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In all of our lives there are encounters with people that have lifelong significance. At the time it may not seem like it, but something they say, the way they look at you, the sense that this person understands you, or wants you to grow into the potential they see in you, hints at that elusive quality of shrewd but generous judgement that sums you up, and makes you want to add up to their judgement. I can think of several people whose appearance in my life came at a crucial moment, when they helped me see the crux of the matter, and gave me the courage to stand at a crossraods and choose.

One of those was Andrew Macrae, whom I first met in 1968. For months, maybe a year, I had been both excited and troubled by the thought that I wanted to be a minister. Excited because here was something for reasons I found it hard to put into words, that I really wanted to do. Troubled because I couldn't match up my own sense of who I was, with what I thought a minister might be about. I was eighteen; I had been expelled from school, and had no O Levels, let alone Highers. There were serial episodes of being in trouble. I had just started an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer, an opportunity sponsored by my Probation Officer. My discourse was hilariously broad working class Lanarkshire, and up till then nobody from my family had ever been within thinking distance of a University.

But two years earlier I had been converted. I had come to know Jesus Christ and trusted in His love as the renewing power in my life. I had discovered the joy of being forgiven, a new life of being reconciled with God and with others I had alienated, an experience of being renewed in heart and mind, and now hungry to know what it meant to follow Jesus and live for God in the power of the Holy Spirit. In the small Baptist community in Carluke I had been accepted, welcomed and trusted. Listening to an old fashioned and in your face minister preaching from the Bible, was to me like water stations for a marathon runner. And as I read and learned and realised how much I didn't know and wanted to know, so began the thought that one day I would love to do this. That word love isn't lazy writing of an overused affective noun; it is the correct and precise word. For the love of God, because of the love of God, in answer to the love of God, I wanted to tell and show and live that love.

Early in that process of longing and self-dismissiveness, knowing what I wanted to do and not knowing how I ever could, my prayers became like day dreams of what it would be like to preach and to care for people in a Christian community. And just as often, I'd have to wake up to the reality that from where I was it wasn't very likely.

It was at that point I met the Rev Andrew Macrae, General Secretary and Superintendent of the Baptist Union of Scotland. I told him the whole story including all my reasons why it was an unrealistic hope, or an immature cry for attention, or significance, or belonging, or whatever. That day I learned a lesson I have never forgotten. Read the first paragraph again, it says as best I can what meeting Andrew Macrae was like for me at that very particular crossroads of my life.

I left his office affirmed, encouraged, firmly told to stop thinking of myself as inadequate as if inadequacy could ever be a disqualification from the service of Jesus. But to begin to think of myself as one who belonged to Christ, and who if called to be a minister will find that "I can do all things through Christ who strnegthens me". Yes, Andrew not only quoted that verse as answer to all my hesitations and self put-downs. He gave me that verse, to go away and begin to think about all this in the light, not of my own self-assessment, but in the light of the fact, yes, fact, that when God calls, we say yes, and in obedient trust, rely on God's grace and provision for what is needed. The first sermon I ever preached, and I still have the handwritten notes in an old brown paper-covered notebook, was on that text.

So when I heard yesterday that the Rev Dr Andrew Macrae had died, I took time to remember, with heartfelt and heartfilled gratitude, a busy gifted man, who made time to see me and who took the trouble to understand me, and discern the undercurrents of a confused but increasingly certain heart, about the call of Christ to ministry. It would be eight years of night school, day release, University and College before I was ordained in 1976.

But that first meeting with Andrew Macrae was decisive, as a previously awkward, wayward teenager was encouraged to believe the Gospel truth that God's grace is sufficient, and our weakness and inadequacy are simply God-given opportunities for that grace to come to fruition. In the words of Paul, and from a distance of 40 years, "I thank God upon every remembrance of Andrew Macrae", to whom I owe much that over the years has confirmed and reassured me in my own ministry amongst our churches, and in our College.

