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Looking for hymns about Pentecost I came across this one which goes to the tune Diademata (Crown him with many crowns).

It's a good modern take on the Veni Sancte Spiritus, and invokes the Spirit to invade our space, touch our common life, and renew the face of the earth in the slow, patient, determined coming of peace and justice. This time of year I have yet another look at that great book about the Holy Spirit, The Go-Between God by John V Taylor. Innovative theology remaining faithful to the Spirit's rootedness in the Triune life of God, and and love-driven to a creative mobility within and upon creation.

Come, Holy Spirit, come!

Inflame our souls with love,

transforming every heart and home

with wisdom from above.

Let none of us despise

the humble path Christ trod,

but choose, to shame the worldly wise,

the foolishness of God.

 

All-knowing Spirit, prove

the poverty of pride,

by knowledge of the Father’s love

in Jesus crucified.

And grant us faith to know

the glory of that sign,

and in our very lives to show

the marks of love divine.

 

Come with the gift to heal

the wounds of guilt and fear,

and to oppression’s face reveal

the kingdom drawing near.

Where chaos longs to reign,

descend, O holy Dove,

and free us all to work again

the miracles of love.

 

Spirit of truth, arise:

Inspire the prophet’s voice:

Expose to scorn the tyrant’s lies,

and bid the poor rejoice.

O Spirit, clear our sight,

all prejudice remove,

and help us to discern the right,

and covet only love.

 

Give us the tongues to speak

the word of love and grace

to rich and poor, to strong and weak,

in every time and place.

Enable us to hear

the words that others bring,

interpreting with open ear

the special song they sing

 

Come, Holy Spirit, dance

within our hearts today,

our earthbound spirits to entrance,

our mortal fears allay.

And teach us to desire,

all other things above,

that self-consuming holy fire,

the perfect gift of love.

This book is a rich combination of biography and autobiography, witha  narrative plot that is a quest story, laced with occasional interludes of self-reflection and examined-life episodes, a journal of living close to nature, a confessional exercise of increasing self knowledge – and much more. It's a remarkable achievement.

From page one Raynor Winn brings us into the life she shares with her husband of 32 years, their children just grown up and left, and we enter the story as catastrophe, 'a tsnumai of bad things' hit them in the face. Her husband is diagnosed with a terminal illness which cannot be cured, is not easily treated and therefore is difficult to manage. Within days they lose a civil court case that costs them their home, their farm and all that they had built together over those thirty two years. And the case was brought by a friend they trusted, and involved a betrayal of that trust and the lacerating knowledge that they lost on a technicality.

What to do? Homeless, bankrupt, facing serious illness deprived of house, security, money and those core essentials for those facing the full force of life gone wrong, a sense of home, of familiar place, gathered memories and known people. The book takes us into the fear and misery of those first days, and then we realise, to our relief; this isn't misery literature about sad lives, it's an account of two people's defiance, resilience, courage, and reckless way of finding and testing out who they are and could be. Sitting under a stair cupboard as the bailiffs knock on the door, Ray finds a guide book to The Salt Path round Land's End, 650 miles of it. And they decide they'll walk out the house, get whatever gear they can afford, get on a bus, and start walking. The plan is to camp wild, to live on minimum and sporadic benefits, and just keep walking.

The idea is insane, and more than once on their long walk they admit it must look like that, and sometimes feels like that. The consultant's advice was take it easy, rest, make the best of each day. Instead they decided to go on a walking expedition along one of the most demanding walks in England. The book is the account of that walk.

The descriptions of land and geology, climate and sea, badgers and seagulls, people and places, changing moods and moments, are held together in a narrative that is never self-pitying though honest about pain and hurt and loss. But the dominant mood is determination to hope; it is clear that these two people decided to live, repeatedly to choose hope, and opted for freedom. No one can say to them, "Well that's easy for you to do". If they did the answer would likely be, "Well, we've nothing to lose, we already lost it!"

I am not a great fan of confession literature as such; too often they become self-congratulatory, giving accounts of enhanced competence, exaggerating to impress, or making a big deal of what life brings their way as if bad stuff never happened to other people. This book is different. These are likeable, honest, vulnerable folk. The escapades camping wild, the hunger and deprivation of having no money, the relinquishing of dignity, make for engrossing and at times moving reading. Then there is the awareness as we read, that these two people, homeless and near peniless, are on a journey on the coast, on an internal journey of self discovery, and are doing so in a society that can often be complacently unaffected by people having a hard time and struggling to make life work.  They encounter kindness and callousness, friendship and snobbery, some who understand and more who were just bewildered or patronising.

