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Walking for exercise is one of the few permitted activities during lock down. These past months the constraints on freedom and movement are felt as an assault on life itself, and it hurts.

I have always enjoyed walking. More than that, I have always needed to walk, going back to a childhood in the country three miles from public transport, when we couldn't afford a car.

But as I grew up, walking as necessity became something enjoyable, to be looked forward to. A Saturday walking for miles was our way of seeing the world, and finding our place in it.

The Scottish word is stravaigin, its meaning a combination of walking about for the sake of it, and that inner impulse to change where we are for somewhere else.

Moorland knee deep in heather, across green fields, around a loch, along the beach, up a hill or more than one; landscape, and what was to be found there, provides an outer world that heals, sustains and stimulates the inner world. 

It's when I'm walking that I become more self-aware by becoming more attentive to what is around me. Walking creates a rhythm in which the body slowly fits itself to the world around, while recovering a sense of who it is that inhabits our inner world.

From those early years endlessly and tirelessly walking the world from our door, to these later years of walking to stay healthy, the experience is the same; time to learn, to love, to pay attention and to make space for joy to barge in.

One of the lock down walks took us up a local hill ,towards an expanding horizon under a casually choreographed canopy of clouds, in a sky only the best artists would attempt. Walking opens up new horizons so that we can see further and more clearly, and sometimes it does the same with our inner horizons helping us interpret the landscape of emotion, imagination and longing.

On the way up the hill, we passed the local wood pigeon, balanced nonchalantly on a dried branch. How do birds know a branch will take their weight? That kilo class pigeon is perhaps more secure on its precarious perch than I am with both feet on the ground.

And amongst the grass, allowed to grow longer to be cut for winter feeding, the usual meadow flowers in a Scottish field. And this tiny beauty, only visible from close up, soaking up sunshine and probably rooted in the rich nourishment of last year's manure. The biblical reference is obvious; "look at the birds…consider the lilies."

These long weeks of lock down have been emotionally expensive, at times emotionally ruinous. Incessant updates and briefings about a global health crisis one everyone's doorstep; anxiety and fear at the shops, replacing what used to be called retail therapy; uncertainty and sadness at so much normality erased overnight; loneliness and frustration as our primary emotional supporters of family, friends and togetherness are made unavailable to us.

New horizons of hope, a more secure sense of place, encounters with unexpected beauty; these are ways of re-configuring our inner world by walking in the outer world. Life has changed for good – I know, the phrase is uncomfortably ambiguous. But for those of us later in life it's hard to see how we will ever get back to life as we have known it for so long. And yet. Hopefulness grows out of looking for goodness, beauty, and truth in a God-made and God-loved world. If life has changed for good, perhaps it is our calling now to realise good out of the way life has changed.  

Martin Buber was one of the most significant writers, philosophers and religious thinkers of the Twentieth Century. His book I and Thou represented a paradigm shift in how humans view the world of objects and subjects. Relationships depend on the address and response of I and Thou, a dialogue between two subjects. That had great significance for Buber's understanding of prayer, worship and the relationship God establishes with each human being, I and Thou.

The poet Kathleen Norris was a careful reader of Buber, her own spiritual search a commitment to establishing and growing a relationship of dialogue and openness to the mysterious presence of God, who is never object, always subject. In The Cloister Walk, her best known book of spiritual reflections, she quotes words of Buber that are deeply resonant in her own experience of God.

"All of us have access to God, but each has a different access. Our great chance lies precisely in our unlikeness. God's all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one person."

This is the kind of nugget that frequently glints on Norris's pages, and especially in The Cloister Walk and a similar later volume Amazing Grace. A Vocabulary of Faith. 

Norris is a lay oblate of the Benedictine Order, and her spirituality and Christian practice has been formed by the disciplines, liturgies and practices rooted in the Rule of St Benedict. When possible she participates in the rhythms of the liturgical day, but is also a preacher and active member within both Catholic and non Catholic churches. Much of her writing explores the tensions and structures of community, the inner conflicts of the individual, usually with reference to her own inner struggles with faith and doubt, and the challenge of sustaining relationships through the inevitable and at times disruptive changes in human lives. 

