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Today was a Zoom meeting of the Aberdeen Theological Circle. Each of those present at today’s meeting offered a few minutes of reflection on a chosen poem, book or Bible passage. Here are some brief notes on what was shared between us. :

 – W H Vanstone’s book, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense and its concluding poem, “Morning glory, starlit sky.” Kenosis as a key concept in Christian theology, particular mention of Inhabiting the Cruciform God, Michael Gorman (Eerdmans: 2009)

-The connection of land, people and liturgy in poetry. Read God’s Grandeur as a poetic vision of human activity overshadowed by the Spirit of God.

– John Betjeman’s poem, ‘The Conversion of Paul’, a serious exploration of the religious experience of being righted by being turned round the other way.

– the complexity of choice, and the unforeseen consequences of choices made and ways not taken. Robert Frost poem, ‘Two Roads’, (The Road not Taken).

Quotation from In Living Colour: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counseling, Emmanuel Lartey. Recognising there are needs everyone has, needs only some have, and needs no one else has. Pastoral responsiveness seeks to be sensitive to those distinctions.

– Two quotations; the first from William Penn on true spirituality as engagement with the world of action, the second from Kahlil Gibran on reason and passion, and the need for a proper equilibrium between these in dealing with human complexity.

– A recent TV programme on Ian Crichton Smith, Consider the Lilies. During the clearances the church was so close to the established order and status quo it was unable to support the powerless. It is hard for the Church to speak truth to power when it is allied to the power that needs spoken to!

– Psalm 30.5 as a statement of trust and hope, for those times when life is overshadowed and overburdened. Sorrow is finite, hope and joy are promised as realities embedded in the faithfulness of God.

– Poem by George Mackay Brown, ‘The Harrowing of Hell’, narrating the spiralling downward journey of the crucified, clothed in his five wounds.

– In response to the Ukraine crisis, the use of social media to bring people together and to hear from Ukraine “your intercessions are imperative. Reading of Psalm 46, a powerful mix of hopeful and reassuring metaphors, and faith as both trust and defiance – much circulated on social media these past few days.

Read as a continuum these reflections are a richly textured testimony to our diversity and unity, and the gift we each are to the other. While the research paper and exploratory discussion will always be our primary way of  engaging in thought, discussion and learning together, perhaps once a session there should be a smorgasbord approach much like today’s experience. It was a good way to spend 75 minutes. 

Yesterday morning, as news was breaking of the invasion of Ukraine, I read Psalm 46. It seems the place to go at dangerous times. The Bible is a book that’s familiar with empires and dictators, armies and invasions, allies and enemies, violence and oppression, and all the other inhuman ways that human beings treat those they consider as a threat, or ‘other’, or an obstacle to political ambition.

The starting point of this call to courage, trust and hope is God. “God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” Whatever the threat of conflict and political collision, God is not going anywhere, other than where God is – in the midst of the conflicting ambitions and military power-plays of nations and people.

This verse is not a way of saying keep your head down, God will deal with it. We are right to be concerned, to fear war and to defend peace. But in all our worrying and working remember this. God is ever-present, a place of refuge and strength whatever happens. As often in the Bible, one of the most important words is “therefore.” Precisely because God is a place of refuge and safety for our souls, and the source of strength for the life we are called to live, “THEREFORE we will not fear.”

We wouldn’t be human if we were not afraid of the outbreak of war, wherever that is in the world. Perhaps especially when war begins to feel near to us, literally too close for comfort. It’s then we come back to those words, “God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear…”

What difference does God make to the geo-political earthquakes which shake our confidence and undermine the foundations of our lives? How are we to think about tanks and missiles, fighter planes and attack helicopters, hundreds of thousands of heavily armed and intensively trained soldiers focused on simply taking over another country?

This Psalm writer has seen these tragedies and outrages before. He shows us the way to hope, to believe in justice, and the possibilities of peace. “Come and see the works of the Lord…he makes wars to cease to the ends of the earth, he breaks the bow and shatters the spear.” God’s purpose is a kingdom of peace. Whatever else the cross of Christ stands for in our world, it is a declaration of God’s opposition to sin and his redeeming purpose, a demonstration that God’s ways are justice, forgiveness, mercy, peace, and reconciliation.

