Blog

I first came across the name of Caryl Micklem as the writer of a slim volume of "Contemporary Prayers for Church Worship", published in the 1970's. The book is long gone, as is the contemporary world for which the prayers were written. But the collection included the kind of prayers that required eyes open to the world in compassion rather than eyes closed in inner reverie. Intercessions were specific, ways of addressing God less consxtrained by tradition.

To lead a congregation in prayer is one of the most significant acts of service and humility before God and before the people. On this I am I guess, old fashioned. After all I still wear a tie both for the formality and for the joy of colour! But it is difficult to feel included when the person leading worship uses the first person singular – they are not leading us in prayer, but forcing us to overhear a private conversation. The unrehearsed, unconsidered outpouring of words and thoughts with blanks filled in with 'just' and 'Lord' and moving in and out of cliched devotion are not so much the outpourings of the heart, as what R E O White, my former College Principal once called, "pouring out the contents of your mental waste paper basket upon the heads of an unsuspecting congregation".

Geroge Macleod, whose small book of prayers "The Whole Earth is Full of His Glory", is in  my view one of the most beautifully composed volumes around, spent as much time, and sometimes he confessed, more time, composing the prayers that would give voice to the spiritual longings, life hurts, celebrations and perplexities of a gathered community of believers, bowing their heads in worship. That kind of thoughtfulness is itself a pastoral discipline that requires the best of those who aspire to "lead" a congregation in  prayer or in worship.

For such reasons, contemporary or not, I have always valued books of prayers, both those that can be used and acknowledged, and those that push us to think differently and with a larger horizon, those that stir imagination and open us up to the range of human experience so infinitely varied from our own – these are amongst the treasures of the church. And sometimes they are written as hymns, like the one below, also by Caryl Micklem. I can still say or sing this and feel that important things I might not have thought of, are now thought about in the presence of God who knows my heart, and my limits of thought and word!

Give to me, Lord, a thankful heart


And a discerning mind;


Give, as I play the Christian’s part,


The strength to finish what I start


And act on what I find.

When, in the rush of days, my will


Is habit bound and slow,


Help me to keep in vision, still,


What love and power and peace can fill


A life that trusts in you.

By your divine and urgent claim,


And by your human face,


Kindle our sinking hearts to flame,


And as you teach the world your name


Let it become your place.

Jesus, with all your church I long


To see your kingdom come:


Show me your way of righting wrong


And turning sorrow into song


Until you bring me home.

The photo was taken on Aberdeen beach one day when I pondered as I wandered.

Amongst the Jewish writers whose wisdom and exeprience of God has touched and opened my heart to important truths are Abraham Joshua Heschel, Chaim Potok, Jonathan Sacks, Elie Wiesel, Joseph Kaplan, Susannah Heschel, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas. And of course Isaiah, Jeremiah, Qoheleth, the Psalmists, the writers of Torah, and the other writers and communities behind the Hebrew Bible.

This collection of contemporary Jewish Spirituality doesn't include those classic expressions of jewish faith and practice. What it does offer is a wide ranging selection of wisdom and reflection on such themes as God, community, prayer, meditation, mysticism, study, blessing, repairing the world and other characteristic emphases of a faith that is profoundly practical as well as profoundly reflective. Either browsing and dipping, or reading more intentionally in this book, you become aware that you are invited to read and think on the rich history of a people's rich experience and the changing contiuity of its story of the journey with God.

Some of what is written here is lightweight, a kind of self-help with a religious underpinning. Some of it presupposes, as it should, an active practice of Jewish faith, ritual and liturgy. But much of it offers wisdom and guidance in what it means to make room in our lives for God, to pay attention to the world around us, and that radical goal of Jewish compassionate action, "to repair the world".

As spiritual reading it is a good balance and corrective that reminds me as a Christian that my own faith and the faith of the Christian church, has deep roots in the soil of the Jewish people and an indebtedness and incorporation into their story which has become our story. And our story, not because the Church co-opts the elected preciousness of the people of God, or renders the Jewish story and faith superfluous. But because from the story of the Jewish people, came the One we call Messiah, and in the purposes of God, Jesus fulfils the great messianic promise that the Suffering and Sovereign Servant will be a light to the nations, and  the blessing of the world. And that to act justly, to love mercy and walk humbly with God is an imperative within the Christian faith as in the faith from which the Church was born.

Now here's a description of someone who knew without having to agonise and strategise, what the cutting edge of Mission has to be in a pluralist, globalised, postmodern, post Christendom, and post much else world.It comes from Lesslie Newbigin, quoted in Geoffrey Wainwright's biography of Newbigin, and it concerns M M Thomas. The initials are shorthand for Madathilparamphil Mammen Thomas – photo above – Newbigin clearly found the nickname M M took less time!

