"For a number of reasons I have been feeling deeply lately."

I put the quotation marks around that first sentence because I want to think about what it says, and why I wrote it. Feeling deeply is one of those neutral phrases, given its edge and direction by naming what it is that creates or causes deep feeling. The metaphor of depth – like deep water, deep space, deep thought, is intended to convey seriousness, the opposite of superficial; profundity in contrast to shallowness, of lasting worth and weight rather than transience, feelings that endure and have to be endured.

In a revealing essay Denise Levertov tells her friend, "we [human beings] are not that different from one another at the deepest levels. In fact, it is precisely at the deepest levels that we are most alike." Here Levertov identifies a peculiar and precious quality of human relationships. She refers to those resonances we feel when in our deepest experiences, our in-depth moments, we know we are not alone; others have felt this too. The French existentialist philosopher-pilot and novelist, Saint Exupery, considered suffering to consist of the vibrations of the soul that remind us that we are alive and that we are human.

The slightly embarrassing confession that lately "I have been feeling deeply", is best understood against those kinds of thoughts. Over the last several months, within my personal circle of friends, we have journeyed through long debilitating illness, bereavement, newly diagnosed conditions that have forced life changes, people striving against the inner darkness and coldness of depression, or living through the bleak haze of the isolation and shame of mental ill health.

Being a friend is one of the highest callings on our time and energy, our money and our possessions. At least it seems so to me. I hope that more often than not, I hold to Levertov's insight that at the deepest levels we are most human and most alike, and because of that, when I feel deeply I place myself in imagination in the place where my friends live. And consequently I pray too, that in doing so, their suffering and my longing to ease it, share it, lift it, or bear it for them, that such deep feelings are themselves prayers. And as that brilliant agnostic Saint Exupery wrote, not knowing he was describing empathy as prayer, I pray too that the vibrations in my soul that their suffering sets off become reminders to me, and in ways wrapped in mystery and grace, become also to them, intimations of what it means to be most fully human and most fully alive.

One of the reasons I read Levertov, regularly and deeply, is because she not only understands deep feelings; she articulates them, or better, she exegetes them, shows what they are, and explains in much of her poetry how they give the thickening texture to love and compassion, sorrow and sadness, joy and hopefulness. In one place she says to be human is to drift on "murmuring currents of doubt and praise", and to "kneel in awe and beauty." We are mortal, vulnerable to time and circumstance, created in the image of God who is eternal love, and thus made capable ourselves of such love as makes bereavement and grief inevitable, suffering and sorrow inescapable, and at times life all but unbearable.

To contemplate our own feelings, and analyse what "feeling deeply" means, can easily become selfish indulgence, surrendering to the whispering temptations to self-importance, and anxious to preserve our own souls from a too costly encounter with the pain of others. On the other hand, to reflect on our deepest feelings, especially those we experience on behalf of others, whose suffering and struggles and sorrows we know, and choose to bear, that is neither selfishness nor indulgence. It is, or can become through such contemplative 'unselfing', prayer as passion, perhaps even prayer as passionate identification with the Passion of Christ and taking up the cross and condition of those we love.

When Paul talked of filling up the sufferings of Christ he spoke of what he barely grasped, and hardly dared give words. Nevertheless, he spoke of the final realities which intersected at the Cross, the nexus of time and eternity, where love with open arms eclipsed hate, mercy absorbed judgement, and suffering redeemed suffering by bearing it. There, at the Cross, God in Christ felt deeply, the sin of the world, felt more deeply still love infinite in mercy for that same world, and then in the desolation of loss and God-forsakenness, Jesus the Christ, the Word become flesh of our flesh, descended to death and the final relinquishment of all feeling. 

Is that too theologically stretched, to compare feeling deeply with the anguish of God in Christ? Perhaps. But at times of grief and sorrow and sadness, when deep feelings of sympathy and love for others preoccupies the mind and sets up those humanising vibrations in the soul, there is an inclination, an inner turning towards that one place where all of this is understood in the deep recesses of the divine life of the Triune God. That is, for me at least, the place where when feeling deeply, I am confident of being understood, and under-girded.  