“Come and see the works of the Lord…” Faced with military aggression against another country, and threats against other countries including our own, what are we to do? It is one of the most frustrating and perplexing experiences in any of our lives when huge events that cause suffering, disruption and death for others, are so far beyond our power to help or heal. What can we do? While world leaders agonise over decisions and consequences, risks and dangers, there seems very little left to us to influence events, or make any real difference to what is happening and what will happen, regardless of how we feel about it.

But then there’s this. “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth.” Twice the emphatic statement, “I will be exalted.” Christian faith is embedded in our experience of God, our refuge and strength, who breaks bows and shatters spears. We rest in Him, our shield and our defender. A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.

These are words we sing because God has revealed himself in Christ. The resurrection is God’s no to death, and God’s yes to life; God’s no to violence and God’s yes to peace; God’s no to hate and God’s yes to love; God’s no to despair and God’s yes to hope.

So, what to do? Be still and know that God is God, and pray. To think about the world situation as one who knows God is God and Christ is risen. Someone has said, “Prayer is the slender thread that moves the muscle of omnipotence.”

To believe and confess that Jesus is Lord, and to pray in His name, is to bring to bear on even the most frightening situations, all the resources of Eternal love poured out in merciful purpose, divine power and redeeming intent.

Be still, and know that. Be still, and acknowledge that God is God. Be still, because God is our refuge and our strength, therefore, we will not fear. Be still and pray for peace in our time. Don’t do nothing, pray, and when you pray you’re not doing nothing. Remember the words of our Lord, and finish your prayer with them in full assurance of being heard, “Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…for Yours is the Kingdom, the power and the glory – and You will be exalted among the nations.”

“God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in trouble.” Amen.

I've been designing and working tapestries for a long time now. My first serious attempt was maybe 30 years ago. There was a long chunk of time in the period since then – 15 years, when I had other things to do and came back to doing tapestry again maybe 12 years ago. I'll do another post soon with some of the older ones that I still have around.

For now, I'm intrigued yet again at how appropriate and theologically sensible are the sayings that surround working tapestry as a parable, metaphor, or narrative imagining of how the presence and activity of God is woven through the texture of our days and years. It's a commonplace to compare the back of the canvas with the front, with the intended encouragement that the messiness has a pattern; be patient and wait until the work is complete. God weaves the varied strands and colours of our lives into a unique pattern that cannot be achieved any other way. You know the kind of thing.

Here is a quotation that is a classic example of trust in the providence of God, and persevering trust despite only seeing the underside of the tapestry:

 “It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.”   ― Maria von Trapp

As one who designs tapestries, I know that improvisation and ad hoc decisions mean that the finished work can vary considerably from what was first conceived and planned. I must also say that I have done several tapestries, beginning with an idea, and starting from the centre allowing the shapes and colours to develop in what feels like a random process of choosing to do what I feel like, what I think might work, and that can reflect the mood at the time as much as anything else. The point is, each tapestry is a creative process, an evolving concept in which the final form becomes clear quite late on in the process.

Years ago I learned a verse that has stayed with me and has in turns reassured, disturbed and even annoyed me. But I keep coming back to it. The lines come from the poem 'Regret' by Jean Ingelow:

This life is one, and in its warp and woof

there runs a thread of gold that glitters fair,

and sometimes in the pattern shows most sweet

where there are sombre colours. 

I bring the words of Maria von Trapp and Jean Ingelow together in this activity involving needle, stranded cotton and canvas in a work of art that becomes the visible consequence of inner thought, prayer and imagination – these three. The current tapestry is one articulation in colour and form of Revelation 21.9-21, John's vision of the New Jerusalem. His description is a verbal symphony, geometry set to music, an imagined place of universal welcome, a home for a broken and now redeemed Creation, illumined by the Love dwelling at its precise centre. To take in any literal sense John's words of how the Ineffable might appear to eyes dazzled by the light of eternal truth, divine goodness and love in purest holiness and redemptive purpose, is as wonderfully futile as standing beneath Niagara with a bucket hoping to capture and contain the essence of a power that annihilates all presumption and preconceptions.

Yet John wrote to be read, and understood, and with pastoral purpose and spiritual imagination about what he saw when he saw heaven opened. And near the end of the drama, there is the crowning vision of the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, with its twelve gates where all who would might enter, and no one was denied. It is a vision of redeeming love, eternal purpose, and is intended to comfort, strengthen and give hope to those who can make no sense of the underside of the tapestry that is their life. So in this tapestry, without intending it there is the messy underside and the changing and evolving pattern that emerges from the continuing work of the needle-worker.