"In a very rare measure he has held together the things which tear most of us apart. Deeply committed to involvement in the secular issues of our time, he has at the same time lived by a deep and growing personal faith in the risen Jesus. Realistic in his exposure of the sins of the churches, he has yet remained deeply rooted in and loyal to the Church of his birth. "[His] coherent theological pattern has had the risen Christ as its centre and the whole world as its circumference."

If your church is looking for a strap line mission statement, please consider that sentence:

"The Risen Christ as our centre, the whole world as our circumference"

I've already posted this mosaic of the walk to Emmaus. There are a good number of artistic alternatives that also portray one of the most poignant and powerful stories of the Christian Gospel. But I am currently staying with this one for the aesthetically uncritical reason that I like it – plain, simple, almost naive, muted in colour, but communicating the burning heart of the story. 

It's often emphasised that the two disciples in their bewilderment, anxiety, disbelief at the turn of events, and pre-occupation with their own voices as they talked out their confusion, didn't recognise that the stranger who fell in step alongside was Jesus. What's not often remarked is that in their ignorance of who was there, in their non-recognition  of Jesus the very one they discussed, missed and grieved over, one thing was obviously and persistently true. Despite their non-recognition, their closed eyes, their sense of being abandoned and left just to get on with the aftermath of disaster, the one they didn't recognise was the Risen Lord. They thought they were deserted, but he was closer to their hearts, and eyes, than they could possibly believe; they complained to the one they were sure was irrevocably gone, about the One who had failed their hopes. But they kept walking, and as they did the stranger helped them move from not knowing to discovery, from confusion to clarity, from eyes closed in the shocked trauma of grief, to eyes opened at the breaking of bread, and from lonely inner coldness of loss, to hearts burning again with hope. 

And I wonder if at times what might restore some faith to tired sorrowing hearts is not the end of the story and the joy of recognition that He is Risen, but our privileged knowing as readers of the story, that in those dark empty moments and on those lonely unseeing miles, the One who comes alongside, though we don't recognise or see Him, is the same one who will stay with us when the day is far spent, and will be made known in the breaking of bread. Yes – the start of the story may well be about the dark night of the soul, and our chance to glimpse how, when we are least aware of it, the Risen Lord is nearer than we think – or believe. Or so it seems to me, on the Monday after Low Sunday, and the frost and snow persist, and the daffodils are still refusing to risk opening. But Spring is here, even if it doesn't seem like it – and they will flower, yes they will!

Related articles

Remaking Our Planned Future – the Road to Emmaus.

It's a shame if the word 'browsing' becomes confined to that desultory form of internet information gathering that requires a browser. This week I've been a browser browsing in my own library. Books I haven't looked at for a while I've handled, leafed through, read, reminded myself why I have it on my shelves, and even decided that maybe the time has come for some books to make way for others.

I'm in the process of re-uniting my library which for 11 years has been split between College Study and home. How to accomodate a library that embodies an intellectual, spiritual and theological journey is not so much a problem as a life-changing challenge and searching process of remembering and reflecting. Some will have to go, but that's OK as long as there's room for the ones that matter, and the ones that really matter, and the ones I couldn't do without. Now these seem four sufficiently broad, arbitrary selection criteria. But there aren't many that sit in the fourth category of those outside the standard of being important now or at some time past, or will some time in the future. I don't buy much ephemera. And by far most of my books have been read, consulted, or used "in the pursuit of learning in Divinity", that lovely Victorian phrase that describes the purpose of St Deiniol's Library down in Hawarden – (where my friend Jason has been for the last wee while and I am trying so hard not to be envious, and not succeeding – bless you Jason!).

So over the next few months I'll post some of the recovered treasure and rediscovered wisdom, and newly uncovered insights as I browse, commune, reminisce, anticipate and celebrate the wonderful gift of books.

Yes I have a Kindle. And yes I think it's a good thing. But it ain't a book, it has no smell of familiarity, no substance of which real friends are made. OK for novels and the occasional theological middleweight. Brilliant for classics so that I have several of the big novels wherever I go. Just made it through Middlemarch reading mainly in rescued minutes. But do I want to read poetry without the feel and weight of even a slim paperback? Maybe. But only if I have to. What about that large volume of Vermeer's paintings reduced to Kindle or I-pad – don't get me started! And as for Raymond Brown's commentary on John, all 1000 plus pages of it, They are an obvious can't do without. I've had those two volumes since I was 22 and they are foundation bricks in my intellectual and spiritual structure. They are un-kindleable!