Essays. The word is a reminder of student days with looming deadlines and frantic accumulation of words to meet the word count. But the essay is an important way of thinking. A good essay assignment provides a laboratory for thought, with limiting parameters which focus the subject and discourage irrelevance, diversions and imbalance. Books of essays therefore tend to be repositories of crisp, lucid, concentrated, considered writing. They may be organised under an overarching theme, or strung like pearls according to size and subject fit, or they are all written by the same person and their particular style, interests and writing goals make them self-selecting.

I like reading essays. Whether books of essays by one author, Journal articles pushing the boundaries of the discipline, Feschriften honouring the life work of distinguished scholars, or papers published post- conferences on whatever. The variety of writers in essay collections enriches perspectives, provides variety of approach, or specific examples of in-depth study of the detail in a restricted and specific small corner of what may be an enormous subject. On the other hand a book of essays by the same author gives access to the thought forms and intellectual wrestlings of one mind, either over the range of a subject or over a period of time as thought has gestated, germinated and grown.

Currently I'm reading the essays of Marilynne Robinson. If you haven't heard of her she is the author of the novels Gilead and Lila. If you haven't heard of them, treat yourself to storytelling that combines the sharp wisdom of a compassionate philosopher, the honest observation of someone who loves humanity and likes human beings, and who quite naturally tells her stories with God on or just over the horizons. Robinson is a theologian, a public intellectual, a precise and observant critic of contemporary Western culture, in all its unpredictable ebb and flow. Her standpoint is unabashedly Christian, and her criteria for what is good and worth defending are rooted in a moral philosophy informed by wide reading across the major humanities and sciences. She is not an easy read. She is a tough thinker who feels deeply, and an author who expects her readers to feel the effects of the workout in the muscles of the mind, not always used to such strenuous effort. But the effort is worth it. 

If you want self-help positivity, look elsewhere. If thinking about what it means to be human, and to wrestle with the mystery and joy and terror of existence, is too much like hard work, stick with tweets, memes and feel-good literature. If the reality of a world drifting dangerously close to self-harm seems mere scaremongering, and you prefer the alternative and virtural realities churned out for our comfort and to keep our complacency levels viable, then Robinson's wisdom won't help you, even though one of her heroes diagnosed your condition decades ago: "humankind cannot stand too much reality." (T S Eliot).

But if you're tired of cheap consoling clichés, perplexed by the unravelling of local and global communities, open to analyses of our cultural shifts that pays serious attention to history, literature, religion and humane learning, then read Marilynne Robinson's essays. They are astringent in their criticism, both cleansing and  stinging. She cares deeply and patiently for human goodness, and believes it is found in human communities, from households to villages, from cities to countries. She is unafraid of the conversation that must take place between science and religion, and she is a wonderful facilitator in that conversation. She knows that liberal democarcy is in trouble, and knows at least some of the reasons, and a few possible remedies. Read her, and ponder the wisdom which is built on foundation pillars plunged deep into the bedrock of a faith at home in the Bible, articulated in reasoned conversation, funded by humane learning, and which is tempered by reverence, awe and a simmering joy in the wonder of things viewed from the truth that God is.   

Here are some points to ponder from her book When I was a Child I Read Books

"In my Bible Jesus does not say, I was hungry and you fed me, though not in such a way as to interfere with free market principles." (139)

"It is very much in the gift of the community to enrich individual lives, and it is in the gift of any individual to enlarge and enrich community. The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another."(33)

"Wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one's own inevitable share in human fallibility." (27)

"I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification." (21)

"At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which taken together make the world salubrious, savory and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental." (93)

"I think it is a universal sorrow that society, in every form in which it has ever existed, precludes and forecloses much that we find loveliest and most ingratiating in others and in ourselves. Rousseau said men are born free, yet everywhere they are in chains. Since the time of the Hebrew prophets it has been the role of the outsider to loosen these chains, or lengthen them, if only by bringing the rumor of a life lived otherwise." (92-3)

Sometimes the Apostle Paul leaves you no room for maneouvre. LIke a playground tough guy he backs you to the wall and is in your face with his face. The same zeal and uncompromising demanding strictures that made him a persecutor of Christians in the first place, can sometimes make him sound like some spiritual absolutist, even a religious bully.

"I consider everything as loss for the sake of Christ" he writes, with a force that make you wonder if he snapped his stylus writing that. All the advantages and  status of being a highly educated, publicly approved, validated and authorised religious policeman he now considers rubbish – and that word rubbish is a euphemism for what the older translation called, in a less sqeamish word, dung. 

