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In a desultory hour this afternoon I went looking for my old friend, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I'd been working on the Christology tapestry, which is very close work and I needed a rest from peering and precision, staring and stitches, colours and choices. The Heschel anthology, I Asked For Wonder is a one-stop dispensary of spiritual wisdom and food for thought.

Worship is a way of seeing the world

in the light of God.

We do not step out of the world when we pray;

we merely see the world in a different setting.

The self is not the hub,

but the spoke of the revolving wheel.

In prayer we shift the centre of living

from self-consciousness to self surrender.

God is the centre toward which all forces tend.

He is the source, and we are the flowing of His force,

the ebb and flow of His tides.

Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest,

and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy.

…….

See what I mean – spiritual wisdom and food for thought. A re-orientation of priorities; a reconfiguration of thought; a necessary change of perspective; a letting go in order to be free; an expansion of the heart by photosynthesis in the light of Divine Presence.

Few writers I know combine the enjoyment of God with such reverence, or see so sharply and persistently the reality of God underlying the ordinary. To use Tillich's phrase, which Heschel would have accepted with some qualification, prayer is to live in constant attentiveness to the One who is the Ground of our being, and whose love and mercy are cause for wonder, thankfulness and worship.

The photo was taken at St Cyrus. In an odd juxtaposition of Blake and Heschel, it nicely illustrates the Heschel's way of viewing the world.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I like this prayer. Probably because I spend considerable spare time with stranded cotton and canvas, weaving and inweaving. Also because only when you discover the infinite options of mixing a couple of dozen six-stranded threads do you realise that diversity of shade and tone and colour make for richness of texture, surprising juxtapositions, clashes, harmonies and always the valuing of what is original, different and fun. Likewise with people, relationships and the life we are given to live.

Go-between God:

inweave the fabric of our common life,

that the many coloured beauty of your love

may find expression in all our exchanges.

Jennifer Wild

The Shalom Tapestry was completed Autumn 2013, and was worked over six months. Each panel portrays a Psalm – the inweaving of colour was a form of contemplative prayer, slowed down musing on the meaning of the texts

Over the years I've lost a book and asked myself if it was important enough to buy it again. I had a hardback first edition of Chaim Potok, The Gift of Asher Lev, and when I went to look for it I couldn't find it. Did it get handed into a charity shop? Did someone borrow it and I've forgotten (check your bookshelves readers whom I know, please 🙂 But it doesn't matter – I was in a charity shop in Crieff and found a mint paperback copy for £1.99 and I'm almost finished reading it again. What a writer Potok was!

However I remember more vividly coming off a train on the way back from somewhere and just as I surrendered my ticket to the exit barrier I remembered I'd left my book on the table. It was Conversations with Denise Levertov, and I had just finished reading it and had annotated it to find the good bits more easily. I resisted buying it again, for a few years, but today it arrived from Amazon because I want to hear her voice at the different stages of her life. It is a voice that talks in compassion and anger, but each in proper proportion; it is a voice that speaks of what is seen and heard, but only after what is seen is taken in, and what is heard is listened to for its truth; hers is a voice that articulates conscience while understanding the entanglements, ambiguities and ethical quandaries that grow across whatever paths we walk.

"Belief is believing there is a God; faith is believing that God believes in you". That's just one of her one liners. This was a poet who wrote poems on subjects for which there were no words, yet she was determined to give word to the wordless horror of rape as a military weapon, napalm as apocalypse reduced to local conflagration, and torture as an acceptable means to the end of national interest.

Denise Levertov's essays A Poet in the World is in effect a confession of faith in the poet's vocation, For her, political issues are so embedded in human flourishing and suffering that they require articulation in words and thoughts, that are not beholden to expediency, pragmatism and the calculus that guages how much human suffering is justified in the pursuit of "freedom", "democracy", and yes, power. 

 

Just back from 4 days of a self-indulgent holiday break at Crieff Hydro, and feeling that life is good and God is to be thanked. Smudge was delighted to see us – she was at the feline equivalent of the Hydro, but happy to be back stomping around her own place.

Amongst the things to do in the rain – visit old churches. Fowlis Wester is as old as they come in Scotland. A church has been here since the 13th Century and this is one of my favourite quiet places, first discovered in 1972. Time has passed the village by, it used to be a thriving trade centre into the 19th century, and it's now hidden from the main road unless you go looking for it.

The leper squint is one of those generous concessions of a bygone age to those who were  otherwise excluded. From this window, and this distance it was still possible for people with leprosy to see the Eucharist being performed, to hear the words, and thus to feel some kind of connectedness in a society where fear, ostracism and a primitive health and safety policy imposed a non-negotiable exclusion. I don't know how many other Scottish churches have a leper squint, this is the only one I've seen, sat beside and wondered about thos all but lost souls for whom this was a window into heaven and the hope that somewhere there was a love that would ransom, heal, restore and forgive.

Leaving the church the sun came out and a glance across the graveyard the snowdrops were astonishingly white against the greys and greens of granite, grass, moss, lichen, the juxtaposition of mortality and eternity, life's promise contradicting death's certainty.

Good places old churches, and old graveyards where the saints of yesterday rest in peace, while encouraging people like me to, as Jesus says, '"work while there is still daylight"!

