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The Glimpses and Whispers of the Creator Redeemer

Yesterday, how pleased and blessed was I……

In one corrdor at University I met three friends coming the other way, one after another, all hurrying, all going to the same meeting,all tight for time, and all stopped to say hello.

The day before left my glasses on someone else's table and went to retrieve them, and had a surprise catch up with someone I didn't expect to see whose company is always a benediction on the day.

In class we were thinking about monastic spirituality, and about the dispoitions of simplicity, stability, listening and hospitality – and we wondered what Baptist church meetings might be like if these were the four dispositions that governed words, thought and behaviour?

On the way home near Auchterarder, a lapwing doing "summersaults" in early spring. Few birds can do aerial acrobatics with such consummate ease and the sunlight catching the black, white and green shimmer of the plumage…praise in motion.

At the Mearns around Laurencekirk, a sunset in my rearview mirror that was so distractingly beautiful I stopped at the lay-by and watched. The brilliant orange filtering through early evening haze, the hill line awash with warm Turneresque tones, and the blades of the windfarm no longer geometric gray but a golden mobile contradicting the fading of daylight.

All of which lifted the heart and reminded me of this hymn I haven't sung for a hundred years – but would like to!

1. How pleased and blessed was I,
To hear the people cry,
“Come let us seek our God today!”
Yes with a cheerful zeal,
We'll haste to Zion's hill,
And there our vows and honors pay.

2. Zion, thrice happy place,
Adorned with wondrous grace,
And walls of strength embrace thee round!
In thee our tribes appear,
To pray, and praise, and hear
The sacred gospel's joyful sound.

3. There David's greater Son
Has fixed his royal throne;
He sits for grace and judgement there:
He bids the saint be glad,
He makes the sinner sad,
And humble souls rejoice with fear.

4. May peace attend thy gate,
And joy within thee wait,
To bless the soul of ev'ry guest:
The man that seeks thy peace,
And wishes thine increase,
A thousand blessings on him rest!

5. My tongue repeats her vows,
“Peace to this sacred house!
For here my friends and kindred dwell:”
And since my glorious God
Makes thee his blest abode,
My soul shall ever love thee well.

I guess the verses are too packed with University Challenge busting allusions to the Bible, and there are too many metaphors that are familiar only to those who once sang hymns like these, and the tune doesn't need all the accoutrements of the now essential praise team, for it to be popular, or even accessible. But that first line, "How pleased and blest was I", the first three lines of verse 4, and the lovely couplet, "Peace to this sacred house! For here my friends and kindred dwell." These are the sentiments of those soaked in Psalm 122, whose prayers are a passionate plagiarism of the psalm-prayers of Israel, and for whom attentiveness to the world around is itself alertness for the glimpses and whispers of the Creator Redeemer.

13 March 2014
Books worth buying twice: Talking with Denise Levertov

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.

11 March 2014
Two Observations on the Wesleys.

`The veteran Methodist scholar Geoffrey Wainwright in a superb essay on Wesleyan hymnody and Chalcedon reminisced:

"When Paul Tillich was still a figure in twentieth-century theology I liked to say to students that Charles Wesley had captured first Tillich and then Chalcedon in just two lines:

“Being’s source begins to be,

And God himself is born.”

………………..

John Wesley has rightly been described as a reasonable enthusiast. But his sermons are too often dismissed as rational argument over-endowed with logic and theological precision, lacking the vitality and imagination necessary to sustain interest and persuade the spirit. How about this then, as a pargrapah that, for spiritual experience described and communicated, stands alongside the effusive Francis De Sales, the intense Teresa of Avila, the passionately alight Augustine, and the enigmatic author of the Cloud of Unknowing, as an account of authentic experience of God, given classic expression in words.

From what has been said, we may learn…what the life of God in the soul of a believer is; wherein it properly consists; and what is immediately and necessarily implied therein. It immediately and necessarily implies the continual inspiration of God's Holy Spirit; God's breathing into the soul, and the soul's breathing back what it first receives from God; a continual action of God upon the soul, and a re-action of the soul upon God; an unceasing presence of God, the loving, pardoning God, manifested to the heart, and perceived by faith; and an unceasing return of love, praise, and prayer, offering up all the thoughts of our hearts, all the words of our tongues, all the works of our hands, all our body, soul, and spirit, to be a holy sacrifice, acceptable unto God in Christ Jesus.