What I found both unusual and welcome was her shrewd frankness about her own heart, and her sharp observation of others' behaviour and character as evidence of what was going on in their hearts. She tells of the daily rhythms of prayer, Psalm singing or reading, meeting in community and learning to live with others. Doing so, we learn to love and come to like people, and to live into the diversity and frustrations inherent in community building. Such disciplined care is the making of those who would follow the One who gave the New Commandment, "Love one another as I have loved you."

As an example of what it means to love someone through thick and thin, Norris writes with considerable frankness about her marriage, her husband, and the tensions and conflicts that building a sustainable shared future involve. In The Cloister Walk she reflects bravely on the triumphs and struggles of intimacy, commitment, and mutual accompaniment in many of life's most serious challenges to two people determined to be with and for each other    

She is very good on depression. Her husband suffered great anguish and with great honesty she writes of how to build a marriage that can sustain the extremes of unbearable joy and unbearable pain. The answer is love, but that too is a great mystery, and lays on us burdens that are also all but unbearable. When she likens her husbands suffering to crucifixion, you know you are reading someone who gets it, and who understands something of the terror of an inner world shut down. In one line she pinpoints the pastoral challenge when helping people confront and live through their suffering: "There's a fine line between idealising or idolising pain, and confronting it with hope." Read that again, slowly.

The Cloister Walk isn't a narrative that reaches a conclusion. It is loosely based on the liturgical year but the cycle is interrupted by essays on saints, reflections on sin, sins and grace, memoirs of incidents, people and life turning points, and much more. There are chunks of lectio divina, prayerful rumination on Bible texts, and out of these come characteristic pointers to how life can be better, obedience more faithful, insight less obscured by our standing in our own light. 

Her brief essay on Gregory of Nyssa ends with the poignant confession: "I frequently take consolation in Gregory's sense that with God there is always more unfolding, than what we can glimpse of the divine is always exactly enough, and never enough."   

    

 

During my read everything about Benedictine spirituality phase, I came across the poet and spiritual writer Kathleen Norris. Strangely I have never got round to looking for and reading all that much of her poetry, though some of her prose writing tips over into the use of poetic language if not structure. But what intrigued and held my interest was her honesty and curiosity about what it is like to pray, to live life in a Godward direction, to seek with the hope of finding and to knock with 'I'm not going away' persistence. 

The first non fiction book she wrote was Dakota. It was reviewed in Commonweal with enthusiasm, “a poet’s book; a work of beauty; a testament to the work of the Spirit.” The original printing of 8,000 proved to be an underestimate – it sold over 100,000 in hardback, and since has gone on selling. The sub title A Spiritual Geography, opens up a book about open spaces and extended silences, a lovingly critical mapping of landscape that sees beneath the visible and senses the depths of life around her. But please note; Norris not only sees beneath the visible, she also sees, pays attention to, and contemplates the meaning of what is visible, tangible and thus made sacramental by the invisible currents of grace. 

She had moved from the cornucopia of New York, to the isolated prairie town of Lemmon, population around 1700. She writes about the desert and the flash floods, the semi-permanent blue blue sky, the foibles and habits of the people, their courage and indomitable rootedness in where they were, and the weather – cyclones and drought, baking temperatures and desert frost, rocks and withered plains, vast cloud formations before rain and hot breezes that dehydrate in minutes.

And in all of this the contemplative voice of poet observing the given external landscape, and the given inner landscape of her mind and heart, he thoughts and feelings, her spiritual responsiveness to what is, and what might be. Think of this book as a travel book; except there are two journeys. The one takes you over the topography and demography of Dakota, its land and people; the other takes you on a journey inwards, reflective, alert and an education of the spirit.

Thinking about the grasslands and the long formation of compost, she considers what's happening to her inner landscape, climate and growth:

"It astonishes me as much as it delights me that moving to the Dakota grasslands led me to a religious frontier where the new growth where the new growth is fed by something old, the 1,500 year tradition of Benedictine monasticism. It grounds me; I use it as compost to 'work the earth of my heart'…I can long for change for a 'new earth…a good heart, a heart like the earth, which drinks up the rain that falls on it and yields a rich harvest.'"

