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Sometimes days don't start well. Then they get worse. Then you get ambushed by the realisation that how you look at the world is far too me-centered. Last Friday was an example of a day that started as a catena of inconveniences, and ended with the discovery that I'm not the most important person on the planet, or the country, or on the road. The cliché "wake up call" has become a cliché because it is overused and overstated, usually. But last Friday was a personal wake-up call, loud, piercing and for the past several days persisting in the memory.

Here's how the day went. It had been snowing, and the 2 or 3 inches of snow had melted and refrozen twice, and it was snowing again. It was the day for the Community Cafe in Montrose, and if the weather was ok, and the roads passable I'd do the 80 mile round trip. The first challenge was clearing the ice and snow from the car, without landing on my back. The road was wet ice and any purchase on the ice scraper channelled the energy to the legs which went sliding without permission in various directions. But I got it done. No way to drive the car up the slight incline. Only way to go was reverse very carefully to the junction behind, then take the car out the bottom way onto roads that were at least driveable. Managed all that and on my way.

Took the road through the city as the roads likely to be clearer. They were, but not much. By the time I got to Stonehaven, with about 22 miles to go I knew I'd need petrol in Montrose. At Inverbervie, with about 12 miles to go I came up behind several cars held back by a huge tractor and even huger dung spreader! No safe place to pass so 30 miles an hour all the way to Montrose. Except there had been an accident across the bridge on the north entry to the town and the traffic was queued back. No alternative route so just wait….and wait. Anyway, eventually got to the cafe, late but still plenty scones and coffee and folk.

On the way out, the traffic still tailing back from the bridge but eventually on our way home. A mile or two out of Montrose my petrol light came on! Oh sh…urely not! It said I had 24 miles to go – easily enough to get to Stonehaven. But the needle fell quickly and relentlessly so I'd need petrol in Inverbervie. Economic driving got me to Bervie – no petrol station! Four miles of petrol left, the clever wee digital thing warned and beeped. Too far to Stonehaven. Embarrassed, but self-justifying, I phoned the AA. Very helpful, they'd be with me in an hour. And he was – but he had no spare petrol so he went on up to Stonehaven and back for a gallon of petrol. Good, that would be easily enough fuel to get us to Westhill. Well, you'd think.

At Maryculter there's a diversion. A long diversion. Only way across the river, and the shortest way, is at Banchory. Petrol going down again, and no petrol stations on the south Deeside road till Banchory. But I make it, with dregs to spare, fillup with petrol and without any other delays get home by 4.30, only 3 hours late. Skating rink roads, outsized dung spreaders, grid locked traffic, self-inflicted petrol crisis, unplanned long diversion – plenty to complain about.

The wake-up call came within an hour of being home. Looking at the local news online, the explanation for the diversion was the death of a school bus driver in a three vehicle accident at Maryculter bridge. At that point the difficulties, problems, frustrations, annoyances or inconveniences of my own day, which had seemed to suggest some cosmic conspiracy aimed specifically at me, were put in perspective. And my self-absorbed inner rants reduced to ridiculous childishness, a mere tantrum in the face of a tragedy that was for very real.

Because this good man, a bus driver was doing his job getting young people to school. And the school they were going to was near Montrose, down the road I had just travelled. And a day that started normally, ended in tragedy. The papers tell us the driver's name, and that he was larger than life, well liked and well thought of by his young passengers. I grieve his death, and pray for his family, and those affected by an accident with widening ripples of sadness into the community.

John Donne wrote, " No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

I am not an island, a self-sufficient or self-important individual. None of us are. All the time life reminds us that we diminish ourselves the more selfish we become. In all the frustration and inner resentment at having had a hard day, I was unaware that elsewhere, a fellow human being, someone who lives in the same city, had been killed while doing his job, and I was annoyed at a mere diversion, a slow moving pungent smelling dung spreader and my own motoring incompetence.

So I pray for two things. A sense of proportion about what does and what doesn't matter in the living of our lives, which can be hard, tough, challenging or whatever. And secondly, for more compassion, patience, and perceptiveness about what is going on around me. In other words, having had a wake-up call, to waken up to life and to the  people who share it with me, known and unknown. And to love life, and love people, and learn again to live with all the inconveniences and compromises that are part of the deal in any worthwhile community. Because "any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."       

 

I've been reading Denise Levertov for around 30 years. That means by the time I started reading her she was in the last decade of a full, sometimes tempestuous, and increasingly fruitful yet not entirely fulfilled life; at least by her own over-hard personal standards and aspirations. Levertov died on December 19, 1997, almost exactly 20 years ago.

