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Smudge has been a source of solace, fun, fascination and sheer pleasure ever since she arrived in our family. They say you're either a dog or cat person, but I'm entirely at home with each or either. Both Sheila and I have had cats around us all our lives, and so no surprise that cats, Smudge included, is her own person, and entirely different in character from Tinker, Bonnet and Gizmo. 

She of course has paid no heed whatsoever to the First Minister's insistence that lock down means lock down. She has come and gone, slept and eaten, sunbathed and hunted, adhered to social distancing and invaded our space, and has been less than impressed by the face masks.

But she has been a source of comfort and distraction through these long and often lonely weeks. There she is bemused by millions of floating dandelion seeds while prowling her marches, and showing us easily bored humans the health benefits of staying curious.

More seriously, the therapeutic effects of pets are well enough known. That story in Genesis when Adam names all the animals is one of those great humanising moments captured in the imagination, and deeply embedded in the human consciousness of our responsibilities towards those creatures who share our planet.

Over these weeks of lock down when it has not been possible to be with family and friends, and social interaction has been minimal and distanced, Smudge has been there. Now cats don't really do the selfless altruistic thing; they tend to know how to push the right buttons for food, doors opened, and the softest warmest seat. Amongst the blessings that enrich our lives are those bonds with animals that grow into a mutual dependency of long established trust, and a sense of home shared. Smudge is all of that. Her capacity for finding soft places in the house and sunny places in the garden is both instinctive and strategic. I swear Smudge is a post-graduate problem solver when it comes to her own personal comfort.

As an example of such innovative selfishness the way she hijacked the foam kneeling pad when I turned my back to go into the garage for pruners, or shears or some other human implement – who cares, he left the mat without a towel on it, it's sunny, so I'm having it. All of this is clearly discernible from the unmistakable body language of indifferent proprietorship, and uncontested ownership adopted by my cat Smudge. 

Like all cats, Smudge is predictable much of the time, but it's those occasional try-ons that make life with a cat a chronic low-key battle of wits. To finish the story, I needed the foam kneeler, which she gave up with that superior nonchalance of the cat whose point has been made with minimal fuss – this time. 

Over nine weeks I only took a few pictures of her, though if I trawl through the years she has been with us an entire album could be compiled. The ones I have taken are reminders that we share our home with a remarkable animal. I don't say that only of Smudge; think about it, the creation of a safe place for an animal that costs money to keep, that claws the stair carpet mercilessly, that has an unerring sense of what can annoy you, and that has woven bonds of affection and loyalty such that you actually care for the blessed thing. And its presence soothes, amuses, gives the day a shape, and its look confers acknowledgement that you exist and that's OK.

There are countless poems about cats. Kit Smart's "For I will consider my cat Jeoffrey" is the all time platinum bestselling poem about a man and his cat. I recently came across 'Magnificat' by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

The title is very clever. Magnificat. The poet is in a deep place of questioning about his own existence, what he is for, where he is going and why any of this matters anyway?

The cat embodies the enigma of each life drama played out against a cosmic vastness that is by turns threatening and welcoming. The poet's double self-assuring command to smile with which his poem ends, pushes the reader towards the hopeful thought with which we go to sleep, trusting the darkness and hoping for tomorrow – "it will be day."

In the days of a pandemic lock down, that kind of hopefulness is an essential corrective in the face of much that disturbs our peace and disrupts our plans. Sometimes it isn't the cosy and comfortable poems we need, but the more astringent words that face the mysteries without explaining them away, while yet insisting with equal force, "It will be day."     

Magnificat   

When will this inner night – the universe – end
And I – my soul – have my day?
When will I wake up from being awake?
I don't know. The sun shines on high
And cannot be looked at.
The stars coldly blink
And cannot be counted.
The heart beats aloofly
And cannot be heard.
When will this drama without theater
– Or this theater without drama – end
So that I can go home?
Where? How? When?
O cat staring at me with eyes of life, Who lurks in your depths?
It's Him! It's him!
Like Joshua he'll order the sun to stop, and I'll wake up,
And it will be day.
Smile, my soul, in your slumber!
Smile, my soul: it will be day!

