead of me two assistants at a cosmetics and cream stall for men and women are accosting passers-by to come and try the various beauty products and processes for sale. The three people ahead of me were all stopped, invited and given an advertising flyer. I wasn't. I suppose they recognise a lost cause, eh?

Sitting in one of our favourite coffee haunts that does the most outrageously good meringues – so big I haven't risked one yet! The three women meeting up for their afternoon refills are asked for their order. Two of them go for cakes to die for – the third says, "Ah'll go fur the low calorie option. Kin ye gie me a meringue wi' less cream?" That would be called creative calorie accounting then?

In Borders I'm engrossed in the poetry section. A tall man in a leather jacket, iron filings for hair, says to no-one in particular and anyone who's listening, "Onybody heard of Edgar Allen Poe? He writes stuff". I asked him if it was for a present, and was it poetry or stories. It was stories he was after – his daughter was "intae that stuff". We headed to the fiction, arranged alphabetically, came to P and there was Poe's tales. "Ah don't usually come intae bookshops, ken. And there's too many books in here onyway." Decided not to disagree, since by then we were getting on fine.

Later, on the hunt for a fleecy throw of a particular colour for someone who'd asked, noticed Primark sells 8 pairs of cotton socks for £2. That's 25 pence a pair. Today they are accused of paying 7p an hour to workers in Bangladesh where there is 70% food inflation and the going rate of pay has stayed at 7p for 2 years (£19 per month). War on Want (see here) accuses Primark, Asda and Tesco of not matching previously given commitments to ethical standards of pay in developing countries. They of course have their answers – but am I the only one that thinks 8 pairs for £2 means somebody somewhere is getting a very bum deal? Who? Not us. Not Primark. So who?

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Yesterday the death was announced of the Reformed theologian William Placher. I first came across his work in his Narratives of a Vulnerable God, and The Domestication of Transcendence, two books which sought to recover the biblical paradox of a God who relates to creation as vulnerable yet transcendent, and in so doing correct those all too human urges to either foist on God our notions of power, or treat God as if that power could be co-opted for our projects and prejudices. His latest book The Triune God: An Essay in Post-Liberal Theology, explores the complexities and limitations for human beings of personal relationships, and seeks to ground them in the relatedness of Love and Being that is the Triune God of the Christian Gospel. The pastoral alertness of Placher's theology can be sensed in words like the following. They demonstrate why his death is a significant loss to the work of relating Christian theology to the realities of life in a post-most things world. How much our world has to learn, and to learn quickly, if we are to learn to live creatively with human difference:

The man who wrote like that, also spoke like that. In a sermon in College Chapel he urged, "The way we best show our love to the whole world is… to love with a particular passion some little part of it."

We need more, not fewer theologians like Bill Placher.

Went to an Advent and Carol service last night. It was highly liturgical, mainly choral music performed by a choir, rather than carols made accessible to a congregation. Delayed by a car accident on the way, we arrived just as the choir, complete with candles, had begun their introit. So we waited with the warmly welcoming door stewards, complete with torches as in the old cinema days, till the first hymn was being sung, during which we were able to slip in without disturbing the carefully choreographed theatre of light and darkness, sound and movement, words and music.

But we didn't have an order of service did we? All distributed before we arrived. And the service was intended to move without interruption so no announcements of hymns and numbers. In the absence of anyone looking upon us with compassion and sharing their Order of Service we were compelled to sneak looks over shoulders, glance sideways at other opened hymnbooks, play guessing games with the words to deduce the hymn we were supposed to be singing before the hymn ended, and while the rest of the congregation sung securely on. But in fact of the four hymns sung I only knew one anyway – and I thought I knew "hunners ae hymns".

All of which drove me to an inner reciting of the unhelpful and non-liturgical response, "It's worship Jim, but not as we know it". We did feel a bit left out. The unfamiliar place, sounds, content of the service made it feel alien, uncomfortable, almost like a different religion. That isn't an over-reaction – it's an attempt to find in our experience a parallel to a number of other people's experience when they come to our country and look for fellowship and welcome, and some reminders of home in Christian churches.