She was a poet, of course she was. But by that obvious observation I mean she had a deep sense of vocation to be a poet, a compelling sense of calling, an inner imperative, and with it a burden of responsibility to the world, and for the world's peace and flourishing. She was a poet and an activist, and mid-life the two fused into a poetry that addressed political and social issues from the perspectives of peace, justice and compassion for humanity. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, nuclear disarmament and nuclear deterrence, liberation theology and El Salvador, and the first Gulf War, together these events and movements provide a political chronology to be kept in mind in the reading of her poetry.

Alongside these is the personality and personal life of a woman whose background was rich in cultural resources: Jewish parents, Christianity of an Anglican flavour, English education, American immigrant, gifted in music, in younger years ambitious to excel in ballet dancing, and always, a reader who wrote and a writer who read widely, deeply and at times hungrily.

Her personal relations with family, lovers, friends, fellow poets and artists, publishers and correspondents were complex, at times volatile, ranging in intensity from lifelong faithfulness to serial fall outs and reconciliations. She was likeable and hard to get on with, demanding and generous, mercurial and compassionate, with a long memory both for kindnesses shown and for offences given.

Her poetry reflects all of this and it is the merit of this biography that her poetry is exploited as a primary hermeneutical lens through which to view her life. At the same time her life is both background and foreground in the overall appreciation and critical appropriation of her poetry.    

There are different kinds of biography. This one is a careful chronological study of Levertov's poetry in the context of her life, and of her inner life as revealed in the poetry. The result is a sympathetic, critical but friendly account of a poet who combines passion for social justice, integrity that acknowledges vulnerability as its price, and an approach to life that is satisfied if she can ask the right questions, and dissatisfied with inadequate answers no longer listening to the big questions. Her poetry moves between interrogative mood and affirmative mood.

Her late poetry gives the sense of having climbed the hill, and now being about to crest the horizon for the reward of the view. For that reason it is the second half of this book that gave me most satisfaction. I've read around quite a lot of the secondary literature on Levertov, including the very fine biography by Dana Greene, published almost concurrently with this one. Both Greene and Hollenberg provide rich context and lucid narrative, as in their different approaches they explore the mind and poetry of Levertov the woman, the poet, the activist and late in life, the Christian. But Hollenberg's slowed down narrrative of Levertov's turn towards Catholicism, and her exposition of that journey in the light of her poetry, is a rich and telling lesson in the importance of allowing Levertov's own voice to be heard.

From Oblique Prayers published in 1984 till her last volume published during her lifetime, Sands of the Well, Hollenberg like a good counsellor allows Levertov to tell her story and to explain her own inner life, in her own terms and words, and from her own unique and by no means safely orthodox experiences. Only then, and into the silence of trust between poet and biographer, does Hollenberg comment and seek to discern and construct a coherent narrative. I remember first reading Breathing the Water, a collection published in 1987, and including her series of poems on Julian of Norwich. The Revelations of Divine Love is a text I know well, and in which at times in my own life I have dwelt for weeks of slow reading. Levertov's Julian poems are amongst the most revealing of Levertov's own spiritual search, and are clear windows into the heart of Julian's theology. She clearly respects Julian's intellect, her courage as a woman writer in a man's world, and her confidence and intimacy even in the face of the Almighty – Julian too was unafraid of the big questions, and impatient with answers not enough to the point.

Hollenberg traces Levertov's journey through her engagement with Julian, her study of art and music, her meditations on biblical texts, late in life influenced by a long nine month daily engagement with Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. As a poet Levertov was well practiced in imagining context, conversations, relationships and the inner lives of those she studied, imagined and tried to understand. Her spiritual exercises during the long nine month engagement with Ignatius and her spiritual director, reinforced that capacity for meditative thought and imaginative writing exercised in precision of expression and spiritual integrity. Her late poetry, like Beethoven's late quartets, sound such depths of human hope and fear, love and loss, and resilience in face of tragedy, that the reader is plunged into the deep waters of self-reflection and deepened awareness of what is at stake in the living of a good, worthwhile and durable human life.

Much, in fact most, of my reading is for the joy of it. But I'm a preacher, and what I read becomes part of the furniture of my mind, both food for thought and food to nourish others. I read poetry to learn how to use words. I read poetry to have my imagination strengthened by the regular work-outs prescribed by demanding trainers. But I also read poetry because I know of very few alternative ways towards that inner enabling to see the world from multiple human perspectives so different from my own. Levertov reminds me every time I read her, of what matters in life, and why. 

