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In the early 1980's I was responsible for a daily 2 minute telephone sermon. It was an innovative approach to ministry and mission which had been going for several years before I arrived. That telephone ministry taught me to count words, and to think and speak with clarity and focus. The recording time was 1 minute 54 seconds. To say something meaningful in such a short time that might help folk through their day, required a strict economy of words, an idea that shouldn't be muddled by superfluous words, and a deliberate inner discipline of slowness in delivery.

Reading some of R S Thomas's short poems on the anniversary of his death, I become aware again of the power of words rationed to concentrate thought and distil meaning, chosen and positioned to convey something that, by verbal multiplication, would be costly in clarity and power. This is especially true of poems that explore our inner climate, a form of introspective spiritual questioning at which this poet excels.

Thomas is attentive, and makes us pay attention, to those hopes that push like green shoots through the cracks in our everyday concrete existence; to the recurring anxieties that by friction wear away the ropes of longing we hang on to for dear life; and to the constant stream of emotional weather fronts that blow across our days bringing alternations of sun or cloud, blue or grey, surprising newness or predictable sadness. Call it the poetics of humanity brought to deeper self-awareness by the easily missed summons of a Significant Other. 

Here is a photo of one of those poems. Rather than just print it out, it helps make my point if we pay attention to an entire page that contains 28 words, and the white emptiness of blank paper, except for those precisely placed and carefully chosen words, which read:        

I think that maybe

I will be a little surer

of being a little nearer.

That's all. Eternity

is in the understanding

that that little is more than enough.

Collected Later Poems, R S Thomas, (Bloodaxe, 2004, page 131)

I find this brief testimony of the soul's pondering deeply moving, and theologically provocative. Is it intended as an overheard soliloquy, or the preacher's humble homiletic wondering out loud in the face of his own uncertainties, or an oblique prayer uttered in defiance of his ever-present because instinctive scepticism?   

That hesitant 'maybe' is characteristic of one who was never so sure of God that he took liberties in the ways he spoke of God, and God's ways. The repeated 'little' qualifying the two comparatives 'surer' and 'clearer' gives those first three lines the balanced precision of hesitancy and certainty, not cancelling each other out, but including each other in. 

'That's all.' The ambiguities that emanate from that unambiguous hinge phrase, screwed firmly in place to open the poem into a vaster reality in the word that follows! 'That's all', says Thomas, knowing full well that there's more. The modest hesitancy of 'maybe' is confronted with 'Eternity', that compelling reality before which every seriously thoughtful mind is hesitant, falters, and hopes. The human mind can neither understand, nor escape from the lure of Eternity.

Yet Eternity is promise before it is threat. We encounter the Eternal in the finite but precious human capacity for self-transcendence in thought, vision and hope: "Eternity is in the understanding…". The inner pressures of Eternity are experienced in our human awareness of time and mortality, and felt in that terrifying yet exhilaratingly deep instinct for meaning, purpose and the ultimate fulfilment of our lifelong longing for life, – and understanding.

To be "a little surer" of the faith we believe, to be "a little nearer" to the One we are called to trust with radical faith, to be conscious of the tension between our limited time and the vast infinity of the space-time continuum; that is to be suspended between the ambiguity of the first line with its "maybe", and the resolved hopefulness of the last, ending with "enough", more than eneough.

I read this poem as a brief sketch of RST at peace with himself, as much as he ever was. Not because all the questions are answered, but because he knows he doesn't have to find all the answers. Trust is living with the questions, being unafraid of maybe, and thankful of all that makes us a little surer of being a little nearer. That's all, and that's more than enough, as indeed is the grace and love of God. 

Halfway through two books that could hardly be more different. Except both are about how we think of God, both challenge our personal (and limited) images of Jesus, and both argue with persuasive passion why all of this matters.

Chine writes as a journalist, a black woman, and as a Christian critical of a church too reluctant to move quickly on racism, and too attached to a white Jesus as the dominant image in the theological and devotional imagination of white Christians. 