That's why reading Paul is an exercise in astringent theology. None of the soft theology of self-care masking our hunger for spiritual convenience; no concessions to the slow, the sensitive or the moderate who might be put off by too much promised discomfort; not a minute's consideration of those who might want to be reasonable and comfortable and at least take their time to think it through. No. Just the starkly stated absolutes. All. Everything. Nothing.

But the key to understanding Paul is to recognise that his greatest absolute was Christ, the one who apprehended him, arrested him, stopped him in his tracks, confronted him with the monster he was becoming with the question, "Why are you persecuting me?"

In most of his letters Paul takes off in flights of theological vision about this Christ who is cosmic in reach and grasp, eternal in purpose and perspective; this one who is equal with God yet surrendering all claims for the sake of a love that would stop at nothing to love a broken creation back to wholeness, and love God's alienated children back to friendship with God. Over years, Paul forged vast theological words like reconciliation, grace, redemption, faith, justification, sin, forgiveness, hope, kenosis, parousia and poured into them all the passion and pain of the story of God, revealed in Jesus, incarnate, crucified and risen.

Late in life, by the time he is writing Philippians, Paul knows he's no longer playing a game of averages or varied options, as if there was the luxury of selecting a suitable worldview from the supermarket of Greco-Roman religions and philosophies. He's on trial for his life, and when that happens most folk, Paul included, begin to wonder what that life has been about, what matters and what matters most. Hence the strong words and unyielding conviction. Christ is everything, and since that absolute reversal of direction on Damascus, he has known that he absolutely belongs to Christ. His whole life meaning is derived from that hinge moment of soul interrogation – "Saul, Saul why are you killing me?"

Ever since, all faith-seeking and faithful and even faith-struggling readers of Paul are likewise questioned about their seriousness of purpose, faithfulness to calling, and responsiveness to the One whose death makes other lives, like ours, worth living. He discovered something cross-carrying Christians inevitably come to know. It is Christ who turns work into service, career into calling, vitality into vocation. It is the life of Christ lived in us that transforms personality, shapes and conforms character to Christlikeness. It is the love of Christ that constrains us, compels us, controls us so that there is a Christ echo in our voice and words, a Christ image in our actions, a Christ love in our relationships, hints and clues and glimpses of God at work in ways beyond our own ability, touching us with grace and teaching us of hope and peace and forgiveness. In other words, slowly and maybe reluctantly, sporadially but repeatedly, we are learning in our own way to say, "For me to live is Christ."  

The footage from Spain is shocking. Violence against a State's own citizens holding an illegal, and therefore non binding Referendum, is not a defence of Democracy. It is an abuse of power to prevent an opinion poll.

If Spain is so confident of the outcome being the status quo, why the extreme measures against unarmed citizens?

The silence of the EU is deafening. Under Article 7 they can call Spain to account for breach of the values of Article 2, which reads in part, Article 2 "The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities."

What I saw on News footage bears no relation to these values.

Last night I watched "Denial", the film version of the trial of David Irving. A BBC production, it should have had all the characteristics of a well researched, cleverly scripted docu-drama powerfully portrayed by a superb cast. In fact it was a mixed experience, at times overacted, unnecessarily reducing Irving to more of a caricature than he really is, and the scriptwriter playing a number of emotional cards that were at odds with the ruthless rationality of the legal team acting as defence.

In 1998 Irving brought a libel case against Deborah Lipstadt, an American Professor of Holocaust Studies whom Irving accused of ruining his reputation as an historian. The defence case was based on exposing Irving's programmatic, ideological and deliberate revision of historical facts and evidence, and also proving that the Holocaust did in fact happen.The core of the film takes place in the courtroom, so that, having known and followed the real case twenty years ago, the outcome of the film is already known.

Timothy Spall as Irving came across as an intellectual chameleon, saying one thing in his writing, then defending it in court by revising it further and further away from what he had originally written. But what remained unchanged was his ideological commitment to revising the history of the Third Reich, Nazism, Hitler, and the Holocaust, in particular, Auschwitz. Spall's portrayal was a mixture of eccentric buffoon, sham academic, sinister supremacist, racist, and slightly perplexed citizen wondering why freedom of speech did not extend to his opinions, historical judgements and public statements. 