It matters to me that I understand the world around me and that I should care about other people, other communities and other ways of being. War and violence, injustice whether economic, racist or religious, are too important to be left to the powerful, with no voices of dissent or reminders of accountability. And it matters that as a person of faith, a Christian who sees Jesus as the self-giving image of the love of God, I live a life that fulfils the outrageous claim of that hard to understand and therefore often misunderstood apostle Paul, that God has given to those who follow Jesus "the message of reconciliation" and a commission to be "ambassadors of Christ."

Denise Levertov moved in and out of faith for most of her life. But in that last decade she, in a deep and not to be sentimentalised sense, found her way home. Her late poetry is profoundly Christian, informed and inspired by the best texts, art and music, and often movingly, at times lyrically, expressed in the kind of poetry only she could have written. I'm deeply grateful to Hollenberg for a biography that does the usual things, but which also shows the patience of the good listener, and the love of the good interpreter.

The last sentence of this fine book is a cut gem of commendation: "Levertov's poetry enables us to see, to feel, to touch, to change, to grow. " I have found that to be true.

Donna Krolik Hollenberg, A Poet’s Revolution: The Life of Denise Levertov. (University of California Press, 2013).

 

Yesterday was Advent Sunday. The text for the day was the Prologue of John's Gospel. (Jn1.1-14) Wanting to explore the great paradox of the "outcast and stranger, Lord of all", I preached on John 1.14: "The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….and we beheld his glory….full of grace and truth."

What to make of the Colossians claim "He is the image of the invisible God". And how to understand the Hebrews prologue:"The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of God's being…" (Heb 1.3) These two verses are theologically implicated in John's Prologue with its vast window on to the cosmos, creation, light and darkness and the invasion of human history by the Word who was in the beginning with God. "The Word became flesh…lived amongst us…we beheld his glory",

So I reduced all that precise, sophisticated discourse to children's talk level. "Jesus is God’s selfie". That contemporary addiction to the smartphone as both mirror and camera gives us a way into the profoundest truth about God. Jesus is God's selfie.

Is that true? Or is that a sell-out of the rich content of our faith by trivialising truth for the sake of some connectedness to contemporary cultural addictions? Jesus is God's selfie. Is this children’s talk mode of the banal "that's a bit like Jesus" type? The Word became flesh…the image of the invisible God…the exact representation of God's being…". Jesus is God incarnate, embodied, humbled to human form. So, Jesus is God's selfie.

When you look at Jesus you see the face of God. The face of Jesus, that looks on harassed and helpless folk, like sheep without a shepherd, and feeds them; the face that looks on vulnerable people, anxious, frightened, confused, and says "I am the good shepherd"; or that looks on Jerusalem and weeps because it has no idea of the things that make for its peace; the face that looks on the Temple, the house of prayer overrun with consumerist commerce and financial services, and that face determined to overturn oppression wrecks the checkouts. Jesus is God's selfie. 

If Jesus is God's selfie, then it follows that by beholding him, listening to him, Jesus' words are heard as the words of the Word of God incarnate. In Genesis 1 God spoke and it was so. "The Word" from the very beginning is the creative word that accomplishes what it says. So Jesus' words have the accent and accomplishing power of God. "Come unto me all who labour…Son your sins are forgiven….God so loved the world…I if I be lifted up….. I am the resurrection…." What Jesus says echoes what God already says, accomplishes what God already purposes, and foregrounds the heart and thoughts of God for all he has created. Jesus is God's selfie.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who turns water into wine, so that the wedding isn't an embarrassment. The God who in Jesus is the bread of life broken, but who also takes bread and breaks it and feeds the hungry, and who takes bread and says this is my body.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who washes feet, even the feet of Judas; the God who looks power in the eye and face and says "You have has no power unless God gives it"; the God who prays for his enemies who are engineering his death with all the ruthless efficiency of Empire and the blind fear of a religion so under threat it validates violence.

Jesus is God's selfie, the God who dies for the sins of the world that whoever believes and trusts that love will not perish but have everlasting life. All of that is what John means, "The Word became flesh and lived amongst us….and we beheld his glory."

Advent is the time to remember who God is, and that Jesus is God incarnate. What we see in Jesus is God. In Jesus, God's selfie, “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…” The fullest revelation of God is in the humanity of Jesus, “outcast and stranger, Lord of all”. In Jesus God did something so completely new the world can never be the same. The world for all its powers and systems, its structures of control and ambitions towards absolute autonomy, can’t change what God has done and is doing by acting as if it never happened. Jesus, the image of the invisble God; Jesus the exact representation of God's being; Jesus, the Word made flesh; Jesus the light shining in the darkness. Jesus God's selfie.

