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We all have our favourite places, and when we need to, we go there. Walking along the edge of a full tide yesterday evening was the right place to be. The rhythm of waves in conversation with the sand, the shoreline washed in pastel colours of fading sunlight, old wooden steps descending to the shore, and a horizon given perspective by support vessels and wind turbines; a place to stop and take a breath was what was needed.

I wonder if that is a reverse perspective of the word breathtaking. Not the beauty that takes your breath away, but the beauty that invites us to breathe. The regular and gentle tumble of waves finally reaching shore and surrendering to the mystery of movement; is there an equivalent relaxing of the soul, when energy is felt as gratitude, and we stand in the moment, heart and mind synchronised with the world around us? 

The past year I've been in search of moments when prayer happens, sometimes even without being conscious that is what it was, till afterwards. Unintentional prayer, is that a thing? Yes, I think it is. If God is out and about in the world, and if that clumsy word omnipresence is an essential truth about God, then I can expect to bump into God when I'm in a hurry and turn a corner without watching where I'm going.

Prayer can't be confined to the constraints imposed by my own whims or disciplines. Prayer doesn't just happen when I say so. Prayer is not, thank God, something I do when God becomes one more resource I turn to for my own needs and ends. Prayer happens when I bump into the God who is at work in the world. That happens more times than I recognise. Grace is God's way of touching our lives. In ways we only rarely and partially recognise, the God of grace is gently resolute, like the waves on the shoreline, a recurring movement towards us of immense patience and creative energy. The omnipresence of God is a presupposition of the life of faith, though often enough we forget the reality, the here there and everywhere of that necessary word.

As a reminder that prayer happens wherever God is, whether we like it or not, there are these slightly scary strangely comforting words:

⁷ Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

⁸ If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

⁹ If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

¹⁰ Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

¹¹ If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me.

¹² Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

Psalm 139 is a wake-up call. Our busyness and self-absorption in our own life project makes no difference to the reality and the real presence of God in the midst of it all. And where God is, grace is, and prayer happens. If prayer is to seek the presence of God, then that seeking is rightly intentional. But God seeks us, and that is also prayer. That wonderfdul scholar of medieval devotional literature, Helen Waddell, once wrote a prayer with the line, "Thine eternity dost ever besiege us.' The word besiege is a brilliant image of the God who just won't go away.

The 'thereness' of God means that for all our prying and seeking, we are but looking for a presence we would otherwise miss. But whether or not we seek God's presence, God is there, and whether we like it or not. Grace is always there before us, awaiting our arrival, inviting our attention, and evoking our grateful yes to the God who, like those waves on the shore, is endlessly patient in approach. And why? Because God works on the scale of eternity and from horizons beyond our knowing. We are besieged by an eternal and holy Love.

And in the miracle and mystery of the life of any one of us, God is there. It is right that we pray, intentionally and with that seriousness of commitment that every relationship of depth requires to stay healthy. But without our ever intending it, and sometimes when we are least expecting it, on the shoreline of our lives, another wave tumbles, and prayer happens. 
 

One of the great names from Twentieth Century British Christianity is W E Sangster. As an evangelical preacher his two main emphases were conversion and growth in personal holiness. One of the characteristics of evangelicalism is giving testimony to a personal experience of conversion through faith in Jesus' atoning work on the cross, and entering into a personal relationship with the living Christ. This personal daily experience of the living presence of the love of God was for Sangster more than devotional; it was expressed in a practical life of obedient living towards Christlikeness. He dedicated his life to preaching and promoting 'holiness', a word almost comically old fashioned in modern discourse, secular or religious. Such conversionist and holiness centred experience has often meant that evangelical spirituality has a particular intensity inherent in spiritual experience, an activism often tipping over into evangelistic drivenness, and subsequently a cost to be paid in exhaustion, dissipation and spiritual disillusion.

All of that W E Sangster understood from the inside. His own health broke down through overwork and too high expectations by the time he was 30. From there onwards he learned the lesson that self-care started and was made sustainable only by reliance on God's grace rather than his own wrong-headed sense of carrying the fate of the world by his own efforts. He once wrote a short prayer about building into each day what he called a "holiday for the soul". What he meant for our own times 70 years on, is honouring those moments of gift by stopping the inner whirring of the hard disk, and looking up from the limiting screen of our own busyness. Amongst the examples he gave was the habit of never walking through a garden without taking time to look at, smell, and wonder at a flower. In the fragility, intricacy, transience, frutifulness and sheer gift of that particular flower, there is grace to be discerned, and a God to be praised.

