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In yesterday's post I conceded that only a few books on prayer have significantly influenced my own understanding and practice of prayer. But there are several that did have lasting effect, and to which I've gone back when I needed a nudge in a prayerly direction. Oh I do realise that 'prayerly' is a made up adverb, and without needing spellcheck getting all upset about it. Sometimes if a word is not to hand, there's a case for temporary semantic improvisation.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean capable of drawing me back to that state of mind that is considerate towards God, a bit like remembering I haven't spoken to a close friend for ages.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean awakening awareness that life has become too much hassle, the day and my head is overly busy, and God is being forgotten in the whirlwind of my imagined service to Him.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean recognising and provoking that unexplained longing for God knows what; yes literally, for God knows what.

By 'prayerly direction' I mean opening up new horizons of faith, hope and love, initiating a work of inner expansion towards new trust, forward impetus, and radical compassion for the world.

It's hard to find all that in a book, and probably impossible to find it all in one book. But Richard Harries' Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness is one of those few that even attempt nudging us in a prayerly direction. The 1985 Archbishop of Canterbury Lent Book is subversive, exhilarating, and wise. It subverts the common assumption that holiness is the crucifixion of desire, and that happiness is an unworthy human goal. It is a robustly positive account of happiness as a cluster of life qualities that lead to human fulfilment. It is filled with wisdom from across the ranges of literature, theology, art, philosophy, and all of these filtered through the pastoral experience and instincts of the author. 

The first chapter is like counter intuitive spiritual direction. Listen to what you want, and never despise wanting. Desire is a fundamentally motivating human passion and to be guided rather than suppressed. Then a whole chapter argues for the seriousness of happiness, and against the view that happiness is a trivial fascination with effervescent pleasures. The human heart hungers; for joy, for peace, for justice, for love, and for more than our words can say or our hearts can hold. Happiness may often depend on circumstances, and it's neither good nor possible to be happy all the time. But the constituents of happiness are embedded in the purposes and nature of God. Happiness matters and can be found, Harries argues as he explores joy and resurrection, joy and suffering, joy and contemplation, and all of these are rooted in the God to whom we pray and whose purpose is in our coming to be all that he calls us to be. 

The rest of the book explores peace, fulfilment, success, security, and love, each one an essay on the heart's longing and the pull of God's love, mercy and grace. Each chapter ends with a prayer. One example, from the prayers at the end of the reflection on success. "O God, most perfect love become most vulnerable, help us to share in and not spoil your great work." Happiness and success is to give our lives to sharing in, and not spoiling God's great work.

There are seven chapters, so 40 minutes a day would be more than worth the risk of investment. I would hope at least some would find themselves nudged in a prayerly direction. Now one of my friendly interlocutors complained tongue in cheek yesterday that book recommendations on this blog are costing him a fortune. Here's the thing. Prayer and the Pursuit of Happiness can be had for £2.80 postage included, or thereabouts, on a certain marketplace platform.

One of the closing prayers at the end of the book, one that always nudges me in a prayerly direction for those I love:

We hold in your presence, O Lord,

all those we love and those who love us.

Your love is so much greater than ours

and you work unceasingly for our well-being.

With all your resources of infinite wisdom and patience,

bestow on them the fullness of your blessing.  

"A religious man

is a person who holds God and man

in one thought at a time,

at all times,

who suffers in himself harm done to others,

whose greatest passion is compassion,

whose greatest strength is love

and defiance of despair."

( Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, (New York: Crossroad, 2010.)

 Heschel was a biblical prophet born out of time. He was born in Warsaw in 1907, part of a long line of Hasidic rabbis, educated in Vilna and Berlin, fled the Nazi invasion via England to America in 1939, and became one of the most respected and influential religious figures in  the mid 20th Century United States. 

He is described as a man of "astounding knowledge, keen undersating and profound feeling; an awareness that man dwells on the tangent of the infinite, within the holy dimension; that the life of man is part of the life of God." (11) One of my all time favourite photos is of Heschel arm in arm and linked in protest with Martin Luther King on the Selma march.

Much of Heschel's writing is a gathering of essays, lectures, sermons, addresses and other occasional writing. His writing is religious writing in one specific sense; reading his words gives us a view of the heart that felt before the mind chose the words to write. In  other words his writing has the quality of the prophet who writes of what he has seen, and who has seen the indescribable. One of his favourite words in reference to God is ineffable; and as a theologian and man of faith his default disposition is wonder, awe and what he called radical amazement. 