A week or so earlier at my own local church I'd had a greatly uplifting conversation with an African couple trying to get their heads round, and their hearts into, a form of worship which, compared to worship as they know it, lacked passion, colour, movement and sheer in your face God inspired emotion. They spoke so movingly of their sense of the strangeness of things, of wondering where the connection points are between worship as they knew it and worship as they now encountered it amongst people of another culture, country and Christian tradition. And all of that makes me wonder what it now means to say there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, because we are all one….. Yes I believe it. But how does that actually work? How in a globalised world can the Church, the Body of Jesus Christ embody forth that underlying unity that while expressed in almost endless diversity, nevertheless retains the face of our Lord recognisable to us all.

At that point I want to think about love, welcome, hospitality, and grace. Take grace for example. Our theology of grace as God's initiative of welcoming love, can surely guide us in our response to the strangers amongst us, and could be a model for Christians who are strangers amongst those of us who, for them, are "the others". I mean initiative that reaches out in friendship. The grace that goes before, that speaks first, that dissolves cultural and emotional barriers by an open and vulnerable acceptance, that enables us to look generously on other people's ways of telling God of their love and worship, or which looks with understanding and a willingness to accommodate the hesitations and confusion of those not familiar with our own ways. Grace which looks the other in the eye, smiles to convey the face of welcome, and looks on the other as a Charis, a gift of presence from God.

All of this connects with some of my planned advent reading. I'd already decided to read several novels located in cultures other than the one I know best, and from perspectives not only different, but possibly hostile to that worldview with which I have grown up. Given the journey of the Magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt, the Advent story opens many windows on a world where difference and otherness too easily degenerate into fear, violence and hatred. So as a way of critically exploring and enhancing my own openness, I'll be reading stories that view the world differently, and try to appreciate the difficulties and opportunities of encounter in a world uneasy with otherness.  The four novels are:

A Thousand Splendid Suns,by Khaled Hosseini

The Islamist, by Ed Hussain

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid

The Road Home, Rose Tremain

Blogging elsewhere today. I've just posted a report on the first meeting of the Scottish Baptist Theological Society which took place last night. Around 20 of us gathered to hear Dr Stephen Holmes, Lecturer in Systematic Theology at the University of St Andrews, deliver the inaugural lecture: Baptists and the Authority of Scripture. You can find it here at the College Blog. 

Not everyone is into this kind of thing though. So here's a poem from U A Fanthorpe (a poet my friend Kate pushed me towards)

We got our first two Christmas cards this week – one from Australia and one from nearer. Years ago I inadvertently threw away a Christmas card I meant to keep. I so wish I hadn't been so careless…

It was made by Christian refugees caught up in the conflict that tore the heart out of Beirut. The picture was of a woman holding her baby, standing in a doorway at night, illumined from behind by a large bright star. Her shadow fell forward in the shape of a cross, as her two arms, half open holding the child, and her upright but tired body, intersected in the light, and cast history forward.

This Sunday is Advent – my favourite liturgical season. Those who pass by this blog – what are you planning to read / listen to?

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm not a Jonathan Ross fan. So please note that the book pictured here is by one Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven: Yale, 2001). This book is utterly absorbing because based on original research, with masses of material organised around an overall theme, and then written with verve and an evangelistic zeal to persuade. Rose has unearthed and illustrated the significance of the working class autodidact – the self taught scholar whose learning is the result of self-motivation towards improvement and a latent yet persistent intelligence and hunger for knowledge that will not be frustrated by being denied social opportunity.

Books about reading are irresistible to the long confirmed and happily resigned to their personal fate bibliophile. But when such a book is also a window on social development and human aspiration, and in addition acts as a catalyst for recalling my personal memories and reinforcing some of my least negotiable political convictions, then it is given a space on the shelf reserved for books to be read straight through, without the diversion of anything else being read at the same time. This is a book for those drizzly, dreich weekends, to be read while fortified by the good things of life. Not piecemeal chapter a day lift and lay, but wholesale undiverted attention.