There is a discipline and a habit involved in looking for, and paying attention to, the grace of God around us. I once hit a wall in my own life trying to cope with a range of life situations that were emotionally draining and physically tiring. So I started doing that. Instead of trying harder, doing more, giving myself a hard time for not 'solving' various problems and resolving situations, I started to look for and pay attention to those reminders all around me that the world doesn't depend on my energy, cleverness, activity, ideas and performance, but on the sustaining grace of God. 

It's the same experience as Julian of Norwich describes unforgettably in her vision of a hazelnut. Get that! This is not a mystical vision of lightning laced clouds, flaming fire across a darkened sky, the complex geometry of God's arrival on dazzling multi-wheeled chariots whizzing across the cosmos at terrifying speed. God's sustaining grace is discovered in a hand holding a hazelnut. All it took was to notice, pay attention, and create enough time to see:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. 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 it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marveled 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. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”  

So there it is. A Methodist preacher as old fashioned as they come, wjose doctoral thesis was entitled The Path to Perfection, being taught not to ignore the miracle of a garden. And a medieval mystic waxing lyrical in vernacular English about a hazelnut as cypher for the whole God loved shebang that has or ever shall exist.

The photos of the roses were moments the other day in a garden centre, when I paid attention, and marveled how all this came to be, and thanked God that whatever else He calls me to do and to be, the sustaining care of Creation is ultimately God's project. We are God's delegates, called to be free agents of wonder, and commissioned to be careful and caring activists on behalf of the grace and mercy of God.

I started reading Salley Vickers realtively recently. About five years ago I came across Miss Garnet's Angel while looking for a couple of things to read on holiday. I think of novels as narratives of human experience in imaginary form. They can be contemporary or placed in another time and place, the plot can be linear, multi-layered or oscillating between times and places. The narrative drive, the complexity of the characters, the social or historical context, the dilemmas, tensions and resolutions are each part of a mixture which is endless in creative possibility for the skilled storyteller. Because the good novelist, for myself at least, has to be a consumate storyteller who early on in the novel persuades you that this story is interesting, these people matter, and I care enough to know how it all grows and goes and turns out in the end.

Miss Garnet's Angel did that for me. I've now read all her novels, including this her latest, The Librarian. What's not to like, if you're a reader? Libraries and librarians, books and children discovering the world of the imagination, and the library as community hub threatened by the remorseless knotweed of budget cuts and local politics. The title will be enough for many novel readers. What makes Vickers' such an accomplished novelist is the way she takes seriously the complexities, mysteries and predictabilities of human behaviour and human relatedness. This is the story of a young woman in the late 1950's, going as children's librarian to an English market town. The socially constrained and unexciting routines of post war town life are deceptive, because like all human communities the town has its alliances and divisions, long held grudges and deep seated loyalties. And the people are unremarkable, from the several children who become the focus of the story to the several adult protagonists who range from the dislikeable to the too good to be true – almost. 

Because Vickers is a moral realist. "Good" people are capable of behaving in ways that can be dishonest, thoughtless, well meaning but mistaken and with significant consequences which influence, even determine the future of "innocent" others. And those who for whatever reasons "intend harm", can in a novel and in real life, unwittingly set in train circumstances and events which turn out to be someone else's "luck". Not only what we do, but why we do it; not only what we think, but the kind of person we are who thinks such things; not only circumstances of inheritance, context and personality, but how these grow and develop over time; these and much else arise out of the incredibly complex and elusive mystery that is the human heart, mind, self and being, and each of these as we come into relation with other such people.

In her best novels, Salley Vickers gets to the heart of human self-awareness as that impinges on and is shaped by all those other selves amongst whom we live and move and have our being.  As a previous teacher of children with additional support needs, a Jungian psychiatrist, and a lecturer in English Literature,  Vickers draws on deep wells of human experience. But of course our greatest insights come when raw human experience is processed, reflected upon, compared and contrasted with our own inner lives and the outer lives of those with whom we live and talk and share time and space.Having an experience is one thing; learning from it is quite another. Assimilated experience, reflected upon and processed into writing like this displays an enriched wisdom.