Spring is here :))

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo was taken late in the day last Spring at Loch Skene, a couple of miles along the road. It was a swan convention, one of those moments when beauty all but forbids trying to make such a coincidence of loveliness into a digital memory.  George Macleod's book of prayers, The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory, is one of the devotional treasures of the Scottish Kirk. These prayers are carefully crafted by one of the most practical mystics in the history of the Church of Scotland. The term mystic shouldn;t be interpreted as meaning vague, soft, evasive of the grit and grind of reality. As far as Macleod was concerned his mysticism was both otherworldly and this-worldly; because it is the awareness of that other tworld, and its proximity to the affairs of this worold that suffused his preaching and writing with a passionate sense of the closeness of the holy to all that we do. He famously described Iona as a 'thin place', a place where heaven and earth are separated by the thinnest of veils.

This man could sit on an Edinburgh pavement eating fish and chips with young lads he had bribed to come to church with the promise of a fish supper; he could galvanise unemployed tradesmen to come and work at the restoration of Iona Abbey and gift to countless seekers a place tome and feel and see and discover the presence of God in the beauty of creation; he could stand as a man in his nineties and deliver an impassioned plea to the General Assembly for a principled and unerring condemnation of nuclear weapons and the abhorrence of the doctrine of deterrence. From such a man comes this prayer, its tenderness and peaceableness with God's creation, all but palpable. Pray it, and enjoy it.

Invisible we see You, Christ above us.
With earthy eyes we see above us, clouds or sunshine, grey or bright.
But with the eye of faith we know you reign:
instinct in the sun ray
speaking in the storm,
warming and moving all creation, Christ above us.

We do not see all things subject unto You.
But we know that man is made to rise.
Already exalted, already honoured, even now our
citizenship is in heaven
Christ above us, invisible we see You.

Invisible we see You, Christ beneath us.
With earthly eyes we see beneath us stones and dust and dross,
fit subjects for the analyst’s table.
But with the eye of faith, we know You uphold.
In You all things consist and hang together:
the very atom is light energy
the grass is vibrant,
the rock pulsate.

All is in flux, turn but a stone and an angel moves.
Underneath are the everlasting arms.
Unknowable we know you, Christ beneath us.

Google has the uncanny habit of odd juxtapositions of ideas and highly logical but bizarre search results. I was reading the biography of Dorothy Day; noticed she treasured her copy of the Vladimir icon of the Mother of God. Decided to Google Vladimir Icon and came up with an utterly incongruous hit. I then went on to Amazon looking for a book that might have more information on the Vladimir Icon. I found Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, at £30 – £40 used.

But the next hit was this! Now there is an irony in the use of the word icon to describe the Russian President whose power has been shown to be ruthless, spiteful, brutal and pervasive in and beyond Russia. Especially is such a link incongruous when the Vladimir Icon is traditionally believed to have saved Moscow from enemies on numerous occasions, including in the 20th Century. So in Russian Christianity an Icon is a window on to God. But to push this and assert that in this Icon resides a power that shapes providence partially on behalf of the Russian nation, that's different. My own theological take on that development is skeptical, and I mean theologically doubtful to the point of dismissal – I do not believe in a God who mediates divine power through images in the interests of political, material, far less national interests.

Nevertheless. The subtitle of this book seems to suggest that Vladimir the President now has the role of the Vladimir Icon, saviour of Moscow, defender of the national interests and self-proclaimed strong man who will make Russia a world power again. And all this on the day when the Russian Parliament approved the deployment of soldiers into Crimea, and with no veto on their movement into the rest of Ukraine. The political complexities, ancient alliances and enmities, the history of betrayals and pay-offs, and the current uncertainties of geopolitical balance and counter-balance, make the Ukraine crisis an impossibly difficult collision of forces and grievances for Western nations to understand. Certainly I can claim no substantial knowledge of Ukrainian history.

But the danger signs are already glowing red, and what is needed is a Vladimir Icon which is not about the protection of narrow nationalist and ideological ambitions, but which portrays the vulnerable love between mother and child, between the infant Christ and Mary, between the Incarnate Son and the Theotokos, the God Bearer. The profoundly human snuggling of the infant into the neck and face of his mother is a masterpiece of religious communication – here is the incarnation, the Word made Flesh, the kenosis of God in Christ who did not count equality with God a thing to be clung to for dear life, but that which would be sacrificed in death for the saving of the world. The idea that such an icon could ever be aligned with military and geopolitical power games in which there is the real threat of war within, and perhaps beyond Ukraine, is one of the incongruities of a fallen world in which beauty and holiness are co-opted by the power brokers and corrupted into propaganda. Whatever power emanates from the Vladimir Icon, is divine only insofar as it provokes to peacemaking, calls secular power to account, subverts the rhetoric of national security as excuse for invasive expansion. Perhaps the most dangerous forms of idolatry is where men (it usually is men) take what is sacred and consecrate it to the exclusive service of their own dire projects.

May the tenderness of God, so vividly visible in this icon;

May the blatant lovingkindness of Christ and his Mother;

May the Word made Flesh, crucified, risen and present in our world;

Bring victory, not to those who are merely powerful,

But to those who seek justice, peace, and the chance to live.