In the Preface to his book of Yiddish poems Heschel confided about a conversation with God: " I did not ask for success; I asked for wonder. And you gave it to me." The anthology I Asked for Wonder distils into 150 pages excerpts from Heschel's writing under various headings. I mention them all because it shows the range of his thought and the core values and convictions by which he lived, and of which he wrote: God, Prayer, Sabbath, Religion, Man (Humanity), Bible, Holy Deeds, The People, The Land. 

"God is of no importance unless he is of supreme importance." That is a foundation presupposition of Heschel's thought. His struggle for words to convey the ineffability of God was lifelong, and surfaces repeatedly in his writing: 

"To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words…The tangent of the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil. Its flutter is music, its ornament science, but what it conceals is inscrutable…. Sometimes we wish the world could cry and tell us about that which made it pregnant with fear-filling grandeur. Sometimes we wish our own heart would speak of that which made it heavy with wonder."

If I'm honest, there are very few books about prayer that I have found helpful. That isn't a dismissal of the careful thought and holy learning and rich experience that went into writing such books. I think it is acceptance that prayer does not consist in practices and techniques, nor approaches modelled by others, nor even good advice or uplifting accounts of personal experience of God. All of these have their place. It was Heschel who, along with one or two others, helped me to break out of the self-centred, self-interested and overly self-conscious practice of prayer as a kind of contract with the Almighty. 

"The focus of prayer is not the self…it is the momentary disregard of our personal concerns, the absence of self-centred thoughts, which constitute the art of prayer. Prayer is an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make Him the Lord of our soul. We submit our interests to His concern, and seek to be allied with what is ultimately right." 

It was that view of prayer, and a lifetime of such praying that impelled Heschel to march against the Vietnam war, to walk alongside the Selma marchers, to rail against the blasphemy that uses the fundamental elements of matter to create nuclear weapons, a reversal of God's creative purpose. 

Sabbath is one of Heschel's most widely read books. Written to describe an alternative to consumer frenzy, the pursuit of affluence, and the commodification of time, it reads like the slow movement of a concerto about God's runaway world. 

"The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness of time. It is a day on which we are called to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world."

And so on. This is a wonderful anthology of the richer thoughts of a great religious thinker, one who took God with utmost seriousness as an agent of mercy and justice in His own creation. He was an ecumenical Jew, open to understand other faith traditions, and deeply secure in his own faith convictions. To read Heschel is to listen to a wise voice speaking hopefully in a despairing world, and telling a truth that arises from the deep core of reality to be found in such human longings as eternity, transcendence, everlasting mercy, and the home of the heart in the heart of God.  

 

 

In 1989 I walked into Waterstone's in Aberdeen and headed for the poetry section. There it was. The paperback edition of The Echoes Return Slow. I'd been reading R S Thomas for some time and found him to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, "Make straight the paths of the Lord." 

It isn't all that far fetched to compare RST to John the Baptist. Thomas shows the same righteous anger, zeal for justice founded on peace, and determined passion about a God most clearly seen on the cross. Some of RST's best poetry has as the cantus firmus, "Behold the lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world." The Welsh priest, no less than the Judean prophet, spoke uncomfortable truth to comfortable power, raged on behalf of a God too easily taken for granted, and had his times when he had to ask if the One he followed, believed in, wrestled with, really was the Promised One. 

The God who inhabits Thomas's poetry is recognisably biblical, the God whose coming is in fire, judgement and apocalyptic warning. Much of The Echoes Return Slow is autobiographical, not only the chronology and circumstances of the poet's life, but the experiences of love and loneliness, faith and questioning, and in particular his experience of ambiguity and even ambivalence, about the awe inducing mystery of God.

There isn't a sentimental line in all his poetry so far as I know. The God who is present can be oppressively present, or painfully absent; the Creator's prerogatives over nature are usurped by human science and technology at humanity's peril; the countryside, the sea and coast, the mountains, all provide a theological landscape where God hides, and can be found only, and if at all, on God's say so.

The Echoes Return Slow is a strangely beautiful book. On the left page is a prose poem, its theme echoed in verse on the right page. The book progresses from his birth, through his growing up, marriage, priesthood, and into those later years. He would live twelve years after Echoes was published, and three more volumes would follow. Those who love the poetry of R S Thomas have their favourite volume – I would cheat and claim his Collected Poems were my favourites, but if I had to choose from around 25 published volumes I'd go for Experimenting with an Amen (1986) and Echoes.

