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  • Lent with R S Thomas: “The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth’s castle.”

    ThomasNo one exposes the illusions and pretensions of the new and fashionable academic discipline of practical theology more effectively than those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, the service of the life in the service of those communities we call the church. Thus R S Thomas who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encoutners as qualitiative research using the hermeneutic phenomenology a la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and his disappoinments with his own fittingness to be a priest, R S Thomas sometimes nailed it.

    Nailed it! Now that's a contemporary term I dislike on semantic and aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image – perhaps because for a Christian to use the verb to nail we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross. And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologians of glory. 

    His prose-poem account of how he spent his days as a priest in a remote and hard to find corner of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

    "A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet…"

    I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts.

    "And yet…" Those two words are hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value, and the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened, but limping towards the dawn.

    DSC03535"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer; it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of frutifulness and harvest, a time for ideas to take root and grow.

    And it is a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet…", there is too, in study and field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

  • Lent with R S Thomas “…sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit.”

    The Collected Late Poems opens with The Echoes Return Slow, a collection of autobiographical poems in which the poet's own life is source and resource for some of his most searing questions and searching observations; at times Thomas writes a line, apparently incidental, an explanatory observation, only the reader hears it as an inner interrogation. Always the questioning, spirituality in the interrogative mood, an intellectual grappling with the world that doesn't depend upon, indeed is impatient with, that favoured word of our own times, "closure". Indeed for Thomas the idea of the pilgrimage is defining, the journey is from here to there and from loneliness to companionship, and the important and life-giving disposition is movement towards rather than arrival, longing rather than terminus, opening up to more possibility rather than the lid snap of a complacent closure.

    So in these autobiographical prose paragraphs and line poems, the poet looks to his future as an old man, by seeking clues in his past. These are deeply personal, private and guarded poems; suggestive rather than illustrative, oblique in their references but together a series of snapshots which capture more of Thomas and his quest and questions than any 24/7 cctv would ever record. This is I think why I find Thomas's poetry so satisfying and unsettling, so true and so real but not with easy truth or reality reduced to the bearable. 

    Thomas 1The poem in which he recalls his own ordination is a study in pastoral frankness; the inadequacy and limits of any human being when faced with grieving parents, bereaved widows, hopeful marriages and faces on a Sunday reflecting the diversity and fragility of human hopes. The prose poem reduces the high calling to be Christ's vicar to local contesxt – "this valley, this village and a church built with stones from the river…" A lesson in reality awaits every Christian minister of whatever denominational hue, in this poem of confessed inadequacy. "The young man was sent unprepared to expose his ignorance of life in a leafless pulpit."

     

    I was vicar of large things
    in a small parish. Small-minded
    I will not say, there were depths
    in some of them I shrank back
    from, wells that the word “God”
    fell into and died away,
    and for all I know is still
    falling. Who goes for water
    to such must prepare for a long
    wait. Their eyes looked at me
    and were the remains of flowers
    on an old grave. I was there,
    I felt, to blow on ashes
    that were too long cold. Often,
    when I thought they were about
    to unbar to me, the draught
    out of their empty places
    came whistling so that I wrapped
    myself in the heavier clothing
    of my calling, speaking of light and love
    in the thickening shadows of their kitchens.

     

  • Lent with R S Thomas: The Cross on the Altar

    IMG_0275-1"Is God worshipped only in cathedrals, where blood drips from regimental standards as from the crucified body of love? Is there a need for a revised liturgy, for bathetic renderings of the scriptures? The Cross always is avante-garde."

    R S Thomas lamented the modernisation of liturgy, the modern fear of any terminology that is not current, contemporary, accessible, or, God help us, relevant. Against Thomas's apparent liturgical conservationist tendencies it may be that there is nothing to be gained by Christianity sounding like a mystery religion, or the Church adhering to a language no longer spoken, and now seldom understood outside the walls of Christian sanctuary. 