McCormack writes as one of the premier theologians of our generation, at the end of a long intellectual pilgrimage through the Christian dogmatic tradition. On his way he critiques the Chalcedonian definition and the early exponents of Kenotic Christology before revisiting the New Testament construal of the God Man, Jesus Christ, with special reference to Philippians 2.5-11.

More on both books anon – for now there is a rich and enriching oscillation of disciplines, experience and examined concepts. Thank God for books.  

Maybe we all have our go to texts when we are searching the scriptures for wisdom, guidance, a word from the Lord, a nudge in the right direction. I often turn to Paul’s prayers. The reason is simple, I think! Paul’s prayers are always for the churches as they face all the ups and downs, tensions and ructions, blessings and demands, of small community life.

Many of us have begun to think about how we now move forward as a church, as a small community of Jesus’ disciples in a world very different from the one we had gotten used to. I too, have been thinking, and praying, and listening for that word, trying to be alert to that nudge, waiting for that guidance that helps make sense of where we are and where God might be calling us into the future. 

So I turned to Colossians 1.9-11, what some scholars call one of Paul’s wish prayers. No, not wishful thinking, but Paul’s wish list of blessings for the Christian house groups in Colossae. It’s worth taking time to read the gist of it:

For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light.

Follow Paul’s line of thought. Paul asks for knowledge of God’s will, all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives so that…. two things – so that they might live a life worthy of the Lord AND so that they may have great endurance and patience. Now there’s a surprise. Yes we would expect to ask God for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when we are seeking to know God’s will. But patience? A willingness to wait often requires more faith than the rush to action or the exciting risks of new ideas and rapid change.

Paul prays that these small communities under pressure will receive from God wisdom, understanding, and patience. Imagine praying for the power of God to be patient! But there is a lot of wisdom, and a lot of faith in Paul’s praying for the communities of Christ to have patience. Read his words again: “being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience.”

Here’s why I think Paul’s prayer for patience helps us where we are right now. The long, slow, and stuttering emergence from Covid-19 lockdown and restrictions will require of us courage, risk-taking, and a huge amount of goodwill and understanding. To think and pray, to share ideas but listen to each other’s fears, to begin to rebuild differently but also to discern what should change and what we should keep and enhance, – that’s a process that works best when we have been empowered with patience.

So perhaps the prayer, “God give us patience” is the prayer for a time like this. I sense and fully understand the urgency, intensity and yes, even impatience, to get started, to get doing, to get the show back on the road. Except the church is not a show, it is a community of the Spirit, a fellowship of believers, and a local expression of the Body of Christ. Together we are the real presence of Jesus, his risen life flowing through and amongst us as together we seek to serve Him in the power of the Spirit, whose fruit is patience.

Paul’s prayer comes from one who knows the wisdom of the gardener who waits for growth, the builder who gets the foundations right, the doctor who doesn’t rush to a diagnosis, and the shepherd who guides but does not chase the sheep. Patience and endurance are very similar words in Paul’s vocabulary. Together they describe the ability to work things out and work things through.

And note this, it’s important. Patience isn’t the product of our own strength, holding ourselves in check with gritted teeth. Patience is God’s empowering presence, the resilience of the risen Christ strengthening his people. So as we begin to think and plan, pray and seek God’s will together, it will put all our decisions and plans on a much surer footing if first we ask for patience.

A closing thought from Isaiah, another of God’s prophets:

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40.31)

Early in the 1980's I read The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen. It's a book that defies description and category. It's a travel book about a journey into Himalayan Nepal in search of the snow leopard. Then again the book reads like a novel with a gripping plot, kept taut by the tension of whether or not he will eventually see the near mythical snow leopard, and with memorable characters. It is undoubtedly autobiographic, and Matthiessen is a wise and self-aware observer of his own inner climate, his hopes and failures, and his way of looking at the world. Throughout the book Matthiessen comments on Zen Buddhism, by then a philosophy that held a deep appeal to someone in quest not only of experience, but of the meaning of Being itself.