So do yourself a favour and read this book. And if you are engaged in pastoral ministry read it alert to the important insights these two walkers offer into suffering, grief, and loss, and the example they set of resilience and of faithful friendship over decades. And as you walk with them you overhear hopes and fears being talked out loud, and you follow the footsteps of love that walks along with and beside each other, no matter what. This is theology with boots on, with a cheap haversack and even cheaper sleeping bag. It is travelling light, but for weighty reasons. And I think you'll come to like Ray and Moth, and be glad you are allowed to look so intimately into their troubles and ways of dealing with them. The book is a gem. 

This old railway sleeper has been recycled as a strainer post. I first came across it in 1978 on holiday and walking along the Inverbervie to Gourdon coastal path. Since well before then it has held the wire tension of the fence, facing the sea only 50 metres away. I love old weathered wood, seasoned timber. Looking at it today, running my fingers over the rough, scarred and cracked surface, wondering what tales it might tell of those who have walked this path, gazed on this sea, carried within them their own tensions and strains.

One of my favourite phrases, seasoned timber. It is one of the metaphors used by George Herbert to describe the soul's resilience, defiant presence in the face of storm or sunshine, core strength that holds the tensions and makes the fence. But at a cost, engraved on the face, that roughened surface of the wood itself a metaphor for those lines and features that give a face its character, and map on the surface the struggles of the soul.

One of the reasons I've spent so much time on the company of a metaphysical poet turned 17th Century country parson, is Herbert's use of such everyday objects as an old piece of weathered wood, 'seasoned timber'.

Standing beside this post today, and inwardly reciting the last verse of 'Virtue' I could feel on my fingertips decades of wear and tear, but aware too of the beauty of aged wood, and how the knots and cracks add to rather than subtract from the sum total of its character. In other words the character is engrained, the grain of the wood mapping the long erosion and shaping of wind, rain, frost and sun. And I became aware that who I am is equally shaped by erosive forces of wind and rain, frost and sun, or their equivalents of struggle and tears, sorrow and joy, seasoned timber.  

Herbert's imagination is of timber that 'never gives', absorbs force, takes the strain. That can mean so many things – to live without pressure warping our integrity; to bear stress without splitting; to survive intact and strong through the four seasons; this is about virtue, that quality of character that comes from countless daily choices of the good when that which was less good was more attractive, advantageous or less costly. So I contemplate those photos of seasoned timber, remember the feel of the weathered contours and worn surfaces, and marvel at the ways God shapes and forms us towards his image in Christ.

Virtue, George Herbert

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eyes:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie:
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like seasoned timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal.
Then chiefly lives.

I have a predilection for thin theological books. I don't mind the substantial, weighty, 'need a desk to read them' kind of volumes. Some of the heavy weights are amongst my closest friends on the shelves. But there's a comforting and subversive satisfaction in having a three foot shelf packed with more than sixty books, each of which is worthy of more of our time and effort than many a weightier tome.

It would be fun to make a list of my dozen favourite thin theological books; thin in size and page numbers, not content. For now I want to introduce one of those slight and slim books that I'm so glad to have read and to own.

Just before that, it's worth reflecting on what it means to 'own' a book. You buy it and you possess it. That's the book as artefact. But then you read the book and you can never unread it. The words pass through your mind but some of them stick; ideas are awakened and the scenery of your inner world is ever so slightly, but now and then significantly, changed. In the process of reading, the reading person changes; in other words reading is a transformative process that enlivens the intellect, pushes the imagination, educates the conscience and ultimately shapes the character from which flows action and behaviour.

Books that open up new horizons, give birth to new ideas, question unexamined assumptions, stimulate imagination and persuade towards new discoveries of truth, such books do something crucial for our growth and inner health – they help us change our mind. Now that too is a telling phrase, 'changing your mind'. Any book that changes the way we think, provokes deeper thought, makes us see the world differently, is a gift that shoves us out of our cosy comfort zone into the cold, fresh daylight in which we see new things and are astonished at what we didn't know we didn't know. To change my mind is to see further, deeper, clearer; and in the light of that new insight the world is different, and such new discoveries compel me to revise my place and purpose in that world.

