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One of the important and unexpected by-products of using a camera is the way it trains you in paying attention, and herefore seeing things otherwise overlooked. It isn't only the subject of the photo, but the perspective, the capacity of framing to focus and interpret what is there. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; there are moments of pure revelation and you know, you just know, you have captured a moment never to be repeated. There are times when what seemed innocuous begins to form into significance, and you see the world differently.

I've looked through some of the photos taken in the last two months and chosen a few which express what for me was a new way of looking and seeing the world, of gazing and beholding the place I am, of noticing and attending to the moment in time that brings me here, now. In that sense a photo is more than a memory – the act of taking a photo is an inner response to what presents itself to us. And if we listen to what is said in that being present to the moment, we come quite near to some forms of contemplative prayer in which our inner preoccupations are relinquished to make room for that which is beyond us, that which summons us and invites our attention.

Each of these photos is such a moment of listening, encounter and presence.

It's many years since as a Baptist I discovered the Rule of Benedict, that remarkably restrained document of spiritual and monastic formation which exerted formative influence on all subsequent Christian monasticism in the West. Some years later I discovered the writing of Sister Joan Chittister, (photo below) in my view one of the most honest and careful interpreter's of Benedictine spirituality, and an effective apologist for Benedictine values as antidote to the consumptive consumerism which is in the heavily polluted air we now breathe.  

WISDOM

To the wise life is not a series of events to be controlled. Life is a way of walking through the universe whole and holy.

LEADERSHIP.

God does not want people in positions simply to get the job done. He wants people in positions who embody why we bother to do the job at all. God wants holy listeners who care about the effect of what they do o everyone else. Imagine a world ruled by holy listeners.

EGOTISM

“When we refuse to give place to others, when we consume all the space of our worlds with our own sounds and our own truths and our own wisdom and our own ideas, there is no room for anyone else’s ideas. When a person debates contentiously with anyone, let alone with the teachers and the guides of their life, the ego becomes a majority of one and there is no one left from whom to learn.

ARROGANCE

When we make ourselves God, no one in the world is safe in our presence.

TIMIDITY

We cxling to our own ways like snails to sea walls, inching along through life, hiding within ourselves, unconscious even of the nourishing power of the sea that i seeking to sweep us into wider worlds.

THE ORDINARY

God does not come on hoofbeats of mercury through streets of gold. God is in the dregs of our lives. That's why it takes humility to find God where God is not expected to be.

COMMUNITY

If we do not serve one another we are, at best, a collection of people who live alone together.

HOSPITALITY

The message to each stranger is clear. Come right in and disturb our perfect lives. You are the Christ for us today.

All quotations are from The Rule of Benedict. Insights for the Ages. STrangely it is more easily available from Amazon.com rather than the UK site. I don't usually advertise Amazon, but no point in recommending a book that's hard to get in this country!

On a recent short break to Crieff Hydro, that Victorian hang out for the well off, I spent a couple of hours in the winter gardens on rainy afternoons. Earl Grey tea, bakewell tart, and a book chunky with theology and New Testament exegesis, made for a surprisingly enjoyable interlude.

The interesting thing is the way the holiday mood easily elides into something altogether more serious. Maybe it's the intentional giving in to the desire for some peace, space, time and the expectation of a reader that when you read something worthwhile, there is a residual dividend of the mind stretched towards new ideas and previously settled thought is unsettled. And perhaps too it is the physical environment of comfort, low buzz conversation, excellent food and the irrelevance of the watch and the diary and the Iphone, that makes us more open and less defensive, more attentive and less preoccupied, more inclined to receptivity than productivity.

In any case, on holiday these occasional hours of serious reading while relaxed and out of the usual routines and context, can be times of fresh orientation, regained perspective, and even inner paradigm shifts in how we see our lives, "going forward". I don't actually like that cliche of the developmental mindset, "going forward". It often seems added on to remind us, or persuade us, that buying into whatever strategy or project will enable us to make real progress in our lives. But here I use the phrase to suggest the fruitfulness, and energy renewal, that can come from stopping with purpose. In my case a time to listen to my life, attend to what I am saying but often refusing to hear, and a time also to listen to a carefully chosen companion, another voice external and coming from another direction. And then to go forward.