Yesterday I was browsing along my Bonhoeffer shelf and there's not much there that doesn't matter any more. I came across this –

There is no part of the world, no matter how lost, no matter how godless, that has not been accepted  by God in Jesus Christ and reconciled to God. Whoever perceives the body of Jesus Christ in faith can no longer speak of the world as if it were lost, as if it were separated from God: they can no longer separate themselves in clerical pride from the world. The world belongs to Christ, and only in Christ is the world what it is. It needs, therefore, nothing less than Christ himself. Everything would be spoiled if we were to reserve Christ for the church while granting the world only some law, Christian though it may be. Christ has died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the m idst of the world. It is nothing but unbelief to give the world…less than Christ. It means not taking seriously the incarnation, the crucifixion and the bodily resurrection. It means denying the body of Christ.

That from his Ethics, and it is Bonhoeffer at his most passionately Christological.

Yesterday I spent the morning helping cut logs for the woodburner. The journey took me up through Inverurie to Oldmeldrum. This is the view of Bennachie from the road. It isn't all that high but it still dominates Aberdeenshire and is a loved landmark.

I spent some time recently pondering the psalms, including Psalm 121. The Scottish Paraphrase remains for me a devotional standard:

The paraphrase translates the first stanza as a Question and answer rather than a statement. I confess that's how I have always read it. When it all gets too much, and it's hard to see the way ahead, or our attention is so focused on the here and the now with all its demands and uncertainties, then that question is both urgent and apt. Lifting the eyes above our limited horizons and the remorseless present, the outline of a mountain forces the attention upwards, and the question "From whence doth come mine aid", is both existentially unavoidable and personally directed to God. For people of faith, the connection between the hill line, prayer and personal circumstances is only completed by that second couplet. "My safety cometh from the Lord, who heaven and earth hath made".

Bennachie in the winter looks bleak and yet when the sun hits the snow it's also a familiar and reassuring landmark. In the days before digital cameras I was coming home from Pluscarden Abbey and passing Bennachie in a winter twilight. Flying across the skyline, against a rose and peach sky fringed with purple, a long skein of geese in chevron formation. That was another mystical ornithological moment when God seemed near, beauty laid my heart open, and prayer was in the compelling urge to stop the car and look – which I did. And perhaps such moments are best left unconstrained by digital technology. The theatre of God's glory remains a sellout of splendour and spectacle. That's why eyes lifted to the hills ask a question that most times is rhetorical, and has the expected answer, "My safety cometh from the Lord, who heaven and earth hast made."

It was those lines that were in mind while doing one of the panels of the Shalom tapestry a few weeks ago. The tapestry is now at the framers, and consists of five panels. One each on Psalm 1,8,23,104, 121. The one below is 121 and is done entirely freehand as a visual impression of a psalm that is now embedded in my spirituality. Once the completed and framed work is back I'll post a photo of it.

"I could live on £53 a week if I had to."

No sir, you could not – nor should you be expected to.

But the desperation that makes you claim such a ridiculous improbability is part of the visual impairment of a Government lacking ears to hear, eyes to see, experience to understand and a heart to feel the rich possibilities of the people who make up our communities.

When it comes to U turns, the transformation from weeping compassion in 2002 Easterhouse, and the body swerve given to the exhortation you preached at a fringe labour meeting in 2006 to aim at a level of income that supported and helped the poorest, requires a sufficient causal explanation for an effect that is gratuitously callous.

Bob Holman is one of my heroes; he along with Kay Carmichael taught me Social Administration at Glasgow Uni in the 1970's. I learned from him the meaning of the word poor. Coming from the family of a dairyman on the farms, though never thinking of myself as poor even if we were, I heard someone explain how the real world works, and how it can be made to work in different ways depending on the choices made by Governments and the powerful. You, IDS, met Bob Holman and took time to see, listen and respond to people in Easterhouse, many of them on benefits, who shatter stereotypes such as undeserving poor, work-shy, benefit fraud and various other bogey words used to justify current policies.

Last June Bob wrote in the Guardian a piece that now seems like a Micah type prophecy. Or maybe Amos who talked about grinding the faces of the poor in the dust and selling them for the price of a pair of slippers.  By the way, I suspect the slippers worn in your home may have cost the best part of a week's survival money for those on £53 a week.You can read Bob's considered outrage here

So now IDS, you are back to stereotypes, scapegoats and soft targets for the populist right. And the demonstrable foolishness, hard to hide cynicism, or otherworldly ignorance exposed by the claim you could live on £53 per week, further diminishes the integrity let alone residual integrity of a coalition brokered on the self-interest of the parties. And I'm sorry to say, based on the arrogant naivete of those who say they know, when in fact they cannot possibly know what it's like to live on benefits.

And as for the claim that the changes will make the benefot system fairer – I am not at all persuaded the word fair is the same as the word just, right and humane. It seems to me a playground word, used by those who think others are being treated unfairly generously. I'm more concerned about those treated unfairly callously.

I recognise but cannotd apologise for the political partisanship of what I've written. I follow One who preached good news to the poor, and worship a God who requires that we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly, and live for the coming of a Kingdom of justice and joy and righteousness.