Rachel Weisz as Professor Lipstadt conveyed something of the intellectual energy and moral passion that drives scholars of events so pivotal in recent human history as Holocaust Studies. Yet sidelined for legal reasons, the script at key moments struggled to give her convincing opportunity to express that intellectual and moral energy. She wins no arguments about how the case is to be handled; when stressed she goes running unaccompanied in central London, at night, despite the hate speech and demonstrations aimed at her each time she enters the court; and her own inner life as a Jewish scholar is rarely evident.

The strongest link in the drama is her QC played by Tom Wilkinson. The exchanges with Irving in the film are psychologically convincing, and emotionally persuasive in the two voices, one cavalier and confidently convinced by his own ideology, the other patiently laying the charges outside the gates that will demolish the fundamental credibility and intellectual integrity of Irving's entire written corpus.

I have long had an interest in Holocaust Studies and remember the furore Irving created in the 1990's, and again when he was jailed for Holocaust denial in Austria. What this film does, despite the flaws, is show us the sinister underside of fake news, hate driven ideology, and revision of history as a programmatic exercise in persuasion. Yet more serious still than these grave dangers, the film comes as a warning of what happens when anti-semitism, racism, and white supremacism are confronted by mere law. The law can find against it; it cannot eradicate it, or persuade those who hold such beliefs that they are morally wrong or their views intellectually untenable, or legally disqualified, or politically toxic. That is a matter for much deeper reflection for a society like ours, now busy redefining the moral and social parameters within which we will all have to live.

Holocaust Studies is now an established area of historical research and reflection. The Holocaust itself remains a powerful generative event inspiring novels, poetry, art, films, music, documentaries, as well as academic study, writing and further reflection. The time is soon coming when there will be no survivors, therefore no witnesses, and there will remain those whose ideological goal is the elimination of the Holocaust from the historic record, or a diminishing of its significance, or reinterpreting of it as less evil than it was in fact and in reality. For those reasons one comment in the film, made by the QC played by Tom Wilkinson, standing in the delousing chamber at Auschwitz, and asking a question that should have been addressed decades ago, and is more urgent now: Why has there never been a proper internationally sponsored scientific, forensic and historically documented study of the very evidence Holocaust deniers deny exists? In our time, in the zeitgeist of a resurgent nationalistic Right in Europe, the securing of that scientific, forensic, historic, documented evidence is becoming increasingly urgent. Lest we forget; lest we fail to remember. Lest memory be erased.

Back in July Sheila and I came across this Ringlet butterfly on a walk near Drum Castle. A relative newcomer to the North East, it used to only come as far north as southern Scotland. Another moment of wonder at the extraordinary beauty of the apparently ordinary.

Then there is the Red Admiral, apparently doing well this summer despite the wet climate. The combination of resilience and fragility in these lovely creatures has the interesting effect of lifting the spirits towards the same carefree happenstance of enjoying whatever comes wherever we go.

There's a pivotal scene in Patch Adams where Robin Williams' character, facing expulsion from medical school flirts on the edge of a cliff wondering if he would, should, could jump. And a butterfly lands on his hand, triggering a conversation with whatever God does or doesn't work in or through or against the ins and outs of human experience. It's a telling reminder of how random loveliness subverts our cynicism and helps us re-engage with a world that has hurt us.

Amongst my favourite writers of English prose is John Ruskin. And amongst my favourite sights when out walking is lichen, in all its varieties of colour, location, texture and shape. Walking along from Findochty earlier this week I took time to notice, attend to, admire, wonder, at the intricacy and durability of those botanical miracles. I still remember coming across these sentences from Ruskin in an anthology, and feeling then, as now, his power of description and emotional impression, distilled essence of Victorian linguistic enthusiasm, only just restrained.

No words that I know of will say what mosses and lichens are. None are delicate enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass – the traceries  of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, aborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace…

 Yet as in one sense the humblest, in nother they are the most honoured of the earth children. Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow fingered, constant hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of the cowslip god – far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

This past week I've been staying in the small Moray fishing village of Findochty. Once you come down the hill into the harbour area there are rocks and cliffs on both sides, a marina filled with yachts and some fishing boats, and the church on the hill. There are several places of worship still going here, though most are more or less declining. The usual narrative of church atrophy, younger people moving away, and the older generations for whom church mattered and faith gave life some anchorage, and God was a living reality in life, are slowly, and literally, dying out. 