10 March 2014
Anatomy of a Disappearance, Hisham Matar. The Power of Story.

This is not review; it's more a meditation on the power of story in our lives. For a while I've found it hard to read a novel. It wasn't a deliberate evasion of fiction which I've always enjoyed, and just as importantly, learned from. Story is the way we think through our lives, encounter other possible selves, explore from both distance and nearness, the experience of others, and ask ourselves questions where it overlaps with our own, or diverges into territory we have never explored.

Anatomy of a Disappearance, by Hisham Matar, is a strange novel. I’m not sure what is to be assimilated as ‘lesson’ or ‘wisdom’; other than the recognition of complexity not only in our relationships with people, but in the mystery and experience of the people to whom we relate; and the puzzle all but insoluble, of our own selves, as that same complexity multiplied by our intermingled relatedness to all those others in our lives, for good or ill.

What is love? Does it change its forms as we grow and mature? Or is it us who change? How many kinds of human relationship are there in which we can still with confidence use the term ‘love’ as descriptor? Does love cause jealousy, or does the birth of jealousy kill love at source? As this story unfolded and the boy becomes a man, his mother dies, his father remarries the woman he wants for himself, then is discovered to have married her to secure her presence for his son, while he secretly loves and lives with the person he really wants to be with, but in the process his father then disappears as a kidnapped political dissident.

Emotional nuance, the dread and dream of desire, the embodiedness of love and yet the inadequacy of mere embodiedness to fully express it; the tension of father and son in this story; the ambivalence of stepmother and child growing into a man and the awakening of desire – all of these are beautifully portrayed in a story that describes the limitations which circumstance inevitably imposes on human love and experience, with resultant sadness, and inevitable if reluctant resignation, but which nevertheless, in the alchemy of human relatedness, enrich and change the protagonists.

And I guess in every human heart there is the intersection of these same fallibilities and possibilities. We love as we can. Occasionally we reach degrees of intimacy that truly satisfy, more often there is the restless attempt to understand, the yearing to build bridges, to reach out, but all the times the frustration of circumstance without and hesitations of confidence and trust within. I do wonder if Christian theology has often enough made allowances for the mismatch between love at its best and the human heart as it is; if our theology of love is adequate to the essential complexity of created being. And I wonder too if or when we might ever clearly understand and pay attention to the frightening precipice on which we all stand as we survey the world of people around us, with all of whom we share this mysterious potentiality that is our life from God, love as divine and human gift, divine grace and human longing, essential vocation and terrifying treasure which must not be wasted.

Psalm 51 with its profound anguish of guilt, shame and yet irrationally persistent hope of redemption, and 139 with its God hauntedness and its mixture of complaint and comfort in the omnipresence and omnisicience of God, are written from such a knowing heart. A heart familier with the confused complexity and inherent dignity in this bundle of longings and anxieties we call our humanity, and which nevertheless trust that God's mercy, grace and love can draw purpose and wsorth out of such a fankled existence.

This novel, with its tale of a son, a mother, a stepmother, a father, and the impact they have on each other at different stages of life, is a potent example of how story enables us to look with compassion on humanity, ours and others; and to be more patient and unjudging of human love in all its fallibility and mistakenness, because it is love in its mysterious reality that sounds the echo in our hearts that we are made in the image of God, and thus allows us to hear the footsteps of God in our lives.

9 March 2014
Renewing the Heart in Old Churches.

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 :))

7 March 2014
A Week of Prayer and Photos (5)

This photo was taken during a holiday in Alnwick and while visiting one of the big National Trust houses. In a week when Twelve Years a Slave won at the Oscars, it is a powerful representation of the beauty of a human being, and the ugly brutality of which human beings are capable in their pursuit of commercial prosperity and political dominance. I stood for a while here, feeling a deep shame for a history which includes the realities which underlie this work of art. What I find so moving about this bronze is that slavery is not condemned by portraying its cruelties and brutalities and disfigurements of the image of God – it is condemned because it puts chains on the freedom of this glorious human being to live with dignity, purpose and the fulfilments of love and life. The loveliness of the form contrasts with the sadness of the face, and those hellish chains. It is a morally irrefutable condemnation of oppression.

The prayer below gives expression to a powerful ecclesiology – by which I mean, Teresa of Avila takes seriously Paul's statement, 'you are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it'. Too often these words are reduced to mere metaphor, a grown up children's address on how the community is to work together, be co-ordinated, respect each other's contribution, never be dismissive of others as though we didn;t need them. All good and proper – but nowhere near the radical theology of Paul if that's all we think those words mean.