    But at the same time, in Thomas's defence, he feared that there may be a great deal to be lost if we surrender the language of faith, the vocabulary of the Spirit, the rhythms and cadences of hymn and liturgy which carry the freight of the Divine promises and presences and which sustain through those times of Divine absence. Thomas was a theologian of God's absence, a pilgrim familiar with the quiet and desolate places, and with an eye and ear observant of emptiness as of fullness. Not for him the easily recited propositions of the over-certain; not for him the substitution of banality and overfamiliarity with the Almighty, often considered by their exponents as informality and demonstrated intimacy, but which are in reality evidence of an absconded reverence and a trivialisation of the Transcendent.

    Whatever arguments Thomas had with God, and there were many – fierce, persistent, unrelenting one to one combat, resulting in inner anguish and spiritual wrestling with the One whose name was witheld and whose touch wounded to the quick – whatever the arguments, Thomas knew his place in the presence, or absence of the Divine. Like the great preacher Qoheleth Thomas knew, he just knew, "God is in heaven, and you are on earth, so let your words be few." Quite.

    The quotation at the start of this post is from a prose poem which introduces his reflections on entering a church and looking at the altar, the cross and then beyond these to the God revealed in such transiently simple and eternally durable realities. The brilliance of the last line illumines the whole poem.

    The church is small.
    The walls inside
    White. On the altar
    a cross, with behind it
    its shadow and behind
    that the shadow of its shadow.

    The world outside
    knows nothing of this
    nor cares. The two shadows
    are because of the shining
    of two candles: as many
    the lights, so many
    the shadows. So we learn
    something of the nature
    of God, the endlessness
    of whose recessions
    are brought up short
    by the contemporaneity of the Cross.

    (The photo is of the small panel of my tapestry, "Eucharist and Pentecost" currently underway)

     

  • Lent: Facing the Failures of faith, Confronting Bad Faith, Recovering Good Faith in God.

    ThomasPoetry is a gift with words that take us to places beyond words. When poetry is written as letters from a far country, they can become life-saving  missives for those of us who must eventually travel there. When it comes to faith, God, sin, love, loss, suffering, hope, grief and much else that confirms our transience, poetry often brings clarification and consolation, providing description of what seemed to us indescribable.

    The relations of poetry to theology, and of both to philosophy and science, have seldom been better configured than in the poems of R S Thomas. In a note on his poetry on my Faceboo page I wrote:

    They are so sharp, combining theological precision with theological hesitation – for Thomas, faith is not certainty, and God is not to be encapsulated in our words nor reducible to our cleverly constructed concepts. But at the centre of these poems is the Cross, the question mark, worship offered through open lips and gritted teeth, and a man whose cantankerous complexity was the vehicle for some of the loveliest lines I know about love, and that great Love that "moves the sun and other stars."

    During Lent I am reading through this volume of his later poems. The poems were likened by Denis Healey to Beethoven's later Quartets in their "fearless exploration of the mysteries of life and death." For years now I have listened to Thomas give  voice to profound uncertainty, hesitant faith, pessimism which stops this side of despair, the elusive miracle of human love which transcends the best of the human intellect to define, delimit or explain away. His exploration of the outer landscape gives him clues to the changing inner climates, the varied landscapes of the mind and the heart and the spirit – I'm not sure Thomas would bother much about the anomalies and theological perplexities of such a tripartite view of the inner life of any one of us. He could be acid and ascerbic about theologians.

    So if Lent is a time for deep thinking; for stripping away illusion to better see what is, or is not, real; for re-aligning the loves of our life so that they nourish rather than devour each other; for facing the failures of faith, confronting bad faith, recovering good faith in God, and in ourselves and our sisters and brothers; then I know few guides more qualified to lead the mind, the heart and the Spirit through Lent and towards Calvary and beyond to resurrection.

    Throughout Lent I'll post some meditations on these late poems, these late Quartets of the the Welsh composer who, like Beethoven, understood the De Profundis, and the Alleluia of those for whom faith comes hard, and is all the more cherished for thattruth.