These are Advent words loudly spoken. They try to put into words God’s final Word, who is the person Jesus. And it is this Jesus, incarnate, crucified, risen and coming, who calls us to a new advent, a new adventure.

Advent is the time when if we listen, behold, think outside the status quo and the givenness of things, we will hear God calling us to new directions, new commitments, new risks, new ways of loving the world as God does.

Earlier today I noticed two books sitting beside each other on my desk shelf. I've used both of them at different times in the past few days. But they aren't books you might expect to be comfortable in each other's company. What has Karl Barth in common with Julian of Norwich? Barth in  his entire Dogmatic project, and in his utter conviction that divine revelation is fully and finally Christological, was leary to the point of hostile towards mysticism and mystical experience.

For her part, Julian's theology and theological style was as far from post enlightenment dogmatics and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas as it's possible to be. Her Revelations are embedded in her deepest identity as "a simple unlearned creature", desiring to understand the Passion of Jesus and thus the love of God. She told these revelations in narrative form, as a series of visions, long contemplated and finally articulated in a work of astonishing beauty, insight and provocative theology. But her theology was profoundly and inescapably subjective. And for Barth all revelation is objective, and all we can ever know of God is by revelation, and that revelation is in the Word, Christ the word made flesh, and in the witness to the word, written and delivered to the church as Scripture.

Of course Julian was equally sure that her Revelations came from God, and their reality depended on their divine origin, and divinely revealed explanation. What we have in Karl Barth and the Lady Julian, are two minds wrestling with the mystery of the love of God, focused on the passion of Christ and the meaning of the cross, and wondering and wrestling with what God has done in Christ and for the world.

For Barth God is all in all; yet, for all her intense subjectivity and mystical ruminations, Julian believes nothing less. Here are her famous words that position her before God as one utterly dependent, and seeking to be utterly obedient:

God, of thy goodness, give me thyself;

for thou art enough for me,

and I can nothing ask that is less

that would be full worship to thee.

And if I ask anything that is less,

ever me wanteth;

for in thee only have I all.

Seven pages into the 800 page first volume on Reconciliation Barth says something theologically similar though in different, more complex, idiom which I have also written as prose poem:

"What unites God and us men

is that He does not will to be God without us,

that he creates us rather to share with us

and therefore with our being and life and act

His own incomparable being and life and act,

that he does not allow His history to be His and ours ours,

but causes them to take place in a common history."

What links these two fragments of theological writing is the common desire to give God his place, to let God be God, to live in an environment of doxology and prayer as the primary sphere and disposition within which to explore the ways of God with His world, especially as seen through the lens of the cross. I have read both Julian and Barth for years, yet I'm not sure I've ever quite grasped the way they share a deep and common crucicentric currency.

The differences in context between a medieval Catholic anchoress writing her spiritual narrative and visions in the vernacular, and a Swiss post-enlightenment Reformed dogmatician writing millions of words over half a century can be overplayed, as if a theological Grand Canyon had opened between them. Differences there are; but what intrigues me is the impact on both, of decades long intellectual and spiritual contemplation on the central mystery of the Christian faith. For both Barth and Julian, the Cross and the Passion of Christ are vividly portrayed and vitally felt both as theological conviction and spiritual experience. Moreover, for both, the Cross and Passion of Christ are the central convictions from which all else that is true of God is derived and must find congruent expression. Christian theology is in Julian and in Barth crucicentric.

Consequently, the human response to the grace revealed and enacted on the cross is self-surrender to the call of the Crucified to take up the cross and follow, to move into a new existence in a life of discipleship and reconciliation that is cruciform, informed and formed by long meditation on Christ crucified. To live in, to inhabit, the words written by another who had thought and prayed and gloried in the cross: "I am crucified with Christ. I live, yet not I, but Christ lives within me. And the life I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me."

So the accidental juxtaposition of two books, leads to this essay on two of the church's greatest theologian. They are so different that any comparison that brings them into some agreement might seem ludicrous; and perhaps that is the folly of the cross. That in Christ crucified Christians converge in the reconciliation of deep differences by the even deeper eternal mystery of God's redemptive ways with the world he created, and with humanity created in God's image and for God's glory, which will not be denied.

 

It takes a remarkable balance of capacities to be a farmer and a poet, to plough furrows and write essays, to plant seeds and select words that will grow in the mind and bear humane fruit. For as long as he can remember, Wendell Berry has been writing and cultivating, thinking and harvesting, practising a productive stewardship of the land and an equally productive stewardship of the language. This is a man at home on the farm and in the lecture room, who chooses to plough with horses and to write with a pencil, his deepest thoughts are passionately articulate and passionately agricultural. He is as careful of verbs and nouns and adjectives, as he is of soil, seeds and their fruit.