The Librarian is a book which allows Vickers to play to her own strengths as observer, questioner, analyst and empathetic narrator of human stories. Sylvia Blackwell the librarian is also a daughter with parents reluctant to relinquish control, she is inexperienced in love and relationships and thus vulnerably innocent, warmly idealistic about books, children and the wonders of reading as a power that can shape and reshape life. The various children have home backgrounds that differ, from the emotionally robust to the fragile, and scarily vulnerable – but all of them one way or another come within the orbital pull of the library and its children's librarian. Then there are the adults, the apparently staid WI, the amorous GP, the head librarian who is both ridiculous and spiteful, the neighbour from Hell, and one or two people who are no nonsense good folk and whose determination to interfere with events make all the difference to how the story ends.

Yes but what's the book about? It's about reading. Reading alters the inner landscape, influences the inner climate, and allows new seeds of possibility to germinate and grow. It's about books and children and the trajectories which reading sets off in the imagination and leads to who knows where in later life. It's about friendship and self-interest and how the two can co-exist, sometimes painfully; it's about the malice of telling secrets and using truth to hurt; it's about love, infatuation, being used, wanting the best of both worlds, and discovering how fragile is the fabric out of which some of our most durable and formative experiences are created.

The Librarian is an old fashioned novel – it is even produced in a hardback edition with a front cover drawn from a 1934 painting (see above). I think the old fashioned format and style of writing is deliberate, and I found it an effective way of persuading the reader that the book they are reading is an important example of the novel's central argument; that reading fiction, inhabiting a story, enjoying a novel, is life changing. Such reading is a transformative process of supplying the intellect and emotions with new imaginary possibilities that shape and reshape often unconsciously, what we see, desire and come to want for our own reality.

Of course what we see and desire for our own reality often doesn't happen, sometimes cannot happen. Disappointment is written into the terms and conditions of a human life. Relationships fulfil and frustrate; friendships grow and can wither; as life moves on, many who are part of our lives for a while are left behind; ambition, hope, possibility may or may not be realised. But, as this novel weaves together towards its resolution,wer are asked to ponder an important life-truth. In all the vicissitudes and what today are euphemistically called challenges that make up our several lives, there is the inner urge towards whatever it is we have it in ourselves to be. There is nothing bleak in this book, nothing overtly dark. Except those apparently little spites and enmities, which when injected into the shared experience of a small community, have power to make or break lives. 

 

For the first time since starting blogging in January 2007 I decided to take a month off, or have a sabbatical, or have a rest. Or even, give it a rest! But I am still committed to this blog as personal space for exploring the world around me and within me, and doing so in writing and sharing for those who want to journey alongside. So, I'm back.

I can think of various reasons for not writing for a while.

To ease the pressure of producing, and instead allowing time to replenish

To preserve energy for other things happening in life which need attention, and which are non-negotiable obligations

To let the sediments settle so that the creative juices clarify and vision is thus sharpened

To evaluate what has been done and consider what might now be done better

To give in to writer fatigue, not by stopping altogether but by intentional time limited permission to not produce, to not feel obligatioon and expectation, to not be driven.

Each of these have been true for me this past month. One of my favourite quotations from Tao Te Ching makes my point far better than those excuses, reasons, rationales or justifications:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.

Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.

Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.

Care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner,

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

I'm working out how best now to use this blog, and continue it as an expression of ministry and sharing with others. There's so much to explore and think through. Questions keep arising that need asking even if the answers are elusive. There are other minds to encounter in reading so that new thoughts, different ideas, the perspectives of others, the truth I need others to show me, the wisdom from faraway and unexpected places, these are sought and valued. Poetry and prayers, biography and history, sacred texts and novels, each creates for us an alternative way of looking at the world, and pushes us towards deeper ways of understanding and listening to ourselves. Early in the life of this blog my love of reading, writing and therefore of books was a regular feature – much of that will be coming back. I remain an unapologetic bibliophile.

This blog has always made books the largest room in the house. Rooms are also reserved for current affairs and a Christian perspective on what it's like to try to follow faithfully after Jesus in a world with altogether different agendas. And part of it too a celebration of this rich planet, the natural and the human world, the diversity of environment and human cultures. And then there's the Bible – I've spent my life since my late teens reading, studying, preaching, teaching and I hope trustfully listening to the sacred text of my Christian faith. 

