Category: Uncategorised

Monday

John 6.35 “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.”

Jesus has just fed 5000 plus hungry people. In Matthew and Luke he teaches his followers to pray “Give us this day our daily bread.” There are different kinds of hungers, and God responds to them all. Jesus is bread and nourishment to the soul. The Creator has made a world of plenty, to be shared. Those whose souls are fed and nourished by Jesus will see in every pair of hungry human eyes, one in whom Jesus comes to us, as “the least of these my brothers and sisters.”

Tuesday

John 8.12 “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

Light and life are cause and effect in John’s gospel. “In him was life and the life was the light of all humanity.”  If we stay close to the light, then we stay out of darkness; and if the light shines in and through us, then there’s no room for darkness. “Shine, Jesus, shine” is a prayer for every day – “Shine on, in, around and through me.” Jesus is the light that enables us to see where we’re going, and with whom.

Wednesday

John 10.7 “I am the door for the sheep.”

Think gate, and a border collie guiding sheep through the gate and the shepherd closing it. The sheep are enclosed, and kept safe. As the Psalmist wrote, “We are his, and the sheep of his pasture.” John goes further and says Jesus is the one who keeps the sheep safe, who guards them from harm. Not only that; Jesus is the door and the door-keeper so we are doubly safe. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me…”

Thursday

John 10.11,14 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep….I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”

“The Lord’s my shepherd I’ll not want…green pastures…still waters…paths of righteousness…deep dark valleys…Thou art with me.” Psalm 23 is the best commentary on these verses. The value of each sheep, the shepherd’s knowledge of, and relationship to each sheep – these were obvious and common everyday realities. And Jesus used them as self-description. This is who I am! The best of shepherds who stands between the sheep and danger, and who will die to make them safe.

Friday

John 11.25 “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

Every Christian funeral is formed and informed by these words, and by their reality in the Risen Lord. The disciples had no idea what Jesus meant when he said these words, but they would. The women would discover the empty tomb, Mary would hear her name spoken, Peter and John would risk a heart attack racing back to tell the others, and Thomas would say, “My Lord, and my God!” Jesus is risen and we now live in a world where resurrections happened and the life that is the light of all people shines, and the darkness will not put it out!

Saturday

John 14. 6 “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

He is a path, if any be misled;
He is a robe, if any naked be;
If any chance to hunger, He is Bread;
If any be a bondman, He is free;
If any be but weak, how strong is He?
To dead men life He is, to sick men health;
To blind men sight, and to the needy wealth;
A pleasure without loss, a treasure without stealth.

Sunday

John 15. 1 “I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener…I am the vine and you are the branches.

We are joined to God through Christ. The life we live is Christ in us. The fruit we bear in Christian character, behaviour, witness and love are nurtured and nourished from our being joined to Jesus Christ. Without him we bear no fruit, life is cut off at source, and we are no longer walking in the light or in the Way that is the way of Christ. It’s hard to avoid the thought that the gifts of bread and wine of communion are to keep us true to the living bread and the true vine. To mix metaphors, the good shepherd is like a door that keeps us close to the true vine and the living bread – there’s a lot of truth in that – but then Jesus said I am the way, the truth and the life!

My first tapestry was completed when I was 7 years old. It was a small picture of an owl sitting on a branch at night and behind it a full moon. When it was finished I gave it to my Gran. It was 25 years before I did another one. This time several small sailing boats in a harbour, following a pattern in the Women’s Weekly, a once ubiquitous magazine in homes of people like my mother who enjoyed stories, recipes, knitting patterns and the occasional craft suggestion. It used different stitches, gobelin, half cross stitch, satin stitch, tent stitch. Two tapestries in quarter of a century. At this rate I might manage two more.

But then I visited Durham Cathedral in the late 1980s and was transfixed by bold shafts of rainbow light coming from the far end. Like the glory of the Lord in Isaiah’s vision, coloured light filled the worship space. Still pristine clear, it filtered bright sunlight into a spectrum in which all the colours of the rainbow had been rearranged as if scattered and regathered into a giant kaleidoscope. The new stained glass window functioned like the stage lights of a rock concert, announcing the presence of the main act, in this case, God who is the energy source of light.

The window in question is ‘Daily Bread’, designed by Mark Angus, and dedicated in 1984. It was a gift from the staff of Marks & Spencer to celebrate the centenary of the company. I spent a long time staring at it.