 

There are always those whose default inclination is to negative a good thing. The snide, superior and in their own opinion more worldly wise, use their wit to unpick the delicate stitching of other people's wonder, admiration and way of looking at the world. A good example is the much maligned sunrise and sunset photos posted on various social media. They have been called the Marmite of the photography world, they are spread across countless screens as if no one had ever seen one before; and you love them or hate them.

The nay-sayers have a point, though it is a small one, and it is still in danger of finding pleasure whining at other peoples pleasure. Once photo-shopping, image editing and enhancement have done their work what is left is usually spectacularly improbable as a recognisable image of a natural phenomenon. That is a valid critique.

But the photo straight from the camera, minimally touched and innocent of insertions, spot fix and filters, whatever its merits as a photo in the eyes of others, has for the photographer at least, the joy of remembering. And then, to take time later for contemplation of what was seen, and why it seemed important to allow that memory and that image to linger in the mind, and even touch the deep places of longings left too long unacknowledged. 

Which brings me once more to photographs in a time of pandemic. I take very few photos of sunrise, I'm doing other things early morning. I take some photos of sunsets, though not all that many. But the sky, clouds, horizons, now these I photograph with the same enthusiasm as others go out to bag another sunrise or sunset. The one above was taken in semi-darkness, after a long hot day by North East Scotland standards, the street lights unable to compete, but willing to compensate for the disappearing sun, at least for a while, until sunrise. This second one is a photograph of clouds, which may seem obvious. But in the driest period for decades for this time of the year, the parched foreground, the distant clouds framed in blue sky, and the newly green trees in the middle ground, coalesce in an image of both uplift and yearning. We are still waiting for decent rainfall! 

Lock down by definition limits horizons, and makes the familiar a slow-growing exercise in tedium. New horizons, the sense of our place in the landscape, and our freedom to change and adjust our environment, have become our way of life in what we too uncritically call the developed world. The abrupt loss of freedom and closing down of travel was a necessary public health imposition, but it has come at considerable cost to our emotional, relational and economic health.

Reflecting on that cost, and what is is we lost when movement out of our own homes was so limited for nine weeks, I was in no doubt the primary loss was the freedom to see the special people in our lives; family, friends, and those whose presence nourishes our sense of self and worth. But a close second was the loss of liberty to go where we wanted, to move from here to there, to yield to those impulses to be elsewhere and see what was there that was of interest.

The sky is one of the constantly changing features of our landscape, and for me a significantly influential governor of my inner mood. This view is from our daughter Aileen's resting place, half an hour's walk from our door. I have found the long weeks of lock down, social distancing, reduced horizons and limited life choices, have opened up new experiences of grief, as all these cumulative daily losses of freedoms and ways of living, have reinforced some of the deep longing and loss that is now part of who I am as a man and a husband and a father clinging to love, gratitude and memories. The photo, with neatly trimmed foreground and receding hazy horizons, splashes of ostentatious yellow, Loch Skene in the centre reflecting blue on blue, and a summer sky over landscape Aileen loved; the whole scene captured a moment of emotional clarity when joy and sorrow in that instant were not opposites, but an inner duet playing the music of the heart in three movements, pensive gratitude, patient hope and sustained love.

That's what a photo does. It captures a moment. The coincidence of outer image and inward imagination in the mind of the person who looks, and doesn't always know what they see, but sees it is important. All the photos here were moments of insight that became later reflection, the fusion of eye and imagination, when the sky lifted the view beyond the earthbound and mundane realities of walking during lock down. The result is a new way of seeing things, this time through our inner viewfinder.

Such photographs are often moments when thought merges into prayer. Not the carefully articulated kind that can be offered in public worship; more the prayers that are longing personified, sorrow accepted, gratitude felt in the deep places, and hope persisted in from a heart hanging on to trust in God as default setting for life:

Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,
Unuttered or expressed;
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.

Prayer is the burden of a sigh,
The falling of a tear
The upward glancing of an eye,
When none but God is near.

Flourish is a rich and reassuring word. From the Latin stem florere it relates to flowers. To flourish is to "develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment." Who wouldn't want to flourish? 