I find it hard to quote bits of Thomas's poems. They are complete statements, and fragments distort, obscure or miss the point of the whole. So I quote two poems in which the priest poet, late in life, is still seeking and sometimes finding, and sometimes being found.

There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village that is without light
and companionless. And the thought comes
of that other being who is awake, too,
letting our prayers break on him,
not like this for a few hours,
but for days, years, for eternity. 

……………………………………..

The church is small.
The walls inside
white. On the altar
a cross, with behind it
its shadow and behind
that the shadow of its shadow.

The world outside
knows nothing of this
nor cares. The two shadows
are because of the shining
of two candles: as many
the lights, so many
the shadows. So we learn
something of the nature
of God, the endlessness
of whose recessions
are brought up short
by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

……………………………………………

 The blurb on the back of Echoes is written by someone who 'gets' R S Thomas. It was from a review written for The Listener (How I miss that weekly tonic for the mind).

"One of the few living poets whose language one feels emerges from a genuinely silent and attentive waiting on meaning…he gives us the best religious poetry we are likely to get."

Waiting on Meaning; now there's a ready made title for a monograph on Thomas's faith, spirituality and poetry! 

In 1976 Amos N Wilder published a brilliant and seminal book on the relationship between poetry and theology. The title was Theopoetic. Theology and the Religious Imagination. It explores the relationship between poetic language and theological language. The search for words adequate to the ineffable will inevitably frustrate. The crafting of images even approximate to the writer's experience of God requires imaginative reverence, disciplined restraint, and the courageous risk of being misunderstood. Patience with the limits of language, persistence in fashioning words with capax dei, and urgency of soul in seeking to know and be known by the God who is nevertheless worshipped, that requires a lifelong willingness to "wait on meaning." 

(The two poems are found in The Echoes Return Slow, R S Thomas, (London: Papermac, 1988)  pages 79 and 83.

I first came across the writing of Antoine De Saint-Exupery at Glasgow University. Existentialist, pioneer air mail pilot, novelist. and author of one of the most enduring and popular children’s books, Le Petit Prince.

If you haven’t read The Little Prince then prepare for that mixture of pleasure and puzzlement when an adult is drawn into the imaginative world of the child. In that world what is real is not limited by adult logic, habituated rationality and grown up small mindedness.

This is a book about friendship and loneliness, about love and commitment, longing and disappointment, of seeking and finding and losing. In other words it is about the relationship between a pilot stranded in the desert after his plane comes down, and a strange child who has come from another world at least a star’s journey away.

In the growing relationship between the two we are never sure if the pilot is hallucinating or giving an account of a real empirical encounter between the pragmatic pilot and the space sojourning little prince. But there is wisdom in the child, and initial scepticism in the pilot.

As the Little Prince describes his previous life on another planet he speaks of a rose uniquely beautiful, a domesticated fox, and of the relationships that grow out of trust, then move to commitment, and become obligations that coalesce in love. The keyword throughout the book is responsibility. If you love and are loved, then you are responsible for that person, to keep them safe, to look after them, to be there with and for them.

If you plant a rose it’s your responsibility to water and feed it; you are not entitled to enjoy the beauty but ignore its need of care. As the Little Prince says, ““It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

Likewise if you tame a fox it needs your company and has acquired the right to the very thing you have made it depend on, your trust, care and love. We interrupt a conversation between the boy and the fox, overheard by the desert stranded pilot:

“What does that mean — tame?"

"It is an act too often neglected," said the fox. "It means to establish ties."

"To establish ties?"

"Just that," said the fox. "To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world….”

Interwoven with these fanciful conversations about the Little Prince’s world far away are sentences that touch into some of our deepest emotional needs and responses.

• “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
• “What makes the desert beautiful,' said the little prince, 'is that somewhere it hides a well…”
• “A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
• “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

There are a few books I have bought several times. Usually because I gave them away. This is one of them. However, one of Saint-Exupery’s other books, Wind, Sand and Stars, gathers together many of his wider reflections on human existence. He asks the classic existential questions: what makes our lives meaningful? what is tragic and what brings joy? what is an authentic human existence? How to live a responsible life, to act creatively for the sake of the world, how to be truly human, these were challenges that haunted Saint Exupery.

“To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world.”