‘Daily Bread’ is an abstract representation of the Last Supper, viewed from above. Words like stunning, breath-taking, cool, brilliant, and all the other over-used superlatives wow social media images – to use another evaluative cliché, they didn’t come close.

Transfixed. Amazed. Silenced. Eucharist. These are better. I fell in love with the sacrament of colour. Texts I knew by heart from 20 years of celebrating the Lord’s Supper moved from monochrome print to dynamic image, creating in me a different kind of spiritual receptiveness. Stained glass as exegesis of the deepest truths in our faith; oh I knew about medieval windows narrating Bible stories to those who could not read.

This, however, was different, for me at least. This window opened windows in my mind, compelled attention to the very feelings it was creating. I felt addressed by a Presence I recognised, but in a medium that was new, strange, and beautiful in a way that expanded my inner awareness of what external beauty can do to a soul.

I bought a slide, remember them? I had an idea. If I could take home some of the richness, texture, luminosity, sheer There-ness of that window, and what that first look conferred on a tourist knocked off his spiritual stride – if only! Somewhere and sometime between leaving the cathedral and arriving home, I had decided to do a tapestry of that blessed window.

Those were still days of slide projectors; digital technology, image transfer, and photo reproduction were still 20 years away. With my slide, and the guide book with its colour photo of the window “he wondered, he stood in his shoes and wondered…”

Forgive the random line from a poem I once recited in early primary school and won second prize! But I did have to wonder. How to capture enough of the image, and the memory of the experience, to make it worth the effort, and more importantly, worthy of the memory.

On a sheet of drawing paper, pinned to the wall, I traced the bare outline of the window from the projected slide. It had to be a reasonable size to allow for variations in colour, and recognisable shapes. Tapestry canvas is made up of tiny squares, how to recreate images that are flowing, curved, circular is a perpetual challenge. One essential is sufficient scale to allow sharp angles to be softened.

Then the colours – wools didn’t come near the vivid contrasts and bold luminosity of the sun shining through the Daily Bread window into the dulled dustiness of Durham Cathedral unlit on a summer’s day. That’s when I decided on stranded cotton. It comes in bright colours, bold as brass, or any other loud colour. But stranded cotton is made in numerous shades of the same colour, and its strands are separable making it possible to mix and match on a different kind of palette.

I traced a bold but quite accurate outline on to the canvas, and with the colour photo as guide, set to work. The canvas was 20 mesh, (20 holes to the inch) the finished size 18×40 cm approx. It took a while. Well over 30 years on, it has faded a little, it has been reframed and remounted, but it still carries the excitement and the memory of that minor epiphany in Durham. And it set me on the way to a form of art which has increasingly become expressive of spiritual experience, and in the doing of it enriches my own spirituality. That’s a post for another time.

What do we think we are doing when we stand before a congregation at the end of a worship service and pronounce a benediction?

What do we think is being done to us when someone stands at the front at the end of a worship service and pronounces a benediction?

I ask because I've done it thousands of times.

Is it a pious habit? A signal for people to leave? A formal spiritual cheerio? A liturgical redundancy? Or an essential act of pastoral care?

Here's what I think I'm doing, or having done to me.

A benediction is a saying of good, quite literally. Good words said to make good things happen. Bene dictum.

A benediction is a blessing, an invocation to the God of grace to go with us wherever we go, to grace us with His presence. 

A benediction is meant to make us feel good (blessed), and do good (be a blessing).

A benediction is indeed an ending of worship, but it is also a beginning, a new commissioning to service – every time, each week.

A benediction is therefore a call to love one another, love our neighbour, and love God, just as we promised we would in the worship service we are leaving.

A benediction is a reiteration of Jesus' promise to be with us, wherever and whenever, and therefore a reminder that we never walk alone. 

A benediction is like the best ways of ending a letter or email, 'kind regards', 'with warm good wishes', 'or my occasional personal sign off, 'shalom the noo.' 

All of these help explain what is being done by us and for us when a benediction is said. Who wouldn't be helped to face whatever the week brings by words like these said over our heads:

 

 

Go forth into the world in peace;
be of good courage;
hold fast that which is good;
render to no one evil for evil;
strengthen the fainthearted;
support the weak;
help the afflicted;
honour everyone;
love and serve the Lord,                                                  rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit;
and the blessing of God Almighty,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
be amongst us and remain with us always.