I've always taken a book of chunky theology or history with me on holiday, along with the more usual and less demanding Lee Child, Henning Mankell, Anne Tyler, Kate Atkinson and various other peddlers of imaginative literature. Mind you, Eugene Peterson is convinced that the best way to understand the doctrine of sin is to read crime novels. Still from that first year in ministry in 1976, when we holidayed on Tiree, that beautiful island jewel set in a sapphire Atlantic as I remember, and I took Hans Kung's 800+ page On Being a Christian, I have always taken one substantial theology book with me on holiday. Friends and colleagues, family and anyone else who discovers my guilty secret, are less than convinced of the wisdom of going on holiday and taking work with me. But it's those occasional hours in the winter garden, or on the sea shore behind rocks or dunes, at the back door of the cottage, on the hotel balcony, in the corner of the bar, that we begin to listen to our lives, and our heart gets a word in edgeways.

At least so it has been for me. I have sat on the hotel balcony in Selva looking at the Dolomites illumined by sunrise, with Wittgenstein's Poker on my knee, and a deep sense of the mystery of how we come to know, and believe, and trust. I have lain on silver sand on Tiree reading Hans Kung's tour de force On Being a Christian, and finding myself moved to prayer by this Catholic priest's passion for truth. I have sat under a tree in a cottage garden near Goathland in Yorkshire reading Elie Weisel's autobiography, All Rivers Run to the Sea, his chapter on the trains so efficiently running to Auschwitz, and being hurled into the present as the Yorkshire steam train came through the bridge, its steam whistle coinciding with Weisel's description of the death trains. And in Mayerhoffen, late in the evening in the corner of the hotel bar, finishing Jurgen Moltmann's The Trinity and the Kingdom of God, knowing I could never think of God in the same way again.

So there it is. An apologia for some heavy reading on holiday. Not for everyone, I know. But for me alongside the fun and intrigue and sheer escapism of the novel, short cumulative interludes for deeper reflection, and at times openness to that even deeper work that God is always doing, mostly unnoticed, to work and to will his good pleasure.

A visit to Crathes Castle Gardens in mid summer is always a feast of colour and abundance. There are wide cottage borders of flowers that have been decades in growing, the colours either blending or clashing, and the blooms planned so that throughout the summer there is colour coming or going. I enjoy the diversity, extravagance and multiplicity of such a long established garden; and then those moments when one particular flower invites and persuades attention.

That happened this morning. At Crathes there is a surfeit of colour and shape, contrast and complement, and it is easy to drift and meander, simply absorbing an environment created for pleasure. We had walked the paths, sat in the shaded seats, taken time to read the names of roses and thistles, trees and shrubs.

I had as usual spent some time at the poppies and meadow flower beds, taking photos which, however well they turn out, are always moments in time frozen for later consumption.

I've never quite reached that place described by Dorothy Frances Gurney, and reproduced in Garden Centre kitsch plaques, "One is closer to God in a garden, than anywhere else on earth." Maybe because as a child and into my teens, in my spare time I was often in greenhouses taking cuttings, growing geraniums, pellargoniums, and other house plants for sale; and my father kept a cottage garden capable of being honourably mentioned in any flower show. I got used to a garden as a work of art, and flowers as a contradiction that everything in life has to be utilitarian or made for a barcode.

But that said, Crathes Garden is a beautiful place to linger, and look, and listen, to the garden and to your heart. Walking out of the garden we came to some trees, amongst them a Japanese Kousa Dogwood in flower.

Unexpectedly, this flower invites and persuades attention. The flower is white, plain, four petalled, and the tree is covered by them, four petalled flowers, white, and cruciform. And it was that observation that made me stop, and look, and think the most obvious thought for a Christian looking at a cruciform flower. There in the delicate profusion of hundreds of flowers, the symbol of love, mercy, holiness, forgiveness, reconciliation and peace.

The connection once made, becomes a prayer, "the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." – "Love so amazing so divine, demands my love, my life, my all" – "We stand forgiven at the cross".