Coming towards Advent, and a liturgy formed around the ancient dualism of darkness and light, the tensions between light and darkness move towards resolution in the story of how "the true light that enlightens all humanity has come amongst us". What is both earth moving and mind shifting is the cosmic scale and world creating power of the language used in John chapter 1. Shining through the rhythmic prose of John's Prologue (ch1.1-18) are ideas of metaphysical brilliance written as conceptual theology in the form of poetry. The whole chapter moves towards the climactic paradox as the Eternal Creative Word becomes time-bound created flesh in the man Jesus who made his home amongst us.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us,… full of grace and truth." The connection between Wendell Berry and the Advent Adventure lies in that paradox. God comes not in words but in a Word. That Word comes in the form of a person, stepping into created relatedness with human beings. This person, Jesus, drinks wine at weddings, cries at missing his best friend's funeral, asks a woman for a drink of water, eats bread, shares bread and even says he is bread. The Eternal Creative Word walks in dust, but walks on water; enables the visually impaired to see, but radiates such luminous truth that those who think they see God's truth so clearly are blinded by a truth they refuse to recognise.

Few contemporary writers have thought so long and hard about the meaning of earth, as Wendell Berry. His poetry is soaked in images of soil and trees, land and woods, skies and mountains, seasons and the weather, horses ploughing and reaping. And all of these images have their daily reality in the life outdoors while also serving as lessons in husbandry of the earth, stewardship of the land, love of life, resistance to brutality, and respect for persons and creatures whose precious lives are both gift and responsibility not to be refused. In other words Berry's poetry is informed by environmental ethics, ecological wisdom, a lifetime's agricultural experience, and rests on a sub stratum of spiritual and moral conviction that this earth is gift to be cared for. Our planet is not our property and it is not a commodity; Earth is organic, living, and provides the soil on which we stand and the air we breathe. It is the God given environment within which created beings can grow, co-exist, discover the ways of justice, peace, mercy and generosity, and do so as wisely grateful stewards of a creationion we did not make and do not own.

And so from Berry to Advent. Because he sees the connection between the Word who became flesh, and the Word of whom it was written, "All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made." Advent and Creation belong together. There is an overwhelmng case for including praise for creation, and lament for human destructiveness in an Advent liturgy. Berry's poetry represents a lifetime's praise and lament, thanksgiving and confession, as he considers the plight of the earth, human responsibility, and the prophetic and urgent task of telling the truth that sets free, and noting and explicating the sins that are destroying our human home.

So here is one of Berry's poems. The light that gives life to everything on this planet is absorbed into the plants that we eat. The theme of light recurs in this poem, as metaphor for feeling bright and thinking gratefully as the mood and the prayer are "bright with praise of what I eat". And the last line contains the cultural converse of the greedy entitlement of the consumer who thinks nothing of what they eat other than as satiation of appetite. The moral imperative extends to how we eat what we eat, and how we view the world that is the farm of creation. 

Prayer After Eating

I have taken in the light

that quickened eye and leaf.

May my brain be bright with praise

of what I eat, in the brief blaze

of motion and of thought.

May I be worthy of my meat.

Wendell Berry is amongst the fellowship of gentle prophets who look on the life of the world with reverence for its mystery and the miracle of its ordinariness. I read him when I sense I'm looking at the world through eyes coloured by cynicism. And he never fails to rebuke the moral despair and spiritual accidie that are the eventual fruits of habitual cynicism. 

The following poem is about everyday sameness redeemed by alertness to newness. What I gain from reading a poem like this is a fresh call to pay attention to my life and to see the minute changes that alter the landscape, whether within or outside. Indeed it is one of Wendell Berry's gifts to show the connectedness between our inner climate and our intentional attentiveness to the outer climate of succeeding seasons, and the rhythm of changes in a world awash with wonder – if we have the time and inclination to notice it. 

Travelling Home, Wendell Berry

Even in a country you know by heart
it's hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction. The
natural correction is to make intent
of accident. To get back before dark
is the art of going.

Advent is coming. It's the season of anticipation, watchfulness, alertness for the signs of coming change. Advent is the liturgical contradiction of that attitude that wearily iterates the cliche "same old, same old". The great Advent adventure is that God is coming.

Prophets' promises are coming to fulfilment.

Notice is served on the status quo.

Same old, same old is being rendered obsolete, contradicted by a much more urgent, immediate and durable reality. "For unto us a child is born…" "Emmanuel, God with us." "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us…" Advent is an annual reminder that nothing is forever, except God and all to which God gives life and sustenance.