All of this, a thin book can accomplish.And Mcgill's is such a book. This is one of the most theologically perceptive books about power that I know. When power becomes demonic, that is, when power is about domination, exploitation, possession and life lived at the expense of others, the result in human life is violence, destructive conflict and systemic injustice. In short, suffering. Widespread, extreme and often avoidable suffering caused by the dominant will to power is the problem of our age, argues McGill. Now he was writing this in 1968, but 50 years down the line the book reads like a commentary on a world being racked by powerful systemic forces, power centred personalities and politicians, weakening of institutions that have sought to contain, restrain and reduce abuse of military and political power. McGill, before the phrase became theological currency was identifying the baleful, insinuating, pervasive realities of "structural sin", systemic, institutional, cultural influences which diminish freedoms, dominate and threaten human societies, and give rise to real evils, violence and consequent suffering.

His analysis of violence leads him to the unfashionable term 'demonism', which he believes is the spiritual reality of our day. Those pages exposing and exploring 'the demonic as the decisive form of evil'' are a potent antidote to those who would dismiss the those realities Paul described as 'principalities and powers', and as 'spiritual wickedness in high places'. This critique of evil has to be read in the age of Trump and Putin, the rhetoric of 'locked and loaded",denials of ecological crisis, fake news and media generated dread, Cambridge analytica and the harvesting of personal data as a weapon of persuasion. It is astonishingly prescient. At the centre of McGill's argument is a concept of power explained as a spectrum. "At opposing ends of the spectrum lie two powers – demonic power that is violent, destructive and dominative, and the power of God that is creative, totally open, self giving and expansive."

The power of God is understood by McGill, not in philosophical categories of omnipotence, hierarchy, imposition or dominance. The power of God is the power revealed in Jesus, who is the human embodiment of the inner life of the Triune God, eternity manifest in history. Service, not domination is God's modus operandi. The contrast between the power of evil as the power to kill, and the power of God as the power to give life could not be more stark.

The contrast between power as domination and power as the willingness to serve is a telling ultimatum to 21st Century post-postmodern cultures and peoples. Relinquishing power as influence over, power as domination of, power as possession of, or power as unquestioned right to self-assertion, is an approach radically at odds with the way the world is currently constructed. Such a concept of power, as service, is unlikely to catch on as the life aspiration of those who buy into a culture of possession, status, ambition and self-absorption in the big project of being me at all costs. But power is a reality in the world of human affairs, and here is Mcgill's approach in two sentences: "Because people today feel the impact of evil chiefly in terms of abusive power, they are asking about God chiefly in terms of his redemptive power. And in the churches they hear very little on this theme." (50)

That is where theology comes in. The victory of Christ is not power conquest, but suffering love. The crucifixion celebrates human power to kill; the resurrection demonstrates and celebrates God's power of life over death, the power of love over violence, and the power of self-giving to challenge self-will, self-interest and most of the other composite nouns qualified by that elusive reality of the self at the centre of each human's being. 

This isn't a book to summarise. It needs to be read, slowly. Its construal of God as Triune interchange of giving and receiving takes time to register as the contradiction of all our human drivenness towards self-preservation and the success of project 'me'. No, it isn't arguing for self-negation, but for a recognition that we are each both givers and receivers, capable of being there for and with each other rather than against each other.  Jesus has shown us who God is, how God expresses power, what love looks like when it takes on the principalities and powers.

I offer one quote from a book that is like this on nearly every page:

"Jesus alone is our true neighbour. He comes to us as a Samaritan might come to a Jew. On the surface he is simply not impressive enough to satisfy us. And yet he heals our deepest wounds and brings us the gift of eternal life. From the world's viewpoint, he comes in a broken and contemptible form, incapable of preserving even himself. He is not powerful in terms of his title and function…He is only powerful – but sumpremely powerful – in the life that he gives to men and women, healing their human sickness and opening to them the gates of paradise. He so fully restores them that they are enabled to become his servants, and in his name may be compassionate to others as he has been to them. He so heals them that by his power they too can go and do likewise…God himself has given us Jesus Christ as our neighbour." (110-111)

 

The Christian lives under the imperative of love. That starts in the heart of God because the Christian knows that the one fundamental reality in the universe is a Love that creates, redeems, sustains and will renew a created order originally conceived in the eternal love of the Father. We love because we are loved. And the love with which we are loved is infinitely costly, inexhaustibly faithful, endlessly creative and wilfully purposeful. 