At the time I first read The Snow Leopard, there were relatively few films or photographs of the animal available. The snow leopard is elusive, shy, lives in remote and inaccessible locations high in the mountains, and in order to see them in the 1970's the traveller had to endure terrain, weather and deprivations only the most hardened and resourceful could achieve. There are near things with avalanches and crevasses, changes in sherpa personnel, conflict and co-operation amongst the team, fascinating descriptions of the food in the remote villages and the customs of people strange and hard to interpret to western eyes. 

On that first reading I came to the end of the book with a profound sense of gratitude that in our world, rapidly being absorbed by human consumption, development of domination, there was still space for such a magnificent, graceful and mysterious animal. That has all changed. The snow leopard faces the very real threat of extinction in the wild. Even in the 1970's Matthiessen had anticipated the increasing dangers of decreasing habitat, the invasion of sightseers and tourists, the massive profits for poachers and the insatiable greed and arrogance of those who glory in trophies and accessories made at the cost of not just one snow leopard; those who kill a male snow leaopard weaken the entire population, and if they kill a female they destroy the possibility of future families in an environment where natural survival is already precarious.

So it was with excitement and a thin sliver of anxiety that I found myself at the Scottish Highland Wildlife Park. The car tour was slow, interesting and simply acted as a warm up act for me. Then we climbed the modest brae to the snow leopard enclosure, and the anxiety that the animals may not co-operate with yet more gawping tourists and decide to hide in the long grass. 

There are moments in all our lives when we know we are seeing something that changes our way of viewing the world, that shifts around and rearranges the inner furniture of past experiences real and imagined. My first view was more a sigh of recognition, the fulfilment of a longing to see, just to see, and be grateful for the existence of these animals. I have a modest and ageing camera, and hadn't come to photograph and capture, but to wonder, and enjoy. No photographic image can substitute for those moments of grace and power when Animesh moved out of the grass and across her cliff top, and I exhaled something between a sigh, a smile and a prayer of gratitude.

All those years ago I had read about Matthiessen's quest, and had been drawn into the story of these magnificent cats. In the intervening time David Attenborough made a full documentary aided by the advent of digital technology and the full resources of the BBC. But this was different. Here was a snow leopard, kept safe in Scotland, the wire fences an ambiguous barrier that contains an animal made to roam for endless miles, but which protects her, allows her to breed, and so ensure some kind of future for her species. And here I was, with a ten year old camera, privileged to see her, and to take in the marvel of wildness and a creature often called the ghost of the mountains.

As a theologian I read a lot of theology. But theology has to find a firm footing in the realities of our world, its politics, economics, ethics and our human impact on God's creation. Theology has to be brought into conversation with what is happening to our environment and climate, and as counter-voice to our insatiable lust for economic power and dominance. Theology is not concerned about concepts and metaphysics, ideas and arguments as ends in themselves. Theology is a means to an end, a way of understanding God, the world and ourselves in ways that enable us to see what we are doing, and learn what we need to do, to be stewards of God's creation, harbingers of God's kingdom, responsible and responsive human beings whose privileged place in the world is a gift not a right, and is for the good purposes of God not the proud self-assertion of human dominance. 

Matthiessen's book, The Snow Leopard, is a masterpiece of literature. For all the reasons previously mentioned, and for one more. For over 40 years I have carried inside me the image of the snow leopard, imagined from the pages of this book. It takes remarkable writing to create the longing and fascination this book embedded in my imagination. No photos or film clips since, have erased my long held desire to see this creature, and to gaze with inner wonder at such a gift to our world. No wonder this animal became a symbol of the World Wildlife Fund. One of the most treasured birthday gifts our daughter Aileen gave me, was a year's sponsorship of a snow leopard. Our visit to the Scottish Highland Wildlife Park was part of that same nexus of love, memory and gift.       