So when Wendell Berry's poem is read the week leading to Advent I'm reading into it deeper meanings than perhaps he intended. Though Berry is not averse to a sense of the transcendent. he is open to those possibilities that expand human potential, to that which comes from outside our own limited sceme of things, that which enlarges our own constrained visions, that which creatively disrupts the sameness of our routines, those interventions which interrupt all those plans and goals of ours, that are simply too tired and self-serving.

Advent ensures we don't go the same way twice, unless we choose to.

Advent offers the possibility that the life of our going changes, and new ways open up.

Advent is when we celebrate the God who in humility and utter love creates a "natural connection to make intent of accident."

And because Advent is about light, lots and lots of light, that final sentence in his poem is, well, pure Advent!

"To get back before dark is the art of going".

"The true light that enlightens everyone was coming into the world…."

"The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not…" 

I've just finished watching The Blue Planet II episode tonight. It was exhilarating and heartbreaking; it was wonderful and shameful; I was delighted and outraged. If you watched it you'll know why. If you didn't, then you owe it to yourself to do so. And yes, here comes the spoiler, the last 5 minutes were shocking. Or at least any human being with a sense of oneness with the world around us, with compassion for the creatures who share this planet with us, with even a modest level of ethical sense or moral principle, would and should be shocked.

For several minutes, while David Attenborough narrated and described the scene, we saw a pod of pilot whales, visibly distressed at the death of a whale calf. The mother had been carrying it around for days. It had died of plastic poisoning, possibly through drinking the milk of a contaminated mother. Rarely, in a longish life of watching nature programmes have I sensed the power of the parable enacted by creatures, nor felt more the potent force of reality brought into the living room through these beautiful creatures performing what can only be described as a dance of lament.

I am unashamedly a biblical theologian, that is, one whose theology as a Christian is rooted in and shaped by ancient texts as they bear witness to Jesus Christ. And when it comes to the world around us, nature, the environment, human stewardship and human agency in the way we treat the earth – all these things are held together in my mind by the doctrine of creation. This isn't about the conflict of science and the Bible, evolution versus creation. I am after bigger fish. This is about what happens when human power and human know how and human technology combine to release the forces that answer to human greed, undermine ethical constraints, and see the world as one global commodity market, and the earth's resources as an infinite source of all we want, all we need, all we can grab, all we can sell, all we can use and all we can waste.

No. I don't expect everyone to share my outrage and sadness, or my anger and shame. But I do expect anyone who half way claims to think Christianly and to read the Bible seriously, to think about what we are doing to our planet and home, and ask if this is what God the Creator intended and intends. For a start the Psalms with their delight in the sheer exuberance and diversity and life affirming extravagance of the world God has made. Then the book of Job with its final chapters where God dares anyone to understand the universe more deeply, love the Creation more profoundly, care for our earth and its creatures more compassionately. For good measure Jesus' teaching and handling of food and water, observation of birds and flowers, and in an oblique throwaway comment that should make anyone who takes Jesus seriously stop and gulp; "Are not five sparrows sold for a penny. Yet not one of them falls to the ground but your heavenly Father sees it."

So what about a pilot whale calf? Does God see it? What does God think? And a pod of mammals so deeply affected you can see it in their behaviour and body movements? Is God's compassion for the whales too? Whatever else The Blue Planet II has shown us, it has shown us ourselves. We are mirrored in the environment we pollute. And our judgement before God is all tied up with what we do about the damage we are doing. "All tied up" is a deliberate choice of terminology – its reference to the turtle also seen in tonight's episode, all tied up in frayed plastic rope, and without hope.

What to do? It will take political will pushed by the impetus of political change to move away from plastics, to begin to limit industrial pollution of the rivers, land and seas, to dethrone the idols of consumerist growth, to change the mindset of mechanised exploitation and national self interest, without stewardship or thought for the environmental consequences. Each of us will have our arguments, and counter arguments. But I defy anyone to watch those five minutes when the choreographed grief of pilot whales conveyed the anguish of our planet, without feeling ashamed of our species. And further I defy anyone who claims to takes the Bible with any kind of seriousness as a way of knowing the ways of God, and to watch those whales without feeling this is wrong.And awakening to the knowledge that our own hearts are echoing the broken heart cry of creation articulated by those beautiful creatures.

The Moor, R S Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

Reading and re-reading 'The Moor' is both unsettling and reassuring. Unsettling because the poet recalls a memory of encounter with "whatever God was there", yet that brooding sense of presence seems accidental, incidental, one of those moments which are given and cannot be contrived, and when the one encountered is as yet unknown. Reassuring because throughout the poem there are clues of a grace which is both pervasive and elusive, drawing from the poet, gestures of reverence which set the mood for prayer, though prayers are neither said nor required. In the poem divine grace and human reverence drift like water-bearing mist, seeping with promise, and slowly settling over empty moorland in need of refreshment. 