My first reading of this book was 25 years ago. Slipped inside the back cover is the sheet of paper on which I wrote a subject index of pages where Norris hit nails on the head and drove important insights into my head. The list now reads as intriguing clues to what interested me then. Such notes as, tensions in life inevitable but good; dryness and impoverished spirit; the sacrament of work; laughter as benediction; poetry and faith; not blaming yourself is pride.

Now that last one; that not blaming ourselves is a form of pride, our loud disclaimer as if we never would or could have done whatever. The old Scottish cry of the self-exculpating child, "It wisnae me!" Norris is on to something here. Honest admission of responsibility, or at least refusing the instinct to self-excuse takes the kind of humility that only comes with maturity, and a growing self-awareness, and acceptance of our own fallibility. Such open acknowledgement of fault runs counter to so much self justifying and self-excusing that has become part of political, social and cultural life. To that extent it is a regression to childish evasion of the reality of who we really are.

In a sermon, one Sunday, Norris quoted the wonderfully named Dorotheus of Gaza, "The root of all disturbance, if one will go to its source, is that no one will blame himself." Norris goes on, "When I read those words at Hope Church, one old farmer forgot himself; he nodded and shouted out, 'That's right.'  

Dakota is an unusual book, and unusually rich in sharp and humane observation, leaving the impression of a writer who has patience with human behaviour and oddities, such that her willingness to take time to understand rather than criticise, easily tumbles over into compassion for people, all people.

That is the essence of hospitality. Here's how she puts it:

"The classic sign of our acceptance of God's mystery is welcoming and making room for the stranger, the other, the surprising, the unlooked for and unwanted. It means learning to read the world better, that we may better know our place in it."

Who wouldn't want to pin that one down, and come back to it 25 years later, and find it truer than ever? 

In the long days becoming weeks becoming months of lock down, like everyone else I'm beginning to feel the tedium of days merging into days of sameness. One of the seven deadly sins is accidie. Nothing to do with accident, and something altogether more invidious.

Not a word we use much today, which is a pity, because there's a lot of undiagnosed accidie around! Accidie has been variously defined as "a state of listlessness or torpor, of not caring or not being concerned with one's position or condition in the world." This is boredom that has become a mindset. It is different from depression, and different again from those phases of life where we just have to get on with routine, duty, obligation, chores all the sub-structures that give stability to our lives. 

Speaking for myself, the recent lock down experience has felt like a slow growing algae across the surface of my daily life. Many of the usual sources of stimulus, challenge and interest are not available. Human contact, conversation, relationships are limited and constrained by a concern not to be a health hazard to each other. Walking once or twice a day, but in your own locality, has been an exercise in mind mapping not only the streets, but the state of the lawns, the stage of the blossom, recognisable paving stones, familiar horizons becoming a haze of sameness.

So, yes, the result of such unvaried routine could well be a state of listlessness or torpor, and loss of interest because that which makes life interesting is unavailable. Like those empty supermarket shelves when this all started, essential supplies of laughter, affection, story sharing, purposeful work, freedom and movement, social gathering, and so much else is not there.

Thinking about this yesterday I wondered about ways of compensating for all this sameness, and also addressing underlying and harder to acknowledge emotions such as anxiety, uncertainty, resentment and an inner disposition of complaint. Supposing that, throughout a whole day, I took time to notice what was happening around me, and made a select list of what floats in and out of my life, and which I miss, unless I pay attention. I'm talking about gratitude, thankfulness for what is and what is there, using the older but no less important spiritual practice of counting my blessings. 

Of course, to count them I have to notice them, and allow time for inner responsiveness to become understanding, appreciation, and perhaps teach myself to learn again how to be surprised. So I did just that. Here's the select list, each with a clue to its significance. Mostly, they happened in the garden.

A small ladybird makes its way across a forest canopy of oregano, growing down the border beside the garden path. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who didn't like ladybirds. The sun shining on its carapace, slow moving scarlet against fresh new growth of improbable green, a tiny, transient drama of life in Herbland.

A large freshly baked croissant just as it came out of the oven, flaky, buttery and light, needing no further supplement of butter or jam, enjoyed with a cup of chai tea, sitting in the sunshine.

Then, quite literally, out of the blue, a large luminescent bubble the size of a tennis ball, made its way between the trees and floated across our grass, a global rainbow, created somewhere down the street by a child unaware they were manufacturing messages of joy for other folk.

