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A Week of Prayer and Photos 1

" 0. Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life,

until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes,

and the busy world is hushed,

and the fever of life is over and our work is done.

Then of Thy mercy,

grant us a safe lodging,

and a holy rest and a peace at last

through Jesus Christ, our Lord."

(John Henry Newman)

…………………

Some versions omit 'this troublous life', maybe a concession to the saccharine tastes of commercialised kitsch on cards, posters and prints. Why would you pray such a prayer if life was untroublous?

The version I first learned used the phrase 'bring us to a safe harbour'. Does anyone else know that version – I'm happy with safe lodging, but I like the image of a safe harbour!

The photo is of the harbour in the village of Whitehills on the Moray coast. Quiet, safe, and a place of peace – in the summer, until the troublous sea gets started!

27 February 2014
R S Thomas: Mysticism and Meeting God on the Moor

We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longing we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we mee God or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.

Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to m,ake things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man. He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland, and one day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all the space.

We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way that emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible.

At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in one sense my friend was unmystical – in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him – and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.

The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.

There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

26 February 2014
The Eloquent Face of Smudge

Smudge outside the window wondering why those obtuse and thick human beings don't realise it's flipping baltic out here – and would you move that useless ornamental tack cat off the window sill and let me in?!

23 February 2014
Judy Collins and the Joy of Songs

"Songs are the heart of our memory and let us live the search for meaning in our lives again and again."(Judy Collins)

Judy Collins is one of the more thoughtful singers, whose singing and songs still speak to the deeper questions that persist and give life its poignancy, mystery, joy and longing. I've listened to her music off and on since I was a teenager, which was just when she was coming to the fore as a folk singer whose voice rang with musical and personal integrity.

I recently bought her album The Very Best of…, and she's right about memory, songs and the search for meaning. Some of the tracks I remember as singles and on albums I played over and over. Just listened to this CD again this morning, which happens to be my birthday, and remembered how her music, her voice and the words of the songs opened our eyes, nudged our imagination, appealed to those aspirations every human heart feels, and celebrated human love as gift and wonder.

And by the way – I love the way the last two tracks seem to belong together – the wistful melancholy of Send in the Clowns, and the best rendering I know of Amazing Grace – which was released around the same time as the pipe band version!

21 February 2014
Why I Miss Seamus Heaney

I miss Seamus Heaney. Not that I knew him, or met him. I only know him through his poems, a couple of documentaries, and a book of interviews. But I miss him. Yes I can read his poetry, some of it I know by heart. Some of his poetry about his father, his upbringing in the country, his shrewd and qualified love for the land expressed in poem after poem – these I read, and can reread to my heart's content.

But I still miss him. By which I mean I can see clearly the emtpy spaces in our landscape left by his passing. By which I mean my sadness that there will be no further words which so wisely cherish and humanely critique this fragile, frightening complexity of human life in all its potential for ambiguity.

I miss him, by which I mean the indefinable lift given to our hearts when we know that there are writers who understand, who care, for whom human tragedy is not always an inevitable given, and whose moral rigour is reserved for the unnecessary cruelties and intransigent prejudices of human behaviour.

I miss him because his own experience of a troubled land created a poet whose compassion and forgivingness are often given words in poems which are universal in their healing and appealing power, teaching through words those human feelings that are the ultimate glory of human community, in which love is lived out in generous and consistent goodwill, humane judgement and a passionate commitment to the other.

I miss Seamus Heaney, but I have his poems, like this one below, which does for me what a good poem should do.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

19 February 2014
A Very Fine Christology: Infinity Dwindled to Infancy.

I just read the notice of the recent death of Edward T Oakes. I was sad to read this, just because I only encountered him in his books, but I liked him! The picture we construct of an author we don't know except through their writing is entirely subjective, impressionistic but not without evidence, reliant on our literary tastes, temperament and the way our own minds work – but nevertheless intriguing. Oakes wrote with discernible passion in his theology, generous in his fairness to other views, and as obvious from the above poster, was himself a fine writer.

His book, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy is beautifully written, and is one of the best systematic Christologies around. The title is from Hopkins' poem "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe". I've read other books by Oakes, including The Cambridge Companion to Hans urs Von Balthasar, which he edited, and his highly prized study of Von Balthasar's theology, Pattern of Redemption.

It's one of the great mysteries of the faith, what our greatest theological thinkers make of the realities of which they wrote, when finally faced with the beatific vision, and still only having words as descriptors. As Barth's jaw drops, so will his pipe; Jonathan Edwards will have to learn to swim in 'the great ocean of love' of which he rhapsodised; Julian of Norwich will think this time she really has died and gone to heaven, and shout without decorum of her sourteous God, "My God, I was right! And all shall be well, and all manner of thing is well! O You Beauty!".