Human consciousness was for Saint-Exupery a miracle in itself. To imagine the vastness of a universe, to contemplate why we love as we love and live as we live, to be self-conscious of our mind and heart, to know ourselves known and to know others, and yet always only partially; what a mystery a human being is.

Saint Exupery made no explicit religious claims, though he was born into a Catholic home. But his sense of eternity and the mystery of being, comes close to that great declaration of religious wonder:

When I consider your heavens,
    the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
    which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
    human beings that you care for them?

Out of that sense of mystery and imaginative reflection on human existence, came his classic novella, Le Petit Prince. 

There's something astonishing about a group of young theological students gathering and into an underground theological seminary in Nazi Germany. They represented a different kind of resistance to National Socialism as they struggled on two fronts, for the soul of their nation and for the soul of the Church in Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been appointed Director of the seminary, and his approach produced a curriculum  and context  radically different from the more cognitive, and traditional theoretical education that dominated theological academia in the renowned Universities of Europe's premier intellectual centres.

The Editor's Introduction to the critical edition begins, "In an ironical way we are indebted to the Gestapo for this remarkable book." Because the underground seminary at Finkenwalde was closed down on Gestapo orders, Bonhoeffer was persuaded to "compose his thoughts on the nature and sustaining structures of Christian community based on the "life together" that he and his seminarians had sustained…" (Life Together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol., p.3)   

The curriculum at Finkenwalde had presupposed a communal life of monastic spiritual disciplines, as these pastors-in-training plunged into studies of what it would mean to live as a disciple of Jesus in the hostile environment of a culture intent on destroying the vital organs of the Body of Christ. The book Life Together gathers together the principles, ethos and structures that shaped life in Finkenwalde Seminary. The sole purpose of all the teaching was to guide and encourage those who took their faith seriously, and were seeking ways of embodying the life of the crucified Lord of the Church in their own discipleship. 

This is a book about community and prayer, about time together and time alone and time with God, and about the dynamics that vitalise and co-ordinate the communion of saints in the Body of Christ. It is also a book about sacrifice and service, humility and honesty, love that does not calculate, and which sets no conditions for loving actions of forgiveness, ministry, healing and compassion.

Bonhoeffer's description of the pastor praying for the people is a searching account of how disciplined regular praying grow out of love, and where love for people is fading, sincerely praying for them has the reflexive effect of growing to love them again.

"A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner." (65)

Elsewhere in the book Bonhoeffer writes of the ministry of listening. He is unsparing about voluble Christians, loving the sound of their own voice, ever ready duracells with their endless output of opinions, arguments and self-absorbed spirituality. If that sounds harsh, here is Bonhoeffer in even more astringent mood:

"Just as love for God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God's love for us that he not only gives us his Word but also lends us his ear. So it is his work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they can render." 

"Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can n o longer listen to his brother will no longer be able to listen to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words." (75)

You can see why this book is essential reading in any serious course on pastoral theology, spirituality and even ethics. It is a thickly textured thin book of ninety five pages. The words flow from the heart of someone who lived what he spoke, and whose determined and determining passion was to follow Christ up the hill carrying his own cross. This is astringent stuff, it stings the heart, but it cleanses away illusions and all pretence of self-importance. No it is not a nice devotional book; it's more like a workbook for the gym, or a manual of disciplines to strengthen mind and heart and soul in living for Christ in community, or a handbook of team building for communities of light resisting darkness.

So Bonhoeffer is training pastors to lead communities of faithful witness and Christlike character in a world turned dark, and intentionally alien to all that Christ is, and all the church was called to be. There was a full curriculum of theological studies at Finkenwalde; these are gathered in two very thick volumes of lectures, essays, sermons and letters from these years. But this small volume describes a remarkable experiment in Christian community whose principles retain their original challenge to any community content to live in the comfortable settled status of business as usual.

I read Life Together fifty years ago. I don't use casual exaggeration much, but it blew me away. I've read it often, taught it over ten years, and still feel the intensity and uncompromising demands Bonhoeffer makes. Just because he can be accused of being unrealistic doesn't make the book less valuable, or true. They say the same about the Sermon on the Mount; which incidentally forms the core of Bonhoeffer's much larger work, Discipleship. 

Please note, in Life Together, Bonhoeffer was recording the pprocedures and result of an experiment in community intended to demonstrate its principles to church, congregations, communities and every brother and sister who hears the call of Christ to discipleship. This book shouldn't be dismissed as 'for ministers'. It is a book about how a group of pastors-in training were helped to develop structures, disciplines, and capacity for God and others, that would sustain them in their Christian calling.