A fading tulip head, breathtaking in the interplay of light and shadow, slowly losing its symmetry as it came to the end of another annual cycle of beauty as gift to whoever takes time to notice.

Four moments of insignificance in the grand scheme of things, whatever we think that might be. But four moments when I knew my life is attached by invisible threads of awareness to a world other than the one inside my own head. John Calvin described the world as the theatre of God's glory. We are part of a continuing drama of creation, change and new possibility.

Gratitude is intentional, it is our inner yes to that drama, and our own part in it, in the theatre of God. By contrast, accidie is resentment that life isn't what we want it to be, and therefore we intentionally withdraw our assent to play our own part in it, and we boycott the theatre.

For myself, a ladybird, a croissant, a bubble and a tulip averted such intentional discontent. Jean Pierre De Caussade's phrase remains for Christian's deeply restorative, that we enjoy and live in "the sacrament of the present moment."      

  

This is an essay in praise of bibliographies. There are select bibliographies, annotated bibliographies, brief bibliographies, long bibliographies. There are even book length bibliographies on particular subjects. A good one of those can be a fast track approach to gaining an overview of the area covered.  

A select bibliography shows an author's footprints and the various paths she has travelled in writing the book. It doesn't list everything she read or consulted, just the ones that are most useful. So much time is saved in research and further reading when a judicious selection of additional resources is the result of someone else doing the sifting and evaluating for usefulness.

Annotated bibliographies go further in selection and description. The author evaluates the contribution of an article or book and you quickly get a feel for whether it's a resource you need to follow up. When someone has read a book or article, and tells you what it does, and what it does not do, they guide you towards, or away from that particular resource. Of course you have to trust their judgement, but that's true in all scholarship – critical appropriation. A good annotated bibliography is like watching a prerecorded football match on fast forward, looking for the goals and cutting out ball retrievals and the thespian dramatics of on field divers!

Brief bibliographies are entirely utilitarian and modest in aim; to reduce the options and save time, but often at the cost of the reader's wider grasp. Providing the bibliography contains the key texts, the significant contributions, the authoritative voices, and a range of perspectives within all that, a brief book list does the job. If it's well done, the brief list becomes a further reading list, with the promise that, if you read these additional resources, you won't be wasting your time.

Long bibliographies can be less reliably worthwhile. It depends on whether the compiler has included all they ever read or saw reference to in writing the article, however tangential. There is a very good reason for insisting that the bibliography of an academic work should only contain works referenced in the main text. The number of items in a bibliography may bear no relation to how much the writer has engaged with and processed all the items on that long list; or whether it's there as a stage prop of suggested erudition.

One of the most useful items in any bibliography is the date of publication. I remember being so disappointed when I looked through the bibliography of a large biblical commentary, which the publisher described as definitive, and found the most recent book listed was ten years earlier than the date of publication. That doesn't mean relevance or value depend only on the most up to date and current work; but on key areas of discussion and contested fields of study, contemporary voices are essential to the integrity of the text. That said, no bibliography on Philippians should omit J B Lightfoot's volume from 1868, or Gordon Fee from 1995, separated as they are by 127 years. 

As to whole book bibliographies, I have to confess I have read several of these all the way through, including volumes dedicated to publications about George Herbert, John Wesley, and The Sermon on the Mount. Warren Kissinger's History of the Interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount is a remarkable achievement completed long before computers and software took the tedium out of sorting data for a publisher.

First published in the early 1970's, it was updated and reprinted in 1991 when desktop computer publishing was in its infancy. I borrowed it from Glasgow University in 1977 on long term loan and filled a card index box with information that anchored my study of the Sermon on the Mount for years to come. It contains hundreds of books and articles, annotated descriptively, and with all the publishers' details for ease of reference in pre-computerised libraries  remember the microfiche? We are spoilt for choice today; back then, a book like this was manna from heaven for the researcher. 

One more thought. When I was writing theological courses for College each module descriptor would have recommended reading. It was always a valuable conversation asking students which they had found most helpful, accessible, worth their time. One student complained about a particular book being hard to read; the response from the teacher, "It's an honours course, isn't it?" So yes. Good to have feedback on the usefulness of recommended reading. Good too to remember that core fitness means pushing beyond what's comfortable. A good bibliography is worth any other half dozen pages of most books.    