In other words, what is being sought, and thought, in the posts which appear here, is hermeneutic competence, a disciplined ability to interpret, an alertness to the different ways of understanding all that come to us and at us in life.

To handle a sacred text like Christian Scripture as competently and honestly and humbly in prayer and disciplined scholarship.

To interpret with self-awareness and integrity before God our own inner lives, the changes of climate, of landscape and understand the plot and characters in our own life-narrative

To belong to and be active in a community and to interpret and work at understanding the dynamics and energies that create, sustain and impel a community outwards in love and service

To listen carefully and patiently to voices other than those familiar to us, in our surrounding culture – for these voices provide critique and rebuke, they offer alternative ways of being and of seeing the world, others and ourselves. 

So Living Wittily remains as the name of my blog, and the motto from Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons explains as much as I think I can what I'm trying to do and why.  

God made the angels to show His splendour – as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds.

Living wittily is to live for God in all the tangled messiness of a world that is and remains God-loved. To serve God with wisdom and faithfulness, with wit and obedience, with humour and humanity, with love and patience, practically and when necessary sacrificially that is to live wittily. And to recognise how hard that is even to discover sometimes, and then to fulfil God's will once discerned, yes, that is to live wittily in the tangle of our minds.

The etching of the Trinity by William Blake is one of the most beautiful representations of the love of God that I know.

Intellectual history enables us to understand how others have understood the world, human affairs, God, culture and much else. Applied to theology, intellectual history is the exploration 0f the people, the social context, the cultural tensions and developments and the intellectual climate out of which theological changes and developments emerge. Within the Christian tradition such changes are either welcomed or resisted, and are seen as conserving or liberalising aspects and elements of the Christian tradition.

Throughout my life I have read widely, ecumenically and I hope both critically and appreciatively, across a range of standpoints within the overall Christian tradition. It may be more appropriate to acknowledge that the Christian tradition is in reality a diversity  of traditions flowing as tributaries from the same headwater. My own tributary is evangelical but with open mind and heart, as befits a Baptist who takes seriously our historic commitment to religious freedom and the refusal to require subscription to credal confessions. So I am an ecumenical evangelical, and a curious one at that.

I am just starting off on my summer big read. In three volumes Gary Dorrien provides an intellectual history of liberal theology as it has developed in America over 300 years. This is a history of Christian thought as it has encountered the modern world, and the adjustments and accomodations many theologians felt compelled to make in order to maintain their intellectual integrity whilst remaining faithful to the deposit of the faith.

The very words conservative and liberal are pejorative words before they ever become descriptive. What sets Dorrien's account apart is the generosity he shows in assuming the intellectual integrity and sincerity with which such thinkers went about their thinking and theology. Far from undermining the faith, they believed passionately they were making it comprehensible and credible in a changing world increasingly secular, shaped by science and technology, and in which the challenges to Christian beliefs, values and practices would come with increasing confidence, and would call in question religious authority, relevance and social privilege.

That the three volumes are devoted to North America is both a plus and a minus. On the plus side it enables Dorrien to examine the growth of liberal theology in careful historical and biographical detail. The biographical research lying behind these volumes is deep, informative and essential; intellectual biography is crucial in writing intellectual history. Ideas may be conceived in the abstract, but they are best expounded out of the life of those who think them and give the best articulation of them. My own research over the years has been heavily indebted to intellectual biography. To place ideas in the lived social and cultural context out of which they originated is an essential discipline which ensures the ideas don't take on the life and content of the interpreter rather than the original thinker.  So, biographical context, cultural and social milieu, and the historical matrix within which ideas are first thought, expounded, and argued for and against; these are major gains in Dorrien's superb achievement in these volumes. 