  • John Wesley’s Prayer: O Lord, Let Me Not Live to Be Useless

    IMG_0275-1For regular readers of Living Wittily apologies for the absence over the past week or two. There have been other fish to fry, other books to read, other places to be, people to meet, and things to get done with some urgency and determination. Of the things to be done the most 'need to get this done' obligation is all about pensions! It isn't so much difficult as serious when you are making decisions about the rest of your life, when a big chunk of it is already behind you! And the pensions adviser is asking the necessary hypotheticals about what happens if…..!

    This February I will reach retiring age, which for me living in 21stC Scotland, is 65, while for many younger than me that dateline age is a receding horizon; my children may have to work till they are 70 before state pension age. Inevitably, and quite properly, such a life event as a retirement date prompts some serious reflection on what has been and what still might be, what has been done and what can still be achieved.

    So here are some ordinary conclusions which have grown out of some thinking and praying, swithering and deciding about this quite remarkable gift which we are right to take for granted, life. To take something for granted is not to undervalue its reality, it is to receive it as a gift without spending life and energy feeling guilty about it. The proper response is gratitude, and the best gratitude is our joy in the gift and in the generous love of the Giver. 

    Retirement is both an artificial label and a fiscal reality. I have no intention of stopping doing what I have done all my working life, though I may do less of it, and have more choice how long and how much. I preach, spend time with people in pastoral friendship, read and write sermons, teach and explore theology. Those choices of how much and hor often and how long I work are made possible by an income now unrelated to work done and hours contracted out.

    Retirement from paid work is not retirement from vocation. Not everyone in our cultural climate would call what they do a vocation, a calling. But many do. And they are not just ministers of religion. Nurses, doctors, social workers, artists, teachers, IT specialists, pilots, fire service, police, naturalists, environmental officers – these are only some of the jobs that some of my friends would be just as passionate about as I am of being a minister. That's because they have a sense that what they do for money they don;t do just for the money. Unsurprisingly, that's also true of my own take on post 65 birthday.

    Retirement is an opportunity to make different choices and enjoy new opportunities. By the time you're 65 the bumper wisdom that says "Life is short, eat your pudding first" takes on a poignant urgency. So these next years it makes sense to do what you really want to do; to spend time with those whose presence and gift of themselves is fundamental to who we are; to gather the goodness of each past year into an external drive for safekeeping, there to ponder the grace that gave each day, grateful and glad for just being there to live it; to kick the bucket that holds the list and just do the blessed list! Well, within limits. Because there are limits. I've little patience with the can do mentality that seems to ignore all the reasons, good and real reasons of life obligations and resources, that stop us living every dream. But there are liveable, realisable, affordable dreams that still demand risk, energy, effort and the courage to reach out and embrace them in all their possibility.

    Retirement is not about me; it is about me in relation to others. I am also tired of the me, me, me, litany of life that pervades the social media like an unexamined credo of the self. My own happiness is not always the most important thing. What I think of myself is not always the best criterion for self-knowing, self-awareness and self-transformation. What I want is not a Christian categorical imperative if what I want is achievable only at the cost and loss it causes others. It is still the case that of all the ways of living our lives, young or old, "the greatest of these is love." If life till 65 means I am now a graduate in the skills and knowledge of living, then post retirement is post-graduate study, researching wider and deeper on the mystery and miracle of human beings and human being.

    So now that the forms are filled, the advice is taken, the process of pension calculation hums away in the background, very little has changed or will change radically on my birthday. But if as Kirekegaard urged, life can only be understood backwards and lived forwards, then I am also persuaded of the wisdom of Dag Hammarskjold: For all that has been – Thank you. For all that is to come – Yes.

    (The photo is a small central panel from the current tapestry I am working, "Eucharist and Pentecost". Tapestry is for me a contemplative form of art, or an artistic form of spirituality.

  • Beatitudes as Guides for Intercession

    ColossiansSunday past I was asked to preach on prayer, using a verse from James Montgomery's still remarkable hymn, "Prayer is the soul's sincere desire". The verse I was to consider was

    Prayer is the simplest form of speech, which infant lips can try; / Prayer the sublimest strains that reach the Majesty on High.