Each week I write a Pastoral Letter to those who are part of our church community in Montrose. I thought I would share the latest one here. It says some of what I feel and think as, like everyone else, I come to terms with this world become strange; and do so as a Christian whose answers raise questions, and whose questions have learned to trust some of the answers.  

………………………………………

The other night I watched a programme on the story of the Hubble telescope. Some of the images of deep space were amazing, scary, wonderful, beautiful, awesome, and utterly unlike anything we could ever see without the marvels of technology, and the intelligence of those who make it all work.

Then I remembered we are in the middle of the kind of crisis that puts us in our place as human beings. We can see light years into the universe, but we are threatened by an invisible and deadly virus. 

We now live in a world where, as human beings, we are being reminded that we are human, not divine. We are here by God’s creative grace and purpose as stewards of creation, not its owners; we are guests not hosts; we can control much, but not everything; our life is precious and so is everyone else's; our life is for a time, but God is forever.

It’s easy for us to see human beings, even ourselves, as the centre of the universe. But the Hubble telescope tells us something very different. We are small and insignificant, tiny specks of dust afloat on the cosmos. But two thousand seven hundred years ago, a singer songwriter stood looking at the night sky and felt small, awed to silence, and prayed:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    any one of us that you care for us?

Yet you have made us a little lower than God

    and crowned us with glory and honour. (Psalm 8.3-5)

It takes great courage, and faith, to look into the infinity of space, and gaze at the vastness of a universe so beyond our knowing we have no words to describe it, no numbers to measure it, no map to interpret it. But the Psalmist long ago got its measure all right. It is the work of God’s fingers; God’s glory is set above the heavens. And us? Human beings with a life span measured in decades? What about us? The Psalm writer says God is mindful of us, and cares for us. Unbelievable! But true.

Seven hundred years ago, a young woman from Norwich, called Julian, had a vision of God’s love. Here is how she described it. 

“God showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand… And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And God answered, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.”

Think of the Psalmist looking at the night sky; imagine a young woman recovering from life threatening illness and holding up her the hazelnut against the vast night sky. Both of them are rejoicing that this is God’s universe! Think of it. The ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know. But God has made us, is mindful of us, and cares for us.

Denise Levertov wrote about that vision of the hazelnut, and her poem ends:

All that is made;

A little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe

In God’s pierced palm.

I think all of us are feeling the weight of these days and weeks that are becoming months. We live in a world that is frightened and seems now unsafe. “But the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” What are human beings, folk like you and me that God should care for us? We are beings for whom Christ died. Our worth is indexed to Calvary. God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” We are each a little thing, held safe in God’s pierced palm.

This is a God-loved world. All the suffering and loss that we are now so aware of, it is known to God; all the grief, borne on the heart of the Father; all that is made held safe in God’s pierced palm.

How then do we as Christians live out that faith in the holding love of God? We are called to help out own communities to recover, even rediscover, the truths that make human life and our future possible. That our significance is not in our possessions, our future is not in our own power, but in the power of God’s love. Renewed by that love we are called to become again carers of creation, lovers of humanity, builders of peace and conduits of hope. 

It will be a while yet before we are able to meet again safely and freely as a community of Christ’s people. But in the meantime, it’s important to remember whose we are, who is mindful of us, and in whose hands our lives are held. There are cords of love and affection, of memories and shared worship, of burdens carried and blessings enjoyed, of prayers for each other and times we’ve been there for each other; these are woven together in all that we share in the fellowship of Christ.

Until we are able to gather again, we are scattered. But the God who calls out the stars and names them, whose glory is set in the heavens, and in whose hands he holds all that he has made, including us, is mindful of us, and cares for us.

Grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,

Older reviews of academic books used to refer to the Bibliography and Indices as "end matter." The cursory reference to end matter was usually after the contents are described, the overall thesis of the book reviewed, then evaluated for cogency of argument, lucidity of writing, and contribution to knowledge in the subject field. More often than not, the end matter only merited a sentence of commendation for thoroughness, and perhaps usefulness.

