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Reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer Readers.

There's a literary genre I don't go in for all that much. The Reader. They are usually thick, often heavy, dense with text, and many of them are compilations of lots of bits often uprooted from context. But there's no doubt they have their uses, providing they are edited by someone who knows what they are doing, remembers who the reader is, and who the Reader is for, and knows the field well enough to include not only the important bits, but the interesting bits.

Not long ago I bought the Bonhoeffer Reader, edited by Clifford Green and Edward De Jonge. Yes it's thick, heavy and dense with text. The selections are organised chronologically but also thematically, from student years to final imprisonment. I have most of the volumes of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works in English, and almost all that is in the reader is taken from those texts.

I also have A Testament to Freedom edited by G Kelly and E B Nelson, a volume that has served Bonhoeffer students as a core resource for nearly 25 years – goodness is it that long. I remember buying it and some of the times I've lugged it around to have something substantial to chew on. It too combines chronology with thematic organisation. When there's a large amount of material, and you don't have time to read it all, but you want to encounter the significant, interesting, mind expanding, characteristic thought of someone who interests you, a well edited Reader is a good deal. Sure it isn't the same as reading a thinker's entire corpus, though you'd have to ask why do that anyway. But with Bonhoeffer a substantial, discerning, well arranged reader works, and works well. So much of Bonhoeffer's corpus is occasional, fragmentary intimations of an intense life, lectures, letters, sermons, and only a few book length items. Even several of them are made up of reconstructed fragments.

The Collected Works has thousands of pages of biographically arranged letters, relevant contextual papers, and other written material from the pen of someone whose life and thought was compressed into such a relatively short life. Not many will want to plough through them or go to the expense of buying them. So between them, these two readers give a wide selection, with quite a lot of overlap – the most recent of which is, of course,based on a critically grounded text. So those who are looking for a way to engage seriously with Bonhoeffer, and to do so beyond the core gifts he left the church (Life Together; Psalms: Prayer Book of the Bible; Discipleship; Ethics), are well served by these two hefty volumes, printed 25 years apart. having used both of them a bit now, I still like A Testament to Freedom. Reading Bonhoeffer on a daily basis for a few weeks is like training for a 10k of the mind, and heart. Either of these books would do.

Then there's always A Year With Dierich Bonhoeffer. I have to say I've often smiled at the likely response of Pastor Bonhoeffer to the thought his writing would one day be a daily devotional. But reading Bonhoeffer is an exercise in expansion, deepening and toughening; expansion so that devotional isn't about a theology of my fulfilment, but a theology of the cross; deepening because for Bonhoeffer devotional is a word redolent of sacrifice, cost, consequence and daily dying; toughening because everything Bonhoeffer wrote that has enduring value for the Church is a distillation into words of the experience of confronting, subverting, challenging and having to live under the oppressive controls of National Socialism. The July 24 reading has these words: " The people who love, because they are freed through the truth of God, are the most revolutionary people on earth. They are the ones who upset all values; they are the explosives in human society." Not for Bonhoeffer the chronic niceness that avoids confrontation and calls it peacemaking!

25 July 2014
Gardening as a Spiritual Discipline, and the Temptation of Tomatoes

It's been a week of Garden Therapy, Horticultural Healing, Soul and Soil, Sweat and Sunshine, Water, Wellies and Dirty Hands – loved it. The turf is laid and we have a new lawn in the making; the flowering currant bush, gnarled, aged and past it, has been removed though its ancient roots registered angry reluctance; the potentilla is re-sited but not happy, but we hope it survives; the bottom corner is cleared of other territorially greedy shrubs and is ready for reshaping into a cottage flower border.

Not everyone knows this, but I once sold geraniums and pelargoniums door to door in Lanark! The previous summer dad and I took cuttings, propagated, repotted, and produced a couple of hundred healthy potted plants. They flew out of the car boot in less time than it took to say pelargonium, and we came away wondering if there was a business in this. There wasn't of course; our prices were too low, the plants had been cared for and nurtured in a too time expensive way, and there's only so much you can do with an 18ft greenhouse!