In a long life, Andrew gave himself tirelessly in the work of the Kingdom, as visionary leader of Scottish Baptists, then at Acadia University, Canada, as early academic exponent and passionate expositor of mission and evangelism as core activities of church life, and as theological educator and ministry mentor to countless students and future leaders throughout the Church of Christ. Thanks be to God for the great gift Andrew was to the Christian church, to our Baptist communities, to the wider ecumenical world where he was a known and loved figure, and to many ordinary folk who sought his counsel and help, I count myself privileged to be included amongst those his shrewd kindness and wise counsel touched.      

Eileen Kennedy is a contemporary American artist whose telling of the story of "Jesus in the house of Martha and Mary" is a powerful image of contrasts. Jesus is dressed in the traditional white robe, sandals, long brunette hair, beard and sitting in the classic pose of the teacher, hands gesturing towards the listener. Mary is sitting relaxed but attentive, leaning towards Jesus, eyes on his face, hands clasped either in prayer or in restful inaction. The sleeping cat adds to the impression of unhurried, non-stressful space.

A larger than life Martha looms over them, dominating the painting by size, demeanour and colour contrast. Her body language is impatient and annoyed, hand on hip holding the cable, other hand gripping the hoover, looking only at Mary, her whole presence an interruption of the conversation between Mary and Jesus; in addition, imagine the noise of the hoover, and the non-negotiable expectation of every hoover operator that those in the way should move to allow their space to be cleaned.

Yellow roses are variously linked with platonic friendship, wisdom and joy, affirmation of life as reminders of the sun. That they act as a partial screen for Jesus, while by contrast the two women are in full view, and their conflicting moods made plain by the body language. Kennedy has some fun with the rose screen. Beside Martha's elbow are two small bluebirds, looking into each other's faces. Lovebirds? Above them a golden bird with feathered tail in full display; frustrated at being left out? And near Jesus ankle a small red bird, meaning what? A tiny intimation of the Passion which lies ahead?

Whose side is the artist on? There is no sign in the painting of Jesus even noticing Martha, His head is facing directly at Mary, whose own head stays level so we are assuming she is looking up. It is an image of intense and exclusive exchange. Martha is annoyed, and from the composition of the painting the viewer may well have sympathy with her. In contrast to the biblical story in Luke 10.38-42, there is no sign of food, kitchen or hospitality. Martha is doing the housework; the hoover is an instrument of interruption, its noise a drowning down of the voice of Jesus and a distraction for Mary by created by Martha, who is driven to distraction by her sister's supposed selfishness. Is Kennedy hinting that Martha is about to bump Mary's seat with the hoover, which occupies the focal centre of the painting?

Kennedy's painting is cunning in a constructive way; it is also subversive of a story too often framed by pious stereotypes that miss the complexity of relationships put under strain by emotional tensions. The painting doesn't resolve those tensions; it highlights them, leaving the viewer to decide what is going on in the heads and hearts of the three protagonists.

Harry Emerson Fosdick used to be a name to conjure with in the first half of the Twentieth Century. He is largely forgotten now. One of the great preachers of a liberal and generous Gospel, he was long time minister of Riverside Church, built by Rockefeller in 1930. Fosdick started off as a Baptist, but was no Fundamentalist, held a progressive view of revelation and a non literalist approach to the Bible, and in social concern and social justice issues was outspoken, influential and often enough controversial.

I was thinking about him this morning, having chosen his famous hymn "God of grace and God of glory" as the hymn opening our worship. Sometimes our hunger for innovation, over-concern with relevance, insistence that hymns reflect personal experience rather than objective affirmation of faith in God, all combine to dull our awareness of that world out there and the realities that have to be encountered and navihated every day. Not so Fosdick, though his hymn was itself thoroughly contemporary, painfully and unuashamedly relevant. But its strength is in its unflinching confession of the mess of things, and its recurring refrain for us to be granted wisdom and courage for this hour, these days, this time. As we sang this there was an unmistakable sense of a congregation in serious agreement with words that spoje with prophetic clarity into the stae of our world, our country and of the heart and mind of contemporary culture. It is a hymn adaptable to our deepest prayers, and an affirmation, if we need it, of our faith in God when a whole lot else is proving transient, unpredictable and uncertain.