It is Bonhoeffer's gift, and legacy, intended as a contribution to the urgency and challenge of living for Christ in a world come of age. It is a spiritual workbook for the church in a secularised culture oscillating between indifference and hostility to the Gospel of Jesus, and inherently resistant to the presence of his disciples as salt and light. Bonhoeffer's short book is an attempt to "infuse new life and a new sense of Christian community into a church grown cowardly and unchristlike." (5) It was written as Hitler  annexed the Sudetenland. But it was written for the whole church, then and there, and here and now. 

I don't have all that many books of prayers. My two favourites are very different. The SPCK Book of Christian Prayer was given to me by the publisher for suggesting several prayers for inclusion. I'm so glad they included the one by George Macleod. It is taken from his diamond of a book, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory.

Lord Macleod of Funiary, is one of the jewels in the crown of the Church of Scotland, and the Church in Scotland. The biography by Ron Ferguson is affectionate, detailed, and written by someone who knew Macleod well enough to be fair about his faults, honest about his achievements, and perceptive in understanding a complex, fiery minister who made a virtue of impatience and infused a can do pragmatism with a passionate and immensely obstinate idealism. And in all of that, Macleod was a man of granite spirituality, incapable of being eroded by the lesser ideals of those he believed tolerated social inequality, settled for mediocre Christianity, endorsed nuclear weapons and other blights on God's created order.

And out of that furnace of spiritual ideals and theological vision, like twice refined gold, poured some of the finest prayers in the Scottish tradition. His prayers hewn out of a deep love for language, display awe struck reverence for the holy love of God, heartfelt compassion for human weakness and failing, and a stern compassion that made him a lifelong opponent of social injustice. The keynote of his spirituality and eschatology is distilled into the title of his small book of prayers – the whole earth shall cry glory. 

Years ago I spent a couple of days sifting through several boxes of unsorted papers at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. I was looking for his written prayers. He was known to spend longer preparing his prayers for Sunday worship than he did on his sermon. The sermon was the minister speaking to people, the prayers were the minister speaking to and with God, crafting words to articulate in God's presence, the heart of each member of the congregation.

What I found were scraps of paper, many of them handwritten, some typed in red or black or both, every one of them with corrections, scoring outs, phrases inserted; they had all over them the fingerprints of hands calloused by the hard work of praying, and finding words worthy of worship. Several were written on the back of corn flake packets, used envelopes, assorted recycled bills, and receipts – and some were written on real writing paper.

There is something almost impertinent about handling such painstaking drafts of prayers intended for God, and for no other eyes. But the time spent reading, taking notes, trying to trace dates, provenance and context, make this thin book one of the treasures of my library. There are thirty prayers, one a day for a month; then, if you're wise, repeat.

Macleod called Iona a thin place, meaning a place where the veil between heaven and earth had worn thin. His prayers are thin with something of the same quality. 

I have written more extensively on George Macleod's prayers. Those interested can find the article online, over on this website.

For now, here is the prayer that was included in the SPCK anthology:

Almighty God, Creator:
In these last days storm has assailed us.
Greyness has enveloped and mist surrounded
our going out and our coming in.
Now again Thy glory clarifies,
Thy light lifts up our hearts to Thee,
and night falls in peace.
But through mist and storm and sunshine,
the crops have ripened here
and vines of Spain have grown.
Thy constant care in all and everywhere is manifest.

Almighty God, Redeemer:
Even as with our bodies, so also with our souls.
Redeemer, Christ:
Sunshine and storm, mist and greyness
eddy round our inner lives.
But as we trace the pattern, looking back,
we know that both darkness and light
have been of Thine ordaining
for our own soul’s health.
Thy constant care in all, and everywhere,
is manifest.

Almighty God, Sustainer:
Sun behind all suns,
Soul behind all souls,
everlasting reconciler of our whole beings:
Show to us in everything we touch and in everyone we meet
the continued assurance of Thy presence round us:
lest ever we should think Thee absent.
In all created things Thou art there.
In every friend we have
the sunshine of Thy presence is shown forth.
In every enemy that seems to cross our path,
Thou art there within the cloud
to challenge us to love.
Show to us the glory in the grey.
Awake for us Thy presence in the very storm
till all our joys are seen as Thee
and all our trivial tasks emerge as priestly sacraments
in the universal temple of Thy love.