My first job was in one of the plant nurseries on Clydeside – I used the rotavator in the 20 or so 50 metre greenhouses, ploughed the fields and prepared the soil for the winter bulbs, was responsible for 6 greenhouses of Clydeside tomatoes, from planting to shooting and de-leafing, to watering, to harvesting – has anyone who reads this ever sat down in a hot greenhouse, picked a tomato that is just on the turn from orange to red, bit off a small chunk, just enough to suck out the seeds, and then eat the whole delicious thing, and declared with the juices on the chin and the quiet certainty of one who knows, who just knows, this could well have been the fruit Eve fell for – a Clydeside tomato plant, laden with trusses of go on eat me tomatoes, growing in tempting abandon in the Garden of Eden…..!

All of which is a way of saying that when it comes to spiritual discipline of the physical manual work variety, it's hard to beat the liturgy of dirty hands, organic life, and the chance to help maintain the fabric of God's created world. My dad of course is long since dead, and at his funeral someone who had never met him, but who took time to speak gently and attentively to my mother, drew a word picture of a man whose roots were in the ground, whose working life had been on farms amongst beasts, and whose feet had worked the earth. He said, "John Gordon was a man of the soil", and in all the other deep and emotion churning moments and memories in that service, that's the one that cracked me open.

So when I garden, I get stuck in. Mostly I'm the labourer, taking instructions from the horticultural choreographer; but always I recognise the genetic predisposition to pray not by clasping my hands, but by getting them dirty.

25 July 2014
To Live in the Mercy of God

By Denise Levertov

To lie back under the tallest

oldest trees. How far the stems

rise, rise

               before ribs of shelter

                                           open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete

sentence too adequate, has no give.

Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of

stony wood beneath lenient

moss bed.

And awe suddenly

passing beyond itself. Becomes

a form of comfort.

                      Becomes the steady

air you glide on, arms

stretched like the wings of flying foxes.

To hear the multiple silence

of trees, the rainy

forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,

                as salt water

                would hold you,

                                        once you dared.



                  .

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured

waterfall flinging itself

unabating down and down

                              to clenched fists of rock.

Swiftness of plunge,

hour after year after century,

                                                   O or Ah

uninterrupted, voice

many-stranded.

                              To breathe

spray. The smoke of it.

                              Arcs

of steelwhite foam, glissades

of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—

rage or joy?

                              Thus, not mild, not temperate,

God’s love for the world. Vast

flood of mercy

                      flung on resistance.

…………………………

A poem for those times we are taken aback by the givenness of life, and the inner imperative that reminds us of the givingness that is at the heart of what Jesus called life more abundant. I've often thought about a cycle of 31 poems, collected into a booklet, and used one a day for 6 months, call it Psalms of the Poets perhaps.

The hunger for awe and the awareness of the vast rock faced mountain that is God's categorical imperative to seek, and climb and risk falling in order to climb; or to live the alternative metaphor, standing in the spray of torrential water hurtling over the cliff, the self-sacrifice and passionate surrender of that

"……………………….Vast

flood of mercy

                     flung on resistance."

Levertov was such a brilliant expositor of human longing and divine elusiveness, human devotion and divine amplitude, our capacity for finitude and God's infinite mercy.

And so, today begins, with a willingness to lie beneath the tree, stand barefoot at the waterfall, know however fleetingly, the drenching spray of mercy.

23 July 2014
Gaza, a Poppy, and words that lie too deep for tears

"The meanest flower that blows can give

thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

The petals of this poppy are gossamer thin, yet the depth of crimson, scarlet and other tones of red give this flower a startling presence, demanding attention. The photo was taken in Aberdeen's Botanic Garden, yesterday around noon. I wasn't looking for a photo, I was walking by myself, praying in a garden about the anguish and blood and tears of people in Gaza. That tragic agony weighs heavily on my heart, because much of my own spirituality and many of the values by which I try to live have long established roots in the soil of Israel's faith. What is happening in Gaza has little connection with the great light bearing statements of that faith about how to live before God.