The moor itself is not explicitly mentioned in the body of the poem. Instead what is described is response to the moor, a range of human feelings gathered into an inner stillness, and then rippled over by the restless presence of "whatever God was there". "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but know not whither it cometh or whither it goeth." (John 3.8 KJV) Only near the end of the poem does the poet move, and walk on; most of the poem describes stillness, silence, and passions reducing to passivity. At the same time, and in contrast to humanly achieved quietness,  Thomas uses the same image of the moor's wild emptiness to describe what was like a church to him. Entering on soft foot may suggest unshod feet, perhaps Thomas is hinting at another wild place with holy ground.

'The Moor' compels softness of step, respect for silence, and due deference of "cap in the hand." The "breath held like a cap in the hand" is yet another biblical hint, this time to those first God-given breaths that animated the first humans; and being dependent on God for breath, the cap in hand is both respectful deference and humble asking, cap in hand.

On that first step onto the moor feelings overwhelm and tears well up at the sense of being called to attentiveness by the rippling waves of grass orchestrated by "the wind that bloweth where it listeth". The sight moves the poet to tears, perhaps of longing and loss, perhaps of gift and gratitude, because in every human life, at different times, both are the work of the heart.

How does "stillness of the heart's passions" become "praise enough"? Perhaps if, and only if, having stepped softly onto the moor,  the poet, and any one of us, take time to see, to feel, to attend to the presence that can be absence.

And that only happens when we hear the commanding imperative, "Be still and know that I am God." The "breath held" suggests an instinctive urge to silence, reinforced by the following abrupt line, "It was quiet". Imposed silence prepares the reader for that particular stillness when the heart's passions subside. Only in such stillness will God make himself felt, if at all. Incidentally Thomas was steeped in the Bible, and this poem could usefully be printed with a sidebar of biblical references, which would include Psalm 46.10 with its command "Be still and know…" as well as references to the Gospels, Genesis, Exodus and Psalms.

"The mind's cession of its kingdom" is the severe self-denying ordinance of a poet suspicious of the totalising claims of rationality, while yet being deeply interested in the intersections of science and religion, and the relation of nature to God, and the attempted rapprochement of honest doubt towards what might constitute an honest faith. But the "cession of the mind's kingdom" also recalls the warnings of Jesus about just who will enter the Kingdom of God. And it is precisely those who cede the mind's kingdom, and who thereby become as little children, hungry to learn, willing to trust and open to growth.

"I walked on, simple and poor…" is a resolution surely reminiscent of the pilgrim, the travelling troubadour, indeed the disciples in the Gospels taking no heed of clothing or money, but choosing to be simple, poor followers on the way, trudging behind the One who had called them to a "cession of the mind's kingdom" and the carrying of a cross into the Kingdom of God.

And as they walked the air crumbled and broke on them generously as bread. The Eucharist is one of the theological constants in Thomas's poetry, the central act of his priesthood, and bread a richly textured and recurring theme. In an early poem 'Bread', Thomas explored the contrasting experiences of hunger and having bread. The poem is also about prayer, and how whether we get what we pray for or no, when we rise from prayer something inexplicable as grace happens. The poem ends loudly echoing resurrection:

…rising he broke

Like sun crumbling the gold air

The live bread for the starved folk.  (Collected Poems, page 93)

Bread crumbles and is broken in order to be shared, and the Eucharist both celebrates and performs that act of self-giving in love and ministry to the people who take in their hands the crumbled bread, and discover in the generosity of bread, the hospitality of God. In the early poems Thomas evokes the 'bread of life' and 'the bread of love', crumbling and crumbled in the Eucharist.

The two stanzas of 'The Moor' are about a wild untamed place which feels like a church, but the poet's experience of stepping onto the moor caused a perplexing loss of the familiar to which his response is wonder edged with that fear which is the beginning of wisdom. Echoing some of his own earlier poems, laced with biblical allusions and clues, the poem is an atmospheric account of one man's discovery that sometimes, without our planning it or even wanting it, prayer happens. Our restlessness is stilled, we stand cap in hand, eyes moistened by the moment, the heart's passions subdued to deeper purpose, and before we know it "the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."  

"It was like a church to me." In a much later poem included in Counterpoint (1990), Thomas brings together modern compromises of faith, scornful regret for an ailing church, and his defiant often quarrelsome faith that at the heart of all things is the Cross, and therefore at the heart of the Church, eucharist.