Pax Christi Father Oakes.

17 February 2014
Who do you believe on Welfare reform? And why it matters to Christians.

Archbishop Nichols, the most senior Roman Catholic cleric in England and Wales, said the welfare state was becoming "more punitive".

"I think what's happening is two things", he said.

"One is that the basic safety net, that was there to guarantee that people would not be left in hunger or in destitution has actually been torn apart. It no longer exists, and that is a real real dramatic crisis.

"And the second is that, in this context, the administration of social assistance – I am told – has become more and more punitive."

"So, if applicants don't get it right then they have to wait and they have to wait for 10 days, for two weeks – with nothing, with nothing. And that's why the role of food banks has become so crucial for so many people in Britain today.

"And for a country of our affluence that quite frankly is a disgrace."

……………………….

A spokesman for the Department of Work and Pensions replied by saying the previous benefits system was "trapping" the very people it was designed to help.

"Our welfare reforms will transform the lives of some of the poorest families in our communities with universal credit making three million households better off and lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty", the spokesman said.

"It's wrong to talk of removing a safety net when we're spending £94bn a year on working age benefits and the welfare system supports millions of people who are on low incomes or unemployed so they can meet their basic needs."

………………….

RANT WARNING

Well, that's all right then. No worries, no problem, everyone is ok……Not.

The word 'trapping' used by this anonymous spokesman is such a tendentious term it makes it sound as if any change has got to be better. After all, there's nothing worse than being trapped on benefits! Yes there is. Being trapped without benefits. The word trapping is shorthand for a cluster of more negative comments that have to be dressed up to make them palatable, and they range from scrounger, to cheat, to neet. And in this welfare shakeup there are those trapped in houses with an extra bedroom, and compelled to choose between paying extra rent or rent arrears, and for some forced re-housing.There are people whose health assessment for fit to work has been ludicrously unrealistic as the DWP seeks to redefine the term invalidity and disability. Indeed you could be forgiven for wondering if the DWP is trying to invalidate invalidity by a redefinition that is driven more by benefit cuts than the very human predicaments of those who are long term sick.

As for the Archbishop. Why is it that church leaders are constantly rubbished when they speak out on social justice? Where is the Archbishop in error? There are, are there not, (A David Frost rhetorical trope) more foodbanks and more people depending on them? Why is that the socially responsible politician might ask? People are having to wait 10 to 14 days for any benefit payment if they fill in the forms unsatisfactorily? Is this denied? The basic safety net has been removed for some, has it not? And the phrase universal benefit is a strange name for a benefit being increasingly constrained by criteria of entitlement, and whose administration is hardly winning the efficiency plaudits of those who audit and review the performance of Government Departments. And Mr Spokesman from DWP, of course the welfare system supports millions – that is what we pay our taxes and National Insurance for. It isn't those who are in receipt of benefits that the Archbishop was speaking about; but those who are not, or whose benefits have been reduced.

The prophet Amos is another voice to hear to place against what I can only call the comfortable complacency of that response from the DWP – is there no truth whatsoever in what the Archbishop claims? Can no improvements be made in the administration and criteria implementation, and were no mistakes made? Is advice and feedback simply to be contradicted, and in tones that are paternalistic, words that are patronising, and a statement with not a shred of hope for those discenfranchised from the welfare system that the holes in the safety net will be mended.

And the Spokesman in genuine self righteousness asks, "Holes? What holes? A net is made of holes surely?" Aye, but this Government has made the holes bigger, and bigger, the logic of which must be that mopre people will fall through. Here's Amos the Prophet and patron saint of Ranters Against the Idols of Austerity, Deficit Reduction and Finance as its own Reward:

"Establish justice in the gate" (the place where wisdom, justice and compassion are to be dispensed)

"They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the heads of the poor into the dust" – I just want to point out that Amos does not speak of the deserving poor, ever – he does speak quite a lot about the undeserving rich though, with their luxury lifestyles, obscene salaries, voracious business tactics, compassionless extravagance and culpable non awareness of the hardship and exploitation that underpins their way of life.

So Mr Spokesman, don't preach your not so good news, though the word preaching is devalued by the use of cliched feel good words like support, transform, and universal, as if these applied equally and to all. It's because they don't apply equally to all that the Archbishop said what he did.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear, before he opens his mouth as Spokesman for a status quo that is increasingly heartless.