I remembered Jesus in a Garden, when he sweated anguish like life blood, drenching his brow and stinging his eyes, and I tried to imagine how a mind that could speak of the flowers of the field and the care of God, could survive the pain and cruelty of political and religious zealotry about to unleash power that crushes, dehumanises and demonises its victims. The cross of Jesus Christ is a scandal that saves the world. That brutal celebration of human ingenuity and artistic skill in extracting maximum pain in protracted time, is, nevertheless, despite our worst and best efforts to explain it, the foolishness and wisdom of God.

So I'm not able to understand the flint faced hatred of Hamas and Israel. As a follower of the Crucified Christ I accept that in a broken and fallen world, I am called to take up my cross, daily, and follow. I accept it and find it so hard to do it, but not for want of trying, and not for want of God's grace. My encounter with this flower was as near an epiphany as I tend to have, a moment of revelation, when the vivid hues of red cut through my questions and complaints, interrupted my anger and outrage, rebuked the impotence and lurking despair of thinking I can't make a difference. Or at least not enough of a difference to register in any way that I could consciously own, and then the words of the old hymn forced a rethink:… "and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be."

No that doesn't remove the obscenity of tank shells hitting a hospital;nor does it excuse the evil zeal that uses unarmed human beings as human shields in the name of God. This fragile, beautiful, so transient flower is a prophetic word of defiance against steel, computerised missiles and flechettes – Google that word – this technology is being used in civilian areas. I find it ironic to the point of logical puzzle, that I a Christian, find in the Cross of Jesus Christ, hope for Hamas and Israel. But I am not within a light year of miles of suggesting that will be any consolation to the people of Gaza this morning. There are times when it is our calling to hope, and to hope on behalf of others. I believe God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.

For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross…." I believe in Christ God breaks down dividing walls of hostility. All this I believe. But never for a moment do I accept that such faith on my part can be content with seeing this as reason for the disengagement of personal comfort. The call to hope for others is also the call to share something, however remote the reality, something of the lamentation of people whose suffering is deliberately inflicted by others who mean them harm.

My encounter with a red poppy, opens up thoughts that, with apologies to that old Romantic Wordsworth, do not, indeed do not, lie too deep for tears.

22 July 2014
Gaza, Israel and the Book of Lamentations

I posted this on facebook this morning. Don't like posting the same stuff on both places, but 1) I feel deeply and strongly on the matter of Israel and Gaza 2) there are different constituencies between this blog and facebook.

…..

The Book of Lamentations is one of the masterpieces of human art. The art of articulating suffering; the art of living without hope but beyond despair; the art of using words to persuade us that for some experiences there are no words; the art of looking on a devastated land, a crushed city and a people broken by a violence disproportionate, ruthless and revelling in its triumph, and doing so through the lenses of tears that will not stop flowing.

The Book of Lamentations is one of the great gifts of Jewish faith to a world that always needs reminding of the sorrow we visit upon one another. It represents the heart cry of a people who want to live. The deep spirituality of such suffering is a call for compassion, the anguished cry of the suffering in the face of the taunts and cheers of the enemy is a sound every human being should recognise and seek to comfort.

When I see the flag of David waving and crowds cheering missiles and shells raining on Gaza, I am reminded of the Book of Lamentations, and a people shattered by the cheering of their enemies. And when Mr Netanyahu tells me the problem is a terrorist Hamas organisation that uses people as a human shield I share his outrage, but not his ruthless intent to destroy the shields, because they are human beings. People compelled to be human shields are by definition powerless, and the slaughter of the powerless is precisely what the Book of Lamentations immortalised in words that come from the heart of a people who know.

No, I have no answers to Hamas' ruthlessness, nor Israel's ruthlessness so I pray as the Prophet did that God will silence the song of the ruthless.
Kyrie Eleison

21 July 2014
Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem … and Gaza

Rockets and missiles. Ground troops and guerilla fighters. Women and children. Dead and wounded. Hatred and revenge. Jew and Muslim. Walls and razor wire. Oppression and freedom. Oppressor and opressed. East and West.