The word has recently become a buzz word in self-help and pop psychology circles. Book titles love it: Flourishing. How to Achieve Happiness and a Deeper Sense of Well-being and Purpose in a Crisis. Yes, I'll have some of that.

Flourish. A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being – and How to Achieve Them. Yes. Always up for new ways of understanding, especially my self.

The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. Yes indeed. My kind of book, exploring my kind of textual territory, and in fairness, the only one of the three I have read. But it's clear flourishing is a good thing, and there's a market for it, though I doubt you can buy it

Describing my sense of self during these lock down weeks, flourishing is not the word that comes to mind on first thought. On second thoughts, it still seems a bit of a stretch. No. I have to be honest. I haven't felt that lock down and all its constraints helped me "develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment." 

However. If I look at the photographs I have taken, it becomes obvious I paid close attention to flowers, you know, these botanical specimens from which we get the semantic seeds of "flourish", florere. No surprise that I took so many. Flowers are fascinating, beautiful and have always been mood shifters for me.

What becomes clear as I review a lot of them is the necessary transience of beauty, and the more poignant thought that the flower has to fade before the seeds form, drop, and keep the cycle of flourishing going for another year.

There is a profound hopefulness hidden in our expectation of next year's beauty from this year's seeds. Isaiah thought so too. "The desert and the parched land will be glad, the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus it will burst into bloom…" (35.1) Deserts will flourish, wilderness will bloom, parched land will blossom. That's a promise, says Isaiah. And he said it to people who had been in exile, a 70 year lock down.

The Hebrew word for 'blossom' is itself like a seed; "it suggests an image of breaking forth, budding, sprouting, even bursting." Latent energy conserved and coiled in readiness; stored up vitality waiting its chance to make its play in a dazzling performance of grace, beauty and life celebration. I'm not sure I know a better image of hopefulness in the dry land of these past weeks. "The desert shall blossom…" Or literally, and with an intensive emphasis, "blossoming it will blossom!"

There are different kinds of desert; or, at least, I have found that there are different parts of our humanity where we experience the desert. Wilderness can be multi-layered in our experience. The drying up of emotional nourishment when we are separated from those we love, who love us, with whom much of our identity is entangled; the wilting of relationships that have had to get by on limited contact, mediated presence through online platforms, and the cancellation of all those informal meetings for coffee, a blether, at the shops.

And church, or rather the absence of church as embodied presence through physical proximity and shared space, that too feels like a receding reservoir. At its best, the church to which we belong is a place of friendship, fellowship, community, communion and shared presence, and all of that providing the compost of our faith and needed nourishment for our roots. But without the water of life shared person to person, each other's presence encountered, and praise and prayer and worship made corporate by the Body of Christ gathering together, I have sensed the slow encroachment on my soul of what Isaiah calls the dry places, the wilderness, the desert.

Such a spiritual, emotional and relational recession is inevitable when sources of nurture are shut off. That is what these past weeks of lock down can mean for human beings made in the image of the Triune God for community, reciprocity, love, conversation, relationship, communion and all the other social interchanges that confer and sustain our identity. And we are not through it yet. 

That's why Isaiah's fascination with flora and flourishing is such a powerful stimulus to new growth. The desert shall blossom and life will flourish again. The dry places will have streams in the desert. The parched land will burst into bloom. Wilderness will again become fertile. Seeds are sown and the energy of life awaits the spring rains and the coming of God.

Let Isaiah have the last word, or the last three words. Lebanon. Carmel. Sharon. "The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendour of Carmel and Sharon." (Isaiah 35.2)

The three arid lifeless places of desert, parched land, and wilderness will become like the three most familiar fertile areas known to the exiles. Lebanon. Carmel. Sharon.These were places of hope and promise that the people would flourish again, the land would be fruitful again, God was on the move again.

To repeat myself; There is a profound hopefulness hidden in our expectation of next year's beauty from this year's seeds.

The idea for this tapestry came from I’m not sure where. But I do remember imagining a chalice touched with the fire of the Holy Spirit, and wondering what that might look like. From there I worked at the shape and colour of the chalice and decided it should be large, generous, dominating the scene, worked in small half cross stitch, but qualified and enriched by other images, particularly fire and the dove, two obviously biblical symbols of the Spirit.