We have over-furnished

our faith. Our churches

are as limousines in the procession

towards heaven. But the verities

remain: a de-nuclearised

cross, uncontaminated

by our coinage: the chalice’s

ichor; and one crumb of bread

on the tongue for the bird like

intelligence to be made tame by.              (Collected Later Poems page 105)

But the verities remain…", Rising he broke, like sun crumbling the gold air, the live bread for starving folk,… one crumb of bread on the tongue… I walked on, simple and poor, while the air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread.   

"Prayer is the soul's sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed…"

That is the opening couplet to one of the finest hymns in the English language, a concise and generous exploration of the kaleidoscope experience of Christian prayer. I mention this hymn here because a number of the words and ideas used by its author, James Montgomery, have significant echoes in the poem "The Moor" by R S Thomas. It is likely that Thomas knew, and even sang Montgomery's hymn. Reading hymn and poem together, several parallels in thought may be traceable, though I think it very unlikely Thomas was in any conscious sense borrowing from Montgomery.

Rather, these two authors were men for whom prayer was a complex form of communication with the Divine, and required the full range of human sensibility, capacity and affective responses. When they tried to articulate the inexpressible and sometimes all but inaccessible truth of communing woth God, and when they attempted any adequate description of experiences both diverse and ambiguous, they settled for oblique references rather than direct definition. In doing so they created space for prayer to be far more than liturgical carefulness or extempore verbalising. Prayer has to be understood on the scale of God rather than reduced to manageable human tidiness. There has to be room for risk, unpredictablity, wildness, and times of silence, absence, unexpected dislocations and surprising revelations of God and world and the heart that dares to pray.

In other words prayer needn't always require words or form. Often without giving a thought to God the experience of God's presence or absence is signalled in the ordinary moments and days of human experience; but also, even if occasionally, when prayer may be furthest from our minds, a presence is intimated in times and places surprising, extraordinary, frightening or consoling.

Before turning to Thomas's poem it is worth pondering several of Montogomery's words and phrases. Prayer happens when "sincere desire" distils into the concentrate of what ultimately we give our heart to. It might find words, or it may simply be whatever it is that sets our heart on fire, with anticipation and with longing. Desire is not wrong; in fact we are more likely to die of complacency than passion. But desire what? Montgomery doesn't say. "The burden of a sigh" is the body language of sadness; can sadness be prayer, with or without words? "The upward glancing of an eye" is that instinctive acknowledgement that however clever, resourceful, vulnerable or empty we are, beyond our own horizons is a mercy and grace all but invisible, but on which we depend, all the while hoping it is dependable. We live by breathing air and oxygen; Montgomery crafts a couplet that uses that hard reality of existence to make prayer a matter of life and death:

"Prayer is the Christian's vital breath,

The Christian's native air,…"

The echoes of God breathing into the first human beings to make them living souls are unmistakable, and intended. "Native air" is about feeling at home, the smells, the taste, the familiarity, the sense that this is what, and this is where, and this is who, we are made for. In all these phrases there is a reluctance to closely define prayer, even less an interest in creating a doctrine of prayer. Instead human experience of longings articulate and inarticulate, of anxiety that troubles and sadness that burdens, of speech both simple and exalted. Even the deeply human lifegiving yet all but unconscious rhythm of breathing by the contraction and expansion of muscles. Each of these is something like what it is to pray. Prayer is more than any of them, more even than the sum of them, but each of them is capable of reminding us of our capax dei, our capacity for God.

With those thoughts – that prayer can erupt from nowhere, often needs no words, is initiated from outside of us by One we neither control by our will nor constrain by our words, and that prayer is more about desires and tears, our praise and penitence, and that prayer is as natural as breathing and as necessary to life as air – with such thoughts, now read R S Thomas's poem about "The Moor", and hear faint echoes of Montgomery's words.

And to say it again, those echoes are not set up by any conscious borrowing on Thomas's part. The explanation lies in the rich common discourse and reserve of men like Montgomery and Thomas (and George Herbert, but that's another story). Such poets refused to define prayer because in so doing they would be in danger of defining too closely the God who both initiates and answers our prayers, who ambushes when we are not looking, and interrupts when we are speaking and not listening.

This is the God who may choose to be present or absent, and whose choices must always be according to a will that is beyond our understanding but is known to be gracious and generous; a God whose love when felt brings " a moistening of the eye…", and who is ever and forever in the background and foreground of our lives, the proof of which is in those moments when the "air crumbled and broke on me generously as bread."  

The Moor, R S Thomas

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God was there made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In movement of the wind over grass.