Amen.

It was a Good Friday service, nearly 40 years ago. The service was shaped around the use of the hands at the Passion. The hands that received the 30 silver coins and embraced Jesus; the hand of Peter grasping for a sword in Gethsemane; those same hands warming themselves at the charcoal fire in a Roman courtyard; the hands of Pilate washed for all to see, hoping to remove all guilt for the execution of the Galilean; the hands of Simon of Cyrene accosted and made to carry the cross for Jesus; and the hands of Jesus himself, nailed down, supporting his own weight when the cross was raised.

And those hands of Jesus that had broken bread on the mountain to feed the crowd, and had lifted and blessed children, had touched lepers and blind people, had overturned tables and sat at a table and broke bread yet again. Human hands, so expressive of human purpose and personality, so communicative of welcome or refusal, clenched in anger or opened in generous giving. And as the Easter story moves relentlessly towards Calvary, there are no clean hands, except those rendered immobile by nails. 

It was in that service, I think 1985, I first heard, read with quiet firmness by my friend Kate, the R S Thomas poem 'The Musician.' In all the years since, I've never forgotten the impact of carefully written words read with no attempt to win the attention of the audience – read with practiced care the poem did that itself. We had just sung,

See from his head, his hands his feet,

Sorrow and love flow mingled down;

did e'er such love and sorrow meet,

or thorns compose so rich a crown.

Kate quietly walked to the front, and without introduction, read 'The Musician.' And so R S Thomas became a voice I listened to, a poet to be reckoned with, a doctor of the soul, especially the troubled soul, the doubting, uncertain and frankly God-questioning soul. Over the years I've read him, agreed with him, disagreed with him, been annoyed with him, but come to love and respect him as one for whom faith was never anything other than fighting the good fight, with perseverance, without self-pity and with a spirituality impatient of a too easy won assurance. 

All of this by way of explaining I'm about to embark on a more extensive study of the poetry of R S Thomas, some of it shared here, much of it accumulating towards, who knows, a possible future publication.

We all have folk in our lives who have the gift of fertilising thought and energising imagination. Kate was like that. Over the near 40 years of our friendship we exchanged books, freely expressing like and dislike, each of us free to be critical in that constructive way that's fun as well as education. On all my subsequent reading of poetry from that Good Friday, Kate's judgment and guidance introduced me to so many other voices, books, poems and much else. But my abiding literary memory is of her reading a magnificent poem, in the context of the Passion, and Christian worship on Good Friday.

The three books are to my knowledge, the best treatments of the theological and religious context out of which Thomas wrote. None of them are an easy read; but neither is the poetry that wrestles like Jacob with the God who is elusive, and whose name we desperately seek to learn, and know.

The poem in calligraphy is 'The Musician', found in Collected Poems 1945-1990, J. M. Dent, 1993. page 104. The story of the calligraphy is for another time.  

Now and again I find something in the Oxfam bookshop that requires to be bought! In the years I've been going there I've bought a first edition Pieta, by the poet R S Thomas, since passed on to another of his devoted readers. The days of such finds are rare now, but when it happens it's hard not to feel 'It was meant!'

Last year one of my College teachers died. We had been good friends all those years, and in recent years lived near enough each other to be able to meet and enjoy many a conversation about history, theology, poetry and a whole lot more. 

A couple of years ago I knew from one of our conversations that he was enthused about a hard to get book, and ridiculously expensive new. It turned up in the Oxfam shop, seriously reduced and I bought it and gave it to him. Such exchanges of shared enthusiasms are amongst the most cherished joys of friendships like that.

Then there was this older and much cheaper book lurking at the back. Let me introduce it. In the months leading up to the Second World War, Archbishop William Temple wrote one of the classic interpretations of the Gospel of John, modestly titled, Readings in John's Gospel. For £1, I replaced the volume I used to have years ago, a chunky well produced paperback by MacMillan Publishers, which I had also given to a friend who liked it so much it became a gift.

The book is dated, the language identifiably mid-twentieth Century and the voice that of an Anglican Archbishop, doing his best to be accessible without short-changing one of the most profound writings in world literature. He succeeded admirably. At least I think so. 