I had considered olives for their oil used for anointing in biblical times, and one of the key emblems of the Spirit. The dove, however has a clear connection to Jesus’ baptism, and with the creation story as the Spirit moved upon the waters, hence its place above the chalice.

I also considered grapes, signifying the wine of the Eucharist but decided to make the wine dominant within the chalice, and close to a small portrayal of the cross. Thus the coming of the spirit in flames, the wine of the new covenant, the cross as the place of reconciliation, and all this set in a field of wheat with flowers, signifying both the bread of the Eucharist and the beauty of creation.

The flames were worked entirely at random with the colours chosen as I went along. The colours were deliberately strong and much more diverse than red and yellow flames. There seemed no reason that the flames at Pentecost should be limited to human perceptions, so the colours express the diversity of creation, the multiplicity of the work of the Spirit and the infinite possibilities of the creative, purposive and redemptive work of God.

The dove is white, a deliberate attempt at both emphasis and differentiation. The contrast between the wild power of the top half, and the much more ordered fruitfulness of the harvest field in the bottom half is an intended effect, though it was not what I first intended. It was trying to solve the problem of bread and wine that pushed me towards wheat and then my early years in the country and corn fields spangled with flowers suggested small, bright and understated beauty in the midst of the Eucharistic grain.

The borders have become a signature element in my tapestries. The allusion to the rainbow does not follow the colour spectrum but makes visible diversity and harmony, difference and complementarity. The inner gold is both light and the life sustaining fruit of sunlight, grain, and bread; the single red line around the border is evocative of the wine of the Eucharist, and the redeeming love that surrounds the whole of Creation.  

The entire work is an experiment in theology, a prolonged meditation on two theological realities which give definition and imagination to Christian living – the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist. I am expecting that this tapestry will mean more to me than to most others who might look at it – not only because I did it and therefore have much already invested in it; but because I am genuinely curious about the relationship between what we do at Holy Communion, and the ministry of the Holy Spirit who in Johannine theology, takes of the things of Christ and makes them known to us. 

Sometimes a photograph captures a mood. Six weeks into the lock down it was all becoming a bit claustrophobic. Partly that was because life had few options for change and stimulus, or new scenery with different horizons. Much more I think, from the missing of people, all kinds of people. From our son and wider family, our close friends and wider circle of folk whose company we enjoy frequently, to our church communities, and even the free interaction with others in shops, on the street, at the garage, we were missing people, painfully aware of an inner ache giving birth to loneliness and emotional bereavement. 

I hadn't used the phrase 'stir crazy' very much, until I realised that's what we were all going through: "restless or frantic because of confinement or routine." In fact it put me in mind of Cole Porter's song:

One hundred yards from our front door is a rookery. It sits at this end of the local golf course, and their large high rise housing estate of nests is located amongst the Scots pines. You get used to them, their occasional squabbles with the local neds – the seagulls, their alarms when the buzzard flies too near, and the daily exit near dusk when they go wherever rooks go to roost. 

Rooks are amongst the best problem solvers. And what about this, rooks have been trained to pick up litter in a theme park in France! They have an unerring instinct for calculating weight bearing twigs. I've never seen one land on a twig and have to hop to another because it broke. From my study window they gather for what looks like a game of chicken, will this twig hold two of us?

My love of birds goes back to earliest days in Ayrshire, and my knowledge of them gleaned from my father, several older farm workers, Ladybird Books, I Spy Birds, The Observer's Book of Birds and The Observer Book of Bird's Eggs. Later I graduated to The AA Book of British Birds, and from there to whatever I could get my hands on at whatever library I joined. The satisfaction I've had identifying birds by sight, flight or call, down the years of my life has been one of the gentler joys and one of the great legacies of growing up on farms.

So when I have my camera, I look for birds. I don't have a sophisticated camera; it has limited zoom and no filters; it is now 10 years old; I'm reluctant to replace it for one that will almost certainly do better. But there are plenty brilliant photos which other people can take and put out there online. I'm looking for that moment when man and bird are far enough away to respect each others' space and near enough for a good look at each other. This blue tit came into the garden the day after lock down, a harbinger of hope, a fragile, flitting presence like a tiny angel with its own tentative annunciation, "All shall be well…I hope!"