The problem is these are not polar opposites; they are mirror images. They represent vicious circles of violence, grievance, vengeance; of trauma, fear and lost trust; of memory, hatred and outrage; of Gaza, Israel and history; of Jew, Muslim and Christian.

During the renewed conflicts between Israel and Gaza I;ve been reading Yopssi Klein Halevi's book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden. A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land. This is a deep book, with revolutionary possibilities in the service of peace.

"There is nothing diaphonous or ethereal about the striving toward God. It is all about the striving for an end to the bloodshed in one holy, tortured corner of Earth".

This book is written by a Jewish soldier turned journalist turned spiritual seeker for peace amongst the three monotheistic faiths. This isn't a book about inter-religious dialogue for the sake of it; this is an account of how hope is hard won, tough minded, but in the end adamantine in its persistence, because hope is one of the essential persepctives of human being and humane living.

Here are some sentences from the end of this remarkable eirenicon.

More than ever, the goal of the spiritual life in the Holy Land is to live with an open heart at the centre of unbearable tension. Still, I regularly disappoint myself, unable to exorcise, except for brief interludes, the jinns of fear and rage…

The one enduring transformation that I carry with me from my journey is that I learned to venerate – to love Christianity and Islam. I learned to feel at home in a church, even on Good Friday, and in a Mosque, even in Nuseirat. The cross and the minaret have become for me cherished symbols of God's presence, reminders that he speaks to us in multiple languages – that he speaks to us at all.

Then, he takes his children to the church of the Holy Sepulchre, this Jewish soldier journalist who has spent months learning new language and discourse with those of other opposing faiths, and who has come to see that these faiths are not irredeemably hostile, but are different languages of faith and faithfulness to God,

This Jewish soldier finishes his book with these words, as he stands in the historic centre of Christian faith in the incarnate God in Christ:

I am suddenly aware of the muezzin , summoning me from the next hill. I get on my knees, press my forehead to the floor, immobile with surrender."

Not since reading Kenneth Cragg's The Call of the Minaret have I read a book of such deep understanding which has grown out of humility, courage and hopefulness. Courage to reach out seeking the other without fear, humility to listen to new visions and unlearn old prejudices, and hopefulness as goodwill and humane openness of heart and hand. And at heart a determined peacableness which sees those of other faiths, not as enemies, but friends, not as aliens but as neighbours, not as strangers but as family – "For this reason I kneel before the father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem – and Gaza.

20 July 2014
Christian Worship Creates and Recreates a world

One of the images on my study wall – a tapestry of the word Shalom based on Isaiah 35

"In Christian worship declaring that Jesus is Lord creates a world before us.

The world and the church do not make it look as if Jesus is Lord;

world and church do not live in light of this fact.

Yet we know that Jesus is Lord,

and proclaiming this reality builds up our capacity to to keep believing it

even though empirical evidence imperils this conviction,

and also builds up our capacity to live on the basis of the statement's truth."

(John Goldingay, Key Questions About Biblical Interpretation, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 359.

19 July 2014
From Inverbervie to Galilee and back again

O Sabbath rest by Galilee

O calm of hills above

Where Jesus knelt to share with thee

the silence of eternity

interpreted by love

Those last two lines, they get me every time. The juxtaposition of eternity and love, not only love as endless, but beginningless; Galilee, a sea which could just as easily become a dangerous cauldron of cross winds and skewing waves; Jesus kneeling before the Father when an eternity of relationship is distilled into the fatigue and emptiness that is the consequence of exposure to the neediness and demands and self-concerned energy of human flesh; that's the reality of the Word became flesh. But it is a reality in which glory kneels in the silent place, and the silent concord of eternal love interprets to Jesus the heart of the Father. Within the tragedy and costliness of human sin and broken love, in that particular place in the created universe, beside the sea of Galilee, once again, through the Word made flesh, God looked on a world, "And God said…"

I love walking by the sea. Partly because the rhythm of the waves eventually persuades the rhythm of my heart, to fall in step. And of course then my own steps slow down and recover a way of walking that isn't the driven energy of that pelagianism that not only makes me want to save myself, but also the world for good measure! At which point I come as close to praying as perhaps I ever do. "The silence of eternity interpreted by love…"

17 July 2014
This the power, of the cross

It was Dr Sheila Cassidy who made me start looking for the cross in unlikely places. While working at St Luke's Hospice she started noticing the cruciform image on windows, door panels, furniture joints. These were daily interruptions of her duties, bringing her mind back to the reason she was doing this kind of work, for love of Jesus who died for all humanity, and in whose resurrection is the hope of the world.