15 February 2014
“Science is not what they say..” a Scientist’s Intellectual Humility

Science is not what they say, so serious

The truth being what you imagine

Not what you see

And not something useful

Or something that pays

Rebecca Elson was an astonishingly gifted scientist, a researcher of "dark matter" and "globular clusters", an astronomer deeply involved in the Hubble project, researcher at the Harvard Centre for Astrophysics and the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy, and one of the most imaginatives scientific minds of her generation. Her book Responsibility to Awe remains for me a precious book, containing her poems, fragments and an autobiographical essay that is both positive and poignant. She died in 1999 at the age of 39.

And it is such a person, of such rare intellectual curiosity and critical generosity, who wrote the lines above – unfinished, unpunctuated and all the more impressive as a statement of science as the servant of human flourishing, not its master, and a vision of knowledge that allows for more than utility and profit, the two wings of technological power. for

12 February 2014
The Moment When I Was Unique in All the World

On a day out doing stuff with Aileen, our daughter.

Waiting at an appointment I passed the time reading George Herbert's poems in my pocket Everyman edition – these are beautiful small hardbacks, and this one stays in the car for just such fugitive moments. I prefer Herbert to Hello magazine in waiting rooms.

Later in the supermarket she tracked me down to haberdashery, where I had discovered and was examining the selection of needles, looking for a particular size of tapestry needle. It hadn't ocurred to me to look in Tesco for tapestry needles. It hadn't ocurred to her that she would find her father enthusing about Tesco's needlework hardware.

While doing so I was whistling quietly – a habit that's really annoying if you're not me. The tune I was whistling, as often, was the one I;d just been playing in the car, John Denver's Poems and Prayers and Promises.

Put all three things together and she reckons I was, at that moment, unique in all the world. Who else would be sampling embroidery needles in Tesco, with a well used hardback volume of Metaphysical poetry in his jacket pocket, while whistling the tune to a cheesy country song by a now dead singer songwriter you either love or hate?

Answer, probably no one else. But George Herbert's is the poetry of religiopus genius; tapestry is its own art form; and John Denver was a supreme artist of music that celebrates humanity, our world and many of the things that matter and then some.

To be at one moment on a Thursday afternoon, someone in whom all three coincide is, to be able to smile at those quotidian intersections of circumstance when the contingent and the purposeful unintentionally embody the unique mystery that is any one of us. And a moment to be thankful for, in the words of Herbert:

Thou who has giv'n so much to me,

Give one thing more a grateful heart….

Not thankfull, when it pleases me;

As if thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart, whose pulse may be,

Thy Praise.

10 February 2014
Caption Contest on Rembrandt’s Paul.

Some Captions as Hermeneutic Suggestions.

"How come they didn't find my sword when they strip searched and jailed me?"

"My feet are killing me!"

"Come on think, think! What was that guy's name again, came from Philippi, begins with an E…"

"Wish they'd invent email and data sticks!"

"God, I need a good PA – I hate paperwork."

Happy to hear other caption suggestions for this painting.

……………….

The above is one of my favourite portraits of Paul the Apostle. Not the armour clad Caravaggio's muscle bound warrior, more the frail and hunted ageing apostle much less sure of himself. Is he ever going to leave prison – he doesn't know, so he has one sandal on and the other under his foot to keep it warm, how beautiful the feet that bring good news.

The books on his bed are almost as big as some recent works written about him by Jewett, Campbell and Wright! More seriously, this is the premier theologian of the nascent church thinking his way towards an adequate theology of the One he calls Lord; or maybe he's wondering just what he needs to write to those migraine inducing Corinthians whom he loves and longs to see grow up!

The sword, lying against those massive tomes, is no longer the persecutor's tool of trade, it is the Word of God, cruciform, the sword of the Spirit. He is blissfully unaware that his own face is radiated by the light of Jesus Christ, he is no longer lost, just lost in wonder, love and praise – even if his expression is a mixture of apprehension and contemplative puzzlement

The stylus is in his left hand – was Rembrandt left-handed, the most natural explanation for showing Paul like this. And the stylus is inactive, awaiting the clarity of thought that perhaps only an apostle who doesn't have delete and cut and paste has patience for, and therefore what is written has to be first thought, because papyrus and ink are unforgiving materials in the service of a forgiving Gospel.

What particular thought is he struggling with – Perhaps that moment of illumination when he, like the rest of us was unsure of God's purposes, and as he weighs the possibilities, "For to me living is Christ, and dying is gain….I am hard pressed between the two: my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better; but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you Philippians."

This portrait is of an apostle both vulnerable and uncertain, not a hint of self-confidence but somewhere deep in the heart's core, a love that inspired recklessness, persistence and some of the greatest thinking about God in Christ the church would ever know.

9 February 2014