Birds do that. They fly in and out of our lives, and if we take time to notice them, and pay attention to the gift they are, they can become therapy on wings. Throughout these weeks we have seen the usual suspects, but also the coal tit, black cap, red kite, skylark, yellowhammer, and wren. No photographs of these, just the memory, and the satisfaction of the brief encounter.

I have a Folio Society Volume of John Clare's Bird Poems, complete with woodcuts. He wrote in records, poems and journals the details of 147 species of British wild birds, and wrote the first full descriptions of 65 birds found in Northamptonshire alone. Clare was a farm labourer, an observer, a careful note taker and record keeper, his knowledge of the countryside, habitats and habits of British wildlife quite astonishing.

He suffered from severe mental illness, and much of his later life is sadly marred by increasingly severe mental ill health. Yet despite such long periods of illness, in the combination of minute and persistent observation, and poetic imagination and feel for words, he has given some of the most lyrical and accurate descriptions of birds and their nests anywhere in the English language.

On one of our walks we were under observation ourselves. High enough up to be safe, it looked down with complacent unconcern, bird watching from the bird's perspective. We decided not to risk walking beneath this super-kilo wood pigeon. But that sky, framing a sumo class pigeon, once again took me outside my own head to look at what is there all the time. It is ironic, and to my own loss, when I make so little time to notice, enjoy and simply celebrate life as gift too easily taken for granted.

Jesus did tell us to "Look at the birds of the air…" And that was in the context of human worry and anxious concern about tomorrow. "Your Heavenly Father knows, " Jesus said. Bird watching as open air therapy, self-care, ekstasis – being taken out of one's own head!  

When you are frightened you don't pay attention to much else going on around you, other than whatever it is that threatens you! Ever since late February when the world woke up to the seriousness of what was happening in China, we have lived with the reality of a new Coronavirus and a global pandemic. By March 23 the entire country went into lock down and that is now only changing, ever so slowly and with considerable caution, thank goodness. 

To be under house arrest for ten weeks is a restriction of freedom unprecedented in peace time, and not even known in this country in war time. With time to think, none of the usual social activities, work responsibilities or leisure diversions available, it was hardly a recipe for happiness. Exercise, but only once a day for up to an hour, became the one chance to break out of the horizons of our own living room and garden.

Add to that sense of confinement the growing addiction to daily briefings with their litany of distressing statistics; then as we watched and listened and learned, a growing sense of mismanaged strategies and missed opportunities. It was becoming clear this was going to be hard, as hard as anything we had faced together as a country for a long, long time.

Mix into all the above an increasing sense of personal impotence in the face of a threat that was invisible, deadly and loose out there, and the ingredients are all together for a breakdown in social cohesion and confidence. In such a constrained set of circumstances, a large space opened up in our minds, quickly filled with shape shifting shadows of worry, uncertainty, disorientation and trashed plans. So. How to survive a lock down, deal with the strong undercurrents of anxiety, reconfigure life around non-community when every instinct is to be with people in whose company we find strength, love and the resources to keep going?

For myself, I looked for solace where I have discovered it is often to be found – outside my own head. Every day we walked, we looked and listened, and I took photos. Some were quite good, some were naff, and a few were worth sharing with others. But the truth is, even the photos that "failed" were taken for a reason, or on a hunch, or because at the time that moment, or view, or object seemed worth hanging on to a little longer. I look at them now and on one level think they can be deleted without loss; at another level I realise this seemed worth the effort at the time, what did I sense or see there, then? 

Like a tree, using its branches to stretch out its claim on the space, an example of arboreal social distancing in a forest. Maybe. During these weeks we have walked often amongst trees. I find an almost biblical affection and affinity for trees. Maybe it goes back to childhood when so much of my time was spent climbing trees. Perhaps it's also the rich texture of biblical references to trees clapping their hands, growing beside rivers of water, and their leaves for the healing of the nations. So a photo with Scots pines, larch, hawthorn, rowan, gorse and broom, barely held in place by an ancient drystane dyke – the photo doesn't capture all of the joy and contentment, but enough to remember the lifting of the heart when looking at them. 