The thing is, once we start talking of Christian love of neighbour, of enemy, and of God, we speak of a love like no other, originating in the outpouring of love that brought the universe into being, and that same eternal purposive love poured out in the redemptive, reconciling and renewing love, revealed in Jesus crucified and risen. That is the starting point. When Paul talks of the hope that does not disappoint he is speaking of that same eternally self-giving, creating, redeeming love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Christian love is not natural, it is supernatural; it is not human love amplified, but divine love multiplied in the hearts of a believing community. Through the Church, the Body of Christ, the love and light of Christ shine through a vast community of communities that are like shining stars in a dark sky in the midst of all the corrupt and crooked ways we as human beings frustrate and resist "the love that moves the sun and other stars".

The church's search for a gospel that is relevant, a message that is attractive, a missional strategy that is effective, must always begin from that first dynamic premise: God is love. In Jesus that love became embodied, alive amongst us, performed and displayed in a life of promiscuous welcome, forgiving acceptance, costly compassion, and a capacity to look at and see and love each human heart in all its potential and waywardness.

So that imperative of love is more than determined goodwill, more than doing our bit to make the world a better place, more than training ourselves in generosity and compassion. The imperative to love is underwritten by an originating and primary Love that transcends our natural inclinations towards kindness; a Love that pushes beyond what might be manageable and reasonable; a Love that seeks to reproduce in our fallible and limited lives the Love that poured itself out in creation and was poured out on the cross by the Crucified, and is poured into us by the Holy Spirit.

No, that doesn't mean we have nothing to do or contribute. There is behind the love command an assumed obedience of the heart, enacted as an obedience of faith, and rooted in the practiced gratitude for the gift and givingness of divine love. Such obedience, gratitude and love for God is enabled by grace, and fired by the Holy Spirit as the power and presence of God pervasive of all creation and gifted to the church as the Body of the living and risen and ever present Christ. And it is through the power and presence of that love in the heart, reshaping mind and thought, and redirecting the will and conscience, that we respond to the love command, to love God completely, and our neighbour as ourselves, and our enemies in imitation of the Christ in whom we see the heart of God.

The too little known theologian Arthur McGill understood deeply and powerfully the implications of this kind of theology.

"A person only begins to love as Jesus commands when they give out of what is essential to them, out of what they cannot 'afford'. For Jesus it is the deliberate and uninhibited willingness to expend oneself for another that constitutes love."

(Arthur McGill, Suffering. A Test of Theological Method, p,55)

Love your neighbour as yourself; love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. How? With what? Why? These questions erupt out of that well we all recognise, the deep well of rationalisation, self-justification, and resistance to any demands that require the surrender of the heart, and the dethroning of the ego. Self-expenditure is as characteristic of Christian love as it is characteristic of Christ. The words 'love' and 'cross' are an unbreakable juxtaposition in the syntax of the Gospel, and in every life spelled out in the obedience of faith. Love, therefore, is forever linked to and demonstrated by sacrifice, by my willingness to give out of what is essential to me, to accept that what is asked is unaffordable if personal interests and comforts come first. The paradox is that in the self-giving of love, the personal cost is not a diminishment, but a personal transformation towards the likeness of Christ.  

(The painting by David Hockney is one of a series on The Sermon on the Mount)

 

"The standards and values

by which Jesus' followers seek to live,

in both their public and private lives,

are his unchanging values

of love and forgiveness,

justice and mercy,

compassion and generosity of spirit….

To build your life on Christ's values is hard enough, but we are judged,

not on whether we succeed,

but on whether we deeply desire to do so

and are not deterred by repeated failure."

(Michael Mayne, To Trust and To Love, p. 76)

Near the end of her life Denise Levertov's poetry became much more interrogative about her own place and purpose in the world. Indeed some of her deeper questions were about the role and the place of the poet in the world, that phrase being the title of one of her best know essays.

Amongst the enriching and provoking themes that run through Levetov's poetry is a deep questioning of what poetry is for, why poets write what they do, and asking whether the poet has any practical contribution to make to the messiness and tragedies of a world broken and jagged at the edges. There isn't a shred of arrogance or overt self-confidence in Levertov's later poetry, but there is a growing sense of a poet who believes, with increasing confidence, that carefully and compassionately shaping words is a necessary precursor to shaping and changing the world towards  more compassionate structures.

In The Poet in the World she writes, "Literature is dynamite because it asks – proposes – moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of human life." The metaphor of dynamite is a telling choice of word. Levertov saw herself as a peaceful but determined revolutionary, one whose work aimed to change the way people think, to offer alternative views of the way the world of human affairs is organised, who challenged the status quo precisely because status implies stasis, and such fixity of thought, worldview and political arrangement, is a road block on the way to a more just, humane and joyful world.For her the question is whether the poet "is an observer or a participant in the life of his (or her) time." By observer she meant bystander, by participant she intended active engagement.