A book by an Anglican Archbishop 90 years on. Dated? Predating serial revolutions in Johannine scholarship? No matter. This is a study of the Fourth Gospel by a scholar who unhesitatingly confesses himself, to borrow Jesus words, "a disciple in the kingdom of heaven…like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

This is my second time working through this old, dated gem of a book, whose author's main purpose was always to provide spiritual nourishment and food for thought for those hungry for truth, and thirsting for a refreshment of faith.

By the way, the top photo is from a recent visit to the philosophy section of our Oxfam Book Shop. I'm intrigued and smilingly approving of their catalogue system. Those who know anything about philosophy know that Immanuel Kant is "the big yin".

Not this time! Our national treasure of a comedian, Billy Connolly, known as "The Big Yin" sits there in all the brash colours that have been his trademark self-announcement. And it may well be that there is as much guidance on how to live live well in the thoughts of the Clydeside comedian, as there is in the metaphysical machinations of the sage of Königsberg!

The Big Preachers

Of atoms were ignorant and molecules;

but thundered verbally from their high

pulpits, training captains pacing

their unstable bridges and warning always

of the wreck of the soul. No scientist

had their renown; the invisible

was undiscovered. What was made

plain by the lightning flash

of their faces was the Creator’s

inimitable purpose. And the people hungered

for more, exposing themselves Sunday

by Sunday to that tempestuous

weather, sharpening their appetite

thereby. You have heard the story

of the visiting preacher’s drawing

of a pretended bow, and how they parted

for the shaft to go by? Those

were the imagination’s heydays

and will not return. Being too thick

to give ground, we take our stand

now on the facts, and the facts

must do for us, a multitude at a time.

R.S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems, (eds.) T Brown and J W Davies, 2013, (page 120)

The title runs straight into the poem. The poet is a preacher himself, but not a big preacher. Some time in the past, within living memory, the big name preachers of Welsh Nonconformity, the revivalists, evangelists and revered expositors of the faith, showed a dismissiveness of new scientific knowledge. Not because they had understood it and answered its claims, but because they were ignorant, perhaps even culpably uninformed about developments in human knowledge, the new physics, the discoveries about how life is formed and matter is constructed. And consequently unperturbed by the implications of such new knowledge on the old faith.

Instead they perform like captains of a ship in trouble, "verbally thundering" from the bridge about the dangers of the storm and the risk of shipwreck for the soul. "No scientist had their renown;/the invisible was undiscovered." In this world of restricted intellect and spiritual excitement, there was neither time nor interest in the "invisible undiscovered", no curiosity about the how of creation, no interest in the inconvenient verging on blasphemous facts, that might dare question "the Creator's inimitable purpose."

Thomas was a pastor, a poet and a Christian with all the desperate questioning of Jacob wrestling through the dark night with an angel of the Lord, wanting to know who He was. Thomas's antipathy to technological control, and his suspicions about the machinery that served human greed for possession and lust for power, arose in part from his being convinced of science as a form of knowledge which challenged religious truth, however zealously proclaimed. 

The image of thunder and lightning gives the big preacher's words an ominous sound; the lit up faces of the people suggests illumination, their seeing of truth only in the preacher's words, and they love it, lap it up, and hunger for more; and all the time, no scientist has their renown, they are ignorant of atoms and molecules. They love this tempestuous weather, the themes of judgement and shipwreck and last minute redemption; but are unconcerned about the other world, the real world, of reason, fact, experiment and proof. 

The story of the preacher's pretended bent bow, and the impact of an imaginary arrow parting the congregation so sure that what is preached is real, exposes the disenchantment about to be told. "Those were the imagination's heydays / and will not return." The old revivals with their fire and rhetoric, verbal thundering and words hurled by tempestuous weather; they are over. That was then, and this is now.

The last four lines are after the storm, and into a chastened silence come words that acknowledge the triumph of science as the primary epistemology of the contemporary world. I'm not entirely sure what Thomas means when he says the people "are too thick to give ground." Thick, as in slow to understand, perhaps even lacking capacity to have seen all this coming? Careless, perhaps, in not taking time to adjust and expand the parameters of faith and science, and seeking mutual enrichment. Instead, they embrace the default negative options of either a fixed reciprocal hostility, or a truce with the protagonists now separated by a Berlin wall of indifference, making impossible any rapprochement of religion and science.