    As part of the service I wrote a prayer on intercession based on two of the Beatitudes. The reason for this approach was my feeling that prayers of intercession can be dominated by whatever is most urgent in our own lives, or in the headline news of the day as it saturates our awareness with images and sound bytes about the awfulness of the world. By using the words of Jesus there is some attempt at content control that is more than the loudest daily sound byte and less than a comprehensive listing of all that's wrong in the world. In other words if the Beatitudes articulate the values and goals of the Kingdom of God, then they have the capacity to carry the freight of our prayers as children of that Kingdom.

    Did it work? Who knows what in our prayers ever "works"? And who knows what "works" would look like in any case as we engage in conversation and heart work with God? But as a way of praying Scripture, of allowing the words of the Bible to inform and direct our praying, it did gather our attentiveness to the experience of people in other parts of this God-loved world. This God of love and reconciliation, of justice and righteousness, revealed in the redeeming vulnerability of Jesus crucified and in the risen life of the crucified, this God whose eternal purpose is the reconciliation and renewal of all things, is the one to whom we pray. What happens to our prayers, and to those for whom we pray, is best left to the loving wisdom of our God.

    The two Beatitudes used were about peacemakers and the persecuted. Here is the prayer that was  in two sections, intersected by singing the Taize 'Kyrie Eleison' as the congregational response.

    The Beatitudes and Our Prayers of Intercession

    Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.

    Peacemaking God, in Christ you were reconciling the world to yourself.
    We pray for a world unreconciled in itself, the countries and peoples of

    Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Pakistan, Israel and Gaza, Nigeria and Libya:

    where for generations fear and anger has blinded and divided communities;
    where grievances suffered and suffering inflicted leaves legacies of hate and suspicion;
    where history overshadows the present, and violence silences voices for peace.

    Help us to trust the subversive wisdom of your Spirit,
    teach us to speak the language of hope;
    as your Spirit brooded upon the waters of chaos,
    enshadow the countries and communities in chronic conflict, with mercy and justice, and peace.
    Prince of Peace and Living Lord – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

    Blessed are those who are persecuted for my sake and the Gospel’s:


    O Lord of life and peace, who reconciles through the blood of the cross,
    We pray for Christians throughout the world who are persecuted for your sake.
    In India and Pakistan, where fundamentalist violence breaks out against small churches;
    For Christians in Gaza, in Iraq and in Syria, caught up in the violence and hatred of war,                            persecuted because of their faith in you, targeted by militant and violent groups:
    In all their suffering strengthen their faith, and give assurance of your presence, your help and your deliverance.


    Keep us faithful in our prayers, grateful for every opportunity to witness as ministers of reconciliation in our place and time – at work, in our neighbourhood, in our families.

    Restore our saltness, brighten our light, renew our lives in the love and peace and joy of Christ – Kyrie Eleison, Lord have mercy

  • “we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing…”

    This got me thinking again about austerity. Even if austerity was justified as an economic policy, that still leaves questions about priorities, and the criteria for choosing and implementing these priorities, and the even more contentious issue of who gets a say in the decision making.

    What gets me about this image circulating on Facebook is the astounding question behind that word if! As if there could be any doubt – music and art are the grammar of our emotions, the wings of the mind, the nutrients of the imagination, the tutors of the conscience and the proof and celebration of our humanity.

    We need music and art education like we need a heart, a brain, emotion and thought; we need music and art education because we are human beings and these are two of the most developed gifts of and to our humanity; we need music and art education because inside every single one of us are strings and reeds that vibrate and voices that sing, the rhythms and cadences and melodies that make life dance, and weep, and love and leap; we need music and art education because there are pictures we dream and create out of the richly textured kaleidoscope of imagination, vision, longing and desiring that is the human hunger for meaning. 

    The removal of music and art education from the classroom is not austerity, it is the removal of opportunity and resources for children and young people to discover the joy and discipline of beauty and harmony. Budget cuts may be necessary to balance the books, but the targeting of music and art education will condemn those same young lives to an austerity of the spirit, an impoverishment of imagination, a limitation of worldview and a constriction of the understanding that through music and art grows into wisdom, wonder, purpose and vocation.