Allowing for non inclusive language when the essay was written in 1965, her words apply to every poet, in each generation: "The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man [or woman], and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."

All of us use words. Not all are poets or read poetry, and perhaps that is part of the malaise in public discourse and the erosion of civility as a common good in the language, conversation and journalism of our culture. But while all of us are responsible for the words we speak and write, it is the poet who can help us have a care about words, and to treasure and conserve the currency and value of words as life-changing, life-enhancing, life-directing sounds and symbols of human exchange and humane communication.

One of my favourite late poems of Levertov is a poignant questioning of the value of her work, her life's work. How do you begin each day as a blank sheet, pen in hand but mind not yet engaged? Where do poems come from? Will they come? Do they matter? Will any one else care enough to read them? What is a poet's vocation? Out of such questions comes the struggle to write, to speak, to bring into being, to articulate the thoughts of the heart and the feelings of the mind. 

Preachers are not poets. But preachers would do well to ask the same questions as the poet, because they too are stewards of words, curators of language, tellers of truth for its own sake, treasurers and conservators of human speech in the service of humanity and in love with the world. And whether preacher or poet, journalist or politician, human life is the richer or poorer for the ways we use or misuse or abuse the miracle that is language.

Variation on a Theme by Rilke.

A certain day became a presence to me;
there it was confronting me –a sky, air, light:
a being. And before it started to descend
from the height of noon, it leaned over
and struck my shoulder as if with
the flat of a sword, granting me
honor and a task. The day's blow
rang out, metallic — or it was I, a bell awakened;
and what I heard was my whole self
saying and singing what it knew: I CAN.
(Denise Levertov)

"The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not. (John 1.5)

Light and darkness, truth and lies, good and evil Jesus and the world; woven throughout the Fourth Gospel are the oppositions and contrasts that swirl around "the Word become flesh". From the very start John sets light and darkness within the frame of the cosmic drama between the Eternal Creative Word and the history of a universe called into being – "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made."

There is brilliant irony in John's choice of words as he describes the opposition of light and darkness. The word translated "comprehendeth" could equally mean "overtake", "overcome", "extinguish". Darkness cannot smother light, cannot extinguish it at source, cannot overshadow it, cannot put it out. All that is clear enough. But 'katalambanein' is also about comprehension, understanding. Using contemporary language John could equally say, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot get its head round it"; or "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness just doesn't get it."

Hence my preference for the older English translations which, quite intentionally, use the ambiguous "comprehendeth it not". Light cannot comprehend, understand, make sense of, light. Light baffles, confuses and finally dazzles darkness. Darkness, ultimately and finally, is at a loss as to how to defeat, extinguish, overcome, negate, the true light of the world. In that one verse, concentrated and compressed into that one negative term, "The darkness comprehendeth it not", is the diamond truth that glitters with unintimidated clarity all the way through the Gospel of John.

Light is inexplicable to darkness however brightly shining and clearly demonstrated; love is a closed mystery to hatred however embodied and eloquent; life is vitalised by the life that is the light of all people, and death is at a loss; truth shines with a persistence and permanence that no amount of lies can occlude, obscure or obfuscate. And the reason? The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has no idea that its own strategies are self-destructive, or that its existence is an absence not a presence. Darkness is blind to its own penultimacy, hostile to the creative purposes of eternal love, and invincibly ignorant of the fundamental truth that God is light and eternal light is prior and primary to all else, even its opposite.

Much of this I have thought and prayed, in a contemplative engagement with the texts of John's Gospel while working this tapestry, called "The Darkness Comprehendeth It Not." I began stitching on the edges and moved to the centre, all the threads mixed and varied and no thread self-coloured, each being mixed mostly of three colours of two strands each. The strong colour spectrum of the rainbow ellipse is deliberate, a striking and unsettling contrast, even though its darkest colours though muted, are woven through the darkness. The rayon threads of the rainbow are startlingly bright, and glimmer against the duller cotton; this is an attempt to capture the incomprehensible brilliance of the light that shines in the eternal Word become flesh, and whose light illumines all of life.