And yet. Walking along the edge of the sea, away from the village, and looking back, there is the church, and it has been there a long time. This particular building at least from 1863. In the vestibule is a horn that was used to call people to worship from 1863 till 1893, when the bell tower was built. Also in the vestibule is a memorial to the remarkable minister of this parish who served for 38 years. The Rev John Wesley McKee clearly won the hearts and the love and respect of the congregation. He was well named and I'm left wondering about that unabashed Methodist brand name shop windowed in a presbyterian church.

Those who are in ministry will have some idea of what it meant in faithfulness, self-expenditure, frustration, investment in a community, and the daily struggle to hold on to his own faith, while fulfilling a calling to support and accompany others on their faith journey.The ministry of the Gospel, the calling of ministry, the life dedicated to Christ, the daily carrying of the cross – whatever phrase we use, we are describing something that invites respect, reflection, and gratitude. The congregation which had this stone erected were placing on permanent record, "This was our minister, our friend, and companion in grace, grief and gratitude."

In the 19th and 20th Century, a fishing town was a place familiar with hardship, risk, danger, and sometimes catastrophe. Along the fishing coasts of Scotland especially until recent years, boats were lost, lives were lost and many a family broken by tragedy at sea. The minister in such a place and at such a time was the primary spiritual resource, and the first recourse for support. What that took out of Rev McKee over 38 years only God knows. But God does know, and his people clearly had a good idea as well. 

So walking along the coast line tonight I took a photo of the church in which the good Rev John Wesley McKee served, and I gave thanks for a legacy of that stern piety and strong love that had bound minister and community for so long, through so much, at such cost, and such blessing. It was shining white against a darkened sky. In an age of selfie addiction, it is an act of corrective protest when a camera is used to celebrate selflessness. At a time when the church faces challenges and changes that will rock it to its foundations, more than ever, the image of this wee church is a sign of faith's defiance, built as it is on rock, perched above and beside the power and relentless restlessness of the sea.

T S Eliot wrote presciently of the church surrounded by a sea of secular pressures and forces hostile to the love, peace and hope of the Gospel. "The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without." (The Rock) Yes indeed, and whatever other "missional strategies" are imagined, dreamed up, entrusted as techniques of ecclesial survival, the church will always need ministries of unselfish service, sustained by long haul disciplines, embodied in lives filled with the performative energy of the Holy Spirit, lived towards the magnetic North of the risen Christ. Patience in peacemaking, persistence in hope-building, stubborn in loving and alert to every reason for gratitude in a grace-endowed world – perhaps funding every other "missional strategy", we could start with these.

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Today has been fitted wall to wall blue sky, bright but mellow autumn sunshine, and a pervasive sense of summer giving way, but reluctantly. A four mile walk along the coast confirms this, and reflecting on it now I'm aware that amongst other things, I have again been ambushed by beauty. How so?

For one thing, a four mile coastal walk is a good way of remembering that spirituality isn't merely about inner climate, emotional ecology and an environmentally friendly approach to our own needs and longings. Such a walk is an intentional refusal to allow inetriority to dictate our mood. Indeed a deliberate external focus is an act of faith in the capacity of the created world to reconfigure our feelings, and help us break out of those tightening circles of anxiety, self-criticism, introspection, and those occasional examinations of our own roots to see if we are growing. 

When our attention is forced away from the limited horizons of our own thoughts, there is a chance to escape the inner busyness and preoccupations of a life lived too near to our own centre. Beauty does that, draws our attention, invites us to an encounter with that which is not of our own making. Walking along Cullen beach, on a day when the waves were in stealth mode, only tipping over when nearly ashore, there is a rhythm and regularity that slowly resets my own inner rhythms. That the sea is bluer than the sky; that the waves are playfully sneaky; that those cliffs have been there for millenia; and that I am walking alongside such incidental beauty; these are the gifts of a creation so taken for granted that in rediscovering their gratuitous loveliness, I rediscover an inner equilibrium of renewed hope and returned joy.

How many waves did it take to create the keyhole in this cliff? The imperceptible erosion over hundreds of years, the tireless energy of millions of waves, the patient persevering friction of water on rock; until the imperceptible is perceived, the waves succeed, the rock yields to water. I look at this eye in the cliff, where seabirds shelter and am moved by the slow and mysterious processes that give shape to our landscape. The physics of kinesis and friction are easily enough described, but how do the elements of wind and water create and sculpt so that the end result makes me want to stand and look, and enjoy. The three words are important and so is their sequence. Stand, look, enjoy.