In the world of Aleppo and Haiti, of Trump and Clinton, of Brexit and the fallout in an increasingly divided society, of concern about increases in hate crime, anti-semitism and xenophobia, the rise of international scale emergencies such as mass immigration and the breakdown of international stability and the slow erosion of the authority of the great institutions such as the United Nations, the increasing undermining of the work of the Intenrational Red Cross and Medecin sans Frontieres, to the slow progress in action to slow down climate change and avart permanent damage to our planet and all the living creatures who share it with us – yes that is one long sentence, a whole paragraph!

But it is only a select and small list of what it is our world faces, the world in which I as a follower of Jesus am called to live as peacemaker, reconciler, carer of creation, worker for justice, conduit and inspirer of hope. So I need hymns like this, to remind me, of the brokenness of the world, and the redemptive grace and glory of God.

1 God of grace and God of glory,
on your people pour your power;
crown your ancient church's story,
bring its bud to glorious flower.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour,
for the facing of this hour.

2 Lo! the hosts of evil round us
scorn the Christ, assail his ways!
From the fears that long have bound us
free our hearts to faith and praise.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the living of these days,
for the living of these days.

3 Cure your children's warring madness;
bend our pride to your control;
shame our wanton, selfish gladness,
rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal,
lest we miss your kingdom's goal.

4 Save us from weak resignation
to the evils we deplore;
let the gift of your salvation
be our glory evermore.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
serving you whom we adore,
serving you whom we adore.

H E Fosdick, 1930

One of the significant thinkers about forgiveness and reconciliation is Miroslav Volf, whose book Exclusion and Embrace was written out of the tragedy of the Balkan war in the 1990's. His home village was attacked by Serbian Cetniks, and subjected to atrocities such as rape, summary execution and arson. In the Preface Volf remembers being asked a question following a paper he had delivered at a theological conference about forgiveness and reconciliation. The influential theologian Jurgen Moltmann asked if, for all the fine theology and theory, he could now emabrace a Cetnik. Volf's answer was searingly honest, and radically charged. He said no he could not – but as a follower of Jesus he must.

And there it is. The dilemma of the enemy, whether perpetrator or victim. How to do the morally impossible even when it is a moral imperative; how to be obedient to God when the whole being revolts at what is demanded. To witness atrocity against our neighbours, our family, to bear the consequences and memory of cruelty, intentional affliction and hate articulated in word, action and cultural violence; how to even think in terms of forgiveness without satisfaction, redress, indeed justice?

Volf's book Exclusion and Embrace was a watershed treatment of how humans respond to inflicted violence, enacted enmity and deliberate relational rejection. Either the heart builds walls that exclude and reject, or it finds a way to embrace, dismantle walls and pursue friendship as the ultimate security of justice. It's a hard book to read, not only because of the subject matter. It is at times technical, socially analytic, psychologically exploratory, and all this in pursuit of a theological foundation for seeing the other, however hated and hating, as one we will seek to embrace rather than exclude. 

One of Volf's more accessible treatments of this whole nexus of ethical and theological problems is Free of Charge. Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace. Even the title is a reset button for many of our assumptions about the drivers and motives of a consumerist and competitive society. Near the start of the book he writes a paragraph that will be unfolded throughout:

God generously gives, so God is not a negotiator of absolute dimensions. God demands, so God is not an infinite Santa Claus. So what is the relation between God's giving and God's demanding? In other words, what is the difference between a Santa Claus God and a gift giving God? The bare-bones answer is this; a Santa Claus God gives simply so we can have and enjoy things; the true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. God the giver has made us to be givers and obliges us therefore to give. page 28

And out of that generosity of giving and receiving is born the disposition to forgive. Later Volf speak out of his own experience of the courage and moral faith that enables forgiveness:

We give when we delight in others or others are in need; by giving we enhance their joy or make up for their lack. We forgive when others have wronged us; by forgiving we release them from the burden of their wrongdoing. The difference lies in the violation suffered, in the burden of wrongdoing, offence, transgression, debt. And that's what makes it more difficult to forgive than to give. page 130

The cost of forgiveness, and the connection between Christian forgiveness and the Christian experience and understanding of God are major strands in all of Volf's writing. The giving God is a forgiving God – but forgiveness is not indulgence of evil, which would neither be justice nor mercy. The dynamics of forgiveness, the anatomy of justice in relation to both mercy and punishment, the moral imperative not to hate and the equal demand to protect the vulnerable and bring justice to the victim, mean that forgiveness is no simple wiping of a slate, no ignoring of offence, no obscuring of the consequences of evil. The Christian faith instinctively turns to ponder the cross and its meaning in the heart of God and for the life of the world. While the ideas of a giving and forgiving God can be spoken as a sound byte, in reality they are truths rooted in the eternal love of God and the tragedy of a broken creation. Hence the focus of the first post in this series.

When it comes to forgiveness Christians should be well ahead of the game. At the dark centre of the Christian message is a cross, occupied by a crucified Messiah, whose last words were a howl of abandonment (Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthami – My God why have you forsaken me? Mk 15.34), followed by the brokenhearted sigh of resignation (Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. Lk 23.46).

The earliest Gospel is unflinching in its storytelling, and offers no comment on that anguished cry of dereliction. Several decades later it would take Paul at his most penetrating as out of that story of crucified love he forged a theology adequate to the Christian experience of forgiveness. "God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." (2 Cor 5.21)

And those words only tiptoe to the edge of the abyss;there is much more, hinted at earlier in Paul's argument about the necessity, meaning, cost and consequences of reconciliation: "He died for all that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for him, who died and was raised again." (v15)

Sixteen hundred years later the quiet Anglican parson, George Herbert, also teetered on the edsge of the mystery. In a poem that demolishes human pride, whether from complacency or defiance Herbert distilled words into such a concentrated sequence of images that his poem remains one of the most potent analyses of the anguish and cost of forgiveness. In "The Agonie", the forgiver is the Holy Creator redeeming fallen humanity and absorbing into the eternal heart of God the sin and suffering of a broken creation, turning judgment to mercy and guilt to forgiveness in an alchemy of holy love condemning sin to nothingness. But at a cost both fatal and vital.

The Agonie

Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heav'n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

Paul's magnificent argument for reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5 is anchored in the granite of a grace that is eternal, infinite, unsearchable, and embodied in Jesus. "No one has ever seen God; the only son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known…and from his fullness we ahve all received grace upon grace."  Herbert takes that bedrock truth of grace unspeakable and unthinkable and uses it as a lens to look at the passion story of Jesus. And the mystery, abysmal and beyond any horizon reachable by reason, is that the man so wrung with pains is the one in whom the holy love of God confronted and suffered the deepest sin, the darkest hours, the fatal consequences, of the soul abandoned by God to the point of extinction. Reading that poem, entitled "The Agonie" is an education in the greatest mystery of human life – the existence of evil and suffering as negations of hope, joy and life itself.

Herbert is not offering explanations; neither is Paul. To "sound" sin and love, to plumb the depths of that eternal antithesis, is beyond human capacity. But out of that antithesis came a reversal of reality so potent with creative power that it is best described as a new beginning. The death and resurrection of Jesus called in question, indeed contradicted, the powers of hate, the destructiveness of violence, the permanence of despair and death as the ultimate threat to life. That's why Paul could say, "If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation, the old has gone, the new has come." (2 Cor 5.17)

Forgiveness is the reality that is called into being by a holy love that confronts sin and nullifies it by absorbing its cost and consequence, by an eternal patience that both judges and suffers the worst sin can do, and by a grace of such rich mercy that through it God evokes and answering love, a grateful gladness and a hope both durable and plausible.  