    A child learning to play the piano or guitar, a group of young people discovering the disciplined joy of choir and orchestra, guided by the conductor; a teenager with oil paint, brushes and canvas, or with clay and sculpting tool, mentored by a teacher who helps them to see, to really see; these are gifts we can provide for our children which make for a richer, expansive life in which the words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' and 'if only', are freed of their limiting power over the self that is each of these young lives.

    Utilitarianism is, paradoxically a useful philosophy, a rule of thumb that fits many if not most substantial decisions we make. The greatest good of the greatest number. But the word also has that undertow of negativity when things are valued for their practical usefulness. Allied to economics it is fatal to those dimensions of human experience which have little market value, which are not crucial to our employability, and which we can live well enough without – until the inner ache of hunger reminds us of their absence. Music and art education are crucial strands of our cultural fabric. To reduce them to market barcodes, budget mathematics, and austerity targets is to apply the utilitarian criterion in its most negative and least valid form. 

    If our school budgets cannot support adequate provision in music and art education that is an issue that ought to be placed way beyond the control and competence of budget number crunchers. Decisions made here affect the capacity of our culture to sustain and maintain a supply of creativity, discipline, confidence and ability sufficient to produce, enjoy and celebrate the intellectual, aesthetic, moral and cultural activities that are amongst our most human attributes.

  • Prayer for those affected by flooding and struggling to recover and rebuilt their lives.

    Creator God, whose love and purpose for all your creation is blessing. We thank you for the gift of this wonderful, beautiful, place we call earth.

    When we pray give us this day our daily bread, we are confessing our dependence on your mercy and the limits of our own strength and abilities. So our heavenly Father, we give thanks for all that has made our lives good – for food, shelter, home and the people we love and who love us.

    Keep us grateful for what we have; generous in what we give; compassionate in our care for others; responsible in how we treat our world; careful not to waste the resources of our planet; and gentle with all those creatures who share our place on this earth.

    This past week we have been reminded we can’t always control what happens. We pray especially today for those whose lives are in turmoil after the floods. Those whose homes are ruined; whose businesses are devastated; those now trying to salvage what they can, and find hope for these next weeks and months. In their despair bring hope; in their bewilderment give reassurance; in their fear and anxiety for tomorrow and coming days, comfort and strengthen them.

    We thank you that no lives were lost despite the disaster; we thank you for all those who worked night and day to help those overwhelmed and in danger – our emergency services, council workers, volunteers, working together within the community for the sake of each other.

    In coming days, when generosity and good planning will be needed, and when the real costs become known, give wisdom and courage to the local council, to our Government, and to those who provide the services to our communities. Help us as churches wherever and however we can, to be engaged in the work of supporting and helping, giving and caring; and if we don’t know how, give us the gumption to find out and to be responsive with whatever we can give and do.

    Lord so much rain – yet remind us that you once taught us to notice that the rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous, and that our Heavenly Father’s love falls upon our world with life giving gifts of refreshing grace, forgiving mercy and righteous peace. Make us then showers of blessing, streams of your mercy, conduits of your grace, and reservoirs of your love in Jesus Christ your son, in whose name we pray, Amen

  • Believing in Jesus as a Way of Life

    Dunn 2As a Christian I believe in Jesus. That obvious and apparently simple and pious confession shouldn't need much theological analysis. There aren't many of our deepest, most significant and defining experiences that can be reduced to concepts, contexts or constructs. They do not need argumentation, they are their own validation. The reality of lifelong love for another person; astonishment at music that causes our inner being to vibrate in sympathy; standing on a mountain top knowing ourselves rooted in landscape, or looking at a clear night sky and feeling small and immense in that one moment of perceived vastness; I believe in love, art, natural beauty. As C S Lewis famously said, whether original to him or borrowed from elsewhere, "I believe in the sun not because I see it but because by its light I see everything else."

    So, I believe in Jesus. Is that as self evident as it sounds?

    • I believe in Jesus of Nazareth.
    • I believe in the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
    • I believe in Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.
    • I believe Jesus is Lord of all.
    • I believe in Jesus, the Son of the Father, and who with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is One God.