Facts. Atoms and molecules. Science and scientists renowned. No more verbal thundering. No longer the heydays of imagination. The day of the big visiting preacher with his pretended bow has gone, is finished The invisible has been discovered, and it has less need of God.

Being too thick

to give ground, we take our stand

now on the facts, and the facts

must do for us, a multitude at a time.

The age of science and technology, of new discovery and accumulating knowledge, of human understanding and knowledge based on autonomous reason and observed reality; facts. The last line is ambiguous, and may have an underlying admission that many of the claims at the heart of Christian faith may not stand up to the scrutiny of autonomous reason, and scientific facts. "Facts / must do for us, a multitude at a time." Faith could be overwhelmed by facts, by observed realities from atoms, to molecules, to matter, to a whole physical universe and its exploration and explanation in terms of science, not religion, of facts not faith, of human reason not God.

And so if "we take our stand now on facts, / the facts must do for us, a multitude at a time", we may be standing on that which cannot bear the weight of the asserted facts of Christian faith. Such credal truths as incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and the reality of God as revealed in those central claims of Christian faith, may not survive facts coming at them "a multitude at a time." 

This is a courageous poem, honest about the religious history of Wales as it was in centuries past and in the more recent past of revivals and controversy over biblical truth, the decline of Nonconformity and its chapels, and unsettling scientific discoveries. Thomas writes with open-eyed realism about the 'now' world, and the changed ways of seeing, understanding and exploiting the world. I'm left wondering if Thomas is arguing (like Barth) that apologetics that seek to argue against the scientific world view, are doomed to failure – if Christians do that, "the facts must do for us, a multitude at a time."

On the other hand, if we are willing to enter into dialogue and live with scientific facts, however inconvenient; if we acknowledge and affirm that though some of the central claims of Christian faith are not verifiable facts, they are nevertheless true in ways beyond empirical laboratory observation. If we can do that, it is possible that facts will do for us, we can live with them, in that more secular world of science where faith relinquishes its stranglehold on all truth. 

In reading Thomas, it is important to give full weight to the tensions and frustrations of this pastor of ordinary folk, trying to preach a gospel that is true and relevant to their struggles, all the while being careful not to claim more than he knew to be true. But what truth? Who's truth? And how does he know? Fact and faith are not opposites; each are ways of knowing, statements of truth, convictions based on lived experience. Thomas, who never aspired to be a 'big preacher', is not ignorant of atoms and molecules. In his pulpit he stands in that liminal space where faith is humble enough to be questioned, and he hopes science is wise enough to acknowledge it doesn't have all the answers to questions only a human can ask. 

The poem was written in 1983. One wonders what Thomas would have made twenty years later in 2003, when the human genome mapping was completed. Perhaps a poem on such an event would have the same ending: "the facts / must do for us, a multitude at a time." 

The world is going through great changes. Much we took for granted is being destabilised. We are living through another age of anxiety, and with good reason. One way to regain a faith perspective is to read the Psalms. Many of them were written in times of chaos, fear and national crisis.

Psalm 97 starts with an affirmation deep rooted in confidence and trust – and perhaps a defiant hopefulness when everyone else is tempted to gloom and doom. "The Lord reigns!"

Monday

Psalm 97.1 “The Lord reigns, let the earth be glad, let the distant shores rejoice.”

Who’s in charge of the world these days, or any day? Nations, governments, vast business and finance corporations, and media and social media empires seem to think they are. Not so says God’s poet. The Lord reigns – behind the machinations and power games, God is working out his purposes. “This earth belongs to God, the world its wealth and all its peoples.” Let the earth be glad – including you!  

Tuesday

Psalm 97.2 “The Lord reigns…Clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”

The God we pray to, worship and serve, is full of mystery and beyond our understanding. The fear of the Lord isn’t being scared of God – we worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The holy God who reigns cares about doing right, and making justice happen. These are the foundations of God’s throne; not profit, not power, but earth and its distant shores rejoicing in justice, mercy and compassion.

Wednesday 

Psalm 97.4- 6 “The Lord reigns…His lightning lights up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens proclaim his righteousness, and all peoples see his glory.