Then came the great dilemma for publishers, whether there should be footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes are far more convenient for the reader and expensive for the publisher; endnotes are cheaper for the publisher and hard work for the reader. Being able to glance down the page for a reference is convenient, quick and doesn't break the flow of thought; but having to go to the back, find the relevant page, then the footnote whose number you may have to check again, read said footnote, and then back to the main text – you can see why readers don't like them.

However. For those who spend a lot of their lives within the literary worlds of scholarship, there is more to be said about 'the end matter', not least, that end matter matters.

Let's start with indices. An index compiled by a computer is about as useful as spreading out a packet of cornflakes and arranging them according to shape, size and tone of yellow.

Take for example the first edition of the massive and learned biography of John Henry Newman, by Ian Ker. The index is huge, the entries often in their hundreds, and you are left with no guidance as to whether the page reference merely uses the word, or has a meaningful discussion of the topic in question. Some entries take up more than a column of figures representing hundreds of references. Mercifully in the second edition the Index is made much more serviceable; perhaps in the intervening years computer programmes have become more subtle and flexible in selecting relevant data.

But an index compiled by a writer who has inside knowledge of why this or that page reference should be indexed, is a far more laborious process and with a far more useful product. Such an index would be based, for example, on the importance of all those references for a more nuanced understanding of the person, concept or event in question. Indeed to compile an index is itself a process of interpretation, and though inevitably biased by the writer's own perceptions, it is the product of the same mind that wrote the book in the first place. So, by all means an index; but please, a judicious selection of the key page references that aids study and gathers for the reader's retrieval, important fragments of knowledge; and please, not a computer generated data mass, promising little more than the distilled essence of tedium proportionate to pedantic comprehensiveness. Because, even with more sophisticated indexing software, a computerised index lacks the discernment of the scholar in intellectual control of the text. 

A better example of an index which aids the reader's learning is in Katherine Sonderegger Systematic Theology Vol.1 The Doctrine of God. In eight pages, references throughout the book are collated and arranged where necessary in sub themes beneath a main subject. The result is an index that serves the reader, offers manageable data, and doesn't waste your time searching through minor tangential references. Yes I would probably have wanted a bit more on some entries; but if the author thought the reference important enough to index, that's at least a clue to significance.

Allow the indulgence of name dropping. Katherine Sonderegger came to Aberdeen University a year or so before she published that volume. She lectures with the same precision of language as she writes. She takes her subject with utmost seriousness, and her listeners likewise, demonstrating in the discussion afterwards what I can only call patience with the question and humility laced with authority in her answers. I'm not sure any question was asked that she hadn't already pondered. 

At the end I spoke with her for a short time, about Julian of Norwich and what one scholar called Julian "teetering on the brink of universalism". Reformed scholar and critical disciple of Karl Barth that she is, she had considerable sympathy for the theological impulse of Julian towards an understanding of God's love that allows God to be God by acknowledging mysteries beyond our knowing when it comes to speech about God. That's what I mean by a theologian whose scholarly authority is enhanced by intellectual humility. And she compiles a very useful index!

 

Today's guest post is from a friend I met many a year ago at Aberdeen University when he was doing post-graduate study on P T Forsyth. We share an admiration for Forsyth, and we both continue to delve into historical and systematic theology. Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy now lives in Halifax Nova Scotia, and he kindly agreed to review a thickly textured thin book. Thank you Leslie, and stay safe and well over there. 

……………………………………..

Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale (1977)

Through the years, I’ve been helped by a wide variety of books on preaching, many of them with chapter titles like “Beginnings, Connections, and Endings” and “Sermons for Special Occasions.” Their help has been always welcome. But what happens when the inexorable return of Sunday seems like a doom? Who will breathe new life into the preacher then?

In such times, my sermon-writing life has been propelled and inspired and given new life by two very different books. These are books that not so much teach one how to preach, but preach the gospel to the preacher—and in doing so, yes! prompt the preacher to preach. Both books, interestingly enough, originated as part of the Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching at Yale University. One of them, from 111 years ago, is P. T. Forsyth’s Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, which started life as a two-inch thick tome, but the inspiration bursts from almost every page.