On the minus side, liberal theology is not geographically constrained; nor is it of one cultural flavour, nor the privileged claim of one national context. In the same two centuries there were massive shifts in intellectual and theological climate across Europe and especially in Germany and Britain. The erosion of biblical authority which caused such a furore in the United States in the mid to late 19th Century caused similar disruption in Germany, England and Scotland during the same decades. The causes and outcomes were different but the underlying conflict over the authority of the Bible and the contested notions of inerrancy and infallibility were similar. Or by the early to mid Twentieth Century American theology was increasingly influenced by the thought of major European thinkers from Schleiermacher to Ritschl, and Barth to Bultmann. Thus American liberal theology was by no means home grown. But Dorrien is aware of this, and what he has produced is a comprehensive, authoritative intellectual history of the American liberal theological mindset. In  doing so he has also exposed the historic and intellectual processes out of which liberal theology grew and bore fruit that continues to sustain, challenge and renew theological study towards an adequate and relevant faithfulness in seeking to communicate the content of the Christian faith in a world less impressed, less patient, and in many ways, less interested.

A few years ago I read volume one. I'll read it again, kind of the way you watch episode one just to refresh the story before episodes two and three. And occasionally a report back here about the journey so far.       

I've never fully understood why I like some music. Nor why some forms of music don't do it for me. I tend to be eclectic, open and adaptable to what comes at me as new, different, in another discourse, idiom or sound. Some of my first experiences of music are quite vivid memories which may help explain those eclectic tastes, laced with likes and dislikes. I remember 1960, aged 9, listening to the radio and Elvis crooning "Wooden heart", not long after came Cliff and his nostalgic "The Young Ones". I can still sing them near word perfect.

Up till then my diet included the old 78 records played on our gramophone; Kenneth McKellar, Nat King Cole, Vera Lynn, Harry Belafonte, Shotts and Dykehead Pipe Band, Cavaleria Rusticana, Connie Francis and Mahalia Jackson.

Some years later throughout the 1960's an avalanche of new sounds, and for that decade a sense of music being all pervasive and increasingly available on transistor radio, 45 singles and 33 LP Albums. Beatles, Hollies, Rolling Stones, Beach Boys, The Who, The Kinks – these are predictable. Less so was my enthusiasm for female performers, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, Marianne Faithful, Joan Baez, though at that age I never quite got Bob Dylan – which outraged one of my pals who had far more cultural discernment than I had, and believed, rightly as it turned out, that Dylan would endure and would rearrange the entire furniture shop of popular music.

By my late teens I had discovered Country music. Johnny Cash was and remains a giant in my own musical enjoyment and enrichment. But over the years since I confess to listening to Hank Williams, Hank Snow, Kenny Rogers, George Jones, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette,and a pick and mix medley of many others who came and went, some now forgotten. Early 70's I came across John Denver live on a BBC programme and recognised a voice that spoke my emotional language. I still have a dozen of his vinyl albums, and regularly play his best songs – he went through a New Age stage when I think much of his music became like over-diluted fruit juice! But his best music remains one of the richer strands in my musical history

Classical music floored me when I first heard the choral finale of Beethoven's 9th symphony on the television. It was played as part of a programme celebrating the achievements of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders' leader, Jimmy Reid. He chose it as a musical version of his socialist vision, of brotherhood, shared joy and shared resources, and an end to poverty and hunger amongst the poor whether on Glasgow's doorstep or anywhere else. The combination of Reid's passion, his political energy, the story of his early years of hunger, hard work and the early death of his father, all combined to make the Ode to Joy an aural celebration of what it means to be human, and in solidarity with humanity.It came with the force of a revelation of what music can be, and do.

Then came my first hearing of Yehudi Menuhin's definitive performance of Brahm's Violin Concerto which I still can't listen to without sitting down and allowing that music to re-order my dishevelled spirits. It was one of my first birthday presents from Sheila. Beethoven's symphonies and piano concertos and Mozart's concertos, the violin concertos of Brahms, Bruch, Barber and Tchaikovsky, and then some Dvorak, Sibelius, Handel and Baroque followed, and more lately still Renaissance choral music, discovered one evening listening to Spem in Alium in a friend's house. By now my musical back catalogue, like a juke box in my head (much more tangible than a playlist) included 60's pop, 70's Country, and a varied ad hoc but growing list of favourite classical composers.

Sometime in the 1990's I came across a little known female folk and country singer, Carrie Newcomer. There was a review article in Sojourner's Magazine and it raved about the social conscience and ethical edge of her songs. I listened a lot to her over the years, and her songwriting has become stronger, more mature, and still has that edge of ethical care for the world and its people.

I mention that long backlist of music I have loved for a reason! And the reason is the question I started with – I still don't don't know why I like some music and not others.