God is Light. Nothing is hidden from God. There is no place so dark God cannot find us. “Even the darkness is daylight to you O God.” However dark life may seem to us, whatever shadows hang over us, God knows and is with us. The million volt lightning that can melt mountains comes to us in the presence of Emmanuel. Jesus is the light of the world, the light of the nations, the glory of God, the Light of God’s love.

Thursday

Psalm 97.7 “The Lord reigns…All who worship images are put to shame, those who boast in idols – worship Him all you gods!”

The Lord reigns – not governments; not banks; not big business; not celebrities and influencers; not right wing or left wing political ideologies. All of these are human ways of power, attempts to be big name lords of the earth. And when they are made the biggest thing in life they are idols. God’s poet is having none of it! Images and idols are pure embarrassment. “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 1 Cor 1.31.

Friday

Psalm 97.8-9 “The Lord reigns…Zion hears and rejoices and the villages of Judah are glad because of your judgments, Lord. For you, Lord, are the Most High over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.”

My guess is God’s poet would have composed some brilliant terrace songs for his team’s supporters! He knows how to get the support singing, whether home or away – and part of that is to make fun of the opposition supporters and their team. This psalm is full of gladness, rejoicing and feel-good phrases. These supporters have no doubt they’re in the winning team. God’s judgments, tactics, motivation, and team talks will make them winners. And the team slogan? “The Lord reigns!”

Saturday

Psalm 97.10 “The Lord reigns…Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for He guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”

Justice and righteousness are the foundation stones of God’s throne. So those who worship God can’t live a contradiction. If you love justice and righteousness, then you hate evil. Simple as that – well, but it’s much more complicated in a world as complex as it is today. Still. God guards our lives, so we pray God will guide our choices and decisions. Politicians often reduce the moral currency of phrases because their actions contradict what is claimed. “That is why we are doing the right thing”, is one such phrase. Make it a prayer, “Lord help me to hate evil, and to do the right thing.”

Sunday

Psalm 97.11-12 “The Lord reigns…Light shines on the righteous and joy on the upright in heart.  Rejoice in the Lord, you who are righteous, and praise his holy name.”

God’s poet in nearly every psalm uses parallelism. He says the same thing twice in words that are different but similar. He does this for emphases, to get important truths into our sometimes thick heads! The light that lights up the world (v 4) shines on the righteous; and not only light, but joy shines on the upright of heart. Not only shine, Jesus shine; but “Lord shine on me – and through me!”

So the Psalms can become our prayers, and a way of strengthening our faith by reminding us of who God is, and what God is about. Sometimes faith is a mixture of defiance and trust, a combination of wisdom and hope, and a call to faithfulness and witness – “The Lord reigns!” 

Since my days as a young boy, walking the banks of the Nith in south Ayrshire, I've been fascinated by swans. To the child I was, swans were huge fabulous creatures. The first times I heard the whoosh of their wings as they took off, and flew overhead, I was in awe of their combination of beauty and power. Where we walk these days, there's a pair of resident wild swans. Occasionally they come over, keeping their distance, and perform what I can only call water ballet, graceful slow movement, effortless gliding, posture and head held just so.

As a theologian I have happily lived with the belief that beauty is its own argument for creative purpose, however conceived and expounded. I have little interest in an analysis of the concept of beauty when I stand beside a lochan and watch a swan embodying that elusive and very thing, beauty.

At least one starting point of reflection would be what any of us might make of the urgency and the urge to "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness." A white swan, against dark water, in winter sunlight, makes a deep impression on the heart, so that I could as easily describe it as the holiness of beauty. Because those moments of aesthetic joy are their own form of inarticulate prayer, that need no words but simply turns us inside out in an embrace of a world where such moments happen, as pure gift and unexpected joy.

Keats' famous line, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever," has its own truth, but that first moment of beauty perceived rebukes our emotional complacency and awakens in us a new hopefulness for a wounded world. To that extent, that first moment of perception, beauty can be the subtle call of God, a nudge towards looking for and living into the beauty of the world. 

But Keats is right. Beauty leaves a lingering legacy, a gift both of memory and the transformative impact of that moment when beauty ambushes us.

"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

Some time in my fifties I discovered the poetry of Mary Oliver. She is a poet of nature, of the world around her. Many of her poems are about birds, which makes much of her poetry a form of literary ornithology.