If this blog is about anything it is about the life of the mind, living with intellectual passion, learning to learn and listen, being open to new possibilities and opportunities and believing in the transformative power of ideas. One of the fundamental resources of a culture and a society is the capacity to read and write.

For the writer, to distill thought and imagination into words and then craft and shape words as conduits of thought and ideas into written communication.

For the reader to interpret and seek understanding of what is being read, as a way of appropriating so far as possible the thought of the wirter, and to do so with critical appreciation, openness to story and ideas, and therefore to build a deeper and richer understanding of the texture and fabric of the world.

So books are vital to sustain that healthy flow of knowledge, as a cradle for ideas, a stimulus for imaginative thought, as a source of critical interrogation of our assumptions, prejudices and knowledge gaps. Novels and technical manuals, self help and poetry, biography and bio-chemistry, cultural history and management practice, social commentary and sporting celebrity, physics and philosophy – the list goes on. So when a decision to restrict reading material available to prisoners is revoked, this is cause for praise, approval and a sign of a more positive view of reading as a transformative practice capable of changing a person's attitudes, worldview, values and personal aspirations for their own lives.

That is what Michael Gove has just announced – an end to reading restrictions for prisoners. I want to affirm that decision without qualification – that is a very good thing he has done.

However reading the full report, which you can find on the BBC Website here, I am less than impressed by the stated reasons for doing this, and the discourse used to defend those reasons; in particular I am unhappy about the assumptions which lie behind the language used by the Government Minister responsible for the efficiency and ethos of our prison system.

To see prisoners as "potential assets" who can be "productive and contribute", and to describe their value in economic terms is to reduce each individual to the status of economic asset or liability. That each person should be ancouraged to contribute to the common good, to work and be productive and constructive in the society to which we each belong, yes, I can see that. But that kind of thinking and way of speaking requires a preliminary and fundamental recognition of a person's humanity, and of the place of humane learning in enriching that humanity. Such learning includes reading, an intellectual activity which rightly directed enables and empowers a person to live a life both fulfilling and valuable to others around them. A human being is not someone who has potential worth, which can only be realised when their usefulness can be measured in employability, earnings and therefore productivity for the market. A human being is just that – a person with potential to fulfill their humanity and to discover their place and worth in a society. When people feel valued, they then contribute that value to the social frameworks within which they live and move and have their being

But yes. Good move Mr Gove. To see reading as a significant strand in the strategy that enables a person to discover who they are, to grow in understanding towards wisdom, to develop knowledge, skills and insights on which they can build a different life, to explore fields of knowledge from physics to philosophy and from poetry to pottery, and from maths to myths; to see that potential and to enable it is a fine piece of responsible government. Well done Michael Gove; the decision is brilliant, the arguments cogent, though the discourse requires to be de-jargonised and translated into the language of humane politics.  

Hendiadys. Not a word beloved of football managers, computer geeks, bankers, call centre employees, politicians, bus drivers, or nearly everybody who has more important things to do than play around with the latinised form of a Greek phrase. Hendiadys indeed! Get a life!

I came across the word in a commentary on Isaiah the prophet, and it just may be that this strange hybrid word will help us make some sense of what's missing in the contemporary experience of many people in austerity Britain. An Isaianic hendiadys might, just might, empower and enable those most struggling with life just now, to get a life.

Hendiadys is the technical term for two different words, which when paired together by "and", convey one single idea. In Isaiah two such words are "justice and righteousness". For Isaiah, these are not two different values, but the conjoining of both into a single and singleminded commitment to public social justice.

The prophets had no patience for political rhetoric, expedient promises, and truth defying evasions. Whether the poor were badly represented in the law courts, or cheated and kept poor by an unjust economic system, the prophets demanded change from such oppressive decisions, closed systems and exclusive privileges. And what they demanded was "justice and righteousness", an overhaul of the system, a repentance of greed, a reconstructed economy built around humane practices aimed at human flourishing. The hendiadys "justice and righteousness" was a divinely minted sound byte; a theological strap line; a hashtag originating with Yahweh.