The second photo is the upside of the tapestry – but at a quite early stage. When it's finished I'll post again and try to explain a bit more what I think I'm playing at! Theology is often more free when not confined to words, even if, as in John's Revelation, words with all their limitations are all he has to describe the indescribable and communicate the incomprehensible. John's geometric precision conveys the exactitude and detail of a city whose builder and maker is God. Incidentally there are several pieces of music I have listened to while doing this work – that will be another post perhaps.        

One reason why I take photographs when out walking. "When Psalmist or Prophet calls Israel to life their eyes to the hills, or to behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unbroken tradition which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers: it is nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments –they are sacraments." (George Adam Smith, The Book of Isaiah, Vol. II, p. 90)

Abraham Joshua Heschel. A Life of Radical Amazement. Julian E Zelizer. (Jewish Lives), (New Haven, YUP, 2022)

Here's a sample of why Abraham Joshua Heschel deserves some of our time, and why his words and legacy remain important as inspiration, guidance and warning for people struggling with the realities and unrealities of the 21st Century.

"Modern thinking has often lost its way by separating the problem of truth from the problem of living, cognition from the human situation…Reflection alone will not procure self-understanding. The human situation is disclosed in the thick living. By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil." (p.227)  

In a long evolution that started in Warsaw amongst Hasidic Jews, and took him to Berlin to study philosophy, then to America in 1940, Heschel matured into one of the leading religious thinkers and most significant political activists in mid century Jewish and American public life. To a remarkable degree, Heschel integrated devout love and learning of the traditions of Judaism, attentiveness to religious practices of worship, prayer and festival, and an increasing commitment and passion for social activism in pursuit of justice, compassion and radical resistance. It is a particular strength of this well organised biography that Heschel emerges as one prepared to live with the tensions such a paradox represented in his own times, as he plunged into "the thick of living."

When he came to America he did so as a refugee, and within 5 years worse than his worst fears were realised as to the fate of his family and people left behind in Hitler's Europe. His mother, aunts and sisters all perished amongst the millions of his murdered people. Like Elie Wiesel his friend and companion, Heschel never forgot, and never allowed the world to forget what happens when nations expel God from the policies, ideas, values, goals and practices of political power linked to military capacity and motivated by national, racial or ideological self-interest.

Zelizer's biography has narrative energy, and provides careful and informed contextual information about such influences as Hasidic thought, Heschel's own tradition of Reformed as distinct from Orthodox Judaism, his passionate investment in the Civil Rights movement and personalities, his pivotal role in Vietnam War protests, his unceasing highlighting of the plight of Soviet Jews. We are given important insights into the institutions in which he taught and where he was admired by many, resented or tolerated by some; and Zelizer traces Heschel's roles and initiatives in the social activists organisations which swallowed so much of his time and energy.

The reader is guided with enough information to understand and appreciate the complexities and demands Heschel faced as one whose driving passion was to "advance the drama of redemption, and…reduce the power of evil." And to do so in mid 20th Century America, as an immigrant Jew of Hasid origins, and as a poetic and persuasive teacher, an inspiring if demanding mentor, or persistent and annoying gadfly who wouldn't just fly away when politicians tried hard not to listen.

But Heschel was a poet theologian. He wrote philosophy of religion in a spirit of adoration of the God who calls the human being to a life of radical amazement, self-emptying awe in the presence of the Holy, and wonder and gratitude for the gift of life every day. So some of his more academic and rigorous colleagues thought his writing and teaching too poetic, vague lacking scholarly credibility, a style of writing which was devotionally woolly rather than rationally elegant. But many, many more readers, found in Heschel's writing a passionate invitation to live the faith, to taste the wonder, to risk the disciplines of a life whose goal is to repair the world, redeem human failing, renew the social and moral fabric of a dangerously self-absorbed culture.

Zelizer is persuasive in defending Heschel's style of writing and goals in his teaching. He wanted Jewish thought to be embodied in life practices and social values that demonstrate truth in action. Nowhere is the integrative force of Heschel's life of the mind, soul and body more clearly demonstrated than in his decision to march from Selma to Montgomery, arm in arm with Martin Luther King and other Civil Rights Leaders. With every step his theological anthropology was lived, enacted and publicised. Likewise his near obsessive focus on highlighting the moral indefensibility of the Vietnam war, and his prophetic outrage at the use of napalm, saturation bombing, proxy militarism on foreign soil, and caught up in the catastrophe, millions of innocent civilians whose value and lives are measured not as collateral damage but as uniquely treasured human beings created for the joy of God. 