The other great encourager comes in at just 98 pages, plus two pages of notes, a “Thickly Textured Thin Book” to be sure. No acknowledgements or introduction, and no index: just one small book of heaven-sent incentive to tell the gospel truth, again and yet again. Frederick Buechner gave these Beecher lectures in 1977, and they were published the same year as Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. In four closely-scripted presentations, he exegeted the title.

First, preaching is telling the truth. “Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are. The task of the preacher is to hold up life to us [so] we can somehow see into the wordless truth of our lives. Before the Gospel is good news, it is simply the news that that's the way it is….” Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” rings through these opening pages.

Second, the gospel is tragedy; “stripping us naked is part of what preaching is all about, the tragic part.” Buechner invites his hearers to attend to Jesus’s invitation, “Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden.” The lecturer also insists that we not rush on to the remainder of that invitation until the full weight of our lives is felt.

Third, the gospel is comedy; witness Sarah’s incredulous laughter “at the idea of a baby’s being born in the geriatric ward and Medicare’s picking up the tab.” And so “the gospel is a wild and marvellous joke”: “the comedy of grace.” The contrast between bad news and good news is stark: “The tragic is the inevitable. The comic is the unforeseeable.” And then this as almost an afterthought: perhaps, from God’s angle, it is “the comic that is bound to happen.”

Finally, the gospel is fairy tale, says Buechner, “and one thinks of the angel in the book of Revelation who gives to each a white stone with a new name written on it which is the true and hidden name that he was named with even from the foundation of the world.” The truth, perceived with a childlike faith, is that “the battle goes ultimately to the good, who live happily ever after.”

Such a breezy outline, of course, leaves so much unsaid. Buechner’s writing reproduces his spoken lectures—spare prose, mostly, with long but simple sentences that lilt with a preacher-poet’s delivery. Extended illustrations abound, and then return again and again—Henry Ward Beecher, the first of the Yale lecturers, cutting himself with his razor as he gets ready for the first lecture back in 1872; Sarah laughing; the various characters in Shakespeare’s King Lear; Pilate and Jesus; Jesus and Lazarus; and the Wizard of Oz. And always, the one with a sermon in hand:

The preacher pulls the little cord that turns on the lectern light and deals out his note cards like a riverboat gambler. The stakes have never been higher. Two minutes from now he may have lost his listeners completely to their own thoughts, but at this minute he has them in the palm of his hand. The silence in the shabby church is deafening because everybody is listening to it. Everybody is listening including even himself. Everybody knows the kind of things he has told them before and not told them, but who knows what this time, out of the silence, he will tell them?

       Let him tell them the truth.

(Rev Dr Leslie McCurdy)

From earliest days the story of Jesus cursing a fig tree has created problems. It was early April; fig trees didn't fruit until late May; it would be unreasonable to complain about there being no fruit when the fruit season was weeks away. Is this mere petulance? Some commentators even describe the fig tree as innocent. What are we to make of a miracle that is destructive, against created things, and seems to be the very showing-off of power that Jesus refused to perform when asked for a sign as proof of his divine status.

One answer is that the incident comes immediately before the cleansing of the Temple, and the withering of the tree is only evident after that cathartic exercise of religious outrage. The point, it's argued, is that the fig tree is God's people, from whom God expected the fruits of righteousness, justice and obedience to Torah. But the people did not deliver; the Temple had become a sham of performance without the fruit of a righteous people. Jesus words of condemnation to the fig tree are an enacted parable of the coming of God in judgement. Most exegetical efforts go in this direction.

Denise Levertov's father had converted from Judaism to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. After leaving home she spent much of her life agnostic to defined religious identity, and only in the last decade or so, slowly moved towards conversion, becoming Roman Catholic in 1989, eight years before her death.

Much of her searching included the Ignatian Exercises, and the discipline of imagining the scene and the characters in the stories and putting yourself into the situation. Something of that same technique is at work in Levertov's poem "What the Fig Tree Said." She personifies the fig tree, which explains to all those exegetical reductionists, empirical rationalists and wooden literalists,  that they are missing the point.

Far from being cursed as a fruitless fig tree, the tree explains to the slow witted readers, that it has been co-opted into Jesus teaching ministry, a living metaphor, a visual aid to get it through the thick skulls of the disciples that they were the fruitless ones. The had walked in the sunlight of Jesus' example and teaching but showed no promise of the fruits of compassion, understanding and growth. Absent fruit is metaphor for barren hearts. 