The photo was taken by my friend Graeme Clarke – sunset on one of the iron crosses on the cloister railings of Paisley Abbey

There's a lot of work being done currently on the Four Gospels in the New Testament. Why four gospels and not five, or three or more? Then there's the question of four gospels telling the same story but with differences of style and content, a variety of emphases and changes in the narrative flow, conflicting chronology and major omissions and additions. But they are each examples of what came to be called a Gospel. Not biographies, or anthologies, more than history and more than theology but with both as powerful streams in the literary genre we now call Gospels. All four are a telling of the story of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the telling each is an interpretationof who Jesus was, and is, for those who heard and followed him, and for those who encountered him whether as supporters, as opponents and as enemies.

Amongst the great British scholars of the 20th Century, the Methodist Vincent Taylor was a leading mediator of responsible historical criticism of the Gospels, and used the relatively new discipline of Form Criticism in his own Gospel studies. His commentary on the Gospel of Mark was for decades a defining voice in the exegesis of Mark's Gospel, and though now dated it remains a magisterial close reading of the text. Seven hundred pages, 500 of them in double column and small print bear witness to an exhaustive and exhausting treatment in the days before word prcoessing. It is a triumph of New Testament scholarship, superceded only by the passage of time, changing methodologies of study and analysis, torrents of new information about the social and cultural context of the Greco-Roman world, advances in linguistics and in the research tools available from online primary sources, to lexical and semantic databases, not to mention the entire industry of publishing in biblical studies. 

And for all our advances, are we any closer to understanding, comprehending, pinning down, encapsulating explaining in any provisional let alone final way, who Jesus is for us today? What was and is the meaning of that life lived in such obscurity, ending in such ignomy, and that after-life which has gone on and on for two millenia as historical challenge and intellectual scandal. An early essay by Taylor is as true, wise and intellectually wondering now as it was 70 years ago when he wrote it. Here is one telling extract, written as a prose poem:

We ask who He is and He gives us no answer.

Enigmatic as in the days of His flesh,

he is enigmatic still to the questing mind.

But He so works in history and life that,

after He has left us “in suspense”,

we come to know of a surety who He is.

He makes Himself known in His deeds,

in the breaking of bread,

in the cross,

in prayer and worship.

He is what He does.

His secret cannot be read:

it must be found.

(Vincent Taylor, "Unsolved NT Problems: The Messianic Secret." Expository Times, 59 (1948), 151. Quoted in David Garland, A Theology of Mark's Gospel. p.25.)

Enig 

Late in her life Denise Levertov discovered Julian of Norwich, and found in her a deep source of healing wisdom, immense and optimistic love for her fellow humans and patience with the world and with the eternal love and purpose of the Creator. A small suite of poems weave some of the themes most resonant with where Levertov was in her own life journey.

Her conversion to Christianity was neither routine nor typical. As a poet who deiberately wrote in prophetic and political mode about the injustices, cruelties and violence scarring the world she was never going to be be content to toe any credal or ecclesial line that was drawn in the wrong place on the sand. In the early years of environmental concern she picked up on the threats to the future of the earth and to the future of humanity and wrote about the exploitations of nature, the militaristic mindset of conquest, dominance and greed. 

Positively she was passionate about peace, and  no more passionate about peace than about its negatives, war, inflicted suffering, systemic injustice, racism and the avoidable poverty of countries stripped of resources and labour to feed the markets and appetites of the rich powerful nations. Levertov was a poet, a prophet and a political activist whose poetry was protest against abuse of power, truth telling to the deliberately deaf and moral resistance to the market assumptions that flatten the hopes of the majority of the world's people.

So when she came to read and write about Julian, she discovered a theologically wise and and spiritually resilient guide who had looked the Black Death in the face and clung nevertheless to her faith in the Divine Love.

And that brief parable of the hazelnut – Levertov considered that image, held the hazelnut against the vast night sky, the complexity of existence, the  ludicrous insignificance of humanity in a universe exploding outwards and away from all that we know, and nodded her agreement with Julian. The reesult is this poem. 