On Tuesday we spent the day at the Highland Wildlife Park, an extension of Edinburgh Zoo, set in the spectacular Landscape between Kingussie and Aviemore. From as far back as I remember I was around animals on various farms in Ayrshire and Lanarkshire. I know, cows and sheep, pigs and hens, horses and dogs and cats – they're hardly the most exciting beasts on the earth. Yes, but.

In those first fifteen years of life I was around animals, and learned to respect and care for each creature that shares our space, and has as much right to life, food and shelter as we have. I remember my first visit to Edinburgh Zoo with the school. I was probably about 8 or 9. We went on a bus and were led in singing songs about animals by Mrs Proudfoot, the music teacher and Headmaster's wife – in 1959 that was the designation.

Elephants, lions, tigers, buffalo, giraffes, penguins, polar bears, monkeys. Here's where age becomes a giveaway. I was seeing in colour and real life, animals I had only seen in black and white on our first TV. A very young David Attenborough on Zoo Quest, and Armand and Machaela Denis On Safari, and various other documentaries made book pictures come alive. 

I've never lost my fascination with animals, and have never had to be persuaded of animal rights. Later as a Christian I came to think much more deeply about the issues of animal welfare, care of creation, and where my inbuilt resistance and opposition to all forms of animal cruelty originated. This has nothing to do with ideology. Two reasons will suffice, one a story, the other a theological conviction.

The story first. I was alongside my dad as a boy of 8 when I was shocked at the way the farmer's son (a young man by then) used a stick to hit the cows to get them to go into the byre quickly. Dad never, ever, used a stick on 'the beasts' as he called them. He confronted the farmer (who was actually a kindly man himself) and demanded that nobody used a stick on cows that were part of the herd he was responsible for looking after, and keeping healthy. The farmer didn't see it that way, and with no hesitation my father told him, either the sticks went or he did. The farmer tried to reason, that sometimes you had to, and his son didn't mean anything by it.

The result was my father gave in his notice and started to look for another job. That kind of stubborn, obstinate, some might even say unreasonable opposition to inflicting hurt on animals, has never left me. It's a conviction born out of witnessing my father using the only lever he had to prevent what was then an acceptable level of pain to force animal compliance. I'm proud of dad for all kinds of reasons – but I still remember his principled outrage to his employer, and his refusal to compromise or negotiate on the use of a stick on a cow.  

The theological conviction that now entwines with such life experiences, came later. Care for creation and all its creatures has grown and strengthened with every decade of my time on a planet rapidly reaching critical depletion. My understanding of God the Creator, and of this natural world as entrusted gift, is enough to fund both compassion for animals and resistance to both animal cruelty and the uncontrolled laying waste of the earth for commercial gain and economic power. So wherever there are those who are working to conserve and care, to protect and preserve, the beauty and diversity of our natural world, my sympathies align with little need to argue the case.

So, back to the Highland Wildlife Park. It doesn't have a huge range of projects, but as a place to watch and wonder at the marvel that is an animal, it is both fascinating and poignant. Pride of place goes to the pair of snow leopards, who recently gave birth to two cubs. But the snow leopards will be for another post. They have a special place in my worldview! The Amur tiger is magnificent, awesome, and one of a disappearing species.

He wasn't for coming out of his den since it was near feeding time, so the photo does no justice to the size and power of this dangerous endangered masterpiece of muscle and size. The photo was taken through three separate steel fences, so I guess that confused the zoom. But for all that, the elusive and hard to get photo of this vanishing tiger is an image that speaks of the terrible consequences of human greed and fear, and of that strange hostility to whatever is greater and more powerful than ourselves.

We control a beast like this with steel fences, and constrain the movements of a body made for jungles and trees, and destroy the freedom to roam and survive on its own. And for good measure, we have virtually erased her habitat so that the future of the Amur tiger is at best precarious and at worst already closed. 