Of ourselves we cannot see this. Sure physician give us sight.
Of ourselves we cannot act. Patient lover give us love:
till every shower of rain speaks of Thy forgiveness:
till every storm assures us that we company with Thee:
and every move of light and shadow speaks of grave and resurrection:
to assure us that we cannot die:
Thou creating, redeeming and sustaining God. 

In 1974 I was called to be student pastor at Cornton near Stirling. By 1976 I would soon be moving to my first full pastoral appointment in Partick, Glasgow. By then I had started to build a study library. One day that summer, in the John Smith Bookshop on Stirling University Campus, I came across a new commentary by G B Caird, someone I had only recently been reading on the Book of Revelation. The new volume was on Paul's Letters from Prison. 

Now you need to know, I read biblical commentaries. I know they are reference works to be consulted, not novels with a narrative, an unfolding plot, character development and mysteries to be resolved and revealed. But some commentaries do have some of those features. There is a story behind the text, there is an inner coherence that answers to situations and circumstances outside the text, there is indeed a flow that moves forward and characters within and outside the text. A text is written for a reason, by someone and for someone. And we are talking about the Bible. For me it is a sacred text rooted in the realities of human life, and so is of a different order from other texts that need notes, learned commentary and contextual studies to understand and not misinterpret them. 

Exegesis is detective work. The aim is to identify writer and written for, situation and circumstance, meaning and purpose. Which brings me to my thin book, 224 pages, on four letters of Paul. It cost £2.95, which today equates to £21.76. Over the summer I read it, and ever since Paul's Letters from Prison have been my favourite letters of Paul. And ever since I have read commentaries, especially when they are as readable and careful as Caird.

In sixty pages I was drawn into the drama of Paul's love affair with the Christians at Philippi. Every time Paul thinks of them he is filled with joy, gratitude, confidence and love. As a young minister reading this very personal letter from Paul the pastor in prison, to the church that has supported him through thick and thin, I was given an education in encouragement, affection and generosity as fundamental virtues in Christian relationships. 

The crux passage of Philippians 2.5-11 takes just over six pages; that compares with the standard major commentaries which take respectively Bockmuehl 34; Fee 37; Hawthorne 45; Hansen 50; O'Brien 84. There's a set of figures you don't really need to know! The point is, Caird was working within clear publisher's word limits. But that's the point. Not everyone could have reduced the complexities of an immense amount of scholarship to six readable pages of elegant, lucid conclusions.

G B Caird's most famous student is N T Wright. Wright's first commentary was on Colossians in the Tyndale series. The Preface includes a moving tribute to the influence of Caird's scholarship in the  formation of his student who has since become a major and global voice in New Testament scholarship. That makes it all the more intriguing that Professor Caird's six pages on the Christ Hymn in Phil 2.11, is given explicit support in Wright's widely influential treatment of the passage: 'Jesus Christ is Lord, Phil.2.511', in an early collection of essays, The Climax of the Covenant, ch.4).

Two comments about N T Wright, and Professor Caird's ongoing influence in his writing. When Tom Wright came to Aberdeen for a day of seminars on his magnum opus, Paul and the Faithfulness of God, (just short of 2000 pages!), there was a book signing afterwards. I took my much prized hardcover copy of The Climax of the Covenant and asked if he would sign it instead of the big Paul book. He was visibly moved, and said of all his books this one had given him the most pleasure as it showcased some of what he considered his most important work, especially the fourth chapter.

My second comment is a long held and fervent hope; footnote 2 reads "I shall discuss these in my forthcoming commentary on Philippians in the ICC series." That was in 1991. For those who might not know, The International Critical Commentary has long been considered the premier critical commentary on the Bible. The volume on Philippians by N T Wright remains a scheduled volume. It won't be thin book!

Back to Caird. Here is his take on Phil.2.5-11.

"The decisive point is the rhetorical balance of the passage as a whole; he who renounced equality with God to become man can adequately be contrasted only with a man who sought equality with God. The contrast therefore is with Adam, and it is because he grasped at equality with God that Christ is said not to have done so. The logic  of this balance further requires that Adam, who grasped at a dignity to which he had no right, should be contrasted with Christ,who renounced a status to which he had every right…" (page 121. emphasis original)

Less than 100 words. A thickly textured thin book. 

   

Year ago I was part of a Board exploring the vocation and gifts of candidates for Christian ministry. One later in life student was asked if he had enjoyed College. The responses went like this, and I won't attempt the phonetic spelling of the broad Scots accent.