Joy is one of the intimations that we are in the presence of beauty. In my earlier post I mentioned the transformative, inspirational power of beauty. When beauty arrests us it carries with it "hints of transcendence, correctives to cynicism, reminders of our "responsibility to awe", tonics for jaded hopefulness, sources of energy to convert carelessness back to care, currents of thermal uplift that give vision beyond limited horizons". These posts are about that kind of beauty having that kind of effect; and about the connections I sense between the encounter with a beautiful world, a camera, and contemplative gratitude that is its own kind of prayer. 

Looking across to the cliffs, or looking through the keyhole in the rockface, and photographing them, are only possible if I stand, and look, and enjoy. All three are required if beauty is to be attended to, its invitation acknowledged, its gifts as gladly received as gratuitously given.

Here is the beacon which stands at the entrance to Findochty Harbour. It is known locally as The Bilken. Out of this and many other harbours along our coasts, for generations, fishing boats have gone and returned. Just in case there is a danger of sentimentalising the sea, and domesticating images as if the sea is always calm and kind, it's a reminder that there is fierceness in beauty, terrifying power in the waves, that currents which sculpt rocks can become hurricane built mountains, and that we trivialise such magnificence at our peril.

Beauty is one of the three transcendentals answering to what is deepest in our mind, utmost in our desire and most fulfilling in emotion. As such our spirituality will be shaped by our perceptions of beauty, sustained by attentiveness to the presence of beauty, tempered by reverence and patience when we encounter beauty. And then there is the theology of beauty, and how we are to understand creation as the expression in time and space of the eternal beauty of the Triune God of grace, love and communion. And how we are to understand ourselves as made in the image of God, our hearts restless till they rest in God, and that through Christ, in the creative power of the Holy Spirit.

Over the summer I've been intentional about beauty. What I mean is I have tried to remember to pay attention to what is there. But how do you become more attentive just because you want to, especially when there is so much else inward and outward that dissipates attention and energy and purpose? The decision to notice the beauty around me is only really made if I do, indeed, if I do in thought and deed, go looking for beauty; or if I at least learn to recognise the presence of beauty at the periphery of my vision, and take time to draw it towards the centre of my attention.

One way is to change my inner priorites of thought. I suspect that is at the heart of what Jesus meant when he said "Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you." If life is in focus, other things become clear. If one thing is made ultimate, everything else becomes penultimate. Seek means to pursue with determination and strategy; it means to desire and therefore to recognise the good that awakens such desire; it means to set a goal and harness energy, time and effort to reach it. Each of these is a way of describing what could be a fruitful expression of prayerfulness. Seeking, desiring,purposing that which is worth our attention and worthy of our affection.

Beauty is one of the inherent gifts of creation, when God's fingerprints are detected all over those moments of encounter with beauty that we all experience now and again. For some time now my camera has become a sort of prayer book, as image replaces word and a photo becomes a moment of wonder. In that moment of framing and analysis, something takes place which is contemplative and tugs at those surprisingly persistent longings that come from God knows where. And God does know where such longing originates, and at our best so do we.

"Seek you first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness…" is one of those words of Jesus that upsets our multi-tasking obsessions. You can't be singleminded and multitask, and in any case we all know that we are being short-changed when someone is talking to us and doing several other things at the same time.

"Seek first…" And yes, I realise this saying of Jesus is about ultimate commitment relativising all other commitments, and that Jesus had in mind more than a small and partial inner adjustment of focus. But the principle is the same, a realigning of priorities, a reorientation of our affections around that which is worth noticing and attending to.

So over the summer I have been seeking beauty that compensates for much that is ugly in our world, in our cultural environment, in our social ecology. I've been looking for hints of transcendence, correctives to cynicism, reminders of our "responsibility to awe", tonics for jaded hopefulness, sources of energy to convert carelessness back to care, currents of thermal uplift that give vision beyond limited horizons. Such responses are made possible by the simple and complex act of taking a photo. Above are three examples of such thermal uplifts, captured moments of hopefulness, the promise and return of playfulness in a life often taken far too seriously.