Her descriptions are both observation of what the eyes see, and inner perception of what the heart feels. What the eyes see, the mind and heart consider, knowing this is a transformative moment of encounter with a hummingbird, an egret, a robin, wild geese, – or a swan.

In her poem, 'The Swan', Oliver laces together metaphors in an attempt to describe what is seen when a swan takes off, rises, and slowly recedes upwards and away. Only at the end of the poem does she raise the question that I think is a rhetorical question expecting the answer, "No. Not really."

The first line asks the only important question when beauty presents itself to us. "Did you see it?" From then on the whole poem is a series of questions, asked with the enthusiasm and persistence of one who has been captivated and needs to share the gift. She knows that beauty has the power to weave bonds out of shared experiences, gifts to us transcendent moments that transform the way we see the world, and each other. And that last line, with its interrogative mood, requiring of us an accountability before beauty; that question, and its answer, takes us back to the biblical command and invitation, "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness."

                                               SWAN 

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? 

 

In his classic study of the Hebrew Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel deals with Jonah in less than two pages. But they are a clear lens through which to read the story of Jonah. His comments occur in his analysis of divine anger, (pp. 279-298) and in particular the contrast between God's anger which is but for a moment, and God's love which is from everlasting to everlasting. 

Here are several passages from Heschel which shed important rays of theological illumination on the dilemma of Jonah as he encounters the God who loves in freedom. The man who wrote this book, and this chapter on divine wrath, himself fled Nazi Germany, lost many of his family in the Holocaust, walked with Martin Luther King, and became an incendiary prophet whose outspokenness and passion for truth at times seemed to channel Amos, Micah, Isaiah and Jeremiah. No wonder his book is a classic treatment of those prophets whose words were as fire in their bones, and who heard the word of the Lord and could not be silent. 

"This is the mysterious paradox of Hebrew faith: The All-Wise and Almighty may change a word that he proclaims. Man has the power to modify his design. Jeremiah had to be taught that God is greater than his decisions. The anger of the Lord is instrumental, hypothetical, conditional and subject to His will. Let the people modify their line of conduct and anger will disappear. Far from being an expression of 'petulant vindictiveness,' the message of anger includes a call to return and to be saved. The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden and instinctive excitement. , but a free and deliberate reaction of God's justice to what is wrong and evil. For all its intensity it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger's sake. Its meaning is…instrumental:: to bring about repentance its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance." (Page 286)

"The contingency of anger is dramatized in the story of the prophet Jonah…God's change of mind displeased Jonah exceedingly. He had proclaimed the doom of Nineveh with a certainty, to the point of fixing the time, as an inexorable decree without qualification. But what transpired only proved the word of God was neither firm nor reliable…God's answer to Jonah stressing the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God's ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God's word were the last word, final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God's anger became effectively automatically: once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it. Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of compassion." (Page 286-7)

"God's anger is not a fundamental attribute, but a transient and reactive condition. It is a means of achieving 'the intents of His mind'. Inscrutable though it seems to the people in the end of days they will understand it clearly (Jer. 23.20)…The ancient conception that the gods are spiteful seems to linger on in the mind of modern man, and inevitably the words of the Hebrerw Bible are seen in the image of this conception. In gods who are spiteful, anger is a habit or a disposition. The prophets never speak of an angry God as if anger were his disposition. Even those who dwell more on His anger than on his mercy explicitly or implicitly accentuate the contrast. His anger passes, His love goers on for ever. "I have loved you with an everlasting love." (Jer. 31.3) Again and again we are told that God's love or kindness (hesed) goes on forever; we are never told that his anger goes on forever." (Page 288-9)

This is not Heschel going soft on justice, holiness and God's righteous anger. The entire discussion of anger is theologically charged by Heschel's conception of God as righteous love, patient mercy, and slowness to anger, but whose anger is the divine recoil from evil.

"No single attribute can convey the nature of God's relationship to man. Since justice is His nature, love, which would disregard the evil deeds of man, would contradict his nature. Because of His concern for man, His justice is tempered with mercy. Divine anger is not the antithesis of love, but its counterpart, a help to justice as demanded by true love. The end of sentimentality is the enfeeblement of truth and justice. It is divine anger that gives strength to God's truth and justice. There are moments in history when anger alone can conquer evil. It is after mildness and kindness have failed that anger is proclaimed." (Page 297)