Candidate: Eh, enjoyed it? No, but I learned a lot.

Interlocutor: What did you learn?

Candidate: The definition of a good book.

Interlocutor: So, what is the definition of a good book.

Candidate: A thin one.

It was a wonderful moment of humour, honesty and humanity. The candidate would never be a scholar, and had no aspirations to be. But he was a learner, and like Nehemiah restoring the walls of Jerusalem, he learned, and built his knowledge, brick by brick.

Multum in parvo. A good book. A great deal in a small space. A thin book. I'm not sure I've come across a more discerning and discriminating definition. Of the quite a lot of books I've read, the ones that have been most memorable, helpful, mind-changing, educative, life transforming, game changers in understanding myself, such readings have mostly been thin books. There are exceptions. From the top of my head, Hans Kung, On Being a Christian, J D G Dunn The Theology of Paul, Walter Brueggemann, The Theology of the Old Testament, Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, and recently John G Barclay, Paul and the Gift. These are thick books, keepers that keep giving.

Recently I took each book off the shelves to dust them, the books and the shelves. It's a good time to ask what gives that book the right to be replaced on said shelves. So a small number will move on elsewhere once we are free to move somewhere other than our for exercise! But handling every book became a slowed-down process more akin to browsing than spring cleaning. And I met up with some thin books that have been around for years, and will stay on the shelves as they have stayed in me. 

The word Jesus used in John's Gospel for "remain" or "abide" describes what I think some books have done for me, to me. They abide in me, their truth remains, their insights continue to inform, and sometimes their influence is unconscious and independent of their originating source. My experience of intercession was profoundly shaped by Bonhoeffer's Life Together; my understanding of God's love was decisively deepened by W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense; there are few better explorations of Trinitarian theology as a way of living the Christian life, than Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God; and Esther De Waal's Seeking God introduced me to The Rule of St Benedict, and the discovery of several life principles that have shaped my inner life for four decades.

Over the next week I'll introduce a number of thin books, including some of those mentioned already. Think of it as one beggar directing another beggar where to go to find bread. The books will be mainly in areas of Christian thought and experience; significant novels, poets, biographies – well they may well come in series of their own.

But here's a favourite sentence from Nicholas Lash, mentioned above. It reads like a poem so I formatted it as such:

God's utterance lovingly gives life,

all unfading freshness:

gives only life,

and peace, and love,

and beauty, harmony and joy.

And the life God gives is nothing other,

nothing less,

than God's own self.

Life is God, given.   (page 104)

See what I mean? 

 

For a number of years we have organised a Summer School in Aberdeen. "We" being the Centre for Ministry Studies which sits within the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Since retiring from full time ministry I have been an Honorary Lecturer in the School, with my main responsibilities supporting the work of the Centre, though that will broaden into a research role once we are through the current restrictions.

Walking through the campus in the early morning the crown of King's College was shrouded in mist and framed in the green leaves of summer. The history of King's College dates back to 1495, work on the Chapel beginning in the year 1500. The Crown Tower was damaged in a storm in the 17th Century and the original crown replaced as now seen in the photo.

This was taken on a cold summer morning, and is one of many I took of our activities and gatherings during that week. Two of the keywords of the week were faithfulness and relevance. We were exploring the uncomfortable tensions between ministry and mission, the need for conversation between church and world, examining the relationships between message and medium, and finding there were as many perspectives as participants!

Relevance and faithfulness don't have to be mutually excluding; but neither do they easily accommodate to each other. The desire to be relevant is for many an attempt to be faithful to the Gospel; but if relevance becomes the primary driver, then how far does accommodation to cultural norms, expectations and values go?

Equally, faithfulness to the Gospel ought to keep the church alert to its cultural, historical and social context. Unless the church remains critically aware of when it is becoming so set in its way that the church and the Gospel have become irrelevant, incomprehensible and remote, then it loses the right to be heard, and anyway, the audience will have stopped listening.

When the church is treated with indifference blue lights should flash and the klaxons of the Spirit should be heard. But, faithfulness to the Gospel is not served by dancing to the tune of the zeitgeist, or losing confidence in the realities of God's Kingdom, of Christ crucified and risen, and of the Holy Spirit the source and energy of God's new creation and purposes of reconciliation.