Rose explains and illustrates why it is that reading and learning has been such a a formative human activity these past couple of centuries. reading him you learn the importance of the Everyman Library, consider the significance of facts like this – Scottish weavers were amongst the most literate citizens of 18th and 19th C Scotland; (David Livingstone wasn't the only one who propped latin books on his weaver's beam). No wonder the Scottish Lowlands had 'one of the highest literary levels in the world in the late 18th century', creating a community in which the Waverley Novels and the poetry of Byron and Moore fired the minds and imagination of thousands of day labourers. And then there was John Christie 'the literary shepherd', who amassed a library of 370 volumes which included complete sets of the Rambler, Spectator and Tatler, and who was one of an entire culture of self-taught agricultural workers who used their isolation in the bothy to read. And much more of the same. 

But Jones is pursuing an even bigger goal – he is exploring how working folk read – read texts of all kinds, including books, newspapers, lectures, sermons, plays, films, radio broadcasts. In other words this is a book about how people excluded from elitist education, nevertheless learned for themselves how to read the world. This is a history of working class independent hermeneutics, in which Rose provides "an intellectual history of people who were not expected to think for themselves". But who did, and with remarkable social and historical consequences.

My two grandfathers could remember older Lanarkshire miners in Shotts, early in the Twentieth Century discussing the atonement, socialism and other "intellectual" questions at the coal face, while eating their "pieces".* And my grandmother, the wife of a miner, (who had full sets of Dickens, Scott, Dumas, and several editions of Burns), knew as much about the Waverley novels, the social context of Walter Scott, and was as aware of the distortions caused by such historical romanticising of Scotland's history as any academic expert of her own time. Of my four grandparents, she is probably most responsible for that wonderful gene that makes a love of reading hereditary!

* A "piece" in Scotland refers to the home made packed food workers took to their work. And a "play piece" the food taken to school in the absence of crisps, chocolate and other unheard of extravagances!

This post is for the benefit of Lynn "who works with children", recently decanted to Edinburgh, and who visits this blog and occasionally comments. During our visit to Cornwall Sheila and I visited Penlee House in Penzance and in the art gallery I was fascinated by this picture. It is of an early Sunday school trip, and is an important and early piece of social documentation of what became for many years a highlight of children's lives.

The painting is called "The Sunday School Treat", and the artist was W H Y Titcomb, one of the Newry school of Cornish artists who flourished in the late Victorian period. This painting shows how Sunday School treats were done on the Cornish coast and estuaries. Despite the unfashionable subject matter some of Titcomb's best paintings document religious themes such as Primtive Methodist prayer meetings, pastoral care of the dying, and the prayer and devotions of the Cornish fishermen. Incidentally Thomas Cook started his travel business by organising day trips on trains (with food included) for Sunday Schools and Temperance gatherings.

Now Lynn – with all the health and safety, risk assessment, child protection and other essential legislative safeguards, I don't suppose we're ever likely to see the likes of these outings again. Anyway – it's so idyllic I thought I'd share it to encourage you and and all those whose ministry and vocational gifts are poured into the high energy demands of working with children. I reckon Jesus probably put such ministry into the higher echelons of good long term Kingdom building.

Now I know it's possible to take things too personally. And that when we begin to do that, we are assuming that we are the centre of attention, which is a bit self-obsessed. So I'm trying not to take it personally, that when I return from a few days on the East Coast (Crail), I'm just getting out the car in Paisley when the heavens open and malteser size hailstones start bouncing off my unprotected skull. And they fell with volume and venom for several minutes. No wonder Pharaoh hated hailstones- especially if he was bald and no one was areound with a palm leaf umbrella.

Anyway, Crail was both fun and fruitful. Some anecdotal evidence:

walking up the road from the centre of Crail we met an elderly woman pulling her shopping trolley. She liked the sound its wheels made, she said. "Makes it sound like a skateboard and people move out the road."