Christ is risen and present in the world by his Spirit; and where two or three gather together there He is in the midst. That isn't metaphor either – He really is present, and Paul's words carry an ontological force which means we are, yes, we are, the Body of Christ. We are In Christ, and Christ is in us; we are crucified with Christ and raised with Him as children of God. All of this Teresa understands, and this famous prayer-poem succinctly reminds us of what that means. One of the questions our severely practical and pragmatic culture likes to ask about anything not covered in the latest book for dummies is, "Yes, but tell me what that looks like"

"You are the Body of Christ, and individually members of it".

"Yes Paul, but tell us what would that look like?"

This is Teresa's answer:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,

no eyes but yours

no hands but yours,

no feet but yours,,

Yours are the eyes through which is to look out

Christ’s compassion to the world;

Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good;

Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.

……………

Yes. And the bronze statue above is a potent reminder of precisely what it is Christ calls us to oppose with our bodies, and to generate in the world compassion, goodness and blessing in His name.

5 March 2014
A Week of Prayer and Photos (4)

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.

3 March 2014
The Vladimir Icon and the Crisis in Ukraine

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.

1 March 2014
A week of Prayer and Photos (3)

The photo was taken this morning on Cairn O' Mount. Low cloud drifting across mountain moor, sunlit cloud and the line of the far horizon inviting into the unknown. This prayer by Thomas Merton likewise acknowledges mystery, trust and the mixture of obscurity and insight that is the essential tension of spirituality, the cloud of unknowing and sunlight epiphany.

MY LORD GOD, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself,

and the fact that I think that I am following your will

does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road

though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always

though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me,

and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Thomas Merton.

…………….

The integrity, honesty with self and radical trustfulness of this prayer have always moved me. The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton's naively brilliant autobiography, is a remarkable conversion story, written with an intensity of devotion which left the immature monk struggling for humility that wasn't put on. That humility and self-deprecation is all the more attractive and authentic for its tone of uncompromising naivete which would later mature into a knowing humility; and an honest self-knowing in which Merton recognised humility and self assertion as the two poles of a powerful personality, given over to grace yet true to itself in its longing for self-transcendence.

Merton has been a companion all my Christian life – often quirky, sometimes annoying, wisely critical, funny without malice, passionate about justice and peace, compassionately humane, a lover of solitude and silence and one who found written communication irresistible. His Thoughts in Solitude, New Seeds of Contemplation, Contemplative Prayer, volumes of letters, essays and journals, are a repository of monastic reflection in which the early Merton is undiscerningly positive, and the later Merton is lovingly critical. With all its faults The Seven Storey Mountain remains a remarkable story of a soul being saved, and then going on being saved, by a grace tougher than his own will. The prayer above comes from a heart that knows its limits, and trusts a love that has no limits.

1 March 2014
A Week of Prayer and Photos 2

You who are over us,

You who are one of us,

You who are also within us,

May all see you-in me also.

May I prepare the way for you,

May I thank you for all

that shall fall to my lot,

May I also not forget the needs of others.

Give me a pure heart-that I may see you.

A humble heart-that I may hear you,

A heart of love-that I may serve you,

A heart of faith-that I may abide in you. Amen.

Dag Hammarskold, Markings.

Humility before the transcendence of God, and intimacy that grows out of the soil of trust; that kind of balance is only achieved as a relationship grows and matures into mutual respective love; what Julian of Norwich called 'courtesy', a word she used often in referring to 'our courteous Lord'. Hammarksjold gently and unerringly taps the nails on the head when it comes to Christian prayer – to be available for God's service, grateful for God's gifts, alert to the needs of others so that prayer is an opening outwards of the heart. And then those four closing petitions for a heart worthy of the love of God, a precis of devotion to God.

I lent my well used and annotated Faber paperback of Markings to a friend who left it on a train. I now have a used Knopf Hardback which has untrimmed edges. I still like the odd book that is distinctive with its rough edges. But I miss that paperback which I bought in 1976 in John Smith's in Glasgow – now long gone, and sadly so.

Hammarskjold was to many an enigma, and yet a highly effective diplomat; a man of the world whose inner strength enabled a highly effective and influential active life in the world of affairs. I place Markings alongside Bonhoeffer's Discipleship, Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation, Moltmann's The Crucified God, Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense as amongst the 20th Century masterpieces of Christian reflection and committed, passionate discpleship.

The photo was taken on the road to Fort William in the autumn of last year. Sometimes an image is itself a kind of prayer – faith as surrender, trust and joy.

28 February 2014