All of that, and much more, we argued about, prayed about, disagreed and discussed further; and all within reach of the shadow of the chapel, its crown, and its cross. In the tension between relevance and faithfulness the cross stands as a stumbling block. No surprise there. "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (I Cor. 1.18) 

Perhaps one of the key problems with a concern for relevance is our reluctance to live the scandal of the cross. Faithfulness to the Gospel is a call to embody the self-giving love of God in ways that are imaginative, costly and deeply disruptive of the settled norms, cultural values and social arrangements of our times. It may be that relevance is not about accommodation. or compromise, or cultural alignment. Instead of seeking to be more attractive, less different, we are called to a determined faithfulness to challenge greed with generous living, to answer competitive structures of advancement by compassionate accompaniment of those left behind, to live a cruciform life in a world that crucified Jesus.

The power and wisdom of God as displayed in the cross cannot be repackaged to make it seem less foolish, or to disguise its weakness. That would be an apology for an apologetic. There is a deep irony when, in the chase for relevance, the church seeks to increase the marketability of its message, which is essentially a scandalous story that is hard to hear. The church is at its most relevant when it is faithful to the Gospel of reconciliation, and embodies the teaching of Jesus in a community rooted in values and practices of the Kingdom of God. The Beatitudes as lived and practised in the community would make the church a community of contradiction, a moral and spiritual resistance to the counter claims of a competitive and acquisitive consumer culture. 

For the church, the first priority of relevance is that the life of the followers of Jesus is congruent with the Gospel. The evaluating criterion of relevance is not what the surrounding world thinks of the church, but how well the church engages with, cares for, gives itself in service to, this world of which it is part, into which it is sent as agents of peace and conduits of love, a world for which Christ died, making peace by the blood of his cross.  

The Scottish puritan Samuel Rutherford was exiled to Aberdeen. From there he wrote some of his letters of spiritual direction, letters that are now classics of Scottish devotion to Christ. With King's college crown and cross in mind, here is one of his sentences:

"Those who can take that crabbed tree handsomely on their back, and fasten it on cannily, shall find it such a burden as wings unto a bird, or sails to a ship." (Rutherford's Letters, Epistle 5, to Lady Kenmure, Nov 22, 1636.) 

Several years ago, after a winter storm and unusually high seas, we went for a walk at Aberdeen beach, down near the village of Footdee (locally Fittie, contracted from Foot of Dee). Large areas of sand had been washed away or shifted elsewhere on the beach, leaving some old breakwaters exposed.

Beach walking for me is usually as near the sea as I can get without getting my feet wet; and sometimes prepared even to risk that. The old wood, eroded, worn and tempered by who knows how many years of surging sea water and shifting sand stood dark and defiant, a reminder of why they were put there in the first place. I stood beside them, looked closely at the grains and patterns, the whirling contours and ridged lines, and simply enjoyed the sculptured skill of wind and wave and sand, the labour of years.

As I walked away, watching the waves still rushing shoreward, the posts receding and changing their alignment, I stopped. And the photo is the reason. From one precise angle the shape of a cross, the waves visible through a cruciform window. I remember stopping, transfixed by the beauty of an entirely coincidental moment when angle of vision and merging shapes produced a different kind of vision altogether. 

This is the only photo I have printed and put up in our home. Within the cross, the shape of a heart. The theological interconnections are obvious enough. What moves me about this image is its accidental nature, the serendipity of the moment, the gift of a seascape in which, it seems, love comes rolling towards us in irresistible waves of mercy. 

We all have our ways of imagining what divine love is, and how God's love could ever be portrayed in words, art, music or any other form of human creativity. And yes I can resonate with the most powerful words written about the cross, look longingly at the finest art articulating the meaning of the cross, and listen to music fit for heaven expressing the pathos of God surrounding Calvary, and each will leave its mark on the soul.

This was different. This wasn't human art or contrivance. This was a moment of epiphany, impossible to repeat, and impossible to forget. I could have missed it, but once seen, it was unmissable. A seagull cry, a wave on the cusp of tumbling, a cobble shaped like an egg from constant friction of wave and sand, any or each would have been sufficient distraction for me to take a couple more steps without looking. But I did look, and see, the calling card of God.

I've tried to understand and explain to myself what happens inside us when we know we have been addressed. A passage from T S Eliot has long helped me to appreciate and revere those fugitive moments when something is spoken into us that we can never unhear, and something is seen that becomes a lens through which, subsequently, everything else can be viewed, if we are lucky enough to look, and sensible enough to pay attention. 

For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

(The Four Quartets, Dry Salvages, V. lines 23-31)