Bought a beautiful pottery vase for our wee hoose. The colours, shape, size and the overall Scottish feel to it appealed to both of us so the decison was unanimous. I love unanimity in a marriage – balanced with an equal amount of equanimity about differences.

Read chunks of the Apostolic Fathers in the new Michael Holmes edition that has the Greek text and the English translation. Just to be clear, I read chunks of the English translation, and occasionally deciphered a Greek sentence or two. But I've liked these early Christian thinkers and writers ever since Maxwell Staniforth's translation was published by Penguin in the 1970's. My aged Penguin was brown, split into looseleaf and recently recycled – so I bought this new edition that matches the format and size of my Greek NT.

Discovered at least three good coffee shops, and one where you get home made clootie dumpling with fresh thick cream, which I haven't had with coffee before but will have again – soon! The photo is the clue – after a 7 mile round walk from St Monans, what's a dollop of cream here or there?

Rediscovered the local practice of the Wednesday half day. As a sabbaticaling visitor I readily approved of the idea that if you have to work on a Saturday (or Sunday), there is a need for compensatory time – and a need to protect it. An incoming resident complained to the butcher that he was shut when she came the day before to buy the victuals for tea. His answer was enigmatic and emphatic 'Aye, but this is Crail". Which had me inwardly seconding the motion, "Aye, so it is".

Walked several chunks of the Fife Coastal Walk, and apart from the usual ornithological suspects, saw redstarts, linnets, goldfinches, a heron standing like a grey obelisk, and close ups of hunners and hunners of geese strip-mining a recently harvested field.

Read around John Wesley's theology and especially those theological traditions which most influenced him including the Moravians, the Greek Fathers, the Puritans, and various other contributors to the eclectic mix that makes Wesleyan theology both rich in its diversity and frustratingly elusive for those who insist on theological consistency.

Spoke with the proprietor of the wee Picture Gallery in Pittenweem, whose wife is a superb painter, and whose daughter is both a primary teacher and a painter in her own right. One of her paintings was beautiful – just what I'd like to have bought and looked at endlessly – but it was too expensive, so I was left to battle with my covetousness. He told us about some of the local artists some of whom are pretty good, and some of the more pretentious ones who see themselves as 'serious' artists. Art is largely a matter of taste, but I do find myself at times baffled by some abstract work which is given a very specific name – and I can't for the life of me get the connection between the name and the picture. Perhaps a conversation of the obtuse with the obtuse. But what a nice man to talk to.

So – Crail was great, and the break a generous gift – and our thanks to the givers.

Walking home from University after picking up some mail and parcels. Three fragments of conversation provided, if not food for thought, then at least a glimpse into alternative worldviews; on reflection, a triptych that shows the laughable and the likeable, the acceptable and the less acceptable sides of life in a town which has the kinds of problems that have no easy answers.
The world according to Paisley……

1. Two women are having a shouted conversation across the High Street. One of them has a birthday and is lamenting her fading looks. A car slows down and stops for the traffic light, cutting off vision and speech. Provokes the non-birthday wumman who shouts "Heh pal! Can ye move yur caur. We're hivin a conversation here!"
Sensible driver didn't make eye contact……

2. Three lassies taking up the pavement three abreast, all multi-tasking – talking, chewing gum, and texting. As they passed (or at least as I stood aside to let them pass, cos they weren't for breaking formation – you could just tell), I heard the intriguing story fragment, delivered with automatic pistol speed and threat,  "Aye but ma mither says she'll batter his mither if he disnae."
If he disnae what, I wondered. And how do they do that – walk, talk, chew and text in a display of skilful synchronised nonchalance?

3. Nearly home when a young guy, I guess third or fourth year from the Grammar, comes up smiles pleasantly and asks, 'Would you mind going intae that shop and getting me fags?" Had to decline, gently and courteously, and he said, "Aye nae worries, Need tae chuck it onyway".
Wish he'd asked me to do something I could have done – nice big lad just trying to work out his problems like the rest of us.