Whatever the reason I have found trees comfortable companions. Old trees have been there for perhaps a century or more, symbols of permanence, signs of the health of our natural world, an antidote to the toxins of human acquisitiveness which threatens our entire eco-system. When the worst of this is over, and we are free to be out and about again, I'll go where there are trees, and take time to sense deep, nourishing, stabilising roots beneath my feet. And be grateful.  

I wrote this Pastoral Letter for people whose faces and presence and voices I am missing. Their absence feels like a hunger that won't go away.

John 6.35.  Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

We pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” trusting God to nourish our bodies. But what feeds our hearts and strengthens our souls is Jesus himself. Our inner hungers of longing for love, waiting for hope, searching for meaning and life in its fullness, can only be satisfied when we come to Christ, and believe in him.

Amongst the most difficult experiences over these past weeks of lock down has been the loss of other people’s company, companionship and presence. We are nourished by relationships of love and affection, and we hunger for conversation face to face. To be with people who share our lives, laugh at our jokes, sympathise when life is difficult and who understand us, is one of the most human forms of inner nourishment.

That’s because over years of memories and friendship, talking and walking together, caring and taking an interest in each other, they have become the soil in which our lives have taken root. We hunger for that communion of spirit, and thirst for the presence of those in whose friendship, love and presence we grow and flourish.

Baptists don’t tend to talk much about the communion of saints. Yet our way of being the church is based on Paul’s idea of being the Body of Christ.  Each one of us is a member, joined together, muscle, joint and sinew, into a co-ordinated body with Christ as the head. Even when we are not together, we are joined by being in Christ and Christ in us, a communion of saints.

So, yes, social distancing makes our gatherings impossible for now, and will make them difficult for quite a while into the future when lock down is eased. But we are nourished by the bread of life, we belong to the Body of Christ, and though we hunger for each other’s company and fellowship, the Body is kept strong by the Spirit of the living Christ. Through all this disruption and interruption of our lives, the joints, sinews and muscles that join us are kept healthy by “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.”

Reflection: My guess is we will never again take for granted the freedom to meet together as the Body of Christ. We will appreciate more than ever how much our congregational praise and singing strengthen our faith, and nurture the bonds of fellowship in Christ. The communion service will be a regular recalibrating of what is most important in our lives. When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” that wasn’t just a stated fact; it is an invitation, now, to belong within the Body of Christ, and to be nourished within the fellowship of Christ’s people.

Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope.

Today's guest post is written by my friend Mo Gibbs. Mo is a married, busy mum of two, and a former Baptist minister and Youth Development Coordinator. She now works as a waitress in a busy restaurant. A coffee and book enthusiast, nothing pleases her more than a good book, good coffee and time spent chatting with friends! She has chosen SUCH a good book!

When I was first introduced to Joan Chittister’s book Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, my family were going through a major struggle.  Her words were like a balm to my soul.  Joan wrote with real honesty about her own struggle with not being able to progress in writing as she’d imagined, and through her writing allowed me a space to reflect on the struggle I was in and a way of beginning to process some of that.  Yet, her book wasn’t simply navel gazing in nature, as she tied it firmly into the story of Jacob, particularly his struggle at Peniel, allowing me to place myself within that story and begin to hear the hope that this struggle didn’t have the final word.  She writes near the beginning of the book:

…if we give up in the midst of struggle, we never find out what the struggle would have given us in the end.  If we decide to endure it to the end, we come out of it changed by the doing of it. … We dare the development of the self. … Life forges us in the struggle.[1]

Her words gave me a way to pause and space to encounter God.  It was by far the best book I read all that year, and I have been recommending it to others ever since, as well as reading more of her writing.