The pervasive recurrence of red signals the cost and consequence of light penetrating into the darkest places, and the promise of redemptive love expensively and expansively present no matter what. The rainbow evokes a whole spectrum of scripture, from Noah in Genesis, to Ezekiel's vision to the throne scene in Revelation 4. In Genesis it is promise, in Ezekiel majesty, in Revelation the it flares in the throne room, and in the midst of the throne, "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world". The red that permeates the darkness serves metaphysical and theological notice on all other accounts of reality and all other attempts to impose or banish the meaning of human existence. Stated with unabashed wonder by that other John in John's Gospel, the Baptist sees eternal truth incarnate in human history, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

The rainbow ellipse encloses much more muted shades and shadows, while nearer the centre still the metallic gold and silver inner ellipse surrounds the inner space in a chain of light. God's created world, fragile but fraught with divine purpose, fallen but not forsaken, is central to the redemptive purposes of the Father. The surrounding darkness is not absolute, but relative; the encircling rainbow is God's yes to his own purposes and the purpose of the Word become flesh, "I have come that you might have life, and have life more abundantly."; and that inner chain, the shining glory of love, truth and life resurrected, encircles a universe in which redemption is gift, reconciliation is accomplished, and life triumphs over death. And in that universe, the light goes on shining in the darkness, and the darkness has not, and will not, overcome it.,

None of this was thought out in detail beforehand, but evolved over the 10 weeks of working the tapestry. Looking at it now, as a finished piece of needle art, it offers another way of exploring the disconcerting ambiguity of John's text. Given the power and works of darkness in our own time, John;s words come to us again and again as words that see the world through a different lens.

Darkness is real; evil, lies, violence, cruelty, greed, death, all are real enough. But they are not ultimate, and their power is not final. Each has its antithesis, so that goodness, truth, peace, compassion, generosity, life, these are of the light, and these are the true reality…"and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

It's a while since I enjoyed a book so much. Beautifully written, honest about life experience and those inner levers that move us, the story of a search within the heart and mind, and out there on the moors of Assynt and around the Green Loch. It's also a memoir of Norman McCaig and that rich vein of mid to late 20th C Scottish poets whose work gives affirming depth and gently questioning pause to the experience of Scottishness.

What makes any one book especially enjoyable? If I start with this one, still fresh in my memory and much of its narrative drive and the sense of the characters still clear and defined, it has much to do with the writer's use of language. Other things, of course, matter. Content, structure, the pace and interest of the narrative drive, the attractiveness of the genre whether memorable memoir, perceptive life reflection, idiosyncratic tour guide, knowing and generous literary criticism – these are all important contributory factors.

But this book is well written. There are sentences that are all but unimprovable. There are longer descriptive paragraphs of landscape, or of observed human behaviour, or of remembered events that turned out to be life-changing, that invite the reader into areas of intimate experience and in which the writer trusts the reader to understand, or at least to respect what he is trying to put into words. All of this Greig does in this book, and to read it is to enjoy the use of words, to appreciate the necessary nuance and entrusted confidence required of a writer to bare his soul, and bear the consequences; that entrusted confidence has to find an answering sympathy from the reader, and when it does there is joy in the reading.

Woven into the narrative fabric of the book are episodes of Greig's own journey to the place where this book was written. These autobiographical reminiscences are neither self-indulgent nor superfluous. They are stranded together with recalled conversations with Norman MacCaig in Edinburgh, with the shared memories of the three friends who find their way to the Green Loch on a fishing quest, and with occasional poems and personal reflections of a writer at home with philosophy and with fly fishing and much in between.

But enjoyment of a book also has to do with its reflexive impact, with what it does to the reader. Reading at its best and most effective is a transformative experience of having our minds opened to new possibilities and perspectives; of being invited and at times compelled to think again about what we thought we were clear about; of being taken into confidence as someone tells us a truth they have found to be both new and necessary for a richer life; of being included in the story of three friends, their interwoven lives, and their hopes and failures, regrets and gratitudes.

In both these senses I enjoyed this book. The writing is warm and humane, learned without being fussy, moves easily from autobiography to landscape description, is written by a lover of Scotland and one who knows the feel of heather and hailstones, likes the taste of whisky and chocolate, is realistic about what a small country is and can be. Along the way Greig is disarmingly frank about his own journey through heather and hailstones in his personal life.

I bought it as a second-hand hardback and am glad of that, because there's something substantial in a HB book. It's a statement of intent to revisit a book made more durable to ensure the writing is protected and preserved for future reference. Often I compile my own index for a book I've read – this one has several page references well worth re-reading.