The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich 1342-1416

Julian, there are vast gaps we call black holes,
unable to picture what’s both dense and vacant;

and there’s the dizzying multiplication of all
language can name or fail to name, unutterable
swarming of molecules. All Pascal
imagined he could not stretch his mind to imagine
is known to exceed his dread.

And there’s the earth of our daily history,
its memories, its present filled with the grain
of one particular scrap of carpentered wood we happen
to be next to, its waking light on one especial leaf,
this word or that, a tune in this key not another,
beat of our hearts now, good or bad,
dying or being born, eroded, vanishing–

And you ask us to turn our gaze
inside out, and see
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and believe
it is our world? Ask us to see it lying
in God’s pierced palm? That it encompasses
every awareness our minds contain? All Time?
All limitless space given form in this
medieval enigma?
                             Yes, this is indeed 

what you ask, sharing
the mystery you were shown: all that is made:
a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, held safe
in God’s pierced palm.

I was once asked to be after dinner speaker at a church dinner. Specifically, would I give a light hearted speech about books and reading. They knew I am a bibliophile, that I read books, enjoy handling books, love the concept and the artefact "book". They're right. I marvel at the ingenuity of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and the human achievement that is writing a spoken language giving permanent visible communication of what is going on in the human mind. The human gifts of story, poetry, philosophy, science, and the technological cleverness of printing words and images, and then, and then the thing itself; the literary continuum of words and images impressed on paper, gathered into order, bound together as pages, chapters and volumes. A book is an everyday miracle of extraordinary significance for human culture and flourishing.

But I didn't speak much about that at all. Over the years I've read more books than I cann count. One a week on average wouldn't be an exaggeration, and only occasionally several or even two in one week. I'm a slow reader but persistent; I believe in both the long haul at the desk and the regular small increments of half hours and hours conscientiously attended to with book in hand.So if my guess of one a week is right and I started reading at 5 that would be 60 times 52 making around 3,100 books give or take. So how to choose which books to talk about? Or which writers? Or what subjects might be of general interest?

Some of them were read and forgotten long ago; some were read long ago and never forgotten. Some I could never be without, some, but not many, I wish I hadn't read at all. I have always had a library of books around me which isn't a fixed collection. Books have come and gone; many have stayed because I want to know them better, spend more time in their company, read them, refer to them, even handle them and remember the pleasure and at times the itellectual joy of what was learned and discovered and opened up by the words read and the thoughts born through reading this particular book, at that special time, for that specific purpose – and finding that the best books don't always meet our expectations. They change them, expand them, ambush our curiosity, pull the rug from our complacent assumptions, change our way of looking at the world, and call in question our ways of thinking and understanding ourselves.

I decided that some of the books that have left their deepest imprint on me were written by writers with the most memorably different names. It was an after dinner talk and couldn't go on too long so it needed to be more than the droning enthusiasm of someone who really needs to get out more. But they had asked me, a preacher and theologian, to talk about books. Well let's meet that one head on.

I chose several writers and their books that once encountered have stayed with me as books I now would not want to be without, and which I would now not want not to have read. And as both a challenge and a way of avoiding predictability I had set the condition that the author's name should be memorably different! Here's the list of books I spoke about within the maximum time of 20 minutes – a quote from each, some context, and why they have become important companions on my journey.

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery

Markings, Dag Hammarskjöld

Selected Letters, Baron Friedrich Von Hugel

My Name is Asher Lev Chaim Potok

The Gospel According to John, Rudolph Schnackenburg

The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel

For the avoidance of doubt, the library / study in the picture is my dream place – until then, happy in my wee room surrounded by books!

 

Reading Dag Hammarskjöld can sometimes be like putting on a thick jacket, hat and gloves and walking out into a winter landscape. He was himself a keen mountaineer and lover of winter mountain landscapes. His stern, austere view of life and duty and destiny brings a bracing chill to his view of his own life and indeed his understanding of each human life lived responsibly. There is in Markings a constant thread of memento mori and at the start of 1951 the first line of his diary is a concentrated focus on the urgency of life responsibility: "night is drawing nigh". The allusion is to a famous Swedish hymn, which in turn echoes the biblical urgency of time passing and eternity not far off, "the hour is coming when no one can work".