Here's a sample of Isaianic social critique:" Learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." (1.17) What he's arguing for is "justice and righteousness" for the vulnerable poor in a society where power is vested in accumulated wealth. Social justice is not an option restricted to when a country has no deficit; the real deficit every time the poor are punished by the rich is a moral one, and it requires repentance. "Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness." (1.27) Repentance is a fundamental change of direction towards newness of possibility and policy.

"In their broadest sense 'justice and righteousness' have political, social, theological, moral and legal dimensions." (Patricia Tull, Isaiah 1-39, Smyth and Helwys, 2010), p.68. At least half a dozen times Isaiah voices the disappointment of God who, looking on the plight of the poor, "expected justice but saw bloodshed, righteousness but heard a cry." (5.17). It's all too easy for any of us to claim the moral high ground when quoting the Bible; and I'm well aware that I am part of a society in which I have become deeply implicated in the way things are, and in the oppression of the poor and the rejection of the stranger.

But Isaiah's hendiadys still brings diagnostic clarity to what is wrong at the heart of western capitalist consumer culture. When wealth is God, – and profit, deficit, debt, interest, cuts, savings, austerity reflect the liturgical language of its worshippers, then someone has to contest such liturgy with an alternative discourse: justice and righteousness, redemption and repentance, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

In the context of 21st Century Britain, single mothers with threatened cuts to tax credits for their children; people with disabilities and threatened reduction of support benefits; increasing numbers of people on wages so low they require working tax credit support from a shrinking benefits budget; and the growing numbers of hungry people depending on charitable food banks – these are our equivalent of orphans, widows, the oppressed and the poor.

One of the great challenges in commentary writing is to discover the contemporary relevance, the practical application, of a text like Isaiah, to those of us who read that ancient text now. I for one have no problem seeing the contemporary relevance of Isaiah's hendiadys to the social realities of an austerity ideology. When the Chancellor announces his Budget today, and the widely expected £12 billion savings from the welfare bill are detailed and justified, that same hendiadys will be a more imposing and perduring bottom line than the savings made at the expense of the poor. "I will make justice the line, and righteousness the plummet; hail will sweep away the refuge of lies, and waters will overwhelm the shelter". (28.17) Isaiah is speaking to the complacent rich, the scoffers who rule in their own interests, and presume upon their own future, while mortgaging that of others.

Whatever else Isaiah was about, in the name of God, the Holy One, he was right into politics, economics, lawmaking and the common good. He put into the mouths of the oppressed poor the complaint,  "Justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us." That is now the deep and chronic feeling of millions in our country struggling to get by. The same Isaiah, with a hopefulness that was defiant of the oppressor, looked forward to the day when "See, a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice." (32.1) Until then, those who are Isaianic in their politics will continue to live and embody grace, mercy, love and that hendiadys, so subversive of austerity focused on the poor: "justice and righteousness".

An interesting experiment with the transferability of symbols and images. The photo of this plump pigeon doesn't resonate with what I think of when the Holy Spirit is described as a dove in the Gospels! The idea of this juggernaut flapping around the head of the Son of God has the incongruity of a Monty Python sketch that didn't make it past the director's cut! Urban pigeons are more evocative of lost sinners than the third member of the Holy Trinity.

Living in Aberdeenshire I might be more inclined to think of the Holy Spirit when I see swifts flying like feathered arrows with a mind of their own, or geese flying home in formation honking their conversation across the skies, or, when on the hills, the curlew's long drawn out cry of longing touches deep recesses of yearning I thought I'd forgotten.

Now and again, ornithology overlaps into orni-theology, as observation of birds occasionally coincides with more existential questions. When Jesus spoke of the birds being non-anxious, it's worth remembering his point of comparison was specifically anxiety about food and clothes and accumulation and the real grounds of security in the providence of God.

I'm not sure Jesus would use the urban pigeon, a stomach with legs and a beak, as a model for human flourishing now. As a metaphor for greed and over-consumption that chases others away from life's essentials,it forms the basis of a parable for our time. Only once have I seen a pigeon taken by a sparrow hawk – it was too heavy to get off the ground fast enough. Hmm.