But here's the thing. Some music doesn't wait for our opinion, analysis, approval or attention. I think it's the distinctive voice and the fit of words to where we are when we hear it. Some music opens us up to new understandings of the world, ourselves, and the complex perplexities of trying to make this life of ours work. Carrie Newcomer does this for me, which is why I go back and replay her music, even when there are intervals of months in between. A new Carrie Newcomer album isn't only an obvious purchase, it's like deciding to take in another night class on compassionate self awareness and humane other awareness.

Newcomer is an important voice crying in the wilderness of a distracted and often heartless world. I am growing older and I'm looking for songs that nurture memories and hopes, that touch into those deep regrets, remembered joys, sounds of past laughter and silences of past pain. In a world of noise and speed, obsession with newness, and hooked on the false security of having and possession, the music I want to carry within me has to have the capacity to sustain who it is I have now become, but also to pull me forward to what is ahead. And just as in my most important reading I look for life wisdom, stories of hopeful newness, and celebration of human resilience and compassion in the face of all that diminishes hope and constrains goodness, so also in music. Carrie Newcomer is a consistent source of such qualities of insight and attentiveness to the human, the spiritual and the hopeful. She is also someone who embodies in her own life commitments the best of the songs she writes and sings.

In the next post I'll write about how Geography of Light, one of her best albums, achieves some of this.

Yesterday we had a Prayer Cafe at our Church. Scones and coffee, then we spent some time working out how we can grow a disposition of gratefulness. As preparation for this I had prepared some working observations of what is implied in being a grateful person. Over a couple of days I noted down what seemed to point in the right general direction of what being a grateful person kight look, or feel like.

To be grateful is to be humble, recognising how much we receive from God and others.

To be grateful is to pay attention to all the good that is happening in our lives, and see God’s signature.

To be grateful is to be so thankful for our blessings that we try to be God’s blessing in someone else’s life.

To be grateful is to speak of Christ to others, and use our gifts generously in their service.

To be grateful is to remember the love and grace that has touched, changed and enabled us in Christ.

To be grateful is to look for the breeze of the Spirit rippling across the grain fields of our lives.

To be grateful is to begin each day glad to be alive, and determined to make each day count for God.

To be grateful, then, is to live in the joy of God, and to give thanks in all circumstances.

 

 Bleeding hearts. it's the name of a flower. And it's obvious why. Those heart shaped flowers, pink veined but with the deepening red gathering as tear shaped pendant drops. A heart broken, the promise of love now wounded, the flowers become bleeding hearts.

The colours are startling in Spring and early summer, perhaps because that is the season of life, and the recovery of growth and vitality. I noticed them while walking in Crathes Castle gardens on a warm sunlit afternoon.

Earlier I had been writing something and had quoted the words of Paul in Romans 5, "God commends his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." That profound and unsettling truth links divine love with human sin, and does so by proclaiming a causal connection between the death of Jesus, divine judgement, human sin and divine love. What's that all about? The question, no less bewildering for its contemporary informality, is much to the point.

God is love is one of the key affirmations of the Christian Gospel, embedded throughout the New Testament and explained and wondered at in the writings of Paul, John and Peter.

When Peter talks of humans being redeemed by the precious blood of Christ he is saying that on Calvary, love lies bleeding.

When Paul affirms he lives "by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me" he is growing towards an atonement theology in which love lies bleeding, and the wounds are borne into the heart of God.

When John has Jesus say, "I if I be lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to me…for God so loved the world", he is articulating the heart of God, and anticipating Golgotha where love will lie bleeding, and die.

The juxtaposition of red heart-shaped flowers with pendant tear drops, and the imagery of the crucified Christ, and that name, "Bleeding Hearts" didn't prepare me for one of those moments when there is a near audible click as several things fit together. Later that day I was reading some poems by R S Thomas. When I am in an interrogative mood, I go looking for fellowship with RST. And I came upon this poem while still thinking of those flowers.

Before writing more, here it is:

                Which

And in the book I read:

God is love. But lifting

my head, I do not find it

so. Shall I return

 

to my book and, between

print, wander an air

heavy with the scent

of this one word? Or not trust

 

language, only the blows that

life gives me, wearing them

like those red tokens with which

an agreement is sealed.