During this lockdown time though, I’ve revisited the book and re-read it.  I’m one of those people who marks books, who underlines and writes in margins and has a ‘code’ – which will make some folks smile and others cringe.  As I re-read the book out came the pencil, as this time there were new things that struck me, new thoughts I wanted to ponder, new things that resonated.  That is the mark of a good book I think!  The struggle we’ve been in the midst of now is different, but it is nonetheless, struggle.  ‘We not only can survive struggle but, it seems, we are meant to survive in new ways, with new insights, with new heart.’[2]  This book is one of those thin books, thick with meaning and with insight and application.  It is one that speaks to the struggles we find ourselves in, though we all face different ones, but that also points towards the hope that is offered to us in God, hope that allows us to be transformed rather than turned to dust.  It is one that does it without trying to sweep the struggle under the carpet, rushing us to a hope that feels inauthentic, but that allows us to look at our reality while drawing us into a reimagined future.  It is, in my mind at least, a thin book rich with prophetic utterings.

Joan, helpfully I think, places some of the marks of the struggles we go through, and that are evident in Jacob’s story, against the potential gifts that they can become.  For example, the struggle with fear is put beside the chapter on the gift of courage.  This stops the book from being one of doom and gloom, but rather recognises that ‘Struggle is a process of pitfalls and challenges which, if met, become hope.’[3]  The elements of struggle that she names are ‘change, isolation, darkness, fear, powerlessness, vulnerability, exhaustion, and scarring.’[4]  The gifts that these things might emerge to become she says are ‘conversion, independence, faith, courage, surrender, self-acceptance, endurance, purity of heart, and a kind of personal growth that takes us beyond pain to understanding.’[5]  These are all things that, I think, if we’re honest, are some of the markers of the struggles we go through in life, whether for just a short period or for more prolonged times.

I think sometimes, as Christians, we find it hard to acknowledge struggle.  Or feel guilt that if we do, then it must mean that in some ways our faith is deficient or our hope in God not strong enough.  Even if it’s not what we would say, or believe, for others, it is something we tell ourselves internally about our own lives.  I also think, sometimes, we try to just pretend struggle isn’t real or doesn’t grip us quite as much as it does.  It is hard to move through struggle to hope when the struggle and its impact is minimized.  So Joan’s attempt to create ‘a spirituality of struggle that owns the pain but also comes to grips with each of its dimensions, with all of its demands’ is valuable.[6]  As much as we don’t want to go through them, they do offer opportunity to become different if our eyes are open to what might be.  ‘The spirituality of struggle gives birth to the spirituality of hope.’[7]  Hope that is firmly grounded in God who never leaves us or lets us go, and who wrestles with us.

There is so much more that could be said about the book … but really I think the best thing is to go and read it for yourself.  Read it and find yourself in Jacob’s story.  Read it and reflect on your own story.  Read it and be reminded that ‘hope and despair are not opposites.’[8]  Rather, the difference is that ‘despair shapes an attitude of mind.  Hope creates a quality of soul.’[9]  I can almost certainly guarantee that this thin book will help spur your soul through despair to hope.

We always think of hope as grounded in the future.  That’s wrong, I think.  Hope is fulfilled in the future but it depends on our ability to remember that, like Jacob, we have survived everything in life to this point – and have emerged in even better form than we were when these troubles began.  So why not this latest situation, too?  Then we hope because we have no reason not to hope.[10]

I cannot recommend this thin book highly enough, especially in times like the ones we are in.  Even though struggles, like now, may scar us, may they also lead us to being transformed by hope.

 

[1] Chittister, Joan D., Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 2

[2] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 3

[3] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[4] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[5] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 19

[6] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 16

[7] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 97

[8] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 106

[9] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 106

[10] Chittister, Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope, 110

This is a case study in end notes, telling the story of two books, and three people called James at birth, but changing it later to Jim or Jimmy.

In 1975 James D G Dunn published a book that challenged the scholarly and popular discussions of charismatic experience and how such experiences of the Holy Spirit relates to Jesus and the wider teaching of the New Testament. The book was called Jesus and the Spirit. The subtitle was more explicit. A Study of the Religious and Charismatic Experience of Jesus and the First Christians as Reflected in the New Testament. This book came five years after The Baptism of the Holy Spirit, an equally rigorous study of the phenomenon of spiritual endowment and expression of spiritual gifts, and largely based on Dunn's doctoral thesis completed under Professor C F D Moule. 