A walk in the woods in the Highlands at dusk. There is a poignant beauty in a dilapidated structure that has lasted the seasons, that once was someone's pride and joy, that has given shelter, and to God's smaller creatures may do still, and whose purpose now is to keep standing, and leave the occasional traveller wondering what it was once used for.

But whatever its previous use, the sight of a building on its last legs touches into something deep in us, our need for shelter, the protection of a place, the comfort that is given not only function, but by familiarity. This small shed sits in a forest in the hills, and through decades of winters its wood has weathered as season's timber,  wind, rain and snow each year taking their toll as the wood warps, nails rust, and roof and walls bear increasing weight with less resilience year on year.

Yes the obvious parallel with human ageing, and yes, with my own growing old. For all the bland optimism and feel good memes about 70 being the new 50, and you're only as old as you feel, and age being only number, and the assumptions that we can stay ahead of this the ultimate numbers game, for all that, this shed shows more realism, and seems content with its own mortality, and its place in time. 

There's something about Qoheleth in an image like this, its mixed messages of decay and defiance, a place of shelter still despite the ravages of time, the hopes and purposes of human building which affirms the future and gives meaning to the present. I'm content to have seen this chapel where the prayers were in the building of it, and its value persists beyond usefulness. And for now, that's not a bad way of thinking of ourselves growing old! 

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I first read that promise of God, "Even to grey hairs I will carry you…" And those climactic verses of the greatest poem of God's protective intimacy, "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…." And all of this brought on by a walk in a Highland dusk, and an epiphany from a shoogly shed silently singing, "I'm still standing…"!

Within the next six months or so three new commentaries will be published on Paul's Letter to the Romans. One of the indulgences of semi retirement (am I allowed to use that word 'indulgence' when writing about Paul's diplomatic letter that precipitated the theological crisis of the Reformation and gave birth to the slogan 'justification by faith?) – in any case, having the freedom and time to read mostly what interests me, I now regularly read biblical commentaries. So three new commentaries on Romans is a bit of a cumulative event. (September 2021, IVP, 544 pp)

The forthcoming Tyndale commentary on Romans is by David Garland. He has already produced a number of highly rated commentaries, most of which I've used, and one, on Second Corinthians, I have read through. The new Tyndale will replace the compact, sensible and loved commentary by F F Bruce. I look forward to working through this replacement, which will be twice the length of its predecessor. (September 2021, IVP, 544pp)

Frederick Dale Bruner's commentary style is very different from the standard approaches of academic historical-critical, rhetorical and literary commentary. His two previous commentaries, on Matthew and John, are each a massive vade mecum of history of interpretation, exposition, exegetical reflection and pastoral comment. His commentary on Romans is similar in style and very different in scale. The Gospel of John came in at 1270 pages, and Matthew in 2 volumes totals 1470; Romans will be 232 pages. That will make it much more manageable, and it will be interesting to find out who his main conversation partners have been from the Romans commentary hall of fame. I have my own favourites, but will enjoy someone else's selection of significant voices. Given the ferment and flux in Pauline studies in the past 40 years, this must have been a master class in distillation. (Oct 2021, Eerdmans, 232pp))

In the Spring, and before Easter, Michael Gorman's theological and pastoral commentary on Romans will be published. Gorman is one of the leading contemporary Pauline scholars whose work over 20 years has increasingly focused on "participation and transformation, cruciformity and new life, peace and justice, community and mission." (text from publisher's advance notice)

It would be fair to say many of us have longed for work like this from Professor Gorman. Amongst other things, this commentary must have compelled Gorman to re-examine and consolidate much of his work to date in the light of a definitive text that is redolent with the very themes on which he has spent his academic career. If similar treatments of 2 Corinthians and Philippians were forthcoming, that would certainly sort out future birthday and Christmas gifts – as we say in Scotland, "If I'm spared!"   (March 2022, Eerdmans, 352ppp))

As it is, I look forward to diving in at the deep end of the pool that is Romans, a kind of baptism into the text, to emerge the better of the swim.