"Philosophy cannot be the same after Auschwitz and Hiroshima…Philosophy to be relevant must offer us a wisdom to live by–relevant not only in the isolation of our study rooms but also in moments of facing staggering cruelty and the threat of disaster." (Heschel, p.151) 

What drove Heschel, was the moral passion of an Old Testament prophet. Writing his classic study, The Prophets, he had been infected by their moral outrage, penetrating critique of the rich and powerful, compassionate concern for the poor, oppressed and vulnerable, and above all their adamantine certainty that such pervasive and structured injustice is blasphemy, and subject to the holy anger and judgement of God.   

I have long studied and admired Heschel. There is a (slowly) growing literature exploring further his ideas, legacy and the importance of voices like his for times like ours. This is now the most accessible, dependable and readable biography of him I've read. Beautifully produced and reasonably priced, it comes with a well constructed and user friendly index, and with endnotes full enough to anchor the scholarship, and selective enough to make them an excellent road map into further study of Heschel. 

I finish with a personal response to this book. Heschel once urged people of faith to defy despair. Here are his words, near the end of his life, written by one deeply wounded by humanity's capacity to inflict wounds and suffering on others. And in the face of humanity's worst, they summon humanity's best as service to God, in words of defiant hopefulness:

"And yet God does  not need those who praise Him when in a state of euphoria. He needs those who are in love with him when in distress, both He and ourselves. This is the task: in the darkest night to be certain of the dawn, certain of the power to turn a curse into a blessing, agony into a song. To know the monster's rage and, in spite of it, proclaim to its face (even a monster will be transfigured into an angel); to go to Hell and to continue to trust the goodness of God –  this is the challenge and the way." (Passion for Truth, pp. 300-1) 

First photo above is of MLK and A J Heschel on the Selma March

Second Photo above is MLK and AJ Heschel at Arlington in shared prayer at a silent protest against the Vietnam war.   

Today I sat for a while chatting with two of our Iranian friends who are currently in hotel accommodation awaiting processing of their applications for asylum. With a mixture of body language, minimal words, Google translate, and the kind of patience and laughter that makes friendships out of perseverance, we managed to talk about some important things – like family, welcome of strangers, our shared faith in God, and football.

Using Google translate I promised my friend I would pray for his wife and family back in Iran. He was typing something to me at the same time. He went first, and his sentence was – "Please pray for my wife ———." I showed him what I typed, "I will pray for your wife ——-"

There are times when you just shut up, don't overthink it, and be grateful for the nudging of the Paraclete, the One who comes alongside as the ultimate translator.

The photo is of someone who was having fun with my name and my often understated proficiency at five a side fitba.

"Man is a being who asks questions of himself" and his first question is "how to turn human being into being human." (Abraham Heschel)

On Holocaust Memorial Day I turn to several Jewish writers whose books and whose lives have influenced the way I look at the world, and how I try to live and be in that world, my world. Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl and Primo Levi have plumbed the depths of human suffering and the evil that imagines and enacts evil and suffering upon others. From them I have learned to listen, to repent, and to try harder to be honest with my own moral assumptions, and blindness.

Amy Jill Levine, Jonathan Sacks and Martin Buber are amongst those who in their writings have sought as Jewish thinkers, to exemplify dialogue towards understanding, education against prejudice, a willingness to consider the piety and poetry of a well lived life towards others who are different. Only where there is such dialogic good will, they argue, can there be a navigable road towards understanding, appreciation and respectful reverence towards the ways of being that grow out of people of different faiths, but the same humanity.

Abraham Joshua Heschel is a Jewish Rabbi, philosopher and spiritual teacher whose writings are now woven like a noticeably bright tapestry thread through my mind and the canvas of my ways of thinking. I first discovered Heschel's writing through his magnum opus The Prophets. Then his two classic books on Jewish philosophy of religion, God in Search of Man and Man is Not Alone.

Over the years I've gathered and read his books and articles and a number of the best studies of his life and work. It so happens the latest biography arrived yesterday, and today is Holocaust Memorial Day. I will spend some of my time today reading Heschel, and reflecting on the blessing he has been to those who have tried to turn their human being into being human. 