My late friend and mentor, the quiet and gentlemanly James Taylor, minister of Stirling Baptist Church, had bought Dunn's new book and had paid £9 for it. The inflation calculator adjusts that to £77 in 2020. Jesus and the Spirit was an expensive book. Jim was both delighted and disappointed.

Jim Taylor was a scholar pastor, a deeply and widely read preacher, and one of the most influential and respected leaders to have graced our Scottish Baptist family. He was also a wise mentor and generous friend to me, until his death in 2011. One day Jim Taylor phoned for our regular post Sunday catch up, when we consoled or encouraged each other as required. In the conversation he told me he had noticed the publication of a big and expensive book I ought to have; it would arrive by post during the week, and it was already paid for. I still have that Analytical Concordance of the RSV New Testament, one of those special gifts intended to bring both pleasure and usefulness, and it has done both down the years. Every time I use that book "I thank my God on every remembrance" of Jim Taylor. 

But back to Jimmy Dunn's book. As pastor preacher in a church at a time when charismatic experience divided evangelical opinion, Jim Taylor was delighted to have an authoritative examination of the New Testament on the issue. Jesus and the Spirit offered balance and ballast in a discussion too frequently divisive and competitivein our Scottish context, with echoes of Corinthian spiritual one-upmanship on the one hand ,and the dangers of quenching the Spirit on the other. Dunn's book, with its predecessor Baptism in the Holy Spirit, was an exegetical game changer of the higher level discussions about contemporary charismatic experience, the biblical text, and early Christianity. As the years have passed, Christian theology and experience have moved on to new emphases and focal points of discussion, but Dunn's work persists as an enduring contribution to study of the interface of historical context, religious experience and textual interpretation.   

Jim Taylor's disappointment with Jesus and the Spirit was that in a book of 516 pages, 361 pages were main text, and 150 pages were end matter, made up of end notes, (362-456) Bibliography, (457-475) and three indices, (476- (Biblical refs, Modern Authors, Subjects). As we sat at the table after dinner, looking through Jim's shiny new book, we soon came to realise that J D G Dunn had set a new bar level for scholarly monographs and the role of end notes / footnotes.This was a gold mine, and it would reward in proportion to investment of time and study.

The book was published in the prestigious and handsomely produced SCM New Testament Library. As the years passed, Dunn's developing work settled into an established pattern of rigorous historical research, cogent argument, textual exegesis and theological discussion – supported by hundreds even thousands of end notes/footnotes. It would be another 15 years or so before word processing, Microsoft Word, and computer software technology changed forever the approach to writing and referencing. So compiling, checking and writing those end notes was a herculean task. In Jesus and the Spirit there were 1600 plus of them!

There's little doubt that end notes are less convenient to the reader. Intriguingly Dunn's volume is the only one in the NTL series that uses end notes, presumably because of the sheer volume in Dunn's book. But those who read the book, including Jim Taylor, came to appreciate the scholarly substructure provided by those packed pages of supplementary information, wider scholarly reference, adduced and evaluated evidence, and each one of them a footprint showing the path of the argument. 

Jimmy Dunn's book is a tour de force at several levels. It was, and remains, essential reading on New Testament pneumatology; one key reason for that is the endnotes, and the degree of industry and thoroughness they demonstrated. And in addition, Dunn made a real contribution to a debate that had divided contemporary evangelical Christianity, and did so with authority and fairness. Dunn's own background was in charismatic evangelical circles, evolving later into a more progressive position which has never entirely moved away from the evidential value of experiential Christianity excavated from biblical texts.

Browsing through my own copy, I am again reminded of Jim Taylor, and the gift of friendship he brought to many of us. My own understanding of the integration of reading, study, pastoral care, preaching and prayer, owes a great deal to early years in ministry, spending time with Jim. He personified something he admired in others, and spoke of such in John Stott and C E B Cranfield, "godliness and good learning."

Holding this book now, flicking through those tightly tied down end notes, I remember with some sadness, and much gladness, that evening when Jim Gordon and Jim Taylor discussed Jimmy Dunn over earl grey tea and Helen's home made shortbread!