    All of these are Christian confessions, from a minimum to a maximum attribution of divinity. So how did Jesus become God? That is one of the pivotal questions in New Testament study today. The big players on the field are Larry Hurtado, Richard Bauckham, N T Wright and my favourite NT scholar, J D G Dunn. I have embarked on a long journey of reading through Dunn's magnum opus, Christianity in the Making, a three volume study that distills a lifetime of scholarship, enquiry and faith seeking understanding. At the heart of Dunn's quest is his own faith as it has grown from that of Scripture Union camps to one lived and studied as one of the pre-eminent New Testament scholars of his generation.


    Dunn jReading Dunn is like being shown round the National Gallery by someone who knows what they are talking about, who has a passionate interest in and love for the subject, and for each of the exhibits. He is an enthusiast who is self critical, knowledgeable with a disconcerting honesty about what can be known, and what can be shown by the evidence. The range of his mastery of the New Testament social and cultural context, his awareness of the history of the three centuries which straddle what we now call the Common Era, and his patient immersion in the texts of the New Testsament and the extra canonical sources could make him an intimidating and authoritative voice; except he is first and foremost a research led teacher, and one who was doing this long before universities tried to manufacture entire faculties aimed at generating research funding with teaching increasingly ancillary to the real work of the University. Yes that is overstated, only slightly though.

    The first 160 pages are important methodological chapters setting his study into the ongoing story of biblical scholarship of early Christianity. Central to that story is what the church and the academy have meant when they have said "I believe in Jesus". And the answers range from Jesus the fictional construct of early sectarian communities to Jesus as understood through the dogmatic and historic traditions of the Church. Of course there is no one understanding of Jesus, how could there be? Dunn's early work was on the unity and diversity of the New Testament, the different styles of Christianity represented in the New Testament documents, and how, despite such diversity there was an underlying unity to be found in the person of Jesus and how he was understood and construed in those writings. 

    Those who preach the Christian Gospel have to wrestle all through life with the reality of Jesus, and how that reality impinges on the world of human affairs and the created and cultural circumstances within and around which we all live. But not only preachers; every follower of Jesus is confronted with the challenge of Jesus' own question, "Who do you say that I am?" And to those who follow he says, "What do you want?" Like the disciples at the start of John's Gospel we stumble into we know not what and blurt out the question which represents all our deepest questions, "Lord where do you stay?" And his answer remains sufficient, "Come and see."

    I believe in Jesus. And for the best part of 50 years I have followed to see if I could see. And I've seen enough to want to keep following in order to see more. It's well known that John uses several words for sight; from the surface vision that takes in what's around us and processes it as information, to that lingering contemplative gaze that compels attention and urges towards new, deeper, more humble understanding, to that moment of revelation when the window of heaven is opened and we are dazzled by glory – "we have beheld his glory, full of grace and truth". 

    J D G Dunn is a contributor to a fascinating book, I (still) Believe, in which leading biblical scholars share their stories of faith and scholarship. He titles his chapter In Quest of Truth. The whole book is well worth reading, perhaps especially for those who stand outside academia and wonder what all the fuss is about; even more especially for those suspicious of biblical scholarship and dismissive of scholarly and intellectual engagement with the foundation documents of our faith.  At the end of his magnificent and flawed The Quest for the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer wrote words that move me every time I read them:

    “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside,
    He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same words: "Follow thou me!" and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”

     

  • New Year – The Graced Significance of Each Moment.

    DSC03614

    That moment, when translucent energy tumbles forward

    in the joyful rush for the shore;

    That moment when the minutes, hours, and days of the past year

    bring us to the cusp of something new;

    That moment when with valid sadness and grateful gladness for what is behind,

    we surrender to the impulse forward and welcome whatever is next;

    That moment when an ocean seeks the shore, and a wave the sand,

    and when a heart relinquishes what has been in order to embrace what might be;

    That moment of silence dissolving into the liquid laughter of arrival

    as wave and heart celebrate the turning of the tide.

    That moment – yes, that moment.

    "For all that has been, thank you; for all that is to be, Yes." (Dag Hammarskjold )

    DSC03615