The curse is not directed at the tree, not even at the disciples, but at the state of mind that is deaf and blind to truth, possibility, newness and a different kind of kingdom. This poet has deep allegiance to metaphor as conduit of meaning. and as an instrument subversive of settled complacency, and disruptive of controlling intellect.

The story of a man cursing a tree for being fruitless out of season is shocking; which means it has done its job. Now it's up to those who were there, and those who are now present through reading the text, to use their imagination. This poem does exactly what Levertov attempts in so many of her poems. She compels the reader to think imaginatively and outside the familiar categories and limits of those who think they know more than they do.

For Leveretov, imagination is "to live with a door of one's life open to the transcendent, the numinous." She goes on, "The imagination, which synergises intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God." ('A Poet's View', New and Selected Essays, 241. 24)

And now to read the poem, with ears that hear, and eyes that see.  

What the Fig Tree Said

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blurting for Him
in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me!—yet how could the Lord
be unfair?—so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
in His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits—compassion, comprehension—
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.

In 1976 I bought the newly published Tyndale commentary on the book of Job, by Francis I Andersen. It set a new standard of scholarship for the series, and remains an important study of a book that is like a theological Matterhorn. Yesterday it was announced that Professor Andersen had died at the age of 94. In the intervening years his name became one of the most recognised in Old Testament and Judaic studies.

The range and depth of Andersen's scholarship was truly astounding, and his subsequent commentaries are amongst the definitive critical commentaries – on Hosea, Amos, Micah and Habakkuk. They are huge volumes, their usefulness arguably limited to those who require minutiae of Hebrew syntax, exhaustive alternative interpretations, and comprehensive coverage of Ancient Near Eastern history, culture and religious practices. Such volumes are to be consulted, used as reference works, repositories for research purposes.

The commentary on Job is different. Under 300 pages of exposition which is readable, careful, pastoral and rooted deep down in the biblical text. When I read of Professor Andersen's death I opened his small commentary, and remembered the times it has helped me navigate the ocean depths of one of the great classics of world literature. Of course there are more up to date and larger volumes on the book of Job; on my own shelves Sam Balentine holds pride of place, alongside several other standard commentaries. I never invested in the Behemoth of Job commentaries, David Clines' 3 volumes at pushing towards 2000 pages! Life is short and books are getting longer!

What strikes me about Andersen's commentary is the Preface. I always read the Preface of a book. It is a courtesy to the author to know what they are attempting to say, and why. Many a reviewer of books would have been far less unfair if they had taken the time to read what the book is, and what it is not. Andersen's Preface reads like a personal testimony of faith. It is a clue to the tone and approach of his commentary.

"It is presumptuous to comment on the book of Job. It is so full of the awesome reality of the living God. Like Job, one can only put one's hand over one's mouth."

Now there's a scholar who recognises his limitations, and the limits of the exegetical exercise! Near the end of the Preface Andersen refers to friends who "brought the love of God to us in a dark hour." His book was written out of personal sorrow and suffering, and he continued, "Everything is a gift, suffering the holiest of all…" 

Throughout the commentary Andersen allows God to be the mysterious, majestic, awesome reality who gives existence and reality to everything else.

"But God has revealed himself, preserving at the same time the inaccessible mystery of His own being. So we must attempt the impossible thing which He makes possible (Mk 10.27). However forbidding, He fascinates us irresistibly until by 'kindness and severity' (Rom 11.22), He brings us in His own way to Job's final satisfaction and joy."

Recent experience of grief and suffering, living the questions about God that sorrow and loss inevitably provoke, and as a scholar excavating a biblical text, Andersen  wrote this commentary for others who stand at the foot of the Matterhorn gazing up at the clouded summit. But all that said, this isn't a 'devotional' commentary. It is however exegesis of a text that helps the reader to better understand both the argument of the book, and the vaster argument between human beings in their suffering, and God as Creator. 

I took time yesterday to be grateful once more for this volume. It is, as many of the best biblical commentaries, an exegesis that expounds the text, and in doing so expounds the experience of the exegete. The Preface is an important part of the whole, a kind of apologia pro vita sua.