One of Hammarskjöld's poems plays with the seriousness of life, and the moral imperative of using the gift of life responsibly by living in the reality of existence and not in the illusion of our own importance:

Lean fare, austere forms,

Brief delight, few words.

Low down in cool space

One star —

The morning star.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Those are the lines of a man unafraid to look life and death in the face, but not with Stoic indifference; on the contrary, with a defiance that is on the side of life, reality, responsible human action geared towards mercy, justice and the righting of what can be righted, and the confronting of wrong as a matter of principle. Any adequate reading of Hammarskjöld's biography makes it clear he was a man of inner granite. His own search was for an for integrity, life purpose and human achievement worthy of the sacrifice it takes to surrender in obedience to God. For there is no doubt that by 1951 Hammarskjöld had come to see and to hear the call of "the Real Thing", that which constitutes and sustains the reality and ultimate significance of all else.

Hammarskjöld's sense of vocation, discovered purpose, and awareness of the personal cost that might shatter the person he thought he was, had been in my mind for several days as I made my way again through Markings, guided this time by the Swedish theologian Gustav Aulen's book on Hammarskjöld. Life and death, achievement and sacrifice, obedience and cost, vocation and surrendered freedom: Markings is laced with those inner questionings that are inevitable when coming to terms with the unavoidable but at times excruciating tensions within which we are at times called to live. In one of those brief entries we wish we could place in exact context, Hammarskjöld in ironic mode: "He received – nothing. But for that he paid more than others for their treasures." This is not so much a complaint by Hammarskjöld; it looks back to his long meditation on Jesus in the upper room, the One who was "absolutely faithful to a divined possibility…"

"a young man adamant in his commitment, who walks the road of possibility to the end without self-pity or demand for sympathy fulfilling the destiny he has chosen – even sacrificing  affection and fellowship when the others are unready to follow him – into a new fellowship." (69)

And there again is the agonising dichotomy – "the destiny he has chosen" – because Hammarskjold had come to see in Jesus, "the young man adamant in his commitment", one who was destined and called and who chose the way of obedience to that call. Any serious Christian commitment must reckon with that same sense that life is gift, and its purpose the giving of that gift in service to the lives of others.

In the pale light of sparseness

lives the Real Thing

And we are real.

Christian life is an adamant commitment to the Real Thing, for only so can it be true that "we are real", and this life is the reality within which we are realised, fulfilled and consummated within the purposes of God. All of this I've been thinking about off and on as I've been reading Hammarskjold, and of course doing other things. Like going out into this real world and living, enjoying, working, looking, but still thinking.

At the very edge of the Forest of Birse is a defiant old Rowan tree. Much of it is now dead wood, but there they are, red berries on the surviving branches still doing what life does. Still there after all those winters, its berries gifts and seeds for the future. Against a blue sky, and in late summer heat, it is both memento mori and memento vitae.

This old blasted tree stopped me in my tracks; at that precise point the word that fitted exactly what I was seeing was "defiant". It was one of those moments when what is already in the mind intersects with what is now seen in the world outside the mind. Our duty to live the gift of life; the truth, so hard at times, that life is not forever, that "night is drawing nigh."

But as well as that the miracle and mystery of continuing fruitfulness right up to the end, that out of life lived sacrificially and gratefully come the seeds of further life. And then the great grace that could never be imagined far less expected as deserved. Life lived towards God, seeking in our weaknesses and failures, our hopes and joys, our loves and griefs, by that same grace praying to be "faithful to a divined possibility"; and the graced promise that such a life bears fruits that can never be counted, calculated or gainsaid, but which are harvested and gathered into the eternal mercies of God as the "divined possibilities" of our lives.

Give us peace with Thee

     Peace with men and women

     Peace with ourselves

And free us from all fear.