 

He too is asking the question, God is love; "What's that all about?" The poem is a confession, but not of faith. He confesses that he is unpersuaded. God is love? "I do not find it so". Thomas scorned sentiment as a substitute for hard thinking. That first question which takes up the second stanza is a rhetorical disclaimer. Of course not. Love isn't a heavily scented word, if it is then it isn't love, and definitely not the kind of love that, for love of the other, lies bleeding. Forget the word, says Thomas. Not language, but life experience might better exegete the meaning of love. "The blows life gives me", and the consequent grief, sadness, loss, and suffering we each endure, these are real, and have to be lived with and lived through. It isn't that Thomas doesn't believe in any kind of love. This second question which takes seriously life's suffering, is the other option. Do not trust language when it is not adequate to the realities it seeks to describe, is Thomas's point. Another astringent thinker, P T Forsyth, complained "it is hard for words to stretch to the measure of eternal things". That I think is what Thomas is saying. Trust "only the blows that life gives me", and wear them like the red molten wax, "red tokens with which an agreement is sealed". But what does that mean?

Faith in God is not about feeling, not even about clear disciplined reasoning, whether about love or hope or peace or whatever. Faith, in this poem, is the capacity to trust the life we are living and to trust that our life, in all its pain and joy, is underwritten by a sealed agreement between – well between which parties? Thomas avoids the word covenant, but the hint is broad enough. And those red tokens of melted wax, red and liquid, and then solidifying into permanence, become a metaphor for that love which though inexplicable, and forever evasive of language however fragrant or precise, is nevertheless real and to be trusted. 

And perhaps for Thomas the priest, the sealed agreement of the divine love that lies bleeding, is recalled and reaffirmed at each Eucharist, when faith again takes hold of the symbols hinted at in those red tokens. And in the reaching out to take the bread and wine redolent of the suffering Christ, faith knows, or at least surmises, that 'those blows that life gives me" are caught up into something eternal, and that, defying all attempts at linguistic control, we call Love. 

Now here's something you don't come across every day. An honest account of what it feels like when God is unaccountably silent, unreasonably absent, apparently indifferent, and our inner climate is colder than winter. That's the title of one of my favourite songs, sung by Sarah Brightman in a stunning Winter concert. The refrain is a quietly sad relinquishment, "It's colder than winter, since you closed the door."

Renita Weems writes of that experience of God not being there, not being here, not being near. There are the usual phrases, spiritual dryness, dark night of the soul, wilderness experience, and the Christian tradition acknowledges those periods when something shuts down in us. The question is what we do with what we feel. And that's a hard question because often, feeling that inner emptiness, and knowing that loss of motivation and sense of purpose, it's hard to even think about what to do, let alone do it. Life has its seasons, including winter. Weems has learned that Winter may best be lived through by waiting, and trusting that in the silence and waiting, newness and life is recovering and pushing again towards Spring."Eventually we have to accept that dying and rising, freezing and thawing, resting and rebounding, sleeping and awakening are the necessary conditions for all growth and creativity." (37)

Thinking about those previous times when 'something in me had shut down', she came to the conclusion "The soul flourishes and withers scores of times in the face of the sublime." That insight positively glows with realism. It is a recognition that life is rhythmic, that relationships can never be sustained at the apex, that passionate awareness cannot be the norm or we would be exhausted. Relationships grow in the daily fluctuations of emotional intensity, and also in the rhythms of presence and absence, words and silence. Thomas Merton, an inveterate writer of words and a brilliant converdationalist and a naturally gregarious man, struggled to fulfil his vocation as a Trappist Monk. He once said, with some irony, "Words are the sounds that interrupt my silence."

In Listening to God, Renita Weems is giving as honest an account as she can of what the silence and felt absence of God might mean, and how it feels. She has come out of the other side of guilt and feeling a failure as if those times of winter were her fault, and God's purpose is that it should always be summer. In a poem that reads like a Psalm, she tells of how she has come to understand that in the waiting is our growing, in the silence is our learning, in God's absence our heart can learn to grow fonder, or come to terms with the truth that God is not a comfort confectionery, but One whose presence need not be registered emotionally.

 

I usedta bow,

now I stand

before God's throne

 

I usedta close my eyes,

now I stare

straight ahead.

 

I usedta do what was expected,

now I do what I must

to make this faith

faithful to me.

 

I usedta be afraid of God,

now I take my chances

and wait

and wait

tapping my feet,

listening for God.