Heschel was within six weeks of being lost to the world in 1939. He managed to escape to Warsaw, then London and finally the United States. His mother and four of his aunts perished at the hands of the Nazis. Heschel never ceased to wonder at the mystery of what it means to be human; likewise one of the dominant notes in his writing is wonder, awe and worship in the presence of the ineffable God of merciful justice and fathomless mystery. The combination of these two convictions, that humanity is in search of meaning, and God is in search of humanity, creates an all but unbearable tension in Heschel's writing. But it results in writing that is one part theology, one part passion and one part testimony. Heschel was a praying philosopher, a doxological theologian, and a prophet of social justice who prayed with his feet. 

The Holocaust was always a sombre backdrop in Heschel's thought. "The degree to which one is sensitive to other people's suffering, to other men's humanity, is the index of one's own humanity." The obverse is also true – insensitivity or indifference to other people's suffering is the index of one's own inhumanity. In the face of the incalculable suffering and incomprehensible evil of the Holocaust, Heschel urged against bitterness and hatred, argued that his people's suffering must not be rendered pointless or unproductive. The Holocaust must not be forgotten, neither by indifference that trivialises a people's tragedy, nor in the fog of justifiable anguish that paralyses goodness and nourishes hate. "Life comprises not only arable, productive land, but also mountains  of dreams, an underground of sorrow, towers of yearning, which can hardly be utilized to the last for the good of society…" (Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel. You are My Witnesses, Maurice Friedman, New York, Farrar Strauss&Giroux, 1987, p.76)

"True love for man is clandestine love for God." In that simple aphorism Heschel distils so much of his life's thought, convictions and actions. The Holocaust happened for reasons both complex and long in the making. The enduring legacy of mechanised cruelty and state sanctioned genocide on such a scale, is finally inexplicable except by the insistent use of terms such as sin and evil, both individual and structural. Heschel knew that, but his sternest warnings were against indifference. And the opposite of indifference is "the true love of man…" For that he argued and prayed, in such ways he acted and spoke, so that as a public intellectual and a prophetic voice, he echoed the passionate partiality of the prophets for acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with God. 

On this Holocaust Memorial Day, reflect on these words of Heschel. They don't fully explain why the Holocaust happened; but they signal the why, and they are a warning to later generations to beware the complacency that allows the necessary conditions for history to repeat itself:

"There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people…The prophets' great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference." (Quoted in Shai Held, Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Call to Transendence. Indiana University Press, 2013, 171-2. Emphases original)  

Pythagoras once wrote, ""There is geometry in the humming of the strings, and there is music in the spacing of the spheres." These past two or three weeks I've been reading over chapter 21 of the book of Revelation, the description of the New Jerusalem. The angel starts to do precise measurements, the length and breadth, the thickness of the walls, the dimensions and number of gates, then a quantity survey of the materials. It's a remarkable exercise in geometry is theological rhetoric, measurements as descriptive qualities and mind-expanding quantities.

This is a City like no other. It is a multi-dimensional geometric blueprint brought to ultimate reality by the Alpha and the Omega. This geometry represents the humming of the strings accompanying the worship of 'the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb', and there is the precision of maths and music in the spacing of those 12 foundation stones, made of every kind of precious stone. Reading that passage while listening to Jessye Norman singing the Holy City has been an exercise in multi-disciplinary reading and listening – listening to the text and hearing it set to music. And it provoked 

I have long pondered the descriptive architecture and literary geometry of John's description of the New Jerusalem, the Holy City. Out of those prolonged reflections I began to doodle, and then to draw a geometric pattern along the lines of John's descriptive prose-poem. Imagination is a way of envisaging, and envisaging is in turn a form of seeing, and seeing is what Revelation is all about!

Pivotal moments are signalled by the dramatic historic moment when John says, "I saw…" 

When I saw him I fell at his feet…

I saw a Lamb standing as though it had been slain…

After this I saw four angels…

I saw heaven opened…

Then I saw a great white throne…

I saw a new heaven and a new earth…

I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem…

It is those momentous moments of seeing that signal revelations in Revelation. They announce a new vision, from the terrifying to the beautiful, from the luminous to the numinous. My doodling was around the angel's geometric survey of the Holy City, and the result is a new tapestry being worked by an expanding pattern of interlocking triangles.

I know. It sounds complicated. It is an attempt at abstract representation of a vision narrated by a seer given a crash course in theological geometry and apocalyptic imagery. I have an idea how it will be developed, and several possible directions it will take towards completion. Will ir work though, Jim. As we say in Scotland when we're not sure, "We'll see!"