Last night walking along Aberdeen beach, a long intentionally solitary walk beside the lapping waves of a receding tide, I stopped at one of the old encrusted wooden barriers. Just about my eye height, under 5 foot, I took this photo. The moment I saw the shape a whole set of connections started to flash alight. These rugged encrusted timbers are there to meet the waves of a sea that can be relentless, ferocious and destructive, as well as calm. This cross shaped barrier remains solidly there, as the tides come and go.

This week I've walked alongside people who are suffering, and whose humanity and hopes are besieged by waves that come rolling in with relentless energy. Alongside a calm sea like this, Jesus walked after a busy and dangerous day when people wanted him to be a king, and didn't realise he already was a king, just not on their terms. And alongside such a sea he walked in early morning after his crucifixion, when he came looking for his friends, and found them becalmed and hungry. Even in my own life just now, this symbol of the love of God beyond telling, ruggedly made flesh in the gift of incarnate deity, tells a Gospel story encrusted with eternity and covered with the marks and realities of history, and reminds me, in all the encrusted realities of my own life, of a hymn about a cross towering o'er the wrecks of time, and another about the cross as refuge tried and sweet, and yet another about the place where sorrow and love flowed mingling down.

It was dusk – and I took the picture with no thought of the camera setting, so this dark, wet, apparently immovable barrier against the dangers of a relentless sea, was for a fraction of a second, illuminated and bathed with light. I took time to pray for those going through their own experiences of what must at times feel like crucifixion….alzheimer's disease, cancer, depression, addiction, betrayal, rejection and that core deep loneliness that now and again we all feel and wonder why God has forsaken us….O cross, that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee….

16 July 2014
Highlights of Last Week 2 – Graduations of Students and Prize Winning Animals

Our students graduated last week, and I attended my last formal graduation on behalf of SBC. I have loved the way my story has woven together with so many other stories. The meta narrative of Christ and Church is itself textured by the stories of those who hear the call of Christ, who hear and heed, and who follow, even to College!

My debt is unpayable to those who encouraged me to study, learn, think, pray, puzzle, proclaim, invest, commit, in other words give myself and my life to the service of Christ and the Gospel and the Church and the World. To have shared in the aspirations and dreams, struggles and successes, pains and gains of so many students has been privilege, pure and simple. Seeing them graduate each year brings such satisfaction, and a humble acknowledgement of God's grace, as these same students are transformed by the renewing of their minds, and will go on in that same grace to prove the perfect will of God. Or so we pray. And playing some small part in that inner reorientation of thought, passion and will is itself a gift more expensive than any of us could afford, and yet one more graced touch of God.

So here are this year's Graduates

Was going to edit this one, but the two faces at the bottom look so surprised and delighted they add so much to the celebration!!

Oh, and here's Ian, the new Principal, resplendent in St Andrew's Doctoral robes and a bow tie that if it starts revolving fast will propel him upwards :))

Then on Saturday there was the Annual Agricultural Jamboree called the Echt Show. I know – Romeo and Juilet at PACE, prestigous lecture at UWS, Graduations in Coats Memorial – culture and education, but a balanced life needs to get its hands dirty. So, remembering many a visit to the Royal Highland Show at Ingleston, we took in the local display of tractors, cows, sheep, pigs, dogs, baking, falconry, jam making, flower arranging – hey, I know, some of these are only borderline agricultural – anyway, it was a good way to spend a sunny Saturday in rural Aberdeenshire.

A wee Hielan coo!

My dad ploughed with one of these!

The wee one dropped in from Narnia.

An Indian Eagle Owl.

15 July 2014