…..

There is a world of wisdom and self-knowing in those words. They are wrought out of a long wrestling with God's closeness and distance, God's words and God's silences. And they have a life-giving pastoral hopefulness for folk like the rest of us who try tive up to expectations of our own and not God's making.

I have always found theological autobiography both fascinating and rewarding. When a theologian takes time to reflect on the meaning of their life, and to critically evaluate what they have thought, said, taught and written, I have sensed that in the articulation of such self-criticism both writer and reader have the chance to grow.

This was true for me when, a few years ago, I read Renita Weems' volume, Listening for God. A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt. I'm re-reading it. I first came across Weems in her commentary on Song of Songs in the New Interpreter's Bible. Not everyone who reviewed it liked it. Weems is an outspoken and thoughtful feminist, and her interpretation of the Song is likewise shaped by her perspective as a woman. Why that should be a 'problem', I'm not sure. Most commentaries on the Song have been by men and presumably written from a masculine perspective. Anyway, what we have in her book is the honesty and integrity of a scholar who has had to live in the male dominated world of church and academia as a black woman theologian. The book is an eye opener, and a moving testimony that comes with the force of an argument on behalf of those who struggle with faith and doubt, hope and despair, blessing and loss, and still hold on.

Listening for God is the disposition of the person trying to hear, wanting to know, seeking for truth, and sometimes encountering only silence. And that silence may not mean the absence of God, nor does it reassure of God's presence; it is ambiguous, creating a tension between the longing of the soul and that for which the soul longs. Early in the book we get a sense of what she is talking about, and the first sound of a voice that speaks with honest to God openness about God. She links silence to intimacy, discerning a rhythm of intensity followed by distance, passion followed by withdrawal, in the most meaningful exchanges of our lives.

"The long silence between intimacies, the interminable pause between words, the immeasurable seconds between pulses, the quiet between epiphanies, the hush after ecstasy, the listening for God — this is the spiritual journey, learning how to live in the meantime, between the last time you heard from God and the next time you hear from God." (25)

The rest of the book is an exploration and an exposition of her own life and those same rhythms of faith and doubt, presence and absence, blessing and loss, assurance and questioning, healing and hurt. She quotes what she calls an intrepid psalm, one of those texts that feels just like that moment when you thought you'd turned the shower to warmer but turned it the wrong way and the cold jets ruin your comfort zone.

As a deer yearns

for flowing streams,

so I yearn

for you, my God.

I thirst for God,

for the living God;

where can I go to see

the face of God?

I have no food but tears,

day and night,

as all day long I am taunted,

"Where is your God?"

This is a book that takes yearning and longing, love and belonging, presence and separation, seriously. Renita Weems is a minister, a professor of biblical studies, an African American woman, and one who has walked through as many valleys of deep darkness as she has still waters and green pastures. As a theologian and a preacher, and an expert on the biblical text, she is expected to be a good guide on the journey; but she confesses that she too gets lost, doesnlt recognise the landscape, becomes uncertain about the direction and the destination.

And here's her take on those times when God is silent: "I didn't know that just because I;d lost my enthusiasm for the spiritual journey disn't mean thatt I'd lost my way on the spiritual journey." That's the whole point. To journey by faith means sometimes going out to a place that we know not where. If God is silent, then we walk on, and listen, and pay attention to the glimpses and hints, the unlooked for and unexpected, the ordinary and the routine, and in that mix of life as we live it trust on that God is there. The down to earth truth is that God's presence is sometimes to be discerned not in the obviously spiritual, but in the even more obviously mundane, "the din of a hungry toddler screaming from the backseat in rush hour traffic."

This is a book for those of us familiar with spiritual longing, restless in our questioning and thinking, hungry for what is real, substantial and sustaining for mind and heart, as we walk the sometimes puzzling and risky road that is our life. Weems comes to accept that confusion and doubt are not wrong, they are as normal as when we feel sure and confident. The rhythms of emotion and mind, the changing circumstances of life, our own inner growing and changing, the chemistry of our bodies and the biosphere of our inner lives are all part of what makes us who we are and gives colour to the life we live. When God is silent it is seldom our fault; guilt is an attempt to explain what in fact needs no explanation. God is silent just now, so what? So listen, look, and find those other ways God communicates, often through others.